Canada's federal Leaders Debate has never seen a talk like this before. In a debate first, the official Leaders Debates (held October 1 in French and October 2 in English) were changed from a podium setup to a roundtable format. While this decision was partially motivated by space concerns after Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party, was confirmed as a participant, it made for an interesting discussion, actual personal replies, and -- at times -- more academic conversations, rather than country club cat fights.

For my own personal first, I live-blogged the English debate, and am here to offer you summaries of each party leader's performance –– y'know, because most of you were busy watching Biden and Palin.

Elizabeth May, Green Party - Winner
No one went into the debate with more hype than Elizabeth May, with the first few days of this election campaign centering around the question of her inclusion. In the French debate, May proved herself capably bilingual, and came off as a spunky -- if eccentric -- leader with a passion for her party's platform. In the English debate, May looked more the part of a political leader, and with excellent timing and delivery got in several bombs, including repeated queries directed at Stephen Harper about his as-yet nonexistent platform. She also championed election reform favouring proportional representation. However, her aptitude at speaking unscripted was known before the debate, while Dion's performance was more a surprise. Ultimately, May proved the Green party is here to stay in Canada.

Stephane Dion, Liberal - A Close Second
Surprising viewers, the little beanpole that could proved himself a true party leader and an actual force with an earnest platform in both the French and English debates. English has never been Dion's strong point, but he paced himself well, encountered few difficulties with vocabulary, and got his point across. Support for Dion leaped up several percentage points after the French debate, and it's likely to increase again in the next poll.

Jack Layton, New Democratic Party
Jack Layton's fear of Elizabeth May before the debate was obvious and expected, considering that the Greens' rise has resulted in fewer NDP supporters. Near the beginning of the English debate, however, he agreed with Elizabeth May several times, hinting at a possible future -- many, many years down the road -- with a Green-NDP alliance. Unfortunately, Layton is at best an average speaker, and won no points with his vague answers today.

Stephen Harper
If Canada's controversial incumbent proved anything in these debates, it is his unwavering ability to unite people against him. In both debates, but especially the English, the four other leaders tag-teamed, hitting Harper with snide remarks and attacks one after another. Meanwhile, the Ice King of Canada attempted to restrain himself, teach his facial muscles to smile, and perfect his family-man-who-wears-sweater-vests image. He really didn't succeed, and the fact that he takes credit for government achievements made before his time and fails to produce a party platform keeps him from (everyone's feared) world domination.

Gilles Duceppe - Bloc Quebecois
Well, Gilles Duceppe is nothing if not honest. In today's English debate he was quick to admit that he will never be Canada's Prime Minister, insisting that no one at the table but Stephen Harper would. Duceppe may be right about his political glass ceiling, but his passion for the arts and Quebec, as well as his vast knowledge of political facts and figures, does prove why he still leads the Bloc.

I was sitting around at work the other day when one of my co-workers asked me if I’d heard that a tanker had struck the Bay Bridge. I said I hadn’t and, with the memories of the 35-W bridge collapse in Minneapolis fresh in my mind, I asked if there was any damage to the Bridge. “No,” he replied, “but I guess there was a minor oil spill. Something like 150 gallons, so not too bad. Best to avoid the beach for the next few days anyway just to be safe.”

Now, I’m a man of many hobbies, but hanging out at the beach is definitely not one of them. I’m pasty by design, and I like to keep it that way thank you very much. Plus, do you know how hard it is to mix a good appletini with sand in the shaker? It’s a nightmare! Anyhoo, I didn’t figure that avoiding the beach would be a problem, so I promptly forgot about it and went back to thinking about more creative ways I can sell out to the establishment.

Well, it turns out that the initial estimate of 150 gallons spilled was a wee bit off. Just a smidge, though.

Um… what? Fifty-eight thousand?! Did they forget to carry the five or something? I mean, I’m not a math person, but that’s like four times as much!

It’s a whole fuck of a lot. And it turns out that it’s doing some really nasty things to the SF Bay ecosystem.

Those swirling questions include the obvious one alluded to above. Namely, why on earth was the initial leakage estimate so much lower than it turned out to be?

In other words, it took them almost 12 hours to release the information to local authorities that the biggest ecological disaster in over a decade had just happened in the San Francisco Bay. Meanwhile, they were telling everyone “no biggie.” And why?

Ok then. So in addition to making sure the Coast Guard responds to problems of this scale more quickly, we need to get them a better PR guy. That much is clear.

While the Coast Guard and local environmental organizations have begun a frantic race to clean up the oil as quickly as possible and minimize damages, state and local officials are pretty righteously pissed off.

The question of who is ultimately responsible could be more difficult than you’d think. The ship’s pilot, John Cota, was tested for drugs and cleared. Of course, he wasn’t tested by the Coast Guard until 24 hours after the spill (apparently the Coast Guard was kind of busy or something) so who knows how accurate that test was. Moreover, the dude doesn’t exactly have a spotless safety record.

To be fair to Cota, Wednesday was a heavy fog day. Of course, we have heavy fog days all the time around here. They’re so common that one could even call S.F. “Fog City” if one were so inclined. Or he might just not have known that the Bay Bridge was there. It’s only been up for 70 years. He might have been working off an old map. It could happen.

Even if they find that Cota personally was not at fault, that won’t necessarily relieve the owners of the ship from liability for the accident. The problem is that actually locating these owners is often difficult. That's because the owners of these ships often bury themselves in so many layers of sub-contracts and chartering agreements that it becomes a tangled mess of jurisdiction.

Meanwhile, the tales of damage done to wildlife, particularly migratory birds, are heartbreaking. Beaches have been closed to the public as rescue workers scramble to pick up as many live birds as they can before they are killed by the toxic sludge in their feeding areas.

If nothing else, it’s an ecological tragedy with a sense of timing, and not just because our state is trying to kill us. Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to review a $2.5 billion punitive damages award against Exxon for their inhumanly reckless and reprehensible conduct leading up to the 1989 Valdez spill. The Court took up not only the question of whether the award was unconstitutionally excessive, but also whether Exxon should have to pay punitive damages at all. Awesome. Wouldn’t want to punish someone for practically criminal conduct leading to the worst ecological disaster of the modern era, would we?

Luckily, the S.F. situation is nowhere near the level of the Valdez spill (which pumped an astonishing 11 million gallons of crude into the Alaska shoreline), but it’s still going to take a whole lot of work to get under control. Hopefully, the Coast Guard isn’t too busy to see things through.

By now you should have heard about the rather groundbreaking Supreme Court opinion delivered this past Monday in Massachusetts v. EPA. As you probably know, it was a major blow to the Bush Administration’s “Environmental” “Policy” (quotation marks intentional) in that it actually forced the Environmental Protection Agency to uhh… protect the environment and stuff. How novel! But to understand what the opinion actually means from a practical standpoint takes a bit more background information on the posture of the case, the players and administrative law in general.

The EPA is an independent regulatory agency. Independent agencies operate as a subset of one of the branches of government but are specifically delegated powers that are traditionally separated into the other three branches of government. In the EPA’s case, it is part of the executive branch (which means the President gets to pick the person who runs it) and it has two jobs: making rules regarding environmental policy and making judgments as to whether those rules are being followed. All of the rules and judgments, or rulemakings and adjudications in administrative law lingo, MUST be based on the statute that created the agency (or any other statutes that the agency was created to enforce) or else they will be struck down.

Since day one, the Bush administration has been no fan of the environmentalist movement. This general distaste of all things green led the administration to staff the Environmental Protection Agency with folks who had no interest in actually doing stuff to help the environment. Now, when an outside group thinks that an administrative agency isn’t doing its job right, they can petition the agency to create a rule. Paul E. Gutermann, managing partner of the Energy, Land Use and Environment practice at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, LLP, explains then how this case got to the Supes:

Everyone still with me? The EPA had basically said, “Yeah, yeah, there’s this Clean Air Act, and greenhouse gases are in the air and endangering the world and stuff, but we’re pretty sure that’s not what the Act meant so we’re just not going to do shit about it. Also, even if we wanted to, we should leave that to Congress (never mind the fact that Congress created us precisely to do stuff like this.) Have a nice day.”

As you can imagine, that didn’t go over very well. The original petitioners, now joined by 12 plaintiff states, filed for a review of the EPA’s rulemaking decision. Upon reaching the Court, petitioners must first get over a Constitutional hurdle that every person who sues anyone has to establish before he or she can be heard in federal court. That hurdle is known as the standing doctrine, which requires: 1) that a plaintiff needs to show that they have been injured, 2) that there is a link between the defendant’s action and that injury, and 3) that the injury can be cured by a win in this suit. Failure on any one of these three requirements and your case is history.

The plaintiffs in this suit had an uphill battle on at least two of the three. After all if you’re Massachusetts, how do you show that global warming is going to hurt your state specifically? It’s not an easy argument to make. Yet it is here that the meat of the case really lies. The Court’s opinion, which was written by Justice John Paul Stevens and joined by Justices Ginsburg, Souter, Breyer and (habitual swing-voter) Kennedy, had this to say on the subject of whether Massachusetts could show tangible injury:

So the state was injured by a loss in the property value of coastal land as a result of the change in sea levels. The Court said this about the causation requirement:

Having established an injury and a causal link to that injury, the court quickly disposed of the EPA’s argument that the problem was too big for it to be redressable by the EPA.

Now that standing was established, the actual decision on the merits of the case was pretty plainly obvious: Yes, greenhouse gasses count as air pollutants within the meaning of the CAA despite the EPA’s argument that they don’t.

The Court had to tell the EPA that “any pollutant” actually meant “any pollutant.” And you wonder why people hate bureaucrats. Then the Court slam-dunked the agency's bullshit alternative argument: that even if they did have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases, it would be a bad idea to do so at this time. No, I’m not making this up.

There were of course the predictable dissents by the predictable dissenters, with Chief Justice Roberts arguing that the plaintiffs lacked standing and throwing around rhetoric about the activist judiciary actively adjudicating. Justice Scalia (a former Administrative Law professor) also pressed for deference to the administrative rulemaking process. That's all well and good, but what does the ruling and its resultant precedent actually mean?

On some level it’s going to be impossible to say right away. As with any legal decision, it may take decades to truly understand its ramifications. However, a few things are clear right away. One is that it opens up the standings requirements for individual states (though not necessarily private parties) to sue federal agencies for enforcement of regulatory statutes. Another consequence is that environmental global warming watchdog groups now not only have the overwhelming majority of scientific consensus on their side, but Supreme Court precedent as well. Finally, it serves as another reminder to the President that the other two branches of government are sometimes willing to do their job even when he isn’t.

Apparently members of parliament in the UK haven't forgotten that one can't spell "conservative" without the word "conserve," or at least "conserv." While global warming and climate change are typically dismissed by many amongst the American conservative movement as a liberal conspiracy to undermine American supremacy in the Middle East or something equally as ludicrous, conservative legislators in the UK are taking the issue so seriously they're pushing for an 80% reduction in carbon emissions from the entire UK by 2050.

It's like looking at some sort of bizarro-America, where liberals are warmongers, Superman is evil and people put vinegar on their french fries. The Labour government had proposesd a 60% increase and that just wasn't enough for the Conservatives, who are demanding that it go to 80%.

By contrast, let's hear a few choice comments from leading American conservatives on the subject:

Disgraced fomer house speaker Tom DeLay:

President George W. Bush:

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK):

Not exactly the same degree of motivation that the UK conservatives have in fixing this problem.

Season? What seasons?

As historically-high temperatures rocked the Northeast yesterday with the mercury climbing to a balmy 72 degrees Fahrenheit in New York City's Central Park—even warmer than sunny Southern California—the muddy ski slopes are empty as people shed their winter clothes in favor of t-shirts and confused cherry blossom trees began to bloom while bewildered geese fly the wrong way.

Meanwhile, it was recently discovered via satellite images that a piece of the Canadian Arctic ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields broke off, and we haven't even reached "spring" yet.

Even the snowstorms that rocked the American Midwest over the last couple of weeks may be due to this warming trend, say scientists.

I, for one, feel like a fucking asshole enjoying these warm temperatures while knowing in the back of my mind that there is a good chance they may lead to massive death and destruction within my lifetime. In fact, it gets me so bummed out I'm pretty certain I don't want to bring a child into this overheating world.

What can we do, though? It's no secret that America is a total slacker compared to the rest of the world when it comes to curbing the pollution and waste that cause these climate extremes. With 2007 set to be the hottest year to-date, we have to do something.

Liberal, conservative, whatever...This affects us all.
Please consider taking action now.

Someone in the Bush administration apparently woke up on the right side of the bed yesterday, feeling good despite the environmental hangover any netrual observer would have expected. Not only has the decision been made that the EPA is A-OK and thus all funding for it can take a major slash with little worry about environmental damage, but apparently geothermal and hydroelectric energy are ready to take over all major US power generation, and so we can merrily cut funding for their further development because they're ready to go.

It's true that research has been ongoing for developing these sorts of technologies for decades, and they have come a long way in that time - though still only represent a minor fraction of the total US generating capacity when compared with polluters like coal, natural gas and nuclear power (until someone comes up with a safe and reliable way to dispose of nuclear waste I'm going to continue classifying it as polluting despite its lack of carbon emissions.) Both geothermal and hydroelectric power have significant factors that make them more attractive to Americans: they're environmentally sounder (though some recent critics have begun to complain about the impact of widespread dams on marine ecosystems) with minimal emissions, and they do not rely on the import of petroleum based products, many of which come from countries hostile to US interests.

The real problem with leaving them in the hands of the free market is that the market really only relies on a single factor to determine efficacy: cost. According to the the DOE's own analysis a modern geothermal power plant is going to bottom out at about five cents per kilowatt-hour. Which, while a good bit below average costs paid by the consumer, is still more than twice what petroleum or nuclear based power generation costs, and four to five times hydroelectric power. Of course, it's unclear whether those estimates include the costs of periodically invading and rebuilding foreign countries in order to ensure a constant supply of petroleum. So while there may be a market niche for geothermal power generation, given the choice between that and cheaper forms, the market will likely stick with the greater profit margin, since national security and environmental impact can only become tangible market forces through government intervention or consumer choice, and even with the limited deregulation of many local power markets consumers are still often limited in what types of power they may choose to pay for.

So it becomes a question of economics. Is it better for the US to continue subsidizing research to develop geothermal energy (hydroelectric seems to be on better footing - though the initial investment of setting up water based generating plants may constitute an insurmountable barrier to investors) or leave it up to the market, which could potentially abandon it in favor of cheaper alternatives with more long term issues. With the current administration it's a no-brainer, environment and national security be damned, if it involves cutting off a government service that some conservatives will inevitably label as a "handout" then it will get done.

There's nothing wrong with developing a technology to the point where it can become viable in the open market and then cutting it loose. Hydroelectric power generation may actually be at this point. But geothermal, while making strides, still has a long way to go, and abandoning this potentially promising technology by letting businesspeople make decisions with repercussions that affect the whole country seems like a bad idea.

As Britain slowly recovers from it's most sizzling July in history, a left-leaning research group slams the media for sensationalizing climate change.

The Institute for Public Policy Research analyzed over 600 environmental news articles and described some of the coverage as being "tantamount to climate porn".

From BBC Online.

Now I've always had my suspicions about the coverage of things environmental. There's such an industry built up around telling us what a bunch of shit bags we are for using the wrong sort of aerosol and imperiling the planet. Yet many scientists think climate change is caused by natural phenomena such as sunspots and volcanic activity.

It's not as though climate change is anything new. Freak weather conditions have been freaking people out since time immemorial.

In London for instance, between the 15th and 19th centuries, there were 23 documented cases of the River Thames freezing over. This was such a novelty for Londoners that special celebratory frost fairs were held.

Ancient peoples used to offer sacrifices to weather gods to avoid unpredictable climate change and there's no mention in the bible of Noah blaming the flood on Shem's use of underarm deodorant.

Yet, if causing paroxysms of guilt can help newspaper shift units it's got to be worth filling people's heads with visions of man made weather apocalypses.