Kista Erikson at Sun News has taken ombage at the fact that Québécois film director Philippe Falardeau's Oscar nominated film "Monsieur Lazhar" received - gasp! - money from the Federal government (hence - double gasp! - from the taxpayer).
http://blogs.montrealgazette.com/2012/02/17/sun-news-network-attack-on-monsieur-lazhar-is-just-goofy/
Montréal Gazette writer Brendan Kelly finds her behavior "goofy" but we think there may be more here than meets the eye. Look behind the goofiness and find, perhaps, a political motivation..
Ironincally, Mr Kelly himself appears to find the trace only to lose it again. Thus he writes quizically:
"What an outrage! Apparently our tax dollars went into this film.
Actually I really have no clue why the folks at Sun News are so
outraged. Is it ’cause the film is in the French? That the main
character is an Algerian refugee? That it takes place in that noted
communist hotbed Montreal?"
Yes, Mr Kelly we are suggesting that Krista lost it - unreflectedly or with premeditation (we do not know) - exactly because the film is in French, the main character is an Algerian refugee (both the fact that he is Algerian AND a refugee can be held against him), and that it takes place in a "communist hotbed" like Montréal.
If such an interpretation is true, one can only speculate. However, it does tie in with the rightwing, redneck, reactionary, populist tone of the Harper government in all its doings and gestures. If true, a new level of hypocrisy of neoconservative thinking would be revealed. We all know that the Harper government has made significant overtures to immigrant communities - at least during electoral campaigns, apparently in an attempt to tap into two potential sources of votes within immigrant communities: 1- the immigrant business community and 2- the conservative / reactionary social attitudes of many New Immigrant communities. This would constitute a delicate balancing act indeed because many Canadian rightwingers appreciate neither immigrants nor their particular brands of reaction (Islam as the One True Faith, outside of which there is no salvation, for example). At the limit, one might argue that the populist ideologues are attempting to play off one group of bigots against another so as to muster the intolerance of both against a common enemy ("the Left": liberals, moderates, social democrats, Québécois nationalists, feminists, "secularists"..) We note however that such hypocrisy and internal division would are, by no means, foreign to populists if their past actions are any judge. One need only consider the state of US politics before John F Kennedy and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Traditionally, the democratic party was the "natural ruling party" founded on an unholy alliance of "Jim Crow" - anti-black - local and state politicians in the South and northern working class / immigrant / labor union voters.
Another example is found in Québec during the "Grande Noirceur" - the Great Darkness, the reign of Québécois Premier Maurice Duplessis (reigned 1936 - 1959). Dupessis promulgated a nationalistic, patriotic - Québécois patriotism, anti-State and anti-labor message. Government spending was cut to a minimum as were labor safety regulations. Result: extractive industries (mining, forestry) payed next to nothing in royalties and taxes, environmental regulations were nil, the death toll from industrial accidents for Québécois workers was four times that of neighboring Ontario, Québécois were among the most uneducated and underpayed Canadians. New immigrants - Italian workers in Montréal - actually earned $200 per annum more than unilingual French Montréal citizens, circa 1960. In return, the Québécois were promised they would go to heaven for all eternity while their oppressors, "les Anglais et les Juifs" - the English and the Jews - would burn in hell for all eternity. The irony is that the greatest turn out of voters for Duplessis' Union Nationale party was in wealthy Westmount where the rich Anglais business owners lived! The populist voice often speaks different messages from both sides of its mouth..
Once again, we observe what can only be called the "prostitution of religion" to serve Ceasar. I recall conversations with people that grew up in Québec under the Duplessis regime. At election times, nuns in school would have kids recite the follow ditty:
Bleu est pour le ciel, Rouge est pour l'enfer
Blue is for heaven, Red is for hell
Blue was the color of the Union Nationale party, Red that of the Liberal party. Kids were told to instruct their parents they would go to hell if they voted the wrong color!
Do we not see echos of these attitudes in today's political scene..
Friday, February 24, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
Steven Harper - Québec separatists' best friend??
bumptious: crudely or loudly assertive; pushy
The idea might seem a bit bizarre but there is an argument that Harper's populist tub-thumping style may end up driving Québec into the hands of the seperatists, reviving what many consider a "dead issue"..
Quebecers, on the whole, see themselves as (squishy soft) "social democrats" on many issues such as abortion, gun regulation, social programs, crime and punishment of adolescents.. Many of us find the recent destruction of the long gun registry repellent and offensive: the gun registry was, after all, created by the activism of Quebecers after the Montréal Polytechnique massacre of 14 female students by a misogynist gunman, 6 december, 1989. The fact that Harper, in good populist funk, went so far as to take part in a celebration - !sic! - of the long gun registry destruction really did not sit well with many Quebecers: it's hard not to feel it as salt deliberately rubbed in an open wound..
Populist, redneck, neocon triumphalism - or just bumptious naïveté?
Justin Trudeau, son of former PM Pierre Trudeau and himself Federal Liberal MP, recently shocked Canadians in a French language CBC interview. Trudeau said he was saddened by the right wing direction Canada was taking under the Harper government. He went so far as to say that if things continued this way he might consider the separatist option: this from a son of arch-federalist Pierre Trudeau! (Obviously, this has separatists chuckling under their breath; I've heard them on the radio..) In the French language clip below the juicy part begins at 13 minutes.
Quebecers are feeling increasingly under-represented, misunderstood and unheeded. The longterm effects of Harper's populist bumptiousness are hard to predict but separatist leader (Parti Québécois) Pauline Marois seems ready to make hay while the sun shines..
In her open letter Madame Marois addresses what many Quebecers feel most offensive in the Harper government's handling of the deregistration process (aside from that damned celebratory cocktail party), the mean-spirited refusal of the Feds to turn over to Québec the portion of the long gun registry applying to citizens of the Province (my translation):
"We have proposed, with the Provincial government, the creation of a Québécois gun registry. To avoid prohibitive expenditures, the elected members of the Assemblée nationale have unanimously requested that Ottawa preserve the registry data relating to the Province of Québec. Unfortunately, your government has announced its intention to destroy these data. The people of Québec have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to create these files which are indespensible to the creation of a Québécois gun registry. Transferring these files to Québec will cost your government nothing. All that we are asking your government is the freedom for Québec to act in its own interests.."
Indeed! But Mr Harper seems far more occupied with short term political gain but populist tub thumping and bumptiousness may be this country's undoing.
Watch out Mr. Harper, what goes round, comes round..
Watch out Mr. Harper, what goes round, comes round..
Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind / Qui sème le vent récolte la tempête
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Elizabeth May pleads for realism on Energy policy
By Elizabeth May, Green Party Leader on 9 January 2012 - 3:10pm (from her blog: http://greenparty.ca/)
An Open letter to Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources Minister of Natural Resources
“Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade. Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth.
No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.
These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.”
- From your open letter of today’s date, January 9, 2012.
Dear Joe,
Your letter caught my attention. I respect you and like you a lot as a colleague in the House. Unfortunately, I think your role as Minister of Natural Resources has been hijacked by the PMO spin machine. The PMO is, in turn, hijacked by the foreign oil lobby. You are, as Minister of Natural Resources, in a decision-making, judge-like role. You should not have signed such a hyperbolic rant.
I have reproduced a short section of your letter. The idea that First Nations, conservation groups, and individuals opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline are opposed to all forestry, mining, hydro-electric and gas is not supported by the facts. I am one of those opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline. I do not oppose all development; neither does the Green Party; neither do environmental NGOS; neither do First Nations.
I oppose the Northern Gateway pipeline for a number of reasons, beginning with the fact that the project requires over-turning the current moratorium on oil tanker traffic on the British Columbia coastline. The federal-provincial oil tanker moratorium has been in place for decades. As former Industry Canada deputy minister Harry Swain pointed out in today’s Globe and Mail, moving oil tankers through 300 km of perilous navigation in highly energetic tidal conditions is a bad choice. In December 2010, the government’s own Commissioner for the Environment, within the Office of the Auditor General, reported that Canada lacked the tools to respond to an oil spill. These are legitimate concerns.
Furthermore, running a pipeline through British Columbia’s northern wilderness, particularly globally significant areas such as the Great Bear Rainforest, is a bad idea. Nearly 1200 kilometers of pipeline through wilderness and First Nations territory is not something that can be fast-tracked.
Most fundamentally, shipping unprocessed bitumen crude out of Canada has been attacked by the biggest of Canada’s energy labour unions, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, as a bad idea. The CEP estimates it means exporting 40,000 jobs out of Canada (figure based on jobs lost through the Keystone Pipeline). They prefer refining the crude here in Canada. (The CEP is also not a group to which your allegation that opponents of Gateway also oppose all forestry, mining, oil, gas, etc is anything but absurd.)
The repeated attacks on environmental review by your government merit mention. The federal law for environmental review was first introduced under the Mulroney government. Your government has dealt repeated blows to the process, both through legislative changes, shoved through in the 2010 omnibus budget bill, and through budget cuts. In today’s letter, you essentially ridicule the process through a misleading example. Your citation of “a temporary ice arena on a frozen pond in Banff” requiring federal review was clearly intended to create the impression that the scope of federal review had reached absurd levels. You neglected to mention that the arena was within the National Park. That is the only reason the federal government was involved. It was required by the National Parks Act. The fact that the arena approval took only two months shows the system works quite well.
Perhaps most disturbing in the letter is the description of opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline as coming from “environmental and other radical groups.” Nowhere in your letter do you mention First Nations. (I notice you mention “Aboriginal communities,” but First Nations require the appropriate respect that they represent a level of government, not merely individuals within communities.)
The federal government has a constitutional responsibility to respect First Nations sovereignty and protect their interests. It is a nation to nation relationship. To denigrate their opposition to the project by lumping it in with what you describe (twice) as “radical” groups is as unhelpful to those relationships as it is inaccurate.
“Radical” is defined as “relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough.” (Merriam Webster).
By that definition, it is not First Nations, conservation groups or individual opponents that are radical. They seek to protect the fundamental nature of the wilderness of northern British Columbia, the ecological health of British Columbia coastal eco-systems, and the integrity of impartial environmental review. It is your government that is radical by proposing quite radical alteration of those values.
Your government has failed to present an energy strategy to Canada. We have no energy policy. We are still importing more than half of the oil we use. Further, we have no plan to reduce dependency on fossil fuels, even as we sign on to global statements about the need to keep greenhouse gases from rising above 450 ppm in the atmosphere to keep global average temperatures from exceeding a growth of 2 degrees C. The climate crisis imperils our future – including our economic future – in fundamental ways which your government ignores.
By characterizing this issue as environmental radicals versus Canada’s future prosperity you have done a grave disservice to the development of sensible public policy. There are other ways to diversify Canada’s energy markets. There are other routes, other projects, and most fundamentally other forms of energy.
I urge you to protect your good name and refuse to sign such unworthy and inaccurate missives in the future.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth May, O.C.
Member of Parliament
Saanich-Gulf Islands
Leader
Green Party of Canada
Comment: Once again, in the use of loaded language - "radical", the deilberate misrepresentation of the intentions of environmentalists as threatening jobs, etc - we catch the Harper government stooping to cheap populist demogogy. This is the "politics of fear", a tactic employed in the 20th century by totalitarian governments at both extremes of the political spectrum (fascist, communist). Such language should be taken as an insult to the public intelligence. It is inevitably a smoke screen used to deflect public attention from the real issues at stake. In reality, green energy will produce the greatest number of stable, permanent jobs: virtually all the economic studies I have encountered conclude that green energies - not centralized, capital intensive fossil energy projects - produce the greatest number of jobs per dollar invested. Green energies are labor intensive, fossil energy is capital (infrastructure, financing) intensive. Populists though are interested in Power, not Truth..
An Open letter to Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources Minister of Natural Resources
“Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade. Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth.
No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.
These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.”
- From your open letter of today’s date, January 9, 2012.
Dear Joe,
Your letter caught my attention. I respect you and like you a lot as a colleague in the House. Unfortunately, I think your role as Minister of Natural Resources has been hijacked by the PMO spin machine. The PMO is, in turn, hijacked by the foreign oil lobby. You are, as Minister of Natural Resources, in a decision-making, judge-like role. You should not have signed such a hyperbolic rant.
I have reproduced a short section of your letter. The idea that First Nations, conservation groups, and individuals opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline are opposed to all forestry, mining, hydro-electric and gas is not supported by the facts. I am one of those opposed to the Northern Gateway pipeline. I do not oppose all development; neither does the Green Party; neither do environmental NGOS; neither do First Nations.
I oppose the Northern Gateway pipeline for a number of reasons, beginning with the fact that the project requires over-turning the current moratorium on oil tanker traffic on the British Columbia coastline. The federal-provincial oil tanker moratorium has been in place for decades. As former Industry Canada deputy minister Harry Swain pointed out in today’s Globe and Mail, moving oil tankers through 300 km of perilous navigation in highly energetic tidal conditions is a bad choice. In December 2010, the government’s own Commissioner for the Environment, within the Office of the Auditor General, reported that Canada lacked the tools to respond to an oil spill. These are legitimate concerns.
Furthermore, running a pipeline through British Columbia’s northern wilderness, particularly globally significant areas such as the Great Bear Rainforest, is a bad idea. Nearly 1200 kilometers of pipeline through wilderness and First Nations territory is not something that can be fast-tracked.
Most fundamentally, shipping unprocessed bitumen crude out of Canada has been attacked by the biggest of Canada’s energy labour unions, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, as a bad idea. The CEP estimates it means exporting 40,000 jobs out of Canada (figure based on jobs lost through the Keystone Pipeline). They prefer refining the crude here in Canada. (The CEP is also not a group to which your allegation that opponents of Gateway also oppose all forestry, mining, oil, gas, etc is anything but absurd.)
The repeated attacks on environmental review by your government merit mention. The federal law for environmental review was first introduced under the Mulroney government. Your government has dealt repeated blows to the process, both through legislative changes, shoved through in the 2010 omnibus budget bill, and through budget cuts. In today’s letter, you essentially ridicule the process through a misleading example. Your citation of “a temporary ice arena on a frozen pond in Banff” requiring federal review was clearly intended to create the impression that the scope of federal review had reached absurd levels. You neglected to mention that the arena was within the National Park. That is the only reason the federal government was involved. It was required by the National Parks Act. The fact that the arena approval took only two months shows the system works quite well.
Perhaps most disturbing in the letter is the description of opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline as coming from “environmental and other radical groups.” Nowhere in your letter do you mention First Nations. (I notice you mention “Aboriginal communities,” but First Nations require the appropriate respect that they represent a level of government, not merely individuals within communities.)
The federal government has a constitutional responsibility to respect First Nations sovereignty and protect their interests. It is a nation to nation relationship. To denigrate their opposition to the project by lumping it in with what you describe (twice) as “radical” groups is as unhelpful to those relationships as it is inaccurate.
“Radical” is defined as “relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough.” (Merriam Webster).
By that definition, it is not First Nations, conservation groups or individual opponents that are radical. They seek to protect the fundamental nature of the wilderness of northern British Columbia, the ecological health of British Columbia coastal eco-systems, and the integrity of impartial environmental review. It is your government that is radical by proposing quite radical alteration of those values.
Your government has failed to present an energy strategy to Canada. We have no energy policy. We are still importing more than half of the oil we use. Further, we have no plan to reduce dependency on fossil fuels, even as we sign on to global statements about the need to keep greenhouse gases from rising above 450 ppm in the atmosphere to keep global average temperatures from exceeding a growth of 2 degrees C. The climate crisis imperils our future – including our economic future – in fundamental ways which your government ignores.
By characterizing this issue as environmental radicals versus Canada’s future prosperity you have done a grave disservice to the development of sensible public policy. There are other ways to diversify Canada’s energy markets. There are other routes, other projects, and most fundamentally other forms of energy.
I urge you to protect your good name and refuse to sign such unworthy and inaccurate missives in the future.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth May, O.C.
Member of Parliament
Saanich-Gulf Islands
Leader
Green Party of Canada
Comment: Once again, in the use of loaded language - "radical", the deilberate misrepresentation of the intentions of environmentalists as threatening jobs, etc - we catch the Harper government stooping to cheap populist demogogy. This is the "politics of fear", a tactic employed in the 20th century by totalitarian governments at both extremes of the political spectrum (fascist, communist). Such language should be taken as an insult to the public intelligence. It is inevitably a smoke screen used to deflect public attention from the real issues at stake. In reality, green energy will produce the greatest number of stable, permanent jobs: virtually all the economic studies I have encountered conclude that green energies - not centralized, capital intensive fossil energy projects - produce the greatest number of jobs per dollar invested. Green energies are labor intensive, fossil energy is capital (infrastructure, financing) intensive. Populists though are interested in Power, not Truth..
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Shedding light on Peak Oil
This is an important book on energy, how much it will cost in the future, what this will mean for our "way of life". The Harper government is in bed with the Oil corporations: they provide a very one-sided perspective on the energy future of this country. To counter this slanted presentation of Canada's energy future, we are reproducing a review of an important book on Peak Oil here.
Book review: Jeff Rubin: Why your world is about to get a whole lot smaller, Oil and the end of globalization (Random House, Canada, 2009) 265 pages; notes and index. Rating 8.5 / 10
HEADLINE: Summer, 2008. Spike in oil prices to $145 / bbl announces the end of the Era of Cheap Energy
Economic insider, Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at CIBC World Markets, has written a very readable, accessible introduction to "Peak Oil" and its future impacts. Although we have doubts about Rubin's cheery "business (almost) as usual" prognosis, he does nail down the basic mechanics and, for this, he gets close to full marks.
Peak Oil refers to human rationality: humans will pick the "low hanging fruit" first; they will first extract the most accessible, cheapest to exploit, reserves of a non-renewable resource (petroleum). This is logical: low production costs mean higher profits. Only later, when cheap reserves are depleted, will producers willingly switch to more risky, expensive reserves. To maintain profit margins they will pass on the increased cost to the buyer. Prices will rise, establishing a new market equilibrium of supply, demand and price.
In extreme cases, such as the contemporary global oil market, supply may become so constricted - "tight supply" - that even exploding demand for oil in emerging markets (China, India) cannot conjure oil out of the ground faster than it's coming already. Supply curves flatten - before, eventually, declining - despite rising prices and demand. This peaking and subsequent flattening of oil production is colloquially referred to as "Peak Oil".
In effect, the problem the globalized world economy faces today is simple: we've put all - or most - of our eggs in the basket called "fossil energy supply" and now that basket is falling (this is why granny used to say: don' t put all your eggs in one basket!) As easy to access reserves of fossil energy deplete, prices will rise, stiffling the economic growth our economic system requires in order to function - or merely survive.
In theory, way back in the 1970s - when people began to realize that we had demographic / environmental problems, we could have "converted" our remaining reserves of cheap fossil energy (coal, oil, gas..) into green energy infrastructure. Waiting until production costs of newly exploited oil fields becomes prohibitive is obviously not an intelligent strategy. Paradoxically, this imbecilic, "wait till the free market provides price signals for green energy development" strategy - promoted by the fossil fuel lobby - has been the policy followed for the last 40 years in first world economies. As Rubin indicates, rising production costs of newly exploited reserves - offshore reserves, tar sands.., will stiffle the transition to a green energy economy. In addition, our margin of error has now shrunk to the vanishing point. We have neither the time, the money, nor the resources to make mistakes. If we had begun a programmed transition to green energy back in the 1970s, we could have avoided the urgency to "get things right the first time". Letting things go to the last minute is dangerous and stupid if you life depends on making right decisions.. In addition, it is more costly to convert to a green energy economy today: the energy "embodied" in the construction of renewable energy infrastructure is more expensive than 40 years ago.
One of the main victims of cheap oil's demise will be the globalized economy itself. The analysis of the impacts of Peak Oil is indeed one of the strong points of Rubin's book.
During the Golden Era of Deregulation - the Reagan / Thatcher era, international trade barriers fell. Blue collar - and eventually white collar - jobs were exported overseas to 3rd world sweatshops, call centers and software writers. When energy is cheap and tariffs non-existent, this makes (short-term) economic - if not moral or strategic - sense: wages and environmental costs associated with regulations are lower (or nonexistent) in the 3rd world. As a result of "outsourcing", profits, dividends to shareholders, obscenely inflated salaries and "bonuses" to megacorporation plutocrats shot through the ceiling. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer - bigtime! The rustbelt spreading through disaffected industrial towns of America marked the demise of the "American Dream" for the little wo/man.. As peak oil now rears its ugly head, we are forced to recognize that the Cheap Energy Binge is over. Now we have the hangover, the cops and the landlord to deal with.. (So hungover, you fear you are going to die. And then it just goes on and on and on, and now you're so sick you really are scared you're NOT going to die..)
As the world economy attempts to recover from the "Great Recession", oil prices will spike again - since supply remains "tight", prices will be driven up by scarcity. Speculation may further inflate prices, repeating the boom-bust cycle of summer / autumn 2008 (which was the cause of the construction bubble collapse in the USA which, in turn, brought down the globalized financial sector, triggering the Great Recession) - this is one probable scenario. Another possible scenario - the economy will be stiffled by higher "new oil" costs and will never recover but continue its death spiral. This latter scenario now seems the more probable one. Only time will tell..
Regardless of which scenario materializes, the globalized economy is cooked. It will be too expensive to ship cheap rubber bath duckies and steel from China to N. America and Europe. As Rubin says, we will have to get used to producing / consuming locally and regionally as people did in the past. We will relearn the virtues of local food: it will be too expensize to ship mangoes to Montréal from tropical plantations employing massive inputs of expensive fossil fuel energy in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, insecticides and transport. We will have to reopen rusting N. American steel mills if we want steel, buy N. American vehicles if we want travel and transport.
For me, the weak point of Rubin's analysis: where will all the locally / regionally produced energy come from? Can we get enough renewable energy online, fast enough to avoid really serious economic and social disruption? If we can, at what price? Will that price be too high, stiffling any hope of long term economic recovery? I am not sure that even "green" Western Europe has enough installed green energy infrastructure to make the transition a peaceful one. It is for the perceived weaknesses of Rubin's analysis of the long term situation, that I withhold full marks: 8.5 out of possible 10.
As a general introduction to the subject of Peak Oil, especially for younger readers, it's hard to beat this book - despite its weaknesses.
Book review: Jeff Rubin: Why your world is about to get a whole lot smaller, Oil and the end of globalization (Random House, Canada, 2009) 265 pages; notes and index. Rating 8.5 / 10
HEADLINE: Summer, 2008. Spike in oil prices to $145 / bbl announces the end of the Era of Cheap Energy
Economic insider, Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at CIBC World Markets, has written a very readable, accessible introduction to "Peak Oil" and its future impacts. Although we have doubts about Rubin's cheery "business (almost) as usual" prognosis, he does nail down the basic mechanics and, for this, he gets close to full marks.
Peak Oil refers to human rationality: humans will pick the "low hanging fruit" first; they will first extract the most accessible, cheapest to exploit, reserves of a non-renewable resource (petroleum). This is logical: low production costs mean higher profits. Only later, when cheap reserves are depleted, will producers willingly switch to more risky, expensive reserves. To maintain profit margins they will pass on the increased cost to the buyer. Prices will rise, establishing a new market equilibrium of supply, demand and price.
In extreme cases, such as the contemporary global oil market, supply may become so constricted - "tight supply" - that even exploding demand for oil in emerging markets (China, India) cannot conjure oil out of the ground faster than it's coming already. Supply curves flatten - before, eventually, declining - despite rising prices and demand. This peaking and subsequent flattening of oil production is colloquially referred to as "Peak Oil".
In effect, the problem the globalized world economy faces today is simple: we've put all - or most - of our eggs in the basket called "fossil energy supply" and now that basket is falling (this is why granny used to say: don' t put all your eggs in one basket!) As easy to access reserves of fossil energy deplete, prices will rise, stiffling the economic growth our economic system requires in order to function - or merely survive.
In theory, way back in the 1970s - when people began to realize that we had demographic / environmental problems, we could have "converted" our remaining reserves of cheap fossil energy (coal, oil, gas..) into green energy infrastructure. Waiting until production costs of newly exploited oil fields becomes prohibitive is obviously not an intelligent strategy. Paradoxically, this imbecilic, "wait till the free market provides price signals for green energy development" strategy - promoted by the fossil fuel lobby - has been the policy followed for the last 40 years in first world economies. As Rubin indicates, rising production costs of newly exploited reserves - offshore reserves, tar sands.., will stiffle the transition to a green energy economy. In addition, our margin of error has now shrunk to the vanishing point. We have neither the time, the money, nor the resources to make mistakes. If we had begun a programmed transition to green energy back in the 1970s, we could have avoided the urgency to "get things right the first time". Letting things go to the last minute is dangerous and stupid if you life depends on making right decisions.. In addition, it is more costly to convert to a green energy economy today: the energy "embodied" in the construction of renewable energy infrastructure is more expensive than 40 years ago.
One of the main victims of cheap oil's demise will be the globalized economy itself. The analysis of the impacts of Peak Oil is indeed one of the strong points of Rubin's book.
During the Golden Era of Deregulation - the Reagan / Thatcher era, international trade barriers fell. Blue collar - and eventually white collar - jobs were exported overseas to 3rd world sweatshops, call centers and software writers. When energy is cheap and tariffs non-existent, this makes (short-term) economic - if not moral or strategic - sense: wages and environmental costs associated with regulations are lower (or nonexistent) in the 3rd world. As a result of "outsourcing", profits, dividends to shareholders, obscenely inflated salaries and "bonuses" to megacorporation plutocrats shot through the ceiling. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer - bigtime! The rustbelt spreading through disaffected industrial towns of America marked the demise of the "American Dream" for the little wo/man.. As peak oil now rears its ugly head, we are forced to recognize that the Cheap Energy Binge is over. Now we have the hangover, the cops and the landlord to deal with.. (So hungover, you fear you are going to die. And then it just goes on and on and on, and now you're so sick you really are scared you're NOT going to die..)
As the world economy attempts to recover from the "Great Recession", oil prices will spike again - since supply remains "tight", prices will be driven up by scarcity. Speculation may further inflate prices, repeating the boom-bust cycle of summer / autumn 2008 (which was the cause of the construction bubble collapse in the USA which, in turn, brought down the globalized financial sector, triggering the Great Recession) - this is one probable scenario. Another possible scenario - the economy will be stiffled by higher "new oil" costs and will never recover but continue its death spiral. This latter scenario now seems the more probable one. Only time will tell..
Regardless of which scenario materializes, the globalized economy is cooked. It will be too expensive to ship cheap rubber bath duckies and steel from China to N. America and Europe. As Rubin says, we will have to get used to producing / consuming locally and regionally as people did in the past. We will relearn the virtues of local food: it will be too expensize to ship mangoes to Montréal from tropical plantations employing massive inputs of expensive fossil fuel energy in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, insecticides and transport. We will have to reopen rusting N. American steel mills if we want steel, buy N. American vehicles if we want travel and transport.
For me, the weak point of Rubin's analysis: where will all the locally / regionally produced energy come from? Can we get enough renewable energy online, fast enough to avoid really serious economic and social disruption? If we can, at what price? Will that price be too high, stiffling any hope of long term economic recovery? I am not sure that even "green" Western Europe has enough installed green energy infrastructure to make the transition a peaceful one. It is for the perceived weaknesses of Rubin's analysis of the long term situation, that I withhold full marks: 8.5 out of possible 10.
As a general introduction to the subject of Peak Oil, especially for younger readers, it's hard to beat this book - despite its weaknesses.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Bienvenue Pascal
Bienvenue, Pascal! Vous pouvez nous écrire soit en anglais, soit en français. J'aimerais recevoir des impressions outre-mer. La vision stéréoscopique est le jeu de DEUX yeux qui envoient des images chacune un peu différente l'une de l'autre..
Friday, December 16, 2011
Laffin' an' fiddlin' while Rome burns
Ah the Tories, one's gotta love 'em! Funnier than a barrel of monkeys..
When Canada was "awarded" the Colossal Fossil boody prize in the Durbin (post Kyoto protocol) talks, Conservatives MPs laughed and cheered.
http://montreal.mediacoop.ca/blog/tim-mcsorley/9348
Behind the good ol' boy laugh up and self congratuations, there is a truth being revealed here which the Left, the Center and the Moderate Right ignore at their peril. In the psychology of reaction, facts, alternative views, the civil rights of scapegoats can all be dispensed with by collective ridicule (or outrage or denigration - it's called Group Think). Ridicule conveniently replaces intelligent reasoned response and debate which, of course, require intellectual effort. In addition, Ideology provides justifications and rationalizations for injustice (laziness, racial inferiority, "clashes of civilizations"..) and provides a norm to which "reality" must be forced, wily-nily to conform. Thus, ideologically speaking, for the Global Warming "sceptic", Global Warming simply CAN'T be happening. Therefore, scientists and academics - despite credentials and field experience - who claim it is happening, MUST be lying and planning to corner the market on carbon credit trading and rake in "trillions" (on a professor's salary??!! - no mention made, of course, of those fossil fuel companies, their executives and shareholders and what THEY stand to profit from continued use of fossil fuels "to the last drop"..)
More specifically, democracy requires free flows of information up and down the hierarchy of governance. Theoretically - not to mention practically! - the public needs proper information on the pros and cons of important issues so they can decide which of the various platforms proposed by political parties they choose to support. Unfortunately, the type of nervous, reactive, ideological arrogance exhibited by Tory members of the house of Commons is fundamentally incompatible with the transparency of information flows required by democracy to function.
1- Ideology blocks openess to alternative views. The ideologue's mind is "opaque" rather than "transparent" and permeable to conflicting facts and viewpoints.
2- Perhaps even more toxic to the free and open give and take of opinion which democracy requires is the fact that ideology encourages intellectual - and eventually moral - dishonesty: all those inconvenient FACTS - what to do about them.. In the long run, the notion of the "Public Good" vanishes, replaced by partisan fighting - and infighting - for status, position, favor, bakchich..
Here's a good example of what Ideology can do to "Democracy" in practice: a Canadian artist who had her funding cut, seemingly because she was too pro-Global Warming in her thinking..
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/canadas-approach-to-inconvenient-art/
While my appreciation of history may be hindered by my ignorance, we believe that reaction is a (nearly) sure sign that a society is failing in some fundamental ways: France before the Revolution of '89, Russia before WW I (and the Russian Revolution which, be it noted, turned out to be a debacle); Europe in the between wars, 1919 - 1939, and the rise of fascism, the contemporary rise of skinheads and U.S. militias.. What the nexus of the crisis will be, will vary, of course, from one concrete historical situation to another.
When Canada was "awarded" the Colossal Fossil boody prize in the Durbin (post Kyoto protocol) talks, Conservatives MPs laughed and cheered.
http://montreal.mediacoop.ca/blog/tim-mcsorley/9348
Behind the good ol' boy laugh up and self congratuations, there is a truth being revealed here which the Left, the Center and the Moderate Right ignore at their peril. In the psychology of reaction, facts, alternative views, the civil rights of scapegoats can all be dispensed with by collective ridicule (or outrage or denigration - it's called Group Think). Ridicule conveniently replaces intelligent reasoned response and debate which, of course, require intellectual effort. In addition, Ideology provides justifications and rationalizations for injustice (laziness, racial inferiority, "clashes of civilizations"..) and provides a norm to which "reality" must be forced, wily-nily to conform. Thus, ideologically speaking, for the Global Warming "sceptic", Global Warming simply CAN'T be happening. Therefore, scientists and academics - despite credentials and field experience - who claim it is happening, MUST be lying and planning to corner the market on carbon credit trading and rake in "trillions" (on a professor's salary??!! - no mention made, of course, of those fossil fuel companies, their executives and shareholders and what THEY stand to profit from continued use of fossil fuels "to the last drop"..)
More specifically, democracy requires free flows of information up and down the hierarchy of governance. Theoretically - not to mention practically! - the public needs proper information on the pros and cons of important issues so they can decide which of the various platforms proposed by political parties they choose to support. Unfortunately, the type of nervous, reactive, ideological arrogance exhibited by Tory members of the house of Commons is fundamentally incompatible with the transparency of information flows required by democracy to function.
1- Ideology blocks openess to alternative views. The ideologue's mind is "opaque" rather than "transparent" and permeable to conflicting facts and viewpoints.
2- Perhaps even more toxic to the free and open give and take of opinion which democracy requires is the fact that ideology encourages intellectual - and eventually moral - dishonesty: all those inconvenient FACTS - what to do about them.. In the long run, the notion of the "Public Good" vanishes, replaced by partisan fighting - and infighting - for status, position, favor, bakchich..
Here's a good example of what Ideology can do to "Democracy" in practice: a Canadian artist who had her funding cut, seemingly because she was too pro-Global Warming in her thinking..
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/canadas-approach-to-inconvenient-art/
While my appreciation of history may be hindered by my ignorance, we believe that reaction is a (nearly) sure sign that a society is failing in some fundamental ways: France before the Revolution of '89, Russia before WW I (and the Russian Revolution which, be it noted, turned out to be a debacle); Europe in the between wars, 1919 - 1939, and the rise of fascism, the contemporary rise of skinheads and U.S. militias.. What the nexus of the crisis will be, will vary, of course, from one concrete historical situation to another.
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