Thursday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Sonal Gupta reports on the detection of massive methane releases from the Kitimat LNG facility which aren't included in normal monitoring or reporting. But Marin Scotten writes that the fossil gas industry is trying to issue propaganda to schools to push students to see continued pollution as inevitable. 

- Guillaume Calline discusses new opinion research showing that European electric vehicle owners are avoiding the anxiety from oil price shocks which has afflicted most ICE vehicle drivers. Nick Carey and Divya Rajagopal point out that Canada is ideally positioned to develop a manufacturing industry for Chinese EVs which can be exported to the U.S. once it's governed by a regime which is less hostile to clean transportation.  

- That said, Ajit Niranjan highlights a new analysis showing how vehicles of multiple types are expanding and creating avoidable hazards for everybody else on the road. And Jack Fitzgerald discusses the similar effect of increasing vehicle heights in the U.S. 

- Finally, Rebecca Solnit rightly points out the through line between the systematic abuse of women by Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein and the Tate brothers. 

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- John Ganz discusses how a number of tech tycoons chose to support Donald Trump as part of a broader distaste for democracy and popular empowerment. And Oliver Darcy discusses how the Los Angeles Times (like other major media outlets) has been converted into a propaganda arm of the business oligopoly after falling under billionaire control.  

- Jesse Drucker examines how the U.S.' estate tax has been undermined, resulting in stagnant public revenues even in the face of systematic concentration of wealth. And Margit Schratzenstaller examines how the rich respond to inheritance taxes - finding far more evidence of evasion and avoidance than of any real moves to avoid paying a fair share. 

- Marcela Garcia reports on the takeover of veterinary medicine by private capital, resulting in corporate control over both consumers and veterinarians.

- Anna Merlan reports on the rise of one prominent climate denial account on X thanks to active support from numerous members of the Trump regime. And Adamo Anthony Donovan writes about the misinformation campaign against bike infrastructure. 

- Joel Bourne discusses the climate and environmental effects of a global food system based on fragile monocultures in stressed ecosystems. And Kiley Price examines how the climate breakdown is both increasing the need for vaccines, and interfering with their availability. 

- Finally, Lise Courteau points out the need to recognize and value unpaid work in order to promote equality and safety for women - even as dangerous political forces are attempting to push in the opposite direction. 

Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Steven Lewis writes that the Saskatchewan Party's mealy-mouthed messaging around the coronavirus looks to be a calculated political choice which is having devastating public health consequences:

There has been a pattern in Saskatchewan's communication about COVID-19 throughout the pandemic. The language is deliberately elastic. It is long on encouragement and exhortation and short on directive. It is more like a public health campaign to reduce smoking rates or encourage physical activity than a mass mobilization in the face of an emergency. 

The subtext is almost therapeutic: you might want to think about this or that, I'm not going to tell you what to do, you have to want to change. You can imagine the fingers crossed behind the back or the permissive wink.

Is this mere bumbling and ignorance of the evidence on how to succeed and how to fail at pandemic control? It's possible but unlikely. The approach is too consistent. No one is winging the messaging after a year of practice. 

Nor is it plausible that the public servants, the public health leadership and the cabinet are unaware of which jurisdictions did what, and the impact of those policies and practices. Yet Saskatchewan consistently drops the ball.

...

(T)he people more inclined to take the pandemic seriously, examine the evidence and listen to public health experts will do the heavy lifting. The gamble is that there are enough of them to give the skeptics and die-hard libertarians a free pass from the consequences of their own choices. 

When the majority takes adequate precautions, the recalcitrant minority also benefits, its safety subsidized by the sacrifices of others. A few hundred cases spread in bars or churches are, on this logic, the price worth paying for keeping the base happy while counting the days until the vaccine cavalry charges to the rescue.

I could well be wrong. Maybe politics has nothing to do with it. The alternative explanation — refusal to learn and adapt, disdain for expertise, bewildering obfuscation — is less flattering to the government. So in the spirit of charity, I cling to the hope that the premier's persistent dodge is artful, the handiwork of a clever strategist rather than one woefully out of his depth.

- Meanwhile, Chuck Collins points out that the U.S. could fund the majority of its COVID-19 relief by taxing back the wealth accumulated by billionaires as the rest of the population has suffered. And Oxfam notes that the Trudeau Libs have decided not to take steps to make Canada's revenue collection more consistent with a feminist recovery.

- Alastair Gee writes about the danger that our climate breakdown may mean the end of forests as they've existed for thousands of years. And Jonathan Porritt warns against the hype that we can avert climate change through nuclear and hydrogen power which will ultimately serve mostly to ensure that an exploitative resource extraction model remains profitable. 

- Regan Boychuk reports on Alberta's belated suspension of SanLing Energy for ignoring obligations to put up $67 million to fund massive end-of-life obligations for its oil facilities. And Sammy Hudes reports on a similar order against Mojek Resources Inc. 

- Finally, Nicole Abbott offers a personal account as to why Canada needs pharmacare for all.

On imbalances

Shorter Murray Mandryk:

The Saskatchewan NDP is facing the same challenges in promoting and supporting female candidates as every other left-to-centre political party in North America has for the past 30 years. So needless to say, the issue is nobody's problem but Dwain Lingenfelter's.

On daunting frontiers

Susan Delacourt tries to talk seriously about a substantive issue in discussing the rural/urban gap in female representation in the House of Commons:

Rural areas are the daunting frontier for women with dreams of getting elected in Canada, according to new, in-depth research.

Louise Carbert, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, has been systematically analyzing how female politicians are faring in Canada's urban-rural divide. Carbert's work has been published in Sylvia Bashevkin's new book, Opening Doors Wider: Women's Political Engagement in Canada. Carbert's main – and sobering – finding is that women are twice as likely to get elected in Canada if they come from urban areas. In 2008, women were elected in 31 per cent of the most densely populated areas of Canada, compared to 14 per cent in rural districts.

"This ratio has persisted over several decades despite substantial increases in the number of women elected overall," Carbert's study says.

So if you're serious about upping the numbers of women in Canadian legislatures, she says, you have to get out of the cities, and into the country.
...
Some say women are under-represented in rural areas because Conservatives generally win in those ridings and Conservatives aren't that friendly to women politicians. The current Conservative caucus is made up of 16 per cent women.

But needless to say, the Cons will have none of it:

But a spokesperson from Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office disputes that notion, pointing out that cabinet ministers such as Diane Finley, Leona Aglukkaq, Gail Shea and Helena Guergis all hail from rural areas, as do several strong Conservative women MPs.

"To suggest there are no strong women representing rural areas flies in the face of the facts and is, in fact, playing to a false stereotype," said PMO spokesman Andrew MacDougall. "It is the Liberals and NDP who have real trouble electing anyone – man or woman – in rural areas because they are out of touch with rural Canada."

Now, seldom will one see such a concise example of the Cons' usual bag of PR tricks at work.

Gross misrepresentation of any position which could possibly operate against their interests, in this case turning an issue of systemic underrepresentation into a fictitious claim of "no strong women"? Check.

Gratuitous bashing of competing parties on issues which have nothing at all to do with the topic at hand? Check.

A complete failure to consider the logical consequences of their own arguments, since if the other two parties in fact "have real trouble electing anyone" in rural areas then the Cons could seemingly fix any underrepresentation issues on their own? Check.

Which raises the question: when that kind of slash-and-burn, reflexively-negative mindset has been rewarded with wins in the past two elections, isn't it a miracle that anybody's still bothering with politics at all?

Hyperwinguttization

I remember well the justified outcry when the Cons decreed that "equality" was no longer part of Status of Women Canada's mandate. But did we miss when they snuck in "subjugation and repression" instead?