politics – Page 41 – Things Are Good

France Wants Lights to be Turned Off

France has passed a law that will make it illegal to keep lights turned on over night in non-residental buildings. Starting in July the lights need to be out an hour after the last employee leaves. This is a great way to save energy while reducing light pollution.

The move, announced on Wednesday, is expected to save 250,000 tonnes of CO2 â€“ enough energy to power 750,000 French households for a year.

The French ecology minister, Delphine Batho, said she hoped the law would change attitudes in France and help the country become a pioneer in reducing light pollution.

Read a bit more at The Guardian.

Toronto Uses Billboard Tax to Fund Arts

many years ago, local Toronto artist and activist Devon Ostrom started Beautiful City to get more funding for the arts in Toronto and since then the project has grown to be quite large. This week they saw their dream realized and now Toronto is using a new tax on billboards (which are a visual blight) to fund more outdoor arts in the city.

Under Crawfordâ€™s plan, another $17 million would be phased in gradually over the next four years until Toronto reaches its oft-stated goal of increasing its per capita spending on the arts from $18.30 to $25.

All this represents a dream come true for a spirited and resourceful group of young artists who have kept up the pressure for years for a billboard tax that could be used to solve woeful underfunding from the cash-strapped city, which had fallen behind other major cities in its investment in the arts.

In Ireland, Carbon Tax Means Less Waste and More Revenue

Modern economies indirectly subsidize environmentally damaging corporate practices by ignoring the environmental costs ( younger generations have to deal with the environmental damage), this can be seen in everything from the tar sands in Alberta to ewaste in electronics. In Ireland they have started a carbon tax to deal with this environmental problem while raising a lot more revenue for the country.

The results in Ireland prove promising and may encourage other countries in Europe to take the European Commission’s suggestions that a carbon tax can help other debt-ridden economies.

Household trash is weighed at the curb, and residents are billed for anything that is not being recycled.The Irish now pay purchase taxes on new cars and yearly registration fees that rise steeply in proportion to the vehicleâ€™s emissions. Environmentally and economically, the new taxes have delivered results. Long one of Europeâ€™s highest per-capita producers of greenhouse gases, with levels nearing those of the United States, Ireland has seen its emissions drop more than 15 per cent since 2008.
…
The three-year-old carbon tax has raised nearly 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) overall, including 400 million euros in 2012. That provided the Irish government with 25 per cent of the 1.6 billion euros in new tax revenue it needed to narrow its budget gap this year and avert a rise in income tax rates.

Gross National Happiness is a Good Thing

Bhutan is a small country with a big idea that can change the world. For many years now gross national happiness is how the country monitors its progress, which is the opposite to how other countries measure success (which is from the quantity of money exchanged).

With a world population more knowledgable about environmental destruction there is an increasing concern that wealth accumulation outranks the needs of people. Gross national happiness can change how we measure progress.

Since 1971, the country has rejected GDP as the only way to measure progress. In its place, it has championed a new approach to development, which measures prosperity through formal principles of gross national happiness (GNH) and the spiritual, physical, social and environmental health of its citizens and natural environment.

For the past three decades, this belief that wellbeing should take preference over material growth has remained a global oddity. Now, in a world beset by collapsing financial systems, gross inequity and wide-scale environmental destruction, this tiny Buddhist state’s approach is attracting a lot of interest.

Great Lakes get More Protection

In a demonstration of the usefulness of having an embassy in another country, Canada and the USA have renewed a pact to protect the Great Lakes. This is a good thing as the Great Lakes need more protection and better environmental care from both sides of the border. The pact also implies a reversal of the destructive anti-science policies that the Canadian government has had this past year.

The updated Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement binds both nations to continue a cleanup and restoration initiative begun when the freshwater seas were a symbol of ecological decay. Many of their beaches were littered with foul algae blooms and dead fish. The Cuyahoga River, which flows into Lake Erie in Cleveland, was so choked with oil and chemicals that flames erupted on its surface in 1969.

The pact calls for further action on problems that inspired the original agreement three years after the embarrassing river fire and a second version in 1987. It pledges to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity” of the five lakes and the portion of the St. Lawrence River on the U.S.-Canadian border.