Canada and global warming: a state of denial 2

CBC Power and Politics is reporting that the First Nations youth and elders at the UN COP25 Climate Change Conference involved in protesting the Teck Frontier oilsands mine (described in the previous post) that would be one of the largest in Alberta history, producing 260,000 barrels of bitumen per day have been detained for participating in  unauthorized protests at the Canadian embassy and at COP25. National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations Perry Bellegarde is trying to obtain their release. Below is a press release from the Indigenous Climate Action group involved in the protests at the Canadian embassy and at COP25. 

Two symbolic protests were held in the city of Madrid, Spain yesterday. In the morning at the Canadian embassy and later in the day, inside the COP 25 UN Climate negotiations. The protests were led by Indigenous youth and elders with the support of Indigenous Climate Action and their partners from across Canada and the USA. At the Canadian embassy in the morning, the group held ceremonies, prayer, and rallied participants to add their voices to a long list demanding Canada reject the Teck Frontier mine, the biggest proposed surface mine ever in the history of the Alberta tar sands. A report released last week by 17 research and campaigning organizations used oil and gas industry projections to show that Canada will be one of the worst violators of the Paris Agreement if it expands its oil and gas extraction as planned, second only to the United States. Rejecting the Teck Frontier Mine is an important first step the federal government can take to ensure a safe climate future.

This morning at the Madrid Canadian embassy, representative of the Dene Nation, Elder Francois Paulette declared that all thirty three First Nations of the Dene Nation including his home community of Fort Smith Landing are unified in their opposition to the Teck Frontier mine and any further expansion of the Alberta tar sands.

“My First Nation the Smith Landing First Nation in Alberta, we outright opposed the teck project. Its 30 km south of Wood Buffalo National Park. This project did not consult with us, their report did not include Indigenous peoples traditional knowledge. As long as traditional knowledge of First Nations is missing from your report, you are missing the most important part of our relationship with Mother Earth, so do your homework before you build projects that are going to destroy yourself and the Earth.” Elder Francois Paulette, Representative of the Dene Nation and Smith Landing First Nation. ....

“Our actions have been against Teck Frontier and all associated pipelines. It is unacceptable that Canada is pushing narratives around reconciliation while simultaneously pushing these projects through our lands, right now in Canada land defenders and water protectors are being forcibly removed from their lands to make way for these projects by armed forces. Canada is responsible to the land it has stolen, responsible to the climate it has disregarded over profit, so we as Indigenous youth are here to say climate leadership must be Indigenous led, our way of stewarding land needs to be respected. We need to reject teck. '' Ta'kaiya Blaney, Member of Tla'amin Nation.

The Teck Frontier Mine has already received a recommendation for approval from the oil industry dominated, Federal Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (CEAA). The CEAA review found that the project would directly impact the treaty rights of First Nations in the region and would also be devastating to both the ecosystem and endangered species like the Wood Buffalo and the whooping Crane. ...

“The largest tar sands mine on the planet is being proposed in my peoples territory right now, it will impact the woodland buffalo, the last remaining wild whooping cranes on the planet and many of the animals my people rely on for food. Aside from the detrimental impacts it will have on my peoples food security, treaty rights and water, It will add 6.1 million megatons of carbon annually to the atmosphere. We must force Canada to reject teck.” Eriel Deranger, Executive Director, Indigenous Climate Action.

Inside the UN Climate negotiations in the afternoon, a second Reject Teck protest supported by Indigenous Climate Action took place.

“This Teck Frontier mine is going to be a complete carbon bomb on Mother Earth, if Teck Frontier is built we will see the world begin to unravel. This is why we are here at COP 25 and this is why we have to reject Teck.” Said Nigel Henry Robinison, Indigenous Climate Action Youth Delegation Lead and member of Cold Lake Dene Nation.

https://www.indigenousclimateaction.com/post/first-nations-demand-canada...

A contrasting examination of some of the darker interests and entities involved in global climate action initiatives. I do not share the view that an environmental and climate crisis is unfounded but the article is important in its listing of entities anything but grassroots and clearly more concerned with steering the agenda towards more profits rather than saving the planet. Cui bono and caveat emptor.

Engdahl: Climate and the Money Trail

https://journal-neo.org/2019/09/25/climate-and-the-money-trail/

"...A key player in the linking of world financial institutions with the Green Agenda is outgoing Bank of England head Mark Carney. In December 2015, The Bank For International Settlements' Financial Stability Board (FSB), chaired then by Carney, created the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) to advise 'investors, lenders and insurance about climate related risk.' That was certainly a bizarre focus for world central bankers.

In 2016, the TCFD along with the City of London Corporation and the UK Government initiated the Green Finance Initiative, aiming to channel trillions of dollars to 'green' investments. The central bankers of the FSB nominated 31 people to form the TCFD. Chaired by billionaire Michael Bloomberg of the financial wire, it includes key people from JP Morgan Chase; from BlackRock - one of the world's largest asset managers with almost $7 trillion; Barclay's Bank; HSBC the London-Hong Kong bank repeatedly fined for laundering drug and other black funds; Swiss Re, the world's second largest resinsurance; China's ICBC Bank; Tata Steel, ENI oil; Dow Chemical; mining giant BHP Billington and David Blood of Al Gore's Generation Investment LLC.

In effect it seems the foxes are writing the rules for the new Green Hen House..."

Fifteen young people, including Greta Thunberg, have signed a letter asking Trudeau to block any new oil and gas projects and to quickly shift out of any current fossil fuel production. Unfortunately, this isn't going to happen but the youth realize they will be the biggest losers as fossil fuel production continues. 

Fifteen young people co-signed a Dec. 10, 2019 letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to block any new oil and gas projects and move quickly to phase out existing production. Photos compiled by Alastair Sharp via https://childrenvsclimatecrisis.org 

The group of youth from across the world said Canada has taken a leading role globally in pushing for climate action, but must apply the same commitment domestically, in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and dated Dec. 10, Human Rights Day.

"Canada must apply its international climate leadership to all domestic action," the letter says. "It must demonstrate how a major fossil fuels producer and exporter can transition away from these pollutants, blazing a trail for other fossil fuel-reliant economies to follow."

They also wrote separately to Norway, another developed economy with a major and still-expanding oil and gas industry, with similar demands. ...

The group — which in September filed a complaint at the United Nations against Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany and Turkey — argues that climate inaction amounts to a violation of the rights of children, who will bear the brunt of the negative effects of a warming planet.

Trudeau has sought to align himself with Thunberg, who has galvanized the world’s young people to demand action on climate change after she started skipping school last year to protest outside the Swedish parliament. They met in September ahead of a massive climate march in Montreal, which they both took part in.

Canada is the world's fourth-largest producer and exporter of oil, which mostly comes from the oil-rich province of Alberta and mostly goes to the United States. The combustion of oil and gas releases carbon and other gases into the atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect that traps heat and is leading to more frequent and more extreme weather events and rising sea levels. ...

Canada is currently considering an application from Teck Resources to develop the $20-billion, 260,000-barrel-per-day Frontier project abutting the Athabasca River in Alberta's northeast, which, if approved, would be the first new open-pit petroleum-mining construction in the country's oilpatch in many years. The government's decision is due by the end of February. 

Canada "must demonstrate how a major fossil fuels producer and exporter can transition away from these pollutants," @GretaThunberg and other youth write in letter to @JustinTrudeau, calling for a block on all new oil and gas projects.

The letter also refers to other expansion activities, including the nearly complete 1,600-kilometre Line 3 pipeline between Alberta and Wisconsin, and the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, which Ottawa bought last year and which, if built, would triple the capacity of that route from the oilsands to the British Columbia coast.

The Line 3 pipeline alone could boost Canada's oil production by 10 per cent. Canada's overall oil production is projected to expand by 60 per cent between 2017 and 2040, while gas production is set to expand by 34 per cent, they said.

Canada "must end the development and export of new oil and gas reserves, and set a plan to quickly phase out existing production fields," says the letter, written by Michael Hausfeld, the youth group's legal counsel. "It must stop prioritizing short-term economic gains over the future of its children and all children around the world."

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/12/09/news/greta-thunberg-and-othe...

Despite a long negotiation process, the world's 200 nations agreed to reduce greenhouse gases but failed to reach agreement on ways to do so, even though scientists warn we have only ten years left if we are to have any hope of dealing with this global crisis effectively. However, grassroot activists, particularly youth and indigenous ones, continue to push for a large, quick and effective transition from fossil fuels to renewables. 

Activists protest outside the venue of the UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid 

After lengthy negotiations, delegations from nearly 200 countries at the COP25 climate summit have reached an agreement on stepping up the global response to cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

However, negotiators on Sunday stalled on an agreement on the regulation of carbon markets, one of the most critical and contentious issues at the climate change conference.

The final declaration called for fresh proposals on pledges on reducing carbon emissions to be in place by next year's COP26. It also called for more ambition to close the gap between existing emissions pledges and goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. 

Although negotiations at the IFEMA trade centre dragged on two days past the official deadline, delegates left the issue of regulating carbon markets until the COP26 summit in Glasgow. ...

Christoph Bals, policy director at NGO Germanwatch,... underlined that the continuing conflict between countries including "the US, Australia and Brazil, where the business model is strongly connected with the fossil [fuel] industries", had been "very visible" during the negotiations.

Asked if that battle concerning carbon markets would continue in the years to come, Bals said it would "in the international forum, but also on a national level. Countries like Switzerland have announced here - and the EU - that they will implement their own rules to deal with the international market mechanisms in a responsible way." ...

Grassroots movement

Despite COP25's mixed results, there were plenty of signs of flourishing grassroots activity against climate change around the two-week conference in Madrid.

Following the arrival of teenage Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who had travelled across the Atlantic by catamaran, a demonstration under the banner "The world has woken up to the climate emergency" drew tens of thousands of protesters on December 6.

Youth climate activists also pushed for a global strike on the conference's final official day, protesting that human rights and social justice had been sidelined. A noisy but good-humoured protest took place in the COP25 entrance hallway on Friday afternoon, with dozens of young activists sitting on the floor to listen to speeches and songs before moving outside to join another group of protesters.

"Young people have demonstrated before at COPs but this last year the Fridays for Future movement has been even more of a driver," Amnesty International's climate change adviser Chiara Liguori told Al Jazeera.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/cop25-summit-fails-address-key-ca...

Unfortunately, things are going in the opposite direction to electric airplane flights, when it comes to electric car sales in Ontario. After the Ford government removed a sales rebate for electric vehicles, sales plummetted dramatically in Ontario. Not coincidentally, at the same time electric cars sales have fallen dramatically in the province, Ontario is the only province in which sales of electric cars are not rising. BC's and Quebec's rebate system have helped these provinces lead the way in electric car sales.

I guess the fossil fuel companies should increase their donations to the Ontario Conservatives.

Sales of electric vehicles in Ontario have plummeted since the Progressive Conservative government cancelled a rebate last year, hampering progress toward a national target.

In the first six months of this year, sales in Ontario were down more than 55 per cent from the same period in 2018, according to data from Electric Mobility Canada. In the second quarter of this year 2,933 electric vehicles were sold in the province, down from 7,110 in the same period last year.

Ontario is the only province not seeing increases in sales, year over year.

Quebec and British Columbia, which have their own provincial rebates, have long been leading in total sales. Ontario's figures had been increasing on par with theirs until the province's financial incentive disappeared.

They rebounded after the introduction this spring of a $5,000 federal rebate, but national sales of electric vehicles are still only at 3.5 per cent, which is a far cry from the federal government's target of 10 per cent in 2025.

"It's going to be challenging for the federal government to meet that target...then even more by 2030 (when Ottawa hopes the number rises to 30 per cent)," said Al Cormier of Electric Mobility Canada.

"If Ontario was in the game again it would make the whole thing a lot easier."

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/12/15/news/sales-electric-vehicles...

While even some delegates to the UN COP25 meeting praised Canada's efforts in dealing with climate changes due to the Trudeau government's propaganda, the reality is revealed by experts showing that Canada is ranked 55th out of 61 large countries when it comes to dealing with global warming. 

Indigenous youth occupy the Canadian embassy in Madrid, Spain. Dec. 11, 2019.

Walk the halls of this sputtering summit and you’ll find UN delegates gratefully heralding Canada as a bulwark against the global tide of authoritarians and extraction populists ignoring climate calamity. You’ll run into climate advocates praising Canada’s pledge to go zero carbon. But step into a side conference and you’ll find a panel of carbon experts PowerPointing the pollution impacts of Canada's rapidly expanding oil and gas industry. They’ve ranked Canada 55th out of the 61 biggest countries in the world, rating our performance “very low.”

Need some fresh air? Outside, activists from every corner of the world are protesting Teck Resources’ proposed mega-mine in the Alberta oilsands which the feds need to nix or approve in the next couple months. Canada's delegates would probably rather stick near the negotiating rooms where observers praise them for pushing stronger international climate rules. Or maybe head over to the finance panel where the United Nations rep is showcasing Canada’s Just Transition strategy for coal workers as a model for the world to follow.

After a miserable day mired in the inanities of United Nations procedures, you might want to head over to the Canadian embassy for a quiet drink. But it might not be so quiet because there you will find Indigenous youth who have occupied the reception area in protest, calling out the government for authorizing pipelines despite First Nations opposition, and approving mega projects which threaten their homes and future.

Canada’s experience at the Madrid COP is a bit of a microcosm of the country’s predicament. Canadians overwhelmingly want more ambitious action against climate change. Two-thirds of voters made that clear in the last election.

The federal government has brought in a package of climate legislation better than most in the world. Our electricity is among the greenest anywhere and is moving towards zero carbon. Provinces with good EV programs are selling electric cars as fast as dealers can get them on the lots.

In fact, 85% of the country is pretty much on track to meet the climate targets Canada pledged to the international community.

And yet, despite our tiny percentage of the world population, Canada is the ninth largest climate polluter in the world. The main reason is that we’re a top-five producer of oil and gas. Back when most of us hadn't realized the climatic dangers of burning fossil fuels, we built an industry that is a true wonder of engineering and technology. ...

But most Canadians benefited greatly from the wealth generated by the fossil fuel boom. What’s different today is that we are belatedly reckoning with the brutalities of colonialism. And now we do know — we know the climate impacts of burning oil, gas and coal. But we are only just beginning to reckon with these fossil fuel impacts. We are phasing out coal use domestically. But with oil and gas, we are doing exactly the opposite — we are doubling down, massively expanding the industry year after year. Fossil fuel production has levelled off in most countries, but it is still growing globally. About 85 per cent of that global expansion of new oil and gas projects is happening in the U.S. and Canada. ...

That’s why the Trudeau government is taking heat from critics young and old. Greta Thunberg led a group of international youth calling out Canada at the beginning of the week. Making the case that continued fossil expansion amounts to abuse of the rights of children, the group called on Canada to "end the development and export of new oil and gas reserves, and set a plan to quickly phase out existing production fields.” Canada "must stop prioritizing short-term economic gains over the future of its children and all children around the world,” the group said.

Bookending the week, Jeffrey Sachs, presiding elder in the field of economic development and the fight against poverty, took to the stage to castigate Canada, and Justin Trudeau specifically: “It doesn’t work to try to have it like Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau — to say 'we will be clean at home but export our crud around the world.'"

Sachs was being generous. Canadians might want to be clean at home, and we do now have real climate policies coming into force, but we still drive the dirtiest vehicles of any country on the planet, and we are still approving massive new fossil projects for LNG and oil. The feds have a moment of truth coming soon after they return home from Madrid — they’ve got to decide whether to allow the largest oilsands mine ever to go ahead right near the edge of Wood Buffalo National Park.

Teck Resources' mega-mine would be “an example of moving the line in the wrong direction,” says Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, a Dënesųłiné woman and member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. ...

Norway’s government made the kind of commitment Canadians voted to get from Ottawa: “We have to cut 55 per cent by 2030 and to zero by 2050,” Norway pledged. "As an oil producer we need to prepare for that change. We have to diversify our economy just like every other country. And stop all fossil fuel use in the future."

http://ecosocialistsvancouver.org/article/whiplash-canada-cop25

Edited To Add (see bold print): Today a Chinese oil company, CNOOC through its Canadian-owned subsidiary Nexen, got permission to drill exploratory oil wells off the Newfoundland coast, as part of a $4 billion exploratory hunt for the province's next major oil project.

So much for Trudeau's reduction in greenhouse gas reduction targets. It's not an accident that the announcement came a couple of days after the UN COP25 conference on climate change and its related protests. This follows the Liberal game plan of declaring a climate change emergency in June and the next day approving the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, as well as fighting an election claiming to aim at greatly reducing green house gas emissions and now approving new fossil fuel projects. 

How many more approvals are coming in Newfoundland, Alberta and Saskatchewan?

The Hibernia oil-drilling platform 315 kilometres off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Newfoundland and Labrador is expecting a wave of oil and gas exploration in the province’s offshore waters over the next few years. The deepwater hunt will involve oil and gas companies spending up to $4 billion to identify the province’s next major oil project.

“There’s an unprecedented level of interest for offshore East Coast Canada,” said Jim Keating, executive vice president of offshore development at Nalcor Energy, a Newfoundland and Labrador Crown corporation, which holds minority equity stakes in three of the province’s offshore oil projects, and is responsible for driving further investments in the sector.

“From 2014 to present, we’ve amassed over $4-billion worth of offshore work commitments, which is about 60 per cent of the total ever in offshore Newfoundland and Labrador in its history. And that goes back to the mid-80s,” Keating added, in an interview. “That’s pretty significant.” ...

The province has four producing oil projects: Hebron, Hibernia, Terra Nova and White Rose. ExxonMobil Corp., Husky Energy Inc., and Suncor Inc. are the primary operators on those projects, with Chevron Corp. and Equinor ASA (formerly Statoil ASA) also involved.

https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/big-oil-sinking-4-...

The Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Jonathan Wilkinson, has announced that the proposed CNOOC International Flemish Pass Exploration Drilling Project can proceed. ...

The proponent, CNOOC Petroleum North America ULC, can now proceed with obtaining any additional authorizations and permits from federal departments as well as the Canadian-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board.

The project involves exploration drilling within two offshore Exploration Licences located in the Flemish Pass Basin, over 400 kilometres east of St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. According to figures provided by the proponent, 100 to 200 people would be working on the offshore drilling installation during operations with an equal or greater number of personnel also involved in support activities.

https://www.canada.ca/en/impact-assessment-agency/news/2019/12/cnooc-int...

The following three and a half minute CBC video about Liverpool, Nova Scotia, that is already extensive flooding due to climate change. Furthermore, the video discusses how this will get much worse as sea levels rise due to glacier melting. People in town already know that not everything can be saved. Furthermore, the video notes that this is going to be many coastal communities in Nova Scotia, Canada, and elsewhere in the world.

This problem is especially severe for Canada because we have the longest coastline in the world 202,080 km, far longer than even second place Norway, which has 58,133 km of coastline (https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-most-coastline.html)

Liverpool Nova Scotia and Sea Level Rise due to Climate Change Video: 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/nova-scotia-town-sinking-as-sea-leve...

 

Liverpool’s waterfront parking lot had major flooding after high tides during storm surges on the weekend of March 2-4. Kenny Veinot photo - Submitted

 

Sadly Rikardo, the subsidies don't stop there. Because Canada is going to have to clean up all the abandoned oil wells in Alberta and elsewhere. In Alberta that cost is estimated to be $260 billion! The oil companies have contributed $1.8 to the fund so us taxpayers are in for the rest of it. Furthermore "It may take more than 2,800 years to clean up some of the decommissioned oil and gas wells currently dotting Alberta’s landscape, a senior regulatory official warned in a recent presentation made privately to the industry." (https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/06/03/investigations/exclusive-alb...)

The sad part of this is that these numbers were provided to  the fossil fuel companies by the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) privately while a much smaller number, $58 billion was being told to the public. Can one say regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry?

The cost of cleaning up Alberta’s fossil-fuel industry could be as staggeringly high as $260 billion, according to internal Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) documents obtained by the National Observer, Global News, the Toronto Star, and StarMetro Calgary.

The documents were used by Rob Wadsworth, a high-ranking AER official, in providing liability estimates to a private Calgary audience back in February. The liability costs pertain to the amount needed to shut down inactive oil and gas exploration wells, abandoned facilities and pipelines, as well as toxic tailings ponds near Fort McMurray, Alta. Wadsworth blamed the costs on a “flawed system” of industrial oversight, urging companies and stakeholders to accept tougher regulations and begin the cleanup process promptly. ...

Until now, the public had been told the cleanup would cost approximately $58 billion. The AER said that Wadsworth’s estimates are based on a “worst-case scenario” of a total industry closure, yet Wadsworth’s presentation suggests the actual costs will be more than his estimates. Several experts who have reviewed Wadsworth’s presentation describe the situation as an economic and environmental crisis, the National Observer reports.

https://ipolitics.ca/2018/11/01/the-drilldown-cost-to-clean-up-albertas-...

In 2018 the Liberals provided $1.6 billion to help fossil fuel companies expand into new markets. Strange how they can promise to exceed their 2030 greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, which were actually those of Harper, and reduce these emissions to net zero by 2050, but I guess they think that all is fair in election campaigns. 

Canada will make available $1.6 billion in financial support to help Alberta's oil and gas sector expand into new markets, Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi announced Tuesday.

Sohi made the announcement alongside International Trade Diversification Minister Jim Carr at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton. Carr described how the money will be used to help the oilpatch in part with liquidity concerns.

"Alberta's energy sector is not just the historic backbone of our economy, but a key part of our country's future," said Carr. ...

Export Development Canada (EDC), the Crown corporation that is already managing the loansrelated to the government's purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline, will make another $1 billion available to "exporters of all sizes" to help companies invest in new technology, "address working capital needs or explore new markets," Sohi said.

Another Crown corporation, the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), will be creating another $500 million "energy diversification" financing program for "higher risk" oil and gas companies dealing with market uncertainty.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2018/12/18/news/sohi-announces-16-billi...

Most Americans Support Phasing Out Fossil Fuels

Last month, The Washington Post reported on the results of a poll it conducted with the Kaiser Family Foundation earlier this year. The poll had remarkable finding: nearly half — 46 percent — of American adults believe the U.S. needs to “drastically reduce” fossil fuel use in the near future to address the climate crisis, while another 41 percent favor a more gradual reduction.

If you think the result was only about political ideology in a highly polarized country, you’d only be partly right – a narrow majority of 51 percent of Republicans surveyed support phasing out fossil fuels, albeit at a slower pace.

In other words, a solid seven-eighths of U.S. adults — including half of the supporters of the unabashedly pro-fossil fuel Republican Party — support a phase-out of fossil fuels. And that population is based in the world’s largest oil and gas producer, third largest coal producer, and the only country to leave the universally-adopted Paris Climate Agreement.....

The report Oil, Gas and the Climate: An analysis of the Oil and Gas Industry Plans for Expansion and Compatability with Global Emissions Limits details the incompatability of reaching the greenhouse gas emission targets globally based both on current and planned 2020 to 2024 already scheduled oil and gas projects. 

The central conclusion is that there is no way to reach the greenhouse gas reduction targets to keep temperatures under 1.5 degrees Celsius under current production levels and that with the already scheduled increases in production between 2020 and 2024, the world will blow by the reductions needed to keep the temperature rise below 2.0 degrees Celsius. Furthermore, with 85% of new production the US and Canada are by far the leaders in this new 2020 to 2024 oil and gas production, enabling themselves to blow by the targets all by themselves. Only by starting the wind-down of fossil fuel production now do we have any chance of avoiding the worst consquences of global warming. 

However, with the Trudeau Liberals' purchase of Trans Mountain, their approval of China National Offshore Oil Corporation's (CNOOC) exploratory wells in the Newfoundland offshore (see post # 2016) and increasing signs that Trudeau is likely to approve Premier Kenney's proposed Teck Frontier oilsands mine in Alberta (see post #204), as well as already approved Premier Horgan's LNG Canada project, Canada is set to be second only to the US in new oil and gas production.

    

(Top) An aerial photo of the site for the proposed Teck Frontier open-pit mine; a currently intact piece of our boreal forest. (Bottom) An aerial photo of a developed area of the oil sands region just kilometers south of the proposed project site. Photo credit: Garth Lenz

 

Key findings

• Carbon emissions from oil and gas in operating fields and mines globally would push the world beyond 1.5°C of warming and make it impossible to meet our global obligations under the Paris Agreement. This is true even if global coal use were phased out overnight, and cement emissions were drastically reduced.

• Over the next five years, from 2020 to 2024, oil and gas companies are set to invest a further USD 1.4 trillion in new oil and gas extraction projects.1,2 The majority of this investment will be in shale and offshore oil and gas.

• New financial investment decisions over this five-year period have the potential to unlock more than
  148 GtCO2 from currently undeveloped reserves3 before 2050, equivalent to building over 1200 new average U.S. coal-fired power plants.4

• In the near-term – looking just at production from expansion projects over the next five years – North America accounts for 85% of new supply.5 U.S. oil and gas expansion by itself will make it impossible for the rest of the world to manage the safe, equitable and necessary decline of oil and gas production by 2050.

• Every major International Oil Company (IOC) has sanctioned new oil and/or gas projects that are not Paris Agreement compliant. Twenty-five companies are responsible for nearly 50 percent of the production to 2050 resulting from new expansion of oil and gas in the next five years.

• A well-planned phase-out of oil and gas production that considers the needs of workers and communities impacted by fossil fuel developments must start now to avoid climate breakdown and a deferred economic collapse. This does not mean turning off the taps overnight. Rather, it means taking climate limits seriously and intentionally planning to wind-down fossil fuel extraction at the pace required to meet them. An intentional and thoughtful phase-out approach makes it possible to create transition plans that are socially just and economically sound. ...

1. Canada

   • New oil and gas development in Canada between now and 2050 could unlock an additional 25 GtCO2, more than doubling cumulative emissions from the sector, and equal to the lifetime emissions of more than 200 average Canadian coal plants.27

   • Although opposition and poor economics have stymied significant expansion plans, two new projects in the Alberta tar sands have been approved in the last two years. Exxon’s Aspen Oil Sands project was endorsed in November 2018, the first sanctioned greenfield oil sands project in five years. And in July 2019, Teck’s new Frontier Mine was recommended by the National Energy Board but awaits Trudeau Cabinet approval. It could emit up to 4 MtCO2 each year.28

   • Shale gas extraction, particularly the Montney Shale Basin29 in British Columbia, is a major focus of the industry. They are projected to invest CapEx totaling USD 26 billion (real 2019) over the next five years for new development in the Montney Basin. From 2020 to 2050, new gas projects could be responsible for as much CO2 as new oil projects.

   • A report from the Canadian gas industry predicts the country’s gas production could be as high as 21 bcf/d in 2040.30 The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers projects that Canadian crude oil production will increase by 1.27 million barrels per day to 5.86 million b/d by 2035.31 

http://ggon.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/GGON19.OilGasClimate.EnglishF...

Another country facing increasing problems due to climate change is Australia where wildfires that started at the beginning of September during the latter part of the Australian winter have continued to rage as new wildfires develop threatening people and habitat. On the latest Climate Change Performance Index just released late this year Australia ranked 56th out of 61 countries that produce 90% of greenhouse gas emissions. Despite all the criticism that Australia's Morrison's government for climate change denial and failure to reduce coal and other greenhouse gas emissions, Canada was only ranked 55th on the index, just one place better than Australia. (https://newclimate.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/CCPI-2020-Results_Web_...)

 Firefighters tackle the Gospers Mountain fire outside Sydney. Parts of eastern Australia have had record low rainfall in 2019, contributing to an unusually ferocious early bushfire season. Photograph: Dean Lewins/EPA

The Australian government is facing criticism over its climate policies as the country deals with devastating bushfires and a historic heatwave.

It has contributed to the long-running debate about the country's approach to climate change. So what is it doing to reduce carbon emissions?

Australia is one of the world's biggest per capita greenhouse gas emitters.

Under the Paris Climate Agreement, created to tackle rising temperatures, Australia set a target of a 26-28% reduction in emissions compared with 2005 levels by 2030.

These goals have been criticised for being too low, and last year the United Nations (UN) reported that Australia was not on track.

The UN found that: "There has been no improvement in Australia's climate policy since 2017 and emission levels for 2030 are projected to be well above the target." 

About half of the G20 countries (those with the biggest economies), including Australia, are falling short.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50869565

With summer just beginning in Australia and the worst of the Australian wildfire season yet to come 50,000 square kilometres of land have already been burned, while PM Scott Morrison, who went on vacation as wildfires raged, continues to deny a link to climate change. It makes one wonder how much worse wildfire season will get in Canada and how long it will take for Canadian politicians to respond to the issue as a true emergency. 

Across Australia Yet another Scorching Summer (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/world/australia/heat-wave-horses.html)

Areas of Australia that have been ravaged by deadly wildfires experienced temporary relief on Wednesday, but oppressive conditions are expected to return this weekend.

About 50,000 square kilometres of land have burned over the past few months, with nine people killed and more than 950 homes destroyed.

New South Wales (NSW), the country's most populous state, has received the brunt of the damage, with around 850 homes razed in the state.

Parts of NSW, including Sydney, experienced cool and damp conditions on Christmas Day, but more than 70 fires continued to burn across the state. NSW has been in a seven-day state of emergency that was to expire on Wednesday night.

About 2,000 firefighters and 400 fire trucks battled the blazes in more favourable conditions, but high temperatures are set to return. Sydney is forecast to hit 31 C on Sunday, while the western suburbs could reach 41 C.

Dozens of Canadian firefighters have travelled to Australia to help with the effort.

Fire danger ratings remained high in northwestern NSW, and were between high and moderate for the rest of the state. ...

The wildfire crisis forced Morrison to cut short his much-criticized family vacation in Hawaii. He returned to Australia on Saturday night.

South Australia state, which last week had 86 homes destroyed after wildfires flared in catastrophic conditions, is bracing for a return of extreme temperatures, with Adelaide, the state capital, expected to reach 41 C on Saturday.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/wildfire-ravaged-areas-australia-holiday-r...

An excellent idea, Sean, but I think we need to be even more radical. Only people between the ages of 16 and 42 should be allowed to vote. I am an outlier in my age cohort (early boomers) in that I generally agree with the policies young people support, but I would gladly give up my vote to allow the younger half of the population to do what it takes to avoid the imminent collapse of civilization as we know it.

Reporters and editors in Canada have chosen climate change as the issue of the year -hardly surprising. It is interesting that this particular article is a reprint of a Canadian Press story about this in Canadian Underwriter, in other words, in the website of one the industries suffering the highest climate change costs, as floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters related to climate change drive up both the insurance industries and their customer's costs. 

Climate change was chosen in a survey of reporters and editors across the country as the 2019 Canadian Press News Story of the Year.

“I don’t think it can be anything but climate change,” said Toronto Star senior editor Julie Carl. “It is gripping our attention, our reality and our imagination.”

A decade ago, climate change was more academic than reality, but in recent years few Canadians haven’t been touched directly by the kind of weather climate change may be causing: floods, fires, major storms, cold snaps, heat waves, longer winters, shorter growing seasons. In June, when Parliament voted to declare that we are facing a climate crisis, it came as parts of eastern Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick were bailing out from the second once-a-century flood in three years.

In the survey, climate change had stiff competition, barely beating out the SNC-Lavalin saga, which itself had to fight its way into second ahead of the Toronto Raptors’ NBA title. In western Canada, many votes were cast for the hunt for two men who murdered a couple and another man in British Columbia before fleeing to the muskeg of northern Manitoba, where they would take their own lives.

But for many editors, the decision to rank climate change No. 1 comes both from the impact it had in 2019 and its expected dominance in our lives in the future.

“There’s no bigger story than the human-made altering of our own planet – even if you don’t believe it,” said Paul Harvey, senior editor at the Calgary Herald and Calgary Sun. ...

It is also a defining issue for the Liberal government. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ran on a promise to ramp up Canada’s environment policies in 2015, including setting a path to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and fix Canada’s environmental review process for major projects.

But the government’s decision first to approve the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, and then spend $4.5 billion to buy the existing pipeline when political opposition threatened to derail the project, left environment advocates disappointed and room for his political critics to pounce.

“You. Bought. A. Pipeline,” NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh countered in a news release, when Trudeau unveiled his climate plans during the election campaign and promised to lead the way to a greener country.

https://www.canadianunderwriter.ca/insurance/climate-change-the-story-of...

Doug Ford is facing a major problem over his stance against climate change: the growing support for attempting to deal with climate change versus a Con base in which many of its members oppose making any significant response.

His popularity has plummeted in the 19 months since then, as he ripped up the province’s existing plan and failed to meaningfully replace it. Meanwhile, climate credibility grows more and more crucial to Canadian political success.

As the new year begins, the Ford government now faces a serious choice: double down and put its chance of re-election in 2022 in jeopardy, or pivot and risk alienating a shrinking base that cheers inaction.

“Clearly, (he'll) have to have an articulated (climate) policy in order to win the next election,” said John Wright, a former Ipsos pollster who is now a partner at Dart Insight and Communications. ...

What Ford has in hand right now is not that, but 2020 will offer several chances for a climate reset. 

Ford’s policy replacement for cap and trade is an evolving draft, his environment minister said last month, after it was slapped down by the province’s auditor general for lack of “sound evidence.” The "Made-in-Ontario" plan makes a big deal about cleaning up litter and proposes little to reduce the pollution causing global warming.

Make no mistake, the Tories are not about to launch a climate plan Greta Thunberg would applaud. Anything they do will underwhelm the most fervently climate-focused voters. Those folks are likely looking to cast their votes for the opposition New Democrats, the regrouping Liberals or Mike Schreiner’s Greens anyway.

But the fact is this: a growing majority of voters actively seek out a government that takes climate action seriously. ...

Less than one-third of voters are indifferent to climate action (both in Canada in general and in Ontario specifically), and they already typically support conservative parties. A green turn would be one way to bridge the gap between that core and the remaining votes Ford needs to chase down, strategists and pollsters say.

“He has a lot of people — younger conservatives, millennial conservatives — who would be inclined to support him and support the federal party if there was more of a real recognition that climate change was something that needed to be addressed,” said Tim Powers, vice-chairman at Summa Strategies and managing director of Abacus Data.

“Climate is starting to matter to all conservative politicians,” he said. “They recognize that the one-trick pony that was the carbon tax has gone to the glue factory and you can't ride that thing anymore.” 

That creates some tricky electoral arithmetic for Ford and his Progressive Conservative strategists to consider.  Ford needs at least 38 per cent of the provincial electorate on his side to win a majority of seats at Queen’s Park next time around (he won with 40.6 per cent of the vote in 2018). He is polling as low as 22 per cent recently, and almost a quarter of those who voted for Ford now have a negative impression of him, according to Abacus Data polling of 570 Ontarians conducted in mid-December. ...

“I would imagine that Doug Ford and his government will have to come up with something a little more plausible if they want to cover this exposed flank in the next election, because they’re not lined up with the mainstream on this,” said pollster Frank Graves, president of EKOS Research Associates. “They’re lined up with their core constituency, but that may not be enough for them to find power next time.” ...

Even critics of Ford’s lack of climate policies acknowledge it wouldn’t take much to reach those just outside the party’s orbit. Greenpeace Canada’s Keith Stewart said just getting behind rather than opposing federal climate plans would help them claim significant progress toward the province’s reduction targets.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/01/02/analysis/doug-ford-delicate-...

Australian Liberal PM Scott Morrison is emblematic of the right's climate change denialism and, its half brother denial change tokenism, and the danger it represents to having any chance of dealing effectively with climate change before the damage it causes becomes globally catastrophic. Unfortunately, we have many politicians in Canada who also fit this mould.

During what was nothing more than a desperate photo opp at a bushfire-ravaged town, he tried to force an upset victim to shake his hand while other citizens heckled and booed him. (https://junkee.com/scott-morrison-bushfire-victim-handshake/236350)

There are worse leaders than Scott Morrison. The “international community” includes torturers, mass murderers, ethnic cleansers and kleptomaniacs beside whom he seems almost benign. But no leader in the world is more abject than the prime minister of Australia. ...

The climate change denialism he espoused is a moving target. In the 1990s, lobbyists funded by the oil industry acted as if the overwhelming majority of scientists who understood the subject were in a conspiracy against the public. They accused the authors of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports of being guilty of a “major deception” when they discussed the human influence on climate. Many still hold to the original sin of this denialism.

Even as Australia burned last week, Tony Abbott, Morrison’s conservative predecessor, was still saying the world was “in the grip of a climate cult”. Abbott proved he was willing to make others suffer for his wilfully ignorant belief by scrapping a carbon tax when he was in power in Australia in 2014. A fallback position is emerging. It accepts that manmade climate change is real but withdraws the concession as soon as it has been made and loses it in an obfuscatory smoke.

The final fallback and the final degradation will come, I predict, in the mid-2020s when the right abandons denialism completely, admits that climate change is catastrophic, but adds it’s far too late to do anything about it, which it may well be.

Scott Morrison is hunkered down in stage two. He grudgingly acknowledges the existence of man-made climate change but hurriedly adds that other causes are at work. The climate has always changed and it’s not worth bearing the costs of challenging a polluting culture. It worked in last year’s elections, but sounds absurd today.

“By not recognising climate change as a serious threat you fail to prepare overworked, underappreciated first responders for larger, more frequent bushfires that devastate communities,” said one previously solid Morrison voter, after he had learned the truth about conservatism as his family waited to be evacuated from a New South Wales beach.

Despite its failure, perhaps because of its failures, the do-nothing Australian right remains admired across the conservative world. The 2019 election was meant to be a climate change election about the killing of the Great Barrier Reef, the extreme drought and average summer temperatures across the continent hitting 40C. Yet Morrison and his campaign team managed to turn it into an election about the Australian Labor party’s tax plans. ...

So impressed was Boris Johnson that he hired Morrison’s boys to win the British general election. Fawning coverage followed of the digital “whiz-kids” from New Zealand: Sean Topham, 28, and Ben Guerin, 24. In Australia, the hotshots refined their technique of dumping hundreds of crude variations on the same theme on social media. They described how Labor would raise taxes and warned that a proposal to encourage electric cars threatened motorists. ...

When Morrison won the Australian general election and the gilets jaunes forced Macron to scrap his proposed fuel tax, liberals received stern lectures about how people did not want to meet the cost of fighting climate change; the point was a good one. After Leave won the 2016 Brexit referendum and Johnson won the 2019 general election, lectures on how voters did not want to be told that Britain was making a terrible mistake followed in turn. Of course, they were true too.

But it is also true that you cannot postpone a rendezvous with reality forever. Whatever memes the right pushes out, whatever social media strategies they adopt and propaganda they trumpet, the lesson the refugees on Australia’s beaches know too well is that fire still burns.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/04/australias-patheti...

jerrym wrote:

SFU professor Donald Gutstein’s most recent book, The Big Stall: How Big Oil and Think Tanks are Blocking Action on Climate Change in Canada, describes how the fossil fuel industry's stalling tactics in dealing with climate change means Canada must adopt radical policies both at the governmental and individual level now in order to deal with the many headed problems associated with global warming. The industry pushed neoliberal market economics as the solution to the global environmental problem as part of the delay process, providing the soothing message that the free market could deal with the problem without creating any great difficult adjustments. 

Using documents and second-hand information gathered over more than 30 years, Gutstein presents a compelling investigation of how corporations and businesses — particularly Big Oil — have manipulated us and our governments to serve their best interests.

“The corporate sector is always concerned about managing public opinion,” Gutstein said when we sat down to talk about his book. “And that goes through different phases and different forms… The risk for corporations in a democracy is that governments will do what the people want, which probably goes against what's best for big business, right? So, how do you take the risk out of that happening?”

The answer, according to The Big Stall, is to pour millions of dollars into neoliberal think tanks, public-relations firms and specialized university research institutes that will pepper the press with their “expertise” and cast doubt on the scientifically proven effects of carbon emissions on the climate. This propaganda has been so successful that a significant minority of Canadians don’t believe human factors are the cause of climate change or that there is solid evidence the Earth is warming, Gutstein found in a February 2018 survey. ...

The Big Stall begins with two stories: prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program (NEP) and the development of the international oil industry which undercut his plan; and Rachel Carson and the start of the environmental movement, and how she was targeted by an agricultural chemical producer even before her book Silent Spring was published. Aside from the beginning and end of The Big Stall, environmentalists like Carson have little presence. In Gutstein’s research, their power and that of environmental scientists have been eclipsed by opinions supporting Big Oil companies that spend millions of dollars to shape opinions and decisions both nationally and internationally.

Before Trudeau could implement his nationalization plan, the energy sector began creating disinformation campaigns to get ahead of governmental restrictions on the oil industry, much like what happened with Carson in the 1950s. Bruce Harrison, then at the Manufacturing Chemists Association, “launched an all-out attack on (Carson’s) credibility,” Gutstein writes. Later in this carefully footnoted book, Gutstein reintroduces Harrison — this time, as a leader of the climate-denial movement. ...

Gutstein has an investigative journalist’s ability to map and trace the movement of people from the private to the public sector, traversing from business to public-relations firms, think tanks, councils and academic and government posts. He draws a picture of intrigue in an interconnected Canadian web. His research covers prime ministers from Trudeau to Trudeau, with a particularly deep dive into Stephen Harper; and premiers — particularly in Alberta, focusing on Peter Lougheed and Rachel Notley. Other individuals who stand out are oil and mineral businessman Maurice Strong; former Energy Policy Institute of Canada co-chair Bruce Carson; past president of Calgary-based think tank Canada West Foundation Roger Gibbons; and B.C. premier Gordon Campbell. ...

When Trudeau promised the NEP, or the Canadization of the energy industry in the 1970s, most of Canada’s oil was exported and owned by U.S. and other foreign oil companies. A consequence of implementing the NEP would be that economic benefits transferred to Ottawa and energy users, “especially Ontario and Quebec, at the expense of industry and producing provinces,” Gutstein documents. The backlash from Alberta’s Lougheed and the oil companies was swift and led to the birthing of the BCNI, “an organization created of petroleum, gas and pipeline associations.” BCNI’s name would change over the years, but it’s mission remained the same: to ensure the energy industry stayed out of government control and public policy pushed in the direction desired by business, Gutstein writes. ...

In the 1960s, scientists talked about carbon pollution leading to an increase of 2 C, 4 C or even 6 C of warming — information that was not exclusive to the scientific community. Shell Oil highlighted this effect in a 1979 coal-sector report and Imperial Oil, Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary, admitted “there is no doubt that increases in fossil fuel and decreases of forest cover are aggravating the potential problem of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Gutstein documents.

The financial support of fossil fuel companies and the foundations of a dozen billionaires “fuelled a 25-year campaign to manufacture doubt and undermine scientific evidence about the link between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming,” Gutstein writes. “Big Oil (followed) the playbook of the tobacco industry” as they set out to bury truths, mislead the public and destroy obstructions to their control of the energy sector. 

Gutstein believes economists took the ideological lead, replacing scientists and carrying the neoliberal flag, which, if reduced to a slogan, would be “all problems must be solved by the market.”

“Climate scientists, with their doom-and-gloom scenarios of devasting floods, heat waves and mass migrations, could raise the alarm,” he writes, “but economists, with their soothing massage of cost-benefit analysis and the magic of markets, would be the first responders.”

Neoliberalism became the prevailing economic philosophy when Brian Mulroney replaced Trudeau, but neoliberalism had been creeping into the veins of political discourse before then, Gutstein writes. The core group behind the propagation of these ideas was the Mont Pelerin Society, with “a mandate to work toward a market state — an individualistic, non-egalitarian society, governed by market transactions,” Gutstein documents. Deregulation, tax cuts to support business investments in the tarsands and other energy-sector development would become the norm. The use of cost-benefit analysis was applied to climate control when appraising investment projects, with the effect that human life and biodiversity became secondary considerations to monetary gain, he writes. ...

n order for government to support Big Oil’s interests, Gutstein, explained in the interview, Big Oil needs public opinion on its side. That means framing the climate change discussion. It takes an army of people to do this, and billions of dollars. Gutstein documents how think tanks, lobbyists, public-relations firms and academic institutions churn out ideas that are then fed to the press and the public. As an example, in 2008, Exxon alone donated $30 million to think tanks and astroturf groups (organizations made up members from varying sectors promoting an idea).

The strategy is simple, Gutstein writes, “bring the entire corporate sector together; recruit sympathetic academics to produce favourable research; influence media opinion; and persuade government officials to embrace the strategy.”

Neoliberal think tanks, “backed with funds from corporations and their owners, usually channelled through private foundations” churn out books and articles disseminated by the mainstream press. Gutstein believes one of the most influential Canadian think tanks is the Fraser Institute, launched in 1974. ...

TV ads are another attack vehicle. After Lougheed left office in Alberta, “neoliberalism crept in the door with Don Getty and slammed it shut with Ralph Klein,” Gutstein writes. Tax writeoffs were increased for capital investments, creating what Gutstein calls, “welfare for capitalists.” By the time Canada signed the Kyoto protocol, $20.6 billion worth of oilsands projects were on the books for the next decade, Gutstein documents. Signing Kyoto threatened the success of these projects and “d’Aquino and the petroleum producers… saturating Ontario with TV ads that were estimated to cost $225,000 a week.” Support for Kyoto was successfully undercut. ...

In order to support development of the tarsands, the Harper government created a campaign, and one gambit was the “The Carson/Canada School of Energy and Environment… to resuscitate the oilsands’ reputation and demonize environmental opponents,” Gutstein documents. The school would “disseminate messages about how clean the oilsands really are.”

Justin Trudeau’s 2016 Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change “twisted and turned through academia, federal and Alberta government bureaucracies, political parties, corporate lobbies, media and think tanks as Big Oil amassed support for the project,” Gutstein writes. To add academic credibility, Roger Gibbins — president of Canada West Foundation and a professor of political science from the University of Calgary — argued that energy development and climate change worked together, “yoking climate change to the energy policy cart and (having it steered) by a western Canadian driver, ensuring the combined policy formation would head in a direction desired by Big Oil,” Gutstein documents.

In 2016, when the University of Ottawa’s Sustainable Prosperity Network rechristened its academic wing as the Smart Prosperity Institute, the result was, “an organization that blurs the lines between government, academia and business,” Gutstein writes. ...

“Madrid was really about Article 6, or carbon trading,” Gutstein explained when we met. Carbon trading means “never really giving up producing fossil fuels because you can find places to buy credits. It's a bait-and-switch strategy. There should've been restrictions, mandatory limits rather than allowing carbon trade.” And it’s a corrupt system, he explained, with “enormous impacts on Indigenous people and on the environment. You get a credit for building a dam, but in the meantime, you flood the lands of thousands of Indigenous people.”

At the end of the book, Gutsein offers several ideas about how we can turn things around. One is to give legal rights to the environment, as the Maori have done in New Zealand. Another is to restore stewardship of their lands to Indigenous Peoples.

“The Indigenous view of the land, the Indigenous law and legal orders, are slowly being incorporated into judicial decisions. I think you can see over the last 20 years a steady progress in a very positive direction,” Gutstein said. ...

The promises of clean growth and sustainability, the plans to create technologies that will reduce or eliminate carbon emissions, seem mostly empty, in Gutstein’s analysis. They are simply another “business” stall to the final solution. For instance, Gutstein shows that when Shell abandoned tarsands for natural gas development, the decision was driven by financial — not environmental — factors. ...

But switching is not the solution, as far as Gutstein is concerned. “By investing heavily in natural gas, the company (Shell) ensures fewer resources will be available for renewables, which in contrast to natural gas are the only path to a low-carbon future.” Clean energy — wind and solar — and the push to develop technologies to capture or alter carbon emissions can be viewed problematically as well, Gutstein argues. They use all use natural resources and energy.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/01/06/reviews/big-oil-and-think-ta...

The plutocrat funded denial and disinformation campaign, including the use  of  think tanks and government subsidies, follows the pattern  of the tobacco industry and cancer, where the companies own scientists knew the truth but sought only to block the evidence.

IMPERIAL OIL, CANADA’S EXXON SUBSIDIARY, IGNORED ITS OWN CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH FOR DECADES, ARCHIVE SHOWS
Murtaza Hussain
January 8 2020, 

....
 In a 1998 article published in Imperial’s in-house magazine, former Imperial CEO Robert Peterson wrote that there is “absolutely no agreement among climatologists on whether or not the planet is getting warmer or, if it is, on whether the warming is the result of man-made factors or natural variations in the climate.” He added that “carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but an essential ingredient of life on this planet.”

Peterson’s paeans to the benefits of carbon dioxide notwithstanding, experts at his company knew with confidence not only that climate change was real, but also that Imperial’s activities were causing crippling harm to the environment. That knowledge was recorded in company documents that were recently revealed to the public and reviewed by The Intercept.
...
THE CACHE OF documents shows that as far back as the 1960s, Imperial had begun hiring consultants to help them manage a future public backlash over its environmental record, as well as conducting surveillance on its public critics. The documents also show that, as the company began to accept the implications of a warming planet, instead of acting decisively to change its business model, it began considering how a melting Arctic might open up new business opportunities.

Even as the fossil fuel industry continued to fight against renewables in public and its CEO worked to confuse public opinion on this critical issue, in private Imperial’s experts recognized the urgency of switching to sustainable energy.
...
“Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Exxon, and by extension Imperial, were among the leading researchers in the world on climate change,” said Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada and a lecturer at the University of Toronto. “They understood the science and understood the implications. They had a choice to either change their business model or obfuscate the reality. They chose to obfuscate. Long after they had accepted that climate change was real, and even started building their installations differently to reflect that, the company continued to publicly deny the science that they knew to be true.”

“Over the decades,” Davies added, “they have been adept at finding ways to delay, deny, and deflect any serious discussion about climate policy.”

Read full article here:

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/08/imperial-oil-climate-change-exxon/

Here's more on the wildfire risk Canada faces as global warming intensifies. 

A firefighter manages a controlled burn to help contain a larger fire near Falls Creek, Australia, Sunday, Jan. 5, 2020. Canadian wildfire experts say Canada is very vulnerable to the kind of devastating wildfires ravaging Australia right now.

Canadian wildfire experts say Canada is very vulnerable to the kind of devastating wildfires ravaging Australia right now.

More than 12.5 million hectares of bushland have burned in Australia since October and prime forest-fire season is just now getting underway.

Multiple heat waves and a lengthy and widespread drought left much of the country, including some of its most populated regions, at higher risk for fire than ever before.

To date the fires have killed 25 people and an estimated 500 million animals, and destroyed almost 1,900 homes. More than 100,000 people have been forced to evacuate to escape the flames. ...

What's happening in Australia now is extraordinary," said Ed Struzik, a fellow at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen's University. And he says, Canada is not immune to seeing the same thing. "We're as vulnerable as any country in the world," he said. Canada is home to about 30 per cent of the world's total forests, and 10 per cent of what is known as forest cover, which refers to a specific density of trees. ...

According to the National Forestry Database, Canada's worst year for forest fires burned about seven million hectares in 1995, while the average yearly amount burned is about 2.3 million hectares. The Fort McMurray, Alta., fire in 2016, burned 590,000 hectares, destroyed 2,400 homes and buildings and forced the entire city of more than 80,000 people to evacuate. British Columbia declared a state of emergency in both 2017 and 2018, when they had two record setting years for fires. In 2017, 1.22 million hectares burned in B.C. and in 2018, 1.35 million hectares burned.

Struzik says fire risk is going up in Canada because of climate change, human activity and a glut of fuel for fires in forests ravaged by pests like the mountain pine beetle whose population growth was greatly stimulated by global warming. "We're seeing things that we just haven't really seen before," he said. "So the signals are there. Very strong signals that we're going to see things get a lot worse before they get better."

University of Alberta wildland fire professor Mike Flannigan says "climate change's fingerprints are all over these Australian fires" and play the same role in raising the risk in Canada. "The warmer it is the longer the fire season," said Flannigan. "The warmer it is the more lightning you see." He said for every degree of warming, the number of lightning strikes goes up by about 12 per cent. Lightning usually causes more than half of the wildfires in Canada.

He also said warmer temperatures dry out trees and other fuels for the fire. Unless there is an associated increase in rainfall, there is more fuel available to burn, allowing fires to start easily and spread more rapidly. They are also more intense fires, making them harder, or even impossible, to extinguish.

"It's a warmer world and part of a warmer world is more fire," he said.

Canada, like Australia and California among others, is also seeing an increase in the number of fires burning closer to where people live and in places where they didn't usually burn before. That is partly because communities are growing out into areas that used to be very unpopulated, but also because people are playing and enjoying the natural environments in places they did not visit much in earlier times.

Humans cause between one-third and one-half of the fires in Canada each year, said Struzik.

Both Struzik and Flannigan say Canada needs to invest in more research to work on fire prediction, prevention and monitoring in particular. Struzik said some of the tools being used now were developed 70 years ago.

Flannigan said fire research budgets have been cut to the bone over the last 20 years or so, but he said he thinks recent investments are now turning that ship around. ...

Individuals who live in cities far from canopied forests are more likely to be affected by smoke and should invest in air purifiers, said Flannigan. Those who live near bigger forests should reduce the risk by removing fuel like shrubbery and mulch around their homes, and not use wood shingles. They also need an evacuation plan.

https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/experts-say-climat...

The extensive wildfires in Australia have also led to widespread protests in Europe. 

Key points:

• Demonstrations organised by Extinction Rebellion were held in London, Berlin, Madrid, Copenhagen and Stockholm
• The protesters called for stronger action on climate change in response to the Australian bushfires
• Protesters in London rallied outside Australia House, while protesters chanted outside the Australian embassy in Berlin 

"Absolutely devastating to watch it. It's like hell. And it seems like governments around the world are in a race to drag us down to hell."

PHOTO: Sheffield woman Anne Coates (right) said the Australian Prime Minister was "a laughing stock around the world". (ABC News: Timothy Stevens)

"Australia, you are custodians of precious species that exist nowhere else in the world. Overturn your Government, they're leading you to destruction."

PHOTO: Fi Radford said Australians were custodians to precious species that exist nowhere else in the world. (ABC News: Timothy Stevens)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-11/scott-morrison-labelled-laughing-...

The following article provides an explanation of why, despite the catastrophic damange done by climate-change induced wildfires and drought many Australians remain in denial.

In a poll released today, Scott Morrison has "suffered a massive hit to his personal approval rating and been overtaken as preferred prime minister by Anthony Albanese in the first published opinion poll of 2020." However, the margin between Labour and the Liberals is very close suggesting the the Liberals may be tempted to change leaders before an election. (https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/13/scott-morrison-su...)

Even as Australia burns, its voters may not take the plunge into meaningful collective action to fight climate change. And here’s why: out there be dragons. Thirty-six of them, by the count of Robert Gifford, a psychology professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. These are the psychological hangups that haunt humans and stymie efforts to deal with the global climate crisis. “Dragons of inaction,” Gifford calls them, and they are formidable. ...

“The dragons of inaction are the reasons or justifications or excuses that people use between either having a good intention to do something and then not doing it or simply using that as an excuse to not be concerned or not take action,” he explained.

The most fearsome of these dragons include a perceived lack of control, the influence of social norms and the difficulty of habit-breaking, conflict with seemingly more pressing needs and wants as well as attachment to a conservative political ideology. Others include putting inordinate faith in technological salvation, growing numb to dire warnings, the perceived inequity of taking action when others might not and mistrust of government and other authority figures. Humans are also prone to discount risks that seem far off into the future or far away from one’s immediate surroundings, Gifford said, and seek to justify the way things are if they expect change to involve personal sacrifice. 

“We call that system justification,” Gifford said. (The full list of his dragons can be found here.) ...

But Australians have long battled dry conditions and seasonal fires, making it more difficult for the human brain to draw the complicated connection to global warming that is making such events more frequent and more intense.

“The challenge we have is it is an exaggeration of weather patterns for which people are already socially adapted,” said George Marshall, co-founder of Climate Outreach, which advises governments across the world on how to communicate their climate change strategies and also the author of the book Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change.

Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, has played up this argument and downplayed the connection to the policies of his Liberal government (the main conservative party in Australian politics). His actions include cheering the expansion of the country’s coal industry and scrapping the previous Labor government’s short-lived carbon tax. Both of these measures encourage more pollution and increase global warming, in turn making Australia’s fires worse.

But people tend to gravitate toward simple explanations, Marshall said, which helps explain the spread of a discredited notion that hundreds of arsonists are to blame. (In fact, police in New South Wales said just 24 people had been charged with deliberately lighting fires since November, while there are more than 150 blazes currently raging in that state.) “The most compelling narratives for us are the ones that have clearly defined enemies and victims,” said Marshall, who is also the author of the book Carbon Detox.

He said the fires, which are most explicitly threatening rural, conservative parts of the country, could send the country down one of two paths. On the one hand, they could spark serious conversations within those communities about the need to deal with climate change, which would in turn force the Liberals to react and adapt. But they could also exacerbate social tensions in a country where voters have entrenched and polarized views.

“You might find a situation where left-wing people in Melbourne become very, very agitated, but someone like a sugar-cane grower in Queensland doesn’t shift at all,” he said. “If you're somebody whose house has burned down or whose farm has lost all its livestock, and you felt that you were really in the middle of it and traumatized by the experience, you're not going to welcome a bunch of cappuccino drinkers in Melbourne going on a march.”

Humans are adept at using motivated reasoning and other mind tricks to seek out information that confirms our own opinions while ignoring or downplaying those that challenge them, political scientists say. So even as some Australians had to plunge into the ocean to avoid the flames and smoke, human psychology offers those predisposed to ignoring climate change plenty of encouragement to look away.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/01/08/analysis/humans-wrestle-drag...

The 2010-2019 decade was the hottest decade ever recorded with 2019 was the second hottest ever. Furthermore eight of the top hottest years ever were in the 2010s.

Climate change deniers refuse to accept scientific warnings (David Horsey / Los Angeles Times)

 

The Supreme Court ruling that the province of British Columbia cannot regulate what can flow through an expanded Trans Mountain pipeline from Alberta has important implications for other pipelines, including a possible one through Quebec to the Maritimes. Although a Trudeau might be hesitant to push through a pipeline against the wishes of a major source of its support, a future Conservative government, both for ideological reasons and because it is not dependent on Quebec support might be willing to do so. Image result for canadian pipeline map So once again the Trudeau government enables the fossil fuel industry to expand its potential greenhouse gas emissions.

Quote:

The Supreme Court of Canada shut down British Columbia’s move to regulate what can flow through an expanded Trans Mountain pipeline from Alberta. The B.C. government wanted to require provincial permits before heavy oil could be shipped through pipelines in the province. In 2018, it asked the B.C. Court of Appeal if such permits were in bounds. Last May that court said no, ruling they would violate Ottawa’s authority under the Constitution to approve and regulate any pipeline that crosses a provincial border. ...

It removes one of the remaining obstacles for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, which seeks to twin an existing pipeline running between Edmonton and Burnaby, B.C. ...

Canada’s Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan welcomed the ruling. “It is a core responsibility of the federal government to help get Canada’s resources to market and support good, middle-class jobs,” he said in a statement. ...

The case had national implications for any project that crosses provincial boundaries, prompting Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec to all seek intervener status. All but Quebec sided entirely with the federal government.