About that Kinder, Gentler, Cleaner Fossil Fuel Industry

Petro-states tend to become lap dogs for the fossil fuel giants that feed them revenues. They wind up, to some degree, in bed together.

Canada is no exception.

The federal government is so in thrall to the fossil fuel industry that it has bought a multi-billion dollar pipeline just to keep them happy, money that it may never recoup.

This is the same government that uses its other face to proclaim climate change the gravest threat facing the nation. Pretty neat trick, eh?

In recent years the fossil energy giants have gone to considerable lengths to greenwash their activities. They routinely tell us they're doing their bit to help our endangered planet.

But that is greenwash, eco-bullshit.

The largest five stock market listed oil and gas companies spend nearly $200m (£153m) a year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change, according to a new report. 

Chevron, BP and ExxonMobil were the main companies leading the field in direct lobbying to push against a climate policy to tackle global warming, the report said. 

Increasingly they are using social media to successfully push their agenda to weaken and oppose any meaningful legislation to tackle global warming.

...After the Paris climate agreement in 2015 the large integrated oil and gas companies said they supported a price on carbon and formed groups like the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative which promote voluntary measures. 

But, the report states, there is a glaring gap between their words and their actions. 

The five publicly listed oil majors – ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP and Total – now spend about $195m a year on branding campaigns suggesting they support action against climate change.

But the report said these campaigns were misleading the public about the extent of the oil companies’ actions because while publicly endorsing the need to act, they are massively increasing investment in a huge expansion of oil and gas extraction. In 2019 their spending will increase to $115bn, with just 3% of that directed at low carbon projects.

These guys, with the collaboration of political Quislings, are out to bring on catastrophic climate change. There is money to be made, many hundreds of billions of dollars to be raked in, some 27 trillion dollars of proven fossil reserves to be extracted, and that's enough to buy a planet's worth of politicians.

You think SNC-Lavalin has the government's ear? Whatever that is, it's nothing compared to having that government in bed, willing to spend many billions to build you a high-capacity pipeline to flood world markets with dangerously toxic, high-carbon bitumen.

Like a Vampire Sizzling Under the Noonday Sun

The more unviable the Athabasca Tar Sands become, the more extreme measures politicians will accept to keep that corpse warm.

There's nothing for it but to drag it out into the burning light of day.

One thing we all know - all of us - is that to these small-minded politicians with their "next electoral cycle" vision, 70 years might as well be 70 centuries. Hell, even their kids will probably be long dead by then.

Imagine if you could just tell the bank how much money you think you owe them and that you’ll settle up 70 years after you move out. Wouldn’t that be easier? 

That is essentially the deal Suncor has been granted by the Alberta government regarding the ballooning liability from their oil sands tailing ponds and related reclamation requirements. 

Like all other operators in the industry, every year Suncor presents the Alberta taxpayer with an estimate of what the corporation thinks it will cost to reclaim the artificial lakes of toxic sludge it has created, in Suncor’s case since mining began in1967. No supporting documentation required.

...Collectively, tailings ponds now cover 25,000 hectares in northern Alberta and contain a poisonous brew of organic acids, benzene, lead and fine clay particles that have not significantly settled out in 50 years. The result is lakes of toxic yogurt impounded by the largest earthen structures in the world.  

Alberta has the constitutional right to manage resources as the province sees fit, but the current situation could be described as regulatory humiliation. Bitumen royalties make up less than four per cent of the provincial budget and capture a similarly puny proportion of the market value of bitumen produced by the companies.

Since 1975, the province produced over 4,800 trillion cubic metres of natural gas, 17.4 billion barrels of conventional crude and 11.4 billion barrels of bitumen with cumulative current value of $1.7 trillion.
Successive governments since Premier Peter Lougheed somehow managed to convert this vast resource bounty into a growing public debt of $43 billion. 

This shockingly inept fiscal management could soon become the problem of all Canadian taxpayers if the largely unsecured liabilities of bitumen tailing ponds are included in the equation. Cleanup costs, as estimated by industry, amount to $27 billion, while other observers put the risk closer to $48 billion. Only $1.4 billion is currently secured by cash reserves from the companies; the rest is backed only by the value of unmined bitumen. 

What happens if global economic forces or disruptive technologies render the remaining bitumen reserves uneconomic? The oil sands are consistently touted as a driver of national economic growth. What if they instead become an expensive and worthless mess the rest of the country is on the hook to clean up? 

An unfolding disaster around abandoned conventional oil and gas wells offers an illuminating glimpse into the future. 

Last March, Chinese-controlled Sequoia Resources announced to provincial regulators it was broke and walking away from 3,000 oil and gas well sites with a potential cleanup liability of $500 million. Sequoia posted no reclamation funds to cover remediation costs, as is typically required, because Alberta regulators granted the failing company exemptions from solvency requirements.

...Throwing federal money at disasters created by captured local regulators is sadly a storied Canadian tradition. 

After operating for 56 years and producing seven million ounces of gold worth almost $12 billion, the Giant Mine in Yellowknife went into receivership in 2004, leaving Ottawa with a $1-billion remediation bill. The Sydney tar ponds cleanup in Cape Breton cost Canadians another $400 million. Ottawa has already contributed $30 million to Alberta’s orphan well fund — a trickle that could soon become a deluge. 

Economic cheerleading by federal and provincial politicians and the mainstream media on behalf of the oil industry is doing the public a great disservice. When the party is over in the oil patch, Canadian taxpayers may find themselves doing the dishes.

It's sad to see Trudeau going down the same path as Harper and Notley doing her best to be even more Tar Sands friendly than her successor, Kenney.

I Don't Get It.

A neighbour of mine who'll turn 80 next week sometimes asks what's happened in recent years, has the world gone crazy? She's having trouble making sense of why so many of us, especially Americans, are doing what we're doing. It's becoming increasingly harder to argue with that sentiment.

Take the States. Polls show that a majority of Americans support everything from gun control to universal health care, action on climate change and reversing spreading inequality and yet they wind up with a unitary government of Republicans controlling the House, Senate and the White House. The rightwing also dominates the Supreme Court of the United States. Somebody elected all those representatives and senators and, well, that president too.

Sure gerrymandering plays a big role but so does big money, money big enough to saddle America with a thoroughly "bought and paid for" Congress. Big money has swept aside any vestige of "government of the people, by the people and for the people" and big money intends to see that notion doesn't return.  Big money leads to legislative capture, regulatory capture, even executive branch capture and, through all that, judicial capture.

Are we that much better when a party that grabs a minority of the votes, high 30s will do, walks away with a majority and the virtually unfettered power to govern the country for four years no matter what the other 60 plus per cent may want? And then, once they get that majority, they shrug their shoulders and turn their backs on just about every solemn promise they made to dupe voters into giving them that high 30 per cent, false majority.

That's "fuck you" squared. Electoral reform? Absolutely, well no. Social licence. Sure, well no. First Nations consultation? Cross my heart, well no. Honest environmental assessments. Damn straight, well no. Reforming the surveillance state? Did you really expect we would? Well no. It goes on and on and on. You want it? You got it, well no. But don't fret. It wasn't all for nothing. The other guy was worse, wasn't he? Isn't getting rid of him reward enough?

No, that's not enough. If you get a majority without the support of 60 per cent of the voting public then your legitimacy hangs by a thread and that thread is honouring your campaign promises. If you renege on those solemn commitments then you jettison your legitimacy with them. You have confessed to conning the gullible, the people who so wanted to believe, to get your lying ass into power. You've done what the guy before you did with all his talk about "transparency" and "accountability."

The very foundation of our democracy is the "informed consent" of the voter. When someone betrays the public, as Trudeau has done so fulsomely, it makes a mockery of informed consent.

A government as free from its obligations as this one, and several of its predecessors before it, does not govern with the informed consent of the electorate. It rules them. It reigns over them, imposing its will, not honouring theirs. That is the antithesis of democracy. It offends me deeply.


I guess I was wrong. I do "get it" after all.

Is It Time We Chaperoned Our Politicians

Where Alberta Fossil Fuelers Go to Shop

Yes, Christy, this is about you - and the rest.

Christy Clark, Canada's  Queen of Cash has been known to be a grateful recipient of campaign contributions from those friendly funsters known as the Calgary Petroleum Club but, of course, that doesn't mean that her government's acceptance of the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion had anything to do with cheque-stuffed envelopes.  Still, the skeptical might just wonder.

Hell, even the New York Times has taken notice of Grifty Clark and splashed her around on the pages of The Grey Lady.

It's fair to say that Canada is a nation of petro-pols. Our House of Commons is chock full of them save, perhaps, for that little lady way over there in the corner. And provincial legislatures from Newfoundland to British Columbia are also sinking under the weight of their own petro-pols.

It's timely help then from a friendly Deutscher,  Arne Jungjohann, an energy analyst from Germany.  His message - if Canada wants to make progress on climate change, if Canada's governments are remotely serious about that, they have to get fossil fuel money out of politics (and, I might add, government subsidies out of the fossil fuel industry).

There are no two ways about it, according to German political scientist Arne Jungjohann: if you want to make meaningful progress on climate change, you have to get big money out of politics.

“Then you get fossil fuel money out of politics,” said the author and energy analyst. “It’s very, very important to make this a non-partisan issue, otherwise you cannot create this stability and certainty that is needed for the investment people.”

Hold on a minute, Arnie. Fossil energy is already a non-partisan issue. Did you ever hear of the industry's latest Alberta champion, Rachel Notley? The Tories are in the fossil fuelers' bag.  So too is environmental hypocrite extraordinaire and Liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau. This is already a non-partisan issue and that is the problem. 

Jungjohann offered “lessons" from the German clean energy story, also called the Energiewende. It’s the German word for the country’s clean energy transition, and Jungjohann co-wrote a book about it: Energy Democracy — Germany’s Energiewende to Renewables.

If Canada has anything to learn from Germany's Energiewende, he said, it's that corporate money must exit the equation, citizens must be involved early on, and clean energy must become non-partisan. He called it the "democratization" of clean energy.

What works in Germany won't work in Canada. At the federal and the provincial level our fossil energy corruption is now institutionalized, embedded.

Where Is the Exit Door?

How long will Canada remain under the boot of market fundamentalism? This is the laissez faire face of modern neoliberalism that has taken hold throughout the developed world, Canada included.

It manifests itself most directly in free trade agreements and associated institutions such as the IMF, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank. Rarely seen is its presence in parallel or "deep government."

Neoliberalism is an ideology and, like most ideologies, it's anchored in both fact and plenty of belief. It's sort of faith-based. Its disciples believe neoliberalism is itself an ethic, in fact the best and preferred ethic to achieve solutions to our problems using the power of the marketplace. It holds that many of the functions ordinarily associated with government can be better undertaken through market forces.

Whether you realize it or not, we've been eating, sleeping and breathing this stuff for forty years. That's been long enough to realize that a lot of the promise of neoliberalism has been hogwash.

Neoliberalism often works at cross purposes to the public interest. Income stagnation is a function of market fundamentalism. Inequality of wealth, income and opportunity is likewise the outcome of adherence to market fundamentalism. It is the engine for transferring wealth from the many to the few and, as so plainly demonstrated by the United States, with that wholesale shift in economic power comes a commensurate shift in political power. This is the rise of illiberal democracy which, unfortunately, is not an outcome but merely an early onset symptom of a darker order to follow.

The problem with illiberal democracy is that many of us see it as genuine democracy. We don't see it for what it is, democracy with a potentially terminal disease. If we did we might be less tolerant of market fundamentalism, globalization and free trade that demand the surrendering of various incidents of our national sovereignty. We might reject the rise of state corporatism.

When your highest court holds that a corporation, itself a "legal fiction", is a person with political rights - you have a real problem. When that same top court holds that corporations cannot be restrained from dominating the political process with massive infusions of money for election advertising and campaign contributions - you have a real problem.

As Stiglitz powerfully chronicles in "The Price of Inequality" the great preponderance of inequality in the U.S. is neither merit- nor market-based. It is legislated, enacted by the people elected to represent the people but instead serving the contrary interests of the few and their corporations. This sort of inequality takes many forms - tax breaks and outright exemptions, subsidies, grants, deferrals and, quite regularly, the transfer of national assets such as water either for free or far below value.  This is a "trickle up" economy where wealth finally crystallizes in the accounts of the investor or rentier class.

America has been our laboratory for this experiment in free market fundamentalism, neoliberalism. What are the observed results? A gutted middle class no longer empowered economically or politically; wage stagnation; inequality of all forms; the collapse of social mobility; the rise of the precariat; the formation of the narrowly held, corporate media cartel becoming an instrument of conditioning and distracting the populace; transactional governance (the "bought and paid for" Congress) and illiberal democracy; and the wholesale, unearned transfer of wealth from the many and from the state, to the few.

So, remind me why Canadians want to go down this road? Make no mistake, that is what we are doing.

We're trapped and so long as we submit to political leadership in thrall to market fundamentalism, we'll become ever more tightly trapped. Tom Mulcair caught hell for his support of both Thatcherism and the Canada-Europe free trade deal, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). One NDP apologist came to Mulcair's defence saying it was preferrable that we trade with Europe because of its social democracy. Oh I know - they're thinking of old Klaus with his alpine hat and lederhosen toiling away in the Black Forest banging out cuckoo clocks.

I guess that person didn't notice that Europe is on fire with discontent triggering uprisings from Athens to London. There's not a lot of social democracy on display in the U.K. and it's being ruthlessly suppressed in Greece with Spain, Portugal and Italy soon to follow. They didn't notice the rise of fascism in Britain, France, Germany and as far east as Hungary where it actually holds power. Neo-nationalism is on the march and it is very angry.

Is there no way out? Sure there is but we'll never find the exit door until we get up and look for it, something for which our political caste shows no appetite.

We need motivation to demand something better.  That begins by recognizing everything we're giving up and what's being steadily drained from us in every context - economically, socially, politically, democratically - through free market fundamentalism. This is not theoretical. It is not hypothetical. It is real. We are living it and we all know that we're feeling it.

A good way to start is to read a few books.  Here are some I would recommend.


David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality.

Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do?

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything.

Thomas Prugh, Natural Capital and Human Economic Survival.

Paul Craig Roberts, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism.

Herman Daly, Beyond Growth.

Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.

Roubini and Mihm, Crisis Economics.

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine.

If you read those ten books you'll see market fundamentalism in the raw and you'll grasp what will befall us, and especially our kids and grandkids, if we don't get out from under it.

It all begins by understanding what we're up against.


* I just checked and, with the exception of Natural Capital and Human Economic Survival (which I still think is an essential read) all of the titles listed above are available in e-book format from Amazon.