Articles by Gar Lipow

Patrick Bond and Rehana Dada solve the mystery

What follows is a guest essay by Patrick Bond and Rehana Dada in memoriam for Sajida Khan.

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Internationally-known environmental activist Sajida Khan passed away on Sunday night in her Clare Road home at age 55. She was suffering her second bout of cancer, and chemotherapy had evacuated her beautiful long hair.

Before slipping into a coma last Thursday, she watched out her window, seeing within a few meters the interminable crawl of dumptrucks unloading heaps of stinking rubbish, as dust carried the smells and chemicals into her yard and home.

Khan's last, painful weeks were spent coming to peace with her failed struggle to close the Bisasar Road dump, a task that successive, dishonest Durban governments had promised to fulfill as early as 1987.

Now the vibrant, uncompromising activist has died, while the dump is thriving and in search of international investors. We don't need Belgian detective Hercule Poirot to learn why, for the answer is found in Agatha Christie's novel Murder on the Orient Express, in the Calais night coach where a man is found dead of 13 stab wounds.

A new Pardoner’s Tale?

David objects to calling offsets indulgences.

In contrast, the actual offset purchasers I've met -- via the internet or in the "real world" -- tend to be environmentally concerned and engaged. They view offsets as something they can do in addition to other things they do to lighten their footprint.

This is disingenuous on two levels.

First the indulgence metaphor is primarily aimed at CDM and JT under the Kyoto treaty, where offsets are legally permissions to emit. An offset that is less than 100 percent perfect in that context is very like indulgences at their worst; net emissions are higher than they would be without the offset.

Offsets under Kyoto are imperfect indeed. About 20 percent of CDM credits under Kyoto consist of F5 gas reductions -- which would be fine, except that a lot of poor nation factories increased their production of those gases in order to then reduce their production and sell the credits. And F5 gases are not the only problematic CDMs that have been sold. Incidentally, as Kyoto ceilings are lowered, CDM is being increased. A great deal of lobbying is taking place to lower CDM standards. Certainly I don't see any signs they will be made stricter.

Monbiot: We can provide all or most of our electricity from renewable sources

In his July 3 column, George Monbiot reminds us of how much worse the threat of global warming may be than the consensus IPCC position. But he also reminds us that there are reasons for optimism too. He cites three studies that point to the fact that there is every reason to believe Europe and the UK can supply between 80 percent and 100 percent of electricity needs completely sun, wind, water, wave, tide, and minor amounts of biomass and geothermal energy, V2G Vanadium flow batteries, and pumped storage.

Given that electricity can drive just about all energetic processes of our civilization -- domestic, commercial, industrial, and transport, that means that we have economically reasonable substitutes for just about all carbon use now.

How progressive can legislation be if it’s never allowed to make progress?

Dan Walters writes in the Sacramento Bee:

The messy departure of the chairman and executive director of the Air Resources Board, if nothing else, reflects the extremely intense, largely clandestine struggle in the Capitol over how Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's much-ballyhooed anti-global warming crusade is to be implemented.

Schwarzenegger says he fired ARB Chairman Robert Sawyer last week because the veteran energy researcher was moving too slowly on cleaning up the San Joaquin Valley's dirty air. But Sawyer and ARB Executive Director Catherine Witherspoon, who resigned Monday, have a far different version, one that rings truer. They contend that Schwarzenegger's chief of staff, Susan Kennedy, and other aides wanted them to slow down on implementing anti-global warming legislation passed last year.