The Keystone XL investment of $1.5 billion, plus a $6-billion loan guarantee, aims to accelerate construction of the massive project. It shows President-elect Joe Biden that Alberta has invested heavily into the project and can’t afford to have it rejected. Federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has also shown a lot of support for the project. He was very happy when president Trump gave it the “go-ahead” after former president Barack Obama cancelled the project when he was elected.
Alberta’s premier, Jason Kenney, habitually inflates the value of the project when he speaks of it. The United States consumption of Canadian fossil fuels is very small when one speaks about the over-all volume consumed. Cancelling Keystone XL won’t place any limits on the amount of oil the United States uses. It will, however, show Canada and the rest of the world that Biden is serious about the environmental plans for the United States.
I am deeply concerned by reports that the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden may repeal the Presidential permit for the Keystone XL border crossing next week.
Biden said he would rank countries’ performance in meeting their Paris commitments and will impose trade tariffs on those not living up to their potential. That includes Canada. It’s a well known fact that our Paris commitment was little more than a joke. This will have strong implications for the direction of fossil fuelled energy in this country.
Alberta’s C$3.5-million inquiry into supposed foreign-funded interference with the province’s fossil industry is advancing “junk climate denial science, bizarre conspiracy theories, and oil industry propaganda,” according to critics who’ve reviewed a series of commissioned studies now available on the inquiry’s website, CBC and the Globe and Mail report.
“If you read any of this stuff, it really strays into Marxism and conspiracy theory and George Soros and Bill Gates,” University of Alberta energy and environmental economist Andrew Leach told the national broadcaster. “It is astounding to me.”
A packet of documents the commission assembled and sent to reviewers for comment contained “textbook examples of climate change denialism” that “minimize or outright dismiss the reality and seriousness of climate change” and are “replete with generalizations, speculation, conjecture, and even conspiracy,” added Martin Olszynski.
Provincial opposition leader Rachel Notley said commissioner Steve Allan was using taxpayer dollars to “support and solicit anti-science, climate-denying ridiculousness,” and urged Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party government to cancel the inquiry. “I think that it sends a horrible message to international investors. It undermines our energy industry,” she said. “Quite frankly, there should be an inquiry into the inquiry, except for the fact that that itself would be another waste of money.”
The latest controversy swirling around Allan’s work began when the Public Inquiry Into Funding of Anti-Alberta Campaigns “posted on its website that it had invited 47 people or organizations to apply for standing as a ‘participant for commentary’ in the inquiry,” CBC explains. The 11 who were granted standing received a package of review materials, including several reports Allan had commissioned.
CBC and the Globe both have detail on some of the materials. A report by University of Calgary political scientist Barry Cooper falsely questions the scientific consensus on climate change. And a missive by historian Tammy Nemeth, a home-school teacher in England, “claims that a ‘transnational progressive movement’ is attempting to overthrow the ‘modern western industrial capitalist society’ by infiltrating institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank, as well as university departments and corporations,” CBC writes.
Nemeth received $28,000 for her efforts, while Energy In Depth, an attack-PR operation associated with the Independent Petroleum Association of America, received US$50,000 for a study titled “Foreign Funding Targeting Canada’s Energy Sector”.
It wasn’t a good look for an inquiry for which the Kenney government has already had to dial down expectations, and is now less than two weeks away from its January 31 reporting deadline. “This is a multi-million-dollar inquiry with subpoena power and public inquiry power,” Leach told CBC. “And what we are getting, the first indication of any kind of research they have gathered, is commissioned reports from industry front groups and people with a questionable history on exactly the types of topics they are trying to look into.”
“The fact Commissioner Steve Allan thought it relevant to commission and consult reports denying the reality of the climate crisis is just another example of how deeply flawed and biased Premier Jason Kenney’s inquiry into so-called ‘anti-Alberta’ campaigns is,” Ecojustice Executive Director Devon Page said in a release.
“Commissioner Allan has already demonstrated time and again that Albertans should not take his findings seriously,” he added. “If it wasn’t already obvious, the commissioner’s latest update of climate denier reports makes it clear: This inquiry lacks any shred of credibility.”
Ecojustice, one of the named targets of the inquiry, will be in court February 11-12 challenging the “partisan political purposes” behind the process.
This article is reprinted with permission from The Energy Mix.
Climate-change denial, bias, and a Marxist under every bed of leaves characterize papers commissioned by energy campaigns inquiry
Steve Allan
Martin Olszynski
An “engagement process update” published Wednesday night by the so-called Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns reveals inquiry head Steve Allan commissioned reports by climate-change skeptics and a fossil fuel industry advocacy group in the United States.
A critical submission to the $3.5-million inquiry by University of Calgary law professor Martin Olszynski called the three commissioned reports “textbook examples of climate change denialism.”
“All of them minimize or outright dismiss the reality and seriousness of climate change, even though none of their authors appear to be trained in climate science,” Prof. Olszynski wrote in his submission, which was published yesterday on the U of C Law Faculty’s blog.
“These reports are replete with generalizations, speculation, conjecture, and even conspiracy,” he said. “The matter of climate change denial is particularly important because it underpins the rest of the narrative in these reports, i.e., that other interests have opposed the oil and gas industry – including Alberta’s – not out of genuine concern for the climate or other environmental impacts but rather for some nefarious – perhaps even Marxist … purpose.”
A bluntly worded CBC story yesterday summarized the paid work as “junk climate-denial science, bizarre conspiracy theories and oil-industry propaganda.”
Photo by Georgialh — A train heads west into the Crowsnest Pass from Coleman, Alberta (CC BY-SA 4.0)
First Nations, ranchers, municipal officials and environmentalists hope to persuade a judge this week to force Alberta to revisit its decision to open one of the province’s most important and best-loved landscapes to open-pit coal mining.
At least nine interveners will seek to join a southern Alberta rancher’s request for a judicial review of the province’s decision to rescind a coal-mining policy that had protected the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains — and the headwaters that flow from them — for almost 45 years.
“You talk about the Alberta identity,” said Ian Urquhart of the Alberta Wilderness Association, one of the parties looking for standing.
“The eastern slopes, the Rocky Mountains and the foothills, are at the heart of what the Alberta identity is. This policy change threatens that.”
The eastern slopes are the source of three major rivers — the Red Deer, the Oldman and the South Saskatchewan. Everyone in southern Alberta and many in Saskatchewan depend on those rivers for drinking water, irrigation and industry. The water is heavily allocated
This is not just another pipeline. It is a tar sands climate bomb; if completed, it will facilitate the production of crude oil for decades to come. Tar sands are among the most carbon-intensive fuels on the planet. The state’s environmental impact assessment of the project found the pipeline’s carbon output could be 193 million tons per year. That’s the equivalent of 50 coal-fired power plants or 38 million vehicles on our roads, according to Jim Doyle, a physicist at Macalester College who helped write a report from the climate action organization MN350 about the pipeline. He observed that the pipeline’s greenhouse gas emissions are greater than the yearly output of the entire state. If the pipeline is built, Minnesotans could turn off everything in the state, stop traveling and still not come close to meeting the state’s emission reduction goals. The impact assessment also states that the potential social cost of this pipeline is $287 billion over 30 years.
Carbon footprint aside, the extraction process for oil sands is deeply destructive. Mining the sands often requires scraping off the life-giving boreal forest growing over Alberta’s oil fields. Photographs of Alberta’s oil sands sites show a vast moonscape impossible to reclaim. The water used in processing is left in toxic holding ponds that cumulatively could fill 500,000 Olympic swimming pools, as one National Geographic article puts it.
And if the pipelines were to leak, the sludgy mixture is almost impossible to clean up. The state’s environmental impact statement notes that the pipeline will run through two watersheds that drain into Lake Superior. Any spill in the vicinity of the Great Lakes, which contain 84 percent of North America’s available freshwater, is an existential threat to our water supply. The climate action group 350Kishwaukee compiled data from Enbridge websites and found at least 1,000 spills by Enbridge pipelines between 1996 and 2014, including a disastrous spill into the Kalamazoo River, which flows into Lake Michigan. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated in 2013 that in spite of an extensive effort, just over 160,000 gallons of oil would remain in the river.
Erin Brockovich said she was “really taken aback that anybody like Michael McCabe would be part of the (Joe Biden) transition team. McCabe worked with DuPont specifically on a communications strategy to make sure they didn’t have to clean up PFOA or follow regulations in Parkersburg, W.Va.”
In Alberta, drafts of a proposed kindergarten to Grade 4 curriculum for social studies and fine arts were recently leaked to the media and have been broadly criticized by education experts.
The leaked documents also show signs that the authors prefer a “back to the basics” approach that stresses learning key facts. The authors express nostalgia for an imagined simpler time when students were required to memorize key dates and events related to the history of the Canadian nation, heritage and Indigenous Peoples. These dates include histories such as 1701 being the date when the Great Peace of Montréal between New France and 39 First Nations was established or 1885 as the date of the second Riel Rebellion/Métis Resistance.
The problem here is that simply plugging in more information about events that include Indigenous Peoples maintains an education model focused on consuming facts as the scaffolding for knowing.
The leaked curriculum documents also frame references to Indigenous topics and themes in the past — as though we as Indigenous Peoples don’t exist in the present. Incorporating course content that devalues and marginalizes the significance of Indigenous knowledges, experiences and histories is an expression of racism and white supremacy.
Instead of this, we need to focus on leading students to understand relationships with each other, with Indigenous communities and with the world in qualitatively different ways.
Stories for good guidance
When teaching and learning is reduced to simply memorizing and recalling information, this ignores the complex and varied ways that humans perceive the world.
School curricula are compilations of stories told to students regarding knowledge and their relationship to it. The stories children hear in schools are meant to foster qualities and understandings that express specific notions of what it means to be human and how to live as citizens.
As a descendent of the amiskwaciwiyiniwak (Beaver Hills people) and the Papaschase Cree who has studied how Indigenous philosophies can expand and enhance our understandings of what and how children should be taught, I find there is much at stake in these curriculum debates.
In the context of Alberta today, we need leadership that provides foresight and guidance on how to understand and address the key concerns of our times: climate change, systemic racism, wellness and economic sustainability. We need stories that teach how humans are related to each other and to all life forms rather than reinforcing inherited colonial divides.
Dwayne Donald discusses how 2009 Alberta curriculum advanced ideas of resilience understood within the confines of our existing capitalist oil economy.
Reviving colonial myths
The leaked curriculum documents express a clear desire to revive the old story of the Canadian nation told in schools for many generations. This story characterizes Canada as a nation created through the hard work and perseverance of settlers who brought prosperity and progress to a land perceived to be empty.
Prioritizing this narrative marginalizes Indigenous standpoints and experiences. It draws on a divisive colonial approach to education that my research has explored through the mythic symbol of the fort at the heart of the creation story in Canada.
The fort is a symbol of colonialism that teaches separation and exclusion of Indigenous Peoples from everyone else. In the Canadian West, forts normalize the colonial divides in Canadian society. Schools and what they teach are founded on these colonial divides. Such teachings reinforce Eurocentric standards and enhance existing divides.
Formal schooling became a primary means by which those with power could discipline the citizenry to conform to this model. This has resulted in schooling approaches that perpetuate falsely universalized assumptions of human knowing and being. These assumptions have become so pervasive that it has become difficult to imagine different ways to be a human being.
This struggle is perhaps the most pressing challenge we face today if we wish to live in more collaborative ways.
The recent leaked curriculum documents in Alberta are evidence of the desire to continue with this “fort-ified” approach to education. They provide little guidance on how to proceed differently. What is urgently required instead are stories that teach young people to be good relatives to their human and more-than-human kin.
The Cree wisdom concepts most central to this understanding of kinship relationality are wîcêhtowin and wâhkôhtowin.
wîcêhtowin refers to the life-giving energy that is generated when people face each other as relatives and build trustful relationships by connecting with others by putting respect, kindness and compassion at the forefront of our interactions.
Translated into English, wâhkôhtowin is generally understood to refer to human kinship. wâhkôhtowin describes practical ethical guidelines regarding how you are related to your kin and how to conduct yourself as a good relative. However, wâhkôhtowin also emphasizes more-than-human kinship relations. This emphasis guides human beings to understand themselves as fully enmeshed in networks of relationships.
Following the kinship relational wisdom of wâhkôhtowin, we’re called to repeatedly acknowledge and honour the fact that the sun, the land, the wind, the water, the animals and the trees (just to name a few) are quite literally our relatives: we carry parts of each of them inside our own bodies.
Taken together, wîcêhtowin and wâhkôhtowin can be understood as promoting an ecological understanding of kinship relationality that becomes apparent to us as human beings when we honour the sacred ecology that supports all life and living.
Today, now more than ever it seems, young people need stories that teach them how to be good relatives with all their relations — human and more-than-human.
Dr. Dwayne Donald is a descendent of the amiskwaciwiyiniwak (Beaver Hills people) and the Papaschase Cree and is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. His work focuses on ways in which Indigenous philosophies can expand and enhance our understandings of curriculum and pedagogy.
The Keystone XL investment of $1.5 billion, plus a $6-billion loan guarantee, aims to accelerate construction of the massive project. It shows President-elect Joe Biden that Alberta has invested heavily into the project and can’t afford to have it rejected. Federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has also shown a lot of support for the project. He was very happy when president Trump gave it the “go-ahead” after former president Barack Obama cancelled the project when he was elected.
