Clear and Present Thinking

And I'll sign it for you! I'll send you all the above, and in case you haven't got enough stuff to read I'll also send you a printed copy of my doctoral thesis, "Time and the Land: This text is not published anywhere, and you can't download it from an archive, so it's a very limited edition. Jun 7, - Jul 7, 30 days. Share this project Done. Clear And Present Thinking: A Free College-level Logic Text. University textbooks cost too much. Thank you, most sincerely, for your support! Our First Stretch Goal: Our Second Stretch Goal: Support Select this reward.

Estimated delivery Dec Kickstarter is not a store. Precision exact to the necessary level of detail Could you be more specific? Could you give me more details? Could you be more exact? Relevance relating to the matter at hand How does that relate to the problem? How does that bear on the question? How does that help us with the issue? Depth containing complexities and multiple interrelationships What factors make this a difficult problem?

What are some of the complexities of this question? What are some of the difficulties we need to deal with? Breadth encompassing multiple viewpoints Do we need to look at this from another perspective? Do we need to consider another point of view? Do we need to look at this in other ways? Logic the parts make sense together, no contradictions Does all this make sense together? Does your first paragraph fit in with your last? Does what you say follow from the evidence? Significance focusing on the important, not trivial Is this the most important problem to consider?

Is this the central idea to focus on?

Clear and Present Thinking: Second Edition. by Brendan Myers — Kickstarter

Which of these facts are most important? Fairness Justifiable, not self-serving or one-sided Do I have any vested interest in this issue? Am I sympathetically representing the viewpoints of others? There are numerous other standards that may be applied to elements on a contextual basis. Much of it is gathered under the banner of the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, the coordinated federal-provincial plan stitched together in the spring of and in constant danger of being torn to shreds ever since.

Wonky conferences, like the one in Halifax, which tend to transpire with little notice and no celebration, are a big part of the daily grinding work of good climate policy. What did a little good climate policy matter in the face of that? What I mean by good climate policy, to be clear, is climate policy that has actually been passed, has become the law of the land, and has then been sent off to do its quiet work of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

That work tends to be far less noticeable than the screaming headlines above news of imminent disaster or even the final sum on a household energy bill. Since the tax was introduced in , gasoline use is down by more than 10 per cent per capita in B. Good climate policy pleases no crowds.

Clear and present danger: The urgency of a good climate policy

There are no raucous rallies or victory marches in its name. But climate policy is needed now at a scale and scope far beyond any given fire or flood — ultimately, we need it to intervene in every transaction involving fossil fuels everywhere on earth — and so it is getting harder for good climate policy to stay quietly out of sight. And because no one likes the look of good climate policy in the light of day — because it seems pitifully weak on its face and embarrassing in its concessions and awkward compromises — it is hard to maintain and defend.

Why is good climate policy so hard to love? The answer, like climate change itself, is multivalent and excruciatingly complex, and it has a lot to do with the scale and time frame of the problem and its solutions. There will be no immediate reward for doing the job well, and rarely does an instant crisis emerge from doing it badly. And in any case, good climate policy satisfies no one completely and makes everyone at least a little uncomfortable. In the foreshortened terms of a bellowed Question Period exchange, the carbon price — any carbon price — is always so high that it will ruin the economy and so low that it will do nothing.

Good climate policy is never an easy political win, and even the hard wins seem like losses from many angles. The third of four smokestacks, known as the Four Sisters, crumbles during a demolition at a defunct coal-fired power plant in Mississauga.

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Ontario managed to eliminate coal-burning power from its electricity grid within a decade. Canada has had some good climate policy over the years, though not too much, and it has even more now, though nowhere near enough. Carbon pricing has drawn the ire of conservatives nationwide, while trading off an oil sands pipeline approval for conservative buy-in on Mr. Never mind that the majority of Canadians — 76 per cent, according to an October survey by Abacus Data — claim to reside somewhere in between, open to the idea of a new pipeline project alongside more aggressive action on climate change.

And so they are barely heard. This is how good climate policy fails. Federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna speaks at a news conference after a meeting with her provincial and territorial partners in Ottawa, soon after the Ontario government said it would scrap its cap-and-trade program. This, despite the Framework being easily the most ambitious climate policy package the country has ever seen, is coordinating climate change action between the federal government and every province and territory other than Saskatchewan.

Fully one-third of those reductions can be achieved if governments nationwide implement only the efficiency measures prescribed by the Framework. Or, rather, the job-killing carbon tax. Or else the insufficient carbon tax, the window-dressing carbon tax, the carbon tax negated by oil sands expansion. Even a report released just a few weeks ago — produced by a think tank headed by a former Conservative policy adviser, no less — showing how most Canadian households will receive more money back in rebates than they will pay in carbon taxes has done nothing to change the tenor of the debate.

This was underscored last week when Mr. In front of a boisterous crowd of more than 1,, Ford called Mr. There are myriad other reasons, from the squabbling over jurisdiction endemic to the Canadian federation to the bounteous political hay to be made these days on both the right and left flanks of Mr.

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Put another way, the fragile coalition needed to keep the Framework in place has, since it was formed, subbed in Mr. Premier John Horgan as the custodians of two of its three biggest partners.

The Globe and Mail

If good climate policy is so likely to lead to such a political mess, what of the other options? These can be categorized broadly as great climate policy and no climate policy. To be fair, conservative politicians have finally been persuaded to pay some grudging bare minimum of lip service to the scientific reality of the situation.

So why should we? Under Andrew Scheer, more than a decade after Mr. It remains hard to imagine any other policy issue of such consequence on which a viable political party can simply take no substantive position at all. So treacherous is the swamp of climate politics that a shrug from the shore can seem like the least damaging stance.

Supporters wave signs during Mr. Ford's anti-carbon tax rally in Calgary. The stronger argument against good climate policy comes from advocates of great climate policy. Great climate policy posits that good climate policy and all its meek, compromised incremental changes are themselves a big part of the problem. If only a courageous government was willing to take much greater strides, or even an enormous leap — the kind perhaps charted in a multi-point manifesto — well, then we would see the kind of rapid transformation needed not only to forestall climate change, but to build a better society in every respect.