Briarpatch Magazine » energy

Letter from the Editor: Drinking deeply from a half-empty glass

dave — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:06:45 +0000

“We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just [...]

“We can no longer be sacrificed”: First nations resistance to tar sands development is growing

dave — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:43:43 +0000

**By Lori Waller Briarpatch Magazine June/July 2008**

Fort Chipewyan, a tiny northern Alberta hamlet perched on the shores of Lake Athabasca, is historically notable as the location of the province's oldest European settlement, a trading post opened by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1788.

Mention Fort Chipewyan today, though, and what's likely to come to mind for most Albertans is not the 18th century fur trade, but cancer.

The community's residents, mostly indigenous Cree, Dene (Chipewyan) and Métis, are dying in alarming numbers from a variety of cancers and autoimmune disorders such as lupus and Graves' disease. The situation was first exposed in 2006 when the town's doctor, John O'Connor, went public with his findings that in this small community of 1,000, he had diagnosed at least three cases of a rare bile duct cancer that normally afflicts only one out of 100,000 Canadians.

Before going to the media, O'Connor had been trying for two years to convince the provincial authorities that something was very wrong in Fort Chipewyan. To this day, the province has taken little action, dismissing O'Connor's concerns with a brief statistical report that found the rate of cancer in the hamlet, although 30 per cent higher than the rate for Alberta as a whole, was not statistically significant enough to be considered "elevated." The report was heavily criticized by academics such as ecologist Kevin P. Timoney for its questionable statistical methodology and lack of peer review.

MediaScout: Scarcity hits the headlines

dave — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:16:19 +0000

By Daniel Tencer MediaScout An easily overlooked article, buried in today’s La Presse and the Star, suggests that the human race came within a whisker of extinction seventy thousand years ago, when the homo sapiens population may have dropped to as few as two thousand people. That should give us pause for thought as we look at today’s news cycle, which is, almost without exception, focused on the apparently sudden arrival of serious problems with our supply of two basic necessities: food and energy. CIBC economist Jeff Rubin is all over last night’s broadcasts and today’s papers, announcing that we can expect a serious shock at the pumps: By this summer, Rubin says, we’ll be paying $1.40 per litre of gas, and that will rise to $2.25 per litre over the next several years, bringing the cost of an average tank of gas to around $100. And, in a not unrelated story, Canadians can soon expect to pay considerably more for basic foodstuffs as well, as grain prices (and therefore, by extension, meat prices) soar over the next few years. The two issues come down to a basic problem that is at the heart of all economics, but one that we, in our age of affluence and seemingly endless economic growth, have mostly forgotten about: scarcity. As developing nations become wealthier, the demand for food and energy rises, while the supply remains stagnant. That is what is happening, and the result appears to be a return to an us-or-them, zero-sum mentality. As Rubin told The National last night: “For every new driver who gets on the road in India or China or Russia, someone’s got to get off the road in [our] part of the world.” In all fairness, we could have seen this coming. Economists and academics have been warning us for years that oil supplies are peaking, and will begin to decline, and that increasing demand for food will put pressure on the planet’s ability to sustain the human race. The predictions of social unrest and war arising from the problem of scarcity continue to be ignored, even as food riots break out in poor countries and the US continues to fight a war in the middle of the world’s largest oil pool. What is conspicuously absent from the Big Seven’s coverage of this issue today is any discussion as to how to solve these problems. There are few questions posed on how to increase food production, no discussion of alternative energy sources. Yet it is becoming increasingly obvious that, if we want to maintain our standard of living, then finding alternatives to fossil fuels and reforming the creaky, at times senseless structure of global agricultural trade can no longer be treated as political footballs to be accepted or rejected-they have to be seen, quite literally, as matters of survival. If we fail to rise to the challenge, then nature itself will no doubt provide a draconian solution. As an example, take another lesson from pre-history in today’s news cycle, an item in The National (not available online) and the Star regarding the fate of the king of the dinosaurs, the tyrannosaurus rex. New genetic evidence suggests that, when conditions became unfavourable for the enormous creature, the t-rex evolved into something more manageable-the everyday barnyard chicken, and the ostrich, to be precise. If we fail to address the problems facing us now, nature could reduce us, too, to a species that is less demanding.

Why the price of ‘peak oil’ is famine

dave — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:23:21 +0000

This is the logical outcome of using fossil fuel inputs to grow food, and then turning that food into fuel. As Evans-Pritchard points out, “energy and food have ‘converged’ in price and can increasingly be switched from one use to another,” which is just a polite way of saying that, in a time of scarcity, rich people’s ability to pay for fuel will quickly outstrip poor people’s ability to pay for food.

Why the price of 'peak oil' is famine
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor The London Telegraph February 9, 2008 Vulnerable regions of the world face the risk of famine over the next three years as rising energy costs spill over into a food crunch, according to US investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Eastern Canada Vulnerable to Oil Shortages

admin — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:30:48 +0000

EDMONTON - Canada is currently the most vulnerable country in the industrial world to short-term oil supply crises, and we need to establish strategic petroleum reserves to remedy the problem. This is the key finding of a report released today by Alberta's Parkland Institute in conjunction with the Polaris Institute. Freezing in the Dark: Why Canada Needs Strategic Petroleum Reserves points out the precariousness of current global oil supplies, especially given current tensions in the Middle East, and fact that Canada imports close to 1 million barrels of oil per day to supply the needs of central and eastern provinces.

Why Are You Ducking The Nuclear Question?

dave — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:03:11 +0000

(An open letter to the leaders of the New Democratic, Sask and Liberal Parties of Saskatchewan) There is something surreal about this election, for none of you has had to fundamentally justify your pronuclear policies. Saskatchewan is now the major front-end uranium supplier of the global nuclear system, and this issue demands public scrutiny.

Have we already hit peak oil?

dave — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 15:04:57 +0000

Many readers will already be familiar with the concept of peak oil — the observation that, over time, oil-producing regions reach a maximum rate of extraction, after which oil production begins to enter a terminal decline. North American oil production peaked in 1985; British oil production peaked in 1999. The question of when global oil [...]

“Fuel made from food is a dumb idea”

dave — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:56:45 +0000

The International Food Policy Research Institute has joined the chorus of groups and individuals speaking out against the biofuel bandwagon. Read Stephen Leahy’s Inter Press Service article here.

Agrofuels Will Harm the World’s Poor

admin — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 20:19:54 +0000

There’s a lot of good information surfacing recently on the follies of making fuel out of food. Paul Beingessner, in a recent edition of his weekly syndicated column, does an excellent job of cutting through the hype to lay bare the major problems that the expansion of the biofuels industry creates — especially for the [...]

Easterners could freeze in the dark

admin — Tue, 29 May 2007 20:40:44 +0000

After being cut off by the Conservative chair during his presentation to a parliamentary hearing on continental integration a couple of weeks ago, Gordon Laxer finally got to say his piece in yesterday’s Globe and Mail. Judge for yourself whether Laxer’s remarks were “not relevant.” Easterners could freeze in the dark The U.S. has a national energy [...]