Eviscerating The Bitumen Bullshit

Give Jason Kenney, his predecessor, Rachel Notley, and our prime minister, Justin Trudeau, their due. When it comes to bitumen and bullshit they'll lay it on just as thick as they can every chance they get.

The Tyee's petro-scribe, Alberta's own Andrew Nikiforuk, systematically debunks every popular lie these characters like to spread about Trudeau's damned pipeline and bitumen's dismal future.

To most coastal British Columbians there's a real malice that emanates from the petro-state's campaign of deceit whether that's from Alberta, Saskatchewan or Ottawa.

I urge you to follow the link and read it in its entirety. For now, here are a few teasers:

According to some of the more ridiculous claims, environmentalists are to blame for bitumen price discounts, Vancouverites are being punished for their orca-loving ways with high gasoline prices, and climate change really doesn’t matter. 

Their politicians don’t dare admit the reality — that combined overproduction of bitumen and U.S. tight oil brought down the global price of oil with a thundering crash in 2014. In the world we inhabit now, oil business as usual has died.

The plot to thwart bitumen sales to China.

The facts are these: Over decades the U.S. has built more than half of the world’s heavy oil refining capacity in the Midwest and Gulf Coast for a variety of reasons. 

Asia owns but 23 per cent of global capacity to refine heavy oil. It’s not willing to pay more for bitumen than the U.S., because it costs more to ship it there.

Alberta’s low royalty policy encouraged the industry to strip and ship diluted bitumen instead of adding value by building more upgrading facilities and complex refineries. 

The province’s dependence on U.S. markets and pipelines is a direct product of what was billed in 2006 as Alberta’s “give-it-away” strategy. 

Obstruction of Trans-Mountain has left BC with a fuel shortage entirely of its own making.

Most of the gasoline consumed in B.C., the nation’s fourth largest market for refined fuels, is made by four Alberta refineries and moved along the existing 65-year-old Trans Mountain pipeline. Less than 10 per cent of the province’s gasoline comes from refineries in Washington State. 

(An historical note: when the Trans Mountain pipeline was built in the 1950s, Vancouver supported four refineries, but as the line exported more oil to U.S. refineries, local refining died off in the 1990s with the exception of Parkland, formerly Chevron, in Burnaby.) 

The Vancouver market has no ready access to refined products brought by sea, so it is a price taker. Economist Robyn Allan calculates that neither taxes, nor scarcity of supply, fully explain why the region has some of Canada’s highest gasoline prices. 

A study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives suggests Alberta refineries have been price gouging Vancouver consumers since 2010, because they can do so due to lack of local competition.

...To date, high prices have had a predictable effect: B.C.’s per capita consumption of refined petroleum goods is 11 per cent below the national average.

Bitumen is the "beating heart" of the Canadian economy.

That’s a big laugh. 

Despite 47 per cent growth in Canada’s oil and gas production since 2000 — largely from the tar sands — royalty payments to government have declined 59 per cent, notes respected energy analyst David Hughes. 

So, too, has the industry’s proportional contribution to GDP.
According to data from Natural Resources Canada, taxes paid by the oil and gas industry since 2006 have dropped from $12 billion to $6 billion*.

It's "Ethical Oil."

There is light oil and heavy oil, but no refinery has ever begged for ethical oil. 

That’s because it doesn’t exist. If Alberta has done such a “moral” job of regulating its resources, what happened to its rainy day fund? 

And if the industry has behaved so ethically, why will Alberta and Canadian taxpayers likely be on the hook for cleaning up and decommissioning $260-billion worth of abandoned wells, pipelines and gas plants?

How ethical is it to allow an industry to set aside funds of $1.6 billion to cover hundreds of billions of dollars in liabilities? 

New research says that “carbon dioxide emission intensities for oil sands facilities are 13 to 123 per cent larger than those estimated using publically available data.”

Is that an ethical development?

Let's do the math. A quarter trillion dollars of unfunded remediation costs versus six billion dollars a year* in royalties to the Alberta treasury. Imagine finding a bar that lets you run a tab for 43-years. That's 43-years worth of royalties.

Myth: Every day Canada loses 30 to 40 million dollars from a shortage of pipeline capacity. That's a lie, one of Junior's favourites.

To illustrate the grandiosity of the claim, just consider the finances of Suncor, one of Canada’s largest bitumen miners. If the industry were losing so much money every day, you’d expect Suncor to be bleeding, too.

But that’s not what its financial statements say.

In fact, Suncor has been recording tidy profits for years, because it mines, upgrades and refines bitumen into a variety of refined products.

The company also hedges against oil price volatility and heavy oil discounts. Even with mandated provincial cuts in production, the company produced396,000 barrels of bitumen in the first quarter of 2019, with net earnings of $1.4 billion compared to $789 million in 2018. 

Husky and Imperial Oil, the province’s other big producers, also reported healthy returns this year.

...So don’t try bullying British Columbians with fictional losses produced by fictional pipelines. 

Alberta’s three major bitumen producers make money regardless of pipeline politics, because they do everything Alberta failed to do: they hedge, add value and refine.

US-funded environmentalists are waging a campaign to block Canada's access to Asian markets. They're out to sabotage our economy.

No conspiracy existed. The campaign largely focused on bitumen’s distinct character. Such crude has higher energy costs and an extreme carbon footprint compared to conventional oils. 

Alberta’s remains one of the world’s dirtiest oils, with emissions 102 to 204 per cent higher than average U.S. refinery crude on a well-to-tank basis that includes all the emissions from mining, upgrading and refining.

That’s why Alberta’s oil was targeted. Period.

And given that oil sands production has increased 376 per cent since 2000, and overall oil and gas production has grown by 47 per cent in Canada, “the alleged foreign funded attack” has been damn ineffective, notes analyst Hughes.

Here on the coast we know these truths. We see the malicious lies, and they are malicious, spun by Ottawa and the oil provinces for what they are, an attack on us and on our coast.  The threats make their malice even more intolerable.

What Do The Tyee, the National Observer, DeSmogBlog and Elizabeth May Have in Common?

That's pretty easy. They're all British Columbian and, collectively, they have laid bare the scam that the Trudeau government is perpetrating on this province so that it can force through the Trans Mountain bitumen pipeline.

We all know the election campaign promises Trudeau used to hoodwink British Columbians into voting Liberal. The business about social licence, First Nations consultation, no pipelines without consent - lies, lies and lies. Boy, were we had by that earnest sounding little prig.

So Junior canceled Northern Gateway but went ahead and approved Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain bitumen pipeline across southern BC and straight through the Lower Mainland's munipalities, terminating at Burrard Inlet from which an armada of wallowing supertankers would transit the Vancouver waterfront through coal harbour and on into the sometimes treacherous and heavily trafficked Georgia Strait.

Justin knew it looked bad and smelled worse so he apologized and said it was a grand compromise between Ottawa and the Notley government. Only this wasn't between Ottawa and Edmonton.  It was British Columbia's coast and the right to put it at serious risk of irreparable environmental calamity that was the bargain, the prize for the deal between Ottawa and Edmonton. B.C. would damn well do as it was told.

Trudeau knew he couldn't rely on the rigged approvals of the industry-controlled National Energy Board. He had denounced the NEB as corrupt during his election campaign. So he announced his government would conduct a remedial assessment of the merits and safety of the Trans Mountain pipeline before deciding if it could go through.

A lot of us suspected that Trudeau was running a scam that, just like Harper, the fix would be in, but it took the National Observer to lay bare this prime minister's perfidy.

The fix was in. Trudeau's approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline was pre-ordained. The federal government's departments responsible for conducting the review were told what to write. They were told that their findings had to support the Kinder Morgan pipeline. 

Right before their internal meeting, federal officials met with Tsleil-Waututh representatives and told them that the government still hadn’t made a final decision on the project. But in the second meeting for government staffers only, public servants who were in the room said O’Gorman’s instructions were explicit. 

“We have to give cabinet a legally-sound basis for saying yes,” O’Gorman said, according to people at the meeting.

Trudeau didn't hesitate to betray British Columbia yet again. It was an act of corruption totally befitting his predecessor, Shifty Steve Harper. Trudeau and Harper are very much cut from the same cloth and that may be unpleasant to Liberals but it's the truth.

It's more than passing curious that these revelations have all come out through British Columbia's excellent news outlets - The Tyee, the National Observer, DeSmogBlog - but there's been not a peep of this in the national, mainstream media - Postmedia, the Globe, TorStar, CBC, CTV, Global. It sort of reinforces the feeling that, in this fight, it's British Columbians versus this degraded nation.

It's one thing to be ashamed of a prime minister. In deeply divided societies it is almost inevitable that one group will be at odds with the national leader. It is something entirely different, something far worse, inexcusable when a prime minister gives the people extremely good cause to be ashamed of their country. No prime minister has any business doing that. Yet Harper did it and we roundly rebuked him for it. Trudeau was supposed to erase that stain and, for a brief while, it seemed he would. The stain is back. It's not treason but it is treachery.

Chrysler Exec to Trump: "You're Full of SH_T!"

Donald Trump doesn't know how to shut his big, fat, greasy mouth.  

Today Trump tweeted, "Obama is a terrible negotiator.   He bails out Chrysler and now Chrysler wants to send all Jeep manufacturing to China--and will!”

Chrysler vice-president of design and president of the Dodge division, Ralph Gilles, fired back: "You are full of shit!"

Gilles later apologized for his choice of words but added,  "lies are just that, lies."

Karl Rove - Lies From the Grave

Former Bush political advisor, Karl Rove, has probably done more than any other presidential aide to confound, confuse, deceive, distract and mislead the American people and he won't quit even long after he's left the White House.

Rove has been trying to polish Bush's apple by rewriting history about the vote in congress authorizing war on Iraq. This guy has had the gall to claim it was Democrats in Congress who forced Bush to act prematurely. For the record, Karl Rove is a complete and shameless liar.

This is the pile that Rove dumped on Charlie Rose last week: "The administration was opposed to voting on it in the fall of 2002," Rove said. Asked why, he said: "Because we didn't think it belonged within the confines of the election. There was an election coming up within a matter of weeks. We thought it made it too political. We wanted it outside the confines of it. It seemed to make things move too fast. There were things that needed to be done to bring along allies and potential allies abroad."

Ex-Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) had an entirely different take on it. In an interview, Daschle said he asked Bush during a breakfast to delay the vote until after the election. "They told us time was of the essence and they needed the vote and they were going to move forward," he said.

The Washington Post went to the archives and found - surprise, surprise - Rove was lying through his teeth. Among the goodies was this line from noneother than Incurious George himself:

"Asked on Sept. 13, 2002, about Democrats who did not want to vote until after the UN Security Council acted, Bush said, 'If I were running for office, I'm not sure how I'd explain to the American people -- say, 'Vote for me, and, oh, by the way, on a matter of national security, I think I'm going to wait for somebody else to act.' "

Rover couldn't even get a break from former White House Press Secretar Ari Fleischer who said,
"It was definitely the Bush administration that set it in motion and determined the timing, not the Congress," he said. "I think Karl in this instance just has his facts wrong."

Even former White House chief of staff, Andrew Card couldn't keep a straight face. Card laughed and said that "sometimes his mouth gets ahead of his brain."

Karl Rove, an utterly shameless liar. And, please, don't think for a minute that he just got his facts wrong - unintentionally that is.