Photo by Photo Submitted
OBJECTING TO CARBON PRICING – Banners are shown at a Unist’ot’en First Nation pipeline blockade, situated roughly halfway on a line between Prince George and Prince Rupert, 60 km south of Houston B.C. Photo courtesy YES! Magazine photo by Stephen Miller
1/2 Five LEAP Manifesto touch-ups to unite Canada, Whse Star April 27, 2016
1) Following compelling statements, on page five, carbon pricing as “a progressive carbon tax” lets down climate survival, forgetting oil and gas expansion is driven through the carbon price frame.
A deal breaker, but it can be corrected, and here is why.
In jurisdictions from B.C. to the U.K., the carbon tax is a flat tax blaming ordinary people who have not made the bad energy infrastructure decisions.
It is never revenue-neutral, not progressive and not carbon-neutral. But it is used aggressively in leveraging and capitalizing carbon derivative speculation.
The carbon price scheme is rounded out with a demand for cap and trade using NDP Leader Tom Mulcair’s slogan “polluter pays” nothing.
By rewarding corporate polluters like Encana in B.C. with cash, cap and trade always distorts energy markets and caps renewables.
Cap and trade as an offset scheme caps emission reductions but not emissions.
It is also a facilitator for carbon accounting fraud, which is evidenced in the B.C. Auditor General’s special 2013 report An Audit of Carbon Neutral Government. Major emitters are excluded by deceptive design of policy itself, not imperfection.
The 2014 IPCC report recognizes conventional fuel taxes, contrary to the carbon tax, have worked and can work to generate and leverage renewable infrastructure investment.
So what is in a name?
Why is the carbon price terminology pushed forward so rigidly purified, so romantically and dogmatically when practical solutions are energy price and energy framework as well as agriculture-related?
The abstract carbon pricing language triggers ownership and policy control by Big Oil and Wall Street cartels, who like to dress in a supposedly market-responsive, friendly corner store image.
Carbon emissions range from cattles’ methane farts, corn-fed, not grass-fed, to air travel to petroleum resources burned in the manufacture of wind turbines. That is, until there are enough of them to make new ones with clean energy and hopefully soon enough.
The Policy Research Group of the University of Sussex released a peer-reviewed economics study on phasing out fossil fuels “within 10 years.”
Climate and other environmental factors along with economics of employment, profitability and conversion efficiencies, lessons learned from other industrial transitions, suggested a war economy pace has the best feasibility. And no mention of carbon pricing.
In fact, a unified carbon product to attach a price to does not exist anywhere – no more than camel’s milk and potato beetles could function as single agricultural market item outside of Wall Street’s creative criminal schemes.
A vacuity of meaninglessness serves to fill in optical illusions that hide and expand the prohibitively high carbon pricing we cannot afford as it is.
As one example, electric vehicles run a lot more cheaply than oil-fired ones.
Lack of fast-charge stations is obviously not a case for retail market signals but represents an infrastructure distortion.
Twisted neoliberal economics, with their carbon price talking points, hide and prolong facts like these.
It’s similar to how Big Tobacco did it; for Big Oil, the stakes are just too high to tolerate truly independent science and evidence. The false flag of the carbon price allows them to play both sides and control the environmental presence in the room.
Likewise, corrupting carbon price talk with its outflow of regulating/permitting crime and not banning fracking obviously played a role in co-opting the Yukon NDP caucus, Yukoners Concerned About Oil and Gas Exploration/Development and the Yukon Conservation Society.
Step by step, they assist and sell the Yukon government’s frack program, in its legal implementation.
This includes Oil and Gas Act amendments that have removed the oil and gas veto right of the Kaska people, amongst removing other obstacles to fracking. At face value, the mentioned entities oppose fracking, of course.
By 2030, Alberta will replace coal plants with, over life cycles, even dirtier frack gas-powered ones.
Like in B.C., frack gas is climate solution number one, digging the carbon hole deeper and far into the future (Oregon fully replaces coal with wind by 2030).
Dimming down awareness is one more carbon pricing strategy that favours such deceptive climate solutions.
It is the idea, sometimes explicit, sometimes subliminal, that CO2 is the only problem of burning fossil resources as an energy source. A single-issue regulatory sausage maker comes in handy for tar and frack recruiters.
This is comforting to all super-polluters in carbon and uranium-based energy sectors that carbon price language hides seven-fold prohibitive impacts.
Fossil/nuclear cartels generate harm against climate, clean water/air/land, democracy, peace, industrial resource preservation, energy/food security as well as energy affordability.
In its preface of the study Carbon Trading – How it Works and Why it Fails, the widely respected Swedish Dag Hammarskjold Foundation speaks for all scientists and economists, I am aware of, who have actually examined climate and energy policies:
“At a time when carbon trading is still being promoted as the central solution to climate change, we continue that it is, instead, part of the problem.”
And, under the headline Taxation:
“As a means for altering behaviour, carbon taxes have many of the same problems as carbon (off-set) trading.”
Amy Miller’s book and movie Carbon Rush add to comprehensive community education on cynical carbon pricing mechanisms that accelerate and incentivize greenhouse gas emission increases.
So did Judy Deutsch for the magazine Canadian Dimension, winter 2016 issue, with the title: “Willful blindness kills hope for climate change reversal”, who wrote:
“Much is left out about carbon taxes. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (senior economist Marc Lee) found that the B.C. carbon tax is a regressive tax, disproportionately benefitting the rich, and that it did not reduce emissions.
“In Australia and B.C., it deflects attention from coal mining, natural gas, outsourcing heavy industry, Kyoto-exempt shipping.”
The Mining Association of Canada rolled out a big media release in claqueur style lobbying for a carbon tax, fully detached from evidence and critical reasoning.
NDP Leader Liz Hanson and Liberal leader Sandy Silver picked it up right away as opportunity to get in on the carbon pricing talk.
Hanson flip-flopped on a previous statement by MLA Kate White on behalf of the Yukon NDP that there is no plan for a carbon tax.
Premiers Darrell Pasloski and Brad Wall of Saskatchewan, similarly to White, had stated a carbon tax is currently neither affordable nor needed.
However, they concurred it is supposedly more or less positive.
On that basis, everybody can get into the “Carbon Pricing Club” tomorrow morning if they feel nobody is watching.
A World Bank internal strategy paper with the Carbon Pricing Club subtitle, to advance elite finance interests, was leaked recently.
The April 2011 membership resolution for the Yukon NDP to “… in government, or opposition, engage in a dynamic exploration and development of a comprehensive Yukon Green Energy Act” continues to be stonewalled by the NDP caucus.
The father of renewable energy source legislation, late Hermann Scheer, provided accounts in Energy Autonomy of how the carbon price routine consistently serves to stop green energy acts and by talking renewables down to cosmetic levels.
Carbon pricing is and was meant to be a tool to build new pipelines, not to stop them.
Mulcair and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley clearly won out on that account of their overall wrong-headed argument against the LEAP Manifesto at this month’s Edmonton NDP convention.
The second part of this two-part commentary, to be published Thursday, suggests renewable energy source legislation as a proven tool to address the climate crisis, why specifically so-called free trade is undemocratic, highlights international solidarity and respects that oil and gas are vital as a petrochemical manufacturing resource.
2/2 Five LEAP Manifesto touch ups to unite Canada, Whse Star, April 28, 2016
Part one of this two-part commentary, published Wednesday, looked at why the carbon price needs to come out of the manifesto.
2) Green energy legislative frameworks unfortunately are not mentioned in the LEAP Manifesto.
The 2014 IPCC report does point out that the carbon price has no successful track record to lower emissions as opposed to green energy legislative frameworks.
And yes, the Ontario Green Energy Act works great also in democratizing energy industries and with cheap electrons for people.
Examples are regions with independent utilities such as Sault Ste. Marie that are less sabotaged by Ontario Hydro and the carbon pricing of Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government.
3) It would be more clear to not say “trade deal” when antidemocratic agreements such as the TPP with (il)legal protectionism for multinationals are the issue.
This way, discussing the upstream root cause of free trade harms is encouraged, including of Chapter 11 Investment in NAFTA and Chapter 9 Investment in the TPP.
Free trade is not about trade but about transferring legislative powers from parliaments to multinationals.
Former Canadian prime minister John Turner pointed out that trade issues without an undemocratic agenda are added on to GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs).
He was clear: free trade deals are not trade agreements.
Turner famously remarked his advantage over former prime minister Brian Mulroney was to have actually read NAFTA. Sometimes I wish I was not the only Yukoner with the Turner edge.
Obviously, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair can make no such claim.
During the 2015 election, he tried to block awareness on the TPP by limiting concerns to supply management details. Mulcair’s characterizations of free trade are false.
Contrary to his understanding, renewable energy, as well as environmental legislation in Quebec and Ontario, have recently been attacked under NAFTA Chapter 11.
It is not as proactive as reading one’s homework assignments. Nevertheless, Mulcair is being taught hard knock lessons.
Canadian voters, convention delegates, Turner, potential U.S. presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and, embarrassingly, Donald Trump, all talk plainly about false free trade. There are lessons also for the LEAP Manifesto.
4) International solidarity as a Canadian value is slim in the manifesto. Getting the carbon price out of it would improve that.
Carbon pricing is a flag of colonial economic warfare today.
Under it, many social democrats, liberals and environmentalists join in the corporate attack on their sisters and brothers, especially in the Global South.
That is a difficult truth that can be understood better when put in the context of another betrayal at the top of great magnitude that still echoes today.
It does so for some who want an international architecture for peace aside to prayers.
Before the guns of August 1914, the world had hung in the balance for decades.
The counter point to a chaos of military alliances was an iron-clad determination for peace of the Socialist International, as most functional diplomatic agreement of its day.
A monstrous war and industrialized killing were to be shut down before getting fully started with political general strikes from Great Britain to France to Russia and other places.
The Social Democratic Party of Germany, representing the largest socialist and labour movement on Earth, played a lead role.
“All wheels are standing still, If a strong arm so will “ are remembered today as once powerful fighting words for peace (Alle Räder stehen still wenn dein starker Arm es will, a line of a labour union song by Georg Herwegh).
However, between 1896 and 1898. Eduard Bernstein released a series of articles under the title Probleme des Sozialismus.
It became the catalyst for a reorientation from socialism to liberalism, namely in the party’s leadership.
As an unintended consequence, international friendship was weakened and the political general strike for peace promise was hollowed out. Ironically, as MP in the Reichstag alongside Karl Liebknecht, Bernstein came to vote against most war bills and bonds.
Perhaps the most sensitive of socialist organizers and writers as well as a critic of militarism, Rosa Luxemburg picked up on the dangerous developments immediately.
Luxemburg was already known as a visionary scholar and humanist who, as another first, had developed a solid grasp of industrial resource colonialism.
Some are familiar with her quote: “Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters.”
Through 1898/99 in the Neue Leibziger Zeitung, she published instalments of Reform or Revolution, a landmark book that is read and is relevant today.
I believe Rosa Luxemburg has a warning for modern environmentalists not to become a historical footnote of global injustice.
The carbon price message in essence meets halfway the Fox News climate deniers in attacking climate science and justice.
Climate science involves a proven understanding of an accumulative greenhouse gas impact through decades and centuries of human-induced industrial emissions.
Carbon pricing mechanisms only refer to current emission levels as relevant and therefore are not science-based, contrary to what is invoked by the manifesto.
The G-77 countries have explicitly and to the best of their powers opposed carbon pricing in Copenhagen, Lima and Paris also by insisting on “common but differentiated responsibilities.”
The non-Western focus is on leapfrogging toward renewables, protest marches against carbon pricing are common. The carbon price becomes part of so-called structural adjustments of International Monetary Foundation and World Bank that are starving the poor countries.
It does so by shackling them to oil imports for which alone around 50 countries expend more than their entire foreign currency reserves.
“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.” said Antonio Marcondes, Brazil’s representative at the 2014 Lima climate conference.
5) The manifesto fails to recognize the long-term relevance of oil and gas. Particularly conventional oil and gas are vitally important and need preserving as a petrochemical manufacturing resource for renewable economies through seven and likely many more generations.
People understand that burning things is different from building things.
Big Oil’s subsidy hunger disagrees, especially in fracking and tar steam extraction which have no useful net energy output.
The Pembina Institute is among those who have failed Albertans badly in not drawing such an important line in the tar sand.
We pay close attention since Pembina fronted for the Yukon government’s frack agenda, in a 2013 hearing in Whitehorse.
Being unclear on the fundamentals creates divisions needlessly by alienating far too many people on all sides, such as during this month’s convention of Canada’s New Democrats in Edmonton.
Let’s talk.
I encourage the LEAP Manifesto to remain short or become more brief by being more specific where it matters and by naming names of acupuncture points on problems.
Misunderstandings, such as wanting to do away with the oil and gas industry immediately, are already thrown at the manifesto and may be avoided.
Clean and succinct language matter so that finance and oil PR firms with their divisive platitudes, who by 1985 had invented the carbon price, have less power over people.
Nnimmo Bassey of Health of Mother Earth Foundation shows how it’s done:
“The Paris Agreement locks in fossil fuels and, to underscore corporate capture of the negotiations, the word ‘fossil’ is not as much as mentioned in the document.”
So does Gwynne Dyer in his latest climate update, “Ponder a non-linear climate emergency”.
We are in cascading feedback loops already, and the assumptions of Paris are obsolete.
But most worrisome, in donkey’s years of writing books and columns, Mr. Dyer, possibly for the first time, has lost his trademark subtle irony and sarcasm.
