The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples’ grassroots tour

The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples’ grassroots tour (COMMENT)

By Whitehorse Star on February 19, 2015

A small First Nations/aboriginal/Metis crowd gathered around Betty Anne Lavallée, National Chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples (CAP), last Saturday afternoon at the Skky Hotel in Whitehorse. 

The city is one of 12 stops during the 2015 CAP Grassroots Engagement tour.

The format was one of conversation around a large table set up. 

Chief Lavallée provided context on the mandate and history of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples that had been founded in 1971 under the name Native Council of Canada (NNC).

Out of 1.4 million, one million aboriginal people in Canada live outside of reserve or settlement lands and in CAP, their interests have a voice, which is one of unity.

She is concerned about a “continuation of genocide by pen, not by sword.”

CAP has a long history and list of achievements fighting for the improvement of aboriginal survival and rights while carefully respecting existing rights.

One example was CAP involvement in the precedence of the 1999 Corbière case, based on which First Nation members, or band members, living outside settlement lands have achieved voting rights.

In the Daniels decision of the Supreme Court, Non-Status Indians and Metis were included in the terms of Section 91 (24) of the 1867 Constitution Act.

In 2013, the federal government’s appeal to reinstate the old division was rejected by the Canadian Supreme Court.

The case was named after the late Saskatchewan Metis elder Harry Daniels, who had initiated and carried the file and who had been national chief for many years.

Before and during 1982, Daniels had been responsible for another breakthrough.

From the 1982 Constitution Act, Part ll Section 35 (2), onward: “Aboriginal peoples of Canada” include the Indian, Inuit and Métis peoples.

In the spirit of Daniels, who is well remembered for fighting, in his words, “shrinking the definition of who is an Indian,” National Chief Lavallée poses the challenge, “How to unite when we are divided by government?”

Some of those gathered last Saturday have senior responsibilities in health, education and judicial community services and programs.

In the discussion, connections and findings of understanding surfaced of how political agendas operate on a nitty-gritty level trying to abolish aboriginal existence in Canada.

Deceptive and supposedly tough-on-crime policy designs aim at racializing and dulling Canada by unfairly, unequally over-policing and consequently over-incarcerating aboriginal people, and artificially undoing public safety structures such as:
• Test case funding towards direction finding of positive judicial precedence;
• Court justice workers;
• Access to legal council with traditional knowledge;
• Aboriginal community outreach workers and meaningful programs in penitentiaries; and
• Resources for families in need. 

Non-aboriginal people should also worry about being colonized by an increasingly totalitarian state and join aboriginal people in opposing the new anti-terror Bill C-51. 

National Chief Lavallée understands it as an out-of-control device to “put elders in jail because they peacefully protect their traplines,” which is already happening in central Canada and the Maritimes.

The chief and the participants alike felt that the current federal government is particularly destructive in its actions and aspirations, but previous governments have also taken attacks to the extreme. 

One such dark moment of complicity with extremism was brought up that had set tone and direction for things to come.

Paul Martin, as prime minister, had hired Tom Flanagan, the Calgary political science professor and then Stephen Harper mentor and operative, as history consultant in the feds’ drawn-out land dispute with the Metis.

Flanagan is spearheading the concept of a Canadian Manifest Destiny. He asks openly for the abolition of aboriginal rights, land titles and the disregard of agreements and treaties.

In his 2008 book First Nations? Second Thoughts, Flanagan’s diatribes remind one of 1830s Georgia, brimming with land-hungry speculators lobbying the Cherokee Removal at fever pitch. 

He writes: “In much of Canada, their (the First Nations) present place of habitation postdates the arrival of European settlers.”

Chief Lavallée said it’s a good thing a growing number of aboriginal candidates are coming forward across the country to run in the coming federal election.

There was interest in forming a Yukon territorial organization of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples.

It looked like a discussion that has the energy to go on.

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.

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.