Showing posts with label Green Party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Green Party. Show all posts
31 March 2015
Greening C-51
Elizabeth May (Green Party Leader and MP) and Bruce Hyer
(Deputy Leader and MP) announced their proposed amendments of
Bill C-51 at a press conference Monday morning. The two Green Party MPs,
both vocal critics of Bill C-51, will table 60 amendments during
clause-by- clause consideration of the bill.
From elizabethmaymp.ca/ Monday, March 30th, 2015
“ ...While there is no way to fix this deeply flawed bill, our duty as elected legislators compels us to protect Canadians from its most egregious faults,” said Ms. May. “Our amendments seek to protect Canadian’s Charter rights and make this country safer by eliminating the reckless and dangerous Conservative policies in C-51.”
The Green Party proposed amendments to each of the 5 parts of the omnibus terror bill. Part 1 would create an information sharing act that would allow almost every government department to share private information about citizens with virtually no restrictions.
“I was shocked that the Privacy Commissioner of Canada was not invited to testify at Committee,” said Ms. May. “There’s a reason: he is deeply concerned that this bill will trample on Canadian’s privacy rights. Our amendments are guided by those concerns.”
Part 2 would expand the no-fly list in Canada. It has been widely criticised as having been drafted without appropriate consultation with the airline industry.
“I greatly question the need to expand Canada’s no-fly list,” said Mr. Hyer. “C-51 creates a dangerous scenario with a complete lack of due process and the ability for Canadian officials to share the information on the list with virtually no caveats.
“Remember, this list catches people deemed too dangerous to fly but too harmless to arrest. The money spent on these pre-screening systems would be better spent on investigative or emergency response measures.”
Parts 3 and 4 would introduce broad new criminal code offences for ‘promoting terrorism’ and radically transform CSIS, providing new police powers to the agency which was designed to only collect domestic intelligence.
“C-51 will chill free speech,” said Ms. May. “It would make those involved in de-radicalising efforts fearful of prosecution which would serve to further isolate – and thus make more dangerous – those individuals prone to committing ideologically driven acts of violence.
“By providing CSIS with disruption abilities, we take an agency that we know to overstep its existing powers, and equip it with a mandate to operate like a secret police. The weak changes the Harper administration announced last week are nowhere near sufficient to satisfy the bill’s many critics. The single best solution to C-51 remains scrapping it completely.”
While Ms. May was a regular attendee of committee hearings during its study of Bill C-51, Conservative MPs blocked her every attempt to ask a single question. Although any MP has a right to sit at committee, participation is at the discretion of the Chair. During these hearings, the Chair chose to put Ms. May’s requests to the floor for unanimous consent, which was summarily denied by her Conservative colleagues.
The process by which Green MPs submit amendments to committee is one created by PMO to deprive Green MPs from presenting amendments to the House of Commons at Report Stage. Ms. May used this right effectively in opposing Bill C-38 in spring 2012. Since the fall of 2013, due to identical motions passed by Conservatives in every committee, Green amendments are deemed to have been moved at committee. Ms. May and Mr. Hyer will be given time to present each amendment but are not allowed to vote. ..."
13 February 2014
27 June 2013
random science 20: another Canadian attempt at climate change denial
(from: Island Tides Thursday, June 20th, 2013)
In case you missed it, earlier this month an article appeared in a little known physics journal, rated by scientists as of ‘low influence,’ the International Journal of Modern Physics B. The article claimed that all the science on anthropogenic climate change was wrong—that global warming was being driven by CFCs, not burning fossil fuels.
The author, University of Waterloo physics professor Qing-Bin Lu, concluded:
‘The observed data show that CFCs combining with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming … The total amount of CFCs, ozonedepleting molecules that are well-known greenhouse gases, has decreased around 2000. Correspondingly, the global surface temperature has also dropped.’
Predictably, Lu immediately became the darling of the climate denier media. He is a young associate professor at Waterloo, with his undergraduate and masters degrees from China and his PhD from Newcastle in Australia. He is not part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
On the basis of this one paper, The Province argued that ‘panicky governments … should stop letting their brains be fried by professional alarmists … and keep a cool head.’
Remember CFCs
Of course, it has been known since well before we negotiated the Montreal Protocol in 1987 that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) act as both ozone depleters and greenhouse gases, as do weaker ozone depleters used to replace CFCs, the HCFCs. Not all ozone depleters are greenhouse gases, and not all greenhouse gases are ozone depleters, but there is certainly a constellation of overlap.
The Montreal Protocol, the architecture of which was virtually exactly copied in the Kyoto Protocol, has been successful in bringing down production and consumption of ozone depleters. That CFCs and HCFCs are warming gases and are being reduced is not in dispute. But what Dr Lu appears to have done was to take those elements we know are true and force them to fit his predetermined theory. Scientists from around the world have taken a critical look at his paper and find nothing there but nonsense.
Here is his basic line of argument: to the extent that there were warming trends before the advent of CFCs, the warming was due to solar activity. Along came CFCs/HFCs (with action by cosmic rays) and look at how the temperature increases, and now that there are fewer CFCs the warming trends are in decline.
There are a few problems with this thesis.
1) numerous studies have demonstrated that the level of warming from 1850-1970 reflected the build up of GHG, and that removing natural forcing, the trend lines match GHG projections, and thus are not explicable due to solar activity. Models simply cannot match the experienced warming if anthropogenic forcing is left out of the models;
2) the attribution of warming to cosmic rays has been disproved, and;
3) the rate of warming is not in decline as CFCs decline.
The modus operandi of Dr Lu is known as ‘curve forcing.’ This is defined by the excellent website ‘Skeptical Science’ as ‘the practice of scaling several variables without any sort of realistic physical constraint until the model closely matches the observational data, and then declaring that you’ve proven that those variables caused the changes in the observations.’ It is essentially tautological. ‘Skeptical Science’ says it is like rigging a card game and then bragging that you are a great card player when you win the game.
It turns out Dr Lu’s previous papers attempting to disprove carbon dioxide as the primary cause of observed warming and pin it on CFCs and cosmic rays (papers in 2009 and 2010) already gave rise to peer-reviewed papers that rejected his approach. In ‘Do cosmic-ray-driven electroninduced reactions impact stratospheric ozone depletion and global climate change?’ (Atmospheric Environment 45 (2011) 3508-3514) German scientists Groob and Muller concluded:
‘The methods of analysing ozone and global temperature data used by Lu, which are based solely on correlations of parameters, are not conclusive to explain the complex processes both of ozone depletion and surface temperature development.’
That same article references a number of other articles that have also rebutted Lu’s claims that CFCs exert more of a warming effect than the more voluminous carbon dioxide emissions.
Tricky for Lu to explain how one group of warming gases (CFCs/HCFCs in relatively smaller volumes) exert warming when other GHG in gigantic quantities (carbon dioxide) do not. To do so, he relies on a theory that atmospheric capacity for any more CO2 uptake is ‘saturated.’ This particular theory was rebutted and put to bed in 1956 by Dr G N Plass and others (Am. Sci 44 in 1956, and again in Am. Sci98 in 2010), and no one since has disproved their work.
In fact, the scientific community, with papers from researchers all around the world, has thoroughly examined the relative warming powers of CFCs and GHG and concluded that CFCs have a warming potential about 1/5th that of GHG. The more I read about Lu’s persistence in challenging multiple areas of atmospheric science the more I wonder why the University of Waterloo is letting him teach physics at all.
Dr Lu has not done any work that would call into doubt the huge body of work that has already established the relative impact of solar activity over time. Furthermore, he claims that global warming has declined, when in fact it is increasing decade over decade. And he bases all his temperature readings on land-based measurements, completely ignoring the fact that the oceans have been warming rapidly. A quite striking statement of the amount of increased ocean warming comes from Skeptical Science :
‘Over the past decade, ocean and overall global heating have continued to rise rapidly, accumulating the equivalent of about 4 Hiroshima atomic bomb detonations per second.’ This is also ignored by Professor Lu. Interestingly, his paper is well-timed in anticipation of the June 8th announcement by President Obama and President Xi of the People’s Republic of China that a shared programme to destroy HCFCs has been launched. Climate is stressed in the announcement from the White House and Peoples Republic of China : ‘The transitions out of CFCs and HCFCs provide major ozone layer protection benefits, but the unintended consequence is the rapid current and projected future growth of climate-damaging HFCs.’
Perhaps this is nothing more than coincidence.
Newly elected Green MLA and renowned climate scientist, Dr Andrew Weaver, summed up the attitude of many scientists who have responded to the most recent salvo from Prof Lu. ‘It’s unbelievable,’ says Weaver. That’s not hyperbole. It’s simply the case that no one with a background in CFCs, cosmic rays, solar energy, terrestrial or oceanic temperature changes, or carbon dioxide loadings in the atmosphere can believe Professor Lu’s theories.
In case you missed it, earlier this month an article appeared in a little known physics journal, rated by scientists as of ‘low influence,’ the International Journal of Modern Physics B. The article claimed that all the science on anthropogenic climate change was wrong—that global warming was being driven by CFCs, not burning fossil fuels.
The author, University of Waterloo physics professor Qing-Bin Lu, concluded:
‘The observed data show that CFCs combining with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming … The total amount of CFCs, ozonedepleting molecules that are well-known greenhouse gases, has decreased around 2000. Correspondingly, the global surface temperature has also dropped.’
Predictably, Lu immediately became the darling of the climate denier media. He is a young associate professor at Waterloo, with his undergraduate and masters degrees from China and his PhD from Newcastle in Australia. He is not part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
On the basis of this one paper, The Province argued that ‘panicky governments … should stop letting their brains be fried by professional alarmists … and keep a cool head.’
Remember CFCs
Of course, it has been known since well before we negotiated the Montreal Protocol in 1987 that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) act as both ozone depleters and greenhouse gases, as do weaker ozone depleters used to replace CFCs, the HCFCs. Not all ozone depleters are greenhouse gases, and not all greenhouse gases are ozone depleters, but there is certainly a constellation of overlap.
The Montreal Protocol, the architecture of which was virtually exactly copied in the Kyoto Protocol, has been successful in bringing down production and consumption of ozone depleters. That CFCs and HCFCs are warming gases and are being reduced is not in dispute. But what Dr Lu appears to have done was to take those elements we know are true and force them to fit his predetermined theory. Scientists from around the world have taken a critical look at his paper and find nothing there but nonsense.
Here is his basic line of argument: to the extent that there were warming trends before the advent of CFCs, the warming was due to solar activity. Along came CFCs/HFCs (with action by cosmic rays) and look at how the temperature increases, and now that there are fewer CFCs the warming trends are in decline.
There are a few problems with this thesis.
1) numerous studies have demonstrated that the level of warming from 1850-1970 reflected the build up of GHG, and that removing natural forcing, the trend lines match GHG projections, and thus are not explicable due to solar activity. Models simply cannot match the experienced warming if anthropogenic forcing is left out of the models;
2) the attribution of warming to cosmic rays has been disproved, and;
3) the rate of warming is not in decline as CFCs decline.
The modus operandi of Dr Lu is known as ‘curve forcing.’ This is defined by the excellent website ‘Skeptical Science’ as ‘the practice of scaling several variables without any sort of realistic physical constraint until the model closely matches the observational data, and then declaring that you’ve proven that those variables caused the changes in the observations.’ It is essentially tautological. ‘Skeptical Science’ says it is like rigging a card game and then bragging that you are a great card player when you win the game.
It turns out Dr Lu’s previous papers attempting to disprove carbon dioxide as the primary cause of observed warming and pin it on CFCs and cosmic rays (papers in 2009 and 2010) already gave rise to peer-reviewed papers that rejected his approach. In ‘Do cosmic-ray-driven electroninduced reactions impact stratospheric ozone depletion and global climate change?’ (Atmospheric Environment 45 (2011) 3508-3514) German scientists Groob and Muller concluded:
‘The methods of analysing ozone and global temperature data used by Lu, which are based solely on correlations of parameters, are not conclusive to explain the complex processes both of ozone depletion and surface temperature development.’
That same article references a number of other articles that have also rebutted Lu’s claims that CFCs exert more of a warming effect than the more voluminous carbon dioxide emissions.
Tricky for Lu to explain how one group of warming gases (CFCs/HCFCs in relatively smaller volumes) exert warming when other GHG in gigantic quantities (carbon dioxide) do not. To do so, he relies on a theory that atmospheric capacity for any more CO2 uptake is ‘saturated.’ This particular theory was rebutted and put to bed in 1956 by Dr G N Plass and others (Am. Sci 44 in 1956, and again in Am. Sci98 in 2010), and no one since has disproved their work.
In fact, the scientific community, with papers from researchers all around the world, has thoroughly examined the relative warming powers of CFCs and GHG and concluded that CFCs have a warming potential about 1/5th that of GHG. The more I read about Lu’s persistence in challenging multiple areas of atmospheric science the more I wonder why the University of Waterloo is letting him teach physics at all.
Dr Lu has not done any work that would call into doubt the huge body of work that has already established the relative impact of solar activity over time. Furthermore, he claims that global warming has declined, when in fact it is increasing decade over decade. And he bases all his temperature readings on land-based measurements, completely ignoring the fact that the oceans have been warming rapidly. A quite striking statement of the amount of increased ocean warming comes from Skeptical Science :
‘Over the past decade, ocean and overall global heating have continued to rise rapidly, accumulating the equivalent of about 4 Hiroshima atomic bomb detonations per second.’ This is also ignored by Professor Lu. Interestingly, his paper is well-timed in anticipation of the June 8th announcement by President Obama and President Xi of the People’s Republic of China that a shared programme to destroy HCFCs has been launched. Climate is stressed in the announcement from the White House and Peoples Republic of China : ‘The transitions out of CFCs and HCFCs provide major ozone layer protection benefits, but the unintended consequence is the rapid current and projected future growth of climate-damaging HFCs.’
Perhaps this is nothing more than coincidence.
Newly elected Green MLA and renowned climate scientist, Dr Andrew Weaver, summed up the attitude of many scientists who have responded to the most recent salvo from Prof Lu. ‘It’s unbelievable,’ says Weaver. That’s not hyperbole. It’s simply the case that no one with a background in CFCs, cosmic rays, solar energy, terrestrial or oceanic temperature changes, or carbon dioxide loadings in the atmosphere can believe Professor Lu’s theories.
11 October 2012
Canada-China Investment Treaty
(from: Green Party of Canada, October 11, 2012)
What Has Harper Done?
On September 9th, Prime Minister Stephen Harper signed an agreement with China, the Canada-China Investment Treaty. The agreement was kept from the Canadian public and Parliament until September 26th, 2012, when it was quietly made public, tabled in the House of Commons. No press release. No technical briefing. The deal is set for automatic approval. No vote or debate will take place in the House. Once tabled in the House, the clock started ticking. 21 sitting days from September 26 (October 31), this treaty will bind Canada.
Red Carpet for China
So what is the Canada-China Investment Treaty? Simply put, it is the most significant trade agreement signed by Canada since NAFTA. Only this time our “partner” is the communist government in Beijing, an authoritarian regime with an appalling record on human rights –and it isn’t getting better. This deal requires that Chinese government-owned companies be treated exactly the same as Canadian companies operating in Canada. Once in force, it lasts a minimum of 15 years. If a future government wants to get out of it, a one year notice is required – and even once the treaty is cancelled, any existing Chinese operations in Canada are guaranteed another 15 years of the treaty’s benefits.
We at the Green Party of Canada believe there are many flaws in that agreement. And we think Canadians should know about them:
1. Open bar for Chinese state-owned enterprises
The Canada-China Investment Treaty means easier takeovers of Canadian assets, especially in the resource sector. In the context of the possible takeover of Nexen by the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC), it is crucial that we collectively pause to consider the wisdom of granting Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) such an easy access to our natural resources.
2. The right for China to claim damages over Canadian laws
The Canada-China Investment Treaty allows Chinese companies (including state-owned enterprises) to sue the Government of Canada over decisions that can limit or reduce their expectation of profits. In treaty language, this is called “tantamount to expropriation.” China can claim damages against Canada for decisions at the municipal, provincial, territorial or federal level. Even decisions of our courts can give rise to damages. The damage claims start with six months of diplomatic negotiation. If that fails, damage claims move to arbitration – behind closed doors.
4. Secret hearings
The Canada-China Investment Treaty would allow Chinese investors to sue Canada outside of Canadian courts. Special arbitrators would take the decisions. These arbitrators, unlike judges, do not have secure tenures or set salaries. Their decision cannot be subject to judicial review. And the arbitrations are to be secret. Even the fact they are happening is to be secret.
5. Right to be heard
Only the federal government is allowed to take part in the arbitration process. Provincial governments or Canadian companies, even if their interests are affected, do not have the right to voice their concerns during the arbitration process.
6. China’s obsession for secrecy
The Canada-China Investment Agreement makes Chinese lawsuits secret . At any time, we will not know if we are being sued and who will decide the case. We will not know what our government is saying on our behalf. We will not know if Canada has been ordered to change government decisions. This is a complete U-turn for Canada who has always insisted on complete openness in investor-state arbitration, for example when signing the Canada-US-Mexico free trade deal.
7. Restrictions on our use of our own resources
The Canada-China Investment Treaty requires that if, in the future, Canada wants to conserve natural resources (fisheries, water, oil, uranium, forests -- everything is covered), and reduce Chinese access to these resources, we are only allowed to do so to the extent we limit our own use of those natural resources.
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