The Madness of King Donald

It's hard to believe that Trump eschews alcohol because he governs like a drunken sailor.

In November, scientists from 13 US federal departments, acting on the directions of Congress, produced the 4th National Climate Assessment, a 1,600 page tome. Congress required it be delivered to and then released by the White House. Trump's reaction? He claimed he had looked at it and then told reporters, "No, no I don't believe it." And that, as they say, was that.

Yesterday the chiefs of America's labyrinth intelligence community appeared before Congress and literally gutted Trump's claims on everything from the supposed threat from Iran to the fanciful idea that Kim Jong Un would ever give up North Korea's nuclear arsenal.

Today, the Emperor Struck Back.

"The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!" Trump tweeted. "When I became President Iran was making trouble all over the Middle East, and beyond. Since ending the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal, they are MUCH different, but a source of potential danger and conflict. They are testing Rockets (last week) and more, and are coming very close to the edge. There economy is now crashing, which is the only thing holding them back. Be careful of Iran. Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!" 

Trump made no mention of Russia, which was specifically mentioned by Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats on Tuesday as likely to target 2020 elections. Also left unmentioned was a response to intelligence officials' warnings about the threat of climate change.

There was a day when a lunatic would be removed from high office for the good of the nation. Trump is in a bad way. His government shut down didn't work. His poll numbers are in the tank. There is a real likelihood of another deep recession before Americans go to the polls in 2020. The special prosecutor is closing in and DJT Jr., along with son-in-law Kushner could soon be indicted. Trump has created for himself not merely "alternative facts" but an alternate reality utterly detached from science, knowledge and intelligence. Reality is whatever he declares it to be. He is mad as a hatter.

Revisiting Posterity

In a post yesterday I drew upon the words of the patron saint of conservatism, Edmund Burke, and the powerful progressive voice of Theodore Roosevelt in 1910.  Without expressly using the word "posterity" both of these men extolled the concept and the role it played in maintaining a healthy democracy.

Burke, the 18th century political philosopher, wrote of posterity as the glue that connects future generations to the past but also the present:

All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust. 

...one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.

In Burke's view, each generation has a life estate in our land but no more and that life estate, bequeathed to us by our ancestors, is in the nature of a trust. We are trustees of the land for the generations that will follow us.  I would like to think he had the current neoliberal contagion or something like it in mind when he writes of "floating fancies or fashions" that undermine the continuity of the commonwealth and prevent one generation from linking with the other.

Roosevelt wrote of "skinning the land."

I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation.

I'm sure he was speaking plainly and pointedly when he spoke of one generation robbing future generations, skinning the land and leaving it worthless to those who will follow.  I wonder how he might have phrased that in this, the age of climate change and the threat of mass extinction?

It was an excellent series that Bill Moyers produced for PBS several years ago that focused my attention on posterity and the little appreciated role it played in maintaining a modern society.  Moyers consulted a variety of sage minds to explore how posterity had been discarded in the modern (neoliberal) mode of governance and whether and, if so, how it might return.  Again, that was before we understood the fact and ramifications of climate change.  I've tried to track down a copy of that series but, to date, with no luck. I shall not give up, not yet.

There is an interview that Moyers conducted in 1988 with the late American historian, Henry Steele Commager, that touches on the central themes of that elusive series.  I'll not add the weight of additional paragraphs to this post but instead present Commager's comments excerpted.

BILL MOYERS: You’ve written that “Great things were won by the generation that won independence and wrote the Constitution. Great things were accomplished by the generation that saved the Union and rid it of slavery. Great things were won by the generation that defeated the fascists in World War II and then organized the peace that followed, the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, the planting of democracy in Japan.” What are some of the issues, do you think, we can’t run from now as we approach the 21st century? 

HENRY STEELE COMMAGER: Well, there’s a great crowd of them. There’s a throng of them pressing on us. The first and most urgent and universal is the environment. Everybody talks about the environment, but we don’t do much about it. We talk about acid rain and sign this treaty with Canada, but we don’t enforce the treaty. We’re polluting the seas, we’re polluting the inland waters, we’re polluting the soil, we’re destroying the forests. We don’t think of our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; we’ll be lucky if they have a country to live in in three or four generations. I think the failure to — the basic failure to think of posterity and to live for posterity the way the framers, the founding fathers, did, to always look a thousand years ahead and think what would be for the benefit of posterity, that has disappeared.

BILL MOYERS: What does it reveal about a president’s mind, when he asks us to think about posterity? 

HENRY STEELE COMMAGER: Well, the most elementary fact, of course, is to preserve the natural resources and to preserve the welfare and the health and the wisdom, take care of the health of human beings and children, and end poverty — all of these things, if we think of posterity. But I think the commonest attitude is, what has posterity ever done for us?

...BILL MOYERS: How much of this is attributed to the fact that we seem to expect less of our leadership today than we did, say, in the founding era? We have, you said — 

HENRY STEELE COMMAGER: Leadership. 

BILL MOYERS: The founding fathers, you said, had this idea of honor. 

HENRY STEELE COMMAGER: Our leadership today is business leadership, it’s financial leadership, it’s not political leadership. Our best people don’t go into politics, it’s too expensive for one thing, and we tolerate that. There’s no reason why we should tolerate these vast expenses for elections, no one tolerates it in European countries, but Americans think nothing of spending $50-100 million on an election.

...BILL MOYERS: If I can’t have a better life, my children will have a better life. 

HENRY STEELE COMMAGER: Yes, that’s true. This was the great thesis, of course, of the early fathers. Equality was a great word, and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America really was “Equality in America, ìthatís what he wrote about, this extraordinary phenomenon, the only country in the world that had equality. And he thought France would have it in time, England would have it in time, but he also saw the danger. What was the great danger that Tocqueville saw? It was what he called “the manufacturing aristocracy,” which was his phrase for a wealthy upper class that made a great deal of money. He said if that ever gets control, democracy may be the most tyrannical form of government ever known by man, and he feared that it might be true. What he called a manufacturing aristocracy, by which he embraced banking and so forth, he’d seen this in England and was afraid of it, and he thought it might destroy American democracy. 

BILL MOYERS: But in this country, it’s driven the economy that has enabled the boats to rise.

HENRY STEELE COMMAGER: So far it’s worked. It worked when we had enough land for the thousandth and thousandth generation, it worked when everybody had an opportunity. 

BILL MOYERS: And today? 

HENRY STEELE COMMAGER: It doesn’t seem to be working now.

---
In 2009, I lamented the extinction of posterity in our politics and civil society.

Posterity doesn't fit into our economic model of production and consumption because it creates a fetter on both. We have lost our understanding of the importance of posterity to our society, to our country. We no longer plan today for generations to come far in the future. We no longer look much beyond the next electoral cycle. 

Protecting posterity is an act of collective consciousness and will. It is acknowledging that we're entitled to our fair share and no more. We can't have it all without depriving future generations of their fair share. 

To try to understand the idea of "fair share" imagine if our great, great, great grandparents had followed our path. 

Imagine if our ancestors had two things - the ability to consume everything they could get their hands on and a blind indifference to the day when it was our turn to populate this country. Imagine if two or three generations had gone on a rapacious binge gobbling up the world's resources; going into serious deficit on renewables (emptying the oceans, logging off the forests, transforming farmland into desert) and fouling the environment. Then consider how their depredations might impact on your life today. I think that's beyond the imagination of all but the best science fiction writers but that's of no real matter. It's enough in any event to make the case for posterity and the concept of "fair share."

It was at this juncture, when developed nations were reeling from the Great Recession, that The New York Times looked at Norway, a nation that had never expunged posterity.

The global financial crisis has brought low the economies of just about every country on earth. But not Norway. 

With a quirky contrariness as deeply etched in the national character as the fjords carved into its rugged landscape, Norway has thrived by going its own way. When others splurged, it saved. When others sought to limit the role of government, Norway strengthened its cradle-to-grave welfare state. 

And in the midst of the worst global downturn since the Depression, Norway’s economy grew last year by just under 3 percent. The government enjoys a budget surplus of 11 percent and its ledger is entirely free of debt. 

Norway is a relatively small country with a largely homogeneous population of 4.6 million and the advantages of being a major oil exporter. It counted $68 billion in oil revenue last year as prices soared to record levels. Even though prices have sharply declined, the government is not particularly worried. That is because Norway avoided the usual trap that plagues many energy-rich countries.

Instead of spending its riches lavishly, it passed legislation ensuring that oil revenue went straight into its sovereign wealth fund, state money that is used to make investments around the world. Now its sovereign wealth fund is close to being the largest in the world, despite losing 23 percent last year because of investments that declined. 

“The U.S. and the U.K. have no sense of guilt,” said Anders Aslund, an expert on Scandinavia at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “But in Norway, there is instead a sense of virtue. If you are given a lot, you have a responsibility.” 

Eirik Wekre, an economist who writes thrillers in his spare time, describes Norwegians’ feelings about debt this way: “We cannot spend this money now; it would be stealing from future generations.”

Norway powerfully demonstrates that posterity is prosperity because it binds us, from generation to generation, to the same common purpose, our collective welfare - past, present and future.

What would be the ultimate act of posterity today? What else could it be but to salvage as much as we can of the environment for future generations? We have, to use Roosevelt's term, "skinned" the land they will inherit. And we're going to continue to diminish their world, the world of the future, in our pursuit of comfort, ease and immediate gratification.  We are degenerate.

Can we restore posterity to Canada's politics and our society? That's extremely unlikely.  Our very model of governance is rigged. Getting the support of just shy of two out of five voters is enough to cement powerful majority rule over the majority of the voters whose democratic voice is nullified by this contrivance.  Imagine three out of five voters sidelined, shoved into a corner, their wishes without expression. The beneficiaries of this corrupt system, primarily Liberal and Conservative, shamelessly pretend that these false majorities are a great thing and contend, through some perverse notion of electoral Darwinism, that their rigged system ensures we are governed ruled by only the very best candidates or what Rafe Mair called the Higher Purpose Persons.

You'll get no posterity, not out of those two roving gangs of blackguards and reprobates. The thing they fear most is that all Canadians should have a voice in their Parliament. Who knows where that might lead?

"Wag the Dog" Time? Is America Planning to Send Troops Into Venezuela?

A gaggle of Trump aides showed up for a rare White House press conference Monday. Among them was John Bolton, note pad in hand. Bolton caused a stir when cameras revealed what was written on Bolton's note pad.

The Grifter-in-Chief Does It Again.

US Treasury Secretary, Sideshow-Steve Mnuchin is again looking to borrow a trillion dollars to cover government deficit and Trump's latest tax cuts.

Axios sums it up:

Treasury borrowing surpassed $1 trillion during President Obama's first term as government spending soared amid the stimulus to combat the 2008 financial crisis, but it has steadily declined in the years since, settling down to $519 billion in 2017 before nearly doubling last year.

Yeah, Obama had to borrow a trillion to fight the Great Recession of 2007/2008 he inherited from the profligate Republicans. Trump is forcing the US to borrow that same amount, for the second year in a row, in a boom economy. He's putting America in hock to pay for tax cuts for the rich and major corporations. Which means if the next big recession arrives next year, Washington will be tapped out and incapable of stimulus spending. And, true to form, Mitch McConnell is now talking about slashing Medicare and Social Security to ease Trump's deficits.

Gee, let me see. If I was the head of a hostile foreign power and I had control of that other nation's leader and I wanted to eliminate that country as a thorn in my side, what would be better than to create a boom economy on borrowed money and then use that to leverage considerably more indebtedness so that, when the rebound recession hits, my stooge's government is tapped out, unable to save itself through traditional stimulus spending. But, of course, that's conspiracy thinking and there's no reason to imagine Trump might be someone's useful idiot undermining the economic integrity of the United States and leaving it utterly defenceless to a devastating recession.

Update:

And who should come bearing praises of Trump this day but our very own Beelzebub, Shifty Steve Harper.  Ignoring what propelled Trump to the White House - the gerrymandering, the voter suppression, the Cambridge Analytica voter manipulation, Clinton's broad unpopularity, the Russians and the fact that Hillary, not Trump, won the popular vote - Harper put Trump's victory down to the power of populist conservatism.

In a new video posted online on Monday titled "Why Trump Won," Harper defends Trump voters as "not the ignorant and misguided deplorable depicted in mainstream media, they are our family, friends, and neighbours."

"Many Americans voted for Donald Trump because the global economy has not been working for them," Harper says in the video. 

"We can pretend that this is a false perception. We can keep trying to convince people that they misunderstand their own lives, or we can try to understand what they are saying and offer some solutions." 

He then posits that the way to serve these "ordinary people" is through "populist conservatism," that’s grounded in "tried and true conservative values." 

The four issues Harper says conservatives should focus on are: 

Market economics;
Trade;
Globalization; and
Immigration.

What a total jackass.

First, We Throw Out the Monsters

 

It was hard not to be impressed when a 16-year old Swedish school girl, Greta Thunberg showed up to read the Riot Act to the delegates at, first, the Katowice climate summit and then at the World Economic Forum in Davos.  Her message is important and deserves our attention and that of our leaders because it cuts through the blather and gets straight to the point.

Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire. 

According to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), we are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes. In that time, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society need to have taken place, including a reduction of our CO2 emissions by at least 50%. 

And please note that those numbers do not include the aspect of equity, which is absolutely necessary to make the Paris agreement work on a global scale. Nor does it include tipping points or feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas released from the thawing Arctic permafrost. 

...Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around. We can still fix this. We still have everything in our own hands. But unless we recognise the overall failures of our current systems, we most probably don’t stand a chance.
We are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people. And now is not the time for speaking politely or focusing on what we can or cannot say. Now is the time to speak clearly. 

Solving the climate crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that Homo sapiens have ever faced. The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases. 

Either we do that or we don’t.

...Some say we should not engage in activism. Instead we should leave everything to our politicians and just vote for a change instead. But what do we do when there is no political will? What do we do when the politics needed are nowhere in sight? 

Here in Davos – just like everywhere else – everyone is talking about money. It seems money and growth are our only main concerns. 

And since the climate crisis has never once been treated as a crisis, people are simply not aware of the full consequences on our everyday life. People are not aware that there is such a thing as a carbon budget, and just how incredibly small that remaining carbon budget is. That needs to change today. 

No other current challenge can match the importance of establishing a wide, public awareness and understanding of our rapidly disappearing carbon budget, that should and must become our new global currency and the very heart of our future and present economics.

...We must change almost everything in our current societies. The bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility. 

Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

From that commentary I wrote a couple of draft essays but they never led to the conclusion I needed. Then I responded to a post by Marie Snyder at A Puff of Absurdity where my thoughts seemed to flow a bit better:

Ms. Thunberg's powerful remarks inspired me to write a piece about what she was telling us about her generation and how they will depict us when it's their turn to write the history books. 

It quickly came to me that our leaders will be branded monsters. Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau, and their contemporaries in the developed world will go down as monsters of a scale previously unknown to human civilization. 

They have full knowledge of what is happening and the enormity of the looming threats. They know how the worst catastrophe can be avoided and they have the power to do that. However, what makes them worse than the monsters of the past is that they're not driven by madness or xenophobia or paranoia or any of the other base instincts that have fueled the outrages of the past. What drives them is greed, the quest for ever more and a short-termer's willingness to kick even mortal threats down the road. 

Emissions had a substantial uptick in 2018. There'll be another this year. OPEC and the International Energy Agency see a great future for fossil fuels, including coal, into the 2040s. We're projected to go from 100 million barrels of oil per day to 112 million barrels per day by 2050. Cuts to coal consumption in the developed world will be eclipsed by the rise of coal in the developing world. We're supposed to be completely decarbonized by 2050 but we stand to be even worse than we've ever been in the past. 

We've known for more than thirty years of this existential threat and the gravity and pace of it has become increasingly well revealed with each passing year since James Hansen testified before Congress in 1988. And yet our leaders have done nothing to rein in the growth of cheap, fossil energy. Even today Canada's government of the self-proclaimed environmentalist, Trudeau, is determined to push through another massive pipeline to my coast in order to flood world markets with the most toxic, highest-carbon ersatz petroleum on the planet. 

What is that if not monstrous?

It was not always this way. The intellectual father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, was a strong believer in conservation, protection of the environment, leaving the world a better place for the following generation. He wrote:

All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust. 

...one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.

Burke wrote that in the 18th century. In the early 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt delivered this passage in his  "Square Deal" speech:

I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation.

The monsters of our day have no time for these ideas.  They are happy to "skin the land and leave it worthless" for future generations.

What passes for governance today is a betrayal of the future. You may have noticed that we wage wars today that transform into quagmires, permawar, war without end. These are not wars intended to achieve some resolution. They are not wars fought to achieve victory. They are wars of punishment, wars for which inconclusive but monstrously murderous results are pre-ordained. They are wars that end not in victory but exhaustion, boredom and obscene indifference.

We have adopted a similar myopia in our approach to governance. We're not in this to win, not in the long run, not for future generations.  We don't have that sort of leadership today and we, at least most of us, are either oblivious to it or, worse, fine with it.  We will go on and on and on until going on is no longer tenable. Then it's chaos. Most of us at least sense that this cannot end well but we would rather not dwell on it.

We are beset by monsters. They are the titans of industry, the pillars of finance and the charlatans we elect to high office. Collectively they pursue an agenda, entirely unlike our own, and their agenda leads to ruin, perhaps even a mass extinction event.

We know the science. It is massive and compelling and brutally clear. We know what must be done and we know what must not be allowed to transpire. We have the warnings. We are surrounded by the early-onset impacts. Yet we look away and instead put our shoulder into enabling the extraction and export of thermal coal, natural gas and the most toxic, highest-carbon ersatz petroleum of them all, bitumen.

Trump runs around searching for a fictitious 'national emergency' but what should trouble us all is not an emotionally unhinged president but that so few of his contemporaries are willing to see the true national - and global - emergency that is already overtaking us.

And They Wonder Why Trump Skipped Dinner?

Washington's elite Alfalfa Club annual dinner was held tonight. Trump shuns the event but attendees were surprised when Pence and his wife along with Jared and Ivanka failed to take their places at the head table.

John Kerry, the outgoing president of the club, greeted his successor, Mitt Romney, and then proceeded to launch a few zingers:

"I got to tell you, you all look incredibly dapper tonight in your ball gowns, your tuxedos, your bow ties and your cummerbunds, or as we call it at our house: workout gear. Or as we call it at our other house: pajamas. Or as we call it at our other house: swimming costumes. But tonight it looks like I've done something Donald Trump can only dream of: finishing my term." 

"Donald Trump could be the first President to go to the inaugural of his successor in a limo with license plates made by his campaign manager." 

"I think we've all noticed, there's been a lot of turnover in this administration. Secretary (Ryan) Zinke was fired. Reince Priebus was fired. Rex Tillerson, Gen. McMaster, Jeff Sessions -- all fired. One thing you can say about the Trump people -- they're not quitters. Wilbur Ross is here. I want to thank him for taking care of dessert. He went to the kitchen and said, 'Let them eat cake.'"

McCallum Axed

Canada's ambassador to China, John McCallum, is out. Justin Trudeau asked for and received McCallum's resignation last night.

The Liberal stalwart succumbed to a bout of foot in mouth disease over the Meng Wanzhou/Huawei extradition fiasco.

McCallum stepped out of line earlier when he told Chinese journalists that Wanzhou had a strong defence against the American extradition bid because the crime alleged is an extraterritorial matter, i.e. the offence alleged would not be a crime in Canada. Unlike the United States, Canada has not turned on Iran. And Trump's careless remark about how Wanzhou would make a useful bargaining chip in Washington's trade war with Beijing suggests the American prosecution is political, not criminal. All of his points are eminently reasonable.

Apparently McCallum went too far for this prime minister when he told a local paper in Vancouver that it would be "great for Canada" if Washington dropped the extradition case.

McCallum served in the governments of Chretien, Martin and Trudeau.

Will This Be the Final Nail in Trump's Coffin?

Donald Trump rode one signature phrase straight into the White House - "Make America Great Again." The TV show hustler convinced the Gullibillies, his base, that he was an unparalleled real estate tycoon, master of the 'art of the deal,' and, just like those other hucksters, the 'prosperity gospel' preachers, he would rain wealth down on his followers until they were sick of winning and the weight of all that windfall cash. He even plunged the US a trillion dollars deeper in debt to float a tax cut for the rich, reviving the 'trickle down' madness in the developed nation that has the worst inequality problem of them all. That money which Trump said would spark an economic Nirvana instead was diverted into share buybacks and executive compensation, not economic expansion.

A lot of Trump's first two years in office was marked by arm twisting, browbeating, even outright threats to not just Democrats but also congressional Republicans.  With the feckless House leader, Paul Ryan, and the utterly servile Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, Trump rode'em hard and put'em away wet.

Trump, however, is no master of the 'art of the deal.' He is master of the con. That's something many people have learned first-hand. People like the unpaid trades who constructed his buildings. People like the investors who poured their money into Trump's failed casinos. Even the saps who paid big bucks to enroll in the laughably named "Trump University."

Trump's administration has been the ultimate expression of a con artist and, like all cons, it cannot last. He's got a lot of weight bearing down on him. The House is now in the Democrat's control. The Mueller investigation is closing in, the latest to fall being Trump's longtime buddy and fixer, Roger Stone. Big as those threats may be, Trump's greatest problem could turn out to be the economy.

Business Insider reports a sharp decline in home sales in 2018 that could spell bad news for the American economy. It's the same phenomenon that presaged nine out of the eleven recessions in America in the postwar era.

As 2018 headed toward its close, Americans' appetites for buying homes fell off a cliff. 

In December, the rate of existing US home sales cratered to 4.99 million, 10.3% below the mark from the year-ago period, according to data released earlier this week by the National Association of Realtors. 

That's the steepest decline in more than seven years, and it followed year-over-year declines of 7.8% in November and 5.1% in October.

...At two of the largest bank mortgage originators and servicers in the US, the numbers were more pronounced. 

At Wells Fargo, mortgage banking revenues fell 50% to $467 million in the fourth quarter, while originations declined 28% to $38 billion. 

JPMorgan, meanwhile, saw mortgage income fall to $203 million, a 46% drop from the same period last year. Originations fell 30% to $17.2 billion.

Can We Not Stop Ourselves?

It's called AGW or anthropogenic global warming. It's warming that is anthropogenic, i.e. man-made, and it's global, just as humans now populate just about every corner of the Earth.

Nobody gets a pass. We're all in on this and we all bear the obligation to deal with it through mitigation, emissions cuts, and adaptation, bracing for the crash.

Nobody gets a pass but some are certainly more accountable than others.  We call this group the major emitters and, when you get into their ranks, you run into the real distraction machine.

When it comes to the major emitters club there are two kinds of memberships. There are countries that, by virtue of their enormous populations, emit far more than other nations. Then there are countries, like our own, where the population has a massive, per capita, emissions problem.

Countries like ours often resort to disgustingly greasy sophistry. That begins with the fairy tale that, because we're so small in numbers, we really don't make much difference so now, if you'll just step aside, we'll be on our way. We don't do that so overtly any more but you can still find oblique references on government web sites.  And, when we crunch our numbers, we take no responsibility for the future emissions from the highest-carbon, ersatz petroleum also known as bitumen that we sell abroad.  We'll flood the world markets with the stuff if we can get that pipeline up and running.  One thing I know is that Andrew Scheer's people and Justin Trudeau's people both think that flogging bitumen is a proper and principled thing for Canada.

We got a blunt warning recently. If we want a reasonable chance to avoid  catastrophic climate change, we must cut humanity's greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030. We've now got less than a dozen years, the smallest of windows, to make this happen. A dozen years in which we may decide the future of human civilization if there even is to be one. So, as that old commercial asked, "where's the beef?"

There's that line about when you want to get yourself out of a hole the first thing you must do is stop digging. We're still digging and faster than ever.  Global emissions shot up in 2018, partly thanks to Trump's "burn the place down" energy policies. 2019 is going to be another record year for CO2 levels.

OPEC, the global oil cartel, sees a bright future for all forms of fossil energy, coal included.

Opec’s annual report significantly revised production estimates upwards. Most of the production increase will come from countries outside Opec, led by explosive growth from frackers in the United States, with China and India leading the increase in demand. 

Opec expects global oil demand to reach nearly 112m barrels per day by 2040, driven by transportation and petrochemicals. That is up from almost 100m today and higher than last year’s projection. 

Coal will continue to be be burned in record amounts, despite concerns about its impact on climate change. Opec estimates that coal usage in the OECD countries will plummet by a third by 2040, but it will increase by 20% in developing countries to reach five times the volumes burned in the west.

So, did you get that? We're supposed to cut emissions by half by 2030. We're now burning up 100 million barrels of oil per day. By 2040 we'll have ratcheted that up, not down but up, to 112 barrels per day. And, while the developed nations may have cut their coal consumption by a modest third by 2040 (I know, WTF!) developing countries will more than make up for it.

The OPEC numbers aren't wishful thinking. The International Energy Agency projections bear them out.

Meanwhile Earth, our one and only biosphere, the environment without which there is no life on this planet, is showing increasing signs of contagion.

We just learned that the Greenland ice sheet is melting four times faster than we had imagined. Globally, our oceans are heating at a record pace. We're told that, within the decade, the rich Barents Sea could transform from an Arctic marine environment to an Atlantic Ocean environment and eventually lose its bountiful cod stocks. Australia this summer isn't baking, it's on "high broil."

Meanwhile, a 16 year old girl goes to Davos to ask world leaders and the titans of commerce and industry to abruptly reverse course, to spare the world and humanity from their predations, even as she knows full well they won't.

I'll end this with a comment left on this blog by reader, Cap.

We have only one chance to get this right, and only a decade to do it in. Failure leads to human extinction. You'd think that would focus the mind. But no, it's business as usual.

As 16-year-old Greta Thunberg told the Masters of the Universe in Davos,

"Some people say that the climate crisis is something that we all have created. But that is not true because if everyone is guilty, then no one is to blame. And someone is to blame. 

"Some people, some companies and some decision-makers in particular have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money. And I think many of you here today belong to that group of people. 

"I want to challenge those companies and those decision-makers into real and bold climate action. To set their economic goals aside and to safeguard the future living conditions for humankind. 

"I don't believe for one second that you will rise to that challenge. But I want to ask you all the same. I ask you to prove me wrong." 

Well, JT, what are you waiting for? 

Cap

Memo to the Oil-Heads

"Sold Out" There's An Understatement.

The Petro-Pimps of Parliament Hill, pose as stewards of the environment but they sure like to tell a lot of lies.  Trudeau says he's fighting climate change but then sweeps aside First Nations and other environmentalists obstructing his best efforts to flood world markets with toxin-rich, high-carbon bitumen. The guy is either schizophrenic or he's a manipulative liar. I don't think he has a disease of the mind.

Trudeau's petro-policies, like his predecessor's, need to be seen in the context of what's happening in the world and what's happening is not good.

The level of climate-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is forecast to rise by a near-record amount in 2019, according to the Met Office. 

The increase is being fuelled by the continued burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of forests, and will be particularly high in 2019 due to an expected return towards El Niño-like conditions. This natural climate variation causes warm and dry conditions in the tropics, meaning the plant growth that removes CO2 from the air is restricted. 

Levels of the greenhouse gas have not been as high as today for 3-5m years, when the global temperature was 2-3C warmer and the sea level was 10-20 metres higher. Climate action must be increased fivefold to limit warming to the 1.5C rise above pre-industrial levels that scientists advise, according to the UN. But the past four years have been the hottest on record and global emissions are rising again after a brief pause.

I detested how the Harper government made Canada a climate change "pariah," the subject of well-deserved ridicule and mockery in other countries. I detest how the Trudeau government has picked up the bitumen ball from the Tories, determined to run it into the end zone. We're still a pariah only one that is more determined than ever to do its bit to make everything that much worse.

No matter. Come this fall, some 70 to 80 percent of the voting public will cast ballots for the Liberals or the Conservatives who, thanks to first-past-the-post, have an electoral sinecure, their gnarled fingers firmly around the throat of this once proud country.  

Focus on the Barents, Pt. 2

Yesterday it was reported that global warming is transforming the Barents Sea from an Arctic sea into an Atlantic sea.

Now a paper published by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme warns that the changes underway could wipe out the Barents' bountiful cod stocks.

The grim forecast is based on the most comprehensive study to date of the effects of climate change on cod, which – for the first time – takes into account ocean acidification as well as warming. 

It found larvae mortality rates were 75% higher when exposed to the combined pressures of the two factors – both of which are caused by emissions – than to heating alone. As a result, fish numbers, catches and revenues will decline faster than previously estimated. 

The Barents Sea, which is in the Arctic, is a major source of seafood nutrition for northern Europe. Along with Iceland, it is a key source of cod imports into the UK, which has over-fished its own waters. More Atlantic fish are migrating into this region as a result of global warming.

But this ocean has the highest level of acidification in the world because cold water absorbs more carbon dioxide, which changes its pH level. It is also the ocean that is experiencing the fastest rates of heating. While the global average is a rise of 1.1C since the start of the industrial revolution, the coastal breeding grounds of the cod in the Barents Sea have experienced a temperature increase of 3.5C. 

Unless the warming trend is controlled, the stocks will see a boom and then a bust.

This marine exodus is proof positive of the reality, even the severity, of global warming.  Fish and marine mammals and sea birds aren't interested in the sophistry of climate change deniers. The entire food chain is on the move in one direction - poleward.  In British Columbia's coastal waters these newcomers range from krill to sardines to transient orca to humpback whales and many more.  And, yes, ocean acidification is already having impacts especially on oyster and scallop beds.  The extra acid in the water makes it more difficult for these creatures to grow proper shells.

But petro-state governments nestled thousands of miles from the coast can't be too engaged with these impacts, not when they're aiming to flood world markets with toxin-laden, high-carbon bitumen that can only add to the warming and the acidification of our oceans.  This is Alberta's and Ottawa's giant "fuck you" to coastal British Columbians. And they claim we're the problem.

Yes, Roger, It's "Politically Motivated"

After making bail, longtime Trump confidante, Roger Stone, dismissed the charges against him as "politically motivated." Hard to argue with that. The crimes for which he now stands charged were entirely politically motivated.

The theft of Democratic party emails was politically motivated. Leaking those emails to Julian Assange, that was politically motivated. The connivance of the Trump campaign with Wikileaks, even if it was conducted by Trump-friendly middlemen, was politically motivated.  The major dump of stolen emails by Assange on the very same day as the Access Hollywood tape of Trump boasting about his ability to grope women was politically motivated.  The timing of the release of the Trump tape and the release of the Clinton emails was coordinated and Steve Bannon was delighted. That was no coincidence. It was orchestrated. Lying to Congress was politically motivated. The witness tampering was politically motivated.

These are all political crimes and any prosecution of those crimes will reflect that.  So when dirty trickster Roger Stone says the prosecution is tainted, he's just blowing smoke up your arse.

It's not surprising that Stone made a gesture on the courthouse steps that we haven't seen for a while.

In case you don't know, Roger Stone idolizes Tricky Dicky. He even has Nixon's face tattooed on his back.

Stone left the courthouse in Fort Lauderdale to a crowd changing "lock him up, lock him up."

The Next Front in the New Cold War? Canada's Back Yard.

Vlad Putin is shrewd when it comes to exploiting weakness or carelessness in others.  When he looks to the Arctic, that's exactly what he sees.

The climate crisis is intensifying a new military buildup in the Arctic, diplomats and analysts said this week, as regional powers attempt to secure northern borders that were until recently reinforced by a continental-sized division of ice. 

That so-called unpaid sentry is now literally melting away, opening up shipping lanes and geo-security challenges, said delegates at the Arctic Frontiers conference, the polar circle’s biggest talking shop, who debated a series of recent escalations. 

Russia is reopening and strengthening cold war bases on the Kola peninsula in the far north-west of the country. Norway is beefing up its military presence in the high Arctic.

Sweden, which already has 65,000 nuclear bomb shelters, is planning to add thousands more to protect the extra three million Swedes it has acquired since the height of Cold War I.

“Right now, the reasons we are seeing more military activity is that countries are worried by the spectre of open water,” one of the speakers, Klaus Dodds, a professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, told the Guardian. “The unique Arctic security architecture has shape and form that come from natural extremities. If the Arctic becomes just another ocean, this breaks down. It’s elemental.”

As noted in the previous post, the Barents Sea is expected to go from an Arctic sea to an Atlantic sea over the next decade and that is predicted to spread to other Arctic regional seas.

The Arctic’s unique characteristics are under attack from all sides. Below, the once-frozen ocean is now mixed with warmer, more saline Atlantic waters. In the skies above, the polar vortex above is weakening, allowing intrusions of balmy air currents from the south. 

Sea ice is being lost at a rate of more than 10,000 tonnes per second, according to Tore Furevik, a professor at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Bergen. “We’re heading for a new and uncertain Arctic with ramifications for nature and politics,” he said. “We should strive to be less suspicious, less hostile and more open-minded if we are to deal with a problem that we have so recklessly created.”

The Barents Flipping Point

It's not so much a tipping point as a flipping point. The Barents Sea, a component of the Arctic Ocean much like the Beaufort Sea or the Chukchi Sea, is heating rapidly.

A rapid climate shift under way in the Barents Sea could spread to other Arctic regions, scientists warn. 

The Barents Sea is said to be at a tipping point, changing from an Arctic climate to an Atlantic climate as the water gets warmer. 

A conference in Norway heard that the Kara Sea and the Laptev Sea – both further to the east - are likely to become the new Arctic frontier.
The scientists warn that it will affect ecosystems.

The Arctic Ocean has a cold, fresh surface layer which acts as a cap on a layer of warm, saltier Atlantic water beneath. 

But now in the Barents Sea there’s not enough freshwater-rich sea-ice flowing from the high Arctic to maintain the freshwater cap. And that’s allowing warm, salty Atlantic water to rise to the surface. 

In what’s known as a feedback loop - the more the layers mix, the warmer the surface gets. And the warmer the surface gets, the more the waters mix. 

So it’s now only a matter of time, the researchers say, before this section of the Arctic effectively becomes part of the Atlantic. It could happen in as little as a decade, they warn.

Now you might be a Trudeau or Scheer acolyte or just a petro-state Canadian but these changes, that we can no longer stop but sure as hell can speed up, will have serious impacts on Canada and the world.  We've been warned, repeatedly, that we're out of time and our only hope of averting catastrophic climate change is to immediately slash our greenhouse gas emissions, meaning we have to put the brakes on our fossil fuel industries. Yet this year we will elect one of two jackasses who are bent on flooding world markets with the most toxic, highest-carbon ersatz petroleum on the planet.  Vote for Trudeau or Scheer, that's what you're endorsing.

Be Careful What You Wish For, Rachel

With an election looming and Jason Kenney breathing down her neck, Rachel Notley is spending millions of dollars, 23 million, her government doesn't have to demonize British Columbia as the bane of Alberta's existence.

One of Rachel's brain farts is to depict BC as, to use Joe Oliver's word, "inimical" not only to Alberta but the entire rest of Canada as illustrated in this made-in-Alberta graphic.

Using BC as her whipping boy is sleazy. Rachel Notley is a sleazebag.  Then again, as a coastal British Columbian, I look at Notley's graphic with a sense of, oh I don't know, whimsy? For Notley rekindles warm memories of British Columbia's own Rafe Mair, who, a few months before his death, penned this, a call for this province to finally rid ourselves of Canada:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rafe's gone. Here I stand.

The Meritocracy Myth

A new report from the London School of Economics shows how the Right has fostered the myth of meritocracy to render the have-nots complacent to inequality. The report, "Divided societies more likely to accept inequality," finds that "people in some of the most unequal societies are the ones that are the least concerned about it."

From The Guardian:

Looking at surveys across 23 western countries since the 1980s, Dr Jonathan Mijs of the London School of Economics International Inequalities Institute monitors how, as countries become less equal, attitudes of the majority shift in the wrong direction.

People come to believe more strongly that their country is a meritocracy where hard work and talent take people to the top. They are less likely to think structural inequalities help or hinder people’s rises. The US, home of the American dream – the myth that everyone has an equal chance to rise from log cabin to White House – is the most unequal, yet 95% now firmly believe in meritocracy. The UK, Australia and New Zealand are not far behind, sharing this anglophone disease, a societal “body dysmorphia”: other European countries are less inclined to justify inequality, though the movement has been in that direction. This is the neoliberal triumph over hearts and minds. 

The meritocracy myth comes with other tropes, especially placing the blame on the poor, with decreasing social empathy. Believing people sink through their own fault is the necessary adjunct for proving that the mega-wealthy got there by merit alone.

...Yet riots are extraordinarily rare – the French have always done it: it’s in their founding revolutionary DNA, and it helps to keep them less unequal than the anglophones. Fear of revolution in the cold war years kept unions strong and boardrooms wary of excess: the mid-70s, famed for union militancy, were the most equal years in British history. 

This research suggests that as countries get more unequal, people live in greater social isolation, locked within a narrow income group. Their friends and family share the same incomes, are segregated by neighbourhood and marry similar partners. Children mix less in socially segregated schools. People no longer see over the high social fences, so they don’t know how the other half lives, Mijs finds.

From the LSE study:

The analysis showed a large majority in almost every country and period supporting the view that theirs is a meritocratic society. At least two-thirds of citizens in all countries (apart from Communist-era Poland) - and 95 per cent of Americans — attributed success to meritocratic factors. 

The study also tracked changes in the Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality) over time alongside citizens’ views, finding that citizens in more unequal societies hold stronger beliefs in meritocracy, and weaker beliefs that structural inequalities might help or hinder their pursuit of social mobility. 

This trend was strongest amongst citizens of more unequal societies, who are markedly less concerned about inequality and expressed the strongest belief in meritocracy, compared to those who live in more egalitarian societies.

It seems that this is what befalls those who tolerate neoliberalism which includes most Canadians.  "At least two-thirds of citizens" in all developed countries embrace the meritocracy myth. And that includes Canadians.

You don't have to go to Jonestown to drink the Kool-Aid. Neoliberals in your own country are more than pleased to pour you a refreshing cup of their elixir. All you have to do is believe it's good and drink it.

More, here.

Michael Harris Surfaces - in The Tyee

He's one of Canada's best progressive pundits and, after a long run at iPolitics, he seemed to disappear. Only he didn't. Michael Harris is back. In The Tyee he writes that Trudeau is tarnished by a litany of broken promises but he'll still win the next election.

What a difference four years and a villain-free political landscape can make. 

With Election 2019 looming, the Shiny Pony is dappled with a little mud; the Cons still haven’t found the batteries for their Andrew Scheer doll; and Jagmeet Singh, though doggedly rumbling down the runway, shows no signs of liftoff. 

Voters might need an extra box to check this time around: none of the above.

...The trouble isn’t that the Liberals haven’t done anything.
It is that they have broken faith on so many of the big files. It was those big files that built the coalition that brought the Grits from parliamentary obscurity to majority government, picking up an amazing 148 seats in the process. 

The PM boasted that no file meant more to him than the relationship with First Nations. But his promise of a new deal has turned into the familiar request from Ottawa to Indigenous people in Canada: “Trust us, be patient.” 

That’s hard to do when the inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls looks more like a resignation mill than a public inquiry. Meanwhile, nearly half of the native communities that expected better living conditions by changing prime minsters are still boiling their drinking water. 

Pleading for patience is not a winning strategy when you are dealing with people who have been waiting for Canada to honour treaties, settle land claims, and offer some form of self-government for decades.

...Nor has arresting matronly protestors and land protectors at the Kinder Morgan site, and in the territory of the Wet’suwet’en in northern British Columbia, done much to convince people like Grand Chief Stewart Phillip that Trudeau’s new age of reconciliation has dawned. The chief’s conclusion, like David Suzuki’s and MP Nathan Cullen’s, is that the PM is a “liar.” 

Then there is electoral reform, Trudeau’s “read my lips” moment from 2015. With a single broken promise on ending Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system, a pledge featured in the government’s first throne speech, another giant bite was taken out of Trudeau’s credibility. 

From the point of view of his environmental supporters, no amount of rhetorical tap-dancing in Paris could make up for the fossil-headed decisions on climate matters at home.

...The government’s answer to the bonfire they have made of several key promises is simple: Justin Trudeau’s estimable personal popularity. Canadians like this guy, cool hair, left jab, quirky socks and all. But even that deadliest of political weapons, Trudeau’s likability, has taken some serious hits in his first term.

There was the distinctly bad odour that arose from the “cash-for-access”fundraisers conducted by the Liberals shortly after they took office. 

Trudeau himself had said that there should be “no preferential access” to government. But that is exactly what he sold to high rollers in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

...However things shake out this October, it is clear that the old Liberal coalition is broken. 

First Nations will not be showing up at the polls in record numbers to vote Liberal, as they did in 2015. 

New Democrats who supported the Liberals to dump Harper and get electoral reform will be unlikely to trust their vote to Trudeau this time. 

A lot of environmentalists, sickened by the gulf between the government’s rhetoric on climate change and its petro-politics, may also be looking for a new champion. 

Even centre-right Liberals, put off by the government’s free-spending ways, could decide to shift their vote, or sit this election out.

...Anyway you cut the electoral cake, the Liberals end up with fewer seats in 2019 than they had in the Heave-Steve election of 2015. 

They already have all 32 seats in Atlantic Canada, so there is nowhere to go but down. It is also unlikely that they will win every seat in Toronto again, as they did in 2015. 

Although the Liberals could scoop as many as 10 seats from the NDP meltdown in Quebec, they could easily lose that many in Doug Ford’s Ontario, where polls have the Liberals and the Conservatives running neck and neck. 

Some Liberal seats won in Western Canada in 2015 will be lost over carbon tax anger. The same goes for the few seats Trudeau won in Alberta, as both Premier Rachel Notley and United Conservative Party leader Jason Kenney continue to blast Ottawa for the province’s economic woes in the oil patch. 

British Columbia provides the most intriguing possibilities for some genuine October surprises when the votes are counted. 

It is hard to see how the Liberals can hold on to all 17 seats from 2015, given the organized displeasure their policies have inspired in both First Nations and environmentalists. It goes well beyond mere disagreement; it is betrayal. It is the kind of emotion that puts feet in the street — and bodies in the voting booth.

...The voter turnout will be lower, and when the dust settles, Justin Trudeau will still be prime minister, though probably at the head of a minority government; Andrew Scheer will still be Opposition leader with a few more MPs, and the NDP will be planning another leadership convention. 

The potential Cinderella story of 2019? 

Depending on who attracts the disaffected progressive vote leaking from both the Liberals and the NDP, Elizabeth May could be getting a belated wedding present sometime on the evening of Oct. 21. 

With Green provincial breakthroughs in B.C., Ontario, New Brunswick and P.E.I., May could finally have some parliamentary company in her plucky Party of One.

Rule # 1

The first rule - don't entrust the vulnerable and helpless to the unsupervised care of guys who look like this:

He's practical nurse, Nathan Sutherland, now under arrest for raping a 29-year old woman who has been incapacitated since the age of 3. The assault happened at the Hacienda Healthcare centre where the woman was impregnated and gave birth.

All of Hacienda's male staff provided DNA swabs, all except Sutherland who held out until forced to comply by court order.  Bingo, the holdout was a match. In Arizona, the tariff for this sort of thing runs from 14 years to life depending on aggravating circumstances and, in this case, there seems to be no shortage of those.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Vancouver police have arrested 47 men in connection with an underage sex sting.  Among those swept up were a former Vancouver School Board trustee and a private Catholic girls school teacher.

Here's the thing. If the Vancouver cops can nail 47 of these sexual predators in one operation, they've got a lot more work to do.

Witness Tampering, Mr. Trump?

Michael Cohen has postponed his scheduled appearance to testify before Congress. The reason? His attorney, Lanny Davis, puts it down to "ongoing threats against his family from President Trump."

That is witness intimidation which is witness tampering which is a felony.  Trump recently remarked that Cohen's family should be investigated for shady dealing.

Cohen was scheduled to testify on February 7th. The Washington Post reports that the following day, February 8th, the House Judiciary Committee is expected to grill Trump's acting attorney-general, Whitaker, about whether the White House has interfered in the investigation by special counsel, Robert Mueller.

Nothing Makes a Petro-State Cringe More Than the Truth

Canada is a petro-state. The US is a petro-state. So too are Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, Iraq and many of the Gulf States.

If there's one thing the petro-states can't stand, especially today, it's the truth.  Which is why they'll duck the latest report of the World Resources Institute.

The WRI report focuses mainly on the coal industry and on the subsidies petro-states lavish on their fossil fuel industries.

Removing coal from the global energy mix is taking too long, too many forests are still being destroyed, and fossil fuel subsidies are ongoing despite their distorting effect on the market, a study has found. 

There has also been insufficient progress in agriculture to stop harmful practices that increase carbon dioxide production, and heavy industry is not doing enough to use energy more efficiently, according to analysis carried out by the World Resources Institute thinktank. 

Without progress on all these fronts, the world is unlikely to see global greenhouse gas emissions peak in 2020, which is likely to be necessary to stay within the 1.5C or 2C warming thresholds that scientists have identified as key to the future safety of the planet.

The report recognizes the considerable spread of electrification but notes alternative, clean energy isn't stopping growth in fossil fuels.

...coal-fired generation is still increasing, with coal-fired power plants continuing to be built in some areas, while existing plants are not being removed from service fast enough. Electric vehicles, meanwhile, comprise 1.4% of overall sales, making a 2020 milestone of 15% of new car sales hard to reach.

Former UN climate chief, Christina Figueres, argues that there's no time to waste. She says that climate change must become our governments' top priority.

“The impacts [of climate change] have never been as clear, nor action so urgent, as we are quickly approaching tipping points of no return. It would follow, then, that leaders everywhere should now be discussing this number one concern as their number one priority.” 

She added: “The decisions we take over the next two to three years are crucial for the unprecedented structural changes we must embark on to safeguard our climate and clean up our air. This is the make it or break it opportunity we have, knowing that the world is expected to invest about $90tn on infrastructure in the period up to 2030, with much of this investment to be programmed in the next few years.”

And it's only fair to ask what's on Canada's agenda for the next two to three years. Oh yeah, that's right. It's multi-billion dollar pipelines and flooding world markets with the highest-carbon, toxin laden, ersatz petroleum on the planet, bitumen. But wait, there's more. Canada is going to continue lavish multi-billion dollar subsidies for the foreseeable future. Trudeau has promised to phase out subsidies by 2025 but he's also made us aware of how much his word is worth and it's not much.

It's not that many years ago that Trudeau's predecessor, Ignatieff, lauded the Athabasca Tar Sands as the "beating heart of the Canadian economy for the 21st century." As far as Iggy's successor is concerned, it still is.