Brexit boost for Sanders, set back for Clinton

Brexit boost for Sanders, set back for Clinton and Free Trade

A slap in the face for those who support Hillary Clinton instead of Bernie Sanders to beat Donald Trump who claims to be against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (During Democratic Party platform talks on June 24, 2016 the Clinton campaign once again supported the TPP, after she had talked against it on the campaign trail). 

Why? Unless Sanders becomes nominated in Philadelphia as Democratic candidate, Trump now owns the economic card and, surprise, has been handed the democratic rights card by Clinton decisively. 

Building a grassroots movement is great, but don't you agree the nomination fight is over when its over after the super delegates vote, and not before? They may be corrupt, I grant you that, but they might also get more scared by the hour? 

The opportunity for a Henry Wallace - Bernie Sanders kind of a President may deflect into space not to return in a 1000 years! A lot can happen in a month's time especially if indy media and avantgarde are not throwing in the towel prematurely, not losing courage to give Sanders a fair chance for President.

A battle can be lost, but what are chances next time if this fight is not carried down to the wire, measuring out the opponent close enough so one might win or get hurt? Predictabilities have gone out the window for good.

With impeccable timing only days before Brexit and Clinton's disastrous overconfidence in reasserting her never seriously shaken bow to TPP, Trump doubled down against unlawful and chaotic free trade deals:

"Hillary Clinton has also been the biggest promoter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which will ship millions more of our jobs overseas – and give up Congressional power to an international foreign commission."

That's right, he has clued in on Investor State Dispute Settlement, multinationals legislating by extorting from the people severe financial penalties against democratic laws in illegal offshore arbitration panels.

Think about it, phoney free trade deals in the November US election will be much more commandeering than with Brexit. Trump fires straight back the ammunition Clinton hands him without even needing anymore his trademark distortions.

Thus, in the complicit, neoliberal process legitimate civic and economic grievances are transformed into chaotic reasoning, irrational racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, all of which are coming to a head.

Brexit happened without blunders and betrayals on the Clinton scale.
There are other lenses into discussing and learning from Brexit, but undemocratic free trade is a constant, not chaotic one, and it works without platitudes and slogans.  

The right-wing agenda of Brexit figurehead Boris Johnson, similar to Trump, syndicates well in much of the corporate-controlled mainstream media. The Lexit (left-wing exit) campaign never gained traction.

Neither one is the editorial outlook of the British Guardian. Nick Dearden, on April 16, seemed to have his finger on people’s pulse months before the vote:

“The problem for the [Britain-visiting] U.S. president is selling TTIP [Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership] the EU-U.S. equivalent of EU-Canada free trade deal Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement – CETA – at the same time as trying to warn against the dangers of Brexit.

“This is a tough task because TTIP has been a godsend for Brexit campaigners, who argue the deal is a major reason to cut loose from Brussels.

It's true that TTIP is a symbol for all that is wrong with Europe: dreamed up, by corporate lobbyists, TTIP is less about trade and more about giving big business sweeping new powers over our society.

It is a blueprint for deregulation and privatization. As such, it makes a good case for Brexit.”

“CETA is probably dead,” according to the Huffington Post and Christopher Sands from the Centre for Canadian Studies at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.

Lame-duck British Prime Minister David Cameron is an ideological free trader who many in the EU and in Britain are happy to get rid off as upside of the Brexit disaster.

He was the only allied leader left in Europe for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Barack Obama to push the ISDS (Investor State Dispute Settlement) by which multinationals can de facto overrule Germany’s and France’s frack ban e.g.) into the Atlantic free trade, CETA and TIPP.

On the artificial stage of the free trade show, Cameron, Trudeau, Clinton and Obama have a point. The Atlantic free trade ISDS, a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Chapter 11 copycat provision, is what free trade is all about; without it, no deal is needed. The rest is filler fluff.

It is true because removals or adjustments of trade tariffs, without an undemocratic agenda, are simply added on to GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs).

Cameron’s pro-fracking, pro-carbon tax and carbon trade stance against renewable policies are on the Brexit bill.

So is the austerity starving of the Greeks, if anybody paid attention to Boris Johnson’s sweeping tirades.

Brexit is an EU identity crisis as much as it is a British one. One part still learns that empires die more slowly than they are born, and the other shouldn’t aspire to become one.

Today, the pro-peace and anti-corporate-rule origins of the EU are widely forgotten.

The project Europe originally had two French fathers, entrepreneur Jean Monnet and early post-war foreign minister Robert Schumann.

They had made a persuasive argument to the socialist/conservative mix of French leadership and conservative German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The core idea the two had dreamt up, already between world wars and initiated from 1950 onward, succeeded like this.

French and German steel and coal industries were to be so closely co-overseen by both governments that war preparations against each other had forever become physically impossible.

Strong labour rights, civic foundations and democratic controls of corporations across the board were core positions of all six founding nations guaranteeing peace, which was laid down in the 1957 Treaty of Rome.

The EU had been founded on peace and democracy, not economics, in explicit and intentional opposition to always closely-linked corporatism and militarism. It also turned out to be a good plan for prosperity.

The brittling of EU principles and cohesion, in shape of EU-NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) package deals to Eastern European countries as measure of a renewed anti-Russian cold war escalation, had started long before Brexit and the crushing of Greece.

In the fields of Ramstein, a small German town close to the French border with cheerful timber frame houses, one of the largest drone bases plays a role in killing children in Pakistan. EU weapons manufacturers export death throughout the world.

Early poison in the heart of the EU became an event that is remembered as the 1973 Basel Committee process.

Quasi as neoliberal kickstarter publicly-owned National Banks were secretively privatized into rogue financier operations with an innocuous title change as so-called central banks.

It was a long game kind of a profiteering racket, and to have eventually devastating results for democracies and economies of the kind we are observing now.

The Big Short, a theme-related docudrama movie, is guaranteed to knock the reader’s socks off.

Solid awareness and honesty about EU failures to be reformed and EU successes made Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and British Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn perhaps the most effective Remain campaigners.

This is despite problems Landslide Corbyn has with the disloyal and now completely unelectable Blairites in the House of Commons, some of whom apparently did more harm than good to the Remain campaign.

These neoliberal fossils of so-called New Labour still worship Tony Blair, the alleged war-criminal and sworn Corbyn enemy.

Sir Ken Macdonald, a former UK director of public prosecutions, and other legal heavies are working toward prosecuting Blair.

Filmmaker and journalist Paul Mason’s column headline in the Guardian has a message to the forlorn Blairists in parliament: “Corbyn delivered the Labour vote for remain – so let’s get behind him.”

Perhaps to be remembered as a hero of political tragicomedy, David Cameron had called the Brexit referendum.

His fate energizes democratic populism as well as semi-fascist movements together with storm warnings for neoliberal elitists like Trudeau, like Obama solidifying his negative legacy and Hillary Clinton (neoliberal equals colonialism under market disguise).

All four seem strong contenders, past and ongoing ones, in the satirical Darwin Awards competitions that recognize outstanding achievements of successful self-elimination from social and political evolution.

(There is a related story on Clinton’s road out of the presidential election in the Whitehorse Star archives or at yukonblogger.)

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.

Clintonomics created Trump; only Sanders can beat him - Whitehorse Star Column June 17, 2016

It is mathematical, after all.

Neither U.S. Democratic primary candidate Hillary Clinton with now 2,200, nor challenger Bernie Sanders, with just over 1,800, can reach the required 2,384 delegate votes before 712 super delegates vote during the last week of July.

Which is long ways off in politics. Currently, Clinton is favoured by 580 and Sanders by 50 of those appointed 712, give or take a few.

Republican and Democratic party executives long have had a contract to operate as one party when it comes to crushing popular nonconformists like Dennis Kucinich in 2008, or now Sanders.

The powerful bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, with its mandate and arsenal of undemocratic manipulation tools to sideline popular candidates, is only one of their instruments.

Presumed Republican candidate Donald Trump who, like other sitting or aspiring dictators, already talks about the presidency in terms of a one-branch government, without acknowledging democratic institutions like Congress, the Senate, the U.S. Supreme Court, future elections or state governments, is a game changer.

He might yet put the fear of God into the elitists in the Democratic Party, such as the appointed super delegates. They typically prefer a Republican president over a populist one of their own.

However, the FBI’s criminal investigation of Clinton may also take her down in a heartbeat.

This is what the premature or fake nomination of Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate by The Associated Press in collaboration (leaked) with the Clinton campaign was all about. On the eve of the California primary, it was timed for a massive vote suppression and distortion.

Ordinary folks and especially young Sanders supporters tend to sacrifice more for the effort than wealthier Clinton supporters in the lengthy, time-consuming primary lineups.

The lie that it was all over made some stay at work or home, and unfairly gave extra percentages to Clinton.

Cautiously put, Clinton is one of the most negatively viewed public figures across the U.S.

Unappreciated by political experts’ tunnel vision inside the Washington Beltway fish tank, in the general public she loses against the straight-shooting Sanders. 

And, importantly, she does much less well than Senator Sanders against Trump.

Polling her against the unpredictable conman Trump is a close thing at this point.

But when the chips are down, her disingenuous air and double-talking track record might come up short. That’s especially when debating this so far very intuitive and successful knife-fighter, who only bloodied 17 Republican primary contenders.

The danger for a national and international stage that the Philadelphia Democratic Party convention will have to deal with is a clear-cut one.

All the oxygen of the entire 2016 presidential primaries consists of breathing anti-establishment sentiment.

It was sowed in decades by neoliberal promoters, for Wall Street crime, militarism, stopping access to health care or education and for fracking the climate, like hawkish Hillary Clinton.

Testimony in 2004 by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, from an interview with veteran journalist Bill Moyers, has recently gone viral.

It concerned Clinton, who flip-flopped on the forever returning bankruptcy bill. It starves and milks poor people by forbidding them bankruptcy, which, as First Lady, she had opposed.

Warren: “This is a bill that is like a vampire; it will not die. There is a lot of money behind it.”

Moyers: “Bill [Clinton], her husband had vetoed it.”

Warren: “Her husband had vetoed it very much at her urging.”

Moyers: “And?”

Warren: “She voted in favour of it ... she has taken money from the [bank] groups and, more to the point, she worries about them as a constituency.”

Warren closeup saw Clinton’s lack of moral fibre as she had face-to-face, comprehensively as law professor, briefed the law-educated First Lady on the consumer credit industry.

The big banks attack freedom with a version of debt bondage by astronomic interest rates on payday loans that are even more extreme than in Canada, for example.

Senator Warren’s June 9 endorsement for primary candidate Clinton gave pause to reflect on deeply corrupted mentalities.

Warren’s up to that point untarnished record is recognized as founder of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and as a long-time political ally of Sanders.

Jill Stein, the Green Party presumptive presidential candidate, knows upholding integrity and accountability is a long game. 

On June 9, interviewed on Democracy Now, she cut to the bone of the Democratic Party’s dilemma: “We are rushing towards war with Hillary Clinton, who has a track record."

“And on climate, H.C. established an office to promote fracking around the world, while Secretary of State. So the terrible things that we expect from Donald Trump, we’ve actually already seen from H.C.”

“The lesser evil very much makes inevitable the greater evil, because people don’t come out to vote for a politician that is throwing them under the bus ... they need you to be afraid of them, because they are not for you.”

Self-appointed town crier and false populist Trump quite possibly cannot lose if the only anti-establishment candidate of both parties, Senator Sanders, is pushed out by continued fraudulent manipulation.

Vote suppression as in California and New York, vote counting fraud like in Iowa, biased super delegates and unbalanced sleaze journalism are running rampant since the Democratic Party primaries started converging toward a Trumpastrophy.

Preventing totalitarian disaster could turn out to be the patriotic and legal obligation super delegates will eventually have to answer for.

Their vote for Sanders further will offer them opportunity to correct and atone for already orchestrated election fraud.

Calling to heel a rising populist movement with deep American roots is useless.

It will work no more than a newborn will go back into the mother’s womb in case its behaviour is not pleasing to everyone.

Once Clinton would be finally anointed, irretrievable chaos will have started.

Sanders supporters, except for a few, will not vote for Trump, but experience shows that insulted and backstabbed people are electorally demobilized and stay home.

It’s a fact that elections are decided not by winning over votes but by turning out the support base.

Bernie Sanders has no problem there, as Clinton supporters are left of Clinton on many accounts: militarism, her Honduras or Libya regime changes as well as a renewed cold war encircling of China and Russia, medicare suppression, financialization, undemocratic free trade deals and unprecedented anti-Mexican deportations that legitimize Trump’s racism.

History bears out that standing on principle improves a people’s practical survival chances often more than shortsighted tactical betrayals.

President John F. Kennedy, who set a high standard for presidents to come, learned and understood that.

With the Trump/Clinton symbiosis, we may be rapidly entering into a dynamic of history JFK once had wisely warned against.

The realization that militarist and imperialist advisors had gulled him to escalate aggression against Cuba and Vietnam made him more mindful and inspired him to initiate the international Alliance for Progress.

On its first anniversary in March 1962, JFK poignantly highlighted social justice and democratic rights: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Peter Becker is Whitehorse energy consultant.

By Peter Becker

Peter Becker CV, Renewable Energy Consulting in Yukon and Beyond.

Peter Becker CV, Renewable Energy Consulting in Yukon and Beyond

IMF breaks rank with the free market agenda, Whse Star June 3, 2016

A highly unusual defector document from free trade religion with the title Neoliberalism: Oversold? was released by three of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’S) senior figures. http://goo.gl/KUhMHz

This break is significant after decades of media and academic lockdown during which economic critiques on incoherent elitism was verboten or pigeonholed as loony.

The explosive news item hit the wire during the last days of May, conveying a sense of urgency as it is dated June 2016. It appears to be part of a wider historical adjustment process that asserts itself in many ways.

Neoliberalism equals colonialism disguised behind market talk.

The IMF paper is not worded quite as succinctly as my own teardown. 

No matter; it is a purely face-saving moderation at this point.

American journalist and financial analyst Yves Smith commented: “In some ways, the fact that this article was written at all, and that it is apparently fomenting debate in policy circles, is more important than the details of its argument.”

It just got harder for the political, education and media mainstream, in Yukon as everywhere else, to continue to eradicate from the dictionary the mention and meaning of neoliberal decay.

Bad news also for the future of carbon-boosting derivative speculation, better known as carbon (tax/trade) pricing, and undemocratic deals like TPP.

Free trade is not about trade, but to shift legislative powers to multinationals.

Without naming the actual web of so-called free trade agreements, their toxic provisions enforcing economic warfare against people are in detail rejected in the IMF paper.

Never before were shots taken at Milton Friedman, the late free trade guru, by an international financial regulator.

Astounding for the conservatively-poised IMF is the choice of its Chile example and thread to lead criticism and rethinking.

First sentence: “Milton Friedman in 1982 hailed [Pinochet’s fascist] Chile as an ‘economic miracle’. Nearly a decade earlier, Chile had turned to politics that have since been widely emulated across the globe.”

Likely, this release happened with the consent and even initiative of IMF head Christine Lagarde.

Until its continued criticism of namely the German and French governments’ bankster profiteering in the Greece crisis, the IMF had been a cheer leader.

Stanley Fischer, formerly of the IMF now with the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, is quoted:

“What useful purpose is served by short-term international capital flows?”

Finance figureheads are suave diplomats of the highest order when admitting they were wrong, and one has to be able to carve out the subtext with precision.

What Fisher is really saying to me sounds a little more straightforward: Inflated currency and derivative speculation siphons off productive investments and disrupts growth of honest businesses.

The very last sentence in the document hits free traders and other neoliberal enforcers hard:

“Policy makers, and institutions like the IMF that advise them [countries], must be guided not by faith, but by evidence of what has worked.”

Evidence-based thinking was kind of my point in the Star column I wrote “Climate survival equals renewable industry growth”, but gladly shared.

Altogether not bad for the muggles from the IMF that they offer a breath of fresh air following 40 years of mental deep freeze and free market mantra singing. 

It is appropriate, since they had ushered in unprecedented protectionism with subsidies for price-fixing cartels like Big Oil.

In the meantime, false populist Donald Trump vultures are feeding on the rage of IMF’s victims of busted labour rights spiralling out of control into Dickensian poverty.

The lost ground and consequences of the IMF’s, World Bank’s, Fraser Institute’s, Clinton’s and Chretien’s actions are with us here today.

On the other end of the spectrum, Fort McMurray’s Iron & Earth oil sands workers, retraining to renewable energy, have beaten the IMF to the punch in sending a signal to restore wealth and growth.

The 500 strong and growing Iron & Earth membership knows that rebuilding economic strength, from the rustbelt in central Canada to the oil patch in the West, comes from installing and manufacturing of a renewable energy infrastructure.

They are getting ready – and are ready.

1/2, 2/2 Oil and gas expansion’s crown jewel: carbon price Whse Star May 27, 2016

1/2, 2/2 Oil and gas expansion’s crown jewel: carbon price Whse Star May 27, 2016

2/2 Climate survival equals renewable industry growth, Whse Star May 30, 2016

Oil and gas expansion’s crown jewel: carbon price

How does it work?

1) Control environmental presence in the room with a weasel ticket into the climate bomb of fracking as climate solution (B.C., Alberta, the U.S., Australia, the U.K., Yukon?).

2) Achieve image make over from militaristic oil cartel to friendly market partner.

3) Hide trillions (according to IMF data) of fossil endgame debt and subsidies to fight the clean cheap electron, and blame everybody else for the climate crisis.

4) Uphold an iron-fisted awareness frame of the carbon price that is limited to current emission levels only. It is an underhanded but relentless attack on climate science, which is fundamentally based on the accumulative impact of industrial greenhouse gas emissions. 

This is how bad things happened to good people in Michael Enright’s CBC Sunday Edition, May 15, 2016. A perhaps understandable fear of facts in the face of danger was tangible with one of his guests.

Whatever the reason, climate survival will be unforgiving to wishful thinking and false statements made in defence of carbon pricing by the York University environmental studies professor Tzeporah Berman.

A) “We reduced [B. C.] emissions.” The B.C. Auditor General and senior economist Marc Lee of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives separately in recent years had tallied up B.C. greenhouse gas emissions and found a sharp increase as well as accounting fraud by carbon price design.

B) Ms. Berman misrepresented B. C. carbon tax and trade architect Mark Jaccard as a carbon price advocate. Like Naomi Klein mentor Kevin Anderson, from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the U.K., he has publicly recanted carbon pricing.

C) She falsely described the Ontario cap and trade carbon price policy as a quasi-friendly cousin of the 2009 Ontario Green Energy Act and attempted to link renewable energy development to carbon pricing. Another serious problem.

The Walrus report “Tilting at Windmills” by Chris Turner from the November 2015 edition provides ample evidence that the GEA was in effect shut down by Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government.

The GEA had a weakness from the start in dragging out small scale and large feed in tariff applications over years.

This halfheartedness also encouraged widespread attacks by oil front groups like Wind Concerns Ontario and North American Platform Against Wind Power.

It was lost in the interview that cap and trade caps emission reductions, not emissions. Every system has slippage, but here all the slack with mathematical certainty points one way: emission increasing. Outcomes concur with the 2013/14 IPCC report.

In contrast, renewable energy source legislation tend to over-achieve emission reduction targets, which is also supported in Part 3 Mitigation of the IPCC report.

The interview conveniently left out free emission permits for carbon derivative traders of the Toronto Stock Exchange as one more incentive to increase emissions; see the Ontario Climate Action Plan. This has a divestment impact against renewables.

The Ontario government is committing a great unfairness that is out of balance with super long-term contracts it has given to the from-cradle-to-grave, emission-intense nuclear machine.

Unlike wind farms, it produces uncompetitive, unaffordable electricity.

Chris Turner found that the infrastructure initiative started by the act continues to thrive brilliantly in the Sault Ste. Marie region with healthy growth of renewable economies.

The key element is a Ontario Hydro independent local power utility, which provides a firewall against sabotage by the carbon pricing, nuke-subsidizing Wynne government.

The late Hermann Scheer’s (the initiator of the German Green Energy Act) advice to the Ontario government in 2009 from the get go was adopted as half-measure, opening the door to problems.

In his landmark book Energy Autonomy, Scheer explains: “… EUROSOLAR had warned in its campaign ‘our air is not for sale’; that carbon trading slowed down the transition to emissions-free energy supply rather than speeding it up.”

“The most prominent example of this is the report on renewable energy submitted by the German Bundestag’s [parliament] Scientific Advisory Council in January 2004.

“According to this report, the Renewable Energy Sources Act, ‘in the interest of economic rationality and ecological reason, should be abolished’ in favour of a scheme for trading in fossil emission rights.”

Independently of economist Scheer, the author of All Electric America, the engineer S. David Freeman, after a life of heading and reforming power utilities toward renewables, had come to the same conclusion against the counterproductive, toxic carbon price.

Carbon taxes, with revenue-neutral pretense or otherwise, and carbon trading both are structurally, intentionally and, through experiences, such as in B.C., Ontario or Alberta, the enemy of renewables, in many ways. Tzeporah Berman is misleading the public.

The reality gap in the Enright-Berman interview (for journalistic balance, it had included the free trade ideologue and Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy) touches on a broader, deeper derailment.

Even excellent researchers, like Kevin Anderson, believe that emission reductions will come without and before renewable energies gain full scale traction.

The error is significant in also wrongly believing industrial growth should or will be curbed soon.

One way or the other, emission reductions will not happen in the immediate future. And these crucial years will better produce a renewable energy transition. At this stage, continued massive emissions, let alone increases, are very bad but unavoidable.

That is until zero emission capacities and even over-capacities are large enough to power clean manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, heating and construction industries, as well as grid storage and smart grid capacities.

At least in the very short term, emission increases are guaranteed, energy revolution or not, and to survive, societies will have to slug it out decisively within very persistent inertias and realities.

With mathematical certainty, the only real variable of an increasingly deadly climate game is not in cutting back growth but in using it towards radically expanding sustainable energy and agriculture industries until saturation and surplus.

This obvious disconnect of leading green thinkers misses that the nyloc nuts, stainless bolts, copper wires and silicon semi conductors of an industrial energy transition can only come from strong economic industrial growth.

Unfortunately, real growth is typically conflated with inflations in the finance sector by mainstream media like the CBC.

The Policy Research Group of the University of Sussex touched a nerve when it released a peer-reviewed economics study on phasing out fossil fuels “within 10 years.”

Climate crisis 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.

Except, building energy industries brings more returns and stability than investing in single-use death instruments as a savagery that was necessary during the Second World War. However, production targets were surpassed and did end the Great Depression.

It is not that Naomi Klein, Kevin Anderson, Mark Jaccard and other bright people have not heard about about renewable energy.

The problem is a particular fogginess on energy industry basics, a lack of clarity on where the cogs of industrial, cultural and political gears interact.

Part two of this commentary, to be published Monday, will highlight practical insights of an energy transition that can achieve climate survival.

Industrial options, not philosophies such as carbon pricing or ending growth visions, increase or decrease greenhouse gas emissions.

2/2 Climate survival equals renewable industry growth, Whse Star May 30, 2016

Part one of this two-part commentary, published Friday, exemplified dishonesty and confusion of the carbon price dogma that we need to push out of the way.

Then society can move forward with legal and cultural reform to no longer block the manufacturing and installing of renewable energy.

A recent University of Sussex study suggests ending fossil fuels “within 10 years” as the most practical of long shots.

Smoke grenades in the climate war do have a name: the two carbon pricing mechanisms of carbon tax and cap and trade. Make no mistake as to how much so-called conservatives subscribe to the carbon price.

Example: the northern premiers in Canada are not applying a carbon tax but are also not coming clean on its negative nature.

They still validate it, which is to also promote a falsehood, as a supposedly constructive climate tool that is just not affordable right now.

Also, unlike the Yukon NDP and Liberals, N.W.T. Premier Bob McLeod, Yukon Premier Darrell Pasloski and Nunavut Premier Peter Taptuna already are openly on the frack ticket and might feel less of a need to weasel into it.

Of course Nunavut and the N.W.T. have consensus governments without territorial party politics.

Remember: people’s energy habits follow not carbon price signals but deep infrastructure availability by around 95 per cent, not the other way around, as the fossil fuel extractors claim, because for status quo they aim.

Folks get on electric transit buses, like in Winnipeg, when given the use of a bus, not because of a carbon tax.

People install photovoltaics on their houses when feed-in tariffs, not carbon taxes, are available. Investments were made and the market opportunity to sell energy is just and useful.

Like everywhere else, carbon price promoters in Yukon refuse to even listen to evidence outside of their dogma, and go on like a broken record.

Lately, especially Stuart Clark and John Maissan, repeat the propaganda of the oil industry, which wants things to stay as they are.

It becomes increasingly silly and suicidal for theoreticians to set a low carbon conjecture against the emission-reducing success of practitioners in the climate survival struggle.

Theories and magical thinking, often moralism and vanity-serving, do not reduce emissions.

One can think of Vandana Shiva, the great carbon price opponent and sustainable agriculture developer from India, the late Hermann Scheer or S. David Freeman as General Patton or Arthur Currie (hero of Vimy Ridge) as equivalent transformative figures in the fight.

We can learn from them and do better than the Yukon Conservation Society on their send-off event for the Paris conference delegation from the Yukon.

John Streicker, the former science advisor at the Northern Climate Exchange, was summoned to the microphone to summarize the basics of climate policy.

His short list of priorities explicitly had carbon pricing and energy efficiency ahead of renewable energy and electric transportation as dead-last, which reminds one of the oil cartel’s climate plan.

Regions and countries that actually lower emissions typically initiate zero emission transportation as lead technology because it has pull for wind energy and other clean sectors in triggering sweeping efficiency and affordability improvements across the board.

Breaking up Big Oil’s stranglehold on transportation is key for growth, especially in auto industry land Canada.

The purpose and effect of upside-down priorities is to minimize efficiency gains to diminishing returns and work towards preserving the oiligarchy status quo.

Yukon NDP Leader Liz Hanson and Jim Tredger, her party’s energy critic, not for the first or the last time, gave their nods to the corrupting carbon price program.

The Yukon Energy Corp. (YEC) also seems to absorb the carbon price message. In February 2016, it published an electric vehicle study commissioned from the ICF International consultancy with ties to the oil and gas industry.

Against the 101 of electric transportation, ICF dismisses fast charge points for Yukon and suggests instead using 110 V block heater outlets.

In contrast, turbo fast-charge stations look and work quite similar to gas pumps and, like gas pumps, overcome all range anxiety.

However, electron fuel is dirt-cheap and super-dependable compared to the price and supply of volatile diesel and gasoline.

The carbon price we are paying at the pump now is unaffordable to half of the folks and uncompetitive, which slows up economic development.

This and necessary infrastructure changes are what the sly carbon price tries to hide from awareness.

I had made the effort to interview YEC president Andrew Hall as well as Yukon EV owners on the matter.

My observation was reinforced directly and indirectly: the study purpose was to prevent a conversation on transportation and string along progress.

Yukoners should have been exposed years ago to this proven core infrastructure technology that is rated for 40-below and worse winters, instead of suffering another frivolous study expenditure.

Time to connect a few dots for values and principles of solidarity. The carbon price plays an important role in the colonial structural adjustment system which, in debt bondage fashion, shackles much of the Global South to very expensive oil imports.

Because the elitist carbon price attacks science, justice, as well as a renewables-dependent climate survival, the G-77 countries, similar to indigenous peoples, have drawn a “red line” against it.

The Yukon Conservation Society send-off event facilitation, including its suggestions made to our Paris delegation, was a shameful one indeed.

Dysfunctionality runs deep with professional and political elites who seem unfit to go beyond cozy business as usual.

Could today’s managerialism work towards legislating the vote for women and First Nations, if we did not have it?

Market talk did not bring those achievements, so we could be stuck. Hard to know, of course, but it seems a fair question that offers a sobering clue on where climate survival is at for real.

The late Jane Jacobs’ 2004 book Dark Age Ahead examined lessons from the historic downfall of great cultures. What stands out is her observation that civilizations fall apart as a result of core institutions breaking down beyond repair.

Jacobs lists in that order five Western pillars in trouble (in my own words):

1) Community and family structure disintegrates.

2) Higher education hollowed out into a degree sale.

3) Abandoning of independent science and base research.

4) Representative system aligns with corporations (Mussolini’s idea).

5) Critical thinking in professions gives way to status thinking.

“Losers [civilizations] are confronted with such radical jolts in circumstances that their institutions cannot adapt adequately....”

I bring up Jane Jacobs because of a vanishing ability by elites and leadership to carry an evidence-based conversation in the face of a serious, acute crisis.

On a burning-up planet, the political fish really stinks from the head as many ordinary people have retained critical capacities in making sense of experience.

Last month’s firing of neoliberal ideologue Thomas Mulcair as the federal NDP leader and the spreading grassroots rebellion in the wake of U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders give hope.

Carbon price derivatives are increasingly intertwined with overvalued, inflated oil and gas positions, and can come to hurt many, including investors, pensioners, etc.

While there is a shady design, I must disappoint the romantics with a shortage of James Bond villains, because it is fed by dull conformism and failure of leadership.

Partnership, not racialized finance colonialism in the Paris agreement fashion, has survival potential.

Derivative speculator rights of Wall Street and Bay Street are written in; the word “fossil” or its meaning are not mentioned.

With eliminating even visibility of the problem, a climate solution was also eliminated by a cast of practically obsolete world leaders.

In September 1861, when the U.S. Civil War was in its first of four murderous years and black soldiers were not yet enlisted to fight for freedom, Frederick Douglas, quite prophetically and accurately, put it this way:

“Men in earnest don’t fight with one hand, when they might fight with two, and a man drowning would not refuse to be saved even by a coloured hand.”