Beleaguered Greece writes down its massive debt 1/3

Beleaguered Greece writes down its massive debt ( Comment Whitehorse Star July 10, 2015 )

Ed. note: this is the first of a two-part commentary.

The status and eventual outcome of the financial crisis are not clear at this point, except for one thing.

Without any doubt, the odious debt is gone after the July 5 referendum.

What is odious debt?

It is the term economists, political and banking people use for debts or parts of a debt that are illegal.

It is no more enforceable than debt from a deal on street drugs or stolen goods could be legally collected.

Its not surprising the Star, as one of fewer than 10 independent and not corporate-controlled dailies in Canada, published some good syndicated coverage.

I am a Gwynne Dyer fan. He summarized well some of the complex stream of events, but a quote from an oil executive in the movie thriller Syriana comes to mind.

“You dig a six-foot hole and you’ll find three bodies. Dig 12 and maybe you’ll find 40.”

Let’s dig a little more and concentrate on the big ones.

Following the successful examples of Iceland and Ecuador from the 2008 financial meltdown, a Truth Committee on Public Debt is currently auditing the Greek debt.

The president of the Hellenic Parliament, Ms. Zoe Konstantopoulou, made the initial decision and set the work in motion April 4, 2015.

Why successful?

Under the participation of citizens and independent international finance experts on June 17, the parliamentary debt audit released its preliminary report with key findings and advice.

Cutting out, writing off the rotten parts of debt combined with democratic economic reforms, including towards public banking, have a good track record.

Not only in Ecuador and Iceland, but also Sweden, in 1992, rebuilt the economy, and restored credit worthiness and investor trust by clearing the air.

This is the exact opposite of the proven debt growing neoliberal restructuring and privatization that is well underway, expropriating Greek islands and gutting out heritage treasures, and to intensify new demands by an EU finance colonialism.

Further, the audit investigates criminal corruption and bribery through years, to the end of selling expensive German weaponry such as superfluous submarines and Leopard tanks to Greece.

Even now, forcing more German weapons deals on Greece, as a condition, is not off the negotiating table. Karlheinz Schreiber is everywhere.

A substantial debt write off within the euro currency poses the problem but also opportunity of novelty to set the right tone in an exercise for preventing events in the future.

The Troika, which is made up of the European Central Bank, the European Commission (essentially EU government), and the IMF, would be in a more credible negotiation position now, had they approached the situation in a more balanced way.

Instead, they had dug in on making an example of destruction of Greek people.

This was not very bright because a heavy-handed approach to make Greece obedient to rules makes no sense when these rules are shifting below people’s feet.

The Troika did one better than example setting, which was mostly left out in the Canadian mainstream media. It really interfered in Greece with a special interest political agenda.

They outright blocked proposals of the latest Greek plan to actually increase and restore tax revenue, which was brought forward before the referendum launch.

Tax evasion in Greece had increased sharply since 1999, a period that saw corporate income tax rate reductions from 40 to 25 per cent.

The drama of it can be understood a little better when adding to that four centuries of Ottoman rule which left behind a strong cultural sediment for social justice.

Poor people paying the taxes and debt the elites owe is much less acceptable in Islamic countries, which also means their banks came out clean in 2008.

Tax evasion is a problem in Greece and a business in Luxembourg, but it is caused and led by elite finance interests, not the ordinary people.

Before the referendum was launched, the EU negotiators had dug themselves into a bad hole when they insisted on their own neoliberal tax ideas even at the expense of some of the creditors they claimed to represent.

The preliminary audit report provides context to such conflicts of interest on page 13.

“The website LuxLeaks provides information on nine Greek firms which benefitted from ‘fiscal agreements’ with Luxemburg (shares with Holland EU tax hide outs as well as austerity speculation interests).

“These are Babcock & Brown, BAWAG, Bluehouse, Coca Cola HBC, Damma Holdings, Eurobank, Macquarie Group, Olayan Investments Company Establishment and Weather Investments.”

Especially the governments of Germany, Luxemburg and Holland, as the hardliners which are  lost most deeply in the austerity rabbit hole, overlook a simple human touch. The only example that counts now is one of integrity.

It’s not just Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece who are more than social democratic by name.

As official federal opposition and coalition partner in the government of several states (provinces), Die Linke (the left party) is gaining ground in Germany, and actually seems able to carry a conversation beyond worn-out platitudes, in Europe as well.

If there is an emerging social democratic shift in Greece, as in other European countries, we can understand it better when we look at what motivates and informs it and what doesn’t.

Certainly a comeback of McCarthyism does not intimidate it; other Cold War confusions or even echoes of Stalin’s charisma do not influence it.

The very last of those had already rung out during the Spanish civil war (1936-1939).

Part two, to be published Monday, will offer a glimpse into why public banking rules prevent debt runaway.

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.