Pipe Dreams -- Feds take over

Pipe Dreams -- Feds take over

Last week the federal government announced that from now on the Northern Pipeline Agency in Ottawa is exclusively in charge of all things Alaska Gas Pipeline in Yukon. Comments, concerns are to be addressed to them and everybody else in their concern or mandate regarding the pipeline might as well go home. That includes the Yukon Government, First Nation Governments, Yukon Environmental Assessment Board, Aboriginal Pipeline Coalition and Yukon Energy Corporation, to name a few.

A stunning turn of events that knocks the wind out everybody, the community seems speechless. Well almost everybody, executive orders of this kind, I thought, were foreshadowed in the June 2009 TransCanada Pipelines/Exxon Mobile partnership agreement. Almost immediately I had undertaken an effort to scrutinize the deal and my findings were published in the Whitehorse Star in the same month.

In a nutshell TransCanada needed Exxon as an American partner to plow through some of the Canadian realities on the ground that I listed above. Reason being that a very effective tool to override lawful government and its legislation, NAFTA chapter 11 can only be levied across international borders and address a federal or national government.

In the Abitibi Bowater chapter 11 case foreign claim on ownership of Canadian bulk water was agreed upon and settled by Canada with $ 130 000 000.00 in August 2010; one of the larger NAFTA chapter 11 settlements or penalties. 

Rather than paying up arbitration panel penalties or settlements and then go collecting, in that case to NewFoundland and Labrador, the federal government now acted preemptively to control everything under their own roof through the Northern Pipeline Agency in Ottawa. In this way it can add the chapter 11 pressure into the sausage making, or should I say pipeline, already on a threat level and continue to keep a lid on the publicity of NAFTA stories.

However, these kind of totalitarian implications of “Fossil Fuel Extreme” on the depletion leg of its reserve use curve don’t arrive quite accidentally in Yukon. Renewable non hydro development is weak and with that community resilience against such political take over attempts. Didn’t we have government devolution? Ottawa’s orders couldn’t have come with a worse timing taking the momentum away of what renewable and democratic energy initiative we do have.

There are other problems that make us vulnerable to the climate crime of these new natural gas developments of the Eagle Plain reserves and the Alaska Gas Pipeline. On the outcome the methane emissions through one generation’s time will have several times the global warming impact of even equivalent diesel or gasoline emissions. New natural gas development scenarios are only possible because there is more reality denial, more separation from our life circumstances than just sticking the head in the sand of the climate crisis.

Critics of greenhouse emissions typically bring forth arguments with a perhaps unintentional but very effective counter-gang dynamic. It means to end up acting as phony opposition that underneath of stated ecological concerns supports what it criticizes, but also counters constructive alternatives.

Worth mentioning are beliefs in the fantasy of climate conferences and related emission trade and carbon tax schemes. Global Thinking and Local Postponing involves pretending the climate problem is one of legal or administrative standards, such as banning land mines or supporting children’s rights to an education and how to go about it. The replacement of the biggest monolithic infrastructure hardware that ever existed, the fossil fuel energy behemoth, with renewable energy technologies is fundamentally different. No new technology, like computers or trains for example, was ever introduced by conferences or introduction quota. If players like countries or corporations in the emissions trade schemes exceed minimum contributions they sell credit to under achievers. The claim of aiming beyond minima is false because a lowest common denominator standard below a ceiling is incentivized. In fact profits in emission trade derivative speculation depend on blocking renewable energy. Rating agencies of a kind that is well known since the financial melt down in 2008 assign carbon credits to activities like rain forest devastation in Indonesia. This country with little industries but giant slash burns is now the third largest green house gas emitter after the US and China. 

Incentivizing green house emissions and blocking renewable energy development is also true for the carbon tax idea. It can be collected from people as long as they are not allowed to sell renewable energy to the grid or access fast charge outlets for plug in hybrid or electric cars.

On the other hand good things happen very quickly in close to 50 countries and jurisdictions, rich and poor, that have quietly enacted renewable energy legislation for the purpose of creating energy markets. Quietly, as not to attract friction with so called ‘trade’ agreements. Its a logical process because the fossil and nuclear energy sectors have become freeloaders in terms of free use of public infrastructures such as global military protections, huge cash handouts that serve no real R & D purposes and externalized destruction costs exceeding the wealth of nations. This will not change over night but measures like legalizing grid access for renewables, local fleet procurement of electric vehicles etc. levels the marketplace somewhat. The fossil fuel industry has the financial security of a two centuries contract, give the renewable providers a contract for a few years. The effects are dramatic, in China wind power grew thirty fold in four years, much faster than planned after renewable energy legislation was passed in 2005. A similar process is underway in Ontario, in Brazil in 2011 wind energy became for the first time cheaper than fossil energy based on conventional, non inclusive calculation.

So what is the problem? 

A growing climate denial drum beat in North America is only part of an even broader intellectual illness that has locked itself into the abstract theory of neoliberal economics which is joined at the hip to the fossil fuel dogma. It is a warlike thought structure and it does create a climate of conformism. Part of this orthodoxy is to observe taboos like the one that forbids to mention anti-democratically enacted protectionism like NAFTA chapter 6 which restricts Canada’s freedom to trade energy.

The controversial spectre of natural gas fracturing in Yukon gains momentum. Nobody introduced a meaningful problem frame that would include the incomparably heavy climate impact of natural gas emissions in general. Or the need for solidarity and dialogue with poor countries who are being injured with the implied distortion of renewable energy as economic burden. Or that the Eagle Plain development in conjunction with the Alaska Gas Pipeline, the latter seems to be okayed now between Washington and Ottawa, could suck us dry so fast we would not know what hit us. Nobody pointed out that North Slope gas aside, six trillion cubic feet from Eagle Plain could supply the Alaska pipeline for five to six years while all our own energy security considerations may have been stopped or sidelined. It’s worth mentioning because gas reserves, conventional or shale, go empty much, much faster than projected these days. Look at the Barnett Shale disappointment in Texas.