Thursday, February 21, 2019

Bitumen Blues on the Hill


The white nationalist rally masquerading as a pro-pipeline truckers' protest clogging the streets of Ottawa is, well, boneheaded.

They seem to have lost sight of the massive wildfire that nearly consumed their cherished Fort Mac and the climate change that turned the boreal forest into tinder. They don't care. All they're concerned about is fossil fuel, especially the highest carbon ersatz petroleum, bitumen.

It's clear that most climate change, especially in the northern hemisphere, is driven by the rapidly warming Arctic. Most of that is caused by the loss of snow, sea ice and the retreating Greenland ice cap. And what is causing the loss of all that reflective ice and snow? A lot of it is caused by black carbon being carried into the far north.

For a while it was thought that wildfires in the northern forests and tundra were the main culprits. That was wrong. New research has discovered that the main source of black carbon across the Arctic is fossil fuels.

The five-year study to uncover sources of black carbon was done at five remote sites around the Arctic and is published in the journal Science Advances. 
The Baylor team used radiocarbon to determine fossil and biomass burning contributions to black carbon in Barrow, Alaska, while their collaborators used the same technique for sites in Russia, Canada, Sweden and Norway.
You could say that trying to flood world markets with dirt cheap, high-carbon bitumen is like cutting our own throats. You could say that. Really, you could.

21 comments:

Toby said...

Mound, have you picked up any hints that someone is financing the "truckers' protest"? Are there hidden interests pumping this?

The Mound of Sound said...


I expect someone is picking up the tab, Toby, but I've no idea who.

Anonymous said...

You're damn right it's a white nationalist rally. The answer to 1984 is 1933. Catch you on the other side, boomer.

Jay Farquharson said...

Dave at The Alberta Blog pointed out that the Edmonton Protest was also timed for Scheer,

That the protest cost the truckers at least $70k,

$2k each,

Which if there was any coordination with Scheer, is a Campaign Contribution, $500 over the max allowance for both personal and Corporate contributions.

So the Nazi Convoy to Ottawa is worth how much as a campaign contribution?

Anonymous said...

There are enough White Nationalist in Alberta to pay for these truckers 100 times over. Anyong

Anonymous said...

Look at all the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere without good reason.. Anyong

the salamander said...

.. the 'story' I dig out of the noise is.. one Glen Carrick managed a yellow vest gofundme campaign. Some 130 thou was raised.. off they went, various stops. Finally, Alberttawa.. uh Ottawa was reached.. where 300 imcluding Andrew Scheer, Michel Bernier and Faith Goldy spoke.. Great .. Then Glen Carrick disappeared with the $$.. truckers short of cash or credit are stuck in Ottawa.. middle class multimillionaires Scheer and Bernier who could have gotten the whole caravan home.. forgot their chequebooks but limo'd off to sumptuous dinners & CTV or CBC hits, upper crust White Nationalass pauper Faith whined in her thin gruel.. so cruel .. the eternal flame flickered not a bit, twas a coldass Canadian night followed.. the leftover diesels went silent.. out of fuel

Jay Farquharson said...

Yellow Vests Canada Exposed links to a news story that a bunch of the “protesters” were driving Company trucks, on Company time, and the Company dime,

and were a bit shocked to discover they had joined up with the Nazi’s.

The Mound of Sound said...

These scumbags and their Tory patrons can all go to hell as far as I'm concerned. The good thing is that they're smoking out Scheer and company for the racist-coddlers they are. God, old Dief must be spinning in his grave.

Anonymous said...

Baylor University. That's in Texas. Seems they know a lot about oil and its hydrocarbons being from there.

Is that a threat, internet tough guy anon 10:42?


mr perfect

Purple library guy said...

Well, speaking as a radical leftist, I for one am quite stoked that these hard right wingers have embraced socialism. I mean, look at their demands! It's as far as you can get from laissez faire or letting the "market" decide. Their industry is already subsidized up the wazoo and the government they are protesting has bent over backwards so far as to put its head up . . . uncomfortable places . . . to try to get regulatory issues out of the tar sands' way. But that is apparently not good enough--as far as I can tell they want nothing less than for the government to intervene in the economy as hard as it takes to guarantee their jobs.

It goes beyond even Keynesianism. Keynes advocated that the government become the employer of last resort in hard times, as a countercyclical stimulus. These guys want the government to guarantee their high wage employment during the high end of the economic cycle at a time of low unemployment.

This is marvellous! I too am entirely enthusiastic about the idea of government guaranteeing employment. Just, I want it to be employment for everyone, not just a few upper middle class racist white guys, and I'd prefer it be employment doing things that are good for the planet, not things that are destroying it. But surely that's not a huge policy difference!

Anonymous said...

Calling these yellow-vest protesters racists and White supremacists is itself an act of xenophobia. I.e., a stereotypical rush-to-judgment and rush to self-righteous hatred based on bigotry.

A person can be against open-border immigration-anarchy and not be a racist. Only a fanatic would declare anyone opposed to a radical and reckless policy an extremist.

In a democracy, people take different positions on issues. Then the majority works its way to some middle-ground solution.

Of course, conservatives who want Big Government to ram pipelines down people's throats are hypocrites. It's up to Alberta to make deals to get their bitumen to market. It's really a provincial rights matter.

Anonymous said...

Carbon taxes are a figleaf of fake virtue that only benefit oligarchs. Tax the West and offshore GHG-intensive industry to the unregulated East. Then cut corporate taxes to keep the carbon tax "revenue neutral."

It's an abomination that does nothing to slow emissions growth – let alone reduce emissions putting them on a path to zero.

IMO, people who support GHG-emission shell games are themselves climate-science deniers.

The best solution I have found is based on carbon tariffs and fair-managed trade.

Big trade blocs like the EU could really hit the polluters where it hurts by taxing dirty-energy imports. Kill off half their market access. That way there are no leaks in the system.

Of course, Euro-oligarchs and Anglo-oligarchs don't give a crap about global warming. They only care about their filthy pathetic dynasties.

They also only care about polarizing the debate. When the people are at each others throats they rule from above the fray of democracy, with absolute power.

BTW, want to talk Keynes? When we get back post-war levels of full employment, real wages and 7% GDP growth, then we have a democratic Keynesian mixed-market economy.

Free-trade globalization has been a 50-year war on Keynesian economics – as well as People of Color, workers and the middle class.

Anonymous said...

Don't you see which way the wind is blowing old timer? The kids are alt right and your time is almost up. Your multicultural experiment has failed and you damned us to hell. Can't wait til you boomers take a dirt nap.

The Mound of Sound said...


Thanks for that, Anon 7:18. I'm glad you think "the kids are all right" because I know better. They're not which you'll realize in the not distant future. I've got a great idea of what's coming your way and it's your dirt nap, not mine, that should be your focus. Your clock is also running, you fool, only it's faster than mine. "The kids are all right" - yeah, that was The Who, wasn't it?

Anonymous said...

I think kids of all ages should act more like adults. Less reactionary and vicious. More moderate and intelligent.

I've followed politics for 30 years and I've never seen anything like what's going on today.

People think all they have to do is jump on some bandwagon to be on the "right side of history." Just hop right on up on your very own high-moral horse and earn easy karma by sneering down at all the evil-doers below.

They're so righteous and true they could put their political enemies in concentration camps and still have plenty left in the bank! Medieval Times!

rumleyfips said...

The trucker say 300 in Ottawa, but the tv shots weren't very impressive. Especially when we saw that some of this ' crowd ' claimed by the diesel dorks were actually anti-pipeline protesters.

Purple library guy said...

Anonymous 3:37 It's true, a person can be against "open-border immigration-anarchy" and not be a racist. You know, in theory. But that's not really relevant to the current situation. In actual fact, everyone who thinks there currently is "open-border immigration-anarchy" to be against, is a racist looking for a problem they can solve with racism. It acts as an excuse, and for some of them lets them tell themselves that it's all about the problem they're solving and so they're not racists. But the only way to believe that's the current situation is if you really want that to be the current situation so you can stomp on some brown people.

Virtually none of Canada's current problems have anything to do with immigration. Full stop. Really, there's nothing. Yes, many immigrants have jobs--but immigrants with jobs generate demand, which generates jobs. They're not "stealing" other people's jobs; the jobs they do are balanced by the jobs they create. It's just like any other form of population growth--more people produce more and consume more, so if the economy was working before the population increase it will be working after. Sure, huge levels of immigration all at once can create dislocations . . . but that happened to Greece and Italy, it didn't happen to Canada. Didn't even really happen to the United States--oddly, the time they started getting paranoid was precisely when overall immigration from Latin America was declining. Canada's immigration levels have been totally normal for ages; I'm sure there are plenty of arguments for tweaking them in one way or another, but a crisis of any sort there ain't. It's a fantasy.

To the extent that there are economic problems in Canada related to immigration, they are because labour laws are too weak and too poorly enforced, and union density is too low. That is, the ability of employers to push immigrant wages down tends to depress wages for everyone and also reduces the immigrants' effective demand so they don't help drive the economy as much. But for the powers that be, that's the whole point, so if you want it changed, vote for leftist parties or demonstrate against bad labour laws, not against immigration.

I suppose it's also the case that if Canada has an unbalanced economy and produces very little of its own goods but rather subsists on exporting finite resources with no value added, then population increase whether from immigration or having kids will reduce the average wealth available to individual Canadians, as the same amount of resource revenue is divided among more people. More fool us for getting involved in free trade schemes that export our jobs, instead of keeping our economy diverse. Well, more diverse--Canada's economy was never truly balanced, but we had much more manufacturing and, in general, internal production than we do now. There used to be a Canadian textile and clothing industry, for instance, so more Canadians would have bought more Canadian made garments and grown the industry, creating jobs; now it means Canadians buy more garments imported from Bangladesh.

But again, the problem there is not immigration, it is "free trade". If you wanna demonstrate against something, demonstrate against free trade, not immigrants.

Finally, the major problem in Canada and around the world (is climate change actually, but aside from that) is rapidly growing inequality. We are all more insecure and poorer because Jeff Bezos and the Koch creeps and Carlos Slim and Jack Ma and Wang Jianlin are richer. The money is being sucked away from us to them. And here it is glaringly obvious that immigrants, particularly the ones that the right wingers complain about, are in no way the problem. Because, duh, they ain't got no money! They can't be the ones siphoning your dough away, if they were they'd have some!

Anonymous said...

"You know, in theory. But that's not really relevant to the current situation. In actual fact, everyone who thinks there currently is "open-border immigration-anarchy" to be against, is a racist looking for a problem they can solve with racism."

JFK-neoprogs remind me of Christian Fundamentalists. I have a saying about them: they look for devils under every rock and behind every tree and inside every home – except their own. They are very paranoid thinking people who are different in belief are evil-doers controlled by Satan.

Since neoprogs believe in the void, and are driven by the same lizard-brain dualism and vicious morality, they have to invent a god of evil to hate and persecute its minions. And that is the evil god of Racism. (It's the best they could come up with.)

Of course, you want to talk "Whiteness" and "White privilege", all the Establishment-university hippies are children of the High Born and their haughty-mediocre lapdogs.

All the systemic racism occurs in Big Liberal Cities which are segregated like Apartheid South Africa. They filter out People of Color to inner-city ghettos they starve of funding for infrastructure and education. They consider them the servant class the world over! The place is a giant racist Nazi concentration camp!

And it's free-trade globalization that brings it. It's two parts: outsource the labor (and GHG emissions) moving factories out the door wholesale! Then in-source the labor you can't (or don't want to) outsource.

The Anglo Deep State spread war and chaos across the Middle East, Africa and the Americas. All for a hell of a deal on resources and pennies-on-the-dollar labor. Cha-ching!

Good times until The Donald came to town.

They should've listened to Kenny Rogers and not have counted their chips while they were still sitting at the table. Then they wouldn't be so livid over The Donald winning back some big fat stacks for the people.

HRC spilled the beans in a leaked speech to bankers: the end game is hemispheric open borders. It's about creating a global oligarchy. Something right out of the pages of '1984'!

Purple library guy said...

Uhhhh . . . I'd argue with that except you didn't make any arguments, you just asserted a bunch of bizarro-world shit without backing any of it up. You're going a long way to avoid confronting the basic fact: There is no immigration crisis in Canada. There aren't even any data points one could cling to in imagining one--no caravans crossing the border, nothing. So, anyone who believes there is one has to be either amazingly easy to fool, or they have to want to believe it--i.e. they have to be racist. And they have to be wannabe Americans; all the propaganda on this is basically American stuff cut and pasted.

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't say there's an immigration crisis in Canada.

Of course, if Canada was a democracy, it would be up to the people to decide what levels of immigration they are comfortable with. I'd say immigration levels are higher than what's comfortable for a lot of people.

There's also the problem of importing Temporary Foreign Workers. The oligarchs always finds MOAR ways to weasel MOAR in. To cut down on labor costs. Drive down labor costs for Canadian workers they can't replace.

China wants free trade with Canada. It comes with them buying a lot of Canadian resource corps and making huge new investments in resource extraction. But then they want to bring in their own workers on the cheap.

(Normally a person gets paid $150k/y for getting stuck out in the middle of nowhere sending checks back to the family. But Chinese peasants will take a lot less!)

But America, on the other hand, they've had a border crisis (of sorts) for decades. Big City Liberals like Latinos. They make good maids. Great nannies for blue-blood little bastards.

They're stocks also get a bump when illegals are working the factories. And when gang violence flares up in their inner-city concentration camps, private-prison-sweatshop stocks turn all that manic energy into an economic miracle!

Talk about insourcing and outsourcing! These free-trading neoliberal weasels have managed to bring back slavery – both at home and abroad!

"The fiend is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man."