CATTLE FARTS

Stanford-led research reveals potential of an overlooked climate change solution

Analyses lay out a blueprint for speeding development of atmospheric removal and modeling how the approach could improve human health and have an outsized effect on reducing future peak temperatures.

BY ROB JORDAN
Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
SEPTEMBER 26, 2021

Earlier this month, President Biden urged other countries to join the U.S. and European Union in a commitment to slashing methane emissions. Two new Stanford-led studies could help pave the way by laying out a blueprint for coordinating research on methane removal technologies, and modeling how the approach could have an outsized effect on reducing future peak temperatures.

Agricultural operations, such as this feedlot at the Harris Ranch in
California, are among the largest sources of human-caused methane emissions. 

(Image credit: Getty Images)

The analyses, published Sept. 27 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, reveal that removing about three years-worth of human-caused emissions of the potent greenhouse gas would reduce global surface temperatures by approximately 0.21 degrees Celsius while reducing ozone levels enough to prevent roughly 50,000 premature deaths annually. The findings open the door to direct comparisons with carbon dioxide removal – an approach that has received significantly more research and investment – and could help shape national and international climate policy in the future.

“The time is ripe to invest in methane removal technologies,” said Rob Jackson, lead author on the new research agenda paper and senior author on the modeling study. Jackson is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor of Energy and Environment in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.
The case for methane removal

The relative concentration of methane has grown more than twice as fast as that of carbon dioxide since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Removing methane from the atmosphere could reduce temperatures even faster than carbon dioxide removal alone because methane is 81 times more potent in terms of warming the climate over the first 20 years after its release, and about 27 times more potent over a century. Methane removal also improves air quality by decreasing the concentration of tropospheric ozone, exposure to which causes an estimated one million premature deaths annually worldwide due to respiratory illnesses.

Graph shows globally averaged, monthly mean atmospheric methane abundance determined from marine surface sites since 1983. (Image credit: NOAA)

Unlike carbon dioxide, the bulk of methane emissions are human-driven. Primary culprits include agricultural sources such as livestock, which emit methane in their breath and manure, and rice fields, which emit methane when flooded. Waste disposal and fossil fuel extraction also contribute substantial emissions. Natural sources of methane, including soil microbes in wetlands, account for the remaining 40 percent of global methane emissions. They further complicate the picture because some of them, such as thawing permafrost, are projected to increase as the planet warms.

While development of methane removal technologies will not be easy, the potential financial rewards are big. If market prices for carbon offsets rise to $100 or more per ton this century, as predicted by most relevant assessment models, each ton of methane removed from the atmosphere could then be worth more than $2,700.
Envisioning methane removal’s impacts

The modeling study uses a new model developed by the United Kingdom’s national weather service (known as the UK Met Office) to examine methane removal’s potential impacts while accounting for its shorter lifetime than carbon dioxide – a key factor because some of the methane removed would have disappeared anyway. The researchers created a set of scenarios by varying either the amount removed or the timing of removal to generalize their results over a wide range of realistic future emissions pathways.

Under a high emissions scenario, the analysis showed that a 40 percent reduction in global methane emissions by 2050 would lead to a temperature reduction of approximately 0.4 degrees Celsius by 2050. Under a low emissions scenario where temperature peaks during the 21st century, methane removal of the same magnitude could reduce the peak temperature by up to 1 degree Celsius.

“This new model allows us to better understand how methane removal alters warming on the global scale and air quality on the human scale,” said modeling study lead author and research agenda coauthor Sam Abernethy, a PhD student in applied physics who works in Jackson’s lab.
From research to development

The path to achieving these climate and air quality improvements remains unclear. To bring it into focus, the research agenda paper compares and contrasts aspects of carbon dioxide and methane removal, describes a range of technologies for methane removal and outlines a framework for coordinating and accelerating its scale-up. The framework would help facilitate more accurate analysis of methane removal factors ranging from location-specific simulations to potential interactions with other climate change mitigation approaches.

Methane is challenging to capture from air because its concentration is so low, but burgeoning technologies – such as a class of crystalline materials called zeolites capable of soaking up the gas – hold the promise of a solution, according to the researchers. They argue for increased research into these technologies’ cost, efficiency, scaling and energy requirements, potential social barriers to deployment, co-benefits and possible negative by-products.

“Carbon dioxide removal has received billions of dollars of investments, with dozens of companies formed,” said Jackson. “We need similar commitments for methane removal.”


Jackson is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy and chairman of the Global Carbon Project. Coauthors of the research agenda paper include Josep Canadell of the Global Carbon Project; Matteo Cargnello, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, Steven Davis and Chaopeng Hong of the University of California at Irvine; Sarah Féron, a postdoctoral fellow in Earth system science at Stanford at the time of the research; Sabine Fuss of Humboldt Universität in Germany; Alexander Heyer and Hannah Rhoda, PhD students in chemistry at Stanford; and Edward Solomon, the Monroe E. Spaght Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford and professor of photon science at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; Maxwell Pisciotta and Jennifer Wilcox of the University of Pennsylvania; H. Damon Matthews of Concordia University in Montreal; Renaud de Richter of Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Montpellier in France; Kirsten Zickfeld of Simon Fraser University in Canada. Coauthors of both papers include Fiona O’Connor and Chris Jones of the Met Office Hadley Centre.

Both papers were funded by the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment’s Environmental Venture Projects program, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Joint UK BEIS/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme. The paper led by Sam Abernethy was also funded by the Stanford Data Science Scholars Program and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Crescendo Project.

To read all stories about Stanford science, subscribe to the biweekly Stanford Science Digest.

ANOTHER RIGHT WING MYTH
Alberta government may consider bringing back flat tax system, Kenney says
HE THINKS HE IS RALPH KLEIN 2.0
'I think it was responsible for a huge amount of tax shifting to Alberta as people moved here to benefit from by far the most marginal income tax rates in the country'

Author of the article:Tyler Dawson
Publishing date:Dec 17, 2021 • 

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney's United Conservatives have been obsessed with the idea of returning to a flat tax for years, but the province's struggling finances have kept it from being a viable option. PHOTO BY DAVID BLOOM/POSTMEDIA/FILE
Article content

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney says the provincial government might consider returning to a flat tax system, which would see every Albertan, regardless of income, paying the same rate of provincial tax.

In response to a question about revenues during a meeting Wednesday with the National Post’s editorial board, Kenney, who was joined by Finance Minister Travis Toews, said he believed the flat tax system had been beneficial to Alberta.

“We used to have a single-rate personal income tax system here … and I think it was responsible for a huge amount of tax shifting to Alberta as people moved here to benefit from by far the most marginal income tax rates in the country,” said Kenney. “That’s one of the things that we will be looking at.”

The United Conservatives have long promised to hold a panel to study Alberta’s revenue, the counter to the September 2019 report into the province’s expenditures, which Toews said will happen, though no timeline was given.

“Certainly, considering revenues is part of the process of putting the province on the sustainable fiscal trajectory,” said Toews.

The mandate of the panel, said Kenney, would be: “What would be the optimal design for a provincial tax system to promote economic growth and job creation?”

Because government revenues are tied so tightly to resource revenues, consecutive Alberta governments have had to deal with the vagaries of the international oil market. It has led, at various times, to calls for the province to institute a sales tax or find other ways to ensure a less volatile revenue stream. Alberta has a law setting out that a sales tax would be adopted via referendum, Kenney said.

“So, with about three-quarters of Albertans pretty consistently opposed to the idea of a sales tax, I don’t think that is something Albertans are going to embrace,” he said.

Alberta had a flat tax system between 2001 and 2015. As of the 2016 tax year, Albertans with incomes less than $131,220 pay 10 per cent income tax — the former flat rate — and that then creeps upwards to 15 per cent for those making $314,928.01 or more.

The new tax rate was announced by Jim Prentice, the last Progressive Conservative premier, in 2015; less than two months later, Albertans dumped Prentice, and Rachel Notley’s New Democrats took over. They kept the promised progressive income tax system, which remains in effect now.

The United Conservatives have been seized with the issue of returning to a flat tax for years, but the province’s finances, walloped as they have been by the collapse in oil prices, the lingering economic downturn and the dampening effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, have kept it from being a viable option, even as the government moved to slash corporate tax rates.

A study from the Fraser Institute, a free-market think tank, suggests that if the rates were brought down from 15 per cent to 10 per cent over four years, the government would lose roughly $1.36 billion in revenue. Yet, economic benefits — such as increased entrepreneurship or investment — could make these losses “relatively modest.”

Lindsay Tedds, an economist at the University of Calgary, pointed out that Alberta’s never actually had a flat tax, because there’s no tax on the first $19,369. “I hate being pedantic,” she said, laughing.

The effects of a return to a flat tax rate, Tedds said, would be complicated to disentangle, because there are so many other factors. While it would certainly see the government lose money, and shift the tax burden to middle-income, rather than high-income, earners, there are other factors to consider, such as daycare, that could affect workforce participation and economic activity. Plus, the effect of lost revenue 

Article contenton government services needs to be considered, Tedds said

“(Alberta) doesn’t just compete on taxes. It’s a bundle of goods and services that attract people to a jurisdiction,” Tedds said. “Are you making assumptions based off of your understanding of the world from the 1970s or 1980s? Or are you really understanding it from 2021?”

At the UCP’s May 2018 convention, the party’s membership voted in favour of adding a promise to return to the flat tax to the party’s policy book, but Kenney, who cited large deficits left by Notley’s government, never fully embraced the commitment.

Yet, this isn’t the first time the premier has hinted that the flat-tax system could return; he has expressed admiration for the flat tax, brought in under Ralph Klein, and suggested a panel could recommend such a thing, but has long demurred on cutting personal income tax rates.

“I think it was a critical part of the Alberta advantage,” Kenney said in 2019. “I like it in principle but I can’t commit to something when we don’t know what the overall fiscal situation will be of a future government.”

Compared to the rest of Canada, Alberta already has a considerable tax advantage, which led to the premier suggesting everyone ought to move to Alberta. Albertans pay far less tax — income, and sales to name but two — compared to other provinces.

“The cost of living differential between Calgary, Alberta cities and Vancouver or Toronto is now so extreme that we really think it’s going to start — it is starting — to generate a new wave of interprovincial migration to Alberta,” Kenney said.

A dual-income couple with two kids in Alberta pays on average $1,064 less than the same family in British Columbia, $6,043 less than a Quebec family and $3,687 less than an Ontario family.

Obama Embraces Neo-Con Agenda

President Obama continues to embrace a conservative reformist agenda with his Monday fiscal summit and his speech to the congress last night. In particular in education he has embraced merit pay and he told congress his administration wishes to expand charter schools. This later move has been the child of the Cato institute in the U.S. and the Fraser Institute in Canada. It is the bugaboo of the neo-con revolution, market delivery of public education by private companies. Setting up competitive private schools in competition with public schools. It as been tried in Alberta and B.C. and has not delivered any greater success in student achievement than public schools. Where it has succceeded is due to a simple fact; smaller class sizes which results in more indidivdual student attention.
At his Monday joint summit meeting, proposals for education reform included merit pay, despite union opposition to this idea, While on the surface merit pay may appear a good idea, it is all in the details. Who decides what merits the pay increase? Is it test scores? Is it an evaluation by students and parents? If it is the former test scores do not reflect real cognitive learning, rather they reflect the limited ability of rote learning; memorising anwsers to test questions.
The Obama administration is embracing other neo-con ideas as well in the areas of health care and social security reform. They begin with the premise that some one is ripping off the system, and a review of health care rip offs was announced to congress by Obama. He also promised that younger American workers would be able to supplement their social security with a persoanl tax free retirement investment plan. Where have we heard this before? Why from the Bush and Clinton administrations of course.
Like Clinton before him, he is a classic liberal, and as I have pointed out here before, classic liberals are embraced by libertarians, radical republicans and liberals. That he is willing to embrace ideas of the neo-con era, shows he truly is bipartisan

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CANADA

BRINGING ON AUSTERITY
Treasury Board demands cabinet ministers cut spending by $15 billion in new Oct. 2 deadline
By Quinn Patrick
-August 15, 2023




In an effort to save just over $15 billion in federal spending, newly appointed Treasury Board President Anita Anand has given cabinet ministers until Oct. 2 to make cuts to current spending plans.

Anand wrote a letter to federal cabinet ministers, many of who were assigned new portfolios in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent cabinet shuffle, telling them to make the cuts necessary to meet the Liberal’s 2023 budget promises.

“I am seeking your support to develop proposals to achieve these targets,” wrote Anand. “In particular, organizations should review their programming to identify where there might be duplication, programs with lower value for money, or programs that do not address top priorities of the government.”

In March of this year, the Liberals announced a budget goal of saving $7.1 billion over the next 5 years by cutting spending on things like consulting, travel and professional services by 15%.

The letter also included a 3% cut in spending from departments and agencies by 2026-27, the cut estimates a savings of $7 billion over the next 4 years. The planned cuts are hoping to see combined savings of $1.3 billion from Crown corporations.

Once the proposals are submitted, they will be reviewed by public servants from the Treasury Board.

Of the estimated $15.4 billion in savings, only $500 million will be saved this fiscal year, indicated the budget letter. Details regarding the $500 million are expected to be included in future Parliament spending reports and more details about the 5 year plan will be presented in 2024 budget reports.

The 2023 budget said its goal is not to reduce overall annual spending in Ottawa but rather to return the amount, “back to a pre-pandemic path.”

In the 2022-23 fiscal year, total government expenses were $470.4 billion and that number is estimated to climb to $555.7 billion by the 2027-28 fiscal year.

Outside of the historical spending made in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Liberal government’s current annual spending remains higher than what they had projected it to be prior to the pandemic occurring. In 2019, the budget was estimated to be a total of $402.2 billion for the year of 2023-24 however this year the budget was projected to be $490.5 billion.

In her fall 2022 economic statement, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland had said that the books would return to balance by 2027-28 with a surplus of $4.5 billion dollars. The latest projections however are not congruent with Freelands 2022 economic statement. The federal deficit currently sits at $40.1 billion and is expected to decline to $14 billion by 2027-28.

The new budget letter by Anand doesn’t have outright plans to cut jobs in the government sector however, it will involve some redeployment and could potentially result in some job losses.

THE SAME OLD BS
“This is about smarter, not smaller, government,” said Monica Granados, a spokesperson for Anand.


RIGHT WING THINK TANK OFFSHOOT OF THE FRASER INSTITUTE
A recent Ipsos poll by the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI) found that most Canadians believe that the Trudeau’s government is spending too much, resulting in too high of taxes.

HOW WAS THE Q? ASKED

“Not only do Canadians find that the Trudeau government spends too much, but they also find that it spends unwisely,” said Renaud Brossard, senior director of communications for MEI.

“This seems to indicate a disconnect between the Department of Finance and the people whose money is entrusted in its care.”

55% of people respondents in the nationwide poll said that they believe Ottawa is overspending.

“The message Canadians are sending Ottawa is unequivocal,” said Brossard. “They are asking Ottawa to cut its spending, review its priorities, and reduce their tax burden.”

McCain Supports Canadian Style Medicare

For veterans. He was using this as part of his Florida stump speeches last week.

Allowing veterans to use whatever provider they want, wherever they want by giving them an electronic health care card or through another method.

It seems our American friends south of the border fear government single payer systems because of their anti-government ideology in some cases and because they don't understand Canada's Medicare system.

They would rather suffer under the current monopoly market controlled by insurance companies and HMO's (owned by corporations and sold on Wall Street) than have a single payer system like we have in Canada where you take your Medicare card to any doctor you want to go see. Just what McCain wants for veterans.

Of course one of the common attacks from the right on Canadian Medicare is that we apparently have line ups stretching for miles for folks waiting for operations. That image of course is courtesy the Fraser Institute.

The reality is that doctors in Canada run their own private practices and clinic businesses which are paid for by you and me through a single payer program run by the government. A fact that seems to be missed by our friends south of the border when they curse government run, socialist medicine.

And yes we still have unacceptable wait times for some surgeries, that has not changed after two years of the Conservatives being in power. So don't expect much from their counterparts south of the border when it comes to fixing their health care problems.


SEE

Proletarian Doctors



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Global Farmers Fight Back

My comrades who are Free Market Libertarians and mutualists who oppose capitalism in favour of a cooperative marketplace, will find much to praise in this new farmers movement. It poses a real alternative to capitalist globalization and corporatist free trade. None other than creation of a new movement for a cooperative commonwealth.

The latest attempt to destroy the Wheat Board in Canada is an example of the attack by the State on small farmers in favour of the Agribusiness cartels in the developed world. The Green Revolution, the push for GMO crops and patents on crops as well as using arable land for production for export; palm oil, are examples of non sustainable agribusiness versus the sustainable production of local farmers.

The recent Fraser Institute report by Preston Manning and Mike Harris calling for the end of supply management, the Wheat Board , and subsidies in the market place for farmers, does nothing but open up the farm marketplace to the agribusiness oligopolies. Ironic since Manning's daddy ran a party; Social Credit, made up of farmers that saw these same oligopolies as enemies of a producer run economy.


The fact is that the majority of farmers in the world are family farmers, not far removed from their peasant roots. It is the peasantry that provides the basis for the survival of the food economy. But with the advent of capitalist globalization the peasantry has become a new force in the world economy as Warren Bellow points out.

It is agricultural reform, the privatization of the inherent collectivism of peasant farming, the enclosure of common lands that led to the creation of capitalism in Britain. Forced off the land the peasants move to the cities to look for work becoming the proletariat.

But not all have done so, since it is the farmers who support the cities with their food production. And forced by globalization to collectivize farmers are reforming cooperatives to deal with the new demands of the marketplace.

Thai pig farmers protest at CPF headquarters

S. Korea may allow farmers to export locally grown rice: gov't source

Farmers Cooperative Extends Rollout Of SOA Tool

Connecting Coffee Growers and Drinkers

Cameroon: Coffee - Reasons Behind Poor Performance

Phoenixville Farmer's Market returns to town for sixth season

Innovations in rural financial system inPunjab

What began in England over 400 hundred years ago is now writ wide across the globe. It is not Free Trade nor Free Markets but the concentration of capital and its power to monopolize the market. It is the transformation of agriculture from sustainable economics to the economics of unrestrained growth. Thus the land, people and environment suffer as we see in Indonesia as the islands there burn for the sake of the agribusiness palm oil industry.

Whereas export crops like organic and fair trade coffee have become a basis for sustainable export farming, which can support sustainable agriculture as well as meet the farmers need to be part of a global market place.


Free Trade vs. Small Farmers

Walden Bello is Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute, and a Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines at Diliman.

The main battle cry of Via Campesina, whose coordinating center is located in Indonesia, is “WTO Out of Agriculture” and its alternative program is food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means first and foremost the immediate adoption of policies that favor small producers. This would include, according to Indonesian farmer Henry Saragih, Via's coordinator, and Ahmad Ya'kub, Deputy for Policy Studies of the Indonesian Peasant Union Federation (FSPI), “the protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports, remunerative prices for all farmers and fishers, abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies, and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture.”

Via's program, however, goes beyond the adoption of pro-smallholder trade policies. It also calls for an end to the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds, thus appropriating for private profit what has evolved through the creative interaction of the natural world with human communities over eons. Seeds and all other plant genetic resources should be considered part of the common heritage of humanity, the group believes, and not be subject to privatization.

Agrarian reform, long avoided by landed elites in countries like the Philippines, is a central element in Via's platform, as is sustainable, ecologically sensitive organic or biodynamic farming by small peasant producers. The organization has set itself apart from both the First Green Revolution based on chemical-intensive agriculture and the Second Green Revolution driven by genetic engineering (GE). The disastrous environmental side effects of the first are well known, says Via, which means all the more that the precautionary principle must be rigorously applied to the second, to avoid negative health and environmental outcomes.

The opposition to GE-based agriculture has created a powerful link between farmers and consumers who are angry at corporations for marketing genetically modified commodities without proper labeling, thus denying consumers a choice. In the European Union, a solid alliance of farmers, consumers, and environmentalists prevented the import of GE-modified products from the United States for several years. Although the EU has cautiously allowed in a few GE imports since 2004, 54% of European consumers continue to think GE food is ”dangerous.” Opposition to other harmful processes such as food irradiation has also contributed to the tightening of ties between farmers and consumers, large numbers of whom now think that public health and environmental impact should be more important determinants of consumer behavior than price.

More and more people are beginning to realize that local production and culinary traditions are intimately related, and that this relationship is threatened by corporate control of food production, processing, marketing, and consumption. This is why Jose Bove's justification for dismantling a MacDonald's resonated widely in Asia: “When we said we would protest by dismantling the half-built McDonald's in our town, everybody understood why -- the symbolism was so strong. It was for proper food against malbouffe [awful standardized food], agricultural workers against multinationals. The extreme right and other nationalists tried to make out it was anti-Americanism, but the vast majority knew it was no such thing. It was a protest against a form of production that wants to dominate the world.”

Many economists, technocrats, policymakers, and urban intellectuals have long viewed small farmers as a doomed class. Once regarded as passive objects to be manipulated by elites, they are now resisting the capitalist, socialist, and developmentalist paradigms that would consign them to ruin. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious “class-for-itself.” And even as peasants refuse to “go gently into that good night,” to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas, developments in the 21st century are revealing traditional pro-development visions to be deeply flawed. The escalating protests of peasant groups such as Via Campesina, are not a return to the past. As environmental crises multiply and the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life pile up, the farmers' movement has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone who is threatened by the catastrophic consequences of obsolete modernist paradigms for organizing production, community, and life.

Farmers hungry for change

At this week's intergovernmental meeting in Rome to assess progress towards the pledge to halve hunger by 2015, the mood was sombre. Figures from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) show not a reduction but an increase of more than 25 million chronically undernourished people since 1996. The figure, now at more than 850 million, is testament to how current global policies are consigning the hungry to stay hungry.

So what is going wrong? In 2002, when the UN World Food Summit pledge was last reviewed, the parallel Forum for Food Sovereignty, organised by non-governmental groups representing small farmers and those who feel the sharp end of hunger directly, concluded that the problem was not a lack of political will, as the FAO asserted, but the opposite. Trade liberalisation, industrial agriculture, genetic engineering and military dominance, it said, were now the main causes of hunger.

The farmers, from 30 countries, who participated in the conference were eloquent about how farming for small producers is more than just a food production system. Edgar Gonzales Castro, from Peru, said his vision of the future was "traditional" agriculture aimed at satisfying the needs of farmers, rather than generating profit. "What matters is that, on the family plot of land, farmers and their families have a range of crops to fill the cooking pot," he said.

"When governments decide to hold public consultations to help guide their decisions, policy experts as well as representatives of large farmers and agrifood corporations are usually centre stage, not small-scale producers, consumers and their organisations," says Pimbert.

The message of the report is that small-scale farmers - the majority of growers in the world - want radically different policies from those being promoted by their governments. The call is for policies to start from the perspectives of food producers and consumers rather than the demand for profit.

If "one-planet farming" means that western governments will only support farming practices that provide healthy, local food, maintain livelihoods for local producers and conserve resilient landscapes, then there is common ground with small-scale farmers. But if it means a uniform system for all, this will accelerate the hunt to source food globally and as cheaply as possible.

This will result in a continuing decline in food quality, with ever higher social and environmental costs, and be lorded over by fewer and fewer transnational agribusinesses. It would lead both to greater obesity and greater starvation, and see the eradication of more farmers and further loss of farmland.

Farmers' Views on the Future of Food and Small Scale Producers is at http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdf/full/14503IIED.pdf

Friends of African Farmers & Fishermen

Friends of African Farmers & Fishermen is a Non Profit local community organisation formed by local women and men who are farmers and fishermen. Due to increasing poverty in the area, the local people formed this organisation of Volunteers to help themselves. Due to lack of money and machinery for farming and fishing, wish to appeal for donations of Farm Machinery ie, tractors, irrigation equipment etc. Donations for our Agricultural and development projects in Volta Region of Ghana. To help women and children to have food to eat.Train the young women and youth to acquire the needed skills. To also help farmers with farming machinery and fishing equipment. This would generate income for the local people.Non Profit Organisation.

SEE:

Free Trade Not Aid

Free Trade and Africa

The War For Chocolate

IWD Economic Freedom for Women

Water War

Development Versus Population Growth

WTO: Privatization of Water

Is There a Silver Lining to the WTO Talks? No




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Alberta government names five new members to Preston Manning-led COVID review panel
PRIVATIZE HEALTHCARE PANEL
Fri, February 17, 2023 



EDMONTON — The Alberta government has named five members to a COVID-19 review panel led by former Reform Party leader Preston Manning, one of whom was recently fired along with the rest of the governing board of Alberta Health Services.

Jack Mintz joins Dr. Martha Fulford, Michel Kelly-Gagnon, Dr. Rob Tanguay and Jack Major on the Public Health Emergencies Governance Review panel.

“Albertans can have confidence Alberta’s pandemic response will be reviewed by these medical, policy, legal and economic experts so our province can better respond to the next public health emergency,” Smith said in a statement Friday.

MR. NEOLIBERAL
Mintz is the president’s fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy and advises and writes on tax, business and health policy.

He and the board were fired by Smith in November. She said they failed Albertans during the pandemic by failing to scale up hospital capacity as promised, forcing the government to impose what Smith has termed freedom-busting health restrictions.

The board members were replaced by an administrator. In an opinion piece published in the Financial Post in November, Mintz wrote that he was OK with the firing because the changes represent a necessary jump-start to achieve true reform in health-care delivery.

Major is a former Supreme Court judge and Kelly-Gagnon is president of the Montreal Economic Institute. RIGHT WING THINK TANK LIKE FRASER INSTITUTE

Tanguay is a psychiatrist and University of Calgary professor focusing on disability and rehabilitation.

Fulford is chief of medicine at McMaster University Medical Centre in Hamilton and focuses on infectious diseases. She challenged the efficacy of some health restrictions during the pandemic.

The panel is not only looking at government decision-making, but also its effects on jobs, children, mental health and protection of rights and freedoms. It is to report back by Nov. 15.

The bulk of the panel's work will be reviewing legislation, regulations and ministerial orders, but it will also take feedback online.

The budget is $2 million. Manning, who was announced as chair a month ago, is to be paid $253,000.

Manning and Smith have been critical of government-imposed health restrictions such as masking, gathering rules and vaccine mandates during the pandemic.

Smith has questioned the efficacy of the methods and their long-term effects on household incomes, the economy and mental health. She has promised health restrictions and vaccine mandates would have no role in any future COVID-19 response in Alberta.

The Opposition New Democrats have labelled the panel a political sop to Smith’s far-right supporters angry over COVID-19 restrictions, and have promised to cancel it should they win the May 29 provincial election.

“This panel is a brutal waste of Alberta taxpayers’ money," said NDP health critic David Shepherd.

"Preston Manning has already reached his own conclusions, and based on the panellists, it looks like it’s headed toward whatever outcome Danielle Smith and the UCP are looking for. An Alberta NDP government will put an end to this sham panel."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 17, 2023.

Dean Bennett, The Canadian Press

Canadian CEO Blinks Earns $38,000

Top CEOs outearn average Canadians by January 2nd.

Hey that's today. It took less than 24 hours for Canada's fat cats to earn what you and I make in a year.

And the average worker has not made ANY real gain in wages for the past decade, which just adds insult to injury.

While the corporate elite got a 262% wage and bonus increase between 2005 and the end of 2006.

Perhaps we should declare January 2 the official Canadian Piggie Day for how much the boss class makes off our backs, while barely blinking an eye, or lifting a pen, or doing anything really productive besides lining their own pockets and those of their shareholders, who are all major pension funds, our pension funds in fact.

By the time the average Canadian grudgingly drags his or her still-hungover body into work Tuesday, swaps holiday tales with the stiff in the next cubicle, and hunkers down to work, the country's highest-paid CEOs will have already earned the worker's annual salary.

Minimum-wage workers would have barely rolled out of bed on New Year's Day by the time the country's top earners pocketed the $15,931 that will likely take the low-paid workers all of 2007 to make.

A study released Tuesday by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says the 100 highest-paid private-sector executives will have earned an average Canadian's salary of $38,010 by 9:46 a.m. Tuesday.

That's not comforting news to the many Canadians whose primary motivation for heading back to work after the holidays is being able to start paying off their Christmas credit card bills.

"When you say that the average CEO made $9 million in 2005 and the average Canadian made ($38,000), the comparison between those things is so far into the stratosphere that I think people have trouble just coming to terms with what the comparison means," said Hugh Mackenzie, an economist with the independent research institute that focuses on issues of social and economic justice.

"Converting it into time sort of puts it into a frame that people can get their heads around."

Mackenzie crunched the numbers based on 2005 salary figures from Statistics Canada and Report on Business magazine's most recent listing of the 100 best-paid CEOs of Canadian publicly traded companies.

According to his figures, by the time Canadians flick on the 6 p.m. news Tuesday, the average CEO will have pocketed a staggering $70,000.

"I was kind of hoping it would get into the second week of January. As it turns out, it was not even close," Mackenzie quipped. "Once people get over how stunning the differentials are, I think it really raises a lot of questions in people's minds."

"How can somebody possibly be worth that amount in income and ... if those people are taking that much money out of the company or out of the economy, what does that mean for what's left for the rest of us?"

And don't forget these fat cats are a minority in Canada.

Wealth survey highlights include:

- The concentration of wealth at the high end continued to grow from
1999 to 2005.
- The wealthiest 20% families held 69.2% of the total net wealth in
Canada, up from 68.5% in 1999. That increase in share was entirely at
the expense of the middle 20%, whose share dropped from 8.8% to 8.4%.
- The net worth of the 20% of families at the bottom of the wealth
scale was negative again in 2005.
- Debt increased at a faster rate than net worth. More than 6.5% of
families literally operate under water -- with negative net worth.
- Between 1999 and 2005, the median debt load for families rose 38%,
from $32,300 in 1999 to $44,500 in 2005.

While the Fraser Institute declares Tax Freedom Day in June to show
how much government taxes us, the fact is that their prescription for tax cuts
have NOT benefited working class Canadians.

Canada is falling behind a number of OECD nations in a wide range of social and economic areas, and a study released today by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives points to tax cuts as the culprit.

The study, by Neil Brooks and Thaddeus Hwong, compares high-tax Nordic countries and low-tax Anglo-American countries on 50 social and economic measures and finds the high-tax Nordic countries score better in 42 categories.

According to the study, tax cuts are disastrous for the well-being of a nation’s citizens. For example, the high-tax Nordic countries have:

• lower rates of poverty, more equal income distribution, and more economic security for their workers;
• a higher GDP per capita;
• higher rates of household saving and net national saving;
• greater innovation, including a higher percentage of GDP spent on research and development;
• a higher ranking on their growth competitiveness by the World Economic Forum;
• higher rates of secondary school and university completion; and
• less drug use, more leisure time, and higher life satisfaction.

A tip o' the blog to Jacobs Super Patented Brain Thoughts

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