Category Archives: Biosphere

Do grow-ops Belong on ALR Land?

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Pic From Victoria Times Colonist

 

It seems that our outgoing head of the ALC believes this to be the case, that concrete slab based bunkers ought properly to be situated on ALR land, because, well, it’s a form of agriculture. I disagree vehemently. In a conversation with a relative in Ontario last winter, it came out that his brother had sold a hundred or so acres of farmland, the kind of black dirt land that requires almost no amendment to produce food crops, and that the highest bidder was a grow-op. Now all that soil is under cement, and I gather that there is never any chance that there will ever be a recovery. The grow-op could have been situated on marginal land, or on utterly unproductive land, without altering the nature of cultivation. In our area, the land under ALR is protected because it is deemed to be potentially productive soil, and the paving over for whatever reason flies in the face of the spirit of ALR.

The time where the justification of the Agricultural Land Reserve is apparent is upon us as our supply lines to California and Florida become more tenuous due to energy concerns, and where those areas are threatened by drought and sea level rise. If we are to be able to have a chance to feed ourselves, we must protect not only the geographic locations under ALR, but also the soil they host, including areas such as, say, the Peace River Valley.

The current scheme for the legalization of marijuana is in large part to blame for this blunder as it continues a régime of restricted supply and subsequent over-valuation of a crop due to induced scarcity and control.

“Economics is a form of brain damage.” 
–Hazel Henderson
This is what is driving our civilization to decay, the idea that this abstraction called the economy takes precedence over the physical conditions that allow the economy to exist. Our margins for existence are pretty thin, and we’ve used up most of the room for error. We continue to err.

Rachel’s Path to Success

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Rachel Notley announced yesterday that Alberta will be seeking intervenor status in the BC reference question, that she’s ready to turn off the oil taps to BC, and that she’s rolling out an ad campaign to win hearts and minds to the Kinder Morgan cause. So here we have a promise to participate in the process whose legitimacy she has denied, a threat, and paid persuasion. Cute.

The ads are the most curious part of the package. That a province that doesn’t balance the books should spend money on ads is pretty retrograde, that the ads in question should be for the benefit of a profitable Texas-based pipeline company touches on absurd, and the idea that she can capture hearts and minds is frightening.

After all, advertising is really about getting the target population to spend more money than it ought to on things it doesn’t need, often doesn’t want, and which may, in both long- and short- terms, be hazardous to the health of the target population. Just sit in front of a television for an hour and you’ll see all these phenomena in play. Perhaps if the ads can make you believe you need to eat Chocolate-Covered Sugar Bombs, they can also convince you that you like dilbit and paying to build a pipeline so that you can ship the stuff through several hundred kilometres of varying terrain and urban landscape to tidewater, thence to undetermined markets leaving no economic benefit for most of BC and a large sword of Damocles in terms of spills. Rachel wants to convince you that this is a good deal. It is not. Rachel, Justin, Jim Carr, Ian Anderson and the whole tar baby industry are lying to you. They want you to lie to yourself. I won’t, not in this instance. Please join me.

 

I sure am glad…

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… that neither Justin Trudeau nor Rachel Notley is my personal investment advisor.

Apparently, Kinder Morgan’s free range investors have figured out that this may not be a good bet in either the short, and particularly, in the long run. I frequently see references by serious business types to the coming collapse of the fossil fuel market, coupled with multiple references to how inexpensive renewable energy is becoming. I have purged my piddly portfolio of the oily stuff, but I collect pensions that are drenched in the stuff, despite the fact that pensioners are increasingly aware of the damage being done in their names and the risks being incurred in the name of propping up a dying industry and the fortunes of some very greedy and corrupt corporate and political figures. It’s very frustrating to see that people who have told so many lies continue to be empowered to work toward the destruction of life on the planet with the money that they collect “legally” from all of us. I left the following comment on Norm Farrell’s blog this morning in the context of his discussion of how the current régime in victoria can remain tone deaf to the financial, social, and ecological  reasoning presented on that organ, In-Sights:

The cudgel of reason seems to lose mass in the face of blind ideology.

So let’s celebrate, while we can, the fact that no amount of common sense seems to get us to the point of doing the right thing in the context of our shared living space, in terms of our economic well-being and in terms of working toward a more reasonable and just society. Let the sparklers light up the throwing of good money after bad, and worse, and worst. We’re there.

Kinder Morgan and Raison d’État

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Listening to Justin Trudeau speak of Canada as a country of rule of law reminded me of this paragraph from John Ralston Saul’s 1992 tome, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West.His assertion that Kinder Morgan had achieved all the requisite permits rings hollow, given the make-up of the NEB and the writing of the regulations by the former Harper administration under whose regulations the Trans Mountain expansion was approved speaks of a willingness to choose allegiance to the law as it suits his own purposes, and his invocation of the national interest belies the idea that the national interest might include the best interests of all Canadian citizens rather than the will of the Chinese government who might eventually decide that they want to ship bitumen into their energy mix, or of the fossil fuel cabal that insists on its right to trash whatever it will in the pursuit of profit, most of which is sent offshore in a big hurry.

This is Justin telling us that he knows better than we do, that he alone can, with the aid of his special sidekick Cath McKenna, perform that special trick of legerdemain wherein we produce more carbon-intensive fuels and manage in passing to meet those laudable climate goals expressed to such loud ovations in Paris in 2015. There is a whiff of something malodorous about this business, something that resembles the duplicity of pretty much the whole of the Liberal election platform. Trudeau the Younger seems to have a bit of a problem being truthful, and his difficulty seems to increase as he seems to increase his belief in his own pronouncements.

If Kinder Morgan does abandon the project, it will be because Kinder Morgan will have recognized that market forces have clearly demonstrated that the project doesn’t work.  There has perhaps been a shove due to the resistance from First Nations and those inclined to leave something of a livable legacy for their children and future generations, but the long-run prospects for fossil fuels get less attractive with every cent that comes off the price of a kilowatt of renewable energy, particularly given that we know how to store and distribute intermittent energy, and that we have the technology to convert electricity to liquid hydrogen, as well as how to make plastics and other items from crops we already know how to grow. Mr. Trudeau would seem to see himself as part of a technocrat élite that ought rightly to be above having its pronouncements or actions questioned, and there are places on the planet where this would work well for him, but in Canada, he is supposed to serve his constituents rather than the reverse.

 

 

Note: A discussion of the rule of law needs to include this little gem depicting an anti-spawning mat installed by Kinder Morgan to facilitate the permitting and building of the Trans Mountain pipeline, an act that looks to my untrained legal mind as a clear infraction of fisheries law. Did Justin stamp his feet over these? They may be all gone (if they aren’t, something is clearly amiss in the realm of the righteous) but the act itself speaks to an attitude of arrogance and impatience that augurs not well for a collaborative relationship between pipeline proponent and citizens.

Note 2: Saul’s book is a worthy read even if you don’t see it as revelatory or agree with his outlook on history and governance. It resonates pretty loudly with me.

Protecting Genetic Heritage

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Along with whatever might be useful as we plunge into the abyss of our GM-AI-Driverless Technofuture:

Semences autochtones : la Tunisie en prend de la graine

Alors que les semences de blé améliorées, massivement importées dans les années 80, sont rattrapées par les maladies, les variétés traditionnelles font de la résistance.

 

An article from Libération details how Tunisia has reverted to the use of heritage seeds for its staple crops, having experienced high degrees of disease and degradation with the ongoing plantings of hybrid and GM varieties adopted in the ’80s. There is particularly heightened interest in this given that Tunisia was where the Arab Spring first arose, and arise it did because of lack of food due in part to lack of funds, tied to lack of work. This appears to be a rare application of that rarest of commodities of late, common sense based on traditional knowledge.

Drinking A Bit of Dilbit

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Wining About Dilbit

A post on CBC tells of a trattoria in Fort MacMurray that won’t serve BC wine because of Horgan’s rejection of KM’s TM dilbit expansion. Here is a comment I left on FB reacting to said boycott:

Fine. I won’t patronize THAT restaurant! (Little chance of being in Alberta at all in any foreseeable future). However, I don’t like the implication that we wouldn’t have any gasoline without KM, and various other whoppers being told by a plethora of politicians, some of whom (Nenshi and Notley, notably) I thought might be beyond that sort of thing. We get all our distilled petroleum product from the United States. There is no refinery for dilbit, or even for sweet crude, in BC, nor in Alberta (could be dead wrong here) whose specialty seems to be digging up the stuff and moving it elsewhere. KM sends the stuff offshore. They are, however, along with their digging friends, kind enough to leave us with the tailings ponds, sour gas and downstream pollution in several river systems. Has Rachel stashed away enough loot to deal with all that? History tells us that as soon as the profits are gone, the KM tentacles will withdraw to Houston with all the loot they’ve accumulated and disappear into a name change (Accenture comes to mind, as well as whatever Blackwater has transmogrified into). Instead of preparing a swift and just transition to renewable energy, Notley and Trudeau continue to back sunset technologies that will doom life on Earth within the lifetimes of their children, and pretending that KM went through any approval that was anything other than a sham and a rubber stamp would be laughable were it not so brazenly false and damaging. Now can someone invoke a divine presence to turn all that dilbit into wine? I think Ernest and Julio might still have a few tankers kickin’ about.

 

 

Goose and Gander

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Gary Bendig

 

The Richmond News had this somewhere in its folds as pointed out by Coins. Harold Steves. This sort of solution to energy needs has been floated hereabouts as well following some visits to the Ocean Discovery Centre a decade ago. This system is essentially a rather large heating/cooling exchange system (an oversized heat pump) based on the rather constant temperature of soil below the surface, or, in this case, water that is in a body large enough that it doesn’t freeze. Even at low temperatures, there is enough energy to extract that it’s worth the cost of pumping and exchange to heat and/or cool a building, or, as in the Richmond case, a whole neighbourhood. An early-on interview with the ODC in Sidney elicited the cost of the upgrade being less than $1m and the payback being on the order of five years, with the additional benefit of providing copious quantities of Saanich Inlet sea water to maintain the various life forms constituting the displays at the centre on top of the HVAC energy for the retail and residential units that make up the bulk of the structure.

Sadly, the idea has landed consistently with the same dull thud of a river rock landing in a bed of shoe-sucking mud with the seeming perspective that we can’t have a district heating initiative without burning something, a kind of tunnel vision that often accompanies the senescent attitude that seems to pervade most of the apparatus of local government and often seems to spread like a plague to the youngers as they move toward olders in association with those self-same olders. Steves seems to have avoided this altogether, having, if I’m not mistaken, been one of the early proponents of the ALR back in1972, and seemingly having kept that fresh perspective right up to the present, thereby earning the designation of Elder rather than older, as distinguished by a large dollop of accumulated wisdom.

Couns. Steves cites this as a reason to put a stake through the black heart of the Site C project. wherein he once again lands on the right side of history. Bravo, and good on him for doing what he can to ensure that there will be further history on whose right side there will be a place for those who follow in his footsteps.

 

Blow Back

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Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

 

The following headline showed up in my Twitter feed this morning:

Local economic impacts would be considerable if Site C

is cancelled: Chamber President

…and you can go to the source here (it was posted by Integrity BC)

The crux of the matter is that there will be a loss of revenue to those providing service to the work site/project and that layoffs will ensue, should the project be cancelled. Yes, there will likely be some of that, though a principled and aware government would be taking steps to mitigate the negative effects by redirecting that portion of the embedded costs to local business for other work that might be deemed in the public interest, and some form of development, if properly thought through, would almost always be appropriate for the region. However, we have to ask ourselves whether any of the local leadership was paying attention as the plans for this project moved forward. The exclusion of the Utilities Commission from any review should have been a red flag, and certainly when the then-Premier spoke of pushing the project past the point of no return, hackles ought to have been fully deployed with the message loud and clear that this was perhaps a politically motivated boondoggle and that those who put their faith in it were those who would be abetting a scheme to defraud taxpayers and ratepayers of substantial sums for decades to come. The documentation was always there, though it might have taken some chasing beyond the confines of Global News or the PostMedia crowd.

The logical course of action now for the Nabobs of the North is to work with Victoria to wind down this project and remediate the entirety of the damages while developing strategies to ensure that an appropriate package of development funds will be earmarked and distributed to northern communities to ensure that they will be equal participants in whatever prosperity flows from the ongoing business of the whole province. Let’s stop making problems to fix, let’s work to ensure that everyone gets a fair shake in an economy that isn’t run for the benefit of large corporate donors to the party of “free enterprise” (and insults in the legislature).

 

A Tale of Two Cities

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…except, in this case, it’s a case of two attitudes defining a single city.something that seems to come to the fore when crisis is upon us. The constructive side of the two outlooks was outlined in some depth is Rebecca Solnit’s book A Paradise Built in Hell, a telling litany of how self-help and community organization develops in times of great stress and potential societal breakdown.

Houston in the time of Harvey is very much a case in point.

Case #1 showed up on a news broadcast that my wife was watching the other day, and the owner was quoted elsewhere in the press as saying something like: “To Hell with profits.” When people see human need and the common good as a higher calling than whatever the status quo was, we’re all better off.

 

 

Case #2 is not such a happy outcome, in which a mega church had to be shamed into contributing to the well being of the dispossessed and the despondent, despite the clear message in the New Testament about duty of care. This piece from iconoclast sportswriter Dave Zirin, delves into the shenanigans of not only televangelists, but sports franchise owners and the havoc they wreak, with seeming impunity, on the public accounts (remember that roof replacement at BC Place?)

 

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-houston-stadium-grift-comes-home-to-roost/

 

One can only hope that, in this battle for the soul of humanity as we enter a time of greater danger and precarity than humanity has faced in and phase of its “civilized” existence, the answer will lie behind Door Number One, with figurative mattresses for all.

 

 

 

Junk Science, Junk Journalism

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The good news is that traditional media, long since captured by the forces of monied greed and power, are bleeding value in a way that, under normal circumstances, would presage their demise in fairly short order. The bad news is twofold.

Firstly, we seem to have a government with a tendency to prop up said media in the name of perpetuating “Canadian Culture”. This is the culture that gave us environmental devastation, residential schools, unending war, the security state, laughable levels of economic and political inequality, contaminated food and water, climate disruption (despite all the pretty words) and a willingness to ignore the ills that confront large segments of the population, and I don’t see that it merits any support from its victims, nor should the “winners” be allowed to redirect their largesse toward PostMedia and its homologues through tax deductions or preferential policy. In the Free Market (a chimera and a camouflage if there ever was one) they should fail and disappear, remaining only in history as a reminder to those that would make themselves irrelevant to a broad swathe of the population.

There certainly is another side to Canadian culture, the dogged persistence of Terry Fox, the  farmers who ponied up to ship hay from one end of the country to another in time of drought and shortage, the folks who scheduled holidays to go and help with recovery following floods, the CUSO crowd who went to Africa and elsewhere to teach and make a selfless contribution to the betterment of lives in underprivileged communities, the people of Newfoundland and Labrador who were so giving when disaster struck in New York City, the FN communities who flew to the rescue of passengers and crew of the Leviathan II , the communities and citizens who responded so generously to the appeal to support refugees and people who volunteer and donate to prop up the failing social safety net. Perhaps we could employ any contemplated funds destined for the press to repairing the tatters in the aforementioned safety net.

Sadly, secondly, it seems that Greenpeace, the target of Princess Margaret’s wrath, has indulged in some chicanery in enticing good folks to contribute to their fund to defend against Resolute Paper’s SLAPP suit. This would be entirely unconscionable were it not the norm, often in government circles, and frequently in the realm of commerce and finance. Our language and visual referents have been so twisted and diluted in the pursuit of commercial advantage as to border on incomprehensibility. People who do this at a personal level lose credibility and trust, eventually being shunned by those who practice a modicum of integrity in their dealings with others, while it seems normal practice in business where the caveats are buried, if expressed at all, in the fine print and legalese attendant on contracts and end user agreements.

Ms. Wente falls into her own morass when she allows her vituperative screed to be published under a headline that hyperbolizes Greenpeace as a menace to the world, after which she extends her hand to the Canadian public for alms to support her in the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed.