Across the west, ‘post-truth’ politics are on the rise, public support for and trust in democracy and scientific institutions is on the decline, and authoritarianism is starting to make a comeback. Most people agree that these trends are bad, but dispute who is responsible. My argument here is that the political polarization we are seeing these…
–Jared Milne- At first glance, pipelines to get Alberta’s oil to market seem stalled. Many people across Canada don’t think the advantages of pipelines are worth the environmental risks they’re worried about. As I’ve pointed out before, Stephen Harper deserves a lot of the blame for opposition to pipelines becoming as strong as it has.…
War on climate change (Wade Davis, The Globe and Mail): The global economic recovery from the Great Recession remains weak and climate change presents a global threat that will require significant investments to overcome. These circumstances provide an interesting parallel to WWII and the aftermath of the Great Depression. In the 1940s, allied powers made big, all-hands-on-deck investments and overcame both major challenges…
Safe to say it’s been an unusually interesting week in the news. Going to keep this post short, because the links mostly speak for themselves. Three things you must teach your kids if you care about the environment (Rebecca Boyles – Ensia): First off, if you’ve never heard of Ensia, you should check it out. It’s one…
Links have a new look! Starting this week, we will be posting our links as separate posts in order to keep each one digestibly short and a bit less eclectic (this makes it easier to have focused discussions in the comments too). Ten ideas to save the economy. Robert Reich, UC Berkeley professor and former Secretary of…
Links have moved to Mondays! From Matt: From bad to worse (Ivan Semeniuk, The Globe and Mail): With this year’s snowpack around 5% of what’s considered normal, California’s drought is about to get a lot worse. Already, this is estimated to be the worst drought in 1200 years. Statewide water restrictions have been introduced for the first…
–Matt Burgess- Carbon pricing debates have been picking up steam worldwide in recent months. The issue has made a particularly strong resurgence in Canada, after being politically taboo for several years. As a growing chorus of economists and politicians of all stripes has echoed the clear economic rationale for carbon pricing, the debate in Canada…
–Matt Burgess– Many would like to see a new binding international agreement to reduce carbon emissions at the upcoming UN Climate Conference in Paris. Though there appears to be some political will for such an agreement, early cracks in the negotiations in Lima in December call to mind the limited success of past climate agreements. The widely hailed Kyoto…
The idea of a national carbon tax has been near the front of many Canadian news cycles since the Liberals included it in their federal election platform in 2008. The Liberals, under Stéphane Dion, proposed a carbon price of 10$/tonne initially, rising to 40$/tonne in the fourth year, levied on electricity and fuel consumption, with the exception…
The Tête-à-Tête 