Energy prices are not to be a political football - June 19, 2015 Whitehorse Star

Energy prices are not to be a political football - June 19, 2015 Whitehorse Star

This commentary responds to the June 11 letter to the editor by Wilf Carter – “How to ensure cheap energy in the Yukon”.

Wilf Carter compared wind energy cost with old, legacy hydro power, not expensive energy from new hydro projects like Mayo B, and also missed the mark on realistic wind kWh prices for Yukon.

It is a frequently made error which heads towards expensive energy because costs for new hydro dams and LNG plants spiral upwards and wind farms continue to become cheaper to build and run.

Some of Mr. Carter’s worthwhile knowledge could have been updated during the last week of May.

On invitation of the Yukon Conservation Society, Don Pettit and Steve Rison, from the privately owned and community-based Peace Energy Cooperative and wind developer, talked to Yukoners.

The main topic was one of the largest wind farms in western Canada, the 102-megawatt capacity Bear Mountain Wind Park development that went online in the B.C. power grid 2009, on budget and on time.

At a production cost of about seven cents per kWh and about 11 cents kWh compensation through B.C. Hydro, it is profitable, and produces several times the energy needed in the Dawson Creek area.

A whopping 280 gigawatt hours of energy annually also represent more than half of the about 450 GWh energy the Yukon grid burns through.

Unlike Bear Mountain, the first Yukon industrial-scale wind development on Mt. Sumanik, that is now approached by the Yukon Energy Corp., does not tie into the stability of a large power grid.

However, like Bear Mountain, it will produce a reliable, switchable and conventional base load characteristic, as most of its seasonal surplus will store in the Aishihik lake hydro reservoir.

Local engineers and researchers had fruitful exchanges, especially on details and no-brainer benefits of the overdue Mt. Sumanik wind project.

Petitt and Rison responded, only from a commercial angle, to a question on the controversial and large Site C Hydro development that its energy may be too expensive and obsolete after a decade of construction.

While a Mt. Sumanik 10-20 MW capacity will be smaller than Bear Mountain, it will have a similar large turbine efficiency and low transmission cost combined with the usual somewhat higher equipment freight and installation expenses.

The hands-on business expertise from Dawson Creek aligned with Yukon engineers who don’t want the competitive and proven Mt. Sumanik wind farm be endlessly kicked down the road with ever more supportive but overdrawn, wasteful and repetitive studies.

Fracking comes in carbon price clothing, Whitehorse Star 5 June 2015

Fracking comes in carbon price clothing, Whitehorse Star 5 June 2015

The answer to JP Pinard’s core question, “ … no carbon pricing at all?

Unequivocally yes; the carbon pricing design is proven to incentivize emission increases, let’s keep it out of Yukon in all its carbon tax and carbon trade forms.

This piece answers questions put to me by JP Pinard in the May 25 Star following my critical opinion piece on U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry from May 21.

I admire your work, from wind mapping projects in Yukon, studies and public education on renewable energy and even a Tedx presentation on wind power integration with electric thermal storage heating, ETS, all the way to an actual wind farm development with the Kluane First Nation.

These and other achievements as an engineer have earned even more opportunity and should not be stopped by carbon pricing.

The macroeconomics reviews of carbon pricing by the heavy hitters say so.

We are talking about serious study and weighing energy and climate policies through thousands of pages. I don’t stop at the reiteration of ideas or slogans but work to the bottom of actual track records.

In its preface of the study, Carbon Trading —How it Works and Why it Fails, published by the widely respected Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, we read:

“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 trading.”

The late Hermann Scheer, father of large-scale renewable energy success stories of many countries, writes in his book Energy Autonomy (2006) The economic, social and technological case for renewable energy and recalls:

“… 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”; and

“The most prominent example of this is the report on renewable energy submitted by the German Bundestag’s 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.”

More people have listened, observed and made themselves heard:

There is the June 2013 protest letter (energyjustice.net) signed by 86 grassroots groups from 11 countries against the carbon tax message of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby.

“We write out of concern that the current ‘carbon fee and dividend’ approach as advocated by Citizen’s Climate Lobby and the Climate Protection Act of 2013 fails on all three accounts (economy, ecology and by inviting false solutions).”

On April 12, 2013, the Guardian reported and linked to protest actions and statements by 100 European Union civil society groups protesting against carbon markets and against “…, Ignoring the structural (not fixable!) nature of the scheme’s failure.”

In a modern media culture, not surprisingly, a big part of the structural, inherent, not fixable, incentive for greenhouse gas emission increase is in the language itself of “putting a price on carbon”.

The invention of the “carbon tax”, always leveraging “cap and trade”, and all the carbon price variations are not accidental.

No more than other bread and butter constructs of sound bite engineering by the advertising agencies which once gave us healthy cigarettes for pregnant women.

Slick language shifts don’t come out of the blue; they have a purpose to fire brain synapses and activate dynamics towards different implications than what appears to be.

For example, people know there are useful business entities such as doctor’s offices, or pharma manufacturing involved in universal medicare delivery.

But the slogan of public private partnerships, P3s, hides medicare privatization, American health care, and people short on cash don’t get surgery.

Or why have elites of various stripes become so enamoured with the “social licence”?

Because it extracts and conjures benefits of minority solutions and bad projects while falsely hiding behind the simple image of public support or democratic agreement, when it is not there.

OK, then; what is the difference between the fuzzy carbon price-tax-trade and, say, a specific tax on gasoline?

The latter is just a budget item, and the government could decide to reinvest it in electric transportation infrastructures.

There, energy use comes down about sevenfold, which brings the cost down of doing business in the community, thus opening up wealth creation and a stronger tax base.

On the other hand, as as soon as the word “carbon price” is spoken, it takes power away from local people, regional as well as national governments and economies, and hands it and the money to rent seekers in corporations and international finance.

Then it’s down to begging and hope for renewable crumbs of tokenism to fall down from the carbon play table.

These incentives for greenhouse gas increases from the carbon price are so many, they are hard to count.

Bringing on fracking through the back door is another attraction to many of the carbon pricers who seek to shirk responsibility for destroying entire regions.

Over the horizon carbon offset trade, financial free trade and out of control stock markets tend to create scenarios where nobody is in reach anymore to be accountable.

Lack of accountability through corporate domination is a big problem already, made worse by the carbon price ideology wherever it takes hold.

Talking point extensions from the “carbon price” were also picked up by environmental NGOs, municipal planners and political parties doing harm to their integrity.

Supposedly, one should look toward the oil industry for climate solutions and therefore saving energy, not renewable energy, is a first priority. The nonsense we get spoon-fed every day.

Unfortunately, many have gotten stuck with this dead-end strategy which minimizes energy savings to diminishing returns and never gets a real start on replacing the emission source technologies, especially of extreme fossil extractivism.

In contrast, a priority on renewable energies and economies multiplies energy savings directly, which also elevates and inspires energy efficiencies across the board.

Time for some housekeeping on NGO websites and college curriculi as well; throwing out the carbon trade proposals would be a good start.

And no, putting the price on carbon does not recycle into anything and does not need to; the carbon price is straightforward garbage.

Naomi Klein presents a fitting title for the first chapter in her climate bestseller This Changes Everything: The Right is Right, but only on account of denouncing the crown jewel of neoliberalism, the corrupt carbon price. And it’s super-dumb to give the climate deniers a ball.

Carbon pricing is proven to be in zero sum opposition to renewable infrastructure initiative, renewable energy source legislation and against pulling back on the annual five trillion globally of fossil fuel subsidies (IMF analysis).

“Putting the price on carbon” lies in effect to people that there are no oil subsidies as energy markets are supposedly functional already.

The oil-minded federal government knows it too, and gave support to Alberta and B.C. carbon schemes, and its talks with the U.S. have already concluded in an understanding on harmonizing carbon pricing standards.

Also, CBC News reports on its politics page, Dec. 17, 2014:

“Stephen Harper is still taking a hard line against introducing a ‘job-killing carbon tax’, but in an interview with CBC News chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge, the prime minister has indicated for the first time (recently) a willingness to accept a price on greenhouse gas emissions.”

The master demagogue can suck and blow simultaneously better than anyone.

It seems we won’t hear much more of Harper’s carbon schemes until after the fall election.

And, with considerable naiveté, the opposition parties appear willing to die once again heroically for the folly of carbon price.

No matter what the track record and evidence, some have a hard time to wrap their heads around what seems counterintuitive to them.

The carbon price supposedly dis-incentivizes carbon, but in fact, does the opposite.

Of course, any kind of scientific, scholarly or legal discovery regularly clarifies optical illusions.

The policy alternatives are not complicated.

Carbon pricing incentivizes greenhouse gas emission increases, and reliably corrupts carbon accounting.

There is no practical or constructive relation between stacking up costs in a separate and parallel carbon finance scenario, to infrastructure realities.

Also, the carbon price ideology falsely tries to say that incentivizing to use a bicycle or a horse buggy instead of a truck, say today, is the main option.

Putting stuff like that upfront that is irrelevant in the infrastructure planning and is used a lot to push back against wind farms and EVs.

Whereas working with energy markets, renewable energy source legislation and energy prices, not carbon pricing, is practical, and has proven in several jurisdictions to minimize or reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Kerry's chairmanship is bad news for the Yukon

Kerry’s chairmanship is bad news for the Yukon ( Comment Whitehorse Star 21 May 2015 )

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry assumed his position as chair of the Arctic Council on April 24, and will have it until April 2017.

Kerry’s track record has been one of a hard-liner behind fracking and as an expert for the green washing of dirty, bankrupt projects with carbon pricing.

Similar to B.C. Premier Christie Clark and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, he is very skillful in exploiting climate concerns to minimize renewables and to push back any no-frack position.

So-called carbon pricing is Kerry’s greenwashing ace, and his underhanded elegance behind destructive agendas perhaps also reminds one of former British prime minister Tony Blair’s false populist charisma.

Kerry’s controversial treatment of the Global South raises warning flags in the North, which is another geography with many indigenous peoples who are impacted by modern resource colonialism.

As so many times before, now as secretary of state, at last December’s COP 20 climate conference in Lima, Peru, John Kerry preferred ideology over evidence.

In sync with his carbon pricing PR, he dug in to allow only current emission levels on the table. The U.S. government and especially John Kerry pushed hard to censor media and youth emissaries and pressure delegates.

His position is a denial of basic climate science facts. According to atmospheric science facts, a carbon molecule in the atmosphere from two centuries ago is similarly GHG (greenhouse gas)-active as one from two days ago.

China and India, with their shares, are the only non-Western economies that make the top 10 list, with China at less than one third of U.S. emissions.

On the BBC News Science & Environment page, Matt McGrath reported on Dec. 13, 2014:

“But this (Kerry’s and mainly the Europeans’) approach is being resisted by a number of countries, including China and many others, who want to adhere to the idea of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’.

“Some countries are suspicious that the text being developed here in Lima is an attempt to get round the concept of differentiation, which is embedded in the 1992 UN (Kyoto) framework convention on climate change.

“The issue has become critical as the chairs of the talks introduced a new draft text that many felt watered down the original commitment.

“A large group of developing nations known as the G77 objected (as they did in Copenhagen” ... ‘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 (Antonio Marcondes, Brazil’s representative at the talks).’”

Equally troublesome for the Yukon and the N.W.T. to his false and divisive climate policies is his strategy to expand fracking everywhere.

Why Colorado’s anti-fracking measures were not supported by Democrats and environmental groups was the title of a report by Joel Dyer, Matt Cortina and Elizabeth Miller, on Oct. 2, 2014 in the Boulder (Colorado) Weekly.

“Hundreds of billions of dollars in natural gas infrastructure are being built with the blessing and even encouragement of Democrats. The State Department, thanks to Hillary Clinton and now John Kerry, has created a fully staffed department charged with promoting natural gas development throughout the world as a means of spreading U.S. influence while simultaneously attempting to diminish the influence of Russia.”

Mariah Blake, in the Sept./Oct. 2014 issue of Mother Jones, also observes Kerry’s frack agenda:

“Despite the public outcry in Europe, the State Department has stayed the course. Clinton’s successor as secretary of state, John Kerry, views natural gas as a key part of his push against climate change.

“Under Kerry, State has ramped up investment in its shale gas initiative and is planning to expand it to 30 more countries, from Cambodia to Papua New Guinea.”

But exactly how does Kerry use carbon pricing language and policies to incentivize increased GHG emissions by way of advancing the dirtiest of unconventional resource extraction such as gas fracking?

Key to understanding is to correct Kerry’s misleading carbon market assumption.

A carbon market will never exist outside of Wall Street, as a single or unified carbon product is not real to begin with.

Kerosine, coke-fuel or heavy bunker oil are no more a single product as strawberries, beef and dried algae can have a consolidated agricultural price, tax or market.

That is how alien “Put a Price on Carbon” really is and was meant to be by the slogan designers from the corporate think tanks already in the mid-1980s.

This kind of vacuum against good sense is what the oil industry wants from its support of carbon pricing to bring on even more subsidization of oil and gas.

The carbon price is a false alternative to renewable frameworks and clean air relevant infrastructure initiatives in electron-powered transportation and other areas that strengthen energy markets and energy security in the real world.

False language Kerry-style of carbon pricing certainly brings down the standards of evidence, as one more effective subsidy for the investment fraud-ridden frack sector.

Example: the March 2015 Canadian Energy Institute study’s 76 pages on conventional natural gas development in Yukon does not show or even indicate a single proven reservoir in all of Yukon, which does not have an oil and gas industry.

But the study was presented widely in a media blitz as if those reservoirs were there, in perfect “frack and talk manner.”

Similar to many pieces from across a wide B.C. media spectrum, “Policy Note” reported in January 2015 under the title: The case against a revenue-neutral carbon tax:

“Revenue neutral is the idea that all carbon tax revenues must flow back out the door as other tax cuts (typically income tax) but also could be in the form of tax credits or a fixed dividend. In some cases, people do not trust that this is going to happen as promised.

“In B.C., they would be right, as 2/3 (very cautious reading) of carbon tax revenues have been used to support corporate income tax cuts.”

Those are new(!) income tax cuts that include gas frack and frack LNG operators as cash funding for fracking directly from the carbon tax!

Further, the carbon tax-linked Pacific Carbon Trust had acted so blatantly as a slush fund operation for cash handouts to especially gas fracking that the B.C. government, in damage control mode, renamed it the Climate Action Secretariat in 2013.

Even Elizabeth Nickson, from the generally oil-friendly and conservative Frontier Centre for Public Policy, followed North/South justice-oriented sources like Oxfam and wrote for the Vancouver Sun on Aug. 14, 2013:

“And where did the money from the carbon tax go? According to B.C.’s Auditor-General, two-thirds of funds brokered by the Pacific Carbon Trust went to Encana, the biggest gas company in Canada, and to the Nature Conservancy of Canada, … This redistribution of revenue from the poor to the rich, however, pales in comparison to the misery foisted on indigenous peoples in the developing world.”

The Oct. 11, 2010 issue of the New Yorker has a broad sheet investigative report on ACES (U.S. Cap & Trade law), by Ryan Lizza, As the World Burns.

The carbon pricing corruption Lizza tracks down in detail includes a Kerry deal with T. Boone Pickens for large government frack subsidies as part of the ACES package.

B.C., with its frack wastelands, poisoned waters, corrupted carbon accounting, economic and democratic decline in the Horn Basin and elsewhere, is often touted as a carbon pricing wonderland.

A good look provides an appropriate idea of what to expect in Yukon from John Kerry’s inspiration.

Report invites mini-fracking, acid fracking, sneak fracking

YG Frack Report invites mini-fracking, acid-fracking, sneak-fracking

Whitehorse Star January 20, 2015 [with some copy edit updates]

Many of the harms are certain, as seen in the Horn Basin/Ft. Nelson area, but ignored by the report from the Yukon’s legislative committee on fracking. Some frack impact details are hard to predict.

Honourably, the committee did not come to an agreement that fracking can be done safely. That aside, the report lacks balance, objectivity and definitions of industry standards.

The word “risk” appears 74 times, the word “harm” seven times.

And harm components that are certainty beyond risk or potential, which is the experience and finding of fracked people, regions, as well as independent science, are never once recognized by the authors and summaries.

During three years of concern in the Yukon, elsewhere the earth-shattering destructive trend has increased from around 40,000 hp diesel pumps on a given multi-well pad to what is now often around 60,000 or 70,000 hp.

How would a compounding destructiveness and widening pathway chaos for methane and deep earth toxins help a future feasibility the report hopes for?

Good things such as water protection, First Nations rights and public consultations shouldn’t be bastardized and streamlined into frack cannon fodder. Supposedly safe underground “carpet bombing” (popular frack industry internal jargon) of entire regions is a corrupting impossibility.

The Yukon government, with the scope and the leading name it had given the committee, is following the example of the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER). [and the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission]

The BCOGC and AER are famous for their preposterous dogma that fracking has supposedly never once polluted water.

There is no mention of false language issues in the report, and not even a hint of problem awareness what embedding of corruption into institutions means to the well-being of an entire province.

Even though the frack committee met with the AER during its 2013 Alberta frack tour, there is not a word on the malaise of fracking democracy, which is foremost on the minds of a growing number of citizens in Alberta and B.C.

The tone of the report seems influenced by the deceptive “go slow” message and slogan of the 2014 frack report by the Council of Canadian Academies that had charmed or bribed a few critics into conformity.

It equally marginalized the evidence that led Newfoundland, New Brunswick and others to moratoriums on fracking.

The confusion of the frack committee and its report completely ignored frackonomics harms such as diminishing returns, devastation of road and other infrastructures, inviting structural unemployment and public debt.

Northern Cross’s supposedly harmless exploration mini-fracking process in reality is regular process of the fewer than 10-year-old HVSFLL (High Volume Slick Water Fracking Long Lateral) brute force fracking standard.

Petroleum engineers define mini-fracking or DFIT (Diagnostic Fracture Injection Test) specifically as part of this late-edition, high-intensity fracking development.

There is good geology and petroleum economics evidence that the mini-fracking purpose is more fund-raising PR and false language acrobatics than geological necessity; Because fracking is a scatter gun.

It plays a role in the way of sneak fracking, especially to get started when it is not legal.

A lot of misleading communication, as in Monday’s frack committee report, tends to come from adopting industry talking points. 

These often are not science or industry literature and standards-based summary, but advertisement agency language without any kind of integrity.

A long small-scale oil and gas history at Eagle Plains in the past had exhausted itself. 

That, DFIT and the updated geological assessment from the July 2012 Yukon Geological Survey, Petrel & Robertson study says there is no proven, recoverable oil and gas in Yukon, except by brute-force fracking.

Depleted conventional gas fields or their reservoirs don’t go back into production more than one can drink coffee from an empty cup. Petrel & Robertson are also clear on that.

EFLO's approved Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board application described fracture acidizing (or, in industry lingo, acid fracking) as a design to break up southeast Yukon shale rock or source rock starting with the locations of the only two, and now defunct, gas wells in Yukon.

Yukon’s ‘frackonomist’ presented false oil and gas data

Yukon’s ‘frackonomist’ presented false oil and gas data ( Comment )

Keith Halliday’s Dec. 5 column published locally with the glib title “Love it or hate it, fracking is here to stay” starts off with invented data that hype up fracking:

Whitehorse Star on December 24, 2014

Keith Halliday’s Dec. 5 column published locally with the glib title “Love it or hate it, fracking is here to stay” starts off with invented data that hype up fracking:

“Since 2010, oil and gas production in the U.S. has gone from a bit over four million barrels a day in oil equivalent to 12 million a day as of September. This is according to the Wall Street Journal and U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), and is largely due to surges in fracked oil and gas production.”

The EIA, in their latest overview report an overall U.S. production, rise since 2010 as follows:

2010 U.S. oil and gas production added roughly up to about daily 20 million barrels of oil equivalent (BOE), not Halliday’s fivefold distortion of four million, comprised of 9.7 million barrels oil daily plus 21.3 trillion cubic feet natural gas annually.

The energy in one BBL, barrel of oil (crude plus other extracted petroleum liquids), also 42 U.S.Gal, also 35 IG (Imperial Gallon), also 159 litres, is equal to 1.7 megawatt hours – one third cord of wood or 6,000 cubic feet of natural gas.

U.S. production of natural gas equated to about 10 mill. BOE daily, which, together with close to 10 mill barrels of oil, added up to 20 million BOE in 2011, and to over 24 million BOE daily for 2013.

Halliday’s tabloid style try with four million BOE in 2010 to hype perception of frack production increase is not a typo. 

He hides that conventional oil and gas production in North America remains the economic feedstock and brittling energy backbone. And that the recently arrived high-intensity fracking standard needs ruinous and ever-increasing subsidies because it has no useful net energy output (similarly debt-increasing and future job-killing as tar sands steam extraction).

“The Middle East, the only large source of low-cost oil, remains at the centre of the longer-term oil outlook” (World Energy Outlook, International Energy Agency, 2013).

Another nice story on a supposed “glut” in his Dec. 5 piece does not check out with the energy availability and affordability problem: 

“The U.S., as well as British Columbia, are now feverishly working on facilities to export North America’s gas glut to other countries where gas prices can be two or three times higher.”

He must have seen but doesn’t mention the EIA’s forecast, which, by 2020, sees U.S. oil production once again decreasing and imports of about 30 per cent as far as they look, which is 2035. Producing frack gas requires expending a lot of oil.

And most of the frack expansion infrastructure such as pipelines, LNG terminals and plants were already stalled out before the oil price drop because of investor pull back.

In terms of Halliday’s LNG export enthusiasm, keep in mind the North American frack sector, as the basis of it, has been plagued with reserve swindles and inflation. 

In 2011 and 2014, it has seen fairly dramatic intervention on behalf of investor protection by government bodies like the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) as well as EIA, which downgraded shale reserve statements by orders of magnitude.

Where is the export natural gas supposed to come from?

According to 2014, CAPP (Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers) data, Canadian natural gas production, after years of decline, continues to decline until 2021, and, followed by a shallow growth bump, again enters decline in 2027.

Their best-case scenario shows continued production decline until 2017, and after 10 years of shallow sloped growth of about 25 per cent, also decline after 2027.

Under NAFTA Chapter 6, Energy Canada cannot reduce energy exports to the U.S. before 36 months of production decline have been proven for a given sector, which further reduces flexibility and export alternatives.

The global LNG trade and production has stagnated since 2010. It was largely built on conventional gas where the profit margin was allowed to expend a whopping 40 per cent of the resource energy, just on the liquefaction process. The LNG export leader Qatar is not the only example.

Frack fields exhaust fast and are a highly subsidized and very short-term gamble dominated by predatory Wall Street whims.

The investors increasingly stay away because the long-term amortization requirements in the oil and gas industry, including of super-expensive LNG plants, terminals and ship building, don’t match up.

As a consequence of such investor skepticism, the LNG terminal projects in the U.S. have slowed down or are stalled.

In B.C., there is not a single go ahead at this point.

Current Canadian share of global LNG trade is zero per cent; the U.S. has between 0.1 and 0 per cent – a little reality check one does not hear about often.

The fact that the accomplished writer and researcher Gwynne Dyer pushed the fiction of North American oil and gas as being competitive overseas, syndicated on Oct. 23 in the Whitehorse Star as “The price of oil will hit its floor and it will rise again” is no excuse for Halliday.

The centre of Dyer’s argument reiterates a master piece from the big oil spin doctors, supposed OPEC break-even prices of well above $100. Actually, diverse government expenditures may add to any national debt but really are not part of national or private oil producers’ balance sheets, not in Qatar and not in Canada.

Similar to Russia’s or various Middle Eastern countries’ oil and gas production, the all-conventional oil production in Saudi Arabia is into gravy and profits above $25-30/BBL.

No doubt Russian and OPEC oil and gas resource extraction operations appreciate a high oil price but don’t have to worry about the outclassed Canadian and U.S. competition.

And in terms of energy markets, OPEC competes with China’s and India’s explosive renewable energy growth. Wind energy grew about 90-fold since 2005 in China.

In reality, even OPEC policies are influenced by the multinational oil majors as well as by corrupt, so-called free trade deals that give foreign corporations the illegitimate authority to de facto legislate, protection racket-style. 

Also, few countries are oil exporters, and most are importers of what is not a luxury commodity. Around 50 of the poorest countries spend most of their foreign currency reserves on oil imports simply to grow or ship food.

After sinking deeper into debt growing and shipping potatoes, millet, rice or corn for a while, at and beyond a fairly universal pain threshold of $70 oil, at some point, some can’t continue.

Then more oil becomes available, and the price drops like just now or in 2008, after it had gone to $147, resulting in economic contraction paired with oil demand destruction and temporary price collapse.

A new window of availability-affordability starts the cycle over. 

And so it continues, with a deadly fever turned into chronic or structural disease of a jittery, energy-starved world economy.

Specifically because the big oil-controlled North America has fallen behind and fails to grow energy industries significantly where it happens, which is in the diverse renewable community-driven sector.

The source of this dynamic or price cycle is energy scarcity, not surplus or glut, with much of conventional, affordable oil and gas running out quickly now, and for many in North America as well, the problem is being priced out of the market.

In case of a business plan or community co-op plan, the required affordable cost projection may typically run over five years or more, certainly not five weeks or months, sort of along Halliday’s embarrassing glut and low-price nonsense.

Fiona Harvey had this to say or quote on April 1, 2012 on the Guardian global development page: 

“With oil prices likely to remain high, the only answer is for developing countries to move to cleaner renewable sources of energy, Fatih Birol, chief economist at the IEA, told the Guardian.

“If you diversify the sources of energy, that is a good thing, and clean energy means using free, homegrown resources, so that will bring down the import bills,” he said.’

When industrialized economies were developing, oil was the equivalent of $13 a barrel, but now developing countries must pay $120 to $130, noted Birol, which leaves developing countries “hamstrung” – so if more people are to be lifted out of poverty, clean energy must be an imperative.

The data from the IEA (International Energy Agency), widely regarded as the gold standard for energy analysis, rang alarm bells for campaigners, and is likely to be closely examined by donor governments, which have not tended to prioritize clean energy in the past.”

Halliday’s blindness on the energy eye misleads Yukoners and Canadians because wasting resources from crucial conventional oil and gas feedstock into the sinkholes of shales and tarsands only deepens the crisis and threat of energy starvation. Trouble is, should the problem hit on a real crisis or depression level, it might be late fixing it.

Like the Alberta and B.C. petro state governments, Halliday is also an ardent “free” trader as well as carbon price and carbon tax promoter, which he has put forward many times.

More neoliberal magical thinking. The polluter powers benefit by carbon pricing ideolog re-assigning responsibility in a way that exploits energy-saving light bulb campaigns, etc. Acquiring and financializing polluter offsets and permits further entrench and expand polluter rights.

Carbon price and carbon market language falsely describe big oil not as oilygarchy but as market player with a supposedly affordable and therefor adjustable product and provide climate outlaws with a fake image of being relevant solution providers.

“Put a price on carbon” was invented and successfully introduced by big oil and Wall Street in the early ’80s as a fictionalized, alternative proposal to a renewable energy orientation, very much in zero sum opposition.

Countries like Denmark that are far below projected greenhouse gas emission levels or caps, China very much putting the same gears in place, instead have strong renewable energy frameworks as policy lead or driver. With fewer unearned privileges for big oil, coal and nuclear markets work.

There, people are encouraged to participate in electric public and private transportation and other zero tailpipe emission technologies. 

And they’re not cynically penalized and carbon-taxed for living with infrastructure decisions they have not made and for which little alternative is available to them.

Matthias Bichsel, then project and technology director at Shell, summed it up in October 2013 in this way, cited by the Financial Post on Oct. 18, 2013: “The United States oil and gas industry has “overfracked and overdrilled’.”

Seasoned oil and gas industrialists like Art Berman and analysts like Deborah Rogers or petroleum geologists like David Hughes, state clearly fracking is more energy waste and investment fraud than resource production.

Rather than for responsible oil and gas production, the frack bubble aims at fracking pension funds and drilling for media releases, and Halliday delivers.

How do we work to get democracy back?

Democracy has always been a question of trend, of direction, and of movement; not of absolutes or a still picture.

By Whitehorse Star on September 17, 2014

Democracy has always been a question of trend, of direction, and of movement; not of absolutes or a still picture.

The federal government ratified last week the controversial Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (FIPA).

It gives multinational corporations from China the right and power to legislate in Canada by overruling Canadian federal, First Nations’ and territorial laws right down to municipal bylaws.

It happens not nominally but effectively through a NAFTA-like secret arbitration panel process, that is outside of Canadian law, by binding and preventing it.

Attention! Different to legitimate legal processes – these panel decisions cannot be appealed.

Opposition parties, except for the Liberals, had tried to stop FIPA in 2013.

It is wrong to assume that dictatorships typically first reach for power with violence when they actually start by passing crime-enabling laws and regulations that attack constitutional rights.

Why would it be different for Canada’s version of an emerging “totalitarian democracy” (the late Gore Vidal)?

There are good reasons why the Yukon and Nunavut Regulatory Improvement Act, Bill S-6, has been tabled to the unelected Senate but not to Parliament.

The harsh reality is that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Bill S-6 amendment of the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Act (YESAA) and the Nunavut Waters Act and Nunavut Surface Rights Tribunal Act rolls back Yukon’s constitutional self-government rights granted under the Devolution Transfer Agreement.

It does that by giving the prime minister and his cabinet rights they did not have, to interfere in the Yukon on behalf of speculators and corporations.

In a throw-back to the 1800s, First Nations are singled out by not living up to contracts with them. Even judges chosen by Stephen Harper have expressed that in a long string of decisions.

Bill S-6 continues with the colonizer stance also by weakening the Umbrella Final Agreement which originated closely interwoven with YESAA.

The Yukon government provides anti-democratic assistance to their masters in Ottawa also by injecting questionable expertise into gas fracking consultations, suggesting a predetermined outcome.

This offers a handy platform to Ottawa to pursue political goals of a postmodern aristocracy hidden behind false economic claims.

In ways different to the First Nations, municipalities also have a venerable grassroots democratic tradition of their own.

The 1998 Yukon Municipal Act had answered to longstanding demands by Yukoners as well as their town and city councils for democratic participation.

When Whitehorse residents used their rights and petitioned city council to hold several referenda, the city turned against them.

In the case of the union-busting Walmart, the petition was a handful of signatures short. At the time, mayor Kathy Watson pushed through a narrow 4-3 vote at city council for the Argus development (Walmart).

In the case of Marianne Darragh’s successful 2008 McLean Lake petition, in an era when city council was very much dominated by the city's managers, the city went to court to escape its duty to hold a referendum.

Perhaps in conventional perception, environmental concerns, before they grew much broader in the face of a climate survival problem, were surrounded by white middle class privilege that did not suffer a serious rights deficiency.

Now, much is to be learned from women’s equality, slavery abolition, aboriginal rights and labour rights struggles.

The finding was that regulating supposedly acceptable degrees of violence and harm against people re-enforces the problem.

Goodwill, information, and general sympathy campaigns were not enough to heal the pestilence of oppression.

It took the claiming, occupying and legislating of rights to make democracy work.

First Nations taught us that rights of the Earth as community rights are not idealism but a practicality proven in a thousand generations.

Should citizens bow to a litigious city hall or corporations in their pursuit or endorsement of fracking-based LNG infrastructure?

Where can citizens go after they have been fed a drumbeat of phoney consultations to the point they want to throw up, being lied to and being denied rightful participation?

When do regulations help the community, and when do they hurt by cajoling people into forgetting to say no to danger and harm?

How do law-making and organizing strategies interact?

What can we learn from other places and fights?

Come to Global Frackdown 2014 and meet the community rights attorneys Mari Margil and Thomas Linzey for a presentation and conversation, 7-9 p.m. Sept. 26 at the Kwanlin Dun Cultural Centre, who will be here on invitation of the Frackfree Yukon Alliance.

Robin Gilson
Peter Becker
Whitehorse

Part 1: A frank analysis of Canada’s energy destiny ( Whitehorse Star Comment ) Part 2: Our nation is swiftly becoming an energy loser ( Whitehorse Star Comment )

A frank analysis of Canada’s energy destiny ( Whitehorse Star Comment )

What makes the energy issue hard to grasp is the need for understanding its complexity, not as a fancy but at minimum.

By freelancer on July 22, 2014

What makes the energy issue hard to grasp is the need for understanding its complexity, not as a fancy but at minimum.

It would involve examination of details, yes, but while holding other strands of thought and questioning in reach.

The public education mandate of news outlets, media, academia and government agencies has much degraded to a pushing of information bits. The offered illusions of instantly making complete sense actually stop the public from even getting going and asking questions to build comprehension.

The energy economy and climate survival outlook is not looking good based on problem-solving resources that become narrower and narrower.

A lot of the pushed information does not speak a language that interacts with the need for people and their heritage to know something out of themselves, from their experience, so they are not stuck with spoon-fed messages.

Walter Benjamin writes in The Storyteller (1936): “Information, however, lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement [which he thinks is wrong] is that it appear ‘understandable in itself’ ” and

“With the [First] World War, a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer in communicable experience?”

1914 Western civilization succumbed to a universe of destruction that choked it in rivers of blood under a “storm of steel” (Ernst Juenger).

And yet the failure of hyper-nationalism and militarism might come to pale against an even deadlier surprise looming now, running out of energy.

It could or would mean scores of people freezing, starving and dying in their homes while other folks or the supplies they need don’t reach workplaces anymore.

A key requirement for an industrial society is and will be affordable transportation. A few short years of fracking for oil and gas (U.S. government Energy Information Agency) fumes are a dead end and a waste, also in this regard.

That’s partly because expensive transportation, logging, mining and farming equipment standards turn over slowly, only in decades.

The remote and vast Yukon’s energy security for long shipping lifelines is super-vulnerable.

Overdue kick starters to electrify those equipment infrastructures matter at any rate of their implementation, as e-technology is here to stay.

Typically, fossil fuel-based power or drive trains cannot compete outside of wasteful monopoly and subsidy regimes. Bringing down the cost of doing business is relevant.

That’s because electric motors produce roughly a sevenfold gas mileage or other physical work advantage over combustion engines from an equivalent energy amount and expense.

Equally to August 1914, catastrophe threatens to be more speedy than any remedy could be, while its causes are hidden by years of denial and jingoism and then cannot be undone.

Current and chronic energy starvation will harden. It will become acute not from a lack of drilling for oil and gas but from drilling too much.

For those who do not understand industrial energy systems, it may sound counterintuitive at first. Herein lies the problem, and in misleading propaganda, of course, by armies of pundits from the CBC to the Sun Media Corp.

The low-hanging fruit, the affordable fossil fuel, the productive conventional resources started to really fatigue a generation ago when oil and gas production peaked in its usable outcome.

The understanding of affordable energy as the low-hanging fruit is important in King Hubbert’s 1956 landmark publication Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels.

And it was refined by Charles Hall as the net energy outcome of energy production.

It also means the analysis of a crude oil production peak is valid today, calculated and timed by the petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert to occur around 2000.

Since then, oil use in the world economy, minus in the oil extraction itself, declines.

Consequently, oil and especially diesel shortages happen the world over, even in Alberta, 2008; supply and affordability fall short of growing structural demand.

Demand destruction and recession see-saw or alternate with price spikes, shortages and price volatility triggered by economic up jitters.

Even though the International Energy Agency (IEA) had consistently predicted global crude oil production to exceed 90 million barrels per day before 2010, production plateaued since 2005, and, to this day, never reached those 90 million.

Partly in response to the widespread shale reserve swindle, the IEA has introduced a new term – “proven-plus-probable oil reserves” – of which they locate 80 per cent in the Middle East (World Energy Outlook, IEA, 2013).

“The Middle East, the only large source of low-cost oil, remains at the centre of the longer-term oil outlook” (World Energy Outlook, IEA, 2013).

Except for the Tengiz oil field in Kazakhstan, through half a century, no new elephant field has come in sight or on line. An all-important one per cent of fields produce over half of the world’s oil.

Most of the oil and gas industry efficiencies and affordability came from these giants; without them, there would probably be very little oil and gas industry at all.

Peak oil is alive and well in a Robert L. Hirsch (long-time U.S. government energy advisor) co-authored 2009 study, picked up by the Christian Science Monitor.

It predicts that creeping and also a steep decline of some time-pressurized and water-injected fields will transition into abrupt exhaustion and failure.

“As the world’s giant fields continue to age and more start to decline, we can therefore expect the annual decline in their rate of production to worsen. ” (Christian Science Monitor online, April 12, 2013 “The decline of the world’s major oil fields”.)

As we shall see, tarsands and shales are a subsidy and financial game with no useful energy production, but still, their gross output is counted as part of the world’s stagnating total oil output.

All of this follows a global reserve discovery peak, also correctly predicted by Hubbert, for 1960.

It is the same year Tommy Douglas advocates for a constitutional Bill of Rights, Marshall McLuhan begins (re) writing Understanding Media, Elvis Presley appears in the movie G.I. Blues and J.F.K. is elected U.S. President, all of it a very long time ago. Too long and too complete of a decline for oil exploration to recover from.

Before that time, significant more new oil and gas was found than was used. Then, less and less was found, and, especially significantly, not a single new super field anymore, except for the said Tengiz Field in 1979.

The opening up of significant new oil and gas prospects collapsed a very long time ago. The petrochemical manufacturing resource has been stolen from a near and far future. Energy has alternative sources, not manufacturing.

Bitumen from tarsands as well as fracking for unconventional shale oil and gas cause some fuss in perception, not useful energy or resource production.

Fracking and tar mining of entire regions of Canada into a resemblance of First World War battlefields even beats those infernal guns in the poisoning of water and air, and, like then, takes away a lot of lives, treasure and energy.

There is confusing frack hype until we deflate it by bringing into the equation Prof. Charles Hall of State University of New York, who specializes in energy economics and ecology.

The energy that can be used, versus the one that is produced, Hall defines as net energy.

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant. The second and final part of his commentary will be published Wednesday.

Find out in part two what net energy does re. jobs, economy and climate. Andrew Nikiforuk’s stories in The Tyee might be useful further reading; “Ailing Shale Gas Returns Force a Drilling Treadmill” (June 27).

By Peter Becker

Part 2: Our nation is swiftly becoming an energy loser ( Whitehorse Star Comment )

The first part of this two-part commentary was published Tuesday.

By freelancer on July 23, 2014

The first part of this two-part commentary was published Tuesday.

Details of “net energy” are being discussed or criticized.

However, the principle of a need for a significant enough surplus is hard to refute. Ignoring the dimension probably is dumber than a mouse or any being could afford to be.

Industrial energy production is only affordable or economically viable if for one unit of energy invested in the process, say for one oil barrel of energy equivalents (electricity, natural gas and renewables used also count), there are a minimum of 10 to 15 units return or surplus.

Economists who work in the field refer to net energy also as net energy gain, energy surplus, energy balance (between input and output) or EROI (energy return on energy invested).

Most counter-arguments are poorly thought out and merely variations that under-build the fundamentals – such as financial accounting would be more relevant than net energy, when profitability actually follows the structural energy price and surplus.

Among the examples is Canada, which is quickly becoming an energy loser as it shifts into low-quality unconventional oil and gas extraction, as increasingly expensive make-work, not real jobs.

No amount of creative accounting can take away the bleeding caused by those production costs that are in the ballpark of a long-term global affordability threshold for oil.

And there is no room for profits and royalties.

We know the cycle: when the crude price does go up, it is soon followed by demand destruction with its price dip.

China, Denmark and Germany, even Ontario, Manitoba and Gamesa Corp. in Spain build economic strength, especially with high EROI figures of wind power that is somewhere between 40, 60, perhaps already reaching as high as 80.

Norway’s wealth, as once Alberta’s, was accumulated from conventional crude oil with 20-30 EROI, but the country has now decided to pull back from frack and tarsands investments, all out in favour of renewables.

The distinction between conventional and unconventional is not 100 per cent but perhaps can be judged 99 per cent of the time.

It becomes meaningful and clear along the EROI scale, which is further backed up by conventional reservoir characteristics in the geology, vs. unconventional tight conditions.

Even the latest intensity increases in earth-shattering fracking force (break the bank, all right) break out no more than five per cent – eight per cent of oil and gas locked in the shale rock porosity.

The net energy equation can be compared to useful net income or net revenue vs. income before deductions, which does not buy anything.

If, for example, hourly net wages go down from $30 to 30 cents, it is bad news, and barely affords an unheated cardboard box as a home.

The B.C., Alberta and federal governments are building debt in this way by subsidizing fracking and tarsands toward the economic ruin of generations.

Hall explains that since about 2000, the amount of energy society and economy are provided with from combined conventional and unconventional drilling, including tar sands, is shrinking firmly.

It also means more and more affirmation that the late King Hubbert is right on track with his emblematic peak oil analysis.

Precision of net energy accounting, like all accounting, has a natural wiggle room, but the health and honesty of the figures are vital for survival.

Recently, the Texas government’s Railroad Commission reviewed data submitted by the Texas shale gas producers to the IEA and found they were overstated by 60 per cent. It is unheard of.

In 2009, the Yukon government suppressed the Mt. Sumanik wind power study IR YCS-YEC-1-1 because it showed wind to be competitive.

The study demonstrates wind can produce energy at half the cost of the Mayo B hydro extension and with better base load reliability.

Mt. Sumanik has a shorter interconnection distance to the large power consumption of Whitehorse and to the large Aishihik Lake hydro reservoir, which absorbs and converts wind energy into switchable hydro power.

Old and new renewable energy can work well together in Yukon to meet a growing demand. Wind in Yukon has a record and expectation for a 10 per cent annual variation over hydro, with 30 per cent.

Mid-range and long-range anticipation, in the face of the climate crisis, for wind is also more stable than for hydro reservoir levels.

According to a cross-section of world industry data, conventional oil and gas is down from about a 100 EROI of historical gushers, that built industrial strength and wealth, to a current net energy surplus of about 20, 25 at best (Qatar, Russia, Iran and Norway).

Energy surplus figures for tarsands mining, coalbed and shale fracking are somewhere between two and five, up to six at best; tarsands steam extraction as well as LNG from frack gas data indicate an energy production of around zero net energy units.

All future and half of current tarsands resources that are to be extracted are deep and therefore accessed and only accessible by the bridge to nowhere steam extraction method.

One begins to understand rising indications that potential investors for B.C. LNG terminals, as well as Keystone, Kinder Morgan expansion and Northern Gateway pipelines are running for the hills.

These pipelines and most LNG terminals will never go ahead, but it helps the speculators to cite First Nation and environmental resistance so they can hide economic failure.

Canada and the U.S. have been “over-fracked and over-drilled” (Matthias Bichsel, project and technology director at Shell, who stopped money losing frack investments) to a degree that fortunately other resources like gold, rare earth metals or bauxite are not exhausted.

Obviously, the general political process and especially academic conversation have frozen up in their facilitation of an oil energy fiction.

First Nations (and general public) throughout Canada are increasingly subjected to consultations that are illegal fraud because they have predetermined outcomes.

The judges of many court decisions who have said so are not “activist judges” because they can still read what a dictionary says about “consultation”.

Another massive failure lies in the un-Canadian lack of true diversity that is expressed by the co-opting of environmental and political opposition into some sort of a petrostate conformism or streamlining.

There is discontent with the destruction ravaged on Canadian lands as a prelude to the coming energy starvation. But too few are able to speak up clearly.

The slogan “Put a Price on Carbon” has become the mantra that insults people’s intelligence by getting them to march in lockstep and lull their awareness, and it is not an accident.

It is a left and right wing problem; environmental and conservative ignorance meets neoliberal and neoconservative cynicism.

It works in terms of implemented policy but also as a talking point that either way counteracts energy security and low or no emission strategies.

“Put a Price on Carbon” was introduced as the oil industry’s fighting word against renewable energy reform that was initiated or inspired by Jimmy Carter following the 1973 oil crunch.

The carbon price idea is to think globally and defer action locally, to present a green washed image that locks up policy within fossil fuel concepts and seeks to restrict renewable energy to cosmetics in three ways.

1. The lie of cheap oil, when fuel expenses really are at and beyond pain thresholds, serves the fiction that carbon taxes and offsets would supposedly nudge people’s GHG behaviour, in a sort of a shopping aisle scenario.

It works nowhere because in reality, filling the heating oil tank in a rental home or driving to work for many is not a luxury choice they would abstain from.

Even more so, not when competitive zero emission infrastructures are artificially suppressed by the elites.

Some confused minds even think allowing independent power producers (IPPs) of renewable energy means privatization, when it is the strategy of big oil affiliates to privatize public utilities.

The Yukon Energy Corp. was attacked in this way 2009, but employees and the Yukon public fought privatization off successfully.

Grid Feed Tariffs, or Feed in Tariffs by which IPPs can sell renewable energy back to the grid, have been adopted in Yukon, on suggestion by the author.

FITs and renewable energy IPPs bring an energy market and democratic trends back, and are a mark of successful industrial countries, not carbon taxing or cap and trade.

1. “Put a Price on Carbon” says, Big Oil is a market player, and thereby hides it is a militaristically minded cartel. Renewable energy is the currency in a market for growing public utilities and private entities.

Close to 100 per cent of renewable energy industries are incentivized by infrastructure leadership, like building electric truck fast charge station nets, and recognizing energy pricing, not carbon pricing.

Part of the carbon pricing diversion from a practical market is the emission offset speculation which, by design, not by accident, acts beyond community reach for a practical accountability.

The Pacific Carbon Trust uses carbon tax money to fund northern B.C. gas fracking operations (all is revenue neutral, of course, adding a revenue and public benefit zero twist to the carbon tax).

Rainforest clear-cutting is often carbon offset financed in similar ways; one famous example is the European Union biodiesel scheme in Indonesia.

1. It is well studied and documented that GHG trends and individual energy choices almost completely follow mostly regional and national infrastructure planning, and not the other way around, as “Put a Price on Carbon” falsely suggests.

“Put a Price on Carbon” is a sneaky back door entry of imposing new Margaret Thatcher-style flat taxes on people.

This exploits the climate crisis and diverts from understanding it properly, which prevents effective door-opening to renewable energy in North America and especially Canada more than anywhere else.

The big lie of carbon pricing is, supposedly the economy in general causes climate change, and not fossil fuel monopolies.

In conclusion, from David Suzuki to Exxon Mobile to Barack Obama, none of the carbon price promoters present evidence or serious review on the concept.

However, on the survival issue, they do park their autonomy and responsibility as citizens, similar to the jingoistic leaders sliding into the First World War.

And those with independent analysis on carbon pricing, taxing and offset trading, like the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation and the late renewable energy pioneer, Hermann Scheer, are clear, “Put a Price on Carbon” is oil propaganda, and it is wrong.

Even limited cataclysms, such as 9/11 or the 1970 FLQ crisis, have a nasty habit of producing national front and War Measures Act-style scenarios that are better considered proactively and cautiously than naively left out of sight.

And yet Canada might have a slim chance to recover its wits in time.

Chucking the neoliberal make-belief of “Put a Price on Carbon” could be the icebreaker to clear the way.

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.

By Peter Becker