Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘environment’

Spotted around downtown Montreal in the minus-20-feels-like-minus-30-with-the-windchill weather:

• A cyclist (you have to be pretty hardcore to cycle in this weather) wearing a full ski helmet, ski goggles, and a ski face mask, every inch of his face protected against the cold.
• Two women, both wearing their jacket hoods with faux fur pulled over their face and eyes, walk smack into each other in a pedestrian head-on collision, neither one willing to brave the wind enough to watch where she is going. They apologize, of course.
• The underground city tunnels about as crowded I’ve ever seen them, full of pedestrians who, like me, have decided that walking through shopping malls and government buildings is preferable to braving the cold for too long.
• A man belatedly stringing up Christmas lights outside a storefront, cursing and swearing to himself as he tries to assemble them without removing his gloves. Good luck with that, buddy.
• The guy handing out the free metro paper outside Square-Victoria metro is reportedly sporting a runny-nose moustache.
• Endless greetings in multiple languages that are variations on “F—, it’s cold!”

I love winter. But I love it more when it’s warm enough to snow. Where’s this global warming thing that they keep talking about, anyway?

A massive ice shelf has broken away from Ellesmere Island, in Arctic Canada… just further evidence that we’re soon going to have the climate of the tropics.

And just in time for an election, too! Stephane Dion ought to be all over this news. Except that polls still put Harper ahead, with Dion’s personal numbers trailing those of even Jack Layton:

The Ipsos Reid Poll, in the National Post newspaper, showed 50 percent of those polled viewed Harper as the best leader. Jack Layton, leader of the left-wing New Democrats, followed with 31 percent support, while Liberal Leader Stephane Dion trailed a distant third with only 20 percent.

If Dion can’t even convert real environmental news into polling numbers, it doesn’t bode well for the Liberals. Time for Dion to dust off his resume; his days as Liberal leader are numbered.

If Gore, Dion et al. are right and we really are about 10 seconds away from totally fucking up our planet beyond repair… well, maybe we’ll all have someplace to go:

A new world has been discovered nestled in the largest planetary system ever seen outside our solar system, fuelling speculation there are many other habitable Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.

Astronomers doubt the new-found planet – one of five circling a nearby star, which is visible with binoculars – can support life.

But they told a teleconference Tuesday the discovery fuels their conviction that many Earth-like planets are just waiting to be discovered.

Traveling at the speed of light, it would only take about 41 years to get there. In other words, a short, pleasant journey. (Advance tickets on sale on ebay shortly… stay tuned!)

Stephane Dion is wasting no time clarifying the policy differences between his Liberals and Stephen Harper’s Tories, with his promise to scrap the GST cut to fund the environment:

He told the university audience that he would not follow through with a promise by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to reduce the GST to five per cent, from six per cent, by 2011.

“(The GST cut) is $5.5 billion out of the economy every year and it will not transform the economy and it is not a good social policy,” Dion said.

Instead, he would introduce tax measures that would encourage people to choose appliances that conserve electricity, cars that use the least amount of gas and for retrofitting homes to reduce heating fuel consumption.

“We want to make a link between your wallet and the planet,” he said, adding that such measures will be part of the party’s next election platform. ”It’s the way you change the culture.”

This is actually pretty savvy of Dion. The announcement is clear-cut, it’s easy to understand, and it comes at a time when the environment is at an all-time high as a voter concern.

Now, we can argue all we want about whether it’s a good idea to reverse tax cuts to try to use the government for social engineering, or whether the GST cut was a silly idea to begin with, or what the best way really is to help the environment. But whichever side of this one you’re on, the most encouraging sign is that suddenly we have a debate that’s once again about vision and policy, rather than about scandal and character. If this is a sign of things to come, I, for one, find it downright refreshing.

Nicholas Roach of Brossard, who writes in a letter published in today’s Gazette:

U.S. ambassador David Wilkins is mistaken when he assumes all Canadians would be offended if our prime minister’s name were placed in the same sentence as Kim Jong Il and Osama bin Laden. I believe that it is insulting to put Kim Jong Il and Osama bin Laden’s names in the same sentence as Stephen Harper’s and George W. Bush’s.

Why? Because Kim Jong Il’s country is not destroying the planet’s environment and bin Laden is not in bed with Saudi oil anymore. They are not the reason future generations will die from global catastrophes. Future generations will hail North Korea for its lack of energy use and bin Laden for fighting imperialists who mess up the environment.

Yes, just as future generations today hail Adolf Hitler for tackling that pesky problem of overpopulation in Europe.

Paris wants to ban SUVs.

Why does this not surprise me? A Civic owner myself, I don’t have any particular use for SUVs. They’re big, they’re clunky, they use a ton of gas. Not exactly my cup of tea.

But something tells me that banning them – especially in Europe, where most people already sensibly drive smaller cars than they do here in North America – is less about practicality and more about politics. Somehow, SUVs have joined McDonald’s and, well, Israel, as symbols of the hated capitalist-American-imperialist ideology that the socialists love to hate. Especially in France. After all, why else pick on SUVs and not, say, minivans or commercial vehicles?