Climate Change - It's Not for Everybody, Not Yet.

Climate change is but also isn't a global problem. Every nation is experiencing it but both the pace and severity of the impacts vary widely. We're not all in the same boat.

As a general rule, the closer a nation is situated to the equator, the worse the impacts. "Climate Departure" for example is predicted to set in over the next few years in the tropics. The more temperate countries will have two, perhaps three decades before they taste the lash. By the time Climate Departure reaches Vancouver, parts of the tropics could already be transformed into uninhabitable wasteland.

So there's a latitudinal divide that separates more vulnerable states from somewhat more advantaged nations. But there's more to this divide than just latitude. There's also wealth. The poorest nations tend to be more tropical, equatorial. The nations that really count, the wealthiest, are the developed nations, the industrial giants, that are in more temperate zones.

So we're not in the same boat. Our lifeboat is reserved for first class passengers. Steerage will simply have to look out for themselves. We hear they're pretty good swimmers.

It doesn't have to be that way but it probably will be. The rich nations of the north could dig down deep and help the poorest and most vulnerable but that would be, well, inconvenient. We would have to restructure our economies. We would have to embrace - in a meaningful way - notions of fairness and equity, the sort of ideas that Jaysus preached. What's that line? "Sharing is caring." Only that's not really in our nature, is it?

It's not like we don't also have to shoulder our burdens.  We know that we're responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions that have fired up the atmosphere to turn the tropics into ovens. We know that we're largely responsible for the plight of the poorest and most vulnerable. We have to live with that guilt but, hey, we'll get over it. Everyone is just going to have to move on, provided "those people" don't get any ideas about moving our way.

Jason Kenney isn't going to lose any sleep about "those people" but, then again, neither is Justin Trudeau. Sure, Jason's open-pit mega mine and Justin's new and expanded bitumen pipeline are only going to worsen the considerable plight of those impoverished little brown people but, well, somebody had to do it to them. If it wasn't us gifting them a hellish near future it would be someone else. Besides we've already promised a "climate emergency." We've gotta keep our word. What, that wasn't a promise? That was a declaration, a proclamation? You could've fooled me.

via GIPHY

We've Got Gas. Right, Who Doesn't?

British Columbia's former Liberal premier and grifter-in-chief, Christy Clark, vowed that the province's abundant reserves of natural gas would be our ticket out of debt and deficits.

Even Clark's successor, NDP premier Jim Horgan, has it bad for natural gas. He can't get enough of the stuff.

The problem with natural gas is that there's a glut of it and plenty of jurisdictions have it in abundance. That glut has kicked the floor out of LNG prices. 

A decade ago, natural gas was heralded as the fuel of the future. In shale fields across the country, hydraulic fracturing uncorked a lucrative new source of supply. Energy giants like Exxon Mobil and Chevron snapped up smaller companies to get in on the action, and investors poured billions of dollars into export terminals to ship gas to China and Europe.

Then things changed.

Chevron, [America's] second-largest oil and gas giant after Exxon, said on Tuesday that it would write down $10 billion to $11 billion in assets, mostly shale gas holdings in Appalachia and a planned liquefied natural gas export facility in Canada. The move was an energy company’s clearest acknowledgment yet that the industry has been far too optimistic about the prospects for natural gas.

...Some analysts said the gas slump could persist for some time because the cost of wind and solar energyhas tumbled in recent years, making those renewable sources of energy more attractive to power producers. And while gas exports are climbing, growing production of the fuel in Qatar, Russia and Australia threatens to drive down international prices over the next few years.

...Gas producers have struggled in part because New York and other Northeastern states have made it harder to build pipelines to transport the fuel. But analysts point to a far bigger problem: The industry is just producing too much gas. In some oil fields where gas bubbles to the surface with crude, it has become cheaper for producers to burn the gas than gather it and send it to market. 

“Natural gas is in the tank,” said Patrick Montalban, president of Montalban Oil & Gas Operations. “We’re looking at a project right now of over 200 wells in Montana that are for sale, but they are uneconomic. Not only are the wells uneconomic, the gathering of the gas is uneconomic.”

...In a recent report, Morgan Stanley estimated that demand for natural gas would grow for a few years but fall 13 percent between 2020 and 2030 as utilities increasingly switch to wind and solar power. Future regulations or a carbon tax put in place by lawmakers worried about climate change could accelerate the transition to renewables. 

Exports offer perhaps the greatest growth potential for American natural gas. But even as companies build more liquefied natural gas export terminals across the Gulf Coast, competition from Russia and Qatar is intensifying and analysts fear there could soon be a global glut of gas.

The Canadian venture that Chevron's looking to ditch? That's the proposed LNG plant in Kitimat. The American giant took a 50 per cent stake in that project and now just wants to unload it.

In late June, finance minister Bill "Job Churn" Morneau announced that Ottawa was chipping in $275 million fossil bucks for what he boasted was the "largest private sector investment in Canadian history."

Jaysus, I Never Imagined It Was That Bad,

The editorial board of the Irish Times writes:  "The radical right has not been sidelined in the Conservative Party, it has taken over the Conservative Party."

Boris Johnson was the airburst. The fallout comes next.

Some cling to the hope that Johnson, freed from reliance on the radical Eurosceptic right, might pursue a softer Brexit, perhaps by having Britain remain in the EU customs union. That’s wishful thinking. The radical right has not been sidelined in the Conservative Party; it has taken over the Conservative Party. Yet while the Brexit endgame, if far from locked down, today looks clearer – much to the relief of Dublin and other European capitals – Johnson’s parliamentary party will now include a clutch of MPs whose constituents have social and economic needs and expectations that the government cannot meet without changing course in key policy areas. That will be one of the recurring tensions of the next five years.

IT calls the United Kingdom "a country coming apart at the seams."

It was, Johnson said, an election result that would “bring our nation together”. That’s hardly true even of Johnson’s own nation, England, which remains bitterly divided over Brexit. But more broadly, the very idea of the United Kingdom as a multi-national state is now in doubt. The SNP’s surge in Scotland, the march of English nationalism and the election of more nationalist than unionist MPs in Northern Ireland all point to the fragility of a union that now looks in real peril. That may well be what is most significant about Thursday’s vote. Boris Johnson and his fellow Brexiteers have united their party, but their country is slowly breaking apart.

By now I think we're all suffering from chronic Brexit fatigue.  Over the past two years we became bored of it.  Thank gawd for Speaker Bercow or nobody would have paid the slightest heed.

Winning an essentially rigged, First-Past-the-Post election, BoJo is managing to use a distorted gauge to claim a majority mandate even though his party was well behind on the popular vote. Once again, FPTP perverts and defeats democracy. This time the fallout is neither irrelevant or inconsequential. What just happened in Britain is going to leave scars.

Could Justin Trudeau Bring Stephen Harper Back to Life?

Michael Harris sees a Stephen Harper comeback in the cards.

...sources within the Conservative party have been telling me of an internal faction eager to see Andrew Scheer gone in order to make way for the return of Stephen Harper as party leader.

...So who might be next up? As the Christmas ditty goes, it’s beginning to look a lot like Harper, everywhere you go.

As one Senator put it to me on background, “While the avalanche of criticism mounts, no one is talking up a successor. Who is waiting in the wings, ready to go, straight out of the box? Only one person is ready. Stephen Harper, come on down!”

...Despite their various talents, none of these potential candidates [Lisa Raitt, Michael Chong, Peter MacKay, Erin O'Toole and Rona Ambrose] has anything like the network that Harper maintains to this day within the CPC. That includes a coveted spot on the Conservative Party Fund. Perhaps that’s why Harper himself had this to say to an audience at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business in February 2018, less than a year after Scheer became leader:
“I think I probably could still easily be leader of my party if I wanted to. I mean, I’m the de facto founder of my party.” 

Hubris or honesty? Both actually. 

A guy named MacKay had a little to do with creating the CPC back in 2003. But Harper’s vaunted opinion of his leadership prospects may be accurate. It gained major traction from a November 2019 Abacus Data poll that asked 3,000 respondents over the age of 18 this question: Andrew Scheer or Who?

“Our test of potential alternatives to Mr. Scheer finds none, except for Mr. Harper, are preferred over Mr. Scheer among those who voted Conservative in the last election,” wrote David Coletto, one of Abacus’s founding partners.

The very idea of another term in power for Sideshow Steve is pretty dreary, especially with the holiday season approaching. It's more than dispiriting. It's infuriating.

It's not that hard to remember back four years when Justin Trudeau came from third place to a majority win, largely on the strength of his solemn promise to implement electoral reform. He assured us that would save and protect us from another thug like Stephen Harper. No more First-Past-the-Post shenanigans to defeat the popular will of Canadians, no siree.  Those days were over.

Only Justin had other plans. Once in power with an admittedly false majority he figured he was set to repeat his victory in 2019 so long as he kept FPTP alive and kicking. So he conjured up a feeble excuse that convinced no one except his most ardent fanboys and reneged on his solemn promise. Then he proceeded to break other promises and sully himself in scandals to the point where he almost got his ass handed to him in 2019 by a third-rater whose only claim to fame was a summer help counter-clerk job at an insurance agency.

If Michael Harris is right and I hope to hell he's wrong, it will be Justin Trudeau who paved the way for a Stephen Harper comeback.  Who knows? When the part-time insurance clerk managed to garner more votes than Trudeau's Liberals, do you think Harper would fare any worse?

The Afghanistan Papers, How Canada Lost the War With the Taliban.

I may be wrong. Perhaps choosing to wage a war in a manner by which it can never be won isn't the same as "losing." However, no matter how much lipstick you put on that pig, it still feels like losing because it sure isn't winning.

When I launched this blog back in 2006, Canada's war in Afghanistan was very much on my mind.  The trauma of the 9/11 attacks on Washington and New York was still relatively fresh. Even if we didn't want to admit it, we were keen on dishing out a little payback.

We'd chosen not to join Bush/Blair in the Iraqi adventure but we could still bang away at something in Afghanistan.  Those were heady days. Remember Rick "The Big Cod" Hillier, the general who sweet talked prime minister Paul Martin into authorizing the Kandahar gig? Canada was going to step up to the plate. No more wimpy peace keeping. We were going to kick some Islamist ass. As the Americans put it, we were "gonna git some."

We were gonna git a lot. Kandahar province to be precise. That's the city of Kandahar and the province of Kandahar - a big and nasty chunk of the nation of Afghanistan. Canada hadn't fought a war since Korea but we were warfighters now.

It just didn't feel right. I had long been fascinated by insurgency/guerrilla warfare - Algeria, Malaya, Viet Nam, that sort of thing. I had read Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic wars and the memoirs of T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia) in WWI. I'd read about the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths, Attila and Theodoric, and how they operated.  Patterns emerged, mistakes were repeated again and again.

Then I heard about his guy named Petraeus, US Army general David Petraeus. I read about Petraeus and this team of experts drawn from military and civilian ranks whose job it was to glean all the lessons on unconventional warfare from the past two millennia. They were going to boil it all down. We were going to learn from all the mistakes and the less frequent successes of the past and digest this wisdom in a new field manual for the United States Army and Marine Corps, FM 3-24.  The Economist published an intriguing review:

"FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency” makes awkward reading for those trained in the notion of out-manoeuvring and annihilating an enemy force. Now American troops must be “ready to be greeted with either a handshake or a hand grenade” and must be “nation-builders as well as warriors”. Under the new doctrine, fighting insurgents involves “armed social work”. 

“Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction,” says the manual. The best weapon is sometimes none at all. The prime objective is not to kill as many insurgents as possible but to maximise support from the local population. Above all, troops must adapt quickly. 

"Instead of isolating themselves in large camps and driving around in armoured vehicles, the manual advises American troops to live “close to the populace”, move on foot, sleep in villages and patrol by day and night. Each company should have a political as well as a “cultural” adviser. Platoons should assign their best soldiers to intelligence and surveillance, even at the cost of firepower. Forget the chain of command: decisions should be taken by consensus where possible.
Soldiering is only one strand. It must be entwined with others—including providing essential services, promoting good governance, building up local security forces and devising an information policy to counter insurgents' propaganda. 

"The 282-page manual reads at times like a litany of the things America has done wrong in Iraq. But those arguing for withdrawal will find little solace. Insurgencies, it says, “are protracted by nature”. America and its allies must show the “ability, stamina, and will to win”. 

"Moreover, counter-insurgency cannot be done on the cheap. It requires large amounts of manpower—some 20 to 25 members of security forces for every 1,000 civilians. The 483,000 combined coalition and Iraqi forces (of dubious quality and loyalty) fall well short of the 535,000 to 670,000 required to secure Iraq.

That's 20 to 25 foot soldiers for every 1,000 civilians.  That's not including the support personnel. Boots on the ground. Kandahar has a population of 1.15 million.  At 20 soldiers per, that would be a combat force of 23,000 gun-totin' soldiers.

But the Big Cod assured Paul Martin he could handle the job with a total force of 2,000 personnel. Out of that number he'd be lucky to field 1,000 to 1,200 combat soldiers on any given day. Not 23,000. Maybe, on a good day, 1,200.

There's only so much you can do with numbers like that and not much of that very effectively. We became a garrison force, popping up here and there during the day with our armoured vehicles and our artillery and our air support and scurrying back behind the safety of the wire in our garrison camps at night. It was a big pointless, futile game of "whack-a-mole."

Canadian journalists reported that we were winning the war. How? How in hell were we winning the war? One name comes to mind, PostMedia's Matthew Fisher. To listen to him tell it, we were bagging one decisive victory after another. Operation Medusa, the battle of Panjwai, dealt a mortal blow to the Taliban insurgents in Kandahar - supposedly.

I contacted a journo from the old Knight-Ridder news service, a guy who ran the hills with the Mujaheddin during the Soviet occupation. He said the only way you won is if you've got a mountain of dead bodies to prove it. Otherwise they've just used the intricate network of irrigation canals to fade away until they're ready to return. And so they did.

Our war was largely cruising around in light armoured vehicles, trolling for IEDs and we did find our share of those. And then we mustered on overpasses along the "Highway of Heroes" to honour their returning caskets.

As this orgy of pointless deaths continued a few inconvenient truths began to leak out. There was one young Canadian subaltern, a lieutenant as I recall, who said that back when we were supposedly whipping the Taliban's ass we were in fact nearly overrun by a force of illiterate Afghan farmboys with their Korean War vintage assault rifles and RPGs.  Oddly enough we didn't hear from him again.

We got familiar with some new names - Haliburton, Blackwater and such. These were corporations who provided "contractors" to assist military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. These contractors, however, weren't engineers and medics. They were retired combat veterans and they carried guns, often better stuff than the military forces had. They were paid a lot too and it wasn't for building roads either.

Then along came former US Army commander turned academic, Andrew Bacevich's 2010 book, The New American Militarism (reviewed here, here and here).  The author explored how what Eisenhower once labeled the military-industrial complex had metastasized into something far worse, a military-industrial-neoconservative-evangelical/fundamentalist-commercial warfighting complex. The corporate sector was no longer just the arsenal of America's military, it was the military's 'for profit' warfighting partner and its riches were vast enough to keep the party going.

Which brings us, nearly a decade since Bacevich's expose and double that since this fiasco started, to what are being called the "Afghanistan Papers."  The common take on this story is that the folks back home were fed a rich diet of lies to conceal that we, our young people, were fighting unwinnable wars.

But there's a darker side to this business, one that's not mentioned in the news reports, one that corroborates Bacevich's denunciation of America's commercial warfighting complex that has its fangs and claws sunk deeply into America's "bought and paid for" Congress.

This revelation comes straight from the mouth of retired general, Trump national security advisor, convicted felon, Michael Flynn.

The “Afghanistan Papers,” as the Post calls the report, have drawn comparisons in their scope and granular detail with the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers, published in the New York Times in 1971. In both wars, “The presidents and the generals had a pretty realistic view of what they were up against, which they did not want to admit to the American people,” Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, told CNN’s Brian Stelter. 

Positivity bias. Michael Flynn, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former national security advisor, was the director of intelligence for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. He provides just one of many disturbing takes on the U.S. war effort. “There is an inherent bias in the intel community because they want to get money, they want to exist, and they want to grow,” he said in an interview. 

Expanding on why field intelligence reports were more negative than the upbeat progress reports presented to the U.S. public, Flynn said that policymakers “are going to be inherently rosy” in their assessments. Later in the interview, he said, “There is a machinery that is behind what we do, and it keeps us participating in the conflict because it generates wealth.”

"Because it generates wealth." Quelle surprise. It goes on and on and on because no one in high office and no one in the top ranks of the military has the integrity to stand up and expose it, to say "enough, no more."

1935. Smedley D. Butler. A retired US Marine Corps Major General. A two-time recipient of America's highest military achievement, the Medal of Honour. There was a man with enough integrity to warn that "War is a Racket."

In War Is a Racket, Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists, whose operations were subsidized by public funding, were able to generate substantial profits, making money from mass human suffering. 

The work is divided into five chapters: 

War is a racket
Who makes the profits?
Who pays the bills?
How to smash this racket!
To hell with war! 

It contains this summary:"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

We got dragged into a place we never should have gone. Our dead and our wounded, their families and their loved ones, and every other Canadian worth their salt deserve an accounting, some explanations, facts not lies. We need to know we have military leaders who won't try to play us, who won't put their ambitions ahead of the national interest. We've got some housecleaning to do.

Will Northern Ireland and Scotland Say "Adios"?

Even Northern Ireland's unionists are losing heart after England's decisive Conservative victory in yesterday's elections.  The massive blow also has Scotland prepping for another sovereignty referendum.

Irish Times writer, Denis Bradley, says it's time for Northern Ireland to demand a new deal from Westminster.

From this side of the Irish Sea, the decision that England has made (not Scotland), may seem irrational, narcissistic and immature but even if the choice they have made is all those things and more, it is theirs to have, theirs to live with, theirs to celebrate or regret in the future. 

The election has confirmed that England is divided; elated and depressed in near equal measure. The country faces a long period of negotiation about its relationship and its trade with the EU, including Ireland. It will have to reengage with the SNP in Scotland in deciding future relationships; with an SNP who, in relative terms, had an election result that is even more impressive than what the Conservatives had. A second independence referendum for Scotland is firmly back on the political syllabus. 

The new government and especially Boris Johnson will have to tread carefully with the unionist community in Northern Ireland, who are psychologically coming to terms (once again) with the reality that England had no difficulty in betraying them.

...Brexit has propelled us back to the future. The fundamental issues that were present almost a hundred years ago when Ireland fractured into six and twenty- six counties are again seeking attention and resolution. Those fundamentals of identity and sovereignty are the same but the soil that they are embedded in has changed radically.

It's no wonder the unionists are losing heart. Their new prime minister, when pressed on the point a couple of years ago, did say that losing northern Ireland, if need be, was a price he'd be ready to pay to achieve Brexit.

Another Win for FPTP. Another Body Blow for Liberal, Representative Democracy.

Boris Johnson won a decisive victory in yesterday's British elections. The Tories marched to a massive majority leaving the opposition Labour and every other party a smoking hole in the ground.

First Past the Post triumphed again.

BoJo won a powerful majority in the House of Commons - on a minority of votes cast. A majority of Britons (I'm going to miss that word) supported parties that backed a second referendum. The will of the British people was to stay in the European Union but FPTP put paid to that democratic expression.

As Irish Times celebrated columnist, Fintan O'Toole, put it this morning:

A line from the old gambler’s lament takes a whole new twist: “Wherever I roll the dice/ The blues run the game.”

Who needs the "consent of the governed" when you can rely on vote-rigging First Past the Post?

p.s. I'm back, for now. My computer, like the newly elected prime minister of Britain, remains deeply unstable.

Well, We're Killing the Atmosphere but We Can Do Better. How About the Oceans?

We usually think of climate change as what happens to us on dry land. Heatwaves, droughts, floods, severe storm events, that sort of thing. We rarely think that most of the impacts of global warming are swallowed up by the seas that comprise 70 per cent of the Earth's surface.

The oceans take most of the heat (you would be frying without them) and they absorb most of the carbon from the atmosphere. But why not hit them when they're down? I know, let's strip the oxygen right out of them. Fish, who needs 'em?

Oxygen in the oceans is being lost at an unprecedented rate, with “dead zones” proliferating and hundreds more areas showing oxygen dangerously depleted, as a result of the climate emergency and intensive farming, experts have warned. 

Sharks, tuna, marlin and other large fish species were at particular risk, scientists said, with many vital ecosystems in danger of collapse. Dead zones – where oxygen is effectively absent – have quadrupled in extent in the last half-century, and there are also at least 700 areas where oxygen is at dangerously low levels, up from 45 when research was undertaken in the 1960s. 

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature presented the findings on Saturday at the UN climate conference in Madrid, where governments are halfway through tense negotiations aimed at tackling the climate crisis.

Farmers often tell us that they're stewards of the land. Land maybe but not the water. That's where they dispose of their excess agricultural chemicals - the fertilizers, the herbicides, the pesticides. That's the blue-green algae blooms that now poison Lake Winnipeg, Lake Erie and many other rivers and lakes. It's the massive dead zone in the Gulf that pours out of the mighty Mississippi.

Some ocean areas are naturally lower in oxygen than others, but these are even more susceptible to damage when their oxygen levels are depleted further, the report’s authors said. Species that can more easily tolerate low oxygen levels, such as jellyfish, some squid and marine microbes, can flourish at the expense of fish, upsetting the balance of ecosystems. The natural oceanic cycles of phosphorus and nitrogen are also at risk. 

The world’s oceans are already being overfished, and assailed by a rising tide of plastic waste, as well as other pollutants. Seas are about 26% more acidic than in pre-industrial times because of absorbing the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with damaging impacts on shellfish in particular. 

Low oxygen levels are also associated with global heating, because the warmer water holds less oxygen and the heating causes stratification, so there is less of the vital mixing of oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor layers. Oceans are expected to lose about 3-4% of their oxygen by the end of this century, but the impact will be much greater in the levels closest to the surface, where many species are concentrated, and in the mid to high latitudes. 

Intensive farming also plays a major role. When excess artificial fertiliser from crops, or manure from the meat industry, runs off the land and into rivers and seas, it feeds algae which bloom and then cause oxygen depletion as they decompose.

When we speak of a climate emergency it's invariably in the context of greenhouse gases and atmospheric warming. We don't include the environmental devastation we inflict on our lakes and rivers and oceans. We go on about desertification and the degradation of our farmlands while ignoring that the main source of protein for the world's poorest 70 per cent is fish. And, what we don't kill off with our aquatic emissions we ravage with our industrial fishing fleets. That's already playing out in all sorts of ways?

Those Somali pirates who seize freighters off the Horn of Africa? They used to be fishermen - until the giant fishing fleets moved in. We took their sustenance. Says who? I heard that from the mouth of a Danish frigate captain on an anti-piracy patrol.  He had a hard time condemning those pirates.

Is This an 'Assault Rifle'?

Depicted above is the venerable 'saddle gun' the Winchester 1873. I'm a fan of lever-action carbines. They're handy in the field. A reasonable hunting rifle but even better if you're walking through bear or cougar or wolf country.

They don't come with 30-round mags. Some, like the Winchester, have a tube magazine under the barrel that, depending on the calibre and configuration, can carry five to eight rounds. My Browning manages one in the chamber and four rounds in the magazine.

Is it an assault rifle? It's not semi-automatic. It's more like a cross between a bolt-action rifle and a semi-automatic. Especially with the Browning's short-throw lever and trigger mechanism, you can get rounds out pretty quick, a lot faster than the usual bolt action. It can make all the difference if a cougar decides you're on the menu for dinner tonight and you need that second or third round to change its mind before it closes the distance.

Today is a solemn day on which we commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre in Montreal.  That murderous lunatic carried a Ruger Mini-14.

In this configuration, the Mini-14 is called a "ranch gun." Good for taking down varmints, wild hogs, that sort of thing.  However, it has a Jekyll and Hyde cousin, what Ruger calls its "tactical model."

Suddenly the ranch gun looks a lot like your typical assault rifle, "black gun." It is sporting a nylon stock, pistol grip, high-capacity magazine, picatinny rail for mounting military-style optics, even a muzzle brake.  Looks way more menacing than the ranch gun above it, doesn't it? Then again, all that add-on gear is intended to replicate this, the "budget friendly" Bushmaster, an AR-15 knock off.

I don't know where we should draw the line on these things. There's obviously no need for "black rifles" or what they connote. But you still have to find that line. Where, how?

Today, like every December 6th for the past three decades, is a day on which we tend to get emotional about the highly charged problems of gun control, man on woman violence. When emotions run high we tend to simplify issues, think in absolute terms, reject complexities and look for quick fixes. Therefore I invite you to read another perspective on assault weapons from SFU professor emeritus, Gary Mauser, a criminologist who has studied firearms legislation. He argues that assault weapons aren't the problem and that popular concerns are misplaced.  Read it and then make up your own mind.

Conspicuous by Its Absence

There was a glaring omission in yesterday's Throne Speech. One word that never crossed Ms. Payette's lips - "emergency." Isn't that curious? Like a growing number of nations, our government just a matter of months ago proclaimed a climate emergency to exist in Canada.

Emergency is a word that conveys something dire, an urgent threat. Emergencies go to the very top of the priority list. That's because they're emergencies. When your house catches fire that becomes more important than mopping the floors or washing the car or cutting the lawn. When you're in an emergency you do what you must, not what you may or may not feel like, but what the emergency demands.  The fire sets your agenda, not the weeds in the flower beds.

So, what about our emergency? What emergency? What would be the logical measures we might expect if our government considered climate change an emergency threatening Canada and the Canadian people?

Would the government, already running substantial deficits, be promising tax breaks? Who cuts taxes in a period of emergency? No, of course not. In an emergency you marshal your resources, you mobilize your people, you harness your industry to do what you must.

In an emergency you try to avoid doing things that make matters worse. You don't squander your resources on annual subsidies to the world's most profitable industries, the fossil energy giants. You don't pretend to cut emissions at home while doing your utmost to ramp up emissions overseas. That's what you call counter-intuitive. The more vulgar of us have a different term - horse shit.

...while the Government takes strong action to fight climate change, it will also work just as hard to get Canadian resources to new markets, and offer unwavering support to the hardworking women and men in Canada’s natural resources sectors

I don't dispute that we're in a grave emergency. That much is unquestionable. While it obviously has made no impression on our government, the latest report from the Potsdam boys - Rockstrom, Schellnhuber, et al - was jarring. They warned that we have probably already triggered six or more major climate tipping points. We have awakened the Sleeping Giant, nature itself. Now nature is actively adding its considerable heft to man-made climate change and its just getting started. We used to have a term for that. What was it? Oh yeah, we called it "runaway climate change." Runaway as in beyond our control, irreversible. Emergency.

Mr. Trudeau has declared, promised, vowed that Canada will be carbon-neutral by 2050. As if. One thing this prime minister has demonstrated is that he's a windbag, a regular Janus. He's a man not to be taken at his word.

Tucker, Mr. Trump Isn't Going to be Happy About This.

Where is Michael Cohen now that Trump needs a man with his skills set? Oh, that's right. He's in prison.

With world leaders caught laughing behind Trump's back, the last thing he needs for Christmas is a return visit from former Playboy playmate, Karen McDougal.

Only Karen is back, thanks to a careless remark by FOX loudmouth, Tucker Carlson, who claimed she “approached Donald Trump and threatened to ruin his career and humiliate his family if he doesn’t give them money.”

McDougal has filed suit in a New York state court for defamation. FOX has said it will vigorously defend the claim.

The former playmate has dished the dirt on Trump in lurid detail. She even said that the impassioned couple shagged in Trump's apartments in Trump Tower while Melania was off somewhere recovering from the birth of their son, Barron. Nice touch, Don.

With a disastrous NATO summit behind him, the Americans backing out of the UN climate accord, Congress about to impeach his narcissistic ass, and his poll numbers flagging, a rehash of his affair with Karen McDougal might just drive Trump to despair.

This Sounds Crazy But, Hey, It's Climate Change

Few know the reality of climate change better than the insurance industry. Insurers have to sell policies. If they don't, they put themselves out of business. They have to set premiums large enough to cover anticipated claims while still making some profit. They've got teams of actuaries whose only job is to work out risks.

Places like California are an insurer's nightmare. Homeowners there are unusually vulnerable to wildfire losses (except in the rainy season when those fire swept areas are susceptible to mudslides).

So what to do? A lot of insurers would like to stop incurring these worsening risks. They've been pulling coverage in the more fire-prone areas. That gets the homeowners upset. The homeowners get the politicians upset. It's the actuarial "circle of life."

On Thursday, however, California took the highly unusual step of banning the practice, a decision that exacerbates the insurance industry’s miscalculation of the cost of climate change. 

The new policy imposes a one-year moratorium, preventing insurers from dropping customers in or alongside ZIP codes struck by recent wildfires. The moratorium covers at least 800,000 homes around the state. The state has also asked insurers to voluntarily stop dropping customers anywhere in California because of fire risk for one year. 

“People are losing insurance even after decades with the same company and no history of filing claims,” Ricardo Lara, California’s insurance commissioner, said in a statement. “Hitting the pause button on issuing non-renewals due to wildfire risk will help California’s insurance market stabilize and give us time to work together on lasting solutions.”

A widespread problem.

In a survey of 27 state insurance regulators this year, the consulting firm Deloitte found that just four states said their insurers were “fully” or “largely” prepared to respond to the risks of climate change. The danger of insurers being overwhelmed by worsening natural disasters “is very real,” Deloitte wrote in its report.

...After two years of extreme losses, it is clear that California’s insurers are struggling to prepare themselves for a new era of accelerating climate risk, according to interviews with insurance executives, academics and regulators. New research shows that the wildfires of 2017 and 2018 alone wiped out a full quarter-century of the industry’s profits. Last year’s Camp Fire was the costliest disaster anywhere in the world that year, according to the insurer Munich Re.

In 2018, the giant German re-insurer warned that increasing losses could cause insurance premiums to become unaffordable for many homeowners.

Ernest Rauch, Munich Re's chief climatologist put it bluntly:

“If the risk from wildfires, flooding, storms or hail is increasing then the only sustainable option we have is to adjust our risk prices accordingly. In the long run it might become a social issue,” he said after Munich Re published a report into climate change’s impact on wildfires. “Affordability is so critical [because] some people on low and average incomes in some regions will no longer be able to buy insurance.” 

Nicolas Jeanmart, the head of personal insurance, general insurance and macroeconomics at Insurance Europe, which speaks for 34 national insurance associations, said the knock-on effects from rising premiums could pose a threat to social order. 

“The sector is concerned that continuing global increases in temperature could make it increasingly difficult to offer the affordable financial protection that people deserve, and that modern society requires to function properly,” he said. 

Munich Re’s insurance cover in hurricane-prone regions such as Florida is already higher than in northern Europe, by an order of magnitude. 

This has a variety of impacts on the real estate markets. Soaring insurance costs lower property values. New buyers or anyone else needing mortgage financing will get turned down by lenders unless they maintain adequate insurance coverage.  Money they have to pay insurers is money they don't have available to pay the people trying to sell their homes. Worse yet, if your property becomes uninsurable it can become almost worthless. Most people's homes are their biggest asset. Oh dear.

Melania's Delicate Sensibilities

She's America's 'first lady' and, boy, is that a tough gig.

Melania Trump went after impeachment hearing witness, law professor Pamela Karlan, who told the Congressional committee that Trump could "name his son Barron but he cannot make him a baron." That was too much for Melania.

This is the same Melania who apparently wasn't too worried about the impact on her son when it came out that his daddy had unprotected sex with a porn star or shagged a Playboy playmate in their Trump Tower home while mom recovered from birthing the sprog.

I don't think young Barron is going to be too scarred by professor Karlan's quip. It's his dad that'll do that job on him. Look how screwed up his other kids are today.

Relapse. They're Back to "Rocket Man" and "Dotard"

Hmmm, nice hair!

Maybe it's just another lovers' tiff. It began when the Mango Mussolini revived 'rocket man' when referring to North Korea's Kim Jong-Un. That got up Kim's backside and he fired right back.

A senior member of the North Korean government has again described Donald Trump as a "dotard" after the US President revived the war words with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by calling him "Rocket Man." 

Choe Son Hui, North Korea's First Vice-Foreign Minister, was quoted by North Korea's state news agency as saying the foreign ministry "can not repress displeasure over the utterances made by President Trump inappropriately at the most sensitive time." 

Choe added: "If any language and expressions stoking the atmosphere of confrontation are used once again on purpose at a crucial moment as now, that must really be diagnosed as the relapse of the dotage of a dotard."

The dotage of a dotard.

Kim has said that Pyongyang is preparing a Christmas gift for the Cheeto Benito but just what they'll be sending depends on whether Trump is naughty of nice.

What Happens When You Unleash a Pop Culture Columnist on a NATO Summit?

I'm not sure but, whatever it is, it's refreshing. Hanna Jane Parkinson brings her pop culture perspective to the sometimes tumultuous NATO summit.

The last time a group of underachievers with an increasingly shoddy commitment to defence stayed at a “luxury resort” in Watford, it was the England football team. On Tuesday, the leaders of the Nato nations arrived to celebrate the alliance’s 70th birthday. Seventy, coincidentally, is about the average age of the leaders.

Conversation at the mini-summit included how to mess up the Syria situation further, while conversation later at Buckingham Palace, behind Trump’s back, was about how awful he is. Now, I’m no fan of Trump, but watching Justin Trudeau instigating this gossip session leaves you with the impression he is definitely the guy who screengrabs your comments in the WhatsApp group and shadily shares them with others.

It's a fun take on an otherwise dreary and stodgy event, even if Justin can't help stepping in the mud puddles. Enjoy.

25th - That's the Silver Anniversary, Isn't It?

The 25th anniversary is a big deal. It's a milestone, isn't it? Family, friends, everybody celebrates someone's 25th.

The global community of nations is marking a 25th anniversary event in Spain right now but there doesn't seem to be much celebrating. Maybe that's because on this, the 25th UN climate summit, there's not much to celebrate.

After a quarter century of deeply shared concerns and solemn promises, man-made greenhouse gas emissions have reached an all-time (for now) high level. Atmospheric GHG loading is far higher than ever in the history of mankind.

After a quarter century, we're told those GHG emissions are only going up for at least the next twenty years.

After a quarter century, scientists (the best of the lot) are warning that we may have triggered so many tipping points that we might have crossed the point of no return. Nine identified tipping points have already gone "active" and present an existential risk of a cascade.

After a quarter century of feigned sincerity, Canada has just restarted construction of the climate-wrecking Justin Trudeau Memorial Pipeline intended to flood world markets with the worst ersatz petroleum on the planet, bitumen.

How's that for a Silver Anniversary?

When the Saudis Can't Break Even on Oil...

Saudi Arabia is sitting atop the world's greatest reserves of light, "sweet" crude. That's the really valuable stuff you just pump out of the ground. No need to dig or boil it out. Doesn't have to be diluted, heated or pushed through pipelines at high pressures.

Saudi oil is pretty much the opposite of high-carbon, high-cost, low-value bitumen, the Athabasca sludge, the crap that Ignatieff boasted was the "beating heart of the Canadian economy for the 21st century." We chose not to construct refineries capable of processing bitumen, creating a foreign "buyers' market." In the global oil markets, we're the poor cousin.

We may be in the tar pit basement but we're not alone. Even the Saudis, with their great oil bounty, are losing money.



If the Saudis, with their low-cost, high-value conventional crude oil are losing money, what do we expect from high-cost, low-value, unconventional bitumen?

The Face of the Petro-State

America's Taylor Energy is an object lesson in how petro-states succumb to a toxic, climate-wrecking industry.

The story begins in the Gulf of Mexico in 2004 when Hurricane Ivan toppled a Taylor Energy oil drilling platform. 15 years later that well is still leaking. 70,000 gallons of crude a day, every day. It has leaked more oil than the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Critics say the lack of action by Taylor and the federal agencies that oversee offshore drilling is a result of a self-regulated Wild West industry that’s allowed to under-report spills while trying to shun responsibility to contain or clean up leaks.

The company says it has done everything possible to stem the flow of oil and that it should no longer be held accountable for the leak. 

Costs are extreme, and the technology needed to fix the massive leak does not yet exist, the company has argued in court.

Polluter pays? Well, not so much. And it seems the people of Alberta stupidly imagine their fossil energy companies will foot the bill for the quarter 'T'rillion dollars it will take to clean up the Tar Sands tailing ponds and those countless thousands of orphan wells.

Standing Up To a Thug

Donald Trump's efforts to break Iran have suffered another setback.

It's called Instex, the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges.  Think of it as a blockade runner that uses currencies other than the US dollar to circumvent Washington's trade sanctions against Tehran.

Originally set up by the UK, France and Germany, Instex has now been joined by Belgium, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Instex is the carrot to Donald Trump's stick. It presents the promise of regularizing trade provided Tehran first returns to compliance with the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.  Will it be enough to draw Iran back into the fold? No one knows.

The "Age of Fire" - It's Here

You have to work really, really hard not to see it, this Age of Fire. You have to be really, really young not to remember a world where this wasn't normal.

Wildfires are a new reality from the tropics extending well inside the Arctic Circle.  Some of them are deliberate. Brazil's rightwing nutjob, Bolsonaro, has looked the other way as settlers torch the Amazon. In Indonesia, the jungle forests are being burned off to clear the land for palm oil production. Most of them, however, are wildfires, a knock-on effect of man-made warming.

What you're seeing now is just a preview of what awaits our children and grandchildren. It is their future or at least one part of it. It is our legacy.

I won't quote from it at length but this article from The Guardian reveals the scope of what we have done to our younger and future generations. It is beyond grim. It is sobering. I urge you to read it.

What the article brings home, however, is that mankind is now in a war for survival, a war that pits us and our hopes for a viable future against some very well connected, very powerful arsonists out to burn it all down.

Most governments continue to move at glacial pace and turn a blind eye to the nine other mega-threats threats menacing humanity. Why? 

Because a worldwide counter-revolution is under way, intended to paralyse action on climate, environmental loss, extinction, toxic air water and food. It is financed by “dark money” from a terrified fossil fuels sector through shady institutions. It pours hundreds of millions of dollars into global propaganda to discredit climate and environmental science, seduce government and deceive the public. 

More sinister still is the growing control of the fossil fuels lobby over governments and the world media – not only in floundering western democracies, but also Russia, China, Brazil, India and Saudi Arabia.

Now a new UN report says fossil corporates plan to ramp up carbon emissions 50% to 120% by 2030 beyond the limit for a safe human future (1.5C degrees). Despite the renewables boom, fossil infrastructure investment has rebounded in 2019 after three years of decline, the International Energy Agency says. On the face of it, the fossil lobby has turned the tide.

There are only three motives to so hazard civilization: greed, malice and ignorance. Either the returns are so great that fossil executives are willing to cook their own grandchildren, or they are blind to the risks. Since these are technical people, the latter does not ring true: oil majors like Shell and ExxonMobil have revealed in court they understood exactly what they were doing to the planet for nearly 50 years. Ignoring it, they then sought to deceive humanity while ramping up carbon output. 

The world is dividing into two opposing movements: the concerned “survivors” – the young, the old, the wise, the educated, the informed and the pragmatic – and the cynics backing the very global system that will precipitate collapse. 

Some scientists’ estimates for how many lives collapse will cost range from 50%-90% of the human population. The number is not knowable because human behaviour, as war, cannot be foretold. The process starts with famines and water crises, both already in evidence, leading to refugee tsunamis and multiplying conflicts.

These forces and their political collaborators, our elected Quislings, are bringing the word to the cusp of collapse.

It is time to speak the unspeakable. 

Without urgent action to terminate fossil fuel use, return the planet to a state of ecological health and address all 10 mega-threats in an integrated way, our worst fears will become our fate. Collapse becomes inexorable. 

Doing nothing or too little sentences humanity to collapse – economic, societal, even existential. It is time to discuss this, openly, honestly, truthfully.

This is a fight for survival and you have to pick sides. No more wishy-washy nonsense about pipelines promising a Green Nirvana. That's horse shit and we all know it. You know it. You can see it. You can smell it in the air, even gag on it. You can't escape it.