Of Course He Doesn't Believe It

The White House picked their moment, Friday afternoon of the Thanksgiving Day weekend, to release their own government's Fourth National Climate Assessment.

The Trump White House wanted the report buried, forgotten, - lost in turkey, cranberries, gravy and mashed potatoes. The report, congressionally mandated and produced by 13 major federal agencies, makes a dark farce of Donald Trump's economic and environmental policies.

So what has the legendary non-reader made of the 1,600 page report? When asked about the dire warnings of major economic losses climate change will inflict on America, Trump replied, "I don't believe it."

Who needs science and facts and evidence when you've got the opinion of a stable genius?

Alberta's Bitumen Pits are a Racket and We've All Been Sucked In. A Made-by-Conservatives Fiasco.

You've probably seen how the mob will takeover a small but profitable business, bleed it dry and then split, leaving the empty, ruined hulk a dead loss for out-of-pocket creditors. That's not far off the mark when it comes to the Athabasca bitumen pits.

The Tar Sands, properly managed, could have been a terrific asset for the Wild Rose province. If only they had listened to Peter Lougheed. Only the mob (foreign energy giants) moved in, co-opted Alberta's political caste (Conservative and New Democrat), negotiated laughable royalty deals that put the province on a ponzi scheme economy, and, at the same time pocketed billions in tax breaks, deferrals and subsidies. Now, with the prospect of bitumen becoming an early "stranded asset," Alberta faces the possibility of getting stiffed for upwards of $260 billion in unfunded Athabasca remediation costs. If that hazmat site is cleaned up at all you can expect most of the cost to be picked up by Ottawa. Alberta, you might have heard, is once again predictably broke.

In today's Tyee, Canada's top petro-scribe, Andrew Nikiforuk, writes that freewheeling Alberta is very much the author of its own misfortune.

The Alberta government has known for more than a decade that its oilsands policies were setting the stage for today’s price crisis.

Which makes it hard to take the current government seriously when it tries to blame everyone from environmentalists to other provinces for what is a self-inflicted economic problem.

In 2007, a government report warned that prices for oilsands bitumen could eventually fall so low that the government’s royalty revenues — critical for its budget — would be at risk. 

The province should encourage companies to add value to the bitumen by upgrading and refining it into gasoline or diesel to avoid the coming price plunge, the report said.

Albertans came blame Trudeau all they want. That is what profoundly stupid people deeply manipulated by their dishonest local politicians will do.

With North American pipelines largely full, U.S. oil production surging and U.S. refineries working at full capacity, Alberta has wounded itself with bad policy choices, say experts. 

The Alberta government and oil industry is in crisis mode because the gap between the price paid for Western Canadian Select — a blend of heavy oil and diluent — and benchmark West Texas Intermediate oils has widened to $40 US a barrel. 

Some energy companies have called on the government to impose production cuts to increase prices.\ 

The business case for slowing bitumen production was made by the great Fort McMurray fire of 2015. 

The fire resulted in a loss of 1.5 million barrels of heavy oil production over several months. As a result, the price of Western Canadian Select rose from $26.93 to $42.52 per barrel.

Bitumen is not oil.

Oilsands crude typically sells at a $15 to $25 discount to light oil such as West Texas Intermediate. It costs more to move through pipelines, as it has to be diluted with a high-cost, gasoline-like product known as condensate. According to a recent government report, it can cost oilsands producers $14 to dilute and move one barrel of bitumen and condensate through a pipeline. 

And transforming the sulfur-rich heavy oil into other products is more expensive because its poor quality requires a complex refinery, such as those clustered in the U.S. Midwest and Gulf Coast. 

But the growing discount has cost Alberta’s provincial treasury dearly because royalties are based on oil prices.

What's good for the goose is not good for Edmonton's gander.

Canada exports about 3.3 million barrels of oil a day. About half of that is diluted bitumen, or heavy oil. 

And the current dramatic price discount has divided oilsands producers into winners and losers. 

The winners invested in upgraders and refineries, while the losers are producing more bitumen than their refinery capacity can handle or the market needs. 

During Alberta’s so-called bitumen crisis, the three top oilsands producers — Suncor, Husky and Imperial Oil — are posting record profits.

...The Alberta government knew this was coming. 

A technical paper on bitumen pricing for Alberta Energy’s 2007 royalty review warned the province about the perils of increasing production without increasing value-added production. 

“Bitumen prices, when compared to light crude oil prices, are typified by large dramatic price drops and recoveries,” it noted. Between 1998 and 2005, “bitumen prices were 63 per cent more volatile than West Texas Intermediate prices,” it said.

A Screw-up with Ralph Klein, Stephen Harper, Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney's fingerprints all over it.

The analysis added that “for bitumen to attract a good price, it needs refineries with sufficient heavy-oil conversion capacity.” 

The province’s push to develop the oilsands quickly increased the risk, the report said. “Price volatility for bitumen, especially the extreme low prices that have been witnessed several times over the past several years, is the most obvious risk.” 

And the report noted that increasing bitumen production posed “a revenue risk for the resource owner” — the people of Alberta. When the differential widens, Alberta makes less money on its already low royalty bitumen rates. 

Companies can compensate for the price risk by buying or investing in U.S. refineries; securing long-term pipeline contracts; investing in storage or using contracts to protect them from price swings. 

Many oilsands producers, including Suncor, Imperial and Husky, have lessened their vulnerability to bitumen’s volatility by doing all of these things.

Shrewd energy companies make out like bandits when prices crater. It means they're off the hook for royalties and get bargain-basement bitumen feedstock for their refineries to turn into finished petroleum products.

Peter Lougheed said "go slow." For Klein and every other Alberta premier ever since it's been "balls to the wall." These brilliant Conservative types have been played for suckers.

Imagine, rock-bottom bitumen is transported from Athabasca to refineries in the States where it is turned into marketable oil and gasoline that is then sold back to Canada at a hefty profit. Good for the energy producers and the American economy. A fiscal disaster for Alberta and Canada.

In 2007 Pedro Van Meurs, a royalty expert now based in Panama, warned the government that its royalty for bitumen was way too low in a paper titled “Preliminary Fiscal Evaluation of Alberta Oil Sand Terms.”

Van Meurs noted that upgrading considerably enhances the value of bitumen and would generate more revenue for the province.
But that did not appear to be the policy the government was pursuing, warned Van Meurs in his report to the government. 

Low royalties “raise the issue whether it is in the interest of Alberta to continue to stimulate through the fiscal system such very high-cost production ventures,” wrote Van Meurs, a chief of petroleum developments for the Canadian government in the 1970s. 

Charging higher royalties would not only slow down production and avoid cost overruns in the oilsands but also encourage “upgrading projects with higher value-added opportunities,” he wrote. 

But Alberta succumbed to sustained oil patch lobbying in 2007 and ignored Van Meurs’ advice.

Sorry, Alberta, but you shot yourself in the foot. You got greedy and were conned into inflicting harm on your own people and Canada also.

As for Trudeau, what does his TransMountain pipeline do but perpetuate this fiasco? What is the point of a pipeline that can only undermine the market price of the bitumen it delivers to foreign refineries?

I Said It Would Come to This. Those Bastards Are Planning Again!!

Our cousins across the pond, a.k.a. "the Brits", are planning for climate change. Not 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius but 4 degrees Celsius of warming and what that would mean for the UK (if there still is a united kingdom should that occur).

Not surprisingly, the Brits are focusing on flooding and inevitable retreat from the sea and, inland, the valleys. Britain is coming to grips with the likelihood that it too will have to deal with IDPs or internally displaced persons, a term once reserved for war refugees but now extended to include climate migrants.

Resilience is the catchword:

People may have to be moved away from high-risk areas as climate change makes flooding more likely and more severe in the UK, the government has said. 

Announcing the biggest review of climate change in Britain for nearly a decade, the environment secretary, Michael Gove,said flooding was one of the key ways in which changes would become manifest in the UK. 

“It will not always be possible to prevent every flood,” he told an audience of Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) stakeholders. “We cannot build defences to protect every single building or reinforce every retreating coastline. We will be looking at ways we can encourage every local area to strive for greater overall resilience that takes into account all the different levers from land-use planning to better water storage upstream, and tackles both flood prevention and response.”

The best way to build resilience is to prepare for plausible worst case scenarios. In the UK, that's 4 degrees Celsius of warming.

The Environment Agency is preparing for 4C of warming in planning the UK’s flood defences, though the Paris agreement aims to limit warming to no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels.

...Next year, Defra will publish a long-term policy statement on flooding and coastal erosion and the Environment Agency will issue a new 50-year flood strategy, which Gove said should “explore new philosophies”, going beyond traditional flood defences such as sea and river walls and other “hard” barriers.

Real petro-states, it seems, don't dwell on inconvenient possibilities such as 4C of warming or the mega-floods and severe droughts that would spawn. Petro-states don't focus on what 4C would mean to already rapidly decaying infrastructure or habitability of cities, towns and villages, most of which are located on rivers, lakes or other waterways. The last thing petro-states want to talk about is internally displaced populations and faltering resilience, urban or rural.

When Politicians Become Habituated to Windfall Revenues, Nothing Good Comes of It

The oil and gas provinces of Canada - Alberta, Saskatchewan, B.C. and Newfoundland (okay, okay, "and Labrador") - are places where politicians dream of easy money.  All they need do is hold out their hand and some energy giant will put money in it, endless amounts of money. So eager are they for windfall wealth that they're willing to look the other way when that's required. They also spend a prodigious amount of time and effort on sleight-of-hand conjuring acts to make what is really a trickle of money appear to be a rampaging river of money.

The poster boy for this chicanery is the Athabasca bitumen pits. It's gotten so bad that a gang of grifters from Texas panicked the Trudeau government into buying a decaying old pipeline for around 700 per cent of its actual value, tying that same government into shelling out another seven to nine billion atop the purchase price to construct a new pipeline for the bitumen producers. Ever feel like we were had?

Yet it seems the myths of petro-Canada are beginning to unravel and the ugly reality of our partnerships with the energy giants is starting to resemble the era when the Vandals sacked Rome.

The Globe and Mail has an investigative piece, "Hustle in the oil patch: Inside a looming financial and environmental crisis."

Harold Wang was driving a hard bargain. In the summer of 2016, the Hong Kong businessman was closing in on a sweetheart deal to acquire a major foothold in Alberta’s oil patch by establishing a brand new company. The price tag: $1. 

For weeks, he had been in talks with Calgary-based Perpetual Energy Inc. and its CEO, Sue Riddell Rose, to buy thousands of aging natural-gas wells. Despite the pittance he was preparing to pay, negotiations had bogged down. By early August Mr. Wang, who had previously worked at major U.S. investment banks, was firing off an e-mail to Ms. Riddell Rose in which he threatened to put the deal on hold. 

After all, the acquisition was not without major risks. Many of the wells were nearing the end of their economic life, and the deal included the assumption of future cleanup costs, pegged by the seller at $133.6-million; Mr. Wang’s company simply did not have the financial wherewithal normally required to convince the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) that he could afford such a cleanup. 

No matter, as that environmental bill had been glossed over: The deal had been structured in such a way that the AER – an industry-funded agency that operates at arm’s length from the provincial government and is charged with both promoting and policing the oil business – would not be able to assess whether Mr. Wang’s new company could meet the obligations.

...Within 18 months, Mr. Wang’s company, by then named Sequoia Resources Corp., would be insolvent, triggering disputes over how it was allowed to buy up energy properties in the first place – and who would cover the costly cleanup of the wells.

... In the oil patch, pliant regulators have enabled well-known companies, including Husky Energy Inc., Enerplus Corp. and others, to foist cleanup costs onto small companies that are buying up the distressed wells of those bigger players. In some cases, those smaller players are purchasing the assets even though they are unable to secure financing from major banks. 

The risky bet is that natural-gas prices will rebound and deliver payoffs big enough to generate profits while also funding the cleanup of old wells as they peter out. 

But the gamble has stirred a backlash in the industry. It has also angered landowners who complain of being shortchanged on lease payments from energy companies. And ultimately it has left taxpayers to shoulder a financial and environmental mess. In Alberta, a string of corporate bankruptcies has already pushed the number of defunct well sites to 4,349, up from 545 in 2014, necessitating a $235-million loan from the provincial government last year to shore up the fund set aside by industry to pay for cleanup. And that count does not yet include any of Sequoia’s wells.

...Depending on assumed costs for plugging and reclaiming wells, the tab could easily climb to $13.2-billion, and reach as high as $26.9-billion, if companies on the brink of insolvency and other struggling firms were to collapse, according to a Globe analysis. 

“It’s a shell game,” said Al Kemmere, president of the Rural Municipalities Association in Alberta, “that we have no ability … to control.”

It is a scam and we'll only know just how badly we've been fleeced when the energy giants, those who knew how to take their share and ours from our resources, take their leave and stiff us for the cleanup. That's when we'll have to reconcile the books and it won't be pretty. 

For all of his efforts on behalf of Alberta's oil patch, Trudeau isn't feeling much love from the people of Alberta who have been brought up to live and breathe victimization. For more on that, read Dave Climenhaga's excellent post, "If other Canadians don't think Alberta should go suck a lemon, they probably soon will."

Too many Albertans have been raised to believe that sinister forces in Ottawa or in other provinces have been conspiring to undermine the market price of bitumen as though their crud petroleum isn't subject to ordinary principles of economics, i.e. supply and demand. In their deluded minds, ramping up supply, flooding world markets with bitumen, in a world already flooded with cheap, clean oil and gas, will magically re-inflate the price of bitumen.

The Surprising Part of America's Fourth National Climate Assessment

The big surprise in the US government's Fourth National Climate Assessment is that there are no surprises.

Sure the outlook is dire. Bad things are happening to America and much worse to follow. Thirteen federal government departments say so and they've written 1,600 pages to back up their claims.

Media reports tout it as alarming. I don't know why. There's really nothing in it that's new, nothing that those who follow such things don't already know.

If there is a message to this two-volume report it's that those who regularly thwart action on climate change because it may set back the US economy are, in fact, about to ruin the US economy.

We have the same mentality in play in Canada. We may make a show of implementing gestural measures, such as carbon taxes, but it's always with the proviso that we must never harm the economy, never restrain our quest for perpetual exponential growth. And yet, just like in the States, the path we're on will hammer the economy in the long run - just not before the next electoral cycle or the one after that. The long term future of the country and of our future generations is a distraction compared to how our political apparatus fares in the next election.

Neoliberalism is the milieu that brings substandard leaders to high office. We wind up with second-raters who just close their eyes and trust in the invisible hand of the marketplace to save our bacon. That's like leaving a tiger to safeguard your prime rib roast.

With the environmental Sword of Damocles hanging over our head, neoliberal ideology is genuinely nihilistic. It is a commercial bargain, one that places little value on what may befall our grandkids or even the economy itself twenty or thirty years from now.

It is no accident that the current environmental calamity took hold when the twisted theories of Hayek and Friedman were made reality by Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney. Nothing changed even when Friedman renounced his own theories as failures. That's the power of nihilistic thinking.

Six months into his premiership, Justin Trudeau was asked how he wanted to be seen. His answer was he wanted to be seen as a free trader. Not exactly the leader he touted himself to be in the run-up to the 2015 election yet, at the same time, probably one of the most honest things he's said since his Liberals formed government.

I sometimes wonder if Mr. Trudeau sees that other locomotive, the one barreling down the track, heading straight for us. That's the locomotive we're being warned is drawing ever closer in all the reports now flooding in, each warning more urgent than the last. Of course once the question is asked, it leads to even grimmer questions.

If he does see the smoke pouring from that locomotive eating up the track, why does he want our locomotive to run ever faster toward it? How does he imagine this ends? Worse yet, what if he doesn't see that oncoming engine? What if he thinks it's something else that just happens to be on the same railway track? What if he believes that two locomotives bearing down on each other at full speed somehow won't collide? What if it simply doesn't matter to him? Maybe he would like to act but thinks he cannot.

We Need to Shrink the Global Economy But Destroying the Environment Can't Be the Best Way to Go About It.

Whether the disciples of perpetual exponential growth like it or not, we're fast heading for a day of reckoning on the global economy.

In theory, at least, mankind should be able to maintain an economy provided it is well within the finite limits of the environment. We've already overgrown the global economy beyond the maximum carrying capacity of the environment by a factor of 1.7 times. We've gotten by through sleight-of-hand measures. We substitute a new resource when an existing resource is exhausted. If there's not enough of what we require, we're very adept at raiding nature's reserves. The one thing these techniques are not is sustainable. You will, eventually, come up empty. We are doing that already.

This all came to mind today thanks to a story in The New York Times warning that climate change will shrink the US economy.

A major scientific report issued by 13 federal agencies on Friday presents the starkest warnings to date of the consequences of climate change for the United States, predicting that if significant steps are not taken to rein in global warming, the damage will knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end.

...in direct language, the 1,656-page assessment lays out the devastating effects of a changing climate on the economy, health and environment, including recordwildfires in California, crop failures in the Midwest and crumbling infrastructure in the South. Going forward, American exports and supply chains could be disrupted, agricultural yields could fall to 1980s levels by midcentury and fire season could spread to the Southeast, the report finds.

The survival of our species, perhaps even most life on Earth, depends on how we, as a global civilization, respond to three, tightly interwoven, existential threats: climate change, overpopulation and our rapacious over-consumption of the planet's resources. Those are the Big Three and you can't solve any of them without solving all of them. So far the community of nations is making a farcical effort on the first and failing. We're not even getting into the other two.

Trump, of course, sees efforts to address climate change as some mortal threat to America's economy. Trudeau says the right things but he too places the economy in clear priority to the environment.

Nobody would dare entertain the heresy of actually bringing the global economy back within the safety limits of the environment. The hard truth is that the economy has been rigged so powerfully that we are mortally dependent on a growing supply of resources the Earth simply does not have. We're already deeply in Overshoot (think of it as environmental overdraft) and we're showing no signs of changing course. The resource path we're following is plainly nihilistic, eventually, but we seem to have a tolerance for nihilistic practices these days.

It's a simple predicament that we avoid acknowledging. Either mankind learns to live in harmony with the Earth or the mechanisms of the Earth will destroy us. Some choice, eh?

Papadopoulos Melts Down

Former Trump campaign advisor turned jailbird, George Papadopoulos now contends he was set up by Australia and the UK in a plot to swing the 2016 presidential election to Hillary Clinton.  From the Sydney Morning Herald:

After Papadopoulos told Downer in 2016 that Russia possessed damaging material about then-US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Downer told US authorities, helping prompt the investigation led by Robert Mueller. 

Since pleading guilty in court, however, a Twitter account in Papadopoulos's name has claimed that Australia was part of a conspiracy against him.

Only today the Papadopoulos account tweeted that Downer was not "repping Australia" and that "America deserves the truth."
The Greek-American energy analyst has portrayed himself as a victim and, in his counter-factual history of the Mueller probe, he is arguing that it is an Australian effort to attack a US presidential candidate, not a Russian effort to subvert US democracy. 

...By Papadopoulos’ own admission, the intended audience for his some of his social media messages was Australia. In a November 4 tweet, (later deleted), Papadopoulos wrote: “Decided am going to start talking to Australia directly.”

He then made the fanciful claim that: “Alexander Downer was an errand boy for the Clinton’s," who "might have single-handedly disrupted the US-Australia relationship to safeguard his ties to the Clintons.” He also claimed the UK, Australia and the Obama administration was "running disinformation operations" against the Trump campaign. 

Earlier, on September 22, he posted: “Australia, if you are listening, do not sacrafice [sic] and damage your relationship with the USA to protect Alexander Downer. He sold you out for the sole purpose to try and sabotage Donald Trump to keep his links to the Clintons alive and well." 

...Papadopoulos’ social media effort appears to be, among other things, a crack at reshaping perceptions within Australia about Downer, Western intelligence and the Mueller probe, while potentially sowing distrust between Australia and its traditional allies.

Papadopoulos’ counter-narratives underscore how easy it is to bring misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theory into the public sphere in part because social media platforms allow for disinformation to be shared and spread easily.

Partially, also, the human mind welcomes information - even if false - that reaffirms biases, an issue relevant to understanding the spread of propaganda online. 

...Fred P. Hoffman, former US intelligence officer with experience in information operations, described Papadopoulos’ campaign as appearing “to be an individual effort at disinformation."

A Gofundme account bearing Papadopoulos's name and photograph is even looking for donations to support his cause.

The conspiratorial claims by Papadopoulos would be simply unusual if they didn’t follow a pattern seen elsewhere involving public figures, Russia, social media, and a counter-narrative of events. These efforts too often involve online fundraising. 

Russia has also sought to sow divisions between Western allies, such as the Five Eyes alliance, for decades.

... Keir Giles, a fellow at the London-based Chatham House, described Papadopoulos's recent effort “in the same vein but less competent and less effective,” than Butina, Snowden or Assange.

“He looks like another individual that in a former, pre-Twitter age would have been found in the park shouting his conspiracy theories at the pigeons,” said Giles. 

Nevertheless, as seen with the use of conspiracy theory around the Skripal poisonings, Seth Rich’s death, or Q-Anon, poor logical consistency is no barrier to their spread. 

Often, all that’s needed to fuel disinformation online is for a compelling idea to be inserted into the fertile ground of an audience willing to believe it.

And Then I Ran, Face First, Into This

Reading, in these times, can be a dismal, even
a torturous task. At any given time I'm likely to have six, eight or even more books on the go. Some I can only take in small bites, a chapter or two at most. I reach a point where I just put it down and move on to another book. It helps to have them scattered around various rooms, waiting to be picked up for another visit.

One now has pride of place at my dining table. It's the late Carl Sagan's 1995 book, "The Demon-Haunted World." It's a pleasant, personal read. Last night, over whatever in hell it was I threw on a plate, I came across this passage that I thought to share with you:

...Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudo-science and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. ...The plain lesson is that study and learning - not just of science, but of anything - are avoidable, even undesirable.

We've arranged a global civilization in which most critical elements - transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment, and even the key democratic institution of voting - profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later the combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

"A Candle in the Dark" is the title of a courageous, largely Biblically based, book by Thomas Ady, published in London in 1656, attacking the witch hunts then in progress as a scam "to delude the people." Any illness or storm, anything out of the ordinary, was popularly attributed to witchcraft. Witches must exist, Ady quoted the Witchmongers as arguing - "else how should these things be, or come to pass?" For much of our history, we were so fearful of the outside world, with its unpredictable dangers, that we gladly embraced anything that promised to soften or explain away the terror. Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.

Ady also warned of the danger that "the Nations [will] perish for lack of knowledge." Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves. I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic and national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

We're Setting New Records

Records aplenty are being broken. Unfortunately they're for atmospheric concentrations of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. The World Meteorological Organization reports there's no sign of a reversal of this trend and the window for preventing catastrophic climate change is now nearly closed.

“The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5m years ago, when the temperature was 2-3C warmer and sea level was 10-20 metres higher than now,” said the WMO secretary general, Petteri Taalas. 

“The science is clear. Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gases, climate change will have increasingly destructive and irreversible impacts on life on Earth. The window of opportunity for action is almost closed.”

Since the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric CO2 levels have increased by a factor of 2.5. Methane is up 3.5 times and nitrous oxide levels have doubled.

This is dreary stuff to read, week in and week out, isn't it? But look on the bright side. The really horrific stuff, the catastrophic impacts, most of that will land in your grandkids' laps long after you've retired for the eternal dirt nap. Oh, sure, we'll see more wildfires, more droughts, more floods, more severe storm events but they'll pale compared to what the next few generations will endure. Besides there's a whole world out there just waiting for us to flood their markets with ultra-high carbon bitumen, don't you know?

Prof Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia, said she was not surprised by the new record levels of greenhouse gases. “But I am very concerned that all three gases most responsible for climate change are rising upwards unabated. It seems the urgency and extent of the actions needed to address climate change have not sunk in. 

“Low-carbon technologies like wind, solar, and electric transport need to become mainstream, with old-fashioned polluting fossils pushed out rapidly.”

Yet the UN's climate body finds that, while national governments have largely failed their people and the global community, much good work has been done by municipalities, regional governments and some state/provinces. 

Canada, of course, imagines itself a Green Petro-State, a delusion akin to being a "little bit pregnant." For a country that seemingly can't agree on anything, when it comes to pushing bitumen offshore the biggest contest between the Tories and the Liberals is which one can fill the most supertankers. Classy, eh?

- the photo is of a thermal-electric (coal) power plant in Poland, the coal-friendly country that will host this year's UN climate summit. 

When It Comes to Climate Change Fixes, Remember This

There are two faces to the climate change issue. One is science. The other is politics. Rarely does the second comport with the first, especially on the thorny problem of what must be done to protect life on Earth from horrific outcomes up to and including mass extinction.

Otto von Bismark touched on the problem when he said that, "The art of politics is art of the possible, the attainable - the art of the next best." That's all well and good when it comes to democratic governance where compromise is vital. It is not good when dealing with national emergencies, existential threats. Politics must rise above this when a clear, powerful and emerging catastrophe looms.

Think of a nation being attacked and its political leadership deciding their armed forces will fight back on the second and fourth week of every month. How do you think that turns out? Military crises require military solutions. Scientific crises require scientific solutions.

We need the political caste to carry the fight against climate change, to defend the future for our grandchildren, but they're not doing it. They serve a competing priority, the economy. They don't want to do anything that "might" impair their quest for perpetual, exponential growth - not for a second recognizing that this pursuit is a major contributing cause of the overall climate change threat. They refuse to acknowledge that, if they can't find ways to shrink the economy within the finite limits of the environment, we'll wind up without a decent economy of any sort. We exist within a fairly thin biosphere that defines the environment and prescribes the limits of mankind's global economy. We're way outside that already, effectively out of bounds when it comes to the survival of our civilization.

On this most critical issue, "the art of the possible" is not nearly enough.

Tall Tales From the Oil Patch

Even out here on the Pacific it's not hard to hear the squeals emanating from Athabasca and the Calgary Petroleum Club. The Tar Sands are in trouble. Actually the Tar Sands are just fine. It's the operators and their political minions that are feeling the heat of bad, bad, bad markets and a bargain basement resource.

The financial papers and the rightwing media are howling with demands for assistance. What they're really after is more government subsidies. More handouts.

The opening lines of a piece in today's Calgary Herald put it succinctly:

More locomotives. More upgrading. More tax write-offs. But, more importantly, more pipelines.

There's a glut of oil on world markets driving prices down. So, when it comes to the filthiest, highest carbon, ersatz oil on the planet that never attracts more than junk oil prices, the solution is government subsidies and pipelines to carry ever more of what the market doesn't want. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Premier Rachel Notley is discussing a series of steps to remedy the plight of Alberta heavy crude, which sold for less than US$18 a barrel on Tuesday. The light oil blend Edmonton par sold for less than half of U.S. benchmark prices, according to data from Net Energy.

On Monday, the premier announced a team of three envoys will sit down with energy company executives to come up with options to tackle the crisis. 

They will have to grapple with the divisive idea of government curtailing oil output as some producers call for the province to take such steps.

...In the 2017 federal budget, the Trudeau government altered tax treatment that allowed petroleum producers to deduct all expenses from discovery oil and gas wells in one year — something that’s available in the United States — moving Canada’s oilpatch instead to a 30-per-cent annual deduction rate. 

“We are competing for capital with the U.S., as well as other jurisdictions,“ said Tim McMillan, head of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. 

“This has been something that has helped drive investment into the U.S., at the expense of Canada.”  

All of these issues — rail, tax treatment and resource upgrading — will help, but ultimately they don’t get to the heart of the matter: Canada needed more pipelines years ago and Ottawa didn’t deliver. 

What's missing from the Calgary Herald op-ed and from the woe is me reports in the rightwing media is any mention of the real problem, the one south of the border. Bitumen simply can't compete with the glut of cheap, conventional oil out of the US. The title of Scott Barlow's piece in today's Globe captures bitumen's predicament.

Texas holds the 'worst nightmare' for OPEC and Alberta.

Bloomberg’s Javier Blas is among the best media sources on the energy sector but today he doesn’t have good news for investors in the sector, 

“The map lays out OPEC’s nightmare in graphic form. An infestation of dots, thousands of them, represent oil wells in the Permian basin of West Texas and a slice of New Mexico. In less than a decade, U.S. companies have drilled 114,000. Many of them would turn a profit even with crude prices as low as $30 a barrel … August saw the largest annual increase in U.S. oil production in 98 years, according to government data. The American energy industry added, in crude and other oil liquids, nearly 3 million barrels, roughly the equivalent of what Kuwait pumps, than it did in the same month last year.’ 

“Texas Is About to Create OPEC's Worst Nightmare” – Blas, Bloomberg 

“Oil bounces above $63 after slide, but glut worries persist” – Reuters

Good oil. Cheap oil. Abundant oil. Adding, in one month, roughly what Kuwait pumps at full bore.

This factor seems to be overlooked in the screams and howls for more government-financed pipelines, more government royalty and tax deferrals, in order to pump junk tar onto glutted world markets. You'll not find that mentioned in the National Post, the Calgary Herald or the Financial Post.

If you find it impossible to believe that the Tar Sands are perched on a platform of outright lies and government incompetence, I'd recommend you read Dave Climenhaga's post on Andrew Nikiforuk's address to the Parkland Institute's annual conference.

...oversupplying a global market that doesn’t need more oilsands bitumen will only lower prices, argued the author and journalist who has written about Alberta’s energy industry for three decades. “That’s Economics 101.”

Instead, the Notley Government has adopted an energy development policy little different from that of preceding Conservative governments or the United Conservative Party Opposition, Mr. Nikiforuk asserted, arguing that such an approach is more likely to intensify the province’s economic pain than ease it. 

Shielding the industry from market forces through rock bottom royalties that effectively act as subsidies and using pipelines to create a supply glut of low-quality refinery feedstock is incompetent governance, whether it’s done by New Democrats or Conservatives, Mr. Nikiforuk said.

...Mr. Nikiforuk said rock bottom royalties – the policy of the Klein Government perpetuated ever since, most recently by the Notley Government’s 2015 royalty review – essentially subsidizes industry profits, especially those of corporations with their own refining capacity elsewhere. At the same time, it does little for the economy. He said the policy also leaves taxpayers holding the bag for the inevitable clean up – estimated by one credible analysis to be over $260 billion. 

As for the claim more pipelines will result in a narrower price differential thanks to new markets in Asia for Alberta bitumen, Mr. Nikiforuk said, that is a pipe dream that defies the laws of economics.

Never mind, he said, that the single study saying this, done for Kinder Morgan Inc. as a sales pitch when it was the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project’s sole proponent – and now apparently taken as gospel by the provincial and federal governments alike – “is bogus.”

When the Climate Hammer Falls, It May Look Like This.

I make an effort to try to keep up with the river of research papers and studies on climate change that now pour in with increasing frequency. Sometimes I have to content myself with abstracts or executive summaries. Some reports I can read in their entirety and make sense of them. They usually make for miserable reading.

One thing I've discovered from following the science is that the lead scientists are often quite willing to answer questions and respond to comments. While it must be a drag on their time, they usually seem interested in building public awareness of what they've found.

A scientist I've found helpful and generous with his time is Dr. Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii. I first posted an item in 2013 on the prediction of Mora's team that the world will be embarking on "climate departure" beginning in the early 2020s. That's when parts of the world may begin becoming uninhabitable, at least seasonally. In 2017, Team Mora produced a study on 27 ways heat waves will cause human deaths. More posts here, here and here.

Today Mora and his U. Hawaii team published a new study in Nature Climate Change. The abstract is brief but here's a news piece from today's New York Times:

Global warming is posing such wide-ranging risks to humanity, involving so many types of phenomena, that by the end of this century some parts of the world could face as many as six climate-related crises at the same time, researchers say. 

This chilling prospect is described in a paper published Monday in Nature Climate Change, a respected academic journal, that shows the effects of climate change across a broad spectrum of problems, including heat waves, wildfires, sea level rise, hurricanes, flooding, drought and shortages of clean water. 

Such problems are already coming in combination, said the lead author, Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He noted that Florida had recently experienced extreme drought, record high temperatures and wildfires — and also Hurricane Michael, the powerful Category 4 storm that slammed into the Panhandle last month. Similarly, California is suffering through the worst wildfires the state has ever seen, as well as drought, extreme heat waves and degraded air quality that threatens the health of residents. 

Things will get worse, the authors wrote. The paper projects future trends and suggests that, by 2100, unless humanity takes forceful action to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change, some tropical coastal areas of the planet, like the Atlantic coast of South and Central America, could be hit by as many as six crises at a time.

That prospect is “like a terror movie that is real,” Dr. Mora said.
The authors include a list of caveats about the research: Since it is a review of papers, it will reflect some of the potential biases of science in this area, which include the possibility that scientists might focus on negative effects more than positive ones; there is also a margin of uncertainty involved in discerning the imprint of climate change from natural variability.

The paper concludes that traditional research into one element of climate change and its effects can miss the bigger picture of interrelation and risk. 

Climate change also has different ramifications for the world’s haves and have-nots, the authors found: “The largest losses of human life during extreme climatic events occurred in developing nations, whereas developed nations commonly face a high economic burden of damages and requirements for adaptation.” 

People are not generally attuned to dealing with problems like climate change, Dr. Mora said. “We as humans don’t feel the pain of people who are far away or far into the future,” he said. “We normally care about people who are close to us or that are impacting us, or things that will happen tomorrow.” 

And so, he said, people tend to look at events far in the future and tell themselves, “We can deal with these things later, we have more pressing problems now.” But, he added, this research “documented how bad this already is.” 

The paper includes an interactive map of the various hazards under different emissions scenarios for any location in the world, produced by Esri, which develops geographic information systems. “We see that climate change is literally redrawing the lines on the map, and revealing the threats that our world faces at every level,” said Dawn Wright, the company’s chief scientist. 

Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the paper, said it underscored the urgency for action to curb the effects of climate change and showed that “the costs of inaction greatly outweigh the costs of taking action.”

Dr. Mann published a recent paper suggesting that climate change effects on the jet stream are contributing to a range of extreme summer weather events, such as heat waves in North America, Europe and Asia, wildfires in California and flooding in Japan. The new study, he said, dovetails with that research, and “is, if anything, overly conservative” — that is, it may underestimate the threats and costs associated with human-caused climate change.

A co-author of the new paper, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hailed its interdisciplinary approach. “There’s more than one kind of risk out there,” he said, but scientists tend to focus on their area of research. “Nations, societies in general, have to deal with multiple hazards, and it’s important to put the whole picture together.” 

Like military leaders developing the capability to fight wars on more than one front, governments have to be ready to face more than one climate crisis at a time, Dr. Emanuel said. 

Dr. Mora said he had considered writing a book or a movie that would reflect the frightening results of the research. His working title, which describes how dire the situation is for humanity, is unprintable here. His alternate title, he said, is “We Told You So.”

As I've written in the past, climate change will be like a prize fight. It won't be a matter of whether your society can take a punch. It will be whether your society can take a flurry of punches and remain standing, round after round. That's the fight we'll be in. Right now we're just sparring and we're doing a lousy job at that.

Trump Fatigue? A Refreshing Newish Way to Look at the Old Bugger.

Everyone from psychiatrists to cab drivers have analyzed the Great American Bloat, Donald Trump. It's a pastime now so shopworn as to become dispiriting. Yet The Week's Windsor Mann has a few fresh insights into the dark heart and weak mind of the American president.

Trump's social autism is the source of his appeal. A Pew surveyfound that what Trump's supporters like most about him is his personality, not his policies. They like his personality more than his policies for the same reason that men like the sex scenes in pornography more than the plots: Vulgarity is the point.

Like many people, Trump is at his worst online. As of July, he had insulted 487 people, places, and things on Twitter. Technology, by separating us from the consequences of our actions, makes incivility easy. The internet is a rude place because it's a safe place. You can fight people without getting punched in the head. Online, the only things that get hurt are feelings and careers.

...Trump isn't solely to blame, but he's primarily to blame. He makes mean people meaner and dumb people dumber. The internet gives people a platform to be nasty. Trump gives them a template.

Putative Christian leader Jerry Falwell Jr. tweeted recently, "Conservatives & Christians need to stop electing 'nice guys'. They might make great Christian leaders but the US needs street fighters like @realDonaldTrump at every level of government b/c the liberal fascists Dems are playing for keeps & many Repub leaders are a bunch of wimps!"

Just as Jesus said.

...Lord Moulton, an English judge, noted that a nation's greatness is measured not by compliance with the law but by "obedience to the unenforceable," that is, by its manners. Manners are the tax we impose upon ourselves to get along with each other, to make life more bearable. 

Trump is a reminder of how not to behave. To make America great again, ask yourself: What would Trump do? Then do the opposite.

CIA Fingers Saudi Crown Prince for Khashoggi Murder

The Saudis have worked overtime to try to insulate Mohammad bin Sultan, their Crown Prince, from the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. It doesn't seem to have worked.

The CIA has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, the Washington Post has reported. 

The Post said US officials expressed high confidence in the CIA assessment, which contradicts Saudi government assertions that he was not involved. 

It is the strongest assessment to date linking Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler to the killing, and complicates Donald Trump’s efforts to safeguard US ties with one of the closest American allies in the region. 

...The Post, citing people familiar with the matter, said the CIA reached its conclusions after examining multiple sources of intelligence, including a phone call that the prince’s brother – Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to the United States – had with Khashoggi.
Khalid told Khashoggi he should go to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to retrieve the documents and gave him assurances that it would be safe to do so, the Post said. 

The newspaper, citing people familiar with the call, said it was not clear if Khalid knew Khashoggi would be killed, but he made the call at his brother’s direction.

Look, Canada's Right Up There With China, Russia

Oh to see ourselves as others see us. Don't we work hard to make sure that never happens?

How does 5 degrees Celsius hit you? A study published today claims that the climate policies of China, Russia and the True North Strong and Free would drive global warming to a 5C rise.

China, Russia and Canada’s current climate policies would drive the world above a catastrophic 5C of warming by the end of the century, according to a study that ranks the climate goals of different countries. 

The US and Australia are only slightly behind with both pushing the global temperature rise dangerously over 4C above pre-industrial levels says the paper, while even the EU, which is usually seen as a climate leader, is on course to more than double the 1.5C that scientists say is a moderately safelevel of heating. 

The study, published on Friday in the journal Nature Communications, assesses the relationship between each nation’s ambition to cut emissions and the temperature rise that would result if the world followed their example.

...The related website also serves as a guide to how nations are sharing the burden of responding to the greatest environmental threat humankind has ever faced.

Among the major economies, the study shows India is leading the way with a target that is only slightly off course for 2C. Less developed countries are generally more ambitious, in part because they have fewer factories, power plants and cars, which means they have lower emissions to rein in. 

On the opposite side of the spectrum are the industrial powerhouse China and major energy exporters who are doing almost nothing to limit carbon dioxide emissions. These include Saudi Arabia (oil), Russia (gas) and Canada, which is drawing vast quantities of dirty oil from tar sands. Fossil fuel lobbies in these countries are so powerful that government climate pledges are very weak, setting the world on course for more than 5C of heating by the end of the century.

In other words, you've got a prime minister feeding you a diet dangerously rich in horseshit.


Sleight of Hand:

Under the Paris agreement, there is no top-down consensus on what is a fair share of responsibility. Instead each nation sets its own bottom-up targets according to a number of different factors, including political will, level of industrialisation, ability to pay, population size, historical responsibility for emissions. Almost every government, the authors say, selects an interpretation of equity that serves their own interests and allows them to achieve a relative gain on other nations.

Neoliberalism has transformed us over the past 40 years. Not just our governments but us as individuals. We have come to accept as normal policies and practices that maximize consumption without anything more than market restraint. We have cannibalized the achievements our predecessors bequeathed to us. We have rapaciously devoured whatever we could lay our hands on in the present. We embraced an ideology of "because I can" with scant regard to whether we should. Worst of all, we have robbed generations to come of a decent future. Asking us to atone for our excess, even to make basic sacrifices, has become an affront. Somehow it morphs into self-righteous indignation. "How dare you?"

During the Harper years I felt deeply ashamed of my country as it was properly mocked, even denounced as a climate change pariah. When Trudeau marched onto the floor of the 2015 Paris climate summit and boasted "Canada's back," I and many Canadians felt that environmental enlightenment was to return. No longer would we be a climate pariah. And yet we still wallow in the gutter with the worst of the worst. Just the three of us - China, Russia and Canada. This is leadership, responsible Liberal leadership?

Messing Up the Food Chain. Can't We Leave Enough for the Whales?

Okay, they're not really whales. They're a large species of dolphin but the Orca, a.k.a. Killer Whales, are one of the most majestic creatures here on the wet coast. Unfortunately, like other non-human species, we're driving them into extinction.

How so? In my opinion, it begins with the annual harvest of roe herring. A large fleet of fishing vessels follow the herring as they migrate south along the east coast of Vancouver Island to meet the lucrative Asian demand for herring roe.

You know when the herring are passing through by the arrival of the fishing fleet and various creatures from sea birds to sea lions that arrive to feast on the hapless herring. Sometimes the sea changes colour to a pale green from the milt released by the males to fertilize the eggs.

It's not just sea lions and sea birds that depend on the availability of herring. So too do the salmon. Many people link the decline in salmon stocks to the commercial fleet's predation of the herring.

Then there's the food chain. Next rung up are the Orca, the magnificent and majestic beasts that live in the Salish Sea. They're starting to run out of their favourite fish, salmon, and they're endangered because of it. Part of the Orca's predicament, in the mind of the locals at least, is, once again, the commercial fishing fleet. For the salmon, the commercial boats present a double whammy threat.

Now the southern resident Orca so beloved on our coast are endangered.

The unfolding tragedy of the southern resident killer whales – and the government response – has exposed a complex ecosystem in crisis. Chinook salmon, the whale’s main prey, are also disappearing. In an area heavily reliant on tourism and fishing, an impending collapse of the two species has led to feuding over how to stave off an ecological disaster. 

“Shutting us down to create more prey for them is not going to do anything for their diet,” said Chamberland. After the news broke, he began receiving panicked calls from clients, looking to cancel trips planned months in advance. Shock quickly gave way to frustration for the young business owner. “I think it’s really scary that we are the target,” he said of the closures.

...“We have an obligation both legally and from a moral perspective, from the context of sustaining biodiversity, to do what we can to protect and recover these whales,” the federal fisheries minister, Jonathan Wilkinson, told the Guardian. “The decline of biodiversity around the world we’re seeing is extremely sobering.”

Coming from this government, that concern rings hollow. DFO is not going to shut down either the pillaging of roe herring or the dwindling salmon stocks. Worse yet, Justin will brook no opposition to his plan to sail an armada of heavily laden bitumen tankers through the waters frequented by both resident and transient Orca.

What we're witnessing first hand is the same human predation that has caused the global population of wildlife to shrink by more than half since the 1970s. We're destroying their habitat, fracturing delicate food chains, a process that claims its victims all the way up the food chain.

We've got the very worst form of government in the wheelhouse, the neoliberals, Conservative or Liberal. Whether it's their obsequious obedience to Big Oil or the predation of our endangered wildlife and biodiversity, business trumps the environment and the Canadian people every time.

Trudeau may like to pose for photos in a canoe, adorned in his father's famous buckskin jacket, but that's as close to Pierre Trudeau as he's going to get. Liberals need to come to grips with what they're really got. Author Donald Gutstein recently compared father and son.

One Trudeau tried to counter Big Oil’s dominance; the other did Big Oil’s bidding. Pierre Trudeau’s message was this: Canadian oil policy must be for the benefit of Canadians. Justin Trudeau’s message was this: Climate change isn’t a crisis but a market opportunity. We can deal with it by putting a price on carbon and by investing in clean growth. 

How did this happen? How did we go from giving the oil industry orders to having the oil industry dictate climate policy?

When Trudeau the elder created Petro-Canada and introduced the National Energy Program, Keynesianism still reigned supreme. Government intervention in the economy was legitimate. By the time of Trudeau the younger, neoliberalism had transformed economic and political thinking, decreeing that only the market can make decisions. 

Neoliberalism reduces the role of government to creating and enforcing markets, and propping them up when they fail, as in the 2008 financial meltdown. Otherwise, just get out of the way.

This neoliberal stamp is all over Canada. You see it in Trudeau's energy policy. You see it in Morneau's dismissive "lump it" warning that Canadians are just going to have to prepare for a life of "job churn." You see it in the threatened Boreal caribou herds. You see it in Trudeau's obsession with flooding the world with climate-killing bitumen carried by an armada of supertankers plying the waters of coastal British Columbia. You see it in the declining salmon stocks. You see it in the endangered Orca population. This is the face of neoliberalism and, as anyone willing to open their eyes will see, it ends badly.

Make no mistake about it. This is what you'll be endorsing when you go to the polls next year. The only option Trudeau will have on offer is to choose the lesser of two evils - him or Scheer. "Better than the other guy" has become pretty thin gruel.

LA Times - Trump's "Cocoon of Bitterness and Resentment"

It's perceptible, even palpable. Donald Trump is showing the strain of the mid-term elections. He's looking worn and acting like an angry child. This, from the Los Angeles Times:

For weeks this fall, an ebullient President Trump traveled relentlessly to hold raise-the-rafters campaign rallies — sometimes three a day — in states where his presence was likely to help Republicans on the ballot. 

But his mood apparently has changed as he has taken measure of the electoral backlash that voters delivered Nov. 6. With the certainty that the incoming Democratic House majority will go after his tax returns and investigate his actions, and the likelihood of additional indictments by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump has retreated into a cocoon of bitterness and resentment, according to multiple administration sources. 

Behind the scenes, they say, the president has lashed out at several aides, from junior press assistants to senior officials. “He’s furious,” said one administration official. “Most staffers are trying to avoid him.”

From Belleau Wood to Arlington National Cemetery to the Asia-Pacific Economic Summit, Trump has gone AWOL.

What makes Trump’s perceived snub to the Asian powers more significant is that it comes on the heels of his brief European trip, which showcased his growing isolation from transatlantic allies. French President Emmanuel Macron rebuked Trump in a speech, stating that “nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism” as the U.S. president looked on sullenly.

Trump’s relations with Latin America, already strained, are little better after the White House last week announced that he was reneging for a second time on a commitment to visit Colombia. He had planned to go there later this month on his way back from the G-20 meetings.

In April, he’d sent Pence in his place to the Summit of the Americas in Peru, citing a need to remain in Washington to monitor the U.S. response to a chemical weapons attack in Syria. He’d planned to visit Bogota on the same trip.

This time around, there appeared to be no extenuating circumstances preventing a visit.

There's a natural temptation to revel in Trump's apparent misery but Schadenfreude shouldn't mask the fact that this guy is seriously unstable and volatile. Worse yet he seems to be moving to purge the voices of moderation from his inner circle, swapping them out for radical sycophants.

Meanwhile, Anne Summers writes in today's Sydney Morning Herald that Trump may be a one-term president. Summers says he's cornered - and he knows it.

A helluva lot was riding on the [mid-term] elections and even if on the night it might have seemed the results were more a rebuke than a repudiation, on closer examination the results are not just good, they are very good.

The next two years are going to be very nasty. Trump is cornered and he knows it. His behaviour since the election indicates how he intends to fight: firing his Attorney-General, no doubt setting in train an attempted firing of Special Prosecutor Mueller, escalating his war against the media.

...We know from Bob Woodward’s recent book, from "Anonymous" in The New York Times and from almost everyone who reports on the White House that we are dealing with an unmoored and dangerous man. We also know that Mueller has a truckload of sealed indictments, including against members of Trump’s family.

Trump has no political skills. Nor does he know how to govern. But neither of this matters any more. 

He is fighting - not for his political life, which is all but over, but for his very liberty. 

The end game, as US commentators are already calling it, is likely to get very ugly.

But it is the end we are looking at, which means we can look forward to it being over. 

...Trump’s so-called base is now locked geographically and demographically. They are overwhelmingly white in a country where "minorities" are fast increasing their share of the population and they are mostly older, often considerably older than the Democrats’ new base. The future is not with them, not even the near future based on Tuesday’s results when a clear majority of Americans delivered a clear and unambiguous verdict on their President.

... But the most heartening result for those worried about incipient fascism was the decisive return to blue of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

In Michigan, 57.5 per cent of registered voters, the biggest voter turnout since 1967, went to the polls. In the Wisconsin suburbs the affluent Republicans who had kept the odious Scott Walker in the governor’s mansion turned their backs on him – and Trump. In Pennsylvania the Democrats picked up three seats and a governor with almost 60 per cent of the vote. 

These are the three states that enabled Trump to win in 2016. Now, with Democrats in control of their redistricting and with 46 Electoral College votes between them, they will ensure he cannot win in 2020.

It'll Be the Death of Us All. Trudeau's Failed Climate Policy.

I like to think George Monbiot had Justin Trudeau in mind when he wrote:

Those to whom we look for solutions trundle on as if nothing has changed. As if the accumulating evidence has no purchase on their minds.

Do not allow those who have caused this crisis to define the limits of political action. Do not allow those whose magical thinking got us into this mess to tell us what can and cannot be done.

In the latest Tyee there's a piece entitled, "The Rise and Fall of Justin Trudeau's 'Grand Bargain' on Climate."

The article, excerpted from Donald Gutstein's book, "The Big Stall," It begins with a dinner meeting in Ottawa between Rachel Notley and her courtiers and Justin Trudeau and his own just days after the election in 2015. Notley was in the national capital to pitch the Dauphin on her climate change policy before he headed off to the Paris climate summit.

After they discussed Alberta’s miserable reputation on the international climate change front, it became clear that Trudeau would back Notley’s carbon tax and “take it national” in short order. And the national carbon tax would give Trudeau licence to approve pipelines that would expand Alberta’s oilsands production. Knowing that Trudeau had her back, Notley could proceed with her plan. The stars were aligning nationally and provincially: Trudeau and Notley could count on each other’s support during the carbon pricing and pipeline approval wars. 

It didn’t take long for events to unfold. Two weeks later, John Manley, head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, gave Trudeau some advice on how to get serious about climate change. Writing in the online magazine iPolitics, Manley reminded Trudeau that the chief executives had been on record since 2007 about the need to put a price on carbon in order to erase uncertainty for corporate planners and investors. 

Manley then made two points: Trudeau had to demonstrate a commitment to “responsible” climate action and he needed to step up efforts to support the export of energy products. More pipelines please. And from the actions Manley said must be undertaken — don’t damage the competitiveness of Canadian companies, phase in carbon pricing gradually, use revenues raised primarily to cut corporate and personal income taxes — it’s clear the responsibility was to the financial well-being of Canadian companies and not to the future of the planet.

And that’s what Trudeau did over the next year, demonstrating a commitment to “responsible” climate action without damaging the corporate bottom line, an agenda also followed by Notley. On the export side of the equation, Trudeau approved two diluted bitumen pipelines plus a liquefied natural gas plant on the British Columbia coast. But he rejected Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline, which by this time was clearly dead to everyone, probably including Enbridge.

Justin Trudeau went on to comfort the Oil Patch with assurances that he was not his father's boy. And, boy, he was not.

For most of the world, the oil crisis of the 1970s and the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 have little in common beyond the fact they both were all about humanity’s seemingly bottomless appetite for burning fossil fuels. 

But Canada has an additional commonality: a member of the Trudeau family was leading the country during each of these events.
Prime minister Pierre Trudeau took dramatic action, creating a national energy company and exerting aggressive public oversight of the industry, in the process enraging the big oil companies and their allies in Edmonton and Washington, D.C. 

His son, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, put forward modest measures Big Oil itself had been advocating for a decade, receiving industry’s plaudits. 

One Trudeau tried to counter Big Oil’s dominance; the other did Big Oil’s bidding. Pierre Trudeau’s message was this: Canadian oil policy must be for the benefit of Canadians. Justin Trudeau’s message was this: Climate change isn’t a crisis but a market opportunity. We can deal with it by putting a price on carbon and by investing in clean growth. 

How did this happen? How did we go from giving the oil industry orders to having the oil industry dictate climate policy?

How this apple fell so far from the tree.

When Trudeau the elder created Petro-Canada and introduced the National Energy Program, Keynesianism still reigned supreme. Government intervention in the economy was legitimate. By the time of Trudeau the younger, neoliberalism had transformed economic and political thinking, decreeing that only the market can make decisions. 

Neoliberalism reduces the role of government to creating and enforcing markets, and propping them up when they fail, as in the 2008 financial meltdown. Otherwise, just get out of the way.

Canada's climate sleight of hand.

In Paris..., at the make-or-break climate change meetings, the talk had been all about two degrees Celsius and even 1.5 degrees Celsius, a vastly more ambitious target promoted by Trudeau’s Minister of Environment Catherine McKenna. It was a target Canada had no intention of meeting, as became obvious over the next year.

Canada’s goal was to cut greenhouse gas emissions — its intended nationally determined contribution — 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, reducing emission from 742 megatonnes to 517 megatonnes, admittedly a daunting task (projected as of December 2016). “Canada is back,” Trudeau was telling the assembled dignitaries. Yet while McKenna was setting praiseworthy temperature and emission-reduction targets, she was designing Canada’s escape hatch as well, as chair of the Article 6 committee that authorized emission markets.

...Article 6 of the Paris Agreement lays out rules for countries that choose to engage “on a voluntary basis in co-operative approaches that involve the use of internationally transferred mitigation outcomes towards nationally determined contributions.” In plain English, this article authorizes countries to participate in carbon markets as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by buying credits from other countries. 

Canada may have taken the lead in this effort because it already knew it could never meet its nationally determined contribution without buying credits from other countries.

Quagmire, or feet of clay.

During 2018, Justin Trudeau faced mounting obstacles to the execution of the “grand bargain” he’d struck with the oil industry: we’ll allow pipeline expansion if you agree to a carbon tax. Trudeau was having difficulty delivering on either side of the equation. Some provinces dragged their heels on any kind of pricing scheme — with the election of Doug Ford, Ontario bailed on the entire concept. Meanwhile, federal opposition parties vowed to kill pricing if they came to power 

At the same time, new pipelines bringing diluted bitumen to the east or  west coasts, or even to the U.S., were bogged down in well-funded, highly organized opposition by environmental lobbies and First Nations, threatening oilsands expansion plans

Unable to deliver, would Trudeau continue to receive oil industry support? His unusual step in the summer of 2018 of bailing out a pipeline that hadn’t even been built was a sign of how far Trudeau’s government would go to support the market. As another federal election loomed, so did the impossibility of squaring a circle. How long could Canadians be persuaded that we could burn more fossil fuel yet not cook the planet?

Will we finally come to realize that progressivism has no home in the realm of neoliberalism? The neoliberal order brought to dominance especially during the era of Harper, Ignatieff and now Trudeau the lesser is oriented in service to the markets. The public is left with broken promises and the fallout from the petro-state. Trudeau is not an enemy of the Canadian people but he certainly is a peril to them, to us.

Monbiot on "Climate Breakdown" - a Call to Arms

The signs are inescapable. They still take many of us by surprise. A lot of us can't or desperately seek to avoid having to connect the dots but that does nothing to keep those dots from growing in number and intensity.

We've been put on notice that this is "last call." We must choose whether we shall succeed or we shall fail. The default option, the one our leaders are following, is failure. We haven't figured out yet that it's in their immediate personal interests to stay on this nihilistic course.

Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, says it's time we stopped swallowing the swill our leaders dish out.

Only shifts commensurate with the scale of our existential crises have any prospect of averting them. Hopeless realism, tinkering at the edges of the problem, got us into this mess. It will not get us out. 

Public figures talk and act as if environmental change will be linear and gradual. But the Earth’s systems are highly complex, and complex systems do not respond to pressure in linear ways. When these systems interact (because the world’s atmosphere, oceans, land surface and lifeforms do not sit placidly within the boxes that make study more convenient), their reactions to change become highly unpredictable. Small perturbations can ramify wildly. Tipping points are likely to remain invisible until we have passed them. We could see changes of state so abrupt and profound that no continuity can be safely assumed.

Only one of the many life support systems on which we depend – soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity – need fail for everything to slide. For example, when Arctic sea ice melts beyond a certain point, the positive feedbacks this triggers (such as darker water absorbing more heat, melting permafrost releasing methane, shifts in the polar vortex) could render runaway climate breakdown unstoppable.  

I don’t believe such a collapse is yet inevitable, or that a commensurate response is either technically or economically impossible. When the US joined the second world war in 1941, it replaced a civilian economy with a military economy within months. As Jack Doyle records in his book Taken for a Ride, “In one year, General Motors developed, tooled and completely built from scratch 1,000 Avenger and 1,000 Wildcat aircraft … Barely a year after Pontiac received a navy contract to build anti-shipping missiles, the company began delivering the completed product to carrier squadrons around the world.” And this was before advanced information technology made everything faster.

It's not climate change that holds a knife to our kids' throats. It's our political and corporate leadership.

The problem is political. A fascinating analysis by the social science professor Kevin MacKay contends that oligarchy has been a more fundamental cause of the collapse of civilisations than social complexity or energy demand. Control by oligarchs, he argues, thwarts rational decision-making, because the short-term interests of the elite are radically different to the long-term interests of society. This explains why past civilisations have collapsed “despite possessing the cultural and technological know-how needed to resolve their crises”. Economic elites, which benefit from social dysfunction, block the necessary solutions. 

The oligarchic control of wealth, politics, media and public discourse explains the comprehensive institutional failure now pushing us towards disaster. Think of Donald Trump and his cabinet of multi-millionaires; the influence of the Koch brothers in funding rightwing organisations; the Murdoch empire and its massive contribution to climate science denial; or the oil and motor companies whose lobbying prevents a faster shift to new technologies.

We may not have oligarchy in Canada yet, not openly, but our political leadership has shown itself incapable of freeing our country from the dominance of the giant oligarchy next door. We slavishly and, yes, obediently follow their economic policy, their military policy and in our bizarre fidelity to Netanyahu their foreign policy. When Saudi Arabia resorts to butchery of its own and slaughters women and children in nearby Yemen we wouldn't dream of stopping the supply of armoured vehicles to the monstrous monarchy. It's General Dynamics, FFS, a Canadian subsidiary of one of the giant US defence contractors. Right up there with Raytheon, Boeing and Northrop. No, American foreign policy dictates what our branch plant is going to do.


The Failure of the Academics

Even the bodies that claim to be addressing our predicament remain locked within destructive frameworks. Last Wednesday I attended a meeting about environmental breakdown at the Institute for Public Policy Research. Many people in the room seemed to understand that continued economic growth is incompatible with sustaining the Earth’s systems.

As the author Jason Hickel points out, a decoupling of rising GDP from global resource use has not happened and will not happen. While 50bn tonnes of resources used per year is roughly the limit the Earth’s systems can tolerate, the world is already consuming 70bn tonnes. At current rates of economic growth, this will rise to 180bn tonnes by 2050. Maximum resource efficiency, coupled with massive carbon taxes, would reduce this at best to 95bn tonnes: still way beyond environmental limits. Green growth, as members of the institute appear to accept, is physically impossible.

Yet on the same day, the same institute announced a major new economics prize for “ambitious proposals to achieve a step-change improvement in the growth rate”. It wants ideas that will enable economic growth rates in the UK at least to double. The announcement was accompanied by the usual blah about sustainability, but none of the judges of the prize has a discernible record of environmental interest.

Those to whom we look for solutions trundle on as if nothing has changed. As if the accumulating evidence has no purchase on their minds. Decades of institutional failure ensures that only “unrealistic” proposals – the repurposing of economic life, with immediate effect – now have a realistic chance of stopping the planetary death spiral. And only those who stand outside the failed institutions can lead this effort. 

Two tasks need to be performed simultaneously: throwing ourselves at the possibility of averting collapse, as Extinction Rebellion is doing, slight though this possibility may appear; and preparing ourselves for the likely failure of these efforts, terrifying as this prospect is. Both tasks require a complete revision of our relationship with the living planet. 

Because we cannot save ourselves without contesting oligarchic control, the fight for democracy and justice and the fight against environmental breakdown are one and the same. Do not allow those who have caused this crisis to define the limits of political action. Do not allow those whose magical thinking got us into this mess to tell us what can and cannot be done.