IN A TIME OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT...TELLING THE TRUTH BECOMES A REVOLUTIONARY ACT

"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wicked of men will do the most wicked of things for the greatest good of everyone." John Maynard Keynes

" Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration" Abraham Lincoln

Monday, July 22, 2013

ROGUE PETRO-STATE? [and] KLUANE UPDATE

                         ROGUE PETRO-STATE?

It has been somewhat of a mystery to progressive type folks here in Alaska, and the northern US lower 48, as to how/why our neighbouring country of Canada continues in it's aggressively destructive path of developing one of the most threatening projects to the global climate system. Mining the oil sands in Northern Alberta, which takes huge volumes of water and energy, to extract the oil. Which uses natural gas to heat/pressurise water, and also to dilute the sludge into "oil", which is then called Diluted Bitumen, or "Dilbit". Dilbit is not like regular oil, it is more corrosive and flammable. This is why the oil-train disaster in Quebec several weeks ago occurred, with more than 50 fatalities.
 
The following article also describes Dilbit, and how dangerous it is.

Your lead editor does seem to notice a change for the worse, in some respects, just in our brief visits to Whitehorse, Yukon, over the past 12 years. To run the Yukon trail marathon there, or just to enjoy the scenery. In 2002, during one of my first visits there, my truck at the time was the vicious target of anti-American graffiti :). Whilst parked in an alley overnight behind a hotel in downtown Whitehorse, someone scrawled in the dust on it, "Americans suck, go home!". This was during the run-up to the illegal/immoral US invasion of the poor country of Iraq, so that was probably one factor leading to that. But starting in about 2005, I started noticing more poverty and mayhem in Whitehorse during my visits, especially so after 2007, and continuing. Part of that may be due to the economy there taking a downturn, and believe it or not, Whitehorse has been "discovered/gentrified", much like Missoula, MT, or Boulder, CO and other nice outdoor cities in the western lower 48. Property prices in Whitehorse now are just as expensive as in these places.
 
Give this article a read, it's very interesting and informative. We used to think of Canada as a more sane, and progressive country than the USA. And it still is in a few ways, for example their banking industry is more heavily regulated, and hence, they have not had any major banking scandals/meltdowns, and government bail-outs of their financial sector. But as the following article attests, our neighbour to the east (and north), is not nearly what we used to think of Canada as being.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/07/01-8

Oh, Canada: How America's Friendly Northern Neighbor Became a Rogue, Reckless Petrostate

by Andrew Nikiforuk



For decades, the world has thought of Canada as America's friendly northern neighbor -- a responsible, earnest, if somewhat boring, land of hockey fans and single-payer health care. On the big issues, it has long played the global Boy Scout, reliably An aerial view of tar sands mining in Alberta, Canada. (Photo: howlmontreal/ Flickr)providing moral leadership on everything from ozone protection to land-mine eradication to gay rights. The late novelist Douglas Adams once quipped that if the United States often behaved like a belligerent teenage boy, Canada was an intelligent woman in her mid-30s. Basically, Canada has been the United States -- not as it is, but as it should be.
 
But a dark secret lurks in the northern forests. Over the last decade, Canada has not so quietly become an international mining center and a rogue petrostate. It's no longer America's better half, but a dystopian vision of the continent's energy-soaked future.

That's right: The good neighbor has banked its economy on the cursed elixir of political dysfunction -- oil. Flush with visions of becoming a global energy superpower, Canada's government has taken up with pipeline evangelists, petroleum bullies, and climate change skeptics. Turns out the Boy Scout's not just hooked on junk crude -- he's become a pusher. And that's not even the worst of it.

With oil and gas now accounting for approximately a quarter of its export revenue, Canada has lost its famous politeness. Since the Conservative Party won a majority in Parliament in 2011, the federal government has eviscerated conservationists, indigenous nations, European commissioners, and just about anyone opposing unfettered oil production as unpatriotic radicals. It has muzzled climate change scientists, killed funding for environmental science of every stripe, and in a recent pair of unprecedented omnibus bills, systematically dismantled the country's most significant long-cherished environmental laws.
The author of this transformation is Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a right-wing policy wonk and evangelical Christian [why does this not surprise us? eds..] with a power base in Alberta, ground zero of Canada's oil boom. Just as Margaret Thatcher funded her political makeover of Britain on revenue from North Sea oil, Harper intends to methodically rewire the entire Canadian experience with petrodollars sucked from the ground. In the process he has concentrated power in the prime minister's office and reoriented Canada's foreign priorities. Harper, who took office in 2006, increased defense spending by nearly $1 billion annually in his first four years, and he has committed $2 billion to prison expansion with a "tough on crime" policy that ignores the country's falling crime rate. Meanwhile, Canada has amassed a huge federal debt -- its highest in history at some $600 billion and counting.

Liberal critics like to say that Harper's political revolution caught many Canadians, generally a fat and apathetic people, by surprise -- a combination of self-delusion and strategic deception. That may be true, but though Canadians live in high latitudes, they're not above baser human instincts -- like greed. Harper is aggressively pushing an economic gamble on oil, the world's most volatile resource, and promising a new national wealth based on untapped riches far from where most Canadians live that will fill their pocketbooks, and those of their children, for generations. With nearly three-quarters of Canadians supporting oil sands development in a recent poll, Harper seems to be selling them on the idea.

THE RESOURCE UNDERWRITING many of these ugly behavioral changes is bitumen, a heavy, sour crude mined from oil sands. Deposits of the badly degraded asphalt-like substance lie under a forest the size of Florida in northeastern Alberta and comprise the world's third-largest petroleum reserves. Over the last decade, as oil prices increased fivefold, oil companies invested approximately $160 billion to develop bitumen in Alberta, and it has finally turned profitable. Canada is now cranking out 1.7 million barrels a day of the stuff, and scheduled production stands to fill provincial and federal government coffers with about $120 billion in rent and royalties by 2020. More than 40 percent of that haul goes directly to the federal government largely in the form of corporate taxes. And the government wants even more; it's pushing for production to hit 5 million barrels a day by 2030.

Never mind that the entire process is a messy and wasteful one. It takes copious amounts of water, capital, and energy to dig out the carbon-rich sands, let alone upgrade and process the heavy crude, which can't even move through a pipeline until it is diluted with an imported gasoline-like condensate. With brazen cheek, the government nonetheless defends the Alberta megaproject as "responsible" and "sustainable" -- "an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the pyramids or China's Great Wall. Only bigger." Bigger indeed: Approved bitumen mining projects could potentially excavate a forest area six times as large as New York City. Reclamation and reforestation remain an uncertain and costly proposition. To date, oil companies have already created enough toxic mining sludge (6 billion barrels) to flood the entirety of Washington, D.C. 

Unsurprisingly, Ottawa has become a master at the cynical art of greenwashing. When Harper's ministers aren't attacking former NASA scientist and climate change canary James Hansen in the pages of the New York Times or lobbying against Europe's Fuel Quality Directive (which regards bitumen as much dirtier than conventional oil), his government has spent $100 million since 2009 on ads to convince Canadians that exporting this oil is "responsible resource development." Meanwhile, Canada has bent over backward to entice Beijing. Three state-owned Chinese oil companies (all with dismal records of corporate transparency and environmental sensitivity) have already spent more than $20 billion purchasing rights to oil sands in Alberta.
 
The kowtowing to China, now the world's largest oil consumer, highlights Canada's big bitumen dilemma: how to get dirty, landlocked oil to global markets. The United States, Canada's biggest customer, doesn't seem to need it as much anymore; imports declined by more than 4 million barrels a day between 2005 and 2011, and with pipeline projects to the United States like Keystone XL stuck in the mud, Harper's vision of being an "emerging energy superpower" appears in danger.
 
Unsurprisingly, Harper has recently jettisoned criticism of China's human rights record. As a secret foreign-policy document leaked last fall to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) makes clear, Canada has new priorities: "To succeed we will need to pursue political relationships in tandem with economic interests even where political interests or values may not align."
In 2012, Canada quietly signed a controversial trade agreement with the People's Republic and approved a $15 billion takeover of Nexen, an oil sands player, by the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp. And, perhaps to warm Canadians' hearts to the Chinese, the government recently lobbied to rent two traveling pandas at a cost of $10 million over the next 10 years.

Now that oil sands mining accounts for nearly 10 percent of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions, Ottawa can't really brook any discussion of a carbon tax, though a majority of Canadians would support one. Harper described the Kyoto Protocol as "a socialist scheme" and a "job-killing, economy-destroying" accord before pulling out of the agreement altogether in 2012. Many of Canada's ministers are now die-hard skeptics even about the science behind climate change. As Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver recently explained to the Montreal newspaper La Presse: "I think that people aren't as worried as they were before about global warming of 2 degrees.… Scientists have recently told us that our fears [on climate change] are exaggerated." To silence any would-be exaggerators, the government simply stopped funding the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, disbanded Environment Canada's Adaptation to Climate Change Research Group, and eliminated the role of chief science advisor. And since 2008, political minders have vetted all media requests for the country's 23,000 federal scientists.
 
After the government barred a federal scientist from talking about the discovery of a large Arctic ozone hole, a 2012 editorial in the influential science journal Nature demanded that the Canadian government "set its scientists free." It seems Harper heard "cut them loose" instead: His government summarily closed the world-famous Experimental Lakes Area research station, a gem of Canadian environmental science that has helped spur global policy on acid rain, to save the princely sum of $2 million a year (though the Ontario government is working to keep it open).
 
THE SINGLE-MINDED PURSUIT of this petroproject has stunned global analysts. The Economist, no left-wing shill, characterized Harper, the son of an Imperial Oil senior accountant, as a bully "intolerant of criticism and dissent" with a determined habit of rule-breaking. Lawrence Martin, one of Canada's most influential political commentators, says that Harper's "billy-club governance" has broken "new ground in the subverting of the democratic process." Conservative pollster Allan Gregg has described Harper's agenda as an ideological assault on evidence, facts, and reason.
 
To be fair, Harper's government does have a plan for climate change -- pumping the problem to the United States and/or China. Oil sands crude transported to the United States by the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, for example, could over a 50-year period increase carbon emissions by as much as 935 million metric tons relative to other crudes. And the planned $5.5 billion Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific Ocean would result in up to 100 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year, from extraction and production in Canada to combustion in China -- more than British Columbia's total emissions in 2009. The 2012 National Inventory Report by Environment Canada, the country's environmental department, actually boasts that Canada has partly reduced overall emission intensity in the oil sands "by exporting more crude bitumen."
 
All this underscores Canada's new reality: Just about any kind of rational evidence has now come under assault by a government that believes that markets -- and only markets -- hold the answers. Any act that industry regards as an obstacle to rapid mineral extraction or pipeline building has been rewritten with a Saudi-like flourish. One massive omnibus budget bill alone changed 70 pieces of legislation, gutting, for example, the Fisheries Act, which directly prohibited the destruction of aquatic-life habitats but stood in the way of the Northern Gateway pipeline, which must cross 1,000 waterways en route to the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, funding for Canada's iconic park system has been cut by 20 percent in what critics have called a "lobotomy." The CBC, the respected state broadcaster long scorned by Harper as an independent check on power, has suffered a series of cutbacks. The Health Council of Canada, which once ensured national health standards and innovation across Canada's 13 provinces and territories, also got the ax. Furthermore, with the élan of a Middle Eastern petroprince, Harper appointed the head of his security detail to be ambassador to Jordan. And he did it all with nary a peep from your average Canadian.
 
More than a decade ago, American political scientist Terry Lynn Karl crudely summed up the dysfunction of petrostates: Countries that become too dependent on oil and gas riches behave like plantation economies that rely on "an unsustainable development trajectory fueled by an exhaustible resource" whose revenue streams form "an implacable barrier to change." And that's what happened to Canada while you weren't looking. Shackled to the hubris of a leader who dreams of building a new global energy superpower, the Boy Scout is now slave to his own greed.

© 2013 The Foreign Policy Group



Some of the comments following this article are equally interesting and informative, written by Canadians, and which add more "fuel to the fire" so to speak.

"I lived up there and still have family that lives up there.
Here is the thing. Many of the people that work there or get jobs up there come from poorer provinces and have lower levels of education.
Yety they make LOTS of money. People with only a high school education can make 100k a year up there quite easily and with that they can buy a lot of things.
It very very hard to tell these people that this all a great mistake that is destroying the ecosystem.
To them it "Do not work here and go back to being unemployed 6 months of the year and have an income of less then 20k or make 100k a year and buy all those things".
To those critiquing the tar sands it is "Guys working in office towers making 80k a year jealous and wanting me to go back to a minimum wage job"
It hard to break that down."

and

"I too have family that works up there, so I know exactly what you're talking about. It is reminiscent of poor youth joining the military in order to attain a decent standard of living that would otherwise be out of reach. Thus are poor people pitted against one another for perceived "self-interest" which, in the final analysis, is anything but. This will continue until capitalism is eradicated -- or we are."

Good stuff, it sounds like Canada is not going to be the safe refuge for us we thought it could be, if/when full-on fascism in the more repressive sense, is implemented in this country.

                                           KLUANE UPDATE

Our research assistant Kluane has fully matured now, having reached the age of three last May. With that has come a noticeable improvement in his attentiveness on our outings, and a general trend toward limiting his excursions to interact with our other residents of the natural world that we often encounter. Nevertheless, there have been some lapses.
Last month, during one of our daily walks here on the Chugach Front, he brought his first treat back to us. We think he didn't actually kill this little rabbit, but stole it from some other animal's stash, such as a lynx, or eagle. Nevertheless, we were proud of him, glad that he has feral instincts, and can fend for himself.
On a planned pack trip late last month, up to one of our most beautiful, easily accessible favourite haunts, Crow Pass, he became separated from Mattie and I near these falls beneath the pass. It was very windy, 80-120 kph wind gusts were howling. We think he lost sight of us after one of his explorations, and the strong winds eliminated our scent/sound. He then went all the way back to the trailhead, whilst Mattie and I set up camp beyond the pass, waiting.
After talking with a few people who came up, we knew he'd keep waiting by our car, so we had to pack back up and abort our trip, though we did at least get to enjoy the scenery a little bit, on both sides of the pass.







At this point, it had been just five weeks since my surgery to remove the metal in my left leg, and it was still rather sore/tender. I hadn't planned on hiking 25 km that day, just half that, with a 13 kg pack. I actually had to throw my pack down the steepest section of trail, coming down from the pass, to maintain stability/traction, since my left leg was weaker than the right one. But, we didn't mind, he did have the sense to stay and wait for us, and we were not going to leave him out there all night, where he could have been abducted.
 
A week later, we went into another one of our favourite nearby Chugach Range areas, Hanging Valley, which is adjacent to the South Fork of the Eagle River valley. We had planned a 22 km round trip, my leg was slightly stronger.
This little valley ascends in just 6 km from the main S. Fk. Eagle River trail to a sheer headwall that looms some 750 metres above the end of the trail. Kluane became separated again, but Mattie and I proceeded up anyway, figuring he'd rejoin us at some point.
 
When we reached the headwall, I was able to hear him barking in the distance, toward the headwall.

It was fairly cold and windy in here on this day, perhaps 5C at 950 metres elevation with about a 60 kph wind. A typical above-treeline Chugach summer day :). After some investigation, we were finally able to see him. We had to hike up to the bottom of the headwall to see him. Apparently he had herded this moose aways up from some brush.

Upon closer investigation, it does appear that they were actually enjoying each other's company! He wasn't barking, just walking around with her (looks like she was a younger cow moose).
We were quite amused, and happy that he seemed to have found a new playmate. Nevertheless, I was getting cold, and wanted to head back down to a lower, less windy spot, to have lunch, before returning to the trailhead. But he wouldn't respond to our calls, and I didn't want to jeopardise my leg by climbing any higher. So we headed back down to this little lake, about 3 km back out the way we came and waited.
After waiting an hour, without him showing, we decided to just keep going. Sometimes he will actually pull ahead of us on outings, and surprise us by meeting us in front. But we walked all the way back to the trailhead, and no sign of him was apparent. So, I decided we had to walk back in, at least partially. Several people returning on the main trail had not seen him, so we walked 8 km back to near the junction of the Hanging Valley trail, to hopefully meet up. We were there 15 minutes, and then I did see him up on top of the Hanging Valley rim, about a km away. I yelled as loud as I could, and he came running. By this time, we'd been separated almost 4 hours, he must have really enjoyed his new playmate's company. My leg was quite tired/sore by the time we returned back to the car, having done 30 km that day, 6 weeks after my surgery. But we were just glad to have him back.

We decided two weeks later, when high pressure ridging brought warmer/calmer conditions to the Chugach, to head back in to Hanging Valley, for an overnight excursion. Perhaps Kluane would even reunite with his playmate.
This time, with temperatures near 15-17C, and just light northerly breezes and some sunshine, it was much more relaxing and enjoyable. We set up camp near Hanging Valley Lake, which is about a km before the headwall, off a side trail to the south of the Hanging Valley trail, and 100 m above it. The play of dappled sunshine on the aquamarine waters of this beautiful clear little lake made for beautiful scenery.
By the time we set up camp, had dinner, and then were relaxing for the evening, the breezes died off, and the mosquitoes became quite intense, almost requiring me to wear a headnet. But both Mattie and Kluane were enjoying the evening, in the beautiful, gentle Sub-Arctic evening.
I could tell our Assistant Editor Mattie, and Kluane were both tired the next morning though, probably from guarding camp, nocturnal expeditions, and fighting off the vicious mosquitoes.
It's very rare to ever see them both sitting next to each other resting, when we are out and about in unrestricted settings. And when we did pack up and head back out that day, he was exceptionally tired, but happy, when we returned to the Chugach Front Research Centre. He really does enjoy being out and free in our natural settings here. And we are quite happy he is with us, and proud of his growing knowledge and faithfulness as he accompanies us on our outings. He has had two brown bear encounters in my presence in the past year, when we surprised one behind the CFRC on different occasions. And he had the sense to listen to me, and not approach them.

On all of our backpacking trips, he stays around camp, and sleeps about 15 metres out. Whilst Mattie sleeps right next to the tent; two layers of security. We look forward to many more outings with him, as he continues to grow in his wisdom and experience.
 
Back in February I had a dream that he was walking upright like a man. I took this to mean he was growing in his maturity and wisdom, into a "power animal" even, like Homer (1996-2011), 

and my old Coyote (1990-2003) were.

So my dream is half-right, but that is changing. As a dedicated "new-age" man in the spiritual sense, I take great stock in my dreams, and this one was very vibrant and powerful. Cheers.
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