Are We Reverting to a More Primitive Order?

It may be one of the most important, rarely asked questions of the day. Are we reverting to a more primitive order, tribalism, and can liberal democracy survive, or at least remain healthy, if we ignore it?

In the Canadian context, the rise of tribalism has to be considered in the American example, a nation and a society that have succumbed to the tribal contagion.

I've assembled a few essays you might find helpful.

Yale law professor, Amy Chua, penned an op-ed in the New York Times  in February, 2018 entitled, "The Destructive Dynamics of Political Tribalism."

A right wing take is that of Patrick Buchanan in July of this year, "Will Tribalism Trump Democracy?"  Buchanan begins by touching on the rise of tribalism in Israel and Poland.

In The Atlantic in October of this year, Chua joined fellow Yale law professor, Jed Rubenfeld, on "The Threat of Tribalism" in which they question whether America's cherished Constitution itself can withstand the clash of tribal forces.

One of the most helpful is Andrew Sullivan's essay in New York magazine from September of last year, "America Wasn't Built for Humans." Here are a few excerpts from Sullivan's piece:

Over the past couple of decades in America, the enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper, simpler to map, and therefore much more ominous. I don’t just mean the rise of political polarization (although that’s how it often expresses itself), nor the rise of political violence (the domestic terrorism of the late 1960s and ’70s was far worse), nor even this country’s ancient black-white racial conflict (though its potency endures).

I mean a new and compounding combination of all these differences into two coherent tribes, eerily balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side but to provoke, condemn, and defeat the other. 

I mean two tribes whose mutual incomprehension and loathing can drown out their love of country, each of whom scans current events almost entirely to see if they advance not so much their country’s interests but their own. I mean two tribes where one contains most racial minorities and the other is disproportionately white; where one tribe lives on the coasts and in the cities and the other is scattered across a rural and exurban expanse; where one tribe holds on to traditional faith and the other is increasingly contemptuous of religion altogether; where one is viscerally nationalist and the other’s outlook is increasingly global; where each dominates a major political party; and, most dangerously, where both are growing in intensity as they move further apart.

...Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience. It comes more naturally to us than any other way of life. For the overwhelming majority of our time on this planet, the tribe was the only form of human society.

...Tribalism only destabilizes a democracy when it calcifies into something bigger and more intense than our smaller, multiple loyalties; when it rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole; and when it turns rival tribes into enemies. And the most significant fact about American tribalism today is that all three of these characteristics now apply to our political parties, corrupting and even threatening our system of government.

...the world wars acted as great unifiers and integrators. Our political parties became less polarized by race, as the FDR Democrats managed to attract more black voters as well as ethnic and southern whites. By 1956, nearly 40 percent of black voters still backed the GOP. 

But we all know what happened next. The re-racialization of our parties began with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, when the GOP lost almost all of the black vote. It accelerated under Nixon’s “southern strategy” in the wake of the civil-rights revolution. By Reagan’s reelection, the two parties began to cohere again into the Civil War pattern, and had simply swapped places.

...By the 2000 election, we were introduced to the red-blue map, though by then we could already recognize the two tribes it identified as they fought to a national draw. Choosing a president under those circumstances caused a constitutional crisis, one the Supreme Court resolved at the expense of losing much of its nonpartisan, nontribal authority.

...The greatest threat to a politician today therefore is less a candidate from the opposing party than a more ideologically extreme primary opponent. The incentives for cross-tribal compromise have been eviscerated, and those for tribal extremism reinforced.

...In the last decade, the gap in Christian identification between Democrats and Republicans has increased by 50 percent. In 2004, 44 percent of Latinos voted Republican for president; in 2016, 29 percent did. Forty-three percent of Asian-Americans voted Republican in 2004; in 2016, 29 percent did. Since 2004, the most populous urban counties have also swung decisively toward the Democrats, in both blue and red states, while rural counties have shifted sharply to the GOP. When three core components of a tribal identity — race, religion, and geography — define your political parties, you’re in serious trouble.

...There is no neutral presidency here, and so when a rank tribalist wins the office and governs almost entirely in the interests of the hardest core of his base, half the country understandably feels as if it were under siege. Our two-party, winner-take-all system only works when both parties are trying to appeal to the same constituencies on a variety of issues.

...To have one tribe dominate another is one thing; to have the tribe that gained fewer votes govern the rest — and be the head of state — is testing political stability. 

What you end up with is zero-sum politics, which drags the country either toward alternating administrations bent primarily on undoing everything their predecessors accomplished, or the kind of gridlock that has dominated national politics for the past seven years — or both. Slowly our political culture becomes one in which the two parties see themselves not as participating in a process of moving the country forward, sometimes by tilting to the right and sometimes to the left, as circumstances permit, alternating in power, compromising when in opposition, moderating when in government — but one where the goal is always the obliteration of the other party by securing a permanent majority, in an unending process of construction and demolition.

...One of the great attractions of tribalism is that you don’t actually have to think very much. All you need to know on any given subject is which side you’re on. You pick up signals from everyone around you, you slowly winnow your acquaintances to those who will reinforce your worldview, a tribal leader calls the shots, and everything slips into place. After a while, your immersion in tribal loyalty makes the activities of another tribe not just alien but close to incomprehensible.

...George Orwell famously defined this mind-set as identifying yourself with a movement, “placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” It’s typified, he noted, by self-contradiction and indifference to reality.

... Tribalism is not a static force. It feeds on itself. It appeals on a gut level and evokes emotions that are not easily controlled and usually spiral toward real conflict. And there is no sign that the deeper forces that have accelerated this — globalization, social atomization, secularization, media polarization, ever more multiculturalism — will weaken. The rhetorical extremes have already been pushed further than most of us thought possible only a couple of years ago, and the rival camps are even more hermetically sealed. In 2015, did any of us anticipate that neo-Nazis would be openly parading with torches on a college campus or that antifa activists would be proudly extolling violence as the only serious response to the Trump era?

Sullivan, of course, writes of America, a two-party state, yet one of the scourges of multi-party Canada is our first-past-the-post electoral system that reduces our government to a de facto two-party reality. In America, he notes, "half the country understandably feels as if it were under siege." What of Canada where it's far worse, where three out of five voters wind up not feeling, but knowing, they are under siege? What democracy is there then?

A party that gains a powerful majority based on receiving not quite two out of five votes, does that not challenge our political stability? That party doesn't govern with the consent of the electorate. It can only rule, its very legitimacy a pretence.

We are not America, not remotely, but we are drawing closer. We do have tribalists on both sides who depict anyone not of their own as evil or "ghastly" and agitate for their obliteration, securing a permanent majority.

I don't believe that democracy is secure in our House of Commons any longer. Ask yourself where would we be without the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and an intellectually honest Supreme Court of Canada? How many times did Harper attempt to flout the Charter to transform Canada, on the strength of another false majority, into something he boasted we would not recognize? It wasn't the Liberals who stopped Harper. It was our laws and our courts.

I hope these excerpts from Sullivan's essay will pique your interest enough to read the entire piece. It's well worth your time.  The op-eds of Yale profs Chau and Rubenfeld are in my view "must reads" and even the right wing perspective of Patrick Buchanan offers genuine food for thought.

Say What? Tucker Carlson Said What?

Are the rats deserting the sinking ship?

FOX News rightwing shill, Tucker Carlson, has lowered the lumber on - wait for it - Donald J. Trump.

In a ranging interview with a Swiss newspaper, Die Weltwoche, Carlson  has slammed Trump saying he's just not "capable."

Asked if he thought Trump had kept his promises, Carlson replied with an abrupt "no."

His chief promises were that he would build the wall, de-fund planned parenthood, and repeal Obamacare, and he hasn't done any of those things. There are a lot of reasons for that, but since I finished writing the book, I've come to believe that Trump's role is not as a conventional president who promises to get certain things achieved to the Congress and then does. I don't think he's capable. I don't think he's capable of sustained focus. I don't think he understands the system. I don't think the Congress is on his side. I don't think his own agencies support him. He's not going to do that. 

I think Trump's role is to begin the conversation about what actually matters. We were not having any conversation about immigration before Trump arrived in Washington. People were bothered about it in different places in the country. It's a huge country, but that was not a staple of political debate at all. 

When asked what he thought Trump had achieved, another zinger.

Not much. Not much. Much less than he should have. I've come to believe he's not capable of it.

...you really have to understand how it works and you have to be very focused on getting it done, and he knows very little about the legislative process, hasn't learned anything, hasn't and surrounded himself with people that can get it done, hasn't done all the things you need to do so. It's mostly his fault that he hasn't achieved those things. I'm not in charge of Trump.

On America's emerging aristocracy.

I'm not against an aristocratic system. I'm not against a ruling class. I think that hierarchies are natural, people create them in every society. I just think the system that we have now the meritocracy, which is based really on our education system, on a small number of colleges has produced a ruling class that doesn't have the self-awareness that you need to be wise. I'm not arguing for populism, actually. I'm arguing against populism. Populism is what you get when your leaders fail. In a democracy, the population says this is terrible and they elect someone like Trump.

...The world of affluence and the high level of education and among-- I grew up in a town called La Jolla, California in the south. It was a very affluent town and then I moved as a kid to Georgetown here in Washington. I've been here my whole life. I've always lived around people who are wielding authority, around the ruling class, and it was only after the financial crisis of 08 that I noticed that something was really out of whack, because Washington didn't really feel the crisis. 

If you leave Washington and drive to say Pittsburgh, which is a manufacturing town about three and a half hours to the west, you drive through a series of little towns that are devastated. There are no car dealerships, there are no restaurants. There's nothing. They have not recovered. I remember driving out there one day, maybe eight or nine years ago and thinking, boy, this is a disaster. Rural America, America outside three or four cities is really falling apart. I thought if you're running the country, you should have a sense of that. I remember thinking to myself, nobody I know has any idea that this is happening an hour away. That's kind of strange since we're the capital city in charge of making policy for everybody else... Massive inequality does not work in a democracy... You become Venezuela.

On Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and her socialist cohort, Carlson said, "That's the future."

On the prospects of a second American revolution:

I don't think that we're anywhere near an outbreak of civil war, armed violence between two sides for a bunch of different reasons... Testosterone levels are so low and marijuana use is so high that I think the population is probably too ... What you don't have, prerequisite fall revolution, violent revolution, is a large group of young people who are comfortable with violence and we don't have that. Maybe that will change. I hope it doesn't. I don't want violence for violence. I appall violence, but I just don't see that happening. What I see happening most likely is a kind of gradual separation of the states. 

If you look at the polling on the subject, classically, traditionally, Americans had antique racial attitudes. If you say, “Would you be okay with your daughter marrying outside her race?” Most Americans, if they're being honest, would say, “no, I'm not okay with that. I'm not for that.” Now the polling shows people are much more comfortable with a child marrying someone of a different race than they are marrying someone of a different political persuasion. 

“I'd rather my daughter married someone who's Hispanic than liberal”, someone might say. That is one measure. There are many measures, but that's one measure of how politically divided we are and I just think that over time, people will self-segregate. It's a continental country. It's a very large piece of land and you could see where certain states just become very, very different. Like if you're Conservative, are you really going to live in California in 10 years? Probably not.

Personally, I would welcome a new, perhaps dual, political entity to the south. A separation of the states, red and blue. Most of our neighbours, including the Pacific coast and the important part of the Atlantic coast, would be much more like-minded than the America that now confronts us. While we're all in for a battering in the decades ahead, the Slave States, the south generally and the "flyover" states, a.k.a. the Heartland are in for a particularly arduous time. Let the Gullibillies have them much along the lines in Chuck Thompson's "Better Off Without 'Em."

Ford Threatens to Boycott First Ministers Meeting.

I guess he forgot to pack his long pants. Ontario's glorious premier, Doug Ford, has threatened to boycott tomorrow's first minister's meeting.

A Ford aide said, "No one should assume the premier of Ontario is prepared to spend his Friday sitting through a series of lectures from federal cabinet ministers."

The threat sent Trudeau aides scrambling across Montreal to track down a few gallons of poutine to soothe the savage premier.

If Lemmings Could Drive...

If lemmings could drive they would be a lot like us. They would still go over the cliff only in a little more style.

A report in The New York Times says we, mankind, are driving ourselves over a cliff.

Scientists described the quickening rate of carbon dioxide emissions in stark terms, comparing it to a “speeding freight train” and laying part of the blame on an unexpected surge in the appetite for oil as people around the world not only buy more cars but also drive them farther than in the past — more than offsetting any gains from the spread of electric vehicles. 

“We’ve seen oil use go up five years in a row,” said Rob Jackson, a professor of earth system science at Stanford and an author of one of two studies published Wednesday. “That’s really surprising.” 

Worldwide, carbon emissions are expected to increase by 2.7 percent in 2018, according to the new research, which was published by the Global Carbon Project, agroup of 100 scientists from more than 50 academic and research institutions and one of the few organizations to comprehensively examine global emissions numbers. Emissions rose 1.6 percent last year, the researchers said, ending a three-year plateau.

Reducing carbon emissions is central to stopping global warming. Three years ago nearly 200 nations hammered out the Paris Agreement with a goal of holding warming below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (two degrees Celsius) over preindustrial levels. 

Avoiding that threshold — already considered challenging — is viewed as a way to stave off some of the worst effects of climate change, like melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels. For the Paris goals to be met, scientists say, global emissions from power plants, factories, cars and trucks, as well as those from deforestation, would need to swiftly begin declining to zero.

I realize these posts are depressing. I know because I only post about a fraction of what I read and I find nothing rewarding in it. Yet we need more people spreading the word, letting others know - those that want to know - what's happening, where we're heading, what it means.

Imagine how the hundreds of scientists from 13 US government agencies that produced the latest National Climate Assessment, all 1,600 pages of it, reacted when their president dismissed it, saying "I don't believe it"?

It's no wonder why the burnout rate among climate scientists is so high.  You muster all the science, distill it into a report, issue a dire warning and then get heaped with scorn and derision. Suddenly that opening for a chemistry teacher in a backwater community college sounds irresistible.

Are we collectively working our way through the Kubler-Ross model of five stages of grief? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. How can anyone, save those who refuse to take a glimpse at what's under the carpet, not be so affected?

Of course we have the global community earnestly toiling away in Katowice, Poland, to find some means of averting runaway global warming. Mr. Trudeau wants a $20 per ton carbon tax to curb our fossil fuel appetites. Some favour cap and trade. There's no real consensus.

What we rarely talk about is how we're going to put in place enough alternative clean energy to keep our economies ticking over without some sort of collapse.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked at that and concluded that, at the rate we're going, we should have an alternative clean energy world in just under 400 years.

Beyond the vexing combination of economic, political, and technical challenges is the basic problem of overwhelming scale. There is a massive amount that needs to be built, which will suck up an immense quantity of manpower, money, and materials. 

For starters, global energy consumption is likely to soar by around 30 percent in the next few decades as developing economies expand. (China alone needs to add the equivalent of the entire US power sector by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency.) To cut emissions fast enough and keep up with growth, the world will need to develop 10 to 30 terawatts of clean-energy capacity by 2050. On the high end that would mean constructing the equivalent of around 30,000 nuclear power plants—or producing and installing 120 billion 250-watt solar panels.

There’s simply little financial incentive for the energy industry to build at that scale and speed while it has tens of trillions of dollars of sunk costs in the existing system. 

“If you pay a billion dollars for a gigawatt of coal, you’re not going to be happy if you have to retire it in 10 years,” says Steven Davis, an associate professor in the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. 

It’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to see how any of that will change until there are strong enough government policies or big enough technology breakthroughs to override the economics.

Which brings us back to December, 2015 and the Paris climate summit. That was when the global community announced they would cut emissions sufficiently to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. When he heard that, Potsdam Institute director, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, warned that to have any chance of meeting that 1.5C target would require nothing less than the "induced implosion" of the global fossil energy industry. Governments, i.e. petro-states, would have to euthanize their fossil energy giants.  He knew that Big Fossil would fight fang and claw, use their massive political clout, anything to keep growing - and they are. And here in Canada we keep subsidizing them to the tune of billions upon billions of dollars every year. What kind of message does that send the Oil Barons?

Washington State Says "No Deal" with Ford's Ontario

A merger was in the works between Ontario's Hydro One and Spokane, Washington based Avista Corp. That is until the state regulator caught a whiff of Doug Ford. Now the deal's off.

As the two party leaders intent on knocking Kathleen Wynne out of the premier’s office this year talked about their plans for Hydro One, regulators in Washington were watching and listening. 

And they were becoming increasingly concerned that a merger between Hydro One and Spokane-based Avista Corp. would always be at risk of political interference. This risk ultimately was at the heart of their decision Wednesday to deny Hydro One’s bid to buy Avista, putting an end to a deal that was more than a year in the making.

Washington has enough problems with one Donald Trump. The last thing they were looking for was a Trump Mini-Me from Toronto.

Mayo Schmidt, Hydro One's CEO at the time, told commissioners on April 10, 2018 that concerns about the provincial government's role were not "valid". 

“The province’s role is limited to being Hydro One’s largest shareholder,” he said, adding, “Hydro One is not any more vulnerable to political change than any other investor-owned utility in Canada, or the United States for that matter.” 

But the commissioners, who regulate private energy companies in Washington state, appeared to have their doubts, announcing instead that they would torpedo the deal.

“The reassurances Mr. Schmidt offered in his testimony may have been given sincerely at the time it was filed but they turned out to be materially incorrect,” the commissioners wrote in their order this week.

Nikiforuk - Chaos the New Normal of World Oil Markets and Canada Hasn't Got a Clue.

When you're producing a low-grade fossil fuel - high-carbon, high-cost, low profit margins - fluctuations in world oil prices hit hard. Such is the fate of Alberta and its Athabasca bitumen pits.

Andrew Nikiforuk writes that the good old days of relative price stability in oil markets are good old days, i.e. they're over. Worse yet, Ottawa and the provinces are totally unprepared for a future of oil price chaos.

As the current global oil glut shakes up petro states around the world, oil prices are becoming more volatile than Donald Trump tweets.
Neither Canada, now the dumb owner of a marginal 65-year-old pipeline, nor Alberta, a key exporter of bitumen, a cheap refinery feedstock, has paid much attention to this revolution.

As a consequence Canada has no strategy to deal with the new normal of highly volatile oil prices.
Government incompetence explains the hew and cry in Alberta about its overproduction crisis and the various proposals to solve it, ranging from the purchase of rail cars (a bad idea) to the decision to order companies to cut production of heavy oil by about 325,000 barrels a day (a sensible idea).

Alberta’s panic attack is based on the idea that bitumen from the province’s oilsands producers is selling at a discount because of a lack of pipeline capacity.

The reality is that the dramatic 30-per-cent drop in oil prices since the beginning of October, from more than US$70 to US$50, is upsetting oil exporters, producers and markets around the world.

Different kinds of oil fetch different prices, based on their quality and transportation costs. And all are experiencing dramatic price drops. Alberta’s bitumen, a cheap refinery feedstock, is not the only crude languishing during a global market glut.

...Too much price volatility can cripple the entire global machine, and low prices for oil can trigger even greater disruption, argues Gail Tverberg, an actuary who writes about “Our Finite World.”

...Tom Therramus, the pen name of a U.S. academic, argues that oil price volatility is a new cyclical trend that has been increasing rapidly over the last 15 to 20 years. 

Writing in the blog Oil-Price.Net, he documents this new development. “Wave-like surges,” or spikes in price volatility, tend to erupt every three or four years like clockwork. In addition stock market volatility tends to follow oil price leaps and falls by six to 12 months. 

This new volatility in oil prices is analogous to other trends like the increasing frequency of wildfires in forests destabilized by drought and climate change. 

And oil price volatility is as dangerous as a wildfire. “Unpredictability in oil price, resulting from rapid changes (up or down) over short time spans, is bad news because oil, and more broadly fossil fuel, is the commodity that is most essential to the operation of a modern economy,” Therramus writes.

...The Harvard Business Review now suggests that everyone should get used to “faster, shallower price rotations based on changes in production.”

For more than a decade the Alberta government has known that bitumen pricing is 60 per cent more volatile than prices for higher quality West Texas Intermediate. But it did little to buffer its economy or its industry. 

...The U.S. fracking revolution has played a significant role in creating a temporary oil glut and destabilizing prices. Last summer the U.S. pumped 11.6 million barrels a day as its oil production surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia. The U.S., still a net importer of oil, hasn’t been the world’s largest crude oil producer since 1973. 

This novel increase has largely been achieved by shattering dense shale rocks with the brute force technology of hydraulic fracking. 

Some U.S. analysts predict the shale boom will last until 2040. But other forecasters such as David Hughes and Art Berman predict the shale gale will peak much sooner — within 10 years — due to high depletion rates, increasingly hard to extract resources and high costs.
In the meantime, a global surge in oil production, largely driven by fracking in North America, has disrupted oil markets repeatedly and added to oil price volatility. Overproduction in shale formations contributed to the oil price rout of 2014 and the collapse of oil prices this fall. 

If Canada had paid any attention to the shale gale over the last decade, it would have limited bitumen production rather than let regulators rubber stamp one oilsands project after another. Competent politicians would have encouraged limited refining near the oilsands instead of advocating for unlimited pipeline expansion. 

Costly, hard-to-produce oil means diminishing returns 

The quantity and quality of oil produced has changed dramatically, meaning diminished returns for all players. Mining bitumen in the boreal forest or fracking tight oil from the Permian require complex and expensive engineering. 

Most of Canada’s bitumen production comes from high-cost steaming operations that use enormous amounts of natural gas (almost one-third of Canada’s annual supply) to boil water to produce steam that is pumped underground to increase bitumen production. In the U.S., about half of all oil production comes from dense shale formations requiring high-cost fracking and horizontal drilling. 

Bitumen and light oil from dense shale formations share a common trait — poor quality that adds to the cost of refining them. Bitumen requires upgrading while light oil poses a different set of refinery challenges, including contamination with paraffin waxes and hydrogen sulfide. 

French geologist Jean Laherrère notes that shale oil is of substantially lower quality than conventional oil. So an increase in the number of barrels being produced does not mean an equivalent increase in energy value. 

The more energy and capital that technological society throws at oil extraction, the more fragile it becomes. A hundred years ago companies drilled a hole and oil gushed from the ground. Now they are smashing concrete-like formations with extreme force or melting oilsands with steam to coax out lesser-quality oil. 

In the process, the world’s oil and gas industry has gone further and further into debt to cover the cost of mining these extreme resources.
Low prices and more volatile pricing are not only big problems for the industry, but even bigger problems for oil-exporting states dependent on oil revenues.

...The global economy is failing, with diminishing returns for the 99 per cent. Elites around the world are fighting among themselves over the remaining spoils. 

Economic stagnation has plunged oil prices into chaotic volatility. (Or has the irrational pursuit of extreme resources such as bitumen and tight oil helped to unhinge the global economy?) 

Canada promoted oilsands production based on forecasts of $100-a-barrel oil. The price reached that level in 2008, and then plunged. Volatility has ruled since. Canada and Alberta have pretended bitumen, a cheap refinery feedstock, would command the same prices as higher quality oil. 

Global markets have delivered the truth. Garbage crude is always garbage crude until you add value by upgrading and refining it. And when prices swing, low-quality oil takes the biggest hit.

Companies can compensate for oil price volatility in the short term by hedging, storing the product or by operating refineries and adding value. Governments can curtail production, as Alberta Premier Rachel Notley reluctantly did. (And yes, the price of heavy oil rallied.)
But the increasing waves of oil price volatility ultimately create political and financial instability. Petro states then practice extreme politics to contain the resulting unrest. And the U.S. is one of the world’s most conflicted and dysfunctional petro states. 

Technology does not create energy. It merely accelerates the depletion of resources by providing more complex, costly ways of extracting what poorer hydrocarbons remain. 

And no, it’s not just fossil fuel resources that are depleted. Cheap oil lets companies build bigger boats with bigger engines to use bigger nets to catch smaller fish, even as stocks are destroyed. 

These energy dynamics also explain the repeated global political failure to face the disruptive anarchy of climate change. Minds conditioned by Titanic economic thinking have lost all connections to traditional instincts for survival, and don’t believe in icebergs. 

Just as they ignore the reality that, in the absence of courageous political leadership, complex energy systems, like cod stocks, can collapse without much warning.

CO2 Emissions Rose in 2017. 2018 Will Continue the Trend. Canada Makes the Top 10 List.

What a disconnect. While the community of nations cuddles in Katowice, Poland, promising to do better in the fight to tame climate change, 2018 is expected to record a 2.7 per cent jump in GHG emissions (the man-made type) over last year's record emissions.

Global carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are projected to rise by more than 2% in 2018 to the highest levels in recorded history, according to a new study by the Global Carbon Project.

The data clearly shows that the rapid growth in low carbon technologies, such as solar and wind power as well as electric vehicles, are not yet sufficient to cause global emissions of planet-warming gases to peak or decline.
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The report comes as climate negotiators gather in Katowice, Poland, for the latest round of UN climate talks, and shortly after other research has warned that progress to cut emissions is happening far too slowly to prevent potentially catastrophic levels of global warming. 

The growth in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry is expected to be about 2.7% in 2018, the report estimates, with a range of between 1.8% and 3.7%, given the range of uncertainty. 

"The growing global demand for energy is outpacing decarbonization efforts. This needs to change, and it needs to change quickly," said Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in the U.K., in a statement. 

The new data for 2018, published Wednesday, shows that global emissions from burning fossil fuels are expected to hit 37.1 billion metric tons in 2018, a record high and the second straight year of growth that followed 3 years of a flat trend.

This year’s rising emission figures are largely due to an uptick in coal use, while oil use is also growing in most regions, including the U.S.
The 10 biggest emitters in 2018 are China, the U.S., India, Russia, Japan, Germany, Iran, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Canada, the report finds. The EU as a whole region of countries ranks third.

Canada, with less than 40-million people in a world of more than 7.5 billion still ranks in the top 10 emitters for 2018.  Yet the Trudeau government, parroting the line favoured by the Harper government, says we're too small to make much of a difference. That's even on Environment Canada's web site. Let's see. There are 195 countries in the world today.  That means 185 countries contribute fewer emissions than teensy-weensy little Canada. We're worse than 185 other countries. And we're less than one half of one per cent of the global population.

 A recent report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that to limit global warming to the Paris Agreement's goal of 1.5°C, or 2.7°F, above preindustrial levels, emissions would need to be cut by 50% by 2030, and slashed to net zero by 2050. 

The new report underscores the fact that we're headed in the opposite direction from what scientists and many world leaders say is needed. 

The bottom line: "We are not doing enough! It is not enough to just support solar, wind, or electric vehicles," Glen Peters, research director at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Oslo who led the emissions analysis, told Axios via email. 

"Unless policies are in place to stop carbon going into the atmosphere, we will never meet our climate goals. We have to support new technologies, while at the same time discouraging old technologies."

Impeachment, Please, While There's Still Time

The Daily Beast has a report that looks into Donald Trump's nihilistic mind.  The future? He doesn't care. He won't be around then anyway.

Since the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s aides and advisers have tried to convince him of the importance of tackling the national debt. 

Sources close to the president say he has repeatedly shrugged it off, implying that he doesn’t have to worry about the money owed to America’s creditors—currently about $21 trillion—because he won’t be around to shoulder the blame when it becomes even more untenable. 

The friction came to a head in early 2017 when senior officials offered Trump charts and graphics laying out the numbers and showing a “hockey stick” spike in the national debt in the not-too-distant future. In response, Trump noted that the data suggested the debt would reach a critical mass only after his possible second term in office. 

“Yeah, but I won’t be here,” the president bluntly said, according to a source who was in the room when Trump made this comment during discussions on the debt. 

The episode illustrates the extent of the president’s ambivalence toward tackling an issue that has previously animated the Republican Party from the days of Ronald Reagan to the presidency of Barack Obama.
But for those who have worked with Trump, it was par for the course. Several people close to the president, both within and outside his administration, confirmed that the national debt has never bothered him in a truly meaningful way, despite his public lip service. “I never once heard him talk about the debt,” one former senior White House official attested.

Apparently Trump imagines that perpetual exponential growth will solve all of America's debt problems and a good many other dangers.

“He understands the messaging of it,” the former senior White House official told The Daily Beast. “But he isn’t a doctrinaire conservative who deeply cares about the national debt, especially not on his watch… It’s not actually a top priority for him… He understands the political nature of the debt but it’s clearly not, frankly, something he sees as crucial to his legacy.” 

The former Trump official adding, “It’s not like it’s going to haunt him.”

Dear Ottawa. Don't Do to BC's Salmon What You Did to Newfoundland's Cod.

British Columbia's salmon stocks are reeling.

Half of Canada’s chinook salmon are endangered, with nearly all other populations in precarious decline, according to a new report, confirming fears that prospects for the species remain dire. 

The report by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canadaconcluded that eight of the country’s 16 populations are considered endangered, four are threatened, one is of special concern and the health of two remain unknown. 

Only one population, which spawns on the Thompson river in British Columbia, is believed to be stable. 

“For those of us who have been working on recovering chinook salmon runs in British Columbia, we knew they were in terrible, terrible shape for quite a while now,” said Aaron Hill of Watershed Watch, an organisation that monitors ecosystem health. “It was actually good to see it finally recognised by this federally mandated science body, because this hopefully initiates more serious protection efforts from the government.” 

Watershed Watch has renewed calls for chinook to be listed under federal legislation which would afford the ailing populations more robust government protection. But similar calls were made last year, when the same committee of scientists found that one-third of sockeye salmon are endangered, and the federal government has yet to take action.

The decline of British Columbia's salmon stocks, whether from climate change or lax federal fishing regulations, powerfully impacts the coastal ecology. Spawning salmon are an essential foodstock for bears, eagles, and other land-based predators. The decline in salmon stocks is considered a major factor in the dwindling numbers of resident Orca.

Surely we learned our lesson with the collapse of Newfoundland's cod stocks. There's no excuse for Ottawa allowing a similar collapse on the west coast.

We May Be the Most Prosperous Nations. That Means We're Also the Most Vulnerable.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, has a membership roster that includes the wealthiest, most prosperous and, generally whitest, nations on the planet.

If there's stuff on the planet we want, everything from energy to critical resources, we get our fill because we're willing to pay what others simply cannot. That's a reality fraught with problems for us, the rich countries. We are now dependent on the continuation of a state of affairs that is utterly unsustainable, emphasis on the word "dependent."

University College London professor, Henrietta Moore, says we have to stop thinking of ourselves as in a different league from the have-nots.

In truth, many of the world’s most “prosperous” countries are its least sustainable. Since the 70s, humanity has been in “ecological overshoot”, with annual demand on resources exceeding what the Earth can regenerate each year. Today, humanity uses the equivalent of 1.7 Earths to provide the resources we use. This applies to the vast majority of today’s wealthy countries. Even nations like Norway, with an apparent ecological surplus thanks to widespread use of renewables at home, mask their true carbon footprint by exporting fossil fuels to be burned elsewhere – in so doing, helping to enhance their own prosperity further.

The stark warnings in a recent report by the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change about the pressing need for a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 underscores how urgently we need to develop new ways of measuring prosperity that take a much bigger account of our global responsibilities. The comforting story of a march towards “prosperity” headed by beneficiaries of inequality in the global north is an illusion our planet simply cannot afford any longer.

It's difficult to think of prosperity as a vulnerability as much as a blessing. Yet professor Moore is right. The prosperous nations use the lion's share of the world's resources and we're utterly dependent on consuming resources at a rate vastly beyond what the Earth can provide. Our dependency is really an addiction and we have no stomach for changing our ways.

Our prime minister is sitting down with our premiers to discuss how Canada can maximize our perpetual, exponential growth. One thing that won't be on their agenda is what this means in terms of our "global responsibilities."

Macron Realizes You Can Only Squeeze the Public So Far

They didn't quite storm the Bastille but the riots that hammered Paris over the Macron government's proposal to hike carbon taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel may have been a wake up call for the French president. Macron seems to have realized that, if you can't squeeze more out of the plebs, there's always the rich.

The French government will consider reintroducing taxes on the most wealthy in what is seen as a further measure to appease the gilets jaunesprotesters threatening to destabilise Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. 

Lifting part of the impôt de solidarité sur la fortune (ISF, solidarity tax on wealth) was a pillar of Macron’s election campaign and one of the first fiscal measures he implemented on taking power in May 2017, leading to his nickname “president of the rich”. 

On Wednesday, as gilets jaunes (yellow vests) vowed to continue protests that have seen parts of Paris in flames and violent clashes with police, the government’s spokesman Benjamin Griveaux admitted ISF could be reimposed. 

“If the measure we have taken doesn’t work, we’re not idiots, we’ll change it. But first we will have to evaluate it,” Griveaux told RTL radio, adding that the evaluation would happen next year. 

Reintroducing the wealth tax has been one of the demands of parts of the gilets jaunes movement that grew out of anger at rising taxes on petrol and diesel.

...Easing the ISF for the wealthy was described by one political commentator as Macron’s “original sin” and has been regarded as being socially divisive at a time when French workers have felt increasingly squeezed financially.

Catering to the whims and threats of the affluent has been a longstanding game in the developed world in this era of "everyday low taxes." It has resulted in corrosive inequality and austerity governance. It has severely undermined social cohesion.

Back in 2011, the OECD (rich countries' club) reported inequality among its member states had reached a 30-year high. It's gotten worse since then.  The damage inequality inflicts on a nation and its people was graphically chronicled by two British epidemiologists, Picket and Wilson, in their 2009 book, "The Spirit Level." Neoliberal governments have been so focused on expanding investment capital to relentlessly grow their economies that they ignored the cost it was exacting on their human capital. It has facilitated the deep divisions that current afflict our societies.

Enough.

That Star in the East is Back. Maclean's Argues for a Clean Energy Revolution in Canada.

It's not the sort of thing I expected to read in the pages of Macleans but, there it is, the case for Canada to rapidly grow the nation's green energy technology. There's nary a word about the environment. The argument is based on growing Canada's economy.

There’s an estimated $26 trillion global opportunity in clean growth coming in the next 12 years, and a trio of new regulatory initiatives from last week’s federal Fall Economic Statement might help Canada grab a bigger share of it through green innovation. If the federal government gets the details right. 

The announcement to allow for the immediate expensing of clean energy investments has rightly received the most attention from the business and environmental communities. In fact, it’s surprising that the regulatory reform initiatives have received any attention at all, given they were buried on page 74 of the update and have low dollar figures attached. 

Finance Minister Bill Morneau has committed to creating a “Dedicated External Advisory Committee on Regulatory Competitiveness” and a “Centre for Regulatory Innovation”. There is $10 million earmarked to help government incorporate economic and competitiveness factors when designing and implementing regulations. 

...The government has set an ambitious goal of increasing overseas exports by 50 per cent to 2025. It is difficult to see how we will accomplish this by simply cutting business costs, though that can help. We need to be tapping into where the global economy is going—by building Canada’s brand as a leader in clean performance and innovation.

This should not be about deregulation. It should be about smarter regulation. 

Strong, well-designed and flexible environmental regulations create sizeable domestic markets for new technologies, which helps our homegrown companies in meeting our export targets.

Some Canadian industries are already heeding the call.

This creates the opportunity for firms like Quebec-based aluminum manufacturer Elysis that has innovated a carbon-free smelting process that eliminates all direct greenhouse gas emissions and replaces it with pure oxygen. This has the potential to eliminate the equivalent of 6.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions—improving Canadians’ health and our environment while at the same time generating massive export opportunities and good jobs. 

That is what we need to be relentlessly focussed on: building the conditions for Canadian companies to compete and thrive in a growing global clean growth economy, while putting rules in place that will protect the health and environment of Canadians.
Business leaders largely recognize what needs to be done to do that. 

And they recently provided this advice to government in the Resources of the Future Economic Strategy Table report. A group of business leaders from across resource sectors recommended that Canada’s regulatory system be “outcomes-driven, stringent, flexible and predictable” and “designed to improve health, safety and environmental performance, stimulate innovation, boost sector growth and competitiveness”.

The stumbling block isn't economic. It's federal-provincial politics in our modern petro-state. Justin Trudeau doesn't want to be seen as "clean energy hostile" to the bitumen pit producers of Athabasca. Trudeau may still believe that Notley can deliver on her promise that Alberta will back his carbon tax initiative but, with Kenney breathing down Notley's neck, that's a real "faint hope" gamble.

Nine to twelve billion dollars for a pointless pipeline? That's money the federal government could put to better use kickstarting a rapid transition to clean energy technology.

Mueller Didn't Show Much on Flynn, Says Manafort Report Friday Will be Public

It was something of a letdown yesterday when Special Counsel Robert Mueller's sentencing report on former Trump national security advisor, Michael Flynn, was released to the public, most its contents redacted. What was made public is that Flynn cooperated fully, was of great assistance to investigators and should not receive a jail sentence.

Friday, however, Team Mueller will be submitting another report, one that will detail how former Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort, breached his plea bargain by continuing to lie to investigators.  That report apparently will be released to the public in its entirety. From Axios:

Special counsel Robert Mueller's team is expected to make its memo about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort public, Mueller's spokesman Peter Carr told Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff, despite speculation that Mueller might file the memo under seal to avoid publicly revealing the additional crimes Mueller's office believes Manafort is guilty of. 

Why it matters: This will give the public rare insight into some of the findings Mueller has unearthed over the course of his Russia investigation, and could provide clarity into what else we can expect from his team when the probe eventually wraps. Meanwhile, memos about former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen are reportedly expected to be unveiled this week as well.

Mueller Gives Flynn a Pass, Recommends No Jail Time

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is singing Michael Flynn's praises for spilling the beans on the Trump campaign/administration's dealings with Russia.

Beyond that, Mueller has kept the details to himself.

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn provided "substantial assistance" in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, according to court papers filed Tuesday. 

Prosecutors described Flynn's cooperation with federal prosecutors in a sentencing memo filed by Mueller that offered few new details of the Russia probe. Citing the extent of Flynn's cooperation, Mueller's office said a sentence that includes no prison time is "appropriate and warranted."

Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to a charge of lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the weeks before Trump took office. 

The crime carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine up to $250,000, but his plea agreement says he's eligible for a sentence of six months or less and can request the court not to impose a fine.

Mueller's submission can be read here although it is heavily redacted. What remains boils down to - he was very helpful.

Will 2019 Be the Year Right Wing Populism Tries to Take Ottawa?

2019 could be a bare knuckle election for Canada, one in which milquetoasts will be easy meat. That, according to a Macleans article by Michael Valpy and Frank Graves:

As Canadians, we sit atop the continent, watching as our neighbours slide into cultural civil war. It has become easy to just be appalled as America becomes riven, with social media and antagonistic rhetoric on both sides of the political spectrum erasing the middle ground. There are two Americas, incommensurably separated on the fundamental issues of the day: climate change, the economy, social issues like health and education, employment, the media, immigration in particular, and globalization and free trade. 

We’ve learned more and more about the populism that has fuelled this complicated moment as the fracture in America races like wildfire throughout Western democracies. It is the biggest force reshaping democracy, our economies and public institutions. It is the product of economic despair, inequality, and yes, racism and xenophobia. It is an institutional blind spot, largely denied or ridiculed by the media, and by the more comfortable and educated portions of society. 

It is very much alive in Canada. In fact, our populist explosion has already had its first bangs and is likely to have a major impact on next year’s federal election.

...Meanwhile, research over the last 10 years has found that Canada, like the United States, is turning into a society fissured along fault lines of education, class and gender. These are social chasms defined by the concentration of wealth at the top of society and, for everyone else, by economic pessimism and stagnation; by a comfortable feeling on one end of the societal teeter-totter, and a fear on the other end that a subscription to the middle-class dream might no longer be available.

Although there has been a recent uptick for the first time in 15 years, the portion of Canadians who self-identify as middle class since the turn of the century has declined from 70 per cent to 45 per cent, a stark number that mirrors America’s—signalling that Canadians have a deeply pessimistic view of their personal economic outlook. Only one in eight Canadians thinks they’re better off than a year ago. Only one in eight thinks the next generation will enjoy a better life.

The irony is that populism is no exclusive preserve of the radical right.  Populism, presented in the form of progressivism, is very much centrist. There was a time when progressivism had at least some toehold within the Liberal Party. The Liberals, however, chose to embrace the global neoliberal order which gutted their ability and willingness to accommodate progressivism where it mattered (see the two paragraphs above).

Six months into his term, Justin Trudeau proclaimed himself, first and foremost, a global free trader even as his finance minister, Morneau, told Canadians they were being consigned to the precariat and would have to get used to a working life of "job churn," living from paycheque to paycheque and hoping not to fall between the cracks. There was a time a Liberal would sooner swallow hot coals than say those things, at least openly.

When Trudeau displaced Harper I had hoped he would heal the divide Harper nurtured and exploited to take power. Trudeau, to his credit, has tried to unite Canadians but he hasn't tried hard enough. There's only so far he can go and remain true to his neoliberal creed.  Trudeau stops well short and, in the result, hands our far right the powerful weapon of populism.

The old nonsense about "it's the economy, stupid" is not the reality of today. Fear is driving public opinion and fear is easily manipulated. Trudeau needs a much better sense of where he stands.

So Much for Democracy. Ousted Republicans go "Scorched Earth."

When you're a Republican, the will of the voters matters very little. That's the message Wisconsin Republicans are sending loud and clear as they try to sabotage offices won by Democrats in the last election.

Republicans are about to lose their grip on power in a number of states, and they’re trying their hardest to sour Democrats’ election wins. 

In Wisconsin, Republican Gov. Scott Walker will have to pass the baton to Democrat Tony Evers come January, but before he does, the state’s GOP-controlled legislature has called for an “extraordinary session” to curb Evers’s power in office and potentially make it harder for Democrats to get elected in the future. 

A similar tale is playing out in Michigan, where Democrats Gretchen Whitmer, Dana Nessel, and Jocelyn Benson handily won the governor, attorney general, and secretary of state races, respectively. Michigan Republicans are trying to make sure the Democratic trifecta has less power to undermine Republicans’ legislative accomplishments. 

The state governments have proposed a slate of bills that would touch everything from voting access to the judicial system. In Wisconsin, the proposals, some of which are expected to pass Tuesday, could limit Evers’s power to change policies around welfare, health care, and economic development, cut down early voting, and even allow the Republican-led legislature to hire their own lawyers to undermine the attorney general. In Michigan, a Republican proposal would guarantee the GOP-controlled legislature the right to intervene in any legal battles involving state laws that the attorney general may be reluctant to defend. 

If Republicans are successful, it’s a power grab that would seriously undermine the platform on which Evers campaigned, and won. 

Two years ago, North Carolina set the precedent for this kind of move, when the Republican-controlled legislature stripped then-incoming Democrat Roy Cooper’s power over Cabinet appointments, made the state’s judicial system more partisan, and ensured that the state’s board of elections would be controlled by Republicans in election years. Cooper has been in legal fights over the changes since.

Meanwhile, NBC's Emily Mills writes that the Republicans want nothing less than to subvert the democratic voice of the public.

There'll Be No Revelations About Jeffrey Epstein and His Play Pals.

The civil trial of Jeffrey Epstein has been stopped on the courthouse steps.  The multimillionaire serial pedophile threw enough money at the plaintiffs to bury their lawsuit, presumably forever.

Epstein also issued this apology to the plaintiffs' lawyer:

"While Mr. Edwards was representing clients against me, I filed a lawsuit against him in which I made allegations about him that the evidence conclusively proves were absolutely false. The truth was that his aggressive investigation and litigation style was highly effective and therefore troublesome for me," said Epstein's statement, which was read in court. 

"I am now admitting that I was wrong and that the things I said to try to harm Mr. Edwards’s reputation as a trial lawyer were false. I sincerely apologize for the false and hurtful allegations I made and hope some forgiveness for may acknowledgement of wrongdoing."

Epstein had no apologies or remorse for the plaintiffs themselves, girls who alleged they too were victims of the serial pedophile.

Even the Pipeline Loving Globe Gets It. Trudeau Has to Choose.

"In the climate change hypocrisy sweepstakes, it’s hard to beat Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But he sure talks a good game."

With that opener, the Globe's Eric Reguly captures the corner Trudeau has painted himself into.


Climate change is a clear and present danger, he says. Left unchecked, it will have dire consequences for the environment, the global economy and humanity itself. In late 2015, just before he enthusiastically endorsed the Paris climate change accord, Trudeau said: “The atmosphere doesn’t care where carbon is emitted. It requires us to take action all around the world.”

Yes, the atmosphere doesn't care where carbon is emitted whether it's from burning high-carbon bitumen or the even higher-carbon pet coke, the granular coal that comes as the silent bonus in every barrel of dilbit.

Less than a year after Canada endorsed the Paris deal, the federal government approved Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. The pipeline connects Alberta to the British Columbia coast and would give the oil sands, one of the world’s most carbon-intensive energy projects, a vast new market in Asia. 

Last spring, when a regulatory war between Alberta and B.C. put the pipeline into deep-freeze, Kinder Morgan abandoned the project. To keep it alive, the Trudeau Liberals spent $4.5 billion of taxpayers' money to nationalize it. They also approved the Enbridge Line 3 crude oil pipeline, from Alberta to Wisconsin. “I’ve said many times that there isn’t a country in the world that would find billions of barrels of oil and leave it in the ground while there is a market for it,” Trudeau said.

In yet another Jekyll-and-Hyde moment in Trudeau’s initiatives on the climate file, he came out in support of the $40-billion LNG Canada project in October. Owned by a consortium of oil and gas companies led by Royal Dutch Shell, the project will take gas from the Montney fields on the Alberta—B.C. border and send it by pipeline to a terminal near Kitimat, B.C., where it will be turned into liquefied natural gas (LNG) and shipped to Asia. 

LNG Canada is a carbon hog. It is also incompatible with B.C.'s carbon-reduction targets and Canada’s ostensible enthusiasm to meet the Paris agreement objectives, which seek to limit average global temperature increases to 1.5 C over pre-industrial levels.

In Harper's shadow.

When then prime minister Stephen Harper yanked Canada from the Kyoto climate accord in 2011, environmentalists labelled him a fossil. Perhaps, but he wasn’t a hypocrite. He knew Canada had zero chance of meeting carbon-reduction targets as long as it remained a resources-based economy, and he was right. Trudeau is promising a greener future, but his enthusiasm for carbon-intensive projects belies that image. Canada is still part of the global warming problem.

Three years ago, Trudeau and McKenna strolled onto the floor of the Paris climate summit to declare "Canada's back." We would no longer be one of the planet's worst climate pariahs. Evil emitter Harper had been swept from office.

Since then the science of climate change has become much clearer, in some cases razor sharp. We have until 2030 to slash global carbon emissions by half if we're to have much chance of giving our grandchildren a survivable future. That warning means you "down tools" on fossil energy consumption and, for producing nations, on carbon fuel production also. You focus on rapidly expanding renewable energy sources to speed up the urgent transition. Instead this prime minister, just like his predecessor, dreams of flooding world markets with bitumen, as much and as fast as possible. On that score, he's making more progress than Harper ever dreamt of achieving.

There's a line that has become fashionable of late - "We are the last generation that can stop climate change."  Insofar as Canada is concerned, Justin Trudeau may be the last prime minister who can stop climate change. The Tories won't. Yet there's no sign Trudeau's Liberals will either.

It Could Be a Busy Week for Trump's Handlers

George H.W. Bush couldn't have died at a better time for Team Trump. What better distraction could they have to disrupt the week's news cycle.

There are two problems tomorrow.

The first will be revelations about Trump's short-lived national security advisor, former general Mike Flynn. Muller's prosecutors are to file their sentencing submissions tomorrow and they're expected to touch on his conversations with Russian diplomats about the lifting of sanctions.

The second landmine is a civil trial that begins tomorrow in Miami. The trial concerns convicted pedophile, multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein and his bevy of pals and enablers. Among Epstein's supposed friends were/are Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, Ken Starr and Donald Trump.

Trump, Melania, Epstein and Maxwell

One of the plaintiffs, Virginia Roberts, claims she was recruited at the age of 15  and she maintains she was made to service not only Epstein but a member of the royalty, an academic and a politician. Roberts says she was recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell (daughter of late disgraced tycoon, Robert Maxwell) while working as a "towel girl" of Mar-a-Largo.

Virginia Roberts, 17, with Prince Andrew

Epstein was charged and given a pat on the wrist, 13-month sentence in the county jail, by a prosecutor named Alexander Acosta who - small world - is now Trump's labor secretary.

Closing out the week will be the filing, on Friday, of the Mueller prosecution's summary of how Paul Manafort breached his plea bargain by lying to investigators and by leaking intel on the investigation to the White House.

Trump's Labor Secretary, a Multimillionaire Sexual Deviant and even Mar-a-Lago

A second video, also graphic, automatically follows the first.

Will Donald Trump, Like Napoleon, Come a Cropper in Moscow?

Was Donald Trump's Moscow Trump Tower tied to lifting US sanctions on Russia?

Is that why Robert Mueller had Michael Cohen plead guilty to the felony of lying to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow deal and when it was abandoned? Is that why Trump's short-lived national security advisor, Michael Flynn, got caught lying about talking sanctions with the Russians well before Trump took office?

When Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress it struck me as odd that then candidate Trump would have not intervened to set the record straight at that time. He was still happy to call Cohen his lawyer and his aide. So, when his lawyer and fixer lied to Congress to bolster Trump's own claims, Trump let that perjury stand. Trump became an accessory.

After Cohen misled Congress, Flynn starts talking to the Russians about lifting sanctions, something he initially denied but then admitted in his own guilty plea.

Now the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee (soon to be the committee chair), former prosecutor Adam Schiff, says that the Trump-Russia "compromise" was far broader than anyone thought.  Schiff points out that the Russians knew that Cohen's congressional testimony was perjured. The Russians knew that Trump knew it was perjured and, by letting Cohen's perjury stand, Trump gave Moscow powerful leverage over him.

We may know more about this when, tomorrow, Special Counsel Mueller's team file their sentencing report on Flynn. Then, on Friday, they're scheduled to file in court their report on how Manafort breached his plea deal by repeatedly lying to investigators and leaking information to the White House.

Brace Yourself for Two Weeks of the Most Sincere, Heartfelt Bullshit You've Ever Heard.

Give 'em credit, they got off to a rip-roaring start. They even used that awesome line about how "this is the last generation that can stop climate change." As if.

I'd much prefer to hear them say "our generation shall stop climate change" preferably before we trigger a mass extinction of life on Earth. "We're gonna do whatever has to be done. No excuses." Only that's not what we're going to do.

We, the community of nations, are going to negotiate. We're going to negotiate to do about as little as each can get away with. That's certainly true for Canada. When this year's climate summit is over, we'll still be committed to flooding world markets with our coal and our conventional oil and, especially, our environment-exterminating bitumen - just as much dilbit as we can pump to "tidewater." Oh yeah, but we've got carbon taxes even if they are minuscule.

Remember this dandy graphic?

What it shows, and we'd rather not see, is that, if the rest of the world was as determined to thwart climate change as much as Russia and China and Canada (yeah, that's us), the world by 2100 would be 5 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial Revolution temperatures. How does that piddly little carbon tax sound  now?

The key to keeping global warming within survivable limits is no secret. It's not even complex. Back at the Paris climate summit in 2015 when Trudeau and McKenna strolled onto the floor after having trounced climate villain, Stephen Harper, to announce "Canada's Back!!", the then director of the Potsdam Institute, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, said they could meet their 1.5 C target but it would require the "induced implosion" of the global fossil energy industry.  This is what Johnny Schellnhuber had in mind by 'induced implosion':



And that is precisely what our prime minister and most premiers do not have in mind. There'll be no induced implosion of carbon energy for them, anything but. They will, however, negotiate. And by negotiate that includes negotiating away your grandkids' future.

Carbon taxes? That's like handing you an umbrella instead of a parachute before you're kicked out of the aircraft door. That's a dandy brolly. Good luck!

That's not to say carbon taxes aren't good or necessary. They are. They are just one measure we must take. The Herculean chore isn't carbon tax. It is in engineering a new, carbon free economy. That means investing massively in low-carbon energy options and speeding up the transition from fossil fuels to alternative, clean energy. That might mean making perpetual exponential economic growth a secondary priority.  No sign of that on Canada's horizon.

The sorry fact is that we're not going to get out of this mess, not going to avert a possible mass extinction event, without clear-headed determination and a willingness to sacrifice - a lot. Industrial and trade strategy now has to be geared around ecological and environmental restoration.

Earth needs a break. If we don't give it the break it needs, it will break us.

So Much for "America First"

General Motors has taken Donald Trump to the woodshed.

Robert Reich writes that GM has shown Trump that 'America First' never trumps  'shareholders first.'

In 2010, when GM emerged from the bailout and went public again, it boasted to Wall Street that it was making 43% of its cars in places where labor cost less than $15 an hour, while in North America it could now pay “lower-tiered” wages and benefits for new employees.

So this year, when the costs of producing many of its cars in Ohio and Detroit got too high (due in part to Trump’s tariffs on foreign steel), GM simply decided to shift more production to Mexico in order to boost profits. 

In light of GM’s decision, Trump is also demanding the company close one of its plants in China. But this raises a second reality of shareholder-first global capitalism that has apparently been lost on Trump: GM doesn’t make many cars in China for export to the United States. Almost all of the cars it makes in China are for sale there.
In fact, GM is now making and selling more cars in China than it does in the United States. “China is playing a key role in the company’s strategy,” says GM’s CEO, Mary Barra. 

Even as Trump has escalated his trade war with China, GM has invested in state-of-the-art electrification, autonomous vehicles and ride-sharing technologies there. 

...In shareholder-first global capitalism, technology doesn’t belong to any nation. It goes wherever the profits are. If a particular technology is vital to American national security, the US government could stop American corporations from doing business in China – just as it does, in effect, when it blocks Chinese companies from acquiring American components if the purchase poses a national security threat. 

“Making America great again” has nothing to do with making American corporations great again. Big American-based corporations are doing wonderfully well, as are their shareholders. 

The real challenge is to make American workers great again. They don’t need just any jobs. They need good jobs, akin to those that GM’s unionized workers had a half-century ago. Most Americans haven’t had a raise in decades, considering inflation. 

...American corporations exist to advance the interests of their shareholders, who aren’t prepared to sacrifice profits for more and better jobs for Americans.