I just purchased a one-way ticket to Toronto on the Via Rail website. The experience was decent enough, though one thing did baffle me. Take a look at the screen-shot below of the last screen before the purchase. It states that the ticket is “Non-exchangeable and non-refundable” and below it says it is “Fully refundable prior to paper ticket issuance…”. If this is not contradictory, I do not know what is – very confusing.

Canada drops from 12th in 2008 to 43rd out of 163 countries, according to the 2010 Environmental Performance Index (EPI). The EPI relies on 25 performance indicators covering both environmental public health and ecosystem vitality.

It’s worth noting that Canada fares quite well on some indicators — in forestry and agricultural practices, notably. Surprisingly, considering our reputation as one of the worst water wasters in the world, Canada also nears the top in water. Sure we have access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. But our generous endowments in water ought not excuse us from more responsible conservation practices.

Less surprisingly, albeit a bit depressingly, we rank 151st on GHG emissions per capita. We also stink at fisheries protection (125 out 127).

For a breakdown of country profiles, click here.

In 1927, Charles Lindberg, flew from Paris to New York solo and kicked off the air transportation industry. Today, Bertrand Piccard carries on the torch with his project Solar Impulse. He plans to fly around the world with no fuel – just solar panels and batteries. For a great description of his project and motivations, watch the TED talk:

The New York Times has an item on a series of climate change lawsuitsthat are making their way through the courts around the U.S. Already, two federal appeals courts have reversed decisions by federal district courts to dismiss climate-change decisions. One of the cases (Comer v. Murphy Oil USA (5th Cir. Miss. October 16, 2009)), a decision of the Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, involved Gulf Coast property owners who claimed property damage resulting from Hurricane Katrina. The plaintiffs sued several large energy and power companies for compensatory and punitive damages, charging that these were caused by greenhouse gases emitted from their operations.

Now the the Alaskan village of Kivalina is appealing the decision of a federal judge in San Francisco which dismissed its claim against several companies, most notably ExxonMobil and Shell Oil, aimed at forcing them to pay the costs of relocation to the mainland, estimated at $US400 million, alleging that the defendants helping are responsible for the climate change that the village claims is destroying its island.

Though Canadian courts have contributed little case law on the matter, large emitters of greenhouse gases in Canada should carefully monitor U.S. rulings on the matter. According to this Fraser Milner Casgrain report:

“While the decisions discussed above involve U.S.- specific claims, owing in large part to the United States Constitution, the cases raise certain legal principles that are universally relevant. While climate change litigation would be novel in Canada, it could ostensibly be based on similar principles of tort law available in the U.S., including the common law claim of nuisance. Although the political question and standing doctrines do not flow from the Constitution in Canada (as they do in the United States) they are the subject of fundamental common law principles. Consequently, any actions brought in Canada would invariably need to address the suitability of the court system to resolve climate change litigation. Additionally, courts would need to grapple with the concept of contribution and whether a defendant’s contribution to a worldwide problem is in itself sufficient to result in liability, when the defendant is one of many worldwide emitters of greenhouse gases.”

Just read a great article by Ralph Losey about the challenge of converting lawyers to a paperless office, or at least an electronic centric office. His article revolves around Plato’s Cave allegory and his argument boils down to,

“Old lawyers have only ever known paper, thus they cannot see all the amazing benefits of e-discovery. Electronic lawyers cannot communicate the benefits to people who are unwilling to change their ways or see the shadows for what they are”.

A great section of the article talks about the bar association made a young lawyer print out his entire website to have it reviewed, it would be funny if it were not so sad. From the article,

For instance, in the 1990s they persecuted electric lawyers who were the first to the Internet and accused them of broadcasting television ads without permission. One electric lawyer was even forced to submit his entire website to his state Bar association for approval as a television ad. His attempts to explain the world outside of the paper cave were futile. They saw the web show for themselves on the televisions sitting on their secretaries’ desks, which were actually computer monitors, but they did not understand the difference. The protodigital lawyer complied and printed out his whole website, disclaimers and all, consisting of thousands of pages of paper when so downgraded into two dimensions. Once the Bar governors saw the television add in the paper they loved and understood, they quibbled with a few terms, required a couple of revisions, and then approved his website,floridalawfirm.com, as a TV broadcast.

A large part of our hesitance to go paperless is old habits; however, a lot of the problem remains in the technology and devices available. Reading long documents on a computer is not pleasant, annotations via keyboard an mouse are still not ideal. With the Kindle, things are getting better and with the mysterious Apple tablet, who knows. Today, devices are still too removed from our natural habits of writing, speaking and interacting with physical objects – but that gap is closing fast.

Our office is pretty much paperless, the only documents we get by mail (not by choice) are bank statements, government letters and cheques – I think that is a statement of who is leading who. We use Basecamp fro manage projects, Highrise to manage business Development, Harvest to manage expenses, DropBox and Google Docs to manage files.

Going paperless is possible, but the two key elements are re-training and making the tools easy to use. Also, try making your employees pay for their own paper, perhaps that might help. When printing seems free, people tend to abuse it.

On a side note, the movie Pirate’s of Silicon Valley contains a scene where the first computer mouse is presented to the board of Xerox, then one of the best companies in the world. The board scoffs at the device, asking, “You want xerox to invest in something called a mouse???”. Xerox nearly went bankrupt in 2000. Youtube clip (jump to minute 3 and 14 seconds):