Credit Where It's Due. Kudos to Volkswagen.

The Boys from Wolfsburg will always be associated with the diesel emissions scandal. It began when VW was caught cheating. When undergoing tailpipe testing its "clean diesel" engine proved remarkably clean. When in ordinary use, however, the engines produced legendary fuel efficiency and impressive power only at settings that generated prohibited levels of toxic nitrous oxide emissions.

VW went into full bore damage control mode. It offered to buy back the cars from disgruntled owners along with a modest settlement for damages. Owners also have the option of having their cars "fixed" - i.e. the cheating software replaced - and just take the damages.

Here's the irony. A lot of automakers produce diesel cars or trucks and most of them are also cheating, some far worse than Volkswagen. Yet, perhaps because this is now a more or less universal problem, the others haven't been prosecuted or forced to institute buybacks or recalls.

This week it became General Motors' turn for its Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups.

"This is a shocking discovery, and a really big deal because the [nitrous oxide] limits for these big trucks are four times what the limits were for the much smaller Volkswagen passenger cars and there are more of these trucks on the road," said Steve Berman.

An article in The Guardian last year reported that 97% of diesel vehicles exceeded the NOx emissions ceiling.  The exception? That would be Volkswagen.

Surprisingly, the tiny number of models that did not exceed the standard were mostly Volkswagens, the carmaker whose cheating of diesel emissions tests which emerged last year sparked the scandal. Experts said the new results show that clean diesel cars can be made but that virtually all manufacturers have failed to do so.

The EA analysis found that just one of the 201 Euro 5 diesels tested – a Skoda Octavia – did not exceed the official limit on the road. Over a quarter of the Euro 5s pumped out at least five times the official limit, including models from BMW, Range Rover, Mercedes, Nissan, Renault and Vauxhall.

Of the 62 Euro 6 models tested by EA, seven did not exceed the official limit in real-world driving: four Volkswagens, a BMW, an Audi and a Skoda. However, an Audi A8 and a Fiat 500X were found to emit more than 12 times the official limit, while a BMWX3, a Volvo S60 and a Vauxhall Zafira were among models emitting more than six times the official limit on the road.

Another report from today's Guardian warns our regulators are not making much progress.

Diesel cars that emit up to 18 times the official limit for toxic pollution when taken on to the road are still being sold, 20 months after the emissions scandal erupted and amid an ongoing air pollution crisis.

In real world conditions, the Nissan Qashqai produces 18 times more nitrogen oxides than the official lab-based test allows under EU directives, while Nissan’s Juke pumps out 16 times more NOx pollution than the limit, according to data from vehicle testing company Emissions Analytics seen by the Guardian.

Further data reveals Renault’s Mégane and Captur models both produce 16 times more NOx when on the road. Overall, the data shows that 80% of new diesels on the market in the last nine months fail to meet the official limit when on the road.

...software upgrades from manufacturers would quickly and significantly cut the emissions of many existing diesel cars: “What you can do is turn up the effectiveness of the emissions reduction technology – it’s almost like a volume knob – and that is a software change. If they turn up the volume, you have a clean car.” But apart from cars from VW, which was caught blatantly cheating, few vehicles in Europe have been recalled.

Justin - "The Political Equivalent of a YouTube Puppy Video."

He gave it a good run but the pundits are finally catching on to the fact that Justin Trudeau, the King of Selfies, is "all hat and no cattle."

The CBC took a swipe at political journalism in Canada with a report, "The media should know better but we keep falling for Trudeau's PR."  Trudeau, it seems, manufactures these "photo bombs" that the media, Canadian and foreign, then splash across their pages.

Today it's The Guardian's turn to call out the Dauphin.

He’s tackled quantum physics, photobombed a beach wedding, posed shirtless for selfies with a family hiking in the woods and, most recently, jogged past a group of Canadian teenagers heading to prom.

And each time, Justin Trudeau’s actions have earned lavish attention from media outlets in Canada and around the world.

But after it was pointed out that the shot of Trudeau breezing past the prom-bound teens was snapped by his official photographer, some Canadians have been asking why the media continues to fall for what seems to be a constant stream of PR stunts.

In politics, even the most spontaneous run-ins are carefully set up, noted Robyn Urback, a columnist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “And public photobombs by politicians in their Sunday sweats usually involve some sort of prior coordination,” she said.

In order to capture the moment that Trudeau jogged past the teens, the Maclean’s reporter Aaron Hutchins wrote this week, the staff photographer would have had to run ahead of a planned route, set up his equipment to carefully frame the desired shot and ensure he was ready to snap when Trudeau came by. “And what once appeared like a pleasant coincidence of timing for whomever gets to pose with the prime minister, it’s starting to feel even more like a staged exercise than it was before,” said Hutchins.

Trudeau is a social media savant, the Toronto writer Jesse Brown wrote in the Guardian last year, and he has used this to position himself as a sunny antidote to the turbulent news spilling out from other parts of the world. “Trudeau is the political equivalent of a YouTube puppy video,” he wrote. “Each week, Trudeau feeds the news cycle a new sharable moment, and our Facebook feeds are overwhelmed with shots of the adorable young statesman cuddling pandas and hugging refugees and getting accidentally photographed in the wild with his top off, twice.”

The result is a media frenzy that has at times overshadowed the crucial questions being asking about his government, such as how they can claim to fight climate change while throwing their support behind two pipelines in Canada and Keystone XL or why they signed off on a C$15bn deal to sell weaponised military vehicles to Saudi Arabia despite critics who worry the vehicles will be used by the House of Saud against its own citizens. Others wonder whether Trudeau’s self-described feminism will result in tangible change for the families of the thousands of missing and murdered indigenous women or those who left behind in a country where the cost of childcare and the gender pay gap rank among the highest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

So kids, if you're having an event but just can't come up with a shameless celebrity whore for the occasion, contact the prime minister's office. Be sure to give at least two weeks notice.

Credit Where It's Due. Cathy Imposes Obama-Grade Methane Rules for Fossil Fuelers.

Trudeau enviromin, Cathy McKenna, has announced new rules for cracking down on methane leaks from oil and gas wells.

The government will publish proposed regulations May 27 that would cover “over 95 per cent” of emission sources for methane, which is 84 times as powerful as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period at warming the planet, according to officials from Environment and Climate Change Canada. The proposal will then be open for a 60-day public comment period.

The proposed rules will require companies to create and maintain a program to detect and repair gas leaks, upgrade automated equipment and mechanical devices, and limit the direct release of methane gas into the atmosphere, including during fracking operations. There will also be rules for air pollutants that contribute to smog, or so-called volatile organic compounds.

Officials said these rules, empowered under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, would help reduce nationwide emissions by 282 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or the same as taking almost 60 million cars off the road for a year. That is expected to save $13.4 billion from 2018 to 2035 in “avoided climate change damages.”

Well, it sounds as though she's off to a good start at least. Given the massive hole the Trudeau clan have dug for Canada by facilitating the expansion of Tar Sands production, it's about time they entered something on the other side of the ledger, if only for appearances.

Prohibiting methane discharges is one thing. Monitoring the often remote well sites where methane can be released - inadvertently or deliberately - is another matter altogether.

A Ray of Sunshine

Via Stephen Colbert and Paul Simon

The Atrocity Known as TrumpCare

Trump's Health Care Victory Party

The Republican majority pushed it through the House of Representatives although many legislators admitted they hadn't even read it. They voted without waiting for the Congressional Budget Office appraisal and that was no accident.

However the CBO ran the numbers on TrumpCare and it's looking like the Great Orange Bloat's victory celebration was premature.

The American Health Care Act would cause 23 million people to lose health insurance over the next decade, and would disproportionally impact older, poorer Americans, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
...

The amended version of the bill — which would allow states to waive pre-existing condition protections as well as mandates on procedures and services insurance companies must cover — had not been scored by the CBO when the House passed it.

But the CBO has now scored the amended version, and the analysis is unlikely to make the bill any easier for the Senate to pass.

For example, a 64-year-old earning $26,500 a year in a state that took waivers would see their premium rise from $1,700 a year to $13,600, the CBO says of the amended AHCA. That's a 700% increase.

Even more, the CBO says the provision allowing states to waive pre-existing conditions would have sweeping negative consequences for those with existing health conditions.

Unless Trump starts kidnapping senators' grandchildren and holding them for ransom, his healthcare bill is not getting through the Senate.

The Queen of Political Cash Comes Up a Dollar Short

British Columbia's far from liberal premier, Christy Clark, appears to have come up short, finally, ending her party's majority rule over the province going back to 2001.

Give Christy her due. She made the most of her advantage while it lasted, extracting the fullest benefit for her party and herself usually at the expense of the province and our people. She ruled largely by fiat. Being a legislator was a part-time vocation at best. The legislature rarely sat except to push through the latest budget.

Christy doesn't deserve all of the credit for her Liberals' lengthy run. That has to be shared with the woefully mediocre and wholly uninspiring opposition New Democrats from Carole James to Adrian Dix to Jim Horgan.

Now it's all down to one riding, Courtenay-Comox. The NDP won it by a narrow, 9-vote margin. Then it was on to the absentee ballot count that many believed would hand the riding to the Liberals. As of last night, however, the NDP lead had grown to over 100 votes.  That's now grown to a 148 NDP margin with a few hours counting left to go.

This horse race hands the balance of power to the Green Party that has been much abused by the NDP in this and past elections.  Suffice to say the Dippers have done nothing to endear themselves to or earn the trust of the Greens.

I would prefer my Greens reject both parties until they extract ironclad concessions on a couple of major issues including electoral reform, Kinder Morgan and the Site C dam.  Of course the counting isn't finished yet and there's a longshot chance the Liberal fortunes could recover in Courtenay-Comox.

Update:

I just had a look at what might have been the outcome had proportional rep been in place.  The Liberals instead of 43 would have garnered around 36 seats. The NDP would have wound up with about 35 seats instead of 41. The Greens would have taken 14 seats instead of 3. Clearly then proportional representation represents nearly as great a threat to the NDP as it does to the Liberals because it gives seats to the grossly under-represented Green voters. Small wonder the Dippers went after the Green vote so aggressively in this campaign. All the more reason for the Greens to use their balance of power strategically to squeeze the parties for electoral reform.

At Last, An Intelligent Discussion About Overpopulation.

The May edition of Foreign Policy magazine is their climate change issue.

As a keen follower of climate science for the past 15 years or more, the shortcomings in the treatment of this potentially existential threat to human civilization has been the fractured and shallow coverage it has received. This has led some to see climate change as something to do with global warming and greenhouse gas emissions. That has encouraged many to see it as resolvable by measures such as geo-engineering. These are facile responses.

Even many climate scientists treat climate change as some stand alone issue that can be approached in isolation. It's a blinkered outlook that goes a long way to ensuring that answers will elude us.

Many years ago I began to assemble a list of the major problems confronting mankind this century. It was an extensive list. I no longer have it memorized but I'll do my best here:

Climate change and associated, largely anthropogenic or man-made challenges including severe storm events of increasing intensity, frequency and duration; a broken hydrological cycle contributing to severe flooding and drought, both cyclical and recurrent; a shift in jet stream circulation carrying warm air into the Arctic and cold polar air deep into southern regions; the heating of the Arctic manifesting in the loss of Arctic sea ice (the albedo), the thawing of Arctic permafrost, the drying out of the tundra leading to uncontrollable wild fires producing black soot; disease and pest migration; species (terrestrial, marine, plant and animal) extinction and migration; the loss of ice caps and glaciers; sea level rise, coastal flooding and the saltwater inundation of coastal freshwater resources; the rapidly spreading freshwater crisis; severe heat events including situations nearing "wet bulb 35" conditions; the collapse of global fisheries from rapacious overfishing; massive deforestation, particularly in South America and Asia Pacific; pollution and contamination of all forms including algae blooms from industrial and agricultural runoff, coastal dead zones; resource exhaustion and depletion; desertification and the rapid loss of arable farmland through soil degradation caused by excessively intensive agriculture; and a host of security challenges including overpopulation and population migration, famine, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, various regional arms races and the onset of resource wars.

I don't claim the list to be exhaustive, merely the best my memory can muster in the moment. I spent a few years looking at this list trying to discern whether and, if so, how these looming calamities were connected. Were there common threads that ran through them?

It turns out they are all, in varying degrees, connected. Each falls into one or more of three basic categories - anthropogenic global warming, overconsumption of resources and overpopulation.  Those common threads, all of them, run straight back to us, how we're constituted as societies and a global civilization, and how we're organized politically, socially, economically and industrially. It was then that I realized that Jared Diamond is right - we don't have much chance of solving any of them unless we're willing and able to solve them all.

I was pleased in skimming through the digital version of the latest Foreign Policy to discover a genuinely thoughtful, well-reasoned and in depth discussion of the overpopulation challenge from and center in their climate change edition. The article asks "Is there a case to be made against baby making?" before unpacking the social, cultural and environmental pros and cons that bedevil the issue.

FP editor, David Rothkopf, has an essay dealing with the scourge of denialism, "The Wages of Sin Is the Death of the World; the biggest threat to a fragile world is human frailty." He looks at how the most climate change hostile government, Trump's, came to power thanks to a deviant sexting a minor.

Rothkopf cites Nate Silverman's conclusion that Comey's decision, just days prior to the election, to announce a new investigation into Hillary's emails discovered on Anthony Weiner's laptop while the FBI pursued the sexting crime was enough to swing three states to Trump that gave him the Electoral College win.

The FBI was hunting down a perv. They seized his computer. On the hard drive were Huma Abedin emails. That caused the FBI to re-open the investigation. Comey made his announcement. Trump won the electoral college.  Now Trump is dismantling the EPA and threatening to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate change accord.

It looks like a good issue. Mine's in the mailbox but you may want to check it out on a newsstand or in your library.

In Defence of the Deep State.

To some, conspiracy theorists and those with a feeble understanding of governance, the Deep State is a sinister group of powerful insiders manipulating the strings of government for devious ends.  If you insist on believing that, this would be a good time to go to another blog or web site.

To me, the Deep State is something else. It is the institutional memory of government, the muscle memory, without which government cannot function. It exists, at times defiantly, because it is indispensable. Today when elected representatives routinely put partisan and special interests ahead of the public interest and the good of the country, the Deep State can be the last redoubt of liberal democracy.

The Globe's Lawrence Martin writes that this dreaded Deep State may be America's only effective counter to its president.

We’ve been hearing that potent term, relatively new to the political lexicon, a lot lately. It has different shades of meaning but generally denotes an entrenched natural governing elite. Conservative governments in Canada, notably John Diefenbaker’s and Stephen Harper’s, feared they would be undermined, though the term wasn’t in use then, by a hostile deep state in the form of a liberalized bureaucracy, media and foreign service.

In Ottawa, you might find the deep state’s charter members in leafy Rockcliffe Park neighbourhood; in Washington, in the cozy conclave of Georgetown, where the establishment forever has been moored.

...

Georgetowners were predictably appalled by the onslaught of the rubes and the rabble. But much of the fear on these narrow stately streets has already lifted. Against the infidels, the long-rooted Washington establishment is holding strong. The deep state is winning.

The renegade Trump administration becomes more conventional by the week. Much of foreign policy has been given over to Foggy Bottom traditionalists. Threats against immigrants have been pared down. The Steve Bannons in the administration are losing their clout. Trade threats have diminished, meaning Canada need not panic. For the NAFTA renegotiation, Ottawa holds some good cards and has a foreign minister in Chrystia Freeland who knows what she is doing.

The Washington bureaucracy, liberalized under Barack Obama, has played a big role, especially through leaks, in the deep state resistance. But the most powerful element has been the bold resurgence, chiefly in the form of The New York Times and The Washington Post, of a traditional mainstream press thought to be in decline.

The Post and Times have hit this White House with one news jolt after another. It’s like they’re back in their heyday of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. Chiefly as a result of their work, a special counsellor is now probing the Trump administration’s Russia ties. Comparisons to Watergate are premature and overheated. But it is worth remembering how the deep-state institutions of the day brought down Richard Nixon who, like Mr. Trump’s political base, railed against eastern elites.

“Of course, the deep state exists,” former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich says. “There’s a permanent state of massive bureaucracies that do whatever they want and set up deliberate leaks to attack the president.”

Says Mr. Trump of the media: “No politician in history – and I say this with great surety – has been treated worse or more unfairly.” His cause would perhaps be helped if in his first 119 days he hadn’t, as the Post reports, made 586 false and misleading claims.

Coinciding with the newspaper muscle-flexing has been the fall of Fox, the President’s media enabler. Fox has been hit by scandal, the departure of top talking heads and the death of its architect, Roger Ailes, who pandered to prejudice like none other and polarized the country in so doing.

The Trump Republicans are not caving to establishment forces on all fronts. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency stands for environmental destruction. The Attorney-General is a lock-em-up lawmaker with a bigoted background. Obamacare is threatened by an appalling piece of House legislation.

But chiefly owing to a robust free press, this administration is being held to clear-eyed account, an account that is allowing the forces of normalization to make headway. If that’s what a deep state is about, the United States should be happy it has one.

Welcome to WaterWorld. No, Not the One With Costner.

Even Americans pay attention to this facet of climate change - sea level rise. And the news is bad and getting worse.

You probably remember the early 1990s well enough. Not that long ago really. Well, over the past 25 years, the rate of sea level rise has increased threefold. And it's still speeding up.

A study published in scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests the threat of rising sea levels has been drastically underestimated.

"The acceleration in global mean sea-level rise is much larger than previously thought," Sönke Dangendorf, the paper's lead author, told DW.

"It underlines that sea-level rise is a serious threat," he added.

Dangendorf, from the University of Siegen in Germany, worked with an international team of scientists from Spain, France, Norway and the Netherlands. They discovered that sea levels had risen relatively slowly - by about 1.1 millimeters, or 0.04 inches, annually - for much of the 20th century. But that changed in the early 1990s

...

This study isn't the first to highlight that the rate of sea-level rise is speeding up. But its findings suggest a significantly faster rate of increase than past research. One of the reasons for the recent acceleration, Dangendorf told DW, is the melting of ice sheets over recent decades.

"We have always had a great uncertainty over the contribution of the large ice sheets, which store 100 times more sea-level equivalents than glaciers," Dangendorf said.

The new research shows the impact of Greenland and Antarctica's ice sheets melting rapidly over the last 20 or 30 years has been greater than expected, and is likely to result in a larger future sea-level rise than previously predicted.

That spells trouble for coastal areas.

Over to you, America. Yes, we mean you, Louisiana. Brace yourselves.

The small floods that submerge roads and sometimes enter homes along Louisiana's coast could become more than an occasional headache. A new study suggests that the frequency of "nuisance flooding" around the Gulf of Mexico will double every decade thanks to small rises in sea level.

In lower latitudes, the flooding will be worse. The tropics, including South America and Africa, will experience a doubling of extreme flooding due to sea level rise, said Sean Vitousek, lead author of the study published in the Scientific Reports journal this week.

On the Louisiana coast, hurricanes, rather than sea level rise, will continue to pose the biggest flood danger. The same is true for the Caribbean Sea and the East Coast. "But the smaller floods are something to worry about, especially as they happen with more frequency," said Vitousek, a coastal hazards researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Nuisance flooding can degrade drainage and sewer systems, contaminate drinking water supplies, damage buildings and disrupt transportation and commerce. Decades ago, it was powerful storms that caused such problems.

"But due to sea level rise, more common (storm) events are now more impactful," wrote National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists in a 2015 report on nuisance flooding. The agency said small coastal floods have been happening two or three times more frequently than just 20 years ago.

"The takeaway is that it doesn't take much sea level rise - just 5 to 10 centimeters - to double the frequency of floods," Vitousek said. 

The latest reports indicate sea level rise is about 4 mm. per year, nearly 1.6 inches per decade.  To add a little perspective here's a handy chart showing sea level rise back to the start of the Christian era.

Is It Time We Chaperoned Our Politicians

Where Alberta Fossil Fuelers Go to Shop

Yes, Christy, this is about you - and the rest.

Christy Clark, Canada's  Queen of Cash has been known to be a grateful recipient of campaign contributions from those friendly funsters known as the Calgary Petroleum Club but, of course, that doesn't mean that her government's acceptance of the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion had anything to do with cheque-stuffed envelopes.  Still, the skeptical might just wonder.

Hell, even the New York Times has taken notice of Grifty Clark and splashed her around on the pages of The Grey Lady.

It's fair to say that Canada is a nation of petro-pols. Our House of Commons is chock full of them save, perhaps, for that little lady way over there in the corner. And provincial legislatures from Newfoundland to British Columbia are also sinking under the weight of their own petro-pols.

It's timely help then from a friendly Deutscher,  Arne Jungjohann, an energy analyst from Germany.  His message - if Canada wants to make progress on climate change, if Canada's governments are remotely serious about that, they have to get fossil fuel money out of politics (and, I might add, government subsidies out of the fossil fuel industry).

There are no two ways about it, according to German political scientist Arne Jungjohann: if you want to make meaningful progress on climate change, you have to get big money out of politics.

“Then you get fossil fuel money out of politics,” said the author and energy analyst. “It’s very, very important to make this a non-partisan issue, otherwise you cannot create this stability and certainty that is needed for the investment people.”

Hold on a minute, Arnie. Fossil energy is already a non-partisan issue. Did you ever hear of the industry's latest Alberta champion, Rachel Notley? The Tories are in the fossil fuelers' bag.  So too is environmental hypocrite extraordinaire and Liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau. This is already a non-partisan issue and that is the problem. 

Jungjohann offered “lessons" from the German clean energy story, also called the Energiewende. It’s the German word for the country’s clean energy transition, and Jungjohann co-wrote a book about it: Energy Democracy — Germany’s Energiewende to Renewables.

If Canada has anything to learn from Germany's Energiewende, he said, it's that corporate money must exit the equation, citizens must be involved early on, and clean energy must become non-partisan. He called it the "democratization" of clean energy.

What works in Germany won't work in Canada. At the federal and the provincial level our fossil energy corruption is now institutionalized, embedded.

Trump Lawyers Up

He says he has no and never has had any connections with the Russians since entering politics but Donald Trump is smart enough to lawyer up anyway.


Donald Trump has appointed lawyer Marc Kasowitz to represent him in an inquiry into Russia's alleged meddling in the US presidential election and any links to the Trump campaign, US media report.

Mr Trump has used services of the New York lawyer - known as a tenacious litigator - for more than a decade.

Last week, former FBI boss Robert Mueller was named special counsel for the Department of Justice inquiry.

President Trump denies any collusion between his campaign and Russia.

However, US intelligence agencies believe Moscow tried to tip the 2016 election in favour of Mr Trump.

Meanwhile, the CBC's Neil Macdonald casts Trump as a "steaming pile of hypocrisy" in a thoughtful piece well worth a read.

President Donald Trump ...is the Chronos of hypocrisy. He is Jabba the Hutt, with hypocrisy crouching in a silver bikini, a leash around its neck.

...

Trump is more capable than even his peers in Third World dictatorships of delivering judgment on something, and then turning around and doing that very thing, fecklessly and without the slightest shame, and then attacking anyone who notices. And like Third World dictators, he surfs on his own personality cult-wave.

It's addictive, actually. On the rare occasion when Trump acts presidential for a few days, reporters and politicos feel like a perk has suddenly and unfairly been cut off.

In case you missed it on Sunday, here's John Oliver's take on "Stupid
Watergate."

Pure Ecstasy

Another one of those "a picture is worth..." moments.

A lucky photographer captures the moment as a wave of utter ecstasy sweeps across the face of pope Francis as he poses for the obligatory snapshot with the Cheeto Benito, his frau, Melania, and his daughter-wife Ivanka.

While they refused to wear head coverings in Saudi Arabia, the ladies got them on quick enough to see the Man in White. They also chose matching black dresses, a tribute, perhaps, to the Inquisition? However Melania clearly wasn't about to waste one of her remaining smiles on the guy in the white beanie. Trump, meanwhile, grinned like a trained seal.

What Goes Around

Don't waste a tear on big game hunter Theunis Botha of South Africa. Just try not to giggle.

Theunis Botha, 51, from Johannesberg, was leading a hunt in Gwai, Zimbabwe, when they stumbled across a herd of elephants, which included pregnant cows.

Three elephants stampeded towards the hunters and Mr Botha opened fire with his rifle, prompting a fourth elephant to storm in from the side and lift him up with her trunk.

The Afrikaans news site Netwerk24 reported that another member of the group fired the fatal shot at the elephant and, as the animal collapsed dead, she fell on Mr Botha.

I have this feeling that where Mr. Botha is going he might find that it's the animals that have the guns.  

Don't Worry, Be Happy. We've Got Kinder Morgan's Word, After All.

A dandy little interactive piece from the Globe & Mail showing how bitumen-laden supertankers will navigate through British Columbia coastal waters.

People who know better won't be impressed but the Globe has always been pro-pipeline, pro-tanker. The least assuring part of the presentation is the rosy Kinder-Morgan assessment sounding the "all clear" on the expansion. That may be why the paper has left out a few points.

One critical point left unmentioned - bitumen. While we're given Kinder Morgan's assurance that a spill is almost impossible, well that's bullshit from the American company intent on pushing its pipeline through to "tidewater." There has been plenty of testimony from experienced mariners including Canadian Coast Guard and Royal Canadian Navy types that predict a spill isn't a matter of "if" but "when" and "how often." Let's cut that in half - a spill is possible if not probable.

A spill of bitumen. Nobody wants to talk about bitumen or dilbit which is what is going in those tankers.

Kinder Morgan and the Globe don't want to get into what happens when dilbit gets spilled into our coastal waters. They pretend it's going to be, worst case, like the Exxon Valdez catastrophe. And, while that was a catastrophe and still hasn't been cleaned up, that was conventional crude oil, not bitumen, not dilbit.

Everybody - the feds, Notley, the oil patch, the pipeline gang think it's just dandy to push this toxic sludge through British Columbia waters.

Nobody - not Peter Kent, not Joe Oliver, not Justin or Cathy or Garneau, not Notley and certainly not Kinder Morgan - can walk on water or prove that dilbit can either. It sinks. The diluent, the light oil, separates and the really toxic bitumen, heads straight to the bottom. They imply that the stuff floats, like the Exxon Valdez oil, but they can't and won't prove it. If they could they would if only to silence their critics.

When he was enviromin Peter Kent was asked if the government had any technology to clean up a dilbit spill. He replied, "no, but we're working on it." Apparently Kent didn't get very far and neither did his successor, Dame Cathy. That much was obvious when the Liberal government's environment ministry authorized the use of Corexit as an "oil dispersant."

Their solution, Corexit. Fuck me, Corexit. The feds, Justin's team, have authorized the use of Corexit as a spill response. You see, Corexit doesn't disperse oil, it sinks it. It's the "out of sight, out of mind" solution to oil spills. Corexit was used at the Exxon Valdez disaster and the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. It doesn't just harm the environment, it maims and even kills those who come into contact with it. Check this out. Yet those bastards in Edmonton and Ottawa think Corexit is just the ticket. Or go here to read the warning labels from the manufacturer.

Corexit is the federal government's admission that when a dilbit spill occurs their plan is to sink it to the bottom where pretty much all the marine life that sustains the oceanic food chain originates. Kill that off and you can kill off most of the marine life between the bottom and the surface - for decades and decades. The Exxon Valdez wasn't bitumen. Neither was the Deepwater Horizon. They were relatively benign crude oil and they remain environmental disasters to this day.

Justin, Rachel, Cathy and Christy - they've all got a raging hard on for this project just like their predecessors. Would you want that stuff, a product whose manufacturer warns, "Do not contaminate surface water," in your river or lake or pond? Would you want your kids or grandkids to swim in Corexit-laced water? Would you want to eat seafood that's been swimming in Corexit and bitumen contaminated water? If you would, well, you would be a moron.

But don't worry, be happy.

Water, Water Everywhere (At Least Everywhere It's Not Wanted)

Let's cut to the chase. The IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has estimated sea level rise over the course of this century will be somewhere between 30 cm. to 1 metre. With the IPCC's track record for getting it wrong, understating the pace and impact of climate change, you can consider that a low ball opinion.

More recent studies of the rate at which ice caps in both hemispheres are declining suggests by 2100 we'll see between 2 and 3 metres of sea level rise. With the current rate of sea level rise of 4 mm. annually and increasing, 2 metres is probably a safe bet.

Which lends a bit of perspective to the recent study about near-term sea level rise. Here they're looking at sea level rise of 5, 10 and 20 cms.  That sort of rise may not be devastating in its own right but it can be when it combines with high tides and storm surge events and it's expected to cause havoc in the tropics first.

In those locations, just 2.5cm of sea level rise leads to extreme water levels being seen twice as often, while a 5-10cm increase means coastal floods are twice as likely across all the tropics. A rise of 20cm leaves almost every coast with twice the risk.

The rise of 5-10cm, likely to occur within a couple of decades, would mean major cities including San Francisco in the US, Mumbai in India, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and Abidjan in Ivory Coast facing a doubled risk of coastal floods. “The maps of increased flooding potential suggest a dire future,” write the scientists.

“This study shows how even small changes in mean sea level can significantly increase the frequencies with which critical thresholds are exceeded,” said Thomas Wahl, professor of coastal risks at the University of Central Florida, who was not part of the research team.

While coastal British Columbia is obviously not in the tropics it already experiences seawater inundation events, especially in spring, when high tides and storm surges can be compounded by early season mountain snowcap melts and runoff. British Columbia's Lower Mainland, one of the most densely populated regions in Canada, is particularly vulnerable when meltwater runoff swells the Fraser River as it nears the sea. There are some very low-lying municipalities along the way, Richmond and Surrey in particular.

[University of Illinois prof, Sean] Vitousek said: “We are going to have to [cut carbon dioxide emissions] and engineer the coastlines to stop a lot of these events from happening. We want Greenland and Antarctica to remain as ice for as long as possible.

“One metre of sea level rise is going to be a game-changer for the coastal zone. The next time you are at the beach or down by the water, think about what that area would be like in some of these sea level rise scenarios, half a metre or metre. You’ll see it’s a pretty scary proposition.”

Assange Outwaits the Swedish Heat

Julian Assange may walk on the rape allegations from Sweden that have kept him bottled up in Ecuador's London embassy for years.


Swedish prosecutors have dropped their preliminary investigation into an allegation of rape against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, bringing an end to a seven-year legal standoff.

The decision was taken after prosecutors concluded that “at this point, all possibilities to conduct the investigation are exhausted”, Sweden’s director of public prosecutions, Marianne Ny, said on Friday.

“In order to proceed with the case, Julian Assange would have to be formally notified of the criminal suspicions against him. We cannot expect to receive assistance from Ecuador regarding this. Therefore the investigation is discontinued.

“If he, at a later date, makes himself available, I will be able to decide to resume the investigation immediately.”

Assange claimed asylum in 2012 arguing that, if he was delivered up to the Swedes, they, or the Brits, would simply turn him over to the Americans for political persecution.

With the announcement Assange got all frisky:

Later he tweeted again: “Detained for 7 years without charge by while my children grew up and my name was slandered. I do not forgive or forget.”

If he does venture out of the Ecuadorean embassy, the British Police still have issues to settle with Assange.

The Metropolitan police in London said Assange would face immediate arrest for breaching his bail conditions; a warrant was issued when he failed to attend a magistrates court after entering the embassy.

“The Metropolitan police service is obliged to execute that warrant should he leave the embassy,” the statement said.

It added: “Whilst Mr Assange was wanted on a European arrest warrant (EAW) for an extremely serious offence, the MPS response reflected the serious nature of that crime. Now that the situation has changed and the Swedish authorities have discontinued their investigation into that matter, Mr Assange remains wanted for a much less serious offence. The MPS will provide a level of resourcing which is proportionate to that offence.”

It's telling that Julian "I do not forgive or forget" Assange acts as though he's been cleared, vindicated. He hasn't been anything of the sort.  If he wants to clear his name he'll have to travel to Sweden. Without that he's just another accused sex offender conveniently beyond the reach of the law. Don't forget, this is the guy who promised that he would hop a flight to the U.S. to face the music if Obama pardoned Chelsea Manning only to renege on that promise when Obama did pardon Chelsea Manning.

Weiner's Final Tumble

Registered sex offender. That should be the last nail in the coffin for the former Democratic congressman, Anthony Weiner.

Mr. Weiner will plead guilty to a single charge of transferring obscene material to a minor, pursuant to a plea agreement with the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, one of the people said. Mr. Weiner surrendered to the F.B.I. early Friday morning.

The federal authorities have been investigating reports that, beginning in January 2016, Mr. Weiner, then 51, exchanged sexually explicit messages with a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina.

The plea covers conduct by Mr. Weiner from January through March of last year, the person said. A likely result of the plea is that Mr. Weiner would end up as a registered sex offender, although a final determination has yet to be made, the person added.

Update:

Weiner has had his day in court and he pleaded guilty.

The 52-year-old admitted to the federal court in New York that he had transferred obscene material to a 15-year-old girl. As part of a plea bargain arranged between the judge and his lawyer, Weiner will not be able to appeal any sentence of 27 months or less in prison.

"I have a sickness, but I do not have an excuse," the ex-lawmaker said.

Besides sending her inappropriate photos of himself, his victim said Weiner asked her to undress on camera. The allegations prompted then-FBI director James Comey to seize Weiner's laptop for evidence.

Comey then stunned the public in October by announcing that some material he had found on Weiner's laptop had given him reason to reopen the closed investigation in Hillary Clinton's handling of State Department business on a private e-mail server. Although Comey described himself as "mildly nauseous" at the idea, many have said his announcement was at least partially to blame for Clinton losing the presidency to Donald Trump.

Yes, Dame Cathy, Pollution Isn't Free.

It's only taken a year and a half but, finally, Justin's EnviroMin, Cathy McKenna, has declared that "pollution isn't free" - only she really doesn't mean it. She's just bullshitting.

Dame Cathy veered clear of the "C" word, choosing "pollution" instead of "carbon."

What has generally been described as a "price on carbon" is now described by McKenna as a "price on pollution" or a "price on carbon pollution," presumably because someone in the Liberal government decided the word "pollution" was more evocative.

It's hard to be mad at carbon. Pollution, on the other hand, has a bad name. So, in the course of her short meeting with reporters, McKenna made two dozen references to a price on pollution.

But an awful lot of pollution in Canada is free. One glaring example is the runoff of agricultural chemicals, primarily fertilizers, that contaminates our surface water generating toxic algae blooms that choke our rivers and lakes. Her ladyship doesn't seem to have any interest in pricing that. No, she's talking about carbon pricing on fossil fuels.

Too bad she couldn't be honest about it. However that might lead her into a trap. If we're to tax carbon at the pump we might just as well slap the same tax at the dock where we plan to load foreign supertankers with the highest-carbon ersatz oil on the planet.  Why shouldn't we tax it here? It won't be taxed in Asia where we intend to see it burned. But that's why she's a bullshitter.

Caesar Was Felled in Minutes. Trump May Take a Little Longer.

It really is a lot like handing your 16-year old the keys to a brand new Corvette and telling him the only traffic signs he has to obey are those he likes.  That, to me, is an apt metaphor for the first four months of Donald Trump's presidency.

Will he be impeached? I don't know and I don't know anyone who does know. The skeleton of impeachment is certainly there but it has to be fleshed out. Someone has to put meat on those bones. Someone, perhaps, like special counsel Robert Mueller.

The special counsel will investigate matters under his broad mandate. There will be three other investigations, at least three. The House of Representatives is investigating. The Senate is running its own intelligence investigation. The FBI is investigating. The media, of course, will be investigating.

There is far more to this than the Comey and Flynn affairs.  It resembles nothing so much as this ball of mating garter snakes.

Now, in that ball are plenty of snakes who have suddenly become worried about their personal well being. These are people who are going to be lawyering up as they try to figure out if and when to cut deals with investigators. Trump has already been gored by leaks. He demands absolute loyalty but, as he's shown with Flynn and Comey, no one can count on loyalty from Trump. Those who choose to rat him out to save their own skins might find they have to take a number.

And so today Trump begins his first foreign trip as president of the United States. He'll swing by Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Vatican before moving on to the Nato summit and then the G7 leaders conference. And he's traveling under a cloud, the cloud of a wrecked and wounded presidency and the spectre of impeachment. Think of it as the Schadenfreude Tour.

Mueller Has a Lot to Gnaw On

If there's one thing that marks the Trump administration it's their favourite pastime, lying. That and the erratic ramblings of the Cheeto Benito.

It's getting tough for Trump's handmaidens. A controversy looms. They all caucus to formulate a teflon response. Then they go out to spread their gospel to the waiting scribes. Then, the next day, Trump himself goes out, contradicts them and admits the rumours were true.

Isn't it curious? These people - Conway, Spicer, Huckabee Sanders, the lot - speak on behalf of the president. They're his people, his staff, the face of his administration. They're the people you see on the 6 o'clock news and the Sunday talk shows. Yet here they say one thing and the next day the president hisself essentially says they were lying. Of course, unless he's lying. They're either making a liar out of Trump or Trump is making a liar out of them. No matter - wash, rinse, repeat - it just keeps on coming.

Now a sane president who values his integrity and reputation might have to deal with this problem, the incessant lying by his staff. Surely he would have fired the lot of them by now. And yet that's not the way it works in the Trump White House.

Then there's this deepening Flynn business. After his confirmation as National Security Advisor rumours surfaced of Flynn's dealings with the Russians. Veep Pence went public saying (lying) that Flynn had done no such thing. 18 days later, more or less, a paper reports details of Flynn's dealings. He's promptly sacked by Trump for lying to Pence only Trump blames the newspaper that broke the story, not Flynn. Conspiracy theory Mike takes one for the team and leaves. Later he seeks an immunity deal. Why, because he had dealings with the Russians?

Now it emerges that Flynn disclosed his Russia dealings long before the inauguration. He wasn't hiding anything - at least not from Trump. So how could he later have lied to Pence about something he'd already disclosed? And how could Trump claim to have been betrayed by Flynn, or some newspaper, or someone, something, anything? Why lie about this at all? One thing is certain. This whole, elaborate yet clumsy lie wasn't about protecting ex-general Michael Flynn.

And there's this business about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Now it emerges there were 18-more meetings and calls that were not, until now, revealed.  It's difficult to make sense of this. How many contacts did Trump and his aides have with, say, the Chinese, or the Swedes, or French officials? Why so many and why the Russians? Why all the denials and obfuscation?

These are the sorts of things that a seasoned counsel can sink his teeth into - all the contradictions, the lies, the inexplicable stuff. It's there. It's on record. A lot of the good stuff comes straight from Trump's mouth. As liars go, Trump is incredibly sloppy and ill-disciplined.