Carbon pricing blames ordinary people with little say ( Comment Whitehorse Star, Dec.24 2015 )

Carbon pricing blames ordinary people with little say ( Comment Whitehorse Star, Dec.24 2015 )

This is a rebuttal to Sally Wright’s letter (Star, Dec. 21).

The “price on carbon” gave everything away.

The second-last line – “This will mean a price on carbon and a regulatory framework which integrates it” – diminished her well-intentioned thoughts on energy planning.

As if there was no price on carbon, as if there was no oil and gas subsidy framework that implements it. Beware of platitudes in the spin zone.

Transportation is not everything, but it is the one sector that Big Oil has a stranglehold on and their spin doctors and greenwasher front groups fight hardest there.

Emissions are not retail or market-driven when it costs close to 10 times more to fuel up a gas or diesel truck than an equivalent electric truck.

Greenhouse gas emissions are largely not a broad, diffuse and consumer-controlled issue but a narrow, precise infrastructure initiative task.

The carbon price doesn’t go there except for locking in the status quo, and instead blames ordinary people with little say on infrastructures available to them.

Ms. Wright’s opinion deflects attention from this fact, which provides comfort to the oil and gas industries trying to wreck Yukon.

To fight Jimmy Carter’s energy reform attempts, 30 years ago, Big Oil PR came up with the ideological carbon price strategy to falsely dress up in a market-responsive image with the option to become greenwashing solution providers as a fox in the henhouse.

It became their successful tool to disguise the infrastructure and oil cartel nature of the problem and to advance protectionism, militarism, polluter permits and rights against energy markets, against renewable economies and agricultures, against capping extraction and emissions, against science-based carbon accounting and against reducing fossil energy subsidies.

In B.C., carbon trading caps emission reductions not emissions, and offset rewards are paid to Encana. The supposedly revenue-neutral carbon tax subsidizes gas fracking and corrupts carbon accounting.

Even after the B.C. Auditor General investigated and exposed the mess in 2013, which is not fixable but simple certainty on a grade two math level, the Pembina Institute continues to herald it as a successful model.

Corporations’ powers to legislate under certain free trade provisions protect oil subsidies similarly to carbon pricing mechanisms.

Different political parties highlight a different focus of protectionism for over-mature fossil resource cartels and run a very effective good cop/bad cop routine.

Ms. Wright overlooks carbon pricers and climate deniers in unison reject the core fact of accumulated greenhouse gas emissions as the climate impact.

As in Copenhagen before, in Paris, the OECD carbon pricers insisted only current emission levels are relevant and fought the renewables-oriented and science-based G77 position (poor countries) tooth and nail. Because by killing climate science, along with it, one gets to kill climate justice.

There are more similarities.

Naomi Oreskes, who co-wrote the political self-defence guide, Merchants of Doubt, observed there are scientists who are so-called climate skeptics.

However, after reviewing close to 1,000 studies, she could not find even a single climate skeptic academic who had examined the issue.

I recommend to make use of this piece of wisdom from atmospheric and oceanic science review.

Let us not focus on mere policy opinions, be it from climate science or economics actors who, with support from corporate media bias, tend to get parroted by many of the environmental NGOs.

In order to find an evidence base for energy and climate policy, it might be more helpful to pay attention to economists as well as climate scientists who have produced a peer-reviewed and respectable body of work on the issue such as Vandana Shiva, Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, Hermann Scheer, Patrick Bond and others.

Ms. Wright’s letters bring up the counterproductive carbon price frequently, and just as regularly ignore renewable energy source legislations which actually achieve impacts on emissions.

As the late Hermann Scheer observed brilliantly, carbon pricing mechanisms, together with talk thereof and renewable market frameworks, are in zero sum opposition everywhere (referenced and sourced by yukonblogger).

Renewable infrastructure priorities ahead of even conservation and efficiency, together with feed-in tariffs, zero emission transportation fast charge points and local industrial content requirements, re-created vibrant energy markets in Denmark, China, Germany, Spain, Ontario and other places.

Keep an eye on some of the smaller regions like around Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., with an independent local power utility where renewable economies, jobs, profits as well public finances are healthy and electrical rates are competitive, characterized by a situation that is shielded from the now carbon price-talking Ontario government and its subservient Ontario Hydro.

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.

By Peter Becker

A fracking sell-out by MLAs and NGOs (Whitehorse Star Oped on December 18, 2015)

 

A fracking sell-out by MLAs and NGOs, 

Whitehorse Star Oped on December 18, 2015

They claim the Yukon government (YG) does not follow its own adopted 21 frack while talk recommendations of the legislature’s select committee report, signed by all parties and lobbied for by the NGOs, and in deed fully complied with by YG in all its oil and gas measures.

Yes, the opposition Liberal and NDP caucuses together with Yukoners Concerned about Oil and Gas Exploration and Development and the Yukon Conservation Society (YCS) are selling us out to the master plan of YG.

Betrayal and structural complicity by opinion leaders, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, has degraded their no-frack sentiment to a softheaded notion, hanging by a thread at best. Northern B.C. and Synergy Alberta copycat strategies have been used.

Let’s follow the chronological order, while touching on a range of formulaic phrases by which Merchants of Doubt and Synergy Alberta (Synergy) talk has permeated and co-opted the message tracks of Yukon friendlies among officials.

First part of unpacking the 21 points and their endorsements is a look at where the advice originally came from. Evidently, it was much derived from the tobacco industry’s PR expertise on regulating crime versus outlawing it.

Everything and everybody are sucked into a vortex of misleading language frames onto a one-way frack track. B.C. Tap Water Alliance (http://goo.gl/w3XEwS) and Public Accountability Initiative (http://goo.gl/iC6RoI ) uncovered tricks and networks.

Yukoners resist, but some have been gulled from no-frack into go-slow signs.

In May 1994, 4,000 pages of internal tobacco industry documents were sent to the office of Prof. Stanton Glantz, University of California, who had been after Big Tobacco for 16 years before successfully exposing their criminal conspiracy suppressing science information.

In the 2014 documentary Merchants of Doubt, Glantz explains that you generally can’t get away with saying that smoking doesn’t cause cancer, or that oil and gas expansion is environmentally clean.

The Merchants of Doubt method is not at all about raising doubt to the benefit of research, as anybody might expect, but pseudo skepticism that attacks facts with green little lies.

Glantz cites, quotes and summarizes from the tobacco industry trove of documents:

“And Hill & Knowlton [H + K PR consultancy, now the frack brain of Big Oil] said to the heads [of Big Tobacco], you can’t deny the evidence. But what you can do is cast doubt. Doubt is our product.”

Infiltrating the local scene are the Environmental Defense Fund, Pembina Institute, Synergy Alberta, Resource Works and other outside front groups orbiting a black hole of false doubter words.

Glantz again: “The only way these guys are actually effective is if the public thinks they’re an independent voice.”

How about the 21 frack while talk recommendations from the all-party select committee?

“The committee did agree that the following [21] recommendations should be addressed before hydraulic fracturing is considered.”

6, full text: “THAT baseline ground and surface water data be collected for an appropriate period of time, in order to ensure that comprehensive data is available.”

It’s B.C.-style soft legalese, but no trust building, as in complete baseline work must be carried out beforehand and completed.

This inevitably brings on best practices, as announced often by YG.

Those nowhere and never have included comprehensively concluded baseline water testing before fracking started.

There is reason and logic to it. Alberta, Pennsylvania, British Columbia are examples, which will include the Yukon with frack procedures already permitted and initiated.

Industry-controlled regulators claim especially high levels of methane toxicity in the water of fracked regions are supposedly naturally occurring and pre-existing.

10 recommends to require to make public the frack chemicals. The entire 25-page frack report hides Fracfocus by making no single mention of this centrepiece of best practice regulations.

There is no excuse. Duty of care aside, on several occasions I had made sure all committee members are aware.

It is almost certain that the Fracfocus chemical disclosure registry will in time be implemented, as it is in place across North America, including in B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Fracfocus is a Kafkaesk masterpiece of deception and nihilism.

It requires disclosure reports, but not until 30 days after frack operations have ended and all specific individual compound disclosures are voluntary.

Medical associations complain that Fracfocus pushes back even those patients’ rights, disclosure obligations, legal remedies and liabilities that existed before Fracfocus.

Herding everybody into establishing a single-issue regulatory focus of water management really manages control of community.

It disallows effective resistance against destroying the fullness of natural and economic life support systems.

Yukoners Concerned accommodates this government strategy by overplaying the message track : “It’s all about the water.”

11, full text: “THAT research be conducted to demonstrate whether well integrity can prevent migration of liquids or gases in the long term.”

Such research is not available. Supporting these recommendations retells government’s misleading statements, which can only get us fracked.

During the January 2014 Yukon legislature presentations/hearings, U of A. Prof. Bernhard Mayer had expressed doubt on industry claims regarding well integrity.

The Merchants of Doubt chutzpah by which his talk hid reality and statistics of the rate of well failures was remarkable.

The author of Sustainable Fossil Fuel Mark Jaccard, a former advisor to former prime minister Stephen Harper, together with Royal Dutch Shell's face for leaky carbon storage drilling, Rick Chalaturnyk, led the Merchants of Doubt charge during the hearings.

Guaranteed frack harms were hidden consistently behind fixable or to be regulated “risks” by silver-tongued charmers with mediocre science credentials throughout the hearing.

They received frequent affirmation from all MLAs and the NGO crowd.

Synergizer methods were explained and anticipated by short video docs on world-leading fracture engineer Tony Ingraffea that I had made and also embedded into a PPT (http://goo.gl/Oy8CtZ ).

During this Yukoners Concerned PPT presentation to the committee, I had alerted the fracking committee members specifically to the Mayer/Jaccard type sleight-of-hand by carefully unpacking it.

In the PPT video material, Ingraffea strongly emphasized that engineers never use the word “prevent” when it comes to well failures.

His professional and poignant advice was critical, yet was totally suppressed and censored out from the report.

12 deals with air quality baseline testing as fraudulently as # 6 does to water.

Merchants of Doubtpiece #13 recommends research on greenhouse gases’ impact but ignores the U of Colorado report with total mass measurement data of fugitive emissions of about nine per cent in a Utah frack field, I had referred to and linked to in the Yukoners Concerned PPT.

The remaining 16 frack implementations are mostly filler and fluff that provide a false sense of security while being screwed, diverting attention from the killer portion that has holes big enough for 210 points to fall through.

The Merchants of Doubt advice details the committee put in its frack report come from somewhere.

In 2012, the China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC), which own most of Northern Cross Yukon hired the PR consultancy H + K, based on expertise lying about cigarette harms.

Following in the footsteps of Stanton Glantz and Patricia Callahan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning muckraking reporter, the Scientific American online from Feb. 17, 2015 quoted former tobacco industry executive Peter Sparber: “If you can do tobacco, you can do just about anything in public relations.”

Yukoners didn’t have much time to find out for themselves.

Like other oil and frack outfits before, in May 2012, CNOOC/NCY hired H + K.

YCS and NCY sign a consultation agreement on Oct. 5, 2012 offering improved government access for YCS in exchange for sidelining community voices against fracking (https://goo.gl/hTEHC8).

It’s divisive and full of template recruiter language that also introduced the image of a “polarized spectrum” to Yukon. It smears frack critics as extreme and ignorant, when really their concerns are typically well-informed and middle of the road.

Triumphantly, the premier waved a copy of the YCS-NCY deal in the legislature’s question period.

On Nov. 22, 2013 the YCS, in the conclusion of its PPT presentation, advised to the frack committee “ … regulations to reduce the chances of negative [frack] impacts …” against even their own presented and valuable enviro science (http://goo.gl/ZW8Pn7 ).

In their second conclusion, YCS is hoping that fracking would not be viable in Yukon. YCS defied their own sources again by falsely suggesting that the industry has economic viability elsewhere.

During those winter months of 2013/14, Yukoners Concerned came under sustained pressure, mostly behind the scenes, to give up their resolute stance against frack implementing regulations. The Yukoners Concerned executive buckled; I didn’t.

Yukoners Concerned never reprimanded the unfair representation in the report of the Yukoners Concerned presentation, as if happy to see their once evidence-based positions gone.

Yukoners Concerned spokespeople forgot Oct. 9, 2013, when we had highlighted to the committee substantial data sets.

We had never noted a relevant lack of data, as the report put in our mouth.

Generally, enviro science had been appreciated but not predetermined outcome science.

The Yukoners Concerned website recommends the frack report without a word of criticism on it.

Yukoners Concerned hides an almost complete censorship of the committee against the peer-reviewed evidence context of jurisdictions with moratoria, contained in the Yukoners Concerned PPT.

In short, the report edits Merchants of Doubt spin into the Yukoners Concerned presentation which it did not have.

Yukoners Concerned is fine with that now. Their latest endorsement for the 21 frack invitations came in a media release in the Star from Oct. 30, 2015.

With the Yukon Party government discredited for some time, the NDP caucus plays a lead role introducing preconceived bias by replacing clean language with validations for false language.

They claim YG doesn’t have a “social licence” for fracking.

Paradoxically, this gives it to them as political operatives, and consulting firms had already printed the social licence during their fracking dog and pony shows. I expect one can get a fishing licence and a social licence in North Korea.

Why does it work that way? It is the kind of thing one receives from Miss Manners who is less so concerned with the democratic mandate.

The “social licence” term is a control group-tested think tank mockery of people’s will that anesthetizes democratic imagery of “consent by people”, “public support" or “approval”.

Social licence arrives by obedience to the term and process it stands for, stating yay or nay to having one is meant to be irrelevant.

The NDP caucus discouraged any discussion on a committee title less ideological, more evidence-based and in balance with firm enviro-science and economics data, such as “Select Committee On Harms and Costs of Hydro Fracking”.

Another of their Merchants of Doubt specialties is abusing the venerable “Precautionary Principle”, away from its meaning in the dictionary of dealing with risk.

The NDP caucus has infected others with this bastardization of language use that deflects from the evidence for certainty.

Frack Merchants of Doubt show conniving silence on the April 22, 2014 letter from the City of Whitehorse to the frack committee that expresses a time-limited concern against fracking into the Whitehorse aquifer, only until a well protection plan is in place (https://goo.gl/YVr5oa).

Secular Nationalism makes ISIS Tick, Whitehorse Star Oped Dec. 2 2015

Secular Nationalism makes ISIS Tick Whitehorse Star Oped Dec. 2 2015

Glimpses into conventional Arab nationalism, non-religious military command as well as secular administrative leadership under the Islamic State recruiter veneer are not new, but a trove of documents acquired by Der Spiegel consolidates a transformative understanding (http://goo.gl/mtjcG4 ).

All the while, the mistakes of 9-11 are repeated, skipping grief and pain of what must be immeasurable loss and jumping into unwise action. Solidarity with the French people means to get especially the French government out of Syria. Here is why.

To get a grip on where the now fast-expanding situation is headed, we need to backtrack and employ the most human of qualities: think a little.

Syria is where the French army was defeated after 14 murderous years of anti-colonial fighting from 1920 to 1934, foreshadowing France’s downfall in the Land of a Million Martyrs, Algeria 1962 after eight years of an imperial bloodbath.

Britain was thrown out of Iraq in 1932 after 12 years of killing and maiming from 1920 to 1932. It still echoed when ex-U.S. president George W. Bush’s and former British prime minister Tony Blair’s coalition of the willing went into Bagdad and stayed 12 years ago.

Of course, France got started in Syria, signing the secret Sykes-Picot agreement with Britain in 1916 that carved out a colonial post First World War Arabia ruled by them.

Particularly French governments have a history of fanatical colonial aspirations in the Middle East and North Africa.

At the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919, to satisfy those ambitions, French prime minister Georges Clemenceau asked David Lloyd George in earnest out for a duel with a choice of pistols or swords, which Lloyd George declined. It wasn’t 1914, which saved his honour and perhaps his life too.

What Arabs typically remember better than the Brits and French is that their promised freedom was stabbed in the back, while as brothers in arms of the allied powers, they were dying in battles against the Ottomans.

History may not condemn a serious rescue mission or military expedition authorized by the UN in response to unspeakable or genocidal ISIS massacres on Muslim communities, Parisians, Kurds and Yazidis.

But a UN Charter, Chapter 7 intervention cannot carry at the same time a second badge of neo-colonial domination and gunboat diplomacy.

More than fear of casualties, this is the real reason of the air war obsession. In the air, one would not have to account for illegal acts of war.

The Arabs are not buying the distinction; neither does international law.

It may sound a bit like a contradiction on terms because without continued Western colonialism, there would be no ISIS political fascism, as they couldn’t care less about distant Western liberties one way or the other.

But going forward on practical terms, there are a few items that would remove the colonizer badge.

However incomplete, a good effort may set a different tone and perhaps open surprising and useful future options by addressing:

Drone warfare-terrorized Muslim populations from Nigeria to the Philippines experience a very common but strange notion. They name a feeling of being dehumanized to the level of bugs that are attacked by crop dusters, particularly by this technology.

The Trudeau government plans to up the military trainer scheme. It is a famously stupid exercise of expediency to sneak neo-colonial occupational forces into countries that don’t want them. The method escalated the Vietnam war, but the Vietnamese caught on pretty quickly. So do the Afghans in a war, with body counts still climbing.

Our women and men in uniform are prepared to die for us, but the very real possibility of once again being murdered execution-style on the military training ground by extremists posing as recruits is a different matter. It is just not right to put Canadian soldiers into this type of hopeless position.

Kurdish, Shia as well as Sunni militias are famous for their cunning and toughness and for their sophisticated artillery and battle-hardened infantry skills – if, and this is a big if, they fight for their own national causes and not a foreign-dictated one.

General Izzat Ibrahim al-Douiri and his assortment of all secular veterans, from the Iraqi officer corps, are doing a phenomenal job training and guiding the ISIS battle units.

Ibrahim had been the one that got away in the U.S. command’s famous deck of cards of Saddam’s Ba’athist villains following the illegal 2003 invasion.

Not since the Russian Red Army defeated the German Wehrmacht, or 90 per cent of it, have conventional ground forces been as successful in set piece battles against superior airpower.

All of these are well-recognized indicators by independent observers that Iraqis and Syrians don’t need foreign military instructors.

U.S. President Barack Obama never made good on the Bush promise and his own promise to withdraw all occupation forces from Iraq by 2011. Thousands of military contractor troops and the U.S. military never left Bagdad’s Green Zone and other strongholds.

Obama could stop his efforts toward implementing the original Bush/Cheney plan of attacking a dozen or so Muslim countries beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa and the Horn of Africa.

Obama could stop his efforts to steal Iraqi oil by not any longer pushing the Iraq oil law, which even the most corrupt puppet governments in Bagdad, after years of being pressured, won’t sign.

Obama and the U.S. Congress could initiate serious reparations starting in stable corners of destroyed Iraq.

It also requires moral and legal reparations by prosecuting war criminals of the Bush presidency but also from within his own administration.

Efforts are slowly underway in Great Britain to prosecute Blair for war crimes, but justice delayed is justice denied.

Unfortunately, there is no indication yet from the Trudeau government that Canada will return to the world community of nations that follows the UN Child Soldier Conventions signed by Canada in 1949, 1977 and 2000.

Under the law, prosecution and punishment of child soldiers or combatants under 18, including the cover-up, facilitation or aiding thereof, is a war crime (no ifs and buts).

Justice and compensation for Omar Khadr, who was also psychologically tortured with attention to sadistic detail by Canada’s CSIS in Guantanamo (CBC video: https://goo.gl/8cTgn4 ), is overdue, and has to be the measure of that.

Aggravating injustice occurred on Feb. 4, 2008, when the U.S. military commissions, in Guantanamo, accidentally released and later suppressed an eyewitness report OC-1 CITF of March 17, 2004.

It contains sworn, legal testimony by the U.S. army personnel who captured Khadr in Afghanistan on July 27, 2002, that Khadr, then 15, did not kill U.S. army medic Christopher Speer.

Some decent women and men stood up for the law and Khadr’s rights.

Among them were UN officials, RCMP Chief Supt. Mike Cabana, who resigned in protest from the RCMP anti-terrorism unit Project O Canada, the former senator and general Romeo Dallaire, Michelle Shepard from the Toronto Star, American military lawyer Bill C. Kuebler and Dennis Edney from Edmonton.

It is widely agreed that the Guantanamo concentration camp continues to be a first-rate recruiting tool transforming young Muslim women and men toward the extreme.

One way to put a little more distance between Canada and Guantanamo would be to avoid the usual decades-long foot-dragging for victim rehabilitation in the justice system and clear the air quickly for all Canadians and now upstanding, loyal citizen Khadr.

Obama could prove that his interest in Syria is about more than increasing arms industry revenue. Maher Arar is a dual Canadian/Syrian citizen who also has family ties to Syria. For a start, he and his family need to be removed from the U.S. no-fly list.

In September of 2002, he was wrongfully framed and smeared by the RCMP as Muslim terrorist. As a result, under the illegal U.S. Extraordinary Rendition program, Arar was kidnapped at JFK International Airport and deported to Syria for contract torture by the Assad regime. Canada made amends exonerating and compensating the innocent Arar, but not the U.S.

Fact is, a lot of difficult processing we do by language, which can be a good and creative force or a bad and obediently dull tool, and some amends are in order.

Toning down terrorism and radicalization of Muslims rhetoric and re-introducing intellectual and mental hygiene to the conversation would help a lot.

To qualify as a terrorist, it seems, one has to be a Muslim first. How often do we hear about Christian terrorists?

When last were Genocidaires with a Christian background, and there are a few of those around from Germany, Rwanda and Serbia, referred to in the context of radicalized Christianity?

When were Christian community groups and churches asked to denounce crimes they have nothing to do with by forcing such demagogic obligations on them?

Perhaps Hannah Arend, the late philosopher and educator remembered for coining some hard-won, transformative truths of our time, can help to break destructive stereotypes?

As a foreign Jew in 1940, she was interned in Camp Gurs in southwest France and narrowly escaped deportation by the French Vichy Regime to a Nazi death camp in Poland.

In 1961, she went on to report for the New Yorker on the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, receiving serious flak for it, at the time.

One reason was that in Eichmann, quasi the transportation agent of the Shoa, she observed mainly an unremarkable bureaucrat who was obediently following orders, not personal hate, even after questions had crossed his mind.

The second reason that got Arendt into equally hot water was that she reported what had come up in the survivor statements of the trial.

Perhaps some of the Jewish community leaders could have risked a little wiggle room and daring towards underhanded resistance rather than submit?

This work later evolved into the household words “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”

“And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.” (Quote from the 2012 movie Hannah Arendt.) Presence of mind and guts sound useful to me.

Justin Trudeau, Obama, French President Francois Hollande, Russian President Vladimir Putin, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and company: bury your inner Cheney and remember Lester Pearson, who de-escalated the extremely dangerous Suez crisis after Britain, France and Israel had attacked Arab Egypt!

In 1956, the so-called Tripartite Aggression aimed at stealing the Suez Canal from the Egyptian people and at regime change against president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had exercised the radical impertinence of nationalizing the canal.

In popular radio and television interviews, Hannah Arendt had learned and taught to carefully and succinctly distinguish “Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme.”

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.

By Peter Becker