Electric mail delivery fleet lowers energy costs, gases (Whse Star. Oct. 27, 2016)

Electric mail delivery fleet lowers energy costs, gases (Whse Star. Oct. 27, 2016)

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A long overdue initiative for electric road transportation is here, and its perspectives pack punch for meeting Vancouver declaration and Paris agreement requirements.

The first part of this two-part commentary, published Tuesday, summarized the back story of energy economics.

A Yukon Party media release of Oct. 17: “This investment of $160,000 will allow the purchase of four electric vehicles and the installation of eight charging stations throughout Whitehorse (some open to public use).”

It is the first concrete climate/energy deliverable of the election campaign.

Coming from the Yukon Party, this may surprise some.

However, it is not so much on the strength of their overall platform that the initiative shines, but it’s helped by the feebleness of the carbon price talk from the opposition parties.

Electric vehicle batteries hold a key for storing energy on the grid through the use of eventually bi-directional chargers as well as for lowering the energy cost of doing business in the community.

Highway fast charge points are the logical follow-up that people will demand.

Helping soon is the close, hands-on visibility of these electric trucks or vans and cars that run on 15 per cent energy and 20 per cent of fuel costs and 10 per cent of maintenance cost of equivalent combustion-powered vehicles.

The carbon tax claim to add a price signal of five or 50 per cent on top of the better than 500 per cent renewable fuel advantage is as false as it sounds.

The carbon pricing myth of viable fossil fuel into the long future is being busted wide open.

Coincidentally, carbon price advocating organizations like the Yukon Conservation Society and the Yukon NDP have often marginalized discussing EV policy options.

They might not realize how much their ecological aspirations have been and especially will be shackled to carbon pricing agendas of the fossil resource industry, locally and beyond.

Unfortunately, widely reported fracking slushfund operations under the cover of B.C. carbon tax refunds have never been denounced by these carbon price advocates who in fact praise the B.C. carbon tax as model.

A disturbing backdrop to the five priorities of the 2011 NDP election platform, which never even mentioned the word energy, creating an invitation, a vacuum that was filled by the Yukon Party with fracking and LNG proposals.

“Putting a price on carbon,” as if there was none, taunts the cord woodcutter who is trying to make it with an old pickup truck and the single mom with an empty gas tank.

Intentionally or not, the annual carbon tax refund, if it was for real, which it isn’t, laughs at the many families who live from paycheque to paycheque.

First Nations from northern B.C. to Treaty 3 lands in Ontario say no to carbon pricing, as it is an ideological bulldozer for pipelines they don’t want.

The Indigenous Environmental Network, likewise to the G-77 developing Nations in Paris, rejected this renewed and racialized finance colonialism.

Developing and First Nations are working toward renewable energy leapfrogging because it is economically and environmentally more realistic than the status quo nickle-and-diming by the carbon price to subsidize unconventional oil and gas expansion.

The tricky carbon tax title automatically locks in the expansion of emitter rights and free emission permits for carbon off-set traders, wherever there is a carbon tax from B.C. to Alberta (by 2017) to Australia (until 2014), Sweden and the U.K., for the purpose of capping emission reductions.

The energy policy study tour NDP Leader Liz Hanson participated in and reported on was offered by the German diplomatic service to Paris conference participants.

It centred around the effects of the EEG from 1999, the successful renewable energy source legislation she never mentioned and which had to fight its way against carbon tax lobbyists who tried and still try to stop it. She should know better than technocratic same old.

J. R. Saul observes in his book The Comeback (of aboriginal peoples) in the chapter History Is Upon Us:

“But the key to dealing with a real crisis, one that goes beyond our personal realities, lies in our ability to move outside what we think of as normal.

“If the crisis is big enough, we have to reconsider the narrative or we can be destroyed by it.”

The electric vehicle initiative is striking as the carbon price lobby of the oil cartel fights hardest to defend a 95 per cent control of the transportation sector.

Premier Darrell Pasloski’s statement that carbon pricing does not work in the North does not go far enough because it does not work – period.

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.

By Peter Becker

Carbon pricing is counterproductive to climate/energy realities (comment Whse Star Oct. 25, 2016)

Carbon pricing is counterproductive to climate/energy realities (comment Whse Star Oct. 25, 2016)

Conventional oil production, which generates or underwrites almost all of the profits, usable net energy output and economic vitality of the global, fossil energy-based economy, has been declining since 2005.

For the simple reason of real economic strength being in decline, actually below phoney GDP growth figures, picking up adequate pace of a renewable energy transition is more difficult now than it was a decade ago.

And it will be harder yet 10 years from now to, for example, push for an overdue wind power expansion.

The high carbon price, if that was a valid term, which it isn’t, or better too high fossil energy costs, is already siphoning off more and more of renewably needed investment.

That is particularly out of sync because wind energy long held the technological maturity to deliver the crucially necessary wealth from affordable, very high net energy output that oil-gushing wells once had until around 1960.

Carbon pricing mechanisms in their real effect subsidize a status quo of unaffordable, unconventional oil and gas expansion and emission increases.

However, even if the carbon price advocacy of slow change held water, it still shows how fundamentally out of touch a carbon tax is with the accelerating pace of change in climate and energy realities.

Growing greenhouse gases, other pollution and increasing financial debts have converged.

High pollution levels increasingly mirror a lot of unconventional extractive process intensity that expends vast financial, energy and mineral resources.

The deadliest bottleneck of energy transition is not an also very important home heating need, but transportation, which is currently 95 per cent oil-dependent.

That includes the often overlooked running of farm tractors that are crucial for food production, locally or otherwise.

Inviting minimum enviro-impact, high energy and profit outputting wind power, similar to Bear Mountain Wind Park in Dawson Creek, B.C., is a no-brainer. But the electric transportation initiative is equally pressing.

Part two of this commentary, to be published later this week, will reflect on the first concrete climate/energy deliverable of the 2016 Yukon election campaign to bring on an electric mail delivery fleet, including charge stations available to the public.

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.

By Peter Becker

Yukoners Concerned is trapped in 21 recommendations (Whse Star Comment Oct. 14, 2016)

Almost two years from the release of the legislature’s fracking committee’s report, Don Roberts continues to misread its 21 recommendations on their face value; green-washing recommendation which converge onto a one-way frack-lane.

In his otherwise mostly acceptable letter to the Star on Oct. 12, Mr. Roberts again asked the Yukon government to fulfil or apply these 21 recommendations, as if they advocated honest environmental protections.

Unlike Mr. Roberts, I have repeatedly questioned the frack report and have not bought into it, thereby also avoiding lending false legitimacy for fracking, which was the purpose of the report to begin with:

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

Recommendation 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 as part of Frack while Talk procedures, but no trust building, as in comprehensive baseline work must be carried out and completed. 

Recommendation 6 inevitably brings on especially B.C. best practices, as announced and complied with by the Yukon government. Those nowhere and never have included comprehensively concluded baseline water testing.

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. 

Recommendation 10 recommends requiring 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 the committee members and legislature audience regulars 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 helpful liabilities that existed before Fracfocus.

Herding everybody into establishing a narrow single-issue regulatory focus of water management really manages control of communities that in truth face broad destructive impacts (the Yukon government calls it Yukon Water Strategy, 2014).

It does so by diluting effective resistance against destroying the fullness of natural and economic life support systems.

Yukoners Concerned about Oil and Gas Exploration/Development, but especially Don Roberts, accommodated this government strategy by overplaying the message track: “It’s all about the water.”

Mr. Roberts never exposed or rejected Fracfocus.

Recommendation 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, University of Alberta 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 Rick Chalaturnyk, Royal Dutch Shell’s face for leaky carbon storage drilling, led the Merchants of (false) 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.

There was frequent applause from all MLAs and the NGO crowd that had included Yukoners Concerned executives.

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

During this Yukoners Concerned PPT presentation to the committee in October 2013, 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, fracture engineer Dr. Ingraffea strongly emphasized that engineers never use the word “prevent” when it comes to well failures, especially of frack wells.

His professional and poignant advice was critical, yet was totally suppressed and censored out from the report that Yukoners Concerned unfortunately endorses.

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

Merchants of Doubt piece #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.

I had pointed out how essential it is to include research such as the one of the U. of Colorado in the face of frack PR that to this day paints as outlier a well-known Cornell University study on the climate impact of methane emissions.

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 to literally drive through frack truck loads by the millions.

Mr. Roberts’ letter is somewhat compromised in its credibility by letting off the hook the opposition parties which have underwritten the report and its 21 pro-frack recommendations.

It is what led to a highly deceptive Yukon Oil and Gas Act (2015 amended Yukon Oil and Gas Act) voted for by all parties, with the NDP failing its responsibility as official Opposition caucus that commanded resources to at least know and express what is going on.

What kind of silliness is at play trying to stop a wrong, while giving assistance to all its surrounding support limbs? After five years of fracking danger, the word disobedience, in civil disobedience, has not yet been learned.

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.

Fragmented words fracture the land ( Whitehorse Star Oct. 3, 2016 Comment )

Is Premier Darrell Pasloski being duplicitous on a carbon tax? Nothing new there.

I have pointed it out over years in the Star and syndicated columns (yukonblogger).

But, unlike recent commentaries on his cabinet discussions by Liz Hanson and Sandy Silver, I didn’t let the premier get away with his consistent understating of the ecological and economic harms of a carbon tax. 

A carbon tax or price has never succeeded to work against emissions, as it had been designed by PR firms of the oil industry to depress renewables and subsidize emission increases with money and false language. (See also IPCC report part 3 as well as leading energy economists, journalists and climate modellers.)

It is educational to take a look at Synergy Alberta, an unregistered oil and gas financed and staffed lobby group, of which for example the Pembina Institute had been a member organization (exposed by the author in 2014), that manages community consultations with psychological crowd control or recruiting methods.

The premier gets to cash in on public opinion, which is learning that the abstract “carbon price” locks in complex business deals, with a title that spells “not transparency.”

The weird non-language of it sounds different for a reason to a plain vanilla propane tax or perhaps a motor sport racing fuel tax.

At the same time, together with carbon pricers from the opposition parties and environmental NGOs, he gets to hold the door open for the frackers who want the “carbon tax”, as it is roughly identical with the “social licence” to expand pollution, debt, carbon off-set speculation, structural unemployment and injustice.

On July 30, 2012, Chris Turner observed in the Canadian Marketing magazine: “Oil industry executives like to talk about ‘the social licence to operate’”. And green-washers eat it up. 

Corporatist think tanks figured out that mentioning the “social licence” provides it, irrespectively of stating nay or yay to somebody having one.

It happens simply by downgrading the threshold of people’s agreement or democratic approval or refusal thereof into therapeutic mush words.

In a lighter moment, perhaps, just listen, really listen, to the oil-drumbeat of the pipeline coalition of Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, and B.C. Premier Christy Clark that is coming through 24/7 on the CBC and other corporatist media.

Or listen to Rex Tillerson, Exxon Mobile’s CEO, who announced Oct. 7, 2015, “It’s just the right moment to introduce carbon taxes.”

Like a boxer in a rigged match, the premier may poke well in setting up to lose a carbon tax fight over a federally mandated carbon tax. Whereas a serious no to carbon pricing based on renewable energy initiatives and credible carbon accounting is bound to win out. 

Pointing out model carbon pricing of B.C. is methodically exempting Encana’s emissions would help an honest and legally effective argument (B.C. Auditor General report 2013).

It’s double-dealing all around by the Yukon Party on carbon taxes, and the NDP and Liberals on fracking.

All three are militantly united in hiding guaranteed fracking harms, such as water pollution, behind the uncertainty of “risk” language.

The point of converting scientifically established certain damage into the uncertainty of “risk” is to falsely suggest regulations for what can’t be regulated and therefore should have a moratorium.

The Yukon Conservation Society (YCS) consistently recommends “robust regulations”, unfortunately thereby softening up evidence against fracking.

It had largely endorsed the draft 2015 Yukon Oil and Gas Act (YOGA ) by responding “Agreed” to eight out of 11 proposals in the online consultation. 

The fundamental and surreal dissociation of the YOGA to the fracking problem is not rejected by YCS nor Yukoners Concerned About Oil and Gas Exploration/Development.

(I had warned against the leg-hold trap of fracking out of conventional drill language all through the frack committee process and its 21 best practices oriented pro-frack recommendations.)

Along those spineless carbon pricing lines, NDP and Liberal MLAs have voted together with the Yukon Party for the December 2015 YOGA that continues and entrenches the abolishment of the oil and gas veto right of the Kaska First Nation on their land in southeast Yukon.

Foreseeably the act, which hides away fracking completely, forced oversight bodies like the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board to deal falsely with brute force area fracking as spot drilling into a conventional reservoir.

The latter is very different to the only one decade-old current standard of unconventional drilling, HVSFLL.

Such a parallel reality version of environmental assessment and administrative oversight is already happening re. EFLO’s Kotaneelee drill permits and re. the China-National-Offshore-Oil-Corp./Northern-Cross-Yukon shale fracking exploration at Eagle Plains.

Checkerboard-style build-outs across large shale rock formations with high-volume, slickwater fracking from long laterals on multi-well pads is a necessary mouthful that fracture engineer Dr. Antony Ingraffea, skyped in to the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre last Thursday, apologized for. 

Proven conventional oil and gas reserves do not exist anymore in Yukon according to Yukon Geologiocal Survey-commissioned studies such as the one by Petrel & Robertson, July 2012. 

Any oil and gas extraction development from now has to mean “carpet bombing” of southeast Yukon, the Whitehorse Trough, the Peel or Eagle Plains. 

“Carpet bombing” fittingly is the industry jargon for HVSFLL. The purpose of supporting the 2015 redoing of oil and gas regulations speaks for itself.

While committing to carbon pricing, the NDP and Liberals, together with the Yukon Party, do not commit to a single kWh of new green energy, not to a single wind turbine, not to a single EV turbo-charge station nor comprehensive renewable energy source framework for private and public investment.

Armed with the freshly amended act in their pockets, the NDP or Liberals in government could continue to pay lip service against fracking while simultaneously forcing it through remote country backdoors on to citizens who typically are not geologists or petroleum engineers.

Yukoners Concerned had organized last week’s well-attended session.

Ingraffea, a well-known Cornell University professor, pointed out the YOGA never even mentions “shale” or “fracturing”, “conventional” or “unconventional”, not in any form.

He explicitly responded to the author in agreement on the deceptive character of the YOGA, which, in Ingraffea’s review, could only be matched on the negative scale by Texas regulations.

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.