Lacking leadership on energy and climate policy 2/2 ( Coloumn Whse Star 28 Jan. 2016 )
Part one of this two-part commentary, published Wednesday, rebutted NDP Leader Liz Hanson’s conclusions from her participation in the Climate and Energy Policy in Germany – Study Tour, where she had skipped the policy part.
And not for the first time, which is indicative of not understanding energy and energy security.
It is energy infrastructure policy that lags behind, that limits or drives development, especially a more democratic economic development.
The hang-up with public energy initiative is a confusion of how market competition works.
And yes, it centres on the Scottish enlightenment philosopher and trail blazer of political economy from the 1700s, Adam Smith.
Smith was a practical thinker, not a right-wing ideologue as some on the left or right would like him to be.
In The Wealth of Nations, a broad tract on economics, he wrote about the free citizens and their welfare, not corporate rights. He intelligently described complex, regulated markets; never a free market.
At a later date, fraudsters and hucksters inspired by novelist Ayn Rand have edited the free market onto his name to squash freedom and obfuscate economics in favour of elites.
They should read The Wealth of Nations and pay attention to “the disorders which generally prevail in the economy of the rich.”
Bad idea to latch onto the distorted version of Smith, which is all too common for politicians of all stripes.
Smith can help us understand the role Big Oil plays today, which was not born by competition but as a military institution inherited from the First World War era.
On the bottom line, oil and gasoline were always expensive but offered more range and faster refuelling to warships and trucks than coaling stations and electrical batteries.
Similarly, the concept of power utility fiefdoms had not been competitive until war production logistics seemed justified in heaping golden handshakes and de facto taxation authority on them.
Once entrenched, these big fossil, big hydro, big nuclear players get to stay rowdies and bullies that break competition laws and shut down markets.
We had forgotten to readjust Big Oil’s deeply layered war subsidies back to a peacetime level. Now is as good as any time to remember and fix that.
Renewables need to be freed from shackles and straightjackets put on them by the carbon and mental fossils in a big zero sum scenario.
Too often, it might falsely appear that, for example, a fast charge net for electric vehicles (EVs) is not necessary, as gas stations are already around.
And supposedly, EVs are no good because they can’t make it cross-country to the next charge point.
It is break-out time from silly chicken or egg and status quo conundrums, that corporate media chase their own tails with.
That is what a green energy act achieves. It involves not subsidies but investments and structures to massively leverage private investments.
Just the fact that fuelling and servicing of EVs is about 10 times cheaper now than equivalent oil-powered ones gives an idea on the direction of the industrial expansion of the renewable electron, which is a marginal cost of zero, similar to diminished costs of digital bytes or bits.
Ten times! Consider again the economic absurdity of the carbon price, which is infatuated and blinded with nickel-and-diming people.
It rejects any awareness of bringing the cost down with renewables for doing business in the community.
It’s a question of life and death in poor countries and neighbourhoods when they are starved into the fossil fuel money drain by carbon pricing mechanisms.
Looking at restructuring energy policy, it is important to recognize that the electron has proven a superior efficiency and upwards trajectory through more than two centuries of industrial revolution. Green energy legislation does not pick winners.
That’s because it is a game that was decided when electric telegraphs became a cutting-edge communication tool during the French Revolution, when Ányos István Jedlik built the first electric motor in 1827, Michael Faraday assembled workable electric generators in the 1830s, Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel put together a functional photovoltaic solar cell in 1839 and Gaston Planté created the first rechargeable electric battery in 1859.
Renewable technology is competitive but also democratic because, decentralized and unlike oil and gas, coal, hydro and uranium, it can be resourced anywhere at much greater capacities.
Necessary measures to reopen the renewable door were, unlike the big oil, big utility case, never meant to be around without sunset.
This is a principle and road map commitment that is contracted into all green energy legislations.
Hanson and all her legislature colleagues may have been intellectually lazy not thinking this through.
But the ball keeps bouncing, and there are consequences.
Christopher Hayes, a journalist with The Nation Magazine, wrote about this neoliberal error in his book Twilight of the Elites.
The Yukon NDP caucus is out of touch with what he calls a post-truth environment.
It is really dumb, setting oneself up for no reward and to be attacked demagogically either way, regardless of selling out or of keeping integrity.
The Yukon NDP caucus talks a good line on energy while covering up its actions and inactions that have let Yukoners down, which amounts to a scandal of which we are only beginning to scratch the surface.
In 2015, they signed the pro-frack select committee report and voted for what amounts to a deceptively amended oil and frack act.
Lessons have been learned. In it, hydro-fracking or unconventional drilling in any variation or derivation of terminology or meaning are not even mentioned once.
Under this disguise of conventional drilling, the amended act is a clear admission that fracking cannot be regulated. It is all about fracking, as Yukon has zero proven conventional oil and gas reservoirs.
Expect a Hanson-led NDP government to underground carpet-bomb (industry jargon for late-edition brute-force fracking) this place into a hellishly shattered pathway chaos for toxin migrations, while still opposing fracking.
Contrary to those perspectives, there is no time to lose for infrastructure initiative, which takes a little while. But it is suppressed with illusions of frack outputs.
In reality, those are scarce in net energy gain, are price-volatile, hyper-subsidized, erratic in production and drop off swiftly everywhere.
Predictable energy security and affordability are a huge concern for a cold and vulnerable Yukon with long lifelines.
It was crucial for the Yukon Party government to bring the opposition onside in substance.
Frack wars, like other wars, are highly destructive and disruptive, and require this kind of uniformity for crisis management. The MLAs did not have to take those decisions but chose them anyway.
Disingenuous or frack turncoat behaviours by the leadership unfairly demobilize NDP supporters, which is what already happened in recent federal, Nova Scotia and B.C. elections. Also, it nudges governments generally from bad to worse, which is unjust for everybody.
Whereas outside the territory, four energy pillars are consistently being legislated in a growing number of jurisdictions. They were first introduced to Yukon by the author in a Star op-ed from Oct. 27, 2010: “Yukon Green Energy Act: When?” (yukonblogger).
“• No cap on program size, no cap on project size;
• Investment priority for solar/renewable over conventional energies;
• Guaranteed feed-in access to the grid together with guaranteed feed-in tariffs;
• Establishment of a fast charge point infrastructure threshold to enable the use of electrical cars, trucks and buses everywhere.”
