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My Favourite Songs of 2025

2025-12-29T12:00:00Z

Best of 2025

Baxter Dury - Schadenfreude

I can forgive Dury mispronouncing the title of his own song, because he absolutely owns the vocal delivery in his cool, flat Cockney accent, invoking Bill Drummond’s deadpan spoken word delivery of “The White Room” by the KLF.

Beach Bunny - Clueless

Honestly, I could have picked just about any song from Beach Bunny’s latest album, Tunnel Vision, a pitch-perfect collection of infectiously hooky power-pop anthems ruminating on insecurity and disillusionment.

The Beaches - Takes One to Know One

Known for their cheeky, self-aware vocals, Toronto’s The Beaches continue the trend with their 2025 album No Hard Feelings. This single, a hilarious and heartbreaking exploration of a wildly dysfunctional relationship, is built on gorgeous indie-pop hooks.

Briston Maroney - Real Good Swimmer

Crunchy, country-tinged alt rock in the vein of early Beck with just a dash of Kid Rock, Real Good Swimmer is a trippy meditation on youth built on an infectious groove and growling ’90s guitars.

Chappell Roan - The Subway

Possibly her most beautiful song yet, Chappell Roan’s The Subway is heart-rending dream pop yearning for an end to the sharp pangs of grief following a breakup. Roan’s gorgeous soprano voice soars and breaks with glottal grace notes that gently evoke the more overt Celtic stylings of the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan.

CMAT - The Jamie Oliver petrol station

After umpteen listens, I still have absolutely no idea what this song is about, but the relentlessly driving beat and steadily rising intensity are impossible to resist. CMAT’s voice is wildly powerful, impish and soaring in equal measure.

Danny L Harle and PinkPantheress - Starlight

I really want to like PinkPantheress, but like so much modern pop, her songs consist of one or two ideas repeated for three minutes. This song is not that - the rave/hyperpop hybrid keeps endlessly mutating and transforming as it builds in ominous intensity.

Del Water Gap - How To Live

Dreamy indie pop with soaring harmonies and the slightest hint of folksy flavour, this meditation on what it means to live with meaning is produced beautifully.

The Faint - Projector Project!

This frenetic electro-dance punk anthem opens with the clever line: “I contradict myself / No, I don’t” and continues with a brash reflection on the ways we protect our identities by reflecting our own most shameful traits outward.

George Alice - SOS

A cry for help dressed in the lush garb of an indie synth pop anthem, this single by Australia’s George Alice explores loneliness and desperation in the era of smartphones.

Girlpuppy - I Just Do!

The past few years have been excellent for female-led alternative rock bands, and Girlpuppy is producing some excellent music in this genre. I Just Do! is tender and bracing in equal measure, paralleling her observation that the same emotional vulnerability that exposes you to danger also opens you to love.

GUV - Let Your Hands Go

GUV, the artist formerly known as Young Guv, solo project of Fucked Up guitarist Ben Cook, trades his iridescent jangle-pop shimmer for a dancedelic homage to the Second Summer of Love: melodic, euphoric, and irresistibly groovy.

Hannah Jadagu - My Love

Dreamy indie pop with lush, reverby vocals and languid, cosy rhythms, My Love expresses the universal longing for a tenderness that has gone missing. “My love, I hope you get all my time.”

The Head and The Heart - Beg, Steal, Borrow

A “Bitter Sweet Symphony” for the Stomp Clap Hey crowd, this track feels at once earthy and elevated - rustic piano-driven Americana with warm harmonies and a swelling, arms-wide-open chorus.

Holy Holy - So Be It

I was never a huge fan of Australian indie rock band Holy Holy, but with this haunting elegy to their indefinite hiatus, I’m starting to think I’ve been missing out. The sound is richly textured, while the lyrics embrace a gentle acceptance of the inevitability of changes and endings.

Indigo De Souza - Heartthrob

In this stirring anthem of resistance and resilience, Indigo De Souza reclaims her agency over her own body in the face of abuse and manipulation. Combining urgent guitar riffs with raw, tender vocals, the soaring major scale balances the emotional charge of the lyrics.

Jessica Winter - L.O.V.E.

Certainly my number #1 earworm of the year, L.O.V.E. proves that you can create something majestic from the simplest of parts: a catchy four-on-the-floor beat, bright piano chops, warm strings and Jessica Winter’s cosy, theatrical vocal stylings.

The Last Dinner Party - Count the Ways

Transmuting the swagger of AM-era Arctic Monkeys through baroque chamber rock, The Last Dinner Party prove with their sophomore album that they weren’t one-trick ponies.

The Lemonheads - Cell Phone Blues

Their first album came out almost 40 years ago, but The Lemonheads show they can still bang off an incredibly fresh-sounding single, combining raw, catchy musicianship with gorgeous harmonies.

Michael Marcagi - Midwest Kid

Michael Marcagi caught lightning in a bottle for his EP Midwest Kid, and the title track perfectly captures the agony and despair of the heartland in this roots rock anthem.

Milk & Bone - Forgone

Atmospheric synth pop combining lush vocals and cold, mechanical noises, this song sends chills up my spine.

Momma - Rodeo

With this muscular alternative rock masterpiece. Momma channel the great female-led rock bands of the 1990s through a glossy modern indie-rock lens.

Nep - Daytona

Have I mentioned it’s been a great year for female alternate rock bangers? Nep perfectly execute the quiet-LOUD dichotomy of Pixies-inspired rock with this nostalgic paean to a once-iconic hometown in decline.

Ninajirachi - Infohazard

It was hard to choose a single from Ninajirachi’s brilliant debut album, I Love My Computer, but I landed on this track - an eerie rumination on getting exposed to a snuff film - for mostly nostalgic reasons: it just about perfectly evokes the otherworldly space trance of Mike Olson’s Guardians Of The Earth, which, as I check the dates, came out around the time Ninajirachi was born. I’d love to know if there’s a direct line of influence there.

Peel Dream Magazine - Seek and Destroy

Twee like Belle and Sebastian and effervescent like Stereolab, Peel Dream Magazine fuse motorik rhythms with turbid synths, soupy reverb, and wispy vocals for a fresh, gently swirling take on indie post-rock.

Robyn - Dopamine

This song was a slow burn for me: it took a few listens to get into it, but once it clicked, Robyn’s meditation on the duality of physical chemistry and emotional resonance launched into my top 30.

Sam Fender - Little Bit Closer

Is it awful that I think Sam Fender sounds the way I wish Bruce Springsteen sounded? He has moved from strength to strength since his 2019 debut, plumbing ever-deeper emotional hollows in his unique brand of Geordie roots rock, and this exploration of faith and disillusionment might be my favourite song of the year.

SG Lewis - Back of My Mind

SG Lewis is just so freaking good - this pulsing dance track swirls with emotion, combining warm synth plucks with twirling arpeggios and haunting vocals.

Sharon Van Etten - Idiot Box

When I was a kid, the “idiot box” was the TV to which we all glued our eyes, watching hour after hour of garbage. As Sharon Van Etten warns us in this irresistible tune, today’s idiot box lives in our pockets and replicates the 24-hour crap cycle with infinite scroll, leading us ever farther away from each other.

Wolf Alice - The Sofa

The Sofa is the comfortable emotional stasis that stops us from taking risky steps out of our comfort zone. This song combines stunning vocal harmonies with languid, ‘70s tinged indie folk in a refreshing break from Wolf Alice’s typical harder sound.

New Single: Crunch Time

2025-12-23T12:00:00Z

I have just released my second single, Crunch Time, a harder, more alternative-sounding song compared to my first single, Bots.

Single

You can listen to the song embedded on YouTube here on this page:

Streaming Links

Lyrics

Crunch time

I'll do the crime 
If it's on your dime
'Cause you’re the prime 
Crunch time 

I'll make the climb
If you feel inclined 
It has to rhyme
Crunch time 

If you need to find it
I'll dig through the grime
It's so sublime 
Crunch time

Release Cover Image

Crunch Time

New Single: Bots (Demo)

2025-12-02T12:00:00Z

So I did a thing. I started making music during the pandemic and realized I’d better start releasing it at some point, so you can now find my first single, "Bots (Demo)", on all the major music streaming platforms, released under my name, Ryan McGreal. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Single

You can listen to the song embedded in a YouTube video here on this page:

Streaming Links

Lyrics

Verse 1: 

Reply guys in your daily feed
Piling on with crazy speed
Their messages are cut-and-paste
And always in appalling taste

They always push it to extremes
With strawmen and insulting memes
Obsessed with globalist elites
But never can produce receipts 

Chorus 1:

They're all bots
They're all bots 
Never an original thought
They're only doing what they are taught 
They're just bots

They're all bots
They're all bots 
Never an original thought
Their farms keep on getting caught
They're just bots

Verse 2:

A supernormal stimulus
Pretending that it's one of us
Enragement farm in Kazakhstan
Assaulting our attention span

The algorithm never sleeps
Into your head it slowly creeps
Now are you feeling triggered yet?
They won't stop ‘til their quota's met

Chorus 2:

They're all bots
They're all bots 
Never an original thought
They're only doing what they are taught 
They're just bots 

They're all bots
They're all bots 
Never an original thought
Their farms keep on getting caught
They're just bots

Bridge:

These free speech absolutists
Are absolutely bunk
Jealousies, conspiracies
To fill your feed with junk

They're astroturfing bot farms
Engaging in bad faith
Party hacks and fossil flacks
They haunt us like a wraith

Chorus 3:

They're all bots
They're all bots 
Never an original thought
They're only doing what they are taught 
They're just bots

They're all bots
They're all bots 
Never an original thought
Their farms keep on getting caught
They're just bots

They're all bots
They're all bots 
Never an original thought
Influence sold and bought
They're just bots

They're all bots
They're all bots 
Never an original thought
What hath these demons wrought
They're just bots

Release Cover Image

Bots cover

What's Next

I am calling this a demo because the vocals were recorded on a phone so they don't sound great. I've asked Santa for a microphone for Christmas and I hope to re-record the vocals in the new year.

Kamala Harris Was a Fundamentally Strong Candidate

2025-09-25T12:00:00Z

Some personal reflections on the US 2024 presidential election now that Kamala Harris’ memoir has come out (disclosure: I haven’t read it yet):

Joe Biden lost the election for the Democrats. Kamala Harris was a fundamentally strong candidate who closed a double-digit support deficit and almost won it back, but she just didn’t have enough time to succeed.

Most candidates have years to plan a presidential run. Harris had hours. Literally hours. Yet she hit the ground running and pulled together a damned impressive campaign with a clear message. Remember how fire that first campaign ad was?

Did she make mistakes? Sure - especially in hindsight. She should have had a better answer to how she would govern differently than Biden. She should have done more media and especially more new media.

But let’s be real. Her competitor was a freaking dumpster fire of terrible news and the media still had no idea how to provide truly balanced reporting on the two campaigns, so they massively over-indexed her modest missteps.

If she had more time, she could have developed a good answer to how she would do things differently than Biden. She’d have time to sit down for more long-form podcasts. (For that matter, her running mate would have more time to practice and get reps in for the VP debate.)

Despite the impossibly short timeline and the deep intraparty agita over the whole Biden issue, Harris still managed to claw her way to a 1.5% gap in popular vote against a competitor who had been campaigning for nine straight years and had his party completely whipped.

It’s easy for commentators to saddle her with culpability for failing to close the deal by emphasizing the impact of her campaign missteps. But they were minor missteps and it is conveniently post hoc to decide they were dispositive.

I mean, the other candidate was literally raving about refugees eating people’s pets and promising to be a dictator while his running mate ordered donuts so badly that it generated an international news cycle. If campaign missteps were the problem, Trump would have been trounced.

The strongest critique is of their theory of attention. Harris optimized for avoiding saying dumb things rather than seeking maximum visibility. She leaned big on linear advertising and legacy media - though, mostly forgotten, she did high-profile podcasts like Call Me Daddy. Just not Rogan.

Would she have won if she went on Rogan? Given his politics and her lack of time to prepare for the particular quirks of Rogan’s bro culture, I can understand why they might worry that it could backfire. If she had more than 107 days to work with, she might have made a different calculation.

She was also operating at a deep deficit as the standard-bearer for the Democratic brand and narrative. Biden had abandoned the bully pulpit as president, leaving Trump and MAGA to set the cultural tone more or less uncontested for years.

As Biden’s VP, she was also effectively sidelined through a combination of the background nature of that role, as well as Biden’s steadily increasing insularity. She further missed the opportunity to raise her profile and sharpen her message in a presidential primary campaign.

When Harris abruptly became the nominee, she effectively popped up out of nowhere, as far as most Americans were concerned.

We now know that Biden should never have tried to run for re-election. Sorry, but anyone still claiming otherwise is just delusional. He could no longer perform the job, and the world finally saw this undeniably after his catastrophic debate on June 27, 2024.

Yes, he ultimately did the right thing, and yes, it is impossible for us to imagine just how excruciatingly difficult it must have been for him to give up the presidency after finally attaining his ultimate vocational dream.

Still, after the debate, he delayed for another 24 days as he tried to stave off the inevitable. Would an extra three and a half weeks have been enough for Harris to prevail? To distinguish herself, craft a sharper message, reach more voters?

We have no way of knowing, of course. We don’t live in that universe. But if starting late was good for election campaigns, I expect more candidates would start late.

Now, to be fair, if we’re running hypotheticals, we should also run the hypothetical in which Biden announced after the 2022 midterms that he wouldn’t run again and gave the party a real chance to field candidates and run a primary.

Does Harris prevail in that scenario? I have absolutely no idea. All I can say is that the crucible of such a campaign would produce a stronger, sharper, better-known candidate; and if it did turn out to be Harris, she would be running with advantages the real Harris had to campaign without.

And so I would argue that it actually supports my thesis here that Harris was a fundamentally strong candidate who simply had too many structural and temporal forces stacked against her to overcome them.

Canadians are Freaked Out - and Furious

2025-03-12T12:00:00Z

Americans pay almost no attention to Canada because why would they? Whereas Canadians pay a lot of attention to America because we have no choice. So the information asymmetry across the world’s dumbest trade war is really stark.

Not only do most Americans not pay attention to Canada, but to put it bluntly, most Americans don’t pay attention to America, either. Americans by and large are sanguine because most of them don’t actually listen to what their president says on a daily basis.

Canadians, on the other hand, are hanging on his every word. Again, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring him, since he has the power and the temperament to upend our entire country.

To any Americans reading this: your Canadian friends are rattled. We’re anxious, scared, angry, outraged, and lowkey freaked out that your leader keeps threatening to annex us.

Maybe it started out as a joke, but Trump’s army of intellectual Zambonis have formulated his rants into an actionable ideology.

We’re also royally pissed off, and we’re goddamned determined not to give up our country.

Trump is a malignant narcissist and a megalomaniac who has surrounded himself with deranged zealots and feckless sycophants. He desperately wants to be remembered as a Great Leader who did the unthinkable, expanded American territory and changed the course of history.

That makes him extremely dangerous.

We really don’t understand why so many of you decided to hand the keys of the White House this staggeringly unfit tyrant again.

Something about the price of eggs?

When I say Canadians are pissed off, I mean it. We’re furious. We’re so angry at this brazen assault on our sovereignty that most of the profound internal conflicts that normally divide us have receded to the background so we can unite against this foreign aggression and stand together in solidarity.

From the collapse of separatist sentiment in Quebec to the unlikely redemption of (double-checks notes) former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney as Captain Canuck, Canadians are setting aside their differences to fight for our country.

We’re choosing Canadian businesses to support, boycotting US imports wherever possible and picking other places to travel.

It’s not personal. We love Americans and had no beef with America before Trump launched his campaign to destroy Canada’s economy so we give up our sovereignty.

So on behalf of Canada, let me ask our American friends: please pay attention to what the man is saying and doing. If you don’t like it, do something about it. Make some noise, pressure your elected representative, join a civic organization, speak up at a town hall, join a protest.

If he gets away with doing this to Canada, you’re next and no one is safe.

Authoritarians love a war to give them the emergency power to suspend civil liberties and engage in mass arrests.

Don’t believe it can’t happen to us or to you.

We’re going to keep fighting against Trump’s invasion, however we can and however we need. But it would be much better for the world - including America - if you can figure out how to contain his lawlessness before he does something that can’t be undone.

Anything Can Happen

2025-03-11T12:00:00Z

Among Canadian football players, it is sometimes joked that CFL stands for “Can’t F—ing Lose”, thanks to the three-downs rule and the field size. The winning team can’t easily run out the clock and so fortunes can change suddenly.

Politics can sometime feel the same way. Three months ago, if you had insisted the Liberal Party of Canada had a real shot at winning the next election, most people would think you were delusional.

Yet here we are, with a new Liberal leader who can credibly campaign on an outsider’s change mandate, and a dramatic reversal of the polling trend that so recently saw the Conservatives cruising to a blowout victory.

I’m not making any firm predictions, only noting that an outcome which seemed inexorable mere weeks ago is now very much up for grabs.

Anything can happen.

In an open society where power is distributed widely, no single agency has the power to determine and enforce an outcome.

This, of course, is precisely why authoritarians hate open society.

Authoritarians hate liberal democracy, with its deliberate diffusion of powers throughout the society.

Authoritarians hate independent news media who exercise editorial freedom to report unfavourably on them. Instead, they want obedient regime media who curry favour and access with the authoritarians through fawning, dishonest coverage.

Authoritarians hate an independent judiciary that tries to enforce constitutional principles fairly, accusing the judiciary of being “activist” when it rules against them and trying to stack the judiciary with shameless loyalists.

Authoritarians hate professional, nonpartisan government employees who are dedicated to the principles of public service and loyal to uphold the law. Authoritarians seek to replace them with loyalists and sycophants who will do the authoritarian’s bidding.

Authoritarians hate competing political parties who dare seek to win power away from the authoritarian, and they abuse their power over the electoral process to stack the deck against their rivals. In extreme cases, they seek to destroy the careers of their opponents by manufacturing scandals and controversies.

Authoritarians hate independent NGOs organized by groups of citizens who believe they have a right to try and shape public policy. Authoritarians accuse such groups of being illegitimate, foreign-controlled, even treasonous, and they seek to use the power of the state to bully the groups into submission.

The goal, in an authoritarian system, is to close the space of possibilities, to exercise deterministic control over outcomes, to ensure that nothing can happen outside the authoritarian’s control.

A politics of certainty is necessarily a politics of tyranny. The only way to accrue enough power to determine outcomes is to strip-mine so much power from the rest of society that it ends up closed, illiberal and servile.

And by contrast, the only way to maintain an open, liberal, democratic society of independent citizens with agency over their own lives is by working together ensure that no authoritarian is able to consolidate and hoard all the power to himself.

Authoritarians want you to accept their absolute control. But their control is just an illusion.

When people get organized and creative, anything can happen.

Trump Turns Hanlon’s Razor on its Head

2025-03-07T12:00:00Z

It’s time to flip Hanlon’s Razor on its head.

Hanlon’s Razor states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” But in the case of Trump, we need to assume the opposite: “Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.”

When Trump ranted in his recent address to Congress about the NIH funding research to make mice transgender, I figured it was BS because almost everything he says is BS.

And that was an easy call, because, as those quaint fact-checkers in the legacy news media quickly observed, the research was actually about making mice transgenic, ie. genetically modifying them to do things like test cancer treatments.

I am seeing lots of takes mocking the stupidity of the goons behind this ridiculous error. And far be it from me to get in the way of someone calling out the stupidity of horrible people doing stupid things.

But I do think focusing on how stupid it is misses a larger point: it may indeed be stupid, but more importantly, it’s malicious.

I’m not at all convinced that it is stupidity leading them to the kind of error that mistakes transgenic with transgender.

In fact I think it’s at least as likely that their conflation was deliberate - or at the very least indifferent.

The DOGE bags and MAGA hacks are looking for anything that they can sell as a “corrupt” or “woke” line item they have found in the budget, regardless of whether it’s real or even particularly credible.

They know they control the media narrative and that in the minds of their followers, an assertion becomes true by the act of asserting it. It’s an exercise of the power to shape reality.

Trump and his enablers know their base will never question them or go looking for independent verification. They will accept it happily, because it reinforces what they already want to believe.

But the obvious stupidity also plays another malicious role: The people in Trump’s orbit who know it’s BS are forced into a choice. They can go along with the BS to show their loyalty, give up another slice of their dignity and further shut the door on ever breaking free.

Or they can say something about it and incur the wrath of MAGA.

The Trump sycophants who know it’s BS have allowed themselves to become prisoners of their own willingness to sacrifice their principles to advance their ambition.

And they know, deep in their hearts, that it still isn’t enough to secure their place: that they are one misstep, one careless eye roll, one capricious turn of the king’s mood, away from being thrown out the window anyway.

They live in terror and are desperate to show their loyalty so they can hang on a little longer. (And no, I’m not asking you to feel sympathy for them.)

So the more absurd a claim is, the more effectively it serves as a loyalty test that locks in the fealty of people who absolutely know better.

It’s why there are formerly normal people today insisting with a straight face that Canada is a rogue nation run by Mexican drug cartels that needs to be disciplined and then annexed.

That’s stupid. But more to the point, it’s deeply, fundamentally malicious.

And so Hanlon’s Razor needs to be flipped upside-down when it comes to anything Trump. The stupidity must be understood as being in service to the malice.

One Lesson the Centre-Left Needs to Learn from the Right

2025-03-06T12:00:00Z

Are you familiar with the story of the ceramics teacher who split their class into two groups? One group would be graded on the quality of one perfect piece, while the other group would be graded on the sheer quantity of pieces they made.

The surprise twist is that the second group actually made the best quality pieces, because they made so many that they got really good at it, while the first group spent all their time trying to make one perfect piece and didn’t hone their skills through trial and error.

The modern right are like the second group, rapidly spraying out a firehouse of one hare-brained, half-baked idea after another to see what resonates and what sticks.

It’s a cacophony of conflicting and downright bizarre stuff and most of it is objectively bullshit. But through sheer law of averages, at least some of the stunts do happen to catch on, and they build momentum and get picked up and repeated a bunch of times and modified and tweaked and fine-tuned along the way and gradually add up to something loosely and superficially resembling a campaign.

All the constant heat and noise and outrage and endless variation means they capture a lot of public attention, including crucially from people who don’t pay attention to politics as such.

In contrast, the centre-left are like the first group, trying to figure out how to make one perfect piece of ceramic that will make the judges swoon, and unsurprisingly they’re not making any headway.

I’m not suggesting the centre-left abandon the idea of making sense. But they would benefit from adopting a culture of rapid prototyping to learn what resonates, what “breaks through” to people who don’t follow politics, and start to develop some skill in navigating the new attention economy.

It’s excruciating watching Democrats flail around, unsure of how to respond to Trump and waiting for someone to come along and provide a unified, poll-tested message they can align around.

It’s time for everything everywhere all at once. Don’t worry about messages that fall flat, just learn and move on to the next thing. Get some reps in, build muscle - and create space for the next generational communications talents who are out there right now, growing and incubating for the upcoming campaign to fight for what remains of liberal democracy.

It’s Not Even Good Coding Practice

2025-02-08T12:00:00Z

I think the story Elon Musk is telling himself and his fanboys about what he’s doing is that he’s cutting the cruft out of the codebase of the US government to make it more streamlined and effective.

As he says, he thinks regulations should be “default gone. Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”

I understand this impulse. I’ve done something similar myself at times with a piece of functionality when no one has any idea who uses it. Turn it off and wait to see if anyone squawks.

There are almost certainly some aspects of the US government that fall into this category. And I guess one way to find out what is really needed is to delete all of it and wait to see what happens.

But as any experienced, responsible developer knows, just because you don’t understand the point of a piece of code, that doesn’t mean it’s pointless.

This is especially salient in the set of federal government policies, where a great many of the programs and regulations were written in blood after a disaster.

The responsible way to refactor a big, messy, complicated codebase that has evolved by accretion over a long period of time is to:

(1) Carefully review and document your requirements so you understand what the code must do.

(2) Write a comprehensive test suite that checks all the items of functionality you identified.

(3) Move your code into a version control system so you can keep track of (and if necessary roll back) your changes.

(4) Set up a development environment that mimics the production environment where you can test changes before deploying them into production.

(5) Run your test suite on your code in dev after every change to make sure you didn’t break anything.

(6) Deploy your changes to production once they’ve been tested and pass every test.

Needless to say, the DOGE script kiddies breaking into departments, hijacking their code and reportedly pushing hot fixes into live production systems aren’t doing any of that.

When you wholesale shut down a government program because you are ideologically inclined not see the point of it, suddenly you may find that airplanes are falling out of the sky, veterans can’t get healthcare, farm produce rots in a warehouse while children starve.

Suddenly there’s a new global pandemic of Ebola and a new global pandemic of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. AIDS drugs stop working. The historic mission to cure cancer grinds to a halt.

It’s reckless and unprofessional. It’s negligent and lawless. It’s unconstitutional and unconscionable. It’s hypocritical projection from a gang of thugs who falsely accused their political opponents of acting unilaterally without legal authority.

It is a shameless, sociopathic power grab. It is cruelty for cruelty’s sake.

And on top of all of that, it’s not even good software development practice, which is supposed to be the thing they’re good at.

Try Additive Approach to Climate Policy

2025-01-19T12:00:00Z

Here’s a proposed analogy for how we might try to think about moving to a net-zero carbon economy: an additive approach works better than a subtractive approach.

I’ve been an on-and-off vegetarian for around 30 years (these days my diet is plant-based but not exclusively). When I started, I didn’t do it by cutting out meat dishes.

I did it by adding more and more vegetarian dishes until the meat dishes were all displaced from my diet. I never felt like I was giving something up - I felt like I was gaining something.

It was an additive approach, not subtractive. It felt like an expansion of my options, not a sacrifice.

So what’s my analogy to the climate crisis? I increasingly find myself thinking we should try taking a more additive approach to decarbonizing our economy.

For years I have felt that a consumer carbon price was inadequate but at least it’s something. It’s actually a classically conservative approach: use price signals in the market to incentivize a shift in demand toward lower-carbon consume goods.

And I thought the Liberals were smart to make it revenue-neutral and paid back as a flat rebate. That way, the more you reduce emissions in your consumer spending, the bigger net benefit you get to keep.

Unfortunately, they did a piss-poor job of explaining the policy to Canadians. In fact, they pretty much entirely ceded to the Conservatives, who successfully (and shamelessly) misrepresented it as a net cost when it’s actually a net benefit to the overwhelming majority of Canadians.

Carbon pricing is an economically efficient policy tool, but approximately half of Canadians have been convinced to despise it, and basically no one in politics is coming to its defence any more.

In any case, carbon pricing alone is not enough to move us to a low-carbon economy. For one thing, a lot of the consumer durables that lock in higher or lower future carbon emissions are manufactured in other countries, so shifts in Canadian consumer demand have less impact on market offerings.

A tiny number of corporations are directly responsible for most global carbon emissions. Squeezing consumers as a way of incentivizing demand for lower-GHG market offerings is one way to drive down emissions, but it subjectively feels both painful and futile to individuals.

And individuals vote.

As a corollary, the stick-first approach makes it easy and appealing for opportunistic politicians to demagogue against carbon pricing, since simple messaging can tap into near-universal public dislike of taxes - even though wanting to avoid paying the carbon tax is precisely the point.

In contrast, the Biden administration’s signature policy achievement, the Inflation Reduction Act, uses public policy and public investment to drive new low-emissions technologies on an industrial scale, addressing the climate crisis on the supply side rather than the demand side.

It has already driven so much new industrial investment and job creation - especially in red states - that it is quite likely to survive the incoming administration in at least some form.

If a Canadian political party came forward with an IRA-style approach to climate policy, I would embrace it enthusiastically - especially if it was coupled with permitting reform to stop environmental laws from being abused to block environmentally-positive investments.

Consumer carbon pricing is almost certainly DOA by the time our next federal election is over (if not sooner). That can be a source of despair, or it can be an occasion to try a new, bold policy that feels additive rather than subtractive.