Friday, September 13, 2024

Are CBC’s science reporters violating Mother Corp’s own Journalistic Standards and Practices? (Opinion)

















According to the JSP, “We do not promote any particular point of

view.” Yet if you heard our Senior Science Reporter talk about the

first private space walk the other day, you’ll know what I’m

getting at. She was positively besotted, using superlatives like

“historic,” and “amazing” often. If that’s not promoting a point of

view, I don’t know what is. (And she’s not the only one.)

Apparently piles of people see the space race as a noble

venture, fulfilling our need to “go where no man has gone before.”

Lots don’t, including myself. With Planet Earth struggling to

shrug off war, famine, poverty, disease and climate catastrophe, I

see countless dollars and rocket fuel being wasted in a quest to go

to a place where there’s no food, no water, no atmosphere, little life

of any kind.

News flash, folks!

We have all of those things right here under our feet

around us! I’m not suggesting our science reporters embark on

quest tomorrow to discredit the space race. Just grow some

skepticism and ask “why” for a change. It should be what we do.

Monday, September 2, 2024

A DISGRACEFUL BETRAYAL OF OUR PRECIOUS ECOSPHERE - A LETTER

       Photo depicts hog manure spread on a Manitoba
field after a rainstorm. Photo by Dr. Eva Pip.




Friday, August 30, 2024

ODE TO PIERRE POILIEVRE

Sounds like the leader of the Cynical Party of Canada sure knows how to win friends and influence people! In trying to persuade the NDP leader to abandon his pact with the Liberals, our country's Top Cynic called him "Sellout Singh." Then he suggested Mr. Singh is only in politics for the pension! What will YOU do for the people, Mr. Cynic? Get us free dental care? Free pharmacare? Oh, right. Mr. Singh has already done that for us! What a parliamentarian you are! What a leader! So you've offered to turn your own pension over to charity then, have you? You, Sir are a menace! A sad, Trump-like, hate-filled demagogue-in-waiting. May you never get within whiffing distace of the PM's office.

L.P.

Thursday, August 29, 2024

Tailings spill fine not even close to maximum allowed, despite regulator's claims

By

When the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) announced Imperial Oil had to pay a $50,000 administrative penalty, it said this was the maximum base amount allowed under the Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act. 

This statement is “misleading” and “clearly wrong,” Nigel Bankes, an emeritus professor of law at the University of Calgary, told Canada’s National Observer in a phone interview. Bankes is an expert in environmental and natural resources law. 

The regulations state the maximum administrative penalty is $5,000 per day for major contraventions such as this one. The AER used the maximum daily amount, but applied it on a monthly basis, which reduced the penalty by more than 95 per cent, Drew Yewchuk, a former staff lawyer with the University of Calgary’s public interest law clinic, told Canada’s National Observer

“That's extremely weird,” said Yewchuk, who likened it to staying at a hotel for 10 months and they decided to instead charge you for 10 days. 

Last year, it came to light that toxic tailings had been seeping from Imperial Oil’s Kearl site for nine months and downstream communities were not properly notified. It took a massive spill of 5.3 million litres in February for the long-term seepage, which Imperial Oil first noticed in May 2022, to be made public through an environmental protection order. The AER’s investigation is still ongoing, this penalty only addresses the seepage that began in 2022.

“Administrative penalties are carefully evaluated by the AER to ensure they are fair and proportionate to the severity of the contravention,” an AER spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement to Canada’s National Observer. The spokesperson reiterated the press release’s statement that $50,000 was the maximum base penalty allowed under the regulation.

“It's absolutely not the maximum,” Yewchuk said.

When @AER_news fined Imperial Oil $50,000 over a tailings leak it said that was the maximum penalty allowed. That is "misleading" and $50k is "absolutely not the maximum": environmental law experts @DrewYewchuk and @NdbYyc1305 told @NatObserver

The AER’s decision said applying the daily maximum would have resulted in “a disproportionate high response … especially in light of the fact that the actual known environmental impacts of the contravention, to date, appear minimal.” 

The regulations consider the potential for adverse effects — not the actual impact.

The decision goes on to say the $50,000 penalty serves as sufficient deterrence to both Imperial Oil and the industry in general.

“That's not enough reasoning to justify a 95 per cent reduction compared to what the table calls for,” said Yewchuk.

The regulations state that the regulator also has the option to assess and collect a separate, one-time amount if the company might have obtained an economic benefit by not complying with the rules. The AER chose not to do this.

Yewchuk said it's rare for the regulator to impose this one-time payment for economic benefits, but not unheard of. Earlier this year, the regulator handed a one-time administrative penalty to Tallahassee Exploration Inc. for failing to monitor and report its methane emissions, he pointed out.

“The AER calculated what it would have cost for them to do the methane measuring that they were supposed to,” Yewchuk explained. The result was a $191,885 penalty.

In the case of Imperial Oil, the AER could have calculated an economic benefit penalty based on what it would have cost to pay enough staff to do more checks and routinely monitor tailings areas, install more monitoring wells or use better materials, Yewchuk said.

Additionally, the AER charged Imperial Oil with two acts of noncompliance, but only fined it for one. For the other incident, the regulator gave Imperial Oil some homework: the company must produce a “lessons learned” report to share with other oilsands operators, as well as “a plan to ensure tailings seepage mitigation and monitoring processes are completed” by Nov. 1. After that, Imperial Oil must also develop a research plan to study the environmental impacts of oilsands tailings water.

“This is the work that Imperial is supposed to be doing, just to run the mine,” Yewchuk said. “They're supposed to be monitoring it. They're supposed to be researching what to do about the tailings … ways to deal with the tailings, to get rid of them, to decontaminate them, to stop expanding tailings areas, and they haven't done it.”

The 40-page decision indicates the AER suggested a $51,000 penalty even before receiving Imperial Oil’s submissions, and ultimately removed the extra $1,000.

“That's odd to me,” said Yewchuk.

“I would have thought that they were going to suggest something higher and have Imperial convince them to walk them back.”

This summer, Laurie Pushor, president of the AER, announced he will not return to his role when his contract expires in April 2025.

Natasha Bulowski / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer

Monday, August 12, 2024

Study reveals Canadian wildfires are affecting US air quality and raising health concerns

PHYS ORG

Wildfire NWT - 2004.

Climate-driven wildfires are rapidly transferring harmful particulate matter containing toxic chemicals over long distances, compromising air quality in the New Jersey and New York City areas, according to Rutgers Health research. Story here.



Degrowth offers a path to a truly just global energy transition

By Jeremy Appel | Opinion | July 11th 2024


Rio Tinto - Kennecott open pit copper mine. Salt Lake County, Utah. How do we balance the needs of an energy transition with the harsh realities of mining critical minerals like copper? Photo by arbyreed/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)


As the world inevitably transitions away from fossil fuel extraction, there’s a growing international consensus that mining critical minerals — including copper, nickel, cobalt, zinc and more — will have to ramp up in order to power clean energy sources.

This consensus, reflected in the 2022 Canadian Critical Minerals Strategy, rests on the assumption that our lifestyles in the developed world are sustainable, if only we stopped pumping CO2 into the atmosphere while commuting from the suburbs in our personal vehicles to work. But given that mining for raw minerals is beset by many of the same problems as fossil fuel extraction — from water pollution to violating Indigenous rights and facilitating violent, exploitative relations with the Global South — I contend this assumption is faulty.

Some degree of mining, naturally, will always be a necessity to keep our lights on and computers running. The fundamental question is one of harm reduction — how do we balance the needs of an energy transition with the harsh realities of mining critical minerals?


Indigenous Peoples and environmentalists have played a leading role in opposing the expansion of mining in Ecuador, which has corrupted pristine, biodiverse lands that are central to Indigenous ways of life. In February, the Shuar Arutam People of Ecuador took Vancouver-based Solaris Resources to the B.C. Securities Commission for allegedly failing to disclose to shareholders that it received consent from just two of 47 Shuar communities for its proposed Warintza mine in the Amazon.

In Sudan, proceeds from gold mining have bankrolled the country’s brutal civil war, which has displaced 7.3 million people and killed thousands since April 2023.

Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have destroyed homes, villages and agricultural land, and engaged in human rights abuses including sexual violence, beatings and arson to make way for expanded cobalt and copper mining, according to a report last year from Amnesty International.

The products of this violence and environmental degradation in the Global South fuel our modern, tech-infused lifestyle in the Global North, which is bad for the environment, Indigenous reconciliation and international human rights.

But under the existing framework of endless growth, it is, more or less, a necessity. Precious metals aren’t going to mine themselves.

Solutions and Alternatives

There are, of course, alternatives to this global rush for critical minerals.

One option is to slow down the pursuit of economic growth, ensuring an appropriate international regulatory regime is in place to mitigate the worst abuses of mining companies and their government enablers.

A good starting point might be the elimination of the investor-state dispute settlement process, through which extractive companies, including Canadian ones, have strong-armed developing countries into paying them billions in compensation for implementing policies that impact their profit margins.

A more radical proposition is to dispose of the concept of growth altogether.

The word degrowth might be jarring to some, who read it as a call for austerity — a sign of how deeply embedded assumptions about the need for constant economic growth are in our collective consciousness — but it’s provocative by design.

French economist Serge Latouche, writing in Le monde Diplomatique, says the purpose of degrowth is “not a concrete project but a keyword,” which challenges the “tyranny [that] has made imaginative thinking outside the box impossible.

“What really matters is that we reject continuing destruction in the name of development,” he added.

At its core, degrowth proposes a decline in wasteful energy and material consumption habits, with decisions about resource allocation made via local participatory democracy instead of the whims of a global capitalist class. It’s about replacing an economics of “desire” with one of “need,” in which ecological and social values are placed at the forefront of allocating resources.

Indigenous relations of reciprocity between the people and the land, in which people take what they need from each other and nature, and give back what they can, provides a useful framework for degrowth economics.

A degrowth economy would build cities efficiently, rather than in ways that enrich developers; protect green spaces, mountains and waterways; transform investor-owned vacant housing into affordable housing; end health-care privatization; make higher education accessible to anyone who yearns to learn; and promote diplomacy in global conflict.

Degrowth ideals offer an on-ramp towards a better green world that doesn’t simply halt increasing global temperatures while reproducing the inequities of the climate crisis, creating instead a truly just global energy transition.

Jeremy Appel is an independent Edmonton-based journalist and author of Kenneyism: Jason Kenney's Pursuit of Power (Dundurn, 2024). He also writes The Orchard newsletter on Substack, which focuses on the intersection of politics, media and corporate power.


THE MERCHANTS OF MENACE. How puppets in government and some in academe are helping corporate hog producers have their way in Manitoba, Canada. An E-book

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