Wealth and Income in the Top 1%
One thing I really like about the Occupy movement is that it reclaiming mental space. I’m thinking of the overt focus on the riches gained by the top 1%, and…
Marc Lee
Are the 1% just lucky?
I expect some folks who oppose the Occupy movement will weigh in on merit – that the top 1% are deserving of their riches because they include people who pay…
Occupation, democracy and coops
I hung out a while yesterday at the Vancouver Occupation, and was impressed with their efforts at radical democracy. Many in the mainstream press have been quick to pile on…
Why occupy? It’s the inequality.
The Occupy Wall Street protests hinge on injustice, in particular a malaise with the current economic system that has brought us a tremendous inequality and the rise of the super-rich,…
Are smart meters worth the cost?
A notice in my mailbox last week told me that smart meters are going to be installed in my neighbourhood. I’ll admit that the geek in me would like to…
Fighting energy poverty and the transition to zero-emission housing
Today CCPA released a new Climate Justice Project report, Fighting Energy Poverty in the Transition to Zero-Emission Housing: A Framework for BC, by yours truly, Eugene Kung (a lawyer with…
BC’s New Jobs Plan
If you are interested in what BC’s new Premier Christy Clark is doing on the job creation front, check out a couple articles on the BC Policy Note blog (here…
Remembering Gideon Rosenbluth
Below is the text of the obituary for Gideon Rosenbluth, a renowned progressive economist and inspiration to us at the PEF, and a past president of the Canadian Economics Association.…
Thoughts on “Why not print money?”
Richard Gilbert’s “Why not print money?” in the Globe’s Economy Lab toys with more radical monetary intervention as a response to the crisis. Desperate times, they say, call for desperate…
About those “unfunded liabilities”
When it comes to the Canada Pension Plan, a major talking point from the right is that the CPP has “unfunded liabilities”, with the implication that is not affordable and…
Canada’s GHG commitment problem
For the past decade, Canada’s GHG emission targets were framed by the Kyoto Protocol, in which Canada committed to a 6% reduction in emissions by 2012 relative to 1990 levels…
Notes on the social cost of carbon
A recent paper by Ackerman and Stanton did some re-estimates of the Social Cost of Carbon, finding this measure of the externality (or costs imposed on third parties) from burning…
Decarbonizing homes and the price of gas
Our climate justice framework for BC is to eliminate fossil fuels by 2040. In the household sector, this poses a significant challenge, not so much in terms of technology and…
Home energy retrofits: part one
I was in the budget lock-up in Ottawa back in 2009, when the feds announced a home renovation tax credit as part of the stimulus package, and one of my…
Deconstructing BC’s carbon neutral government
Besides the carbon tax, one of the most important BC government climate action initiatives has been the adoption of Carbon Neutral Government. That is, count emissions from public buildings and…
Navigating challenging economic waters
Down south, the Obama administration is in a dangerous game of chicken with Republican congressional leaders, who are cynically holding the US economy hostage in order to impose a radical…
Is BC about to drop a new carbon bomb?
Any day now the BC government should be releasing the latest greenhouse gas data for the province, and we will see if any progress is being made towards a legislated…
BC’s Regressive Tax Shift
With much of the talk on taxes in BC about the HST, we issued a new report today that looks at the bigger context for BC’s tax system (Vancouver Sun…
Not allowed to talk about poverty
BC Stats put out a release yesterday with the headline “Low Income Cut-Offs (LICOs) are a Poor Measure of Poverty” and author Dan Schrier gets in a dirty hit right…
Fossil fuel expansion as a crime against humanity
After at 2010 that was one of the warmest years on record, 2011 has shown us astonishing patterns of extreme weather worldwide. It would take a long time to make…