No, silly! Not the Bush cabinet at their White House meeting this morning.
(The photo is courtesy of the White House. Can you find George? Clue: Skeletor Man is nearby.)
NO! It’s CANADA!
Canada: environmental bad boy
‘Sluggish, asleep at the wheel, haywire and incontinent.’ A leading green country a decade ago is found severely wanting in a new report, writes Anne McIlroy
Monday October 24, 2005
Canada’s international reputation as a boy scout on environmental issues has been in decline for well over a decade, and now a new report ranks it 28th out of 30 OECD countries on key indicators such as cutting greenhouse gas emissions and smog.
The damning report was commissioned by the David Suzuki Foundation, an environmental group based in Vancouver, and prepared by a team of scientists at Simon Fraser University. It found that Canada was the worst or second worse performer in the OECD on eight of 29 environmental indicators including per capita production of volatile organic emissions, one of the main components in smog, per capita generation of nuclear waste and energy use per unit of GDP. … Read all at The Guardian.
So that’s why the air smells funny when I turn my nose northward!
I guess I have some work to do up here! Damn, that makes me feel really crappy… 🙁
Oh, I’m Canadian…
Still ahead of you guys though…. 😉
Just kidding, it’s nothing to be proud of in this case.
Careful Susan, I suspect that Spiderleaf and Catnip will be along as soon as they finish their Labatt’s and that funny round bacon. 😉
I’m just giving them a hard time.
Betcha if we had an HONEST environmental report, we’d come out badly.
There are some problems though. We live directly across the Strait of Juan De Fuca from Victoria, B.C., which dumps its untreated raw sewage into the strait. Not too cool.
Surprising in this day and age.
While Martin’s government has been borderline acceptable on most issues, and exemplary on a few… Their environmental policy is total crap. This is why we Canadians need to get our shit together and elect an NDP government already.
Not totally surprising, but still disappointing. I think we have a strong environmental movement in this country, but we’ve done a poor job on the causes we choose. I care about wildlife protection, but I’d rather see environmental lobbies focus their energies and resources on reducing pollution and toxic chemicals than preventing the seal hunt.
I think we need to be more active about these sorts of things, especially with the NDP holding the balance of power in Parliament. Now is a great chance to get some environmental legislation passed.
Well at least that funny smell here isn’t me! Of course we smell funny…I mean, of course the country smells funny – only 72% have proper sewage treatment facilities. So we like to poop in holes in the ground. You got a problem with that?
And, like our enviro minister says: we have better drinking water than Mexico! That has to count for something.
Let’s see…what else…oh yeah…WE’RE AHEAD OF THE UNITED STATES!
Funny smells from the north indeed!
I was being silly … i don’t smell anything funny / just sea air.
What’s really creepy is all the pollution that wafts over from Asia and harms our rain forest in the national park.
You won’t like this story:
The photo with the story of clouds of air pollution over China viewed from space is positively frightening!
:-O 🙁
You know, I saw this report when it came out last week or so and was going to diary on it, but how do you tell your friends something like this? It’d be like telling you that your had a run in your stockings or your slip was showing.
Right around the election, when we were seriously considering relocation north, I looked into Canadian environmental regulations (since I work in the field) and found out that your versions of Superfund and RCRA (our toxic waste dump and hazardous waste management laws, respectively) weren’t nearly as strong as I had expected. And you leave a lot more of environmental enforcement to the provinces than we leave to the states, it seems. You also don’t seem to have standardized test procedures for use across the country – so if 500 ppm of benzene is found at a site in BC you can’t directly compare the result to another sample from Ontario, as the test methods might have been different.
As a fence-mending gesture after the Republicans leave office, adoption of uniform environmental test methods across North America should be adopted (we could form a joint commission like the Great Lakes Commission to standardize things in a manner agreeable to both parties). Ideally we’d get Mexico to join in and do it under auspices of NAFTA, maybe. After all, pollution problems do not respect borders, and this would give us a common analytical language so we could have a civilized discussion of where to go next.
What got me going was that the Guardian title was funny … and then, fully realizing that we in the U.S. are as bad, and probably worse, I thought i’d put it up as a ribbing.
For example, the logging around here has risen dramatically since Bush changed the laws. The logging trucks barrel down the highways all day long.
And where there used to be divits in the mountains, there are now entire denuded sections of the side of a mountain. It’s very sad, and quite ugly.