gas

Thursday May 25, 2023

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday May 25, 2023

Opposition Parties Reject Access to Classified Information in Inquiry Decision

May 5, 2023

On Wednesday, the Bloc Québécois and the Conservatives aligned in their refusal to examine classified information that had led to a watchdog’s recommendation against a public inquiry into allegations of foreign interference. Both party leaders expressed their reluctance to be bound by the obligation of secrecy.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, however, urged his colleagues to prioritize facts over partisan interests, specifically calling out Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. During an event in Winnipeg, Trudeau criticized Poilievre, stating, “Pierre Poilievre is deliberately choosing to remain uninformed.”

David Johnston, appointed by Trudeau as a special rapporteur in March to investigate the foreign interference allegations, presented his initial report on Tuesday. The report advised against initiating a public inquiry into the allegations of foreign interference during the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. These allegations had been a contentious issue for the government following reports by Global News and the Globe and Mail, which referred to leaked national security documents and anonymous sources.

News: Poilievre calls on Singh to force a foreign interference inquiry  

March 24, 2023

In his report, Johnston also recommended that the government grant the necessary security clearances to other party leaders, allowing them access to the complete report, including a confidential annex of materials used to reach his conclusions. Despite calls from the NDP, Conservatives, and Bloc Québécois for a public inquiry, Johnston explained that due to national security concerns, the reviewed intelligence must remain classified. Consequently, a formal inquiry would largely be conducted behind closed doors. Instead, Johnston pledged to hold public hearings to discuss the broader issue of foreign interference, without delving into the specific allegations.

Johnston acknowledged the challenge of not being able to publicly disclose the reviewed information and emphasized the importance of future potential leaders of the country intentionally remaining unaware. He also recognized the opposition leaders’ desire not to be constrained by security laws that prohibit the sharing of such material.

March 9, 2023

Trudeau accepted Johnston’s findings and sent letters to Opposition leaders, inviting them to begin the process of obtaining the required security clearances. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh expressed his intention to do so. However, Poilievre rejected the offer, vowing to call for a public inquiry if the Conservatives formed the next government. Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet also supported him, describing the opportunity as “a misguided trap.”

Trudeau urged opposition leaders, including Poilievre, to review the substance of Johnston’s report, emphasizing the gravity of the situation. He singled out Poilievre, stating, “He is more interested in political arguments and personal attacks than in confronting the facts. Can we consider him a serious leader?”

Poilievre, speaking to reporters in Toronto on Wednesday, criticized Johnston as a “Trudeau insider,” highlighting the former governor general’s friendship with Prime Minister Trudeau’s father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and his involvement in the foundation named after the former prime minister. In response, Johnston defended his work and his relationship with the current prime minister, stating that their families had gone skiing together decades ago.

Erin O’Toole: I met with David Johnston for his report – here’s what happened  

March 17, 2023

Poilievre suggested that an experienced judge in handling national security cases should be responsible for determining which information should remain classified and what could be made public if an inquiry were to be called. He asserted, “Justin Trudeau is concealing something.”

Although Poilievre declined the opportunity to closely examine the report himself, he stated that he would not hinder the review by Conservative MPs serving on the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians. Johnston confirmed that these committee members would receive additional information and could challenge his conclusions if necessary.

On Wednesday, MPs from the NDP, Conservatives, and Bloc Québécois on the House of Commons procedure committee jointly signed a letter requesting Johnston’s presence before them to answer questions about his decision not to recommend a public inquiry. The letter, shared on social media by Conservative MP Michael Cooper, characterized Johnston’s decision as “a disregard for diaspora groups who face abuse and intimidation from hostile foreign governments.” (AI)

 

Friday November 18, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday November 18, 2022

Canada won’t back call at COP27 to ‘phase down’ oil and gas production

Canada won’t agree to add language calling for the phaseout of all fossil fuels — including oil and gas — to the final agreement at this year’s United Nations climate talks in Egypt, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said Thursday.

November 10, 2021

The agreement from the UN conference in Scotland last year called for countries to move faster to get rid of coal-fired electricity plants that are not abated with technology to capture emissions. It was the first time a COP pact included any reference to reducing any kind of fossil fuel use.

India spent the last two weeks of COP27 negotiations pushing to add oil and gas to that paragraph in this year’s final pact.

The European Union said it was supportive of the idea as long as it does not weaken the language on coal. United States climate envoy John Kerry said the U.S. was on board as long as it applies only to “unabated” oil and gas.

But there was no sign of any such language in the draft text of the COP27 pact released Thursday. The final draft was still being negotiated as the two-week climate talks near their final day Friday.

Canada backed the coal language last year, but Guilbeault said it’s not open to adding oil and gas to the pact this year.

April 11, 2018

During a one-on-one conversation in Egypt Thursday with Climate Action Network Canada’s national policy Caroline Brouillette, Guilbeault said Canada’s focus is on regulations and policies that curb greenhouse gas emissions, like regulations on how much methane oil and gas producers can emit.

It’s also focusing on reducing demand for fossil fuels with policies that promote energy conservation alternatives, such as electric vehicles, clean power and more efficient buildings.

He said if Canada backed the addition of oil and gas phaseout language it would prompt pushback from the provinces, including in court.

“Everything we do is challenged in the court,” he said. (Carbon) pricing was challenged, our plastic pollution regulations were challenged, our environmental impact assessment is being challenged — either by provinces or companies, or both. And if we’re not on very solid legal ground, we will lose in front of the tribunals and that doesn’t help anyone.“

October 28, 2021

Guilbeault said Canada hasn’t been challenged over plans to phase out coal, but is on almost everything it does on the oil and gas side.

“We have to be super careful in terms of what we do … that what we do will hold in court,” he said. “Otherwise we’re wasting time, and precious time, to fight climate change.”

Julia Levin, national climate program manager for Environmental Defence, called that a disappointing excuse.

“I’d say it’s clear that the government of Canada is beholden to fossil fuel lobbyists and putting their interests ahead of public welfare,” said Levin.

She added that Canada’s position is strange, considering the agreement would likely have included the same abatement provision as coal. While Levin doesn’t back carbon capture and storage as a serious solution to cutting emissions, she said even that would be “a clear signal that, according to the U.S. and others, the age of oil and gas is over.”

November 4, 2021

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, meanwhile, said getting lower-emission oil and natural gas to international markets is paramount for its members.

“As global demand for natural gas and oil will remain strong for decades, Canada has a role to play in providing safe and lower emission resources to the world’s energy mix,” said Lisa Baiton, CAPP’s president and CEO, in a written statement.

The hope in Egypt is that countries would reach a consensus on action to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to still make it realistic to reach the goal of limiting global warming to no more than 1.5 C. (The Peterborough Examiner)

From sketch to finish, see the current way Graeme completes an editorial cartoon using an iPencil, the Procreate app, and a couple of cheats on an iPad Pro … These sped up clips are posted to encourage others to be creative, to take advantage of the technology many of us already have and to use it to produce satire. Comfort the afflicted. Afflict the comforted.

Friday October 14, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday October 14, 2022

The high cost of pandering to extremists

It didn’t take long for new Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to do a swan dive into the murky waters of delusion and political pandering.

May 20, 2022

Shortly after being sworn in Tuesday to replace Jason Kenney, Smith called those who refused vaccination against COVID-19 “the most discriminated against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime.”

That she could say so demonstrated to everyone who has faced true discrimination either a profound ignorance of both history and current realities or a bottomless capacity for pandering to the misplaced sense of victimhood in her right-wing base.

On Wednesday, Smith issued a statement saying she had wanted to highlight the “mistreatment” of those who chose not to get vaccinated and that she had not intended to “trivialize” the discrimination faced by minority communities.

Still, words have consequences. Words can console or wound, inspire or enrage. They can bring out what’s best in us, or what’s worst.

Hate-mongering and character assassination in Canada — however much we fancy our political discourse more civil than in the United States — has already seen in Ontario communities stones being flung at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh assaulted with hatred and racism.

Those with political pulpits and media soap boxes must remember that along with that power and influence they assume great responsibility.

September 13, 2022

Kenney acknowledged in his final words as premier that the conservative movement in Canada is giving succour to disturbing elements. He warned federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre about keeping company with extremists whose chief interest is in “tearing things down and blowing things up.

“I think a Conservative party that is focused on a campaign of recrimination over COVID, politicizing science, entertaining conspiracy theories and campaigning with QAnon is a party that can’t form a government and shouldn’t,” he told Global News’ “The West Block.”

Former prime minister Brian Mulroney agreed, telling CTV’s “Question Period” after a private dinner with Poilievre “that you can’t get elected with that kind of stuff.”

Among other things, it was recently found that YouTube videos produced for Poilievre contained a hidden tag appealing to an online anti-women movement — #mgtow, Men Going Their Own Way — that Canadian security agencies view as a danger.

Trudeau told Poilievre in the Commons that “in reaching out to extremist online groups and pulling in anti-women, misogynistic groups for his own political gain” is something for which he will have to answer to Canadian women.

But it should not be left just to women to object. All rational citizens should be on guard against the kind of rhetoric and messaging aimed at courting the tear-things-down and blow-things-up elements in Canada.

September 24, 2022

As has been seen around the world, there is political opportunity for leaders cynical and self-interested enough to tap into pools of rage. It is not as if Canadians, living where we do, lack for horrifying recent evidence of the damage recklessness leaders can incite. There is a direct line from “some very fine people on both sides” and “stand back and stand by” to the deadly attack on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

American scholar Larry Diamond wrote in his 2019 book “Ill Winds” that “a culture of democracy is also a culture of moderation.

“Democracy can’t function when politics is dominated by opposing camps of ‘true believers’ who view compromise as betrayal and dismiss discordant evidence as fake,” Diamond wrote.

Premier Smith seems not to have read his book.

What we need from our leaders is the serious work to understand the social fragmentation and political polarization that got us here and a resolve to mend these rifts, not to exploit them for political gain.

Complicity by political leaders with the extreme fringes will provide fuel for social conflict and chaos. But it is complacency on the part of a moderate majority that will provide the opportunity. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial) 

From sketch to finish, see the current way Graeme completes an editorial cartoon using an iPencil, the Procreate app, and a couple of cheats on an iPad Pro …

 

Tuesday May 17, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday May 17, 2022

*A making-of clip of this cartoon may be found here.may be found here.

Ontario NDP plan to run deficits for 6 years and cancel gas tax cut

May 10, 2022

Ontario’s New Democrats are pledging to run larger deficits than the Progressive Conservatives and Liberals if elected and would likely not balance the budget for six years, but the party is eyeing some cost savings from cancelling a gas tax cut.

That pledge is expected to save $600 million in the first year by reversing the Progressive Conservative government’s move to reduce the provincial portion of the gas tax by 5.7 cents a litre for six months starting July 1.

Catherine Fife, who has served as the NDP’s finance critic, presented the costing Sunday and acknowledged the high cost of living, including rising gas prices that have topped $2 a litre, but said the temporary cut from the Tories is just a “gimmick.”

“We are looking for a long-term, sustainable strategy to alleviate gas prices, but also to stabilize,” she said, pointing to the party’s promise to regulate gas prices.

Friday February 19, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday February 19, 2021

Texas, Land of Wind and Lies

Politicians are neither gods nor saints. Because they aren’t gods, they often make bad policy decisions. Because they aren’t saints, they often try to evade responsibility for their failures, asserting either that they did as well as anyone could have or that someone else deserves the blame.

October 3, 2014

For a while, then, the politics surrounding the power outages that have spread across Texas looked fairly normal. True, the state’s leaders pursued reckless policies that set the stage for catastrophe, then tried to evade responsibility. But while their behavior was reprehensible, it was reprehensible in ways we’ve seen many times over the years.

However, that changed around a day after the severity of the disaster became apparent. Republican politicians and right-wing media, not content with run-of-the-mill blame-shifting, have coalesced around a malicious falsehood instead — the claim that wind and solar power caused the collapse of the Texas power grid, and that radical environmentalists are somehow responsible for the fact that millions of people are freezing in the dark, even though conservative Republicans have run the state for a generation.

This isn’t normal political malfeasance. It’s the energy-policy equivalent of claiming that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a false-flag Antifa operation — raw denial of reality, not just to escape accountability, but to demonize one’s opponents. And it’s another indicator of the moral and intellectual collapse of American conservatism.

The underlying story of what happened in Texas appears to be fairly clear. Like many states, Texas has a partly deregulated electricity market, but deregulation has gone further there than elsewhere. In particular, unlike other states, Texas chose not to provide power companies with incentives to install reserve capacity to deal with possible emergencies. This made power cheaper in normal times, but left the system vulnerable when things went wrong.

Texas authorities also ignored warnings about the risks associated with extreme cold. After a 2011 cold snap left millions of Texans in the dark, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission urged the state to winterize its power plants with insulation, heat pipes and other measures. But Texas, which has deliberately cut its power grid off from the rest of the country precisely to exempt itself from federal regulation, only partially implemented the recommendations.

And the deep freeze came.

January 31, 2019

A power grid poorly prepared to deal with extreme cold suffered multiple points of failure. The biggest problems appear to have come in the delivery of natural gas, which normally supplies most of the state’s winter electricity, as wellheads and pipelines froze. Nor was this merely a matter of the lights going out; people are freezing too, because many Texas homes have electric heat. Many of the homes without electrical heat rely on, yes, natural gas. We’re looking at enormous suffering and, probably, a significant death toll.

So Texas is experiencing a natural disaster made significantly worse by major policy errors — and the officials who made those errors should be held accountable.

Instead of accepting responsibility, however, officials from Gov. Greg Abbott on down, backed by virtually the entire right-wing media complex, have chosen to lay the blame on green energy, especially wind power.

November 29, 2018

Now, it’s true that the state generates a lot of electricity from wind, although it’s a small fraction of the total. But that’s not because Texas — Texas! — is run by environmental crazies. It’s because these days wind turbines are a cost-effective energy sourcewherever there’s a lot of wind, and one thing Texas has is a lot of wind.

It’s also true that extreme cold forced some of the state’s insufficiently winterized wind turbines to shut down, but as I said, this was happening to Texas energy sources across the board, with the worst problems involving natural gas.

Why, then, the all-out effort to falsely place the blame on wind power?

The incentives are obvious. Attacking wind power is a way for both elected officials and free-market ideologues to dodge responsibility for botched deregulation; it’s a way to please fossil fuel interests, which give the vast bulk of their political contributions to Republicans; and since progressives tend to favor renewable energy, it’s a way to own the libs. And it all dovetails with climate change denial.

But why do they think they can get away with such an obvious lie? The answer, surely, is that those peddling the lie know that they’re operating in a post-truth political landscape. When two-thirds of Republicans believe that Antifa was involved in the assault on the Capitol, selling the base a bogus narrative about the Texas electricity disaster is practically child’s play.

And if you’re expecting any change in the policies that helped cause this disaster, don’t count on it — at least as long as Texas remains Republican. Given everything else we’ve seen, the best bet is that demonization of wind power, not a realistic understanding of what actually happened, will rule policy going forward. (New York Times)