Read this article by Holly Martin in examiner.com about UV emissions by compact flouresent light bulbs. Excerpt: “The SCENHIR report had concluded that the use of an extra glass ‘envelope’ around the curled CFL, making it look like a more traditional bulb, should nullify the risks of UV exposure in most cases.” (July 19, 2012)
Read this op-ed by Anthony Britneff and Ben Parfitt in The Province.
Excerpt: “To entice the owner of the destroyed Burns Lake mill to rebuild, the commit-tee chose to go down the same tired road that gave rise to the timber supply crisis: push the boundaries of what can be harvested to the extreme. This was essentially the approach applied in the East Coast cod fishery, and we all know how that worked out.” (August 20, 2012)
Read more: http://www.theprovince.com/MLAs+aren+facing+truth+forests+tapped/7115424/story.html
Read this statement from the Sea Shepherd website, quoting Paul Watson’s attorney, clarifying the captain current legal predicament. (Aug. 11, 2012)
After much speculation and misinformation about the impact of the recently announced ‘Red Notice’ issued by Interpol for Captain Paul Watson, founder and president of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society who was arrested at Frankfurt airport on May 13th and held in Germany for 70 days until his departure on or around July 22nd, Sea Shepherd is setting the record straight. Using information posted to its website as provided in a letter from Captain Watson’s lead legal counsel in Germany, Oliver Wallasch, Sea Shepherd addresses the speculation head-on with the legal facts of this case.
Questions & Answers
Q.: What is the impact of Captain Watson forfeiting bail to leave Germany?
A.: Skipping bail in Germany is not a crime! This is totally different from U.S. jurisdiction and from other countries in the world. Article 2 of the German constitution states, that Germany grants personal freedom. Therefore it is not even a crime in Germany to escape from prison. The decision of the client to leave the country leads only to the consequence that the local (not international!) arrest warrant of the Higher Regional Court was set into force, and that bail is seized (forfeited) on decision by the court. Because of the fact that the client was arrested in an extradition procedure, Germany is not actively searching for Mr. Watson locally or internationally.
Letter from Paul Watson’s lawyer. (Click to read the entire unedited letter)
Q.: What is the extradition procedure in Germany as it pertains to this case?
A.: In the case of Mr. Watson, we knew that besides the request of Costa Rica, there was also a ‘blue’ note issued by Interpol on charges from Japan against the client. This ‘blue’ note on the warrant from Japan has been active since 2010 and has not converted into a ‘red’ notice with Interpol during the whole extradition procedure with Costa Rica. But we learned that Japan was highly interested concerning the procedure with Costa Rica because they sent requests through Interpol Tokyo to the Higher Regional Court to gather more information on the procedure itself. This was absolutely unusual. The German authorities are allowed to extradite even without a special treaty with the requesting country. Therefore it was very likely that Japan would ask for extradition itself on a bilateral basis; after Mr. Watson left the country, we learned that such an extradition request was forwarded by the Japanese Embassy through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the General Public Prosecution Office in Frankfurt. The scenario would have been that Mr. Watson would have been extradited to Costa Rica, and then extradited after the procedure to Japan.
These facts show, that there was a link between the extradition request from Costa Rica and the upcoming extradition request from Japan. Having in mind that the president of Costa Rica visited Japan at the end of 2011, having in mind that Japan granted an enormous amount of money for “environmental protection” in Costa Rica, it is obvious that these two countries have a very close relationship.
Q.: Is the Interpol ‘Red’ Notice a warrant and what is its impact?
A.: Interpol Notices are international alerts allowing police in member countries to share information. Interpol is not actively issuing arrest warrants, Interpol is not actively searching for the defendant, and Interpol is not involved in the extradition procedure. Interpol just exchanges information between the police in the member countries.
The information that Interpol has issued a ‘red’ notice against Mr. Watson on the charges of Costa Rica only means that the police in the member countries shall be aware that Mr. Watson is wanted by Costa Rica. It is up to the police and the judicial authorities within the Interpol member countries whether or not they want to act on this local arrest warrant from Costa Rica.
Almost everyone knows about the Dutch painter, Vincent van Gogh, and his turbulent life of abject poverty, bouts of insanity, total failure as an artist — he sold one painting in his career — and his eventual death from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot to his stomach.
This personal tragedy juxtaposes with his current popularity and success — one of his paintings, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, recently sold for an astounding $82.5 million. But van Gogh’s significance is not usually considered in a wider cultural context. This is what the art historian Modris Eksteins explores in his two books, Rites of Spring and Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Age (Maclean’s, Feb. 27/12).
To understand van Gogh’s deeper significance, we need to recognize that history is only meaningful in the grand sweeps that are rarely noticeable to those living at any given moment. So the details of ordinary life usually provide little perspective of what is actually happening until these daily events fall into the context of larger time frames. This explains why artists and historians are so important. And the two come together in Eksteins’ consideration of van Gogh.
Van Gogh’s present popularity, Eksteins argues, arises from the match of his personality with our present age — “an icon of authenticity for the age of doubt”. Van Gogh certainly didn’t seem to belong in his own time. During the span of his life, from 1853 to 1890, he embodied all the traits that were uncharacteristically Victorian. Instead of diverting the raw drives of life into duty, order and propriety, van Gogh lived them directly, like a unfettered animal following the creative urges of his instincts. He seemed to be wholly out of tune with the outward pulse of his era. But, as Eksteins argues, van Gogh was wholly in tune with the unconscious forces that were frustrating Victorian Europe at the end of the 19th century.
Europe was struggling with a “crisis of authenticity”, a pseudo certainty that felt hollow and hypocritical. In essence, van Gogh was living the life that many Victorians secretly desired but rarely fulfilled. It took the Great War and its aftermath to bring this obscure Dutch painter to prominence.
At the end of van Gogh’s life in 1890, Europe did not know it was careening toward catastrophe. But all the conditions were being set for the 1914 calamity of the First World War. As difficult as it is to believe today, most Europeans welcomed the conflict, enticed by the prospect of authentic experience and an opportunity to live all their high Victorian values of pride, loyalty and honour. They learned a sorry lesson. At the end of the destruction and carnage — at least nine million dead — Europe sat amid wreckage, a continent devastated physically, economically, socially, psychologically and philosophically.
Europe, in effect, had lived Vincent van Gogh’s life and could now identify with him in a way that was never possible during its previous innocence. Van Gogh’s popularity soared. He became an icon of the new century’s turmoil and intensity. In Eksteins’ words, “We choose our heroes out of our deepest concerns.” Or, expressed differently, the people we make into our heroes embody a part of ourselves that we do not always recognize at a conscious level. Thus our heroes creep into prominence, slithering sideways in curious disguises until we eventually understand how they define who we really are.
This brings us to the present, to the way history always repeats itself — the unfolding circumstances are always different enough to surprise us yet always similar enough to be familiar — and explains why van Gogh still looms so large in our imaginations. The First World War bred a half-century of tumult and shattered ideals, wreckage that we are still trying to reconcile with an image of better selves. Like the Victorians, we also live in a world of illusions.
We, in the 21st century, are not that different from the Victorians at the end of the 19th century on the brink of conflagration. Instead of their hollow decorum, propriety and duty, we are a culture of materialists and consumers, technological and scientific wizards wholly engrossed in our own biases. Just as the Victorians, we possess the same smug and compulsive indifference to the warning sirens screaming around us. The momentum of our cultural habits carries on with the same willful blindness that characterizes every civilization marching into its future — smart enough to observe what is happening but not quite able to measure its actual significance.
The brooding presence haunting us today, of course, is global environmental deterioration exacerbated by too many people consuming too much on a planet that is now too small, a destructive compulsion coupled with a momentum of greed that sometimes seems unstoppable. Our frenzy of resource extraction, energy consumption and industrial production makes the Victorians’ storied enthusiasm seem comatose.
Is our situation analogous to the Victorians? Will we re-live their naivety with an Armageddon of our own? The real answer is that we don’t know — yet. But rising numbers of ecologists, climatologists, biologists, economists, philosophers and almost everyone of intellectual and scientific substance are warning us of imminent and irreversible consequences that should give us pause for a very serious evaluation of our collective values and behaviour.
But maybe we already know. Perhaps this is why we are so drawn to Vincent van Gogh, the earthy, intense and self-destructive painter who risked all and lost all in the fire of his creative energy. Perhaps Eksteins’ insight — that “we choose our heroes out of our deepest concerns” — is truer than we realize.
Read this editorial in the New York Times about the US Department of State’s environmental assessment of the Keystone XL pipeline. Excerpt: “The climate question must be addressed, if only to give a full accounting of the range of consequences of developing the tar sands, an effort in which the United States will be complicit if it allows the pipeline. That includes the effect of destroying 740,000 acres of boreal forest (a vital sink for greenhouse gases); the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted in extracting the oil from the tar sands (a highly energy-intensive process); and the gases emitted by burning the oil.
The point was reinforced this month when 10 leading climate scientists sent a letter to Hillary Rodham Clinton asking the State Department to consider how helping to open Canada’s tar sands would affect the planet’s climate. ‘The vast volumes of carbon in the tar sands ensure that they will play an important role in whether or not climate change gets out of hand,’ the letter said. ‘Understanding the role this large-scale new pipeline will play in that process is clearly crucial.'”
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/canadas-oil-the-worlds-carbon.html
Read this article by Jonathan Leff in the Globe and Mail. Excerpt: “Canada’s Enbridge Inc., already under fire from U.S. regulators over a massive oil spill two years ago, said on Friday it had shut a key pipeline indefinitely after an oil leak in Wisconsin.
“Line 14, a 318,000 barrel per day leg of the major Lakehead System that carries light crude oil from Canada to Chicago-area refineries, was shut after a spill that released an estimated 1,200 barrels of oil, Enbridge Energy Partners said in statement. The cause of the spill was undetermined.”
Premier Clark’s fight with Alberta Premier Redford over the Northern Gateway project is a very dangerous ploy. She has, by this action, said plainly that the BC environment is open to bids in exchange for the desecration of our province. We are the hooker bargaining over the price of services.
The Premier’s environmental stipulations will cause no concerns with Alberta, Ottawa or Enbridge. Of course they will agree to these terms including a clause re cost of damage – those promises are easy to make and easy to ignore. Once the bitumen starts to flow, how do you enforce any agreement?
The four salient facts remain – spills by Enbridge’s own admission are inevitable, the terrain is inaccessible, the bitumen is highly toxic and all but impossible to clean up, and once the pipeline is operative we will have serial spills, each time adding to existing spill damage.
The spat the premier has launched with Alberta Premier Redford is strictly political with the object of Clark and the Liberals getting better polling numbers.
Unfortunately for the premier, this is like sex – great while it lasts. What we’ve heard from Premier Redford is simply the first round of a long bidding exercise. It must be remembered that Premier Redford did, a few months ago, offer to help build the necessary docking facilities in Kitimat. (That strikes me as an offer to dig your grave and supply a headstone if you would be so kind as to commit suicide!)
What Premier Clark has done is buy a bit of political time in the hope that when next May’s election comes around she will look as if she’s valiantly defending BC’s integrity.
The fact is she has BC in a process it should never be in – trading BC’s environment in exchange for unenforceable and useless environmental safeguards – and money, the amount and payer(s) to be determined. She is doing this not in our province’s interest but that of her party and herself.
This is vintage Liberal stuff – the first priority is always to get elected.
I don’t believe that this ploy will work. The opposition to the Northern Gateway (Enbridge) and tanker traffic is too great.
The responsible course – and one which would have helped her and her party considerably the long run, i.e. next May’s election, would have been to announce that the Liberal government was opposed to the entire Northern Gateway initiative and that in that respect the government and the opposition were agreed.
The general fainting spell this would bring would quickly pass and the NDP would have lost its initiative on this issue.
Alas, such responsible positions don’t happen in BC politics.
The BC Liberals have just offered the sword of surrender to Enbridge and Ottawa as the organ-grinder’s monkey, Environment Minister Terry Lake, made clear in a statement today.
Separating the pepper from the fly shit, the Liberals want more money and more environmental safeguards imposed upon Enbridge, which must be severely monitored by the feds. (With the same enthusiasm the Department of Fisheries and Oceans safeguards our Pacific Salmon, no doubt.)
As I said here recently, Premier Clark has declared that BC is a whore, the only thing to be decided being how much?
Let me place matters on the table once more:
Of course Premier Clark will have her “demands” met.
More money is a slam dunk because there’s a hell of a lot of it available. It will start with offers to build the port facilities at Kitimat – which is sort of like offering to donate your the grave and headstone if you’ll commit suicide. There will be royalty sharing offered along with lots of cash to buy off First Nations.
Of course the feds and Enbridge will meet the demands in the press release which were:
The province wants limits to liability in the event of an oil spill to ensure there are sufficient financial resources to properly address the effects of a spill and it is calling for increased federal government response.
B.C. also wants tougher federal rules requiring industry to provide and replace marine response equipment.
And the province wants a Natural Resources Damage Assessment process to give certainty that a responsible party will address all costs associated with a spill.
The naiveté is breathtaking! Why, I imagine Prime Minister Harper will even say “cross my heart and hope to die” when he makes the solemn pledges!
This is an act of craven cowardice to help the bedraggled, leader challenged BC Liberals for the May 2013 election.
Harper will come up with oodles of safeguards just as the BC government did with fish farms and will pursue them with the same diligence his government and the BC government has with the Fish Farmers.
I don’t mean to be rude, folks, but how do you compensate for lost or badly polluted fish habitat, starving caribou and polluted rivers? How do you put a dollar figure on shattered ecologies? How do you compensate First Nations for lost hunting grounds? How do you compensate the tourist industry for their lost revenues?
Perhaps most importantly, what is the going rate for a province that has just sold its soul?
Premier Clark and her bedraggled, divided gutless cabinet and caucus have sold us out in hopes they can rally the right wing back into the fold and you can bet the ranch that Harper will go easy on the BC government when the HST expires next April as part of this surrender package.
Our provincial government, in place to protect our province’s integrity has, as predicted, sold us out for a mess of pottage in a sorry attempt to save its grubby political hide.
Check out this video news story from CTV on the discovery this week of piscine reovirus – a pathogen believed to cause the deadly Heart and Skeletal Muscular Inflammation in farmed and wild salmon – by SFU researchers in wild Cultus Lake trout. (July 19, 2012)
Watch video: http://www.ctvnews.ca/video?playlistId=1.884995
Collect enough pieces of information and they eventually fit together into a meaningful pattern. But rarely do enough of them appear in one newspaper on one day to create an environmental portrait of a planet. This happened in the June 21st edition of Toronto’s Globe and Mail — more poignant for the first day of summer than the editors had probably intended.
Page A-14 featured Rio+20, the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit first held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This periodic international gathering of nations has been attempting to pursue so-called “sustainable development goals” that will improve the well-being of humanity while ensuring environmental protection. The newspaper’s headline read, “Summit fails to meet even the lowest of expectations”. Indeed.
Historic agreements on preserving biodiversity and reducing greenhouse gas emissions have failed miserably. In 20 years of effort, only four minor goals of the Earth Summit’s 90 have been met. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations summarized the progress. “Let me be frank,” he said, “Our efforts have not lived up to the measure of the challenge.” Then he reminded the gathered heads of state and the citizens of the world of a usually forgotten but obvious fact. “Nature does not wait,” he said. “Nature does not negotiate with human beings.”
On a side-bar to the Rio+20 feature, the newspaper cited some of the environmental changes that have occurred since 1992. “The annual global temperature has increased 0.32 degrees Celsius…”. Based on 10-year running averages, “Every year since 1992 has been warmer than the year of the original conference.” Meanwhile, “the chief heat-trapping gas, carbon dioxide, climbed 10 percent from nearly 358 parts per million in April, 1992, to 394 ppm this past April.”
Rising carbon dioxide levels translate into climate change. The newspaper cites United Nations’ statistics tallying 4.4 billion people affected by natural disasters since 1992, $2 trillion in damages and 1.3 million killed. Despite earthquakes, “storms, extreme temperatures and floods were the biggest killers.” Worsening the situation has been the loss of 300 million hectares of the world’s primary forests, an area the size of Argentina.
Beneath the dismal news on Rio’s Earth Summit was the small but hopeful note that the Maldives, the island-nation in the middle of the Indian Ocean, will be establishing the “single largest marine reserve in the world”. This effort is intended to slow the decimation of global fish stocks and protect the Maldives’ fisheries and biodiversity.
On page S-4, the newspaper reported that British Columbia was bracing for flooding from heavy rains and melting snow. Extreme weather events were raising the Fraser River and its tributaries to near-record levels. This fits with an earlier announcement from the insurance corporations of Canada that water damage from rain, storms and floods is now their largest source of claims. This trend is supported by an article in the prestigious Science journal (Apr. 26/12) noting a four percent increase in the activity of the global water cycle between 1950 and 2000 — twice the rate of the predictive models. Each degree of temperature rise translates into an 8 percent increase in the activity of the hydrological cycle. Moisture is also redistributed differently so that dry places are commonly becoming dryer and wet places wetter. All this works according to the laws of physics, not to our convenience. It’s what Ban Ki-moon meant when he said, “Nature does not negotiate with human beings.
“Endangered Environmentalists” was the small banner appearing on page L-7. The number of activists killed in the last three years has “risen dramatically”. The cause was identified as the “intensifying battles over dwindling supplies of natural resources”. In the decade ending in 2011, 700 people have been killed in more than 34 countries — more than one per week — as they protested or investigated “mining, logging, intensive agriculture, hydropower dams, urban development and wildlife poaching.” Tensions are rising on a crowded planet as ecological and conservation concerns are colliding with the momentum of industrial development, consumer expectations and basic human needs.
This environmental portrait of the planet would not be complete without a review of the economic and financial world. Page B-1 featured Canada’s efforts to become a member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a tariff-free network of more than 10 countries intent on dramatically increasing trade, manufacturing, resource extraction and energy markets to two billion people. But no mention was made of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, protecting ecologies or searching for the elusive formula that is paradoxically called “sustainable development”.
On page A-13, Margaret Wente wrote a sobering piece about the burden of debt weighing down most countries. Europe is heroically trying to address its financial mess while the US is mostly avoiding its because of the immediate political and social costs. But most debt, according to the economic historian Niall Ferguson, is “public”, the spending commitments that allow “the current generation of voters to live at the expense of those as yet unborn.” As Wente notes of Ferguson’s data, “In the US, the gap between future federal government obligations and future revenues has reached an estimated $200 trillion — nearly 23 times the official debt.” And this doesn’t include record amounts of local, state and personal debt.
The portrait of the planet in this one edition of one newspaper is of human society living beyond its economic and environmental means. At least, this seems to be the way the pieces fit together.