Think of It As an Honest Mistake. A Heaping Pile of Honest Mistakes.

Petro-states exhibit certain common traits. A willingness to freely and repeatedly lie and deceive is one of them.

This, however, isn't about lying. This is about a mistake, an honest mistake, many absolutely honest mistakes. This is about coincidence on an industry-wide scale.

The mistake concerns Tar Sands emissions reported by the energy giants to the federal government. It concerns emissions that were, gasp, under-reported, again and again. An honest mistake, repeated across the board.

A number of major oilsands operations in northern Alberta seem to be emitting significantly more carbon pollution than companies have been reporting, newly published research from federal scientists suggests, which could have profound consequences for government climate-change strategies. 

The researchers, mainly from Environment Canada, calculated emissions rates for four major oilsands surface mining operations using air samples collected in 2013 on 17 airplane flights over the area.
In results published today in the journal Nature Communications, the scientists say the air samples from just those surface mining operations suggest their carbon dioxide emissions are 64 per cent higher, on average, than what the companies themselves report to the federal government using the standard United Nations reporting framework for greenhouse gases. 

It means that Canada's total greenhouse gas emissions would be around 2.3 per cent higher than previously thought. And if research eventually shows that other oilsands sites are subject to similar underreporting issues, Canada's overall greenhouse gas emissions could be as much as six per cent more than thought — throwing a wrench into the calculations that underpin government emissions strategies.

Of all the "honest mistakes" not one was for over-reporting emissions. They were all under-reported emissions, just a wild coincidence. Besides, anyone can be out a titch or two here or there. There's a 13 per cent titch and a 36 per cent titch, a titch at 38 per cent and even a 123 per cent titch for Syncrude.

The gap between the facilities' reported carbon dioxide emissions and the levels calculated by researchers was 13 per cent for the Suncor site, 36 per cent for the Horizon mine, 38 per cent for Jackpine and 123 per cent for Syncrude.

Left out of the study, notably, are emissions from all oilsands operations that use in-situ extraction, pumping steam into the ground to get the petroleum out. About 80 per cent of oilsands reserves, and the majority of current production, require in-situ extraction. 

That means the overall amount of underreported greenhouse gas emissions could be significantly higher.

The Oil Patch may be blowing smoke up Justin's backside but others aren't so conveniently fooled.

"Increases in emissions from the tarsands are undoing all the progress being made in other sectors," said Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada, in a statement. 

"If we are serious about protecting communities from climate-fueled floods, wildfires and other extreme weather, the last thing Canada should be doing is building new pipelines to expand oil production and exports. Either we act like this truly is a crisis that threatens our health and survival, or we sleepwalk towards disaster. It's as simple as that and our politicians are currently choosing the second option."

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.

National Observer Slams Canada's Business Writers for Media Malpractice

...it is not the media’s job to assume that opinions without evidence are equal in worth to opinions which are fact-based. Or to assume that the scale and decibel level coming from oilsands advocates is proof of their cause. A noise meter is not evidence. Or to assume that the voices of opposition should be discounted as, at best, merely emotional and at worst, severely irrational.

Paul McKay, writing in the National Observer, takes Canada's business journalists and a lot of their fellow journos to the woodshed, accusing them of "media malpractice."

He begins with the story of an American school teacher, Ida Tarbell, who, in 1902, broke into journalism with a 19-part investigative series that set fire to the industrial barons and their monopolies.

Tarbell’s target was America’s biggest petroleum conglomerate, Standard Oil. She exposed, installment by installment, the brutally ruthless tactics (including serial Congressional bribery) the corporate colossus used to gain and maintain monopolies for shareholders and its galvanic founder, John D. Rockefeller. It enlightened the public, humbled the high and mighty, and ushered in a ‘trust-busting’ progressive U.S. President who ramrodded federal anti-monopoly laws through a simultaneously amazed, apoplectic Congress. Standard Oil and the Rockefellers never saw Tarbell, a former schoolteacher, coming. No one had dared to ask the questions she did, let alone print them.

Soon, fellow ‘muckraker’ reports exposed corruption and monopoly abuses in Chicago meatpacking plants, rapacious railroad barons, municipal graft, laboursafety violations and union-busting, and appalling conditions in public insane asylums. One investigative report revealed that the owner of the worst slum tenements in New York City was the richest church in America.

The best of these journalists used an alloy of evidence and audacity. They dared to ask questions others were too lazy, inept or timid to ask. Our profession has its heroes – like Emile Zola accurately accusing the French government and military of knowingly convicting an innocent officer of treason. Or Woodward and Bernstein daring to ask if a troupe of third-rate, bungling burglars might be henchmen for President Richard Nixon. Or, more recently, Michael Lewis exposing breath-taking ‘big shorts’, rogue hedge funds and algorithm flash trading. 

But a history of business journalism proves these figures are an exception. It is notorious for failing to detect bubbles before they burst with calamitous consequences.

...In Canada, our business press only belatedly dug up the real dirt on companies like Henry Pellatt’s Home Bank after its 1923 collapse, Viola Macmillan’s 1964Windfall mining scam, the fatal coal methane levels at Clifford Frame’s Westraymine, the $6 billion Bre-X swindle (which was exposed after the chief prospector jumped from a helicoptor with false, salted samples) and the collapse of apparently venerable Nortel Networks in 2009. 

In fact, the leading figures behind these spectacular failures were often lauded by the business press right up to the moment they became disgraced. The evidence of imminent demise was lurking, but nobody went looking for it. None dared ask tough questions. They did not do their job.

And now their failure turns to bitumen and pipelines and the alchemy of trying to conjure convenient facts out of thin air.

Which brings us to Canada’s bitumen bubble, and missing-in-action media coverage, which amounts to malpractice. 

In the days following Kinder Morgan’s ultimatum that it would jettison its planned Trans Mountain oil pipeline and forsake Canada unless it gains a clear and certain path to final approvals by May 31, a collective wail of lamentations ensued from oil companies, the pipeline manufacturers, the Alberta premier and Opposition leader, the Prime Minister and his senior cabinet members, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, and major banks. This is natural and fitting, and so is media coverage of their collective fury and resolve to avert that ultimatum. It is a big story. It needs to be covered.

The questions that go unasked.

In my view, Canada’s mainstream business news platforms (with a few stellar exceptions) have failed in their responsibility to make facts and evidence the cornerstone of their oilsands coverage. I routinely read the business sections of the Globe, Toronto Star, Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, Vancouver Sun,National Post and Financial Post. I scan BNN daily and the political panel shows of CBC and CTV.

To my knowledge, no one has asked these four key questions: 

What proof is there that Asian refiners have signed contracts to purchase vast volumes of Alberta raw bitumen for decades to come? If these do not exist, there is no demand.

What proof is there that Asian refiners are willing to contractually commit to a much higher price than U.S. refiners will pay for raw Alberta bitumen? If such contracts do not exist, there is no price certainty to support oilsands expansion. 

What proof is there that Alberta bitumen ranks high in global comparisons of oil quality, price, and ocean supertanker access, shipping costs and speed? 

Which private Big Oil players have recently placed big bets buying new, undeveloped oil sand properties, which would underpin Alberta’s expansion plans? 

Tellingly, the working assumption seems to be that such business case certainty must exist, even though there is no evidence of it. That there isn’t a bitumen bubble, because no reporters have dared to ask if Alberta’s oilsands ambitions really amount to a bright and shining lie. Just as generations of children don’t press their parents very hard about that pony they expect to get for Christmas and how it will get down the chimney. The answer might be unthinkable. 

But this media malpractice is not just a sin of omission, of failing to ask tough questions. It is a sin of commission when business journalists or media personalities lob only softball questions to oilsands advocates. They print or broadcast assumptions masking as facts, and confuse what many Albertans would like to happen with what is likely to happen because of inconvenient facts.

Negating science. Science, what science? Never heard of it.

In a month of media coverage about the escalating battle about the Kinder Morgan pipeline, not once have I seen a climate scientist interviewed about the risk greatly expanded bitumen exports might pose to people and the biosphere. In effect, science (the most reliable source of facts) has been banished from the debate stage, leaving provincial economics and national politics to dominate every discussion. How convenient. 

This has partitioned the parameters of debate, and the very vocabulary used. The fate of Alberta future oilsands and pipeline projects gets confronted not by respected climate or marine scientists, but video clips of Left-Coast environmentalists with a placard in one hand and a latte in the other. Bitumen with a demonstrably deadly chemical signature becomes a benign ‘product’ or ‘resource,’ barely different from wheat, lumber or potash. 

Yet the world’s top climate scientists have explicitly warned that Alberta’s oilsands amount to a delayed-fuse ‘carbon bomb’ our biosphere cannot tolerate. Top international economists, led by the esteemed and astute Lord Nicholas Stern, have identified those same bitumen deposits as ‘unburnable’ stranded assets. To date, these scientists and economists have not issued warnings about the perils of Canadian potash exports. 

Once adopted, these unchallenged oilsands euphemisms take on a force of their own and foster new imperatives. Of course, Albertans should be outraged if they can’t get their ‘resource’ to market. Of course the federal government should step in to protect the sanctity of equitable, inter-provincial trade. Ergo, the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion becomes a matter of national interest, where supporters are patriots, opponents are almost treasonous and any province which defers approvals until more science is completed is worthy only of being ‘nation-shamed.'

A Press that goes along to get along asks few questions.

...the business press readily reported alarming forecasts that western Canada would lose untold billions in future wealth should the two new pipelines not get built. Those forecasts of forfeited wealth came from major Canadian banks which assumed, without providing evidence, that exported bitumen could fetch much higher prices from Asian refiners than U.S. counterparts now pay. The banks did not disclose that they also have billions in outstanding loans to oilsands and pipeline projects. I saw no media reports or commentators that called out this brazen conflict of interest. 

In an equally glaring case, former Bank of Canada chief Mark Carney (who now heads the Bank of England and is a perennial newsmaker), warned on behalf of a consortium of central banks that global corporations involved in fossil fuel financing or production must assess and explicitly warn their shareholders about ‘stranded asset’ risks in a climate-constrained world. It fell on deaf ears at business news desks in Canada. 

But last week, Europe’s largest bank, HSBC, joined other global banks, insurance pools and pension funds in declaring it would no longer risk loans to new oilsands projects, or planned pipelines like the Trans Mountain expansion and Keystone XL. That may amount to a final, fatal bullet aimed squarely at Alberta’s bitumen bubble.

What's that blur? Oh, that's Notley and Trudeau and McKenna spinning like Dervishes.

For failures to unravel Looney Tunes logic, candidates abound. Alberta premier Rachel Notley, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and federal environment minister Catherine McKenna blithely claimed that ramping up carbon-laced bitumen exports would garner new cash to help pay for low-carbon investments in Alberta and B.C. marine safety upgrades. And that Canada could meet its solemn Paris pledge to reduce national carbon emissions while two oilsands provinces go totally rogue. Alberta touted its vaunted carbon tax on large emitters as a sign of climate leadership, but all future raw bitumen exports are exempt. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals promised a reform of national environmental assessment laws, then exempted oilsands and pipelines in the draft regulations.

...But what if this red-hot rhetoric, and a potentially ruinous breakdown in the bonds of Confederation, are actually warning signs that a bitumen bubble is beginning to crack open? Last year, Big Oil players dumped $22.5 billion in oilsands assets. If that is accurate, it is perhaps too much to expect politicians from Alberta and Ottawa to question the future their reputations and political fortunes rest on. 

But when the stakes are so high, and when there are whiffs of panic, extortion and even all-out political warfare in the air, it is precisely the time business journalists should be asking tough questions and demanding answers. Where are the Asian contracts to buy vastly more raw bitumen for decades? What price have they promised to pay? How does that square up with competing, global oil supply rivals? Who has prepared a serious global oil market analysis? 

That is our job. It is our professional, perhaps even patriotic, duty to do it well.

It seems odd that this story begins with an American schoolteacher, Ida Tarbell, and ends with a Canadian schoolteacher, Justin Trudeau. I guess they just don't make them like they used to.

"Here I Stand" - The Late Rafe Mair on an Independent British Columbia. He Saw This Coming, a Lot of Us Did.

Lawyer, Social Credit cabinet minister, columnist, broadcaster: Rafe Mair was one of those legendary firebrands British Columbia occasionally produces. Mair died in early October, 2017, seven months after he had penned a call for British Columbia to leave Canada.

His words never rang truer than now when we're getting browbeaten and strong armed by our federal government and threatened by the malignancy on our eastern frontier, Alberta. Mair had them both foremost in his mind when he wrote this.

I find I no longer come close to sharing the values Canada now stands for – I’m not talking about opinions but a philosophy of life, a set of basic values. 

As a core value, I value the environment above the desire of bankers and developers to make money and bought and paid for politicians to support them. I accept the need for societal sustenance but do not accept plunder in the name of progress. 

The flashpoint is the Trudeau supported revival of the Alberta Tar Sands and the Prime Minister compelling BC to sacrifice both principle and its environment to the transport and sale of Tar Sands product to places that will be under no constraints as to its use. I believe Canada must accept responsibility for safeguarding water, land and air in places it exports products and services. I cannot be loyal ro a country that has no such values.

...I have long felt more British Columbian than Canadian. When BC Minister for constitutional affairs working on amending the BNA Act to become the Constitution, I observed the perpetual second class treatment of BC and saw how no one cared that the Senate was an ongoing, deliberate putdown of my province, observed its woeful lack of representation on federal boards and commissions, lack of BC prime ministers and utter absence oF BC Governors-General, the disgraceful Prussian arrogant treatment of BC’s fishery by the federal government, the unthinking and uncaring expectation that in the 1970 FLQ crisis that it was fine to put BC, which wasn’t involved under martial law (no one would surely suggest that a murder and a kidnapping in BC by BC separatists, would have resulted in Ontario and Quebec being placed on martial law). The put downs seemed endless and started early. 

My generation grew up learning that Canadian explorers were Cartier and Champlain, Indians were Iroquois, Algonquin and Huron, and some limey, Sir Isaac Brock was a Canadian hero. I learned about Captains Cook and Vancouver, Quadra and Russian settlements in British History in a private school and about Simon Fraser and David Thompson at UBC. I didn’t read a decent history of BC until from Dr. Walter Sage and Dr. Margaret Ormsby in secohd year UBC and the real history of the land of my birth until I was nearly 70 and interviewed Dr. Jean Barman on her classic, The West Beyond The West. I doubt one in 100 kids of my vintage could name the first BC premier or the rich Victoria merchants, without a suggestion of public support, who sold us out to Ottawa for a mess of potage and a railway to help Ontario grab our resources cheap.

...The real reason I want BC out is a question of principles, or values, if you prefer. I’m not talking about political issues but basic tenets of belief.

The Meech Lake/Charlottetown Accords disclosed a basic gap between the Central Canadian elite – the people the late Denny Boyd called “Higher Purpose Persons (HPPs)”, who know best, – and those ignorant idiots in BC who refused to accept special powers for one province. 

After Elijah Harper killed Meech Lake, BC said next time it won’t be the premiers deciding but the people in referendum and thus it was that The Charlottetown referendum was held and 67.9% of British Columbians said “we’ve had enough of your patronizing crap – get stuffed!” 

Then Justin Trudeau decided, cross my heart, hope to die, to give Canadians a better voting system. To do it democratically, we’ll hold cozy neighbourhood meetings around the Country, then the House of Commons will meet, and the Liberal Party will cram through a reformed First Past The Post with a preferential ballot and presto! by an amazing coincidence, The Liberals will have its way and should carry Central Canada forevermore.

HPPs said there mustn’t be a referendum because, er, the people can’t understand these complicared issues and remember what happened when they voted on Charlottetown! In fact the HPPs were right for the wrong reason. Trudeau understood it was a Liberal Party Permanent Election formula he was after and wasn’t going to let those troublemakers in BC spoil it all for the elite, the HPPS as they did with Charlottetown in 1992. It was safer to break your word and lay low.

...I am an environmentalist. When we lose our environment, be it the extinction of a species we’ve never heard of, a valley sustained by its fauna, flora and water or a run of herring it is a huge tragedy. That list, as you know, is endless. Reading reports from Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd breaks the heart. 

Does that mean that I oppose all industry and development? 

That’s a pretty silly question. We have to work, eat and survive. But to the Canada exemplified by Trudeau, development, without more than cynical word service for the values I care about, trumps everything. Bear in mind throughout the balance of what I have to say that the Precautionary Principle is the law of Canada. 

Definition – The precautionary principle (or precautionary approach) to risk management states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public, or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus (that the action or policy is not harmful), the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking that action. 

Start with fish farms. Recently disease spreading from farms to wild salmon was scientifically demonstrated yet another time. The evidence of assaults on our wild salmon by sea lice from fish farms and disease from farmed fish, not to mention damage to other sea life and to the ocean floor, has piled up for 15+ years, is overwhelming yet, in as few words as possible, what was Fisheries Minister and DFO answer to the plethora of evidence generally and to the latest report? “BC, GO FUCK YOURSELVES!” 

Forgive my language but when I look at the work Alexandra Morton has done, the long underfunded battle of First Nations, the impact of this fascist government on commercial fishermen and, yes, sports fishermen, going back to Confederation that’s the only way I can translate the Federal Government’s attitude of sacrificing our precious resources to a large Norwegian despoiler of nature.. 

Does this offend your basic set of values? It certainly does mine! 

...The Alberta Tar Sands, the world’s biggest natural polluter, produces a tar like substance artificially liquefied, which if spilled, especially on water, is virtually impossible to clean up as it usually sinks too quickly to be dealt with, a spill defined as minor into the Kalamazoo River, in Michigan, in 2010, has not yet been cleaned up and probably never will be. The federal government has approved the Kinder Morgan pipeline to bring this from the Tar Sands through BC to Burrard Inlet (Vancouver Harbour) them taken by tankers across the Salish Sea, through or near the Gulf Islands through the Straits of Juan de Fuca to the Ocean. 

The company claims this will “only” add 400 tankers a year but as the Duke of Wellington said to a man on a London street who hailed him ‘Mr. Robinson, I believe’, “Sir, If you believe that, you’ll believe anything!” 

Spills are inevitable. So are tanker collisions and serious ones. Great damage will be done to our precious sea life, lives will be lost. And for what? 

Does this offend your basic set of values? It certainly does mine! 

A final word. Many things make up a nation but in my view shared values outrank all the rest combined. These aren’t political quarrels I have with Canada, though I have lots of them. No, these are fundamental values I can’t live without and Justin Trudeau can’t live with. None of these values destroy industry but put it, and what we are deeply committed to in British Columbia, on a level playing field where he who would impact the very essence of our homeland has the onus of proving he will do no harm or none which we whose home it is will not accept. 

British Columbia, my home, has been pushed around the 85+ years I have lived, worked, served, loved and, yes, loafed in her. To be called a bad Canadian because I want to protect her wild life and their habitat and don’t want to assist uncaring capitalists and their captive governments to spread ruin here and elsewhere has finally become too much. 

I hope you understand but that’s irrelevant, “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.”

I somehow think those words are destined to live on. Eventually, maybe not this year, perhaps not next but, eventually, we're going to get out of this empty shell of a country where choice comes in meaningless options of Harper or Ignatieff, Trudeau or Scheer, pale suits stuffed with wet cardboard. We cannot solve the challenges of this century with leaders of their meagre calibre.

$2,000,000,000,000.00 - Now There's a Figure That Grabs Your Attention.

Two trillion dollars. I'm guessing that, even for you, that's a lot of money.

It's the estimated liability of Alberta's five largest energy producers according to the Parkland Institute, a think tank at the University of Alberta.


"The Big Five need to start publicly disclosing their emissions modelling for the sake of transparency and accountability," reads the report, released Wednesday by the Parkland Institute, an Alberta public policy research network based at the University of Alberta.

It says Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL), Suncor Energy, Cenovus Energy, Imperial Oil and Husky Energy have not fully disclosed how much carbon pollution they expect to create out of their own assets. This pollution now has a hefty price tag since governments around the world have committed under the 2015 Paris Agreement to slash greenhouse gases in order to prevent dangerous changes to the climate.

“Governments can’t properly regulate corporations when they don’t have all the facts at hand,” the report’s co-author, Ian Hussey, said in an interview.

“Those are disclosures that we’re not seeing yet, but we believe these companies are already making these calculations.”

The report says the carbon liabilities — that is, the social cost of the carbon pollution that will come from developing their fossil fuel reserves — of the “big five” firms, based on a conservative estimate of $50 per tonne, is $320 billion, outweighing the whole of Alberta’s GDP, which it pegs at $309 billion.

In a scenario where polluters were paying $200 per tonne of carbon emissions, that liability would add up to $1.99 trillion based on their proven and probable reserves of oil and gas, according to the study.

Once again we're left to grapple with spotty accounting from the Oil Patch where environmental costs are frequently treated as "externalities" that are kept off the books, allowing the economic case for the Tar Sands to appear viable.

The oil wars that pit Victoria against Edmonton and Ottawa are heating up. The crud that Alberta and the feds insist on pumping/leaking across British Columbia and our coast is just that, crud. It's full of heavy metals, acids, carcinogens and other toxins that are incredibly persistent and damaging. The Americans gave us a free demonstration of that from the Enbridge spill in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Yet Rachel and Justin and all their subordinate sphincters think pumping that same lethal crud across British Columbia's mountainous and seismically active territory is just dandy. 

And when - not 'if' but when - one of those tankers runs up on the rocks and pours a planetary gutload of that crud into our coastal waters, the Trudeau government has approved the use of Corexit as an oil spill "dispersent."  Corexit doesn't disperse anything. It buries the evidence, sending it to the seabed, out of sight/out of mind, where, in the case of a product as noxious and persistent as Tar Sands dilbit, it can contaminate the marine ecology for decades, generations. The Americans have given us another demonstration of that. Corexit was used with disastrous consequences in the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, which, decades later is still not cleaned up, and to bury the evidence from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Thanks, Justin, for adding insult to injury or, perhaps, disaster to injury.

The BC government's latest, unpatriotic impertinence has been to restrict the amount of dilbit that can be transported across our province until "the behaviour of spilled bitumen can be better understood."

Now you would have thought, with so much at stake, that the feds and their counterparts in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and the big energy producers would have long ago tested how dilbit behaves when spilled into both fresh and salt water. Oh wait, the freshwater testing has already been done in Kalamazoo. That's not good. But there's still the critical saltwater testing. We haven't seen anything on that although when the government resorts to approving Corexit that's an indication that they have probably run their tests and don't want to talk about it. Besides they - the feds, Alberta and the Tar Sanders - would much prefer to offload that risk on the people of coastal British Columbia. 

Rachel managed to drop a shitload of righteous indignation on British Columbia for its audacity.

“Having run out of tools in the toolbox, the Government of British Columbia is now grasping at straws,” said Alberta Premier Rachel Notley in a statement. “The B.C. government has every right to consult on whatever it pleases with its citizens. It does not have the right to rewrite our Constitution and assume powers for itself that it does not have. If it did, our Confederation would be meaningless. Therefore, the action announced today by the B.C. government can only be seen for what it is: political game-playing.”

Of course there's one thing Notley, like her Conservative predecessors, does not want to discuss - why they think it's okay to ship that crud in the first place. Why not refine it on site? Why not keep those heavy metals, acids, carcinogens and myriad toxins right where they found them, in Athabasca?  At least minimize the environmental risks to British Columbia. Build a refinery or three, hire a bunch of Canadians to work the plants and ship full refined synthetic crude oil. There's a plan.

It's a plan but it costs money. And the Tar Sands can only pretend to be economically viable if actual costs are minimized, buried, or offloaded on someone else, free of charge. 

So, Rachel, up yours. All the way up.

I Missed This Last April. It Seems Justin Did Too.

This comes directly from the business page of Canada's most oil-friendly newspaper, The Calgary Herald. It's from April 24, 2017 to be exact.

China’s ambassador to Canada tried to allay concerns about a possible free trade pact between the two countries, addressing worries surrounding state-owned enterprises snapping up oilsands assets.

“To be honest, Chinese enterprises buying Canadian oilsands enterprises are actually incurring (a) loss,” Ambassador Lu Shaye told the Canada China Business Council on Wednesday, according to a copy of his speech.

“Canadian oilsands is not competitive given the current international oil price. Even if Canadians did not disapprove of China’s investment in (the) oilsands industry, I do not believe that Chinese enterprises would still be interested in this.”

So, just what is the deal? We're told this Kinder Morgan pipeline, so fiercely opposed in British Columbia, must be pushed through to meet Chinese demand. When Trudeau said he was going to renege on his solemn election promises, that was the line he used to justify his betrayal.

WTF?  Do we have some order from China for a million barrels of bitumen a day? If not, where are we planning to ship this crud?

Alberta's Hundred Billion Dollar Hangover Cure

There's these two guys, see? Regan Boychuk and Brent O'Neill. Two Albertans. They want to revive Alberta's collapsed labour market while, at the same time, cleaning up the mess "up north." And they figure a hundred billion dollars should just about cover it.

First, however, they'll have to get the Alberta government to face the problem it's spent decades ignoring - the environmental catastrophe sometimes called the Tar Sands.

Their proposal, "is built on several premises. The first is that the time for fossil fuel extraction has ended in Alberta. The low fruit has been picked and nobody saved anything for the future.

"The second is that climate change has become a clear and present danger. “We need to start making a real reduction in man-made emissions so our future generations have the same opportunities we once did” says the RAFT proposal.

"The best way to respond to this emergency — as well as increasing oil price volatility — is to wind down the industry and re-employ people in a massive environmental clean-up, RAFT proposes. While industry has a legal obligation to clean up its inactive wells and abandoned pipelines, it probably won’t spend the money unless government tackles some surprising legal obstacles.

"Cleaning up has many economic benefits. It puts oil service companies back to work and would employ thousands throughout the province. The clean-up would last decades and fixing leaking wells would reduce methane pollution into the atmosphere."

"Current liabilities for the conventional sector, the plan notes, include 444,000 oil and gas wells (only 200,000 are actually pumping liquids), 430,000 kilometres of pipelines (the distance to the moon is 384,000 kilometres), 30,000 oil and gas facilities, 900 square kilometres of oil sands development, 220 square kilometres of tailing ponds and “a 11.2 million ton sulfur pile that dwarfs the great pyramids of Egypt.” (The sulphur is another waste stream from bitumen upgrading.)

"No one has argued about the environmental necessity of a clean-up.

"Consider the size of the environmental burden. Last month the Alberta Energy Regulator reported that the forecast cost of reclaiming inactive oil and gas wells and abandoned facilities now totalled more than $30.6 billion. (When I first reported on these liabilities nearly a decade ago they amounted to $9 billion.)"

But there's a snag.

"Incredibly, the regulator holds only $240 million in its clean-up fund. That potentially leaves taxpayers on the hook for a $29-billion clean-up bill if laws and policies don’t radically change in the province and country.

"It’s widely agreed the industry-funded regulator, directed by a former oil patch lobbyist, has failed to grasp the gravity of the situation or the inadequacy of its current policies.

"That means the final bill for just for 75,000 [conventional oil] wells (not including 60,000 wells that pump less than 10 barrels of oil a day and are no longer economic) could be as high as $82 billion.

"The oil sands add to these growing environmental liabilities.

"Alberta’s auditor general has already warned that the province’s clean-up fund of $1.6 billion is grossly inadequate to cover an estimated $21-billion clean-up liability for just eight oil sands mining sites and 19 coal mines. Treating the toxic water in the tailing ponds might cost another $24 billion.

"Industry and the Alberta government have known about these liabilities for years. And the principle that industry is responsible for cleaning up its polluted sites is widely accepted.

And what would theft be without an Artful Dodger?

"...part of the problem results from small changes made to the federal Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act that effectively made it legal for oil and gas companies to declare bankruptcy and walk away from unreclaimed wells. The changes basically ensured that other creditors got paid while the public got stiffed with the environmental bills."

"In an article in University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review, Alexander Clarkson proposed changing federal law to declare well reclamation a “super priority.”

"That would give clean-up costs priority over creditors who extended risky loans to the company.

"More importantly, it would force bankers and other creditors to factor in environmental risks when lending to the highly indebted oil patch."

The Scam - Three Card Monte

"Cenovus, for example, paid only $3 million in royalties on bitumen sales worth $1.1 billion in the first six months of 2016. That’s less than a one per cent royalty.

"CNRL Resources paid $6 million on sales of $1.9 billion worth of bitumen.

"Suncor paid $48 million in royalties on $4.7 billion worth of gross bitumen sales. And on it goes.

"Many of the oil sands companies making money tend to own refineries and are what industry calls “integrated producers.” They include big oil sands players such as Suncor, Imperial, Husky and Cenovus.

"Even when oil prices are low these integrated players make huge profits by buying low-priced bitumen, upgrading and refining it and then selling high-priced refinery products in the North American market. Oil prices might be low but gasoline prices remain surprisingly high."

In other words, the screwing of the province and people of Alberta is nearly complete and, as usual for someone screwed over, they're left with a parting gift - environmental devastation and an enormous clean up bill. That's what they get from decades of utter neglect by Conservative governments (and now Notley's to boot).

Ralph Klein instilled the Mardi Gras mentality in Alberta's legislature and no one's been able to shake it since. Oh there was wealth, vast wealth supposedly but, oddly enough, there's nothing to show for it today except for that cesspool in the backyard. Shoulda listened to Peter Lougheed ...but, no.

Why the World's Eyes Will Be on Canada on October 19th

Next week's general election will decide whether we can restore the Rule of Law and a functional democracy to Canada. Both hinge on driving Stephen Harper out of office. Yet that's just scratching the surface of what it means to Canada and to the world to rid our country of this thug.

In the latest Foreign Policy, Jeff Dembicki writes that freeing Canada from Harper's yoke is just as critical to the world as it is to Canadians.

For years, Canada and Australia have been the climate villains the world has loved to hate. They’ve been the ones giggling in the corner at each year’s round of climate talks, trashing renewable energy, boasting about their reserves of coal and oil sands, and giving the diplomatic middle finger to serious emissions cuts. This summer a panel led by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan argued, “Australia and Canada appear to have withdrawn entirely from constructive international engagement on climate.” A story on the website Road to Paris by the journalist Leigh Phillips was even blunter: “They are what could be called the Bad Boys of climate change.”

Australia's prime ministerial coal scuttle, Tony Abbott, is gone, deposed by his own caucus, yet Harper remains a real threat to the 'make it or break it' climate summit in Paris this December

....though climate change has not loomed large in the election, if Harper’s Conservatives lose their ability to govern, the country would likely find itself with a profoundly different climate policy — and one that could potentially influence how world powers choose to negotiate and implement a post-2020 global climate change agreement at the COP21 summit in Paris this December.

“My feeling is there’s been a bit of a sigh of relief from the international community, at least in climate circles,” said Erwin Jackson, deputy CEO of the Climate Institute, an Australia-based think tank.

...By no means will Australia and Canada be setting the agenda at this year’s big climate talks — that’s for major powers like the United States, China, and the European Union. But as fossil fuel-producing middle powers, Canada and Australia have a significant role to play, argues Jackson, who has over 20 years of experience working on climate policy. “It’s in the ideas space that they’re really important,” he said.

Many developing countries are convinced that the only way they can become affluent is by burning fossil fuels. Although India recently promised to get 40 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2030, coal-fired power capacity is growing by 9.4 percent each year. And the country’s power minister, Piyush Goyal, claimed that “development imperatives cannot be sacrificed at the altar of potential climate changes many years in the future,” when asked in 2014 about India’s appetite for fossil fuels. Similarly, China has promised to cap its carbon emissions by 2030 while at the same time consuming more coal than the rest of the world combined.

But if Canada and Australia can prove to the world at Paris that they’re now willing and able to work with the global community to reduce their emissions to safe levels, while at the same time making coal and oil sands a less important contributor to their GDPs, Jackson argued, “that will give confidence to other resource-based economies in the developing world that they can do the same.”

The timing for such a scenario is perfect. They world is now adding more renewable energy capacity (143 gigawatts in 2013) than oil, coal, and gas combined (141 gigawatts the same year). Over half the world’s coal reserves aren’t profitable to extract at today’s prices, Moody’s Investors Service has estimated. And in 2014 the global economy grew while emissions stayed flat, the first time it has done so in 40 years, according to the International Energy Agency. The goal in Paris is to negotiate an international climate treaty capable of accelerating all this momentum. “[It’s about] sending a signal to investors that we’re all on one train and it’s heading in one direction,” Jackson said. “So you need to realign your investment decisions on that basis.”

Canada has not been sending that signal under Harper, who has been in power since 2006. The country may miss its 2020 climate target by 20 percent, a result primarily of increased oil and gas production, an Environment Canada report submitted to the U.N. this spring suggested. Canada’s fossil fuel-dominated energy sector is worth more to the national economy — it’s about 10 percent of GDP — than retail, construction, agriculture, and the public sector combined. A new government in Ottawa wouldn’t have much time to change the country’s course, but a sincere and dedicated effort to do so might communicate a powerful message to the international community.

Simply getting rid of Harper won't be enough. The next prime minister, be it Mulcair or Trudeau, needs to get Canadians to re-think our petro-statehood. We have to change course on high-carbon fossil fuels. Right now both opposition leaders, while lacking Harper's hydrocarbon malevolence, back bitumen extraction, transportation and export. It's going to take immense courage and vision to change that and we won't know until well after the votes are counted if either man has that strength or conviction. All we know for sure is that one man, the current prime minister, plainly doesn't.

“Harper and Abbott tapped into people’s very real fears of losing their jobs,” Phillips, who writes about European affairs and climate for outlets like Nature and theGuardian, said in an interview.

Those fears are an impediment to action, especially for efforts to negotiate a binding climate treaty among the world’s 196 nations. All it takes is a few loud dissenters to slow down the entire process. That’s the role performed by coal-dependent Poland within the European Union. Internationally, developing countries like India have made legitimate claims that their economic growth isn’t possible without burning fossil fuels. What incentive do they have to reduce their dependence on coal, gas, and oil if “bad boys” such as Canada and Australia refuse to do the same? “Those divisions are the big blocks toward achieving an international consensus,” said Phillips.

A Closer Look at Oil and Climate Change.

Stephen Harper will not be pleased.  The Carnegie Endowment is fingering his cherished Tar Sands.

Not all oil is created equal.  Sweet crude, of the Saudi sort, comes out of the ground almost ready to use.  It's pumped out of the ground easily, free of most contaminants (sulphur, water, sand, natural gas).  The amount of energy required to extract and refine a barrel of oil is modest.  That, then, provides the benchmarks by which other oils from other places can be judged.

A new report from the Carnegie Endowment, "Know Your Oil: Creating a Global Oil-Climate Index," evaluates the major oilfields around the world in the context of their respective climate change impacts.

This is research Harper can't suppress.  It's available online and it's free of charge.  Why does this report matter?  It clearly identifies the highest-carbon oil fields, such as our own bitumen fields.  If we're to have much hope of avoiding runaway global warming, the highest carbon stuff will have to be left in the ground.  These are the "stranded assets" the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, recently warned about.

For Canada overall there's good news along with the bad.  While Athabasca fields are at the upper end of the scale for greenhouse gas emissions, the east coast Hibernia field is second to the lowest.  Bad news for Alberta.  Good news for Newfoundland & Labrador.

The Clean Energy Light at the End of the Tunnel

High carbon energy's days are numbered.  A report from IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency, predicts a 40% drop in the cost of renewable energy over the next few years.  That should more than offset the recent drop in oil prices and consign the highest cost/highest carbon fossil fuels to the dustbin of history.

IRENA's report, "Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2014, states that biomass, hydropower, geothermal and onshore wind are all competitive with or cheaper than coal, oil and gas-fired power stations, even without financial support and despite falling oil prices. The report was released at IRENA's annual conference in Abu Dhabi this month.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) power generation is leading the cost decline, with solar PV module costs falling 75% since the end of 2009 and the cost of electricity from utility-scale solar PV falling 50% since 2010.

In a separate report issued by Deutsche Bank this month, the cost to generate power through solar power was predicted to drop by 40% over the next three to four years. Deutsche Bank has also reported that the cost of rooftop solar power is expected to beat coal and oil-fired plant energy costs in just two years.

All of this is in keeping with the warning UBS, the world's largest private bank, circulated to its clients this summer.  The bank warned investors that conventional power utilities were on their way out due to the cost efficiency of solar power and battery technology advancements.

In language more closely associated with green NGOs, the bank with assets of more than $1.5tn says it expects a paradigm shift away from large-scale conventional power plants. “Power is no longer something that is exclusively produced by huge, centralised units owned by large utilities. By 2025, everybody will be able to produce and store power. And it will be green and cost competitive, ie, not more expensive or even cheaper than buying power from utilities,” say the authors, who urge their financial clients to “join the revolution.”

“Solar is at the edge of being a competitive power generation technology. The biggest drawback has been its intermittency. This is where batteries and electric vehicles (EVs) come into play. Battery costs have declined rapidly, and we expect a further decline of more than 50% by 2020. By then, a mass [produced] electric vehicle will have almost the same price as a combustion engine car. But it will save up to €2,000 (£1,600) a year on fuel cost, hence, it will begin to pay off almost immediately without any meaningful upfront ‘investment’. This is why we expect a rapidly growing penetration with EVs, in particular in countries with high fossil fuel prices.”

The expected 50% reduction in the cost of batteries by 2020 will not just spur electric car sales, but could also lead to exponential growth in demand for stationary batteries to store excess power in buildings, says UBS. “Battery storage should become financially attractive for family homes when combined with a solar system and an electric vehicle. As a consequence, we expect transformational changes in the utility and auto sectors,” it says. “By 2020 investing in a home solar system with a 20-year life span, plus some small-scale home battery technology and an electric car, will pay for itself in six to eight years for the average consumer in Germany, Italy, Spain, and much of the rest of Europe.”

Clearly this is the death knell of Harper's bitumen boosters. Institutional investors won't want to tie up their assets in long-term commitments to high carbon fossil fuel production.

Harper's Bitumen Policy - Don't Ask, Don't Tell

The Harper government has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid the public learning just what's in bitumen and the risk that stuff poses to our rivers, our lakes, our groundwater supply and our oceans.  Mum's the word.

Two things we've learned about Harper by now.  He's secretive and pathologically dishonest.  The man is a born liar.

One of those subjects Harper wants to keep out of the public eye is bitumen, his Athabasca Tar Sands bounty.  His government commissioned a study in 2003 and promptly buried it.  It has now surfaced but it raises a massive number of questions and delivers damned few answers.

Here's what the Canadian Press says is missing from the report.

Toxicology: Research on the biological effects of oilsands products is lacking. Report found no peer-reviewed articles at all.

Bitumen in water: There is little information on how bitumen, diluted bitumen or products used to dilute bitumen behave in water, including whether bitumen sinks or floats.

Metals: Although bitumen has different heavy-metal concentrations and components than conventional oil, their behaviour in a spill hasn't been studied.

Condensate: Not much is known on the toxicity of condensate — a lighter hydrocarbon used to dilute bitumen for pumping — once it enters a body of water.

Pathways: The mechanics of how bitumen and other oilsands products interact with organisms is unknown.

Air toxicity: More research is needed on the toxicity and deposition of oilsands hydrocarbons through the air.

Specific water bodies: Little research has been done on the effects of hydrocarbon spills specific to Canadian waters such as the Great Lakes.

Photo-toxicity: Studies should be conducted on whether chemicals in bitumen are made more toxic by sunlight, as happens with some hydrocarbons

Dispersants: More needs to be known about the interaction of bitumen, the environment and dispersants, which are chemicals sometimes used to break up and speed the decomposition of oilspills.

Ice: The behaviour of oil, bitumen and dispersant in the ice-choked, cold and dark waters of the Canadian Arctic is largely unknown.

The government has been sitting on this report since 2013.  A spokesman for Fisheries & Oceans tried to fend off criticism by saying that a peer reviewed version of the report will be released soon.  Peer reviewed?  What is there that warrants peer review?  The report simply lists, item by item, all the critical information we don't have, all the matters that haven't been studied.  How do you peer review that?  

The industry responded quickly and, as expected, the bullshit flowed hot and heavy.

"There have been a number of studies by reputable third-party and scientific organizations ... that demonstrate that diluted bitumen behaves just like any other type of crude oil product that's transported through our pipeline," he said.

In an emailed statement, Phillipe Reicher of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association made a similar point.

"Generally speaking, we have no operational evidence that indicates that diluted bitumen behaves differently than other forms of crude oil," he said.

Claiming that dilbit behaves just like any other type of crude oil and that there's no operational evidence to indicate that dilbit behaves differently than other forms of crude is an outrageous and very deliberate lie.  Just two words are needed to put the lie to that - Kalamazoo River.  

What's a Single Issue Prime Minister to Do?

These are not good times for Canada's petro-prime minister.  Harper's Holy Grail, Canadian energy superpowerdom, has sprung a leak.  Even The Globe & Mail, says bitumen no longer makes any economic sense.

If $40 a barrel still seems a ways off, consider that the benchmark price for oil sands crude is already trading in that price range. What’s more, if production from high-cost sources isn’t withdrawn from an oversupplied market, oil prices may soon be trading even lower.

The first thing Canadians should recognize about the new world order for oil prices is that – contrary to what we’re being told by our federal government – the economy is no longer in dire need of any new pipelines. For that matter, it can live without the new rail terminals being built to move oil as well. Yesterday’s transportation bottlenecks aren’t relevant in today’s marketplace.

At current prices there won’t be any massive expansion of oil sands production because those projects, which would produce some of the world’s most expensive crude, no longer make economic sense.

The recent spate of project cancellations by global oil giants – Total’s Joslyn mine, Shell’s at Pierre River, and Statoil’s Corner oil sands venture – is only the beginning. As oil prices grind lower, we can expect to hear about tens of billions of dollars of proposed spending that will be cancelled or indefinitely postponed.

...If plunging oil prices are writing a boom-to-bust story in provinces such as Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland, the narrative will be much different in other parts of the country.

Ontario’s long-depressed economy is already beginning to find a second wind, recently leading the country in economic growth. And the engine is just beginning to rev up. As the largest oil-consuming province in the country, lower oil prices put more money back into the pockets of Ontarians, while also juicing the buying power of its most important trading partner. Ontario’s trade leverage with the U.S. is set to become even more meaningful as the Canadian dollar continues to slide along with the country’s rapidly fading oil prospects.

Just as the oil sands boom turned Canada’s currency into a petrodollar, pushing it above parity with the greenback, the loonie is already tumbling in the wake of lower oil prices. And it shouldn’t expect any help from the Bank of Canada, which continues to signal that it’s willing to live with a much lower exchange rate in the face of a strengthening U.S. dollar.

A loonie at 75 cents means GM and Ford may once again consider Ontario an attractive place to make cars and trucks. Even if they don’t, you can bet others will. With the loonie’s value falling to three quarters of where it was only a few years ago, we’ll start seeing Ontario, as well as other regions of the country, start to regain some of the hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs that were lost in the last decade amid a severely overvalued currency.

Yes, kids, that was the very conservative Globe & Mail admitting that Eastern Canada has for years been afflicted by the Athabasca-borne "Dutch Disease."  Harper, Oliver, Flaherty and the rest of the parliamentary clown car have expended massive energy in denying it but Alberta's wealth (the money they've long since 'pissed away') has hurt Canada's manufacturing sector and the hundreds of thousands of workers that lost their jobs. 

Cognitive Dissonance is a Lousy Political Platform, Even for the Liberals.

Cognitive dissonance occurs when an entity embraces two or more contradictory beliefs or values at the same time.  As social psychologist Leon Festinger showed, cognitive dissonance in an individual leads to psychological distress.  To cope, that individual or entity may simply block out information that contributes to the stress of dissonance.

Case in point.  Justin Trudeau is an avowed supporter of bitumen trafficking.  It would seem he draws the line of environmental consciousness somewhere between bitumen and asbestos even though high-carbon fossil fuels, not asbestos, could well destroy our civilization and ruin Canada for future generations.

It's not that Trudeau rejects the theory of anthropogenic global warming (or at least he hasn't said as much) but he seems to compartmentalize his dissonance, clearly choosing to block out information about CO2's contribution to global warming when he proclaims his fealty to bitumen. 

It's not just the pipelines that are the problem, Justin.  It's the energy consumption, GHG emissions and environmental devastation in the production of dilbit and the energy consumption, GHG emissions and environment-wrecking impact of refining, distributing and burning that dirty, synthetic crude.

It's not that Justin is going to come right out and say that he wants Canada to punch above its weight in contributing to the rapid growth in atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions that are already wreaking havoc around the world, especially in our far north.  He would never say such a thing but you can infer that intention from his platform. You can't divorce consequences from the policies that trigger them.  Can't be done.

The Liberal leader objects to bitumen pipelines strung across northern B.C. that may endanger the livelihoods of tens of thousands and against the wishes of the residents and their communities.  He does favour bitumen pipelines crossing central and southern B.C. that may endanger the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands and against the fierce objection of the residents and municipalities representing far more than a million Canadians.  Of course that's not so much cognitive dissonance as it is raw, opportunistic hypocrisy.

Justin likes to convey the impression that he's all about values, quite ready to make the tough, moral decisions.  I'd like to believe him, you know, but it turns out cognitive dissonance is like a virus and can be highly contagious.  If you suspect you've already been infected, go see your doctor.

Geriatric Pipelines?

An analysis of the pipeline failure that spilled 200,000 gallons of Athabasca dilbit in Mayflower, Arkansas concluded there was a manufacturing fault in the pipe.

Here's the thing.  The pipe that failed was 70-years old.  Who knows, maybe your great-grandfather had a hand in its construction?  But this geriatric pipeline was just a fluke, right?  No, not at all.

Citing an ongoing investigation, both Exxon and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) waited nearly a month after receiving the report before releasing the details to Arkansas newspaper Log Cabin Democrat Thursday.
Implications of the report are significant as it shows that pipelines "similarly manufactured, and in the same era as the ruptured line in Mayflower, are inferior and susceptible to failure," the Democrat reports.
A pipeline industry insider who declined to be named told Common Dreams that there are "tens of thousands of miles of pipeline in the ground and operating from the approximate vintage" as the Pegasus pipeline.
"The fact of the matter is, any pre-1970s pipeline was manufactured with old technologies,"  John Tynan, Watershed Protection Manager with Central Arkansas Water, told Common Dreams.
"The only way to eliminate their risk is to completely remove the pipelines and shut down the operation," he added.

What is a product as corrosive and toxic as Athabasca dilbit, that requires such high pressure to pump, doing in antiquated, "old technology" pipelines?

Is there a lesson in this for eastern Canada.  The Energy East pipeline deal to carry Athabasca bitumen to New Brunswick for refining and export won't involve much new pipe.

"70 per cent of the pipeline is already in the ground in the form of TransCanada’s existing Alberta-to-Ontario natural gas pipeline that will be converted to accept oil."

So, let's get this straight.   That million barrels a day flow of bitumen will cross Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario, in an old, natural gas pipeline.  Hmm, what could go wrong?  

Then again, if Enbridge is promising the Americans that Keystone XL will be a brand new, high-technology, state of the art pipeline constructed from scratch, why are Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario being stuck with a recycled, natural gas line of undetermined vintage?   Could it be they're being put at risk to save a few bucks?

Canada's Carbon Black Eye - Bitumen Peddling

Across Canada, provincial  and local governments have achieved great things in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the Harper government has grabbed as much undeserved credit for that as possible.

Yet Harper and his slackjawed EnviroShill, Peter Kent, can't hide the impacts of their bitumen-peddling policies, no matter how much credit they steal from others.

Canada's annual heat-trapping greenhouse gases continue to level off or decline in most sectors of the economy, outside of Alberta's oilpatch, says the latest annual inventory report submitted by the Harper government to the United Nations.

 

The government report, prepared by Environment Canada, noted the country's average temperatures were 1.5 degrees C above average in 2011, which makes it more likely to observe impacts such as rising sea levels and increasing extreme weather events that could intensify in the future.

"In some regions, the impacts could be devastating, while other regions could benefit from climate change," the report said.

But oilsands companies exploiting Alberta's natural bitumen deposits, which require large amounts of energy and water to extract heavy oil, continue to be the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases in the country, standing in the way of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's target to lower annual emissions by 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020. A report released by Environment Canada in August estimated Canada was on pace to be about 20 per cent above that target in 2020.

The oilsands sector also now represents about eight per cent of Canada's overall annual emissions.

The report said Canada had the largest growth in emissions among G8 countries over the past two decades. It is also among the top sources of greenhouse gases in the world, representing about two per cent of global emissions, and one of the highest sources of greenhouse gases per person.

 Oilsands industrial activities have reduced emissions per barrel of oil produced by about 26 per cent since 1990 because of new technologies, as well as exporting some emissions to the U.S. for some refining and upgrading activities.

Other figures from the report show that Alberta's industrial facilities are responsible for 48 per cent of all industrial emissions in the country in 2011, followed by Ontario at 19 per cent, Saskatchewan at nine per cent and Quebec at eight per cent.

 

 

A Tar Sands Compromise, One They'll Have to Refuse

Today's bitumen trafficking contemplated by Enbridge, Redford and Harper is beset by indefensible problems.   The proponents are making it far worse than it needs to be.

A huge part of their problem is dilbit, the stuff that still lines the riverbed of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan.  It's truly noxious stuff.   Just to be able to be pumped through a pipeline, Alberta bitumen must be diluted.   It's mixed with dilutents to become what's commonly known as dilbit, diluted bitumen.   This dilbit is then pumped across Canada's borders for export to world markets.

What happens to dilbit once it reaches Asia or Texas?   The dilutents are refined out.   Then the crud is refined out of the bitumen to leave a functional, synthetic petroleum that can be further refined into conventional fuels such as gasoline, jet fuel, etc.

The really nasty nature of dilbit is that, when it is spilled, it creates a hell of a mess.  It's laced with heavy metals, acids and carcinogens.  If spilled on land, the soil usually has to be dug out.   If spilled  in waterways, like the Kalamazoo River, the dilutent separates out, rises to the surface, vaporizes into a toxic cloud, while the remainder, the bitumen, sinks to the bottom and contaminates the river bed or lake bed or seabed.

Regular oil tends to float or so we believed before the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.   But a good deal of it does float and can even be broken up and dispersed by wave action.

So, why do Enbridge, Redford and Harper insist on trafficking in dilbit at all?   Why not do the upgrading/refining in Alberta and export, instead, synthetic crude oil - the stuff that floats?  

That's right.   Build the infrastructure, hire Canadians, and refine the bitumen into its safest form right on site in Alberta.   More economic activity for Alberta, more revenue, a product that they don't have to desperately shop around the globe.  No need to import costly dilutents into Alberta, far less volume to pump out.  That also translates into fewer tankers needed to ply British Columbia's coastal waters carrying far less hazardous cargo.   That sounds like win, win, win, win.

So what's wrong with that idea?   Plenty.   That would mean having to reveal that Athabasca bitumen is a major, sub-prime asset that, in refined form, can't compete on world markets.   That would invite scrutiny of the Athabasca Con game.

Exposed, the marketable price of Athabasca synthetic crude, would invite sober scrutiny of other aspects of the venture - the subsidies, tax deferrals, and minimal royalties; the true viability (or myth) of carbon capture and sequestration; the massive energy and water consumption for extraction and upgrading;  postponed costs of environmental remediation; environmental impacts, current and future including the tailing ponds; the havoc of inevitable "boom and bust" cycles resulting from having to market the world's most expensive petroleum; the corruption of governments, federal and provincial; perhaps even the contribution to climate change and the sullying of Canada's reputation.

And that's why this simple compromise would be a non-starter for Enbridge, the Calgary Petroleum Club, the Athabasca operators, Redford and Harper.   They haven't cloaked this venture in so many blatant lies so that they can be smoked out into the light of day.

Yet it's a good and reasonable policy alternative for the Liberals or New Democrats.  Be a good neighbour to British Columbia, only ship the clean stuff, not that rank bitumen or dilbit.   Keep those refining jobs in Alberta.   Keep that refining infrastructure and income in Canada.  Cut down on dangerous and unnecessary tanker traffic.  It sells itself.   What could be more reasonable?

Force Harper and Redford and Enbridge to say that it's such a lousy, high-carbon product that it's not viable if we have to refine it here before export.   Force them to show that Athabasca bitumen is a sub-prime asset.   Make them show how reckless and short-sighted their bitumen obsession has made them.

Canada's Sub-Prime Disaster Waiting in Harper's Wings

One sector known for being a holdout on climate change is the financial community.   Some of the most outlandish denialist journalism has come (and too often still does) from once credible outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and Financial Post.

But now they're being overtaken by reality.  Denialism, no matter how loud and influential and constant, cannot stop the steady advance of climate change and that makes it ultimately self-defeating.   The flat-earthers learned that in their day.  Wishful thinking and denialism are losing strategies.

A new day may be upon us as even the Financial Times seems to acknowledge the writing on the wall:

A new project has asked more than 1,000 of the world’s biggest asset owners to say what their exposure is to climate risks and what they are doing about it. 

Julian Poulter, executive director of the Asset Owners Disclosure Project, says it is becoming more important that institutions understand and disclose the impact that climate change could have  on their portfolios.

There is increasing certainty that climate change is happening and that its impacts are going to be profound. The International Energy Agency says that the world is on course for average temperature rises of at least 4C, not the 2C targeted by policy makers, adding that if we are to stay within the 2C target, two-thirds of fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground.

“The year ahead will be dominated by growing tension between ever-stronger evidence of climate change and the inadequate policy response,” says Nick Robins, head of the climate change centre at HSBC. Awareness of the severity of climate impacts is likely to be further strengthened in September, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes its fifth review of the science of climate change.

This implies that high-carbon assets will face increasing regulatory constraints and a growing risk of becoming stranded assets. Yet the average pension fund portfolio has 55 per cent of its assets invested in high-carbon sectors or sectors greatly exposed to climate change, Mr Poulter points out.

The range of sectors he highlights – such as oil and gas, energy, transport, manufacturing and the financing that funds these activities – gives a good idea of how affected most portfolios will be.

“As universal owners, they are exposed to the impacts of climate change in all regions, asset classes and industries,” he says.

“The only realistic method for asset owners to manage climate risk is to hedge their portfolios – to invest in low-carbon assets so that when carbon is re-priced, either directly or indirectly, the destruction of value in their high-carbon investments is offset by an increase in value in their low-carbon investments.”

The first step in this rebalancing of portfolios is for institutions to find out how exposed their current investments are, and then to tell people about it.

This is a significant leap for the sector, which has a tendency to be secretive. “There is a crisis of transparency in this industry,” Mr Poulter says.

“Asset owners have never been put on the spot before.”

And there, laid bare before you, is the folly of Stephen Harper and Canada's bitumen traffickers.   "...two-thirds of fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground - the destruction of value in their high-carbon investments"   There it is, in a nutshell.

When business recognizes that two-thirds of fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground that guts the value of the world's carbon-filthiest and most expensive petroleum resource, bitumen.   Investors are already waking up to the looming destruction of value in their high-carbon investments - bitumen or, more to the point, the companies that produce, refine and export the stuff.

Asset owners, i.e. investment funds, are now on the spot and they've never been put on this spot before.   They have to be realistic about the reality and impact of climate change not only on the environment but on the portfolio they're selling to their investors.   It's their asses on the line now.

There is a major campaign now underway to force academic institutions to divest holdings in high-carbon resources.   When the investment community follows suit, as it will, all the King's horses and all the King's men in Ottawa and Calgary and Edmonton will no longer be able to mask the reality that Athabasca bitumen is a horribly sub-prime asset on which they have been recklessly gambling the economy and fiscal stability of our country.

The fact that bitumen is unjustifiably expensive to produce and transport coupled with the fact that it's the highest-carbon variety of ersatz petroleum on the planet should be enough to persuade any rational, responsible leader to act prudently.   Add to that all the other factors - the tax deferrals; the subsidies and grants; the resources squandered on extraction including energy and water;  the ecological devastation, existing and potential;  the deferred (perhaps permanently) remediation; the carbon emissions associated with extraction, processing and transportation; the devastatingly overheated Alberta "boom and bust" economy; this may be the biggest and costliest blunder in Canadian history.

It's one thing for Stephen Harper to ignore reality.   He does that as a matter of course just as he ignored the alarms of the onrushing 2008 economic meltdown while ushering Canada toward U.S.-style casino capitalism.

It's another thing altogether for our Liberal and New Democrat leaders not to recognize the peril of our sub-prime Athabasca bitumen and it's cowardly of them not to stand up for the Canadian public and try to stop this from getting any worse than it already is.

Folly, sheer folly.