Chris Hedges Has a Point

I recently sent an email to a liberal friend in West Virginia.  I referenced Thomas Jefferson's writings on rebellion and asked whether a stacked judiciary, a shamelessly "bought and paid for" Congress, and a criminal presidency, didn't meet the conditions that Jefferson argued justified revolution.

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure”

"Men have the right to a just government, have natural rights, and have the right to consent to be governed."

I asked her if America had not reached the levels of corruption and tyranny of which Jefferson wrote? If not, how? If so, why are the people not rising up in defence of their cherished Constitution?

The truth can often be ugly. I'm a reader of Chris Hedges although, in the past couple of years, I have sometimes found his views a bit extreme with a resort to hyperbole. This passage from his latest op-ed, however, is on the money:

If what happens in courtrooms across the country to poor people of color is justice, what is happening in the Senate is a trial. If the blood-drenched debacles and endless quagmires in the Middle East are victories in the war on terror, our military is the greatest on earth. If the wholesale government surveillance of the public, the revoking of due process and having the world’s largest prison population are liberty, we are the land of the free. If the president, an inept, vulgar and corrupt con artist, is the leader of the free world, we are a beacon for democracy and our enemies hate us for our values. If Jesus came to make us rich, bless the annihilation of Muslims by our war machine and condemn homosexuality and abortion, we are a Christian nation. If formalizing an apartheid state in Israel is a peace plan, we are an honest international mediator. If a meritocracy means that three American men have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the U.S. population, we are the land of opportunity. If the torture of kidnapped victims in black sites and the ripping of children from their parents’ arms and their detention in fetid, overcrowded warehouses, along with the gunning down of unarmed citizens by militarized police in the streets of our urban communities, are the rule of law, we are an exemplar of human rights.

The retreat into illusion.

The rhetoric we use to describe ourselves is so disconnected from reality that it has induced collective schizophrenia. America, as it is discussed in public forums by politicians, academics and the media, is a fantasy, a Disneyfied world of make-believe. The worse it gets, the more we retreat into illusions. The longer we fail to name and confront our physical and moral decay, the more demagogues who peddle illusions and fantasies become empowered. Those who acknowledge the truth—beginning with the stark fact that we are no longer a democracy—wander like ghosts around the edges of society, reviled as enemies of hope. The mania for hope works as an anesthetic.

What lies ahead.

The embrace of collective self-delusion marks the death spasms of all civilizations. We are in the terminal stage. We no longer know who we are, what we have become or how those on the outside see us. It is easier, in the short term, to retreat inward, to celebrate nonexistent virtues and strengths and wallow in sentimentality and a false optimism. But in the end, this retreat, peddled by the hope industry, guarantees not only despotism but, given the climate emergency, extinction.

This is no time for moralizing or airs of superiority or schadenfreude. The collapse of America's democracy is a contagion. That much is manifest in the spread of illiberal democracy, totalitarianism-lite, and the rise of radical rightwing movements spewing fear, hatred, racism and every other form of bigotry and xenophobia around the world.

Peter MacKay and the Conservative Party Leadership

Apparently Peter Mackay is the only prospective challenger for the Tory throne so far to cough up the $300,000 admission fee.

Question. If no one else chooses to throw away 300 large, does that mean Peter has "bought" the Conservative Party leadership?

I'm having a bit of trouble with the optics.

So Much for the "Sweetness and Light" - EU and UK Get Frisky

Shots are being fired across bows.

What's the point of walking out if you don't slam a few doors on the way? That seems to be Boris "BoJo" Johnson's outlook.

No sooner had the union jacks been lowered in Brussels and Strasbourg, after 47 years of tortured British membership, than Boris Johnson was preparing to launch the UK into yet another uncompromising battle with the remaining 27 nations of the European Union. 

The morning after he had finally achieved his goal of removing the UK from the European club, Downing Street released photographs of the prime minister triumphantly striking a gong on the stroke of 11pm (midnight Brussels time) as this country took its leave. The text from a short speech he made as the clock struck 11 was also released. 

As he hit the gong with glee, he was just flexing his muscles for more combat with the UK’s now ex-partners. 

There now begins an 11-month transition period during which the prime minister and his government will face the herculean task of securing a future trading and security relationship with the EU. If there is no deal by 31 December, the UK will face a cliff-edge descent into the economic unknown.

Trench warfare.

The EU is making clear its bottom lines. It insists that the UK must accept alignment with its rules on workers’ rights, the environment and state aid, as the price for a deal (fearing that otherwise the UK will steal a competitive advantage). But Johnson will say that his government will make no such concessions, under any circumstances. There will be no alignment whatsoever.

Downing Street also did nothing to knock down reports that the UK is preparing to impose full customs and border checks on all European goods entering Britain, to try to increase pressure on the bloc to give way in the negotiations, which are due to start next month.

Tossing grenades.

Dominic Raab has been accused of engaging in diplomatic “sabre-rattling” after rejecting legislative alignment with Brussels and dismissing claims by Michel Barnier that the Brexit agreement makes customs checks in the Irish Sea “indispensable” . 

The UK foreign secretary said following EU rules after 2021 “just ain’t happening” and insisted it was wrong for the EU’s senior negotiator to claim that goods entering Northern Ireland and Great Britain would be subject to extra paperwork once Britain leaves the post-Brexit transition period.

Europe lobs a few grenades of its own.

The Euros are wasting no time responding where they sense BoJo is most vulnerable - Scotland.

Donald Tusk, the former president of the European council, has said there would be widespread enthusiasm in the EU if Scotland applied to rejoin after independence. 

In remarks that will boost Nicola Sturgeon’s campaign for a second referendum, Tusk told the BBC he had great sympathy with the desire of many Scots to rejoin the EU after Brexit. 

“I want to stop myself from saying something too blunt. Sometimes I feel I am Scots. I’m very Scottish now, especially after Brexit,” he told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show. 

“Emotionally, I have no doubt everyone would be enthusiastic here, in Brussels and more widely in Europe, but still we have treaties and formalities. But if you ask me about our emotions, there’s a genuine feeling. You will witness only, I think, empathy.

Ireland wants BoJo to grow up.

A clash in thinking over regulatory alignment between the UK and the EU is already shaping up to be a central sticking point, with the EU insisting on alignment in exchange for access to the single market and the UK threatening to throw up a customs wall around Britain.

[Irish prime minister, Leo] Varadkar called on the UK to tone down the “nationalist rhetoric” and said negotiations would get off to a better start if they did “not repeat some of the errors that were made in the last two and a half years”. 

“Let’s not set such rigid red lines that makes it hard to come to an agreement and let’s tone down the kind of nationalistic rhetoric,” he told the BBC. 

He said reports that British ambassadors were being instructed to sit away from EU ambassadors at international events was “silly”. 

“I think it just comes across as a little bit petty. It’s kind of when you are in primary school and in secondary school and you get worried about who you can sit beside in class. 

Childish, to be sure, but there's a far darker side to England's Brexiteers.

Chevron Takes 2 Billion Dollar Hit on Kitimat LNG

It's actually $2.12 billion CDN, $1.6 billion USD. That's the write-off Chevron is taking on its Kitimat LNG investment, an interest the company is still trying to sell.

Chevron chief executive Michael Wirth said the company made the “hard decision” to divest Kitimat LNG.

“Our assessment on the Kitimat project is, given all the other developments out there in the world, that one was going to be tough to compete versus our alternatives,” Mr. Wirth said during a conference call with industry analysts on Friday. “As an investment proposition, we just want to find the very best projects.”

Mr. Wirth noted that one of the challenges in Canada is the long distances to transport natural gas from northeastern B.C. to the West Coast. 

Pacific Trail Pipeline proposes to follow a 480-kilometre route from Summit Lake near Prince George in the B.C. Interior to Kitimat LNG’s terminal site at Bish Cove. The idea is to connect with a planned 260-kilometre pipeline from northeastern B.C. to Prince George. “Canadian gas – that is quite a ways away from the Kitimat site,” Mr. Wirth said.

Overkill?

Spotted on the Deutsche Welle web site, this photo of a pilot aboard a jetliner flying passengers out of China, presumably Wuhan.  Overkill? You decide.

A German military aircraft carrying 128 evacuees from Wuhan was expected to arrive at Frankfurt Airport Saturday morning, but was delayed due to issues with Russia.

The Airbus A310 had been due to stop in Moscow for crew-change and refueling. However, Russia refused to allow the plane to land due to "lack of capacity" at the airport. The plane was diverted to Helsinki.

Airbus and the Ghost of Brian Mulroney

A blast from the past. A German-Canadian huckster. A former Progressive Conservative cabinet minister. A dodgy prime minister. A European aircraft giant with a reputation for handing out easy money.  Karl Heinz Schreiber, Elmer MacKay, Brian Mulroney and Airbus.

Schreiber went into a German jail cell. Elmer, late father of Peter, took his secrets to the grave. Brian went to a coffee shop to collect envelopes stuffed with cash. And Airbus - well it's still at it.

Airbus, Europe’s largest aerospace multinational, is to pay a record £3bn in penalties after admitting it had paid huge bribes on an “endemic” basis to land contracts in 20 countries. 

Anti-corruption investigators hailed the result as the largest ever corporate fine for bribery in the world after judges declared that the corruption was “grave, pervasive and pernicious”. 

The planemaker agreed to pay the penalties on Friday after reaching settlements with investigators in the UK, France and the US to end inquiries that started four years ago.

Like that horrible TV show where they're constantly trying to recover pirate treasure from Nova Scotia's Oak Island, the 'commission' Airbus admits it paid to cinch the Air Canada deal but never divulged to whom remains a deeply buried secret.

Trump's "Little Blue Dress" Moment?

It was a semen stain on Monica Lewinsky's little blue dress that Ken Star used to skewer Bill Clinton. DNA don't lie.

Now Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carrol, who alleges she was raped by Donald Trump, wants her own little dress tested against  Trump's DNA.

The statute of limitations for the alleged rape by Trump has expired. Carroll is currently suing Trump for defamation after he denied her allegation, saying that he had never met her. Since that time at least one photo has been unearthed showing the two together with their spouses at a social event, talking and laughing years prior to the alleged rape. 

Trump’s attempts to have the case dismissed were rebuffed earlier this month by a Manhattan Judge. Accordingly, the case is proceeding into the discovery phase. 

The dress Carroll was wearing when Trump allegedly attacked her was never washed and hung in Carroll’s closet for years. In connection with her defamation suit, Carroll had the dress tested. A lab report found four DNA samples on the dress, at least one of them male. Carroll’s attorneys have now formally requested a sample of Trump’s DNA to determine whether it matches the sample on the dress.

Oh dear. They've got the DNA tested. Now all they need is a sample from Trump. What's that I hear? It's the sound of a scalded cat.  Here is Carrol's account of the alleged assault.

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights. 

I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room. 

The whole episode lasts no more than three minutes. I do not believe he ejaculates. I don’t remember if any person or attendant is now in the lingerie department. I don’t remember if I run for the elevator or if I take the slow ride down on the escalator. As soon as I land on the main floor, I run through the store and out the door — I don’t recall which door — and find myself outside on Fifth Avenue. 

And that was my last hideous man. The Donna Karan coatdress still hangs on the back of my closet door, unworn and unlaundered since that evening. And whether it’s my age, the fact that I haven’t met anyone fascinating enough over the past couple of decades to feel “the sap rising,” as Tom Wolfe put it, or if it’s the blot of the real-estate tycoon, I can’t say. But I have never had sex with anybody ever again.

French Navy Sails to Defend Greece - Against Turkey

Another story that has gone largely unnoticed on our side of the Atlantic concerns growing tensions between two NATO members, Greece and Turkey, that have now drawn France to send naval units.

Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has welcomed a decision by France to dispatch war frigates to the eastern Mediterranean as a standoff with Turkey over regional energy reserves intensifies. 

With tensions between Athens and Ankara causing growing international alarm, Mitsotakis described the vessels as “guarantors of peace”. 

“The only way to end differences in the eastern Mediterranean is through international justice,” he told reporters after holding talks in Paris with the French president, Emmanuel Macron. “Greece and France are pursuing a new framework of strategic defence.”

Turkey, a charter member of the Axis of Authoritarianism, is doing what fascists do - seeking to extend its control and influence beyond its borders.

The Gallic-Greek alliance cements what officials in Athens are calling a renewed diplomatic push to counter Turkish belligerence in the Mediterranean. 

Greece’s defence minister, Nikos Panagiotopoulos, recently went as far as to warn that armed forces were “examining all scenarios, even that of military engagement” in the face of heightened aggression from Ankara. Rejecting Turkish demands that Greece demilitarise 16 Aegean islands, he accused Turkey of displaying unusually provocative behaviour. 

The demand, made by his Turkish counterpart, Hulusi Akar, follows a dramatic surge in recent months in the number of violations of Greek airspace by Turkish fighter jets. “Greece does not provoke, does not violate the sovereign rights of others, but it doesn’t like to see its own rights violated,” said Panagiotopoulos.

...

“What we are seeing is a far more revisionist and aggressive Turkey aiming at change of borders be it on land or sea,” said the international relations professor Aristotle Tziampiris at the University of Piraeus. “That, and Erdoğan’s increasing authoritarianism, is the cause of such tensions and consternation with Greece,” he said. “To counter the aggression, Athens is resolved to strengthen partnerships and strategic alliances, be it with France, other EU allies or the US.”

Macron and Erdogan are also squabbling over Turkish meddling in Libya.

Turkey has blamed France for instability in Libya after French President Emmanuel Macron accused his Turkish counterpart of failing "to keep his word" to put an end to meddling in the North African country.

The French leader claimed earlier on Wednesday at a meeting with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis that Turkish warships accompanying Syrian mercenaries arrived in Libya in recent days. 

Macron said the action was a "clear violation" of what Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised at the Berlin conference on January 19 where world leaders pledged to stay out of the Libyan conflict. 

"These past few days we have seen Turkish warships accompanied by Syrian mercenaries arrive on Libyan soil. This is a serious and explicit infringement of what was agreed upon in Berlin," Macron said, referring to the international summit.

Nicola Sturgeon - Scotland Wants Out

Today is not going down well with one of the UK's component nations, Scotland. 

First minister, Nicola Sturgeon, put it plainly:

“As of 11:00 pm tonight (2300 GMT) the U.K. that Scotland voted to remain part of, a U.K. inside the E.U., the status quo that a majority voted for, will no longer exist. There will be a material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014,” she said, referring to the last referendum on Scottish independence.

Members of the devolved Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh this week voted to back her calls for a fresh vote, which she wants to be held as early as this year. 

But U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has rejected SNP requests to formally transfer powers from London to Edinburgh for the referendum – dubbed indyref2 – to be held.

"Leave a Light On"

Scottish newspapers on Friday marked Brexit with pro-European front pages, reflecting the majority vote north of the border with England to remain in the E.U. in the 2016 referendum. 

“Short changed: Isolated, worse off, weaker and divided,” said the Daily Record. 

Pro-independence daily The National wrote: “Dear Europe. We didn’t vote for this. Remember to … Leave a light on for Scotland.” 

 

Hungarian Anschluss, Orban Style. Poland Drives Stake Into Heart of Democracy.

There's a lot going on in Europe these days that escapes much notice on our side of the pond. We hear about the rise of  "illiberal democracy," a term coined by its high priest, Hungary's Viktor Orban. The odious Orban is now setting his sights on restoring Hungary to its pre-WWI greatness.  His strategy is to stage a "virtual reunification" of former Hungarian territory that is now part of Slovenia, Serbia and Romania.

A century since the Treaty of Trianon dramatically shrank the size of the Hungarian state and stranded millions of Hungarians beyond its borders, Orban is pouring money into ethnic Hungarian communities in neighbouring states, issuing passports and picking up voters and political leverage for the ruling Fidesz party. 

The largesse, however, has come at a price for democracy, according to a BIRN investigation in Slovenia, Serbia and Romania, where Hungarian spending shot up from 40 million euros in 2015 to 330 million in 2018 and amounted to more than three quarters of a billion over the four-year period. 

In these countries, local proxies beholden to Budapest now wield a worrying degree of influence over media, culture and development funds, imitating Orban’s own ‘illiberal democracy’.

The article contains links to reports on just what Orban is up to in these neighbouring states and it's a bit scary.

The photo above shows Trump welcoming Orban to the Axis of Authoritarianism.

Meanwhile, another member of the Axis of Authoritarianism, Poland, is making progress in suppressing judicial independence and the rule of law.

Since the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS) took control of the lower house of Poland’s parliament in 2015, the country’s democracy has been under attack. Judicial independence has been of particular concern. 

The situation has already forced the European Union in 2017 to take up Article 7 deliberations that could ultimately suspend Poland’s voting rights within the European Council. 

The ongoing saga between Brussels and Warsaw came to a head on earlier this month when the opposition-controlled Polish Senate rejected a controversial draft law aimed at punishing justices who question controversial judicial reforms. 

Unfortunately, this victory was short-lived. The draft law returned to parliament, where lawmakers from the Law and Justice party hold the majority. Last week, the PiS-controlled lower chamber overturned the Senate’s vote, and approved the bill. Now that the legislation has passed in the lower house, it is up to PiS-aligned President Andrzej Duda, who is expected to sign the bill into law.

The photo above shows Trump inducting Duda into the Axis at the White House.

Is Toronto's Head on the Climate Block?

Toronto may be in line to get hammered by climate change in the decades to come.

Out of 85 major cities around the world, Toronto is projected to experience the fourth largest climate shift by 2050 if nothing is done to curb global carbon emissions, according to a new study by Nestpick, based in Berlin. The apartment rental platform used research methodologies and reports from established climate change experts to compare the cities’ climates, average temperature, sea-level changes and water stress.

Toronto’s average temperature is expected to rise 3 C compared to that metric 1970 to 2000. As a result, the city’s climate will change from “continental” to “temperate,” meaning winters will be warmer and rainy, the research suggests.

Ottawa and Montreal ranked 15th and 16th in terms of how much their climates will shift, and both could see a temperature change of more than 3 C, the study said.

Calgary will see less change in its climate, with a 2.14 C temperature increase by 2050 and continued warm summers and cold winters.

Brexit - the Final Countdown

The Brits, half of them anyway, are looking forward to midnight and Britain's official departure from the European Union. The Euros, on a different time zone, will mark the event at 11 p.m., London time.

Festivities? There are bound to be some. CBC was reporting this morning that in Scotland they're marking the day by flying the EU flag. They don't see much to celebrate in being forced to leave the European Union against their will. Hmm, that may have repercussions down the road.

Then there's Northern Ireland. Ouch.

The Irish border was a sticking point during negotiations for the withdrawal agreement. There were concerns a hard land border on the island of Ireland could lead to cumbersome lineups, political unrest or even a return to violence.

Instead British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's deal puts the border on the Irish Sea, essentially a border inside the U.K., where goods going between Great Britain and Northern Ireland will be subject to checks.

It would give the EU control over what is making it into the Northern Island and possibly down to the Republic.

"What we are going to be concerned about is what rules and regulations will be put in place," said Seamus Leheny, policy manager for the Freight Transport Association. "Worst-case scenarios if the system isn't robust and efficient, you can have a backlog of goods."

The process will remain as it is now during the 11-month transition period but eventually there will likely be new checks and paperwork required at ports in Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile, Sinn Fein is demanding a referendum on uniting the North with the Republic.

A poll on Irish unity was not an “exotic red line” for Sinn Féin entering coalition government but “an absolute necessity” after Brexit, said the party’s president Mary Lou McDonald. 

Speaking at a protest against Brexit on the Irish Border on the day the UK leaves the EU, the Sinn Féin leader said “preparations for constitutional change” on the island “needed to start.” 

The party, in third place in the polls closely behind Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, has made a Border poll within five years a condition of entering a government after the February 8th election.

It's perfect tinder for the hot heads who might spark a return of The Troubles. BoJo some time ago hinted that he'd accept losing Northern Ireland if that was necessitated by Brexit.

Citizens of the Republic have a date with destiny next week when they go to the polls to choose a new government. The Guardian reports that recent polls show a surge in support for Sinn Fein among younger voters.

It is fitting that the final word go to Irish Times/Guardian columnist, Fintan O'Toole, who penned Britain's obituary a few days ago.

During the referendum campaign in 2016, Johnson puzzled many of his own supporters by claiming Brexit itself as, of all things, “the great project of European liberalism”. This may be like claiming puritanism as the great project of sexual liberation, but it does make a superficial kind of sense. The central idea of Brexit is indeed part of 18th- and 19th-century European culture: the nation state as the primary locus of political loyalty and as the collective manifestation of a unified “people”. Brexit has to present itself in these terms: a suppressed people rising up, as Jacob Rees-Mogg puts it, to set itself “free of the heavy yoke of the European Union”.

But here there is a great irony: Britain is not and never has been a nation state. For most of its history as a state, it has been at the heart not of a national polity, but of a vast multinational and polyglot empire. And the UK is itself a four-nation amalgam of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. There is no single pre-EU UK “nation” to return to. There is no unified “people” to whom power is being returned. And this is the contradiction that the Brexit project cannot even acknowledge, let alone resolve.

Scotland and Northern Ireland rejected Brexit even more emphatically in the general election of 2019 than they had done in the referendum of 2016 and a clear majority of voters in the UK as a whole voted in 2019 for parties that promised a second referendum and an opportunity to stay in the EU. So while Johnson likes to talk of 31 January as “this pivotal moment in our national story”, there is neither a settled nation nor a shared story. Brexit is not Northern Ireland’s story. It is not Scotland’s story. It is not even London’s story. It is the national origin myth of the place that Anthony Barnett, co-founder of openDemocracy, calls “England without London”. 

There is no doubt that Brexit has worked in the way that nationalist movements try to – it has united people across great divides of social class and geography in the name of a transcendent identity. Many of those people, if not quite drunk on scrumpy and bawling Brexit shanties, will feel real joy on 31 January. But the problem is that this unity of national purpose functions within a nation that does not actually exist: non-metropolitan England and parts of English-speaking Wales. And it is purchased at the very high price of creating much deeper divisions between England-without-London and the rest of the British-Irish archipelago. 

There is a particular paradox here when we think back on that great Brexit slogan: take back control. It is that the parts of the UK that have actually “taken back control” into their own local democratic institutions reject Brexit; while the parts that support Brexit have no such institutions. The Scottish parliament, the Welsh Senedd and the Northern Ireland assembly have all voted overwhelmingly in recent weeks to reject the withdrawal agreement. (Their votes will of course be ignored by the government in London.)

Thanks, Justin. Trans Mountain Pipeline Destroyed Salmon Habitat.

We're getting steamrollered by Trudeau and his Liberal thugs but the truth still gets out. From the Canadian Press.  And a guy named Mike Pearson is blowing the whistle.

Work on a Trans Mountain pipeline crossing in a British Columbia stream has destroyed salmon habitat, raising concerns about the Crown corporation’s ability to build infrastructure through waterways if the expansion project proceeds, a scientist says. 

Mike Pearson says the “amateur hour” work on the Stewart Creek crossing in Chilliwack will reduce food sources for coho and chum salmon and limit their ability to hide from predators. The fish are part of the diet of endangered southern resident killer whales. 

“There was no consideration given whatsoever to the habitat, which is just not acceptable,” said Pearson, a biologist with 30 years’ experience.

Trans Mountain Corp. filed documents with the National Energy Board showing its plans to cover exposed pipe in the Fraser Valley creek. It wrote that it would place concrete mats in the channel, extending about eight metres upstream and nine metres downstream of the exposed line, and cover it with small stones. 

Pearson said the work was completed in August to September of last year. He visited the site in December and took photos that he says show most of the stones have been swept away by currents, leaving the concrete blocks exposed. 

“The work has degraded habitat in several ways,” he wrote in an assessment filed with the energy board by intervener Yarrow Ecovillage. 

The smooth, hard concrete provides no hiding places for salmon, supports very few of the aquatic invertebrates they feed on, inhibits plant growth and prevents fish from burying their eggs, the document says. 

Pearson believes it’s not an isolated incident. An assessment he did of a pipeline creek crossing on Sumas Mountain in 2015 for Pipe Up Network, an anti-pipeline group, concluded the site was physically unstable and reconstructed with materials inappropriate to restoring habitat. 

A stream-keeper has also raised concerns about excavation at Trans Mountain’s terminal in Burnaby. John Preissl has filed several complaints with the energy board alleging the work has caused sediment to fall into two salmon-bearing creeks.

Only this morning I listened to a report on CBC radio about the feds launching a campaign against single-use plastics.  The Liberals were starting by releasing scientific studies on the problem. That made me wonder why the Trudeau government still hasn't released the science about the pipeline and the risk of environmental catastrophe from a bitumen leak in BC coastal waters. Trudeau has been saying for years that his government has "done the science." Environment Canada, the Royal Society and other experts say no, the science hasn't been done. Nobody has answered the hard questions, especially not the Dauphin and his cabinet. If they're not lying and, despite all evidence to the contrary, they have done the science, it's safe to assume there's an important reason for making sure it never sees the light of day.

Better Than Nothing? Not Really.

The government of the United States of Trump has released a report projecting that US CO2 emissions will decline by a staggering 4 per cent by 2050 from 2019 levels.

Projections from the administration, released in its annual energy outlook, find carbon emissions are likely to decrease through the 2020s before picking up again in the 2030s. 

The trend line leaves U.S. carbon emissions almost exactly where they are right now. 

“Total U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide emissions resume modest growth in the 2030s, driven largely by increases in energy demand in the transportation and industrial sectors; however, by 2050, they remain 4 percent lower than 2019 levels,” the report says. 

Though a number of states have set goals to have their electric sector be carbon neutral by 2050 or sooner, the report suggests those efforts could be derailed by growing transportation emissions, which are currently the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA.)

The report is a blaring "Up Yours" to climate science types who have warned that our only hope of averting catastrophic climate change depends on slashing GHG emissions by half by 2030 and entirely by 2050.  In essence, the United States is signing humanity's death warrant.

"That's What You Get For Lovin' Me" - Jason Kenney Style

Are rural Albertans finally waking up to realize that the provincial energy industry's interests and the public interest are not one and the same? Is it dawning on them that Jason Kenney and his UCP have taken sides and it's not theirs?

The Tyee's Mitchell Anderson explains how quickly Kenney has betrayed rural Alberta.

[Kenney's] United Conservative Party won every single seat in communities smaller than Lethbridge when they swept to power last April. Kenney helped accomplish this by carefully crafting his public persona as a pickup-driving regular guy, battling the Ottawa elite on behalf of everyday Albertans.

But actions speak louder than words, and rural Albertans have good reason to question who exactly their pugnacious premier is really fighting for. 

Last week Kenney told towns they may have to eat $173 million in unpaid taxes from oil and gas companies — an amount doubled since last year — because they can’t expect to get “money from a stone.” 

What does it mean when the premier says companies who’ve made billions off Albertans’ resources have turned to stone?

You play ball with me and I'll stick the bat straight up your backside.

Consider the ballooning problem of abandoned wells, which grows worse every year. Oil companies are washing their hands of formerly profitable drill sites and leaving landowners and municipalities holding the bag. Almost 100,000 orphaned or inactive oil and gas wells require reclamation at an estimated cost of $30 billion.  

The “world-class” Alberta Energy Regulator — funded by the very industry they are tasked with overseeing — have secured less than one per cent of this amount. Instead of getting on with this important cleanup work, many of the companies responsible for the growing mess are now choosing not to pay their local taxes — with the apparent blessing of the premier. 

Cash-strapped local governments are frustrated by the lack of legal mechanisms to go after delinquent oil and gas companies, most of which are still in business. Ponoka County Reeve Paul McLauchlin told the Canadian Press, “My personal opinion is that this is a tax revolt. [Oil and gas companies] are using this as a lever to decrease their assessment and change those costs.”

...

 Unlike higher branches of government that can run rolling deficits, local governments in Alberta are required by law to balance the books, no matter what budgetary indignities are imposed by the province.

...
It is not just municipalities being screwed by the Kenney government and the oil and gas sector, but local landowners as well. Farmers and ranchers with pump jacks and pipelines on their properties are increasingly complaining that companies are failing to honour the terms of lease agreements. 

Daryl Bennett of the Action Surface Rights Association, representing about 200 landowners in southern Alberta recently told City News, “I get calls every day from landowners saying, ‘Hey, I got a notice. They’re cutting the compensation.’ There’s thousands of landowners in this situation.”

...
Even when abandoned well sites are remediated, landowners have good reason to doubt whether this work will be done properly. An internal government report accessed by the Narwhal found less than three per cent of sites issued a reclamation certificate by the AER ever had a field inspection. Many of these former installations showed long-term degradation — one farmer described his recently reclaimed well site, “the spot where nothing grows.”

As the problem of abandoned wells and unpaid debts mounts in rural Alberta, the premier indicated he will continue to keep fighting — for the oil and gas industry.

Oh well, the bill for remediating those Tar Sands tailing ponds won't be in the mail for another decade or two, probably hot on the heels of some bursting of the carbon bubble. It's not clear whether all Canadians will be left holding the bag for that clean up but it's all but guaranteed we'll be on the hook for the write off costs of Mr. Trudeau's trans mountain pipeline.

A Preview of Something That Could Go Horribly, Horribly Wrong.

Imagine two vehicles racing toward each other at a closing speed of just under 15 kilometres a second.  Not an hour, not a minute - a second. Now imagine those vehicles passing each other by a distance of 30 metres, perhaps 15 metres, possibly less. One vehicle weighs 954 kilograms, the other 85 kilograms.

Now imagine the razor-sharp calculations are just a smidge out and they smash into each other at just under 53,000 kms. an hour. 

The vehicles are dead satellites and their rendezvous is set for 6:39 p.m. ET some 900 kilometres over Pittsburgh.

It's the stuff of nightmares. Here's a video that will give you an idea of how vulnerable our civilization is to this sort of catastrophe.



It has a name, the 'Kessler Effect' or the Kessler Cascade.

It's not something that could go wrong but something that, unless we do something very expensive and inconvenient about it, will go wrong as a mathematical certainty. NASA scientist Don Kessler got to thinking about all the junk in low-Earth orbit zinging around at 15,000 miles an hour. He wondered what happens when, eventually, that junk begins to impact other orbiting stuff like satellites. Even a small piece of junk is all it takes for a big satellite to explode into thousands of new bits of orbiting shrapnel just waiting to turn other spacecraft into ever more clouds of orbiting shrapnel. Eventually there'll be nothing left functioning in space and that orbital band will become unusable for, well, generations.

You know that cellphone? Nah, ain't going to work. Neither will your computer or your cable TV. Ditto for your and everyone else's GPS and that includes the military and every airline. Your ATM? Forget about it. And the transportation and distribution networks that keep food on your local store shelves, they'll go down too. If we're lucky our authorities will be able to keep some of our utilities functioning at some level, at least for a while.

Our governments, or some of them, are really beginning to take this seriously now but that mainly takes the form of panic, not action. There is futuristic talk about deploying orbital janitors that will track down and capture space debris and fire it back to earth for it to burn up on re-entry. Talk, however, is cheap. Action is expensive and, for the moment, elusive.

Smart acrobats have figured out they can still dazzle the crowd and use safety nets - just in case. In fact, I enjoy the performance better knowing the guy leaping from one swing to another has a good chance of not killing himself if something goes wrong. The thing is, we're not as smart as those acrobats. We're doing all the high wire stuff today without nets. It's just that we've been trained never to look down.

Umm, Donald, About that Impeachment Defence

Monbiot Says "To the Max"

Better late than never, the Guardian's enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, says it's time to scrap the "target approach" to fighting climate change. He argues we need to move to a focus on maximization.

It’s not just the target that’s wrong, but the very notion of setting targets in an emergency. 

When firefighters arrive at a burning building, they don’t set themselves a target of rescuing three of the five inhabitants. They seek – aware that they may not succeed – to rescue everyone they can. Their aim is to maximise the number of lives they save. In the climate emergency, our aim should be to maximise both the reduction of emissions and the drawing down of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. There is no safe level of global heating: every increment kills. 

Maximisation is implicit in the Paris agreement: it requires governments to pursue “the highest possible ambition”. In its land-use report, the CCC repeatedly admits that it could go further, but insists it doesn’t need to, because its policies will meet the target. The target has supplanted the ultimate objective, which is to respond appropriately to the climate emergency. This is a classic vindication of Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” 

We are all familiar with the absurdities of target culture. ...We know how, in many workplaces, the target becomes the task.  We know how targets encourage people to game the system, as hospital administrators do with their waiting lists, and cause Kafkaesque nightmares of overzealous officialdom, as David Boyle documents in his new book, Tickbox.

...
The appropriate response to the climate emergency is a legal duty to maximise climate action. The CCC’s board should be disbanded and replaced by people whose mandate is rigorously to explore every economic sector in search of the maximum possible cuts in greenhouse gases, and the maximum possible drawdown. We have arrived at the burning building. The only humane and reasonable aim is to rescue everyone inside.

George is right - in theory. All the flaws he shows in our emissions targets system are real and they're potentially lethal. At some point, however, we need to recognize that there doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm for meeting those modest targets anyway. Look at the record of our own federal government that, even now, is pondering the proposed Teck bitumen mine in the Tar Sands that would blow Canada right out of all those solemn promises.

What I like about Monbiot's suggestion is that it would steer us toward the real solution to the myriad existential threats to our survival. The simple fact is that the key to preventing civilization's collapse is for mankind to find ways to live in harmony with our very finite planet, Spaceship Earth, our one and only biosphere. There are far too many of us. We consume far more than the planet can provide. And we're fouling the atmosphere and acidifying our oceans. That's the face of our excess, our insistence on doing everything we possibly can without the slightest regard to whether we should.

Here's the thing. We could easily draw up a fairly accurate picture of what mankind would be like if we were to live sustainably on our planet. That would lead us to a vision of what James Lovelock called "sustainable retreat" - growing smaller, consuming less, producing less waste and contamination. Once we had that in front of our faces we might realize how far behind the curve we have fallen and how we need to focus on maximization. Nah, forget it.

China, Thanks For the Coronavirus

Now, stop being a dick and give us back those damned hostages.

Mini-Nukes or Those Little Bundles of "Instant Sunshine"

I first heard the term "instant sunshine" on some NATO base in Europe in the mid-70s. It was a slang reference to the bevy of tactical nuclear weapons, bombs or missiles, even a few artillery shells, deployed to destroy or at least delay a horde of Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks pouring into Western Europe via the Fulda Gap.  These were small, sub-Hiroshima-grade mini-nukes to be dropped wherever the bad guys could be forced to concentrate.

Those tactical nuclear weapons weren't "war winners." Their man purpose was to pause an invasion for a day or two to allow the leaders in Moscow and Washington  to cool off. They were buying time that, it was hoped, would prevent Armageddon, a massive exchange of strategic nuclear weapons, the Dr. Strangelove stuff.

Some critics saw them as "gateway bombs" that would forever break the taboo on nuclear warfare. They argued that, once you use the small nukes, you've lowered the threshold for an all out, civilization-ending nuclear exchange. Fortunately that hypothesis never got tested.

The Soviet Union is gone. The Warsaw Pact is gone. NATO keeps busy with "make work projects" in Afghanistan or bolstering the Baltic democracies against Putin. However of late there's been renewed interest in a new generation of mini-nukes.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the group that just moved the Doomsday Clock to 100-seconds before midnight, warns that Trump is changing the paradigm on the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are widely seen as bombs built never to be used. Historically, granular—even seemingly mundane—decisions about force structure, research efforts, or communicated strategy have confounded planners, sometimes causing the opposite of the intended effect. 

Such is the risk carried by one strategy change that has earned top billing under the Trump administration: the deployment of a new “low-yield” nuclear weapon on US submarines. 

Low-yield, high risk. The Trump administration first announced its plans for a new low-yield nuclear warhead in its February 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, a public report meant to communicate and clarify various American nuclear weapons policies. The Nuclear Posture Review presented the lower-strength warhead as necessary for the “preservation of credible deterrence against regional aggression.” In other words, the United States was seeking a new, intermediate option for an imagined scenario in which Russia, after starting a conventional war in Europe, might be tempted to use smaller nuclear weapons first in order to win the conflict. In such a scenario, US thinking goes, the threat of US retaliation with full-strength bombs would not be believable and would not be enough to deter Russia from pursuing such a course in the first place. The way to deter a limited nuclear strike by Russia was for the United States to have a readily available option for retaliating with a limited, proportional strike of its own.

The Atomic Scientists argue this is a bad idea for a bunch of reasons. For starters, there are few tactical targets that can't be easily taken out with conventional weapons. When you do launch a missile with a nuclear warhead it can be difficult, in some cases impossible, for the other side to discern whether it's a mini-nuke or a strategic nuclear attack and they've only got a few minutes to decide what nuke is coming and how to respond.

Perhaps the most worrisome issue is Trump's stated willingness to use tactical nukes for a first-strike attack on countries such as Iran that pose no immediate threat to the United States.

Critics worry that military planners will be tempted to use the low-yield warhead not for deterrence, but for a first strike. Such concerns were initially dismissed out of hand, but recent news coverage gives them more credibility. 

Reporting by Newsweek in January 2020 revealed that in 2016 the United States held a wargame featuring the Air Force’s B61 nuclear bomb—another weapon with a low-yield option—in an imagined battlefield situation against Iran. Despite signing a landmark nonproliferation agreement with Iran the previous year, the Obama administration saw fit to train its command and control systems for a nuclear attack against a non-nuclear state. Officers speaking on the record to Newsweek about the exercise even identified the W76-2 as an imagined first-strike option for such a scenario, suggesting that its deployment is “explicitly intended to make the threat of such an attack more credible.”

What we learned in the Cold War and ever since is that nuclear weapons are a "confidence game." You need your adversary to be confident that you won't launch a surprise attack. You want your adversary to trust you. This has already prevented more than one global nuclear exchange when a computer went wrong or there was confusion in missile detection systems. There's a great premium for everyone in maintaining a reasonably high threshold on the use of nuclear weapons. Likewise there's a real danger when you lower your nuclear threshold and undermine your adversary's confidence level. And, who is more likely to undermine that confidence, than America's own lunatic-in-chief, Donald J. Trump?

Icarus, Meet Boeing

The global aviation industry is now responsible for emitting more greenhouse gases than the total emissions of 135 nations combined.

The National Observer has an eye-opening report on the "spectacular expansion" of jet fuel consumption in our hyper-connected world.

The burning of jet fuel is increasing by an additional 44 million litres every day — an additional 16,000 million extra litres each year. That's like burning 1,000 tanker trucks more than the day before. And then 1,000 more than that the next day … ad nauseum. 

The International Energy Agency (IEA) credits the "spectacular expansion" of jet fuel burning, along with increasing plastic production, for fuelling the vigorous rise in global oil demand. 

At current rates, the aviation industry will soon be dumping a billion tonnes of CO2 per year into our atmosphere. That exceeds the combined emissions of 135 nations … for everything. 

...the industry isn't planning to stop at a billion tonnes. They are spending trillions of dollars to buy more jetliners, expand airports and build the fossil fuel infrastructure that will push their climate pollution to ever more dizzying heights.

...
On top of that, the best climate science indicates that burning jet fuel in the upper atmosphere creates additional warming from other greenhouse gases and contrail cloudiness. While less well quantified, the full climate impact is estimated to be between 1.5 times CO2 at the low end, and five times CO2 at the high end.

...
Aviation's soaring climate pollution carries another large, though little appreciated, climate risk: the industry produces very little value from each tonne of CO2 it emits. The economists' term is "high carbon intensity," while a more colloquial term is dirty dollars.

The industry's own GDP and CO2 numbers show they emit around 1,200 grams of CO2 per dollar of GDP they produce. For context, China's coal-choked economy emits only a third as much CO2 per dollar. 

The aviation industry says: "If aviation were a country, it would rank 20th in size by GDP (similar to Switzerland)." What they don't mention, but the chart shows clearly, is that the industry dumps 15 times more climate pollution than Switzerland to get there. 

However you slice it, there is growing risk — to industry, investors and humanity — from driving such a breakneck expansion of a "three-times-dirtier-than-China" industry into the teeth of the gathering climate storm.

The author contends the only viable solution is the "peak flight" option by which the number of flights/passenger miles would be frozen at today's levels. Then new technologies should be enough to gradually reduce overall GHG emissions. The downside is that we would land into an allocation quandry - rationing. Who gets to fly, who stays grounded? Do we all get one flight per year, two flights per year, perhaps one flight every two years? If we're to avert calamity the friendly skies may become somewhat less welcoming.

Don't worry, it'll never happen. Why not? Because it would be a forum for equitable allocation. Climate change and equitable considerations are not welcome at places like Davos or on Capitol Hill. That could open a hornet's nest of claims pertaining to carbon budgets, etc. The plebs might want their fair/fare share of the action and we cannot be having that, can we?

Is Trump Trying to Grab Syria's Oil?

In recent remarks Donald Trump has hinted he wants control of Syria's oil. Coming from a guy who has repeatedly lamented that the US didn't just take Iraq's oil a move on Syria's oil can't be taken lightly.

Over the past eight days, four Russian attempts to get to Syria's oil fields have been blocked by US forces.

In the latest confrontation, a Russian column was stopped by US soldiers in ten armoured vehicles. The Russian military responded by trying to send a helicopter. It was intercepted and forced to land by two American helicopters.

US Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, has confirmed that the US force is deployed to prevent either Assad's government or its Russian allies from taking control of the oil fields.

Three Rockets Hit US Embassy Compound in Baghdad

The sprawling US embassy compound in Baghdad's Green Zone has been hit before. What makes today's attack different is that one of the three rockets hit the embassy cafeteria at dinner time.

Three rockets slammed into the US embassy in Iraq's capital on Sunday in the first direct hit reported after months of close calls, as thousands kept up anti-government sit-ins across the country. 

The attack marked a dangerous escalation in the spree of rocket attacks in recent months that have targeted the embassy or Iraqi military bases where American troops are deployed. 

None of the attacks has been claimed but Washington has repeatedly blamed Iran-backed military factions in Iraq. 

On Sunday, one rocket hit an embassy cafeteria at dinner time while two others landed nearby, a security source said.

The return of Muqtada.

Shia cleric, Muqtada-al-Sadr, has been rallying thousands of supporters to demand a complete ouster of American troops from Iraq.  He has also supported anti-government protests that have resulted in the deaths of some 600 protesters at government hands since October. In 2004 his Mahdi army (now rebranded the "Peace Companies") played hell with American occupation forces in Baghdad and Najaf. He was, for a time, wanted by American authorities for murder.

Today, even some of Sadr's former adversaries, American and Iraqi, see the firebrand as Iraq's last best chance for restoring peace.

Will Trump strike back?

American authorities claim no casualties were sustained from the direct missile strike on their embassy cafeteria at dinner time but the Americans have a track record of saying whatever suits them.

Obama Praises Canada - "A Country Where Facts Still Matter."

Obama addressed 6,000 young people from across the GTA last week. He urged them to embrace creative skills.

“Anything that’s replicable, anything that’s repeatable, some machine is going to do better,” the 44th president of the United States told the audience.

Obama said young people need to think about things that have not been done before, and skills that include interacting with other human beings. Creativity, analytical thinking and team building are the types of skills that will continue to be vital in a future full of job automation, he said.
...
Young people need to emulate Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg who “speaks to a generation that’s going to deal with this mess,” Obama said. 

Obama had some praise for Canada, saying Canadians are “reasonable” people and, while there may be some political divisions here, at least it’s a country where “facts still matter.” 

“You should preserve that,” he said.

The Rise of the "Useless" Class. How to Survive the 21st Century.

I recently came across an article predicting that critical thinking was/is on its way out. Reality is becoming blurred. The news media has long switched from disseminating information to peddling messaging, opinion, with a chosen slant. We're about to embark on a new world that will feature things such as "augmented" or "blended reality" in which the reality you experience and perceive will be supplemented by additional streams of information to create a partially manufactured perception in which the line between the two can become increasingly difficult to discern.

It was suggested that, as our connection with reality is manipulated we will gradually shift into a world in which we choose to follow feelings rather than knowledge. This may be what we're seeing in play in the United States today, even in the American Congress where some are struggling to defend the Constitution from erosion into irrelevance.

Change is upon us and it is going to intensify with every passing decade.  Which is why I offer you the latest out of Davos from historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari in which he discusses survival strategies for the 21st century.

America Lost Its Mind after 9/11. Martin Indyk Wants to Restore Sanity to US Foreign Policy

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.

Nikiforuk Dismembers the LNG Myth

Veteran energy scribe, Andrew Nikiforuk, tackles the lies that our federal and some provincial politicians spin about liquefied natural gas. 

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.

Adding insult to injury are the paltry revenues we're earning from this scam. As Norm Farrell pointed out recently on his excellent blog, In-Sights, LNG is not the windfall British Columbians were promised.

British Columbia’s January 2020 sale of Petroleum and Natural Gas Rights returned $61,195 to the provincial treasury.

That ranks seventh worst in the 278 months since 1996. The best monthly sale produced 728 million in today’s dollars.

Eight of the last ten monthly sales of rights rank among the worst in 23 years.

 Somebody is making money only it's not the province and people of British Columbia. As Norm puts it, "we're fracked."

Don't you think these endless lies are getting old?

Stop Clinging to Politicians Who Are Hanging You Out to Dry.

There was an item in the papers about how our federal government will be providing handouts to farmers who need extra fuel to dry out their sodden grain harvests. That's what can fairly be called climate change relief.

I wonder if Ottawa will be issuing grants to those of us who now need air purifiers to keep our homes safe from damaging wildfire smoke, another climate change impact?

To say that the federal government's climate change and energy policies are schizophrenic is a massive understatement. A recent article in The Narwhal, for example, pegs our governments' overall subsidies to the climate wrecking fossil fuel industry at $1,650 per year for every man, woman and child in Canada. Per year, every year.

Speaking about climate wrecking, there's a new report from Yale 360 about how man-made climate change is terraforming the Arctic. It warns that some 2.5 million square miles of permafrost could disappear by the end of this century. That's 647 million hectares or 6.47 million square kilometres. That's a lot, especially when you take into account the volume of once safely-sequestered methane that will be released as that permafrost melts.

...if the Arctic continues to warm as quickly as climatologists are predicting, an estimated 2.5 million square miles of permafrost — 40 percent of the world’s total — could disappear by the end of the century, with enormous consequences. The most alarming is expected to be the release of huge stores of greenhouse gases, including methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide that have remained locked in the permafrost for ages. Pathogens will also be released. 

But less well appreciated are the sweeping landscape changes that will alter tundra ecosystems, making it increasingly difficult for subsistence indigenous people, such as the Inuit, and Arctic animals to find food. The disintegration of subterranean ice that glues together the peat, clay, rocks, sand, and other inorganic minerals is now triggering landslides and slumping at alarming rates, resulting in stream flows changing, lakes suddenly draining, seashores collapsing, and water chemistry being altered in ways that could be deleterious to both humans and wildlife. 

“We’re seeing slumping along shorelines that can drain most of the water in a lake in just days and even hours,” says Marsh, a former Canadian government scientist who is now a professor of hydrology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. “It’s not surprising when you consider that as much as 80 percent of the ground here consists of frozen water. When that ice melts, the frozen ground literally falls apart.” As a result, says Marsh, indigenous communities, the resource industry, and the government need to better understand how a warming climate is impacting water resources and permafrost ecosystems.”

It is estimated that the Arctic permafrost holds 1,400 gigatons of CO2. Scientists figure if we're to have a slightly better than average chance at holding global warming to 1.5 degrees C, the carbon budget/atmospheric loading remaining is somewhere around 120 gigatons of CO2. Given recent increases in man-made CO2 emissions and projections by OPEC and the International Energy Agency that we'll be using ever more fossil fuel at least into 2040, man-made emissions are poised to blow straight through that 120 gigaton 'budget' even without what we can expect from the disappearing permafrost.

I know, I know, all these posts seem so gloomy, apocalyptic almost and they might turn out to be apocalyptic if we don't change course. Will we? Not until we make our politicians understand their jobs depend on doing the right thing, not the easy thing, now.

Who Knows? Maybe It Builds Character. But Probably It Just Kills.

No, probably it's just another lethal toxin or rather a family of persistent toxins.

Residents of Miami, Philadelphia and New Orleans are most at risk from PFAS or perflouroaylkyl substances in their drinking water. And they're called "forever chemicals" because they simply don't go away.  And they're associated with cancers, liver damage, lower birth weight and a variety of other maladies - but who's counting?

The findings here by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) show the group’s previous estimate in 2018, based on unpublished US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data, that 110 million Americans may be contaminated with PFAS, could be far too low. 

“It’s nearly impossible to avoid contaminated drinking water from these chemicals,” said David Andrews, a senior scientist at EWG and co-author of the report. 

The chemicals were used in products like Teflon and Scotchguard and in firefighting foam. Some are used in a variety of other products and industrial processes, and their replacements also pose risks. 

Of tap water samples taken by EWG from 44 sites in 31 states and Washington DC, only one location, Meridian, Mississippi, which relies on 700ft (215m) deep wells, had no detectable PFAS. Only Seattle and Tuscaloosa, Alabama had levels below 1 part per trillion (PPT), the limit EWG recommends.

Naturally, Diabolical Donald Trump's administration is fighting this one bloody fang and claw.

In 2018 a draft report from an office of the US Department of Health and Human Services said the risk level for exposure to the chemicals should be up to 10 times lower than the 70 PPT threshold the EPA recommends. The White House and the EPA had tried to stop the report from being published.

Remember, kids, a fucked-up America is a Trump America.

As for Canada, we've got the same problem, albeit perhaps not as severe as the American experience. The linked article discusses PFAS in Canada and how little we've done about them. The only province to regulate them so far is British Columbia.