Quotulatiousness

February 16, 2021

Reduce, re-use, recycle … reject

Filed under: China, Economics, Environment, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Miltimore rounds up several recent stories about American cities backing away from their elaborate, expensive, and wasteful recycling programs. We’ve had three generations of kids brought up indoctrinated into the belief that recycling was not only a good idea, but that it had almost mystical qualities and that it was essential to “saving the world”. The economic facts strongly contradict that, and have always revealed the inefficiencies and outright waste produced by even the best-run municipal recycling programs.

China, perhaps the largest buyer of US recyclables, stopped accepting them in 2018. Other countries, such as Thailand and India, have increased imports, but not in sufficient tonnage to alleviate the mounting costs cities are facing.

“We are in a crisis moment in the recycling movement right now,” Fiona Ma, the treasurer of California, told the Times.

Cost is the key word. Like any activity or service, recycling is an economic activity. The dirty little secret is that the benefits of recycling have been dubious for some time.

“Recycling has been dysfunctional for a long time,” Mitch Hedlund, executive director of Recycle Across America, told The Times.

[…]

And then there are the energy and resources that go into recycling. How much water do Americans spend annually rinsing items that end up in a landfill? How much fuel is spent deploying fleets of barges and trucks across highways and oceans, carrying tons of garbage to be processed at facilities that belch their own emissions?

The data on this front is thin, and results on the environmental effectiveness of recycling vary based on the material being recycled. Yet all of this presumes the recyclables are not being cleaned and shipped only to be buried in a landfill, like so much of it is today. This, Mises would say, is planned chaos, the inevitable result of central planners making decisions instead of consumers through free markets.

Most market economists, Reed points out, “by nature, philosophy, and experience” a bunch skeptical of centrally planned schemes that supplant choice, were wise to the dynamics of recycling from the beginning.

In a 2004 episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit, they discussed recycling:

January 17, 2021

Hector Drummond on Boris “Cane-Toad” Johnson

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Environment, Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As a teaser to attract new subscribers to his Patron and SubscribeStar pages, Hector Drummond shared this piece on the ecological disaster of Australia’s 1930s cane-toad importation and the similar political disaster of Boris Johnson in Britain:

In the 1930s Queensland farmers were facing trouble with large numbers of cane beetles eating the sugar crops that were an important part of the state’s economy. So the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations came up with a cunning plan. They would import some cane toads (a native of middle and south America), because cane toads ate cane beetles. This was sure to solve the problem in a trice. One-hundred and two cane toads were duly imported into the state, from Hawaii as it happened, to do the job.

Unfortunately this soon became a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. In fact it wasn’t any cure at all because the cane toads didn’t bother much with the cane beetles, and instead ate everything else they could wrap their tongues around. The other thing they did was multiply at an explosive rate. These days there are estimated to be 200 million cane toads in Australia, mainly in Queensland, and they cause havoc with the native fauna, not least because they have nasty poison-producing glands on the back of their head which the native animals have no naturally-evolved defence against. Curious pet dogs who mess about with a toad can die.

In 2019 Britain was facing its own crisis. It had become obvious to half the country that Theresa May’s Conservative government was deliberately trying to prevent Brexit from happening. As the other parties were even worse, the only hope for a real Brexit to take place was if a new pro-Brexit leadership in the Conservative party could be installed. After a titanic struggle, this finally happened, and Alexander “Boris” Johnson became the new leader, with Michael Gove and advisor Dominic Cummings at his side.

Unfortunately Johnson has proven to be Britain’s own version of the cane toad, a cure that is vastly worse than the disease. Johnson, at least, proved to be more able than his Australian counterpart at doing the job that was required of him. Whereas the Australian toad was about as interested in cane beetles as Olly Robbins was in getting the UK out of the EU, Johnson at least gave us a middling type of Brexit which, as fudged as it was, was at least far better than anything any of his fellow MPs could have got.

But in terms of being worse than the disease, Cane-Toad Johnson has proven to be far, far more destructive than the cane toad ever was. The cane toad, after all, is merely an ecological pest, whereas Johnson has proved to be a dangerous menace to the country’s liberty, prosperity and health. The poison from his glands has leached into our very life. We have become like domestic dogs who have been forced to lick them every day.

January 7, 2021

QotD: Sneering at “the throwaway society”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Health, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For half a century, it’s been a term of disdain: the “throwaway society,” uttered with disgust by the environmentally enlightened. But now that their reusable tote bags are taboo at grocery stores and Starbucks is refusing to refill their ceramic mugs, they’ve had to face some unpleasant realities. Disposable products aren’t merely more convenient than the alternative; they’re also safer, particularly during a pandemic but also at any other time. And they have other virtues: the throwaway society is healthier, cleaner, more economical, less wasteful, less environmentally damaging — and yes, more “sustainable” than the green vision of utopia.

These are not new truths, even if it took the Covid-19 pandemic to reveal them again. The throwaway age began because of public-health campaigns a century ago to control the spread of pathogens. Disposable products were celebrated for decades for promoting hygiene and saving everyone time and money. It wasn’t until the 1970s that they became symbols of decadent excess, and then only because of economic and ecological fallacies repeated so often that they became conventional wisdom.

In a strange turn of events, the most affluent society in history suddenly turned into a mass of neurotic hoarders. Sifting through garbage for valuables, an activity formerly associated with the most destitute inhabitants of Third World shantytowns, became a moral duty in American suburbs. Greens campaigned for “zero waste” and a “circular economy” in which disposable products would be outlawed. They confidently predicted that the throwaway society was doomed, but if they’d known anything about its history, they would have realized that it was created for very good reasons — and that it will endure long after their lamentations are forgotten.

John Tierney, “Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society”, City Journal, 2020-09-13.

January 1, 2021

QotD: Buying “organic” food

Filed under: Business, Economics, Environment, Food, Health, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… every time I buy “organic”, I feel like I’m sending a reinforcement to several different forms of vicious stupidity, beginning with the term “organic” itself. Duh! Actually, all food is “organic”; the term just means “chemistry based on carbon chains”.

Take “no GMOs” for starters. That’s nonsense; it’s barely even possible. Humans have been genetically modifying since the invention of stockbreeding and agriculture; it’s what we do, and hatred of the accelerated version done in a genomics lab is pure Luddism. It’s vicious nonsense, too; poor third-worlders have already starved because their governments refused food aid that might contain GMOs. And without GMOs it’s more than possible that the new wave of wheat rust, once it really gets going, might condemn billions to death.

Vegan? I’ve long since had it up to here with the tissue of ignorance and sanctimony that is evangelical veganism. Comparing our dentition and digestive tracts with those of cows, chimps, gorillas, and bears tells the story: humans are designed to be unspecialized omnivores, and the whole notion that vegetarianism is “natural” is so much piffle. It’s not even possible except at the near end of 4000 years of GMOing staple crops for higher calorie density, and even now you can’t be a vegan in a really cold climate (like, say, Tibet) because it’ll kill you. In warmer ones, you better be taking carnitine and half a dozen vitamins or you’re going to have micronutrient issues sneak up on you over a period of years.

OK, I give on gluten-free. Some people do have celiac disease; that’s a real need. But “no trans fat”? Pure faddery, or the next thing to it. The evidence indicting trans fats is extremely slim and surrounded by a cloud of food-nannyist hype. I hate helping to keep that sort of balloon inflated with my dollars.

Who could be against “fair trade”? Well, me … because the “fair trade” crowd pressures individual growers to join collectives with “managed” pricing. If you’re betting that this means lazy but politically adept growers with poor resource management and productivity prosper at the expense of more efficient and harder-working ones, you’ve broken the code.

Finally, “pesticide-free”. Do I like toxic chemicals on my food? No … but I also don’t fool myself about what happens when you don’t use them. This ties straight back to the general cluster of issues around factory farming. Without the productivity advantages of pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, and other non-“organic” methods, farm productivity would plummet. Relatively wealthy people like me would cope with reduced availability by paying higher prices, but huge numbers of the world’s poor would starve.

I buy “organic” food because it tastes better and I can, but I feel guilty about reinforcing all the kinds of delusion and superstition and viciousness that are tied up in that label. We simply cannot feed a world population of 6.6 billion without pesticides and factory farming and GMOs and preservatives in most bread; now, and probably forever, “organic” food will remain a luxury good.

Try telling its political partisans that, though. Hyped on their belief in their own virtue, and blissfully ignorant about scale problems, they have already engineered policies that have cost thousands of lives during spot famines. The potential death toll from (especially) anti-GMO policies is three orders of magnitude higher.

And my problem reduces to this: how can I buy the kind of food I want without supporting dangerous delusions?

Eric S. Raymond, “Organic guilt”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-08-23.

December 31, 2020

QotD: The “noble savage” belief system

Filed under: Americas, Australia, Environment, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the whole weeks-long saga, which featured urban protestors appearing alongside their Indigenous counterparts at road and rail barricades throughout Canada, tapped into a strongly held noble-savage belief system within progressive circles. Various formulations of this mythology have become encoded in public land acknowledgments, college courses, and even journalism. The overall theme is that Indigenous peoples traditionally lived their lives in harmony with the land and its creatures, and so their land-use demands transcend the realm of politics, and represent quasi-oracular revealed truths. As has been pointed out by others, this mythology now has a severe, and likely negative, distorting effect on public policy, one that hurts Indigenous peoples themselves. In recent years, Indigenous groups have finally gotten a fair cut of the proceeds of industrial-development and commodity-extraction revenues originating on their lands. And increasingly, they are telling white policy makers to stop listening to those activists who seek to portray them as perpetual children of the forest. It is for their benefit, as much as anyone else’s, to explore the truth about the myth of harmonious Indigenous conservationism.

***

When the ancestors of North America’s Indigenous peoples entered the New World some 16,000 years ago via Siberia, they hunted many of the mammals, reptiles, and birds, from the Arctic down to Tierra del Fuego. Mammoths, mastodons, and enormous ground-dwelling sloths, as well as giant bears, giant tortoises, and enormous teratorn birds with 16-foot wingspans — animals that had never had a chance to evolve in the presence of humans — were among the many species that disappeared from the Americas. Some medium-sized animals — such as horse, peccary, and antelope species — were also wiped out. But others survived: Bison and deer species, tree sloths, tapirs, jaguars, bear species, alligators, and big birds such as rheas and condors are, at least for the time being, still with us. The existence of these survivors, along with the relatively unspoiled forests, grasslands, and rivers seen by the first Europeans to enter the Americas, served to support the illusion that America’s first peoples had been maintaining what popular environmentalist David Suzuki calls a “sacred balance” with the natural world. Throughout history, however, humans killed animals that were tasty, numerous, and huntable. For kin-groups, staying alive meant making life-and-death cost-benefit calculations about where to send your berry-pickers and hunters. “Sacredness” had nothing to do with it.

This is not to say that the Indigenous peoples who migrated from Asia to the Americas were especially bloodthirsty (though Europeans typically reported that their hunting and fishing skills were excellent). In every known case where humans entered continents formerly uninhabited by our species, the bigger animals tended to disappear, since they provided the most sustenance per kill. The first humans to enter Australia some 70,000 years ago wiped out giant kangaroo species, rhino-sized marsupial herbivores, jaguar-sized marsupial carnivores, big flightless birds, and many other megafauna. The same thing would happen in Europe: After sapiens completed its occupation of that sub-continent some 30,000 years ago, the mammoths, woolly rhinos, giant deer, and lions they recorded in their cave paintings and carvings also disappeared.

Baz Edmeades, “The Myth of Harmonious Indigenous Conservationism”, Quillette, 2020-09-06.

December 12, 2020

“Canada’s party system has long been an outlier that has baffled political scientists”

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, History, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ben Woodfinden emerges from a pre-winter hibernation to mull on how environmental issues intersect with regional and linguistic issues in a uniquely Canadian way that does not match how these issues play out in other countries:

“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

… if you want to understand how democratic politics work, you have to begin with the premise that voters and electoral coalitions are made up of individuals with overlapping and complicated political identities, not just rationalistic voters who need to be convinced with some charts and data.

These identities and value divides coalesce and become the basis of the political cleavages around which competition in democratic regimes is built. There are many classic accounts of party system formation in political science, the one I think most plausible and still useful is the now classic account of cleavage politics posited by the political scientists Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan.

This now classic account of the formation of party systems in Western Europe argues that long existing social conflicts and divides that existed prior to the gradually universal extension of voting across Western Europe helped to structure political competition. Specifically, industrialization and nation building generated four major cleavages that structured political conflict and party systems going forward: territorial cleavages defined by a centre-periphery divide, religious cleavages defined by a church versus state divide, an urban-rural cleavage, and a labour-capital cleavage.

Canada’s party system has long been an outlier that has baffled political scientists who study these things. If you’re looking for a good comprehensive overview of the history of the Canadian party system I’d recommend this recent book by Richard Johnston. Since the 1930’s Canada has defied what is perhaps the single most generalizable finding in comparative politics: Duverger’s Law. Canada also defies many of the expectations of the cleavage theory of party formation. But Canadian politics can still be broadly understood in terms of cleavages, albeit idiosyncratic Canadian cleavages (regional and linguistic cleavages especially).

I won’t bog you down with too much academic explanation. There is an enormous body of literature that builds on, tests, and modifies the cleavage thesis. Much of the talk in recent decades has been about an “unfreezing” of the traditional cleavages that have dominated party politics in western democracies, and the reorganizing of politics around new cleavages.

As traditional industrial, class, and religious cleavages have declined new cleavages have emerged and politics has been playing a catch up game. These new cleavages coalesce around educational, geographic, gendered, and age divides. This realignment, which has been in the making for decades has become the dominant political narrative since 2016, and as I’ve written in the newsletter recently these divides exist in Canada just as they do in Europe and America.

But the realignments these new cleavages produce often require singular events or defining figures to fully emerge. In the United Kingdom, the 2016 referendum produced a realignment because it scrambled the existing partisan and political arrangements so much that it gave rise to a hyper-polarized culture war around a remain/leave divide that people reoriented their own politics around this divide.

November 7, 2020

Misunderstanding what is meant by “mineral reserves”

Filed under: Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It seems to happen almost as regularly as Old Faithful, as someone blows a virtual gasket over the reserves of this or that mineral “running out” in x number of years. Tim Worstall explains why this is a silly misunderstanding of what the term “mineral reserves” actually means:

“Aerial view of a small mine near Mt Isa Queensland.” by denisbin is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

It’s not exactly unusual to see some environmental type running around screaming because mineral reserves are about to run out. The Club of Rome report, the EU’s “circular economy” ideas, Blueprint for Survival, they’re all based upon the idea that said reserves are going to run out.

They look at the usual listing (USGS, here) and note that at the current rate of usage reserves will run out in 30 to 50 years. Entirely correct they are too. It’s the next step which is such drivelling idiocy. For the claim then becomes that we will run out of those metals, those minerals, when the reserves do. This being idiot bollocks.

For a mineral reserve is, as best colloquial language can put it, the stuff we’ve prepared for use in the next few decades. Like, say, 30 to 50 years. That we’re going to run out of what we’ve got prepared isn’t a problem. For we’ve an entire industry, mining, whose job to to go prepare some more for us to use.

[…] A mineral reserve is something created by the mining company. Created by measuring, testing, test extracting and proving that the mineral can be processed, using current technology, at current prices, and produce a profit. Proving that this is not just dirt but is in fact ore.

Mineral reserves are things we humans make, not things that exist.

November 3, 2020

QotD: Water pricing

Filed under: Asia, Economics, Environment, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Near all freshwater availability problems come from the fact that farmers get it cheap or for free, diverting it from much more valuable uses like keeping people alive if they drink it. This is true in California – we’ve actually cases of farmers using $400 of water to grow $100 of alfalfa – as it is in Pakistan. There are cases of people growing water hungry crops in near drought areas just because they get that water too cheaply.

[…]

Gaining revenue with which to build dams is useful, it most certainly is. But that’s not the only function of pricing. The cash to increase supply, great, but the very fact of charging will reduce demand. And we should be charging what it costs to produce the water too. So charges should cover 100% of the costs of the dams, not just 25%.

It’s entirely possible that charging that full cost will mean that no farmers want the water. OK, then we shouldn’t build the dam, should we? For if the value of the water – measured by what people will pay – is less than the cost of its provision, then that’s value destroying, providing the water. The dam makes us all poorer, therefore we shouldn’t build it.

The point here being – and it’s an important one – that prices affect both supply and demand. They’re what brings them into balance even. So, yes, charge for water, but not just so that we can pay to increase supply, also so that we, merely by charging, reduce demand.

Tim Worstall, “Pakistan’s Chief Justice Almost Right – Charge For Water, Not For Dams, But To Charge For Water”, Continental Telegraph, 2017-07-17.

October 22, 2020

Carbon taxes may be the most efficient way to address GHG emissions, but no government has implemented them properly

Filed under: Business, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I was persuaded by the economic arguments in favour of a carbon tax to address the externaly of greenhouse gas emissions, but I’ve long been skeptical that governments would actually implement them in a way to minimize economic distortion. A report from the Fraser Institute this week shows I was right to be doubtful, as none of the 31 OECD countries in the study have managed to introduce some form of carbon pricing without political “tinkering” … rather than replacing inefficient regulations, taxes and mandates with the carbon tax, they’ve generally just added carbon pricing on top of existing rules, making the carbon pricing scheme merely another tax grab that fails to achieve the stated goals:

Most economists consider human-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions an unintended negative externality of production and consumption. A negative externality occurs when the effects of producing or consuming goods and services impose costs on a third party which are not reflected in the prices charged for said goods and services. In the context of GHG emissions, this negative externality is calculated using the “social cost of carbon,” which is the future damage to society (adjusted to present value) of one additional tonne of carbon emitted to the atmosphere today.

Governments have a wide variety of policy alternatives to address the negative externality of emissions depending on the degree and depth of the policy intervention. They can either mandate individuals and firms to change their behaviour through com­mand-and-control regulations, grant subsidies and tax credits to foster cleaner energy sources, or use market-based mechanisms to correct the misalignment of incentives. It is widely acknowledged that carbon pricing, one of these market tools, is the most cost-effective policy to reduce emissions, as it relies on price signals and trade to provide flex­ibility to economic agents as to where and how emissions mitigation occurs.

[…]

This report includes thirty-one high-income OECD countries, where each country has either implemented a carbon tax, an ETS [emissions trading system], or a combination of both pricing mechan­isms. Carbon taxes are being implemented in 14 of them whereas 25 of these countries have their emissions covered by an ETS. Our analysis finds that, on average, 74 percent of carbon tax revenues in high-income OECD countries go directly into their general budget with no earmarking for any specific expenditure, while 12 percent are ring-fenced for environmental spending, and only 14 percent for revenue-recycling measures. This means that most governments are using carbon taxes as a revenue-raising tool rather than a mechanism to internalize the negative externalities of emissions in a cost-effective man­ner. Additionally, the vast majority of ETS revenues are being used to artificially acceler­ate the use of renewable energy sources, infrastructure, and technology.

The study also finds that no high-income OECD country has used carbon pricing to repeal emission-related regulations, but instead have introduced new ones following the adoption of the carbon tax or the ETS. Emissions caps, mandated fuel standards, technology-based standards, and renewable power mandates are just some examples of these regulations that undermine the cost-effectiveness of carbon pricing mechanisms. The majority of high-income OECD countries have a combination of support schemes for renewable energy sources, carbon pricing tools, and command-and-control regulations.

Overall, no high-income OECD country is following the textbook model of an optimal carbon pricing system, undermining their theoretical efficiency by design and implementation.

September 24, 2020

That Prometheus dude has a lot to answer for…

Filed under: Australia, Environment, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Arthur Chrenkoff on the surprisingly high percentage of wildfires that don’t have a natural origin:

The Green Wattle Creek bushfire moves towards the Southern Highlands township of Yanderra as police evacuate residents from Yanderra Road, 21 December, 2019.
Photo by Helitak430 via Wikimedia Commons

Whatever your position on climate change – majority of experts believe that higher temperatures and drier conditions exacerbate wildfires, both in Australia and America – there is no immediate solution to be found on the global level. If you agree that man-made emissions are driving up temperatures, there is no course of action that will in any substantial way change the climatic conditions for the better over the next few decades (the most ambitious climate change plans talk in terms of slowing down temperature increases, not reversing the trend). Shut down the whole industrial civilisation tomorrow, and the present climate would still lag behind. Talking about wildfires and climate change (as Pelosi, Newsom and many others do) might be a good propaganda for climate action, but it will do nothing for this or any future fiery disasters.

Fortunately, there are much more immediate factors and solutions than shutting down coal and transitioning to renewable energy (themselves decades-long projects). Wildfires are almost exclusively man-made calamities, but not in the way the climate change activists think. Changing climate might indeed be making fires more difficult to contain and extinguish, but it neither starts nor fuels them. We do. Herein, therefore, lie the opportunities to mitigate such disasters as we are witnessing at the moment.

Almost all fires are started by humans

Forests don’t spontaneously combust. And while lightning can often set trees on fire, this accounts for only a very small proportion of all fires.

In Australia, it has been estimated that 87 per cent of 113,000 fires that occurred “in nature” between 1997 and 2009 have been man-made.

In the United States, the latest study from the University of Colorado at Boulder calculates that 97 per cent of fires between 1992 and 2015 that threatened homes (i.e. those happening in the so called “wildland-urban interface”) were started by humans (as were 85 per cent of all fires in “very-low-density housing” areas and 59% of all wildfires in the wild).

A word of caution: man-made does not automatically mean intentional. The scenarios range from broken glass acting as lenses for sun rays or sparks from power lines and machinery, through carelessly discarded cigarette butts and incompletely extinguished bonfires, to amateur back burn attempts getting out of control and – yes – deliberate arson.

During the Australian bushfire crises, I have compiled media reports of around 200 individuals who have been arrested and/or charged in connection with starting fires – many, though not all, on purpose.

In the United States, the cases of arsonists caught by the authorities are mounting, though nowhere near the Australian numbers yet. In Portland, a man was arrested for starting a fire, released, and started another six fires – at this rate, the US might quickly catch up to Down Under.

September 17, 2020

Why Does Road Construction Take So Long?

Filed under: Environment, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published 3 Jun 2020

Explaining how earthwork works, and why road construction often takes so long.

Sign up for Brilliant for free at www.brilliant.org/PracticalEngineering and get 20% the annual premium subscription!

Like it or not, roads are part of the fabric of society. Travel is a fundamental part of life for nearly everyone. Unfortunately, that means road construction is too. But, I hope I can give you a little more appreciation for what’s going on behind the orange cones.

-Patreon: http://patreon.com/PracticalEngineering
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Writing/Editing/Production: Grady Hillhouse
Editing and Direction Help: Wesley Crump

This video is sponsored by Brilliant.

August 23, 2020

Trudeau’s hopes for re-election hinge on promising “an organic chicken in every pot and a solar panel on every shed”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Line wonders who the hell the Liberals think they are:

It may have been easy to miss amid the news coming out of Ottawa, but as the government lost its finance minister, appointed Chrystia Freeland to yet another job, prorogued parliament, halted testimony into its latest scandal, prepared for the announcement of a new Conservative Party of Canada leader and braced for a likely second wave of COVID-19, the prime minister promised to announce a transformative agenda. One that promises sweeping social change, and a wholesale re-invention of our economy in line with the greenest ambitions. We here at The Line have but one question.

Who the hell do these people think they are?

It is obvious to anyone who has been reading the news and possesses even residual brain function why the prime minister would like to be talking about a plan for transformative change. Talking about all the amazing things he could do for Canadians with borrowed money beats talking about his government’s bumbling of the WE file and the departure of now-former finance minister Bill Morneau.

Promising an organic chicken in every pot and a solar panel on every shed is obviously more appealing to Trudeau than repeating the last month. But it is astonishing to us — as jaded as we have undeniably become — that the government is talking about this instead of the necessary steps needed to shore up this country ahead of a likely second wave of COVID-19.

This government has a mandate to respond to the emergency, by mere unlucky virtue of being in power at the moment the virus hit. It is the duty of every Canadian government to safeguard the wellbeing of the population, full stop. But the emergency, contrary to what you may believe if you’ve been reading Liberal Party HQ memos, is not over. We have an urgent need to secure more medical equipment, to harden our long-term care facilities, to prevent any further lockdowns from derailing a fragile economic recovery, to ensure the resiliency of critical supply chains, and to shore up our health-care system. This is what every Canadian official should be focused on right now.

[…]

But can anyone maintain faith that the Liberals will stick to their knitting when we hear buzzwords like “transformative” social change? Sweeping climate-change reforms? Engineering a new green economy? They are all fine notions — let’s put them to the people and vote on them. Until calling that election is feasible (mid-pandemic, it is not) this government simply does not have the mandate to undertake such far-reaching efforts.

It’s easy to forget now, but only nine months ago this government was reduced to a minority of seats in parliament. The Liberals lost the popular vote, and saw one million of their own prior voters abandon them. They are only in government because the Conservatives, to the surprise of no one, found several novel and exciting new ways to fail.

August 12, 2020

QotD: The circle of recycled life

Filed under: Business, Economics, Environment, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

1. Somewhere in this great land, a concerned and responsible corporation is having their twice-weekly colorful and compelling advertising supplement printed on 100% recycled paper.

2. As soon as they are completed millions of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements are shipped by truck to the various regional receiving centers of the U.S. Post Office.

3. From those centers, any number of allocated pallets of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements are broken out, put on U.S. Post Office trucks and delivered to local postal carrier destinations inside northern California.

4. My personal Paradise postal carrier and hundreds of others report for work at local postal carrier centers throughout northern California and load up their vans with enough of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements to deliver one or more to each and every house on their route.

5. My very polite personal Paradise postal carrier parks her van at the end of my block and loads her sack with these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements.

6. She comes up my walk, up the porch stairs, and deposits my full share of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements into my mailbox with a clang every day between one and three in the afternoon.

7. Hearing the clang I sigh and wend my weary way to the front door and open my mailbox and pluck out said colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements.

8. With a heavier sigh I go back in, trudge through my house, out my back door to the alley, and place the colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements into my Recycling bin with the rest of the week’s mound.

9. Tomorrow the huge, lumbering Paradise Waste Management Recycling garbage truck will stop and empty my Recycling bin into its maw and haul all the colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements off to the Chico California Recycling and Brand New Mountain of Garbage center.

10. The collected colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements will then be shipped, by truck, to the center for turning recyclable paper into … recycled paper which will then be used by a concerned and responsible corporation for their twice-weekly colorful and compelling advertising supplements printed on 100% recycled paper.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Next year, as sure as spring brings septic system failures to Paradise, postage will increase because the U.S. Postal Colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements “Service” will need more money to keep The Recycled Circle of life going.

Gerard VanderLeun, “The Circle of Recycled Life”, American Digest, 2018-06-01.

August 11, 2020

The Vanishing Aral Sea

Filed under: Asia, Environment, History, Religion, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 22 May 2017

The History Guy examines the Aral Sea and the confluence of geography and history.

The History Guy uses images that are in the Public Domain. As photographs of actual events are often not available, I will sometimes use photographs of similar events or objects for illustration.

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The episode is intended for educational purposes. All events are presented in historical context.

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August 3, 2020

Recycling is a SCAM!

Filed under: Asia, Business, Cancon, China, Economics, Environment, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 29 Jun 2019

Recycling is a disaster. This video was sponsored by Loonie Politics! Sign up using the code word “McCullough” for 25% off! https://looniepolitics.com/register/

Visit the channel of guest star Demetrios: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNKV…

An in-depth look at Canadian recycling:
https://globalnews.ca/news/5199883/ca…

The Vice video I mentioned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv1UP…

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