We are phasing out one of our plans, the Basic Plan. The basic plan offered access to updates, topics and legislation – but no legal register functionality. Over the past year and a half we have found all of our new clients have required legal register functionality and the clients on the basic plan were not completely satisfied with their service.

For clients who are on the basic plan, we will keep it active until your subscription comes up for renewal – you will then be able to upgrade or downgrade your account.

Shortly we will be adding a new plan that helps Canadian businesses deal with health and safety legislation. Stay tuned.

Should the Climategate revelations change our views about global warming? Robin Hanson (an expert on idea futures) thinks not. Sure, the scandal has exposed the ugly side of academics caught distorting research for political ends, but as Hanson puts it:

“It is a shame that academia works this way, and an academia where this stuff didn’t happen would probably be more accurate. But even our flawed academic consensus is usually more accurate than its contrarians, and it is hard to find reliable cheap indicators saying when contrarians are more likely to be right.”

Just a quick note that Copenhagen might yet still have some life in it. With President Obama announcing his forthcoming presence, Canada and China are following suit with their high leaders, Harper and Wen Jiabao respectively. China seems to be serious about reducing the greenhouse gas emissions, simply for the reason that they are very energy wasteful and have lots of room to improve efficiencies. Outline of commitments can be found here.

One note that stood out in the above article was that over a quarter of Chinese wind-farms (some of the largest in the world) are operational, but not connected to the grid,meaning the electricity they produce is not being used. This is astounding. Often, grid companies (government controlled) are slow to build lines to remote parts of the country – this is a major issue in Canada with many wind-farms on hold because of a lack of grid connectivity.

Let us see what happens at Copenhagen.

The United States throws out 40% of their food (article). With the world under greater and greater ecological pressure, many parties state the obvious: efficiency improvements are the low hanging fruit. Lowering your house temperature in the winter, raising it in the summer, buying a fuel-efficient car or changing your light bulbs saves a great deal of energy at very low-cost. A major, but overlooked, contributor to environmental degradation is food production, transportation, and preparation.

Not only is over food over consumption bad for the environment and your health; in a world where people still go hungry it is immoral to waste food. For all humanity’s sake we should eat less (and less meat). When your mother told you to finish your plate because kids in Africa were starving, she was not lying.

Recently I had the misfortune of eating at a hotel buffet. I have no evidence to back this up, but I am convinced that eating at a buffet greatly increases the amount of food you consume. You keep going back for “just a little bit more” and before you know it you have had three portions. Self-serve buffets can be found around the world, but the United States is certainly the champion. Serving plates of food, in the traditional fashion creates a form of measurement for us to know when we have eaten enough. The smaller the plates, the less we eat; not because we are less hungry, but because our brains trick us into being full. In Japan, they eat Bento boxes, prepared platters with various items that fill you up to 80% full. Then your stomach contracts and you feel full. This, and their insistence on fresh products, has helped Japan achieve the longest lifespans in the world and some of the lowest obesity rates.

Many westerners are now using Bento boxes to save money by bringing their lunch to work and to become more healthy. I think it is high time we reduce the amount of food we waste.

No question that Climategate is damaging for proponents of global warming theory. But more worrisome is that mainstream media will respond by giving credence to the fevered ravings of conspiracy theorists. So far reactions betray the lack of political will in this world to do what it takes to set the us down the right path — probably owing to public fatigue with the threat of climate change.

For those outside Quebec who don’t know him, Jean-François Lisée is a well known author and was once special advisor to the former Quebec premiers Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard. He’s also not a bad blogger.

He has recently published a new book, Imaginer l’après-crise. Piste pour un monde plus juste, équitable, durable, co-authored with Éric Montpetit. The book is a useful reminder that the crisis of capitalism which revealed its symptoms in 2008 is further exacerbated by our latent ecological crisis, since our planet simply cannot sustain economic growth as we know it.

The book brings together a dozen thinkers, from Quebec and abroad, who offer some ideas about how capitalism should be reformed. What’s important to take away from most of these researchers is that in the long run, it may be possible to resume sustained growth, but not until we adapt to a new kind of growth that produces less of an environmental footprint. So far it seems that the best way to achieve that is to tax resources instead of labour.

Below is an eight-minute documentary, produced by fans in support of the book: