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.