May 23, 2007
Backlash against a whistle-blower
Andrew Nikiforuk
The Globe and Mail
May 19/07
For years, Dr. John O'Connor has made headlines by continually asking why natives near the oil sands have so much cancer.
But that's not the only reason he's in such hot water now.
FORT CHIPEWYAN, ALTA. - When John O'Connor, a diminutive and soft-spoken Irish-born family physician, began his weekly visits to Fort Chipewyan, a picturesque community on the shores of Lake Athabasca, he never expected that eight years later he would be fighting for his professional life.
Located near Wood Buffalo National Park and once Canada's richest fur-trading post, Fort Chipewyan looks like an idyllic place. But the elders soon started to tell their new doctor stories of deformed fish and bleeding muskrats and how an unusually high number of local people had been "taken with cancer." Dr. O'Connor says he couldn't help but wonder what was happening in the settlement of 1,000 that sits near the mouth of the Athabasca River about 300 kilometres downstream from the largest capital project in the world: the northern Alberta oil sands. In 2005 alone, half the community's 14 deaths were due to various cancers.
"Is it genetics, lifestyle, the environment or just bad luck?" he recalls asking himself. "What's going on? Where could the origin be?" He had practised medicine in Fort McMurray, at the heart of the oil sands, since 1993, and had never seen such problems in the city. "I can't explain it." Since then, his concern for the health of his native patients has led to many sleepless nights as well as an open battle with the Alberta government over the lack of medical resources in the service-challenged Northern Lights Health Region, where 14 family doctors care for 80,000 people. Now, he finds himself the subject of an unusual investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta that could compromise his future. A ruling could come down at any moment, and he feels that he's in such dire straits that he has decided to pack up and leave the province altogether.
The hunters, trappers, fishermen and oil-sand workers of "Fort Chip" seem flummoxed by what's happening to their doctor, who works 80 hours a week, but his colleagues feel the case is politically motivated. "This is not about shutting up John; this is about shutting him down," charges Dr. Michel Sauve, a respected Fort McMurray internist.
"There should be whistle-blowing protection for doctors." And that seems to be the root of the problem. As well as asking pointed questions about cancer causes, Dr. O'Connor, the region's chief of family medicine, has spent much of the past few years criticizing the shortage of medical resources as well as the carnage on the road to Fort McMurray, a stretch so deadly it has become known as Hell's Highway.
Yet he didn't start to speak up in earnest about his patients in Fort Chip until 2004, when he diagnosed a middle-aged patient with a very rare bile-duct cancer known as cholangiocarcinoma. He knew it well because his father had died of the same disease in Ireland. "It's vicious and fast." It's also strongly associated with chemical pollution, including arsenic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs, a group of carcinogens discharged by oil-sand mining, which now produces a million barrels of oil a day - half the nation's gasoline supply - and gives Ottawa more than $6-billion a year in taxes.
Normally, this form of cancer occurs in one in 100,000 people.
So, when Dr. O'Connor found another case the following year, as well as clusters of immune-system disorders, in a community of just 1,000 people, he called for an independent study. "Am I seeing a problem, or am I not?" he asked officials.
He wasn't the first to ask for a study. The fact that uranium mines, now abandoned, pulp mills and the oil sands have flushed chemicals into Lake Athabasca for decades prompted scientists to seek a survey of health in the region in 1999. Three years later, two Fort McMurray doctors asked again for a comprehensive health study on behalf of several first nations.
Finally, in 2004, Alberta's oil regulator, the Energy and Utility Board, recommended a study. But Alberta Health and Health Canada started working on one only after a CBC reporter asked Dr. O'Connor early last year why there were so many cases of cancer in Fort Chip.
The story made The National , and five months later the agencies released a statistical analysis, albeit one that had not undergone a peer review, which kept it from being deemed first-rate research.
The report found that, from 1995 to 2005, the community's cancer rates "were comparable to the provincial average," although officials agreed the incidence of bile-duct cancers -- by this point, five cases in the North Lights alone -- was "provocative." Dr. O'Connor challenged the thoroughness of the analysis while people in Fort Chipewyan expressed deep skepticism. In response, Alberta Health accused him of having withheld cancer reports. "Either there is no evidence, or he has decided to ignore the law," charged provincial spokesman Howard May.
Expressing disbelief at the charge, Dr. O'Connor said: "I haven't received any requests for information. I don't know what they are talking about." In an independent analysis, well-known Alberta ecologist and statistician Kevin Timoney also found the provincial study to be deeply flawed.
"It's difficult to find a significant result in a small sample size," he explained. Because missing just one case would skew the results, "statistics offer a blunt tool for detection of elevated cancer rates" in such a small community.
Mr. Timoney also found widespread evidence of chemical contamination in the Athabasca River. According to data collected by a government and industry group known as the Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program (RAMP), the levels of PAHs in the river's sediment now resemble those found at highly contaminated sites in the United States.
A RAMP report last year also found that 7.4 per cent of fish from the river had growth abnormalities. "That's high," says Mr. Timoney, who is now conducting an extensive water-quality study for the community's local health board.
Frustrated by government unwillingness to conduct a proper health study, Dr. O'Connor announced in December that he plans to leave Fort McMurray this summer and move to Nova Scotia. Then he caused an even bigger sensation by writing in an emotional letter to Halifax's Chronicle Herald newspaper that life in Fort McMurray is "intolerable." He also warned Atlantic Canada workers not to expect to come west and find a family doctor or affordable housing when they get here.
"The quality of life," he said, "is extremely low." Because of the letter, Dr. O'Connor admits, "a lot of people in administration thought I was the worst thing that had happened to the town." After all, the provincial government was in the middle of a campaign to recruit more health-care workers to a region that it says has "the most severe" gaps in care.
Within weeks, three employees of Health Canada, one from Alberta Health and another from Environment Canada had filed a complaint against Dr. O'Connor with the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
According to one source, the bureaucrats have accused him of "irresponsible actions" and "raising undue alarm among the public." His concerns about contamination, they said, have left the people of Fort Chipewyan "fearful of the places they live in and their traditional foods." Asked why government employees would take such a drastic step, a Health Canada spokesperson stated via an e-mail simply that health professionals of all sorts are obliged to report on "professional practice issues." However, the timing of the complaint has led Dr. Sauve and other local doctors and nurses to conclude that the federal and provincial governments wanted to silence an outspoken critic of the area's industrial growth. The college normally reviews complaints made by patients, Dr. Sauve explains, and shouldn't be used as "a state tool for censoring doctors." The "fearful" people of Fort Chipewyan, meanwhile, contend that they have voiced concerns about cancer rates and water pollution for years. When the wind is right, they can smell the oil-sands plants, and now carry filtered water into the bush when hunting.
Margaret Simpson, a 60-year-old Dene and Catholic lay priest, says that in 2005 she often buried two people a week. "What is happening here? It drove me nuts," she says, describing Dr. O'Connor as her friend as well as her physician.
"It's not fair what's happening to him. Maybe they are trying to keep him quiet about something they don't want known." Raymond Ladouceur, a 65-year-old commercial fisherman who says he routinely pulls deformed fish from the lake, echoes her sentiment.
"These guys who accuse him of agitating the community should apologize.
Let O'Connor do his job. He is concerned about life and we support him. The whole community does." Five years ago, Mr. Ladouceur says, he sent 200 pounds of pickerel riddled with tumours, bulging eyes, crooked tails and pushed-in faces to Fort McMurray for testing he hoped would determine what has been going wrong.
But provincial officials didn't pick up the fish, he says, and they were left to rot in a truck.
Andrew Nikiforuk is an award-winning Calgary journalist. Next month, he will be among the speakers at an Alberta Environmental Network conference on water in the Athabasca Basin, as will Dr. John O'Connor.
May 21, 2007
A cowboy with a cause
Rancher riding along the highway to Victoria to raise awareness of student health concerns
By Sage Birchwater
Tribune Staff Writer
May 17 2007
Sage Birchwater photo
Tony White, horse Suzie-Q and dog Doug at the side of Highway 97
on the way to Victoria, just south of McLeese Lake. White should
arrive in Williams Lake today.
Butte Creek cowboy Tony White, is no stranger to travelling long distances by horseback. A few years ago he rode his palomino Suzie-Q, up to Butte Creek in the Fort St. John area from Camrose, Alberta to do a little cowboying. Now he’s riding south 863 kilometres from Prince George to Victoria, to raise some issues with the provincial government.
“It’s for the kids,” White says. “The oil and gas industry and the provincial government are getting too greedy. They’re endangering the health and safety of the students in Fort St. John elementary schools.”
The problem, he says, is gas flare and pipeline emissions letting poisonous gases into the environment that is affecting the youth.
“The kids are sick all the time. The North Pine School had to be evacuated four times and the Butte Creek School twice.”
He says that’s not right.
“The main compressor for the Alaskan Pipeline is old and is only half a kilometre behind the Butte Creek School.”
He says he talked to the Oil and Gas Commission that regulates the companies.
“They told us there was nothing they could do about it. They told us the government had given the companies a grandfather clause to pollute.”
He says the attitude from the MLAs and oil companies is that nobody is going to do anything about it, and nobody cares.
“So I’m taking it upon myself to be a voice for the kids.”
White insists he’s not a tree hugger.
“I’m a rancher and a cowboy who depends on technology. I feed 1,500 animals. They’ve got clean-burning systems out there, but they don’t have to use them.”
White says last year the oil patch didn’t shut down during a critical migration of the caribou and it wiped out 18,000 animals.
“Our newest generation coming up has nothing to look forward to unless some serious changes are made. I’m going down to Victoria as a voice for them.”
White, the father of a nine-year-old daughter, says other parents share his concerns.
“We have to work together. I’m going to our elders with the voices of the children. We can’t fix it. All we can do is prevent it from getting worse.”
Up north he says he lost three friends to cancer in the past two years.
“We’re not trying to shut down the industry, we just want the government to take action.”
The Tribune found White, Suzie-Q and his Australian shepherd dog Doug, resting in a little meadow beside Highway 97, south of McLeese Lake on Tuesday. He says he plans to stay on the main highway to draw attention to his cause.
“Everybody I’ve talked to agrees what I’m doing needs to be done.”
He says he’s done his homework and knows the technology is out there that can make a difference.
“The car companies can shut down your vehicle from space if you don’t make your payments. So why can’t the oil companies clean up their act.”
White and his horse and dog will likely reach Williams Lake today.
He plans to arrive in Victoria by mid-June.
“Hopefully the MLAs will still be in session.”
White says he’s making the journey on his own hook and any donations of grain for his horse along the way would be appreciated. He travels 20 to 25 kilometres a day and stops and camps in grassy areas over night.
© Copyright 2007 Williams Lake Tribune
Hydroelectric power's dirty secret revealed
Duncan Graham-Row
New Scientist
24 February 2005
Contrary to popular belief, hydroelectric power can seriously damage the climate. Proposed changes to the way countries' climate budgets are calculated aim to take greenhouse gas emissions from hydropower reservoirs into account, but some experts worry that they will not go far enough.
The green image of hydro power as a benign alternative to fossil fuels is false, says Éric Duchemin, a consultant for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "Everyone thinks hydro is very clean, but this is not the case," he says.
Hydroelectric dams produce significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, and in some cases produce more of these greenhouse gases than power plants running on fossil fuels. Carbon emissions vary from dam to dam, says Philip Fearnside from Brazil's National Institute for Research in the Amazon in Manaus. "But we do know that there are enough emissions to worry about."
In a study to be published in Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Fearnside estimates that in 1990 the greenhouse effect of emissions from the Curuá-Una dam in Pará, Brazil, was more than three-and-a-half times what would have been produced by generating the same amount of electricity from oil.
This is because large amounts of carbon tied up in trees and other plants are released when the reservoir is initially flooded and the plants rot. Then after this first pulse of decay, plant matter settling on the reservoir's bottom decomposes without oxygen, resulting in a build-up of dissolved methane. This is released into the atmosphere when water passes through the dam's turbines.
"Drawdown" regions Seasonal changes in water depth mean there is a continuous supply of decaying material. In the dry season plants colonise the banks of the reservoir only to be engulfed when the water level rises. For shallow-shelving reservoirs these "drawdown" regions can account for several thousand square kilometres.
In effect man-made reservoirs convert carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into methane. This is significant because methane's effect on global warming is 21 times stronger than carbon dioxide's.
Claiming that hydro projects are net producers of greenhouse gases is not new (New Scientist print edition, 3 June 2000) but the issue now appears to be climbing up the political agenda. In the next round of IPCC discussions in 2006, the proposed National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Programme, which calculates each country's carbon budget, will include emissions from artificially flooded regions.
But these guidelines will only take account of the first 10 years of a dam's operation and only include surface emissions. Methane production will go unchecked because climate scientists cannot agree on how significant this is; it will also vary between dams. But if Fearnside gets his way these full emissions would be included.
With the proposed IPCC guidelines, tropical countries that rely heavily on hydroelectricity, such as Brazil, could see their national greenhouse emissions inventories increased by as much as 7% (see map). Colder countries are less affected, he says, because cold conditions will be less favourable for producing greenhouse gases.
Despite a decade of research documenting the carbon emissions from man-made reservoirs, hydroelectric power still has an undeserved reputation for mitigating global warming. "I think it is important these emissions are counted," says Fearnside.
Warming up to nuclear power
Kate Riley
Seattle Times
20 May 2007
Craig Pridemore was a University of Washington student when he started his career influencing public policy. He and his friends made a road trip to Richland in the early 1980s to protest planned construction of five nuclear-power plants.
Now, the Vancouver state senator, who remains an environmentalist and successfully sponsored legislation this session to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, reluctantly concedes nuclear power might need to play a role in the monumental task of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States - he said so in testimony before a state House committee.
He's not the only one. U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Bainbridge Island, who has been driving a Prius and talking about global climate change since before it was fashionable, also agrees that nuclear power might need to be part of the solution to curb greenhouse-gas emissions while managing new demand.
"Global warming is such a titanic challenge, all of us have to check our prejudices at the door," said Inslee. He has just finished a book, "Apollo's Fire: Igniting America's Clean Energy Revolution," that will be published by Island Press this fall.
Neither Pridemore nor Inslee is enthusiastic about the prospect of an expansion of nuclear power - which accounts for about 20 percent of U.S. electricity - because it has other problems. Though nuclear plants don't emit greenhouse gases, disposal of the radioactive waste stream is a challenge.
But the challenge of climate change is so daunting that it is already causing major policy reprioritization, whether federal, state or household. Gov. Chris Gregoire recently set ambitious goals, starting with reducing the state's greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels within 13 years. A high-powered stakeholders group, including utility representatives, industry executives and environmentalists, has begun meeting to figure out how the state will get there.
So far, the governor has taken a cautiously open-minded tack on a Tri-City Industrial Development Council (TRIDEC) proposal that, if successful, could expand nuclear activities in the state.
The community in southeastern Washington is among 13 candidates for the Department of Energy's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership program. TRIDEC, along with other community organizations, including the operator of the state's lone nuclear-power reactor in Richland, has proposed the community be part of a program to reprocess spent commercial nuclear fuel and recycle it, and also be the site of a new research reactor. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell also are in a wait-and-see mode.
Such open-mindedness about nuclear power borders on heresy among many environmental organizations, especially in the Northwest, which has plenty of negative nuclear baggage.
First, there was the notoriety of the Washington Public Power Supply System default on $2.25 billion in bonds in 1983. Hugely overestimated need for power and the large capital cost of five planned nuclear-power reactors contributed to the breathtaking default - a record for any public agency at the time. Though Washington state was not involved in the project, its bond rating fell by association. Only one reactor was completed - in Richland - and is still operated by the agency, since renamed Energy Northwest.
Second, there is the wince-evoking legacy of five decades worth of nuclear defense production - and inept disposal of waste - at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation on the elbow of the Columbia River. The last defense-production reactor was shut down in 1989, but the costly cleanup is expected to take decades.
Then there is the muscle of the Northwest environmental community, which has tended to use both the former and the latter episodes to argue against anything nuclear.
"Political feeling may be more raw in the Northwest because of the failure to build those four nuclear plants," says Rudi Bertschi, who also actively opposed nuclear construction in the early 1980s. He later served as chairman of the Energy Northwest board and helped play a role in the agency's turnaround. "That was very traumatic for a lot of people."
An economist and energy consultant, Bertschi says he's "agnostic" about whether new nuclear plants should be built, saying it will depend on the costs government associates with carbon emissions. "A carbon tax would definitely change the economic formula," he said.
Nuclear technology fell so out of favor locally, the University of Washington terminated its nuclear-engineering department in 1992 for lack of student interest.
But now the conversation is changing. Environmentalists acknowledging nuclear might have a role in combating climate change are becoming, if not common, much less rare.
Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore has been the most vocal. The organization was founded to oppose nuclear weapons and warfare.
"... I think we made the mistake early on of lumping the peaceful use of nuclear in with the war-like use of nuclear," Moore said in a recent interview with E&ETV. "And I've come to realize that it doesn't make sense to ban the beneficial use of technology just because that technology can be used for evil."
Greenpeace remains fervently anti-nuclear, promoting instead an expansion of renewable energy and energy conservation. From its Web page: "Greenpeace has always fought - and will continue to fight - vigorously against nuclear power because it is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution is to halt the expansion of all nuclear power, and for the shutdown of existing plants."
Moore and former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman are co-chairs of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which supports nuclear as a clean-emissions energy source. Although some environmentalists denounce Moore, others with respectable environmental credentials are joining him in pushing nuclear to be considered as part of the solution. Among them are James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis, which suggests Earth is a superorganism, and a member of Environmentalists for Nuclear Power; and Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Guns, Germs and Steel."
Worldwide, more countries are embracing nuclear. France gets 78 percent of its power from nuclear - and never has had an accident; all of Europe gets about 32 percent.
The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its fourth assessment report released May 4, included nuclear as a potential part of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Last month, finance ministers from the Group of Seven industrialized countries, including Britain, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United States, announced their support for nuclear power as a partial solution to global warming and easing dependence on fossil fuels. Also in April, the United States and Japan signed an agreement to conduct joint research on nuclear power, which includes the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) proposal.
The one serious U.S. nuclear accident, at Three Mile Island in 1979 (causing no injuries or death), triggered a safety revolution that led in 2006 to a median plant safety record of only 0.12 industrial accidents per 200,000 worker-hours, a record low, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Back in the Northwest, it will be interesting to see how this debate plays out, especially given the crunch between energy demand growing with population and the legal challenges to the Northwest's electricity mainstay - hydropower.
About 60 percent of Washington's energy comes from the 31-dam federal hydro system, but four dams on the lower Snake River in southeastern Washington are under the jurisdiction of a federal judge. Environmentalists have prevailed in federal courts to press U.S. agencies to do more to restore endangered salmon runs affected by the Snake dams. Federal District Court Judge James Redden has said if the agencies don't satisfy his concerns, he might order the dams breached. Together, the four represent about 1,000 megawatts of power - enough to keep the lights on in Seattle.
The same organizations that support dam breaching, including the Northwest Energy Coalition, successfully proposed Initiative 937, which requires most utilities to have at least 15 percent of their energy portfolio be produced by non-hydro renewable sources, such as wind and solar power. Also backed passionately by Inslee, the new law encourages energy conservation to lessen the need for new polluting power sources, which will help buy some time.
But many in the Northwest are skeptical of the changes going forward. Hydropower, which is created by letting water run through turbines, is particularly suited to "shape" - or balance - the ups and downs of wind power. The wind doesn't always blow, after all.
That will mean, eventually, power plants with more-controllable energy production will be needed to fill in the power need when the wind doesn't blow. And given passage of Sen. Pridemore's bill that essentially eliminates the possibility of any new coal plants, that means new natural gas plants or something that burns cleaner - like, possibly, nuclear power.
Nuclear power has some major drawbacks. It is expensive and what to do with the waste stream remains an open, politically charged question. Energy Northwest, like other commercial reactor operators across the nation, has years worth of spent nuclear fuel intended for permanent disposal at the U.S. Department of Energy Yucca Mountain Repository that is years past opening. U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., intends to kill the repository in his state and, with his clout as Senate majority leader, just might be successful.
Bush's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership proposal would reverse a more than 30-year-old U.S. policy decision and begin recycling spent nuclear fuels with "proliferation-resistant" technologies. The plan could entail spent nuclear fuel being shipped to Hanford from sites around the country for reprocessing and recycling, as well as a new power reactor.
At a public Energy Department siting hearing in Pasco in March, there was a lot of activist muscle memory in the room that drew more than 300 people. Many of the old guard in the community of Cold Warriors argued they had the expertise to help the nation reduce existing waste through the recycling mission and advance a new generation of safe nuclear power. Anti-nuclear activists, including Heart of America Northwest, raised the specter of Energy Department's indisputably atrocious record of defense-waste disposal from years ago. Clean up the mess before you add more, they argue.
There is some truth and reason on both sides. But GNEP might not even survive the next presidential election.
Inslee, who says he hasn't yet studied GNEP enough to have a position, has an important message for everyone, including polluters and environmentalists like himself: "We are all going to have to get rid of our knee jerks."
This is a shrewder world where climate change is a reality and humans are considering how to minimize their role in it. The solutions need to be more carefully pragmatic and less reflexively ideological.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/text/2003713025_sundayriley200.html
May 18, 2007
Do we want Pipeline Canada?
By Terence Corcoran
National Post
18-May-2007
The Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline, for decades a glimmering mirage on the horizon of Canada's northern economic future, may soon become the nightmare of Canadian energy policy.
Having just sold off Petro- Canada, ending that particularly disastrous episode in national energy history, the Harper Conservatives are floating the idea of taking control of a new national project, Pipeline-Canada. As a Crown corporation, Pipeline- Canada would contract out construction of the $16.2-billion project to Trans-Canada Pipeline.
If this were to happen, rest assured that it would not really be an energy policy. It would be, above all, a native buy-off policy, a job-creation policy, a make-work program and a political strategy to secure votes and seats in Parliament.
But as an energy policy, the benefits are far from obvious. A government-funded pipeline megaproject would do nothing to help establish Canada as an "Energy Superpower." But it could set Canada up as an Energy Superloser. With a $16-billion construction cost, the latest estimate, it poses a monumental risk to the government.
Even if work started today, completion wouldn't happen until 2014 at the earliest, and by then the gas might not be needed in the United States, the primary market.
Gas is a major potential source of electric power, and 10 or 15 years from now Mackenzie gas is unlikely to have any advantages. By 2014 and after, other sources of energy are expected to be on the market, driving the price of gas down and rendering Pipeline- Canada uneconomic. Liquified natural gas (LNG) could be landing in massive quantities in the United States, coal gasification is under intense development, as is another coal technology, thermo-energy coal burning. And who knows what chaos climate regulation will bring?
If the private sector doesn't want to bear the risk, as it clearly doesn't, why should the government? Jim Prentice, the Minister of Indian Affairs, is playing a key role in the pipeline rescue, and northern jobs and native issues are said to be the main driving force behind the mounting pressure on Ottawa to rescue the pipeline from reluctant oil companies.
It would be a sad day for Canada if Ottawa were doing this to buy off native groups that have long stood in the way of the pipeline. One hopes, as well, that Mr. Prentice is not responding to First Nation leaders who are threatening economic disorder and a National Day of Action if aboriginal discontents and land claims are not soon on track for settlement.
Caving into blackmail is hardly the road to civil peace. It could also involve turning over Mackenzie gas royalties to local aboriginal groups.
If Pipeline-Canada were to build the Mackenzie line, it implies a fat settlement as Ottawa then assigns cash flow from gas sales to aboriginal groups. That removes some of Ottawa's native support costs and transfers the burden to the oil industry and gas consumers.
Also likely to play a public role in any Ottawa rationale will be northern economic development. Back when he was in opposition and hounding the Liberals to get the Mackenzie pipeline built, Mr. Prentice liked to talk up and circulate studies showing the major benefits that would flow from its construction.
Numbers reached the sky: $52-billion in total revenue, $57- billion in new GDP, 157,000 person years in direct and indirect jobs, and up to 400,000 in additional person years of employment.
That was when the cost of the pipeline was estimated at only $7-billion. At $16.2-billion, all those numbers can be blown up to double the original estimates. The more Ottawa sinks into a pipeline, whatever its merits as an investment, the bigger it can make the benefits look on paper.
All such calculations, however, are economic fabrications designed to generate political support. They are no reason to spend the money if the project itself is too much of a risk and a potential economic disaster.
Spending $16.2-billion would certainly set the Tories up for comparison with the Liberals. Former Calgary Liberal MP and deputy prime minister Anne Mc- Lellan still boasts on her Web site that the Liberals had "committed nearly $800-million to facilitate construction of the [Mackenzie] project by private sector sources."
If Ottawa does take up control and funding of the Mackenzie Valley project, Mr. Prentice, if he dares, will be able to claim that the Conservatives out-spent the Liberals by 20 times -- adding another winning claim to the growing Conservative list of Liberal firsts, and dragging the Tories into another dangerous national energy program.
May 15, 2007
Russia to Build Underwater Tunnel to Alaska
COMMENT: No, it's not April 1 and apparently this is, if not real, at least not an intentional joke. And some think SeaBreeze is ambitious!
Russia to Build Underwater Tunnel to Alaska
MOSNEWS.com, 19-Apr-2007
Russia-Alaska link: A Bering Strait tunnel
Sabra Ayres, Anchorage Daily News, 21-Apr-2007
Tunnel dream: Undersea project would link Alaska, Russia
CNN.com, 25-Apr-2007
Russia to Build Underwater Tunnel to Alaska
MOSNEWS.com
Created: 19.04.2007 11:59 MSK (GMT +3)
Official from the Russian Economy Ministry told reporters on Wednesday, April 18, that Russia plans to build the world’s longest tunnel, a transport and pipeline link under the Bering Strait to Alaska, as part of a $65 billion project to supply the U.S. with oil, natural gas and electricity from Siberia.
The project, which Russia is coordinating with the U.S. and Canada, would take 10 to 15 years to complete, Viktor Razbegin, deputy head of industrial research at the Russian Economy Ministry, said. State organizations and private companies in partnership would build and control the route, known as TKM-World Link, he added.
A 6,000-kilometer (3,700-mile) transport corridor from Siberia into the U.S. will feed into the tunnel, which at 64 miles will be more than twice as long as the underwater section of the Channel Tunnel between the U.K. and France, according to the plan. The tunnel would run in three sections to link the two islands in the Bering Strait between Russia and the U.S.
“This will be a business project, not a political one,” Maxim Bystrov, deputy head of Russia’s agency for special economic zones, was quoted by Bloomberg as telling a media briefing. Russian officials will formally present the plan to the U.S. and Canadian governments next week, Razbegin said.
The Bering Strait tunnel will cost $10 billion to $12 billion, and the rest of the investment will be spent on the entire transport corridor, the plan estimates.
“The project is a monster,” Yevgeny Nadorshin, chief economist with Trust Investment Bank in Moscow, said in an interview with Bloomberg. “The Chinese are crying out for our commodities and willing to finance the transport links, and we’re sending oil to Alaska.”
The planned undersea tunnel would contain a high-speed railway, highway and pipelines, as well as power and fiber-optic cables, according to TKM-World Link. Investors in the so-called public-private partnership include Russian Railways, national power utility Unified Energy System and state-controlled pipeline operator Transneft. This information was contained in the press release which was handed out at the media briefing and bore the companies’ logos.
Russia and the U.S. may each eventually take 25 percent stakes, with private investors and international finance agencies as other shareholders, Razbegin said. “The governments will act as guarantors for private money,” he said.
The World Link will save North America and Far East Russia $20 billion a year on electricity costs, said Vasily Zubakin, deputy chief executive officer of HydroOGK, Unified Energy’s hydropower unit and a potential investor.
“It’s cheaper to transport electricity east, and with our unique tidal resources, the potential is real,” Zubakin said. By 2020 HydroOGK plans to build the Tugurskaya and Pendzhinskaya tidal plants, each with capacity of as much as 10 gigawatts, in the Okhotsk Sea, close to Sakhalin Island.
The project envisions building high-voltage power lines with a capacity of up to 15 gigawatts to supply the new rail links and also export to North America.
Russian Railways is working on the rail route from Pravaya Lena, south of Yakutsk in the Sakha republic, to Uelen on the Bering Strait, a 3,500 kilometer stretch.
The link could carry commodities from Eastern Siberia and Sakha to North American export markets, said Artur Alexeyev, Sakha’s vice president.
The two regions hold most of Russia’s metal and mineral reserves “and yet only 1.5 percent of it is developed due to lack of infrastructure and tough conditions”, Alexeyev said.
Japan, China and Korea have expressed interest in the project, with Japanese companies offering to burrow the tunnel under the Bering Strait for $60 million a kilometer, half the price set down in the project, Razbegin said.
“This will certainly help to develop Siberia and the Far East, but better port infrastructure would do that too and not cost $65 billion,” Trust’s Nadorshin said. “For all we know, the U.S. doesn’t want to make Alaska a transport hub.”
The figures for the project come from a preliminary feasibility study. A full study could be funded from Russia’s investment fund, set aside for large infrastructure projects, Bystrov said.
http://mosnews.com/money/2007/04/19/alaskatunnel.shtml
Russia-Alaska link: A Bering Strait tunnel
By SABRA AYRES
Anchorage Daily News
Published: April 21, 2007
JUNEAU -- A proposal for another big construction project is gathering headlines across the world.
No, we're not talking about a $30 billion pipeline to send natural gas to the Lower 48.
This is bigger:
A $10 billion to $12 billion tunnel under the Bering Strait linking Alaska and Russia. And another $50 billion to lay railways to make the tunnel usable.
The proponents of the 64-mile tunnel are not working off an original idea.
Over the past 150 years, at least one Russian czar and several American entrepreneurs have devised plans for linking the continents.
The latest Russian concept is a tunnel tying Russia's Chukotka to Alaska's Cape Prince of Wales as part of a hoped-for continuous railway from London to New York. More than 6,000 miles of new rail lines -- about half laid in Siberia and the remainder in Alaska and Canada -- would connect the railheads on both sides. Siberian oil, gas, hydroelectric power and fiber optic cable could be exported through pipes built beside the high-speed rail service, they said.
But something is different about this current proposal, backers of the plan say, and it's not just modern technology.
Some say it's the tolerant nod of approval the Russian government has given to hosting a conference next week on the tunnel project.
Others say it's the momentum the idea has gained from media attention this week.
Maybe it's just timing: Russia's economy is booming, thanks to high world oil prices that have poured billions into the Russia treasury after 15 years of a difficult, post-Soviet transition.
In Alaska, a new governor promising to get the state a profitable natural gas pipeline has spurred some to think about fresh starts.
But it could just be kindred spirits finding common ground on dreaming big. Russia, the largest country in the world, once tried to reverse river flows to better irrigate crops.
Alaskans have seen their fair share of mega projects, too, including the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
Former Gov. Wally Hickel has long been a champion of big, transforming projects.
Hickel is one of the Bering Strait tunnel project's most serious supporters. He said he plans to attend the conference next week in Moscow to watch a plan he has been behind for some 25 years finally find the support it deserves.
"You know how to build a gas line? Just build it," Hickel said. "Big projects are what civilizations need. Just to let the world know you can do it."
The tunnel idea resurfaced last week when a long-time advocate of the project, Viktor Razbegin, a deputy at the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, announced the Moscow conference and invited several American and Canadian enthusiasts.
Razbegin, Hickel and members of the aptly named Interhemispheric Bering Strait Tunnel & Railroad Group have been coordinating on the project since the late 1990s.
Enthusiasm aside, the current idea, like those in the past, is meeting skepticism.
Experts have said construction in the icy Bering Strait is possible, but finding funding will be difficult.
The Russians will need to complete a huge amount of rail lines to reach the remote Chukotka region, currently only accessible by plane or boat.
"I don't mean to diminish this, but a connection to Russia through Alaska any time soon is probably no more valid than the idea that we are going to send a manned mission to Mars," said Bruce Carr, the Alaska Railroad's strategic planning director.
The state-owned Alaska Railroad has been studying the possibility of connecting to Canada's rails for more than 60 years, Carr added.
The U.S. government has shown little interest in the project.
"It would be safe to say that no one here has ever heard of this thing," said Janelle Hironimus, a spokeswoman for the State Department.
Several of Russia's deputy ministers are scheduled to attend the conference, but Kremlin officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have been reluctant to throw their full weight behind it.
Still, the Russian side of the project has put on a remarkable un-Russian PR campaign ahead of the conference, said Joe Henri, an Anchorage developer and a member of the Interhemispheric Bering Strait Tunnel group
Russian organizers said the tunnel would help develop the remote Far East, where there are untapped stores of natural resources.
The state-owned electricity, railway and energy pipeline companies are listed as conference sponsors.
By late this week, stories from London to Ottawa popped up in the media and on the Internet.
Bloggers began having a field day. "Bering Strait Tunnel Project: OMG! Ultimate Road Trip!" one headlined.
Henri said the interest is a big change for a plan that has been called crazy.
But will attention and the Moscow conference move the project along?
"Biggest thing now is to form a corporation, get some Russian money, sell some stock and raise money for a feasibility study," he said.
Daily News reporter Sabra Ayres can be reached at sayres@adn.com or 1-907-586-1531.
Tunnel dream: Undersea project would link Alaska, Russia
CNN.com
April 25, 2007
Story Highlights
• $65 billion project would go under Bering Strait
• Proposed tunnel would be 68 miles long, in waters up to 180 feet deep
• Chunnel, linking Britain and France is only 30 miles long
• Project would take 20 years to build
MOSCOW, Russia (AP) -- For more than a century, entrepreneurs and engineers have dreamed of building a tunnel connecting the eastern and western hemispheres under the Bering Strait -- only to be brought up short by war, revolution and politics.
Now die-hard supporters are renewing their push for the audacious plan -- a $65 billion highway project that would link two of the world's most inhospitable regions by burrowing under a stretch of water connecting the Pacific with the Arctic Ocean.
Russians and Americans alike made their pitch for the project at a conference titled "Megaprojects of Russia's East," held Tuesday in Moscow.
"It's time to the rewrite the old slogan 'Workers of the world unite!"' said Walter Hickel, a former Alaska governor and interior secretary under President Richard Nixon. "It's time to proclaim, 'Workers -- Unite the world!"'
A Russian Economics Ministry official tossed cold water on the idea, saying he wanted to know who planned to pay the mammoth bill for the project before seriously discussing it. But Hickel was unfazed in his speech, saying the route would unlock hitherto untapped natural resources -- and bolster the economies of both Alaska and Russia's Far East.
The proposed 68-mile tunnel would be the longest in the world. It would also be the linchpin for a 3,700-mile railroad line stretching from Yakutsk -- the capital of a gold- and mineral-rich Siberian region roughly the size of India -- through extreme northeastern Russia, in waters up to 180 feet deep and into the western coast of Alaska. Winter temperatures there routinely hit minus 94 F.
A group of Russians and Americans pitched a $65 billion project Tuesday that would link their two countries by a highway under the Bering Strait, the stretch of water that connects the Arctic and Pacific oceans. The tunnel would start at approximately Wales, Alaska, and connect to approximately Uelen, Russia, according to the Interhemispheric Bering Strait Tunnel & Railroad Group.
By comparison, the undersea tunnel that is now the world's longest -- the Chunnel, linking Britain and France -- is only 30 miles long.
That raises the prospect of some tantalizingly exotic routes -- train riders could catch the London-Moscow-Washington express, conference organizers suggested.
Lobbyists claimed the project is guaranteed to turn a profit after 30 years. As crews construct the road and rail link, they said, the workers would also build oil and gas pipelines and lay electricity and fiber-optic cables. Trains would whisk cargos at up to 60 mph 260 feet beneath the seabed.
Eventually, 3 percent of the world's cargo could move along the route, organizers hope.
Private investment called for
Maxim Bystrov, deputy head of the federal agency for managing Special Economic Zones, injected a note of sobriety to the heady talk of linking East and West by road and rail. He said his ministry would invest in the project only when private investors said they were committed to building it.
"As a ministry employee I am used to working with figures and used to working with projects that have an economic and financial base," Bystrov said. "The word 'prozhekt' has a negative meaning in Russian. I want this 'prozhekt' to turn into a 'project."'
The idea has a long history. Russia's last czar, Nicholas II, twice approved the implementation of a similar plan, perhaps eying the gold- and oil-rich territory that the Russian Imperial government had sold to the United States just before the turn of the 20th century.
The First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution doomed both attempts.
Despite the allure, there were signs Tuesday that there is no light at the end of this particular tunnel. A top economic adviser to President Vladimir Putin, as well as the Russian railway minister, who had been billed to speak, pulled out at the last minute.
$120 million in study costs alone
The feasibility study alone would cost $120 million and would take two years to complete, organizers said. Actual construction of the road-rail-pipeline-cable effort could take up to 20 years.
Still, Vladimir Brezhnev, president of Russian construction conglomerate Transstroi, said that the technology to tackle the construction work existed.
"Perhaps not all of us will be involved in this," he told conference participants. "But as an engineer I wish I could be."
A statement adopted at the conference Tuesday called on the governments of Russia, the United States, Japan, China and the European Union to endorse the tunnel as part of their economic development strategies. It urged government officials to raise the issue at the G-8 summit in Germany in June.
George Koumal, president of the Interhemispheric Bering Strait Tunnel and Railroad Group -- the noncommercial organization pushing for the project -- said that while many have seen England from France and vice versa across the Channel, there is little communication between the people living on either side of the Bering Strait.
"There are very few people who have stood on the beach in Alaska," he said. "Seemingly you can stretch out your hand and touch Mother Russia."
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
How Creative Mass Non-Violence Beat a Nuke and Launched the Global Green Power Movement
By Harvey Wasserman
CommonDreams.org
Sunday 13 May 2007
Thirty years ago this month, in the small seacoast town of Seabrook, New Hampshire, a force of mass non-violent green advocacy collided with the nuke establishment.
A definitive victory over corporate power was won. And the global grassroots "No Nukes" movement emerged as one of the most important and effective in human history.
It still writes the bottom line on atomic energy and global warming. All today's green energy battles can be dated to May, 13, 1977, when 550 Clamshell Alliance protestors walked victoriously free after thirteen days of media-saturated imprisonment. Not a single US reactor ordered since that day has been completed.
In the classic tradition of New England democracy, it all started when the tiny town of Seabrook voted four times against the construction of a mammoth twin reactor complex aimed at the salt marshes along its seashore. The site is at the very southeast corner of New Hampshire, where the Granite State meets Massachusetts and the Atlantic. All other towns within a ten-mile radius of the proposed plant joined the opposition, including those in Massachusetts.
The absurdly mis-named Public Service Company of New Hampshire offered the cash-strapped communities major economic bribes. But local stalwarts feared disruption of their lives, destruction of the local fishing industry, ecological desolation of the marshes and the dangers of radiation.
So a de facto coalition rose up that joined extremely conservative locals with the very peace activists they had bitterly denounced for marching against the Vietnam War, which was just ending. Many were new to the environmental cause, having moved to communal farms in rural areas where they became acquainted for the first time with trees, grass and gardens.
The coalition was joined by Quaker stalwarts from Boston who helped introduce many of the youthful demonstrators to the art and politics of creative non-violence. Forming the Clamshell Alliance, they began small-scale civil disobedience at the Seabrook site, which was just then being bulldozed.
On August 1, 1976, 18 New Hampshirites were arrested there. On August 22, 180 from around New England were dragged away.
In October, at a nearby seaside park, the Alliance staged an Alternative Energy Fair. They drew on the experiences of the Toward Tomorrow Fair, recently held at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The conference's godfather was William Heronemus, who pioneered a vision of huge windmill arrays off-shore and in the Great Plains, which he dubbed "the Saudi Arabia of Wind." Also speaking was a young Oxford don named Amory Lovins, who helped conceive an ultra-efficient world powered by renewable energy.
From these gatherings came a "Solartopian" vision of a fossil/nuke-free economy, powered by green energy, that the Clamshell demonstrators carried with them onto the Seabrook site. They were battling not just nuclear power, but an obsolete "King CONG" paradigm centered on coal, oil, nukes and gas. Once the immense resources being wasted on nukes and unclean fossil fuels were shifted to renewables and efficiency, they said, a green-powered Earth would come.
On April 30, 1977, about 2,000 Clams poured onto the Seabrook site from numerous directions. Key to the months of prior planning was the requirement that all who came to occupy the site be trained in small "affinity groups." The sessions included discussions of the theory of non-violence, and active role playing in which demonstrators would take turns practicing the rituals of both arresting and being arrested. (These sessions are documented in the Green Mountain Post film "Training for Non-Violence" available via www.gmpfilms.com.)
Technically, the Clams' commitment was to shut construction altogether. The theoretical model came from Wyhl, West Germany, where a mass grassroots occupation stopped a proposed nuclear facility. The Wyhl campaign helped birth a social movement that's led to Germany's renunciation of nuke power, a multi-billion-dollar boom in green power and what may be the world's most efficient industrial economy.
New Hampshire's extreme right-wing Gov. Meldrim Thomson wanted none of it. He demanded that the state police bar the demonstrators from the site altogether.
But the patrol was worried about chaos on local highways, especially the nearby Interstate 95. They preferred to let the Clams march onto the bulldozed construction site, where they could be easily herded onto buses and hauled to local courts for arraignment.
The 1414 arrests proceeded deep into the night. No instances of violence were reported, and no one was seriously injured.
The Clams' expectation was to be booked and freed on personal recognizance, as in the previous actions. They had volunteered to be arrested. They had come to state their case that stopping nuke power served a higher good.
But early in the evening, a livid Gov. Thomson helicoptered into the seacoast. He demanded that the detainees from out of state pay bail.
Most refused. In solidarity, so did most of the New Hampshirites.
Next morning, the nation awoke to read that more than a thousand non-violent protestors were being held in five National Guard armories spread around the state of New Hampshire.
At the crucial moment, Thomson's attorney general (none other than David Souter, now a "liberal" associate of the U.S. Supreme Court) swooped into the seacoast and browbeat a local judge into requiring bail. The Clams stiffened. The epic confrontation was on.
The global media had a field day. The Guard in Manchester, the biggest of the armories, was forced to visit a local McDonalds to buy hundreds of hamburgers for their unexpected "guests" (many were vegetarians and would eat only the buns). Gov. Thomson, who constantly railed at neighboring Massachusetts, advocated arming the New Hampshire National Guard with nuclear weapons.
But for the first time ever, the world's print and electronic journalists gave serious focus to nuke power's fatal flaws. The question of whether to build more reactors got the kind of thoughtful, responsive coverage that left the American mainstream with the coming of Ronald Reagan.
Thomson wouldn't budge on bail. Beckoned by jobs and families, a steady flow did exit the armories.
But a hard core stayed. Charles Matthei refused to eat or drink at all. Edgy officers finally put him (gently, and unindicted) out on the street.
Staunch New Hampshire conservatives cringed in embarrassment. The mass imprisonment cost the state's notoriously thrifty taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars per day.
Finally, on Friday, May 13, Thomson caved. Some 550 Clams walked free, pledging to return for their trials (which they did) with no bail posted.
The standoff sparked a global movement against atomic power and for green energy. Dozens of alliances sprouted up at US reactor sites. California's Abalone Alliance led thousands of arrests at Diablo Canyon, perched perilously close to a major earthquake fault. The Trojan Decommissioning Alliance eventually shut Oregon's only nuke. At Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island, protestors demanded - unsuccessfully - that Unit Two not open.
TMI all but undid Jimmy Carter. Carter campaigned in New Hampshire in August, 1976, as the Clamshell staged its first protests. For a documentary crew from Green Mountain Post Films he outlined a series of requirements he pledged to enforce before any new reactor could open. Neither Seabrook nor TMI could meet them. But construction continued at Seabrook anyway. TMI went critical in December, 1978, then melted three months later.
Carter did fund pioneer green energy work at the Solar Energy Research Institute (now the National Renewable Energy Lab) in Golden, Colorado. But the reactor battles proved politically disastrous.
The ultimate blow came when TMI-2 melted in the wee hours of March 28, 1979. Had it not been for the demonstrations at Seabrook and elsewhere, the accident might have garnered a few paragraphs in the local papers.
But inspired in part by the protests, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas's China Syndrome, happened to open in theaters just as TMI went to the brink. The industry took the double body blow of a terrifying disaster and a Hollywood blockbuster.
Ironically, Carter's greatest triumph, the signing of the Camp David accords, had just been consummated at the White House on March 26. For thirty-six hours the president basked in an afterglow that might have helped him coast to re-election.
But, suddenly, there he was in the TMI control room, dressed in protective booties, desperately doing damage control. Had the public and Jimmy Carter's career been spared the openings of Seabrook and TMI, the world might be a very different place.
The grassroots alliances helped drive the nuke industry into dormancy. Seabrook Unit I was eventually finished. But Unit 2 is a rotting hulk, every bit as useless (but not quite as radioactive) as TMI-2.
Richard Nixon had pledged to build 1000 nukes in the US by the year 2000. But the industry peaked at less than 120. Today, just over a hundred operate. No US reactor ordered since 1974 has been completed. The Seabrook demonstrations - which extended to civil disobedience actions on Wall Street - were key to keeping nearly 880 US reactors unbuilt.
Nixon's nuke backers thought they could solve the Arab oil embargo. But rising oil prices helped doom reactor construction. In construction and in fuel enrichment, nukes depend on fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases and are in increasingly short supply. Another round of rising oil prices could easily doom another round of proposed reactors, as could impending shortages of raw uranium.
As in the 1970s, the cost calculations for new reactors that are fictional wish lists. Despite millions in PR hype, there is no core Wall Street funding for new nukes or reliable private insurance for liability in case of a major accident. There is also no solution to the problems of waste storage or terror attacks. Whatever economic case there might have been for atomic energy thirty years ago has long since disappeared.
The global grassroots movement that emerged from those New Hampshire armories was savvy, well-organized and passionate. It defined the Solartopian paradigm of an energy-efficient, fossil/nuke-free world powered by renewables.
Tens of thousands of arrests have followed at hundreds of No Nukes demonstrations. But no non-violent reactor opponent or arresting officer has been seriously injured. It is an epic monument to the evolution of peaceful civil disobedience as an effective agent of social change.
Thirty years since construction began at Seabrook, it is a given that any new reactor construction will be accompanied by mass arrests, huge cost overruns, and profound political and financial instability.
By contrast, the prices for renewables and efficiency have plummeted. While reactor construction has gone nowhere, wind, solar and bio-fuels have become reliable multi-billion-dollar money-makers enjoying double-digit growth rates. The revolution in green power is poised to do for emerging Solartopian economies of the next quarter-century what the computer revolution did for the last.
Those 550 Clamshell activists who held fast in Mel Thomson's armories thirty years ago opened the door for a brave renewable world. Their astonishing victory on May 13, 1977, still testifies to the power of mass non-violence - and to the coming reality of a green-powered planet.
Harvey Wasserman helped co-ordinate media for the Clamshell Alliance, 1976-8. He was arrested at Diablo Canyon in 1984 and at Seabrook in 1989, and is author of "SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030" (http://www.solartopia.org/). He is senior editor of http://www.freepress.org/, where this article first appeared.
May 11, 2007
Tory MPs storm out of meeting on energy sharing
Canada left short to aid U.S., says professor
Ottawa Citizen
Fri 11 May 2007
OTTAWA - Amid heated charges of a coverup, Tory MPs on Thursday abruptly shut down parliamentary hearings on a controversial plan to further integrate Canada and the U.S.
The firestorm erupted within minutes of testimony by University of Alberta professor Gordon Laxer that Canadians will be left "to freeze in the dark" if the government forges ahead with plans to integrate energy supplies across North America.
He was testifying on behalf of the Alberta-based Parkland Institute about concerns with the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a 2005 accord by the U.S., Canada and Mexico to streamline economic and security rules across the continent.
The deal, which calls North American "energy security" a priority, commits Canada to ensuring American energy supplies even though Canada itself -- unlike most industrialized nations -- has no national plan or reserves to protect its own supplies, he argued.
At that point, Tory MP Leon Benoit, chair of the Commons Standing Committee on International Trade which was holding the SPP hearings, ordered Laxer to halt his testimony, saying it was not relevant.
Opposition MPs called for, and won, a vote to overrule Benoit's ruling.
Benoit then threw down his pen, declaring, "This meeting is adjourned," and stormed out, followed by three of the panel's four Conservative members.
The remaining members voted to finish the meeting, with the Liberal vice-chair presiding.
Benoit's actions are virtually unprecedented, observers say; at press time, parliamentary procedure experts still hadn't figured out whether he had the right to adjourn the meeting unilaterally. Benoit did not respond to calls for comment.
It's "reckless and irresponsible" of the government not to discuss protecting Canada's energy
supply, says Laxer.
Atlantic Canada and Quebec already have to import 90 per cent of their supply -- 45 per cent of it from potentially unstable sources such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Algeria, Laxer said.
Meanwhile, Canada is exporting 63 per cent of its oil and 56 per cent of its gas production, mostly to the U.S., he says.
"It's shocking the extent to which the Conservative party will go to cover up information about the SPP," says NDP MP Peter Julian, who also sits on the committee.
Other MPs raised concerns about recently revealed plans under the SPP to raise Canadian limits on pesticide residues to match American rules.
Questions were also raised about whether the effort will open the door to bulk water exports.
Representatives from the departments of Industry and International Trade defended the SPP as an effort to protect Canadian jobs in a competitive global market, without sacrificing standards. They denied charges SPP negotiations have been secretive, saying civil-society groups are welcome to offer their input, and referred MPs to the government website.
May 07, 2007
Alaska legislators (22 of them) still stumping for VECO
COMMENT: This article from Alaska follows the arrest of Vic Kohring, chairman (well, former chairman) of the Alaska Special Committee on Oil and Gas. Kohring was charged with selling his vote on oil taxes last year to oil field services company Veco. Two other former legislators were also charged. It's just the tip of an iceberg, says the writer.
(Update, May 8: VECO Corp.'s chairman and chief executive officer, as well as one of his top lieutenants, pleaded guilty to providing more than $400,000 in illegal payments to five Alaskan state legislators and other officials in the state.)
There are two cultures at play here. One is national - does the national character of the US and Alaska lend itself to this sort of deal making? The other culture is sectoral - is the modus operandi of the corporate and specifically of the oil and gas sector, open or even conducive to such arrangements? And how do you suppose this plays out with BC, Alberta or Canada's legislators? Just askin'
But apart from my tasteless question, what I found really interesting in this article is the discussion about the corporate and state split of the value of oil and gas production. In Qatar, Exxon recently cut a deal for a split of 30% (to Exxon) : 70% (to Qatar) for natural gas. In Libya, Gazprom outbid Exxon's 75% : 25% offer with a winning 90:10 split.
In BC, the provincial government settles for a net 12% royalty on oil, an estimated net 13% for coalbed methane, and a net 17% for natural gas, as well as provincial and federal corporate taxes.
We're so smart. Giving away the farm. Qui bono?
Alaska legislators (22 of them) still stumping for VECO
By Ray Metcalfe
Alaska Report
May 6, 2007
Even though the FBI's indictments of dirty politicians and those who bribe them has begun, (just the tip of the iceberg) House Majority Leader Ralph Samuels, Senate President Lyda Green, and about 20 other members of our Legislature who owe their elections to VECO are still stumping for the oilfield services company that is at the center of the ongoing FBI investigation.
Why would any legislator trust those who say the governor's Alaska Gasline Inducement Act is bad for Alaska, when they know those detractors are directly or indirectly associated with those who bribed our legislators.
They are pushing an ethics bill that does nothing, and - for those who haven't already figured it out - our state treasury is now funded by a tax scheme that brings in about half of what it should. It's the same tax scheme referenced in the indictments that VECO bribed our legislators to pass.
To put into perspective what legislators who take bribes have cost Alaska: In March 2005, Exxon Mobil signed an agreement with Qatar to spend $13 billion developing the infrastructure to extract, liquefy, and export, 17.2 million tons of liquefied natural gas to the UK annually. In exchange, Exxon keeps 30 percent of the profits, and Qatar takes the other 70 percent.
Since that deal was made, the competitive market has changed. Exxon Mobil's more recent bid for similar development rights in a Libyan oilfield was outbid by Gazprom. Exxon offered to share the profits - 25 percent to Exxon, 75 percent to Libya. But Gazprom agreed to develop Libya's oilfield for 10 percent of the profits, giving Libya 90 percent.
Alaska now gets a 12.5 percent royalty, plus a 22.5 percent net profits tax, and the feds take about 10 percent, for a total of about 45 percent. In other words, the rest of the world has let the competitive market work to get oil companies like Exxon to develop their oilfields for between 10 percent and 30 percent of the profits. Meanwhile Alaskans are misled to believe they must give up between three and five times as much of their profits, or Exxon and others will leave us for greener pastures.
Allowing three major oil companies absolute control of both the production and the transportation of Alaska's oil has given BP, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips a monopoly and kept competing oil companies out of Alaska's oil patch.
The current 45-55 split of the proceeds from this state's oil makes Alaska the lowest taxing major oil producer in the world by a wide margin. The difference between what we get and what we could get if we simply allowed the competitive process to work is about $2 billion per year. That's enough to eliminate all property taxes plus add an additional $1,500 dollars to your dividend check.
If BP, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips move on to greener pastures, other companies will step in and offer us just as much as they offer other countries. What could be better?
Ray Metcalfe is a former Republican legislator from Anchorage and longtime government watchdog. He is chairman of the Republican Moderate Party. Contact him at RayinAK@aol.com.
http://www.alaskareport.com/z45863.htm
Veco executives plead guilty to bribing officials
By RICHARD MAUER and LISA DEMER
Anchorage Daily News
May 7, 2007
Bill Allen, a welder who took the Veco Corp. from a small Kenai oil-field company to a billion-dollar international contractor and a major political force, pleaded guilty Monday to bribing at least four Alaska legislators, including former Senate President Ben Stevens.
In a plea bargain with the U.S.Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, Allen and Rick Smith, Veco’s vice president for community and government affairs, each pleaded guilty to three identical felony charges - bribery and two counts of conspiracy.
Both men accepted responsibility for making more than $400,000 in illegal payments and benefits to public officials or their families. More than half the money went to Stevens in the form of phony “consulting” fees, the government charged.
Stevens, son of U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, has not been charged. He was named in the plea documents as “State Senator B,” but his identity was unmistakable.
In return for special consideration at sentencing, Allen, 70, and Smith, 62, agreed to cooperate in the ongoing federal investigation. The government also promised to not seek charges against Allen’s son Mark, a Veco official, his daughter Tammy Kerrigan, or any other relative.
The federal plea bargain doesn’t bar state prosecutors from seeking additional charges against Allen and Smith. Both men acknowledged violating state campaign finance laws in their plea.
The plea deals were formalized in secret last week and opened in U.S. District Court Monday morning in unannounced back-to-back hearings before Judge John Sedwick, each lasting about 40 minutes.
Allen, in a gray suit, white shirt, red tie and black cowboy boots, sat hunched over the defense table beside his lawyer, former U.S. Attorney Bob Bundy. Allen is hard of hearing and asked Sedwick to repeat several of his questions, but not the questions about how he would plea.
“Guilty,” he repeated three times in a gravely voice to each of the charges.
Taking prosecutors’ recommendations, Sedwick released the men on $10,000 unsecured bond and ordered them to report weekly to federal probation officers. They were allowed to keep their passports and may travel freely pending sentencing, which was held off indefinitely. They could face about 10 years in prison and up to $750,000 in fines, but cooperation could substantially reduce the penalties.
On Friday, federal authorities acting on bribery and conspiracy indictments arrested Rep. Vic Kohring, R-Wasilla, and former Reps. Pete Kott, R-Eagle River, and Bruce Weyhrauch, R-Juneau.
Veco, Allen and Smith showed up in those indictments as “Company A,” “Company CEO” and “Company VP.”
It appeared from those charges that the FBI used electronic surveillance of Veco’s suite in Juneau’s Baranof Hotel to capture incriminating dialogue and images. The indictments spoke of payments by Allen and Smith of several thousand dollars and promises of jobs to the legislators. In return, the legislators agreed last year to vote for the oil production tax favored by the oil industry, the government alleged.
Those indictments referred to an unnamed state senator who allegedly played a role in one part of the conspiracy - a plan by Veco to farm out legal work to Weyhrauch, an attorney, in return for his vote on oil legislation. The description of that unnamed senator was ambiguous - Stevens was one of three senators it could have been.
But one of two unnamed state senators in Monday’s charges against Allen and Smith is clearly Stevens. The Veco “consulting” payments of $243,250 between 2002 and 2006 documented in the charges precisely match the amount Stevens reported on his financial disclosures as consulting income to his firm, Ben Stevens and Associates.
Over the years, Stevens has refused to disclose what work he did for that money or for any of the other consulting jobs he has listed, mostly for fishing industry clients. Former state representative Ray Metcalfe, in complaints to the Alaska Public Offices Commission and to federal authorities, challenged Stevens, saying the payments were thinly disguised bribes.
Nothing came of Metcalfe’s APOC complaints - the state agency said that Stevens adequately described his work. It refused Metcalfe’s demands to look deeper and investigate whether Stevens actually worked for his money.
But in their admissions to federal prosecutors, Allen and Smith appeared to vindicate Metcalfe.
“Although Allen and Veco characterized these payments … as being for consulting services, Allen acknowledges that in actuality the payments … were in exchange for giving advice, lobbying colleagues, and taking official acts in matters before the legislature,” prosecutors said.
Only once in five years did Stevens consult for Veco on a matter not involving his legislative job - a task involving a sunken boat at an unidentified location where Veco wanted to build a dock. Stevens worked less than 20 hours on that project, the prosecutors said.
Allen also promised an executive job to Stevens when he left office. On June 25, 2006, Stevens said he’d take that job, the charges said.
Stevens’s attorney, John Wolfe of Seattle, declined to respond to specifics in the charges, but said his client did nothing wrong.
“Ben Stevens denies engaging in any criminal conduct and maintains that he is innocent,” Wolfe said. “Mr. Stevens is surprised to learn that Bill Allen has pled guilty to various federal crimes and hopes that Mr. Allen is not falsely accusing former and current members of the Alaska Legislature in order to mitigate his admitted criminality.”
One other unnamed state senator, a “state elected official,” and two unnamed Veco executives also show up in the charging documents against Allen and Smith.
The senator in question was not accused of taking illegal payments but was listed as a member of the conspiracy to bribe and extort. That senator attempted to enlist the support for Veco-backed legislation of the “state elected official” through an illegal campaign contribution scheme.
Four state senators match the description of that person, two of whom had their offices searched by the FBI in August: John Cowdery, R-Anchorage, and Donald Olson, D-Nome.
The unnamed senator is likely Cowdery, said Kevin Fitzgerald, his defense attorney. As to what that means for Cowdery, Fitzgerald said he’s investigating the allegations laid out in the case against Allen.
Cowdery is in poor health. He’s been hospitalized in Juneau with pneumonia and a lung infection, Senate majority spokesman Jeff Turner said on Monday.
The “state elected official” was impossible to identify from the information in the charges, although he or she never received Veco’s campaign contributions. It’s possible the official was helping the government in the investigation.
The two unnamed Veco executives were accused of participating in a scheme to use corporate money to reimburse political campaign contributions by Veco officials - crimes under federal and state law. Allen and Smith admitted violating federal tax laws by taking deductions for illegal activity.
Veco executives routinely donate to political campaigns, giving tens of thousands of dollars to candidates in last year’s primary races alone.
Allen, in his plea, admitted reimbursing Rep. Kott for a $1,000 donation Kott made in the governor’s race. The contribution wasn’t further described in the charges, but APOC records show that Kott donated $1,000 to former Gov. Frank Murkowski’s re-election bid on May 31.
Many of the allegations listed in the indictments Friday against Kott, Kohring and Weyhrauch show up in the Allen and Smith admissions as well. But there are also new allegations, such as from May 7, 2006, when Kott was on the floor of the House and his cell phone rang. Allen and Smith were calling to give Kott “instructions on how to vote on the particular pice of legislation,” prosecutors said.
Some time later, Kott called them back with a report on the status of the vote “and the projected outcome,” the charges said.
Veco, meanwhile, is continuing to conduct its business, the company said in a statement.
Allen is listed as an owner of 5 percent of Veco’s stock in the company’s 2006 biennial report to the state. But the company’s attorney in the criminal case, Amy Menard, said he no longer has an ownership interest.
Allen is also the publisher of the Voice of Times, a half-page opinion section in the Anchorage Daily News. It is what remains of the Anchorage Times, which Allen owned for two years before it lost the newspaper war to the Daily News.
Asked whether the Daily News will continue to publish the Voice of the Times, Publisher Mike Sexton said, “We are troubled by recent developments and are reviewing the entire situation.”
As to the status of Allen and Smith at Veco, they still held their titles on Monday, Menard said. But that could change.
“I can tell you that in light of today’s events, we expect the board of directors to be meeting this week and making decisions about appropriate actions,” Menard said.
http://www.adn.com/news/politics/fbi/story/8863305p-8765669c.html