According to pipeline supporters and cheerleaders, one of the primary rationales for building pipelines to tidewater – Canada’s east or west coast – is to maximize the price that Canadians can get for tar sands oil by reaching world markets. It has been repeated so many times that it has become something of dilbit dogma. The argument goes like this: we need a pipeline to tidewater because it will unlock new markets overseas (usually Asia) where we can get a better price for Canadian oil than we would without those pipelines. Sound familiar?
A number of years ago this argument may have been true, especially when you ignore the economic, environmental and social costs not captured by market prices (which economists call “externalities”).
But we live in a different world today. Oil prices have plummeted and are forecasted to stay low for some time. The US is now a major producer of oil that is cheaper than that from the oil sands, and it recently lifted its 40-year ban on exporting oil. In addition, solar and wind power are now “crushing” fossil fuels, with investment nearly double that of oil and coal combined in 2015. And finally, the world came together in Paris and agreed to aim to hold global temperature increase to 1.5°C, which necessarily requires a decarbonization of the global economy.
All of these factors mean that the economic case for getting oil to tidewater by pipeline in Canada has evaporated. And people are starting to notice.
Last month, a brief from Oil Change International debunked the economic myth of tidewater access and concluded that producers of Canadian oil are already getting the best possible price through existing pipelines to the US, which access the largest heavy oil market in the world.
The brief discusses why Western Canadian Select (WCS) – the key Canadian benchmark for heavy oil – trades at a discount to other benchmarks such as West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the primary benchmark for US Gulf Coast and Midwest oil. The two key factors are quality and geography: WCS trades for less than WTI because it is lower quality crude that is more expensive to refine, and it must travel longer distances to refineries.
Supply and demand factors have played a role in the past in depressing Alberta crude prices: “When the supply of tar sands crude exceeds either available pipeline capacity or the ability of refineries at the terminus of those pipelines to process it, the price of tar sands crude goes down relative to other crudes in the market.”
Indeed, for a period in 2013-2014, there was a bottleneck in the US Midwest to the Gulf Coast and WCS was trading at a deeper discount – an average of $24/barrel, with daily peaks that surpassed $40. However, since that time, enough new pipeline capacity has come online in the US to alleviate the bottleneck, and “effectively eliminate the market-driven portion of the price differential.”
In the last year, the WCS discount has shrunk to the $12-14 range to account for the unavoidable quality and geographic considerations discussed above.
In fact, there is now surplus capacity that, according to the International Energy Agency, would allow for additional Canadian exports to Asia without the construction of either Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain expansion, Enbridge’s Northern Gateway or TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline. Instead, they could follow existing routes including pipelines to Oklahoma and the existing Trans Mountain line to access Asian and OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) markets.
But accessing those markets would not necessarily get Canadian producers a better price. In addition to paying the transportation costs, there would be additional costs of shipping the crude to Asia and elsewhere.
The Oil Change International brief concludes that “if sent to Europe or Asia, tar sands crude would fetch notably lower prices than in the U.S.” It reaches this conclusion by comparing the prices achieved by a similar heavy sour crude benchmark, Mexican Maya, which over the past 15 months was priced, “on average $3.70 less in Europe than in the U.S. Gulf Coast and $8.73 less in the ‘Far East’.”
Accessing Asian and European markets doesn’t address the quality and geography discounts that WCS currently faces. In fact, those discounts may be even steeper in Europe and Asia, which are a lot farther from Canada than Oklahoma. One of the impacts of the US lifting its export ban was that the WTI benchmark and European Brent Crude benchmark became much more aligned, meaning that the ‘world price’ for oil (Brent) is more or less the same as WTI. This supports the conclusion that Canada is already getting the best price for its oil with current pipeline capacity.
Former CIBC chief economist Jeff Rubin also released a paper in March 2016, entitledThe Future of Canada’s Oil Sands in a Decarbonizing Global Economy. In his paper, Rubin argues that two factors threaten the future of the oil sands, and neither of them is the lack of pipelines.
First and foremost, the collapse of global oil prices has hit high-cost oil sands producers the hardest. Oil sands crude is one of the most expensive types of crude to extract, so as marginal producers in the world supply chain, oil sands producers gain the most from rising prices but are also the most vulnerable to plunging prices. Indeed, 17 projects totaling US$47 billion have been cancelled or indefinitely postponed in Alberta’s oil sands, representing 8.2 billion barrels of oil or 1.3 million barrels per day of production. Those projects make up nearly half of the 33 largest oil and gas projects cancelled around the world in 2015.
As oil prices continue to stay low, which most industry analysts predict, Canadian producers will continue bleeding red ink, and cancel further projects, prompting Rubin to ask:
“Why build pipelines to sell oil at prices that do not even cover the cost of getting them out of the ground? Like the production they were intended to carry, none of the proposed new pipelines have an economic context in today’s oversupplied oil market.”
Rubin’s second factor centres around the historic Paris Agreement at COP21, where world leaders agreed to pursue efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C, which will require a massive decarbonizing of our energy economy. This shift will not only squeeze out high cost producers (such as the tar sands) from the global carbon budget, but it will require a decrease in the demand for oil. That means many oil reserves will have to be left in the ground, and the pipelines that serve them will become stranded assets long before their expiry dates. Those stranded assets become liabilities for pipeline companies that expected them to be used for their full useful life.
But oil prices will bounce back, as they always do, right? Not according to BP Chief Economist Spencer Dale, or Governor of the Bank of England (and former Bank of Canada Governor) Mark Carney, who have concluded that, with the increasingly aggressive actions on climate by governments all around the globe, the fossil fuel glory era is nearing its end.
Sunny ways?
The Trudeau government prides itself on evidence-based decision-making and being sound economic managers. Let’s hope that he and his team can understand that accessing tidewater will not save the Canadian oil industry – on the contrary, it may cost them more. Instead, we should be focusing on transitioning to a renewable energy economy, for example by training former oil sands workers to install solar panels,so that we can move beyond last century’s model.
West Coast Environmental Law has been opposing tar sands pipelines for nearly a decade because of their contribution to climate change, First Nations and community opposition, oil spill risk and the inability to clean them up, and because the risks far outweighs the benefits. Those benefits have shrunk even more.
Behind closed doors, the party is trying to find common ground and nail the landing.
NDP MP Nathan Cullen: party must ‘come to those hot-button topics like pipelines in a way that is respectful.’ Photo by Matt Jiggins, Creative Commons licensed.
One of the NDP’s longest-serving MPs says the party can survive the controversial Leap Manifesto, and is already at work behind closed doors to bridge its recently very public divides.
“Suffice it to say I think we really have some good thinking on this and some really good plans, but they have to involve more people than they have so far,” said BC MP Nathan Cullen (Skeena-Bulkley Valley).
The manifesto plunged the party into a fierce internal debate at its convention two weeks ago in Edmonton. Its sweeping program calls for increased funding for health care and public transportation, among many other progressive goals.
It also says Canada must stop relying on natural resources for its economy, declaring, “There is no longer an excuse for building new infrastructure projects that lock us into increased extraction decades into the future.”
The contention directly challenged the party’s Alberta wing, recently its darlings for having toppled the province’s Conservative dynasty last year. In government, the party has been wrestling with reluctant neighbours for pipelines to get its oil to tidewater.
Were Leap’s pipeline prohibition ever implemented, those NDPers say, its ideals would destroy thousands of jobs in Alberta and elsewhere in Canada.
‘A faulty document’
Alberta Federation of Labour president and former NDP candidate Gil McGowan called the manifesto’s orchestrators, who include journalist Avi Lewis and his partner, author Naomi Klein, “downtown Toronto dilettantes,” and not in a good way.
McGowan told the CBC there was even talk of the provincial NDP splitting from the federal party over the issue.
Returning to Parliament Hill on Wednesday, Linda Duncan, the party’s only Alberta MP, was clearly irritated when journalists pressed her on unity within the NDP.
She stressed that the party had only voted to discuss the manifesto.
“There was not a vote on whether people were for or against what was in that document,” she said, adding. “It’s a darn good thing because it was a faulty document.”
Even prominent progressive professor James Laxer weighed in, insisting that the Leap doesn’t represent the interests of the people.
A unifying document
As the dust swirled, Lewis leapt to the document’s defence, arguing that in fact it would “bring us together,” and accusing critics of “politics” and aiding the interests of the federal Liberals and Alberta opposition Wildrose parties.
But for all the public crossfire, Cullen said that behind closed doors there are people trying to bring the party together.
Cullen said the “heat was turned up” in the days around the convention, and will cool off with time.
To help the party chill, he’s been speaking to both Alberta NDPers and pro-pipeline people in the party, and with Leap supporters.
The conversation the party needs “is to respond to that desire to be the unapologetic progressive party that we’ve always been,” Cullen said, “then come to those hot-button topics like pipelines in a way that is respectful.”
Cullen didn’t expand on how the gap between the two sides could be bridged, pending further engagement with party leadership and other members.
But he hoped for healing, he said, rather than exacerbated divisions, from the upcoming leadership race.
Perplexed by the backlash
Lewis said he thinks it will take more dialogue among party members to resolve things.
“I’m a little perplexed by the level of anger among the Alberta NDP cabinet and leadership,” he said, pointing out that Alberta members knew about the manifesto beforehand, and had a chance to address it prior to the convention in Edmonton.
He accused media and the party’s opponents of mischaracterizing the Leap Manifesto, choosing to focus just on its fossil fuel ideas while ignoring the rest, and of incorrectly making him and Klein the face of the manifesto, even though it was “literally written by committee,” with contributions from many people.
“A political firestorm erupted, where the right and the corporate media saw a terrific opportunity to wound the NDP, and that’s what we’re actually dealing with,” Lewis said. “I and others are waiting fervently, for the moment when we can regain a civil debate about these very tough issues.”
And despite the indignation of the party’s Alberta wing, Lewis said it was clear that delegates at the convention wanted to discuss the Leap.
“There was a general feeling within the party, the whole party, that this was a healthy debate to have,” he said. “For whatever reason the Leap started to represent some sort of new spirit for the NDP that people were interested in discussing.”
Lewis said those opposed to the Leap need to consider its other aspects, such as funding for public transportation, to see that it really is a document that progressives could agree on. He noted it includes a call for communities to meet and discuss the document.
Cullen echoed those sentiments. The manifesto’s authors and those who support pipelines, he said, have similar values on many other issues.
“No one can argue with me that Naomi Klein is any more progressive than Rachel Notley,” Cullen said. “They have different roles: one is the premier of a province and one is a very popular author and thinker.”
The NDP’s challenge is to find room — both behind closed doors and in public — for both. SOURCE
The construction site of the hydroelectric facility at Muskrat Falls, Newfoundland and Labrador is seen on July 14, 2015. (Andrew Vaughan / The Canadian Press)
By Michael Shulman, reposted from CTVNews.ca, Apr 18, 2016
A new study says a hydroelectric dam currently in the works in Newfoundland and Labrador could expose more than 200 Inuit people to excessive levels of methylmercury, the most toxic form of mercury.
The report was commissioned by the Nunatsiavut Government, which governs an autonomous Inuit area in the province, to look at the downstream impacts of Nalcor Energy’s 824 megawatt, Muskrat Falls’ hydroelectric dam on the lower Churchill River in Labrador.
The team of independent research from the U.S. and Canada, including scientists from Harvard University and the University of Manitoba, found that flooding the Muskrat Falls reservoir could cause an “overall increase” in the exposure of local Inuit people, with between 32 and 200 individuals being affected depending on the clearance of trees and brush.
Thousands of Inuit live downstream on the shores of Lake Melville, and have relied on the waters for food for centuries.
“Our culture and the health of our people is being threatened directly by this development,” Sarah Leo, president of the Nunatsiavut Government, told NTV.
The findings contradicted an environmental assessment by Nalcor, which showed no measurable of effects of methylmercury at Lake Melville. It said that the toxin would break down as it moved downstream.
“Scientific evidence demonstrates both that there will be substantial downstream impacts, and also that Nalcor’s premise for predicting no downstream impacts was false,” said the authors of the study.
Methylmercury is a toxin that primarily affects the central and peripheral nervous system in humans.
Exposure in adults can affect cardiovascular and immune health, as well as hormone function.
Chronic exposure from seafood has been associated with brain impairment in children, including IQ deficits, attention deficit behaviour, as well reductions in verbal function and memory.
The developing fetus is most vulnerable to effects of methylmercury.
Concentrations of the toxin increase substantially as it makes its way up the food chain. Levels in fish and marine mammals are usually up to 10 million times higher than the water they live, and spikes in exposure can be felt for decades.
The formation of Methylmercury, which occurs naturally by specialized bacteria, is “dramatically enhanced” during flooding thanks to abundant decomposing vegetation in reservoirs, according to the study.
“We are running out of time,” said Darryl Shiwak, Nunatsiavut Minister of Lands and Natural Resources.
“This reservoir will be flooded at some point, (and) when that happens it is too late.”
The study found that experimentally flooded soils from the Muskrat Falls reservoir area showed a jump in methylmercury concentrations within 72 hours, and a 14-fold increase with 120 hours.
The researchers anticipated the elevated levels could last decades.
The Harvard team involved in the study also constructed three possible scenarios that would affect methylmercury levels in Lake Melville in the event of the flooding of the Muskrat Falls reservoir.
The scenario where topsoil, vegetation and trees were completely removed resulted in “significantly lower increases” of methylmercury exposure, whereas only partial clearance of trees and brush led to the funnelling of high amounts of the toxin into Lake Melville.
The current plan is to only partially clear the reservoir, according to the study, and its impacts are “much greater than previously assessed.”
Even if the first scenario took place, the scientists said there would still be an “overall increase in Inuit methylmercury exposure.
The worst outcome could see methylmercury exposure in those who consumer high amounts of local foods increase by up to 1,500 per cent.
“We haven’t considered what we would do … if (Nalcor doesn’t) decide to fully clear Muskrat Falls, but at this point all options would be on the table,” said Shiwak.
The study also called Nalcor’s plan to issue consumption advisories, as a way to mitigate exposure, is a “flawed health-protection strategy.” It added that current impact monitoring plans are “inadequate.”
The researchers also made several recommendations, including:
Requiring Nalcor to fully clear the Muskrat Falls reservoir of wood, brush, vegetation and topsoil.
Requiring Nalcor to negotiate an impact-management agreement with the Nunatsiavut Government before flooding the Muskrat Falls reservoir.
Requiring Nalcor to establish an independent expert advisory committee to advise on mitigation measures and monitoring programs.
Nalcor says it is studying the effects of the dam and monitoring exposure to methylmercury, but it does not believe the Muskrat Falls reservoir poses an increased risk to the people of Lake Melville.
The Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project was green lit by the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador in December 2012. Construction is currently underway and it is expected to take five years to complete.
As the signing ceremony for the landmark Paris Climate Agreementapproaches, people around the world are starting to think about how best to implement the international plan adopted at COP21 in Paris last year. It’s also clear that Mother Nature isn’t willing to wait. Several climate and scientific milestones have happened since countries adopted the Paris Agreement four months ago, underscoring the need for immediate and comprehensive action:
Key Climate Milestones Since Paris
2015 becomes the warmest year on record.
Soon after the Paris Agreement was signed in December, scientists confirmedthat 2015 was the warmest year on record. While last year’s temperatures were influenced by a strong El Nino, scientists have found that climate change was the key driver of the record warm temperatures. While most global temperature records are surpassed by slim margins, last year’s average global temperature broke the previous record set in 2014 by 0.16°C (0.29°F)—22 percent higher! To put that in perspective, if this were the men’s record for fastest mile, the current mark of 3 minutes and 43 seconds would have been shattered by a new record of 2 minutes and 54 seconds.
Record warmth experienced each month of 2016.
Temperature records have continued to be smashed in the first quarter of 2016. January, February and March each surpassed the warmest average temperature ever recorded for those months. This record-setting warmth aligns with expectations that 2016 could end up being as warm or warmer than 2015. In fact, the record annual global temperature in 2015 only included three months that exceeded 1°C above their respective monthly averages (each of the last three months of the year). The 1°C threshold has been exceed in each of the first three months of 2016.
Arctic sea ice peak reaches record low.
Each winter, the Arctic sea ice extent reaches its peak and then declines as the spring and summer months come. During this past winter, the peak in Arctic sea ice was the lowest it has ever been since records began 37 years ago.According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA, this year’s peak sea ice was 5,000 square miles—an area about the size of Connecticut. Since records of Arctic sea ice began, its average annual extent has decreased by more than 700,000 million square miles, or more than 2.5 times the size of Texas.
Key Scientific Findings Since Paris
It’s not just climate records that have been broken since COP21 in Paris. Our understanding of the risks and impacts of climate change has also evolved:
Connection between extreme events and human-induced climate change strengthens.
Early in 2016, the U.S. National Academies published a groundbreaking report assessing the current state of science on the attribution of extreme weather events. They found that scientists have greatly advanced our understanding of climate change’s role in extreme events. Once thought scientifically inconceivable, it is now more possible to quantitatively assess the extent to which human-induced climate change influenced either the likelihood or severity of a particular event. For example, scientists have determined that sea level rise made the flooding levels during Hurricane Sandy twice as likely to be reached today compared to 1950. The 2010 heatwave in Russia was found to be three times more likely to occur in the 2000s than it would have been in the 1960s as a result of climate change. Researchers have also found that the conditions leading to the 2011 Texas drought are 20 times more likely to occur now than in the 1960s due to human-induced climate change.
West Antarctic Ice Sheet at significantly greater risk to rapid melting.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) holds so much ice that if it melts, it could raise sea level by 12 feet or more. Historically, most scientists believed that the worst scenarios of the ice sheet’s melting would not happen for hundreds or thousands of years. But in late March 2016, a Naturearticle found that if emissions continue on a carbon-intensive trajectory, we could see more than 3 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century from WAIS melting alone. Considering additional contributing factors to sea level rise, we could witness 5-6 feet altogether by 2100. This would catastrophically redefine the world’scoastlines. After 2100, the rise in seas grows exponentially, with more than 45 feet by 2500.
Impacts of high-carbon behavior could be worse than we thought.
Scientist Jim Hansen and colleagues published a study in March showing that if GHG emissions continue to grow, our world would be redefined, with multi-meter sea level rise within 50-150 years, heightened storm and climate extremes, and other impacts, causing forced migration and economic collapse. The authors—who base their study on climate modeling, paleoclimatic analyses and modern observations—suggest that the changes “might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization” and that there is “a real danger that we will hand young people and future generations a climate system that is practically out of their control.”
Post-Paris: A Time for Action
As dire as these findings are, all of the studies note that if we get off our carbon-intensive trajectory, we can avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change. The Paris Agreement established the framework for doing so, but it will be up to each government and its citizens to not only implement their existing commitments, but find additional ways to transition to a zero-carbon future.
The Agreement’s signing ceremony later this week is the first step in taking this much-needed action. Country leaders should sign and ratify the Agreement as soon as possible in order to start making progress on the long-term goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C.
Canadian prime minister seeks to bring global agreement into force as soon as possible in bid to reverse reputation as ‘carbon bully’
Justin Trudeau is determined to bring the Paris climate agreement into force as early as this year, sources say. Photograph: Patrick Aventurier/Getty Images
Justin Trudeau will lobby governments to approve the Paris climate agreementand bring it into force as soon as possible, reversing Canada’s past reputation as a “carbon bully”.
The Canadian prime minister will join 155 other countries at the United Nations on Friday for a symbolic signing ceremony.
Trudeau is determined to bring the deal into force - possibly as early as this year - and will lobby other governments to that end, according to Catherine McKenna, the environment and climate minister.
“We are going to do whatever we can to encourage countries to ratify,” she said.
Some 55 countries covering 55% of global emissions must formally approve or ratify the agreement before it comes into force.
Trudeau is hoping to bring the climate deal to the Canadian parliament for formal approval by the end of the year, McKenna told the Guardian.
“We are going to ratify this year,” she said in an interview. “I think it’s important to get Canadians on board, but the timeline is certainly this year.”
Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, has built the 22 April signing ceremony into a key event, calculating that - once a deal had been forged in Paris last December - governments’ engagement with climate change might wane.
That strategy appeared to have paid off, with campaign groups reporting more mobilisation around the Paris deal.
Obama is sending John Kerry, the secretary of state, to represent the US at the ceremony.
Negotiators feared a long time lag would compromise efforts to hold warming 2C below pre-industrial levels, the goal of the agreement. There has already been about 1C of warming.
“We had 195 countries come together so we want to make sure those 195 countries are staying engaged and staying committed,” McKenna said.
That sentiment is widespread. Ahead of the signing ceremony, religious leaders and institutional investors called on governments to follow through on their pledges from Paris.
On Monday, about 250 religious leaders called on countries to revisit their pledges - and take more ambitious cuts, such as the phase out of fossil fuel subsidies and the transition to 100% renewable energy.
“The planet has already passed safe levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” the statement from the religious leaders said. “Unless these levels are rapidly reduced, we risk creating irreversible impacts putting hundreds of millions of lives, of all species, at severe risk.”
On Tuesday, institutional investors managing $24tn in assets called on leaders to move swiftly to bring the Paris agreement into force.
“Maintaining strong momentum is particularly important in the lead up to the G20 meeting in China,” Emma Herd, chief executive of the Investor Group on Climate change for Australia, said in a statement.
Since his election last year, Trudeau has shown increasing interest in the role of a global climate leader.
After coming to power last year, he moved to break with the pro-oil policies of his conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper. His government is in the midst of a six-month review of climate and energy policy.
That meeting of minds between Trudeau and Obama has raised expectations of a North American climate alliance between the US, Canada and Mexico. “If you can mobilise Canada and the US and Mexico, that sends a strong signal to the world,” McKenna said.
On a domestic front, however, she acknowledged that Canada faced challenges.
A carbon price was a “no-brainer”, McKenna said. However, it was difficult reconciling the economic pressures on energy-producing provinces such as Alberta and Newfoundland and provinces such as Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia, which already have strong climate policies.
Ecological and social science research increasingly demonstrate that ‘globalization’ is not what it seems. It does not produce more prosperity and reduce poverty for the world, but just the opposite. Ever more powerful transnational corporate money sequences multiply through organic, social and ecological life hosts looting and polluting them.
But what can the social alternative be?
Philosophers across schools reject any ultimate common value, and no political party has any unifying solution. Meanwhile a Hobbesian imperative rules – that all must compete harder in this end-game to survive. The cumulative consequence is that common life capital bases are increasingly depredated and stripped to further enrich the corporate rich. Business statistics themselves show that the poorer half of the world has lost over 40% of its wealth in the last five years, while less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population has multiplied its private wealth. Yet the World Bank still claims ‘global poverty reduction’, elite voices blame ‘overpopulation’, and games spectacles capture most attention.
With even the opposition repeating masking slogans of “neo-liberal”, policy drivers to reclaim the life capital of humanity are not conceived. ‘Liberal’, ‘Conservative’, ‘Keynesian and ‘Marxist’ theories lack any life capital base or measure. All acceptable economic schools assume priced commodity-cycles as an end in themselves. So-called ‘neo-classical economics’ has no life coordinates, while political leaders assume this economics in a world of invisible-hand rule.
Even ecological economics remains confined to raw material replacements so that board-foot plantations and biodiverse forests are not distinguished in value. One welcomes counter-evidence to this profile across parties and schools, but none is shown. As in the past, few in favorable positions want to move out of the value system that rules. There is fiddling at the margins, but the ruling paradigm works ever more systemic oppression and ruin on the ground.
Keynesianism is the favorite alternative of progressive economists in the press, but it too is life-capital blind. Keynes himself only questioned the Supply = Demand equation, arguing it could also be the reverse with Demand leading the productive cycle (ie., by government spending, even if it were only “holes in the sand”). This is about as far as the ‘alternative’ goes, with military, PPP, green-wash schemes and bank handouts spending trillions of public wealth to keep the big corporate money-sequences going.
‘Growth’ is the panacea, that is more priced commodities. The life-coherent idea that the demand of the economy is ultimately the demand of life systems for life goods is completely repressed. Money-exchanges alone compute even if the ice-caps melt, more billions are malnourished and ever more species go extinct.
Life Capital, not Marxism is the Solution
For Marx, productive forces are the ultimate driver of history and the base of human evolution, with the environment as instrumental value for human production re-creating the world to serve ever more empowered stages of productive development. In these respects Marx’s position and orthodox techno-economics today are alike in principle. They argue for opposite outcomes – working-class revolution versus capitalist-system growth – but both are forms of technological determinism. Neither has a life capital base – the missing ground and link of received economic thought.
Close examination reveals that productive-force determinism is the ultimate driver of society for Marx with no grounding life-value base to control or direct it – Stalinist growth being an extreme example of the problem. My own long research through these issues has concluded that life capital is the underlying ground long eluding us – the ultimate base of human society and development, and the only concept which unifies across social, ecological and organic systems. It is the unseen foundation of the unifying alternative, and applies across domains.
Defining Life Capital as Universalizable and Objective Value through Time
Life capital is an objective and quantifiable process whose criterion is life wealth/capacity that produces more life wealth/capacity without loss and with cumulative gain through generational time (e.g., a society’s public hydro infrastructure, its literacy development, or an individual’s organic fitness through age stages).
Yet it is crucial to emphasize that life capital does not presuppose a private possessor of it. Nor does it require a private profit. But both these false presuppositions have become instituted as akin to physical laws in the reigning ‘economic’ paradigm.
At the most comprehensive level, life capital denotes the collective life bases of the planetary ecosystem and all the socially constructed conditions of humanity’s provision of life goods which are reproduced and gain through generations. In any form, macro or micro, life capital is always that which enables life capacities to reproduce and advance through time. Life capital, at any level, however, can be run down by a life-blind economic system such as ‘globalization’ today. The collapse of the Easter Island culture is a paradigm example of this hollowing out of a society’s life capital bases in life-blind devotion to its system constructions as an end in self. We follow this pattern on a global scale today.
How Life Capital Applies to our Daily Lives
Life capital is all that we continuously depend on to live and live well – breathable air, potable water, everyday knowledge, energy infrastructures, and life-protective laws and regulations. There is no good of our lives not dependent on it to stay alive and well, but the current ruling system increasingly despoils it across sectors. This is the essential problem of our world.
On the individual level, each one of us is a bearer of life capital which we manage better rather than worse by developing rather than wasting or depleting it. On the micro as well as the macro level, our life capital is far deeper in value than what can be sold in the market. Yet we lack the concept for what ultimately matters to us, that without which every life is reduced, malnourished and dies. This is especially true for social and ecological life capital on which we depend without knowing it – for example, effective societal norms and infrastructures ensuring clean air, water, stable climate, civil safety, electricity infrastructures, education, healthcare, income security.
All this becomes self-evident with testing inspection. But nothing is less comprehended in the reigning ‘Economics’. Its paradigm is decoupled from life means and substance in principle, with money demand for them as their only worth. If it is not priced for exchange and purchase, it has no value in this value system. There is no life-value in the calculus. If a natural resource or beauty does not make money, it is ‘wasted’. If a corporation kills people by its negligence, the value of their lives is the income to replace them.
It may seem that life capital has already entered into progressive economists’ vocabulary with concepts of ‘ natural capital’, ‘social capital’, ‘human capital’ and ‘knowledge capital’ which have become familiar in recent decades (beginning with ‘human capital’ from 1960’s onward applied to people who increase their own market value by earning university degrees). Yet these seeming forms of life capital reverse its meaning. They mean only what can be equated to a money value in the market, and so rule out life capital value itself – the value in itself and for life of nature, society, and knowledge. Life value, all real value on earth, cannot be conceived within the instituted blinkers.
Since only what increases revenues/reduces costs in money transactions and sequences is a “cost” or “benefit” to this value calculus, polluting, depleting and otherwise destroying life capital is built in as more “efficiency” because it reduces cost inputs. Thus a contradiction arises across the oceans and forests of the world. Life capital is perpetually despoiled as ‘natural capital’ to maximize money-value profit however natural life capital is in fact destroyed, moving from one site to the next as ‘globalization’. What is called ‘development’ and ‘growth’ cannot distinguish between this ‘investor value adding’ and the cumulative destruction of life systems.
What Has Gone Wrong at the Most Basic Level
As money becoming more money for transnational private possessors has become the ruling value system of the planet, the moral disorder is not examined or represented as it behaves. Rather it is auto-venerated in stock epithets of ‘freedom’, ‘prosperity’, and ‘new wealth’. In reality, a triad mechanism of media indoctrination, transnational treaty commands and armed force have imposed the system step by step. The global money-sequence system operates in accordance with three internal laws not discussed. It selects for more priced commodities without life standards, multiplies money demand to the richest, and – mot deeply – depredates life capital across social and ecological life support systems.
That this system cumulatively entails eco-genocidal effects is taboo to raise within official society. Most people have no idea of the inner logic of the reigning assumptions. Orthodox theory is instead devoted to perfecting the models of money-sequence ‘value adding’ with arcane mathematics leading devices for the rich to slip between the cracks of the law. Wall Street has in this mode modelled control of the buyable water and land in the world for future profit to its ‘investors’ with anything else that can be bought and sold to spike private money sequences.
While every plane of existence from which more money-value can be extracted is in the cross-hairs, no effectively binding protection for life capital bases has been allowed since the mildly successful Ozone Layer Protocol of 1988. The planet is systemically converted into private money sequences to the top depriving and destroying organic, economic and natural life support systems. The crowning irony is ‘austerity programs’ for society to keep the meta program going. At the same time, corporate-rights treaties are backed by severe punishments of taxpayers for any profit-reducing deviation by democratic laws – for example, to reduce neuro-toxins in the air, or stop toxic dumps, proscribe dolphin meat, or prohibit slave labour products. All is enforceable by financial and armed embargo in the last resort, and corporate state politicians are pervasively lobbied with electoral financing and post-office wealth to serve the new world order.
The emergence in the 2016 American presidential primaries of candidate policies to reverse these transnational corporate rights expresses a growing political resistance of the US population – even if the issues are obscured in the corporate media. It has been a long time coming. Thomas Berry long ago observed that “corporate profit is the deficit of the Earth”. Yet in the more exact words of Wall Street analysis: “With captive customers, the cash flows are virtually guaranteed. The only major variables are the initial prices paid, the amount of debt used for financing, and the pace and magnitude of price hikes – easy things for Wall Street to model.”
‘Freedom’ here consists in no recourse left for society to stop or limit the hollowing out of life capital to maximally profit transnational ‘investors’. In pretence of ‘free trade’, peoples are deprived of what ultimately matters to them without knowing what has happened. This is why in the end people feel increasingly helpless and meaningless in a world run out of control.
Primary Implications for Public Policy and Recovery
Re-grounding begins with a first principle. Real economic value is not created by the global market or by money exchanges. This ruling delusion has been promoted by neo-economics since the turn of the 20th century when it reduced economics to dyadic money exchanges with no life coordinates or bases – a system in which the best of possible worlds is a money-price gain for the exchangers. In life-capital understanding, the economic ground begins with reproduction of the planetary atmosphere itself, the oceans, hydrological cycles, soil cover, forests, fellow species, and all such life bases now erased from accounts by the reigning model.
Yet life capital includes far more than the planet’s physical resources on which life depends. It denotes all real goods that are reproduced and/or cumulatively advance through time, including scientific knowledge, life protective norms, and accessible energy sources. These are all measurable life capital formations along with the human-made bases of the real economy of producing goods otherwise in short supply.
Orthodox economics, in polar contrast, eliminates all life capital from view, and all commodities are ‘goods’ by definition. Only what can be privatized to yield more money counts as ‘economic’ or ‘competitive’. Thus a system of taking more than is put in every cycle with no limit becomes the supreme law of ‘value creation’ with all its profitable produces as ‘goods’, never bads.. Behind the scenes, the, the ‘masters of the universe’ create money by ever rising debt-issues and service charges which create nothing, but propel margin feeding in ever greater multiples. No step is possible without the guarantee and force of corporate states. “My administration”, said President Obama to his Wall Street audience on April 3 2009, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks”. Governments’ servant economists and stacked committees, double-standard tax policies, escalating subsidies, armed force protections, privatization of public knowledge, and foreign wars are further dimensions of this transnational corporate system at work.
Life capital is opposite in nature. Whether our own lives or family, our bioregion or the planetary life-host – or the tree, garden or birdlife, vocation or vocabulary at hand – there is one underlying formula of life substance and flourishing across al of them. Life capital produces more life wealth/capacities without loss and with cumulative gain through time in all its variations, the law of true human evolution. Securing our life capital base to live by is its first moral axiom across cultures and tastes. This underlying first principle entails, in turn, policy and regulation to prevent any life capital being run down, wasted or destroyed – as almost all are now. Our collective and individual life capital of ecological, social and organic life hosts are all at risk.
Solution follows from recognising the problem. Moral and policy deciders collectively reclaim human purpose by binding life-capital standards to regulate production, trade and investment- as we already do now with water and sewer standards and enforced laws against criminal attacks.
How the Mass Media Paralyse Societies within the Life-Blind Money Mechanism
The mass media are advertising vehicles which sell media spaces to the wealthiest corporations. They are operationally structured as a propaganda system for the corporations buying the spaces and the system they are embedded in. This is an analytic description confirmed by examining their electronic and hard-copy operations across formats.
It follows that the mass media promote and idealize the corporate operations and wealth sustaining them. But what is not recognised is that these corporations collectively depredate the life capital bases of societies with no connected media investigations. With no life capital standards governing, a global market race to the bottom forms without alternative.
All the while, trillions of dollars/Euros/pounds of public money go to big banks and corporations to keep them going. A staggering $5.3 trillion (U.S.) of public money by IMF calculation is given to fossil-fuel corporations alone, even as the climate destabilization they lead reaches cataclysmic proportions. Despite finally known emergency, even all ecological life support systems together do not receive a small fraction of what subsidizes the big banks and oil/motor industries propelling their collapse.
What is not seen is not responded to. The mass media are, in fact, structured to divert attention from the system’s degenerate trends to sell priced commodities as their law of motion. Endless images, gossip and tales of appetite, fear and projection hold populations in thrall disconnected from their common life-ground. The latest Enemy of the US/EU is then cast as the real threat to global life security – presented, for example, by intermittent hate messages on Vladimir Putin. What is actually occurring in tidal trends – the acidifying oceans, rising climate instability, species extinctions, and youth without meaningful life vocations –dissolve out of view.
The system remains auto-assumed as the best of possible worlds by the media, economists, formal economic models, and academic mainstreams. And why not? Human slavery too was thought optimal for centuries – in fact, it was the first major commodity of ‘global free trade’. Mass homicide by system starvation and ecocide are still called ‘costs of development’ with no challenge of the term. As knowledge and information themselves become proprietary monopolies, we come to see that the world’s deepest problem is the instituted mind-lock of the reigning paradigm beneath consciousness of it. its life blind logic.
From Sports to the Academy: Life Capital Bases Blocked Out A-Priori
On the system-wide level, the dominant mass media are governed by three implicit goals – selling corporate ads, validating money power, and blocking out life capital bases.Professional sports exemplify the system as its ultimate site of transnational market propaganda. They draw increasing mass audiences round the world with no competitor to mobilize public attention and commitment. The inner logic of the ruling value system is imprinted beneath notice.
The more money sports stars get, the more money take is glorified, the more ads are sold, the more public attention and wealth are diverted from profound public issues like the degrading life capital bases of society and the planet. In this way, the ultimate struggle for better life on earth is displaced by commercial contest spectacles and logos competing for private money pay-offs for the few. Free time itself is subjugated by the corporate money system.
Mass spectator sports are an allegory and a linchpin of the system’s hold (and I say this as a former professional player). Battle cries of ‘everything is at stake’ drive ersatz-tribal passions to displace what really matters to life on Earth. Even if a public issue comes into the spectacle-sales agenda, it too is converted by corporate ads into sales images of concern and action. The rising catastrophic storms, sea-rises and weather extremes are euphemized as ‘climate change’ with only market solutions promoted.
In the US, the most popular sports are linked to military displays, bands and metaphors, with few noticing the US military is the biggest killer and greatest polluter in the world. Again we see the many levels at which life-blind aggression and attack is built into this system. The destruction becomes part of the excitement with, for example, pristine nature as a favorite scene of beauty to sell fossil-fuel super engines ripping up the life terrain. Reduced to ad vehicles, the mass media follow one underlying law of meaning. The truth is what sells. Parallel to the games spectacles, marketed personalities are the centre of elections too. Collective life capital bases as the proper concern of nations and democracy do not compute within the reigning mind-set.
The academic world has been taken over by corporate self-maximization in less visible ways. University administrations have become corporate fund managers accountable to no academic standards in their multiplied spending on their own offices, salaries, and corporate-ladder culture. Their essential function is partnering with leveraged corporate research funds necessary to replace underfunding by corporate states – a 25 year planned process in North America.
At the same time, commercial publishers have bought up once-independent scholarly journals across the academic world, multiplied their prices to libraries, and imposed corporate procedures of refereeing with corporate forms ruling out critical autonomy of evaluation. Throughout, the externally profiting transnational corporations exploit university scholars’ need to be published with no payment for their services. In fact, the publishing corporations pay nothing for the entire life-capital infrastructure of advancing learning and disseminating knowledge, an extremely costly affair for advanced facilities and world-level expertise. All educational costs are borne by taxpayers and student fees, exerting mounting downwards pressure on public capacities of research and teaching. Ever more cuts follow from corporate states and administrations so that, for example, casual labour with no research support does most of the teaching and instruction. Throughout research for new commodities for the global corporate market becomes the dominant objective of funding sciences themselves.
Every step of these systemic degradations and front-line dispossessions dismantles the life capital evolution of public learning and higher research leading the species’ evolution.
Lead Philosophies Decoupled from the Life-Ground Too
In the background, the most lauded thinkers block out the advancing corporate occupation and its life capital alternative in principle. Martin Heidegger seems to sense the great hollowing out in his signature idea of our “forgetfulness of Being”. Yet he has no life-ground to go on but the “home of language” rooted in pre-Socratic conceptions. Wittgenstein and others follow with “language games” and “linguistic philosophy” in the English-analytic tradition, but again with life-ground and social structure bracketed out as if they did not exist.
Today’s leading social philosopher-scientist, Jurgen Habermas, reduces “life-world” (Lebensvelt) to background assumptions, and rules out any alternative economic order a-priori. The dominant justice/moral theories of John Rawls and Robert Nozick have dominated normative philosophy over half a century, but cannot get beyond self-maximizing agents in a social void with no collective life capital bases imagined across industries of literature. ‘Communitarian’ philosophy moves underneath liberal atomism to social institutions and traditions as common bearings of persons and social reality, but has no deeper test or validation of them in universal life needs or life capital ground. Even socialist theory and doctrine provides no unifying life foundations integrating ecology, economics and life-value choice space.
Throughout the evolved life ground is lost – the life capital bases of humanity and nature as ground and measure of all life value through time in process of reproduction, loss or gain. We already have the basics in any working public health system where every one of these parameters can be known down to the finest detail of life capacity performance and well-being, but joining the dots into unifying concept and common thread across domains is the missing meta step.
The Postmoderns Revolt Against Any Common Life-Ground At All
Many celebrate post-modern with thinkers like Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida and Lyotard who are believed to expose the inhuman and the repressive in our institutions and language by a liberation from metaphysics of duality and deep structures. Less noticed, the postmodernists implicitly repudiate any unifying life-ground whatever. Life capital does not exist. Like the global market, postmodernism proclaims the free, the particular and the disruptive without any life base, while ignoring the actual global command system’s attack on planetary life itself. Some like Deleuze may loathe capitalism. But they have no conception of humanity’s universal life bases and necessities to ground agreement or alternative to what destroys them.
Organising principles which bridge from the past through the present to the future by objective common life interests are, yet again, ruled out. The economists’ life-blind paradigm of liquid mechanics goes on being mapped onto the living world, unquestioned even by the self-conceived subversives of totalizing structure.
Life Capital Meaning Steers Humanity’sUnderlying Evolution
A simple example is herds of livestock. Their life capital continues so long as they reproduce or gain in collective life capacity of yield in meat, milk-production, pull-power, manure, and hide material, all quantifiable through time. The same can be said of socially constructed and regulated life capital formations – public literacy and health systems, clean air and water, electric-light access, recycling garbage and sewage systems, life security in body and speech, book and film libraries, ecological integrity including noise bylaws, biodiverse pathways and surroundings. We find life capital meaning most inclusively and incisively when we consider our lives without any of them.
In polar contrast, public spending is now increasingly diverted to subsidize the private money-sequence system in trillions of dollars to dominant corporations leading the depredation of life capital bases – for example, ‘quantitative easing’ to the destabilizing and non-productive speculations of big banks and the massive subsidization of the armaments, oil and luxury motor industries. But the most built-in appropriations of public wealth and collective life capital bases are by corporate lobbies feeding on public services and the public purse directly by privatization schemes. To cite British MP John McDonnell: “Privatization over the last four decades has been a history of snatching up public assets to print private money. From the earliest privatizations of water, energy and rail to the PFI [Private Financial Intitiatives] from the last decade, it has been one long confidence trick.”
The same covert raiding of public life capital to feed private corporate profits has been imposed by captive states across the world – a systematic eating away of social life support systems and services accompanying the looting of ecosystems and natural resources as ‘the last frontier of easy money’. Collective life capacities and capital are the victim, but no measure of their losses exists. In fact, every overloading, depletion, pollution, abandonment, reverse liability, under-investment in infrastructures, and price-gouging of ‘privatization’ programs follows the reigning paradigm’s primary axiom of rational choice. In its abstract form, the rule of self-maximizing preference in all things is the overriding law of modern reason with no proof or question of it in even the inner sanctums of high theory.
Life-coherent reason is missing – consistency with life capital requirements. Consistency with evidence and other statements provide empirical and logical validity, but not life validity – the lost life-ground of knowledge. It is already at work without the name in valid life-protective and safety regimes across sectors, and in medical science, public health and infrastructures and requirements of life necessity across domains. The underlying meaning is the evolution of human society itself towards ever more life-coherent rule systems of how to live on the planet. Life capital defence and advance is the missing link and guiding thread across domains.
Public money is properly investment flow of society into life capital. But much goes immediately to paying off private banks which create the money as unlimited debt issues with permanent service demands, a distinguished from central bank loans with no such private-profit issue and claws on the public purse – as in successful economies like China and in Canada’s before 1974 when its great social and physical infrastructures were built. Another US $26 trillion today goes offshore to evade public taxation. At every level, the life capital bases of society are invaded by private money-sequence demands adding costs and degrading them so that most are in cumulative decline. This is the macro pattern of life capital dispossession and common wealth destruction by the transnational money-sequence system until a public life capital turn steers us.
The Unifying Alternative follows from the Logic of the Problem
In the degenerate trends identified above, the private market system lacks life capital coordinates and binding standards to guide it. Yet if we consider human advances made through generational time, we find the underlying principle of public life capital always at work in some form – from language development by agreed-on conventions enabling more meaningful communications to protection of community water supplies and waste-recycling separation to knowledge criteria and storing across the lines of death to the ecological protection systems that ultimately decide the rise or fall of civilisations. Seek any exception to this evolutionary pattern so far as humanity advances. It is the unseen moral vocation of the race.
Steering is life-coherent through time by life-capital measure and principle at all levels – as already being achieved in life-coherent energy and trash conversion systems, still-working public health systems, open knowledge centres of dissemination and learning, and ecological understanding dissolving life-blind ignorance. The life capital base of developed societies has already evolved beneath market phenomena, but without second-order understanding or even a name.
Thus the global money-sequence system continues to seek ‘growth’ that cumulatively despoils life capital and support systems without a connecting concept of the problem and solution across domains. Life capital provides this missing concept and common ground as the set-point of life-coherent policy deciders across jurisdictions. It is always what ultimately matters to human and fellow life – that without which life capacities are destroyed over time. Its measure invariably enables an objectively unifying meaning of life-value gain or loss throughout – of life security in need, of housing and nourishing food supply, of adequate clean water and sewage cycles, of accessible learning and knowledge, of public facilities and structures of production and art, and of the environmental integrity of our life-host – in short, the true goods of life which are now everywhere at risk without a life-value ground and compass to guide choice and action.
John McMurtry is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and his work is published and translated from Latin America to Japan. He is the author and editor of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems published by UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), and his latest book is The Cancer Stage of Capitalism/from Crisis to Cure.
Justin Trudeau in NY later this week to sign climate deal slashing emissions 30% below 2005 levels by 2030
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be in New York later this week to sign the latest global climate agreement, under which Canada commits to slash emissions 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. (Martin Meissner/Associated Press)
The Canadian Press, reposted from CBCNews, Apr 18, 2016
A new government inventory report says Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions continued their slow climb in 2014.
The national inventory released Monday by Environment Canada shows emissions were estimated to be 732 megatonnes of carbon dioxide and other equivalents — a 20 per cent increase over 1990 levels, when Canada first committed to cutting emissions growth.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be in New York later this week to sign the latest global climate agreement, under which Canada commits to slash emissions 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
The latest inventory shows that emissions in 2014 were 15 megatonnes below 2005 levels, but slowly rising.
Emissions actually fell steeply in 2009 due to the global economic downturn, but the report says emissions have climbed 5.2 per cent since then.
The energy sector made up 81 per cent of Canada’s GHG emissions in 2014, with agriculture the next biggest sector at eight per cent.
Mining, oil and gas doubled emissions
Since 2005, public electricity and heat production has seen a 39 megatonne decrease in emissions, with Ontario’s closure of coal generating power stations credited with most of the downturn. However emissions from mining and upstream oil and gas production boosted emissions by 34 megatonnes.
“In 2014, emissions from mining and upstream oil and gas production were more than twice their 1990 values,” states the report.
“This is consistent with a 91 per cent increase in total production of crude oil and natural gas over the period, largely for export, which has grown by over 200 per cent.”
Six provinces saw declines in emissions between 2005 and 2014, led by Ontario (down 19 per cent) and Nova Scotia (down 29 per cent), while four provinces increased emissions, led by Alberta’s 17 per cent increase.
