Deutsche Bank has gained a reputation for channeling sketchy money to dodgy borrowers. When DB turns its nose up at you, you have a real problem, probably more than one.
Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank is joining a lengthening list of European lenders and insurance companies that say they won't back new oilsands projects.
The German bank said Monday its new fossil fuels policy will also prohibit investing in projects that use hydraulic fracturing or fracking in countries with scarce water supplies, and all new oil and gas projects in the Arctic region.
It says its ban on oilsands financing, effective immediately, will include exploration, production, transport or processing, seemingly including oilsands pipelines and upgraders or refineries.
The Canadian Association of Oil Producers responded with threats to destroy the world.
"Attempts to stifle Canadian production by restricting financing can have only one effect; countries with lower environmental standards — and in many cases lower social, human rights and governance standards — will fill the void."
A recurrent theme on this blog is the subject of how something as benign sounding as "normal" can be a one-way road to the cliff-edge.
Anthropologist, Jared Diamond, addresses normalcy in his book, "Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." He discusses normalcy in the context of "creeping normalcy" or "landscape amnesia." That refers to human nature's shortsightedness, our ability to forget the past, to blur memories that remind us of how dangerously far we have gone over a remarkably brief period of years. If you lose your awareness of what "normal" meant ten or twenty years ago, you have lost your metric by which to gauge change. A sense of normalcy can mask enormous abnormality.
The Tyee's, Andrew Nikiforuk, addresses the danger in his latest column, "Normal is the Problem."
Sharon Wilson is a fifth-generation Texan who drives around rural communities and takes pictures of oil and gas facilities with an infrared camera. The pictures make visible all the methane pollution that industry and governments pretend is not happening in rural communities.
Wilson recently tweeted these two sentences: “We can and must do better than going back to normal. Normal is the problem.”
And she is right as rain about that. Normal has become a pathological state.
...Let’s face facts: our hi-tech, globalized-trade-anything-for-peanuts world run mostly by tyrants isn’t natural.
Since 1970, an outpouring of normality has just about destroyed the Earth: It has created an abnormal economic machine, blind to energy spending, that doubled the global population and boosted per capita consumption by 45 per cent.
At the same time the so-called value of global economic activity grew by 300 per cent. Meanwhile global trade has exploded like a coronavirus by 900 per cent. To support all this consumption and trade, the extraction of “living materials” from nature has jumped by 200 per cent.
...That’s like eating your kidneys for dinner, and I can’t think of anybody who would consider that normal except Hannibal Lecter.
We have eliminated 40 per cent of the world’s original forests. We have extirpated (and there’s a word for these normal times) most of the world’s large mammals. An estimated one million species of animals and plants stand on the brink of extinction. ...Homo sapiens, another mammal, are on that list, and we pretend that’s normal.
...Normal means you don’t have any respect for limits or sacred places. Normal means you think you can simply swap fossil fuels with so-called “clean energy” and protect the norm. But it mostly means you have surrendered your capacity to be human and to love this place.
So I don’t want to go back to normal.
I don’t want to go back to a world where it’s okay to industrialize and then globalize the care of old people as though they are just another resource to be mined before they die.
...I don’t want to go back to the digital contagion uprooting our minds and souls where authoritarian males justify the mining of our computers for data to improve their ability to engineer our behaviours.
That’s just predation.
I don’t want to go back to a world where lawyers and judges don’t understand the difference between a legal system and a justice system. I don’t want to go back to a world where governments think it is okay to sacrifice agricultural communities with disruptive fracking technologies that cause earthquakes, pollute groundwater and consistently lose money.
That’s just white-collar crime with a high-pressure water pump.
...I don’t want to go back to a world where we accept the status quo of escalating wealth inequalities and polarized political thinking.
Polarization ends in one of three bloody ways: civil war, revolution or slavery.
...I don’t want to go back to a world where billionaires think so little of this Earth that their primary obsession is to escape to Mars.
I don’t want to go back to a world where political leaders don’t have the courage to talk about cheap energy, reckless consumption, over-population and climate change in the same sentence.
And I don’t want to go back to a world where the media can’t admit that our civilization, as William Ophuls puts it, “has gotten too big, too complex and too hard to manage.”
I don’t want to go back to an economy where corporations socialize all costs and privatize all gains. That’s robbery and theft. And it must end.
...So Sharon Wilson got it right. Normal is the problem, and the normlessness of a pandemic has exposed the fat tail of normal as pathology.
And I am not going back to it.
Sharon Wilson says we can leave normal for better this way: “Do all things with love, and be damn fierce about it.”
Amen to that.
Ask yourself this: Is your political party of choice in these ranks? If it is, what are you doing supporting it?
Canada seems likely to get knocked off its perch as the world's fourth largest petroleum exporter. We've milked it for all it was worth but today it's worth way less than its weight in milk.
It was only a few years ago that our then freshly-minted prime minister appeared before an audience of oil men in Houston assuring them that "no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there." Hey, Justin, wanna bet?
He is a betting man, at least when he's playing with house money. That's how we got saddled with the government's bad bet on the Trans Mountain pipeline. The bandits who owned it, former EnRon alumni, were threatening to just shut it down. They wouldn't budge even when Ottawa offered to guarantee their return on the asset. Nobody in the private sector wanted to touch it. And so Ottawa's money man reached for the government cheque book and wrote those cowboys a cheque for far more than the pipeline's actual value. Way more. Billions more.
Canada would have a massive new pipeline to "tidewater." Justin would see to it and no solemn campaign promises would get in his way. He got bruised and battered by the courts along the way but now he's poised to drive that puppy through all the way to Burrard Inlet and the BC coast.
The prime minister didn't foresee a pandemic that would sweep the world. No one did. I didn't. I'll bet you didn't either. Scientists did and they gave plenty of warnings but they were vague warnings of contagions, epidemics, maybe even pandemics of one sort or another, here or possibly there, at some point in the near or intermediate future.
Even though we saw emerge a glut of conventional, inexpensive oil, we had other reasons, political reasons not to give up the ship, HMCS Athabasca II. It might have been shipping water and listing by the stern but it wasn't sunk yet. If world oil prices rebounded it might even reach the safety of a port. We doubled down.
Then Covid-19 showed up and threw a wrench in the global economy that, in turn, put a big dent in the demand for oil just as a couple of major producers had weaponized oil to drive others out of the market. As their wells kept pumping oil at record speed they got ahead of recessionary markets and began running out of places to store the stuff. They had to do something with it and so, yesterday, they wound up paying about $37 a barrel to anyone who would take it off their hands. You could fill five oil tanker trucks and drive away with a cheque for $37,000 for your efforts. Pretty sweet deal.
Meanwhile, in the land of garbage oil, bitumen, it was even worse. That's not cheap oil. It's expensive oil. Some countries can produce conventional oil for $10 or $15 per barrel. Bitumen, dilbit, that costs $45 per barrel for extraction, processing and transmission to a refinery on the Gulf coast. This doesn't sound like a wonderful prospect when US refineries are paying customers to haul their superior product way.
Does this mean the end of oil? Hell no. Globally, we've gone from a 100 million bpd habit to around 65 million bpd. But that shrinkage means there is less room to accommodate all of today's players. It's not a good time for high-carbon, high-cost, low-value junk oil such as bitumen. It's also a lousy time to have political leaders with feet of clay.
If you walk into the barn and find your prized mare lying dead in her stall, ordering a pricey new saddle won't help anything. But our government seems to have run out of ideas. Are they to blame? No, not really. They didn't trigger the oil war. They didn't create the pandemic. But they did plenty of things that were pretty damned dumb.
Andrew Nikiforuk looked at some of the collateral damage a few days ago, well before oil prices went negative.
Art Berman, one of North America’s most astute and consistently reliable oil analysts, admits the pandemic is compounding the problems of an industry and global economy already in waning health.
“Energy is the economy, and oil is the largest and most productive part of world energy. The global economy has been dying of accumulated debt for 50 years. Coronavirus has sent it to the intensive care unit.
“If the economic patient survives the ICU, it will need a long period of recovery and therapy before returning to its previous life.”
Wood Mackenzie, the British consultancy, now estimates that 10 per cent of global oil production is uneconomic insanity at prices below $25 a barrel.
Heavy oil of the sort Canada produces requires extensive upgrading and pricey transportation costs. It’s always the first to feel the pinch of any volatility because of its high cost — about $45 a barrel.
...
Canada, the world’s fourth largest oil exporter, banked its destiny on the export of low-grade bitumen with no strategic risk planning. As a result it will experience huge economic losses and roller-coaster volatility for its currency.
Alberta promoted over-production and pressed for new pipelines to carry the increased flow. Now, as global demand plummets, it can no longer fill the pipelines it has.
Rystad Energy, the proficient Norwegian-based analyst, has already noted that of all the world’s oil producers, Canada will be “the most affected so far.” Lacking buyers at a suitable price, it will produce well below its capabilities this year, “shutting in” nearly 1.1 million barrels per day.
Canada’s six largest banks, which loaned $58.8 billion to the Canada’s overleveraged oil industry in 2019 — a 59 per cent increase in the last five years — might quietly be panicking in board rooms at an appropriate physical distance.
Robyn Allan is an independent economist who before the pandemic and oil price wars persistently challenged the economics touted to support the Trans Mountain pipeline. She foresees much trouble ahead for the industry.
“After this crisis, things will not return to where they were. All economic activity is affected by the virus outbreak. And just like some people who catch it and move from home to hospital to ICU because of weak systems or pre-existing conditions, the tarsands were already an aging and compromised activity that was on the downside of its life cycle. Big Oil in Canada was going to be hard hit without COVID-19. With it, many companies are going to go under — and go under quickly.”
"Gasmageddon"
Natural gas, whose price is often tied to oil, is another sick patient on oxygen. Many analysts refer to that fuel’s price collapse as “gasmaggedon.”
Rystad Energy predicts that if low prices persist — and most forecasts suggest low prices for years — “nearly 42 per cent of Australia’s gas resources would be rendered uneconomic — a scary thought to the world’s largest gas exporter.”
Such prospects must weigh heavily on B.C. Premier John Horgan. His government has actively subsidized the province’s faltering fracking industry, along with Shell’s LNG Canada terminal.
His province’s billion-dollar subsidies include the construction of the Site C dam to provide cheap electricity to the LNG industry. Horgan and his predecessor Christy Clark promised that an LNG windfall of revenue and jobs would justify the low royalties, loosened environmental restrictions, strained First Nations relations and gambled taxpayer money on the emerging export industry.
Now that promise looks undeliverable, as the pandemic rocks B.C.’s economy and a healthy global LNG market recedes from view.
The Kitimat LNG project is floundering. Chevron, the lead partner, has been trying to unload its half interest for some time. Chevron took a $1.6 billion USD write down on the asset, admitting Kitimat can't compete. Chevron's partner, the Australian LNG giant, Woodside, followed by taking a $720 million after-tax writeoff. That's the project that Christy Clark pegged as a trillion-dollar revenue windfall for the government of British Columbia.
...
Alaska, which garners about 34 per cent of its revenue from oil, thought the resource would be selling for $66 a barrel right now. Alberta, which depends on oil to cover 10 per cent of its budget, said it needed $58 a barrel. Nigeria, Texas, New Mexico, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, you name it — all made similar projections.
All face plummeted prices — U.S. crude, for one example, tumbled to an 18-year low of $18 a barrel on Friday. (It went to negative $37 a barrel yesterday)
Newfoundland once boasted, in 2009, that 30 per cent of its revenue came from offshore oil. Now it is less than 10 per cent, and as runaway debt due to its hydroelectric megaproject takes its toll, that province sits on the verge of bankruptcy.
Add Newfoundland to the list of petro-states small and large that were already wheezing before Code Blue. Now the pandemic has put them on economic ventilators with no guarantee of quick recovery.
Meanwhile Russia is racing to squeeze out North American competition from Asian gas markets. Bank of England, ex-Bank of Canada governor, Mark Carney, gave us plenty of warnings that bitumen, like coal, was in jeopardy of becoming a stranded asset - uneconomic, valueless. That was more truth than our leaders could handle. Reap the whirlwind, I suppose.
Pity Alberta premier, Jason Kenney. The provincial government's favourite game, Blame Ottawa, has run out of steam. Michael Harris writes "it's Game Over for Kenney."
Before COVID-19 turned Times Square into a ghost town, shut down the NHL, and closed Parliament, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Taj Mahal, Kenney was making news directing elbows into Justin Trudeau’s grizzled beard — elbows sharpened by years of political skirmishing. He kept bugging Trudeau to concentrate on the economy. Alberta’s primarily.
It was the familiar harangue: Ottawa was failing the West and the energy sector, and it had to stop or else. Trudeau had other fish to fry, including extravagant promises on fighting climate change — promises he largely broke during his first term, and for which he was punished by voters in 2019.
After crushing Rachel Notley and the NDP in that year’s provincial election, Kenney turned his guns on the feds with a vengeance. His base was suffering from extreme economic angst. Nothing concentrates the mind like being out of work. Alberta’s premier had lots of targets: the hated carbon tax, the cancellation of the Energy East pipeline in 2017, and sluggish progress on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project.
Reality Rains on Jason's Parade.
In the middle of mugging the feds, Kenney was hit by a double whammy for the ages. COVID-19 took the world by storm, crashing the stock market like a house of cards. And then there was the catastrophic drop in the price of oil after Russia, OPEC, and Saudi Arabia rumbled over the issue of cutting supply to prop up sagging prices.
Welcome to West Texas Intermediate oil hovering around $22 dollars U.S. a barrel -- less than a third of the price needed by Teck Resources to make its Frontier project in the tar sands viable.
And welcome to the truth about the tar sands and Jason Kenney. Turn out the lights, the party’s over. It has been for quite some time. This week, oil made from Alberta bitumen was going for just over $7 a barrel, discount and all.
The premier lives in the past, a place where successive Conservative governments relied on what they believed would be ever-increasing oil revenues; where you didn’t have to have a real Sovereign Wealth Fund like Norway’s; you didn’t need a sales tax; climate change didn’t exist; gas would always be cheap; and no one had ever heard of shale fracking.
The Lights Dim and the Curtain Comes Down on the Wild Rose Theatre of the Absurd
Trudeau can’t be blamed for either COVID-19, or the catastrophic drop in the price of oil. There is only a ticking clock on fossil fuels as they overheat the planet, decades of bad resource management in Alberta, and Jason Kenney’s determination to carry on the tradition.
Simply put, the province has a lot of a resource that no one wants, and fewer institutions are willing to invest in as the carbon window closes on a dying industry. There is a reason that so many companies have simply sold their interests in the tar sands: Koch Industries, Royal Dutch Shell, Norway’s Statoil, and Marathon Oil. They can’t make money. Not making money doesn’t fit into anyone’s strategic plans.
There is also a reason that other companies like Imperial, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil admit that billions of barrels of oil within their tar sands holdings will likely be left in the ground.
These are the stranded assets that the former governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, made headlines with a few years ago.
When companies can’t make money from their tar sands assets, and more and more banks won’t finance such projects, there is only one option left — the one Jason Kenney will likely choose: government will become the financier of last resort for a doomed industry.
Kenney has thrust the Batmobile into reverse. He is offering his electorate a ride back to a time when Barry Manilow was crooning Mandy, and Peter Lougheed was premier of Alberta. Just one problem. There is no highway to the past. Using public money to finance oil and gas projects through the Alberta Energy Company, the way Lougheed did nearly 50 years ago, is delusion on roller skates.
Trudeau's Folly or Why Ottawa Should Stop Throwing Good Money After Bad
As for Justin Trudeau, it would be a major mistake to allow Premier Kenney to use the COVID-19 emergency to extract federal tax dollars for the fossil fuel industry. That doesn’t square with his promise to fight climate change. Besides, Ottawa already put one multi-billion dollar pipeline on the public tab, and that is one pipeline too many.
We are alarmed and concerned by events unfolding in northern British Columbia. Once again we have watched as RCMP officers armed with automatic weapons and equipped with dogs, drones, helicopters, and sound cannon and with the overwatch of RCMP snipers dismantled three peaceful Wet’suwet’en checkpoints.
These blockades arose from the incursion of a fracking natural gas pipeline backed by Dutch, Chinese, Korean, Malaysian and Japanese multinationals into traditional Wet’suwet’en territories, without permission from the Wet’suwet’en leadership and over their strenuous objection.
The health risks from fracking are well known, including release of carcinogenic toxins such as benzene. Pregnant women in northeastern B.C. have serum benzene levels three times the normal level and studies have shown this has an association with increased childhood leukemia rates. U.S. studies have shown increases in congenital heart disease, chronic pulmonary disorders and small birth-weight babies in populations living in proximity to fracking operations. And as we all know, every pipeline leaks.
...The health risks presented by climate change should terrify everyone.
The American Journal of Public Health has pointed out that Indigenous groups are highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, “warming temperatures have the potential to affect infectious diseases associated with the preparation of traditional foods (e.g. gastroenteritis, food-borne botulism), zoonotic diseases (e.g giardiasis) and traditional plants or remedies.” In addition, “high-intensity rainfall events could be particularly problematic, with waterborne disease outbreaks (e.g. typhoid, bacillary dysentery, Escherichia coli and cryptosporidiosis)”, not to mention the direct and indirect effects of wildfire outbreaks we have already seen in B.C.
The JP Morgan report on the economic risks of human-caused global heating said climate policy had to change or else the world faced irreversible consequences.
The study implicitly condemns the US bank’s own investment strategy and highlights growing concerns among major Wall Street institutions about the financial and reputational risks of continued funding of carbon-intensive industries, such as oil and gas.
JP Morgan has provided $75bn (£61bn) in financial services to the companies most aggressively expanding in sectors such as fracking and Arctic oil and gas exploration since the Paris agreement, according to analysis compiled for the Guardian last year.
...
The authors say policymakers need to change direction because a business-as-usual climate policy “would likely push the earth to a place that we haven’t seen for many millions of years”, with outcomes that might be impossible to reverse.
“Although precise predictions are not possible, it is clear that the Earth is on an unsustainable trajectory. Something will have to change at some point if the human race is going to survive.”
The investment bank says climate change “reflects a global market failure in the sense that producers and consumers of CO2 emissions do not pay for the climate damage that results.” To reverse this, it highlights the need for a global carbon tax but cautions that it is “not going to happen anytime soon” because of concerns about jobs and competitiveness.
The authors say it is “likely the [climate] situation will continue to deteriorate, possibly more so than in any of the IPCC’s scenarios”.
This is not what the fossil fuel industry wants to hear, especially in Canada where mounting opposition to gas and bitumen pipelines challenges producers and their political minions.
The oil and gas industry has had a far worse impact on the climate than previously believed, according to a study indicating that human emissions of fossil methane have been underestimated by up to 40%.
Methane has a greenhouse effect that is about 80% more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period and is responsible for at least 25% of global heating, according to the UN Environment Programme.
...The findings, published in Nature, suggest the share of naturally released fossil methane has been overestimated by “an order of magnitude”, which means that human activities are 25-40% more responsible for fossil methane in the atmosphere than thought.
This strengthens suspicions that fossil fuel companies are not fully accounting for their impact on the climate, particularly with regard to methane – a colourless, odourless gas that many plants routinely vent into the atmosphere.
An earlier study revealed methane emissions from US oil and gas plants were 60% higher than reported to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Accidents are also underreported. A single blowout at a natural gas well in Ohio in 2018 discharged more methane over three weeks than the oil and gas industries of France, Norway and the Netherlands released in an entire year. At the time, the company said it was unsure of the size of the leak. The immense scale was only revealed a year later when scientists analysed satellite data provided by the European Space Agency.
Fracking also appears to have worsened the problem. Atmospheric methane had started to flatten off at the turn of the century, but rose again after a surge in fracking activity in the US and elsewhere. The industry, however, continues to claim that the energy source can be used as a “bridge fuel” because it has lower carbon emissions than oil or coal, but this fails to account for leaks and flares of methane and other gases during extraction.
So, a little bit here, a little bit there. Sure it adds up but does it really matter?
Dave Reay, the executive director of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation, said one of the key messages from the study was that the old bottom-up method of measuring methane emissions was “woefully inadequate”.
“We knew fossil fuel extraction – including fracking – was a major part of global methane emissions, but this impressive study suggests it is a far bigger culprit in human-induced climate change than we had ever thought,” he said.
“If correct, gas, coal and oil extraction and distribution around the world are responsible for almost half of all human-induced methane emissions. Add to that all the carbon dioxide that is then emitted when the fossil fuels are burned, and you need look no further for the seat of the climate emergency fire.”
To see what "invisible" fugitive gas emissions look like, the New York Times last year published an item that showed gas sites as we see them then again as seen through an infrared lens. It's an eye-opener, one that you should check out.
The Trudeau government isn't exactly winning the hearts and minds contest with British Columbians. Ditto for John Horgan's NDP.
The Tyee's Andrew Nikiforuk writes that Canada is once again lapsing into colonialism in its confrontations with BC's First Nations.
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
— Albert Camus
Whenever Canada has a chance to depart from its brutal colonial past with First Nations, it automatically lapses into bad habits.
On Thursday, the RCMP and the Canadian state came to a moral crossroads on a snowy country road and looked briefly down a pathway to reconciliation. Then it said, “Fuck it.”
A highly militarized police presence once again used force against Wet’suwet’en protestors blocking the construction of a $6.6-billion methane pipeline needed to feed a grossly uneconomic $40-billion liquefied natural gas project.
In so doing the police made a mockery of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
It is not a complicated document. As criminologist Jeff Monaghan notes, the declaration expects “that conflicts like this will not be resolved violently or militarily but with negotiated solutions. The document directs us to do peaceful negotiated solutions that respect everyone’s rights, and equally.”
That didn’t happen.
As reliable agents of the Canadian state and defenders of resource extraction, the RCMP let it be known that the Trudeau government puts highly subsidized methane projects ahead of reconciliation and UN declarations.
Let’s be clear: in Canada, low-priced natural gas matters more than unresolved land claims.
By implication the government also told the nation that it puts uneconomic LNG projects ahead of climate change, given that serious methane leaks from the shale gas industry are now accelerating that chaos.
It, too, advances LNG ahead of the destruction of the arable lands and First Nations treaty rights in Peace River.
...
But what about the 20 First Nations that have signed on to the project, you might ask?
Yes, they signed and the negotiations were colonial. It was sign or get nothing. Many nations signed under severe constraints. Nor were they presented with economic alternatives.
As legal scholar and expert in Indigenous rights Dayna Scott has noted, Indigenous leaders are faced with a “false choice. They’re being asked to choose whether or not they want to sign a deal and get some benefits for their people for a pipeline that’s going to go through whether or not they agree to it.”
Now consider the position of Hereditary Chief Na’Moks (John Ridsdale). He is not willing to settle for mutual benefit agreements or the modern equivalent of beads and trinkets:
“They wanted access to the land, and we said you’re not getting access, you’ll never get approval, not from the hereditary chiefs and not from our people.” A colonial mind, however, can’t fathom such arguments, because it still refuses to come to terms with the nation’s dirty past.
For the most part Canadians remain an arrogant mining people with little regard for the truths of our colonial history. Most still think we have nothing to acknowledge, let alone make amends for.
The farce of "reconciliation."
...
The Canadian state’s willingness to ignore reconciliation is even more galling when you consider its colonial defence of the preposterous economics of LNG and fracked gas in northern B.C.
In Canada, LNG development has become an absurd Soviet engine that ignores costs and environmental damages.
But being Canadian, it drapes itself with the plastic word “responsible.”
“Responsible” subsidies for the foreign-funded LNG industry now include low royalties; nearly $1 billion worth of royalty credits; discounted electricity prices; reduced corporate income taxes; free water for fracking; reduced carbon taxes and the deferral of provincial sales taxes during construction. The Canadian government even invested $275 million in LNG Canada!
These subsidies, however, still can’t make LNG economic. In 2018 the Canadian Energy Research Institute examined the economics of LNG.
It concluded that Western Canada LNG would be $1 to $3 more expensive than the current spot price in Japan of $8 per million (BTU) and needed more subsidies and tax credits.
CERI then calculated what the LNG industry would need in terms of future prices to remain economically viable: a market price of $8.99 per million BTU or higher in Asia to break even. Or an oil price of approximately $80 or higher to break even under long-term LNG contracts.
Those conditions don’t exist and show no signs of coming into being.
A global LNG supply glut has collapsed prices in Asia to as low as $5.5 per million BTU in Japan and India. Analysts say the glut could last years.
Meanwhile oil prices, which influence LNG pricing, remain in the doldrums.
Unless the Canadian and B.C. governments are prepared to give away LNG, neither Coastal GasLink nor LNG Canada are economic at this point in time.
These appalling economics explain why Chevron pulled out of the Kitimat LNG project last fall. At the same time, Chevron wrote off $11 billion in underperforming shale gas assets in Appalachia due to low prices and overproduction.
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And let’s not strut like peacocks and talk about the rule of law as Horgan has done.
In Alberta, oil and gas companies now break the law every day. They owe $172 million in taxes to rural municipalities and millions more to landowners for unpaid surface leases.
Does Alberta Premier Jason Kenney arrest the offending white collar criminals and charge them with breaking civil contracts? No. He actively excuses their behaviour.
So there is one rule of law in Canada for insolvent resource extractors, and another law for First Nations, rural municipalities and landowners.
Fortunately, the Wet’suwet’en respect laws that are thousands of years old.
For years Andrew Bacevich has lamented how his country allowed military force or the threat of military force to displace diplomacy as its principal instrument of foreign policy. It's no wonder then that he should embrace Martin Indyk's proposals for a reformation of Washington's approach to the Middle East.
Indyk has had a storied career in American diplomatic circles. He also twice served as US ambassador to Israel. Now he wants a sea change in America's approach to the Middle East. Bacevich clearly approves:
In an extraordinary op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal (of all places), [Indyk] asserts that “few vital interests of the US continue to be at stake in the Middle East.” Policies centered on ensuring the free flow of Persian Gulf oil and the survival of Israel have become superfluous. “The US economy no longer relies on imported petroleum,” he correctly notes. “Fracking has turned the US into a net oil and natural-gas exporter.” As a consequence, Persian Gulf oil “is no longer a vital interest — that is, one worth fighting for. Difficult as it might be to get our heads around the idea, China and India need to be protecting the sea lanes between the Gulf and their ports, not the US Navy.”
As for the Jewish State, Martin notes, again correctly, that today Israel has the capacity “to defend itself by itself.” Notwithstanding the blustering threats regularly issued by Tehran, “it is today’s nuclear-armed Israel that has the means to crush Iran, not the other way around.”
Furthermore, Martin has had his fill of the peace process. “A two-state solution to the Palestinian problem is a vital Israeli interest, not a vital American one,” he writes, insisting that “it’s time to end the farce of putting forward American peace plans only to have one or both sides reject them.”
Martin does identify one vital U.S. interest in the Middle East: averting a nuclear arms race. Yet “we should be wary of those who would rush to battle stations,” he cautions. “Curbing Iran’s nuclear aspirations and ambitions for regional dominance will require assiduous American diplomacy, not war.”
That last sentence captures the essence of Martin’s overall conclusion: he proposes not disengaging from the Middle East but demilitarizing U.S. policy. “After the sacrifice of so many American lives, the waste of so much energy and money in quixotic efforts that ended up doing more harm than good,” he writes, “it is time for the US to find a way to escape the costly, demoralising cycle of crusades and retreats.”
... Martin deserves our congratulations. We must hope that his heresy catches fire and spreads throughout the Blob. In the meantime, if he’s in need of office space, the Quincy Institute stands ready to help.
Welcome to the ranks of the truth tellers, comrade.
The Big Lie is that Canadian natural gas will wean Asia off thermal coal energy and thereby slash greenhouse gas emissions.
Representatives of the British Columbia, Alberta and federal governments are making the global rounds these days to sell the notion that liquefied natural gas exports can help the climate crisis.
The pitch goes like this: According to LNG Canada, the big Shell project now under construction in northern B.C., could replace 20 to 40 coal-fired plants in countries like China and India with Canadian methane, and reduce their emissions by 60 to 90 million tonnes.
And so, while the blockaders of northern B.C.’s LNG Canada pipeline await police eviction while claiming to stand up for Indigenous sovereignty and climate protection, backers of the project lay claim to their own moral high ground. Such claims are problematic, if not false. The best evidence to date reveals two quite inconvenient truths.
One, B.C.’s LNG is not cleaner than coal, due to leakage rates in our fracked shale fields of three per cent.
Two, there is no guarantee that China will use Canadian gas to actually displace coal power production, given that coal-fired plants already operate as efficiently as methane-fueled ones.
The extraction (fracking) industry lies. The transmission (pipeline, storage, liquefaction, shipping) industry lies. The provincial authorities lie. Their federal counterparts also lie.
The world's oceans are absorbing nearly a third of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. That's a good thing. Without that we would all be in a horrible mess. It's also a bad thing. Some of that CO2 turns into H2CO3, carbonic acid. That messes up the pH. The oceans become more acidic and that spells trouble for a variety of marine life, particularly shellfish.
For those who still think that fracking is worthwhile, there's a different picture emerging thanks to a new satellite designed to monitor methane leaks around the world. It's sensors detected a methane leak at a fracking site in Ohio last year that was greater than the methane released by some entire countries.
The findings by a Dutch-American team of scientists, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, mark a step forward in using space technology to detect leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, from oil and gas sites worldwide.
The scientists said the new findings reinforced the view that methane releases like these, which are difficult to predict, could be far more widespread than previously thought.
The blowout, in February 2018 at a natural gas well run by an Exxon Mobil subsidiary in Belmont County, Ohio, released more methane than the entire oil and gas industries of many nations do in a year, the research team found. The Ohio episode triggered about 100 residents within a one-mile radius to evacuate their homes while workers scrambled to plug the well.
The steady outlook for coal comes in spite of waning demand in industrialized nations. Europe has set a goal of zeroing out carbon pollution by the middle of the century, which would mean drastic reductions for coal. In the U.S., competition from natural gas has cut into demand for coal, despite President Donald Trump’s vows to revive the industry.
The story is different in Asia, which will more than make up for reductions elsewhere. India, with a population of more than 1.3 billion, will see coal generation increase by 4.6% a year through 2024 to help power its growing economy. In Southeast Asia coal demand will grow more than 5% annually. China, which accounts for almost half the world’s consumption, will also have modest growth with usage peaking in 2022.
Professor Robert Howarth examined hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, over the past several decades, noting the fracking boom that has taken place since the first years of the 21st century. Between 2005 and 2015, fracking went from producing 31 billion cubic meters of shale gas per year to producing 435 billion cubic meters.
Nearly 90 percent of that fracking took place in the U.S., while about 10 percent was done in Canada.
...In addition to being the second-biggest contributor to the climate crisis after carbon dioxide, methane has been known to cause and exacerbate health issues for people who live in areas where large amounts of the gas is present in the environment.
Chest pains, bronchitis, emphysema and asthma can all be caused or worsened by high levels of methane. The process of fracking has also been linked to pollution in drinking water.
Of course these are treated as "fugitive emissions" and therefore kept off Canada's emissions books. The Trudeau government is a big fan of LNG. So too is our NDP government.
How do you inform yourself about climate change? Do you ignore it to the extent possible, try not to think about it? Do you look at it as a scientific issue? Do you see it from an economic perspective? Or do you think of it as a political problem?
The climate crisis is multi-faceted. Despite the steadily growing mountain of research and analysis, the deniers and delayers continue to wage a rearguard action to sow doubt and outright lies. They're still using every trick in the book, stuff tried and tested in the tobacco wars.
The science types keep delivering dire projections or at least they seem dire at the time. Yet, before long, we learn that what we thought was dire, even alarmist, was actually understated. Several studies have found that the scientific community is often reluctant to give it to us straight lest that somehow blow back on them.
The economists are now fully engaged in the climate crisis. They're doing stress analyses and costing out impacts. They too have been understating the measure of climate change costs but, we're told, they're working to catch up. Their central theme is that it'll be costly to take the bold action the climate crisis demands now but several times costlier down the road if we don't act quickly.
Then there is the worst of them all, the political caste. What makes them the worst of the lot? It's their blatant conflict of interest that pits their own, short term partisan interest above the long term public interest and jeopardizes the future.
Environment minister, Cathy McKenna, has repeatedly said that action to thwart climate change must not harm the economy. Missing from that pithy line is the price future generations will have to pay for our government's self-interested betrayal.
Andrew Nikiforuk recently summed up our major parties' villainy:
Andrew Scheer, a conservative Catholic, offered a rehashed version of Stephen Harper’s oil evangelism, based on deregulating the fossil fuel industry, demonizing environmentalists and promoting a Matthew Effect social agenda: let those who have more already earn even more.
Canada’s petroleum evangelicals now wrap themselves in the flag and demand that we drill more with fewer regulations, even though the market is oversupplied and the climate has reached a tipping point. Conservation and reduced energy use are ignored.
...The Liberals think they can twin an uneconomic bitumen pipeline largely for Chinese markets and somehow battle climate change. Conservatives may be anointed by oil but Liberals are anointed by rank dishonesty.
The Liberals (and the BC NDP) also think they can subsidize liquified natural gas plants and still claim they’re fighting climate change by supplying $680-million subsidies to electrify fracking operations in B.C.’s northeast.
...Our pathetic politics reflects the inertia in the fossil fuel system, the moral poverty of the status quo and a popular denial about the scale of change required to prevent an unending emergency.
We are living the storm before the storm.
The deniers and the delayers are the imperial storm troopers of the carbon cabal. They work for corporations that have no fiduciary duty to the planet or its people. Modern capitalism is a "by hook and by crook" business and we try to tame it by regulation.
Contrast that with the political caste. Our politicians do have a fiduciary duty, a duty to protect us and future generations, and these solemn obligations they routinely honour in the breach, not compliance. We invest them with the power and resources to perform their fiduciary duties and they alone exercise sovereign powers supposedly on our behalf except, too often, they don't.
Justin Trudeau and his government will not be remembered for the apologies he so freely issues or for his selfies nor even for the parades in which he marches. Future generations will have a clearer and more critical view of the Dauphin and they'll be living his legacy.
The Tyee's petro-scribe, Andrew Nikiforuk, digests the indigestible aftermath of our federal election. Hint: it bodes no good.
Once again we have been reminded that Canada’s political parties behave like organizations “publicly and officially designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and of justice,” as Simone Weil characterized parties seven decades ago.
What they have left us are political divisions that have now painted the face of Canada red or blue.
And just as in the excited United States, the conservative blue largely spreads across oil-producing regions suffering from low prices, while the red occupies oil-importing provinces.
...The energy divisions in both countries tell a story of appalling leadership, the strength of propaganda and political inertia.
One-third of the blue nation not only doesn’t believe that climate change is an emergency, but remains in denial about the increasing volatility of oil and gas prices.
Low prices and overproduction of high cost bitumen and fracked oil and gas have eroded the economics of the fossil fuel industry, throwing some people in Alberta and Saskatchewan into cauldrons of resentment, stoked by the propaganda manufactured by “wildcat Christians” and the oil industry.
Darren Dochuk, an Edmonton-born history professor at the University of Notre Dame, brilliantly explained in his book Anointed with Oil that places like Texas, Saudi Arabia and Oklahoma have interpreted the extraction of fossil fuels as an act of divine providence. They are God’s people.
Scheer Madness and Liberal Expedience.
...Andrew Scheer, a conservative Catholic, offered a rehashed version of Stephen Harper’s oil evangelism, based on deregulating the fossil fuel industry, demonizing environmentalists and promoting a Matthew Effect social agenda: let those who have more already earn even more.
Canada’s petroleum evangelicals now wrap themselves in the flag and demand that we drill more with fewer regulations, even though the market is oversupplied and the climate has reached a tipping point.
Conservation and reduced energy use are ignored.
...Only religious fervour allows people to blindly ignore the economics of supply and demand as well as the aging nature of the west’s hydrocarbon bounty. And it takes religious fervour for Alberta’s oil and gas cult to ignore the red elephant in the room — $260 billion worth of leaking wells, pipelines and old gas plants that need to be cleaned up.
...The province’s biblical ardour makes it hard for the rest of Canada to understand the incessant hand-wringing and complaining in a province that has failed to collect royalties that would have given citizens fair payment for oil and gas resources; failed to save for a rainy day; and failed to manage its resources wisely.
Albertans aren’t alone. Across Canada, about one-third of voters apparently believe that we can build pipelines and LNG plants and still somehow fight climate change. And not just Conservatives — this bunch includes federal Liberals and BC New Democrats.
The Liberals think they can twin an uneconomic bitumen pipeline largely for Chinese markets and somehow battle climate change. Conservatives may be anointed by oil but Liberals are anointed by rank dishonesty.
The Liberals (and the BC NDP) also think they can subsidize liquified natural gas plants and still claim they’re fighting climate change by supplying $680-million subsidies to electrify fracking operations in B.C.’s northeast.
...The reality of the physics is not comfortable.
We have used fossil fuels to support a global population that is at least eight times above any sustainable level.
In the last 150 years we have deployed hydrocarbons to construct a highly complex economic system that is consuming all life, respects no limits and is poised for collapse. It has one religious mantra: technology, the source of maniacal complexity, will save us.
...Greta Thunberg is right. We need a new kind of politics and a new way of thinking. And a new way of living. We won’t get there without co-operating and working together.
We will have to take steps back, not forward.
That’s the wisdom of a Swedish teenager. Children can always see what squabbling adults can’t.
But Canada will not be leading the way anytime soon.
Our pathetic politics reflects the inertia in the fossil fuel system, the moral poverty of the status quo and a popular denial about the scale of change required to prevent an unending emergency.
You can read the AFN's entire 2019 federal election analysis here. Jagmeet Singh has the nascent Dippers all tumescent with his one-liners but he's just peddling greenwash. If you're truly concerned about the climate crisis, voting New Dem is almost as bad as going for the Liberals or the Tories.
There's another party, one that has been working on the crisis for years. Their platform would bring Canada into 450 ppm territory. And, for all the Liberals who'll howl how that would wreck the economy, the experts conclude that's a load of crap.
The NDP’s plan, which is being touted as "A New Deal," only outperforms the Liberals by about 12 megatonnes. Meanwhile, their plan would have a more significant negative impact on economic growth. The party's plan relies on government funding for many of the policies — things like $1.5 billion for green innovation, $2.5 billion for home retrofit incentives and $6.5 billion for electric vehicles and transit.
...The Greens have proposed policies that radically transform some Canadian industries. They propose, for instance, banning oil fracking, which means shutting down most oil production in Canada outside of the Alberta oilsands.
"The Green Party is the only party that is taking us to deep levels of decarbonizing the economy and deep emission reductions," said [Waterloo prof, Angela] Carter.
"They give us a fighting chance of doing our part in the global community of keeping global temperatures to a 1.5 C of warming."
..."When I look at that GDP data I'm actually pretty reassured," said Carter. "I mean even the Greens have what we've been calling the most radical policy here. They are not bringing us into recession. This is not a recessionary picture at all."
The bottom line. There's only one party taking the climate crisis seriously and, unless you're a Green, it's not yours.
When it comes to climate change this election has been swamped in greenwash. Justin promises action - haven't we heard that before? Andy, well he's not really promising anything.
Jagmeet has been drowning himself in green paint but his plan isn't much better than Trudeau's.
The three of them, if they lived up to their own hype, would still leave Canada in the 600-650 ppm range and that is the path to climate catastrophe.
There is another party and it has a plan that would take Canada back down to 450 ppm. That, of course is the Green Party, the only one that's not feeding you horse shit.
CBC hired the economic modelling firm, Navius Research, to scrutinize each party's platform on greenhouse gas emissions.
The NDP’s plan, which is being touted as "A New Deal," only outperforms the Liberals by about 12 megatonnes. Meanwhile, their plan would have a more significant negative impact on economic growth. The party's plan relies on government funding for many of the policies — things like $1.5 billion for green innovation, $2.5 billion for home retrofit incentives and $6.5 billion for electric vehicles and transit.
"The NDP relies on inefficient government intervention, but also on the myth that reductions can happen by hitting large industry instead of final consumers of coal-fired electricity, gasoline, diesel, natural gas, et cetera," said Mark Jaccard, a professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Resource and Environmental Management.
Then there's the Green Party.
The Greens have proposed policies that radically transform some Canadian industries. They propose, for instance, banning oil fracking, which means shutting down most oil production in Canada outside of the Alberta oilsands.
"The Green Party is the only party that is taking us to deep levels of decarbonizing the economy and deep emission reductions," said Carter.
"They give us a fighting chance of doing our part in the global community of keeping global temperatures to a 1.5 C of warming."
"When I look at that GDP data I'm actually pretty reassured," said Carter. "I mean even the Greens have what we've been calling the most radical policy here. They are not bringing us into recession. This is not a recessionary picture at all."
Jagmeet is a nice guy. I get that. But he's 'orange' and orange has never done green very well. He threw something together because he figured it was a vote winner but the Dippers haven't thought it through. They simply looked the other way for years while the Greens really focused on giving Canadians "a fighting chance."
It's Climate Week. Today the world leaders are supposed to gather at the UN to turn in their homework - concrete plans to slash greenhouse gas emissions. Not targets, not aspirational mumbo-jumbo. Plans.
Of course the North American bad boys won't be turning up. Trudeau is busy campaigning. Trump has chosen to host a religious freedom conference, anything to avoid having to utter the dreaded words "climate change." Climate Week may be a week of mourning.
The ruling elites and the corporations they serve are the principal obstacles to change. They cannot be reformed. And this means revolution, which is what Extinction Rebellion seeks in calling for an “international rebellion” on Oct. 7, when it will attempt to shut down city centers around the globe in acts of sustained, mass civil disobedience. Power has to be transferred into our hands. And since the elites won’t give up power willingly, we will have to take it through nonviolent action.
Protests can be the beginning of political consciousness. But they can also be empty political theater. They can be used to celebrate our moral probity—advertisements, especially in the age of social media, for ourselves. They can be a boutique activism in which protesters allow themselves to be funneled through police barricades and arrests are politely choreographed, resulting in a few hours in jail and the credentialing of the demonstrators as radicals. They can be used to distance ourselves from a repugnant political figure such as Donald Trump, while leaving us silent and complicit when the same policies are carried out by a supposed progressive such as Barack Obama. This is a game the state has learned to play to its advantage. As long as we do not disrupt the machine, as long as we protest according to their rules, the elites will let us march through the streets of Washington in pussy hats or walk out of school for a day.
Are Liberals and Conservatives like Democrats and Republicans?
Democrats, like Republicans, serve corporate power. They will not end government subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and the extraction industries. They will not impose carbon taxes to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They will not limit overconsumption. The technologies they invest in—fracking, hybrid cars, genetically modified food—are designed to maintain or expand consumption levels, not reduce them. They will not redirect the trillions of dollars and scientific and technical expertise from the military and corporations toward saving us from environmental catastrophe. The rhetoric and gimmicks they use to placate the public, from carbon credits to wind turbines and solar panels, are, as the scientist James Lovelock says, the equivalent of 18th-century doctors attempting to cure serious diseases with leeches and mercury.
The Damage We've Done
...Those living in the global south are already suffering and dying from the effects of global warming, for which the wealthy industrialized nations of the global north bear most of the responsibility. The richest 0.54%, or 42 million people across the world, are responsible for more emissions than the poorest half of the global population, or 3.8 billion people. These elites are sacrificing the poorest on the planet first as they work up the social and economic hierarchy to extinguish us all.
We have to let go of our relentless positivism, our absurd mania for hope, our naive belief that with grit and determination we can solve all problems. We have to face the bleakness before us. We live in a world already heavily damaged by global warming, which will inevitably get worse. Refusal to participate in the further destruction of the planet means a rupture with traditional politics. It means noncooperation with authority. It means defying in every nonviolent way possible consumer capitalism, militarism and imperialism. It means adjusting our lifestyle, including becoming vegans, to thwart the forces bent upon our annihilation. And it means waves of sustained civil disobedience until the machine is broken.
...The mathematical models for the future of the planet have three devastating trajectories: a massive die-off of perhaps 70 percent of the human population and then an uneasy stabilization; extinction of humans and most other species; an immediate and radical reconfiguration of human society to protect the biosphere and make it more diverse and productive. ...We know what we have to do if our children are to have a future. The only question left is how do we empower leaders who will save us.
As I read Hedges' piece I kept thinking 'if only.' My differences with Hedges are a matter of degrees. The wishful thinkers obstruct action with their 'oh, they'll think of something' notions. As for the neoliberals - including the likes of our prime minister and his finance minister - you can't count on anyone who still pursues perpetual exponential growth. Those aren't your kids' friends. They're not your grandkids' friends. Protecting the biosphere is not their priority. For them, growing the petro-economy is a greater priority.
One of the side effects of following developments in climate change is having to pull your punches. There are things you don't want to talk about, especially not in conversation and even with those closest to you. It's as though there are things that are taboo, lines that must not be crossed.
For me, one of these is the issue of catastrophic or "runaway" global warming. That point, wherever it is, when natural mechanisms sometimes called "feedback loops" kick in, gradually eclipsing even man-made climate change.
Even the best climate scientists can only speculate on that point of departure where our last chance of averting catastrophic change has been foreclosed. After that you're just along for the ride. It's almost certain we, the great unwashed, won't know what has befallen us until well after it's too late. Certainly not with the political leadership of the current era, a.k.a. the wilfully blind.
The wildfires that have raced across the Arctic this year may be the harbinger of runaway climate change. That vast region contains massive amounts of greenhouse gases, primarily CO2 and methane. The loss of Arctic sea ice and the warming of the waters of the Arctic Ocean and associated seas adds a new source of water vapour to the atmosphere, itself a very potent greenhouse gas.
The state of the climate is still somewhat speculative. Don't count on your leaders to keep you informed. We've got a guy who will look audiences straight in the face and claim that flooding world markets with high-carbon, low-value bitumen is the key to a green future for Canada.
So, what's new? Just be glad you're not Chinese. The Peoples Republic is making strides in developing alternative clean energy but it's also expanding its coal-powered electrical system. Not good. A new report warns that China is facing another compounding threat - the jet stream.
The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) finds that Chinese smog will be compounded by 'stagnant air' that hovers in place for long periods. The jet stream we used to have (for most of my lifetime) moved like a gently undulating snake. It was great for agriculture among other things. Today's jet stream often looks more like this:
Today's jet stream is erratic. It can draw polar air deep into the south and warm air from the south high into the Arctic. The new jet can also stall out. It can "park" weather systems over the same place for extended periods. Remember the last Calgary floods? That's what happened. Go back a few years before that and you might remember a few days in February where Atlanta, Georgia was ice bound, while a village in northern Alaska logged 62 degrees Fahrenheit. Same deal.
In other climate news, the folks in Nepal are not happy with what they find awaits the glaciers of the Himalayas this century. A study concludes that even if mankind did limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (dream on) the glaciers would lose a third of their ice by 2100. That's the best case scenario. If we go along with the fossil fuelers, including our own, it's more likely to reduce those glaciers by two-thirds or more. The hook is that China, India and Pakistan are mortally reliant upon access to freshwater from the Himalayan headwaters which, conveniently for China, are largely found in Chinese-occupied Tibet. I suppose it doesn't help that the three countries vying for access to those waters are geopolitical rivals and they're all nuclear armed. What would go wrong?
Here's one for the pipeline builders. A new study concludes the world needs to start shutting down fossil energy infrastructure - now. Anything short of a government shutdown, what Schellnhuber described as an "induced implosion" of the fossil fuel industry, will defeat any chance we have of averting catastrophic climate change.
Now I hate to piss on the Dauphin's parade but high-carbon, low-value fossil fuels have to be left in the ground even if that does disrupt his political agenda. It's a pretty nihilistic political platform yet it's gospel to Liberal and Conservative alike.
What cheerful news from The Guardian today? Not much, sorry.
Scientists at Cornell University have found that fracked oil and gas wells are releasing far more methane gas than imagined. These 'fugitive emissions' have been climbing sharply since 2008.
Robert Howarth, the author of the paper published in the journal Biogeosciences, said the proportion of methane with a “carbon signature” linked to traditional fossil fuels was falling relative to the rise of methane with a slightly different carbon make-up.
Researchers had previously assumed the “non-traditional” methane was from biological sources such as cows and wetlands, but the latest research suggests unconventional oil and gas from fracking may be playing a significant part.
The theory would support a correlation in the rise of methane in the atmosphere and the boom in fracking across the US over the last decade.
“This recent increase in methane is massive,” Howarth said. “It’s globally significant. It’s contributed to some of the increase in global warming we’ve seen and shale gas is a major player.”
There's a new industry in Iceland making brass plaques to commemorate the demise of the island's glaciers.
They figure they'll be needing another 400 or so before long. Fortunately - and unfortunately - that's all the glaciers they've got. While Icelanders mourn with tasteful brass plaques, their neighbours in Greenland are losing their minds, succumbing to despair and depression. Can't be helped, I suppose.
The American Meteorological Society has released its 2018 State of the Climate Report, all 325 pages of it. The link will take you to all 325 of those pages. The 11 page Executive Summary is here. Cut to the chase - atmospheric greenhouse gas loading in 2018 were the highest on record - and those records reach back 800,000 years.
Greenhouse gases were at levels unseen in 60 years of modern measurements and 800,000 years of ice core data, the study found. The data used in the 325-page report was collected from more than 470 scientists in 60 countries.
The global annual average for carbon dioxide, which is elevated because of human activities such as driving cars and burning fuel, was 407.4 parts per million, 2.4 ppm higher than in 2017. The warming influence of CO2 and other gases in the atmosphere is now nearly 43% stronger than in 1990.
While the east coast has been sizzling this summer, the Post found that most regional increases were driven by warming winter temperatures, not summer heat waves. That’s means lakes can’t freeze (causing algae blooms, in some cases) and pests don’t die as per usual in certain historically cold regions. Less snow and ice also means those regions are less able to reflect solar radiation during winter, further feeding into the warming cycle.
The freezing point “is the most critical threshold among all temperatures,” David A. Robinson, New Jersey state climatologist and professor at Rutgers University’s department of geography, told the Post.
Scientists aren’t yet sure why the Northeast is warming so quickly. But experts say these 2-degree C hotspots are like little pieces of the future here in the present, showing us what’s coming.
A particularly vulnerable region is southern California. They're what you might call "screwed." Sorry, LA, sorry San Diego. Same, same for Florida.
Observer political columnist, Will Hutton, writes that we should not despair. Climate change and other forces will herald the end of the lousy governance of the neoliberal era. He claims that "these are the dying days of a rancid old order." You be the judge of that.
If you find yourself in need of a bit of cheering up, there's always Monty Python's Eric Idle.
