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.”