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Governments undermining action on climate, Canadian, U.S. critics charge
Mike De Souza, CanWest News Service
OTTAWA — Canadian and American politicians renewed attacks on their respective governments Friday over concerns the Harper and Bush administrations are cooking up a scheme to undermine international action on climate change.
While Democratic representatives fired off a harsh three-page letter to U.S. President George W. Bush, urging him to reverse course, opposition MPs in Canada urged the Harper government to back away from plans to invest billions of dollars in a major gas pipeline project and accept a growing scientific consensus about the dangers of global warming.
“Canada has remained silent for weeks, and our international reputation is suffering,” said Liberal MP John Godfrey. “Prime Minister [Stephen] Harper and President Bush share several points of view and even share some advisers. On top of that, they share inaction on the issue of climate change.”
(19 May 2007)
Al Gore Has Big Plans
James Traub, NY Times Magazine
…Six years after the Supreme Court declared him the loser of a presidential race that seemed his for the taking, Al Gore has attained what you can only call prophetic status; and he has done so by acting as he could not, or would not, as a candidate – saying precisely what he believes, and saying it with clarity, passion, intellectual mastery and even, sometimes, wit.
Everywhere he goes, people urge him, almost beg him, to run for the presidency. He probably won’t – though he might. (“It’s complicated,” he told me, “but it’s not mysterious.”) He says he thinks he’d be better at it this time than he was last time. And he probably would be: Gore really does know how to hold 6,000 people in a room. But sometimes one person is one person too much for him. Given his druthers, he’d really rather talk about complexity.
Gore is a gifted, and remorseless, explainer. Over the last three decades, he has been trying to explain a complicated and unattractive idea that scarcely anyone wanted to hear – that mankind has threatened its future on the planet by massively increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now, thanks in part to Gore himself, fewer and fewer people dispute this premise.
But winning the argument – the smoking-causes-cancer part – is only the beginning. Gore and the country’s major environmental groups have now embarked on a three-year effort, for which Gore hopes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, to persuade the American people, and the political parties, to take drastic action to curb greenhouse gases. It is a campaign of such vast ambition that you could almost imagine passing up a run at the presidency in order to pursue it.
“The central challenge,” he said to me later that evening, as he was waiting to go onstage at the University of Miami, “is to expand the limits of what’s now considered politically possible. The outer boundary of what’s considered plausible today still falls far short of the near boundary of what would actually solve the crisis.”
(20 May 2007)
Long profile.
Byron Bay won’t budge over rising sea liability
Heath Gilmore, The Sydney Morning Herald
IN a move that will have ramifications for Sydney waterfront owners, members of an exclusive beachfront community have threatened to sue their council if it does not protect them from the threats of global warming.
Top law firm Mallesons Stephen Jaques, acting for a number of Belongil Beach residents, fired off a legal warning last month complaining that Byron Shire Council had failed to protect their properties from the threat of erosion.
The legal threat relates to the council’s long-held policy of planned retreat for Belongil Beach and other areas in the Byron area. In plain language, it means properties affected by rising sea levels would be abandoned rather than protected. ..
(20 May 2007)
