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October 27, 2008 By Jeffery Young
Posted by Sana Khan at October 27, 2008 October 22, 2008 By Jeffery Young
Posted by Sana Khan at October 22, 2008 October 20, 2008 Flick Off Express: The Ottawa finale By Dominic Ali It started around 12 noon, when Suzuki boarded the train to meet the student winners from the RBC online contest. They seemed enthralled and almost giddy when he entered the train car, kind of like that scene in the Matrix when Neo meets Morpheus. The Doc is a incredibly busy guy, and at age 72 he isn't showing any signs of slowing down. The colorful trees in the park provided a fantastic backdrop to the speakers and the bands. Faisal and José spoke really well, as did David Brooks, a water policy expert. And of course the Constantines and Spiral Beach rocked the house. (I must remember to buy copies of their CDs--I was too busy at today's show to buy them and get them signed.) It was inspiring to see Suzuki pull out his stops and explain climate change an Canada's lax environmental policies in ways that even I could understand. Although I've seen him dozens of times in the six years I've been at DSF--I've never failed to be blown away by his speeches. It's like watching a master at work: Yo-Yo Ma playing a Bach concerto. Jackson Pollock painting a masterpiece. And David Suzuki giving a public talk. On the train back to Toronto tonight, I had a chance to talk to some of the RBC contest winners. The students are so smart--so much more attuned to current events and the world than I ever was. I wonder what kind of Canada they'll have in ten years. I remain optimistic. To read the rest of Dominic's reports from the tour check out the Flick Off Express blog.
Posted by elijah v at October 20, 2008 October 13, 2008 By David Suzuki
Posted by elijah v at October 13, 2008 October 08, 2008 By David Suzuki
Still, how do we get people who are comfortable and in a nice rut to look at the world differently and make changes? Half the books I’ve written have been for children, not because I believe we have time to wait for them to grow up and replace us, but because if children tell parents they’re worried and want change, how can any parent avoid not acting?
There must be a science to all this. How on earth did our attitude to smoking undergo such an amazing change over the past decade? There’s gotta be a lesson there.
Lately I’ve been thinking about something else. Ten years ago, if you went to a public toilet, nine times out of 10 a guy who used the urinal would walk out without washing his hands. That’s just the way it was. Today, I’m amazed that it’s exactly the opposite: almost all men wash their hands after pissing. How in the world did that come about? Was there a propaganda machine I somehow missed? Are little boys being taught that from kindergarten on? I am very serious: How in the world did this seismic shift happen? We gotta find out so we can apply it to environmental issues. Got any ideas?
Posted by elijah v at October 08, 2008 October 08, 2008 Who’s responsible for the global market? By David Suzuki
Posted by elijah v at October 08, 2008 October 06, 2008 What’s up with this economy stuff? By David Suzuki I’m not an economist, so when I read the news these days, I find myself going crazy because I just don’t understand what’s going on. For years, two great superpowers, America and the Soviet Union, went head-to-head, one advocating free-enterprise capitalism, the other communism – and the good guys won. For decades, North Americans have been told that anything smacking of socialism was bad. Indeed, in the U.S. some even feel government itself is an enemy of the people. So government regulation is bad. Socialized medicine is bad. Welfare is bad. Regulation is bad. Trust the free market, we are told. So what I see is a free market where the main players’ sole function is to make money, and not to provide employment, not to create wealth to provide social services, just to make money, and the more and faster, the better. And boy, it works. Remember Enron? And now it seems these bright boys in banks had a great idea that I’m too stupid to understand. They believed that the price of real estate will inevitably rise. It was a truth like the second law of thermodynamics. So they arranged mortgages for people with no money and no collateral (some call this NINA, for “no income, no assets”) and then bundled up these mortgages and sold them on the stock market. I’m kinda lost here. And guess what? Property prices faltered, and when the banks came calling, people couldn’t make payments and had to forfeit their property, and the whole house of cards collapsed. But we have a global economy, and this pernicious setup reverberates around the world, so these great scions of free enterprise are now begging the government for taxpayers’ money. Isn’t that welfare? Isn’t that what they tried to stamp out? I just don’t get it. Another thing: After the oil crisis of 1973 when OPEC flexed its muscles with an embargo, there was huge pressure on Detroit to increase the fuel efficiency of cars. The automakers fought any regulations tooth and nail, but the imposed standards worked, and fuel efficiency rose steadily. But then Detroit found if they put an auto body on a truck chassis, their emissions standards could be those of trucks. SUVs were a money fountain and boy, did they make a lot of money. But then, California politicians decided their pollution problem needed laws to require higher fuel-efficiency standards. What happened? The big automakers, including Toyota, sued California. They’re still suing the state. But now the big three Detroit companies are tanking as gas prices change consumers’ choices. And guess what? The Detroit automakers are begging Washington for money so they can build fuel-efficient cars! I just don’t get it. Would someone please explain it
Posted by elijah v at October 06, 2008 October 06, 2008 True security means reducing reliance on fossil fuels By David Suzuki Everybody uses the term sustainability these days, and that’s great. As biological creatures, we depend on resources and energy to live, as do all other species. For most of human existence, we’ve used materials from our surroundings: wood, animals, water, rocks, etc. Much of it was renewable. Nature replenished what we used. Today, we should use these renewable resources at a level at which they can be replenished year after year. We should use materials that aren’t renewable, like minerals, very carefully and efficiently, and we should recycle them. Almost all species depend on photosynthesis for energy. That is, plants capture the energy of sunlight and transform it into chemical energy that they can store and use when needed. Animals like us exploit that sunlight by eating plants or animals that eat plants to recover that stored energy. We also release energy by burning peat, dung, wood, coal, gas, and oil, all of it some form of stored energy from photosynthesis. But fossil fuels are not renewable. They are finite, and now we are burning them on such a scale that the resultant greenhouse gas (CO2) is building up and trapping more heat. Furthermore, uranium and fossil fuels, especially oil and gas, are not evenly distributed over the planet. They occur in often highly volatile political regions like the Middle East, Russia, Venezuela, and Nigeria. So when the crisis of climate change is focusing our attention on fossil fuels, we have a huge opportunity to shift to a truly renewable and more equitable form of energy, namely sunlight with its associated wind, waves, tides, and biomass. If the U.S. government can make a commitment of $600 billion to a war in Iraq (Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz thinks the bill could be $3 trillion) and $700 billion to failing banks to ensure security, think of what it could do with even a fraction of those dollars to get us off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy. Now that would be true security from the geopolitics of oil.
Posted by elijah v at October 06, 2008 October 05, 2008 We must listen to the scientists By David Suzuki
Posted by elijah v at October 05, 2008 October 02, 2008 When greenwashing becomes a crime By David Suzuki
Posted by elijah v at October 02, 2008 |
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November 2008
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Less than a day to go to the election and, as I feared, the environment has disappeared from election discourse. All the leaders are scrambling to respond to a tanking global economy. But who has considered this crisis to ask some really important questions like how did politicians sell us out to forces of the global economy that are out of our control? I was astounded at the panic in the U.S. government that led that it to pass, in a matter of days, a bill committing $700 BILLION to banks that merrily made oodles of money in a phoney scheme that was built on nothing. It looks as though even 700-billion big ones will not be enough to pull us out of a severe recession, if not a full-blown depression. I’m already in full-blown depression about where we are heading.
I have found that the
most difficult challenge is getting people to change behaviour. When
I walk down the street, I often see people hunch their shoulders and
look at me sheepishly as if to say, “I know, I know. I have to
sell my SUV.” Hey, I’m not Mr. Perfect, giving everyone
else shit for not being like me. I’m a sinner too. I fly far
too much, and although I have offset my flying carbon emissions for
four years, I have to reduce my actual emissions. I’ve been
doing that by lumping commitments so I only have to fly once for
several things; by taking the train between Toronto, Ottawa, and
Montreal; and more and more, by doing talks by videoconference.