Kerry’s chairmanship is bad news for the Yukon ( Comment Whitehorse Star 21 May 2015 )
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry assumed his position as chair of the Arctic Council on April 24, and will have it until April 2017.
Kerry’s track record has been one of a hard-liner behind fracking and as an expert for the green washing of dirty, bankrupt projects with carbon pricing.
Similar to B.C. Premier Christie Clark and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, he is very skillful in exploiting climate concerns to minimize renewables and to push back any no-frack position.
So-called carbon pricing is Kerry’s greenwashing ace, and his underhanded elegance behind destructive agendas perhaps also reminds one of former British prime minister Tony Blair’s false populist charisma.
Kerry’s controversial treatment of the Global South raises warning flags in the North, which is another geography with many indigenous peoples who are impacted by modern resource colonialism.
As so many times before, now as secretary of state, at last December’s COP 20 climate conference in Lima, Peru, John Kerry preferred ideology over evidence.
In sync with his carbon pricing PR, he dug in to allow only current emission levels on the table. The U.S. government and especially John Kerry pushed hard to censor media and youth emissaries and pressure delegates.
His position is a denial of basic climate science facts. According to atmospheric science facts, a carbon molecule in the atmosphere from two centuries ago is similarly GHG (greenhouse gas)-active as one from two days ago.
China and India, with their shares, are the only non-Western economies that make the top 10 list, with China at less than one third of U.S. emissions.
On the BBC News Science & Environment page, Matt McGrath reported on Dec. 13, 2014:
“But this (Kerry’s and mainly the Europeans’) approach is being resisted by a number of countries, including China and many others, who want to adhere to the idea of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’.
“Some countries are suspicious that the text being developed here in Lima is an attempt to get round the concept of differentiation, which is embedded in the 1992 UN (Kyoto) framework convention on climate change.
“The issue has become critical as the chairs of the talks introduced a new draft text that many felt watered down the original commitment.
“A large group of developing nations known as the G77 objected (as they did in Copenhagen” ... ‘We stand behind the differentiation, we stand behind common but differentiated responsibilities, these are issues we hold very strong and these are definite red lines (Antonio Marcondes, Brazil’s representative at the talks).’”
Equally troublesome for the Yukon and the N.W.T. to his false and divisive climate policies is his strategy to expand fracking everywhere.
Why Colorado’s anti-fracking measures were not supported by Democrats and environmental groups was the title of a report by Joel Dyer, Matt Cortina and Elizabeth Miller, on Oct. 2, 2014 in the Boulder (Colorado) Weekly.
“Hundreds of billions of dollars in natural gas infrastructure are being built with the blessing and even encouragement of Democrats. The State Department, thanks to Hillary Clinton and now John Kerry, has created a fully staffed department charged with promoting natural gas development throughout the world as a means of spreading U.S. influence while simultaneously attempting to diminish the influence of Russia.”
Mariah Blake, in the Sept./Oct. 2014 issue of Mother Jones, also observes Kerry’s frack agenda:
“Despite the public outcry in Europe, the State Department has stayed the course. Clinton’s successor as secretary of state, John Kerry, views natural gas as a key part of his push against climate change.
“Under Kerry, State has ramped up investment in its shale gas initiative and is planning to expand it to 30 more countries, from Cambodia to Papua New Guinea.”
But exactly how does Kerry use carbon pricing language and policies to incentivize increased GHG emissions by way of advancing the dirtiest of unconventional resource extraction such as gas fracking?
Key to understanding is to correct Kerry’s misleading carbon market assumption.
A carbon market will never exist outside of Wall Street, as a single or unified carbon product is not real to begin with.
Kerosine, coke-fuel or heavy bunker oil are no more a single product as strawberries, beef and dried algae can have a consolidated agricultural price, tax or market.
That is how alien “Put a Price on Carbon” really is and was meant to be by the slogan designers from the corporate think tanks already in the mid-1980s.
This kind of vacuum against good sense is what the oil industry wants from its support of carbon pricing to bring on even more subsidization of oil and gas.
The carbon price is a false alternative to renewable frameworks and clean air relevant infrastructure initiatives in electron-powered transportation and other areas that strengthen energy markets and energy security in the real world.
False language Kerry-style of carbon pricing certainly brings down the standards of evidence, as one more effective subsidy for the investment fraud-ridden frack sector.
Example: the March 2015 Canadian Energy Institute study’s 76 pages on conventional natural gas development in Yukon does not show or even indicate a single proven reservoir in all of Yukon, which does not have an oil and gas industry.
But the study was presented widely in a media blitz as if those reservoirs were there, in perfect “frack and talk manner.”
Similar to many pieces from across a wide B.C. media spectrum, “Policy Note” reported in January 2015 under the title: The case against a revenue-neutral carbon tax:
“Revenue neutral is the idea that all carbon tax revenues must flow back out the door as other tax cuts (typically income tax) but also could be in the form of tax credits or a fixed dividend. In some cases, people do not trust that this is going to happen as promised.
“In B.C., they would be right, as 2/3 (very cautious reading) of carbon tax revenues have been used to support corporate income tax cuts.”
Those are new(!) income tax cuts that include gas frack and frack LNG operators as cash funding for fracking directly from the carbon tax!
Further, the carbon tax-linked Pacific Carbon Trust had acted so blatantly as a slush fund operation for cash handouts to especially gas fracking that the B.C. government, in damage control mode, renamed it the Climate Action Secretariat in 2013.
Even Elizabeth Nickson, from the generally oil-friendly and conservative Frontier Centre for Public Policy, followed North/South justice-oriented sources like Oxfam and wrote for the Vancouver Sun on Aug. 14, 2013:
“And where did the money from the carbon tax go? According to B.C.’s Auditor-General, two-thirds of funds brokered by the Pacific Carbon Trust went to Encana, the biggest gas company in Canada, and to the Nature Conservancy of Canada, … This redistribution of revenue from the poor to the rich, however, pales in comparison to the misery foisted on indigenous peoples in the developing world.”
The Oct. 11, 2010 issue of the New Yorker has a broad sheet investigative report on ACES (U.S. Cap & Trade law), by Ryan Lizza, As the World Burns.
The carbon pricing corruption Lizza tracks down in detail includes a Kerry deal with T. Boone Pickens for large government frack subsidies as part of the ACES package.
B.C., with its frack wastelands, poisoned waters, corrupted carbon accounting, economic and democratic decline in the Horn Basin and elsewhere, is often touted as a carbon pricing wonderland.
A good look provides an appropriate idea of what to expect in Yukon from John Kerry’s inspiration.
