In the interest of Awareness, here’s our quick roundup of some Earth Day links and other environmentally topical reading:

Earth Day Canada has a handy guide to Earth Day events across Canada. Plenty happening today and over the rest of the weekend.

The New York Times on Earth Day as Big Business. The Globe and Mail chimes in with what seems like self-parody: “Four stock picks for Earth Day.” Really.

Carbon offsets are a scam, says the Christian Science Monitor in a new series of articles examining the industry:

They are buying into projects that are never completed, or paying for ones that would have been done anyhow, the investigation found. Their purchases are feeding middlemen and promoters seeking profits from green schemes that range from selling protection for existing trees to the promise of planting new ones that never thrive. In some cases, the offsets have consequences that their purchasers never foresaw, such as erecting windmills that force poor people off their farms.

Carbon offsets are the environmental equivalent of financial derivatives: complex, unregulated, unchecked and—in many cases—not worth their price.

Heather Rogers also calls foul on carbon offset projects in the current issue of The Nation.

Via this Worldchanging blog post, a recent TED Talk by Catherine Mohr about the hard reality of building an environmentally friendly home, eschewing the kind of green sentimentality that fuels carbon offsets and diving deep into the actual data. It’s short, funny, and educational:

Climate fight! University of Victoria Professor Andrew Weaver announced yesterday in a press release that he is suing the National Post for four articles it wrote about him over the past few months. Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis, says the Post “attributed to me statements I never made, accused me of things I never did, and attacked me for views I never held.” The four articles in question are “Weaver’s Web,” “Weaver’s Web II,” “Climate agency going up in flames,” and “So much for pure science.” Suing the Financial Post op-ed page for their ridiculous environmental reporting may seem like suing the sun for shining, but Weaver is one of the country’s top climate scientists, so this bears watching.

Rabble has some suggestions for Earth Day–related things to do on university campuses across Canada.

The David Suzuki Foundation is running a series of book swaps across the country until April 24. If you haven’t read it, it’s new to you — and might save some paper as well.

Finally, Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians sends a dispatch from Cochabamba, Bolivia, where she’s attending the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth:

Taking "the call" literally: A protester at the International Day of Climate Action holds up a placard with the Prime Minister's phone number.

It’s now been a year since the tour. His ecoHoliness David Suzuki joined his Foundation with the Canadian Federation of Students and the Sierra Youth Coalition as he spoke to youth across the country and to George Stroumboulopoulos on The Hour, where one particular U of Guelph student was watching.  When it came to the perennial question that speakers like him always get, the “what can I do?” part, Suzuki made his answer political.

Darcy Higgins, my co-columnist here, attended Suzuki’s talk the early evening of last year’s federal election day. Suzuki echoed change-making advice he got from a former PM: if you get thousands to Parliament Hill, the politicians will have to listen: Fill The Hill.

Hearing the call, there was a lot of chatter and talk after the tour on what to do, but Gracen Johnson, a third-year International Development student, was the one to make it happen.

By the International Day of Climate Action, October 24, 2009, a few thousand showed up on a cool rainy Ottawa day to send their C-Day message.

“I do not consider myself an activist,” Johnson told us this week, “In fact, I don’t really like being called an activist.”

“This is not activism, it’s basic citizenship. Everyone shares the responsibility to hold our government accountable and live as a global citizen,” she said.

“Canada needs to pipe up about the need for mitigation, adaptation, and a green economy. The green solutions out there are inherent in our approach to tackling climate change and would be beneficial to almost all other areas of environmental integrity,” she said, adding that sustainability is the key.

So, we asked Johnson, did C-Day help to achieve this?

“In my view C-Day was a tremendous success. Will we see our government immediately pass Bill C-311 and get busy on a climate change action plan? Probably not. However, I never expected that. What I did expect and certainly experienced was the uniting of the country,” said Johnson.

On buses from as far away as Halifax and Winnipeg came people who found themselves together in a shared cause, in a way that had not yet been done. Meetings by phone and online, working groups and tireless outreach made it an effective action with little budget and no staff.

A committed group of youth is moving forward from C-Day, with a very active movement, as well as a youth delegation going to Copenhagen and a team working at home. Johnson points readers to “Climate Crew Mondays”: activist “stunts” happening weekly throughout November across Canada.  Much of the activism – or, ahem, basic citizenship — is being done as it was in the 1960s: by university students and on campuses. You can act by finding and spreading the actions on Facebook under the group It’s Time to Listen / Il Fait Écouter.  Actions have already taken place at Dalhousie, UNBC, UVic, UBC and UWInnipeg.

But what would success from all of this action look like?

“Canada needs to lead, follow, or get out of the way in the international climate negotiations,” says Johnson. “Right now, I am simply hoping that our government will stop being obstructionist at the negotiation tables. Maybe if we just get out of the way, the international community will be able to make significant progress. In my frustration, I hope they show us no mercy”.

No mercy from the international community and a strong showing from Canada’s youth. Push from inside and out are always good for change making.

Though facing a tough climb with the Harper government, citizens can never predict their success or failure. German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the U.S. Congress Tuesday with a speech that thanked Americans for their leadership in Europe over the last decades.  Merkel talked about the Berlin Wall that divided Europe and was torn down because of both agitation within Germany, and international pressure from without.

She now believes there are different kinds of “walls” dividing us, “walls in our minds, walls of short-sighted self-interest, walls between the present and the future,” said Merkel.  Even before the breaking of the wall in 1989, just travelling to the United States was out of reach for her — who knew that 20 years later she could speak in its Capitol Building?  Who could have predicted that the wall would come down?

So we now raise Suzuki’s bet and call: let’s find a hundred more Gracen Johnsons to make it happen.

Another B.C. election has passed, and the Liberals under Premier Gordon Campbell were able to hold on to power, but it was hard to tell at times which party stood where on the issues and the political spectrum. The environment was a central issue in this election, but it played out in a way that made no sense based on the historic positioning of political parties in Canada.

The Liberal Party of B.C., which since the demise of the Social Credit has been perceived by some to be more right-wing, was the party that defended the merits of a carbon tax. Meanwhile, the voice of the left, the B.C. New Democrats under Carole James, went all-out under the slogan “axe the tax.” They vowed to eliminate the green tax and, instead, embrace a system of cap-and-trade similar to the one now endorsed by the federal Conservatives.

Environment groups and left-of-centre think tanks, such as ForestEthics, the Pembina Institute, and the David Suzuki Foundation, were put in the awkward position of having to enter the campaign to challenge the NDP.

They were concerned that if the NDP was successful using this strategy it would set the environmental movement back decades, as political parties dropped crucial environmental initiatives from their platforms. While B.C. might be unique in how dramatic its provincial politics tends to be, the NDP across Canada appears to have abandoned the environmental file.

In the last federal election, Jack Layton found himself running against a much more environmentally aggressive Stéphane Dion, and even when the possibility of a coalition government emerged, it was the NDP that insisted the “Green Shift” not be government policy.

So what explains this bizarre policy positioning? The answer is the Green Party. In 1929, American economist Harold Hotelling advanced a model for business based on “spatial location.” Let’s say you want to open a convenience store on a street where there is already one on its eastern end; where would the ideal location be to open your store? As close as possible to your competitor, of course, so as to capture every customer on the street to the west. That way, when someone leaves the house to purchase, say, a carton of milk, they will stop at your store because it is closer, even if just by a few feet.

In 1957, Anthony Downs applied this spatial model of competition to politics and suggested that voters will choose political parties that are closest to them in terms of policy. This explains why, in a two-party system like that of the U.S., the policies of the two political parties end up so similar, as each party tries to grab the maximum number of votes on its side of the left/right spectrum.

The Democrats need to be only slightly left of the GOP to get everyone to their left. Where else can the voters go?

In Canadian elections, we have had a number of what we call “third parties,” such as the NDP. The benefit of this sort of competition should be that these parties can adhere to their core ideological values because they have more room to manoeuvre, while still positioning themselves strategically to capture the greatest share of the electorate.

Enter the Green Party. Now with a new viable political player on the field, the other parties have been repositioning. It doesn’t matter that the Greens have yet to score an actual electoral victory; their simple presence in the campaign has altered the other parties’ strategies. The effect has been most substantive for the NDP, which has tried to stake out new ground on the environment, the deficit, and even law and order.

Political parties, of course, are not convenience stores. Economics is modelled using homo economicus, an incredibly selfish man—a man who considers only what will make his own life better, trying to get the most for the least. That is why economists are always surprised when people walk further to get their milk and even pay a little more. The economic model does not allow for considerations economists call “irrational,” like loyalty to a local neighbourhood store and the people who run it.

But this is not the ideal citizen that democracy is predicated upon. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, argued that the very nature of society would force people to rise above their own selfinterest and make decisions for the common good. It was because he believed in a “general will” greater than the individual—that people believe in democracy.

The NDP needs to ask itself what it believes in. Does the party want voters to walk the extra distance for their policies because they’re the right ones—or do they simply want to offer policies that are convenient?