Day: June 26, 2013

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Baby, it’s hot out here.

With these unspoken words, President Barack Obama announced his climate action plan, a piece of political theatre as much as it was a stab at hard policy. In a sun-drenched space at Georgetown University, in typical 33 Celsius Washington summer temperatures, Mr. Obama played the scene for all it was worth.

Mr. Obama in fact opened his speech with these words: “And my first announcement today is that you should all take off your jackets. I’m going to do the same.” A century of presidential press conferences in typical steamy Washington conditions, and this may be the first in which a president took off his jacket and then, with painstakingly deliberate moves with a fat, white handkerchief, mopped his not-that-sweaty brow.

We’re down to our sleeves out here

Presidents don’t sweat, unless they’re under potential indictment, in a TV studio — or trying hard to beat out a propaganda theme on the perils of global warming and the need for dramatic policy action. Oddly, at 33 degrees and only 55% humidity, it wasn’t even that hot a day in the U.S. capitol, about average for June. It just needed to be seen to be really hot to make the president’s steamy policy rhetoric seem plausible, if not credible.

Read more

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Barack Obama downplayed any thoughts that his new climate change action plan is a straight choice between “the health of our children and the health of the economy.”

But it wasn’t just the 33 degree heat that made him wipe his brow continually. This was a defining moment in his presidency — a speech where he made clear he is a firm believer in man-made climate change and intends to match his lofty rhetoric with regulatory action.

What to make of Mr. Obama’s plan from a Canadian perspective? The president was as inscrutable as providence when he talked about whether or not he plans to approve the Keystone pipeline that would carry Canadian crude from the oil sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

Mr. Obama made it clear he intends to take on the coal-generated power station industry, which accounts for 40% of the greenhouse gases produced in the United States. He said there are currently no limits to how much carbon dioxide power plants can emit — “It’s not right, not safe and it needs to stop,” he said. This is the president’s big target: four coal-fired power stations in the U.S. owned by one company generate 60% more CO2 than the entire oil sands.

Read more

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

In announcing his plan to restrain climate change Tuesday, United States President Barack Obama effectively named his price for approving the Keystone XL pipeline: no net increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

The surprise reference to the Canadian project was made in a speech at Washington’s Georgetown University, where he announced long-expected mandatory reductions of greenhouse gas emissions by operators of power plants, the biggest single source in the U.S., while continuing to promote green energy.

“This does not mean we are going to suddenly stop producing fossil fuels,” Mr. Obama added. “But our energy strategy must be about more than just producing more oil. And by the way, it’s certainly got to be more than just building one pipeline.

“I know there has been, for example, a lot of controversy around the proposal to build the pipeline, the Keystone pipeline, that would carry oil from Canadian tar sands down to refineries in the Gulf and the State Department is going through the final stages of evaluating the proposal. That’s how it’s always been done.

“But I do want to be clear. Allowing the Keystone pipeline to be built requires a finding that doing so would be in our nation’s interest. And our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.

Read more

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/

Andrew Nikiforuk is contributing editor to the Tyee, a Canadian online newspaper, and author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent.

For decades, the world has thought of Canada as America’s friendly northern neighbor — a responsible, earnest, if somewhat boring, land of hockey fans and single-payer health care. On the big issues, it has long played the global Boy Scout, reliably providing moral leadership on everything from ozone protection to land-mine eradication to gay rights. The late novelist Douglas Adams once quipped that if the United States often behaved like a belligerent teenage boy, Canada was an intelligent woman in her mid-30s. Basically, Canada has been the United States — not as it is, but as it should be.

But a dark secret lurks in the northern forests. Over the last decade, Canada has not so quietly become an international mining center and a rogue petrostate. It’s no longer America’s better half, but a dystopian vision of the continent’s energy-soaked future.

That’s right: The good neighbor has banked its economy on the cursed elixir of political dysfunction — oil. Flush with visions of becoming a global energy superpower, Canada’s government has taken up with pipeline evangelists, petroleum bullies, and climate change skeptics. Turns out the Boy Scout’s not just hooked on junk crude — he’s become a pusher. And that’s not even the worst of it.

Read more