News roundup, 19 Feb 2025

- Donald Trump is tipping his hand about one of the reasons he wants to conquer Canada - our water. This should come to no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention; the US has coveted Canada's water for decades, and there have been all kinds of grandiose schemes like NAWAPA and the GRAND Canal about how large amounts of Canadian water could be sent south. The long-term consequences of shifting such vast amounts of water across thousands of kilometres are, of course, hard to predict and might well not be limited to one continent - more water at temperate latitudes, for instance, might mean changes in rainfall patterns halfway around the world if there were enough of it. Plus if more evaporation occurred overall this could amplify global warming, since water vapour is a greenhouse gas.

- Steve Burgess of The Tyee made a relatively innocuous post on the former Twitter as well as on Bluesky, characterizing Donald Trump's treatment of Justin Trudeau as a "hostile act". On Bluesky the post faded into the obscurity that gentle complaints typically fade into, but on Musk's platform the post was brigaded by huge numbers of rabid Trump supporters, many of whom seemed to be reading from the same script.

- Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have been ordered to get senior staff approval for "all upcoming international engagements" until the end of March. This includes international travel paid for by their employer as well as virtual meetings about pretty much any topic of significance.

- John McConnell Jr., a judge with the US District Court for the District of Rhode Island, has had articles of impeachment issued against him by Georgia Republican congress member Andrew Clyne. This is ostensibly because he was acting as "partisan activist" by pointing out the fact that the Trump administration is ignoring his court orders. Of course, he would need to be convicted by two thirds of the Senate in order for the impeachment to be successful, which seems unlikely so long as not too many Democrats are stopped from voting on the matter somehow - like say if a dozen of them suddenly get arrested by the Trump loyalists with whom the FBI is being stacked.

- Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is warning that Trump's policies - both in their own right and in the erratic manner in which they are being imposed - puts the country at significant risk of stagflation. The fact that Elon Musk's DOGE has mooted the idea of a selective default on some American bonds does not help matters.

- The library board in the town of Valleyview, Alberta (population 1,673 as of 2021) has voted to close the town's free-standing library and move it into a new school that is being built. This will cut their available space in half, and will also potentially force the library to comply with school division rules about LGBT* content - the latter almost certainly being seen by the board as a feature rather than a bug. The library was subject to bitter debate as far back as a year ago, and the folks in this Reddit thread believed at the time that there is a broad plan to get far-right types elected to local positions so as to gain a foothold from which to build their movement. This is a tried and true tactic in the US, and folks in that thread think that it's starting in earnest in rural Canada. Notably, some say that rural Alberta is considerably more extreme than similar-sized communities on the other side of the Rockies in BC.

- Some American doctors, especially women, are looking at their options for setting up practices in Canada, fearing that the political climate in the US will make their jobs difficult or even legally dangerous. If nothing else, this could go some distance towards filling gaps in Canadian healthcare.

- The decline of organized religion in urban areas across North America and Europe means that there are a lot of badly underutilized churches sitting around. As with the conversion of office buildings into residential, converting a church is not as easy as it might seem. However, it's definitely possible; I live a block away from a perfect example of this. That said, that particular building is owned by Manitoba Housing, meaning that a fair amount of provincial money had to be spent in order to make it work. No reason why you couldn't do more of that, though.

- A proposal before the Steinbach, Manitoba city council would create a whole new zoning category - the emergency shelter - and could potentially throw the door open to NIMBYs who don't want poors living in their neighbourhood.

News roundup, 27 Nov 2024

- Justin Trudeau has agreed to an urgent meeting with provincial and territorial leaders to discuss the looming tariffs that Donald Trump has vowed to impose on Canada, though it's not clear what they're going to be able to do about the situation. Doug Ford is particularly worried, given Ontario's dependence on the American export market. Ford described the proposed tariffs as "like a family member stabbing you right in the heart"; it's kind of telling that Ford thinks of Trump as being like a family member.

- The Ford government has passed Bill 212, the legislation best known for limiting the ability of cities to build bike lanes. Other provisions in the bill have not received as much scrutiny - notably the fact that it removes environmental and other safeguards that might stand in the way of building a new freeway the government is planning.

- The Manitoba Nurses Union is hoping for a return of the weapon detection system that was tested in the emergency room at Health Sciences Centre this past summer, and is calling for it to be used at all entrances to all hospitals. The union's president, Darlene Jackson, says that nurses are reporting "escalating violence" in ERs around the city, and that this is driving people out of the profession.

- Brazil's former rightwing populist president Jair Bolsonaro has been charged with plotting a coup d’état following his electoral defeat in 2022. We'll have to see if the Brazilians do a better job of dealing with this situation than the Americans have.

- Farmers in Arizona are suffering the effects of subsidence as a result of excessive groundwater pumping, but they sure as heck aren't going to accept any kind of rules to manage the problem. Because rules are for dem big city libtard ay-leets, I guess.

- Anger over Jeff Bezos' interference in the editorial policy of the Washington Post in order to block the publication of an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris has led some book lovers to seek an alternative to Amazon-owned Goodreads. One beneficiary of this is a site called The StoryGraph.

- With the pending closure of supervised consumption sites in Ontario, someone has gone around putting up these posters that purport to be from the provincial health department, pointing out where the drug consumption will be relocated to by this move.

News roundup, 21 Oct 2024

- BC's election is too close to call, with the results in several constituencies riding on mail-in and out-of-district ballots that haven't been counted yet. Mail-ins aren't expected to be counted until the 26th; it's a safe bet that if the Conservatives end up losing they'll use the delayed results as "evidence" that the election was rigged. And it's more than a bit disturbing that over 40% of the electorate (probably much higher in rural areas) voted for a far-right extremist party. And in the last week of the campaign, someone cut Nathan Cullen's image out of a lawn sign and suspended it from a makeshift gallows; sadly that seems to be fairly reflective of the way that constituency is going, given that Cullen was defeated on Saturday.

- Winnipeg mayor Scott Gillingham is proposing a new emergency service that would specialize in mental health issues. Given that the police have a rather spotty track record in that area, plus the fact that even the sight of a police uniform can be a problem for some people in crisis, this may be a good idea.

- The impact of climate change on heavily populated areas such as the Middle East and south Asia are hard to overstate. Many places are running out of water as rainfalls decline; some people will die in place but many more will become what might be called "environmentally displaced people". Some use the term "climate refugee", but they don't fit the current international definition of refugee, and the chances of the definition being updated and thus obligating signatories to the refugee convention to accept them are pretty slim. Incidentally, some historians believe that the so-called "Sea Peoples" linked to the Late Bronze Age collapse were environmentally displaced people. Think about that, then maybe read Christopher Priest's novel Fugue for a Darkening Island...

- The US Department of the Interior has approved a 2 gigawatt geothermal energy site in Utah. The operation is expected to generate enough electricity to supply over 2 million homes.

- A survey of employers found that many of them are having a hard time implementing a return-to-office policy. 75% say that they are having problems getting workers to comply with RTO mandates. Interestingly, only about half say that they "definitely" or "probably" will be stricter in their enforcement of such mandates.

- Several Republican AGs in the US are suing the FDA for approving online sales of the abortion drug mifepristone (also known as RU-486). One of the harms they're claiming is rather interesting - there has been a drop in births among kids aged 15 to 19, which has the potential to slow population growth and thus potentially result in states like Missouri "losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding". Yeah, they said one of the quiet parts out loud.

- An RCMP officer in Burnaby has finally been forced out after having spent more than half of his career on paid leave for reasons the force seems reluctant to discuss in any detail.

News roundup, 27 Aug 2024

- Despite Justin Trudeau's unpopularity with the general public, his cabinet are standing solidly behind him - at least publicly. The fact that the party has no mechanism to force him out probably has something to do with that.

- A patchwork of treaties and compacts dictate how water in the Colorado River system is shared between Mexico and the various affected US states. The problem is, the rules were drawn up over a century ago, at a time when the watershed received a lot more rainfall than it does now, and serious conflicts are looming unless new agreements can be reached. The one silver lining is that those conflicts would probably be worked through in courts rather than on the battlefield, which is more than can be said for the situation on the Nile or, much worse, the Indus.

- An Irish climate scientist is calling on her country to be proactive in moving people and key infrastructure, such as railway lines, away from the coasts before sea level rise becomes too severe.

- The push to force workers back to the office continues. This article concedes that working from home generally does not harm productivity or collaboration - but still argues that the push for RTO is a good thing. It blames working from home for the so-called "loneliness epidemic", which is kind of dubious (how many of your strongest social connections come from work?) but also says the quiet part out loud by admitting that the decline in commercial real estate is one of the biggest reasons. Strangely, it also blames remote work for "the growing homelessness and crime in city 'ghost towns'", which seems to me to be getting it backwards - devaluing real estate is a potential solution to homelessness, not a cause. That said, it does mention one valid concern - a decline in commercial real estate means declining tax revenues for municipalities.

- The Manitoba government has appointed an adviser to the Hanover school division, which serves the city of Steinbach and surrounding areas and has thus been riven with culture wars. The Tory opposition, predictably, is making angry noises about the move.

- Further to the reports that 7-Eleven is considering closing up to 10 locations in Winnipeg, the one at Arlington and Notre Dame was robbed six times in a single day.

Water resolution passes at UN

So the resolution to declare water and sanitation to be basic human rights passed at the UN General Assembly. But guess who sat out the vote:

Although the motion passed with 124 countries voting in favour of the resolution drafted by Bolivia, Canada was among the 41 nations to abstain on the issue.

Hmm. And why did John McNee (Canada's ambassador to the UN) abstain? Don't know; perhaps it was a compromise between him and the government.

One thing that bothers me about the resolution, though, is this:

The final resolution "Calls upon States and international organizations to provide financial resources, capacity-building and technology transfer, through international assistance and co-operation, in particular to developing countries, in order to scale up efforts to provide safe, clean, accessible and affordable drinking water and sanitation for all."

All of that is very good. Safe, clean, accessible, and affordable drinking water and sanitation should be available to all. But in that list I'd like to have seen the word sustainable.

Speaking of water...

The UN General Assembly is expected to vote shortly on a resolution declaring water to be a basic human right. Sounds like a good idea, no? However, the usual suspects would disagree:

Barlow, former senior adviser on water at the UN and chair of the Council of Canadians citizens group, is optimistic the resolution will pass by majority vote.

However, it appears powerful nations — including Canada — either will not support it or will push for a version that Barlow says would continue to allow water to be bought and sold as a commodity.

“My fear is that the world is going to be divided into North and South — developed and developing nations — and that’s a disaster for the United Nations and for the world,” said Barlow. She was referring to apparent behind-the-scenes opposition by the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Britain and other European countries, as well as Canada.

Now why would this be? Dunno; perhaps some people fear it would limit their ability to sell stuff like this?

Another water war brewing?

A couple of months ago I mentioned the dispute between Egypt and its upstream neighbours over the waters of the Nile. Well, that's far from the only place on the planet where trouble is brewing over this essential resource:

The last time water issues pushed India and Pakistan to the brink of armed conflict was half a century ago, when Bashir Ahmad Malik was an engineering student. His government asked him to drop his graduate studies and join a team of experts urgently negotiating a way to share water between the rival countries.

“Both sides were threatening war,” he said. “India was shutting the canals, starving or flooding us.”

The Indus Water Treaty averted disaster when it was signed in 1960. Even when India and Pakistan did eventually go to war over different issues in the following decades, they continued to respect the water treaty.

But the agreement now seems to be unravelling. Dispute-resolution mechanisms, never invoked in the first four decades of the treaty, have been triggered twice in recent years. The latest round of talks broke down earlier this month, as the two sides failed to agree on a neutral umpire to settle a quarrel over India’s plans for the Kishanganga hydroelectric project in northern Kashmir.

Even the veteran water expert who assisted with the original negotiations now feels that the treaty was inadequate.

“At the time, we felt it would be all right,” Mr. Malik said. “But now, I don't think it was a good treaty for Pakistan.”

Loss of faith in the Indus Water Treaty comes at a time when water disputes between the nuclear-armed neighbours have reached unprecedented levels of bombast.

From the Globe. Scary times we live in...

New desalination technique shows promise

If this works on a large scale, maybe we won't have to worry about the Yanks taking our fresh water:

The world isn’t facing a water shortage. Anyone who lives by the ocean knows that.

What we are running short of is fresh water. Only 3 per cent of the water on this planet is considered fresh water, and of that about two thirds is locked up in glaciers.

Most of the rest isn’t close to the people who need it most, with parts of Australia, India and the U.S. southwest being some of the better known water-scarce regions.

This has brought heightened attention recently to the importance of water desalination, and more specifically, lower-cost ways of removing salt from seawater that don’t require enormous amounts of heat and electricity.

On this front, a start-up from Vancouver called Saltworks Technologies has been breaking new ground with a process, explained below, called “thermo-ionic desalination.”

By way of background, most of the world’s desalination plants today separate salt by distilling seawater, but this requires an immense amount of energy to rapidly vaporize and then condense the water.

Newer desalination plants typically use a process called reverse osmosis. This is when the seawater is forced against a membrane that filters out the salt and other minerals. The approach is less energy-intensive than distillation, but the big pumps that push the water through the membrane still require lots of electricity.

How much electricity? Economist Jeff Rubin, in his book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, cites the example of Saudi Arabia’s Shuaibah 3, the world’s largest desalination plant. It can produce 880,000 cubic metres of fresh water daily. The electricity to run this facility comes from a massive oil-burning power plant.

Shuaibah 3 is just one of several large desalination facilities in Saudi Arabia that get their power from oil-fired generation stations. “The World Bank estimates that the Middle East will need roughly another 50 to 60 billion cubic feet (1.42 to 1.7 billion cubic metres) of water annually over the next 10 to 15 years to meet the region’s burgeoning water demand,” writes Rubin. “Desalinating that immense volume of water could ultimately require the use of a million barrels of oil per day.”

This is why a company like Saltworks is so important. It has figured out a new process that can cut the energy demands of a desalination plant by more than half, and in some cases by as much as 80 per cent. Ben Sparrow, the mechanical engineer who co-founded Saltworks in 2008, says a small pilot plant is already operating in Vancouver that can process 1 cubic metre of ocean water a day.

From the Star. Interesting stuff, and a lot less troublesome than pumping water over the Rockies (or blasting out gigantic trenches with nuclear bombs, as Gary Filmon supposedly advocated in his master's thesis).

A war over water?

We're seeing some sabre-rattling on the part of Egypt about upstream uses of the Nile:

After he signed the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat said: “The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water.” Well, the world kept turning, and now a potential war over water is creeping onto Egypt’s agenda.

Egypt is the economic and cultural superpower of the Arab world. Its 78-million people account for almost a third of the world’s Arabic-speaking population. But 99 percent of it is open desert, and if it were not for the Nile river running through that desert, Egypt’s population would not be any bigger than Libya’s (5 million). So Cairo takes a dim view of anything that might diminish the flow of that river.

Back in 1929, when the British empire controlled Egypt, Sudan, and most of the countries farther upstream in East Africa, it sponsored an agreement giving Cairo the right to veto any developments upstream that would decrease the amount of water in Nile. The rationale at the time was that the upstream countries had ample rainfall, whereas Egypt and Sudan (at the time ruled as one country) depended totally on the Nile’s waters.

Thirty years later, in 1959, when Egypt and Sudan were already independent but all of the upstream states except Ethiopia were still colonies, Egypt and Sudan signed another agreement that left only 10 percent of the Nile’s water to the seven upstream countries while giving Egypt almost 80 percent and Sudan the rest. The argument was still the same: the countries further upstream had rainfall, while it hardly ever rains in Egypt or Sudan.

Now the upstream countries that got almost no water in that deal are rejecting it. Thirteen years ago, they persuaded Egypt and Sudan to start talks on the river, but they have now concluded that the two Arab countries really only joined the talks to prevent any new deal. So they are now going ahead without them.

From the Georgia Straight. Will war actually break out? Too soon to tell, but in the long run it's almost inevitable that nations will come to blows over water.

Water export legislation exempts bottled water

The federal government recently surprised skeptics like me with legislation to restrict bulk water exports. However, there's a problem here:

A federal government plan to strengthen a ban on bulk water exports is undermined by a loophole allowing significant water removal for exports of bottled water, critics said yesterday.

Ottawa MP Paul Dewar, the New Democratic Party's environment critic, signalled amendments will be sought to a proposed bill to strengthen the existing ban against bulk water exports by extending it to more than 80 rivers and streams that cross the U.S.-Canada border. "Canada will continue to export water in bulk, just in small individual containers instead of giant containers," said Joe Cressy of the Polaris Institute, a research and advocacy organization that is campaigning against bottled water. "The bill is a first step but it doesn't go far enough."

The new legislation is intended to thwart the diversion of river water south to the U.S. through such means as dams, aqueducts, canals and pipelines.

From the Montreal Gazette (h/t pogge). There may be other issues too -- the Council of Canadians is concerned about what else might not be covered:

Council of Canadians national water campaigner Meera Karunananthan says, “We don’t see Bill C-26 as a ban on bulk water exports. It does not appear to cover waters that are not boundary or transboundary waters.”

In other words, if someone were to draw water from the Churchill River and haul it away in supertankers, that would be just dandy under this legislation. Is this likely? Hard to say. The CoC's Maude Barlow notes here that the right wing think tanks have had their eyes on Arctic water for some time, though.

An ominous sign for the future of California

There isn't enough fresh water:

Mike Chrisman looks out from his SUV as he drives through seemingly endless rows of walnut trees on his property near Visalia, in central California. "I have to be optimistic, I'm so tied to this land," he says. His great-grandfather, after trying his luck in the Gold Rush, settled in Visalia in the 1850s, and the family has been there ever since.

But as California's secretary for natural resources – a job at the intersection of the environmental and farming lobbies, perennially at loggerheads over the state's scarcest resource, water – Chrisman also knows that optimism has become a minority view.

His land is in California's Central Valley, a region that covers 19 counties and stretches for 725 kilometres from the Cascade Mountains in the north to the Tehachapis in the south, and is bounded in the east by the Sierra Nevada and the west by California's Coast Ranges.

Much of it was an inland sea in its geological past, and its alluvial soils and Mediterranean climate make parts of it, particularly the San Joaquin Valley in the south, about the most fertile agricultural region in the world.

But this status is at risk because water, the vital ingredient to make the soil productive, is increasingly scarce. Some of the reasons are natural; California has been in one of its periodic droughts since 2006, and climate change is a long-term threat to the state's mountain snowpacks.

Others are political; the pumps and aqueducts that carry water from the wetter north to the dry fields in the south are creaking with age, threatening ecosystems and endangering species.

And the absurd thing is, Californians use insane amounts of water simply making their lawns and golf courses look nice and green. They really need a reality check, though I fear their answer to the problem will be to push for something like this.

A not-so-grand idea reappears

You may or may not have heard of the GRAND Canal proposal. If nothing else, it deserves credit for its audacity. It was proposed by a chap named Tom Kierans, an engineer from Newfoundland who figures he knows how to solve the water problems faced by the American southwest and the Canadian prairies.

The idea is this: Kierans thinks that water could be drawn from Lake Michigan to supply the southwestern US, and from Lake Superior to supply the Prairies. To make up for this, though, we'd need to add more water to the Great Lakes, otherwise they'd eventually be drained. This is where Kierans' proposal gets... uh, interesting. He proposes building a gigantic dam to wall off James Bay from Hudson Bay, so that water from the rivers in northern Ontario and Quebec would be retained. Some outflow would be allowed at first, but no inflow from Hudson Bay, resulting in James Bay being turned into a giant freshwater reservoir. From there, the water would be diverted (and at some points pumped) into Lake Huron via the Harricana River, Lake Timiskaming, the Ottawa River, and the French River. Got that?

Of course, this sounds like utter madness. Even setting aside the environmental concerns (mixing watersheds is generally not good for biodiversity, and some have suggested that the resulting changes to marine currents in Hudson Bay could be harmful as well) the amount of effort, expense, and energy that would be required to do this is staggering. The idea has been floated a few times since Kierans proposed it in 1959, and was studied approvingly by some politicians, including Quebec premier Robert Bourassa and some guy named Brian Mulroney (remember him?) but fortunately these proposals haven't gone very far.

However, the idea is now being discussed again, in the mainstream media no less. Are they trying to soften us up for the idea? Certainly some, such as Gwynne Dyer, are saying that if we don't sell our water to the Yanks they'll just take it. But what if we don't build the GRAND Canal? Would the Great Lakes states stand for the lakes getting drained so that the southwest can keep their golf courses green and their pools full? I'd like to think not.

Of course, if it comes to that the US might resort to other means to get us to cooperate...

Sell water to the Yanks or they'll take it, Dyer says

So Gwynne Dyer is now saying that if we don't sell our water to the US, they'll just take it anyway:

Canada must start selling its water to the United States before the Americans decide to take it and the country should also pay Alberta to stop tar sands production amid an emerging global climate crisis, international affairs columnist Gwynne Dyer said Monday.

Global warming and its calamitous fallout coming over the rest of this century is the subject of Dyer's next book. He described the sober picture of what might happen in a lecture to a nearly full house at the Roxy Theatre in Owen Sound.

The London-based, Canadian-born syndicated columnist said British policy makers are secretly worried about a scenario in which even a 2 C increase in daily average global temperatures would turn today's agricultural breadbaskets into deserts.

The American midwest, the Mediterranean basin, the north Indian plain, the Australian wheat belt, "those areas will suffer catastrophic losses of rainfall and will see crop yields fall drastically," Dyer said, clad in his trademark worn brown leather jacket.

Funny thing is, the US is having a hell of a time fighting protracted guerrilla wars at a "safe" distance; having one on their borders would be more than they could handle. Of course, I really hope they're not stupid enough to try, because the consequences would be devastating for both countries.