Costs of Climate Change - Chocolate

 

It might seem a minor issue, but chocolate is an important food commodity and most of us REALLY like it.  Chocolate in drinks, chocolate in baking, chocolate as, well, chocolates.  In 2022/23, global production of chocolate was around 5 million metric tonnes.  Most of that production comes from a few countries in Africa (about 70%).

Climate Change is Coming for Your Chocolate

Unfortunately, Africa is also suffering from the effects of human-driven climate heating.  A number of adverse conditions are on the rise in parts of Africa, such as Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon and Nigeria.  All have experienced increased heat, unusual rainfall and increases in plant diseases.  Cocoa production has suffered and prices have increased as a result.

"The report calculated that over the last decade, climate change had added an extra three weeks of above 32C heat in Ivory Coast and Ghana during the main growing season between October and March.

Last year, the hottest year globally on record, they found that climate change drove temperatures above 32C on at least 42 days across two thirds of the areas analyzed."

Book Burning 21st Century Style

 

The metaphorical book burnings have started, just with a 21st Century twist.  But first, some history, lest we forget.

Germany in Olden Times

In the 1930s, there were a well-documented series of ritual book burnings carried out by the German Student Union, targeting books deemed subversive or deemed to represent ideologies opposed to Nazism.  The burnings included books written in English, French, Jewish authors, people like Albert Einstein and Helen Keller.

As with any good, well-planned authoritarian campaign, the Nazis compared this to Luther's ritual burning of the papal bull.  As with many authoritarian comparisons, it wasn't similar, the Nazis engaging in cultural genocide which later morphed into actual genocide.

Canada in More Recent Times

Canada had a short-lived brush with the attempted authoritarian control of science, in our case.  The government of Stephen Harper engaged in a campaign to close and/or destroy research libraries and research documents.  His government also tried to muzzle scientists, especially any who were engaged in climate and/or environmental research.

I was told of a personal situation where a National Park Interpreter (Park interpreters give guided walks and presentations about the natural world as it exists in Canada's National Parks) was smacked down for presenting a comedic scene between a caribou and a pika that asked "why do people do what they do".

In and around 2013, the Harper government conducted what has been described a chaotic series of closures of federal research libraries and the destruction of research material.  This sad time in Canadian history has been told in many ways from many sources, such as:

Federal Library Closures and the Harper Government's Monoculture of the Mind.

What's Driving Chaotic Dismantling of Canada's Science Libraries?

"Libricide": Harper Government Closing and Junking Environmental Libraries

The conclusion quickly reached was that the Harper government was engaging in a long-term strategy to suppress Canadian science, a story documented here.

Book Burnings 21st Century Style

Fast forward to the past two weeks.  The Trump administration has seemingly engaged in the removal of research files and data related to public health, environmental research and other related areas.

There's a Canadian connection here, interestingly.  A Canadian researcher was contacted by a colleague to see if she was aware of the imminent destruction of key data sets held by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  In a matter of hours, a number of archivists managed to download and save the entire CDC website.  The story first appeared here:

Canadian Residents are Racing to Save the Data in Trump's Crosshairs.

Some studies that could inform future decisions about the H5N1 virus (bird flu) also appeared to be at risk.  Also disappearing was a website containing the names of the January 2020 insurrectionists, and websites that monitor HIV infections.

There is an Internet Archive, but it could become a target of the Trump Administration and his Brown Shirt goons.  However, the Internet Archive is backed up here in British Columbia as well, putting it beyond the reach of the aforementioned goons.

This campaign of destruction might seem puzzling, but keep in mind two things.  First, the Republican Party in the USA has become increasingly antagonistic towards science, a fact that should be apparent to pretty much anyone.  Second, Trump is the one quoted saying: "If We Stop Testing, We'd Have Fewer Cases".  

No Donald.  If you stopped testing, you'd have the same number of cases, you just wouldn't know about them and wouldn't know enough about what was happening to make sensible public health decisions.  Which, I suppose is exactly the problem Trump was having.  This is one more reason why the USA had one of the highest death rates during COVID.  Poorly informed and proud of it.

Trump idiotic claims have been retold and refuted in many places, such as here, and here, and here.

One Final Note

It's worth remembering these stories and what happened here in Canada around 2013/14.  One of the future contenders for Prime Minister in an election that will likely take place this spring, was a Cabinet Minister in Harper's government.  Pierre Poilievre has provided no reassurance that any future government of his won't engage in the same kind of tactics we're seeing south of the 49th.  I wouldn't trust him as far as I could spit.

A Developing Kakistocracy

 

Kakistocracy -  is a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens.  The word was coined as early as the seventeenth century.

Donald Trump's "Kakistocracy" is not the first, but it's revived an old word. (an article from 2018, but even more appropriate now)

RFK Jr - proposed to oversee the Health Cabinet portfolio - Confirmed anti-vaxxer, profits by selling useless health products.  Refuses to say if he'd stop saying vaccines cause autism if he was given suitable proof.  Calls fluoridated water toxic.

Tulsi Gabbard - Republicans and Democrats on the Intelligence Committee repeatedly asked Gabbard — in sometimes fiery exchanges — about her past praise for National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden and comments that appeared to sympathize with Russia on matters involving Ukraine.

Pete Hegseth - defense secretary - known for sexual misconduct, alcohol abuse and mismanagement in previous jobs.

And, to summarize his first week back in office, we have this article:

FACT FOCUS: A look at false and misleading claims made by Trump during his first week back in office

One Journalist's Viewpoint

 Andrew Coyne.....

“Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.

The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.

There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.

The first six months will be a time of maximum peril. NATO must from this moment be considered effectively obsolete, without the American security guarantee that has always been its bedrock. We may see new incursions by Russia into Europe – the poor Ukrainians are probably done for, but now it is the Baltics and the Poles who must worry – before the Europeans have time to organize an alternative. China may also accelerate its Taiwanese ambitions.

At home, Mr. Trump will be moving swiftly to consolidate his power. Some of this will be institutional – the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with Trumpian loyalists. But some of it will be … atmospheric.

At some point someone – a company whose chief executive has displeased him, a media critic who has gotten under his skin – will find themselves the subject of unwanted attention from the Trump administration. It might not be so crude as a police arrest. It might just be a little regulatory matter, a tax audit, something like that. They will seek the protection of the courts, and find it is not there.

The judges are also Trump loyalists, perhaps, or too scared to confront him. Or they might issue a ruling, and find it has no effect – that the administration has called the basic bluff of liberal democracy: the idea that, in the crunch, people in power agree to be bound by the law, and by its instruments the courts, the same as everyone else. Then everyone will take their cue. Executives will line up to court him. Media organizations, the large ones anyway, will find reasons to be cheerful.

Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fuelled by his ill-judged tax policies – he won’t replace the income tax, as he promised, but will fill it with holes – and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation.

Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants – finding them, rounding them up and detaining them in hundreds of internment camps around the country, probably for years, before doing so – will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late.

We should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses in any event. They were not able to see Mr. Trump for what he was before: why should that change? Would they not, rather, be further coarsened by the experience of seeing their neighbours dragged off by the police, or the military, further steeled to the necessity of doing “tough things” to “restore order?”

Some won’t, of course. But they will find in time that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things.

All of this will wash over Canada in various ways – some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it. And who will have the backing of their patron in Washington.

All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them.”

Written by Andrew Coyne.

Andrew Coyne is a highly respected Canadian columnist with the Globe and Mail and a regular panelist on CBC's The National, who has previously worked with Macleans Magazine (Senior Editor) and the National Post.

Book Review - Pandexicon

Pandexicon - by Wayne Grady

Pan.dex.i.con - How the Language of the Pandemic Defined Our New Cultural Reality

A compendium of terms that entered our consciousness and our language during the COVID pandemic.

One of the better books I've read recently.  Discusses many terms that we became familiar with since this started in late 2019.

Before COVID, very few of us know what a PCR test was or why it was useful.  Few of us thought much about face masks, handwashing, social distancing, Reproduction Number, social bubble, flattening the curve or above-the-keyboard dressing.

Before COVID, most of us hadn't heard of mRNA, hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, Remdesivir or monoclonal antibodies.

Politics quite quickly inserted itself into the discussion about how serious the virus was, what treatments might work, whether vaccines were safe or not and what constituted acceptable public health policy.  Five years later, almost ALL of those issues still reverberate literally everywhere, not just on anti-social media.

Face masks and vaccines remain a very visible target (ignoring for the moment the nomination of RFK Jr to the Health portfolio in Trump's Cabinet).  It's almost impossible to understand why something so innocuous as a face mask and so medically valuable as a vaccine would become such social flashpoints, but here we are, five years later.  They STILL are.

A study published in Nature found that, on average, fluid droplets from a contagious person contained 7 million viruses per millilitre and that a person gave off 2600 of those droplets per minute when talking, many more when shouting, as at a Trump rally.  Masks reduced those numbers.  And yet, a Dollar Store employee was shot and killed when he insisted that a customer wear a mask.

"All the reasons for NOT wearing a mask are flawed: no one is invincible, we can never know whether someone near us is infectious, not all government mandates threaten our human rights, and many Trump supporters contracted COVI-19 and died."

Among the many vaccines under development once the SARS-CoV-2 virus was sequenced, were the mRNA vaccines, specifically the vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna.  They had among the best success and the fewest side effects.  Billions of those vaccines have been given globally in the past 4 years.  The vaccines clearly worked.  ANY search for deaths related to COVID show clearly that those unvaccinated were many times more likely to die than those who were vaccinated.

Despite this kind of evidence, the vaccines were declared to be toxic, experimental, responsible for "sudden deaths", somehow connected to "mandates"..... anyone who lived through the past 4 years will remember the "discussion".

It's worth reminding people that mRNA is a molecule that is found in most cells of your body already, where it's involved in protein synthesis.  The vaccines simply mimic that process to have your cells make part of the COVID spike protein so your body can start preparing for that time when you're exposed to the real thing.

Government restrictions, lockdowns and mandates simply drove some people over the edge.  The freedom absolutists were outraged that anyone dare tell them what to do.  I'm still seeing this outrage.  Public health officials were vilified.

In late 2024, Avian Flu (H5N1) started showing up in the news.  Judging from the comments, it would seem that we learned nothing.  The H5N1 virus is literally only a few mutations away from being able to move from human to human.  Could it happen?  Yes.  Will it happen?  Probably.  Sometime.  Stay tuned.

Why the Brits Don't Like Trump

 Someone asked "Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?"

Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England, wrote this magnificent response:

"A few things spring to mind.

Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.

For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace - all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.

So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing - not once, ever.

I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility - for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.

But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is - his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.

And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults - he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.

Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.

Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.

And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.

Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.

He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.

He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.

That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.

There are unspoken rules to this stuff - the Queensberry rules of basic decency - and he breaks them all. He punches downwards - which a gentleman should, would, could never do - and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless - and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority - perhaps a third - of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think 'Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

* Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

* You don't need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.

After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.

God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.

He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.

In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws - he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:

'My God… what… have… I… created?

If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set."

- courtesy of "Occupy Democrats"

A Clean Air Tax - Thanks Alberta

 

Keeping a promise made a number of months ago, Alberta appears ready to bring in a new tax, this time on EV owners.  The tax reportedly will be $200 a year, charged only to owners of full BEVs (battery electric vehicles).

The St Albert Gazette published a story about this upcoming tax here.

The government claims that the tax is to make up for the fuel tax that EVs don't pay plus the damage caused to roads because EVs are supposedly so heavy.

Two things:

• Where in Canada do you pay a consumption tax on something your don't consume?
• EVs, although heavy, are not always the heaviest vehicles on the road.  Let's consider large pickup trucks and large SUVs, many of which weigh more than at least some EVs.

Claims have been made about fairness, that EVs don't pay the fuel tax (which doesn't go directly to road maintenance anyway) but continue to use the roads.

If fairness is the real concern, I have a suggestion, as mentioned in the article above.  Have part of  every vehicle registration fee based on the curb weight of the vehicle.  Not just EVs.  ALL vehicles, including the oversized pickup trucks commonly seen in Alberta (and elsewhere).

It's also worth pointing out an odd bit of hypocrisy here, coming from the Alberta Government, of all places.  The federal Carbon Tax (basically a tax on pollution) has been the target of animosity from Conservatives, especially from Alberta.  I've heard terms like "tax grab", "useless" and such.  With this EV registration tax, the Alberta Government is taxing vehicles that do not give harmful pollutants.  It's a "clean air tax".  A tax grab for NOT using something.

Well done Alberta.  Once again, you've made your disregard for fairness, pollution and environmental damage stunningly clear.  Once again, you've made it quite clear that you don't want to engage in any kind of energy transition which would be quite consistent with your nutty beliefs that climate change driven by fossil fuel use isn't actually a problem.

What's next, Alberta?  Will people with heat pumps be charged a special tax because they're NOT using natural gas (aka: fossil gas)?  Will people who don't drink alcohol be charged a special tax because they're NOT buying beer and therefore not contributing to government coffers through special liquor taxes?

As I say, well done, Alberta.