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Ottawa’s Fraudulent Global Warming Plan
Canada’s federal government is fiddling while the world burns. The Tories’ “Action Plan” to deal with climate change, announced by Environment Minister John Baird on April 26, is actually a recipe for inaction and delay.
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Canadian Mining Companies Helping Themselves to Others’ Wealth
Like a thousand other domestic mining companies operating abroad, Glamis is supported through Canadian stock exchanges, the world’s biggest source of capital for mining. Canada’s laws protect investors by imposing reporting, disclosure and other obligations on corporations. These laws, however, do little to protect people in developing countries from mining risks, including the human-rights abuses that often accompany such mega-projects.
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An Energy Security Program for Canada
We are seeing an international paradigm shift on climate change, which will bypass Canada if we remain locked into unlimited energy exports. Until Canada gets a “Mexican exemption” and exits NAFTA’s energy-proportionality clause, there is little chance of Canada fulfilling its modest, international Kyoto targets, let alone going far beyond them.
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Scouring Scum and Tar from the Bottom of the Pit
Faced with the undeniable reality of “Hubbard’s Peak” in global conventional oil supplies, the world’s largest multinational energy corporations are now hell-bent on squeezing oil out of tar in northern Alberta, like junkies desperately conniving for one last giant fix in a futile attempt to quench America’s insatiable “addiction to oil” (described so eloquently by President George Bush II). Along the Athabasca River near Fort McMurray, a sub-arctic town almost 1,000 kilometres north of the U.S. border, tar literally seeps out of the riverbanks where Aboriginal peoples once used it to patch their birch-bark canoes. But most of the tar sands lie hidden below northern Alberta’s boreal forest, in an area larger than the state of Florida.
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Peak Oil and Alternative Energy
The world is beginning to wake up to the fact that peak oil is real. Various financial institutions, as well as oil companies, independent geologists, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a range of corporations eager to cash in on alternative energy sources have stressed its importance. Sweden and Norway have both initiated plans to be essentially free of fossil fuels by 2020, and a small number of municipalities are beginning to incorporate energy consumption and production into their core planning activities. In other words, plans are already underway to prepare for an energy future that no longer relies on cheap energy.
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Responding to the Challenge of Peak Oil
Over the past two years the price of oil has climbed relentlessly. This is true not just of the volatile spot price, but also of the five-year futures price, which for many years held reliably close to the U.S. $20 mark. At this time of writing, both the spot and futures prices are near $70. North Americans know that this translates to high gasoline prices, and, since they can scarcely live without their cars, many are worried and angry.
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Nuclear Warning
In your recent book, New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s Military-Industrial Complex, you state, “Never, in the almost three decades that I have been campaigning against the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear power have I felt that the world is in so much danger.” What kind of risks are we currently facing?
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Why We Need To Nationalize Oil and Gas
As most experts agree, the production of natural gas and oil is nearing its peak. At the same time, the demand for both commodities is rising — and rising rapidly — as both China and India begin to experience their industrial revolutions.
The first thing that this unprecedented new situation of approaching peak oil and gas has meant is that prices have gone through the roof. What’s more, it’s very likely that these prices are going to stay sky-high for the foreseeable future and beyond.
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The American Empire Meets Peak Oil
Following the Soviet collapse in 1989, the U.S.’s economic empire was left without any effective constraints except two: global warming and peak oil.
While Canada’s economic elite continues to push further integration into the American economic empire, it seems blissfully ignorant of the fact that globalization, the American Empire, is a falling star that is simply running out of gas.
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Northern Pipe Dreams, Northern Nightmares
For a moment in the seventies, the mystical North burst upon the Canadian consciousness, as “Justice Tom’s Flying Magic Circus” (a.k.a. the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry) wound its way across the country. In 1975, at community hearings throughout the Northwest Territories, fiery Dene activists like Frank T’Seleie from Fort Good Hope condemned Bob Blair, president of Foothills Pipelines Ltd.: “You are like the Pentagon, Mr. Blair, planning the slaughter of innocent Vietnamese. Don’t tell me you are not responsible for the destruction of my nation. You are directly responsible. You are the twentieth century General Custer. You have come to destroy the Dene Nation. You are coming with your troops to slaughter us and steal land that is rightfully ours. You are coming to destroy a people that have a history of thirty thousand years. Why? For twenty years of gas? Are you really that insane? The original General Custer was exactly that insane. You still have a chance to learn.”
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