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As BC’s coastal mountain glaciers recede the effects alter ecosystems. Can human engineering begin to compensate? Second in a series.

Pacific white-sided dolphins cruise Knight Inlet. The fjord that receives the melting waters of the Klinaklini Glacier has been home to First Nations for millennia. Photo: Knight Inlet Lodge.

[Editor’s note: To read the first instalment of The Big Melt, a special Tyee series, go here.]

When William Glendale was 10-years-old, his logger father was away for work so much, he bought his son a boat and a .30-30 rifle. “My father told me, ‘When your mom wants fish, go fishing. When she wants meat, go get her a deer.’” Sixty years later, no one knows Knight Inlet better than William Glendale — a Hereditary Chief with the Da’naxda’xw/Awaetlala First Nation, whose traditional territory includes the upper portion of the inlet. (The Mamalilikulla and Tlowitsis First Nations have territories overlapping the inlet out towards Johnstone Strait.)

Knight Inlet is the deep glacial fjord that receives the melting waters of the Klinaklini Glacier on B.C.’s central coast. As long as the Klinaklini Glacier has existed, Glendale’s forebearers have lived in its proximity.

But their future is cast in shadow by research led by B.C. glaciologist Brian Menounos, a professor at University of Northern British Columbia and a Hakai Institute affiliate. As the first story in this series explained, their findings show that the last two decades have been disastrous for western North America’s mountain glaciers, particularly for those on the south and central Coast Mountains, including the Klinaklini Glacier — the largest glacier in western North America south of the Alaskan border.

In 2018, Menounos and his collaborators published research that revealed that glaciers across western North America are melting faster than previously assumed, and that melting had accelerated about four-fold in just the last decade.

The 470-square-kilometre Klinaklini, like many glaciers of the south and central Coast Mountains, is expected to lose at least 70 per cent of its total ice by the end of the century, and as this happens, an ecosystem that has evolved in tandem with the glacier will be upended.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Oil Tanker Spotted in Risky Active Pass Alarms Activists

May 10, 2021

Oil Tanker Spotted in Risky Active Pass Alarms Activists

Officials promise no repeats. But advocates say the incident raises new concerns about regulation of tankers in BC’s waters.

Narrow, twisting and busy Active Pass is no place for oil tankers, say advocates. But a loaded tanker travelled through the busy pass last month. Photo by Ruth Hartnup, Creative Commons licensed.

On a calm Friday afternoon in late April, avid naturalist Barry Swanson was watching Active Pass from his home on Galiano Island, keeping an eye out for the pod of southern resident killer whales that swim by every couple of days.

Instead of orcas, he was shocked to see an oil tanker traversing the narrow channel.

The MV Kassos was sitting low in the water, its hull heavy with petroleum products bound for Los Angeles.

Swanson is the co-founder of the non-profit Salish Sea Orca Squad, a group that works to raise awareness about the region’s killer whales. In an interview with The Tyee, he says he was very concerned to see dangerous cargo being shipped through the narrow waterway.

Active Pass sits between Mayne and Galiano Island. The channel is deep but narrow — 302 metres wide at its skinniest — and features strong currents, rip tides and a blind corner, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada. It’s also a route favoured by BC Ferries, connecting Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay and the mainland to the Southern Gulf Islands.

It’s extremely unusual for an oil tanker to take Active Pass instead of the neighbouring Boundary Pass, favoured by almost all other commercial routes for its wider, calmer waters. Swanson says he’s never seen an oil tanker take the pass before.

“When you have a tanker travelling through these waters… there is always tremendous danger with dangerous goods being spilt in any amount. It would be a disaster for that to happen,” Swanson says.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bank of England Now 2nd Central Bank to Taper, After Canada, but Denies Tapering is “Tapering,” also Following Canada

May 7, 2021

Bank of England Now 2nd Central Bank to Taper, After Canada, but Denies Tapering is “Tapering,” also Following Canada

The Big Taper starts one central bank at a time. But you gotta keep the markets from swooning with a bit of welcome delusion.

The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) today announced that it voted unanimously to maintain its policy rate at 0.1%. But in terms of its asset purchases, it took the trail the Bank of Canada blazed last November and then widened in April: tapering.

The BoE announced that the blistering pace of its asset purchases would be “slowed somewhat” – tapering the bond purchases from £4.4 billion a week to £3.4 billion a week – but that this tapering was an “operational decision” that “should not be interpreted as a change in the stance of monetary policy.”

This “is not a tapering decision,” emphasized BoE governor Andrew Bailey during the press conference. The reason this tapering is not “a tapering decision,” he said, is because the BoE left its target for the final level of QE assets unchanged.

Unlike the Fed, the BoE doesn’t have an open-ended QE, but had set a target of bringing its holdings of UK government bonds to £875 billion and its holdings of corporate bonds to £20 billion, for a combined target of £895 billion. And at the meeting, the BoE didn’t change these “fixed amounts,” as Bailey put it.

Obviously, denying that tapering is tapering was designed to mollify the markets with a welcome dose of delusion, and it worked: the UK’s stock index FTSE 100 rose 0.5% for the day.

However, when the members voted on maintaining the target of £895 billion, it wasn’t unanimous, with eight members voting for maintaining it, and one member, outgoing chief economist Andy Haldane, voting to lower it by £50 billion, to £845 billion.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Unearthing the Work of Indigenous Master Horticulturalists

April 28, 2021

Unearthing the Work of Indigenous Master Horticulturalists

These forest gardeners got sustainable returns for centuries. Dr. Chelsey Geralda Armstrong is now studying their work.

The SFU team found ecological diversity was richer on the lands of ancient Indigenous villages than in neighbouring forests. Photo submitted.

Ahistorical ecologist and her team at Simon Fraser University have made a crucial discovery about B.C.’s ancient forest ecosystems — one that could strengthen the systems of today and tomorrow and equip us to understand our own environment even as it changes with the climate.

Dr. Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, an Indigenous Studies assistant professor and the leader of the Historical and Ethnoecological Research Lab recently published a study in the journal Ecology and Society. In it, she documents four sites that are ecologically more diverse than the conifer forests surrounding them. And for good reason: each is on an Indigenous reserve and marks the site of an ancient community of master horticulturalists.

It’s an old settler myth that North America was “undeveloped” by Indigenous peoples, who subsisted as hunter-gatherers and therefore didn’t deserve to claim stakes in any particular land. Never mind that agricultural civilizations flourished all the way from Mexico to the Great Lakes, or that white explorers traversed the continent by following long-established Indigenous trade routes.

Here in B.C., this self-serving cultural ignorance operated even with relatively advanced anthropologists like Franz Boas, who assumed he was studying dying peoples and only wanted to record their folkways before they vanished. In Boas’ case, he additionally focused on Indigenous men and ignored women, so he missed a key element of coastal Indigenous culture — the clam gardens designed and maintained by women, which could sustain a population well over 100,000 in the centuries before contact.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

RCMP Secret Facial Recognition Tool Looked for Matches with 700,000 ‘Terrorists’

April 28, 2021

RCMP Secret Facial Recognition Tool Looked for Matches with 700,000 ‘Terrorists’

Emails expose the BC force’s previously unknown purchase, which broke rules. Critics worry about privacy, racial profiling and false positives.

Documents obtained by The Tyee identify the BC RCMP as IntelCenter’s first publicly revealed facial recognition service client. The firm’s military, intelligence and law enforcement customers have remained secret until now. Photo by Darryl Dyck, the Canadian Press.

RCMP units in British Columbia broke the force’s own rules when they secretly subscribed to a facial recognition service that claims to help identify terrorists, documents newly obtained by The Tyee show.

Internal emails reveal that in 2016 the RCMP became a client of U.S.-based IntelCenter, whose website boasts of a massive cache of images acquired from various sources online, including social media.

IntelCenter offers enforcement agencies the ability to match against more than 700,000 faces the company says are tied to terrorism.

Until now, military, intelligence and law enforcement customers of the firm’s facial recognition service have remained secret. The BC RCMP units are IntelCenter’s first publicly revealed clients.

To create its software, IntelCenter partnered with a facial recognition tech company named Morpho, later bought and renamed Idemia, which provided biometric services for clients including the FBI, Interpol and the Chinese government.

In documents acquired by The Tyee through access to information requests, the RCMP blanked out its total volume of searches, but the US$20,000 price paid on contracts indicates the force likely purchased thousands of searches annually.

The B.C.-based E Division told The Tyee it bought the software to test its feasibility, and only did so in B.C. The contracts came to an end in 2019, said the BC RCMP. The force’s national headquarters said that it currently has no national contracts.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

New Study: Cross-Border Energy Infrastructure Critical To U.S.-Canada Energy Trade, Benefits Consumers On Both Sides Of The Border

April 17, 2021

New Study: Cross-Border Energy Infrastructure Critical To U.S.-Canada Energy Trade, Benefits Consumers On Both Sides Of The Border

WASHINGTON, April 6, 2021 – The American Petroleum Institute (API) today released a new report examining how growth in cross-border petroleum trade between the United States and Canada has led to the further integration of North American energy markets, delivering economic benefits, lowering consumer energy costs and strengthening energy security on both sides of the border. The analysis, which API Senior Vice President of Policy, Economics and Regulatory Affairs Frank Macchiarola highlighted in remarks before the 2021 Scotiabank CAPP Energy Symposium earlier today, underscores how continued development and maintenance of cross-border energy infrastructure will be critical to sustaining this trade relationship and further integrating North American energy markets.

“The integration of U.S. and Canadian energy markets has been a win-win for both countries, supporting economic growth and lowering energy costs for working families while bolstering North American energy security,” API Senior Vice President of Policy, Economics and Regulatory Affairs Frank Macchiarola said. “None of this would be possible without the cross-border energy infrastructure that enables the safe and efficient transport of these energy resources. Continued development and maintenance of this critical infrastructure is essential to furthering the success and mutual benefits of this important trade relationship.”

U.S. and Canadian petroleum markets are increasingly integrated:

U.S.-Canada petroleum liquids trade nearly doubled over the past decade.
Petroleum liquids trade represents 10 to 20 percent of total U.S.- Canada trade flow.
U.S. crude oil made up 72 percent of Eastern Canada’s crude imports in 2019.
Canada supplied 58 percent of US heavy crude oil imports in 2019.

Integration of U.S. and Canadian petroleum markets strengthens the energy security of both countries:

Increased imports of Canadian crude oil in tandem with booming domestic production have allowed U.S. refiners to significantly reduce crude oil imports from OPEC 70 percent from 2010 to 2019.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Canada to censor political taunts. Implement internet kill switch.

April 13, 2021

Canada to censor political taunts. Implement internet kill switch.

(Constituents to remain fair game for abuse from party apparatchiks)

A colleague forwarded me the text of an article from Blackrocks Reporter, which covers Canadian politics from Ottawa, our capitol.

It’s a report on Federal Heritage Minister Steven Guibeault’s ongoing vendetta against non-conforming political speech on the internet, in which he’s calling for censorship of “hurtful” comments against politicians and implementation of an internet killswitch to facilitate it.

Blackrocks is behind a paywall, permit me to quote it here:

‘Federal internet censors should target hurtful words against politicians, says Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault. The Minister added pending regulations may include an internet kill switch to block websites deemed hurtful, but called it a “nuclear” option.

“We have seen too many examples of public officials retreating from public service due to the hateful online content targeted towards themselves or even their families,” said Guilbeault. “I have seen firsthand alongside other Canadians the damaging effects harmful content has on our families, our values and our institutions. As a dad and a stepdad to six kids, I know more can and should be done to create a safer online environment.”

Guilbeault made his remarks in a podcast sponsored by Canada 2020, an Ottawa think tank affiliated with the Liberal Party. Legislation to censor internet content will be introduced shortly, he said.

“I am confident we can get this adopted,” said Guilbeault. “Once the legislation is adopted, clearly creating a new body, a new regulator like that in Canada, would take some time.”’

The same story is covered here by the Post Millienial (the rest of Canada’s “approved media”, as in the ones who received hundreds of millions in tax breaks and subsidies from the Federal Government in the run up to the last election, are not giving it a lot of airtime for some reason).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Sorry Cranky Conservatives! Carbon Pricing Wins the Day

March 29, 2021

Sorry Cranky Conservatives! Carbon Pricing Wins the Day

The Supreme Court ruling is good news for anyone invested in a habitable planet. But fixing the climate is going to take more.

‘There’s no court we can appeal this to,’ Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said on Thursday, before vowing to continue his fight. What taxpayer-funded mischief will Canada’s conservative leaders get up to next? Photo by Sean Kilpatrick, the Canadian Press.

Canadians worried about the survival of the country had cause for relief Thursday morning with news the Supreme Court of Canada had ruled 6-3 the federal government is entitled to impose a national carbon-pollution pricing system — in other words, to act like the government of Canada.

Had the court done what a cabal of climate-change-denying provincial Conservative premiers had hoped to achieve, one almost wonders what the point would have been of remaining a confederation.

Thursday’s ruling settles that question for a generation, if not longer, at least as far carbon pricing goes. Quite possibly for a lot more than that, too.

Even Alberta Premier Jason Kenney crankily admitted at a morning news conference that “there’s no court we can appeal this to,” while vowing, naturally, to make a political fight of it.

It remains to be seen how that will work out, but it seems likely “The Resistance,” as Canada’s conservative leaders used to like to think of themselves back when they were riding a little higher, will try to think up more taxpayer-funded mischief as long as there is a Liberal government in Ottawa.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

David Climenhaga , TheTyee.ca, carbon tax, government, canada, conservative party, climate change, carbon pricing, supreme court of canada, alberta, jason kenney

The Blockaders

March 26, 2021

The Blockaders

As logging resisters near month eight in Fairy Creek, a judge may order their surrender. Inside their last stand for old growth. A Tyee special report.

Members of the Fairy Creek Blockade occupy a logging road, preventing loggers for Teal-Jones timber company from moving into one of Vancouver Island’s last old-growth watersheds. Photo by Ken Dawson.

Simon Frankson emerged from his sleeping bag at 4 a.m., just in time to join the fray.

The day before, a balmy afternoon in early August, he and about a dozen campers had studied a satellite photo of the area: a mountainside sheathed in deep green cedars and Douglas fir trees, many of them hundreds or thousands of years old, in a watershed known as Fairy Creek in the southwest corner of Vancouver Island. The telling grey stripe of a logging road was creeping up from the left side of the image. It was the same kind of road that has, over the past century, made way for logging companies to cut down 80 per cent of the ancient forest on an island larger than Belgium.

When Frankson and the campers had arrived the night before, things already looked different than in the photo. The stripe had grown into a web of roads advancing up and across the slope. One more day and the machines could crest the ridge above them, opening up yet another valley to industrial logging.

Now Frankson was rubbing the sleep from his eyes and readying himself for his first shift as an old-growth forest blockader. Out of the blackness, the harsh headlights of a four-by-four came swerving around a switchback toward the camp. Frankson jumped up to join the line of bodies rushing to stand their ground…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Serena Renner , Zoë Yunker , TheTyee.ca, canada, british columbia, protest, logging, old growth forests, fairy creek,

Canada, the Supreme Court hold that Carbon Tax is Constitutional

March 26, 2021

Canada, the Supreme Court hold that Carbon Tax is Constitutional

In Canada, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Ottawa has the power to impose a carbon price across the country as a “matter of national concern.” This is a major win for Trudeau and he can really make sure that the Canadian economy further declines to enable the Build Back Better agenda.

Let me make this VERY CLEAR. Even the US Supreme Court upheld Obamacare by holding it was a “TAX” When Obama deny that. Even the US Supreme Court would have struck down Obamacare as a social program, but as a TAX it held that government can impose ANY tax it so desires and at any rate. When it comes to taxes, the Supreme Courts of Europe, USA, Canada, or Bangladesh, will ALWAYS rule in favor of governmental power to TAX without constraint. They will ignore the history that 99% of all revolutions unfold because of taxes. Therefore, do not be surprised about tax rulings by the courts. This is also when Western society is doomed. We will not be able to sustain this sort of government beyond 2032. So just start planning now for the next real Great Reset which will be the overthrow of republics.

This is why in my solution, TAXATION must be abolished – PERIOD! If we simply printed the amount of money we needed to run government and it is capped at say 5%-10% of GDP, it would be far less destructive than taxation for the debt will never be repaid. At times, the accumulative interest expenditures have reached 70% of the debt showing that the real problem is borrowing in the first place. All of this COVID and Climate Change is a cover-up for the fact that the system of debt is coming to an end…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

martin armstrong, armstrong economics, climate change, carbon tax, canada, taxes, supreme court of canada, canadian government

Bank of Canada Announces Balance Sheet Reduction, Suddenly Worried about “Moral Hazard”

March 24, 2021

Bank of Canada Announces Balance Sheet Reduction, Suddenly Worried about “Moral Hazard”

“Once crisis tools have served their purpose, central banks should scale them back.”

The Bank of Canada will unwind its crisis liquidity facilities, will further reduce its purchases of Government of Canada bonds, which it already started tapering in October, will let short-term assets “roll off” the balance sheet when they mature, and will as a result reduce its total assets from C$575 billion now to $C475 billion by the end of April, announced Bank of Canada Deputy Governor Toni Gravelle in a speech today.

Most of the speech was focused on the reasons for the QE and liquidity programs that the Bank of Canada unleashed starting in mid-March last year, in a two-fold role: In its role as “lender of last resort,” to deal with the “extreme stress” in the markets, as liquidity dried up and markets weren’t functioning or had “seized completely” as everyone was trying to sell everything in a mad “dash for cash.” And in its role as provider of stimulus as the economy that was spiraling down.

But these actions ballooned the balance sheet fourfold, to C$575 billion, and it created the possibility of “moral hazard.”

“Moral hazard emerges whenever market participants or other economic actors feel that they can engage in risky behavior without bearing consequences if things go wrong,” Gravelle said, a year after moral hazard became forever the guiding principle of the markets.

But moral hazard can be limited “by ensuring that such actions have a predetermined expiry date or are unwound when they’re no longer needed,” he said.

“Once crisis tools have served their purpose, central banks should scale them back to show that they are emergency measures and don’t reflect business as usual,” he said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

wolf richter, central banks, bank of canada, wolfstreet, canada, housing bubble, mortgage bubble, interest rates, qe, quantitative easing

The fat-takers cross the oceans

March 22, 2021

The fat-takers cross the oceans

Ecological overshoot is a global crisis today, but the problem did not begin with the fossil fuel age. From its beginnings more than five centuries ago, European colonization has been based on an unsustainable exploitation of resources.

In Seeker of Visions, John (Fire) Lame Deer says “The Sioux have a name for white men. They call them wasicun – fat-takers. It is a good name, because you have taken the fat of the land.”

The term, often also written as “wasi’chu”, has engendered discussion as to what the words originally meant in the Lakota language.¹ In any case, the phrase “fat-takers” seemed fitting to Lame Deer, it caught on quite widely – and it took literal meaning to me as I learned more about the history of European colonization.

When I wrote a newspaper review of a then-new book by Farley Mowat in the 1980s, I couldn’t help but recall Lame Deer’s words. Nearly thirty years later, I’ve come to regard Mowat’s book, Sea of Slaughter, as a foundational study in biophysical economic history.

Here, Canadians may ask incredulously, “Since when was Farley Mowat a biophysical economist?” And readers from everywhere else are likely to ask “Farley who?” A brief bit of biography is in order.

Farley Mowat (1921 – 2014) was one of the most successful Canadian writers of all time, author of dozens of best-selling books beginning in 1952 and continuing into the twenty-first century. He wrote in a popular style about his own experiences in Canada’s far north, the maritime provinces, travels in Siberia, and his life-long love of the natural world. Never shying from controversy, Mowat became a hero to many Canadians when he was banned from entering the US, and he was vilified by many for his support of the direct-action Sea Shepherd Conservation Society which named two of its ships in his honour…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

canada, farley mowat, an outside chance, Bart Hawkins Kreps, overshoot,

Massive Protest in Quebec Against Lockdowns over Weekend

March 9, 2021

Massive Protest in Quebec Against Lockdowns over Weekend

Resistance is NOT futile! They have a very short window for their Tyranny.

When Is Mountaintop Removal Not Mountaintop Removal? In Alberta, of Course!

March 6, 2021

When Is Mountaintop Removal Not Mountaintop Removal? In Alberta, of Course!

The Kenney government plays word games as it plans to strip-mine the Rockies.

Does this look like mountaintop removal to you? Coal mining underway in Elk Valley, BC, on the west side of the Rockies across from where Alberta plans similar mining. Photo by Callum Gunn.

In Alberta, the government of Jason Kenney has one definition for mountaintop removal, while most people have another.

You might think that excavating the top of a mountain until it’s reduced to a series of carved away “benches” that rise like giant steps to a last shred of a mountain’s peak is “mountaintop removal.”

If so, you disagree with the Alberta government.

Here’s someone else who disagrees with the Kenney definition. Australian coal miners.

While the Kenney government claims mountaintop removal can’t happen in Alberta’s water-sensitive eastern slopes, Benga Mining, an Australian firm owned by Aussie billionaire Gina Rinehart, says that’s the technique it intends to employ — and in a joint federal-provincial hearing no less.

Last week, the Kenney government told the Narwhal in a series of emails that open-pit mining can’t be called mountaintop removal if it only removes, say, 90 per cent of a mountaintop.

By Alberta’s definition, the top of the mountain has to be “completely” removed to qualify as mountaintop removal.

The Alberta Energy Regulator and Kenney spokesperson Kavi Bal both informed the Narwhal that open-pit mining can scrape off the sides of a mountain, devein coal seams and leave a ridge a pockmarked shadow of itself after removing tonnes of toxic debris, and that’s OK: because it’s open-pit mining, and not mountaintop removal.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘A Monstrous Monument to Greed and Stupidity’: Critics React to Site C Decision

March 2, 2021

‘A Monstrous Monument to Greed and Stupidity’: Critics React to Site C Decision

BC Liberals accuse NDP of mismanagement; Greens warn public to brace for higher costs.

Premier John Horgan confirmed today that construction of the Site C dam will once again go ahead. ‘I know there are a lot of British Columbians who have never accepted this as an appropriate way for BC Hydro to go,’ he said. Photo via the BC government.

Premier John Horgan’s announcement today that the government will continue with the Site C dam despite massive budget increases and delays brought criticism from opponents and supporters of the project.

“We’ve seen mismanagement of this file,” said Tom Shypitka, the BC Liberal critic for energy, mines and low carbon innovation. “It’s a sad day for the taxpayers, but it’s a good thing to see Site C proceed for the future of British Columbians.”

Horgan announced the government will continue with the project even though the budget has grown to $16 billion, an increase he blamed largely on unexpected geotechnical issues and delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is now expected to be in service in 2025.

The Site C budget was $7.9 billion in 2010. When the NDP decided to continue construction in 2017 they increased the budget to $10.7 billion.

Shypitka said the cost of the dam has doubled since the NDP came to government and that the oversight committee it put in place in 2018 has clearly failed. “Under their watch, this project has gone off the rails. That’s on the NDP government.”

He rejected the idea the BC Liberals should have been more diligent before starting the project. It’s unclear how much of the delay and cost escalation can be blamed on the pandemic and how much was due to the NDP’s mismanagement, he said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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