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A collection of articles, written by various authors, on global issues.
Exxon Valdez punitive damages reduced
June 10, 2010
Will this US Supreme Court decision to cap punitive damages in maritime 'accidents' have a role to play in the Gulf of Mexico marine oil well blow-out? It is already being challenged in the US Senate.
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Boreal Forest Agreement: the real deal, or a sham
June 10, 2010
Critics are divided on whether the logging companies or the ENGOs 'won'. Were the logging companies 'blackmailed' or the ENGos 'end-run'? Read an analysis and parts of the agreement to see what you think. Nevertheless this is a landmark deal - perhaps only time will tell who it benefits.
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People's conference on climate change in Bolivia
May 27, 2010
Cochabamba was the antidote to Copenhagen. The people's conference, hosted by Bolivian President Evo Morales, attracted 35,000 participants from 140 countries. It reaffirmed and strengthened the Kyoo committment.
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US Supreme Court puts the cart before the horse in allowing election period advertising
February 18, 2010
Patrick Brown examines a supreme court as politicized and divided as the rest of American government institutions. Why is it different in Canada and why we should keep it that way?
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The changing game in Afghanistan
February 4, 2010
An in-a-nutshell recap of past strategies for Afghanistan and the new, and more hopeful, 'game' of building schools and backing education in the devastated country.
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The Importance of Three Cups of Tea
February 4, 2010
Pené Hollingworth tells of Greg Mortensen's work building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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Earthquake day in Port au Prince
January 21, 2010
Chris Rolling's first person account of what it was like.
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Countdown to Copenhagen
November 5, 2009
Elizabeth May talks about the demonstration in the public gallery of Parliament on Monday, October 5 and gives a short history of climate change politics.
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Australian politicans still playing politics on global warming
October 10, 2009
Misunderstanding about the concept and impact of climate change leads to political mudslinging.
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Health care and national personality - Editorial
September 24, 2009
Canada's universal health care system produces a national characteristic of hope; whereas, in the United States, uncertainty about health care feeds a climate of fear which Canadian can scarcely imagine. No wonder Obama faces so much opposition.
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Australian politics takes precedence over global warming
August 27, 2009
Australia's Senate is the scene of political moves. A combo carbon trading and renewable energy measures bill was defeated with insufficient debate and a refusal to amend by Kevin Rudd's government. However when the contents were split into two, the renewable energy measures was passed three days later. A second defeat of the carbon trading bill will mean that the Rudd could call for a double dissolution of parliament, giving him a good chance at gaining control of the Senate in an election. Meanwhile time is dangerously short for Australia to have a good national policy to take to Copenhagen in December.
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WA Goes for Climate Change
June 4, 2009
Washington State Governor initiates sweeping climate change reforms despite his legislature's refusal to authorize a cap-&-trade system.
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Blueprint for a green New Deal
April 9, 2009
Green Party co-leader Dr Russel Norman has called on New Zealand’s National Party minority government to use environmentally friendly initiatives to tackle the effect of the global recession.
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Editorial: Time for a global carbon tax
March 12, 2009 | Patrick Brown & Christa Grace-Warrick
If President Obama's proposed ineffective, cumbersome cap-&-trade scheme is implemented the moment for a worldwide carbon tax will be lost.
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Cap-&-trade failing the emissions test; calls for carbon tax
January 29, 2009 | Patrick Brown & Christa Grace-Warrick
Carbon cap-&-trade, a government-initiated system devised to let ‘free market economics’ take care of greenhouse gas reduction, is failing. The scheme to prevent climate change has fallen prey to the ‘market’s’ insatiable need to ‘game’ any entity put up for trade.
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Friedman's last hurrah
October 30, 2008 | Patrick Brown & Christa Grace-Warrick
Is the so-called economic crisis another Friedman-esque manipulation of the world for the benefit of big corporation? There are signs that people are no longer as easily shocked.
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Has the US crippled NATO?
September 4, 2008 | MurrayDobbin
With the end of the Cold War,many analysts and policymakers imagined that the developed world might actually move away from its irrational attachment to militarization and war. The most optimistic envisioned a huge, international peace dividend, shifting untold billions previously spent on conventional and nuclear weapons to tackling poverty and inequality around the world.
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World Greens call for global parliamentary assembly
May 15, 2008
Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May has joined with Green Party delegates from around the world to pass a resolution calling for ‘the establishment of a UN Parliamentary Assembly’ to reduce the ‘international democratic deficit.’ The resolution was passed by representatives of green parties and movements from over 80 countries who gathered in Sao Paulo at the beginning of May for the second Global Greens Congress.
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New Zealand ends privatized railway adventure
May 15, 2008 | Patrick Brown
New Zealand has ended a fifteen-year experiment with railway privatization by buying out the railway and ferry operations of Toll Holdings Ltd for NZ$665 million (CDN$500 million). The purchase includes rail operations on both the North and South Islands, together with ferries across Cook Strait that carry railcars, vehicles, and passengers.
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Gateway project; pipeline to hell
May 1, 2008 | Peter D Carter
Folks in BC have never liked the idea of oil tankers plying their coast. How about 320 per year? How about tankers all the way down the coast from Kitimat to California?
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Sub-prime fraud made simple
January 24, 2008 | Commentary by Patrick Brown
House-building is a major driver of the US consumer economy. In fact, as much of the economy deteriorates, it becomes increasingly important (along with the war business, which is completely financed by government debt).
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Australia ratifies Kyoto Protocol
December 13, 2007 | Richard Curchin
Kevin Rudd, the new Labor Prime Minister, has hit the ground running, having already ratified the Kyoto protocol, and is promising reform for the environment, industrial relations, education, health, and telecommunications and to withdraw troops from Iraq.
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Schmeisers honoured with ‘Right Livelihood’ award’
December 13, 2007
Percy Schmeiser, who together with his wife Louise fights against Monsanto’s marketing practices, said: ‘It is our opinion that the full ramifications of allowing patents on plants and other life forms have not been fully examined. But governments from around the world have bowed to the pressure of big multinational corporations who have requested patents on life forms.’
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‘Gone for Broke’ - Australian federal election 2007
November 29, 2007 | Richard Curchin
Why the governing coalition of the Liberal and National Parties used the slogan ‘Go for Broke’ in their Australian federal election campaign is open to guess—but they’ve gone.
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Metaphor and Method, Shock &andAwe
October 18, 2007 | Book Review by Patrick Brown
When the review copy of Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, arrived, the editor told me I couldn’t have it to read; she had started it and wouldn’t send it to me. ‘It’s the story of my lifetime, it all makes sense, now!’ she said.
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Peace in Afghanistan — Made in Canada
October 4, 2007 | Commentary by Patrick Brown
On September 25, just as the Canadian government was sending confusing signals about its intentions in Afghanistan, the Senlis Council, an international think-tank, proposed a new vision for our Afghan future. Most important, it calls on Canada to take the lead in the international community, and to stop seeing itself as a ‘junior partner’ to the US.
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Democracy Versus Television
July 26, 2007 | Book Review by Patrick Brown
Democracy, says Al Gore, has not survived television. This is the same Al Gore who has so successfully used film and television to tell the world about global climate change. But he’s chosen to write a book, The Assault on Reason, to make his case.
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Editorial: Net Zero
February 22, 2007
It seems that this newspaper has been publishing articles about global climate change for as long as we can remember. We’re delighted at the way our governments have suddenly caught up to us, and our readers.
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Tax Greenhouse Gas Emissions—No Caps, No Trades
February 22, 2007 | Patrick Brown
A number of Canada’s large industrial and electrical generation operations are major producers of greenhouse gases(GHG).
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The Great Chinese Carbon Credit Scam
February 8, 2007 | Patrick Brown
One of the strategies that was proposed by the previous Canadian government (so Canada could appear to meet its Kyoto greenhouse gas reduction targets) was the purchase of GHG credits which are generated by ‘green’ projects in developing countries.
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Editorial: Canada’s Afghanistan Responsibility
November 30, 2006
The US mid-term election has come and gone. The results confirm that a substantial majority of Americans did not agree with the direction that their all-Republican government (president, senate, and house of representatives) was taking.
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Deep Integration: Beyond the Economy?
November 2, 2006 | Patrick Brown
The North American Free Trade Agreement was legislated into effect ten years ago by Parliament, the US Congress, and the Mexican legislature...It’s impacts have been massive.
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Youngsters Show a Way to Peace
August 24, 2006
On August 19 and 20, ten Palestinian, ten Israeli, and nine Canadian teenagers showed the short films that they had created together)...The films are the result of a two-week program called ‘Peace It Together,’ during which the 29 youth heard each other’s stories and struggled to come to terms with the violence and stereotypes that impact their lives.
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25 Years of Living with the AIDS Pandemic
August 24, 2006 | Dr Bhagirath Singh
The August 16 International AIDS Conference in Toronto marked the 25th anniversary of the first reported cases of AIDS. Since then, HIV has infected more than 65 million people worldwide, of whom 25 million have died.
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Media Review: Which Way at the Crossroads?
November 3, 2005 | Peter Carter
So is there an answer or is the future all gloom and doom? Is there, as Scientific American says, a plan for a bright future beyond 2050? Yes, there is and that depends on us—now. There is a detailed blueprint for the future. It’s called Agenda 21.
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Book Review: Déja Vu Deconstructed
October 6, 2005 | Patrick Brown
History has the remarkable optical quality of increasing clarity with distance: the further away we are, the more patently logical history appears. But it’s a brave man that attempts to put recent history into a logical framework, to interpret the apparently random events of our own lifetime as the natural symptoms of the ebb and flow of beliefs and forces, of nations and conflicts.
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The Crisis in Niger
September 22, 2005 | Peter Carter
On the heels of July’s G8 meeting, at which wealthy national governments yet again procrastinated and prevaricated on debt cancellation for the poorest of the world’s poor, aid agencies and the UN at last managed to focus the attention of the world on the plight of starving people in Niger.
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Statement by Stephen Lewis, UN Envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa
August 11, 2005
Lewis' seven-point speech at the International AIDS Conference in Brazil.
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Fudging Kyoto
February 24, 2005 | Patrick Brown
Canada’s approach to the ‘First Compliance Period’ (2008–2012) of the Kyoto Protocol is in the nervous process of revelation.
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Book Review: Making the Global Village Our Turf
November 20, 2003 | Patrick Brown
Lloyd Axworthy's book is a prescription for Canada's activist involvement in the entire world...
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Journal from Palestine
October 27, 2003 | Jean McLaren
Jean, a Raging Grannie from Salt Spring Island, served one-month in Palestine with the International Womens' Peace Service. This is her story.
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The Peace Pages
February 13, 2003
On February 15, 2003, a large number of people world-wide demonstrated for peace. In honour of the demonstrations, Island Tides compiled four pages on the costs of unleashing war...
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