Climate: LNG in B.C. vs Alberta tarsands

[OldBlackDog]

Interesting report.

I know you will love it.


http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/in...Store_id=3f33b3c9-a28b-4f6c-a663-50c7d02fda24

 

[agentaqua]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/u-s...-special-challenge-for-g20-bound-pm-1.2834460

U.S.-China climate deal poses special challenge for G20-bound PM
Stephen Harper will have to deal with climate issue now that the goalposts have shifted
By Chris Hall, CBC News Posted: Nov 14, 2014 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: Nov 14, 2014 10:26 AM ET

U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping drink a toast in the Great Hall of the People on Nov. 12, 2014, shortly after agreeing to an ambitious plan to limit greenhouse gases.
U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping drink a toast in the Great Hall of the People on Nov. 12, 2014, shortly after agreeing to an ambitious plan to limit greenhouse gases. (Greg Baker / Associated Press)

PM's brief stop home 3:05

Photo of Chris Hall

Chris Hall
National Affairs Editor

Chris Hall is the CBC's National Affairs Editor, based in the Parliamentary Bureau in Ottawa. He began his reporting career with the Ottawa Citizen, before moving to CBC Radio in 1992, where he worked as a national radio reporter in Toronto, Halifax and St. John's. He returned to Ottawa and the Hill in 1998.

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Two things happened this week that may come to shape Stephen Harper's leadership, both at home and on the world stage, as he gets set to attend this weekend's G20 summit in Australia.

The first happened Wednesday when Finance Minister Joe Oliver confirmed that the federal budget is back in surplus for the first time since 2008, when Harper agreed to run the biggest budget deficit in Canadian history to try to stimulate the economy out of a global recession.

Canada becomes one of the first countries to return to fiscal health, a point of pride and of influence as another conservative prime minister, Tony Abbott of Australia, tries to focus this year's G20 leaders on the path of lowering taxes, eliminating deficits and reducing trade barriers in the hope of boosting economic growth.

Joe Oliver's election-bound budget surplus
These are all Harper values, ones he relentlessly pursued largely without political cost, though every federal agency and many others groups paid a price.

The Conservatives strictly controlled spending across government, in the process reducing and in some cases eliminating funding to agencies and non-profit groups that didn't fit into Harper's agenda.

At the same time, in eliminating the deficit without raising taxes, Ottawa capped but did not cut transfers to the provinces for health, social programs and post-secondary education.

The government also created the Building Canada Fund to sustain investments in crucial infrastructure like roads and bridges.

Is it enough? Provincial and municipal politicians will say no, but that's the nature of the relationship. The fact is there are tens of billions of dollars available in the coming years to do this needed work.

The goalposts shift on climate change

And then there's the other thing that happened this week, a challenge that will be much trickier for Harper to manage because it will play not only a role in defining where he has been as a leader, but where he still has to go heading into an election year.

This week's surprising climate-change deal between the U.S. and China offers Harper a choice.

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He can continue, as he always has, to argue that the work to reduce carbon emissions must be done without damaging the fragile economic recovery.

Harper Abbott 20141022
Australia's Tony Abbott and Canada's Stephen Harper in Ottawa in June 2014. No fans of "job-killing carbon taxes" here. (Adrian Wyld / Canadian Press)

On that he has important supporters in Brisbane, including G20 chair Tony Abbott.

Abbott was in Ottawa in June, when he and Harper both ridiculed efforts to put a price on emissions as a "job-killing carbon tax."

The Australian PM has also refused repeated calls from European leaders and others to put climate change on the agenda this weekend, insisting the focus of the summit remain squarely on economic issues and the handful of priorities he's chosen, as if promoting the economy and protecting the environment are inherently contradictory.

But where Abbott is a blunt edge, Harper's crafting of Canada's message probably requires a finer touch.

Canada's economic future depends heavily on the energy sector, in particular continued development of Alberta's oil sands while selling the product in the U.S. and beyond.

Those efforts get a boost with the Republicans about to control both houses of Congress, and with their renewed drive to pass legislation to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to American refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

But the White House has hinted at a veto if Congress pushes ahead on Keystone, and Barack Obama has made climate change a priority of his second term, a factor that no doubt played a huge role in this week's deal with China's Xi Jinping.

Surprise?

For the first time, China has agreed to cap its emissions — by 2030 at the latest — and to diversify its energy supply to include more non-fossil fuels. In turn, Obama is promising the U.S. will reduce its emissions by up to 28 per cent below 2005 levels within the next decade, which is a much greater commitment than Canada's.

For years, the Conservative government has tried to move in lockstep with the U.S. to reduce pollution.

But, unlike the U.S., Canada has yet to bring in standards for its oil and gas sector. And environmentalists are unanimous in saying Canada won't make the more modest emission reduction targets (17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020) that the U.S. has now trumped.

Earlier this month, French President Francois Hollande chided Harper about Canada's record at a news conference in Ottawa. This U.S.-China deal — between the two biggest polluters on the planet — sets the bar even higher.

So what can Harper do? The prime minister surprised many of his most persistent critics at the 2008 G8 summit in Muskoka by proposing the maternal and child health initiative, which has grown to a multi-billion commitment to reduce the staggering mortality rate among new mothers and infants in the developing world.

That program remained true to Conservative principles. No Canadian money would be used for abortions, progress would be monitored. The UN would be accountable for results.

As for climate change, it isn't on the agenda in Brisbane this weekend, but it's certainly in the news. There will be pressure from leaders and from protesters outside the conference setting for Canada to step up its commitment.

Perhaps it's a chance for Harper to surprise again and set out what Canada can do, while remaining consistent with those Conservative values.

 

[OldBlackDog]

National Climate Assessment report ignores critical scientific evidence when submitted by top researchers and scientists.

Four former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrators testified before the EPW Committee in 2014 and provided important answers to questions for the record as it relates to basic CO2 science, economics, and EPA regulations:

1. CO2 is necessary to life on earth. It is in fact plant food, and makes possible the process of photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is the process whereby plants using light energy from
the sun convert carbon dioxide and water to glucose sugar and oxygen gas through a series of reactions. The general equation for photosynthesis is:

carbon dioxide + water = light energy => glucose + oxygen
6CO2 + 6H2O =light energy=> C6H12O6 + 6O2

2. Humans exhale CO2 at a rate of approximately 40,000 parts per million (ppm). Humans inhale CO2 at the rate it currently exists in the atmosphere, which is just below 400 ppm.
Accordingly, humans exhale CO2 at a much higher rate than they inhale. Not a single former Administrator could answer a question on these rates.

3. As all four EPA Administrators made clear, EPA’s decision to regulate CO2 is the first time the agency has ever regulated a gas that is necessary to and makes life on earth possible. As well, it is also the only gas the federal government has ever tried to regulate that humans exhale at a greater rate than they inhale. Given both these facts, the claim that CO2 is a “pollutant” deserves further scrutiny.

4. Finally, all four former EPA Administrators were unable to name even a single product that could be made out of wind and sunlight. Everything in modern society, from computers, laptops, solar panels, iPads and flat screen televisions, to advanced medical equipment and all our nation’s critical infrastructure is built out of fossil resources and their derivative products

 

[seadna]

Rather than apologizing for its undisputable mistake after being first exposed by reporter Gavin Atkins at Asian Correspondent, the global body responded in typical alarmist fashion: with an Orwellian coverup seeking to erase all evidence of its ridiculous predictions. First, the UNEP took its “climate refugees” map down from the Web. That failed, of course, because the content was archived online prior to its disappearance down the UN “memory hole.

Then the UNEP tried and failed to distance itself from the outlandish claims, despite the fact that the map was created by a UNEP cartographer, released by UNEP, and repeatedly hyped by the outfit in its scaremongering campaigns. Eventually, as more and more media around the world began picking up the story, a spokesperson for the UN agency claimed the map was removed because it was “causing confusion.”

From the above I infer that:
1) You did not yourself, ever read any such report, see any such map or see any such claims from the UNEP yourself, correct?
2) You did not attempt to follow the story back to the original sources or to use an internet history such as the waybackmachine to see if such maps existed and to see if they made the claims that the author above seems to think they made.

I did. I cannot find such maps or claims. I looked pretty hard. I even followed links posted by the reporter Gavin Atkins. Those don't lead to maps. Of course he did add the caveat that one of his links was to a Google cache and it might not be there unless we looked "quick" (in a 2011 article). One of his links leads to unrelated asylum application data. None of his links leads to an actual page with the information on it that is claimed in the above article. One possible theory is that a reporter with Gavin Atkin's skill, doesn't know how to take a screenshot to capture the evidence of the "undisputable mistake" and the subsequent "Orwellian coverup". That's a theory that suggests he's either stupid or incompetent. Another possible theory is that the map shown was a projection of what might happen in 2100 and not 2010 (given projected levels of sea rise) and that someone made a typo. It's also possible that the map that allegedly existed was one of several maps based on one extreme in a given model. Without being able to actually look at the alleged maps and the surrounding text, it's hard to say. Another possible theory is that the author is just making crap up or giving a highly biased interpretation of something he thinks he saw.

So.... again refer back to post 826.

 

[seadna]

National Climate Assessment report ignores critical scientific evidence when submitted by top researchers and scientists.

Four former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrators testified before the EPW Committee in 2014 and provided important answers to questions for the record as it relates to basic CO2 science, economics, and EPA regulations:

1. CO2 is necessary to life on earth. It is in fact plant food, and makes possible the process of photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is the process whereby plants using light energy from
the sun convert carbon dioxide and water to glucose sugar and oxygen gas through a series of reactions. The general equation for photosynthesis is:

carbon dioxide + water = light energy => glucose + oxygen
6CO2 + 6H2O =light energy=> C6H12O6 + 6O2

2. Humans exhale CO2 at a rate of approximately 40,000 parts per million (ppm). Humans inhale CO2 at the rate it currently exists in the atmosphere, which is just below 400 ppm.
Accordingly, humans exhale CO2 at a much higher rate than they inhale. Not a single former Administrator could answer a question on these rates.

3. As all four EPA Administrators made clear, EPA’s decision to regulate CO2 is the first time the agency has ever regulated a gas that is necessary to and makes life on earth possible. As well, it is also the only gas the federal government has ever tried to regulate that humans exhale at a greater rate than they inhale. Given both these facts, the claim that CO2 is a “pollutant” deserves further scrutiny.

4. Finally, all four former EPA Administrators were unable to name even a single product that could be made out of wind and sunlight. Everything in modern society, from computers, laptops, solar panels, iPads and flat screen televisions, to advanced medical equipment and all our nation’s critical infrastructure is built out of fossil resources and their derivative products

1) is true. 2) 40,000 ppm is a concentration not a rate. So (2) makes no sense at all and clearly was written by someone with no to minimal science background.. Moreover, what concentrations we breath in and out is not at all relevant to the question of the impact of CO2 on global warming. So in addition to BS, tossing out red herrings is another favorite tactic of climate deniers. (3) Still uses the wrong term "rate" and ignores the fact that high concentrations of CO2 contribute to global warming and hence can cause large scale environmental damage (which justifies the classification of CO2 as a pollutant). We also don't allow companies to dump sugar into our waterways at concentrations that would damage the environment even though it's OK to eat a little. (4) Also irrelevant and not a reason to not try to reduce CO2 emissions. Again refer back to post #826.

 

[OldBlackDog]

Really, why dont you read the Senate report this was taken from.
I am sure they will love your thoughts.

http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/in...Store_id=3f33b3c9-a28b-4f6c-a663-50c7d02fda24

1) is true. 2) 40,000 ppm is a concentration not a rate. So (2) makes no sense at all and clearly was written by someone with no to minimal science background.. Moreover, what concentrations we breath in and out is not at all relevant to the question of the impact of CO2 on global warming. So in addition to BS, tossing out red herrings is another favorite tactic of climate deniers. (3) Still uses the wrong term "rate" and ignores the fact that high concentrations of CO2 contribute to global warming and hence can cause large scale environmental damage (which justifies the classification of CO2 as a pollutant). We also don't allow companies to dump sugar into our waterways at concentrations that would damage the environment even though it's OK to eat a little. (4) Also irrelevant and not a reason to not try to reduce CO2 emissions. Again refer back to post #826.

 

[seadna]

Really, why dont you read the Senate report this was taken from.
I am sure they will love your thoughts.

http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/in...Store_id=3f33b3c9-a28b-4f6c-a663-50c7d02fda24

Again refer back to post #826. The senate is one of the biggest and best BS generating machines there is.

 

[OldBlackDog]

So, you are saying that the senate of the U.S. is full of ****?
So all the reports given on global warming to them is also full of ****?
Or, is that just the ones you do not agree with?

Again refer back to post #826. The senate is one of the biggest and best BS generating machines there is.

 

[OldBlackDog]

Did you miss this??

Rather than apologizing for its undisputable mistake after being first exposed by reporter Gavin Atkins at Asian Correspondent, the global body responded in typical alarmist fashion: with an Orwellian coverup seeking to erase all evidence of its ridiculous predictions. First, the UNEP took its “climate refugees” map down from the Web. That failed, of course, because the content was archived online prior to its disappearance down the UN “memory hole.

Then the UNEP tried and failed to distance itself from the outlandish claims, despite the fact that the map was created by a UNEP cartographer, released by UNEP, and repeatedly hyped by the outfit in its scaremongering campaigns. Eventually, as more and more media around the world began picking up the story, a spokesperson for the UN agency claimed the map was removed because it was “causing confusion.”

 

[OldBlackDog]

The actual temperature data show no significant change in global temperatures over the past decade and certainly less warming than the climate change models predicted. At an August 1, 2012, hearing before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works...climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama-Huntsville offered testimony demonstrating that the IPCC climate models, which have been relied upon by alarmists, vastly over-stated the degree of warming in comparison to actual temperature data observed by advanced satellites. Dr. Christy’s chart...demonstrates that the IPCC models, on average, predicted a significant amount of warming that has not actually occurred. In fact, contrary to the President’s assertion, the chart shows that global average temperatures have not increased at all over the past decade, and certainly less than was predicted 10 years ago.

 

[seadna]

So, you are saying that the senate of the U.S. is full of ****?

Is that a rhetorical question?

 

[seadna]

Did you miss this??

No - did you miss this? (see bold faced, underlined text).

From the above I infer that:
1) You did not yourself, ever read any such report, see any such map or see any such claims from the UNEP yourself, correct?
2) You did not attempt to follow the story back to the original sources or to use an internet history such as the waybackmachine to see if such maps existed and to see if they made the claims that the author above seems to think they made.

I did. I cannot find such maps or claims. I looked pretty hard. I even followed links posted by the reporter Gavin Atkins. Those don't lead to maps. Of course he did add the caveat that one of his links was to a Google cache and it might not be there unless we looked "quick" (in a 2011 article). One of his links leads to unrelated asylum application data. None of his links leads to an actual page with the information on it that is claimed in the above article. One possible theory is that a reporter with Gavin Atkin's skill, doesn't know how to take a screenshot to capture the evidence of the "undisputable mistake" and the subsequent "Orwellian coverup". That's a theory that suggests he's either stupid or incompetent. Another possible theory is that the map shown was a projection of what might happen in 2100 and not 2010 (given projected levels of sea rise) and that someone made a typo. It's also possible that the map that allegedly existed was one of several maps based on one extreme in a given model. Without being able to actually look at the alleged maps and the surrounding text, it's hard to say. Another possible theory is that the author is just making crap up or giving a highly biased interpretation of something he thinks he saw.

So.... again refer back to post 826.

 

[OldBlackDog]

Voted for them did you?

Is that a rhetorical question?

 

[OldBlackDog]

Just googled it up like you guys do. Was not hard to do. I do note that you guys do not read things very well.

No - did you miss this? (see bold faced, underlined text).

 

[OldBlackDog]

Miss this did you?

Real scientist.



http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/13/guy-stewart-callendar/

 

[seadna]

So provide a link to the map and the surrounding text so that we can all see it.

 

[OldBlackDog]

I am really becoming worried about your reading skills.

Rather than apologizing for its undisputable mistake after being first exposed by reporter Gavin Atkins at Asian Correspondent, the global body responded in typical alarmist fashion: with an Orwellian coverup seeking to erase all evidence of its ridiculous predictions. First, the UNEP took its “climate refugees” map down from the Web. That failed, of course, because the content was archived online prior to its disappearance down the UN “memory hole.

Then the UNEP tried and failed to distance itself from the outlandish claims, despite the fact that the map was created by a UNEP cartographer, released by UNEP, and repeatedly hyped by the outfit in its scaremongering campaigns. Eventually, as more and more media around the world began picking up the story, a spokesperson for the UN agency claimed the map was removed because it was “causing confusion.”

 

[seadna]

I am really becoming worried about your reading skills.

So, did you or did you not "google up" any actual map and surrounding text that the author "Gavin Atkins" says indicate the UNEP made outlandish claims and then participated in an "Orwelllian cover up"?

Or is this reporter unable (or too stupid) to take a screenshot?

 

[seadna]

Voted for them did you?

Only two of them. But should I assume you really want to debate whether or not politicians are full of crap with you taking the position that they are to be trusted? I don't think you'd fare very well in such a discussion. It would however serve your purpose of trying to distract from any substantive discussion of the impact of CO2 on the climate and the impact of the Alberta tar sands project on the climate.

 

[OldBlackDog]

I will find some outlandish claims for you. There appears to be lots from your leaders.

So, did you or did you not "google up" any actual map and surrounding text that the author "Gavin Atkins" says indicate the UNEP made outlandish claims and then participated in an "Orwelllian cover up"?

Or is this reporter unable (or too stupid) to take a screenshot?