Saturday, April 07, 2007

IPCC: 'Canada the Lucky One'

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has good news and bad for Canada within its second of four reports regarding global climate change, released Friday in Brussels. The good news is: Canada is better able to weather global climate change than poorer nations. Other than that, the report is a stern warning to all nations, citizens, and businesses to get serious about changing the way we do things.

Despite what some of the participating scientists who prepared the report say was a "softening" of the message for political purposes, there is little good news contained within "Climate Change 2007" Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for anyone, anywhere on the planet.

And, despite Canada's relatively "lucky" positioning in the northern hemisphere, surrounded by three oceans, with still favorable weather patterns providing plenty of rainfall on the coastal regions, and enough for prairie farmers, the country faces some of the greatest challenges a warming planet will present; challenges that will take more than thrown money to address. But even so, money is needed for research and development of the alternative products and processes a new world will require, and at a time when green rhetoric is all pervading, Ottawa is in fact de-funding the very departments of government designed for the purpose.

According to Mike De Souza at CanWest News, the greenhorn Federal Environment Minister John Baird defensively suggested, his government's cutting off funding devoted to climate change was done to better serve the issue, saying;


In the face of the Conservative retreat from climate change leadership, the minister advises Canadians act without thinking about, or researching, where and how to act. Baird would have Canada throw its metaphorical water on a burning planet, by first firing the ones hired to look for the smoke.

Among those losing funding: Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network; the Adaptation program funding frozen, research program faces March '08 shutdown.

Health Policy Research Program; a program to explore possible health sector scenarios due to climate change; de-funded.

Reducing Canada's Vulnerability to Climate Change; program to study landscape, coastal areas, and infrastructure and community planning; scheduled to be phased out March '08.

Canada Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences; a major foundation, doing research and training the next generation of climate scientists; funding frozen since July 2006.

Again, Baird doesn't seem capable of grasping the ramifications of his party's policies. De Souza quotes the minister saying;

"It depends on what the research is about. We don't need more research to convince us this is a major problem. We accept the science. We accept the global research and it seems that (for) Stephane Dion and the Liberals, all they want to do is more research. We don't need more reports, We need to focus on the big challenge at hand."

If anything, the U.N. report stresses the need to remove politics, both domestic and international, from the climate change challenge; time, they say, is not a luxury we can afford to squander with petty finger-pointing and internecine squabbling. If this is a preview of the Conservative environmental platform for the expected late Spring federal election, the Environment minister's ham-handed explanation of his party's environmental black thumb, retrograde policies will prove a godsend to the Liberals.

Ian Burton, one of the Canadian delegation and co-author of the second report to the IPCC, says despite Canada's geographic and financially advantageous position, it lacks a clear vision, and more importantly, any practical plan in place to deal with some of the urgent issues at hand. Margaret Munro of CanWest quotes Ian Burton;

"What is missing, he said, is a comprehensive strategy to cut the country's greenhouse-gas emissions and deal with the "destabilizing" changes underway."

Duane Smith of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference emphasizing the necessity to move, saying;
"Let's not just talk about it, let's put a game plan in place. We are bearing the brunt of the changing environment as we speak."

And Smith ain't whistling Dixie; the poles, north and south, are the most effected areas of the planet. The polar ice cap is melting at a rate even faster than the most skeptical scientists believed possible a few short years ago, and the Antarctic has seen major calving of the ice shelves there. Canada's northern boreal forests are endangered by industrial logging, and resource exploration and extraction. The permafrost, literally the foundation of the north, is melting, undermining the towns and cities built upon it. Not to mention the almost unthinkable: An end to Canada's vast and diverse wildlife.

We Canadians are fortunate, we're often reminded by the scolding patriarchs of government. Indeed, we are lucky to be living here, surrounded by peace and abundance, but luck isn't enough anymore. As the environmentalists' report warns, we do not have the luxury of wasting time, either arguing, and warring amongst ourselves, or suffering the fools and ass-backwardly obsessed, who have hijacked the instruments of state to serve the ends of a increasingly outrageous global elite, desperate to maintain their extravagance regardless of the costs borne by the rest of us.

It is too late to suffer the Stephen Harper's, and George W. Bush's, and John Baird's of the world, who would fiddle while the planet burns.

Chris Cook
is a contributing editor to and host of Gorilla Radio

Thursday, April 05, 2007

De-Taxing War

Hang Up on War

By Amy Goodman

04/05/07 "ICH' -- -- If you are upset that Congress won’t defund the war in Iraq, there’s something you can do: Stop paying a tax. Legally.


Remarkably, the Internal Revenue Service has made it easy to request the refund, yet IRS Commissioner Mark Everson says that many taxpayers are overlooking it. Obtaining the refund is easy. But first, a little history.

The Spanish-American War lasted from April to August of 1898 and was predicated on a U.S. government demand that Spain abandon its colony in Cuba, which the U.S. subsequently occupied. By the end of 1898, the United States had also taken over the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico.

The war was also used as an official pretext to take over Hawaii. The Senate debated over the annexation in secret, some arguing for total annexation, others for just Pearl Harbor. Sen. Richard Pettigrew of South Dakota derided the annexation plan as money “thrown away in the interest of a few sugar planters and adventurers in Hawaii.” Military bases and raw materials—sound familiar?

The telephone tax was instituted as part of the War Revenue Bill, which expanded the government’s ability to collect taxes, ostensibly to pay for the war. As with the myriad controversial “pork” items added to the recent Iraq war funding authorization, the 1898 bill was the subject of scores of amendments that benefited big business. These included tax breaks for powerful industries like the insurance companies and tobacco dealers.

The telephone tax of 1 cent per call targeted the wealthy, who were generally the only ones who had telephone access in 1898. After the war, the tax was eventually raised to 3 percent. Since the Vietnam War, it has been the target of war tax resisters, people who refuse to pay taxes because they do not want to fund war.

Tax resistance has a long history. Henry David Thoreau promoted it in his essay “Civil Disobedience” to fight slavery: “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.” The IRS has vigorously targeted full-fledged tax resisters—ranging from those refusing to pay the Pentagon’s percentage of their taxes, to those who outright refuse to pay anything to the government—making an example of them by garnishing wages, sending them to prison for tax evasion and confiscating their homes.



The website,, lists step-by-step instructions on how to recoup the telephone tax rebate, and recommends donating it to charity.

While Congress and President Bush trade barbs over war funding, with a simple check mark on your tax return you can help to defund the war. Claim your telephone tax rebate. Let the Pentagon hold a bake sale.

Amy Goodman

© 2007 Amy Goodman

Tuesday, April 03, 2007


Driving the Riff-Raff Print E-mail
Click Name for Bio of ')">Chris Cook
Tuesday, 03 April 2007
Driving the Riff-Raff
by C. L. Cook
The peril of our current reality occurred suddenly to me the other night, revealed, as Shakespeare said many truths often are, in jest; the terminal fate of the human race could not have been made more clear.

* Witness: the University bus exchange - Victoria - night. Waiting to board the perennially overcrowded University bus, (the under-serviced situation there too a symptom of our collective undoing), I saw three bus drivers shooting the breeze, while laying over. Our driver "Dan," as he later identified himself, turned to his fellows and said; "Well, time to go drive the riff-raff."

That would be me, and my fellow sardine-packed transit passengers.

Whether Dan considers himself to be another of the "riff-raff" I don't know, but I expect, while he's wearing the uniform of his occupation, he considers himself one of US rather than THEM, the passengers whom's safety and service he is charged to maintain. Of course, Dan is, in the eyes of others wearing other uniforms, one of THEM; riff raff, hoi polloi, a lowly "civvie" to be denigrated, disregarded; someone whose societal relevance is to be dismissed out of hand: a nobody.

* Witness: a city bus - Victoria - day. On a blustery, late winter's morning, a near empty bus approaches a bus shelter, near empty too, but for a ragged old man, his chin on his chest, snoozing. The driver pulls up to the shelter, opens the door, and shouts at the elder; "Clear off!"

My friend tells me; "No-one rang for the bus to stop, and nobody was getting on. He [the bus driver] just took it on himself to hassle this poor old guy, one of the real survivors." And off the man shuffled, his bundled rags pulled in tow.

* Witness: a city sidestreet, piled high with snow - Victoria - night. The sidewalks impassable, an elderly woman picks her way carefully along the street, gingerly following the automobile ruts. A Victoria City police van comes up behind. The window rolls down, and the head of a young constable emerges. He bawls at the woman; "Get outta the road!" and splashes on past.

There are doubtless many more examples, many I'm certain you've witnessed yourself: Bicycle police downtown pushing around the homeless for the crime of their poverty; shopkeepers abusing youngsters for the fault of their youth; automobile drivers abusing everyone for the sin of slowing their progress. It's all indicative of a growing incivility, directed downwards towards those deemed socially inferior, and therefore fair game for petty tyranny. I believe, this deterioration in the fabric of public life isn't merely a local phenomenon, but a trend dropped from the heights of what's left of western civilization upon the heads of its neo-peons.

Witness: a television - anywhere - anytime. The walls of the room are blue hued behind the viewer. On the screen, chaos; a city is drowning, desperate people wave make-shift flags, surrendered to the situation, begging for help. But help isn't quick to arrive. The people are left to their own devices - sink or swim.

I watched as the hurricane approached. I saw what Katrina did to Florida, and I heard what the veterans of storms past said about "Little Andrew." I watched as the storm slowly turned into the Gulf, the Gulf grown unnaturally warm. I watched that Gulf feed that storm, and I followed it's inexorable progress toward the doomed city. And I watched the people of that city abandoned to the waters.

Witness: a television - anywhere - all the time. The walls of the room are blue hued behind the viewer. On the screen, chaos; a city is burning, desperate people wail and wave make-shift flags, surrendered to the situation, begging for help. But no help will arrive; those sent know only how to start fires, not stop them.

I watched as the wars approached. I saw what George Bush did to Iraq, and I heard what the veterans of Desert Storm said about their "splendid little war." I watched as that storm turned slowly into Gulf War Syndrome, an unnatural pollution of the gene pool. And I followed the inexorable succession of a second George, and watched as he approached the doomed city, and I saw the people of that city abandoned to the flames.

Writing of "the day that changed everything," Victoria novelist, Hal Sisson, in the "dedication" section of his 'Modus Operandi 9/11' says; "[U]ntutored emotions of ignorant people are the material that enables evil deeds; and when I have shuffled off this mortal coil I want to leave concrete proof that I was not one of the willfully blind or deliberately ignorant persons unwilling to question the ridiculous government story of what happened on 9/11; unable to entertain the irrefutable evidence of the administration's complicity and participation in the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."

Is it too much to believe a government would sacrifice a few thousands of "its own people" to profit its benefactors? How could it seem incredible, when thousands die daily due to the cancerous by-products of an industrial society gone off the tracks? How could it seem absurd that a system routinely disposing of hundreds of millions to a life of want, and suffering, and penal servitude would flinch at a few thousands of souls thrown into the crucible of their infernal greed?

The abrogation of civic responsibility, as we see today in both global polity and local policy, are the twin disasters spelling the end of us all. And if that sounds too incredible, consider what we collectively countenance with our silence as humanity's epitaph; again, taken from Hal Sisson's dedication.

"The major incredible international crime perpetrated by the world's bully was the use of radioactively contaminated depleted uranium 238, that is spreading through Iraq, Afghanistan, other neighboring countries and the world, via dust storms and global air currents, and becomes deposited in human bones, causing cancer and congenital anomalies. If the U.S. administration is allowed to use nuclear weapons on Iran, then mutually assured destruction and annihilation becomes only a matter of time."

I'm watching as that storm approaches.

["*" denotes incidents occurring right here in genteel Victoria that I'm personally acquainted with. Quotes are from the dedication in 'Modus Operandi 9/11' by Hal Sisson.]

Lethal Solution

A Lethal Solution


by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian 27th March 2007.
















You can join the campaign at


1. HM Treasury, March 2007. Budget 2007, Chapter 7.

2. Department for Transport, 21st December 2005. Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) feasibility report. Executive Summary.

3. George W. Bush. 23rd January 2007. State of the Union Address.

4. The US Energy Information Administration gives US gasoline consumption for October 2006 (the latest available date) at 287,857,000 barrels. If this month is typical, annual consumption amounts to 3.45 billion barrels, or 145 billion gallons.

In the state of the union address, Bush proposed a mandatory annual target of 35 billion gallons.

5. George Monbiot, 23rd November 2004. Feeding Cars, Not People. The Guardian.

6. Nils Blythe, 23rd March 2007. Biofuel demand makes food expensive. BBC Online.

7. Eoin Callan and Kevin Morrison, 5th March 2007. Food prices to rise as biofuel demand keeps grains costly. Financial Times.

8. Keith Collins, chief economist, US Department of Agriculture. Quoted by Eoin Callan and Kevin Morrison, 5th March 2007, ibid.

9. Food and Agriculture Organisation, December 2006. Food Outlook 2.

10. UNEP and UNESCO, February 2007. The Last Stand of the Orangutan. State of Emergency: Illegal Logging, Fire and Palm Oil in Indonesia’s National Parks.

11. Wetlands International, 8th December 2006. Bio-fuel less sustainable than realised


13. David Miliband, 14th July 2006. Malaysian Diary.

14. Commission Of The European Communities, 7th February 2007. Results of the review of the Community Strategy to reduce CO2 emissions from passenger cars and light-commercial vehicles. COM 19 final.

15. HM Treasury, ibid.


17. Robert F. Service, et al, 16th March 2007. Cellulosic Ethanol: Biofuel Researchers

Prepare to Reap a New Harvest. Science 315, 1488.
DOI: 10.1126/science.315.5818.1488


Sunday, April 01, 2007

Gorilla Radio for Monday, April 2, 2007

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: . He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, . And, you can check out the GR blog at:

It's been almost fifty years since the popular revolution toppled the Batiste regime in Cuba; and, it's been almost as many years that the island nation has suffered an American led embargo, the longest siege in recorded history. Canada has so far refused to enjoin the starvation campaign against the revolution, but recent political developments here could well threaten the friendly relations enjoyed between Cuba and Canada. Fernando Gomez represents the Cuban Institute in Friendship with the People, and its outreach effort, the Che Guevera Work Brigade. He'll be speaking tonight at the BCGEU building tonight at 7pm. Fernando Gomez and the Canada's working relationship with Cuba in the first half.

And; Canada's foreign policy is altering its hue. Fighting its first "insurgency" war from the distant garrisons of Afghanistan is just one of the radical changes to what Canadian's would regard as the country's traditional role in world polity. Not the nation of Pierre Trudeau, hero to a generation of American asylum-seekers fleeing the war against Vietnam, today's conscientious objectors to the extra-legal occupation of Iraq fleeing to Canada face arrest, and expensive legal entaglements, likely ending in extradition rather than refuge; for others, the treatment is of a more sinister nature. Lee Zaslofsky is with the Toronto chapter of Canada's War Resisters Support Campaign, and he'll be here on a disturbing trend in Canadian policing that questions this nation's autonomy. Lee Zaslofsky and Resisting War: A Canadian tradition, in the second half.

And; Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of the good things to get up to in and around Victoria this week. But first, Fernando Gomez and the Che Guevera Work Brigade.

