Canada Wasn't Ready For Afghanistan Casualties

Then again it's not like we're not in our tenth year of the Afghan War.   Harpo's Veterans Affairs minister, Jean-Pierre Blackburn, admits his department wasn't prepared to handle the 'influx' of wounded from Afghanistan and is now 'scrambling' to meet the new demands.

And Blackburn places the blame squarely where it belongs - on his staff.  “This department was functioning with traditional veterans. With the Afghanistan situation, this department was not ready.”

What?   They only had 'traditional' veterans? What in hell is this jerk on about?  Wait, there's more:

“Now we are doing those changes to be sure that our new modern veteran will obtain all the services that they should obtain.  The situation in 2010 is not the same one in 1945 or 1953,” he said, referring to World War II and the Korean War.

Oh yeah, of course.   A guy who gets his foot blown off in 2010, he's not remotely like a guy who got his foot blown off in some French forest or some Korean hillside.   He's a  modern veteran or, as we like to call them, a "ModVet."

Blackburn is right, though.  The situation in 2010 isn't the same as 1945 or 1953.  Back then we understood that war generates a lot of severely wounded soldiers and we prepared for that.  In 1945 and 1953 Canada and our soldiers didn't have to contend with both fighting an enemy abroad and the Harper government once they got home.   That greaseball Harper made full and shameless use of our soldiers for partisan advantage while he could but now it's all he can do to force his lips to say "Afghanistan."

New Veterans Ombudsman Off to a Predictable Start

There's one thing common to senior NCO's, they know their place.   You don't rise through the military enlisted ranks by being outspoken to your superiors.   You take your orders, salute and do as you're told.  It's sort of like being in Harper's cabinet.

And that appears to be a perfect fit for Canada's new veterans' ombudsman, retired C.W.O. Guy Parent, who rises up through the ranks of his department to fill in for his former boss, Colonel Pat Strogan who stood up to Harper and paid for it with his job.

Chief Parent wasted no time in slagging his former boss and assuring his new bosses that he'll toe the line.

"  I think Mr. Stogran in the last few months has gone away from the traditional ombuds role to become more of an advocate, which will be of very great value to us now for the future,"  Parent said.


"  But we need to go back now to an approach that is actually constructive and based on facts so we can approach the department and make recommendations that will accomplish something in the end." 

In fairness, it's too soon to know if Parent is the bootlicker that he comes across as but, if he isn't, he's going to have to prove it.   And he can slag Strogan as much as he likes but the Colonel had the respect and support of the ordinary soldier and that  Parent can't inherit.

But What About Bikini Waxing?

A notorious Russian prison in Moscow is going to install tanning beds to improve the health of its inmates.

"We are developing additional medical services ... and even sunbeds will be put in place," Butyrka's head Sergei Telyatnikov told state-run radio station Vesti FM.

The sunbeds, which Telyatnikov said would be used for medical purposes, will be installed by the end of the year, the state-run RIA news agency said." 


Russia's prison service recently admitted half of its inmates are seriously ill with diseases ranging from HIV to tuberculosis.

Well, I guess if you're going to be slung into a dank, 19th century Moscow dungeon, a tanning bed might not be such a bad idea.

35 - 29. Time to Start Looking for a Star in the East?

Yet again the Harper Tories remain firmly stuck in minority territory and the Ignatieff Liberals remain even more firmly mired well behind by six points.   No matter how poorly he governs Harper remains almost effortlessly well ahead of his only potential rival, Ignatieff.

Some argue it's because Canadians "don't give a shit" about federal politics any longer and that may be true.   But Libs can't duck their problems that easily and not ask themselves why they're not connecting so that voters actually do give a shit.  A disengaged electorate is a Tory win and a Liberal loss.   Holding Harper to a minority isn't the same as keeping him in a box.   He is advancing his ideological agenda, bit by bit, incrementally and the hapless Libs do nothing except sit by and watch.

Right now I'd bet that Jim Prentice is a better bet to become a Harper slayer than Michael Ignatieff.   If Harper returns with yet another minority, he'll be much more vulnerable to a threat from within than to any from the Liberal ranks.   That shouldn't be the case, but it is.   If you're hoping he'll be unseated by a Liberal, you would do well to start looking for a star in the East.

Watching the Sun Setting on America

Change is afoot.   You can see it everywhere if you know what to look for, where to look.   The global power base is changing.   Power and influence is slowly draining out of America and passing to China.

One of the signs of this transition from a declining America to an ascendant China is the attitude displayed by other players.   Around the world officials are now calling out America as they once never would have dared.   The German finance minister slamming the U.S. for living so long on borrowed money.   African nations quite curtly snubbing American overtures to establish a military presence on the continent.  The Japanese telling America to get out of Okinawa.   Now, according to AFP, the Chinese are suggesting that the G20 should begin monitoring the U.S. Federal Reserve.

China’s state media has issued a new broadside at the US Federal Reserve’s move to prime the US economy, suggesting the Group of 20 should monitor policy shifts by the US central bank.

The Xinhua news agency said in a commentary the Fed was “risking the global recovery by following its own track for economic revival” by spending an extra $US600 billion ($A593.65 billion) buying Treasury bonds to stimulate the US economy.

It's obvious that the Chinese, like the Euros and others, are no longer hesitating to grumble about what they see as America's fiscal excesses.   Free Market America is now calling on them to accept fixed limits to the trade surpluses countries like China and Germany can run with the U.S. and they're openly balking.

America's problems are compounded by its dependence on these same upstarts for loans to keep itself afloat and its insistence that those loans be written in American dollars while, at the same time, it undermines its own currency by printing another $600-billion of magic money.   That's like saying "loan me some money and I'll pay back some of it."

The sun is setting on America and that's a reality ushered in when Ronald Reagan introduced America's Age of Ruin.   Reagan single-handedly transformed the U.S. from the world's largest lender nation into the world's largest debtor nation and the only president who even tried to reverse that and put America back on an even keel was Bill Clinton.   That is the post-Reagan Republican legacy, the hollowing out of America's power and prestige.

America isn't going to precipitously collapse.  It will probably just continue to decline as the Brits did after WWII - but only if it's lucky and comes to its senses in time.  If ruin does befall America, it will be of its own making.

Bush - Should've Kept His Mouth Shut

Not much good (or sensible) ever came out of the mouth of former president George w. Bush.   After eight disastrous years in the White House he should have understood that much.  Yet Bush couldn't help but come out with his 'memoirs' which is a term that only very loosely describes the nonsense and outright fabrications he peddles in "Decision Points."

Now it's one thing to make silly statements.   We've all done it.  It happens.  Most of us, however, don't go out of our way to incriminate ourselves as Georgie has.  In his book Shrub foolishly allows that he quite freely authorized the waterboarding of al Qaeda suspects.  One of them, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, was waterboarded an impressive 183-times.    I don't even think the Khmer Rouge came close to that.  Unfortunately for Mr. Bush, long, long ago the American courts ruled that waterboarding is indeed what it is, torture.   That makes Bush a torturer.   That makes Bush a criminal, in fact a war criminal.  

George tries to muster up something resembling the defence of necessity.   He writes that the waterboarding crimes paid off in intelligence that foiled plots to attack targets abroad including Heathrow Airport and London's Canary Wharf.  That might be an interesting argument, if it was true, but British officials wasted no time rejecting Bush's claims.

The Brits say they didn't get any actionable intelligence from Mohammed just organizational stuff about al Qaeda.   And, as for that Heathrow business?  That happened a month before Mohammed fell into U.S. hands.

Years ago F.B.I. agents who did successfully interrogate Mohammed, in the effective, non-torture way, stated that nothing useful or reliable had come from the CIA's waterboarding attempts.   That might explain why they repeated them 183-times, no?  I mean it pretty much speaks for itself.

So, once again, George is caught up in a lie, just like when he was asked whether he'd ever done cocaine.   Meanwhile former German chancellor Gerhard Shroder has come straight out and said Bush is peddling lies in his book.   Shroder told der Spiegel that "the former American president is not telling the truth"   in claiming that he gave Bush his full support for aggressive action against Iraq.  Shroder says he told Bush Germany would stand behind him if the purported link between Saddam and al Qaeda was proven but he quickly came to realize that the American tale was  "false and constructed."    

Bush was never out of the country before he became president and that's probably a good thing.   These days it might not be wise for senior members of his administration to do a lot of traveling abroad where people might start asking awkward questions.

Do As I Say, Not...

British prime minister David Cameron should be wary about lecturing the Chinese.  The text of a speech Cameron is to give in Beijing extols the rule of law and urges the Chinese to follow the example of Britain and others.

This is an ideal time for Cameron to practice what he preaches, the rule of law.   There is mounting evidence in the U.K. indicating that war crimes were committed by the British military, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and likely by the British cabinet and former prime minister, Tony Blair.

If Britain's vaunted rule of law is to have any meaning, if it is to be spared the indignity of political expedience and hypocrisy, then surely Cameron must honour it by seeing that war criminals in his own land are duly prosecuted.

India's Coal Binge

It's being called a "$35-billion bankrolling of enhanced global warming by capital markets."  The 'It' is a prospectus from the Indian state owned coal company, Coal India, which is selling 10% of its shares on the domestic and foreign markets.  It's the largest ever initial public offering on the Indian stock exchange.  From The Guardian:

" Coal India's prospectus, crafted with the help of a clutch of big-name investment banks, did not mention climate change once in 510 pages of exhortation to invest.
And invest the fund managers did, unfettered by risk regulation or any meaningful requirement to place a value on the climate consequences of their scramble for short-term profit. The offering was oversubscribed 15 fold, and the stock soared on the first day of trading, 4 November, valuing Coal India at $49bn.

Those ending up owning stock include 484 foreign funds, 195 mutual funds, 44 insurance companies, and many banks. Many of these investors were using ordinary citizens' money, and this would have included the nest eggs of people worried about global warming and its dire impact on the world by the time they retire. But those people are mostly allowed no say in where their pension funds, insurance premiums, and banking deposits are invested."

The Coal India news comes hot on the heels of yesterday's warning by the OECD's International Energy Agency that the growing market for oil foreseen for the next twenty years will leave us utterly incapable of meeting the goal to restrict warming to 2 degrees Celsius.   In other words, we're stampeding ourselves full bore down the path to runaway global warming.

Brits Reject Bush Claim Waterboarding Saved UK Lives

A key part of George w. Bush's new autobiography is his admission that, while President, he committed the war crime of authorizing waterboarding of al Qaeda suspects.   Long settled American law holds that waterboarding is torture and, as such, a criminal act.

To justify his war crime Bush made the claim that information tortured out of these suspects,  "helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport, and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States."

According to The Guardian, British officials say there is no evidence to support Bush's claims that waterboarding saved the lives of any Britons.

" It is not the first time information extracted from Mohammed has been claimed as helping to prevent al-Qaida attacks on British targets. Mohammed cited attacks on Heathrow, Big Ben and Canary Wharf in a list of 31 plots he described at Guantánamo Bay after he was subjected to waterboarding 183 times following his capture in Pakistan in March 2003. The Heathrow alert in fact happened a month before his arrest, with army tanks parked around the airport, in what was widely regarded as an overreaction."

Oopsie!   If you're going to confess to a war crime and then seek to justify it, you really need to have your facts straight.   Don't try to justify it with things that happened a month before the crimes were actually commenced.   But wait, there's more.

Der Spiegel reports that former German chancellor, Gerhard Shroder, has come right out and accused George of deliberately lying.

" In his memoirs, called "Decision Points" and released on Tuesday, Bush writes that Schröder told him in January 2002 that the US president had his full support when it came to his aggressive Iraq policy. Bush wrote that Schröder indicated he would even stand behind Bush should the US go to war against the country.


On Tuesday evening in Berlin, Schröder denied that he ever made such a promise. "The former American president is not telling the truth," he said. He said the meeting in question focused on the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and whether those responsible were supported by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
.
"Just as I did during my subsequent meetings with the American president, I made it clear that, should Iraq ... prove to have provided protection and hospitality to al-Qaida fighters, Germany would reliably stand beside the US," Shröder said. "This connection, however, as it became clear during 2002, was false and constructed."

Oh, my goodness, there goes another of Bush's balloons shot down - his claim that he had no idea his intelligence on Iraq was flat out wrong.   Of course it was wrong, it was "false and constructed."   That's constructed as in plainly made up.

If the Tar Sands are Such a Boon to Alberta, Why All the Boondoggles?

The Athabasca Tar Sands make money - for Big Oil at least.  The bitumen pits supposedly make plenty of money for the federal and Alberta governments too but just how much do they really pour into government coffers?

Like all good petro-states much of this vital information isn't readily available to the public and just as much probably isn't even known.   It's just as easy to cook the books as it is to cook the bitumen.

The sludge we process to provide SUV juice to American gas pumps is heavily subsidized.    For example, if Big Oil paid the actual value of the vast quantities of fresh water it draws from the Athabasca and Peace Rivers there probably wouldn't be a project at all.   But the oil companies get that public property for virtually nothing.   When we give public property to a private company, that's a subsidy.

What about the land, air and water contamination associated with bitumen extraction and processing?   When you let the producers off the hook for the cost of cleanup, that's a subsidy.   When our healthcare systems and society bear the cost of the human toll from that contamination, that's a subsidy.

Today there was a torrent of greenwash from the Alberta government about carbon capture and sequestration.   There'll be a fund set up for that - a shared fund - industry and the Alberta government will pick up the tab (supposedly).   The government's share is a subsidy.

But what might become the biggest subsidy of them all is the Alberta government's agreement to assume liability for whatever might happen should all those millions of tonnes of compressed CO2 leak back out to the surface - ever as in forever and ever, amen.   CO2 is lethal.  When If that pressurized and toxic gas eventually does find an opening to the surface maybe this century, maybe next, maybe a millenium from now, the liability for deaths and loss could be enormous.   That too is a subsidy or at least the present value of that indemnity sure is.

These are all subsidies but only when you recognize them for what they are.  If you're like the Alberta government or even our federal government, you can pretend to turn a blind eye.   But that doesn't change a damned thing and, when it comes to change, it'll be the people of Alberta who stand to get short-changed.

We've Lost Control of the Environment, Is the Global Economy Next?

You hear rumours of protectionism and currency wars.   They pop up every few days and then they subside.   Washington wants China to revalue its currency, the Yuan.  It wants its major trading partners to limit their trade surpluses with the U.S.   Then Washington announces plans to print 600-billion dollars worth of magical money to buy back government debt.   Nations are getting angry and they're all quick to point fingers.

German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, isn't pulling any punches:  "The German export successes are not the result of some sort of currency manipulation, but of the increased competitiveness of companies. The American growth model, on the other hand, is in a deep crisis. The United States lived on borrowed money for too long, inflating its financial sector unnecessarily and neglecting its small and mid-sized industrial companies. There are many reasons for America's problems, but they don't include German export surpluses."

Herr Schauble is right, the U.S. has lived on borrowed money, trillions of dollars of money borrowed from foreign lenders, since Reagan ushered in America's Age of Ruin.   America turned its back on manufacturing, opting instead for an insane, short term, high-yield FIRE (finance/insurance/real estate) economy that was bound to undermine its economic strength and stability.   Vast wealth accrued to America's top 10% while the remaining 90% worked ever harder to simply tread water or fall behind.

Now America is going out and simply printing 600-billion dollars worth of non-existent wealth and that's alarming the world.   But America has a rich, recent history of forays into non-existent or fictitious wealth.   The Savings & Loan scam was non-existent wealth, the Dot.Com bubble was mainly non-existent wealth, Enron and Worldcom too, and most recently it was the housing bubble and trillions of dollars of credit default swaps backed by completely non-existent wealth.   This time, instead of Wall Street or American banks pulling the non-existent wealth scam on the American people, it's Washington giving its foreign lenders a taste of the same medicine.

America, the great believer in free trade and free market economies, is now yelling "uncle" - "Uncle Sam" that is.

No one knows how this one is going to play out.  Inventing $600-billion dollars is a gutsy move, especially when you know what it could mean to your economy in the long term if your foreign benefactors dump the greenback as the world's reserve currency.   This is one to keep an eye on.

The Only Question Now - Just How Bad Will It Get

The International Energy Agency warns we can kiss goodbye any hopes of limiting greenhouse gas-driven warming to under 2 degrees Celsius.   The energy arm of the OECD says oil demand will grow steadily over the next 25-years essentially dooming climate change goals.

Even under climate change pledges made under the Copenhagen Accord last year, fossil fuels will still account for more than half the increase in total energy demand, with oil to remain the dominant fuel, the IEA said in its World Energy Outlook report.

The broad failure of the Copenhagen summit on the climate would cost the world $1 trillion in extra investments needed by 2030 to avoid irreparable damage to the climate, raising the total investment needed to $11.6 trillion, the IEA estimated.

...The IEA, the energy monitoring and strategy arm of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, concluded that this " rising demand for fossil fuels would continue to drive up energy-related carbon dioxide emissions through the projection period.

"  Such a trend would make it all but impossible to achieve the two degree C goal..."

It's already becoming widely accepted that the November climate change summit in Cancun will be a failure marked by bickering between China and the U.S.   Meanwhile climate change denialists are leading the pack of Republicans that have captured the House of Representatives killing even the pathetically inadequate measures proposed before the elections.

Well, we're all Easter Islanders now.  It's too bad we won't figure out what that really means for our country and our people while we still have time to implement proper adaptation and remediation measures.   Those are steps you have to take before the problems land on your doorstep.

The Latest Tar Sands Subsidy - Albertans Assume Liability for Carbon Sequestration Failure

In theory, capturing CO2, liquifying it and pumping the highly pressurized liquid into underground chasms is a great way to get rid of the harmful greenhouse gas.  In theory.

Unfortunately it's theoretical and replete with unresolved questions that leave "CCS" an unproven option.   While a pilot project is being run in Saskatchewan, no one has run a successful operation on the scale that would be needed to sequester carbon emissions from the Tar Sands.

But, assuming that the empty reservoirs beneath Alberta could be used to house massive volumes of liquid carbon dioxide, what then?  There's a huge problem.  That pressurized CO2 could leak out and when it reaches the surface it's very lethal.  So you have to monitor what's happening underground and on the surface and somebody may have to compensate anyone damaged (i.e. "killed") if when leaks occur.  And just who is that 'somebody' going to be?   Why that would be the people of Alberta.

The province, the Alberta conservatives, say there'll be a fund into which the province and Big Oil will chip in to monitor the CCS wells.   That's probably true, at first.   However scientists warn that the need to monitor will do on effectively for ever, millenia at a minimum.   So does anybody think Big Oil is planning on picking up the cost of that monitoring into perpetuity?  What a joke.

But then there's the leakage thing, compensating the dead and injured.   Big Oil isn't even sticking around for that one.   In fact the sweetheart deal the Alberta Cons have cooked up leaves the people of Alberta liable - forever and ever, amen.  And, as Andrew Nikiforuk points out in Tar Sands, Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, not only is the rock vulnerable to failing under the pressure of liquified CO2 but that area is perforated with drilled wells, 300,000 in all.   In other words it's just a matter of time before there's a failure and large volumes of lethal, concentrated CO2 reach the surface.

CCS sounds good until you look at it and read between the lines of the deal that Alberta has cooked up with Big Oil.   Then it begins to look like a formula for disaster.

At Least There's No Doubt Any Longer, Bush Admits to War Crimes

Waterboarding is a war crime.   That was settled in American law a good long time ago.  Waterboarding is torture.   Torture, in the context of armed conflict, is a war crime.  George w. Bush has freely acknowledged that, despite repeated claims that "America doesn't torture," he did authorize the use of torture in the interrogation of al Qaeda suspects.

Bush claims the waterboarding disrupted al Qaeda plots and saved lives, a claim that is long disputed.   In any case he's American and Americans are outside international law, not above it, just outside it as in "outlaw."   That was their choice and they took it.

Now Here's Something You Probably Never Knew About Australia

It seems that the Australian Capital Territory doesn't have any criminal law prohibiting bestiality.   That's all that's saving Australian Rugby League star, Joel Monaghan, from prosecution after a photo became public of him literally "screwing the pooch."

It seems to have happened in the course of a drunken, end of season rugby revel called "Mad Monday."   Monaghan's agent described it as a "prank played on an absent teammate" who happened to own the dog.  Prank?   No, I don't think so.

Maybe those Australians should look to see what else might be missing from their criminal laws.

For This, Heads Should Roll

That a young Chinese man masquerading as an old Caucasian man managed to board an Air Canada flight certainly raises a few questions.    That three Air Canada cabin crew ignored a passenger who warned them about the disguised man - while the plane was still on the ground in Hong Kong - rings alarm bells.

35-year old clothing retail production manager, [Nuray Kurtur-Balas],  says she told the flight attendants the passenger’s heavily wrinkled face looked like plastic and didn’t match his young looking hands.
 
She says one flight attendant complimented her on her observation, another said he’d look into it, and the third said the man might have a medical condition—but no action was taken.

It was only after the flight took off and the man removed his mask that the air crew alerted authorities to meet the plane when it landed in Vancouver.

This is utter nonsense.  That cabin crew should have informed their captain immediately about the passenger's observations and that aircraft ought to have remained safely on the ground until the issue was cleared up.   Heads should roll for this.

We Just Have to Get Past "Cheap"

Our addiction to fossil fuels, especially coal and petroleum, is based on one thing - price.   Today, at least, fossil fuels deliver the greatest bang for the buck and, for that advantage, most of us would prefer to stick with them.   Hydrocarbon fuels may contribute enormously to global warming but, hey, don't ask me to pay more for clean and don't you dare ask me to give up my SUV either.

Today's New York Times reports that green energy is taking a kicking over cost in the current market:

"...Invenergy, had a contract to sell power to a utility in Virginia, but state regulators rejected the deal, citing the recession and the lower prices of natural gas and other fossil fuels.


“The ratepayers of Virginia must be protected from costs for renewable energy that are unreasonably high,” the regulators said. Wind power would have increased the monthly bill of a typical residential customer by 0.2 percent.


Even as many politicians, environmentalists and consumers want renewable energy and reduced dependence on fossil fuels, a growing number of projects are being canceled or delayed because governments are unwilling to add even small amounts to consumers’ electricity bills.


Deals to buy renewable power have been scuttled or slowed in states including Florida, Idaho and Kentucky as well as Virginia. By the end of the third quarter, year-to-date installations of new wind power dropped 72 percent from 2009 levels, according to the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group.

The long range problem is that allowing the fate of green energy to hinge on price fluctuations for non-renewable fossil fuels, denies alternative fuels the market stability they need to survive, much less succeed and thrive.   This short-sighted neglect sacrifices long term benefits for temporary savings.   I guess that's the way we run our societies today which is probably an object lesson for just how well we're going to meet the challenges of this century.

The New York Times Sums Up the Khadr Farce Quite Nicely

Rightwing thugs in Canada (and they're not all Tories either) haven't got the guts to denounce Omar Khadr's Kangaroo Kourt but today's editorial in The New York Times does just that - and very powerfully.

It is perhaps the best summation of this travesty yet published.  Read "Warped Justice."

Senator Wallin Declares Afghanistan "Winnable"

Harper appointee Pam Wallin declared in yesterday's National Post that Afghanistan has been a grand success.   She says she "couldn't agree more" with Brigadier General Jonathan Vance who opined, "[I]t is entirely winnable. It just takes a lot of time, focus and patience."

To me, Vance's pronouncement seemed to say that Afghanistan might be winnable by someone else at some time in the distant future.   These days generals don't seem to wage wars they might have to win or lose before they can safely retire.  But they always know that somebody can win it, eventually,  if they only have lots of time, and focus and patience.

Of course a lot depends on how you define 'win'.   When we got into this adventure almost a decade ago, 'win' meant we would 1) drive the Taliban out, 2) track down bin Laden and destroy al Qaeda, 3) establish a viable, democratic central government, 4) raise, equip and train an Afghan National Army, and 5) institute Western liberal human rights and, in particular, women's rights.

Nine plus years later, how have we fared?  The Taliban are resurgent; bin Laden is apparently alive and keeping busy in Pakistan; al Qaeda has spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa; we have a criminal enterprise in lieu of a viable government in Kabul operated by a totally corrupt bureaucracy, judiciary and security service; the country has morphed into a narco-state; Afghan soldiers desert at roughly the same rate as we manage to train them; and the warlords we empower have restored Islamist fundamentalism to the countryside crushing all the nonsense about women's and human rights.

 

With that much progress in barely nine years, how much more success can Afghanistan bear?

Russians Sound Warning on Arctic Seabed Drilling

For Russians to be fretting over the perils of Arctic seabed drilling seems incongruous given Moscow's thirst for northern oil and gas but maybe that makes it all the more worth heeding.

"  Shared by Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Russia and the United States, the Arctic may hold around one-fifth of the world's untapped oil and gas reserves according to a U.S. Geological survey. The past few years have seen a rush of activity in the region, with UK oil explorer Cairn Energy drilling for oil off the west coast of Greenland and Norway's Statoil, one of the world's largest offshore oil producers, pushing further and further up the Nordic country's serpentine coastline, drilling wells inside the Arctic Circle beneath both the Norwegian and Barents Seas.

...The rewards could be huge. Russia, the world's top oil producer with output of more than 10 million barrels of oil per day (bpd), estimates that its Arctic zone holds around 51 billion tonnes of oil, or enough to fully meet global oil demand for more than four years, as well as 87 trillion cubic meters of natural gas.

...But even as Russia opens its northern waters to exploration, there's reason to pause. In the wake of BP's catastrophic leak in the Gulf of Mexico this spring, Russian officials and experts warn an oil spill under the ice could turn out far worse than one in warmer deepwater climates. Arctic conditions -- remoteness, fragile ecosystems, darkness, sub-zero temperatures, ice, high winds -- make dealing with an oil spill a massive task.


It's not that a spill is more likely in the Arctic than in a warmer, deep-water locale, says Nils Masvie, a director at Norwegian offshore risk-assessment firm Det Norske Veritas. "But you cannot extrapolate and say the risk is the same in a cold climate. No, the risk is higher."

That's because it's so much harder to manage a spill and offshore emergency in the ice and dark. "" Sometimes search and rescue operations stop in the evening because it is too dark, resuming again at eight o'clock when the light returns. But if something happens on the Arctic Barents Sea in November it would be, 'OK, we'll come back for you in March,'" says Masvie.

It's hard to imagine the Petro-Pols of Parliament Hill saying no to seabed drilling in Canada's Arctic sector.   They should, but they won't.

Read more here.