A "Harper-Whipped Throwback"

That's how Michael Harris sees Tory leadership hopeful, Peter MacKay.

He can’t speak French, he views the media as either a vanity mirror or the enemy, and a rubber boot has more ideas.

So why is Peter MacKay the favourite to become the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada? 

Chaos. The truth is the CPC is a hot mess at the moment. It is desperately looking for the stability of a well-known party figure to restore order. Pierre Poilievre, Rona Ambrose, and Jean Charest didn’t want the job. That is the best thing MacKay has going for him, no serious rivals, and trouble in the CPC family.

...

At his official campaign launch, MacKay couldn’t even manage token French, those dreadful, memorized, stumbling mutilations of the language politicians try to pass off as fluency when in Quebec. He was roasted in Quebec papers for his illiterate assertion “J’ai sera candidate.” The Journal de Quebec responded with the headline “Good Luck Mister.” 

How could a guy live and work in Ottawa for more than a decade and still not be coherent in one of the country’s two official languages? 

That is a question that becomes all the more damning, because so much language-training is available to MPs and cabinet ministers in the nation’s capital.

...
MacKay has yesterday’s solutions to tomorrow’s problems. That hardly passes the “Greta” test, and none of it will fly with young Canadians.

MacKay is no more electable outside the semi-friendly confines of the CPC than Harper was in 2015. The party has learned nothing from consecutive electoral defeats. It continues to blame “messaging” instead of piss poor, out of touch policy. And marching in a gay pride parade one day before Conservatives pick their leader at the convention, as MacKay has said he will, looks more like optics than a change of heart.

... 

His signature move as a Progressive Conservative was to abandon the party’s traditions, the better to embrace the Reform vision of Harper. It was not a merger so much as a surrender.

To diehard Progressive Conservatives like David Orchard, it was also treachery. In presiding over the demise of the PC party, MacKay did exactly what he promised Orchard he would not do — lead the party into merger oblivion. 

As for the value of MacKay’s resume as a Harper cabinet minister, it is highly dubious. It was MacKay who named Michael Sona as the culprit in the Guelph robocalls scandal — and he did it before Sona had been formally charged. That is not normally what justice ministers do. 

As minister of defence, MacKay became famous for being photographed hopping in and out of the cockpit of a fake F-35 Stealth fighter jet. He was less forthcoming with real information about this troubled aircraft, including its mind-blowing cost and chronic problems. 

It took the Parliamentary Budget Office and Kevin Page to reveal that the government had monstrously lowballed the most expensive acquisition to that point in Canadian military history. And the deception had been done deliberately, ostensibly to spare Canadians from “sticker shock” if the real price were admitted.

MacKay was also part of the CPC caucus that voted unanimously not to exempt Veterans Affairs from government-wide cuts, a move that would reduce their benefits, including their medical care. 

Harper wanted to balance the budget in time for the 2015 election, regardless of whether that meant ending postal delivery, closing scientific facilities or cutting services to veterans. MacKay went along. 

The follies MacKay committed during his tenure as a Harper cabinet minister were sometimes funny, sometimes outrageous.

Andrew Nikiforuk - Canada Chooses Colonialism Again

The Trudeau government isn't exactly winning the hearts and minds contest with British Columbians.  Ditto for John Horgan's NDP.

The Tyee's Andrew Nikiforuk writes that Canada is once again lapsing into colonialism in its confrontations with BC's First Nations.

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

— Albert Camus

Whenever Canada has a chance to depart from its brutal colonial past with First Nations, it automatically lapses into bad habits.

On Thursday, the RCMP and the Canadian state came to a moral crossroads on a snowy country road and looked briefly down a pathway to reconciliation. Then it said, “Fuck it.” 

A highly militarized police presence once again used force against Wet’suwet’en protestors blocking the construction of a $6.6-billion methane pipeline needed to feed a grossly uneconomic $40-billion liquefied natural gas project. 

In so doing the police made a mockery of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 

It is not a complicated document. As criminologist Jeff Monaghan notes, the declaration expects “that conflicts like this will not be resolved violently or militarily but with negotiated solutions. The document directs us to do peaceful negotiated solutions that respect everyone’s rights, and equally.” 

That didn’t happen.

As reliable agents of the Canadian state and defenders of resource extraction, the RCMP let it be known that the Trudeau government puts highly subsidized methane projects ahead of reconciliation and UN declarations.

Let’s be clear: in Canada, low-priced natural gas matters more than unresolved land claims.

By implication the government also told the nation that it puts uneconomic LNG projects ahead of climate change, given that serious methane leaks from the shale gas industry are now accelerating that chaos. 

It, too, advances LNG ahead of the destruction of the arable lands and First Nations treaty rights in Peace River. 

...
But what about the 20 First Nations that have signed on to the project, you might ask?
Yes, they signed and the negotiations were colonial. It was sign or get nothing. Many nations signed under severe constraints. Nor were they presented with economic alternatives. 

As legal scholar and expert in Indigenous rights Dayna Scott has noted, Indigenous leaders are faced with a “false choice. They’re being asked to choose whether or not they want to sign a deal and get some benefits for their people for a pipeline that’s going to go through whether or not they agree to it.”

Now consider the position of Hereditary Chief Na’Moks (John Ridsdale). He is not willing to settle for mutual benefit agreements or the modern equivalent of beads and trinkets:

“They wanted access to the land, and we said you’re not getting access, you’ll never get approval, not from the hereditary chiefs and not from our people.” A colonial mind, however, can’t fathom such arguments, because it still refuses to come to terms with the nation’s dirty past.

For the most part Canadians remain an arrogant mining people with little regard for the truths of our colonial history. Most still think we have nothing to acknowledge, let alone make amends for.

The farce of "reconciliation."

... 

The Canadian state’s willingness to ignore reconciliation is even more galling when you consider its colonial defence of the preposterous economics of LNG and fracked gas in northern B.C. 

In Canada, LNG development has become an absurd Soviet engine that ignores costs and environmental damages. 

But being Canadian, it drapes itself with the plastic word “responsible.” 

“Responsible” subsidies for the foreign-funded LNG industry now include low royalties; nearly $1 billion worth of royalty credits; discounted electricity prices; reduced corporate income taxes; free water for fracking; reduced carbon taxes and the deferral of provincial sales taxes during construction. The Canadian government even invested $275 million in LNG Canada! 

These subsidies, however, still can’t make LNG economic. In 2018 the Canadian Energy Research Institute examined the economics of LNG. 

It concluded that Western Canada LNG would be $1 to $3 more expensive than the current spot price in Japan of $8 per million (BTU) and needed more subsidies and tax credits.

CERI then calculated what the LNG industry would need in terms of future prices to remain economically viable: a market price of $8.99 per million BTU or higher in Asia to break even. Or an oil price of approximately $80 or higher to break even under long-term LNG contracts.

Those conditions don’t exist and show no signs of coming into being.

A global LNG supply glut has collapsed prices in Asia to as low as $5.5 per million BTU in Japan and India. Analysts say the glut could last years. 

Meanwhile oil prices, which influence LNG pricing, remain in the doldrums. 

Unless the Canadian and B.C. governments are prepared to give away LNG, neither Coastal GasLink nor LNG Canada are economic at this point in time. 

These appalling economics explain why Chevron pulled out of the Kitimat LNG project last fall. At the same time, Chevron wrote off $11 billion in underperforming shale gas assets in Appalachia due to low prices and overproduction.

...
And let’s not strut like peacocks and talk about the rule of law as Horgan has done. 

In Alberta, oil and gas companies now break the law every day. They owe $172 million in taxes to rural municipalities and millions more to landowners for unpaid surface leases. 

Does Alberta Premier Jason Kenney arrest the offending white collar criminals and charge them with breaking civil contracts? No. He actively excuses their behaviour. 

So there is one rule of law in Canada for insolvent resource extractors, and another law for First Nations, rural municipalities and landowners. 

Fortunately, the Wet’suwet’en respect laws that are thousands of years old. 

They plan on upholding them.

So should we.

Don't Say This Question Hasn't Crossed Your Mind

Is America finished, ruined beyond redemption, a now hopeless case?

It's the sort of question that, once raised, prompts a flood of ready opinion, the sort of deluge that reveals many of us having been asking ourselves this same thing.

The BBC's New York correspondent, Nick Bryant, has this on his mind also.

The new decade in American politics has started with a hangover that keeps on getting worse - a quickening of the downward democratic spiral we have witnessed over the past 30 years. 

So much of what has gone awry has been resident in the trial of Donald Trump. 

The partisan vitriol. The degradation of debate. The use of what were previously rarely used weapons - in this instance impeachment - to escalate America's ceaseless political war. 

This sorry saga has offered yet more proof that, far from being an aberration, the Trump era is a culmination. 

The hyperpartisanship of Republicans and Democrats has been evident in the party-line votes to impeach and acquit. The coarseness and ugliness of political discourse we have heard every day, which prompted the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Robert to tell both sides to dial back the rhetoric.

Trump, the Constitutional Wrecking Ball.

Constantly it is remarked upon how Trump has departed from the norms of presidential behaviour, but one of the main effects of these past three years has been to destroy the shared sense of what those norms should be. As the impeachment trial underscored, Washington cannot even agree on what constitutes right and wrong. Following his acquittal, Donald Trump has claimed a Pyrrhic victory, but there is no doubt about the loser: the country he leads and has helped divide.

...
Trump's victory rally in the East Room of the White House the morning after his acquittal, where Republican jurors stood to applaud, may well come to be seen as a definitive moment - when the party of Reagan truly became the party of Trump. Senators from the Grand Old Party, the GOP, have now clicked on the terms and conditions of the Trump presidency after examining for three years the fine print. They have fallen into line. Many have become his spear-carriers. Striking, too, was how the Attorney General, William Barr, got up from his seat at the event to clap and salute Trump's legal team, suggesting the wall that should exist between prosecutors at the Justice Department and political operatives at the White House has been flattened.
...
The State of the Union address on Tuesday night showed how toxic the air in Washington has become, from the refusal of Donald Trump to shake Nancy Pelosi's hand ahead of his address to her ripping up of his speech afterwards. Never before have we seen such a breakdown of basic decorum, or, in modern times, the hatred it betrayed.
For me, though, the moment that encapsulated the era came when Trump awarded the presidential medal of freedom to the conservative radio host, Rush Limbaugh. The right-wing talk show host is a high priest of polarisation. Few conservatives have done more to pave the way for Donald Trump. With that primetime ceremonial, the president revealed the chronic state of America's disunion.

...

But the chaos of caucus night in Iowa has reminded us again of the country's democratic decay. Even the mechanics of democracy no longer seem to work any more, a problem highlighted in the disputed 2000 election that has not yet been fixed. 

On Tuesday night, we witnessed American polarisation play out in real time. During the impeachment trial it often seemed that the very idea - and ideals - of America was on the stand. 

A broken politics, a broken democracy, a broken country.

Remember How We Admired the Dakota Pipeline Protests?

A lot of Canadians expressed support when American First Nations protesters tried to block the Keystone XL pipeline at Standing Rock in rural North Dakota.

It's Canadian First Nations who are now leading the resistance to the threats posed by pipeline projects supported by both provincial and federal governments.

It's probably time we stood with them, showed a little solidarity.

First Nation protesters have come out in Ontario to block the railway lines between Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. In Winnipeg yesterday local First Nations shut down Portage Avenue in front of the RCMP headquarters.

Pipeline Stasi Shamed into Changing Course. Won't Arrest Journalists for Crime of Journalism.

Apparently  RCMP sleuths have discovered there's something called the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  The pipeline Stasi are in a tactical retreat.

The RCMP is standing down on threats to arrest journalists who are reporting on a police raid in Wet’suwet’en territory in northwest B.C. that began in the early predawn hours on Thursday. The raid has continued into Friday afternoon as police advance down a forest road occupied by Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, Wet’suwet’en members and their supporters in opposition to the Coastal Gaslink pipeline.

Journalists reported being threatened for photographing police in tactical gear, and some were physically removed from the site. But on Thursday evening the RCMP wavered in the face of outrage to infringement on press freedom in an email to Ethan Cox, editor of Ricochet Media. Photojournalist Amber Bracken is also on scene for The Narwhal at Unist’ot’en camp where police are expected to make arrests late Friday or Saturday. 

Earlier that afternoon, Cox tweeted an email he received from an RCMP spokesperson that stated Ricochet journalist Jerome Turner was “subject to all the same restrictions as anyone else within the zone,” and would have to choose to leave or “be subject to arrest.” 

By Thursday evening, the same spokesperson, Chris Manseau, amended the RCMP’s position and said journalists “can rest assured that the RCMP will make every reasonable effort to allow media personnel to get as close as possible to the enforcement area, while ensuring no interference with police operations.”

Decriminalizing journalism. What a novel idea.

It's Up, Up and Away for Trudeau's Folly

It's no wonder the private sector wants nothing to do with "Trudeau's Folly," a.k.a. the Trans-Mountain pipeline.

When Kinder-Morgan dangled the hook there was only one sucker willing to bite - our federal government.  And Trudeau and Morneau took that hook real deep; hook, line and sinker deep.

Those Texas boys, En-Ron alumni, knew how to play the rubes.

There was a reason Kinder-Morgan was going to walk away from Trans-Mountain. They knew how much it would cost to expand that pipeline and they knew it just wasn't viable. Then along came these Ottawa marks with their chequebook, allowing the Texans to score a handsome profit.

The feds have tried to flog the damned thing but the private sector wants nothing to do with Trudeau's Folly. They can see the writing on the wall for high-carbon, low-value fossil fuels. They know the markets are becoming very leery of resources that could overnight turn into "stranded assets." There's a glut of good oil. Why sink tens of billions of dollars that you may never recover into garbage oil?

Colin Powell is credited with formulating the Powell Doctrine that says don't get into something without first knowing how you'll get back out.

Now it's coming out that the budget forecasts for building Trudeau's Folly were about as reliable as Trudeau's judgment in buying the pipeline.

The cost to build the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion has jumped by 70 per cent to $12.6 billion from a three-year-old estimate of $7.4 billion. 

President and CEO Ian Anderson says the company owned by the federal government has spent $2.5 billion to date, including the impact of delays and additional regulatory processes, leaving an additional $8.4 billion needed to complete the project, plus $1.7 billion of financial carrying costs. 

He says the project is now expected to be in service by December 2022. 

The estimate of $7.4 billion was made in 2017 by the previous owner, Houston-based Kinder Morgan, Inc., which sold the expansion project and the existing pipeline to the federal government in 2018 for $4.5 billion.

This being government we probably haven't seen the last cost increase the Canadian public will have to bear from Trudeau's Folly.

Trump Says "Snitches Get Stitches"

You tell the truth about Donald Trump and it'll cost you. There was plenty of that today as the Mango Mussolini, reveling in his staged impeachment acquittal, took his revenge on those whose sin was that they wouldn't lie for him.

First to go was Colonel Alexander Vidman, purged from his job on the National Security Council. His twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vidman, was also shown the door. Both Vidmans were escorted to the White House door by security and told not to come back. Classy. Next up was now ex-ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland.  Like Vidman, Sondland gave evidence before the House impeachment committee that Trump had used hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to shake down the Ukrainian government into investigating Joe Biden and his son.

Snitches get stitches, bitches. Oh well, it could have been worse. At least they didn't wind up like Epstein.

Trump is said to be cleaning house at the National Security Council to shape it more in his image - smaller, less capable, compliant.  The New York Times suggests the purge is just starting.

The ouster of the Vindman brothers and Mr. Sondland may only presage a broader effort to even accounts with the president’s perceived enemies. In the two days since his acquittal in the Senate, Mr. Trump has railed about those who stood against him like Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, calling them “evil,” “corrupt” and “crooked,” while his White House press secretary declared that those who hurt the president “should pay for” it.

Sort of like Stalin, only without the Makarov pistol and the bullet behind the ear.

Pope Francis Says - "Eat the Rich"

Pope Francis says tax policies that favour the rich - tax havens, shelters and such - are part of a "structure of sin."

Speaking at the seminar set up by the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences the Pope criticized “the richest people” for receiving “repeated tax cuts” in the name of “investment and development.” These “tax haven accounts” impede “the possibility of the dignified and sustained development of all social agents,” claims the Pope.

He added that “the poor increase around us” as poverty is rising around the world. This poverty can be ended if the wealthiest gave more. 

“The 50 richest people in the world have an equity equivalent to 2.2 billion dollars. Those fifty people alone could finance the medical care and education of every poor child in the world, whether through taxes, philanthropic initiatives or both. Those fifty people could save millions of lives every year,” the Pope said.

Calling Yourself "Liberal" Doesn't Make You a Liberal

The federal government needs to get their attack dogs under control. The RCMP now resemble East Germany's Stasi. The latest outrage from these thugs is the threat to arrest and prosecute journalists who photograph officers in combat gear at the site of Wet'suwet'en protests in northern BC.

“Reporters need to be there to witness police actions, especially against Indigenous people,” Karyn Pugliese said.

The Wet’suwet’en’s hereditary leaders are opposed to the $6.6 billion Coastal GasLink pipeline, which is under construction to move fracked gas from B.C.’s northeast to LNG Canada’s export facility in Kitimat, B.C. 

“The RCMP need to realize we are not a police state. They don’t get to control editorial,” Pugliese said. 

“The public has a right to know what’s going on so they can make good democratic choices. There’s no role for police to decide they’re going to step in between journalists and the public’s right to know.” 

Pugliese said she confirmed reports that journalists were told by the RCMP not to photograph or film officers in tactical gear carrying assault rifles or arrests — or they’d be at risk of arrest themselves. Police also detained journalists in a van and removed them from the site.

In January the UN called on Justin to call off his dogs. He ignored them.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has issued a triple-barrelled decision calling on Canada to immediately suspend work on the Coastal GasLink pipeline, the Trans Mountain pipeline and the Site C dam until “free, prior and informed consent” is obtained from Indigenous peoples. 

The committee urged Canada to immediately cease the forced eviction of Wet’suwet’en peoples who oppose the Coastal GasLink pipeline and Secwepemc peoples opposed to the Trans Mountain pipeline, to prohibit the use of lethal weapons — notably by the RCMP — against Indigenous peoples and to guarantee no force will be used against them. It also urged the federal government to withdraw the RCMP, along with associated security and policing services, from traditional lands. 

In a two-page decision statement, the committee said it is alarmed by the escalating threat of violence against Indigenous peoples in B.C. and disturbed by the “forced removal, disproportionate use of force, harassment and intimidation by law enforcement officials against Indigenous peoples who peacefully oppose large-scale development projects” on their traditional territories.

It's pretty disgraceful when the UN has to tell your government to withdraw their thugs. It's also a clear indication that the label "Liberal" no longer stands for very much at all.

A Courtroom Full of Criminals

"Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, president of the United States, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help you god?"

That was the oath that bound members of the US Senate as jurors on the impeachment of Donald J. Trump.

"Impartial justice."

Only Chief Justice John Roberts knew, as he administered that oath to Senate Republicans that the one thing they would not deliver was impartial justice.  He knew that he was presiding over a sham. He knew that those Senate Republicans were perjuring themselves as they swore that oath.

Roberts looked the other way.

He knew that acquittal was a foregone conclusion. He knew that the fix was in. He probably knew that some of those senators, those deemed less than wholly reliable, had been intimidated. He knew it was a blatant case of jury tampering, itself a felonious crime.

Yet he looked the other way.

The majority leader, Mitch McConnell, didn't hesitate to tell reporters that he was coordinating the trial with the White House. Imagine a juror who shamelessly admits he is coordinating the trial with the accused. Is that impartial? 

The Resistance Builds

Support is building for the Wet'suwet'en in their resistance to the RCMP clearing protesters out of their lands.

The Tyee and the National Observer are clearly backing the First Nations. So too is the Council of Canadians which has sent an email call to come out in support of the "land defenders."

It's time to speak up and show up in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en Nation as they continue to assert sovereignty on their traditional territories in the face of state violence. A repeat of last year, when the RCMP forcibly removed Wet’suwet’en people and their guests from the Gidimt’en checkpoint, could have been avoided. But despite the fact that the RCMP were authorized to use lethal force against Indigenous land defenders in last year’s raid, the B.C. and federal government have not chosen to de-escalate the situation, putting the lives of Wet’suwet’en people and their supporters at risk. This is unacceptable. Take action today by calling your Member of Parliament. The Wet’suwet’en land defenders are also asking people to show up at local solidarity actions against state violence held across the country on Monday as they say “no” to the Coastal Gaslink (CGL) pipeline through their land.

"A Beaver on Steroids"

Harbour Air has taken to the skies with its first electric-powered de Havilland Beaver.



It wasn't a long flight, about five minutes in all. Long enough to prove that it flies just fine or, as the company CEO and founder, Greg McDougal, who was at the controls put it, "like a Beaver on steroids."

“A revolution starts, as they say, with the first shot,” magniX CEO Roei Ganzarski told National Observer. “And this flight is that shot.” This past March, McDougal partnered with Seattle-based startup magniX, which developed the 750-horsepower Magni500 electric aircraft motor that powered this morning’s flight. 

Ganzarski explained that a variety of factors make Harbour Air, and in particular the routes served by its fleet of DHC-2 de Havilland Beavers, ideal for electrification.

“The Beaver is the perfect plane for this, because it's a workhorse,” said Ganzarski. “It’s a tank. It’s incredibly reliable, easy and simple to operate and modify. If you’re going to try something revolutionary, let's try something that you think has the highest likelihood of success out the door.”

It's believed the electric Beaver will be perfect for the Vancouver to Victoria, harbour to harbour, run.

Will Governments Step In as Markets Bow Out?

The future of fossil energy is precarious. We've been warned of the "carbon bubble" for years by scientists, economists and both of the past governors of the Bank of England. They predicted that the markets would sour on fossil fuels which left stock markets around the world holding some $27 trillion of investments in proven oil reserves. 27 trillion dollars in peril.

We've been hearing rumblings coming from the investment class.  Last week, CNBC's brash market guru, Jim Cramer, pronounced the "death knell" for fossil fuels.

Today the CEO of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, said they'll be steering future investments out of high-carbon, low-value fossil energy.

In 2013, Britain's Financial Times warned of the enormous vulnerability carried by the markets.

There is increasing certainty that climate change is happening and that its impacts are going to be profound. The International Energy Agency says that the world is on course for average temperature rises of at least 4C, not the 2C targeted by policy makers, adding that if we are to stay within the 2C target, two-thirds of fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground. 

“The year ahead will be dominated by growing tension between ever-stronger evidence of climate change and the inadequate policy response,” says Nick Robins, head of the climate change centre at HSBC. Awareness of the severity of climate impacts is likely to be further strengthened in September, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes its fifth review of the science of climate change. 

This implies that high-carbon assets will face increasing regulatory constraints and a growing risk of becoming stranded assets. Yet the average pension fund portfolio has 55 per cent of its assets invested in high-carbon sectors or sectors greatly exposed to climate change, Mr Poulter points out.

That same year the Parkland Institute warned that Canada was succumbing to a federal-provincial resource trap.

Historically, Alberta’s economy has been the most unstable in all of Canada, but the volatility was largely confined to its own borders. Today, aided and abetted by the federal government, Alberta has exported its instability to the rest of the country. 

Those familiar with the tenets of staples theory will recognize the pattern. 

Pioneered by Canadian economist Harold Innis, staples theory emphasized the dilemmas associated with single-resource production. When the world price of a commodity is high, the allure of riches can be so great that people throw all of their effort and money into riding the resource boom. But the price of staples is unstable, subject to, among other things, over-production, replacement technologies, the vagaries of climate, transportation glitches and even fashion. 

Just as the price of a staple commodity can rise quickly, it can drop, bringing economic, social and political ruin. Canada’s landscape is dotted with this story, from towns (Uranium City) to regions and provinces (Newfoundland and cod). Sometimes, of course, the good times return, but often they don’t. In any case, the result is growing economic and political dependency, what Innis referred to as the “staples trap” – easy to get into, hard to get out of. That’s where Alberta and Canada find themselves now. 

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is on record as declaring Canada an emerging energy superpower.  ...Far from being a superpower, however, Canada increasingly looks like a hundred-pound weakling, a single-resource producer, buffeted by pricing over which we have no control, technological innovations that portend a reduction in the value of oil and environmental issues that threaten all of us.

In 2013 I began to worry whether the Canadian people were being set up by the Harper government. Harper is long gone but that worry has only worsened.

If/when the financial markets turn away from bitumen what happens then? Does Harper go on bended knee to the Politburo in Beijing? Does he firesale Athabasca to the Communist Chinese? I suppose that's one option in a scenario that is truly short on options. 

What does a rational person do confronted with such harsh realities? Why am I asking that? This is about Steve Harper, the man who has little time for science or facts or reality. All we need to know about Steve's fitness to handle looming disaster we learned from the gross incompetence he displayed in failing to notice the great meltdown of 2008 thundering down on Canada and the world. You know, the Great Recession he claimed that nobody could have foreseen (except for everyone who actually did). 

Could this be enough to send Steve and his cabinet generals into the bunker? If Big Money deserts Athabasca could Steve choose to fight it out to the end? Could he take a page out of Obama's playbook and warp it into a TARP-style bailout of the Tar Sands? Would Harper's cowed, majority caucus let him double down on an already lost bet?

TARP is a reference to America's Troubled Asset Relief Program spawned by the 2007-8 Great Recession. It allowed Washington to buy "toxic assets" to keep troubled financial institutions from collapsing.

Now you may scoff at the idea that our federal government would ever bail out the financial sector if bitumen becomes a stranded asset. Think again. Ask yourself if that wasn't the underlying reason Ottawa paid far above market value for the Trans-Mountain pipeline? Kinder-Morgan wanted to walk away from that asset. Morneau went to Texas with the government's cheque book in hand and gave those bandits whatever they wanted. No surprise that, when Ottawa, canvassed the market for buyers there were no takers.

How much further will Ottawa go to prop up the Tar Sands? If the markets turn on high-carbon fossil fuels, will Ottawa let Athabasca fall or will it buy out the fleeing investors?  We witnessed what happened in the States when banks were "too big to fail." Are the Tar Sands "too big to fail"? Does Justin have the courage to let it go? We may know before long when Trudeau has to say yea or nay to Teck's proposed massive bitumen mine.

"A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance" Another Nail in Fossil Energy's Coffin.

When seven trillion dollars speaks, people listen.

That's the sort of clout BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink, commands when he announces that, going forward, his firm will incorporate environmental sustainability in its investment decisions.

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager with nearly $7 trillion in investments, and this move will fundamentally shift its investing policy — and could reshape how corporate America does business and put pressure on other large money managers to follow suit. 

Mr. Fink’s annual letter to the chief executives of the world’s largest companies is closely watched, and in the 2020 edition he said BlackRock would begin to exit certain investments that “present a high sustainability-related risk,” such as those in coal producers. His intent is to encourage every company, not just energy firms, to rethink their carbon footprints. 

“Awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” Mr. Fink wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times. “The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance.”

The worm, it seems, is turning for high carbon, low value fossil fuels. Good thing we bought that pipeline for way above fair market value just before the world opted for survival.

Those Texas bandits at Kinder Morgan must be laughing their asses off at how the Trudeau government paid them top dollar just when they were ready to walk away from the whole thing. I'll bet they saw this unfolding. They knew it takes decades to recover the construction investment before ever turning a profit on a pipeline and they knew that bitumen was a likely "stranded asset."

Meanwhile, when Jason Kenney praises Justin, you know the feds screwed up.

Is It Time to Expel Ottawa's Fisheries Department From Coastal BC?

This is the same Department of Fisheries and Oceans that ruined the east coast cod fishery. Among their litany of outrages on the west coast are the fish farms where Atlantic salmon are raised in disgusting pens and spread disease to our wild salmon stocks.

Now this.

In Vancouver Island's magnificent Clayoquot Sound 14 of 15 of the DFO regulated fish farms have tested positive for a highly contagious virus.

The report by Clayoquot Action, a Tofino-based conservation society, says feces, flesh and scale samples from 14 out of 15 farms tested positive for the piscine orthoreovirus, a disease that gained notoriety after a video of bloody discharge from packing plants in Tofino and Campbell River went viral in December 2017. 

Laboratory testing by the B.C. government showed the underwater effluent was contaminated with piscine orthoreovirus, a disease found in 80 per cent of farmed Atlantic salmon that is linked to a host of fish health problems, including heart and skeletal muscle inflammation and haemorrhages in internal organs.

Clayoquot Action campaigns director Bonny Glambeck said it’s particularly concerning to find piscine orthoreovirus on Chinook salmon farms located along wild salmon migratory routes in the Clayoquot Sound UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, off the west coast of Vancouver Island. 

Four of the active farms the group tested are owned by Creative Salmon, the only company raising Chinook on a large scale in open net pen farms in B.C. Most B.C. open net pen operations — including 11 other active farms tested for the study, which are owned by Cermaq, a Mitsubishi subsidiary headquartered in Norway — produce Atlantic salmon, a species not native to the Pacific Coast. 

“Wild Chinook salmon in Clayoquot Sound are on the brink of extinction,” Glambeck told The Narwhal.

The DFO dismisses the problem, saying it's a BC strain of the virus that has a minimal risk of spreading disease.  The tests prove DFO is, to give them the benefit of the doubt, wrong.

“They are essentially denying the existence of this Norwegian variant in British Columbia waters … It’s just shocking to me that they continue to deny that it is damaging and dangerous to wild salmon, pretending that it’s not happening.” 

Terry Dorward, a Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation councillor, said the federal government is spreading “disinformation” about the piscine orthoreovirus variant found on salmon farms in Clayoquot Sound, whose biodiverse rainforest islands support many species dependent on wild salmon. 

“This is similar to what my people — Indigenous people — experienced when we were given smallpox blankets,” Dorward told The Narwhal. “We were nearly wiped out. And I believe the same thing is happening to our wild salmon.

...
In 2018, the state of Washington announced that open net pen fish farms would be phased out by 2025. The state also stopped hundreds of thousands of salmon infected with an Icelandic strain of piscine orthoreovirus from being transferred to the farms, saying wild salmon could be at risk.

Flirting with Armageddon. We're Not So MAD Anymore.

By MAD, I refer to the doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" that is credited with averting a major nuclear exchange of ICBMs by the American or Soviets during the Cold War. The temptation to launch a pre-emptive strike fades when you know the other guy will always have the means to retaliate in kind and you'll both wind up dead.  Hence prudence became the order of the day.

Then America elected (loosely speaking) the "very stable genius" to preside in the Oval Office. The Americans time their elections to permit a reasonable transition period before the winner is inaugurated president.  During that interval the president-elect goes to school. This takes the form of numerous briefings on stuff a president needs to know from day one. High on the priority list are briefings on America's nuclear weapons. 

When it came to the nukes Trump was reported to have asked, with some annoyance, what was the point of having all these nuclear weapons if he couldn't use them. That should have been a bright red flag. It wasn't.

Trump bridled at his many predecessors' "no first use" pledge. He then ordered development of a new generation of tactical nuclear warheads and said he reserved the right to use them even against nations that had no nukes of their own.

Voila.  There's a new toy aboard America's nuclear ballistic missile subs.

The U.S. military has deployed a new addition to its nuclear arsenal — a long-range missile armed with a nuclear warhead of reduced destructive power. The so-called low-yield missile joins other, more powerful weapons aboard stealthy submarines prowling the oceans. 

The debut deployment aboard long-range submarines, known as boomers, is a landmark in U.S. nuclear weapons policy. It is the first major addition to the strategic nuclear arsenal in recent decades and is a departure from the Obama administration’s policy of lessening dependence on nuclear weapons in pursuit of a nuclear-free world.

Unleash the Spin-Meisters.

John Rood, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said in an AP interview Monday that adding the “low-yield” warhead, known as the W76-2, to submarines which tote Trident II ballistic missiles lowers the risk of nuclear war. He said the United States will continue its stated policy of using nuclear weapons only in “extraordinary circumstances.” He also said the warhead will help the United States dissuade Russia from risking launching a limited nuclear conflict. 

Apparently Mr. Rood does not understand that "no first use" should not be confused with "extraordinary circumstances." Don't forget, we're talking about "extraordinary" in the context of Donald Trump's very stable mind.

Still no word on the actual yield of the W76-2 warhead. It is supposedly in the 5-7 kiloton range, about half the yield of the Hiroshima bomb, but there's no way of confirming that.  There's also no word on whether these submarine-launched weapons will be MIRV'ed. That refers to the standard multiple warhead missile that launches several warheads independently.

It's not the new warhead that bothers me. It's the abandonment of "no first use" and the lunatic who has his finger on the nuclear trigger.

News From the Front. Arctic Methane Bomb Worse than Predicted.

Permafrost that thaws abruptly releases twice as much greenhouse gas as when it thaws gradually.  The problem is that much of the permafrost is now thawing much faster than had been expected.  Okay, cause + effect = well, you can guess.

Permafrost, a perpetually frozen layer under the seasonally thawed surface layer of the ground, affects 18 million square kilometers at high latitudes or one quarter of all the exposed land in the Northern Hemisphere. Current estimates predict permafrost contains an estimated 1,500 petagrams of carbon, which is equivalent to 1.5 trillion metric tons of carbon.

Some 20% of the Arctic region has conditions conducive to abrupt thaw due to its ice-rich permafrost layer. Permafrost that abruptly thaws is a large emitter of carbon, including the release of carbon dioxide as well as methane, which is more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. That means that even though at any given time less than 5% of the Arctic permafrost region is likely to be experiencing abrupt thaw, their emissions will equal those of areas experiencing gradual thaw.

This abrupt thawing is "fast and dramatic, affecting landscapes in unprecedented ways," said Merritt Turetsky, director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at CU Boulder and lead author of the study published today in Nature Geoscience. "Forests can become lakes in the course of a month, landslides occur with no warning, and invisible methane seep holes can swallow snowmobiles whole." 

Abrupt permafrost thaw can occur in a variety of ways, but it always represents a dramatic abrupt ecological shift, Turetsky added. 

"Systems that you could walk on with regular hiking boots and that were dry enough to support tree growth when frozen can thaw, and now all of a sudden these ecosystems turn into a soupy mess," Turetsky said. 

Permafrost contains rocks, soil, sand, and in some cases, pockets of pure ground ice. It stores on average twice as much carbon as is in the atmosphere because it stores the remains of life that once flourished in the Arctic, including dead plants, animal and microbes. This matter, which never fully decomposed, has been locked away in Earth's refrigerator for thousands of years.

Nature is now a player in our climate crisis. It's time we began to add these GHG feedback loops into our climate change planning. The threat isn't just man-made emissions any more.

"The impacts from abrupt thaw are not represented in any existing global model and our findings indicate that this could amplify the permafrost climate-carbon feedback by up to a factor of two, thereby exacerbating the problem of permissible emissions to stay below specific climate change targets," said David Lawrence, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and a coauthor of the study. 

The findings bring new urgency to including permafrost in all types of climate models, along with implementing strong climate policy and mitigation, Turetsky added.

The inescapable fact is that our timelines for slashing greenhouse gases are out of whack with reality. We don't have until 2050. 

When Big Pharma Apes Big Tobacco

When North Americans began kicking the habit, Big Tobacco opened up new markets for their "cancer sticks" overseas, especially across Asia Pacific.  Now, Big Pharma, reeling from the pushback over opioids is looking to shop its deadly wares to the same tobacco-friendly markets abroad.

In 2016, nearly 50,000 people died of opioid overdoses in the United States, and, per capita, almost as many died in Canada. From 2000 to 2016, more Americans died of overdoses than died in World War I and World War II combined. Yet even these grim numbers understate the impact of opioid abuse, because for every person who dies, many more live with addiction. 

This public health story is now common knowledge. Less well known is the growing risk that the epidemic will spread across the globe. Facing a backlash in the United States and Canada, drug companies are turning their attention to Asia and Europe and repeating the tactics that created the crisis in the first place. At the same time, the rise of fentanyl, a highly potent synthetic opioid, has made the outbreak even deadlier and begun to reshape the global drug market, a development with significant foreign policy implications. As a result, the world is on the cusp of a global opioid epidemic, driven by the overuse of legal painkillers and worsened by the spread of fentanyl, that could mark a public health disaster of historic proportions.

...

Opioids are widely misused for three reasons. First, clinicians can’t objectively measure pain in the way they can body temperature or blood pressure, so they rely on patients’ accuracy and honesty in judging pain severity. Second, opioids are highly prized, even by healthy people, because of the euphoria they create. And third, anyone without scruples can sell prescription opioids on the black market.

After several epidemics involving legal medications in the nineteenth century, in 1914, the U.S. government banned most distribution of opioids. For nearly 50 years after that, North America saw few opioid-related problems besides heroin use in a few U.S. and Canadian cities.

All of that changed in the mid-1990s. Several pharmaceutical companies began aggressively marketing opioids to treat chronic, not just acute, pain, claiming they carried little risk of addiction.  ...During the period of mostly uncritical enthusiasm for prescription opioids, the largess of manufacturers flowed to virtually every organization that should have been protecting the public, including health-care regulators, professional medical societies, medical school education programs, elected officials, patient advocacy groups, medical opinion leaders, and state medical boards. 

A study by the Center for Public Integrity and the Associated Press found that from 2006 to 2015, the pharmaceutical industry spent $880 million on campaign contributions and lobbying state legislatures, 220 times as much as the amount spent by groups trying to limit opioid use. In 2013, the marketing expenditure of each of the ten largest phar-maceutical companies exceeded the entire budget of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

...
A key lesson of the current epidemic repeats one from the history of tobacco: legal drugs pushed by corporations can bring death on a scale vastly surpassing the effects of illegal ones. Calls to legalize recreational opioids that fail to grapple with this reality do not deserve to be taken seriously.

Trump to Honour Limbaugh with Medal of Freedom

I suppose it makes sense. One degenerate, racist bigot with a mile-wide streak of cruelty would choose to bestow a high honour on another degenerate, racist bigot who also displays a mile-wide streak of cruelty.

Donald Trump says he'll award America's Medal of Freedom to self-inflicted lung cancer victim, Rush Limbaugh.

Sinn Fein Swings Ireland

Polls suggest that Sinn Fein is in line to finish first in Irish elections on Saturday.

Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Féin’s leader, said on Tuesday that Irish people wanted a change from Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, centrist rivals that have dominated Irish politics for a century. 

“People aren’t fools … There isn’t a whit of difference really between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael and people see that,” McDonald said before a television debate on Tuesday night with leaders of the three parties. 

Earlier, an opinion poll gave Sinn Féin 25% support, vaulting it into top position for the first time and potentially heralding a realignment of Irish politics. 

The party’s IRA links alienated voters during the Troubles in Northern Ireland but it is now appealing to people in the republic who chafe at homelessness, high rents, hospital waiting lists and other problems.