Such founding fathers of the environmental movement as Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, and Patrick Moore, an early stalwart of Greenpeace, now support nukes. James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a climate-change prophet, favors the so-called fourth-generation nuclear systems, which would substantially reduce the amount of nuclear waste. Hans Blix, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector, is another supporter. So, within limits, are liberal senators like John Kerry and Barbara Boxer. And so is President Obama.

I assume I don’t have to spend a lot of time talking about Moore, Brand, or Hansen.  But Hans Blix’s position on this list puzzles me. Whatever Blix’s political views are, and he seems to have had a role in the Swedish centre-right earlier in his life, the reason Hertzberg is including him on this list is basically because Blix opposed the war. Fine. But Blix’s views on nuclear power are neither novel nor surprising, nor would any informed progressive be confused by them.

Blix was the head of the IAEA for 15 years. The IAEA’s job, before it was enforcing non-proliferation, was to proliferate: to aid the spread of nuclear technology to the developing world.

So Hertzberg’s inclusion of Blix on this list makes no sense at all, like discovering that the Secretary of Agriculture is in favour of corn exports, or that the Secretary of the Treasury favours a strong dollar. It’s a non-story. Unless you’ve just decided to recycle the same well-trod copy from countless reporters before you, but want to give an impression of originality by using a slightly different set of names.  Too bad Hertzberg stepped in it.

It all started so well. Almost exactly three years ago, Ontario’s government announced the construction of two new nuclear reactors to replace ageing parts of our current power supply. Despite the drawbacks of being announced in the middle of summer vacation season and happening in Ontario, it nonetheless made news around the world. This was probably the furthest that any proposal for nuclear building had gotten in the 21st century, and it was kind of a big deal: The Washington Post said it “put Canada at the leading edge of what the nuclear industry calls a ‘renaissance’ of support for nuclear power.”

The usual suspects touted Ontario’s nuclear ambitions as a sign that nuclear power was hip and cool again. See — even the Canadians are doing it!

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Earlier in the spring, there were persistent rumours that, after getting bids from the major nuclear players, Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman was suffering from “sticker shock”. Throw in a major global recession, and a provincial government that his already mired in a scandal for wasting taxpayer’s money by the millions, and it was starting to look bleak for the our shiny new reactors. It certainly didn’t help that the Federal government decided to throw a monkey wrench into things.

Then, this morning, we get a short press release from George Smitherman’s office:

The Government of Ontario today announced that it has suspended the competitive RFP to procure two replacement nuclear reactors planned for the Darlington site….

The submission from AECL was compliant with the terms of the RFP and the objectives of the Government. However, concern about pricing and uncertainty regarding the company’s future prevented Ontario from continuing with the procurement at this time.

This makes my home and native land the latest jurisdiction to reconsider the much-ballyhooed, little-realized nuclear renaissance.

Of course, this is happening at the same time as Ontario reels out major new subsidies for green energy and remains committed to phasing out coal for good by 2014. No word on whether that will be pushed back for a second time because of the nuclear delays, so it’s possible that this is at best a mixed blessing. But given that at the very least we’re looking at saving billions of dollars, I call this a win.

Yup, on top of all the other things we’ll have to worry about in a melting world, there’s the sad fact that we’ll have more and more reasons to kill each other over dwindling water and food supplies. When you consider that the 20th century was bloody enough as economic and industrial opportunities were expanding, the 21st century is looking mighty depressing if you believe that wars can start over resource scarcity.

You can download the podcasts of Parts I, II, and III of Climate Wars here, though I can’t testify as to how long they’ll stay up there. So give it a listen soon. And do check out the book — like I said, haven’t finished it, but it’s excellent so far.

The City of Calgary’s entire fleet of trucks and buses may soon be partly fueled by biodiesel produced from Alberta beef tallow.

Tallow is all that’s left over after an animal has been processed. The city has been experimenting with tallow from the meat-packing plant in High River, Alta., as part efforts to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

…

Not only is the tallow in ready supply locally, turning it into biofuel recycles a product that would normally be thrown away, he said.

Tallow-waste biofuel is also more ethical than other alternative fuels, since it does not displace food crops such as corn, which is used in the production of ethanol, he said.

That’s a neat trick of sunk-cost accounting. Sure, beef production is ridiculously carbon-intensive, making this biodiesel probably more climate-hostile than even corn ethanol, but hey, we’ve already got all this surplus cow fat to get rid of. I’m all for waste recycling, but reducing the production of waste is the first step, right?

I’ll confess this is a first-blush impression, and welcome the opportunity to be proven wrong. But doesn’t this sound like a poor excuse to support beef prices?

This is probably a bad sign for the coalition. Even yesterday some in the Liberal Party were looking ready to bolt, and we need to remember that Stéphane Dion’s hold on his party was never that solid to begin with. Even if the Liberal Party doesn’t bolt en masse, only a few members need to get what was once called "a diplomatic flu" and miss the crucial vote that would retain Harper in power.

All of the major party leaders addressed the country last night, and Dion claimed that a coalition would invest in transit infrastructure, green energy, and green stimulus. If they make it to January, he might still get that chance. But nobody’s made a lot of money by betting on Dion’s political abilities thus far, and I personally don’t expect this coalition to last that long.

According to initial reports, Dion would become Prime Minister until the spring, when his party chooses a new leader.

It will go down on Dec. 8, when opposition parties will table a motion of no confidence in the House of Commons; the motion will endorse a coalition of parties forming a replacement without running a new election.

All this is nearly unprecedented in Canadian politics (nearly unprecedented because the last true coalition government was during WWI) and pretty much unvarnished good news for the environment.

Dion has gotten a lot of positive press for his environmental policies. Too bad he was a better environment minister than political leader, or else his party might not now be looking for his replacement.

The Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Quebecois are all further to the left and much, much better on environmental questions than the current government. Between a change in Ottawa and the change in Washington, it looks like the last of the roadblocks to serious climate change action in North America are falling.

But we’ll see what happens Dec. 8.

• Stéphane Dion, Liberal leader and Kyoto champion, will lose his job next spring if not sooner. I’ve got to say, I feel bad for him. But his party has never been kind to losers, and he came to power less because of his own popularity than because of the deep, deep divisions within the Liberals. Those divisions haven’t gone away — if anything, they’ll be deeper.
• A carbon tax is probably dead in Canada for now. But hope still glimmers for cap-and-trade. Maybe.
• Canadian politics continues to be dull. Like, watching-paint-dry dull.
• Like most Canadian political junkies, I’m more excited for the results November 4th than tonight’s.
• It’s past 11 PM, my country will be governed by reactionaries for another few years, and I’m gonna keep drinking until the sweet embrace of night.

Simply because something must happen does not mean that it will happen … It’s not that people are stupid (although many are) or dishonest (although many are); its that the institutions make certain outcomes difficult to achieve.

Farley thinks that America isn’t in as bad straights as pre-Imperial Rome, but of course the bailout isn’t America’s only crisis at the moment. There is this whole "oh God oh God the planet is burning" thing we’ve got going on which America has shown precious little ability to solve. Then again, even the best countries haven’t been doing what’s necessary.

Nobody who reads this blog needs to be educated on the campaign of deception, denial, and delay that the carbon lobby has been engaged in for the last 40 years, but it’s worth considering just how profound a failure of politics this is. The outlines of the solution are clear: decrease CO2 emissions to zero using renewable energy, and then start pulling out the stuff we’ve already dumped in our sky-sewer. And yet the solution, clear as day, has eluded our politics.

America has faced problems like these before, and the record isn’t all good. Sure, the U.S. government stepped up to the plate during the Depression, and did rather nicely on that whole "winning World War II" thing, but I’m not sure those are the best analogies for our current troubles.

It’s been two years since David’s interview with Jeff Goodell, and I can’t shake Goodell’s comparison of coal dependence to the Slave Power. But of course as big a problem as coal is it’s not just coal, it’s oil and gas too. Just as ante-bellum America was built on the ruined backs of slaves, modern America rose on a tide of fossil fuels. There is simply no comparison between the central role fossil-fuel energy has in the American economy and any other sector. But there is an easy comparison between the central role of slavery in the first industrial revolution and fossil fuels in the second. Both were necessary preconditions. As Findlay and O’Rourke argue in Power and Plenty, it was the ever-expanding production of American cotton that allowed the massive expansion of the industrial super-product of the age, British textiles. Similarly, America’s industrial enormity of the 20th century was predicated on the availability of cheap energy of the dead-dinosaur variety.

Here’s why this comparison scares me at the same time as I think it illuminates so much: America’s political system failed, miserably, to square the circle of competing demands from abolitionists and the Slave Power, because the conflict was one of moral absolutes. America, as the man from Illinois said, could either be slave or free, but not half-and-half. And so America endured what was, up to that point, history’s bloodiest conflict.

We’re faced with a similarly stark choice today. We can either keep emitting GHGs and all die, or we can stop. And there are plenty of people, to borrow Rob Farley’s phrase, who would be content to see the world burn.

I don’t know how to reach leaders who still believe that the extraction of fossil fuels is an acceptable thing for public policy to encourage. (Clearly.) Here in Canada, the left-wing party had to quickly disavow comments from a rookie candidate who said that the tar sands would have to be shut down. Of course, he was correct, but we mustn’t say such things in public. Even on the left.

It seems unhip to say, but this is an argument that is going to be won or lost on a moral argument. Economics is, rhetorically speaking, enemy territory. Economic arguments are used to obfuscate as much as illuminate, when they aren’t being used outright to drive us over the cliff. National security is at least as dangerous, considering the military-industrial complex will never be an environmentalist’s friend. As Goodell says, decide what is right and proceed from there.

The alternative is simple: just as Christians believe our descent began with original sin, it will end with a terminal sin like that described many years ago by Jonathan Schell in The Fate of the Earth:

What the end of civilization, genocide, and extinction all have in common is that they are attacks not merely on the existing people and things but on either the biological or the cultural heritage that human beings transmit from one generation to the next; that is, they are crimes against the future … In its nature, human extinction is and always will be without precedent, but the episodes of radical evil that the world has already witnessed are warnings to us that gigantic, insane crimes are not prevented from occurring merely because they are "unthinkable."

In other words, just because something must happen to save us does not mean that it will happen.

To understand how disingenuous this is, Dion spent months preparing the ground for his carbon tax announcement, which was conducted with huge fanfare and hoopla. Now he’s saying the media are the ones who claimed it was a "major" part of his platform.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the green shift, and I’ve been a fan of Dion for some time (which I put in writing here), but he sees the writing on the wall and is trying to lift his numbers.  I don’t think it’ll work.

The election has been pretty dull, even by Canadian standards. Aside from an argument over whether the televised debates should have four or five party leaders on stage (take that, America!) there have been very few sparks. The governing Conservatives have a campaign message centered around making Stephen Harper look less like an android and more like he wears sweater vests and demonizing the Liberal leader Stephane Dion as a "risky" choice.

The leftist NDP has tried to recast itself as a reasonable choice, not just for the third-place "conscience of Parliament," but as the loyal opposition or even, in their dreams, the party of Government.

But it’s the Liberals who have put a carbon tax at the center of their platform.

The "Green Shift" should be familiar in conception to Grist readers: establish a carbon tax, reduce taxes on income. The problem is that the Liberals haven’t exactly ignited voter interest. The polls have been noisy to say the least, but the latest poll I could find shows the Liberals 15 points behind [PDF] the Conservatives. Other polls have the race substantially closer, but none have the Liberals winning.

What happens if the Liberals lose? The only serious attempt to bring a carbon tax to Canada will have been defeated, and it’s possible that British Columbia’s provincial carbon tax may die after that province’s next election as well. This point was made by Marc Lee a few weeks ago, and reported by the Tyee’s Tom Barrett. The fear among some greens, apparently, is that if both parties fall on a carbon tax, then strong efforts for carbon pricing will be dead in North America for the foreseeable future.

Now, frankly, I don’t think that’s likely. Washington will continue to make its own laws for its own reasons, and the rest of the continent will get pulled in whichever direction that happens to be. Merits of the proposal aside, I was never terribly optimistic about a carbon tax in the U.S. anyway.The hypotheticals about my own national election really change that very little.