Americans Get Real About Climate Change - Finally

For 15 years or more I've been following how Americans respond to the issue of climate change. It's about as politicized an issue as any I can recall. The Repugs have been a million shades of angry denial. The Dems, perhaps fearful of upsetting the voting public, have not always been that much better.

One inescapable truth was that, sooner or later, reality would prevail over partisan political bullshit. That's physics for you. There's no way to get around it. Even King Canute knew better.

Canute set his throne by the sea shore and commanded the incoming tide to halt and not wet his feet and robes. Yet "continuing to rise as usual [the tide] dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person. Then the king leapt backwards, saying: 'Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.'"

Now Republicans aren't as smart as King Canute. They've got about as much grasp of climate change in all its dimensions as my dog and he knows, when the tide comes in, to move higher up the beach. But that may be about to change.

Repugs, especially along the southeastern seaboard and the Gulf coast, are finally coming to grips with sea level rise. It's a problem, especially as the east and Gulf coasts are subsiding as the seas keep rising. A piece in the Washington Post claims Republicans are coming out of the "climate closet."

What they've also come to realize is that the public is coming around on the dangers of climate change and there'll be a price to pay at the polls if they don't change their attitude and introduce climate policies. Those angry old white folks are just going to have to bite it. Their days are just about over.

That doesn't mean Congressional Republicans have "seen the light." They haven't, especially when it comes to funding climate action. There'll be no carbon taxes for them, not yet anyway.

A new paper published by PLOS/ONE maps how Americans will retreat from the sea and where they'll relocate.  Obviously they'll be heading inland. America's IDPs - internally displaced persons.

“A lot of cities not at risk of sea of level rise will experience the effect of it,” says Bistra Dilkina, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, who led the study. “This will require an adjustment in terms of the [increased] demand on the cities’ infrastructure.” 

Dilkina and her team used migration data from the Internal Revenue Service to analyze how people moved across the U.S. between 2004 and 2014. Movement from seven Katrina and Rita-affected counties to unaffected counties between 2005 and 2006 was categorized as climate-driven migration. Researchers then combined that analysis with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) projections on the effects of sea level rise on coastal counties, and trained a machine-learning model to predict where coastal populations will move when forced to leave their homes—and how that, in turn, affects the migration of non-coastal residents.

The authors conclude that many of the displaced people will try to relocate to nearby cities, to stay as close as possible to everything they had to leave.

...cities closest to the flood-prone areas, and that aren’t typically attractive destinations for newcomers, could see a higher-than-average influx of migrants. In Florida, for example, that means people may increasingly move to the shrinking core of the peninsula as the coastlines disappear into the ocean. Demographer Mathew Hauer, whose climate migration research was a building block for Dikina’s, explained in Audubon Magazine that people tend to move to familiar places nearby, where they might already have friends, family, or some other support network. People may also flock to major urban centers like Dallas and Houston, which the model predicts will absorb the most migrants, and drive up the pace of urbanization.

There'll be a process of "climate gentrification" as displaced newcomers settle into towns and cities, in turn displacing the poorest residents.  But, for many, moving inland won't be much of an answer. It may be out of the frying pan but into the fire.

For one thing, sea level rise is just one effect of climate change. Heat waves will drive people north—and could make make cities like Duluth and Buffalo “climate havens.” Urban flooding will reshuffle populations within a city. And extreme storms will move people in yet other ways. Meanwhile, as in Paradise, “forest fires are going to have dramatic effects on the West Coast, including the Pacific Northwest,” says Keenan. “All of those things are changing land economics, housing economics, and public finance.”

And, of course, you can't take it with you. For most Americans, the house is their major asset. A lot of those buildings will be abandoned. People have to start over. That's doable when it's an isolated problem. When it's whole neighbourhoods, entire counties, that's far tougher.  Severe storm events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration; droughts and floods, heat waves, the loss of groundwater resources - it all adds up to a migration north. (Hey, the Euros are onto this too. The Scandinavians foresee their Baltic beaches becoming the next big resorts replacing the Mediterranean getaways.)

Rush Limbaugh - One Smoke Over the Line

He's the dean of open-mouth radio, widely loved by American nativists, xenophobes, racists, misogynists and garden-variety bigots and just as widely deplored by everyone else.

Rush Limbaugh, whose signature prop was a big fat stogie, told his audience today that he has advanced-stage lung cancer.

Along with Bill Cosby, Limbaugh has even graced the cover of Cigar Afficionado.

I don't wish him ill but, then again, he's taken care of that himself. 

On his radio show, news about the homeless has often been preceded with the Clarence "Frogman" Henry song "Ain't Got No Home." For a time, Dionne Warwick's song, "I Know I'll Never Love This Way Again" preceded reports about people with HIV/AIDS. These later became "condom updates" preceded by Fifth Dimension's song, "Up, Up and Away". For two weeks in 1989, on his Sacramento radio show, Limbaugh performed "caller abortions" where he would end a call suddenly to the sounds of a vacuum cleaner and a scream. He would then deny that he had "hung up" on the caller, which he had promised not to do. Limbaugh claims that he used this gag to illustrate "the tragedy of abortion" as well as to highlight the question of whether abortion constitutes murder. During the Clinton administration, while filming his television program, Limbaugh referred to media coverage of Socks, the Clintons' cat. He then stated, "But did you know there is also a White House dog?" and a picture of Chelsea Clinton was shown.

   

Rush Limbaugh, 69.

The Death Knell for Fossil Fuels?

There's really not much to like in CNBC's brash investment guru, Jim Cramer. Until now.

Cramer warns that the fossil fuel industry has entered the "death knell stage."

Cramer added that "the world's turned on" the industry as they did with tobacco. 

"They're done," Cramer said of fossil fuels on the network's "Squawk Box." "We're starting to see divestment all over the world. We're starting to see ... big pension funds saying, 'We not going to own them anymore." 

"The world's changed," Cramer continued. While companies like BP still mark profits, "nobody cares," because "new money managers want to appease younger people who believe that you can't ever make a fossil fuel company sustainable." 

"You can tell that the world's turned on them, and it's actually kind of happening very quickly," said Cramer. "You're seeing divestiture by a lot of different funds. It's going to be a parade ... that says look, 'These are tobacco, and we're not going to own them.'"

It sounds as if Morneau and Trudeau need to get ahead of this and fast. Canadians may be stuck with Trudeau's multi-billion dollar pipeline but, maybe, if he's lucky they can fire sale it to someone. When we're already running deficits wouldn't it be better to cut our losses where we can?

Oh, and do pass the word to Trudeau's nemesis, Jason Kenney.  His petro-fantasies, it seems, are over. And Jason might want to start collecting the $200 billion it will take to clean up the Tar Sands tailing ponds before the fossil giants fold their tents and steal away into the night.

UPDATE:

Cramer isn't the only one thinking fossil fuel's day in the sun is over.  Young Calgarians, 20-24 year bracket, are pulling up stakes and moving elsewhere. The allure of the oil patch is fading.

It's a refrain Dr. Laura Hambley, president of Calgary Career Counselling, has heard time and time again. 

She says many young people who come to her organization in search of career advice say they would like to stay in Calgary but aren't sure it's realistic. 

"We're hearing concern and worry and fear," she said. 

"They want to choose careers that are viable and where there will be employment … and we're seeing lots of stories about young people who are bright and who have worked hard at post-secondary and yet cannot get a position."

Sarah's Eulogy for a Long-Dead Democracy

Is today's America no longer a democracy but a tyranny? In today's Globe, Sarah Kendzior persuasively makes the argument.

The Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump was never a matter of law. It was always a matter of power. Mr. Trump has openly committed crimes and even confessed to crimes: What is at stake is whether anyone would hold him accountable. The way that Mr. Trump gets out of crimes is not by actually proving his innocence, but by declaring that crimes are not crimes when he commits them. This has been his strategy since his tutelage under the late mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, whose motto “I don’t want to know what the law is, I want to know who the judge is” shapes Mr. Trump’s worldview today. 

In the Senate, Mr. Trump is being judged by a jury of his lackeys. The trial is a loyalty test for Republicans, who will decide whether to take their criminal President and crown him criminal king. It is a test of whether they will obey their own abuser: According to CBS, GOP Senators were allegedly warned that those who voted against Mr. Trump will have their heads “on a pike." The choice for Republicans has always been to pledge fealty to the President or leave; a record number of Republican elected officials have retired since Mr. Trump took office.

...
As I have warned in these pages for years, an autocrat must be stopped early or he will rewrite the law so that he is no longer breaking it. Many officials had the job of holding Mr. Trump accountable – James Comey, Robert Mueller, the Republicans, the Democrats and Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, who sits in the trial like window dressing for the defenestration for democracy – and they have failed to act with the urgency and bravery required. The President does not want to be punished but he loves to get caught. He flaunts every crime he gets away with because it showcases the degradation of law, which ironically was furthered by his opponents’ blind faith in it. 

Last week the Senate debated as to whether the trial would be allowed witnesses. This request had an element of saviour syndrome – the delusion that one person, such as the notorious warmonger John Bolton, would swoop in and set the U.S. straight – but it was also an attempt by the Democrats to honour legal precedent. Since Mr. Trump and his backers’ aim is to destroy legal precedent, thus paving the way for one-party autocratic rule, the GOP voted against it.

...
The gulf between truth and accountability is one of the hardest aspects of living under the Trump administration. We know what happened, and we know that this knowledge will likely not translate into justice. Flagrantly rigged trials are nothing new in the U.S., as any student of black history will tell you. What is new is the capitulation of an entire party to a corrupt president. . We didn’t need another witness to take the stand and tell us that.

News From the Front - "What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear"

Something is happening that the climate modelers didn't foresee. Well, most of them anyway.  Bloomberg reports their models are suddenly running "red hot."

There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they’ve agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3° Celsius. It’s an outcome that would be disastrous—flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat—but there’s been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations.

Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections in excess of 5°C, a nightmare scenario. 

The scientists involved couldn’t agree on why—or if the results should be trusted. Climatologists began “talking to each other like, ‘What’d you get?’, ‘What’d you get?’” said Andrew Gettelman, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which builds a high-profile climate model.

I know one climate scientist who probably doesn't find these revelations bizarre or disturbing. He's the guy who runs the climate science lab at the University of Hawaii, Camilo Mora.  His team's modeling predicted a new phenomenon they called "climate departure" that was expected to set in early in the 2020s. (He also addresses overpopulation) Their study was published in the journal, Nature, in 2013.

To put it another way, for a given geographic area, “the coldest year in the future will be warmer than the hottest year in the past,” said Camilo Mora, the lead scientist on a paper published in the journal Nature. 

Unprecedented climates will arrive even sooner in the tropics, Dr. Mora’s group predicts, putting increasing stress on human societies there, on the coral reefs that supply millions of people with fish, and on the world’s greatest forests. 

“Go back in your life to think about the hottest, most traumatic event you have experienced,” Dr. Mora said in an interview. “What we’re saying is that very soon, that event is going to become the norm.”

When Mora's team released its paper it created a stir, a short-lived stir that lasted just a few days before it was flushed down the memory hole. Since then other climate scientists have come to the same conclusions. Again, down the memory hole. Now we have Bloomberg reporting on how the major climate models are inexplicably changing, predicting major changes in the Earth's temperature. As the song goes, "Something's happening here."

UPDATE

Today's missive from the science guys who bring you the Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It's about heat - the enormous amount of heat being generated that is cooking the planet. They've invented a new metric, the Hiro. That's the measure of how much heat was created by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in WWII.

The Earth today is heating at the rate of five Hiros per second. That's 300 Hiros per minute. 18,000 Hiros per hour. Damn, that's a lot of heat.

...the use of Hiros has one major upside. Earth and especially its oceans have been accumulating such a vast amount of heat due to human-caused global warming that it’s difficult to comprehend. Most people have little if any sense what 10 zettajoules per year—the amount of heat energy absorbed per year by the Earth—means. That’s why climate communicators have searched for a metric of comparison that the public can grasp. It’s relatively easy to visualize five atomic bombs detonating every second, and consequently comprehend the vast amount of energy being absorbed by the Earth’s climate system. 

For those who nevertheless object to the Hiros analogy, perhaps microwaves offer a more palatable comparison. The heat accumulating in Earth’s oceans over the past 25 years is also equivalent to every person now on Earth running 35 standard household microwave ovens nonstop during Justin Bieber’s entire lifetime

...
The good news: the rate at which we’ve been adding heat to Earth’s climate hasn’t changed much over the past two decades. The bad news: to avoid a potential climate catastrophe, global heating needs to begin declining soon and rapidly, which will require international implementation of numerous ambitious climate policies. 

So far, many governments appear more inclined to keep increasing fossil fuel extraction than taking the necessary steps to slow global heating. Political leaders in many countries can implement these destructive policies without fear of losing power because too few people grasp the urgency of the climate crisis. Perhaps visualizing global heating as five atomic bomb detonations per second will help convey that sense of urgency to more people.

Hmm. Political leaders "inclined to keep increasing fossil fuel extraction." I wonder who that could be?

And This, Kids, Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

It's not just that governments don't tax enough. It's that they don't tax big incomes and big wealth nearly enough. Economist and professor Richard Wolff argues that modern global capitalism is theft on a massive scale.

In modern capitalism, governments routinely borrow money. They do this to finance budget deficits that occur when governments raise less in taxes than they spend. Governments also borrow to invest in long-term projects of economic development. The swindling occurs when the lenders and borrowers—usually private financiers and career politicians—negotiate loans that serve their own particular interests at the expense of the taxpayers who eventually cover the costs of repaying the government’s loans plus interest on them. 

If governments raised enough taxes to cover their desired levels of spending, they would not need to borrow. Taxes imposed on the wealthiest corporations and individuals would be the most equitable strategy. The corporate wealthy protest, of course, threatening that if taxed, they might reduce their contributions to the economy (investing less, etc.). Most government politicians sympathize with those protests. Many come from the ranks of the wealthiest corporations and individuals (or aspire to join them). They share similar ideologies and depend on campaign donations from them. Compliant politicians typically exaggerate the negative aspects of taxing corporations and the rich. They rarely compare them to the negative effects of the alternatives: taxing middle and lower income people more or cutting government spending.

I can't quite explain it but I just keep coming back to a finance minister, a really rich guy, working for a trust fund boss, who blithely consigns the public to a future of "job churn." What was his name?

...
Deficit finance—the polite veneer for this swindle—deepens inequality in the United States and everywhere else it is practiced. It redistributes wealth from the mass of people (taxpayers) to the richest who “save” by means of lower taxes and then “invest” those “savings” in government loans. In transferring money from the many to a few, deficit finance operates like a lottery.

Keep these thoughts in mind when the major impacts of climate change arrive and we can no longer afford to ignore them. By then we'll be playing a deep game of "catch up" and the costs we have so successfully fended off will be far greater. That's when you'll see the PPP scam, the public-private-partnership game at full bore.

I know, I know - the photo identifies Wolff as a Marxist economist. Well, unless you've had your head buried in the turnip patch, you should know that a good bit of what Marx wrote and we angrily denounced for decades, is coming to pass.  Even prominent, mainstream economists such as Nouriel Roubini admit as much.

Chris Hedges Has a Point

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

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

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

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

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

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

The retreat into illusion.

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

What lies ahead.

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

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

Peter MacKay and the Conservative Party Leadership

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

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

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

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

Shots are being fired across bows.

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

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

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

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

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

Trench warfare.

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

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

Tossing grenades.

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

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

Europe lobs a few grenades of its own.

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

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

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

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

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

Ireland wants BoJo to grow up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chevron Takes 2 Billion Dollar Hit on Kitimat LNG

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

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

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

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

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

Overkill?

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

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

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

Airbus and the Ghost of Brian Mulroney

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump's "Little Blue Dress" Moment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

French Navy Sails to Defend Greece - Against Turkey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicola Sturgeon - Scotland Wants Out

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

First minister, Nicola Sturgeon, put it plainly:

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

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

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

"Leave a Light On"

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Toronto's Head on the Climate Block?

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

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

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

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

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

Brexit - the Final Countdown

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

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

Then there's Northern Ireland. Ouch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, Justin. Trans Mountain Pipeline Destroyed Salmon Habitat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better Than Nothing? Not Really.

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

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

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

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

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

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