Daily Archives: March 3, 2015

Cultural Ecocide, democracy, Fascism/Corporatism, Politics, racism

AFN fears ‘unjust labelling’ of First Nations activists as ‘terrorists’ under proposed anti-terror bill: document

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Screenshot 2015-03-03 at 10.37.38 AM
Thomas Mulcair warns Bill C-51 threatens First Nations’ dissent, Question Period, Feb 25, 2015

 

by Jorge Barrera, reposted from APTNNews, Feb 28, 2015

The Assembly of First Nations will be seeking to appear as a witness before the House of Commons committee currently studying the Harper government’s proposed anti-terror bill.

The AFN’s main concern is about its potential impact on First Nation dissent, according to a document from the national chiefs organization which analyzes Bill C-51.

To voice concerns about its potential impact on First Nation dissent, according to a document from the national chiefs organization which analyzes Bill C-51.

The AFN will also be seeking standing as a witness before the Senate committee taking over study of the anti-terror bill once it passes through the House of Commons, which is expected because the Harper government has a majority.

The AFN analysis document says the proposed bill could lead to the “unjust labelling of First Nations activists as ‘terrorists.’”

“Many of the provisions drafted in the proposed Act could potentially apply to activities of Indigenous peoples living in Canada and there are very few provisions proposed that would prevent the legislation from being interpreted against First Nations people,” said the analysis.

The AFN will also be seeking to meet with officials and MPs on both sides of the debate to have amendments considered in discussions on the proposed bill.

“Our office will seek to meet with government and opposition officials to seek amendments to the draft legislation,” according to the AFN’s analysis which was finalized Tuesday. “Our office will be working with First Nation leadership and interested organizations to assess the potential impacts of the legislation.”

The proposed anti-terror bill will give the Canadian Security Intelligence Agency police-like powers. It also gives police more leeway when it comes to arresting individuals suspected of committing acts of the terror. The bill also aims to crack-down on online speech that is perceived to promote terrorism.

The Harper government has rejected calls for more oversight to accompany the new powers the bill will give to law enforcement agencies.

The Liberals have stated they want amendments to the bill, but will support its passage even if their amendments are rejected.

The NDP has stated it intends to oppose the bill.

The AFN is among a list of 60 potential witnesses the NDP is planning to submit to the Commons Public Safety committee studying the bill. The NDP will also be including Indigenous activists on the list of potential witnesses.

It’s unclear at the moment when the committee will actually begin to hear from witnesses. On Tuesday, the Conservatives reportedly tried to limit the amount of days spent hearing witnesses while the NDP responded by filibustering, pushing the meeting to the four-hour mark.

The committee meets again in camera Thursday and NDP public safety critic Randall Garrison is expected to table a motion to have the committee sit during evenings and through break weeks to hear from as many witnesses as possible.

During question period Wednesday, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair accused the Harper government of trying to limit debate on the bill. He asked why Prime Minister Stephen Harper didn’t want to hear from First Nation leaders on their concerns about the bill. Mulcair quoted from a statement issued by the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs last Friday which said the proposed anti-terror bill “directly violates the ability” of Indigenous people to assert and defend their constitutionally protected rights.

“First Nations are raising the alarm,” said Mulcair. “Again, Bill C-51 goes well beyond terrorism and will impact constitutionally-protected dissent and protest. Why is the prime minister afraid to hear from First Nations themselves?”

Harper wasn’t in the House of Commons for question period, but Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney fielded the question. Blaney said First Nations had nothing to fear from the bill.

“For greater certainty, it does not include lawful advocacy, protest, dissent and artistic expression,” said Blaney, quoting directly from the bill. “Please read the bill and then we can have a debate.”

The AFN analysis also references the same section Blaney used to argue First Nation dissent did not face a threat, but came to a different conclusion.

“Although most First Nations demonstrations could be considered as lawful advocacy, protest or dissent, it is likely that there would be disagreements between First Nations and the government as to what would constitute unlawful activity,” said the analysis. “The legislation does not account for disagreements or who would determine in the event of an ambiguous situation, such as if a demonstration was considered a lawful protest by a First Nation, but deemed an interference with critical infrastructure by the federal government or law enforcement agencies.”

The analysis also raises concerns about another section of the bill that covers activities that “undermines the security of Canada” including interfering with the government’s capabilities around defence, intelligence, border operations, public safety and the economic and financial stability of the country.

“This definition could be problematic for First Nations communities or citizens who may be engaged in various activities to: assert inherent or recognized rights and title; protect their land and water rights and interest; or oppose major development projects on their traditional lands that threaten the enjoyment of their Aboriginal or Treaty rights,” said the analysis. “The proposed legislation could result in the unjust labeling of First Nations activists as ‘terrorists,’ such activists who: seek to exercise their freedom of speech and freedom of assembly to assert First Nation’s collective rights, title and jurisdiction; march across or set up blockades at the border of the Unites States and Canada; set up a blockade along a major highway or railway; block access to a road or railway’ or publicly encourage such actions.”

The analysis also said the AFN was watching Bill C-639, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code, protection of critical infrastructure, which is a private member’s bill introduced by Conservative MP Wai Young last December. Bill C-639 aims to expand the Criminal Code definitions of critical infrastructure to also encompass everything from telecommunications, to transportation to finance, health care and food, said the analysis.

“The critical infrastructure provision in (the Bill C-51) closely resembles…Bill C-639,” said the analysis. “Unlike Bill C-639…Bill C-51 is very broad and will embody any activity that ‘undermines the security of Canada.’”

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biodiversity, climate science, conservation, Ecocide, Preventing Ecocide

California’s terrifying forecast: In the future, it could face droughts nearly every year

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A paddleboarder floats in Shasta Lake in Lakehead, Calif. As the severe drought in California continues for a third straight year, water levels in the state’s lakes and reservoirs are reaching historic lows. Shasta Lake is about 30 percent of its total capacity, the lowest it has been since 1977. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

By Darryl Fears, reposted from the Washington Post, Mar 2, 2015

Not long ago, scientists at NASA and two major universities warned of an inevitable “megadrought” that will parch the southwestern United States for 35 years, starting around 2050. By then, a new study says, Californians should be fairly accustomed to long, harsh and dry conditions.

Over the past 15 years, temperatures have been rising in the Golden State, resulting in annual periods of extreme and blazing heat, while the cycle of low and moderate precipitation cycles have not changed since 1977. That means that it’s far more likely that extreme heat years will coincide with dry years.

[NASA: A ‘megadrought’ will grip U.S. in the coming decades]

That’s a recipe for drought, the authors said. Mix searing heat with little to no rain and snow, then bake.

Unlike other climate studies that sound an alarm for impact far into the future, the Stanford University study led by associate professor Noah Diffenbaugh pored through historical data from the U.S. National Climatic Data Center to explain current conditionsand concluded that California should get used to it. It was published Monday afternoon in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Irrigation water runs along the dried-up ditch to provide water for the rice fields in Richvale, Calif. (AP/Jae C. Hong)

Diffenbaugh and two graduate students at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy an Environmental Sciences explored the role temperature has played in California’s drought for 120 years. Between 1896 and 1994, climate patterns in the state created a 50 percent chance that a year of extremely warm temperatures would merge with a year of moderately dry conditions. But between 1995 and 2014, extreme temperature years were so common that their chance of combining with dry years increased to 80 percent.

The forecast is negative, but not necessarily the outlook, the authors said. California has opportunities to manage its risks with smart water policies that use precipitation to bank ground water so that farms, which use 77 percent of the state’s water, can survive. The statewide water use is similar to what it was 40 years ago, meaning that even though the population has exploded to 33 million, Californians share about as much water now as they did in the 1970s.

State officials can learn from advanced water management practices already in use in the Middle East in nations such as Saudi Arabia and Israel.

“California was already on the cusp, where 100 percent of the years are not only warm but severely warm,” said Diffenbaugh, a senior fellow at Stanford’s university’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “When a low precipitation year occurs with warm conditions, it’s twice as likely to result in drought.”

[Tropical forests may be vanishing even faster than previously thought]

As part of the study, the researchers also observed the impact of greenhouse gases from human activity — carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane from power plants, vehicles, factories and other sources — on temperature and precipitation, Diffenbaugh said. Graduate students Daniel Swain and Danielle Touma were co-authors for the study.

“A lot of this paper is about greenhouse gas emissions that have already happened,” Diffenbaugh said. “Really what California is experiencing is the cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases globally. And the United States has been responsible for a large fraction. Historically the United States has been responsible for a quarter of the emissions and the European Union another quarter.”

Even if world governments that are sharply divided over the approach to lowering greenhouse gas emissions somehow managed to reach a consensus, California will still feel the heat well into the future, Diffenbaugh said.

[How dust leaves the Sahara and floats to Amazon forest]

California, the nation’s most populous state, is suffering one of its worst droughts ever, fueled by the exact conditions cited in the study — record-low precipitation and record-high heat. The lowest calendar year of precipitation on record in the state happened between 2013 and 2014, and 2014 was the hottest year in California history.

Earlier scientific research suggests that the extremely dry and hot period between 2012 and 2014 might be the worst in a millennium, the study said. But even that can’t hold a candle to the droughts expected 35 years from now. Scientists at NASA and at Cornell and Columbia universities said climate models used for a study released two weeks ago show 80 percent chance of an extended drought between 2050 and 2099, lasting more than three decades if world governments fail to act aggressively to mitigate the effects of climate change.

North America has experienced so-called megadroughts before, during the 12th and 13th centuries. But those were caused by natural changes in weather patterns that give megadroughts a 10 percent chance of forming at any time. The harsh future drought will be the result of human-caused warming.

An international panel of leading climate scientists said in 2013 that the planet is warming at an accelerated pace and found with 95 percent certainty that human activity is the cause. The past three decades have been the hottest on the planet since 1850. Carbon concentrations in the atmosphere have increased 40 percent since then, and carbon, methane and nitrous oxide are at levels unprecedented in at least 800,000 years.

“With climate change, the likelihood of a megadrought goes up considerably,” said Toby R. Ault, an assistant professor in the department of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell, one of the co-authors. Benjamin I. Cook of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Jason E. Smerdon of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory were the other authors for that study.

After 2050, there is “overwhelming evidence of a dry shift,” Ault said, “way drier than the megadroughts of the 1100s and 1200s.” The cause, Smerdon continued, “is twofold, reductions in rainfall and snowfall. Not just rainfall but soil moisture … and changes in evaporation that dry out the soil much more than normal.”

Leading to the theorized megadrought, California is likely to experience a series of micro droughts, researchers say.

[West’s historic drought stokes fears of water crisis]

A third study published three years ago had similar findings. The research is newly published, but its findings are not dramatically different from similar studies in the past. Beverly Law, a specialist in global change biology at Oregon State University’s College of Forestry, co-authored a study of megadroughts three years ago.

It showed that a drought that affected the American West from 2000 to 2004 compared to conditions seen during the medieval megadroughts. But the predicted megadrought this century would be far worse. Law said the NASA study confirmed her previous findings.

“We took the climate model . . . and compared” two periods, 2050 to 2099 and 1950 to 1999, she said. “What it showed is this big, red blotch over Southern California.” SOURCE

 

Activism, Cultural Ecocide, Ecocide, Fascism/Corporatism, Politics, Preventing Ecocide

Stephen Harper’s Petro-State Is Built on Tar Sands

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Petrostate

By Mark Dowie, reposted from the Huffington Post, Mar 2, 2015

This article first appeared in The Washington Spectator.

Late 21st-century graduate students of business studying the growing problem of stranded assets will almost certainly focus on the history of Canada’s Athabasca Oil Sand (aka tar sands). The case studies they read will either describe the gradual abandonment of the world’s largest reserve of bituminous crude or they will read about the tar sands’ miraculous last-minute escape from becoming the world’s largest stranded asset. For either outcome, the turning point they will look back on is just about now.

In some respects Alberta’s gigantic deposits of bitumen, a dense mixture of sand and heavy crude oil, third in size only to the reserves of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, were stranded from the start by location. Situated in the heart of a vast boreal forest at the center of a very large continent, they are hundreds of miles from the nearest refinery and thousands more from navigable tidewater.

 

If Canada’s oil sands do one day become stranded, the equivalent annual emissions of over 65 coal-fired plants and 50 million passenger vehicles will remain underground.

 

Of course, some of Alberta’s crude has made its way to market, but so much slower than it could have, or was projected to, that producers, refiners, shippers, banks and other investors in tar-sands development are beginning to wonder whether they have backed a good play by investing over $160 billion to turn tar into oil.
So the economic stranding process has already begun. Five global energy giants-Shell, Total, Suncor, Statoil and Occidental-have cut bait on major bitumen deposits in Alberta, in which they had already invested billions. Suncor has just slashed another billion dollars from its capital spending program and $800 million more from operating expenses. And as oil prices slide lower, commercial and investment banks are reconsidering future underwritings. An industry that recently envisioned doubling production over the next 20 years is now looking at something closer to the opposite, a halving of production or worse in far fewer than 20 years.
American media coverage of the tar sands has focused primarily on the approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which, if completed, would carry 830,000 barrels of Athabasca crude, every day, to the world’s largest refining center near Houston next to a booming export hub. Because American and Canadian politicians and oil execs have lobbied so hard for its approval, Americans tend to believe that construction of Keystone will secure the future of the tar sands. Not true. To even approach break-even, at least four other pipeline routes will be needed to carry bituminous crude to the world’s market: two to the Canadian west, one to the east and one north. If two or three of those lines are somehow stopped, and that’s quite likely to occur, the stranding of the tar sands will escalate, Canada will cease being a petro-state, and its business leaders will begin their search for yet another staple to drive its national economy.

Staples Economy

Canada has always been what economists call “a staples economy,” reliant almost completely on one staple resource after another. Fur was followed by cod, then wheat, potash, minerals, timber, and hydropower. Today, Canada’s staple resource is carbon, some of which derives from coal but most of it from oil. Oil, in fact, represents 46 percent of Canada’s commodity production. Unfortunately, over 90 percent of its reserves are bitumen, the costly production of which nets only 4 percent to Canada’s GDP. But oil represents 40 percent of the country’s exports. So the urgency to develop and export the tar-sands oil has become a national priority.

Canada’s tar-sands booster-in-chief is Prime Minister Stephen Harper, an Alberta-based petrolero who rose to prominence in politics as Chief Policy Officer of the Reform Party, Canada’s version of the American Tea Party. Founded in 1987, Reform merged in 2000 with the floundering Progressive Conservative Party to form a new and almost unbeatable national coalition calling itself the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance (after adding “Party” to its name, it became CCRAP, and was nicknamed “see-crap”). Harper became party leader of CCRAP, which has since won two national elections. It’s as if Ted Cruz became the Republican front-runner and won the White House twice.

Kevin Kreneck
Map by Kevin Kreneck

 

Once a member of Canada’s Young Liberals and a supporter of Pierre Trudeau, Harper went west as a young man, worked in Alberta’s oil fields and followed his father into employment with Imperial Oil, Canada’s second-largest petroleum company (69 percent owned by ExxonMobil). There, like so many other western Canadians, he grew to despise Eastern Canada, rather like the scion of a prominent American family moving from Connecticut to Texas. In Calgary, he became an outspoken and eloquent opponent of Trudeau’s National Energy Plan, which seemed set upon nationalizing Canada’s last staple resource. While there is still talk of nationalizing oil and tar-sands oil in Canada, and in some polls a majority of Canadians support the idea, that couldn’t possibly happen with Harper in power.

At the 2012 World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, Harper announced that the expanded production and export of tar-sands bitumen was a national priority. Canada, he predicted, was set to become an energy superpower. In Ottawa, he took immediate and aggressive steps to weaken environmental protections like the Navigable Waters Protection Act, which was hindering pipeline construction, and to fast-track tar-sands production.

But Harper’s focus remained on Europe, where in 2012 the European Parliament and member European Union governments were debating terms of a revised Fuel Quality Directive (FQD) and considering an official ban on the import of “dirty fuels” — oil shale, liquid coal and tar sands, all of which have high extraction impacts, releasing more greenhouse gas than conventional oil through their “well to wheel” life cycle. A Stanford University study that many members of the EU Parliament relied on projected a 23 percent increase of lifecycle carbon emissions from tar-sands production.

Harper and his advisers immediately saw the danger of that study and the disaster a European ban on dirty fuel represented for Canada’s largest new staple. One vote in Brussels could leave the tar sands stranded immediately and forever, even if oil producers found a route to the Chinese market.

During the two years leading up to the EU parliamentary vote on the issue, Harper mobilized Canadian oil executives and his cabinet behind a $30 million nation-to-nation lobbying effort. Their first target was the Stanford study, which they drove into the ground with their own industry-funded studies.

Week after week, planeloads of oil execs and PR flacks crossed the Atlantic, Harper aboard whenever he could be, laterally threatening a trade war with Europe if the vote went the wrong way. Side trips were made to Washington. And members of the European Parliament were flown to Ottawa and Alberta for gold-plated junkets.

Without Harper’s effort, the Parliament in Brussels would almost certainly have voted to ban dirty fuels. After two years of intense lobbying, the measure lost by a 12-vote margin 337 to 325, with 48 abstentions. A few months later, in the fall of 2014, the first shipment of tar-sands crude arrived in Europe, with many more to follow, as a vote on the Fuel Quality Directive will not come up again for at least four years.

In the meantime, if a few EU member nations condemn tar-sands oil, and ban its import, more small nails will be driven into the tar-sands coffin. And if two of the proposed source-to-port pipelines on the drawing boards are blocked (see map andsidebar here), more producers and investors will abandon the sands.

If Canada’s tar sands do one day become stranded, the equivalent annual emissions of over 65 coal-fired plants and 50 million passenger vehicles will remain underground. And a lot of the credit (or blame) will go to environmental activists, aboriginal communities, litigious farmers and groups like Greenpeace, 350.org, who have added to their anti-pipeline advocacy a campaign to pressure institutional investors to divest their “Big Fossil” holdings. Even before divestment began, nine of 10 tar-sands producers’ stocks had underperformed the market. So they are vulnerable.

 

Strand Their Capital

According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank in Cleveland, the campaigns of environmentalists and native communities have already cost tar-sands producers $17 billion. But that has not stemmed the determination of the North American fossil-fuel industry to move Athabasca crude to refineries around the world.

Despite the insistence of American Republicans and petroleros that everything rests on completion of Keystone XL, the pipeline means little to the U.S. economy. In Canada, however, economists estimate that U.S. rejection of the pipeline could cost the country as much as $1.7 billion a year, far more significant than the loss of two or three hundred permanent jobs the pipeline would create in the U.S. And by simply raising break-even higher than it already is for bitumen producers, stopping Keystone could place the tar sands in far greater danger of being stranded.

While assets like the tar sands should be stranded, because mining and burning them will raise the temperature of an already overheated planet a degree or more, they are more likely to become stranded, because they are either unable to reach market or have lost market value.

The sad irony is that before Canada selected tar-sands crude to be its staple export, the country was poised to become a major global contributor to clean energy. It had signed climate treaties, promoted solar-energy, developed hydroelectric power and had a prosperous renewable-energy industry under sail, for which the country possessed all the necessary natural and financial resources. Then one powerful neoliberal free-market zealot decided to double down on high-carbon fuels and announce to the world that tar sands would become the next nation-building staple for his country.

It appears he was wrong about that, which would not be a bad outcome for the planet.

SOURCE

Journalist Mark Dowie is the author of Conservation Refugees: The Hundred Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native People.