Alberta premier must not support the climate scare when promoting her province’s hydrocarbon fuel resources in Washington DC this week
By Tom Harris
Introducing the International Climate Science Coalition video, “Alberta government feeding the fire that threatens to destroy Canada’s main source of wealth”.
History is replete with tragic examples of those who collaborated with the enemy or sought to appease political correctness and wishful thinking for their own short term benefit. Nowhere is this more evident than in today’s climate change debate. Politicians from across the political spectrum, fossil fuel companies and academics who should know better, not only bow to the climate scare, but actively support it. They even use the unscientific, misnomer-riddled language of their opponents.
The situation is especially alarming in oil-rich Alberta, Canada. There, a supposedly conservative government feeds the fire that threatens to destroy the province’s, and indeed the country’s, main source of wealth, their vast hydrocarbon resources. In an attempt to please the Obama administration so as to secure approval for the Keystone XL pipeline project, and to keep climate campaigners and Canada’s mostly left wing media at bay, Alberta Premier Alison Redford has completely capitulated to climate alarmism.
Her approach is doomed to failure. After all, the primary threat to Keystone XL is the feared impact of oil sands expansion on global climate, and XL will certainly facilitate oil sands expansion.
If approved, the pipeline will pump 830,000 barrels of crude oil every day from Alberta’s oil sands, the world’s third-largest proven reserves, to refineries in Texas. That is over 4% of U.S. daily oil consumption and about 20% of all U.S. imports from the Middle East and Venezuela combined. Besides enhancing America’s energy security, thousands of jobs and billions of dollars are at stake in both countries. Significant tax revenue will flow to provincial, state and federal governments and industry and ordinary citizens alike will see enormous benefits.
But oil sands processing produces more carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas of most concern in the climate debate, than does the refining of conventional crude oil. So activists have drawn a line in the sand with Keystone XL. Even though the oil sands contribute only just over 1/10th of 1% of humanity’s total CO2 emissions, anything that helps the oil sands grow must be stopped, they say. XL is symbolic of our dependence on fossil fuels, an addiction that campaigners believe is destroying the climate.
If science supported the hypothesis that CO2 emissions are causing climatic Armageddon, then anti-Keystone protesters would have a point. To the degree possible, we should then be looking for less CO2-intensive energy sources and trying to ramp down, not up, projects such as the oil sands. Rejecting Keystone XL would then be a cogent symbol that President Barack Obama is serious about tacking global warming, a legacy he would dearly love to be remembered for.
But the science is too immature to know how much influence our CO2 emissions have on climate.
Computerized climate models clearly do not work—even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits there has been no overall warming for the past 17 years, something the models failed to predict. Applied mathematics professor Christopher Essex of the University of Western Ontario emphasizes that “the big policy questions are beyond the best models we can currently make. Climate is far from a simple solved scientific problem.”
The geologic record does not support dangerous CO2-driven planetary warming either. “CO2 has played no role in the dramatic climate change of the ice ages, or at any other time over the past 500 million years”, said University of Ottawa Earth Sciences Professor Ian D. Clark. “Only in unverified computer models cited by the IPCC does CO2 drive climate change.”
It is not surprising that the Alberta government dare not contest the scientific foundation of the climate scare. Perhaps they even believe Al Gore when he says that the science is settled. But it makes no sense for Redford and her cabinet to accept, let alone promote alarm. While they do not have the training to know which side of the science is right, they must know that ending our use of fossil fuels entirely, the ultimate aim of climate activists, would cripple the province’s economy, and eventually that of Canada and the United States.
Redford meets with lawmakers in Washington DC this coming week to lobby for the Keystone XL pipeline project and the oil sands. By more carefully crafting her message, and not simply caving in to political correctness, Redford can boost these important projects effectively without helping her strongest opponents.
The 14 minute video just release by ICSC lays out how to do this.
The public can judge for themselves whether Alberta’s premier continues to support the main argument of Keystone XL opponents. Her Tuesday afternoon presentation to the Washington DC-based Brookings Institute, strong proponents of the climate scare themselves, may be heard in line in real time at http://www.brookings.edu/events/2013/04/09-alberta-energy-redford.
________________________
Tom Harris is Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition, and an advisor to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Why do Canadians care whether Americans prefer to run a pipeline across their land or pay Warren Buffet to cart the oil around in rail wagons.
Alison Redford is a big believer in Climate Hysteria and CO2 (Carbon) Hysteria. Redford also sees herself as the smartest person in the room. And she lies a lot.
Last April during a CBC hosted election forum, Wildrose leader Danielle Smith made basic factual statements and was attacked for doing so.
Calgary radio station News Talk 770 has many program hosts who expose the flaws in CAGW. The news director, Laura Knop, however seems to be an intense alarmist. Every newscast the next day went after Smith portraying her as believing in a “flat earth”.
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/technology/Debate+crowd+heckles+Smith+statement+climate+change/6488113/story.html#ixzz1sayLaLnw
——–
“We’ve been watching the debate in the scientific community, and there is still a debate,” Smith said. “I will continue to watch the debate in the scientific community, but that’s not an excuse not to act.”
Smith said she is frustrated by the climate change debate because politicians set impossibly high targets then do nothing to achieve them. She said the Wildrose will take a different approach, putting in place “constructive policies” that reduce overall emissions.
———-
Unfortunately, Danielle Smith appears to be losing her backbone.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion/op-ed/Thomson+Wildrose+Party+warms+global+warming/8166518/story.html
Richard Verney
You might highlight how Uk is coping with the recent record cold winter and the government’s policy of phasing out coal and fossil generating plants . I understand that the energy supplies were so low that had Uk not received two shiploads of fossil fuel gas at the last moment , a lot of people would have been without heating fuel. Why are the renewables not doing the job . ? Not enough of them or unreliable ?
Herkimer – the word is moot, not mute. Though I guess debates can become muted.
DirkH says:
April 7, 2013 at 7:27 am
Why do Canadians care whether Americans prefer to run a pipeline across their land or pay Warren Buffet to cart the oil around in rail wagons.
======================================================================
This is not about running “a pipeline across their land”. The pipeline has been approved, is in the process of approval and actually been built where the States have authority. The American people know what is right and approve of this project. What this is about is where the US Federal Government has jurisdiction, namely the border crossing, and whether we have an integrated economy between Canada and the USA or not. Not approving the deal due to purely political reasons and throwing actual science and the rule of law out the window is what is worrying. If at the end of the day Obama continues to hold this up we will simply refine the fuel ourselves. Even the NDP and Ellie Mae (Green Party) want that to happen so the enviroradicals will have to step aside for that.
To Moderators – please do no publish, just fix the errors.
to
to
It should be obvious that there are a lot of tentacles to this issue. Source processing of the oil sands has improved greatly over the last ten years, so much so that emissions are marginally higher than conventional oil. That is why it passed the last environmental review in the U.S. This put the option on the table for the Obama administration. TransCanada Pipeline has a good track record, and current construction is vastly better than that of the older technology. Trains now carry the oil south, but the pipeline capacity is far greater and probably safer. The current production will be limited by transportation – expansion requires the pipeline.
A pipeline to the Pacific is possible, but costly. It also will face a First Nations blockade- they have been scared and bought off by the big greens. Last week a representative of Canada’s “Idle No More” Aboriginal movement lobbied against the simple construction of a two-mile spur line on a local Reserve to move Bakken oil in Western Manitoba- and won. This First Nations equation is huge in Canada and will have to be dealt with. Canada would be better off increasing our refining capacity, but that is a very expensive proposition in a limited domestic market.
The fact that Obama has hedged on this issue even after clearing all assessments bodes poorly for the final outcome. There is a lot of chatter up here about a trade-off. In essence, Canada will be pressured to adopt a carbon tax in exchange for the pipeline. I think that is where Alberta will come down because it’s economy is not in good shape right now, and, like Obama, they could use the tax revenue to cover poor fiscal governance. My guess is that Obama will sign if a major concession of some kind is offered. Otherwise he will not risk his base votes until after the mid-term election.
I wish both Canada and the U.S. could simply base resource/energy decisions on sound economic and environmental information. In this case, the bases have been covered and it should be a no-brainer. But we have Suzuki (and now Hansen) and the sky is still falling.
On the point of Canadians being a voice of reason, take a look at Michael Fullan’s (based in Toronto but a change agent with global aspirations) work on using education to drive transformative social, political, and economic change. Starting at the level of a student’s values and beliefs especially if school can be used to make emotion the driving force. They emotionally believe as an article of faith in climate change and it guides their behavior and creates a belief that they and we must all act.
Remember the cardinal rule of the social sciences which is where Climate Change Models originate in is that a theory does not need to be true factually to be influential in its consequences if it can change beliefs that guide or prompt behavioral action. In fact I am off this morning reading through the transformative potential of personal construct theory. The margins of the 1971 UK book can barely contain all my recognitions of how this factually incorrect theory is being implemented globally in order to both alter and make the prevailing beliefs of the next generation of voters predictable.
We adults past a certain age writing about the nonsense being foisted on us in the name of catastrophic climate change are really not the audience to be influenced.
“symbolic of our dependence on fossil fuels, an addiction that campaigners believe is destroying the climate”
DUH!
What hasw the human species de[eded upon for energy since the dicovery and harnessing FIRE?
Tom Harris knows that Alison Redford campaign was and still is supported by Globemedia, one of the fiercest scare mongering media in Canada, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters that keeps offering Op-Eds to the Tzeporah Berman (former Greenpeace), Maurice Strong, Thomas Homer-Dixon, David Suzuki and likes, even timing up openly with Tides astroturfed political groups for domestic political purpose, once their US funding and influence in Canada was courageously exposed by Vivian Krause.
Redford is a watermelon bankrolled by the Carbon Capture industry which she obliged with billions of government money for some dubious capture project in Alberta. She will be the Alberta Gillard.
As for the opinion of some Postmedia journalist in Edmonton on Danielle Smith, we all know the Edmonton Journal publishes anything that fits the carbon lobby, including a while ago some Op-Eds by some PhD student who since has made a flagging name for himself in deeper climates…
The climate scare diktat is being enforced by any means available. How long will the Canadian government be able to deflect it? Will the Conservatives cave in a backstab Canadians with some Carbon Tax as they did with the Income Trust issue?
Science, real or the bad one, is old news. Let’s see if Australians will be able to rid themselves of Gillard and her green bankers… That should give us an idea of how democracy has been perverted.
Dirk H: Why do Canadians care . . . ?
Because at some point in time we need to stop the Faux Environmentalists from forcing special interest, minority based, politically motivated decisions on the populace to decisions based on sound economics which operate within the existing laws of today. Trans Canada Pipelines isn’t trying to do anything illegal. It is trying to provide oil in what it believes is a more economically viable manner. The companies which extra oil from the oil sands operate in one of the most environmentally stringent jurisdictions in the world.
FYI, there are good arguments much of the protest is supported by American based environmental NGOs, specifically so Americans continue to receive oil at a significantly discounted rate from world market pricing. See Vivian Krause: http://fairquestions.typepad.com/rethink_campaigns/. She looked at the tax returns of Canadian based so called environmental groups and there are a lot of suspicious donations by Tides, etc.
Once the CAGW HOAX is finally thrown on the trash heap of history, which shouldn’t be much longer, there will be long-term repercussions to future scientific funding as taxpayers will no longer trust governments to fund scientific research given the $trillions already thrown do pawn the toilet on the CAGW charade to obtain political objectives rather than conducting true science.
In the future, the private sector will fund both basic and applied research through corporations, universities, Alumni, organizations, NGOs, associations, etc. There will obviously be less total scientific funding available, but there will much less corruption and waste that currently exists under public funded scientific research.
….people need to get this straight. Redford and many (probably most) politicians don’t care about anything other then themselves and the liberal left causes. they only fear the left not the right. the left will f##k them up. the right wont.
that said they are often leftists/marxist anyhow as Redford is.
there will be no pipeline to the USA …stop kidding yourselves. you are confusing logic with the lefts agenda. they intend to destroy the west so what do you think they will do. WAKE UP …the WAR started long ago and YOU ALL STILL don’t see it.
right now the USA is able to buy Canadian oil at a discount, that will end if a pipeline to a deep water port in the Gulf is built. The US Navy says that the planet is getting hotter and that around summer of 2020 the polar ice cap will be gone and they will have to look for a new place to hide their subs from the surface fleet. The people who think that the planet isn’t getting hotter live in the same bubble as those who thought Romney was going to win
I’m not pitching in about Canadian politics, although the comments here are familiar. Almost all political leaders in the developed world seem to be incompetent, venal, morons.
But I have no difficulty in understanding Tom Harris’s piece. Recent history gives a plethora of examples of oil, coal and gas firms whose executives lavishly funded the greenie alarmists and spouted their greenie claptrap, either because they were so dumb that they believed it, because they thought it would deflect criticism – perhaps towards their competitors, or because they recognised the long term advantage of always being able to sell energy products (at an increasingly good price) when the politicians had screwed up with their stupid Ruinable Energy projects.
Best example? BP and its advertising campaigns a year or so back. The greenies took the dough and just accused BP of “greenwash”. (Google it!)
So if Redford tries to have her greenie agit-prop cake and also eat it by promoting the pipeline, she will be able to point to plenty of precedents. Of course, they didn’t work either.
Best defence? Attack, for sure!
Herkimer, what you and Richard Verney said about future colder winters, I cannot agree nor disagree as I do not have the appropriate knowledge. However I do have common sense and what common sense is telling me is that in the UK, we have had four cold winters on the trot, to turn off our coal fired power stations on a whim of some EU directive is suicide and short sighted stupidity. There is no way that the useless windmills blighting our landscape can produce enough power to keep the country going, either economically or socially. Due to our last governments energy policy, which has been perpetuated by the present coalition government, we are heading for disaster.
At the moment I am in Southern Spain and everyone has been talking about the very wet winter. The reservoirs are all full to overflowing, and if there is no more rain at all, there is enough water to supply the Costa del Sol for 30 months. The desalination plant near us has not been used for years. It is obvious that this region of Spain has our normal winter weather while in the UK we have had Arctic and Scandinavian weather.
Will this happen again? I don’t know, but we would be pretty stupid to take the risk by irreversibly decommissioning our major sources of power, especially as it is based on a theory that is falling apart at it’s computer modelled seams!
Oh and one more thing, snow is not a rare and exciting event in North East England, neither is the Costa del Sol turning into a desert with millions of climate refugees heading for the balmy north, as was predicted 20 years ago
“The US Navy says that the planet is getting hotter and that around summer of 2020 the polar ice cap will be gone”
John: We’ll have lots of polar bears surfing around on ice. In fact, pick ANY amount of money and you’re on. Please, oh please, oh please say yes you’ll take my bet. I would love to have my mortgage paid off.
OH, and my post above should read “extract”, not extra.
Alberta had better get their pipeline built quickly or it won’t get built at all. British Columbia is now hosting a poison pill.
Commenters above have presented two general facts:
1) The weather is getting colder, which causes more difficulties with crops and basic winter survival. And it won’t likely improve for decades to come.
2) Fossil fuel use is threatened by anti-development environmentalists, even as reserves of these fuels are expanding. Controlling CO2 is the excuse that has proven to be effective in persuading low-information voters.
The vast majority of people are completely unaware of a paradigm shift that is now afoot. This shift will be as significant as the invention of fire itself. And while some may wish to ignore it or deny it exists, their myopic view won’t change the radical changes that are in progress.
Several companies are gearing up to implement this technology into hundreds of applications–replacing the vast majority of fossil fuels in the process. Expect the dismantling of wind farms and solar panel facilities, as well as nuclear power plants.
Here’s what the company from Vancouver, BC has been doing in the shadows, since marketing isn’t even needed:
http://pesn.com/2013/04/04/9602290_Defkalion-laying-low-preparing-to-make-a-big-splash/
An interesting side show will be whether “watermelon” environmentalists embrace it, or reject it as it destroys their quest for control. But regardless of the outcome (for someday the perception of CO2 will switch from being a toxin to a highly desirable fertilizer), we certainly live in interesting times.
And whether Alberta gets a pipeline not, production of fossil fuels and the revenue from these will soon be in drastic decline. Alberta will find that building a pipeline won’t matter.
My neighbour, an older gentleman and longtime conservative chastised me for the “Wild Rose” (Danielle Smith) sign on my lawn during the election. I recently asked him how he thought his party was doing. He just put his head down and grumbled something under his breath and went in the house.
I saw Redford coming from a mile away.
The coalition government in the UK and some Pro-Cons in Alberta are following the old “convergence” line of the Cold War when it comes to energy policy. This is all in an attempt to appear fashionably reasonable to a left-leaning press which beats them a little less for their trouble. We have the same tendencies among our wet Republicans here. Bob Dole was once dubbed “the tax collector for the welfare state” and deserved it.
… as to the US Navy I can personally attest to the craven nature of the filling the upper ranks. Like many in science they should have a “will work for funding” sign hung around their necks.
Tom Rude mentioned the Tides Foundation. Previously (last week was busy) I laid out a description of a document called The Acceleration Agenda from the Tides project, New Policy Institute, that envisions restructuring and increasing US federal revenue sharing around achieving a regional Race to the Top around urban areas and a green “clean economy” vision. Thus using our tax money or future indebtedness to bribe politicians at all levels into supporting this vision. It was also explicitly a formal embrace of Industrial Policy as what governments everywhere should be doing in the 21st century.
These 12 regions are so pie in the sky of what can work once federal money is withdrawn that it has California’s economy being built on the high speed rail project. The Southwest is to be the Saudi Arabia of Solar. Economically it makes no sense but when even the report mentions the Green Gold Rush that everyone wants to cash in on, politicians at the state and local level love the idea. It is OPM after all. Regions are also supposed to be equal so the well-functioning areas can subsidize areas like Detroit and Chicago and Cleveland that are dysfunctional by any measure.
The Global Cities Initiative envisions this kind of federal encouragement of local Urban push everywhere. The last presentation of 2013 is in Mexico City. These initiatives should definitely be on everyone’s horizon in appreciating what can perhaps best be described as a return to a feudalistic view of the State vs subject. I think we are seeing this attitude almost daily now from politicians globally. How to advance the power of the Predator State.
As a Alberta PC party insider, I know for a fact that Redford’s days as a leader are numbered. During the upcoming leadership review in November 2013 she will be stripped of her current title. She has alienated caucus members by her end run approach and that does not sit well with the democractic process. She will not survive and the successor will be from the right camp. Only question is how much more damage can this UN mole accomplish.
Socialist Alberta premier Alison Redford hijacked Progressive Conservative”sell out party. Need I say more. She ain’t no hero like ex Alberta premier Ralph Klein. RIP.
Canada is full of elitist like Alison Redford’s watermelons all, and fully ensconced in the utopian dream of UN agendas 1 to 1000 – take your pick!
Canada has such promise, but the Alison Redford’s of the world have infiltrated every fiber of the Canadian fabric!
If Obama does not OK the Keystone XL expect to see a very slightly shorter version proposed. Stopping a few miles South of the Canadian border near a rail line. A couple of unit trains comprised of oil cars on a very short shunting job to a spot just North of the border and you have a solution that can be built without State Department approval.