politics

Malaysia Stops Jailing Addicts, Helps Them Recover Instead

- Adam Clare

lighter and joint

Addiction is tough and it can happen to anyone. In Malaysia they are changing their drug laws to reflect this reality by providing rehab for users instead of locking them up in prison. Malaysia has tried the now-classic and irrefutably irrational “war on drugs” approach and found that it didn’t actually solve anything. Hopefully this current change in law within the country inspires others in the region to rethink their approach to this vital health care issue.

Home minister Hamzah Zainudin said the change of approach towards drug abusers and addicts – from prison sentences to rehabilitation and treatment programmes – will happen this year and would remove the stigma they carry in society, which looked negatively at abusers and drug addicts.

“Besides that, it will also facilitate their reintegration into the community and give them a second chance,” he said in conjunction with the 38th National Anti-Drugs Day on the National Anti-Drugs Agency’s (NADA) Facebook Live session today.

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Highways Make Traffic Worse, Transit Improves Traffic

- Adam Clare

Regular readers of this site already know that highways are amongst the worst ways to move people effectively and also a way to ensure urban development is built to cater to cars instead of human beings. Yet, in Ontario the government wants to build a $6 billion highway to promote low-density car-based development and increase the region’s carbon output. The utterly incompetent Conservative party is set on destroying the efforts of environmentalists and farmers to conserve prime farming land.

Building a highway isn’t good. If you want to actually improve transportation in Ontario – or almost anywhere – build better public transit. Vox explores this concept in a recent video.

The concept of induced demand has been around since the 1960s — nearly as long as the inception of the federal highway system — and has been proven by several studies since. But it still hasn’t stemmed the tide of big, expensive highway infrastructure projects as a Band-Aid to congestion.

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The Argument to Shrink the Economy Keeps Getting Stronger

- Adam Clare

The idea that we can eventually decarbonize our economy to keep it growing has been talked about for decades; sadly we’re far away from a carbon neutral economy and even it we did achieve such an economic system we still need to shrink it. What makes a “good” economy is up to us since we create the rules and laws around economic practices. Currently we designed our economic systems to be inherently unsustainable since it’s based on growth for the sake of wealth production. Instead we can make economic systems that favour environmental protection, economic equality, or any other good idea.

Regardless, we can start making more people aware that we need to shrink, rather than grow, the economy.

Green growth, Hickel concludes, is an ecologically incoherent â€œfairy tale.” If this seems harsh, consider what the ecomodernist position asks us to believe. The current system requires annual growth of roughly 3 percent to avoid the shock of recession. This means doubling the size of the economy every 23 years. The economy of 2000 must be 20 times larger in the year 2100, and 370 times larger in the year 2200. The green growth position rests on the assumption that this can go on, basically forever, because innovation will “dematerialize” the economy. Yet 2000 was the first year that, according to experts, humanity used more energy and materials than the safe limit. And the growth economy, far from dematerializing, remains geared toward expanding future markets for extremely materials-heavy products like Tesla cybertrucks and Apple iPhones. Comparing this to a fairy tale is, if anything, too generous, since children’s stories usually involve some kind of moral lesson applicable to the real world.

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Accelerating the Circular Economy

- Adam Clare

construction

The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected economies from the local to the global and we can rebuild our economy using old destructive methods or rebuild it in a way that future generations can benefit. Everyday there are more calls to reshape our economic systems to respect the environment more while increasing profits, and we can. The circular economy is all about both local profits and global environmental protection. Over at the World Economic Forum they have outlined a few ways we can speed up our shift to a more sustainable economic structure.

2. Transforming consumption

A step further along the value chain, Transforming Consumption addresses the reality that we currently consume 1.75 times more resources each year than the Earth can naturally regenerate, and we are on course to more than double resource use by 2050. Here, innovators are working to conceptualize new models of circular consumption, including product-as-a-service, product-use extension (e.g. repairs, secondary marketplaces), and sharing platforms. Algramo is a Chilean start-up whose omni-channel, cross-brand platform technology enables brands and retailers to sell goods to consumer using smart reusable packaging for the lowest possible prices. Algramo’s packaging distribution system incorporates Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies to enable innovations such as their patented Packaging as a Wallet technology and IoT-connected vending machines. It is estimated that converting 20% of plastic packaging into reuse models presents a $10 billion opportunity, making rethinking packaging both a significant business priority in addition to having environmental imperative.

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America Finally Acting on Climate Change

- Adam Clare

After years of neglect, and at times overt destruction, of the environment by the federal government in the USA is finally doing something about climate change. It’s acknowledged by scientist and average people that the greatest threat to humanity is climate change. Arguably the States have been the greatest contributors to the dire state of the climate.

The Trump administration in the USA didn’t understand science and welcomed policies which helped corporations get short term profits while saddling future generations with massive environmental debt.

It’s great to see that in Biden’s first week as President he is taking climate change seriously.

“It’s about coming to the moment to deal with this maximum threat that is with us now, facing us, climate change, with a greater sense of urgency. In my view, we’ve already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis,” Biden said in a statement prior to signing the executive orders. “We can’t wait any longer.”

He emphasized in his statement, “Environmental justice will be at the center of all we do.”

Gina McCarthy, who Biden appointed as the first ever White House National Climate Advisor, told reporters at a press briefing that the United States would announce its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) — or each country’s commitment to reduce carbon emissions, a stipulation that is required in the Paris Climate Accord which Biden rejoined — prior to a climate summit on Earth Day, April 22.

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