Notch One Up for Artificial Intelligence

There are plenty of bright lights who warn that artificial intelligence, AI, could be the end of us. Elon Musk is one. More recently, Yuval Noah Harari, has written of a world in which AI becomes the ruling force that may or may not keep us around for muscle. It all sounds quite bleak, dire.

It's not a one-sided picture of dystopia looming. Far from it. I caught an item this morning on BBC's global podcast about AI and antibiotics-resistant disease control.

In a world first, scientists have discovered a new type of antibiotic using artificial intelligence (AI). 

It has been heralded by experts as a major breakthrough in the fight against the growing problem of drug resistance. 

A powerful algorithm was used to analyse more than one hundred million chemical compounds in a matter of days. 

The newly discovered compound was able to kill 35 types of potentially deadly bacteria, said researchers.

I wasn't sure if this was BBC hyping something for a story so I searched science web sites and, wow, the story is being posted just about everywhere.

MIT broke the story two days ago. I assume that's because it was MIT's own researchers who unleashed AI to come up with new antibiotics.

The computer model, which can screen more than a hundred million chemical compounds in a matter of days, is designed to pick out potential antibiotics that kill bacteria using different mechanisms than those of existing drugs. 

“We wanted to develop a platform that would allow us to harness the power of artificial intelligence to usher in a new age of antibiotic drug discovery,” says James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering. “Our approach revealed this amazing molecule which is arguably one of the more powerful antibiotics that has been discovered.” 

In their new study, the researchers also identified several other promising antibiotic candidates, which they plan to test further. They believe the model could also be used to design new drugs, based on what it has learned about chemical structures that enable drugs to kill bacteria.

Now if they can figure out how to use AI to put the malevolent genie of 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue back inside his bottle, we'll be onto something.

Colby Takes the P*ss Out of the Buffalo Declaration

Even NatPo columnist, Colby Cosh, can't take the Buffalo Declaration seriously.

Alberta or Buffalo? Choose your own adventure? I suppose the revolution is still incomplete in the minds of the authors, too: they have begat a manifesto, but have not quite figured out on whose behalf, precisely, they are speaking. Forgive us, we’re all kind of new at this game of soft nationalism. (Or, rather, at the game of creating a Quebec-style spectrum of nationalisms, ranging from paranoid cranks to grouchy-but-devoted three-quarter federalists.) 

It is definitely a logical problem that so much of the declaration is devoted to the proposition that Alberta is culturally distinct from its neighbours — so much so as to permit the sort of political claims and considerations that would ordinarily pertain to a nation. The East, we are told, is full of the descendants of “bankers, lawyers and other capitalists.” Meanwhile, Alberta was being peopled by the wretched of the Earth. “Settlers like the Hungarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Dutch, Germans, Scots, Chinese, and Icelanders immigrated to Alberta because of poverty, overpopulation and unemployment in their homelands. 

... 

It turns out that the people who came from the corners of the Earth to dwell in West Buffalo were sailing into a trap. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren now find themselves once again bled white by a tsardom’s cold and distant bureaucracy. Look at the language, the particular word choices, at the head of the document. “The economic and social challenges faced by Canada,” we are told, “… are the symptom of the colonial power structures from which Alberta and Saskatchewan were born.” Many Buffalonians “are disconnected from, and feel disrespected by, the power class of the Laurentian consensus.” Alberta faces “systemic inequities.” 

...

No wonder the Buffalovskian mental revolution is tricky. To find a hearing outside Buffalo, its factual basis will have to convince — no easy task, and the authors have not been as careful as they ought. (They hint that Alberta is experiencing a suicide epidemic, but rates are still slightly higher in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and many times higher in the rump Northwest Territories and Nunavut. The SNC-Lavalin mess is characterized as interference in “judicial” rather than prosecutorial independence. There’s a complaint about Alberta “access” to the Parliamentary Press Gallery that is flat-out mysterious.)

But perhaps the main task is to train the Buffalo audience in an unfamiliar and unnatural argot of victimhood, one in which injustices are always “systemic” and change must always be “structural” and you get a failing grade if you go a hundred words without mentioning undifferentiated “power.” If you feel “disrespected,” as we Albertans surely often do, you should immediately take that to be evidence of a conspiracy against your ambitions. And if it should occur to you that one of the signatories of the Buffalo Declaration now protesting perpetual Albertan exclusion from government was a minister of the federal Crown 52 months ago, well, maybe that’s your false consciousness talking.

Trudeau - the Barricades Must Come Down

Prime minister Trudeau has said "the barricades must now come down, the injunctions must be obeyed, and the law must be upheld."

It's not clear whether Trudeau was referring to the Wet'suwet'en territorial dispute of the rail line blockades and other disruptions across Canada. Perhaps he means both.

In Longueuil, police have given protesters until 5 p.m. to leave their barricade and clear out.

It could be a busy weekend for cops across the country.

The Last Frontier - Teck's Fuzzy Math

Vancouver mining company, Teck Resources, is increasing the pressure on the Trudeau government to approve its Frontier mine proposal for the Athabasca Tar Sands.

Teck claims it will face a $1.13 billion write down if the feds don't play ball on the Frontier mine.

This comes at the same time as Teck announced a $910 million write down on its 21 per cent stake in the Fort Hills bitumen mine. The company blames the Fort Hills mark down on "lower market expectations for future oil prices."

Okay, let's get this straight. Teck is declaring a $910 million write off on an existing Tar Sands mine because of lousy oil prices. But it's going to declare an even bigger loss if the feds don't approve the Frontier mine that even Teck execs admit might not get off the ground anyway. From BNN Bloomberg:

“I don’t think [Teck will] build it,” said Brian Madden, senior vice president and portfolio manager at Goodreid Investment Counsel, on BNN Bloomberg Friday. “It’s not economic and I don’t think shareholders or the market will sanction them to splash out $10 billion, or whatever it’s going to cost to build this mine in the current oil price environment.” 

The impairment tied to Fort Hills dragged Teck into the red for the quarter ending Dec. 31, with a loss of $891 million, compared to a profit of $433 million a year earlier. On an adjusted basis, Teck earned $0.22 per share, down from $0.86 in the fourth quarter of 2018. Analysts, on average, were expecting profit per share of $0.39. 

“Ongoing global economic uncertainty negatively impacted commodity prices in the fourth quarter and that has continued into 2020, exacerbated by the effect on markets from the coronavirus and the impact of severe weather conditions in British Columbia, followed by blockades on rail lines,” said Teck CEO Don Lindsay in a release.

Sorry but this doesn't add up. Teck which has a total market cap of $10 billion writes off nearly a billion of that value on a Tar Sands mine due to chronically low (inadequate) world oil prices but will take a further $1.13 billion hit if Trudeau doesn't approve a mine that's not economically viable for a company that's getting cold feet about the project anyway.

I think somebody's trying to blow smoke up Justin's backside. I'm just not buying it. What do you think?

photo: the Suncor/Total/Teck Fort Hills mine.

About that "Buffalo" Business.

Somebody should let Michelle Rempel in on this.

This is a buffalo found in Africa, the Cape Buffalo.

This is the water buffalo found in Asia.

This majestic beast, however, is a bison. It is found in North America.

And this is our bison's European cousin. It's now also making a comeback.

A major difference is the presence of a hump. Bison have one at the shoulders while buffalo don’t. The hump allows the bison’s head to function as a plow, sweeping away drifts of snow in the winter. The next telltale sign concerns the horns. Buffalo tend to have large horns—some have reached more than 6 feet (1.8 meters)—with very pronounced arcs. The horns of bison, however, are much shorter and sharper. And, if you want to throw a B into the mix, you can check for a beard. Bison are the hipsters of the two animals, sporting thick beards. Buffalo are beardless.

I thought you might want to keep the distinction in mind if you're thinking about giving any credence to Ms. Rempel's "Buffalo Declaration."

Nobel Laureates Demand Trudeau Nix the Teck Frontier Bitumen Mine

A group of Nobel laureates have written an open letter to Justin Trudeau and his assistant pm, Christia Freeland, to reject the Frontier pit mine for the Athabasca Tar Sands.

Projects that enable fossil-fuel growth at this moment in time are an affront to our state of climate emergency, and the mere fact that they warrant debate in Canada should be seen as a disgrace. They are wholly incompatible with your government’s recent commitment to net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. And with clear infringements on First Nations rights, such projects fly in the face of rhetoric and purported efforts towards reconciliation. 

The response to the climate crisis will define and destroy legacies in the coming years, and the qualifications for being on the right side of history are clear: an immediate end to fossil-fuel financing and expansion along with an ambitious and just transition away from oil and gas production towards zero carbon well before mid-century.

JP Morgan's Schizophrenia

JP Morgan is perhaps the world's largest investor in climate-wrecking fossil fuels. The bank has also realized that the fossil energy economy has mankind on a precipitous road to an irreversible end.

The JP Morgan report on the economic risks of human-caused global heating said climate policy had to change or else the world faced irreversible consequences. 

The study implicitly condemns the US bank’s own investment strategy and highlights growing concerns among major Wall Street institutions about the financial and reputational risks of continued funding of carbon-intensive industries, such as oil and gas. 

JP Morgan has provided $75bn (£61bn) in financial services to the companies most aggressively expanding in sectors such as fracking and Arctic oil and gas exploration since the Paris agreement, according to analysis compiled for the Guardian last year.

... 

The authors say policymakers need to change direction because a business-as-usual climate policy “would likely push the earth to a place that we haven’t seen for many millions of years”, with outcomes that might be impossible to reverse. 

“Although precise predictions are not possible, it is clear that the Earth is on an unsustainable trajectory. Something will have to change at some point if the human race is going to survive.” 

The investment bank says climate change “reflects a global market failure in the sense that producers and consumers of CO2 emissions do not pay for the climate damage that results.” To reverse this, it highlights the need for a global carbon tax but cautions that it is “not going to happen anytime soon” because of concerns about jobs and competitiveness. 

The authors say it is “likely the [climate] situation will continue to deteriorate, possibly more so than in any of the IPCC’s scenarios”.

America's Long Goodbye

With Donald Trump, ambition is often betrayed by execution.  Trump wants America out of Afghanistan. For all the good they've done these past 18 years and the dismal prospects of any meaningful success if American forces stayed there another 5 or 10 or, groan, another 18 years, leaving only makes sense.

Some of us are old enough to have seen this before. America blunders into a war that turns into a quagmire of its own making. Years pass. America wants out. The last time this happened it was to the refrain of "Peace with Honour." As it turned out, even Henry Kissinger could secure neither peace nor honour. North Vietnam continued fighting, defeated the army and government of South Vietnam, and, as Russian-built T-54 tanks stormed the presidential palace in Saigon, reporters captured photos of the last helicopters taking off from the embassy helipad, ferrying desperate US and Vietnamese personnel to safety aboard the navy vessels waiting offshore.

When Kissinger negotiated with the Vietnamese, the government of South Vietnam was largely absent front the talks. The Americans got their deal (or so they thought but perhaps even they knew better) and then presented it as a fait accompli to their South Vietnamese allies.  The way cleared by the withdrawal of American forces, the North simply steamrollered the South and that was that.

Flash forward to today. The Americans are back at it, this time in Afghanistan. Once again they're eager to end a war they never had the will to win. Again they're negotiating withdrawal with their adversary, this time the Taliban, while their ally, the government of Afghanistan, is sidelined.

Team Trump isn't negotiating a peace pact with the Taliban. He hasn't got the leverage for that. What the Americans are after is what they achieved in Viet Nam, a cease-fire that allowed them to clear out their troops unmolested. Don't be dismissive about that. In the 19th century the Brits waged two failed wars in Afghanistan and when they tried to get out they were slaughtered.

Viet Nam left deep scars on the American psyche. It bruised American pride and the public's sense of invincibility. (Americans do have an incomplete and remarkably flexible grasp of their own history) It wasn't until George H.W. Bush's triumph in Operation Desert Storm that American confidence in their military prowess was restored.

Afghanistan won't be a repeat of the Vietnam debacle. Vietnam claimed some 50,000 American military lives (and almost as many again by their own hand afterward). Afghanistan, by comparison, a paltry 2,000 US military personnel. And there's even less chance of a lasting peace than there was in Viet Nam.

The Americans failed to defeat the Taliban and the Kabul government, without American muscle, will have even less chance.  The Americans failed because they were never in it to win. Long before he became a household name, an American general named David Petraeus convened a gaggle of experts, military and civilian, who were the best minds on asymmetrical warfare -  insurgency. They gleaned the wisdom of military experience battling guerillas going back to the days of Caesar and they produced an excellent digest, field manual FM3-24, to guide commanders both in the Pentagon and on the ground in Afghanistan.

FM3-24 is an incredible work. I own a copy. There's only one thing wrong with it. Having been given a pretty good road map on how to win - or lose - such a war, the Americans, including David Petraeus ignored the history of the past two thousand years. Threw it in the bin. (When Canada took the combat role in Kandahar we ignored it too)

One thing Petraeus pointed out is that, to win, the insurgents don't have to defeat the invincible army. All they need to do is outlast you. If, when you get tired or bored and pull up stakes, they still occupy the field, they win. Hence the old line about how we've got all the watches but they've got all the time.

But America's real failure isn't in the provinces or the ungovernable hill country of the Afghan/Pakistan border. It's Kabul. It's the government America established after driving out the Taliban government.

Early on in the war a Senate foreign relations committee staffer testified on Capital Hill about Afghanistan. He told the senators that there's never been a stable, successful country in that region that didn't first overcome too scourges - tribalism and warlordism.  The US sort of tried to keep the warlords out of the post-Taliban civil government. Didn't work. Ditto for tribalism although, in fairness, that's a tall order in a country that's made up of so many ethnic groups and territories including Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara, Baloch, Turkmen and more.

The Talibs, of course, were the Pashtun home team and probably will be again.  You could say that, when the US capitulated to the warlords it wrote off any prospects of stable governance for Afghanistan and, with that, America and its allies were just treading water, marking time, babysitting an unresolved civil war on hiatus.

Today the Taliban stand resurgent. They control most of the countryside. Ousting the current national government in Kabul should be a matter of pressing on an open door. After that, who knows?

If you want to read more about the West's miserable failure in Afghanistan, Foreign Policy has a pretty thorough piece, "Why America Failed in Afghanistan."

Canada has never had a post mortem on our own failed mission to Kandahar. We've never looked at how Paul Martin was seduced into approving this adventure, the role Rick "The Big Cod" Hillier played in launching this foolishness, the sub-par performance of Canada's generals and the price paid for their failures by the only first-raters, the men and women we sent to Afghanistan to fight the unwinnable war. We need to learn the lessons of where this all went wrong.

40 Months for Roger Stone

It's a far cry from what DoJ prosecutors wanted, around 9 years, but Trump dirty trickster Roger Stone has been sentenced to 40 months in prison, just over a third. It's unclear whether attorney-general Bill Barr's meddling played much of a role.

Nouriel's White Swans

Economist Nouriel Roubini shot to fame for his predictions of the 2007/2008 Great Recession. While he used to speak of black swans, Roubini is now turning his attention to white swans as the major threat of the day.

Beyond the usual economic and policy risks that most financial analysts worry about, a number of potentially seismic white swans are visible on the horizon this year. Any of them could trigger severe economic, financial, political and geopolitical disturbances unlike anything since the 2008 crisis.

For starters, the US is locked in an escalating strategic rivalry with at least four implicitly aligned revisionist powers: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. These countries all have an interest in challenging the US-led global order and 2020 could be a critical year for them, owing to the US presidential election and the potential change in US global policies that could follow. 

Under Donald Trump, the US is trying to contain or even trigger regime change in these four countries through economic sanctions and other means. Similarly, the four revisionists want to undercut American hard and soft power abroad by destabilising the US from within through asymmetric warfare. If the US election descends into partisan rancour, chaos, disputed vote tallies and accusations of “rigged” elections, so much the better for rivals of the US. A breakdown of the US political system would weaken American power abroad. 

...

 Although the Sino-American cold war is by definition a low-intensity conflict, a sharp escalation is likely this year. To some Chinese leaders, it cannot be a coincidence that their country is simultaneously experiencing a massive swine flu outbreak, severe bird flu, a coronavirus outbreak, political unrest in Hong Kong, the re-election of Taiwan’s pro-independence president, and stepped-up US naval operations in the East and South China Seas. Regardless of whether China has only itself to blame for some of these crises, the view in Beijing is veering toward the conspiratorial.

But open aggression is not really an option at this point, given the asymmetry of conventional power. China’s immediate response to US containment efforts will likely take the form of cyberwarfare. There are several obvious targets. Chinese hackers (and their Russian, North Korean, and Iranian counterparts) could interfere in the US election by flooding Americans with misinformation and deep fakes. With the US electorate already so polarised, it is not difficult to imagine armed partisans taking to the streets to challenge the results, leading to serious violence and chaos.

...By next year, the US-China conflict could have escalated from a cold war to a near hot one. A Chinese regime and economy severely damaged by the Covid-19 crisis and facing restless masses will need an external scapegoat, and will likely set its sights on Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and US naval positions in the East and South China Seas; confrontation could creep into escalating military accidents. It could also pursue the financial “nuclear option” of dumping its holdings of US Treasury bonds if escalation does take place.

...The US, of course, will not sit idly by while coming under asymmetric attack. It has already been increasing the pressure on these countries with sanctions and other forms of trade and financial warfare, not to mention its own world-beating cyberwarfare capabilities. US cyber-attacks against the four rivals will continue to intensify this year, raising the risk of the first-ever cyber world war and massive economic, financial and political disorder.
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Looking beyond the risk of severe geopolitical escalations in 2020, there are additional medium-term risks associated with climate change, which could trigger costly environmental disasters. Climate change is not just a lumbering giant that will cause economic and financial havoc decades from now. It is a threat in the here and now, as demonstrated by the growing frequency and severity of extreme weather events.

Roubini's point is that there are so many potentially seismic forces coming into play that stability, certainly across the West, is not to be taken for granted.

Boogaloo - There's a word I haven't heard in a long while.

Whatever it once meant back in the 60s or 70s, Boogaloo has become the brand of a rightwing extremist movement said to be flourishing in the United States.


The group agitates for another civil war and advocates for a campaign of violence against liberal politicians and law enforcement. Boogaloo was hatched online. A former New Jersey attorney-general now lecturing at Rutgers calls it "a breakthrough case study in the capacity to identify cyber swarms and viral insurgencies in nearly real time as they are developing in plain sight."

U.S. law enforcement officials and researchers at various levels have issued warnings about the growing threat posed by domestic extremists motivated by fringe ideologies and conspiracy theories. Joel Finkelstein, NCRI's director and a research scholar at the James Madison Program at Princeton University, said the report had been sent to members of Congress and the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Justice, among others. 

Paul Goldenberg, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, said the report was "a wake-up call." 

"When you have people talking about and planning sedition, and violence against minorities, police, and public officials, we need to take their words seriously," said Goldenberg, who is also CEO of the security consulting company Cardinal Point Strategies. 

Goldenberg said the report had "gone viral" within law enforcement and intelligence communities since its limited release last week. People are reading it and distributing it "far and wide," he said.

The movement, such as it is, has shown an uptick in activity in recent months.

In the last three months, boogaloo-related conversation has grown rapidly, according to the researchers, who found that use of the term has increased nearly 50 percent on platforms like Reddit and Twitter over the last few months. Increased exposure, the researchers warn, carries the danger of indoctrination. 

Boogaloo extremists have used social media to "strategize, share instructions for explosives and 3-D printed firearms, distribute illegal firearm modifications, and siphon users into encrypted messaging boards en mass," according to the NCRI report. The report also notes how the boogaloo concept has been monetized, through merchandise advertised through Facebook and Instagram ads, and marketed to current and former members of the military. 

On Facebook and Instagram, the researchers pointed to several boogaloo-themed public groups and accounts with tens of thousands of members and followers.

Facebook, predictably, claims it polices users and has a zero tolerance for hate groups. Reality suggests otherwise.

Since NCRI generated the report last week, membership in several boogaloo groups on Facebook has nearly doubled, according to an NBC News analysis. During the same period, two of Facebook's most popular boogaloo groups that boasted nearly 20,000 followers are no longer available this week. Facebook did not return request for comment. 

Much like the OK hand symbol coopted by white nationalists who later denied the association, the ambiguity of the term boogaloo works to cloak extremist organizing in the open. 

"Like a virus hiding from the immune system, the use of comical-meme language permits the network to organize violence secretly behind a mirage of inside jokes and plausible deniability," the report states. 

The term "boogaloo" has also been seen in real-world activism. At the Virginia Citizens Defense League's annual Lobby Day in Richmond in January, one group of protestors who go by Patriot Wave, wore Pepe the Frog patches emblazoned with "Boogaloo Boys." One man carried a sign that read, "I have a dream of a Boogaloo." The rally was held on Martin Luther King Day.

Trump Tried to Cut Deal With Assange

The Daily Beast reports that Trump made overtures to Julian Assange offering the WikiLeaks founder a pardon if he would cover up the Russian involvement in hacking Democratic Party emails in 2016.

President Trump offered to pardon Julian Assange if he agreed to cover up the involvement of Russia in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee, which were later published by WikiLeaks, a London court was told on Wednesday.
...
Edward Fitzgerald, Assange’s lawyer, said on Wednesday that a message had been passed on to Assange by former Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. 

Fitzgerald said a statement produced by Assange’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, showed “Mr Rohrabacher going to see Mr Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr Assange... said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks.”

More here from msn.com

Trudeau's Folly - Opposition Wants It Scrapped.

Canada has a pipeline problem. The problem is we own one. It's Kinder Morgan's old Trans-Mountain pipeline that we bought from those Texas bandits at way over market value. The new owner, that would be Canada, is poised to greatly expand the pipeline from Alberta to the BC coast.

When Bill Morneau cut the overly generous cheque to Kinder Morgan we were given the government's numbers on total project costs. The latest estimates have swollen by some 70 per cent. You can think of it now as "Trudeau's Folly."

An Angus Reid poll found that Canadians are losing their appetite for Trudeau's Folly. A Nanos poll confirmed it.

Citing these polls, Bloc Québécois leader Yves-Francois Blanchet, NDP environment critic Laurel Collins, as well as the Greens' parliamentary leader Elizabeth May, today called on the federal government to scrap the Trans Mountain expansion.

Of course, scrapping the TMX expansion would probably sound the death knell for the Teck Frontier mine that is slated to put an extra 260,000 barrels a day of bitumen into the system.

The Wet'suwet'en Take Ottawa to Court

Two Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs are suing the federal government for failing to adhere to its emissions targets under the Paris climate accords.

Mr. Naziel, who goes by the hereditary name Smogelgem, is head chief of Sun House, which is one of 13 Wet’suwet’en house groups. His uncle, Mr. Gagnon, goes by the hereditary name Kloum Khun under Owl House. 

Both house groups fall under the Laksamshu clan, which is one of five Wet’suwet’en clans.Mr. Naziel and Mr. Gagnon are the plaintiffs named on behalf of their house groups. 

“The defendant has deprived the plaintiffs of their right to equal protection and equal benefit of the law based on the age of the plaintiffs’ younger members and future generations by making laws that allow high GHG-emitting projects to operate now and into the future in breach of Canada’s fair contribution to keep global warming to non-catastrophic levels,” their court action said.

I have trouble thinking these chiefs will prevail. They may succeed, however, in shining a very unwelcome light on some important issues that this government would rather not discuss. That, in its own right, would be a victory.

Speaking of Pipelines. Gas Leaks Under-Reported.

This is not what the fossil fuel industry wants to hear, especially in Canada where mounting opposition to gas and bitumen pipelines challenges producers and their political minions.

A new report finds that we have been underestimating human-caused methane emissions by a whopping 40 per cent.

The oil and gas industry has had a far worse impact on the climate than previously believed, according to a study indicating that human emissions of fossil methane have been underestimated by up to 40%.

Methane has a greenhouse effect that is about 80% more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period and is responsible for at least 25% of global heating, according to the UN Environment Programme. 

...The findings, published in Nature, suggest the share of naturally released fossil methane has been overestimated by “an order of magnitude”, which means that human activities are 25-40% more responsible for fossil methane in the atmosphere than thought. 

This strengthens suspicions that fossil fuel companies are not fully accounting for their impact on the climate, particularly with regard to methane – a colourless, odourless gas that many plants routinely vent into the atmosphere. 

An earlier study revealed methane emissions from US oil and gas plants were 60% higher than reported to the Environmental Protection Agency. 

Accidents are also underreported. A single blowout at a natural gas well in Ohio in 2018 discharged more methane over three weeks than the oil and gas industries of France, Norway and the Netherlands released in an entire year. At the time, the company said it was unsure of the size of the leak. The immense scale was only revealed a year later when scientists analysed satellite data provided by the European Space Agency. 

Fracking also appears to have worsened the problem. Atmospheric methane had started to flatten off at the turn of the century, but rose again after a surge in fracking activity in the US and elsewhere. The industry, however, continues to claim that the energy source can be used as a “bridge fuel” because it has lower carbon emissions than oil or coal, but this fails to account for leaks and flares of methane and other gases during extraction.

So, a little bit here, a little bit there. Sure it adds up but does it really matter?

Dave Reay, the executive director of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation, said one of the key messages from the study was that the old bottom-up method of measuring methane emissions was “woefully inadequate”. 

“We knew fossil fuel extraction – including fracking – was a major part of global methane emissions, but this impressive study suggests it is a far bigger culprit in human-induced climate change than we had ever thought,” he said. 

“If correct, gas, coal and oil extraction and distribution around the world are responsible for almost half of all human-induced methane emissions. Add to that all the carbon dioxide that is then emitted when the fossil fuels are burned, and you need look no further for the seat of the climate emergency fire.”

To see what "invisible" fugitive gas emissions look like, the New York Times last year published an item that showed gas sites as we see them then again as seen through an infrared lens. It's an eye-opener, one that you should check out.

Guilty as Charged?

It is, by any measure, a scathing indictment of modern societies, our own very much included.  The charge as dark as any faced by the worst societies in history. Only we stand accused not of genocide but something far worse.

We stand accused of failing to ensure a "liveable planet" for today's children and the generations that will follow them.

Every country in the world is failing to shield children’s health and their futures from intensifying ecological degradation, climate change and exploitative marketing practices, says a new report. 

The report says that despite dramatic improvements in survival, nutrition, and education over the past 20 years, “today’s children face an uncertain future”, with every child facing “existential threats”. 

“In 2015, the world’s countries agreed on the sustainable development goals (SDGs), yet nearly five years later, few countries have recorded much progress towards achieving them,” says the report by a commission of 40 child and adolescent health experts from around the world. 

“Climate change, ecological degradation, migrating populations, conflict, pervasive inequalities, and predatory commercial practices threaten the health and future of children in every country,” it says. 

The commission, convened by the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations children’s agency, Unicef, and medical journal the Lancet, calls for radical changes to protect children’s health and futures from the intensifying climate emergency.
It also highlights the threat of predatory commercial practices, linking children’s exposure to marketing of fast food and sugary drinks to an 11-fold increase in childhood obesity, from 11 million in 1975 to 124 million in 2016.

A recent article in The Guardian focused on the mental health problems spreading through children who know, all too well, that they're in our crosshairs. They've got a damned good idea of what's coming their way after we're gone. There are many scholarly reports online about research into climate change and juvenile mental health even at this early stage.

They're the future of our country and they're in peril - from us. For many of us, our window of opportunity to help them, perhaps to undo some of the damage on its way to them, is limited. We probably haven't got much more than ten years to make a meaningful difference. That means we need to make them our priority, not ourselves, and definitely not those guys in the lounge at the Calgary Petroleum Club.

Letting Nature Survive. There's a Radical Notion.

23 former foreign ministers have penned a joint letter urging world leaders to allocate a third of our planet to nature.

Humanity’s ongoing destruction of nature threatens the survival of our species, a group of former foreign ministers has warned, calling on leaders to step back from “the precipice” of irreversible ecological ruin and protect the planet. 

The planet’s rapidly warming oceans must be the focus of increased conservation efforts due to their importance in producing oxygen and food for billions of people, the former ministers added, as governments prepare to begin negotiations for a Paris-style UN agreement on nature next week.

...“The loss and degradation of nature jeopardises human health, livelihoods, safety and prosperity. It disproportionately harms our poorest communities while undermining our ability to meet a broad range of targets set by the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. We must rise above politics and ideology to unite the global community around the urgent cause of protecting our planet and way of life,” reads the statement, which was released through non-profit thinktank Aspen Institute. 

The former ministers highlighted the climate crisis, the “excessive exploitation” of natural resources, and ecosystem degradation as grave threats to international security, warning they “imperil the future for our grandchildren”. 

“Humanity sits on the precipice of irreversible loss of biodiversity and a climate crisis that imperils the future for our grandchildren and generations to come. The world must act boldly, and it must act now,” the statement continues.

I don't know about you but it completely boggles my mind that we should have reached a point in human civilization where a group of former senior diplomats should feel the need to write, begging current world leaders not to destroy our biosphere. "Please don't kill everything." That's what they're trying to convey. Ask yourself how in hell did we come to this point? What have we become?

To All You "Rule of Law" Progressives.

It doesn't take much to peel back the veneer of some self-styled "progressives." The Wet'suwet'en controversy makes that clear. In reality, most of us know Sweet Fanny Adams about our First Nations, our history of dealing with them, and their rightful place in Canada.

Among the gaggle of diverse interests trying to seize the narrative you will commonly hear the "rule of law" bullshit bandied about.

Former CBC journalist, Jennifer Ditchburn, is now the editor-in-chief of Policy Options, the online magazine for the Institute for Research on Public Policy. Her article, The Breathtaking hypocrisy of the howls for "rule of law," published yesterday, should set straight your misconceptions.

In British Columbia what we're seeing in these protests is the culmination of more than a century of quite deliberate indifference on the part of the colonial and provincial governments to the prior, and superior, rights of First Nations. Why negotiate when you can just take their lands?

Treaty negotiations did not take place in vast tracts of British Columbia – a direct affront to the rule of law. “Under international and British law at the time of colonization, unless Indigenous people were conquered or treaties were made with them, the Indigenous interest in their land was to be respected by the law of the European colonizing nation,” historian and lawyer Bruce McIvor explained last week.


Politicians and pundits have been calling for the rule of law to be respected, given the ongoing protests in BC and in southern Ontario in support of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs opposing the Coastal GasLink project. The protests have stopped CN and Via Rail trains from running in parts of Canada. But let’s set aside for a moment the question of the legitimacy or illegality of those protests. Where have all these influential voices been on the much larger rule of law question, the one that set the stage for these conflicts in the first place?

... 

We also ignore that the courts have acknowledged repeatedly that Indigenous laws and rights are part of the rule of law in Canada. “Indigenous legal traditions are among Canada’s legal traditions. They form part of the law of the land,” Federal Court Justice Sébastien Grammond wrote in a 2018 decision. 

National newspaper columnists have called the Wet’suwet’en system of governance an “oligarchy” and based on a “feudal genealogy,” but the Courts (which help shape the rule of law) haven’t shown that disdain. The Supreme Court has acknowledged the limits of the Indian Act-prescribed structures when considering the holders of Aboriginal title – and dealt specifically with the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs’ authority in the 1997 Delgamuukw decision. In the Supreme Court of British Columbia Tsilhqot’in decision, Justice David Vickers put it succinctly: “While band level organization may have meaning to a Canadian federal bureaucracy, it is without any meaning in the resolution of Aboriginal title and rights for Tsilhqot’in people.”

... 

Canadian law when it comes to Indigenous communities has been a slippery, oppressive thing throughout the country’s history. Treaties are the law, but they are routinely violated. Laws were invented to erase Indigenous culture. It took until last year for the federal government to finally remove the legislated gender discrimination from the Indian Act. 

In British Columbia, the type of land title negotiations that created the Douglas treaties on Vancouver Island (themselves the subject of contention) were abandoned and unilateral settlement occurred on vast tracts of Indigenous land elsewhere in the province. The rule of law and the “honour of the Crown” were disregarded. In 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada advised the Crown that it had a “moral, if not a legal, duty,” to settle the question of title in order to facilitate “the reconciliation of the pre-existence of aboriginal societies with the sovereignty of the Crown.” But today, delving into those fundamental issues around land title and Canada’s fundamental violations of the rule of law seems to exhaust the stamina of many Canadian political and thought leaders.

Don't blame the Wet'suwet'en or other First Nations protestors who have come out in solidarity. The path they are on is one of our choosing. It is a path of our making. The "rule of law" is meaningless when the rules are applied selectively, to only one side, at the choosing of the other. That, is our game.

Even progressive voices in the States know what this is about. Consider this recent article in The New Republic:

The response from Canadian officials has been predictable: RCMP officers have threatened journalists trying to cover the raids. Horgan, who also spoke to the Assembly of First Nations two months ago and claimed to understand that “reconciliation is not just words,” has decried protest efforts. Talking about a blockade of a government building, Horgan said that that “people were denied access to their workplace, not because of their political views but because they were seen as symbols of government—that’s unacceptable.” 

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer called upon those enforcing the blockade to “check their privilege,” an attempt to reframe the issue by appealing to those affected by the rail closures. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, after squeezing past protestors to enter the Halifax City Hall, said that “it is very important for all people in Canada, including government officials, to be able to go about their rightful and legitimate business.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, currently on a trip in Africa, told reporters in Senegal that while it’s crucial to “respect the right to freely demonstrate peacefully,” Canada is a “country with a rule of law and we need to make sure those laws are respected.”

They are setting a trap, trying to pit Indigenous land defenders against the non-Indigenous population and claiming themselves as allies to the “working man” or whatever false story they want to tell. But the story is slipping away from them, if slowly.

“[The media is] starting to talk about our territories as unceded sovereign territories and land defenders and Wet’suwet’en people and governance, and not talking about us as if we’re just protestors off the street, which I think was one of the biggest problems with how mainstream media has been covering this story,” Wicksham said of how coverage of the anti-pipeline movements has recently shifted. She added that she felt as though the media reports in the past have too often focused on the divisions within the Wet’suwet’en community over whether to allow the CGL pipeline, instead of centering the fact that their traditional governance structure is being ignored by Canadian politicians.

Defenders of the Land

The Wet’suwet’en, along with other Indigenous land defenders across North America, have posed a question to their non-Indigenous neighbors: Who is being more unreasonable, the Indigenous people enforcing their sovereignty and history on the land, or the government and extractive companies literally cooking the planet?

Who Is Pitching "De-growth"? The Harvard Business Review

At some point, we'll realize the GDP-Growth Club is about as ridiculous as the Flat Earth Society. The big difference is one is inherently nihilistic, while the other is populated by people who wear tinfoil hats.

The GDP brigade with their fetish for perpetual exponential growth as the solution to all our problems includes every government in Canada, provincial and federal. Ditto for governments across the developed world and the emerging economies. It's part and parcel of the neoliberal model they embrace.

It came as a bit of surprise to find an article promoting "de-growth" in the pages of the Harvard Business Review. The article is written by two business profs, Bothello (Concordia) and Roulet (Cambridge).

...with today’s the climate crisis, debates around degrowth have been reinvigorated, and many major figures such as Noam Chomsky, Yanis Varoufakis and Anthony Giddens have, to varying degrees, expressed support for the idea. 

For others though — especially business leaders — degrowth is completely unthinkable, not least because of the anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist roots of the term. The prevailing view is that growth is an economic necessity, and any threat to that not only undermines business, but basic societal functioning. For instance, the CEO of H&M Karl-Johann Persson recently warned about the dire social consequences of what he perceives to be a movement of “consumer shaming.” Framed in these terms, the resistance of multinational CEOs and entrepreneurs alike is predictable, as is the reluctance of politicians to promote degrowth policies that would potentially prove unpopular with key constituents. The economist Tim Jackson provides a concise assessment: “Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries.”

Strike Three for perpetual exponential growth.

First, given the finite nature of our planet, infinite economic growth — even of a different variety — is a logical impossibility. Secondly, innovation and improvements produce, in many cases, unintended consequences. One of which is the Jevons paradox, where individuals compensate for efficiency through increased consumption. For instance, more energy-efficient refrigerators lead to more refrigerators in a home. 

The third and most fundamental issue is that the degrowth movement has already begun: at a grassroots level, consumer demand is actively being transformed, despite political and corporate reticence. A recent YouGov poll in France highlights that 27% of respondents are seeking to consume less — double the percentage from two years prior. The number of people eating less meat or giving it up altogether has been rising exponentially in recent years, too. Similarly, the movement of Flygskam (literally “flight shaming” in Swedish) has had early successes in reducing pollution: 10 Swedish airports have reported considerable declines in passenger traffic over the past year, which they attribute directly to Flygskam.

As one door closes, another opens.

Flygskam has been a boon for train travel, bolstered by a social media movement called Tågskryt (“train brag”). Meanwhile reduced meat consumption has been accompanied by an explosion in meat substitutes that produce one-tenth of the greenhouse gases compared to the real thing. Accordingly, degrowth reshuffles competitive dynamics within and across industries and, despite what many corporate leaders assume, offers new bases for competitive advantage.

The authors identify three strategies for business to adapt.

First, firms can pursue degrowth-adapted product design, involving the creation of products that have longer lifespans, are modular, or are locally produced. Fairphone, a social enterprise, eschews the built-in obsolescence of larger mobile device manufacturers and produces repairable phones that dramatically extend their longevity. Similarly, the start-up The 30 Year Sweatshirt sells high-quality, durable products that run counter to fast fashion principles. 

Second, firms can engage in value-chain repositioning, where they exit from certain stages of the value chain and delegate some tasks to stakeholders. (I really don't understand this one)

Third, firms can lead through degrowth-oriented standard setting. This entails creation of a standard for the rest of the industry to follow. The apparel company Patagonia — that explicitly follows an “antigrowth” strategy — is the poster child for this philosophy, offering a worn-wear store and providing free repairs for not only their own products, but also for those of other garment manufacturers. Walmart and Nike have solicited advice from Patagonia on such practices, and more recently H&M imitated the service with a pilot in-store repair facility. In a similar vein, the automobile company Tesla released all its patents in 2014, seeking to catalyze the diffusion of electric vehicles. Such initiatives were not merely marketing ploys, but also strategies to standardize a practice or technological platform throughout an industry — one in which companies like Patagonia or Tesla would have existing expertise.

Until now, consumerism has been driven by the markets. It may be time for consumers to take the whip hand, transforming the markets to conform to a fast changing world. The sooner the better.

Things Look Different From the Salish Sea

I guess it's a West Coast thing. Maybe it's the granola. The simple fact is that British Columbia is the best province in Canada. When it comes to health outcomes, if BC was a nation we'd be ranked third, a close third behind Sweden and Switzerland. We have a much better climate and an outdoors that seems to invite people outside whether it's sailing the coast, fishing for a salmon for dinner, skiing the mountains (Whistler, Blackcomb, all the rest), hiking the magnificent forests, trail riding on mountain bikes or just walking the beaches there's usually something to draw you outside.

There's an attitude, a vibe, out here on the left coast that's a bit different. Maybe it's the isolation of the multiple mountain ranges that sequester us. We're just more progressive. We have some fine progressive media outlets such as the venerable Georgia Straight, The Tyee and the surprisingly good National Observer. In a nation dominated by chains such as National Post, Bell/Globe Media and such, these indie papers are a very welcome breath of fresh air, even sanity.

There is an understated distrust of things east of the Rockies, especially governments, provincial and federal. We don't like getting steamrollered by "the east" which is pretty much everything from the foothills to the Ottawa River.

Maybe it's all of these things that explain why we're more sympathetic to protests whether it's to block a new coal port on the Fraser or First Nations standing against our government to defend the old growth forests of Clayoquot Sound, or the 1995 Shuswap/Secwepemc standoff at Gustafsen Lake. Does this sound familiar?

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched one of the largest police operations in Canadian history, including the deployment of four hundred tactical assault team members, five helicopters, two surveillance planes and nine Armoured Personnel Carriers. (the vehicle shown is not an APC but an AFV, an Armoured Fighting Vehicle of the sort we used in Afghanistan) The RCMP kept journalists well away from the site and some reporters became uneasy that the only side of the story being told was that preferred by the police. 

On September 11, RCMP detonated an explosive device buried in an access road to the camp, heavily damaging a supply truck being driven by occupiers. The incident resulted in a firefight that made use of the military-loaned Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs). Non-indigenous occupier Suniva Bronson was shot in the arm during the shootout and would be the only injury in the extensive exchange of bullets. On the following day, an unarmed man crossing a field designated as a no-shoot zone was shot at by police sharp shooters. Police later admitted to this mistake. The standoff ended peacefully on September 17 when the few remaining occupiers left the site under the guidance of medicine man, John Stevens. 

By the end of the 31-day standoff, police had fired up to 77,000 rounds of ammunition, and killed a dog. One of the indigenous leaders claimed that at least one of the shooting incidents blamed on them in fact occurred when two APCs fired on one another when their view was obscured. The operation was the largest paramilitary operation in British Columbia history and cost $5.5 million.

Then, as now, more blame was attached to the federal government than was their due. Then, as now, the provincial government was NDP.

It's hard not to sympathize with the Wet'suwet'en when you see the state overplay its hand. Whether it's Coastal Gaslink (provincial NDP, LNG lobby) or the Trans-Mountain pipeline (federal Liberals, Alberta PCs, bitumen lobby) our First Nations are doing the heavy lifting and a good many of the rest of us are deeply grateful for their resistance. The Petro-State is not going to go quietly into the night. Imagine a government that declares a climate emergency one day and the very next day greenlighted a massive bitumen pipeline that it had stupidly purchased in our name.

Non-violent civil disobedience is the order of the day. I expect the Coastal Gaslink protests are just a pre-cursor to the resistance that will be sparked by Trudeau's Folly as the pseudo-green Dauphin drives his ridiculous pipeline to "tidewater."

It's like the "death of a thousand cuts." With each insult I feel more British Columbian and commensurately less Canadian. It's not the Wet'suwet'en who are undermining national unity. No, that's the handiwork of people like Trudeau and Kenney.