WIP

That was a good presentation by Hans Rosling -- except that he is assuming that progress will continue based on his examination of the past 200 years. I don't know about Hans Rosling's background, but I suspect that it's not in environment or resource management, since the world has reached Peak Oil - and we are experiencing increasing energy costs as a result; declining availability of water resources, and the early impacts on agriculture of climate change -- all of which lead to the problem that we are at peak food production globally. Those rising numbers that Rosling is showing on his chart are likely already falling, and by the end of this decade and the next, there will be a precipitous decline in wealth and average life spans in many parts of the world! Here's what makes me a pessimist about our global predicament: Global Food Prices to Double by 2030, OXFAM Predicts In brief, Oxfam is looking at the dilemma of increasing populations with rising food prices, and predicting a return to widespread famines that hadn't been seen in the last couple of decades. As noted in the Guardian article -- the poorest people in the world already spend over 80% of their incomes on food, where are they going to come up with the money to pay for food that has doubled or tripled in price?

I posted some stuff a while back written by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett - who've done some exhaustive analysis on quality of life information around the world - The Equality Trust and the general rule of thumb is that self-perceived happiness and personal satisfaction is tied to relative equality, not absolute numbers on per capita income etc. This explains why a citizen of Costa Rica has physical and mental health stats that are on par with many nations in Western Europe, and better than here in North America, where per capita incomes are 2 to 3 times higher. Over the last 30 years, the hollowing out of the middle class has created a society where everyone else is a competitor, and we have fewer and fewer people we regard as peers. Whatever methods are chosen, quality of life will not improve no matter how much the libertarians think they can "grow" the economy. Satisfaction will be determined by halting the growing gaps in income and wealth, and reducing them back to pre-Reagan levels.

You are like many idiots I talk to, who are totally ignorant of Canadian history, and would lead us into a shooting war on these land claims issues. Conservatives are always trumpeting how highly they respect the rule of law....well, there were a lot of agreements made and treaties signed before Canada became a nation, because unwillingness to do so may have led to the British being driven out and never having the opportunity to turn a colony into a nation. It would be ruinously expensive to follow them to the letter, or to foment a civil war, and that's what compromise is all about.

Don't forget, some of the land, like around Oshweken, has been poisoned by decades of clandestine industrial dumping. The real tragedy when it comes to land claims disputes, such as along the Grand River, is that taking the quiet road of going through the courts and talking to the politicians went nowhere, and weren't even considered newsworthy by local media. Until the road blocks went up, and a local developer in Caledonia had his new subdivision occupied, it wasn't a news story, and many people who moved to Caledonia in recent years, didn't know anything about the history, and the chance that they could be stuck in the middle of it.

Since this thread is still plodding along, I just want to mention that DSK's sexual assault of this woman should be regarded as his 2nd offense....since she may have been forced to emigrate to America in search of work largely because of the ruinous IMF loans that were forced on her place of origin - the West African nation of Guinea. Send DSK over there to be put on trial!

I'm pretty sure he was bought and paid for a long time ago! Afterall, he's one of them. Romney's great claim as a businessman is being a disaster capitalist who's firm - Bain Capital, looked for struggling companies to buy out, put loans on their balance sheets - drive them into bankruptcy - and then sell off their assets. The big joke on the Republican campaign is that Romney would create jobs because 'he's a businessman'...well, so is Herman Cain, but for some reason Karl Rove doesn't want to put his investors' money on that one. When the dog show is finally over, I'll bet that either Romney or Pawlenty will be the Republican nominee. The businessmen like to get the crazy church people in the Republican Party energized to go out and work for them, but they are never going to let one of the crazies like Michelle Bachman become the Party's nominee....they'll find a way to get their hand-picked choice to the Fall Convention.

This is one of the fallback arguments by the globalists...since I don't recall hearing much about the need to improve life in the Third World back in the 70's, when the big full court press was launched by business, media and politicians to promote "free trade." Now, even though many people have lost good-paying jobs to have to work in McDonalds or Walmart, and the middle class has shrunk to insignificance as a political force - we are instead being told we need to support globalization for altruistic reasons. Two problems with this argument: 1. Over here, NAFTA led to cheap agribusiness imports into Mexico, and the collapse of small family farms.....which in turn, led to the mass migration across the border looking for jobs. What did the Mexicans get in turn? Well, off the top, I found an excellent little article from a college newspaper in California: Teenagers are the main source of profit for many popular clothing stores, and the mindset that one person cannot make a difference is exactly what the companies want to hear. For instance, the Gap, a main beneficiary of sweatshop labor, urges teenagers to buy its clothing, omitting from their cheery advertisements that a Global Exchange investigation revealed that workers in Mexico for the Gap earn as little as 28 cents per hour making jeans that later sell for over $100. http://voice.paly.net/node/15396 Got that? 28 cents per hour! That's the race to the bottom that wage-earners have been on since globalization started. It's a fake, disingenuous argument for corporatists here to imply that an unwillingness to outsource manufacturing is demonstrating a lack of charity to the third world. The reality is that this kind of development has made life worse for both, the people living in both the developed world and undeveloped nations...we're all on a race to the bottom, and the only beneficiaries are the small, wealthy elites who have the capital to outsource their business to the places that can produce products or provide their services at the cheapest costs! 2. The ecological and resource bottlenecks. In brief, since we've covered this subject many times before -- the American way of life depends on dirt cheap energy and cheap resources, and both are becoming more expensive because many of them are running out, and demand presented from rapidly developing nations like China and India is outstripping supply. Ten years ago biologist/ecologist James Lovelock estimated that the present human population at the time would need three planet earths to provide an American style of living for the entire world....who knows how many planets it would take now that we have further overshot the carrying capacity of the planet! Except for a wealthy few, the vast majority of people everywhere, are going to have to live frugally, and focus on real quality of life, instead of the extremely wasteful consumer capitalism that drives world economies today. And, productivity went up, but all they got was more cutbacks, while executives increased their bonus pays....but, that's okay with you, as long as the executives get rewarded for all of their fine efforts!

Oh, there are no failed Republican ideas that the Harper Conservatives aren't going to try out on us.

No, my point is that we have fewer sources for information on the Canadian economy, just as we have less sources for information on social issues.

Yes, that free trade scam that dangled the promise of cheap consumer products in front of everyone's eyes has led to the race to the bottom for wage earners. Funny how the only international cooperation that exists works for the benefit of multinational corporations!

Consider these happy clappy numbers for Canada as something that we can look at in the rear view mirror! The same economic factors that have eliminated the middle class in the U.S. are at work in Canada also; and nations with a small wealthy class and a large population watching their standards of living decline don't usually rank as high on "happiness."

Well, here's something that doesn't surprise me at all! I've been reading one story after another about the hollowing out of the middle class in the U.S.; wage stagnation - except for the top 1%, while there has been virtually nothing written on the subject of income demographics here in Canada. The last story I came across noted that the number of billionaires in Canada more than doubled during the last nine years, but finally someone has done a little fact-finding to give a more complete picture of the problem: Yahoo News Recent reports show Canada’s wealthiest one per cent accounted for 32 per cent of all income growth between 1997 and 2007 – the most in recorded history. Thanks to skyrocketing executive compensation levels and an aggressive attack on well-paid, family-supporting jobs, the gap between the rich and the rest of us grows ever wider. The example of Air Canada provides a snapshot that the same forces at work in the U.S. economy are happening here....employees forced to take pay cuts, while company profits go up and the CEO walks out with a shitload of money: Nothing epitomizes this situation more than the recent history of Air Canada. In the last decade, Canada's national carrier has suffered unprecedented financial turbulence, including run-ins with bankruptcy protection. According to the Canadian Auto Workers’ internal research, over the same period Air Canada's CEO at the time, Robert Milton, pocketed $86 million – while thousands of front-line employees were forced to take cuts, to the tune of about $10,000 per year, including an erosion of real wages, lost vacation, paid lunch breaks and other benefits. Air Canada workers made major sacrifices. The company plowed ahead with plans to do more with less. Work intensified and productivity skyrocketed. Measured in seat miles delivered per employee, labour productivity at Air Canada jumped 75 per cent. Yet many who had earned a good (albeit modest) salary saw their quality of life and working conditions decline. Really, do we have to copy every stupid mistake that the U.S. has made in the last 30 years of globalist dogma and supply side economics?

I haven't really been following this issue, but off the top, I'm not surprised that Harper is going to take the ax to First Nation budgets now that he has a majority government. They don't vote Conservative and never will for the most part, so money will be diverted to where it's needed most: buying more fighter jets and guided missiles to support the U.S. war efforts.

And, you have just explained why libertarians are the show ponies for the corporate globalists: it never occurred to you that there are other forces besides political organizations at work, and taking the power to impose an agenda away from government, just puts that power in the hands of the people with the capital and the money. So, instead of a powerful international body that could impose carbon taxes and trade penalties on high carbon emitters, we instead have an amalgamation of oil and coal companies that want no costs added to emitting carbon vs. a few investment banks like Goldman Sachs - who see a money-making opportunity in the setup of a carbon credit-trading market. Libertarian thinking has left the world stuck between corporations who want to consume more fossil fuels, and other corporations who want to create a fake green market that will do little or nothing to solve the crisis!

No, you have no idea what fascism is, otherwise you would be aware that there is no single definition of fascism! A successful fascist movement takes the root elements of: nationalism, religious justification, authoritarianism, and social darwinism, and blends them into a populist mix to attract as many followers as possible, while achieving what are considered their crucial goals. Best definition I've found is by historian - Robert Paxton: A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. And, if you can't see our democratic system devolving into fascism, you are more ideologically blinded on politics than you are on the environment!

They are hard at work creating an all-American fascism....and that's the most blatant form of social engineering that exists.

It would have happened without either institution, because Alan Greenspan was able to push the dogma that derivative investments should exist in a completely unregulated market. Greenspan proved freemarket fundamentalism to be a false dogma.

It's mostly rightwing bullshit! I'm not going to claim to be a banking or finance expert, but from my limited research on the banking and real estate meltdown in the U.S., it can't all be blamed on Fannie and Freddie indiscriminately underwriting bad mortgages. And I heard Greta Morgenstern interviewed a couple of weeks ago on a podcast of one of the NPR shows -- even she doesn't claim that government pressure on Fannie (which came from the Bush Administration also) to place the expansion of home ownership above all other concerns, as the only reason for the meltdown. Without considering the problem of allowing banks to resell their mortgages to third parties as investments...and thereby cutting their own risks from bad loans, the issue cannot be fully grasped in any meaningful way....which is exactly what rightwing propagandists want anyway! There is a fundamental, structural problem with capitalism itself that the right doesn't want to look at - unrestrained capitalism is not self-regulating! That is just a fictitious claim...sort of a faith-based argument that does not coincide with the facts, when we look at what the tax and regulation rules have been during boom and bust cycles. It's no mere coincidence that booms and busts were prominent as corporations gained more legal power during 19th century America, and leveled out after the period of reform that FDR instituted during the Depression. And lo and behold, look what happened in the 90's, when the Glass-Steagall Act that separated personal and commercial banking was repealed! Since then, it's back to the days of the Robber Barons and market bubbles and busts. The big problem that many analysts on the left see as key to present economic problems is based on the fact that the aggressive hedge fund managers and Wall Street bankers have run out of markets that were actually growing real economic activity, and started creating phony markets of derivative investments: collateralized debt obligations, mortgage-backed securities, and the unregulated investment insurance contracts called credit default swaps....which were primarily issued by AIG, and started the bank run that made Bush's Treasury Secretary - Henry Paulsen call for that 700 billion bank bailout that started the crash in these phony markets. AIG threatened bankruptcy if all of the CDS owners tried to cash in, and the cascading effect would have brought down this whole house of cards, and revealed just how phony modern currency and banking and investment really is.

No, junk science is Roy Spencer declaring that rising Co2 levels will have no greenhouse effects, or they will be mitigated by other factors, but not having any explanation for why that did not happen in the past. I first heard this story on the latest episode of Quirks and Quarks on CBC Radio....you ought to listen some time....there are published research studies indicating that common fish species...can't get much more common than Clown Fish...are adversely affected in a way that had never been considered before. Consider how so many fish species are dying off for reasons not presently understood, or why bees, and many other species of insects and amphibians are also becoming extinct, and we have reasons not to be screwing around with the environment -- since the full implications won't be realized until decades later!

If future generations survive, it will be called a bottleneck! For what it's worth, the last really serious bottleneck happened 50 to 70,000 years ago, when the human population crashed to as few as 2000 survivors....that might have been the end of us, and we would have been none the wiser! There's nothing to go on so far to indicate which way this story will play out in the future. The present trends aren't encouraging. I was thinking something similar when I read "Climate Wars" by Gwynn Dyer, a couple of years ago. The present wars and foreign policy moves in the U.S., have to be understood as part of a policy of competing with China for the remaining reserves of oil and other mineral resources, before they make any logical sense. One thing for sure, running out of oil is not reducing carbon output, since the prevailing strategy is to just to use more energy to get at the remaining oil and cook tar sand deposits for their oil content.

So, all of your gnashing and wailing against doing something about climate change pretty much boils down to libertarian dogma! The only reason why health care and pension plans are in jeopardy is because of the screwed up priorities that put ceo's and hedge fund managers' profits ahead of average people.....we know where most of the money is going, so don't try to pretend that our debt-based finance banking system is for the benefit of retirees!

First, you need to understand the problem before you can provide solutions! You don't even recognize a problem, so what solution is there?

There have been warming periods in the past caused by Milankovitch cycles, or possibly changes in solar output, since we are finding that the Sun is not as steady and reliable as previously believed, but if we accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, then our present situation of continually adding to atmospheric CO2 levels will inevitably force changes to the environment. Unless, I see some evidence behind some claims that CO2 has no effect beyond a certain level, discounting CO2 makes no sense. During some of the past warming events, CO2 could lag temperature increase if, as many climatologists believe, oceans release CO2 into the atmosphere, but that in turn, amplified the warming trend because of CO2's greenhouse effect, which led to more CO2 being released. There's no reason why CO2 can't be both the cause and effect of further warming, if we take positive feedback cycles into consideration. It's not likely, according to the same people who study these things, that shifts between glacials and interglacial periods could be explained by changes in the amount of solar radiation alone. And, positive or negative effects would also be a factor in the changes from ice sheet cover to vegetation and open water. The big point that climate skeptics are missing in the arguments that CO2 will lack warming, is that our present situation is unique. There has never been a species dominate and alter the planet's ecosystems as we have today, and no previous time in Earth's history has experienced such a rapid increase in greenhouse gas levels as we are creating at the present time - 10 Indicators of a Human Fingerprint on Climate Change Nevermind the effects on reefs and crustaceans for a moment, here's an interesting article from Discover Magazine that illustrates why it's not a good idea to be f!@#$%% around with the environment when we don't understand all of the consequences: Ocean Acidification Could Leave Clown Fish (Like Nemo) Lost at Sea Ocean acidification, the second part of the one-two punch packed by global warming, has been shown to disorient young clown fish and prevent them from finding their way to their natural habitats. A new study found that dropping the pH of seawater interfered with the fish‘s ability to sniff out environmental cues. Most research on the environmental impacts of acidification has focused on the vulnerability of shellfish, corals and crustaceans, whose shells are weakened and dissolved by acidic waters. But the latest findings show that fish may also be directly and profoundly affected

We are the only species of animals on this Earth to develop the capacity to be aware of our situation and change it; so if we can't, as a species, use those higher cognitive functions to override our basic, primal instincts and emotions, then that is a waste of what this Universe is capable of. Complex, intelligent life forms that develop self-awareness, are likely extremely rare events in this vast, empty universe. We don't know if there have been any other places in the Universe where life has reached our present level -- why waste the chance we have to just do what comes naturally for animals? Maybe intelligent life develops until it reaches the point where it destroys itself and never makes the leap to Type Two Civilizations that physicist - Michiou Kaku writes about in his pop science books. That would explain why we have gone 40 years without finding an alien radio signal at SETI.

And you're supposed to be no.1 of some sorts on this forum? Atmospheric CO2 levels have gone from 280 to almost 400 ppm in the last 150 years, and this has no connection to warming, such as the 40% loss of ARctic sea ice over the last half century according to the deniers. For what it's worth, I don't drive....my wife drives our car a couple of times a week, but that's another issue. If it's a matter of what policies would have a real impact, I want carbon (from oil, gas, coal, tar sands or whatever source) to be taxed at the proper level that matches the externalized costs burning carbon leaves behind for everyone to pay for collectively -- so put the full price on the label and see what happens to market forces that you rightwingers always tell us are so important! Compared to North America, pricing carbon has enabled Western Europe to enjoy a better standard of living on half the carbon footprint that we put out.