The Perils and Pitfalls of the J. Trudeau Memorial Pipeline - They're Very Real

To hear many east of the Rockies tell it, a dilbit spill in British Columbia's coastal waters isn't going to happen, although it is, and, should it, they have a "world class" oil spill response programme, although they don't. Those are just lies they have to spin to scrub the narrative of their "national interest" claim. Isolate all the problems and then you can say it's a matter of economics and one recalcitrant province.

South of the border, the Americans are remarkably candid about the realities of an increase in tanker traffic resulting from the J. Trudeau Memorial Pipeline expansion. Their honesty is a refreshing break from the nonsense this prime minister tries to force feed British Columbians.

The presence of that much more oil puts the Strait at a “very high” risk of spills, according to one study by Canadian authorities. Another showed that in six of seven simulated spill-response drills by B.C. officials, more than half the oil during a major spill would have remained in the water five days after a hypothetical accident. 

“We haven’t felt that in the past the standards and capability across the border were as strong as they are on the U.S. side,” said Jensen, with the Department of Ecology. 

In addition, oil-sands petroleum has in previous accidents proved more difficult to clean up than North Slope crude. A former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) chemist has argued that oil from Alberta could sink if left on the surface too long, making cleanup virtually impossible.

“We don’t really know how to clean a spill of that stuff up,” said Kongsgaard, of the Puget Sound Partnership. “You’re not going to hear from the cleanup people that we really understand how it behaves at all.” 

But the fact that Haro Strait and Boundary Pass just to the northeast are the most likely place for any serious accident poses a special kind of concern for many officials. 

The region’s endangered killer whales concentrate in those areas, and “We’ve seen that they don’t move around to avoid spilled oil,” said Brad Hanson, a marine-mammal expert with NOAA.

It's times like these that you get to know your friends from your, let's put it this way, your adversaries. The way I see it, our adversaries are the Alberta thugs, Notley and her soon to be replacement, Jason Kenney, and the Ottawa thugs, your prime minister Trudeau and his pack of drylander MPs. It is passing curious that on this pipeline/supertanker steamroller, Justin doesn't have one of his British Columbia MPs leading the charge. Those cowards have gone mute, perhaps Justice Minister Jody excepted and even Jody is keeping her lip buttoned. The rest are fretting about whether they'll get their asses handed to them next year. No, the Gang of Four are Quebec's Trudeau, Manitoba's Carr, Ontario's McKenna and Quebec's Garneau.  A dilbit spill will be no skin off their asses. And, to prove it, McKenna even approved massively toxic Corexit as an oil spill dispersant.

But we do have friends. We have friends in Washington state and Oregon and California, even in Alaska. Notley and Trudeau remind us of the difference between friend and - well, adversary. Notley showed that she's no friend when she passed legislation allowing her government to cut off oil and gas supplies to British Columbia. Trudeau, our other adversary, let her get away with it.

Washington governor, Jay Inslee, however showed that we have a real friend to the south when he assured BC premier Horgan that Washington would supply us with the required fossil fuels if Alberta put the screws to us. It almost seems reminiscent of the Berlin airlift. Notley, with Trudeau's concurrence, threatens to disrupt life for ordinary British Columbians if we don't submit to her will. And then the Good Guys put in an appearance with a friendly "fear not."

Times like these make me just a little sympathetic to Donald Trump who cannot find the billions of dollars he'll need to build his wall along the Mexican border. British Columbians already have the wall we might need. It's huge and it's granite and it reaches thousands of feet into the sky. It's even aligned right, north and south. It's the Rocky Mountains and all the other mountain ranges west of it.

It's not unusual for newcomers to have trouble adjusting to those mountains. They complain that the mountains make them somehow feel cut off from their families and home provinces. Some just go back from whence they came. Some find those mountains distressing but most of us find them assuring, our own Great Wall.

Our majestic mountains create not just a physical divide but also a psychological separation. I wonder if Trudeau gets that. I'm not sure he does.

Today in Extinction News

What a week it's been on the mass extinction front. It began with an official US delegation to the Bonn climate summit that tried to turn it into a fossil fuels trade show. Sort of like pushing cigarettes at a lung cancer symposium. All class, America. All class.

Then there was the report out of the International Energy Agency that concluded the United States will pass Saudi Arabia at its peak in the extraction and sale of gas and oil by 2025.  Washington has served notice. As far as the US and fossil fuels are concerned, it'll be burn baby, burn.

Now it's Brazil's turn in the dirty energy spotlight. It seems the Brazilians figure that old Carbon Bubble has to burst sometime and they want to get as much of their fossil fuel reserves on the market before that happens.

Brazil is planning a fire-sale of its oil resources before shrinking global carbon budgets push down demand and prices, environmental groups have warned.

The focus of concern is a government proposal for up to $300bn in tax relief to companies that develop offshore oilfields that opponents claim would use up 7% of humanity’s emission budget if global warming is to be kept below 2C.

Climate Observatory, WWF, Greenpeace and other groups say the subsidies could spark a get-it-out-of-the-ground race with fossil fuel rivals such as the US, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway and the UK.

The accusations contradict Brazil’s position at this week’s climate talks, where the country’s negotiators have urged the world to be more ambitious in cutting carbon emissions.

“The country is doing the exact opposite – increasing emissions and opening itself up to big oil with billionaire subsidies at a time when the country still tries to recover from its worst recession,” said Carlos Rittl, executive secretary of Climate Observatory.

Think of Yourself as Collateral Damage

We're all familiar with the reality of collateral damage these days. An Afghan wedding party gets disrupted by an uninvited guest in the form of a thousand pound high explosive bomb dropped on what was mistakenly thought to be a group of terrorists. Or sustained attacks on war zone hospitals run by Medicins sans Frontieres. Something big moves, something small gets flattened.

A lot of Canadians wonder why Canada should be so eager to sign on to the Trans Pacific Partnership, the TPP. What do we get out of it? By the government's own admission, next to nothing. The best argument I've heard for it from our government is that we'll be worse off if we don't. What's that, extortion? "Nice place ya got here. It'd be a shame if somethin happened to it."

Extortion? It just might be. That comes through when you think of the Trans Pacific Partnership as America's geopolitical wet dream. For what is a trans-Pacific deal that deliberately excludes Asia's largest economy, China? Chances are it's a gambit, disguised as a trade deal, that's really intended to target China. And it comes with collateral damage, ordinary people in Canada for starters.

I read an interesting defence of the TPP in Foreign Policy. It wasn't written by some economist. No, it was penned by retired four-star US Navy admiral, Jim Stavridis, now dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. To Stavridis, the failure of the TPP initiative would be America's Brexit.

The case for the TPP is economically strong, but the geopolitical logic is even more compelling. The deal is one that China will have great difficulty accepting, as it would put Beijing outside a virtuous circle of allies, partners, and friends on both sides of the Pacific. Frankly, that is a good place to keep China from the perspective of the United States, and the treaty thus brings together not only Japan, Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and other Asian partners, but also Chile, Mexico, Canada, and Peru. The obvious missing member from Asia is South Korea, but indications are clear that over time South Koreans will want to be part of the agreement. This will be relatively easy to facilitate as South Korea already has a robust bilateral trade agreement with the United States....What is particularly compelling about the TPP, however, is the geopolitical argument in its favor. Three key points are especially salient:

China is on the march in Asia. Beijing intends to claim essentially the entire South China Sea as its territorial waters, based on preposterous historical arguments soundly rejected by international courts. It continues to build artificial islands, destroy reefs, and practice hybrid maritime warfare with unmarked sailors in “fishing boats” intruding aggressively into Japanese, Philippine, and Vietnamese waters. China clearly intends to be the dominant actor in East Asia, and absent a strong U.S. presence, it will succeed. An Asia dominated by China does not serve U.S. interests for a host of reasons, especially given the economic vitality of the region.

This is a moment of real vulnerability for many Asian nations. The unpredictable Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is watching this potential U.S. Brexit from Asia and already talking about increasing military ties with China. Vietnam, historically wary of its massive neighbor to the north, frequently discusses its vulnerability with U.S. leaders. Japan is rattled by Chinese activity around the Senkaku Islands, and even South Korea — which maintains strong ties with China — is worried about Beijing’s seeming reluctance to rein in the behavior of its client state, North Korea. A U.S. failure to maintain a strong economic presence in the region — highlighted by the TPP — will have significant negative effects on our political and diplomatic position over time.

Sending U.S. aircraft carriers is not enough. Some would argue that the United States can exert all the influence it needs to by simply sending enough Carrier Strike Groups sailing through the western Pacific. That kind of simplistic “show the flag” argument doesn’t work in the 21st century; we are more than 100 years on from Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet. A nation’s influence is the composition of its military, cultural, political, and — above all — economic influence. As the leader of what would be the largest free-trade zone in the world, the United States would continue to exert real leadership in this crucial region.

...Over 2,500 years ago, during the Zhou dynasty, the philosopher-warrior Sun Tzu wrote the compelling study of conflict The Art of War. There is much wisdom in that slim volume, including this quote: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” The United States can avoid conflict best in East Asia by using a robust combination of national tools — with the TPP at the top of the list. Looking across the Atlantic to the Brexit debacle, we must avoid repeating the mistake in the Pacific.

The clear winner if the United States rejects the Trans-Pacific Partnership will be China, and an increasingly authoritarian and regionally dominant President Xi Jinping will be cheering the loudest.

Leaving Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen aside, you can hardly go wrong taking geopolitical advice from an American general or, in this case, admiral. Those guys are the pros from Dover.

The line I like best is this: "The United States can avoid conflict best in East Asia by using a robust combination of national tools — with the TPP at the top of the list." I guess admiral Jim has forgotten that America was trying the very same thing he proposes only against Japan right up to the morning of  December 7, 1941 - Pearl Harbor.

If the TPP isn't going to do much for Canada and the price for so very little is to be herded into America's geopolitical corral for the purpose of isolating and containing China shouldn't we at least be holding out for something a lot better?

How America ReStructured the Balance of Power in the Middle East. Hint - Neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia Came Out on Top

It was a strategic defeat when Washington failed to impose a "secular" government on Iraq and, instead, had to back off and watch a government representative of Iraq's long marginalized and brutally suppressed majority, the Shia, ascend to power with its public support. If Bush/Cheney didn't capitulate they were in for two endless unconventional wars - one with the Sunni army who were sent packing off home with the toppling of Saddam's government, the other with the Shiite militias. And so Nouri al Maliki came to power to run roughshod over a country that has never demonstrated itself capable of functioning as a state except at gunpoint.

Here's the thing. The Iraqis have never said they want to be Iraqi. They weren't Iraqis until Britain and France shook hands and drew some lines carving up what, until the end of WWI, had been Ottoman Empire territory. Voila, instant Iraq! It's probably fair to say the Iraqi people were simply living, breathing spoils of war. Without any voice in the matter they, Kurd/Sunni/Shiite were much akin to captives.

When Saddam was toppled, the Americans never consulted Iraq's ethnic constituencies to discover what they wanted. Judging by what has happened ever since that might have been a priceless lost opportunity.

The Kurds were upfront. They wanted an autonomous Kurdish state from Kirkuk to the Turkish border. They even had a constitution for such an independent state drawn up with the help of US foreign service staffer, Peter Galbraith, son on John Kenneth..

It's quite likely that Iraq's Sunni population would have been content with their own state nestled between the Kurds to the north and the Shia to the south and abutting Syria. That would have given them control of the as yet not well explored oilfields in the central area.

The Shia would have their own theocratic enclave in the south including Baghdad and the oilfields that generate most of Iraq's current wealth. They would have also had the backing of neighbouring Iran to guarantee they would never again succumb to Sunni domination.

I'm drawn back to Galbraith's observations in his 2008 book, "How Iraq Ends"

For the most part, Iraq's leaders are not personally stubborn or uncooperative. They find it impossible to reach agreement on the benchmarks because their constituents don't agree on any common vision for Iraq. The Shi'ites voted twice in 2005 for parties that seek to define Iraq as a Shi'ite state. By their boycotts and votes, the Sunni Arabs have almost unanimously rejected the Shi'ite vision of Iraq's future, including the new constitution. The Kurds envisage an Iraq that does not include them. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, 99% of them voted for Kurdish nationalist parties, and in the January 2005 referendum, 98% voted for an independent Kurdistan.

America's war in Iraq is lost. Of course, neither President Bush nor the war's intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.

The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning - a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes - but by the consequences of defeat. As Bush put it, "The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America."

...Iraq after a US defeat will look very much like Iraq today - a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by America's failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian power in the region.

The Americans will never deign to admit it but their defeat in Iraq has led to a curious rapprochement between Washington and Tehran as the once low-grade civil war between Shiite and Sunni Iraqis metastasized into today's war with ISIS.

Despite the best efforts of the United States, Iran is now the co-dominant power in the Middle East. And rising. (Washington remains the other half of that "co.")

Another quick plunge into largely forgotten history: the U.S. stumbled into the post-9/11 era with two invasions that neatly eliminated Iran's key enemies on its eastern and western borders - Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. (The former is, of course, gone for good; the latter is doing better these days, though unlikely to threaten Iran for some time.) As those wars bled on without the promised victories, America's military weariness sapped the desire in the Bush administration for military strikes against Iran. Jump almost a decade ahead and Washington now quietly supports at least some of that country's military efforts in Iraq against the insurgent Islamic State. The Obama administration is seemingly at least half-resigned to looking the other way while Tehran ensures that it will have a puppet regime in Baghdad. In its serially failing strategies in Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria, Washington has all but begged the Iranians to assume a leading role in those places. They have.

And that only scratches the surface of the new Iranian ascendancy in the region. Despite the damage done by U.S.-led economic sanctions, Iran's real strength lies at home. It is probably the most stable Muslim nation in the Middle East. It has existed more or less within its current borders for thousands of years. It is almost completely ethnically, religiously, culturally, and linguistically homogeneous, with its minorities comparatively under control. While still governed in large part by its clerics, the country has nonetheless experienced a series of increasingly democratic electoral transitions since the 1979 revolution. Most significantly, unlike nearly every other nation in the Middle East, Iran's leaders do not rule in fear of an Islamic revolution. They already had one.

For all the bluster of America's Republicans, the nuclear deal with Iran could remove the last hurdle to the country's emergence as the powerhouse of the Middle East.

While diplomacy brought the United States and Iran to this point, cash is what will expand and sustain the relationship.

Iran, with the fourth-largest proven crude oil reserves and the second-largest natural gas reserves on the planet, is ready to start selling on world markets as soon as sanctions lift. Its young people reportedly yearn for greater engagement with the West. The lifting of sanctions will allow Iranian businesses access to global capital and outside businesses access to starved Iranian commercial markets.

Since November 2014, the Chinese, for example, have already doubled their investment in Iran. European companies, including Shell and Peugeot, are now holding talks with Iranian officials. Apple is contacting Iranian distributors. Germany sent a trade delegation to Tehran. Ads for European cars and luxury goods are starting to reappear in the Iranian capital. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of foreign technology and expertise will need to be acquired if the country is to update its frayed oil and natural gas infrastructure. Many of its airliners are decades old and need replacement. Airlines in Dubai are fast adding new Iran routes to meet growing demand. The money will flow. After that, it will be very hard for the war hawks in Washington, Tel Aviv, or Riyadh to put the toothpaste back in the tube, which is why you hear such screaming and grinding of teeth now.

..No, what fundamentally worries the Israelis and the Saudis is that Iran will rejoin the community of nations as a diplomatic and trading partner of the United States, Asia, and Europe. Embarking on a diplomatic offensive in the wake of its nuclear deal, Iranian officials assured fellow Muslim countries in the region that they hoped the accord would pave the way for greater cooperation. American policy in the Persian Gulf, once reliably focused only on its own security and energy needs, may (finally) start to line up with an increasingly multifaceted Eurasian reality. A powerful Iran is indeed a threat to the status quo - hence the upset in Tel Aviv and Riyadh - just not a military one. Real power in the twenty-first century, short of total war, rests with money.

The July accord acknowledges the real-world power map of the Middle East. It does not make Iran and the United States friends. It does, however, open the door for the two biggest regional players to talk to each other and develop the kinds of financial and trade ties that will make conflict more impractical. After more than three decades of U.S.-Iranian hostility in the world's most volatile region, that is no small accomplishment.

And, so, America's defeat in Iraq was not a total loss for it became, quite unintentionally, the ice-breaker between Washington and Tehran.  As for Iraq, it will eventually have to sort itself out - probably through partition.  With Iran acting as defender of the Shiite south and America as guarantor of Kurdish independence, a new Sunni state expanding westward into Syria seems inevitable.




The Balance of Power  (TruthOut).

Netanyahu Has Screwed the Pooch for Israel

Even if the next US president is a Republican, what Netanyahu is doing this week will cost Israel far into the future.  What the Israeli prime minister has somehow failed to grasp is that he is targeting the office of the president.

Even those who wish him luck now will never look on him, or Israel,  the same way again. He's a handy snake to have around - for Republicans, this time - but, afterwards, everyone gets a stick.

There are lines and Netanyahu is crossing one, a big line.  It's the sort of thing that isn't forgotten and even a future Republican president won't readily forgive.

Americans are all about their presidency.  Hell, they campaign for the office for two years.  They crave it and getting it means everything yet here's this Israeli yahoo coming right into their own backyard to undermine it.  Oooh, that leaves scars.

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And then there's this, full page ad from the New York Times aimed at John Boehner

Will British Columbia be the Last Pacific Jurisdiction to Legalize Pot?

Washington took recreational marijuana off the state criminal books two years ago.  Last night voters in Alaska and Oregon followed suit.  California is expected to do the same in 2016.

Imagine.  British Columbia, the province once known for "B.C. Bud", could be the last jurisdiction on the Pacific Coast to have a criminal prohibition against marijuana growing, possession and/or sale.  And that, like so many other things that grate on British Columbians, is because the power to change is held by Ottawa - and held over our heads, as usual.

Ottawa has final say, sort of.  Law enforcement agencies in British Columbia normally can't be bothered to arrest individuals for simple possession.  Even growers rarely do prison time.

The greatest hit British Columbia's marijuana industry has suffered has not come from the feds or from law enforcement.  It's come from the loss of markets due to the legalization spreading through the US.

It could just be me but I've noticed a real increase in the Harper government's anti-pot TV ads lately.  I sense they're targeted at Harper's base - angry, fearful old white people.

Arms Race Update - Sarkozy Backs Medvedev

George Bush isn't just a lame duck, he's a dead duck president in the eyes of French president Nicolas Sarkozy. That much is apparent in Sarkozy's decision to join Russia in condemning the US anti-missile battery deployments to Poland and the Czech Republic.

Sarkozy and Medvedev have agreed to stage an international summit next year to hammer out a new security agreement for Europe. The invited will include Russia, all 27-European Union nations and, presumably, the United States. In making the announcement, Sarkozy didn't pull any punches about how he views the America missile battery deployment. From The Guardian:

"Deployment of a missile defence system would bring nothing to security in Europe. It would complicate things," said the French leader, who currently chairs the EU. As he attacked the plan, Czech and Polish ministers met in Prague to affirm their support for the installations and send a signal to the Obama administration, pleading for it to go ahead.
"I'm 100 per cent sure that Obama won't kill missile defence," Alexandr Vondra, the Czech deputy prime minister, told the Guardian. "The European pillar of missile defence is in the interests of everyone who wants to keep Nato strong."

The French alignment with Russian aims will upset pro-US leaders in western and eastern Europe, but will enjoy support in Germany and Italy, which are eager to draw Russia in as a partner despite the recent invasion of Georgia."

It's clear that Obama isn't going to be given much time to weigh America's role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and whether he's ready to continue the Bush policy of treating NATO as America's Foreign Legion. If major players such as Germany and France openly break with the White House on European security, that just could be the end of NATO.

For France to launch this European security initiative on its own, without consultations with Washington, also suggests that Europe is looking for a new understanding with America, one in which the US is no longer the first and final word on matters the Europeans consider their business.

It Doesn't Add Up

If we've learned one thing from that gang of right-wing mongrels in the White House, it's that we ought to take their claims with a truckload of salt. How can I put this respectfully? Oh yeah, they're a pack of manipulative frauds and liars (no wonder Harper adores them so).

So where is the healthy skepticism toward the latest White House claim that Syria, aided by North Korea, was building a nuclear reactor for the production of weapons of mass destruction until it was - blessedly - destroyed by the Israeli Air Force last year? The western media are swallowing this one quite happily, like trusting little children. No one is stepping back from this narrative, taking a careful look and asking just why it doesn't add up?

It doesn't add up.

The story is that Syria, with North Korean collusion, was constructing a secret weapons reactor in the middle of the desert. There's your first clue that this doesn't add up. A "secret" reactor in the midst of a "desert"?

How does any nation do anything secretly in a desert? If there's one place you can't hide anything of any size it's a desert. Now, unless the Syrians are complete morons they would know that their region is under constant satellite surveillance. They would have to know their every move would be observed, tracked and analyzed.

A nuclear reactor requires a building with unique design and construction. It's the sort of thing the computers that digest satellite imagery can spot instantly. A nuclear reactor doesn't look anything like the new 7-11 they built down the street last year. A nuclear reactor looks like - why it looks just like a nuclear reactor!

A nuclear reactor requires a lot of infrastructure - massive amounts of electricity, water, etc. Those aren't the sorts of things you'll readily find in the middle of a barren desert. That means you would have to build roads and power lines and water lines that would stand out in a desert and would lead the observer to ask, "hey, what are these for?" You can also follow them right to this big structure in the middle of the desert and say "hey, what is this?"

With satellite imagery capable of reading licence plates from space, concealing anything - any equipment, any structure, any activity - at a place of interest is extremely difficult even if it's not in the middle of a barren desert. In a desert, however, that goes from "extremely difficult" to "damned nigh impossible."

Another wee problem with building such an obvious target in the middle of the desert is that it makes targeting it a snap. There are no box canyons, no sheltering mountain slopes, just wide open spaces that allow an attacker to come from anywhere and make the target easy to locate and attack and difficult, if not impossible, to defend.

Okay, so maybe the Syrians are dumb as mules but the North Koreans sure aren't. They know a thing or nine about American satellite imagery and they've had decades to learn how to get around it. They also know that getting caught building a weapons reactor abroad would have enormous consequences for them.

So, take all these things together. You can't disguise what you're building, you can't hide it, you can't defend it, you know you're going to be watched and under constant surveillance and yet, poor as you may be, you're going to build a very expensive weapons reactor in this most unlikely of places knowing full well it's going to be destroyed and there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop that.

And that's the narrative Washington has sold to the western media. Dumb, dumber and dumbest.

Here's something else to dwell on. Just what is Washington up to? Why are Bush/Cheney running this particular scam at this particular time? These things do happen for a reason but the recesses of the mind of Dick Cheney are a damned dark place to go looking for one.

p.s. The pic above is Israel's Dimona weapons reactor.