Good Sunday Morning! Happy Solstice!
The great thing about winter solstice with all that it embodies of deep cultural religious and pagan significance, is that from today on our days get longer.
We will have more light. And, even though we experience it every year, I never fail to be cheered by longer days and the late evening summer sun, as we approach June 21 and summer solstice. From shortest to longest day of the year, our moods are affected by our place as the Earth revolves around the sun. Our home on this planet is worth fighting for.
This week I have been reflecting on the number of things that are simply pure nonsense embraced by the pro-fossil fuel crowd.
I was set in this direction by this truly appalling bit of news:
An Alberta oil advocate has withdrawn a campaign to rename the never-built Northern Gateway pipeline the “Spirit Bear” pipeline. Robbie Picard launched the campaign earlier this month. He has formally withdrawn the effort.
He says he was not aware that “Spirit Bear” is a legally protected sacred symbol of the Kitasoo Xai’xais Nation. The name, also known in the Nation’s language as Mooksgm’ol, represents a sacred white bear, also called the Kermode bear (a black bear species with a genetic anomoly giving it white fur), found in the Great Bear Rainforest and carries spiritual, historical and ecological significance. Picard said he was unaware of the name’s legal and cultural significance when the petition launched.
Read more at: https://northernsentinel.com/
This is right up there, in terms of cultural sensitivity, with Minister of Energy Tim Hodgson saying a couple of weeks ago that he should consult with First Nations leaders and elders on Zoom. Where do these people come from? What did they learn there?
I feel compelled to cut and paste, repeating, this one sentence for its astonishing ignorance. “the Spirit Bear as a powerful regional emblem symbolizing harmony between nature and industry.”
Profound ignorance underlies why most Canadians now think a pipeline across British Columbia is a good idea. We are good neighbours. We are also Canadians first and foremost. With Trump taking aim at our economy, we are more prepared to compromise in the national interest.
Public opinion has been conditioned to accept the idea that more pipelines make sense through steady repetition of things that are not true.
The process of shifting public opinion started the moment that Justin Trudeau’s government bought the pipeline from Kinder Morgan of Texas. More effectively than I could have imagined, public familiarity with the arguments against pipelines was forgotten as the federal Crown corporation, TMX, wasted $34 billion in public funds to build it. Our protests more or less stopped, with full respect to Burnaby area protests, from tree-sitting medical doctor and SFU professor, Dr. Tim Takaro and fellow tree-sitter and Green Party candidate Maureen Curran who refused to accept that the dangers of the pipeline were no longer worth opposing. The weight of inevitability ended up silencing our voices in ways I had not imagined.
The rhetoric and rhyming slogans of Pierre Poilievre started being accepted as if they were grounded in reality. Topping the hit parade of falsehoods, now accepted by Liberal Mark Carney, driving new “anti-red tape” laws are these doozies:
- That Kinder Morgan faced a tangle of multiple environmental assessments at provincial and federal levels, frustrating the aims of the private sector proponent.
Truth: BC Premier Christy Clark, as a favour to Stephen Harper, decided NOT to have a BC government review of Kinder Morgan.
Truth: Stephen Harper, through his spring 2012 omnibus budget bill, C-38, repealed the Mulroney-era federal environmental assessment law, replacing it with a more discretionary assessment, fast-tracking reviews, time limited and rushed to do the whole review ASAP. Plus Harper’s C-38 removed the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency from conducting the review and put the (then) National Energy Board (NEB) in charge.
As ever “haste makes waste” and the NEB, having never run an EA, made so many mistakes that the permit to allow the TMX pipeline was quashed by the Federal Court in August 2018.
- Meanwhile Kinder Morgan decided against building the pipeline, as was transparent in the winter 2018 shareholders’ meeting where former CEO Richard Kinder (formerly a senior executive of Enron) announced KM was liquidating the few billion dollars raised to secure capital to build the pipeline and was, instead, using it to pay down HQ debt. That, and the KM decision to re-organize its assets, setting up a separate Canadian affiliate, holding most, but not all, of KM Canadian assets, making it easier to carve it up and walk away.
One non-factual building block for the public’s shifting opinion on pipelines is the notion that Alberta has been unfairly blocked from getting its resources to market (and this of course is buttressed by the invented and false argument that development has been stalled).
The reality is that the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, and now under Mark Carney, are doing far more than Harper ever did to boost production of one of the planet’s dirtiest forms of oil. As the price of oil has dropped, if left to market forces, oil sands production would be declining. But thanks to the tax payers of Canada footing the bill for the TMX pipeline, the production of oil sands bitumen has increased,
This is a recent assessment from Standard and Poors:
Canadian Oil Sands Production Expected to Reach All-time Highs this Year Despite Lower Oil Prices– Standard and Poors outlook… “The latest forecast expects oil sands production to reach a record annual average production of 3.5 million b/d in 2025 (5% higher than 2024) and exceed 3.9 million b/d by 2030—half a million barrels per day higher than 2024. The 2030 projection is 100,000 barrels per day (or nearly 3%) higher than the previous outlook.”
The looney idea that China wants our oil for energy is at least dented when one realizes that of the dilbit we are now shipping to China through the TMX pipeline a third is not used for energy at all. Once the diluent is removed (as it is only added to get the solid tarry substance—bitumen—to flow through a pipeline) about one-third of what we are shipping doesn’t end up in Chinese refineries but is used to pave roads in China. That is one small blessing; at least that much is not burned to throw more fuel on the planet-warming fire.
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I am highly motivated as should be all climate-concerned fellow citizens. Our government is pulling against market forces. It is committed to fossil fuels even when we could electrify our economy and rely on cheaper and available renewable energy.
Canada is the right G7 county to start doing the right things. Despite rhetoric, as you likely know, we remain the worst. I never stopped using 1990 as the base year and reference point for climate action, as was first decided in negotiating the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Remember it was Harper in 2006 who shifted Canada to using 2006, And later, shifting again to 2005, each time weakening our ambition. But it is stunning that the EU is on average 38% below 1990 levels, the UK more than 50% below 1990 levels, the USA, even after one Trump term and into the second is 3% below 1990 levels. What of Canada’s emissions? 18% above 1990…
Canadians simply assume we must be better than the US. Tragically we are going in the wrong direction, and faster under Carney than under Trudeau. We need to confront rather directly the lie that Alberta has been unfairly treated. Canada has wasted $34 billion and trespassed on Indigenous lands to build a pipeline carrying a highly dangerous substance threatening our coasts and marine environment. Who is being treated unfairly here?? And the BC NDP government wants more fracking and more LNG pipelines, with Energy Minister Adrian Dix, without consulting First Nations, offering up his solution: Pump a million more barrels of dilbit through the existing pipeline, dredge Vancouver Harbour to run bigger tankers navigating through Burrard Inlet and the Second Narrows. As British Columbians unwillingly having these increased risks thrust upon us, we have been manipulated into thinking we need to do more to help Alberta.
Please do explain to friends and family – around the family table over the holidays, that we have an obligation to protect our salmon, our whales, our coastal waters. That while Alberta claims its economy is at risk, as it grows with federal subsidies, the multi-billion dollar industries of coastal BC, in fisheries, recreation and tourism, are at risk every single day without an ounce of benefit coming our way.
If you live in a district with a Liberal MP, ask them to explain.
In the meantime, we are all shifting to focusing on the joy of the season. Christmas is Thursday! Make your homemade treats. Try to avoid consumer culture Christmas. Wrap your friends in hugs!
Sing as much and as loudly as you can. This is, forever, my favourite! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpsXNlarAk8
Meanwhile, sharing for those who are inclined, today’s global effort to shift consciousness through meditation.
Best to all and will be back in your in-box next week!
Love
Elizabeth
Sunday, December 21
World Meditation Day morning group meditation followed by group practice of the TM-Sidhi program
• Sunday, December 21
• Victoria TM Centre
• Arrive by 7:45 am
• TM promptly at 8 am
• Full 20 minute meditation
• TM-Sidhas are invited to stay after TM for the TM-Sidhi program
• For TM practitioners and anyone who practices any silent meditation technique
Please RSVP by December 19 by clicking here
World Meditation Day afternoon group meditation followed by candle lighting and cake
• Sunday, December 21
• Victoria TM Centre
• Arrive by 4:45 pm
• TM promptly at 5 pm
• For TM practitioners and anyone who practices any silent meditation technique
• Please note that there will not be TM-Sidhi group program in the afternoon
After the group meditation, we will each have the opportunity to light a candle and make a wish, an intention, a sankalpa for the coming season, either silently or aloud. Then we will have cake!
Please RSVP by December 19 by clicking here
Please join us for either or both events and let’s bring inner and outer light to Victoria and the world on this shortest of days in the Northern Hemisphere!
If you are not able to join in person, you can join the worldwide events on YouTube Livestream.
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GSM from December 14, 2025 – IGNORE if yours came through last week.. we had some gremlins interfering with the software we use.
Hello all. John Kidder here, Elizabeth’s husband and occasional co-writer! Elizabeth has finally hit the wall of exhaustion from the crush of parliamentary work that hit its peak before Thursday’s adjournment. So I am back as a guest writer!
We’ve been talking about the enigma of Prime Minister Carney, who just last year was seen as one the world’s great champions for action on climate change. Now his Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Alberta, calling for a new pipeline, eliminating policies and programs intended to reduce carbon emissions, all intending to make Canada a “conventional energy superpower” have given the lie to that impression. Elizabeth has asked me to write this week to her faithful readers.
I hope this does not bore you to tears.
I believe Mr. Carney is a smart right-thinking accomplished man. I believe he intends right action with every decision. I want to believe he’ll be able to guide the country through perilous times. But after the last month or so, I’m not so optimistic.
First, his approach to government concerns me.
We see legislation that permits cabinet ministers to override any existing law (except the Criminal Code), more to permit government to simply decide that projects it thinks are in “the national interest” will not be subject to ordinary due diligence, enormous “omnibus” bills that affect all sorts of established law, on and on it goes. These are driven through the House in just a few hours consideration by procedural manipulations that don’t permit debate. You’ve read about this in Elizabeth’s letters. This is all supposedly because of the threat of Mr. Trump’s smashing through every established principle and practice of the United States and posing a grave economic threat to Canada.
We need a whole new strategy, they say, so government must have near-emergency powers. We need to act big and bold and fast, so let’s get those pesky economic and environmental assessments and that time-wasting parliamentary nonsense out of the way. It seems to me that Mr. Carney thinks of Parliament the way a hard-charging CEO might think of a particularly useless board of directors – a talking shop that does nothing real, an ugly angry Question Period shouting match show for the faithful (he’s right about that), way too many people, impossible procedures (the newest book on Parliamentary procedures is 1400 pages long), impossible to make timely business decisions, such a waste of time, etc. It would be better, thinks the Prime Minister, if they just asked for routine quarterly summary reports and otherwise got out of the way.
Mr. Carney is an enormously experienced senior bureaucrat. Now he’s Prime Minister of a complaisant parliament largely ignorant of its duties. So he’s rewriting the rules. And since none, NONE, of the MPs (except Elizabeth, who reads every single word) ever read let alone dissect proposed legislation – their whips tell them what to think, personal investigation is discouraged – the changes Mr. Carney is making to the basic structures of Canadian governance are sliding through without meaningful discussion.
This allows a sort of “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley approach. When I was running technology startups, we were always mindful of the “90-90 rule” – the first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time and money; the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time and money. The famous Norwegian project manager Bent Flyvbjerg wrote a book “How Big Things Get Done” based on his extensive experience being called in to rescue enormous projects that had gone awry, and a database of 160,000 other big projects around the world. He observes that democratic governments are particularly prone to acting quickly without enough planning, in part of course because of the short-term transactional nature of electoral politics. Flyvbjerg’s extensive data shows with no room for doubt that acting quickly without enough planning leads to failure. Mr. Carney invited Flyvbjerg to brief his cabinet – I see no sign that his advice stuck. We are about to embark on large long-lasting “projects of national significance” with much reduced analysis and planning, not more.
Elizabeth has pointed out that Mr. Ford in Ontario and Mr. Eby in BC have passed similar legislation greatly expanding their powers to act precipitously because of so-called “emergencies”. And of course we see the prime example south of the line, where the orange ogre declares an emergency whenever he sees something he doesn’t like and issues “executive orders” to use whole-of-government power as he sees fit.
These are not signs of a healthy democracy. I don’t like it.
Second, I have been confused by Mr. Carney’s approach to “climate finance” since I first saw him at the Glasgow Climate COP in 2021. He announced that he and some banking colleagues had agreed to put up $126 trillion to fund the transition away from fossil fuels. Whoa, I thought, that’s a lot of money – enough to meet the “loss and damage” needs of the poorest countries so badly affected by changes to the climate caused by us the richest countries, and enough to drive rapid deployment of renewable energy everywhere. Then I remembered that Mr. Carney is first and foremost a banker. Bankers always, always want the money back, with interest (or that much better word used by loan sharks, the “vigorish”). Loss and damage payments given to poor countries are not intended to be paid back. And deployment of abundant low marginal cost renewables can’t make the big fat profits that scarce high-cost fossils or nuclear plants do. As an example, Chinese solar panels are so inexpensive farmers in Germany are buying them to use as fencing – power output is a side benefit. No way to make big money from such cheap commodities. So perhaps one might have some caution.
Two years later in Dubai at COP 28, I watched Mr. Carney headline a panel of private equity investors. Private equity types (like Mr. Carney’s expected appointment for Ambassador to the US, Mark Wiseman, ex-BlackRock) are famously rapacious. Now the talk was of “hundreds of trillions”, and of the eagerness of said investors to push money out the door to “get things done fast”. No talk of funding things that wouldn’t make a lot of money back. So who did one see at that meeting? All sorts of nuclear energy people – they’re always ready to soak up a few hundreds of billions of dollars to pursue their fantasies. Bent Flyvbjerg’s database (see above) shows that big projects’ risks of failure are not evenly distributed like a bell curve around their initial estimates, “plus or minus 25%” or the like. The curve is not normally distributed at all, and failures are mostly way out in what he calls the “fat tail” off to the right – over 90% of nuclear power projects in his database are many multiples of original cost estimates and take many years more than expected. This is good stuff for the big money folks, especially if the power the nukes eventually provide is through a public utility that sets prices to cover costs. Cheap widely distributed power, solar cells on roofs, micro-grids, and the like, are the very opposite – almost all come in on time and on budget because the technology now is like Lego, proven plug-and-play, quick and cheap to deploy, that can produce electrical power at very low marginal cost, with the potential for very low prices. No wonder the money doesn’t want them.
Mr. Carney’s right hand man, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Tim Hodgson, by coincidence another Goldman Sachs banker, seems to be the government’s chief promoter of nuclear energy – the MOU contains an astonishing agreement that Alberta will produce nuclear power (not wind or solar, with which Alberta is hugely endowed) to feed into the BC grid, all to be in place by 2050. At least, 25 years could be a realistic assessment of how long it might take to actually get power from the much-hyped hypothetical “small”, “modular”, reactors, that are neither small nor modular nor existent anywhere in the world.
Third, the MOU with Alberta is an astonishing backtrack on any number of initiatives designed to reduce Canada’s emissions just a little, enough so that we could credibly pretend that we were serious about climate change. That’s all gone. Clean electricity and a move to renewables, the tanker ban, etc., by the board. Add to that elimination of programs to retrofit housing stock for energy efficiency, incentives for electric vehicles, even repealing laws against the oil companies’ continuing campaigns of misinformation and greenwashing – gone with the wind. And, to top it all off, a brand new pipeline to sell bitumen to Asia, to boost Canada’s GDP and reduce dependency on American markets. Bovine fecal matter, the lot of it.
So – Mr. Carney
- knows climate science but acts against its indications and implications,
- understands that world markets are moving away from fossil fuels, but acts like a short term commodities trader,
- understands democracy but acts like a chief executive.
I see three key factors leading to these seemingly contrary positions. All are influenced by Mr. Carney’s training and experiences as a banker, that seem to have eclipsed his advanced training in economics. Without going too deep into the weeds of jargon, these factors are the discount rate, questions about fixed or variable costs, and inclusion of non-monetary values in estimates.
The ”discount rate” is used to compare the values of events that happen at different times. People prefer benefits now to benefits in the future, and we all like to put off costs. The amount by which we reduce the perceived value of future benefits is called the discount rate. If the discount rate is low, we value the future relatively highly compared to the present. If the discount rate is high, the present is seen as much more important.
Fixed costs are costs that don’t vary when uses or output change. The fixed cost of the TransMountain pipeline, for example, is the $34 billion cost to build it and related infrastructure. That will not change whether the pipeline is not used at all or is used to maximum capacity. It’s on the government’s books as an asset, purchased with long-term debt. But the cost to operate the pipeline depends on how much it used and for what products, hence “variable”. Businesses and government are stuck with the fixed costs, so decisions in the short and medium term consider only variable costs. Once built and the debt loaded onto the public books, industry will carry on for years pumping gas and oil as long as the price exceeds the variable costs – building pipelines and LNG infrastructure guarantees that they’ll be used even as demand drops and prices decline, way into the future, far past the point that the investment as a whole would be considered feasible. Hence the bogus claims that Transmountain is “making money” . Not on your life – it’s making no contribution at all to paying down the debt for the fixed costs of construction.
“Non-monetary values” include many environmental matters, values like safety and security, the costs of social inequities, the immensely distressing way we’re loading more and more of today’s failures on our descendants, etc. Because things like this do not have clear costs or prices established in a market, various tools are used to estimate them so that, if relevant, they can be included in an evaluation.
OK? Clearer (I hope) than mud so far?
Here’s how I think these affect Mr. Carney.
I think he calculates like a good banker – short-term, transactional, and all about money. His banker’s mindset is necessary for political decision-making – it enables rational calculation of monetary costs and benefits, in a short time frame that lines up with election reality. That means a relatively high “bank” discount rate, so costs and benefits are counted in the near term; calling fixed costs “public investments” without much thought about how the increased debt should be paid for over the long term; non-monetary values excluded from consideration.
The banker’s point of view may be necessary, but it is nowhere near sufficient[1].
I wish he would think more like a good economist – a low “social” discount rate, all costs fixed and variable included, and a lot of thinking about social effects. That requires, at least, a longer time horizon to include effects on people who are not only not this term’s voters, but people generations hence; all costs fixed and variable in every assessment; calculations including numerous costs and benefits that are non-monetary and difficult to quantify.
I do think Mr. Carney and Danielle Smith of Alberta are making bad decisions that will generate undesirable consequences. That does not mean I accuse them of acting immorally or unethically. I think each is trapped by circumstances only partly of their own making, constrained by their training (as a banker or as a talk-show host), pinned in the unnatural short electoral cycle of party politics, and trying to do their best for the people who support them.
I do wish they and other politicians could break out of those boxes to consider a longer time frame, a more inclusive accounting, and a much broader set of interests. Then, perhaps, they might properly be able to see climate change and financial and inter-generational inequities as problems to be solved to the benefit of all, not just troublesome factors that interfere with the pursuit of ever-growing wealth for their allies and supporters.
And I do wish they would listen just a little more to Elizabeth May. I’m obviously biased, but I have observed a lot of Canadian politicians for a lot of years, and there is simply no one like her – profoundly concerned for the public good, immensely knowledgeable about how parliament is supposed to operate, amazingly diligent and so smart in her work on legislation, a valued colleague to so many in the House, and the most accurate repository of knowledge about the past fifteen years of Canadian government. She is the best asset Parliament has. More power to her, says I.
[1] Aristotle was on to this, 2300 years ago.
He thought of “oikonomia”, our “economics”, as the art and science of acquiring the necessary elements for the needs of the people and the state. The word “eco-nomics” comes from “ecos” meaning “home”, and “nomos” meaning “management”. Likewise, the word “eco-logy” comes from “ecos” and “logos” meaning “logic, or rules”. So economics and ecology are simply different aspects of the necessary work to live well in our home the earth. Not opposed, but complementary. I believe this to be economics in the truest and best sense.
On the other hand, Aristotle despised the mere accumulation of wealth for its own sake. For instance, an ever-growing GDP as a goal into and of itself. This he considered unnatural, unlimited, and opposed to the good of the people and the polis. Perhaps we might think of this as banking at its crudest.
signing off, John Kidder
WOW.. imagine that my husband says such complimentary things (lucky me to have such support!) .. and I have to say I end up being so upset with Mark Carney that I do use words like unethical. But John is right. This insight that he is a banker first and not a very good economist makes sense to me. and I hope to you. As he creeps ever closer to a majority government, recruiting Conservatives to join his increasingly conservative LiberaIs, I hope and pray we can hold him to the minority parliament decided in the last election.
In the meantime, I hope to see many Green friends at 4 pm today for “it’s a Wonderful Life!” at the Star cinema… in which the moral man of principle, played by Jimmy Stewart, trying to hold body and soul together running a small credit union, takes on the greedy banker, played by Lionel Barrymore.
In closing, I have added some of my work this week found in links in the P.S. and another call for signatures for the Peace Charter petition,
Many thanks for all you support, until next Sunday!
love
Elizabeth
P.S.
Press Conference: Press Conference: Elizabeth May Provides End-of-Session Update on Key Legislation, Federal Budget Developments, and Emerging U.S. Security Policy | Elizabeth May
Explainer on Bitumen and Dilbit: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSIY5X8kRJu/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
Peace Charter: https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-6869