Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Americans have grown apart

I don’t know the methodology used to create these distributions, but this graphic from a recent Economist article on the political effects of social media shows how Democrats and Republicans have overlapped less and less in the last 25 years:

I would really like to know the method behind creating these shapes. For instance, in both there are “Republicans” who are nearly at the “consistently liberal” outer edge, and “Democrats” nearly on the outer right. My guess is that this is based on party self-identification, but it would be good to know more.

Canada’s Indigenous apocalypse

You’ll meet Indigenous people of Canada who describe their world as postapocalyptic, an alien and hostile place where a stable existence is pieced together, if at all, from the cultural rubble of a cataclysmic conquest. On the far side of two centuries of disruption and oppression on the Canadian prairie — massacred bison herds, the forced assimilation of the 1876 Indian Act and the reserve system, the horrors of the residential schools, and the ecological upheaval of an economy driven by lucrative resource extraction that steadily eroded every way the First Nations of the prairie and boreal forest knew to live off the land — there is rarely any continuity for Indigenous people with their past, its culture and traditions, and the land that once sustained them.

Turner, Chris. The Patch: The People, Pipelines and Politics of the Oil Sands. Simon & Schuster, 2017. p. 152

Targeting pipelines

By the time of the 2015 World Heavy Oil Congress, midstream companies like Kinder Morgan, Enbridge and TransMountain PipeLines had grown used to the calamity that accompanied their pipeline applications. TransCanada’s Keystone XL project had ignited the battle, drawing ferocious protests from ranchers and Indigenous people in Nebraska. This in turn had attracted opposition from regional and then national and global environmental groups, which had long searched in vain for a catalyst to intensify and expand climate change activism. Keystone XL turned oil sands pipelines into an international political issue and a proxy of the first resort for the much broader debate about climate and energy policy. In the process, the pipeline — eventually any pipeline intended to move bitumen to tidewater — became the symbol of the entire fight. It was the line in the sand, the first full and direct conflict between progress in the age of fossil fuel — defined by expanding energy use and industrial megaprojects — and progress in the age of climate change, which sought to balance economic growth and industrial development with sound environmental stewardship and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Turner, Chris. The Patch: The People, Pipelines and Politics of the Oil Sands. Simon & Schuster, 2017. p. 119 (emphasis in original)

Scale of bitumen sands investment

Midway through the boom’s first wave, in 2006, a Statistics Canada study reported that Alberta was in the midst of “the strongest period of economic growth ever recorded by any Canadian province.” Annual provincial gross domestic product (GDP) and population growth both cleared 10 percent.

When the oil industry’s champions first pitched the federal and provincial governments on more favourable tax and royalty regimes in the mid-1990s, they promised $25 billion in capital expenditure on oil sands projects within 25 years. They hit that mark inside of five years and kept on charging. More than $200 billion was invested in the oil sands from 1999 to 2013. In 2014, the peak year for investment, $34 billion more in capital poured into the Patch. Alberta collected $5.2 billion in royalties from oil sands production the same year.

Turner, Chris. The Patch: The People, Pipelines and Politics of the Oil Sands. Simon & Schuster, 2017. p. 96

The bitumen sands and global decarbonization

Still, even if it was not recognized in many boardrooms in Calgary or anywhere else in the industry, oil’s dominance could no longer be taken for granted. Climate change was not readily managed like the sludge in a single tailings pond or contained like the mess from a single pipeline spill. This was a more profound challenge to the industry’s story of progress — perhaps an existential one. In the years after Shell unveiled its two scenarios, environmental activists began to stand in opposition to one new fossil fuel project after another, and bankers and investors started to ask industry executives tough questions about whether their reserves represented future profits or “stranded assets.” And starting with the proposed Keystone XL project, a major new pipeline that intended to carry Alberta’s bitumen from a storage terminal on the prairie south of Fort McMurray to the Gulf of Mexico, the oil sands became the front line in a larger conflict. In the story of progress being told with climate change at its centre, the world had no choice but to move as quickly as possible toward an economy free of greenhouse gas emissions. For a variety of reasons connected only tangentially to the daily operations of an oil sands site — American political considerations and universal symbolic impact, in particular — the elimination of the Patch’s daily ration of the world’s oil supply came to be seen as the essential first step in this decarbonization process.

Turner, Chris. The Patch: The People, Pipelines and Politics of the Oil Sands. Simon & Schuster, 2017. p. 15–6

Quebec’s face covering ban

The Current recently ran a segment on Quebec’s new law banning face coverings for those providing or receiving public services, including medical services and public transport.

I can’t see any way to interpret this law other than discrimination against Muslim women. That impression is actually magnified by the Quebec governments contortions in trying to defend it as constitutional, for instance by saying it will equally bar people wearing scarves and sunglasses. That – combined with a bizarre promise that people who wear face coverings for religious reasons will be allowed to apply for an exception – highlights how the law serves no comprehensible or valid purpose, while needlessly constraining individual choice.

The panel assembled on the show make some strong points: notably, how when governments pass laws that discriminate in this way they can help to legitimize and embolden bigots in the broader society. This will subject women who are already subjected to bigoted abuse to more, while undermining the perception that Quebec values everybody’s human rights.

The Chiron and humanity at its worst

I’ve written elsewhere about how The Economist doesn’t understand climate change. In their science section and the occasional editorial they stress the need for massive and urgent action, but their thinking is not joined up. Their general editorial stance remains that economic growth is the greatest good, every new fossil fuel discovery is a boon, and that largely business-as-usual politics is either desirable or inevitable.

One passage from a recent special report on France demonstrates the chasm between their enthusiasms and what is necessary for a sustainable world:

The word “factory” does not do justice to Bugatti’s state-of-the-art production site in the shadow of the forest-clad Vosges mountains in eastern France. There is no grease or grime around the assembly line. The floor is a shimmering white gloss. The airy space feels more like a museum of modern art, gleaming eight-litre engines displayed like so many design exhibits. Workers wear white gloves, as if handling treasures. In fact, they are building the world’s fastest supercar.

A Milanese engineer, Ettore Bugatti, founded a car factory in this corner of France in 1909. Germany’s Volkswagen, which later bought the brand, chose Bugatti’s historic French site to develop the Veyron, a car designed to combine elegance and speed. The French factory turned out every one of these luxury record-breaking cars after their launch in 2005. This year Bugatti unveiled a successor, the Chiron, which pushes the limits of physics and sleek design further still. The car reaches 100km (62 miles) an hour in two-and-a-half seconds and has a starting price of €2.4m. Christophe Piochon, head of the French plant, compares the exquisite craftsmanship that goes into the construction of a Bugatti car to haute couture.

This schoolboy hard-on for a product that embodies everything that is putting humanity in peril is both telling and depressing. There’s a pretty strong case that nobody should be allowed to be rich enough to own a €2.4m car. Most people in that position are probably corporate executives, and there is little reason to believe they deserve it. It does not seem that the people who are given such lavish compensation produce that level of value for their employers, and even if they did it doesn’t necessarily follow that they should get to keep it for themselves.

Beyond the issues of economic inequality, there is the fundamental inappropriateness of the technology itself. Car racing is spectacularly pointless in itself, but a race track is essentially the only suitable venue for such a vehicle. Having people driving them around city streets as status symbols demonstrates much about what’s sick in our culture.

Limits to the effectiveness of divestment

There are some comparatively convincing arguments for why fossil fuel divestment can’t do much to limit the severity of climate change, at least in terms of the direct effects from institutions selling their shares.

One important one is that people buying and selling stocks, and the changing value of the stocks, doesn’t directly profit or harm the company involved. A secondary market in shares is necessary to make IPOs possible, but once a company has gone public, it raises the money for big new fossil fuel projects in other ways, such as borrowing from banks.

Another is that — while the proven reserves owned by companies like ExxonMobil are vast and can do considerable climate damage — sovereign countries have much larger reserves:

There are responses to these objectives, mainly in terms of how divestment is meant to gradually shift investor sentiment. Divestment is based on a financial as well as a moral case: if we really are going to control climate change, we can’t burn most of the world’s remaining coal, oil, and gas. As such, it makes no sense to develop big new projects, since we can’t even use all the resources in projects that have already been built. If it helps to spread that idea, divestment will have been worthwhile.

It might even help reduce the value of Saudi Aramco itself and the magnitude of its future investments, given that the firm is expected to be partly privatized in the near future.