Conservative Budget Promotes “Head In Oil Sands” Approach to Climate Change

by Christine
350 or Bust

As the Globe and Mail’s Shawn McCarthy points out, the budget announced by Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty yesterday puts climate action on ice:

"The Harper government has taken a pause in financing federal action on climate change.

In his budget speech Thursday, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was literally silent on the issue – climate change was not mentioned, though the government has in the past described it as one of the major challenges of the age.

Rather than provide new spending for programs to reduce Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions, the government is standing pat as it prepares to regulate emission reductions in transportation, electricity and industrial sectors."

Graham Saul, Executive Director of Climate Action Network Canada responded to Flaherty’s budget as follows:

“Just when we thought that it couldn’t get any worse, today’s budget is a monumental failure of this government to do what it takes to address climate change in a meaningful way.

We are falling behind in the race for the clean energy jobs of the 21st century; the U.S. continues to outspend us embarrassingly 14:1 per capita on renewable energy. We have also failed to commit to our fair share in supporting poorer countries as they adapt to climate change."

Tim Weis, Director of Renewable Energy and Efficiency Policy at the Calgary-based Pembina Institute, points out on his renewable energy blog that in this budget Canada has hit rock bottom on investments in the environment. The resulting lag in innovation and green jobs will haunt Canada in the years to come:

"Yesterday’s Speech from the Throne committed Canada to becoming a “leader in green job creation”, but today’s budget does not walk the talk. With the Federal renewable energy investment program officially out of money, this budget’s void effectively means the federal government is walking away from renewable power. In spite of studies that have shown investments in renewable power actually generate a net financial gain for the government, it appears that this government still believes that taking action to protect the environment is at odds with building a strong economy. (In fact, Pembina’s analysis shows that we can take strong action to address climate change while growing our economy and creating nearly two million net new jobs.) "

Perhaps that perception is in part why Canada ranked 14th out of 17 countries for innovation, according to a recent report card from the Conference Board of Canada. Without strong federal leadership, Canadians will continue to lag behind as other countries take the lead in the emerging clean-energy market. (The U.S., for instance, set aside $98 billion for environmental and sustainable energy projects in last year’s economic stimulus package, outspending Canada 14:1 )

It seems that Harper’s Conservatives are leading Canada on a charge to nowhere but down economically and environmentally. The writing is on the wall - the carbon economy is the past, not the future. Former World Bank Chief Economist Lord Stern has estimated that to keep heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions below levels that would cause catastrophic climate change would cost up to two per cent of global GDP. Lord Stern initially predicted that failure to act on climate change could cost from five to 20 per cent of global GDP, but recently revised that, saying the cost of inaction would be “50 per cent or more higher” than his previous highest estimate – meaning it could cost a third of the world’s wealth.

As scientist Richard Gammon, speaking on the steps of the U.S. Congress in 1999 said:

"If you think mitigated climate change is expensive, try unmitigated."

If you haven’t already contacted your Member of Parliament as well as Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Minister of the Environment Jim Prentice, do so now. Tell them it’s time for the Conservatives to get their heads out of the oil sands and take decisive action on climate change.

Click here and here to find out what else you can do to fight climate change.

Socialism in the 21st Century: A Model with Changeable Pieces

What does 21st-century socialism consist of? Is it only a slogan or a dream that can be turned into a reality? Last century’s socialism has bequeathed this new one a logbook, with certain qualities that 21st-century socialism must acknowledge, embracing some, correcting others, and avoiding still others completely. The fast-changing times we live in today will necessarily make this model a puzzle we can put together and take apart.

By Juan Carlos Monedero

According to the logbook bequeathed to 21st-century socialism, last century’s predecessor had four main qualities: efficiency, heroism, barbarity and ingenuousness. The efficiency had to do with its capacity to bring a considerable amount of humanity—feudal Russia, imperial China and the depressed areas of Central Europe, Africa and Asia—into the modern era. The barbarity is what makes up the black book of the often unfairly called “real socialism,” and had to do with the Gulags, Walls, purges, political prisoners, lack of representative democracy, creation of enemies of the people, elimination of dissidence and the like.

Twentieth-century socialism also demands that we remember its heroism—often purposefully silenced—in stopping the spread of Nazism during the Second World War (of the 50 million dead, 20 million were Soviet citizens) and those who died or were imprisoned and tortured in the struggles against dictatorships and for democracy. Less talked about was socialism’s ingenuousness in the past century, by which we mean simple, even simplified, albeit well meaning, solutions to complex problems that aren’t resolved by changing the analysis of human nature.

Five main reasons 20th-century socialism was ingenuous

First, it was naïve for believing that assaulting the state apparatus was enough to change the social system. This naiveté is found in Marx himself, a man so convinced that a harmonious reign would follow the fall of capitalism that he didn’t stop to develop a theory of transition, justice or the State to match the challenges that were to come. Once power was won all else was improvisation. That was why Lenin decided to interpret each moment in the unfolding process, even as other Marxists reproached him for his rush and his unwillingness to adjust to the pace laid out by Marx, by then considered an oracle.

Two, it was naïve for believing that creating a single party ruled by democratic centralism (i.e. information flowing from bottom to top and orders from top to bottom) was enough to regulate society, respond to evolutionary changes and join together different volitions. Only if one believes that there’s such a thing as a single truth can one propose the creation of a single party.

Three, it was naïve for believing that nationalizing the means of production and controlling them through the State would satisfy social needs more effectively and abundantly than capitalism. Nationalizing the means of production does not mean socializing them.

Four, it was naïve for believing that what worked well in Russia would work equally well in other countries with different experiences, histories and worldviews. This was behind the bitterness of Peru’s Mariátegui, who warned orthodox Marxists that Latin America needed a Marxism that was “neither an imitation nor a copy” of the Soviet model.

And five, it was naïve for believing that uninterrupted growth would bring a reign of abundance that would end all human and social problems, ignoring humans’ need for deeper meaning, the depletion of the planet’s resources and the problems of modern productivity. Likewise for incorporating the idea of “the end of history” without understanding that socialism itself is a part of history and therefore must change with the societies and remain open to incorporating new needs, such as ecological sensitivity.

Twenty-first century socialism must rectify these errors and do a more complex analysis than the simple one that led to political actions in the past century now considered contrary to commonly accepted emancipating practices. Twenty-first century socialism will keep its substance. It is socialist because it clearly and definitively situates itself in opposition to capitalism and the exploitation capitalism entails. In addition to class domination, socialism now must incorporate any other type of domination—gender, racial, environmental, sexual and generational—into its social transformation. In this sense, socialism maintains its role as party pooper to capitalism’s promised orgy.

How can we envision socialism in the 21st century? I imagine it with these characteristics.

Twenty-first century socialism must rethink the definition of human nature

This definition must not be based on false assumptions about good and evil. We are neither angels nor devils. Both selfishness and altruism are part of our biological makeup. Which one is emphasized depends upon the social structure. Socialism committed the error, a legacy of the Enlightenment, of thinking that human beings were not only “good” but “perfectible.” On the other hand, Hobbes’ statement that man is “the wolf among men” is also incorrect. Humans have a strong survival instinct that leads them to both individualistic and group behaviors.

We now know that the new circumstances do more for any transformation than the supposedly “new man” who constantly reverted to old vices during the 20th century. Social conditions can even lead to genetic modifications. People who live from planting rice in wetlands have developed alleles that make them immune to malaria. All this explains the social nature of human beings.

Save Greenpeace

Website calls on employees, public to “Save Greenpeace”

Hiring Tzeporah Berman jeopardizes 39 year legacy of environmental activism

Since Greenpeace International announced its hiring of ForestEthics founder and current Power Up Canada director Tzeporah Berman as co-director of its climate campaign, a chorus of long-time environmental activists have voiced their strong opposition.

Today, activists launched a new website they hope will amplify these voices and help convince Greenpeace to change direction: http://www.savegreenpeace.org/

Greenpeace International co-founder Rex Weyler (not affiliated with www.savegreenpeace.org) called the decision to hire Berman “an all-out betrayal of environmentalism, of the groups and activists who built the environmental movement in Canada and in the world, and a betrayal of the Earth itself.”

“Tzeporah now speaks for General Electric, not for the Earth, not for wilderness, and not for our children’s future,” he added in an email making the rounds in environmental circles.

Since 1980, environmental groups have increasingly partnered with the corporations involved in environmentally damaging activities, trading mild reforms for their seal of approval. Yesterday, a former employee of Conservation International told The Nation that “Not only do the largest conservation groups take money from companies deeply implicated in environmental crimes; they have become something like satellite PR offices for the corporations that support them.”

Tzeporah Berman has been a pioneer of the collaborative approach. As founder of ForestEthics, she drew the ire of BC environmentalists and natives for eliminating public oversight from negotiations around the Great Bear Rainforest, giving the go-ahead to a plan to log 70% of the pristine forest. She has most recently been a vocal supporter of Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government while advocating for the privatization and damming of BC’s rivers as director of Power Up Canada.

Greenpeace was founded in Vancouver in 1971. It has its roots in a frustration with the Sierra Club’s–a dominant environmental group at the time–inaction in response to nuclear testing. Sierra Club brass did not like the direct action tactics of Greenpeace’s founders, and a new kind of environmental organization was born. In 39 years, Greenpeace has conducted hundreds of direct actions confronting destructive corporate practices. The approach resonated: Greenpeace’s membership is 2.8 million strong as of 2008.

“Greenpeace’s original approach was confronting corporations and governments at the scenes of their crimes,” said savegreenpeace.org co-creator Macdonald Stainsby. “That approach has softened lately, but if they hire Tzeporah Berman, they’ll be on the fast track to corporate collaboration, beyond the point of no return.”

“There is a massive struggle going on inside Greenpeace,” he added, “but people who are employees can’t talk about it, so it’s up to the rest of us to oppose this vocally.”

SaveGreenpeace.org invites visitors to sign on to a statement opposing collaboration with corporations, asking the venerable direct action organization to reverse course and not hire Tzeporah Berman.
Contact:
Macdonald Stainsby
780 233 4992
mstainsby@resist.ca

Ecorise Italy

From Fabio Barteri
Ecorise, Italy

Ecorise is an ecosocialist political laboratory which has more than 20 activists. We are all students of biology, environmental and natural science, geology and engineering who want to bring the ecological issues back to the political debate in the University Movement and public opinion.

Our aim is to produce independent information based on a website, an independent web-tv, a monthly newspaper (500 copies), a facebook page, meetings and conferences and even flash mobs. Despite our site is mostly in Italian language, you can still folow us. We have even an english section (mostly Derek Wall's articles.) and a Spanish section.

In Italy it is very hard to set up political groups because of the heterogeneity of the political views. In fact, we have five communist parties, two green parties, two social  d mocrat parties and a lot of independent and anarchist groups. The left is divided. In ecorise we have been able to gather a lot of different political views.

We have anarchists, social democrats, leninists, trotskyists and even liberal democrats and non-better defined"greens". It is very interesting that the proposal of the ecosocialist theories encountered a large approval. Some of us translated the article "What is Ecosocialism" by Michael Lowy and shared between ecorise activists, even anarchists agreed with him. Maybe the ecosocialist theories can take back unity in the left. 

The logo we have chosen for ecorise it is a simple but very effective logo: a five-pointed green star. This logo combines the usual communist red-star and the green, color of environment and science. I think this could be a good symbol for representing ecosocialism. The five- pointed star historically represents the unity of five continents and mankind in socialism, the green represents the unity and balance of mankind and environment. Thus a green star could stand for "united in socialism andecology".

"Nothing in Politics Makes Sense Except in the Light of Ecological Wisdom"

website: http://www.ecorise.org/
mail: info@ecorise.org
facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Roma-Italy/ecorise/213428590777?ref=ts
webtv: http://livestream.com/ecorise
Newspaper (PDF download): http://ecorise.org/?page_id=23

Environmental crime scene in Regina

Written by Hunter
ActUp in Saskatchewan

March 3 was the day the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) held its annual meeting in Toronto. RBC is the largest financier of the environmentally devastating Alberta Tar Sands project. Since 2007 the RBC has extended over $14.3 billion (USD) in credit to companies operating in the Alberta Tar Sands.

The tar sands operation currently uses 350 billion litres of water annually, with 90% of that water being so toxic after use to process the heavy crude oil that it kills any animal that consumes it. RBC states that water quality is a top corporate priority.

 In support of activists who were gathering at the RBC annual meeting in Toronto, a group of Climate Change Protection Ninjas descended upon a reported environmental crime scene in Regina.

Atomic accomplice

Canada's uranium sales increase pollution and risk of rogue nuclear weapons.
by Paul McKay
StraightGoods.ca

[Below is an excerpt from Atomic Accomplice. The whole book is available for purchase from the address below.]

Canada has been dealing atoms since 1942, when the Mackenize King war cabinet approved joining the US nuclear bomb effort known as the Manhattan Project. It supplied key ingredients to US production plants and weapons laboratories making the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The prevailing myth is that this tragedy ended Canada's involvement with the military atom. But that is false. Instead, like a radioactive plume silently spreading out concentrically from an atomic blast, Canada has accelerated the global dispersal of weapons-related elements, technologies, and secrets.

As of 2008, the world's 440 power reactors collectively met only five percent of global energy demand — the same contribution as wood.

Much of this happened below the public and political radar, and has already helped in the making of nuclear bombs currently stored in the arsenals of the US, Britain, Russia, France, Israel, India, and Pakistan. Canada has also dealt atomic supplies and secrets to military dictatorships in Argentina, Taiwan, Romania, South Korea and Communist China.

We are still engaged in this deadly diaspora. Canada currently exports 7.3 million kilograms of uranium annually. When fissioned in any reactor of any owner or origin, this will create some 19,000 kilograms of plutonium each year, or enough to make 2,300 warheads annually if it is extracted from the spent fuel. These annual uranium exports also contain 52,000 kilograms of fissile uranium-235, or enough to make 2,600 atomic bombs each year.

Because it is essentially immortal, this 'embedded' Canadian plutonium and U235 will imperil global security for millennia because they will outlast hundreds of future governments in the recipient countries. Or, for all intents and purposes, the rest of human history.

This is not conjecture, or hyperbole. It is a stark, fundamental fact of physics which no honest scientist can deny. The fission of uranium and the creation of plutonium are inextricably entwined like fire and smoke, or the twisted double helix of DNA.

For this reason, physicists aptly named plutonium after the deathless and diabolical Greek god of the underworld. Standing outside nature itself, it embeds a dimension of destruction almost beyond imagining. A fissioned mass the size of a stick of chewing gum can destroy a city.

Canada leads the world in uranium exports. Ergo, it leads the world in collateral plutonium proliferation, and the spread of fissile U235. This earns more than $1 billion in current cash flow, but uranium's alter ego will court calamity for centuries to come because embedded in these exports is enough fissile material to make almost 5,000 warheads each year.

This trade fits the profile of a psychopath, or black marketeer. It will be a tough truth for Canadians to swallow. We pride ourselves on our standing as an "honest broker" in international relations, and for the peace-keeping forces we have sent, often at great cost in lives lost, to far-off places where civilians are at the mercy of murderous conflicts.

But "following the atoms" proves that we are a boy-scout nation with a very dirty secret. That secret has been under-written by $30 billion in taxpayer dollars, greased with secret bribes to win export deals, and buried in decades of deceit by official Ottawa.

*****

Ten years into the 21st Century, humankind and the lovely delicate planet we share, confront two catastrophic forces — atomic proliferation spreading horizontally among nations because of unpoliceable nuclear fuels and technologies, and a climate crisis fostered by unchecked greenhouse gas emissions.

Canada is doubly implicated in this because Saskatchewan's uranium mines are putting millions of kilograms of fissile material on the open market each year, and Alberta's infamous tar sands are spewing millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the Earth's open skies.

As of 2008, after a half century of heavily-subsidized development, the world's 440 power reactors collectively met a mere five percent of global energy demand — the same contribution as wood — or about sixteen percent of electricity production. Annual nuclear output was 2.6 billion kilowatt-hours.

The matching world uranium consumption was 65 million kilograms per year,6 and the matching plutonium created annually in the radioactive spent fuel from these reactors was 70 tonnes 7 - or potentially enough for 7,000 bombs per year. These statistics are from the very nuclear industry which has recently re-branded itself as the "emissions free" white knight which can smite the scourge of greenhouse gases. That claim, and those numbers, compel some simple arithmetic.

Doubling nuclear power to ten percent of world energy demand would require some 900 reactors to be in operation, which would consume 120 million kilograms of uranium annually and create enough plutonium for 14,000 warheads each year. By comparison, the existing world total of nuclear warheads is 27,000.

If it is assumed that 900 future civilian reactors would have an average life-span of three decades, enough cumulative plutonium for 420,000 warheads would be the collateral cost of meeting ten percent of global energy demand for a few decades.

These numbers belie the nuclear industry's claim that its vaunted renaissance will slay the dragon of greenhouse gases. It is technically and financially impossible for nuclear plants to replace the 86 percent of global energy now supplied by fossil fuels. Replacing only five percent would create an extra proliferation liability lasting hundreds of centuries. This is no less harrowing because it is buried in the fine print.

An energy strategy which merely substitutes plutonium tommorrow for carbon pollutants today amounts to trading fatal poisons. So, despite the daunting task, human survival depends on devising an exit strategy from both.

Paul McKay is a multiple recipient of Canada's top journalism awards for investigative reporting, business and feature writing. He is a past winner of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy, and was the 2005 Pierre Berton Writer-in-Residence. A series he wrote for the Ottawa Citizen was a finalist for the Governor General's Michener prize for public service journalism. He has also written four critically acclaimed books covering public policy, business biography, and true crime subjects. His feature writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Vancouver Sun and Maclean's Magazine.

Copies of his latest book, Atomic Accomplice, can be purchased online here.

Tars sands protest in London, Ontario

On Monday afternoon, Climate Justice London (formerly known as Mobilization for Climate Justice-London), held a successful 'die-in' inside an RBC branch in downtown London, to protest RBC's role as the largest financier of tar sands projects. Here's some pictures both from inside and from outside the branch.

Photos here.

- S

Cashing in on the Tar Sands

Taxpayers' money involved in financing controversial tar sands companies
Indignous Envionmental Network News

It's been revealed that RBS have been involved in providing loans worth $7.5 billion in the last three years to companies carrying out highly controversial ‘tar sands’ mining [1] in Canada.

A coalition of NGOs including PLATFORM, the World Development Movement, People & Planet and Friends of the Earth [2] are tomorrow releasing a report, 'Cashing in on Tar Sands – RBS, UK Banks and Canada’s ‘Blood Oil’ which shows that outside of North America, RBS is involved in the highest quantity of loans to tar sands-related companies, equivalent to 8 per cent of the global total.



Exploitation of tar sands have been the subject of international criticism for its negative impact on climate change, Canadian ecosystems and the Indigenous communities that live in the region. On the 1st of February, executives of European and North American banks, including RBS, met in Toronto to discuss concerns over a public backlash over the banking sector’s involvement in the increasingly controversial projects. [3]

The report is being released on Monday, the day three of the groups are in court challenging the Treasury over RBS’ use of public money to provide finance for companies that exacerbate climate change and disregard human rights, including tar sands, coal, oil and gas and other forms of mining, for examples Vedanta's bauxite mines in India.

Mel Evans from PLATFORM, one of the authors of the report said: “RBS has been involved in providing more money in loans to destructive tar sands companies than any other UK bank. When RBS executives get their bonuses, they are being rewarded for enabling oil companies to devastate traditional ways of life for Indigenous communities in Canada, while making the problems of climate change much, much worse.”

Clayton Thomas-Muller, an Indigenous activist from Canada said: ““RBS must publicly commit to not providing finance to Canada's Tar sands. Failure to do so would be morally bankrupt given that the developments entail massive ecological destruction and human rights abuses particularly in First Nations Lands. Now that RBS is owned by the public, the bank should be transformed into a leader in the emerging green energy economy in the UK rather than causing so much destruction to the lands of Indigenous Peoples in Canada.”

The World Development Movement and People & Planet are today announcing a week of protests to be held simultaneously with the RBS AGM on Wednesday 28 April. This will involve protests outside the AGM centre and branches across the UK calling for a moratorium on RBS investments in tar sands because of their devastating impact on human rights and the climate.

Deborah Doane, director of the World Development Movement said: "It's deeply concerning to learn that so much of our money is being used to provide finance for tar sands extraction. These investments have a devastating impact on the lives of Indigenous communities in Canada, while fuelling climate change, just to service the rich world’s unquenchable thirsty for dirty energy. The consequences of climate change are already hitting the world's poorest people the hardest, and this completely cancels out efforts we take nationally to prevent catastrophic climate change. This is a huge injustice and during our week of protest we will be demanding that investment of our money into this 'blood oil' be stopped immediately."

[1] Tar sands are a type of oil that is mixed up with a particulate matter that needs to separated. The process of obtaining the oil is around three times more carbon intensive than obtaining conventional oil. In addition the process creates enormous lakes of toxic byproducts that are leaking into water sources, and are being blamed by local communities for the abnormal rates of rare cancers they are experiencing.

[2] The full list of groups publishing the report is PLATFORM, the World Development Movement, People & Planet, the Indigenous Environmental Network, Friends of the Earth - Scotland, Friends of the Earth – England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Friends of the Earth – Europe, the New Internationalist, Indigenous Peoples Links, BankTrack and the Rainforest Action Network

[3] The meeting was hosted by the Royal Bank of Canada and was held at the RBC Plaza in Toronto Canada and attended by 41 banking executives from around the world, including Baba Abu, the RBS Head, Sustainable Business, Global Banking. The day included presentations by Jim Ellis, the Albertan Deputy Minister for the Environment, and Peter Watson, the Deputy Minister for Energy, and a presentation on ‘Public Opinion on Canada’s Oil Sands’ by Bruse Anderson of National Public Relations.

(3) Investments were scrutinized of 26 banks from across the world, including Barclays, RBS and HSBC. The report looks at looks at the finance that RBS, Barclays and HSBC have made to companies that (a) have an ownership stake in existing tar sands projects and projects under development; or (b) own, operate or are developing pipelines primarily being used to transport tar sands oil over a three year period from January 2007 through to December 2009 and has been collated using a Bloomberg terminal

For more information and interviews, please call:
Mel Evans -PLATFORM – 07790 430620
Kate Blagojevic – World Development Movement – 0207 820 4900 / 07711 875 345
Clayton Thomas-Muller – Indigenous Environmental Network – +1 218 760 6632
Darek Ubaniak – Friend of the Earth Europe - +32 495 460 258

Avi Lewis introduces Lecture Series; Naomi Klein on Climate Debt

The CCPA hosted the inaugural David Lewis Lecture, in Toronto last week. The lecture, introduced by Avi Lewis and presented by Naomi Klein, is presented below.



View the rest of the lecture here.

What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism

By Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster
Monthly Review

For those concerned with the fate of the earth, the time has come to face facts: not simply the dire reality of climate change but also the pressing need for social-system change. The failure to arrive at a world climate agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009 was not simply an abdication of world leadership, as is often suggested, but had deeper roots in the inability of the capitalist system to address the accelerating threat to life on the planet. Knowledge of the nature and limits of capitalism, and the means of transcending it, has therefore become a matter of survival. In the words of Fidel Castro in December 2009: “Until very recently, the discussion [on the future of world society] revolved around the kind of society we would have. Today, the discussion centers on whether human society will survive.”

Read the full article at Monthly Review.

Avoiding apocalypse fatigue

By Murray Dobbin
Murray Dobbin's Blog

We need to keep reminding ourselves that if we want to inspire people to change the world we have to do more than scare the hell out of them. The issue of global warming is becoming less and less important to Americans (I haven't seen recent polling regarding Canadians) and the reason, according to a couple of prominent environmental analysts, is what they call apocalypse fatigue.

The numbers are not encouraging. The major increase in public attention and concern brought about by Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth film, and his media blitz, seemed to promise a permanent change in attitude. But according to Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger that concern is rapidly decreasing. "Belief that global warming is occurring had declined from 71 per cent in April of 2008 to 56 per cent in October [2009] -- an astonishing drop in just 18 months. The belief that global warming is human-caused declined from 47 per cent to 36 per cent."

But those numbers aren't the bad news. According to Nordhaus and Shellenberger the actual support for government action on climate change has been very consistent over the past 20 years -- regardless of new science or other developments that play to the issue. "Roughly two-thirds of Americans have consistently told pollsters that global warming is occurring. By about the same majority, most Americans agree that global warming is at least in part human-caused..."

No, the bad news is that although people express support for action, that support is very weak. "Looking back over 20 years, only about 35 to 40 per cent of the U.S. public worry about global warming ‘a great deal,' and only about one-third consider it a ‘serious personal threat.' Moreover, when asked in open-ended formats to name the most serious problems facing the country, virtually no Americans volunteer global warming." Other environmental problems -- like pollution and air quality -- get mentioned more often.

Why do only half of those who support action on climate change say it's a priority for them? Nordhaus and Shellenberger turn to political psychology for the answers and find some in the notion of "system justification" which they describe as the fact that"...many people have a psychological need to maintain a positive view of the existing social order, whatever it may be. This need manifests itself, not surprisingly, in the strong tendency to perceive existing social relations as fair, legitimate, and desirable, even in contexts in which those relations substantively disadvantage the person involved."

The other factor making commitment to action weak is that the threat seems far off and is connected to very ordinary daily activities -- not some specific, looming event. In response to this low level of commitment, some climate activists emphasize the worst case scenarios as if they were the most likely -- hoping to push people to greater commitment. But it isn't working -- it is driving moderates and conservatives, climate fence sitters away rather than getting them to make a greater commitment.

I have written before that what we are really talking about regarding climate change (combined with the limits of growth and the finite nature of energy and other natural resources) is a cultural revolution. While Nordhaus and Shellenberger aren't calling for such change they make the point that implied in the demands of climate activists are changes most Americans (and Canadians, I expect) are not prepared to make -- at least not to prevent a far-off apocalypse. "Having been told that climate science demands that we fundamentally change our way of life, many Americans have, not surprisingly, concluded that the problem is not with their lifestyles but with what they've been told about the science."

Nordhaus and Shellenberger are focused narrowly on the issue of climate change and try to end their article on an optimistic note saying most Americans will support action on climate change: "...so long as the costs are reasonable and the benefits, both economic and environmental, are well-defined."

But that optimism contradicts their own analysis. In fact, the costs are not "reasonable" if we accept uncritically as a basic assumption the continued existence of a perverse consumer society based on continued unlimited economic growth around the world. To make the demands of climate change action "reasonable" we have to redefine what reasonable means -- and that calls for a for a revolutionary change in the way we see ourselves, the way we live our lives, our relationship to nature and what actually makes us happy.

Until we integrate the demands of climate change into a positive vision of the future -- until we quit organizing for progressive change by trying to address a whole list of single issues, only vaguely connected to each other, real change will remain elusive.

Murray Dobbin is a guest senior contributing editor for rabble.ca. Murray has been a journalist, broadcaster, author and social activist for 40 years. A board member and researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, he has written five studies for the centre including examinations of charter schools, and "Ten Tax Myths." Murray has been a columnist for the Financial Post and Winnipeg Free Press and contributes guest editorials to the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and other Canadian dailies. He writes a regular "State of the Nation" column for the on-line journal theTyee.ca which is published simultaneously on rabble.ca. His blog is murraydobbin.ca

Raging Grannies do Climate Change, in song!

by Cathy Fitzgerald
An art and ecology notebook

Please, pour yourself a cup of tea and join us . . .

We are out in the streets promoting peace, justice, social and economic equality through song and humour.

Just a little something for International Women’s day later this week (8 March), a bit of music from the Canada-led 15 year plus phenomenon, the now International Raging Grannies and one of their latest songs, Climate Change is Coming to Town.

Take a few minutes and listen to the Toronto Raging Grannies Climate Change is Coming to Town (it’s brilliant) Click here.

Song Courtesy of Toronto Raging Grannies

(To the tune of Santa Claus is Coming to Town)

Oh, you better reduce your greenhouse gases.
You better educate the public masses.
Climate change is coming to town!

It knows that you’ve been stalling.
While land turns into lakes.
Our inaction is appalling.
So commit for the earth’s sake.

Oh, you better invest in wind and solar.
Cause Santa needs this to save the polar.
Climate change is coming to town!

Oh, you better create low emission transport.
Santa does this with reindeer escorts.
Climate change is coming to town!

Santa knows that you’re not naughty.
He sees that you do care.
So tell our politicians.

We don’t need more hot air.
Oh if we want to keep our ice and our snow.
We have to keep commitments to Kyoto.
Climate change is coming to town!

Oh it’ll take work, it won’t be a breeze.
But we have to act now to drop those degrees.
Climate change is coming . . .
Climate change is coming . . .
Climate change is coming . . .
to town!