Five LEAP Manifesto touch-ups to unite Canada, Whse Star April 27/28 2016

Photo by Photo Submitted

OBJECTING TO CARBON PRICING – Banners are shown at a Unist’ot’en First Nation pipeline blockade, situated roughly halfway on a line between Prince George and Prince Rupert, 60 km south of Houston B.C. Photo courtesy YES! Magazine photo by Stephen Miller

1/2 Five LEAP Manifesto touch-ups to unite Canada, Whse Star April 27, 2016

1) Following compelling statements, on page five, carbon pricing as “a progressive carbon tax” lets down climate survival, forgetting oil and gas expansion is driven through the carbon price frame.

A deal breaker, but it can be corrected, and here is why.

In jurisdictions from B.C. to the U.K., the carbon tax is a flat tax blaming ordinary people who have not made the bad energy infrastructure decisions.

It is never revenue-neutral, not progressive and not carbon-neutral. But it is used aggressively in leveraging and capitalizing carbon derivative speculation.

The carbon price scheme is rounded out with a demand for cap and trade using NDP Leader Tom Mulcair’s slogan “polluter pays” nothing.

By rewarding corporate polluters like Encana in B.C. with cash, cap and trade always distorts energy markets and caps renewables.

Cap and trade as an offset scheme caps emission reductions but not emissions.

It is also a facilitator for carbon accounting fraud, which is evidenced in the B.C. Auditor General’s special 2013 report An Audit of Carbon Neutral Government. Major emitters are excluded by deceptive design of policy itself, not imperfection.

The 2014 IPCC report recognizes conventional fuel taxes, contrary to the carbon tax, have worked and can work to generate and leverage renewable infrastructure investment.

So what is in a name?

Why is the carbon price terminology pushed forward so rigidly purified, so romantically and dogmatically when practical solutions are energy price and energy framework as well as agriculture-related?

The abstract carbon pricing language triggers ownership and policy control by Big Oil and Wall Street cartels, who like to dress in a supposedly market-responsive, friendly corner store image.

Carbon emissions range from cattles’ methane farts, corn-fed, not grass-fed, to air travel to petroleum resources burned in the manufacture of wind turbines. That is, until there are enough of them to make new ones with clean energy and hopefully soon enough.

The Policy Research Group of the University of Sussex released a peer-reviewed economics study on phasing out fossil fuels “within 10 years.”

Climate and other environmental factors along with economics of employment, profitability and conversion efficiencies, lessons learned from other industrial transitions, suggested a war economy pace has the best feasibility. And no mention of carbon pricing.

In fact, a unified carbon product to attach a price to does not exist anywhere – no more than camel’s milk and potato beetles could function as single agricultural market item outside of Wall Street’s creative criminal schemes.

A vacuity of meaninglessness serves to fill in optical illusions that hide and expand the prohibitively high carbon pricing we cannot afford as it is.

As one example, electric vehicles run a lot more cheaply than oil-fired ones.

Lack of fast-charge stations is obviously not a case for retail market signals but represents an infrastructure distortion.

Twisted neoliberal economics, with their carbon price talking points, hide and prolong facts like these.

It’s similar to how Big Tobacco did it; for Big Oil, the stakes are just too high to tolerate truly independent science and evidence. The false flag of the carbon price allows them to play both sides and control the environmental presence in the room.

Likewise, corrupting carbon price talk with its outflow of regulating/permitting crime and not banning fracking obviously played a role in co-opting the Yukon NDP caucus, Yukoners Concerned About Oil and Gas Exploration/Development and the Yukon Conservation Society.

Step by step, they assist and sell the Yukon government’s frack program, in its legal implementation.

This includes Oil and Gas Act amendments that have removed the oil and gas veto right of the Kaska people, amongst removing other obstacles to fracking. At face value, the mentioned entities oppose fracking, of course.

By 2030, Alberta will replace coal plants with, over life cycles, even dirtier frack gas-powered ones.

Like in B.C., frack gas is climate solution number one, digging the carbon hole deeper and far into the future (Oregon fully replaces coal with wind by 2030).

Dimming down awareness is one more carbon pricing strategy that favours such deceptive climate solutions.

It is the idea, sometimes explicit, sometimes subliminal, that CO2 is the only problem of burning fossil resources as an energy source. A single-issue regulatory sausage maker comes in handy for tar and frack recruiters.

This is comforting to all super-polluters in carbon and uranium-based energy sectors that carbon price language hides seven-fold prohibitive impacts.

Fossil/nuclear cartels generate harm against climate, clean water/air/land, democracy, peace, industrial resource preservation, energy/food security as well as energy affordability.

In its preface of the study Carbon Trading – How it Works and Why it Fails, the widely respected Swedish Dag Hammarskjold Foundation speaks for all scientists and economists, I am aware of, who have actually examined climate and energy policies:

“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 (off-set) trading.”

Amy Miller’s book and movie Carbon Rush add to comprehensive community education on cynical carbon pricing mechanisms that accelerate and incentivize greenhouse gas emission increases.

So did Judy Deutsch for the magazine Canadian Dimension, winter 2016 issue, with the title: “Willful blindness kills hope for climate change reversal”, who wrote:

“Much is left out about carbon taxes. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (senior economist Marc Lee) found that the B.C. carbon tax is a regressive tax, disproportionately benefitting the rich, and that it did not reduce emissions.

“In Australia and B.C., it deflects attention from coal mining, natural gas, outsourcing heavy industry, Kyoto-exempt shipping.”

The Mining Association of Canada rolled out a big media release in claqueur style lobbying for a carbon tax, fully detached from evidence and critical reasoning.

NDP Leader Liz Hanson and Liberal leader Sandy Silver picked it up right away as opportunity to get in on the carbon pricing talk.

Hanson flip-flopped on a previous statement by MLA Kate White on behalf of the Yukon NDP that there is no plan for a carbon tax.

Premiers Darrell Pasloski and Brad Wall of Saskatchewan, similarly to White, had stated a carbon tax is currently neither affordable nor needed.

However, they concurred it is supposedly more or less positive.

On that basis, everybody can get into the “Carbon Pricing Club” tomorrow morning if they feel nobody is watching.

A World Bank internal strategy paper with the Carbon Pricing Club subtitle, to advance elite finance interests, was leaked recently.

The April 2011 membership resolution for the Yukon NDP to “… in government, or opposition, engage in a dynamic exploration and development of a comprehensive Yukon Green Energy Act” continues to be stonewalled by the NDP caucus.

The father of renewable energy source legislation, late Hermann Scheer, provided accounts in Energy Autonomy of how the carbon price routine consistently serves to stop green energy acts and by talking renewables down to cosmetic levels.

Carbon pricing is and was meant to be a tool to build new pipelines, not to stop them.

Mulcair and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley clearly won out on that account of their overall wrong-headed argument against the LEAP Manifesto at this month’s Edmonton NDP convention.

The second part of this two-part commentary, to be published Thursday, suggests renewable energy source legislation as a proven tool to address the climate crisis, why specifically so-called free trade is undemocratic, highlights international solidarity and respects that oil and gas are vital as a petrochemical manufacturing resource.

2/2 Five LEAP Manifesto touch ups to unite Canada, Whse Star, April 28, 2016

Part one of this two-part commentary, published Wednesday, looked at why the carbon price needs to come out of the manifesto.

2) Green energy legislative frameworks unfortunately are not mentioned in the LEAP Manifesto.

The 2014 IPCC report does point out that the carbon price has no successful track record to lower emissions as opposed to green energy legislative frameworks.

And yes, the Ontario Green Energy Act works great also in democratizing energy industries and with cheap electrons for people.

Examples are regions with independent utilities such as Sault Ste. Marie that are less sabotaged by Ontario Hydro and the carbon pricing of Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government.

3) It would be more clear to not say “trade deal” when antidemocratic agreements such as the TPP with (il)legal protectionism for multinationals are the issue.

This way, discussing the upstream root cause of free trade harms is encouraged, including of Chapter 11 Investment in NAFTA and Chapter 9 Investment in the TPP.

Free trade is not about trade but about transferring legislative powers from parliaments to multinationals.

Former Canadian prime minister John Turner pointed out that trade issues without an undemocratic agenda are added on to GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs).

He was clear: free trade deals are not trade agreements.

Turner famously remarked his advantage over former prime minister Brian Mulroney was to have actually read NAFTA. Sometimes I wish I was not the only Yukoner with the Turner edge.

Obviously, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair can make no such claim. 

During the 2015 election, he tried to block awareness on the TPP by limiting concerns to supply management details. Mulcair’s characterizations of free trade are false.

Contrary to his understanding, renewable energy, as well as environmental legislation in Quebec and Ontario, have recently been attacked under NAFTA Chapter 11.

It is not as proactive as reading one’s homework assignments. Nevertheless, Mulcair is being taught hard knock lessons.

Canadian voters, convention delegates, Turner, potential U.S. presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and, embarrassingly, Donald Trump, all talk plainly about false free trade. There are lessons also for the LEAP Manifesto.

4) International solidarity as a Canadian value is slim in the manifesto. Getting the carbon price out of it would improve that.

Carbon pricing is a flag of colonial economic warfare today. 

Under it, many social democrats, liberals and environmentalists join in the corporate attack on their sisters and brothers, especially in the Global South.

That is a difficult truth that can be understood better when put in the context of another betrayal at the top of great magnitude that still echoes today.

It does so for some who want an international architecture for peace aside to prayers.

Before the guns of August 1914, the world had hung in the balance for decades.

The counter point to a chaos of military alliances was an iron-clad determination for peace of the Socialist International, as most functional diplomatic agreement of its day.

A monstrous war and industrialized killing were to be shut down before getting fully started with political general strikes from Great Britain to France to Russia and other places.

The Social Democratic Party of Germany, representing the largest socialist and labour movement on Earth, played a lead role.

“All wheels are standing still, If a strong arm so will “ are remembered today as once powerful fighting words for peace (Alle Räder stehen still wenn dein starker Arm es will, a line of a labour union song by Georg Herwegh).

However, between 1896 and 1898. Eduard Bernstein released a series of articles under the title Probleme des Sozialismus.

It became the catalyst for a reorientation from socialism to liberalism, namely in the party’s leadership.

As an unintended consequence, international friendship was weakened and the political general strike for peace promise was hollowed out. Ironically, as MP in the Reichstag alongside Karl Liebknecht, Bernstein came to vote against most war bills and bonds.

Perhaps the most sensitive of socialist organizers and writers as well as a critic of militarism, Rosa Luxemburg picked up on the dangerous developments immediately.

Luxemburg was already known as a visionary scholar and humanist who, as another first, had developed a solid grasp of industrial resource colonialism.

Some are familiar with her quote: “Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters.”

Through 1898/99 in the Neue Leibziger Zeitung, she published instalments of Reform or Revolution, a landmark book that is read and is relevant today.

I believe Rosa Luxemburg has a warning for modern environmentalists not to become a historical footnote of global injustice.

The carbon price message in essence meets halfway the Fox News climate deniers in attacking climate science and justice.

Climate science involves a proven understanding of an accumulative greenhouse gas impact through decades and centuries of human-induced industrial emissions.

Carbon pricing mechanisms only refer to current emission levels as relevant and therefore are not science-based, contrary to what is invoked by the manifesto.

The G-77 countries have explicitly and to the best of their powers opposed carbon pricing in Copenhagen, Lima and Paris also by insisting on “common but differentiated responsibilities.”

The non-Western focus is on leapfrogging toward renewables, protest marches against carbon pricing are common. The carbon price becomes part of so-called structural adjustments of International Monetary Foundation and World Bank that are starving the poor countries.

It does so by shackling them to oil imports for which alone around 50 countries expend more than their entire foreign currency reserves.

“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.” said Antonio Marcondes, Brazil’s representative at the 2014 Lima climate conference.

5) The manifesto fails to recognize the long-term relevance of oil and gas. Particularly conventional oil and gas are vitally important and need preserving as a petrochemical manufacturing resource for renewable economies through seven and likely many more generations.

People understand that burning things is different from building things. 

Big Oil’s subsidy hunger disagrees, especially in fracking and tar steam extraction which have no useful net energy output.

The Pembina Institute is among those who have failed Albertans badly in not drawing such an important line in the tar sand.

We pay close attention since Pembina fronted for the Yukon government’s frack agenda, in a 2013 hearing in Whitehorse.

Being unclear on the fundamentals creates divisions needlessly by alienating far too many people on all sides, such as during this month’s convention of Canada’s New Democrats in Edmonton.

Let’s talk.

I encourage the LEAP Manifesto to remain short or become more brief by being more specific where it matters and by naming names of acupuncture points on problems.

Misunderstandings, such as wanting to do away with the oil and gas industry immediately, are already thrown at the manifesto and may be avoided.

Clean and succinct language matter so that finance and oil PR firms with their divisive platitudes, who by 1985 had invented the carbon price, have less power over people.

Nnimmo Bassey of Health of Mother Earth Foundation shows how it’s done:

“The Paris Agreement locks in fossil fuels and, to underscore corporate capture of the negotiations, the word ‘fossil’ is not as much as mentioned in the document.”

So does Gwynne Dyer in his latest climate update, “Ponder a non-linear climate emergency”.

We are in cascading feedback loops already, and the assumptions of Paris are obsolete.

But most worrisome, in donkey’s years of writing books and columns, Mr. Dyer, possibly for the first time, has lost his trademark subtle irony and sarcasm.

An internal bank manual for the Carbon Pricing Club

An internal bank manual for the Carbon Pricing Club (Whitehorse Star Comment March 30, 2016)

The club image as a signal for special finance interests looks cynical, but the honesty of it is a refreshing contrast to the World Bank’s generally false advertising of fighting poverty with free trade and the climate crisis with carbon pricing.

The Institute For Climate Economics, I4CE, in Paris, posted an unusual and very tight 10-page set of sales instructions and recruiting strategies that comes in big fat letters.

It is authored by Dr. Venkata Putti, the program manager of the World Bank’s Carbon Finance Unit, http://goo.gl/6b8LvA .

The front page poses the question and thread: Towards a Carbon Pricing Club on the Road to and through COP21? 

The document headline reads: WBG Carbon Pricing Initiatives: Building and Linking the Next Generation of Carbon Markets.

Graphically, a winding labyrinth is laid out for processing financial derivative, carbon tax leveraged products and related expansion of sales and PR networks (renewable energy is unmentioned). Here is the abbreviated list of seven main stations:

1. CPLC, Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition;

2. PMR, Partnership for Market Readiness;

3. CADF, Carbon Asset Development Fund;

4. PAF, Pilot Auction Facility;

5. NCM, Networked Carbon Markets;

6. CPF, Carbon Partnership Facility;

7. T-CAF, Transformative Carbon Asset Fund

“Carbon markets in the Paris agreement – an early holiday gift” says a Dec. 17, 2015 blog posting by Vikram Widge, head of Climate and Carbon Finance at the World Bank Group.

As somebody who remembers the 2008/09 financial heist, I cannot help to notice the sinister flavour of this obfuscation gobbledigook has investor fraud written all over it.

The concern is legitimate that the lack of transparency in financial product design is helping those who would embezzle people out of their retirement savings and seek a carbon money laundry for criminal gains.

What is in a name or in a name change?

The World Bank still exists, but a lot of its business is carried out as WBG, World Bank Group, which is the World Bank plus three add-ons, including the anti-democratic free trade enforcer ICISD. 

The International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes participates in overruling parliaments in Quebec and Ontario against environmental and renewable energy legislations, under NAFTA Chapter 11 Investment. 

WBG’s ICISD is engaging in direct intervention to increase greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.

Elsewhere, the World Bank’s trail of action since the days of the Marshall Plan has become a questionable one as well.

Following the post-Second World War era, the World Bank has changed its economics focus to a political one.

So-called structural adjustment programs, SAPs, play a role as tools of World Bank and IMF that throughout the Global South are understood to be neo-colonial and anti-development in their orientation.

Around 50 of the poorest countries spend more than their entire foreign reserves on oil imports alone.

The World Bank co-ordinates carbon pricing mechanisms with SAPs towards restricting renewable development to cosmetic insignificance. 

The results are devastating for environment, energy/food security and economy.

Generally, SAP enforcement by World Bank and IMF, aligned with free trade deals, oppose democratic institutions such as parliaments, medicare, education and unions.

Economically, the WBG restricts value adding, wealth building, exporting industries in favour of poverty, debt and pushing raw resource exploitation. 

Looking at the hypocrisy of internal and public World Bank communication, one particular aspect of false language contaminates or suppresses discourse these days.

It is the idea, sometimes explicit, sometimes subliminal, that CO2 is the only problem of burning fossil resources as energy source. 

This is comforting to super-polluters in carbon and uranium extraction that carbon price language hides seven-fold prohibitive impacts (and disproportionally blames little guys who make no infrastructure decisions).

Fossil/nuclear cartels generate harm against climate, clean water/air/land, democracy, peace, industrial resource preservation, energy/food security, market economy and energy affordability.

Dimming down awareness is one more carbon pricing strategy that favours deceptive climate solutions like gas fracking in B.C. and Yukon or subsidizing Royal Dutch Shell’s failed leaky carbon sequestration tinkering in Alberta and Saskatchewan. 

What jumps out from the Carbon Pricing Club document is a cancerous ambition to fill all policy and manoeuvring space with inflated circular thinking. It is to get everybody to chase their carbon price tails, to suck the oxygen right out of even seeing anything that can make sense. 

As in the broader and substantial World Bank PR on carbon pricing, the club is about ignoring clean energy source legislation, sustainable economies or allocating fuel/alcohol taxes towards renewable infrastructure initiative.

High-profile environmentalists David Suzuki, Bill McKibben or, locally, John Streicker and the Yukon Conservation Society, invoke the impression that carbon pricing is science-based or even recommended by the IPCC. Distortions are reminiscent of World Bank language.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expressed no such thing. From the beginning in 1988, it had set down evidence-based principles which continue in the up-to-date 2013/14 Fifth Assessment Report, AR5. 

The IPCC assessment reports on the climate crisis come out of three working groups:

• Working Group I reviewed climate science; 

• Working Group II reviewed climate adaptation; and

• Working Group III reviewed climate mitigation.

The adaptation and mitigation working groups refer to carbon pricing and its hypothetical input assumptions critically and separate to climate science.

It is discussed as theory that has no evidence nor shred of empirical proof to support what never worked. 

Proven climate solutions, of renewable legislative frameworks and of cutting fossil subsidies, to fight greenhouse gas emissions are substantively recognized and ranked highly by the IPCC. 

Given the academic light weight of the carbon price which to date has not survived a single examination by economists that I am aware of, the amount of PR traction involved is nothing short of astonishing.

We need to remember the carbon price title was not randomly chosen by marketing brains 30 some years ago.

The hollow abstraction of it that matches nothing and everything is what oil and finance profiteers require to design their needs into it. 

On March 11, 2016, Keith Halliday, the Yukon News columnist, prolific carbon price and frack proponent, flip-flopped on carbon tax and trade.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, Yukon Premier Darrell Pasloski and Takhini-Kopper King MLA Kate White, on behalf of the Yukon NDP caucus, have made similar public statements.

While in the new consensus a carbon tax is supposedly a more or less positive instrument, it is currently not affordable nor needed. On that basis, everybody can get (back) into it tomorrow morning if they feel nobody is watching. 

The NDP further has the carbon trading agenda of the club on its books and has not let go of it. In no way is that coming clean on the stuff that is unethical and deceptive all around.

Does that make Halliday, Wall, Pasloski and White fence-sitting politicians, fifth column or sleeper cell for the Carbon Price Country Club (CPCC)?

Editorial exposes déjà-vu of Kaska deal (16 Feb. 2016 Whse Star)

The strength of the Star editorial from Feb. 10 was in holding to account the current deal signed by the Yukon government and Kaska chief against the failed aspirations of the somewhat identically presented 2003 deal.

And in pointing out that a legitimate process would have needed to be transparent on how it is interwoven to the preceding deal, and that it would have needed the support of the Kaska citizenry, who apparently do not consent.

I might add even more context by pointing out these are Kaska citizens who have not swallowed the Dec. 13, 2012 annulling of their veto right to oil and gas development, a removal of rights which continues in the 2015 amended Oil and Gas Act.

And unfortunately they face a much bigger problem, made bigger by the opposition NDP and Liberal party as well as the Yukon Conservation Society.

All could have said no, but chose to become part of the problem and support the act to come online.

Alberta carbon price plan ambushes clean energy (4 Mar. 2016 Whse Star coloumn)

Blacked out is renewable energy source legislation from Denmark to Texas to China that have become legend for reducing emissions and leveraging employment. 

Adopted is the oil industry’s and Wall Street’s carbon tax agenda, which shifts blame to people and subsidizes carbon increases.

Gordon Laxer, a veteran energy analyst from the University of Alberta’s Parkland Institute, finished his Dec. 3, 2015 piece in the Edmonton Journal, “Opinion: Alberta’s climate plan stands in the way of Canada’s”, with the observation:

“Getting the NDP’s backing on expanding the oil sands lends more credibility than Big Oil could have got from a Conservative Alberta government. No wonder Big Oil is smiling. It’s time to reboot Layton’s dream” (of actually cutting emissions).

The carbon price-centred Alberta process lacks balance in single-mindedly adopting the recommendations of those close to corporatism, exemplified by its chair, Andrew Leach, from the Alberta School of Business.

Ignored are all investigations into these mechanisms.

Those include investigations by the Guardian, Harper’s Magazine and the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, which exclusively found corrupt carbon price designs that incentivize greenhouse gas emission increases.

Mitch Jones reported for foodandwaterwatch.org on Sept. 9, 2014, “Why a Carbon Tax Won’t Save the Climate”. Jones agrees with the financial services industry on an important point. Carbon taxes and carbon derivative trade are one beast.

B.C. Auditor General Doyle observed in 2013 that carbon taxes are not revenue-neutral, as falsely claimed by the B.C. government, typical for carbon pricers. 

Jones: “Wall Street hopes to build new financial markets and speculative financial instruments like those that brought down the global economy in 2007.”

Alberta’s carbon tax strategy as a launch tool for carbon derivative markets, separate to the real economy but siphoning investment from it, uses the playbook from B.C., the U.K. and Australia.

Economists Dr. Lynne Chester and Stuart Rosewarne, University of Sidney, lived through the carbon tax episode in Australia and were baffled by surprises.

In the very week the Gillard government enacted the carbon tax, it rolled back the renewable energy framework.

In 2011, Chester and Rosewarne published an interesting paper examining financial markets that generate subsidy structures towards fossil resource cartel interests, funded by the taxpayer, under the title: “What is the relationship between derivative markets and carbon prices?”

“More recently, Prime Minister Gillard announced an intention to introduce a carbon tax from mid 2012 to apply for three to five years until the implementation of a carbon trading scheme.”

Following the Gillard logic, the Alberta plan calls for tar sands emissions to expand from currently around 70 million tons of emissions a year to 100 million tons, and describes it as cap, which it is not.

There is a commitment to phase out coal by 2030, significant for Alberta electrical generation.

It is to be replaced with over its life cycle with even dirtier fracked gas, which is deceptively lumped in with renewables as “cleaner electrical supply.”

This reorientation from coal to fracking flavours the entire corrupt process. 

The plan for more, not less fracking appears recklessly based on oil cartel interests, bound to deepen economic disaster and unemployment.

China, ahead of Germany, shows how it’s done. Wind power grew over 100-fold since the 2008 financial heist.

Economics, energy security and affordability are the main drivers in the transition, even ahead of emissions concerns, recently phasing out brand new coal plants.

Economic decline in Alberta became visible with a lowering crude price during the second half of 2014.

However, already in 2013, problems accelerated when the price for one barrel hovered firmly above $100.

Because of growing unconventional reserve replacement, namely shale fracking and tar steam extraction that have no net returns, 2013 profits of the five Big Oil players had remarkably contracted by more than 25 per cent.

Not just in the Star and other independents but in the corporate mainstream media, the facts were widely reported. They are facts that cannot be repaired with returning higher prices, but can only deepen in their impact.

This happened after over a decade of continuous profit increases that had dipped only once during the financial heist of 2008/09.

Yet there is no awareness nor mention of such relevant facts in a document that needlessly incurs future debt by throwing more good money after bad.

The purpose of the carbon pricing terminology is to activate a well-grooved mechanism that is a trigger signalling to elite climate undertakers the feeding trough of carbon tax revenue.

By its nature, a carbon tax, similar to a sales tax, is always a regressive tax, a flat tax and never progressive nor socially fair.

In contrast, a fuel or alcohol tax can be transparently allocated by government toward clean energy infrastructure investments.

The unified carbon tax, for in reality widely differing products, has a vacuous abstract title for a reason. It is to fill in harm and prevent benefits for people and environment.

Tucked away within endless arrays of bureaucratic platitudes, a language of increased emitter privileges, permits and rights in the Alberta climate strategy further underpins multinational corporations’ powers to legislate under free trade agreements.

Unconstitutional powers of NAFTA chapter 11 Investment have already been exercised against environmental protections and renewable energy development in Quebec and Ontario. More undemocratic hostilities can be expected from CETA and TPP (former PM John Turner: real trade items are updated in GATT).

The plan falsely assigns the role of climate solution provider to the oil and gas industry with hard targets to accelerate emission increases for decades to come. Renewables are given meaningless, anecdotal mention, when, cost competitively, they are in a position to replace coal and more.

The plan is so badly one-sided, it was impossible to anticipate before reading it. Renewables can replace obsolete coal-fired electrical generation without stepping on the toes of a single existing oil and gas operation, but are shut out.

Unfortunately, the unscientific and dishonest Alberta process is now invited as a model for climate consultations in Yukon by Stuart Clark, John Maissan and Richard Price (a University of Alberta professor).

They take carbon price encouragement from Keith Halliday and John Streicker.

Electric cars and trucks are about 10 times cheaper to fuel up and service than equivalent combustion-powered ones. 

Obviously, there is an infrastructure flaw of lacking fast charge points and initial EV purchase rebates, not a retail market problem.

Ten-fold, that is how far out of touch the carbon tax proposal is with its five- or 15-percent price signal at the pump to supposedly nudge people’s behaviour.

General Motors Corp. has done its homework. The brainchild of CEO Mary T. Barra, the 2016/17 Chevy Bolt (not Volt) is essentially a half-price Tesla car with its 200-mile driving range.

With one 20-minute or so charge top-up, it can go from Whitehorse to Watson Lake, and likewise anywhere crosscountry without range anxiety.

The proposed carbon flat tax may take the economic freedom and dignity of lower-income people to buy an electric car, a bus pass, or force them to take their kids out of hockey practice and music lessons.

Made poorer by carbon pricing, the carbon tax won’t stop them driving to shop for groceries even more often than before to stay on top of deals, food bank hampers, etc. Underlying cynicism and vanity of the carbon price ideology are disturbing.

Homeless people with minimal or close to zero carbon footprints receive zero carbon credit benefits in the Alberta green washer process that directly rewards emission increases of big polluters.

Political fault lines of carbon pricing are not exactly what some think they are. The previous Conservative government already implemented part of Alberta Premier Rachel Notley’s plan. And the most right-wing government in Canada then as now, B.C., has the most aggressive oil and gas subsidy regime.

Carbon flat tax dividends and carbon offset rewards are paid directly to gas frack operator Encana, whose emissions are to a significant degree excluded from carbon accounting.

Underneath false populist double talk, then-prime minister Stephen Harper had given full blessing to these mechanisms enacted by two carbon pricing governments.

The ethics code for professional engineers restrains statements made as an engineer to the scope of one’s trade competence.

And yet engineers Stuart Clark and John Maissan underwrote, with professional credentials in bold letters, what I believe are unsubstantiated political leanings in their Yukon News commentary on Feb. 17.

NDP brings in Bill McKibben and bad climate advice (Whse Star column 8 Mar. 2016)

It seems out of touch with the still carbon price confused energy and climate conversation in Yukon where, e.g. an S. David Freeman, who has headed and converted power utilities towards renewables and wrote All Electric America, could have inspired solutions.

At this critical point where Prof. Mark Jaccard, a climate modeller and former figure head of carbon pricing, Simon Fraser University, is backing out, the NDP invites Bill McKibben.

His climate crisis awareness we already have, and his increasingly muddleheaded digging deeper of the carbon price hole, we don’t need.

The choice of speaker for the Change 2016 event is equally out of touch with the climate and energy conversation in Canada, where the rats are beginning to leave the sinking carbon price ship. And not just in the Vancouver Declaration of the recent first ministers’ conference.

The event organizers could have done one better and combine McKibben’s carbon tax emphasis with David Suzuki, who is one more excellent academic and speaker who got himself lost in the policy mine field.

It would have covered the scope of Big Oil and Wall Street climate strategy.

Quite possibly, the Yukon Conservation Society, which, like Suzuki, proudly recruits for carbon derivative trading, would have pitched in.

But three decades of carbon price ideology in instrument and propaganda have incentivized and accelerated emission increases consistently and done enough harm deepening the climate crisis (the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation provided one of many studies).

McKibben brings even more baggage to burden Yukon, where oil and gas resources are only accessible by fracking.

Bill McKibben continues to tickle investors and governments with supposedly $20 trillion of value in the ground they should not touch.

Whereas oil and gas industry data show reserves that are largely unconventional and actually are a financial liability in geological characteristic, which is covered up by more layers of fraud against taxpayers and investors through inflated volume numbers (Deborah Rogers, David Hughes, Art Berman).

2/2 Lacking leadership on energy and climate policy

Lacking leadership on energy and climate policy 2/2 ( Coloumn Whse Star 28 Jan. 2016 )

Part one of this two-part commentary, published Wednesday, rebutted NDP Leader Liz Hanson’s conclusions from her participation in the Climate and Energy Policy in Germany – Study Tour, where she had skipped the policy part.

And not for the first time, which is indicative of not understanding energy and energy security.

It is energy infrastructure policy that lags behind, that limits or drives development, especially a more democratic economic development.

The hang-up with public energy initiative is a confusion of how market competition works.

And yes, it centres on the Scottish enlightenment philosopher and trail blazer of political economy from the 1700s, Adam Smith.

Smith was a practical thinker, not a right-wing ideologue as some on the left or right would like him to be.

In The Wealth of Nations, a broad tract on economics, he wrote about the free citizens and their welfare, not corporate rights. He intelligently described complex, regulated markets; never a free market. 

At a later date, fraudsters and hucksters inspired by novelist Ayn Rand have edited the free market onto his name to squash freedom and obfuscate economics in favour of elites.

They should read The Wealth of Nations and pay attention to “the disorders which generally prevail in the economy of the rich.”

Bad idea to latch onto the distorted version of Smith, which is all too common for politicians of all stripes.

Smith can help us understand the role Big Oil plays today, which was not born by competition but as a military institution inherited from the First World War era.

On the bottom line, oil and gasoline were always expensive but offered more range and faster refuelling to warships and trucks than coaling stations and electrical batteries.

Similarly, the concept of power utility fiefdoms had not been competitive until war production logistics seemed justified in heaping golden handshakes and de facto taxation authority on them.

Once entrenched, these big fossil, big hydro, big nuclear players get to stay rowdies and bullies that break competition laws and shut down markets.

We had forgotten to readjust Big Oil’s deeply layered war subsidies back to a peacetime level. Now is as good as any time to remember and fix that.

Renewables need to be freed from shackles and straightjackets put on them by the carbon and mental fossils in a big zero sum scenario.

Too often, it might falsely appear that, for example, a fast charge net for electric vehicles (EVs) is not necessary, as gas stations are already around.

And supposedly, EVs are no good because they can’t make it cross-country to the next charge point.

It is break-out time from silly chicken or egg and status quo conundrums, that corporate media chase their own tails with.

That is what a green energy act achieves. It involves not subsidies but investments and structures to massively leverage private investments. 

Just the fact that fuelling and servicing of EVs is about 10 times cheaper now than equivalent oil-powered ones gives an idea on the direction of the industrial expansion of the renewable electron, which is a marginal cost of zero, similar to diminished costs of digital bytes or bits. 

Ten times! Consider again the economic absurdity of the carbon price, which is infatuated and blinded with nickel-and-diming people.

It rejects any awareness of bringing the cost down with renewables for doing business in the community.

It’s a question of life and death in poor countries and neighbourhoods when they are starved into the fossil fuel money drain by carbon pricing mechanisms.

Looking at restructuring energy policy, it is important to recognize that the electron has proven a superior efficiency and upwards trajectory through more than two centuries of industrial revolution. Green energy legislation does not pick winners.

That’s because it is a game that was decided when electric telegraphs became a cutting-edge communication tool during the French Revolution, when Ányos István Jedlik built the first electric motor in 1827, Michael Faraday assembled workable electric generators in the 1830s, Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel put together a functional photovoltaic solar cell in 1839 and Gaston Planté created the first rechargeable electric battery in 1859.

Renewable technology is competitive but also democratic because, decentralized and unlike oil and gas, coal, hydro and uranium, it can be resourced anywhere at much greater capacities. 

Necessary measures to reopen the renewable door were, unlike the big oil, big utility case, never meant to be around without sunset.

This is a principle and road map commitment that is contracted into all green energy legislations.

Hanson and all her legislature colleagues may have been intellectually lazy not thinking this through.

But the ball keeps bouncing, and there are consequences.

Christopher Hayes, a journalist with The Nation Magazine, wrote about this neoliberal error in his book Twilight of the Elites. 

The Yukon NDP caucus is out of touch with what he calls a post-truth environment.

It is really dumb, setting oneself up for no reward and to be attacked demagogically either way, regardless of selling out or of keeping integrity.

The Yukon NDP caucus talks a good line on energy while covering up its actions and inactions that have let Yukoners down, which amounts to a scandal of which we are only beginning to scratch the surface. 

In 2015, they signed the pro-frack select committee report and voted for what amounts to a deceptively amended oil and frack act.

Lessons have been learned. In it, hydro-fracking or unconventional drilling in any variation or derivation of terminology or meaning are not even mentioned once. 

Under this disguise of conventional drilling, the amended act is a clear admission that fracking cannot be regulated. It is all about fracking, as Yukon has zero proven conventional oil and gas reservoirs.

Expect a Hanson-led NDP government to underground carpet-bomb (industry jargon for late-edition brute-force fracking) this place into a hellishly shattered pathway chaos for toxin migrations, while still opposing fracking. 

Contrary to those perspectives, there is no time to lose for infrastructure initiative, which takes a little while. But it is suppressed with illusions of frack outputs.

In reality, those are scarce in net energy gain, are price-volatile, hyper-subsidized, erratic in production and drop off swiftly everywhere. 

Predictable energy security and affordability are a huge concern for a cold and vulnerable Yukon with long lifelines.

It was crucial for the Yukon Party government to bring the opposition onside in substance.

Frack wars, like other wars, are highly destructive and disruptive, and require this kind of uniformity for crisis management. The MLAs did not have to take those decisions but chose them anyway.

Disingenuous or frack turncoat behaviours by the leadership unfairly demobilize NDP supporters, which is what already happened in recent federal, Nova Scotia and B.C. elections. Also, it nudges governments generally from bad to worse, which is unjust for everybody.

Whereas outside the territory, four energy pillars are consistently being legislated in a growing number of jurisdictions. They were first introduced to Yukon by the author in a Star op-ed from Oct. 27, 2010: “Yukon Green Energy Act: When?” (yukonblogger). 

“• No cap on program size, no cap on project size;

• Investment priority for solar/renewable over conventional energies; 

• Guaranteed feed-in access to the grid together with guaranteed feed-in tariffs;

• Establishment of a fast charge point infrastructure threshold to enable the use of electrical cars, trucks and buses everywhere.”

1/2 Lacking leadership on energy and climate policy (Coloumn Whse Star 27 Jan. 2016)

Lacking leadership on energy and climate policy (Coloumn Whse Star 27 Jan. 2016)

Liz Hanson’s letter in the Jan. 11 Star about her participation in a popular program of the German Foreign Office, the Climate and Energy Policy in Germany – Study Tour left out the policy part – the Renewable Energy Sources Act from 1999 (EEG). 

It starts to look like evasion.

Renewable economies and energy security have been ignored or diminished to sentiment by the Yukon New Democratic Party (YNDP) caucus and executive in almost every way that mattered since the party convention of April 2011 delivered a clear mandate.

The membership had resolved for the YNDP to “… in government, or opposition, engage in a dynamic exploration and development of a comprehensive Yukon Green Energy Act.”

Yet, the word “energy” did not make it into the five platform priorities of the YNDP during the 2011 territorial election. That created the opportunity for the Yukon Party, campaigning on fossil energy, to exploit the vacuum.

In five years’ time, the YNDP caucus never made an attempt to table renewable energy source legislation. It never mentioned nor discussed it in public; never asked a single pertaining question in the legislature.

The late Herman Scheer, once a longtime social democratic MP of the German parliament, is recognized as the architect of the EEG and the energy transition (Energiewende) which Renewable Energy Sources Legislation gave birth to.

If not Ms. Hanson’s, he has other readers’ attention on where failure comes from.

In his landmark book Energy Autonomy, Scheer explains: “… EUROSOLAR had warned in its campaign ‘our air is not for sale’; that carbon trading slowed down the transition to emissions-free energy supply rather than speeding it up.”

Independently of economist Scheer, the author of All Electric America, the engineer S. David Freeman, after a life of heading and reforming power utilities toward renewables, had come to the same conclusion. 

Carbon taxes, with revenue-neutral pretense or otherwise, and carbon trading both are structurally, intentionally and, through experiences, such as in B.C., the enemy of renewables, in other ways also. 

One is an accelerated depletion for fuel purposes of vital petrochemical manufacturing resources, which is irresponsible.

Fossil combustion for the purpose of heat and much of transportation is being competitively replaced step by step, but alternative manufacturing resources are not there anytime soon. 

Put a price on carbon, as if there was none.

By ways of deceptive marketing psychology and greenwashing slogans, adopting the cigarette industry model, subsidies, misinformation and polluter rights are expanded on behalf of outdated fossil energy cartels. 

Indeed, the counterproductive carbon pricing dogma prevented renewable policy initiative and unbiased listening in the minds of some, even before they would become government. 

Expect the drama to continue of popular economics/ecology-based common sense against rigid, elite managerialism during the NDP convention on April 30 leading up to another territorial election.

“Over the course of our tour, we repeatedly heard about the importance of civil society in pressing governments and energy corporations to make the move towards a renewable energy future.”

It is the exact opposite of what my contacts in German solar projects tell me, and goes against the core of zero emission development.

Exxon, Shell, Big Coal and other combustive cartels lobby hard for legislating carbon pricing mechanisms and against renewable source acts to unnaturally limit the clean electron to cosmetic levels.

The fossil actors have and desire no relevant role in the renewable transition, a fact that is not caused but recognized by renewable energy source legislations. Steam trains and rail lines were not built by coach makers, and so it is now.

“Back home, I hope to connect with Yukon College’s Northern Research Centre to follow up on some proposals for ongoing exchange between Yukon and Germany.”

Talking to the Yukon Research Centre people and drawing from their excellent renewable technologies archives is always interesting.

In the context of energy policy, the letter continues being misleading to the public because policy is so far not the expertise and agenda of the centre, what really is Ms. Hanson’s, MLA Jim Tredger’s and their MLA colleagues’ job. 

Like many politicians’ statements, Ms. Hanson’s letter has conflated policy with technology; she is hiding behind an anecdotal approach. More global thinking and local postponing in the Copenhagen and Paris fashion is not what Yukoners want.

It is out of touch with energy markets, industrial, civic and climate realities.

Technologies always improve, but much of the renewable set has been turnkey-viable for years and decades.

Not understanding energy policy and energy security is trouble. 

The second part of this two-part commentary, to be published tomorrow, shows it in more detail and where the thinking has derailed, but also leads to some practical corrections and perspectives.