Tarsands

Global corporations are only interested in getting a resource as cheaply as possible with as many subsidies or tax breaks as possible. The environment and the benefits to the owners of that resource are only a necessary afterthought. They would prefer to rely on spin rather than to make improvements.
The BC government would be wise to heed Mr. Lougheed's warnings with regard to the shale gas projects.

My view is somewhat different; leave the resource in the ground!

Our provincial royalty is down to 5% and if these turkeys are elected again it will be down to zero!

We get nothing for royalty and as Taft pointed out we get only 48 cents per bbl on the payment in kind scheme that moves bitumen to provincial upgrading. One can get more for a bottle return in the province!

Our Heritage Trust fund has been plundered to the extent greater than 90 billion dollars. That is 10 or 11 complete provincial budgets paid by that plan. This has allowed the artificially low royalty rates.

Candidates for the Conservative Leadership are buying into the Wild Rose Party idea of increasing the Heritage fund through a still greater taxation of the populace. Both are still on tract to continue to draw down the fund to support lower royalty and pipeline construction.

I say again; if we cannot do better than this in the province we should leave it in the ground. We simply cannot afford any more of this kind of prosperity!

A Thinking Man

Pete Lougheed raised royalty rates by a good margin when he was premier of Alberta much to Big Oil's chagrin.

Pete was premier for a relatively short time even though the Conservative party has had a vice grip on power for ever. I am sure 'industry leaders' made sure he got out sooner rather than later so they could get more manageable (dumb-ass sock puppets - Don Getty, Ralph Klein, Stelmach...) leaders installed. To that end, royalties have dropped like a rock the whole time Lougheed's been gone.

But it is good to hear someone of note talk sense in Alberta for a change - no one will listen though, Albertans, by and large, have been inoculated against reason and the pursuit of prudent self interest for years by neo-liberal (economics for dummies) beliefs - the ones that just so happen to work so fabulously well for American energy companies.

What's a Conservative?

Peter Lougheed, small c or big C, is right by Ocam. Hopefully the "elegance" of his the tar-sands analysis, his stature and success will induce people to reflect on what "conservative" really means anymore. I suspect a lot of people vote "conservative" as if it represents "toryism." Can't blame them for mistaking tory with the neo-liberal/ neo-con/neo-right bunch that has either usurped parties with a tory name, like they have the "Progressive Conservatives" in a few provinces, or co-opted the name "Tory", like Harper's "Conservatives (not Progressive) have done. Peter Lougheed's view shows that there is an important, not just a semantic, difference. As it stands today in Alberta, ideological competition on the right looks like it's all about out neo-conning each other. And even though Lougheed's old party still has elements of old toryism, the people vying for leadership are all neo-cons, separate only by degree. I think this is why Lougheed has chosen to speak up at this time. He wants people to examine for themselves what "conservative" really means.

For me (and how I am interpreting Mr Lougheed's view,) "Toryism" is essentially communitarian whereas neo-rightism is not. Oh sure, the old fashioned Tory would admit to class distinction where a social democrat wouldn't, but, other than that, the two accept public ownership of important monopolies and view society as an organic whole where no one is left out. For the neo-rightist it's everybody for themselves and if one falls behind, no matter how undeserving, that's just too bad. Greed rules the rich and powerful few at the top and poverty rules the rest. Played out it results in the vast majority being left out. Given that the majority of conservative voters do not regard themselves as, or aspire to, high class, it would seem that their votes are misplaced by, in effect, supporting a neo-right party that is merely labeled as conservative. In fact, Toryism overlaps with Social Democracy in many places. It is essentially antithetical to neo-rightism.

Lougheed is speaking out now to awaken people (not politicians) to what's going on, and what's going on wrong, with the tar sands. And if Albertans want this gigantic resource to benefit all of society, they must re-examine what exactly is a "conservative."

more Refineries?

"Why we are exporting raw bitumen when we could be exporting the hundreds of products that are derived from our own petrochemicals?

...Imagine instead developing our petroleum resources more deliberately; charging appropriately for those resources; ensuring they build a job-rich industrial, value-added economy here in Canada – and that most of the treasure derived from these one-time, never-to-be renewed fossil resources were preserved in an investment fund."

Seriously are Albertans that

Seriously are Albertans that uninformed? or are they afraid of the Libs or NDP more? Maybe even stupid? Even though I am not a huge tar sands fan, the jobs should stay here and not be exported. Albertans get screwed on that and the low royalties they get from big oil.

Pipeline or Transmission Line?

If we have to use tar sands energy for a few years, perhaps we can burn it in electricity generators in northern Alberta and ship the energy to the US in a wire?

in the ground where they belong

Of course there needs to be some sort of transition from freely tapping the treasures that lurk beneath the ground to leaving them where they lie.

One thing would be to identify the best social and economic use for finite fossil fuels. Are cars the best way to burn up fossil fuels?

The next would be to define what our energy needs will be if we value add our vast resources in Canada and to provide for that growth.

However, as Nikiforuk states at the end of his commentary, no one knows "what the fuck they are talking about". As a Swedish planner once said, "the future is unprovable".

In BC we have no Heritage Fund as previous provincial governments have take the royalty riches from the Northeast Oil and Gas fields as used them to bolster their claims of having 'deficit' free budgets.

BC was receiving billions of dollars in future lease sales only to see that money go towards short term economic benefits, funding for underutilized publicly owned structures burdened by debt service costs and operations and maintenance costs.

In fact, the current BC government has decided to return $140+ million of the public treasury back to the oil and gas industry at a time when the government is running a deficit and the oil and gas industry reports record breaking profits in the billions per quarter.

Building more refineries and producing more of the by-products from bitumen or light crude only encourages the production of some of the more environmentally lethal and sensitive materials.

Gasoline makes up about 1/2 of all by-products from a barrel of crude also contains some of the worst chemical compound by-products from refining processes such as benzene, butadiene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, trimethyl pentane, methyltertbutylether (MTBE) and at least 200 other chemicals which are teratogenic (able to disturb the growth of an embryo), carcinogenic (ability to produce cancer) and/or mutagenic (capable of producing mutation).

Petroleum produced by-products such as plastic have been shown to be the main source of synthetic hormone disruptors known as xenoestrogens. Xenoestrogens have been linked to the rise in breast cancer rates.

Our reliance on the "value-added" products derived from crude oil may be killing us off at greater rates than all the wars since 1900. Breast cancer deaths in the US alone in the last 20 years are greater than all the deaths from wars since WWI!

We should be wary of solutions that fail to protect the health and safety of all living things. Refining more crude in Canada or in the US or in China makes no sense for a healthy future.

Stop This Raw Material Export Dependency...

"We should be refining the bitumen in Alberta and we should make it public policy in the province," he told the CBC.

First, the "environmental economic purists" who basically insist on the cessation of all economic activity that impacts the environment, have their heads in the clouds rather than the sand... and I suspect, most typically come from well off families rather than we plebeians always living a little more perilously. Creating sterile city parks and jogging paths, even bird watching, are not without their negative impacts on "real" nature.

Humans are part of the flora and fauna of this planet no less. And we need to understand and accept this. We are not going to allow ourselves to be starved or force marched back into caves or even tepees.

Which is not to fail to understand that there are really, really serious problems, and a not good even short term prognosis to the current ways and levels at which we are beating up on the planet. This really does need to change. And the land scarring and polluting Tar Sands Project is a screaming primary example of this.

But which said, does not negate the value and importance of the approach being suggested here by Lougheed and the author of this article... which first is SLOW DOWN, certainly on this tar sands project. (Mind, an economic collapse of capitalism, alreading looming, is likely to do this regardless of Conservative/fascist policy.)

The other appropriate point, at least that I take away from this article is, we really need a quite overall different approach to ALL our raw materials, not JUST bitumen... Process them ourselves for ourselves first, at long term sustainable levels of exploitation and population, rather than boom and bust for EXPORT as the private wealth accumulation agenda foists on us. , And build the appropriate processing and manufacturing industrial base around these resources, again around the same principles of exploitation and use, and primarily for our own "self-sufficient" use.

This kind of a "development system" in place, then look to what levels we can realistically and reasonably sustainable trade with other folks around the world... looking first to exporting "finished products" in preference to even processed raw material concentrates etc.

The primary objectives being "self-sufficiency", long term sustainability at minimum environmental impact levels, focused on the rounded social, economic and cultural development of the country, and the well being of our people... as opposed to the obscene enrichment simply of a small ruling class.

continued next post....

II... Stop This Raw Material Export Dependency

From previous post...

And the "best", not "perfect", prerequisite that this will be done and sustained is an economy and political institutions firmly grounded in new concepts of working class/community participation/ as in democracy.

Short of a major Apocalyptic scenario, which I concede is NOT outside the realm of real possibility, given present projections and environmental impact levels, we are nonetheless not, as a species, "voluntarily" all going back to the land or primitive tribal levels of existence. It is simply NOT on. (And coming down the other side of this "Peak Oil" paradigm we are in, I also concede, there are going to be huge socio-economic global convulsions... which may for a time even, take us perilously close to this quasi Apocalyptic vision.)

Much all depends on how quickly and determinedly we all begin to act, to first bring our population and resource exploitation levels into some kind of sustainable balance, and recreate a new economic order especially, built around quite different agendas and objectives. The two go together, rather joined at the hip, so to speak.

The more we choose to just let things run their "natural" course, waiting for nature or God(ess)to carry through their own resolution to the problem, the more likely Apocalyptic it will be, in my view.