Google has just unveiled a system to display laws, case rulings and citations. Modelled after much of the work at the various LIIs around the world, this system helps make american legal opinion much more accessible. From Google,

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. To understand how an opinion has influenced other decisions, you can explore citing and related cases using the Cited by and Related articles links on search result pages. As you read an opinion, you can follow citations to the opinions to which it refers. You can also see how individual cases have been quoted or discussed in other opinions and in articles from law journals.

See for example, the citations for the famous Roe v. Wade case. Very happy to see this technology come for american laws as there is no US equivalent to our amazing CanLii.

No big surprise here, but our government is saying climate change laws will likely not be put in place for a few years. I suppose that is what they said in 2000 as well. It seems our government and Canadian society has little appetite for regulating climate change, with the forthcoming Copenhagen, it seems inevitable many climate change hopes will not materialize. CBC article here.

Out in the pacific ocean, there is a garbage field larger than continental America. Composed of plastic waste – bags, bottle caps, lighters, etc. the garbage, a testament to our wasteful ways, is growing in size. Chris Jordan, a famed photographer, just posted some horrifying pictures of dead birds who eat the garbage and then die. Here are his photos and one sample below. Article on the patch here.

A lot of bleak headlines today about how climate change talks in Copenhagen will fail. But the eulogies are a bit premature.

True, over the past year, world leaders have really been lowering the bar. Today, another round of dampening expectations made headlines, as leaders at this week’s APEC meeting are saying that a binding global accord in Copenhagen is out of reach. No one in their right mind believes that next month’s conference will produce a final treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

But let’s not fool ourselves. Those leaders were only saying out loud what everyone has been whispering for months.

The chances of success at Copenhagen were always dim, as they hinged on overcoming massive obstacles, not least of which is the distrust between rich and developing countries. Complicating matters significantly, the world’s biggest polluters are trade competitors. China, focused on lifting its population out of poverty, does not want to be bound to emissions reductions. The U.S., nursing a bruised economy, stresses over China’s unfair competitive advantage.

And yes, the world has been lackadaisical about implementing the Kyoto Protocol. It only went into effect in 2005, seven years after it was opened for signature in 1998 by the parties. And it takes time to develop economic, political and industrial policy, so the expectation of meeting emissions goals before 2012 always seemed a bit naive. With a few notable exceptions (Britain, Germany), we did little to pick up the pace.

Still, history teaches us that negotiating a meaningful global treaty is never swift and easy. It took decades to form the WTO and to build a common European market. Why should agreeing to a workable climate change treaty be any different?

Of course, as the deadline approaches, the news outlets are right to paint a bleak picture. And time is not a luxury we have in ample supply. But Copenhagen is not yet fated to be a failure. Recently, Connie Hedegaard, the Danish minister of climate and energy, emphasized the importance of sealing a deal in Copenhagen, saying “the world is watching. The world is waiting.” Hopefully there will be a more compelling reason to make talks in Copenhagen truly constructive. If the world’s governments don’t manage to generate some serious momentum behind a global climate change strategy, they run the risk of exposing their gross failures in leadership.

Last week in Hong Kong, a friend and I received tickets to an Intelligence Squared debate on climate change. Intelligence Squared is a non-profit organization that holds debates with leading experts around the world on pressing issues. Many of these debates are aired on BBC.

The debate I attended concerned the following statement, ““THE WEST IS FULL OF HOT AIR; ASIA IS SAVING THE WORLD FROM CLIMATE POLICY DISASTER”. Coming into the debate, the crowd was already against the motion, but after 90 minutes of discussion, the crowd had become even more against. The panelists for the motion argued that Kyoto had failed to produce reductions in GHG emissions and that developing countries such as India and China had a right to develop and produce greenhouse gases. The team against the motion argued that the west was already leading the fight against global warming and that Asia was building so many coal power plants that it could hardly be expected to save the world from climate change.

As with many of these debates, it is very hard to separate items for analysis. As was discussed, the developed countries rely on Asia to produce low-cost goods for our consumption – thus their coal plants are partially our fault. Conversely, most of the CO2 in the atmosphere today comes from the west, we thus have a responsibility to sacrifice first and lead the world to a carbon free future. The most interesting element of the debate was the discussion of the “right to develop”, the idea that all humans have a fundamental right to certain material comforts and to deny that, because of carbon emissions or any other reason, is morally wrong.

The right to a roof over your head, food on the table, healthcare and education are basic human rights. I challenge anyone to tell a poor asian father and mother that they cannot purchase a refrigerator or a car or that it will cost more because of global warming. As bad as global warming is, the solution cannot be to restrict the enrichment of poor people around the world. When you travel through a poor country, you come face to face with the desperate need for development.

When I lived in Beijing in 2005, I distinctly recall a friend explaining the sensation of eating an egg for the first time. She had never eaten meat, let alone an egg, because it was too expensive. In the west, we simply cannot comprehend the level of poverty found in many parts of the world and to deny them the right to develop because of global warming is wrong. As previously discussed on this blog, lifting people out of poverty will likely be our best chance at solving the pressing ecological problems we face. Only with more education and wealth can people understand our ecological problems and change their behaviour accordingly.

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P.S. China is already a leader in solar panel production, reforestation and wind power. They are also furiously building nuclear power plants, hydroelectric projects and other low carbon ways of producing electricity. So I hardly think we can say they are not working on modernizing their power production and reducing their carbon intensity.