Hopes are being pinned on bio-fuels as a way out of the agriculture crisis. Ethanol and bio-diesel, the hopeful say, will increase the demand for crops like wheat and canola enough to make farming profitable again. Farmers and governments have pinned so much hope on bio-fuels because the traditional things that used to be trotted out as reasons for hope have pretty much crashed and burned.
Environment and sustainability
The “Big idea” that Canada can generously share its water the same way it now shares energy on a continental scale is generally based on four false assumptions: 1) that Canada has lots of “surplus” water; 2) that Canada has no water problems; 3) that Canada maintains excellent water data; and 4) that Canada can get fabulously rich selling its water.
These myths are debunked below.
For the past 14 years, as editor of The CCPA Monitor, the monthly journal of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Ed Finn has been analyzing, exposing, and debunking the doctrine of neoliberalism. This is the ideology used to justify the overwhelming power that corporations have seized or been granted over the past three decades—power that has been harnessed to gain economic and political dominance on a global scale.
Premier
Gordon Campbell has positioned BC as a global leader on climate change.
From handshakes with Al Gore and Arnold Schwarzenegger to an ambitious
plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by one-third by 2020, his
enthusiasm for fighting climate change is laudable.
Anyone
who has paid attention knows that things are wrong, horribly wrong,
with what was once the dominant industry on Vancouver Island and indeed
coastal BC.
It took intense pressure and heat over millions of years to turn buried plant and animal life into the natural gas that energy companies now suck out of the ground with increasing speed in northeast BC.It will take just 34 years, based on current rates of production and reliable estimates of what remains, to deplete that irreplaceable, publicly owned natural resource – and half that time if, as BC government leaders have sometimes advocated, energy companies were to double their efforts.
In his otherwise excellent report, The Economics of Climate Change, Britain’s Sir Nicolas Stern states that climate change “is the greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen.” Close, but no cigar. At least, not yet. The science and the seriousness of the global warming problem is not disputable, but it is debatable whether climate change can yet be awarded the dubious honour of greatest “market failure.”
For several years, BC has been hooked on revenues from the fossil fuel industry. Skyrocketing royalty payments to the province from companies pulling oil and natural gas out of BC's energy-rich northeast corner now outstrip income from forestry. Over the past 10 years, production of natural gas in BC has increased by more than 40 per cent, and the number of wells has more than tripled.