It's Europe Calling, Justin. You Might Want to Take This. No? Okay.

The EU elections showed that voters are abandoning old school politics and the same old, same old. Small wonder. Right wing populists appear to be the big winners but also rising is the Green Party.

People are worried. They can see what's coming. They can feel what has already arrived.

In Canada we have two "same old" parties. The Conservatives are the Party of Darkness when it comes to climate change. They're the ultimate in Petro-Pimps and they're scrambling to staunch an exodus of radical rightwing populists to Bernier. However, not far behind, is the modern shell of the once great Liberal Party who have also chosen the petro-state over the future of Canada even as they pay unconvincing lip service to the climate crisis.

Make no mistake. Today's LPC is not the party of Laurier, St. Laurent, Pearson or the real Trudeau, Pierre, just as today's Republican Party has nothing to do with the 'party of Lincoln.'

People can sense weakness. They can smell fear. And there's plenty of both emanating from the Liberal leadership. Justin has made his bed and he's sharing it with the petro-economy. "No one would find 173 billion barrels of oil and just leave it there." Even if that was true it was an incredibly stupid thing to say and an even dumber mantra around which to forge a government.

We thought Trudeau had vision from his campaign rhetoric in 2015. He was positively inspirational coming off nearly a decade of the Harper government. Only he wasted no time in reneging on those grand promises much like a snake sheds its skin. The Liberal Party faithful have been straining to downplay that ever since but, today, the best thing they have going for themselves is Andrew Scheer and the grim prospect of another Tory government. That speaks to just how hollow the Liberals have become. "Vote for Us, We're Not Him." Well, in a lot of respects you're pretty close.

The world is changing - rapidly, dangerously and, those determined not to see it excepted, we all know it. We can see where we're headed and what that means for our young people, our grandkids and the children they will have. Greta Thunberg and her army of followers remind us that parties like Canada's Conservatives and Liberals are not on their side. You have to dig pretty deep to deny that.

The world has been given a very narrow time frame to try to avert catastrophic climate change. We have to cut carbon emissions by half by 2030. Andrew Scheer and Justin Trudeau will not even acknowledge that much less commit to the sort of changes we would need to meet that obligation. And, yes, it is an obligation. Any genuine progressive would understand that, Liberals not so much.

The current government has fallen further and further behind even meeting Stephen Harper's emissions cuts targets, even as climate change has worsened considerably.  That's not progress. That's a retreat, a capitulation. Please, don't give me any of that nonsense about minuscule, gestural carbon tax.

The great Liberal leaders of the past worked to make Canada a better place, a greater nation. That vision disappeared from the party well before Justin Trudeau showed up.

Donald Trump, Viktor Orban and many others show what happens when governments fail to respond to popular discontent. These people are right there in the wings just waiting to pounce. They take that discontent, the fuel, and put the match of fear and anger to it. It works. It won't last long. Climate change is worsening. It's now a climate crisis. Climate deniers like Trump and Orban can't outrun it.

You may have noticed that the American mid-west is entering its second week of continuous severe weather events - high winds, heavy flooding rains, tornadoes. In large swathes of America's bread basket this year's crop is in peril.  In the west, the wildfire season is here, perhaps fittingly hitting Alberta hardest. Meanwhile their newly minted premier dismisses climate change as the "flavour of the month." That is a man holding his province and his people hostage to a dead end ideology.  Well, they chose him, they deserve no better. Canada, however, does deserve better. 'Same old, same old' has run its course.

Two weeks ago the Washington Post reported that temperatures in the Russian Arctic had hit 84 degrees F.  while atmospheric carbon dioxide hit 415 ppm. for the first time in human history. The next four years are predicted to be unduly hot which takes on a strange context given that the past many years have been record setting. I think that means we're in for "really, really hot weather."

Climate departure, now sometimes called "climate catastrophe" is predicted to begin setting in around 2023.  Back in 2013 Camilo Mora's climate team at the University of Hawaii released a paper on this troubling phenomenon that will hammer economies in affected nations and likely trigger mass migrations.  In the ensuing three years other studies corroborated what's coming.

According to this study, the tropics, which are the near-equatorial region of this planet that’s almost 100% impoverished, and that has thus contributed virtually nothing to global warming, will begin the period of permanent catastrophe starting in approximately 2020; but the (cooler) moderate-latitude countries, such as in North America and Europe, will begin this catastrophic period in or around 2047.

This isn’t to say that things won’t continue to get worse after then; it’s only to say that this is, as the article will be titled, “The projected timing of climate departure from recent variability.”
This landmark article was co-authored by a team of 14 climate-scientists. It says: “Unprecedented climates will occur earliest in the tropics and among low-income countries.” It explains that the reason for this is that the countries near the equator have far less variability in their weather than do the moderate-climate countries, and so the species that constitute the ecosystems there cannot tolerate temperatures outside their narrow range, which has existed within that narrow range for thousands of years. Consequently, species-extinctions will soar there much faster and earlier than here. The existing impoverished economies, within around 2,500 miles of the equator (where average per-capita incomes are less than 10% of the average in the moderate-latitude countries such as ours), will become unlivable.

This study notes the “obvious disparity between those who benefit from the process leading to climate change and those who will have to pay for most of the environmental and social costs.” Of course, “those who benefit from the process leading to climate change” are the oil companies, and the coal companies, and the natural gas companies, and the pipeline and service companies, and ultimately their owners: especially the aristocratic families who control them. It would be false to assume that any poor people, even in countries such as the United States, will benefit from continuation of “the process leading to climate change.” However, some of the chief financial backers of the Republican Party and of other conservative political parties in the moderate-latitude countries benefit enormously from that “process.” Thus, many people who will not benefit from climate change end up voting for climate change; and, of course, their children and subsequent descendants will suffer greatly from their votes.

The Colombia-born Dr. Mora, in an interview with Yale360,  tried to make the people of the developed world, that's us, understand  what we're doing to the weakest and most vulnerable people.

I grew up in a country where there has been a long history of violence. We have been in war for 50 years, and one thing people don’t realize is what it means to be in a place where anyone can get shot at any moment, where people are starved to death, where there is not enough food to feed people. In the first world, people don’t know how rich they are, and they don’t realize what is happening in the rest of the world. And for me that’s a driving force. It’s scary to think about climate change because when we start damaging physical systems and the carrying capacity of physical systems to produce food, people will react to this in a terrible way. I’m telling you, I have seen it in my own country. It’s very negative the way in which people react to hunger. And that’s one of the things that’s most frightening to me with this large-scale analysis — the fact that I know we’re on our way to some very disturbing scenarios if we go down this pathway of damaging physical systems in the ways that we are today.

We need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 for us, not for them. Those little brown people with their already precarious lives and their devastated homelands, they're hooped.  And yet Liberals and Tories alike think it's entirely reasonable to flood world markets with high-carbon, high-cost, low value bitumen. That's what it means to be a Liberal on the cusp of this next decade.

We're just a few months away from choosing our next government. It will pit Andrew Scheer, a man whose promises, odious as they are, can probably be trusted versus the current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, a man who has shown his solemn promises to be thoroughly unreliable. Great choice.

This year will be our last chance to make a difference. Four years from now, catastrophic climate change will be locked in.

What Are We To Make of Justin Trudeau?

To a few, he's the best person ever, a truly decent man and a great prime minister. To a different few, he's the worst person ever, utterly corrupt, even venal.

I don't believe either of them. He is flawed. He is not to be trusted. He'll break his promises without breaking a sweat. Not everyone can lie so effortlessly. That doesn't mean he's the worst person ever. That doesn't quite reach the level of corrupt. He could be corrupt but I've yet to see the proof of it.

I don't think he's a good prime minister, not even close. Leaders of other governments - Scotland, Wales, the United Kingdom - have declared a state of emergency over climate change. It's not like there's any shortage of evidence that this emergency does exist or that it's extremely dire and in urgent need of action. Only we're not declaring an emergency or taking any emergency measures to deal with it.

When it comes to the drivers of climate change - greenhouse gas emissions - we're still slackers. Canada with our very modest population still stands in the top ten nations for overall GHG emissions and we're in the top three for per capita emissions. That puts a powerful onus on us to implement extraordinary measures to curb our emissions. This time we are not the good guys.

The UN's IPCC has given us the prescription. The nations of the world must cut GHG emissions by 50 per cent by 2030.  Major emitters that we are, we're not even acknowledging that injunction. Our emissions are actually going up, especially now that we've found the bitumen barons to be grossly underestimating their emissions. 50 X 2030 - that's for losers, not Canada, but we will throw in a little carbon tax for appearances.

There's a looming existential threat, a major force in what some warn will be a sixth mass extinction, and we're thumbing our nose at it. Tell me, what kind of leader does that? Full points if you said "ours."

So whether he's corrupt or not isn't that important to me. He's not much of a leader. The guy who's gunning for his job will plainly be worse but when you're talking about unaddressed existential threats the distinction between them narrows quite a bit.

It's no excuse to claim that answering the call is not politically feasible. That doesn't matter. When the threat is existential you're obliged to try. If you fail and lose that doesn't matter. You must try and then hand the reins to the next guy from him or her to try. Eventually one of you will succeed and whether that requires five or even ten leaders to fall that's not important, not compared to what's at stake.

One thing I do realize is that I don't want to see either the Liberals or the Conservatives take another "false majority." They can't be trusted with the power of majority government. Both sides believe that winning the support of slightly less than two voters out of five gives them a magical mandate to do whatever in hell they choose but a false majority is a false democracy. I don't want someone incapable of getting even close to a majority of the electorate thinking they have the right to make fundamental changes to our country. That's oppressive. It's anti-democratic. And, when that almost two out of five victory is gained on the back of a litany of false promises never fulfilled, it's that much worse. You're not governing with the informed consent of the public. You're governing with the misled consent of a minority of the public.

The petro lobby is alive and well within the Liberal and Conservative parties. That's why they won't declare a state of emergency. It's why they balk at even attempting to cut our emissions by half by 2030. That's how they betray our nation, our people, and our future generations.

I don't know if Justin has obstructed justice. I don't know if he's corrupt. I know he's not as decent as his more ardent supporters claim, not remotely.

This October I hope for a weak minority government with the Greens winning enough seats that they can force the next government to respond to this incredibly dangerous threat. Whether that's Justin or some new Liberal face or Andrew Scheer, we can't afford to give them much slack.

Young People, Climate Change, Quebec

Have our atrophied old school political parties misjudged the issue of climate change? I think so. The worst part is that they haven't merely shot themselves in the foot. They were pointing that gun considerably higher.

This isn't about Paul Manly and the Green's by-election win yesterday in Nanaimo-Ladysmith. It's about much more than that, a generational thing that may cost the old school parties dearly in years to come. It's about students. Quebec students. It's about climate change. And, sure, it's about generational justice.

A Quebec high school French exam question that asked students about adapting to climate change has drawn a torrent of online criticism, as teens used memes and videos to denounce what they see as government inaction on climate issues. 

The question on last week’s ministry exam for Grade 11 students asked: “Can we adapt to climate change?” 

It quickly drew the ire of students like 17-year-old Francis Claude, who feels the way the question was phrased suggests the government has accepted climate change. 

“It’s like they want to abandon the fight against climate change, and just make do and adapt,” said Claude, whose Facebook group dedicated to the exam has exploded to almost 37,000 members in recent days. 

Claude said the members of his generation are committed to fighting environmental destruction, not adapting to it.

What's expedient to the old-before-their-time pols like Justin and Chuckles is seen much differently by our young people. It's their future being compromised by a gaggle of political hacks. It's the whole Greta Thunberg thing.

Trudeau is selling out their generation. They're not addled, unlike Liberal supporters who think a carbon tax at this horrible moment is meaningful, some great green step forward. These young people, they're clued in. They pay attention because, in many ways, we're deciding their fate twenty, thirty, forty years down the road and we're making those calls based on our interests, not theirs.

Trudeau is bad. Scheer will, if he gets the chance, be far worse. Scheer will do the nihilistic bidding of his posse - Kenney, Moe, Pallister and Ford and all the boys in Big Oil's boardrooms.

But "lousy" versus "even worse" isn't much of a choice, is it. And if those people are relieving themselves on your future maybe you just want rid of the lot.

We get the same warnings the kids get. We see the same stories in the papers, on TV. Only they don't mean as much to us, the "not just yet" generations. To the kids those reports and all those studies have a decidedly dystopian tinge while it's all "don't worry, be happy" from their elders, the Higher Purpose Persons like Justin and Andy and even Jagmeet.

Why shouldn't they get pissed off? Their needs, the real life and death stuff, isn't reflected in our decisions. Trudeau's pipeline is a repudiation of their lives twenty, thirty, forty years from now when we'll be enjoying a restful dirt nap as they curse our memory.

This is possibly, even probably, the decisive election year. After this year the door will close on a lot of opportunities to implement urgent initiatives. How many of these rubbish parties will present credible plans to slash Canada's greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030 and then to decarbonize our society and our economy by 2050? After the phenomenal disappointment of Justin Trudeau how are young people to trust them?

They're going to have to sacrifice. We're already seeing to that. But it's compromising their future that we support, not sacrificing today to give them a fair shake, a less degraded future, that we'll endorse.

“What’s the point of studying for a future we’re not going to have?” said Claude, who attends Mont-Ste-Anne School in Beaupre, 40 kilometres northeast of Quebec City. 

Claude said he started the Facebook group so students could exchange study tips and share jokes and memes about the exam process. But it has now morphed into a sort of environmental forum, where students direct their anger at the government and its perceived inaction.

Good luck to those kids. They'll need it. We'll see they need every scrap of luck they can muster.

White Supremacy Flourishes When Politicians Flirt With Scum.

Max Boot has a lesson for all of us but especially for those who have developed a sudden fondness for Andrew Scheer.  The American conservative writer warns it's no longer acceptable for our political leaders and some media outlets to play under-the-table footsie with white nationalists and white supremacists. It's time to recognize those groups are as dangerous to civil society, more dangerous, than any threat we face from Islamic terrorists.

The cycle of hatred is endless and now global. Extremism flows across the Internet to all corners of the world, providing demented individuals an excuse for snuffing out the lives of others. We know this; that is why we have been fighting a war on terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001. But our focus has been one-sided: We fight Islamist terrorism while slighting the dangers of white-supremacist terrorism. The Anti-Defamation League reports that between 2009 and 2018, 73 percent of extremist killings in America were carried out by white supremacists. Yet, only 900 out of 5,000 open FBI investigations into terrorism are focused on domestic terrorists and the Department of Homeland Security office charged with countering domestic extremism has been “gutted.”

...There are people in positions of power and influence in this country who sympathize with white nationalists and share their concerns. Anti-Semitism pervades both the left and right. President Trump condemned the Poway attack, but the day before, he again defended the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Trump’s mendacious claim was that the protesters were simply defending a statue of Robert E. Lee — as if it’s commendable to pay tribute to a general who fought to preserve slavery. 

Trump’s hate-mongering is powerfully amplified by America’s most watched cable network. Last year, Laura Ingraham said on Fox News Channel: “The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like.” Her colleague Tucker Carlson complained that immigrants make “our own country poor and dirtier and more divided.” Such sentiments are disturbingly similar to those posted on the Internet by the Christchurch shooter and shared by the attackers in Pittsburgh and Poway. Indeed, a Fox News reporter, in an internal email, called out two colleagues for “sounding like a White Supremacist chat room” in defending Trump’s praise of the Charlottesville protesters. 

...It’s impossible to imagine television stars being given a prime-time platform in America to spread Islamist ideology. But it’s considered perfectly acceptable at Fox to provide a platform for white-supremacist ideology. That double standard needs to end if we are to prevent more white-supremacist attacks in the future.

As for Andrew Scheer, the Tyee says he's playing both sides.  Like Bernier, he's never far from his dog whistle.

Two leaders of federal parties vying in the fall election, for example, have attempted to insulate themselves with public statements that fail to match their actions. Conservative Party of Canada leader Andrew Scheer denouncedthis April anybody who “promotes white nationalism, promotes any type of extremism.” He did so, however, after speaking at events with white nationalists and pushing an anti-immigrant motion that furthers their cause. 

People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier declared that “racists are not welcome in this party.” Meanwhile, he’s criticized “extreme multiculturalism” and tweets other xenophobic statements that makes far-right extremists eager to sign up. 

Many media reports assume hate-tinged populism is an offshoot of a grassroots movement angry about job losses and “politically correct” elites. If unwelcome racists find common cause with that movement, it’s unfortunate, goes the narrative, and politicians understandably sometimes react belatedly or clumsily.  

Indeed, the Yellow Vests movement portrayed itself as a populist revolt led by laid-off Albertans while attracting people who stockpile weapons and draw firearms on police. And the United We Roll convoy organized by Glen Carritt this February brought frustrated oil workers and members of anti-Muslim hate groups like Northern Guard to the front lawns of Parliament. 

Many of the nearly dozen experts The Tyee interviewed for this piece argue that in fact the opposite is likely true: the rhetoric and actions of prominent conservative politicians and media members are helping to create and embolden such a movement by inflaming racial and cultural resentments.

The Tyee article explores the common threads that run through this rogues' gallery from Harper to Kellie Leitch to Scheer, Bernier and Kenney, to the Yellow Vests, Ezra Levant and Faith Goldie.

However, before Trudeau acolytes mount their high horses, they should pay attention to this earlier Tyee article, "How Trudeau is Helping Canada's Radical Right Flourish."

The Bill for Thawing Permafrost? Try 70 Trillion Dollars (USD)

This is one we're not going to be able to duck. We can't kick this can down the road. It's already underway, one of the knock-on effects of existing global warming. It is the thawing of the permafrost across the far north. And it's going to cost us dearly.

Dmitry Yumashev and a team of researchers at Lancaster University have studied the effects of melting ice sheets in the Arctic and concluded that an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide and methane from melting permafrost, coupled with added absorption of heat from the sun due to a lack of sea ice reflecting sunlight away from the surface of the Earth, will lead to an increase in the cost of global warming by a staggering $70 trillion. That is ten times the amount of economic benefit that might be derived by easier access to mineral resources in the Arctic and lower shipping costs across the top of the world.

The study, entitled “Climate policy implications of nonlinear decline of Arctic land permafrost and other cryosphere elements,” was published on April 23 in the journal Nature Communications.

...“It’s disheartening that we have this in front of us,” says Yumashev. “Even at 1.5 C to 2 C, there are impacts and costs due to thawing permafrost. But they are considerably lower for these scenarios compared to business as usual. We have the technology and policy instruments to limit the warming but we are not moving fast enough.” That lack of urgency is precisely what the Extinction Rebellion protesters, Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders are talking about.

...The studies continue to pile up, but most countries are still pursuing a business as usual path, risking the very existence of the human race and every living thing on Earth to preserve the hegemony of fossil fuel companies. If there is any record of humanity’s all too brief time on Earth left after we die off, perhaps whatever species comes to inhabit the Earth in a few million years from now will shrug and look to William Shakespeare to explain the insanity that lead to our demise. “Lord, what fools these mortals be,” wrote the bard.

Coincidentally, Captain Pipeline was discussing climate change today and yesterday. One was on Twitter where the prime minister observed, quite righteously, that, without a healthy environment, there would not be a healthy environment. I think he stole that line from David Suzuki who later called JT a 'twerp.'  Then there was this epiphany from yesterday.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned that cities across Canada will experience more frequent flooding because of climate change and governments need to adapt to this new reality. 

"We're going to see more and more of these extreme weather events more regularly," he said during a visit to an evacuation centre in the city of Gatineau. 

"It means we have to think about adaptation, mitigation and how we are going to move forward together."

What he has to think about is how we are going to cut our greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030. Everything else is bullshit.

We know that little Canada with just 0.5 per cent of the world's population is in the top 10 nations for total greenhouse gas emissions and in the top three for per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Top ten, top three. Despite that we've got a Liberal prime minister and his would-be Conservative successor both hellbent on ramming through a mega-pipeline to flood world markets with high-cost, high-carbon, low-value bitumen.

He's dead wrong when he preaches we must think about adaptation and mitigation when we need to be thinking about how a succession of political leaders, Libs and Tories, have betrayed us on climate change and the cost future generations will have to pay for their cowardice and neglect.

What We're Up Against - The Gang That Would See Canada in Ruins.

It's the cast of "The Gang of Thugs" premiering this fall.

Crimes Against Humanity

Bear with me while I vent a little - no, a lot.



If you want to measure the sincerity and determination of the government's efforts to thwart climate change, try this:

1. - Remember that climate change is the first existential threat that human civilization, Canada included, has faced. It is of an order of magnitude more threatening than any war in history.

2. - Realize this is a "whole of government" size problem. We need to harness the entire power and resources of our governments, federal and provincial, to this effort.

3. - Measure the magnitude of the danger, and the resources available to respond to it against what these governments are actually doing which is not very much.

The economy remains Justin Trudeau's singular priority. It remains Cathy McKenna's priority. This is why we're left with a grimly laughable carbon tax response.

These people know the degree of decarbonization that will be required to meet the threshold of a 50 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 and net zero by 2050 and it is only fear of the electorate that keeps them from scoffing at it in public.

I was relieved to see their own commissioner's report recognize that it is "effectively irreversible" but, as I've been writing for a number of years, what we do now will determine how much worse, even deadlier it will be for our young and future generations.

We do have the fate of the future in our hands, just as Greta Thunberg and her school climate strikers remind us, and promoting the extraction and export of highly toxic, high-carbon fossil fuels, precisely when we need to be going just as fast as we can in the opposite direction, is monstrous.

There are monsters among us.

Yes, the will of Justin "No one would just leave it in the ground" Trudeau is monstrous. The will of his environment minister is monstrous. The will of the Liberal government and the Conservative opposition is monstrous. The will of the premiers working to derail even a minuscule carbon tax is monstrous.

Bold as it is to say this, what they're doing represent crimes against humanity and yet almost none of us can get our heads around that. We're Canadians, citizens of the world sans pareil. Canadians are nice. Canadians are caring, generous, compassionate. Canadians aren't the kind to line their pockets at the expense of the lives of little brown people from poor and vulnerable countries in distant lands. To all of that - "bollocks."

There are several papers on accelerating climate change as a crime against humanity. This one, at Jacobin Magazine, summarizes the case without resorting to frustrating legalese.

There is no excuse any more for pretending we don't know what that stench is pouring from those chimneys. We know full well.

It Is Revealed in Glimpses But This Is the Unmistakable Face of Today's Right Wing

Whether it's Donald Trump's absolution of white nationalists or Andrew Scheer and Dave Tkachuk embracing them on the lawns of the Parliament buildings, the abject evil of the right wing is unmistakable.

Here's the latest. An Australian senator, Fraser Anning, has responded to the Christchurch massacres by blaming the carnage on the victims, Muslims.

Following the attack, which left 49 people dead at two mosques in Christchurch, Fraser Anning tweeted: “Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?” 

In a statement shared by an Australian journalist on Twitter, the Queensland  senator also wrote: “As always, leftwing politicians and the media will rush to claim that the causes of today’s shootings lie with gun laws or those who hold nationalist views, but this is all cliched nonsense. 

“The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.”

Why do we let these people live among us?

Good News for the Environment = Bad Tidings for Prime Minister Pipeline

If it's as good as they say it is - and, with these "breakthroughs" that's always a very big "if" -  the fossil energy industry could be kaput. Sorry, Justin. Sorry, Rachel. Sorry, Jason. Sorry, Andrew. Sorry, Big Oil. WooHoo, British Columbia.

An article in Financial Post claims a BC company has come up with a breakthrough technology to capture and transform atmospheric carbon, carbon dioxide, into fuel for cars, trucks and jets.

In an article published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Joule, Carbon Engineering outlines what it calls direct air capture in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere through a chemical process, then combined with hydrogen and oxygen to create fuel.

“If these aren’t renewable fuels, what are?” said David Keith, professor of applied physics at Harvard University, lead author of the paper and principal in Carbon Engineering.

At least seven companies worldwide are working on the idea. Swiss-based Climeworks has already built a commercial-scale plant. 

It costs Climeworks about US$600 a tonne to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Carbon Engineering says it can do the job for between US$94 and US$232 a tonne because it uses technology and components that are well understood and commercially available.

Winning the cost war.

Carbon Engineering’s fuel costs about 25 per cent more than gasoline made from oil. Oldham said work is being done to reduce that. 

Because the plant currently uses some natural gas, by the time the fuel it produces has been burned it has released a half-tonne of carbon dioxide for every tonne removed from the air. That gives it a carbon footprint 70 per cent lower than a fossil fuel, he said. 

That footprint would shrink further if the plant were all-electric. And if it ran on wind- or solar-generated electricity, the fuel would be almost carbon neutral.

Playing into BC's hand.

“What you need is a way to make a fuel in a place where you’ve got really cheap low-carbon power, and that will power the airplane. That’s the core idea here.” 

Putting a price on carbon has been crucial to Carbon Engineering’s development, said Oldham. 

“We would not be in business if carbon pricing did not exist.”

If the key is to find really cheap, low-carbon power for the extraction/processing operation that means solar, wind, hydro-electric and/or thermal-electric. British Columbia has vast untapped supplies of thermal-energy. It's what you get in mountainous terrain. And, as for hydro-electricity, we've also got that in abundance. That's also what you get from mountainous terrain along the west coast of any continent.

So, let's say this Carbon Engineering outfit is legit and they manage to produce renewable, i.e. "clean" hydrocarbon transport fuels at or below current fossil fuel prices, there goes the market for the sort of fossil fuels we're dependent upon today. Places that can produce the least costly, low-carbon power for recycling atmospheric carbon will have energy independence from the fossil fuel industry.

The logical extension of this is that nations that don't have an abundance of fossil fuel reserves but have the ability to produce renewable energy at competitive cost would be able to harvest atmospheric carbon to produce their own transport fuels. That would throw a huge wrench into OPEC and its parasite producers such as Canada.

Carry that one step further and you come to the Athabasca Tar Sands and Trudeau's Trans Mountain pipeline, both essentially DOA. If Carbon Engineering's technology pans out, Canada's days as a petro-state are finished -except for the aftermath.

Wouldn't that be ironic if a British Columbia company brought down the very jurisdictions that have been pressuring, even threatening, the province to bow to the petro-state?