Corpobligation: What will government or industry do to manage the incredible growth of the oil sands industry in Northern Alberta?

• The wild west is back and the oil sands are on fire...and bogged down in sludge.
• Industry input is important for developing regulations but what happens when regulators are "captured" [coopted] by the companies they regulate?
  

Rick Mercer, of the Rick Mercer Report, outlines the Conservative Party's Oil Sands friendly environmental plan.

Corpobligation: The Onion presents some insights into more efficient transportation and torture techniques.

• The Onion asks the important questions like, "Why waste electricity on testicle torture?"
• Energy savings can be achieved through wind power, balsam wood transports...
• The militaries of both the US and Canada are facing increasing environmental oversight, which is especially important given the environmental destructiveness of weapons like uranium depleted shells, mini-nukes, active sonar...etc..

Corpobligation: At the time turning points in corporate/operational risk management can be difficult to define but one has certainly been crossed in the case of Canada's nuclear industry.

• Background: Canadian Nuclear Safety Comission (CNSC) shut down the Chalk River, medical isotope, reactor run by Atomic Energy Canada Limited (AECL) in November 2007, because of AECL's failure to meet certain safety regulations.
• This led to a shortage of medical isotopes and an eventual Federal legislative override of the regulations to reopen the nuclear plant. Subsequently, the Linda Keen, president of CNSC, was removed from the presidency, although she still sits on the CNSC committee.
• In a world facing global warming, nuclear energy is hot but controversial.
• The new President of the CNSC is considered "good news for everybody."
• The media has a challenge in covering an issue like the nuclear industry and the spin has been rich on both sides of the safety issue - how can CSR help?

Corpobligation: While the carbon tax initiatives of the Quebec and British Columbia (BC) government are modest, they show the potential of tax shifting to discourage bad things (polluting/destructive) and encourage good things (innovation, sustainability). Carbon taxes (may) promote better CSR and environmental practices.

• Apply to virtually all fossil fuels, including gasoline, diesel, natural gas, coal, propane, and home heating fuel, making it among the broadest and most comprehensive in the world.
• Initial rate based on $10 per tonne of associated carbon, or carbon-equivalent, emissions and will rise by $5 a year for the next four years — reaching $30 per tonne by 2012.
• Carbon tax will be revenue neutral as a result of tax cuts and allowances to aid in adaptation.
• The proposed carbon tax is mostly for show, if we rely on narrow neoliberal economics (read more below).
  

Quebec's carbon tax :

• October 2007 - 200 million dollars a year, 1.2 billion dollars over 6 years, to support projects that will allow us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• According to the CBC, The tax will amount to 0.8 cents on every litre of gas sold in Quebec, and 0.9 cents on each litre of diesel fuel.
  
• Oil companies will be hardest hit. They will pay about $69 million a year for gasoline, $36 million for diesel fuel, and $43 million for heating oil.

Corpobligation: Bailouts for banks that sold questionable mortgages suggest that lenders can avoid responsibility for their financial choices. What does this say for their social and environmental choices?

• Today, the Federal Reserve has injected another $30 billion into the financial system.
• Moral hazard is the principle that individuals and businesses will take risks because they will not face the full consequences of failure. In the context of mortgage lending, banks may lend to higher risk borrowers in the quest for profits without adequate consideration of default risk because they know they will be bailed out by the government.
  
• In the words of a great Bird and Fortune sketch,

Financial crisis can be avoided "provided that governments and central banks give us, the financial speculators back the money we have lost...[T]his is rewarding the financial ingenuity of the markets...[W]e don't want the money to spend ourselves...we want it so we can carry on borrowing and lending money as if nothing had happened, without thinking too much about it."

See the video...

What, you need a bigger flat screen movie/entertainment display? We have a deal for you.

The Globe and Mail's, Grant Robertson highlights the growing presence of bigger TVs in both our homes and landfills. Falling prices on new flat panel, LCD, and plasma televisions illustrate the problems with an economic system that fails to internalize costs of resource use and waste disposal. What do you do with the TV after it's obsolete? Can we afford to recycle all of these TVs?