Stop Shipment of Radioactive Components through Great Lakes

Energy policy in BC appears devoid of sound economic or ecological underpinnings. The marginal cost of new energy is so high, that every new gigawatt hour purchased by BC Hydro is increasingly more difficult to sell into the export market. California, the only market large enough to take up much of BC's export, has a renewable portfolio standard that doesn't permit any of this new IPP electricity produced in BC. The recent lobbying by a team from MEMPR, BC Hydro, and IPPBC (now calling itself Clean Energy BC in another Orwellian linguistic trick) failed completely to win over state legislators. The export scheme of Campbell et al is doomed, yet it has now become the only argument they have to defend what they've been doing for the last ten years.

NIKIFORUK: What Those Who Killed the Tar Sands Report Don't Want You to Know

Why did a parliamentary committee suddenly destroy drafts of a final report on tar sands pollution? Here's what they knew. Andrew Nikiforuk runs through the shameful testimony the committee heard, and decided to hide, in the Tyee, Thurs July 15, 2010. Everyone in Canada should read this story, but....probably won’t. Gotta go to the mall, you know.

We've understood the concept of disaster capitalism, and the shock doctrine used by the World Bank and the free marketeers to make national governments buckle under to a radical capitalist agenda, but now Sean Holman of Public Eye ("I'm not wearing a tin hat!") has unvealed the shock government requirements for senior government bureaucrats under the BC liberals.

Basically, the executives have to be able to manufacture crisis, to create the opportuniies to get public (and presumably employee) consent to actions they do not agree with. Such as....chopping social services, inflicting misery on the weak in our society, and selling public assets, from BC Rail to the forests and rivers.

You can read the job description here.

Reminds me of the comment in Barry Broadfoot's Ten Lost Years history of the 1930s in Canada  - along the lines of "If you know a man who was a banker during the depression, he is not a nice man." 

You can hear or read a masterful summary by Bill Rees of his ecological footprint thinking, combined with a discussion of human brain evolution and the forces driving the human brian, including the need to re-invent a global mythology, here.

Rees points out that economic growth only became a governmental policy in the 1950s (who could have imagined!) and that not only is it killing us but it is not necessary despite the human brain structures driving us away from our current best interests.

One hundred years from now, if the new (or perhaps very ancient) and enlightened ways of living which are required come to pass, the People's Accord of Earth Day 2010 from the Global Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia will be remembered as the beginning of the beginning of the New Way. The Accord promises Rights for Mother Earth, and basically proposes a new way of living with Earth and with each other.

You can read an official translation of the accord here. May it be so.

The following poem by Nnimmo Bassey was read at the opening ceremony of the World Peoples Climate Conference Summit                                               

I will not dance to your beat (a poem )

“Peoples Accord” drafted and accepted in Cochabamba

Rex Weyler has started a new blog for BC Citizens for Public Power, and the first entry is a 12 point summary of  the problems with BC Energy planning under the Gordon Campbell Liberals. "What’s wrong with the Liberal government’s BC Energy Plan? First of all, it is not a British Columbian energy plan at all, but rather a plan to privatize BC’s watersheds and power production, erode our public utility, BC Hydro, and export electricity to the US market. It is a globalization plan, with BC cast in the role of a resource colony." 

The whole blog is simple and succinct. You can read it here  

Most Welcome News!

(Coast Salish Territory/Vancouver, B.C. - March 23, 2010) The UBCIC Chiefs Council met last week in Vancouver, B.C. and one item of discussion was the proposed Enbridge Pipeline Project. UBCIC Resolution 2010-11, Enbridge Pipeline Project, was presented, discussed and ratified.

Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, President of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs stated "The UBCIC is opposed to the Enbridge Pipeline Project and stands with the many First Nations who are standing as a unified block in their opposition to this proposed Tar Sands pipeline."

This morning, the Coastal First Nations, who are an alliance of First Nations on B.C.'s North and Central Coast and Haida Gwaii, announced that they will not allow pipelines and oil tankers carrying Alberta's Tar Sands Oil in British Columbia.

Commentator Greg Palast questions the slowness of the American response to the Haiti disaster, comparing it with Iceland's teams which have been on the ground for several days. He also details some of the brutal history of Haiti, including the  Duvaliers, but stretching back to a century of reparations paid to French merchants for compensation after the original slave uprising on what was once a fertile and prosperous island. 

http://www.countercurrents.org/palast170110.htm