Topic
What grows in tidal zones may be our best ally against climate change. How to preserve BC's 'blue carbon'?
Zostera marina eelgrass with flowers (British Columbia). Photo: John Dove.
Baby copper rockfish (British Columbia). Photo: Sharon Jeffrey.
Eel grass (British Columbia). Photo: James Mack.
Eelgrass transplant sites in Squamish, British Columbia.
Eelgrass transplant sites in Squamish, British Columbia.
Mangrove roots in Tulap, Indonesia. Photo: Jasmine Mason.
Mangrove tour in Tulap, Indonedia. Photo: Jasmine Mason.
Mangrove with fish trap near Tulap, North Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Orange starfish and eelgrass (British Columbia). Photo: Jens Wieting.
Sea slug clings to eelgrass (British Columbia). Photo: Sharon Jeffrey.
Nikki Wright, a volunteer member of the gumboot army, and Dr. Colin Campbell at Pat Bay on Vancouver Island doing eelgrass mapping. Photo: Ana-Simeon.
Old growth mangrove in Tulap, North Sulawesi, Indonesia. Photo: Jasmine Mason.
Pandalus in grass. Photo: Sharon Jeffery.
Parksville mapping. Photo: M. Deakon.
Roque eelgrass blades. Photo: Sharon Jeffery.
Transplanted eelgrass. Photo: Jamie Smith.
A Tyee Solutions Society visualization and series.
How eight coastal First Nations will harvest money from trees without saws.
Hospitals and schools must pay the Pacific Carbon Trust, but what are they really buying?
In February of this year, scientists identified what may be the oldest living organisms on Earth: a gnarled mass of aquatic seagrass off the coast of Spain, thought to be 200,000 years old. About 8,000 kilometres away, in the estuary of the Squamish River, a gumbooted army of volunteers attempts to restore a once broad seagrass meadow, long ago destroyed by log booming.
What the two aquatic gardens a hemisphere apart share is the potential to store more carbon than the thickest swathe of Amazonian rainforest, nurturing as much life concentrated into a smaller footprint. And while forests hold carbon for centuries at best, the sediments below such aquatic meadows can store carbon for millennia.
Coastal marine environments like seagrass meadows, salt marshes and mangroves (known collectively as "blue carbon") are just beginning to attract attention for all the free services they provide to humanity, most notably a seemingly supernatural capacity to remove carbon from the atmosphere (see sidebar).
Yet as with many natural spaces on land, no widely accepted metric yet exists to place a value on the carbon-scrubbing services such blue carbon sinks provide. As their importance has gone unrecognized, human activity has destroyed as much as seven per cent of the globe's remaining blue carbon sinks, including those in B.C., in a single year. Their continuing losses expose coastlines to erosion, diminish biodiversity, and release enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
The term "blue carbon" is used to refer to marine vegetated coastal habitats that can store enormous amounts of carbon over millennia.
Seagrass is a generic term for a rare group of flowing ocean plants (called "angiosperms") that thrive in submerged meadow ecosystems and range from cold polar waters to the tropics. A native seagrass in British Columbia is eelgrass (Zostera marina), which is by far our most abundant blue carbon stock.
Salt marshes and mangroves are intertidal systems, living between the rise and fall of the tides. Salt marshes generally hold more carbon by area than eelgrass in British Columbia, but much of our historical stock has been lost. Mangrove forests occur only in tropical and subtropical areas, where they are routinely cleared to farm shrimp for export to developed nations.
The maximum reported carbon-sink capacities of salt marsh, mangrove and sea grass ecosystems exceed that of undisturbed Amazonian forest by factors of 10, six and two respectively. Globally, blue carbon habitats are disappearing four times faster than tropical rainforests.
"Imagine what it would cost to construct a carbon sink to absorb all the emissions from the planet's entire transportation fleet," says Sierra Club of B.C. science advisor Colin Campbell. "You would be aghast at what that would cost right? But we already have it, with our blue carbon habitats, and all we have to do is stop wrecking them to make shrimp farms, marinas and boat ramps."
BC vulnerable
Campbell is currently championing a cartographic sweep of the province to map where blue carbon occurs and how it stores carbon so efficiently. Better understanding, he hopes, will discourage society from wiping that capability out.
The author of a pioneering report on the precarious state of B.C.'s blue carbon stocks, Campbell estimates that just 400 square kilometres of salt marsh and seagrass meadow are left in coastal B.C., an area just slightly larger than the city of Abbotsford that yet stores away as much carbon as B.C.'s entire forested share of the boreal ecozone, which covers nearly one-third of the province's total land base. And each year those neglected sea gardens lock away as much more carbon as 200,000 cars emit over that time.
Today, 85 per cent of this key environmental asset lacks all protection from the impacts of human development.
Trained as a palaeontologist, and later in ecology at the University of California at Berkeley, 66-year old Campbell says blue carbon suffers a "charisma gap." Unseen underwater environments are not as intriguing to the popular mind as tropical and temperate rainforests. Worse still, they inhabit places where humans love to build things. Think scenic coastal marinas built over B.C. salt marshes, or tropical mangrove forests razed to farm shrimp.
Carbon stored in coastal marine environments went almost entirely unstudied until 1996. But when they looked, scientists were astounded: blue carbon plants have the ability to bury carbon in the sediments in which they grow, where it can be held for millennia in ooze that accumulates to great depth over time.
"Blue carbon comprises half a per cent of the whole world's ocean surface and yet [it's] storing more than half of the carbon the ocean actually sequesters every year," says Campbell. "Because of that, our estuaries and eelgrass-rich intertidal zones in B.C. occupy the highest possible priority for conservation, restoration and enhancement."
While most of B.C.'s blue carbon stocks exist in the southwestern corner of the province, there are other significant fields found all along the central and north coast. A single patch of salt marsh at the end of Kingcome Strait on the central B.C. coast is believed to be absorbing as much C02 as 1,000 gas powered cars just shy of 3,000 tonnes of CO2 every year. And it's doing it for free.
Underwater offsets to protect blue carbon?
Researchers at Duke University's Nicholas Institute consider the ongoing destruction of blue carbon environments a "market failure" in desperate need of correction.
"Because markets do not easily capture the values of ecosystem services," they report, "those who control coastal resources often do not consider these values when choosing whether to clear habitat to produce goods that can be sold in the marketplace."
A partial answer, the Duke researchers suggest, is to give coastal ecosystems and the role they play in the global carbon and climate system a footprint in the financial world as well. In other words: measure the storage in blue carbon areas by the tonne, and sell it on the open market as offsets.
This is easier said than done: while it is now commonplace to protect standing forests by creating offsets based on estimates of the carbon stored there, scientific uncertainty continues to limit the prospects of creating carbon offsets from blue carbon.
Not a single blue carbon offset project yet exists anywhere in the world. James Tansey, CEO and co-founder of Offsetters Clean Technology Inc. believes it's a lack of knowledge that is holding us back.
Science lacks the foundational knowledge about mangrove, eelgrass and salt marshes that it has long possessed about forests, in large part because we have never commercially exploited these habitats. The extractive value of cut timber provided an incentive to continually improve our understanding of how forests grow and regenerate, Tansey notes; no comparable interest motivated acquiring any such knowledge about blue carbon.
As a result, every effort to quantify what's stored in blue carbon must start from close to scratch. In order to meet the expectations of international offset buyers, Tansey says, "You're going to have to do [each inventory] salt marsh by saltmarsh, get the data, and that's going to be a huge barrier to growing it quickly. I think forests are going to dominate [carbon offsetting] for a long time."
It starts with trees
Another hope is that blue carbon will eventually be bundled with other social and economic values into a sort of "value-added" carbon offset. A framework to do just that has existed since 2005.
The Climate Community and Biodiversity Alliance (CCBA) was created in 2003, back when voluntary carbon markets were new. International environmental groups allied to develop a way to consider more than just carbon when creating offset projects.
"CCBA is basically a stamp of high quality to show that a project is not only delivering carbon benefits, it's also delivering significant benefits to the local communities and for biodiversity," says the Alliance's standards coordinator Gareth Wishart from his base in Virginia.
Since the standard was completed and it was first launched in 2005, the CCBA has become a necessity for forestry offset projects hoping to tap the most lucrative voluntary carbon offset markets -- worth more than $420 million globally in 2010.
"Bundling the [offset] product is where everyone is headed," says Campbell, who attended the 2012 World Oceans Summit in Singapore, and participated there in discussions about "stacking" terrestrial forest and blue carbon offsets. "You bundle them to create this product," he explains, "and what buying it really means, is not ruining it for a century."
Compared to tropic archipelagos like Indonesia, B.C.'s carbon stocks are relative tiny. That suggests that even when the data are in, potential paydays from blue carbon could be humble here.
"B.C. might not be the most profitable place to be doing work on blue carbon," Campbell concedes. "But it's here, it's healthy, and there's a lot of estuaries that store carbon that have no protection whatsoever. From my point of view, there's something to do here."
Most of it has yet to be tackled. David Rokoss, director of Compliance Markets (where regulated entities buy offsets to meet legal requirements) for Vancouver offset developer ERA Restoration Associates, says stacking environmental values on top of carbon to enhance the value of assets is still largely a voluntary market phenomenon.
"But we hope carbon is the gateway into unlocking additional biological values inherent in the ecosystem," Rokoss says. "Nobody has ever really put a tangible value on water and salmon spawning grounds, and all these things that carbon helps promote. The million dollar question now is, does [CCBA] add additional tangible value to that project or that offset?"
In addition to CCBA, two other initiatives are laying groundwork for the future monetization and protection of blue carbon environments. The American Carbon Registry, an organization that hosts a voluntary carbon credit registry, this year unveiled a wetlands program targeting the restoration of wetlands in the Mississippi Delta, designed to protect both carbon stores and coastlines from storm surges and flooding.
And by October of this year, a new set of rules for creating a broad range of wetland carbon offset projects -- including possibly mangroves and salt marshes -- will be finalized by the Verified Carbon Standard, a greenhouse gas accounting program used across the world to verify and issue carbon credits in voluntary markets.
An army in gumboots
Before British Columbians contemplate putting a price on blue carbon, there is upfront work to do.
Salt marshes in the intertidal zone -- the area exposed by low tides -- can be surveyed on foot, or better yet by helicopter or planes with video. Most seagrasses live below the low tide mark however; the scuba divers or boats and towed cameras needed to record them are slow and expensive.
Partly as a result, much of what we know about blue carbon in British Columbia has come from volunteers concentrated in the Lower Mainland and southern Gulf Islands -- known loosely in B.C. environmental circles as "the gumboot army."
Since 2002, an unlikely citizen's network of community conservation groups, government agencies, scientists and First Nations has working collaboratively to conserve seagrasses and map more than 12,000 hectares of eelgrass (Zostera marina) on B.C. coastlines. The Seagrass Conservation Working Group, as it is known, works hand in hand with a tiny nonprofit called SeaChange, which applies for grants to do the necessary mapping, as well as educational outreach and restoration.
The last of these will become more important as time goes on, says Nikki Wright, a jack-of-all-trades biologist, scuba diver and community organizer who also serves as both executive director of SeaChange and chair of the working group.
"We call eelgrass a plastic plant," she says, "because it's so flexible. It's one of those plants that has higher hopes for climate change, because it can adapt itself in a relatively short period of time."
Eelgrass has proven adaptable equally to the muddy shallows of the Salish Sea and the rocky pocket beaches and estuaries up along the central and northern B.C. coast. Even in the Squamish Estuary at Cattermole Slough, rinsed in turbid, freezing-cold glacial melt 11 months of the year, replanted eelgrass is taking root, Wright says.
Old fashioned preserves
Wright displays the simultaneous optimism and world-weariness typical of many volunteer stewards who sense they are fighting a losing battle as governments step back from protecting the environment. She worries how pending changes to the federal Fisheries Act may focus reduced stewardship on commercially valuable fish, neglecting their habitat.
"It's very exciting that [blue carbon] is finally starting to get on the radar," she says. "But where the resources are going to come [from] to actually do the research, monitoring and data gathering, is a real puzzle. Things are looking a little dark."
There is one glimmer of hope for B.C.'s blue carbon stocks. As of this writing, the provincial and federal governments are inching closer to creating a 1,400 square kilometre marine protected "reserve" in the southern Georgia Strait -- a region that is ground zero for blue carbon.
Last October, the governments agreed to boundaries that would extend from the southern tip of Gabriola Island to Saanich Inlet and Cordova Bay, just north of Victoria (see map). Since that time Parks Canada and the province of B.C. have been engaging 19 affected First Nations and additional local governments affected by the boundary. A spokesman for the B.C. Ministry of Environment said a decision on the reserve could come in 2013.
Protect and enhance
After nearly two decades immersed in mapping and restoring blue carbon, Wright has devised a prescription for ensuring that our blue carbon stocks continue to flourish in B.C.:
1. Map out exactly how much blue carbon we have.
2. Protect it.
3. Identify where more can be restored, and do it.
Campbell is focused on the first of those tasks. "We need to determine how much carbon our eelgrass holds in long-term storage, and how much more gets added every year," he says. After the carbon-rich sediments beneath coastal B.C. grass beds are mapped, they must still be drilled for cores that will reveal the quantity of carbon they store and how long it has been sequestered.
Only when all that is done, he and Wright agree, are we likely to give these habitats their full due in our other economic and development decisions. ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
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pwlg
41 weeks ago
Saving marshes with monetary values is a questionable exercise
Saving our marshlands and estuaries in BC should not be in question by anyone.
It is good that the author has provided a good case for the ecological value of marshlands and estuaries, the problem I have is the economic value the offsetters, who gain from this value, seem intent on "proving" in order to save these important areas of our province.
There are several examples of carbon trading, carbon sink evaluations and offset scams out there.
Here's one from Australia worth a good read...
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/51569
Illahie
41 weeks ago
It should be called Blue Sustainable Carbon
Or BS carbon for short.
Does the author have any data to support these bizarre assertions?
Fiat lux
41 weeks ago
Imaginary monetary values
Imaginary monetary values have already destroyed physical dimensions, logical thought and pushed humanity to the verge of no return.
The least we need is more of that nonsense.
What we need to save the Earth is a monetary system tied to physical realities and not the whims and fraud of gambling casinos.
Ed Deak.
Nana
41 weeks ago
The warming is spurious
U.S. Temperature trends show a spurious doubling due to NOAA station siting problems and post measurement adjustments.
http://dprogram.net/2012/07/30/new-study-shows-half-of-the-global-warming-in-the-usa-is-artificial/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
edoherty
41 weeks ago
Impact of Delta Port expansion?
Skip the dubious carbon credits crap. Protection and enhancement is better done using tried and true mechanisms, without the profit potential for Wall Street scam artists.
And, speaking of protection, what about the impact of the proposed expansion of the Delta Port coal and containers terminal. It may be on one of the biggest areas of carbon sequestering seafloor in the province, and blocking increased coal exports could be a double win.
snert
41 weeks ago
edoherty
Expanding Delta Port will not result in massive losses of habitat. Adding in second port certainly might. Blame Vancouver for trying to off load anything that smacks of a real job, exporting them all to the surrounding areas.
Hakuin
41 weeks ago
got relabelled, Judy?
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/koch-funded-scientist-global-warming-
Illahie
41 weeks ago
500 Grams per year
Eel grass produces 500 grams of carbon per square meter of eel grass bed per year! It may be just me, but this is totally insignificant.
See Page 14
http://www.sierraclub.bc.ca/publications/seafood-oceans/Blue%20carbon%20bc%20report%20final_web.pdf
"Of the various estuarine habitats, the most critical for carbon sequestration in B.C. are the eelgrass beds, especially those of the native Zostera marina, which are known
to fix up to 500 gmC/m2/year,34 while salt marsh on average sequesters 210 gmC/m2/year"
NickS
41 weeks ago
Only 500 gms per sq meter?
A chia pet would give more than that. That is as insignificant as the effect of CO2 on temperature.
Good thing there are better reasons to preserve eel grass which are at work now.
charlesjustice
41 weeks ago
what do we want to invest in
If the economy is going to turn around and be sustainable we need to start investing in maintaining eco-system services, and make their preservation more likely. At the same time activities that are eco-system destroyers ought to be penalized.
The present global economic system does the opposite - it rewards eco-destruction by encouraging shrimp and salmon farming, mountain-top removal, etc., etc. and penalizes preservation because that's supposedly not an efficient use of resources.
But preservation and maintenance of eco-systems is an efficient use of resources if we realize that the economy is a part of the Earth and not the other way around. The financial sector should really reflect this reality too. Carbon offsets, and carbon trading are a part of this but they are only the beginning.
Ed Deak is on target, as usual, that we need to change the nature and use of money. To achieve a no-growth economy we will have to sever the relation between money creation and debt. It is possible, it's just a matter of changing the general perceptions about economics, finance and money and then going ahead and changing the rules - obviously a long-term project.
wiley
41 weeks ago
new climate for seagrass beds
Are we already grasping at small straws? All the carbon sinks in the whole world combined cannot keep up with the Crazy Burning Man. What indeed is there left to trade?
With the anticipated sea level rise due to what humanity has already spewed into the sky, most of the Fraser delta will be intertidal zone soon enough. Lush new clam beds and eel grass! Eventually, even if we take this AGW stuff seriously enough quite soon, the delayed reaction will grind on, and the high tide line will be lapping at the banks of Abbortsford. By then,much of the best coastal BC farmland will be inhabited by crabs and molluscs.
Illahie
41 weeks ago
So what is really going on here?
I don't think this is about saving the planet. eel grass habitat is already protected. If a project, such as a new marina development disturbs eel grass habitat, DFO requires that an equivalent habitat be established, which usually involves hand planting by divers.
This appears to be a re branding of the carbon offset business. Which could mean this is an attempt to turn blue carbon into green cash. A capitalistic endeavor no less. My greedy heart is turning green with envy.
Fiat Lux would be proud.
Fiat lux
41 weeks ago
Have to point out that Herman
Have to point out that Herman Daly, one of the few economists with brains, has been writing about the destruction caused by the presently ruling criminal theory, and developing his "0 growth" principles for over 30 years.
http://grist.org/article/bank/
http://www.amazon.ca/Beyond-Growth-Economics-Sustainable-Development/dp/0807047090
The destruction of the environment and humanity, caused by deregulated money creation, demanding conversion into resources, can be seen all around us, yet the idiots are still preaching "growth", while 30 million starve to death every year and we, who live on the land, can see the daily growing damage.
The present version of capitalism, enslaving and destroying the world, is on its last leg, soon to follow its idiot twin, communism, to the grave, because the leaders of both rackets have been and are the same people, the same mindset, waving different coloured flags and preaching "freedom" to fool their followers.
I've had many years of experience in fighting the communists, from guns to intelligence work and propaganda busting, and can now see the same symptoms of decay and self destruction we observed during the last years of the Soviet empire.
The Soviets weren't pulled down by the people demanding capitalism, as per the propaganda version sold here, but because they got fed up with their crimes against humanity, as they are getting fed up here and now with the enslavement, destruction, collectivization and colonization by imaginary money, without any benefits to the the majority.
Ed Deak.
Illahie
41 weeks ago
This article is a good example
This article is a good example of just how far the environmental movement has fallen.
It is now clear to me that the original environmental goals of clean air, clean water, and good management of the worlds resources have fallen by the wayside.
The climate crowd seems mostly interested in the development of a super order of government which will tax countries and citizens into the stone age, and allow for a large trough of money for the climate hogs to roll around in.
Other parts of what is left of the environmental movement seem to be mostly obsessed with halting all forms of human activities.
Resource extraction, industrialization and economic growth are a means of reducing poverty and human misery throughout the world.
It helps make the world a better place.
Fiat lux
41 weeks ago
Perhaps some of you
Perhaps some of you "conservatives" should take a few minutes to discover the distinction between production for the benefit of humanity and destruction for profits for a few.
When 100 hp of human energy is replaced with 1,000 hp of oil, or other forms of energy and called "efficiency" it is either stupidity, or crime.
When 2 people can make good living with a sawmill and 50 loads of logs per year and are displaced by automation where each worker needs 80 wage years of monetary investment and 400 loads of logs/yr to pay for it it is a goddamn crime wave against the environment and humanity.
Some of us have spent lifetimes in industrial production as owner managers and know what we're talking about.
What is your life experience in industry Illahie ? Apart from having read a few books and bought stock as an "investor" with a jerk like Kevin O'Leary for patron saint ?
Ed Deak. (Not hiding behind some phony name, but standing up and taking responsibility for my actions and words. )
Illahie
41 weeks ago
Is it about energy?
Energy is simply the ability to do work. It should not be feared.
The power of humanity is in our minds, and the collective knowledge that has been built up over thousands of years. The internet may be the greatest innovation to date, for it has allowed information sharing for millions of people, and subsequently allowed for the rapid advancement of civilization.
To use the human body only for physical labour is to waste the mind, our most precious resource.
The off shoring of physically demanding tasks to developing countries, helps reduce poverty in those countries, and raises their standard of living.
Perhaps one day soon Fiat lux will be heating his home, and growing his food with with a Thorium molten salt reactor.
Hakuin
41 weeks ago
The Regressive Preservatives
And their ilk couldn't care less about ecological reality and physical limits. They are driven by religious faith and will kill us all before they recant. They honestly worship a god of greed and wilful blindness and see all the world as theirs to rape. Jihad is coming.
anne cameron
41 weeks ago
carbon sequestration
is a mugs game at present. I tried to have a huge section of municipally owned forest, which contains vestiges of first growth and several very rich spawning channels, declared a carbon sink in the hope the community could earn some "carbon credit" money... I can read quite well, and I can fill out forms, and I know how to use a telephone and at the end of a YEAR of real frustration, I folded. They've got it set up so you have to go through a sort of "broker"...and by the time you pay for this study, that study and the next study... it would have cost more than $72,000.00 for this village to have even begun to register our forest...
If the government is even halfways serious about carbon sequestration they would stop the b.s. and make it easy to register.
It makes a person cynical. Made this person think the whole carbon sequestration thing was set up to benefit financially the friends of the government and the bureaucrats who actually run things.
I don't hold out a lot of hope for the eel grass. Or the kelp forests. The Phillistines are in charge.
Ed Deak...thank you. Sincerely.
Fiat lux
41 weeks ago
Ill....People are born with
Ill....People are born with different talents and life purposes. Some are very happy with heavy physical work, other in offices. It has to be their choice, not of some "conservative" fascists ordering them around on what they may do.
Depriving people of chances to make their living the way they want to and like is a dictatorial crime against democracy and humanity.
I'm what is called a Cambridge man and have worked in all kinds of physical jobs in 3 countries, as a student, also as an animator in cartoon movies, when they were still done by human hands.
I was 28 when we came to Canada in 1955. Applied for several office jobs, but needed some money and the first job I could get was in a kitchen cabinet factory. Loved working with wood and so I apprenticed with a top notch custom furniture maker at .75 cents an hour.
Couldn't do it today, with all the imported junk furniture on the market.
Never looked back, loved every minute of the work, started my own business, now Magic Hand Custom Furniture Ltd. in Richmond in 1957 with a $500. bankloan and was employing 5 or 6 skilled tradesmen within a couple of weeks.
Again, couldn't do it today, because all the productive trades have been exported to Asia.
People now don't have choices, but are ordered to do what the "foreign investors" want to "make profits", while the governments are selling the ground from under their feet,
My guys bought and owned their own homes, and when their kids went home from school there was somebody in the house, waiting for and looking after them.
What have we today? Two people in the family can't make a living. Kids running around , stuffed with junk foods, because that's all they can have. "Free trade" with slave labour countries, now planning another one with India with 15 million slave kids, many of them sold by their parents. So we can import their "cheap products", wear kiddie labour "Nike slashes" on everything, while we have chronic homelessness,close to a million in foodbank lines, while their employees are taking off to tax havens with billions, because in our criminal system they're "productive" by stealing the public blind.
When did we have a chance to vote on these criminal "free trade" rackets, negotiated and signed in secret by criminal and pimp politicians and miseducatded, brainwashed economists? Like the one called Stevie.
Wake up friend ! Your defence of this criminal system reminds me of nazis and communists I have known dreaming of bygone "great times"
In any case, the sale of resources and service jobs are not " income", not GDP, but liabilities, in any rational business accounting system. Something our "conservatives" have long forgotten, if they could ever understand the difference.
Ed Deak.
Illahie
41 weeks ago
The dinosaurs could not adapt either
We live in a very wealthy country, few places on earth have our opportunities and freedoms. People are free to choose their path in life. We also have a pretty good social safety net.
If people decide to pursue employment in industries where they compete for labour with third world countries where people make one or two dollars a day that is their choice.
The uneducated people in third world countries have no choice, and few opportunities for advancement.
We are very fortunate.
Fiat lux
41 weeks ago
We don`t have to, never had
We don`t have to, never had to "compete" with countries where workers are making one of two dollars a day, because that's not "competition", but a racket we used to be protected from with tariffs.
We have armies and the government is planning to buy F35 jets for "protection", while selling off civil and human rights to
some of the biggest criminals in the name of "free trade", which has little to do with trade, but exploitation and colonization.
We had decent living standards, wages and ownership of farms and properties in this country, before the present crime wave and exploitation was forced on us by Mulroney and Chretien, now topped off by Harpo.
In a free country people are supposed to be able to choose their ways of life and be protected by governments, because that's what they're elected for and not to sell them off to slave drivers so that a few crooks can make disgusting profits.
When somebody is born to be a trades person, nobody has the right to deny him or her the right with fraudulent monetary figures.
I would sooner be dead than work in an office, even with all the education I absorbed. So are millions.
Work is supposed to be a satisfactory experience and not an enslavement to please theorists and other crooks.
In any case, when products are imported, because they're "cheap" is is another crime when local people are deprived the right to produce them and make decent living.
Cost transfers on others are legalized robbery.
Ed Deak.
anne cameron
41 weeks ago
when
next you go shopping for groceries, look at where the food originates...why does SuperStore sell potatoes from Idaho but not from the Pemberton Valley? Why apples from Oregon and not the Okanagan? How much of our cheese is actually produced in Canada... we have supposed protection from hormones and additives in our milk but if the cheese and yogurt, etc., comes from the USA...???
We're being led around by our noses while the raw resources are stolen out from under us. Harpo and his crook cronies are negotiating a "trade deal" with Europe which could see us lose control of our water and put us in the position of having to pay by the measure for what now falls from the sky as rain...my research suggests that in every country where "privatization" of water resources has been forced on the people the cost of water has gone up up up while the quality of it goes down down down and people who were not thirsty before, now are. But Harpo thinks it's a great idea! The Euro is almost dead money but he's got his hand out, willing to sell out our lakes and rivers for money, just as Crispy is willing to whore herself for a bigger slice of the leaking oil pipeline pie.
Damn their eyes...and their airses!
Ed Deak...you're spot on!!!
Fiat lux
41 weeks ago
anne... what you're saying
anne... what you're saying are typical and logical examples of fraudulent monetary values, controlled by a criminal element, distorting realities and physical measures.
A factory survives on the production of certain products. If the management fires the production workers, but retains the janitors, repair and office personnel, paying them from the sale of materials and equipment on hand, the factory will go broke.
The same applies to societies and countries.
Our idiot, miseducated and criminal politicians have ruined our economy, albeit Mexico is still the worst case under NAFTA, and are selling off the country to "foreign investors", who bring nothing but hot air, while taking control.
When I had my shop at 7th and Cambie in Vancouver, there were dozens of small manufacturing outfits within blocks, employing skilled people, paying decent wages. All gone.
When we see something "Made in Canada", we almost faint, while our politicians are waving their Canadian flags and wearing Maple Leaf mittens, "Made in China".
The fools and their "conservative" supporters don't have the brains to realize that long distance transport and the wrecking of local industries is not "cheaper", but far more expensive on the long run, with future generations paying for the the damage.
We were forced to sell our organic herd of cattle, because the Canadian feedyards are controlled by a US company, making billions from our pockets, by cutting prices to producers and raising prices in the stores.
The world's food supplies are now controlled by a half dozen of the multinational corporate mafia, with our politicians selling more to them.
All in the "wealth creating" interest of "free trade", "free enterprise" ruining private enterprise, under the fraud of "competitiveness" and "individualism".
Stalin and Mao must be rolling in their graves for not having thought of this wonderful racket of "globalization" with imaginary money that exists only as computer figures,kowtowed and paying homage to by "conservatives".
I`m expecting a world class professor friend next week, already had some conferences with his PhD class, and I think it is about time for our universities to start opening up the world enslaving fraud for all to see. Before it is too late for humanity's survival as a civilization.
Ed Deak.
Illahie
41 weeks ago
The future is not in the past
During the cold war, there was a fight between Capitalism and Communism. Now the Chinese Communists are the worlds biggest capitalists.
Fiat lux should really be fighting the ubiquitous shipping container, for it has truly transformed the world. Thanks to the shipping container, the cost of transporting a container of goods is nearly the same, whether the source it is just across town or from an ocean away.
The UN sponsored climate crowd that wants to control the world (and lux thought that communism was bad) are losing big time. The world is starting to realize that Carbon is a precious resource, and not a disease.
The developing world is going to require enourmous quantities of energy, and we can help supply it.
Corporations are goint to do a lot of business in the years ahead, and they are going to profit. Money will be flowing to their shareholders. So who are the shareholders?
The shareholders are mostly pension plans. Pension plans are owned by people like Fiat lux and anne cameron.
Fiat lux
41 weeks ago
This wonderful dream of
This wonderful dream of unlimited capitalism, like its idiot twin crime wave of communism, built on the theories of some jerk called Marx, is about to collapse, because no economic system built on
illusionary theories has ever survived, or can ever survive.
Our "conservatives" may not have the intelligence to understand history and how psychology has always been used to control people and how the same psychology has ultimately destroyed the systems built on faith and fraud. And never before in a worse way than by the presently ruling gang of confidence tricksters.
Those containers, containing garbage products from Asia are not "cheaper", because the people in the foodbank lines and future generations are paying the real prices.
Plus the 30 million starving to death every year, forced off their subsistence farms to grow "cash" crops by the corporate mafia, paying with their lives.
Capitalism is finished. What we need now are people and politicians with brains to pick up the pieces, save lives and set up economic systems built on realities and democracy, not on faith based fraud.
Anybody who still has stocks in the markets is a gullible fool. Even if they are pension plans. I grew up in the depression and know what it was like, yet, nothing has changed. 1988 was a good example and premonition of things to come.
Ed Deak.
snert
41 weeks ago
Ed Deak
Interesting physics - 100 hp equals 1000 hp. Bet the 1000 hp doesn't have to sleep at night.
At .4 HP/well conditioned human that would that would actually take 2500 people to replace that engine. The logistics boggles the mind, for starters as does the fact that you actually believe it would be a good thing.
Fiat lux
41 weeks ago
Snert.... Try to read what's
Snert.... Try to read what's written and not what you imagine.
100 hp of human energy does not equal 1,000 hp. but 1/10 of it.
It may take 2,500 people to replace that engine, but the engine only replaces 50 or 60 people, which is the point even nuke enthusiasts should be able to grab.
Happens all the time , as those of us experienced in industry and manufacturing have have seen for years.
Albeit, your efforts to nail me are rather amusing, so please keep them up for laughs.
Ed Deak.
Illahie
41 weeks ago
Snert, be careful it takes 2500 people to replace 50 to 60
Back away, back slowly away.
danicaB
41 weeks ago
interesting!
Seaweeds are really nutritious and it is really good. No wonder marshes are recommended too.
Illahie
41 weeks ago
It is not just Eelgrass that is sucking up CO2
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/02/co2_absorption_doubled_since_1960/
snert
41 weeks ago
Ed Deak & Illahie
Just comparing apples to apples and it's not 60 if you use Ed's ratio at .4 HP/person it's 250. Why would one even mention 1000 HP if it weren't being used? Or is this just an attempt at smoke and mirrors? You, know throw in a couple of invalid comparisons.
Maybe Ed would let us know where he found the figure that states one human puts out between 1 2/3 and 2 HP. The best I could find was the .4 figure which seems realistic.