I WANT A NEW DEAL, ONE THAT WON’T NOT BE GREEN

The American media have been losing their collective shit nonstop for the past week over Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’ “Green New Deal” proposal, which is to be expected because whenever anybody to the left of Henry Ford proposes major policy shifts in the United States the American media will lose their collective shit regardless of what the policy is. Of course, the Green New Deal is a massive and dramatic policy proposal, so some shit-losing is appropriate, but it’s good for us to realize that the shit-losing is taking place in a context where we are literally looking at the end of the human race as a species as being one of the realistically possible end-points in the debate. (As AOC sarcastically Tweeted over the weekend: “Sure, ‘mobilizing the economy to save our planet from irreparable global catastrophe’ SOUNDS nice, but will it play well in the Midwest?”)

Because there’s been a lot of disinformation spread about the GND (much of it purposeful by conservative fraudsters), it’s probably helpful to start with the basics of the proposal, and it’s important to use the word “proposal” because it’s not a bill or a fully drafted law being tabled for debate. It’s a broad-strokes series of suggestions at this point, because the Democrats can’t pass anything because they don’t control the Senate, so it’s really only a resolution in the House of Representatives. It’s the House saying “we like this idea.” (If it passes - which, I suspect, it likely will.)

So, what’s in it? Well, the first six pages of the fourteen-page resolution (which sounds longer than it is because Congress uses big margins and large font) really just boil down to “because climate change is extremely dangerous to human life on Earth, we agree that we should do things to mitigate and prevent it.” And then you get into the actual ideas, which are (deep breath):

1.) building defensive projects to mitigate the effects of extreme weather, 2.) fixing/upgrading American infrastructure to reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emission (which includes smart power grids and upgrading literally every building in the USA to be energy-efficient), 3.) transforming the US power grid to be 100% renewable/clean energy, 4.) mandating zero-emission/”clean” manufacturing, 5.) reducing greenhouse gas emission on agriculture, 6.) investing in clean transportation options like mass transit, high speed rail and electric cars, 7.) investing in recarbonization projects (like treeplanting), and 8.) stopping/cleaning industrial pollution that isn’t necessarily contributing to climate change but is still bad as a general rule. Then there’s a bunch of language about how this all should be achieved, much of which is the usual “by democratic processes and talking with everybody involved to get their input,” but which is notable for insisting that one of the results of all of this should be that everybody in the USA gets high-quality healthcare, affordable housing and economic security.

I feel the need to restate this: none of this is actually a concrete plan with steps to achieve same. That sort of lawmaking is insanely complex and results in massive omnibus bills, where people who oppose the bill complain about the bill being umpteen thousand pages long so of course nobody has read the whole thing so why are we even passing it and so on. This is, basically, a statement of principles combined with a wishlist. Which, again, is fine! If you can’t pass a law, and right now the Democrats can’t, then the best thing to do is loudly say “this is what we believe and these are the specific things we want to do” so you can get people excited to vote for you because they want you to do those things.

All of that said, is the plan a good one? And the answer to that question is: sorta. Because the thing is this: there is nothing, really, in the Green New Deal that is a bad idea. Much of is is essentially saying that money that would end up having to be spent anyway (all that infrastructure spending, for example) be spent in a way that concentrates on environmental good while spending it. Much of the rest is really just saying that the USA should implement infrastructure concepts and ideas and practices which we already pretty much know work. Like, the reason we don’t have electric car charging stations everywhere isn’t because we don’t know how to charge electric cars efficiently. We already (mostly) know how to do that: it’s just a matter of building all the stuff, and as we build all the stuff we’ll rapidly figure out how to make it even better. Similarly, we know how to make buildings energy-efficient, and we know how to build high-speed rail and mass public transit, and we know how to design smart energy grids. It’s really just a matter of deciding to spend the money.

But the flipside of “we already know how to do this, we just need to decide to do it” is the parts of hitting zero-emissions that the Green New Deal sort of glosses over. As Ramez Naam pointed out on Twitter, concentrating on clean energy and transportation is sort of problematic, because although we haven’t completely perfected carbon-friendly versions of those technologies and systems yet, we’re well on track to doing so. Whereas with respect to agriculture, land-use change, and manufacturing - which comprise about 45% of carbon emissions worldwide - we’re nowhere near solving those problems, and because climate change is a global problem, what we need more than anything are solutions which drive down the cost of rectifying those problems.

Global meat production has been growing nonstop since World War II (and trending upwards generally for much longer than that) because humans really like eating meat. Which is understandable, because meat is delicious. But all those animals being raised for meat fart a lot, and that’s a problem because methane is a really powerful greenhouse gas, and more animals being bred for slaughter means more greenhouse gases. Plus, since the animals need room to graze, we chop down forests to make room for them to graze, which means less carbon being absorbed by trees. There is no easy way around this: we need to shift modern society towards eating far less meat. Or, alternately, invent a cow that doesn’t fart methane. (It probably says a lot that you read that last sentence and thought “that’s more likely than getting people to eat less meat.” And you know you did.)

As for manufacturing: steel and concrete are used in the majority of all manufacturing. They’re both extremely carbon-intensive to make, and concrete, as it ages, releases CO2 into the atmosphere to boot. (Cement manufacturing alone represents five percent of all CO2.) We don’t have any ways around steel CO2 production yet, and as for concrete, the only option I know of that appears to be better from an emissions standpoint is geopolymerous concrete, AKA “what the ancient Romans used,” and scientists are trying to figure out the exact mixes the Romans used and reproduce them using non-Roman ingredients so they can become worldwide in potential use. We basically need a Manhattan Project for each of these things.

The Green New Deal does not discuss these problems, and concentrates a lot on things the USA can solve readily and relatively easily. But I tend to take the position that it is better to get everybody on board with the stuff you can do right away at the same time as the stuff that is going to take a while, so I am generally supportive of it.

SORRY, NO FUNNY HEADLINE ABOUT POTENTIAL INSECT EXTINCTION

Seeing as how we’ve got a lot of enviromental news this week, let’s keep on that theme: the science journal Biological Conservation published a study this week which represents the first global scientific review of insect populations, and it is capital-letters Not Good. The major takeaway is that, driven primarily by agriculture destroying insect habitat, insects are going extinct faster than any other type of animal, with total insect populations shrinking by 2.5% per year, and we could be looking at total extinction of most types of insects within “a few decades.” This would be extremely bad, because without insects we don’t have flowering plants (which eliminates just about all fruits and vegetables), or most animals (because the smallest animals eat the insects, and many bigger animals then eat the smaller animals), or lots of other things. Realistically, if we don’t have insects, we don’t have most humans within a generation or two.

You might be saying “Chris, this sounds a lot like that extinction-of-all-fish study you talked about last month” and you would be right! We are, in fact, steadily (and, let’s be honest, not that steadily, not any more, not when we’re talking about this sort of thing happening within the potential lifespan of a middle-aged man) exhausting our global ecosystem’s ability to keep ourselves alive. Which is sort of impressive, in a completely terrifying way.

In short: if anybody complains about the cost of carbon taxes or the Green New Deal, ask them how they feel about eating money.

NOT ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS, BUT MAN DID DOUG FORD FUCK UP THIS WEEK

Doug Ford sent out Minister of Community Services Lisa MacLeod - a not-terribly-bright person who has repeatedly demonstrated such during her tenure in her Ministry - again this week to take the hits as the Tories effectively cut services for autistic kids in Ontario and then tried to call it a good thing.

Quick summary: there’s a waitlist for autism therapy services in Ontario, because there’s a reasonable amount of demand for it and not enough money allocated for it in the budget, so only about a third of families with autistic kids get the therapy and educational assistance they need and not all of them get it early enough and the funding they get doesn’t even cover all of the expenses, more often than not. It’s a shitty situation all around, and of course during the campaign Doug Ford promised $100 million in new funding for the Ontario Autism Program. (Doug Ford also rather notably told parents of autistic kids to go to hell when he was running for Mayor of Toronto in 2014, but that was before he needed their votes.)

Anyway, Doug actually has to run a government now and it turns out you can’t pay autism therapy specialists with pretend money, so the Tories’ solution was, essentially, to “open up the waitlist” by giving money directly to all parents with qualifying autistic kids. Except that the amount of money that is available gets capped sharply after the autistic child in question turns six, and there’s really not enough money for intensive autism therapy even before a child turns six because families can only get up to $20,000 per year and such therapy can cost as much as $50,000 to $70,000. All of this is because the Tories, in short, decided to “open up the waitlist” without significantly increasing the total amount of money, so instead of a third of families with autistic kids getting the help they need, everybody gets mostly not nearly enough help. (This is what happens when you decide that the core principle along which your government should operate is “nobody should get free stuff they don’t deserve.”)

Also this week, in negotiating with the Ontario Medical Association re: doctor’s payments, it was revealed that the province is suggesting that payments for psychotherapy treatment should be capped and clawed back. This follows on Doug’s proposed $335 million cut in mental health spending (it isn’t part of it, it’s an entirely separate cut), and also follows Doug’s promise during the election of $1.9 billion over ten years in extra mental health funding, which seems very unlikely to happen.

I’m not going to discuss the impact of these cuts should they happen, because The Government That Couldn’t Stop Stepping On Its Own Dick hasn’t actually done anything official yet on these fronts, and there doesn’t seem to be much point to me in talking about cuts that may or may not happen. But I think it’s important to say that there’s going to be cuts somewhere, because there have to be, because one of the things the Doug government has done is cancel cap-and-trade, which means the province gets $3 billion per year less in revenue. They also cancelled the income tax hike on the wealthiest tax bracket, which killed an extra $275 million in revenue. Plus the province was already running a deficit in the billions anyway.

Add all of that up, and then remember that the province’s credit score has already been downgraded as a direct result of credit agencies saying “we think Doug is an incompetent twit” and the only answer is that there have to be cuts, because the two options for balancing a budget are cutting services or raising taxes, and Doug isn’t raising taxes. And the cuts we’ve seen his government propose so far are relatively small ones! If there’s going to be major cuts, they’re going to come in the next budget, and they’re going to be massive cuts, not these smaller nickel-and-dime ones.

CATALONIAN SECESSION, OR “A STORY ABOUT PEOPLE TRYING TO LEAVE THEIR POLITICAL UNION THAT ISN’T BREXIT FOR FUCKING ONCE”

So there were huge protests in Madrid this weekend by conservative and centrist political parties and their supporters against the current president, Pedro Sánchez, because they feel he has betrayed the country by being too generous to Catalonian separatists. The Catalonian separatists, on the other hand, think that they haven’t gotten enough from Sánchez and want more. This is, in political terms, a “pickle.”

Generally, when people think of separatist movements in Spain, they think of the Basques, because the Basque separatist movement had its own terrorists until quite recently (the ETA, who mostly bombed and attacked government officials and police) and terrorism is dramatic and gets people’s attention, like you are Hans Gruber saying “they’re very good, I read about them in Forbes.” But Catalonian separatism, while much less violent, is nearly as old as Basque separatism - and probably more important, because the Basques have always been relatively small and poor compared to large and rich Catalan, and while it might seem classist to say that large rich countries are more important than small poor ones, that’s just realpolitik for you.

In 2017, a referendum in Catalan resulted in a massive show of support for independence from Spain, in part because of the region’s cultural distinctiveness and in part because Catalan - which, in case you’ve gotten this far and don’t know, is the northeastern bit of Spain bordering France, where Barcelona is - is probably the richest overall part of Spain and there’s long been a bit of “why are we paying for them” sentiment in the region. (To put this in Canadian terms, it’s like if the Alberta separatist movement was A) serious B) popular C) historically significant and D) grounded in distinct cultural differences beyond the relative popularity of cowboy hats and oil.) Granted, only about 40% of the population voted in the referendum, but one of the great truisms of democratic politics is that if you don’t show up to vote, you don’t count.

Anyway, when Sánchez took over the Prime Ministership of Spain last year following a no-confidence motion in the former PM, Mariano Rajoy, when the latter was tainted by corruption and scandal, he only became PM (of a minority government) because he had the political support of multiple parties, including - most importantly right now - the two pro-independence Catalonian regional parties (both the left-wing Catalonia Yes and the centrist Democratic Convergence of Catalonia). Those parties demanded a binding referendum on Catalonian independence as the condition for their support, and they haven’t gotten one yet and probably won’t because Sánchez and his Socialist Workers’ Party oppose Catalonian independence, just like all the other national parties do. But Sánchez has offered to have a sort of national summit on Catalonian independence, wherein - I’m not sure exactly what would happen at such a thing, to be honest, because if you oppose independence you’re not really going to offer it and that’s all the separatist parties want. But he offered it, and now the conservative opposition is furious because how dare he.

Nobody has any idea what’s going to happen this week, when a vote will be held on the 2019 federal budget. If it gets defeated (IE, if the Catalonians desert Sánchez), then that’s a vote of no-confidence and bam, elections. If it doesn’t get defeated, the opposition is demanding elections next year and with the protests getting as fervent as they are, they might well get them.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched this week:

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949, Robert Hamer, Kanopy) - 3/5

Polar (2019, Jonas Akerlund, Netflix) - 2/5

Play Time (1967, Jacques Tati, Kanopy) - 3.5/5

Now You See Me (2013, Louis LeTerrier, Blu-ray) - 2.5/5

We’re about halfway through Russian Doll and thus far it is remarkable work: brilliantly written and Natasha Lyonne is pitch-perfect. I’m also rereading Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, which remains a great book about the English language (although I will reread Made In America next, since he surpassed himself with the same general topic with that one).

See you in seven.