Note: This interview with Paul Martin is not directly about Paul Hawken’s book “Natural Capitalism” (Hawken who also wrote “Blessed Unrest”). http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=3492 .
Former Prime Minister Paul Martin tells us about a concept called natural capital, an idea that would see our water, forests and other resources put on the country’s balance sheets.
The slap-happy beaver, for centuries a centerpiece of Canadian economic growth. Today, many people consider them pests because of the wetlands they help create. But it turns out, those wetlands may have real value.
So once again, the beaver may be a valuable contributor to the economy. We heard from Glynnis Hood, an associate professor of Environmental Science at the University of Alberta’s Augustana Campus and the author of The Beaver Manifesto.
Increasingly, economists are considering putting nature on the balance sheet … a concept called natural capital. On one side of the ledger, ecosystems perform invaluable services like flood control, pollination, carbon sequestration and water purification.
One estimate suggests insect pollination is worth hundreds of billions of dollars globally. The economic value of the Canadian boreal forest has been pegged at 700 billion dollars annually … just by being there. On the other side of the ledger, the world’s top 3,000 companies do 2.2 trillion dollars in environmental damage a year according to one estimate .
Former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin has become a major proponent of bringing natural capital on to the national accounts. And he joined us from his office in Montreal.
“Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.”
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“Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.”
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“The bottom line is down where it belongs – at the bottom. Far above it in importance are the infinite number of events that produce the profit or loss. ”
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“The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.”
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“I believe this movement will prevail. I don’t mean it will defeat, conquer, or create harm to someone else. Quite the opposite. I don’t tender the claim in an oracular sense.
I mean that the thinking that informs the movement’s goals will reign. It will soon suffuse most institutions, but before then, it will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destructive behavior. Some say it is too late, but people never change when they are comfortable. Helen Keller threw aside the gnawing fears of chronic bad news when she declared, “I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time!” In such a time, history is suspended and thus unfinished. It will be the stroke of midnight for the rest of our lives.
My hopefulness about the resilience of human nature is matched by the gravity of our environmental and social condition. If we squander all our attention on what is wrong, we will miss the prize: In the chaos engulfing the world, a hopeful future resides because the past is disintegrating before us. If that is difficult to believe, take a winter off and calculate what it requires to create a single springtime. It’s not too late for the world’s largest institutions and corporations to join in saving the planet, but cooperation must be on the planet’s terms. The “Help Wanted” signs are everywhere. All people and institutions including commerce, governments, schools, churches and cities, need to learn from life and reimagine the world from the bottom up, based on the first principles if justice and ecology. Ecological restoration is extraordinarily simple: You remove whatever prevents the system from healing itself. Social restoration is no different.
We have the heart, knowledge, money and sense to optimize our social and ecological fabric.
It is time for all that is harmful to leave. One million escorts are here to transform the nightmares of empire and the disgrace of war on people and place. We are the transgressors and we are the forgivers.
“We” means all of us, everyone. There can be no green movement unless there is also a black, brown and copper movement. What is more harmful resides within is, the accumulated wounds of the past, the sorrow, shame, deceit, and ignominy shared by every culture, passed down to every person, as surely as DNA, as history of violence and greed. There is not question that the environmental movement is most critical to our survival. Our house is literally burning, and it is only logical that environmentalists expect the social justice movement to get on the environmental bus. But is actually the other way around; the only way we are going to put out this fire is to get on the social justice bus and heal our wounds, because in the end, there is only one bus.
Armed with that growing realization, we can address all that is harmful externally.
What will guide us is a living intelligence that creates miracles every second, carried forth by a movement with no name.”
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“Mother’s milk would be banned by the food safety laws of industrialized nations if it were sold as a packaged good.”
Click on: Pryde newspaper. (The name and date of the publication were trimmed off.)
Note: I have a few family pictures for Fiona.
2 — THE LETHBRIDGE HERALD — Monday, June 19, 1967 (Re: Georgina (Gina) Blondin, mother of Fiona)
/INetCache/IE/SVJEE32R/Linder_June191967.pdf
Centennial Show On Barges
HAY RIVER, N.W.T. (CP)
The Northwest Territories’ counterpart to the Centennial train and caravans pushed into an ice-filled Great Slave Lake early Sunday from this centre 700 miles north of Edmonton . . .
Entertainers include Rick Smith, 20, of Fort Smith, an organist; the Tundra Folk, a folk-singing trio from Yellowknife, and the Centennaires, a mixed Indian, Eskimo and white rock ‘n’ roll group. They will put on shows and concerts in communities where the flotilla stops.
Indian Princess Georgina Blondin, 19, smashed a bottle of champagne against the steel side of Radium 100 at the official launching ceremonies Saturday. Among those at the launching was Northern Development Minister Laing, who, in a brief address, told the crowd they are not looking at history, but making it.
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https://bahai-library.com/boyd_memoirs&chapter=2
We heard somehow that the people who organize the Miss Canada Beauty Pageant were anxious to have a candidate from the Northwest Territories. So we agreed to organize a Miss NWT Pageant.
Eileen senior been trained in Toronto at the Walter Thornton Modeling School and provided guidance and advice for our candidates on posture, walking and makeup. About twenty young ladies participated and some of them looked quite stunning. Apart from appearance and presence the panel of White, Indian and Eskimo judges interviewed all candidates and asked questions about their knowledge of their culture, traditions and stories. A young woman named Georgina Blondin, a Dogrib Indian
(Sandra: ? Gina was also identified as from Slavey First Nation. Her cousin, Ethyl Blondin, born in 1951, an MP, was born in Tulita, NWT, which is “Sahtu Dene (75.2%) who speak English and North Slavey”. It is written of her Father After moving to Behchoko, Blondin was eventually registered as a Dogrib beneficiary although he was born near Deline. Deline’s people (Wikipedia) are SahtuDene people speaking North Slavey)
was finally selected and first runner up was Addie Tobac, a Chippewayen, who was staying with us at the time. Addie, a beautiful woman, who was deaf, felt bitter that she was not chosen to win. Addie was writing a book and accepted our hospitality but according to Rosemary, her resentment of white people led her to include us in her hostility. A lot of Northern kids were angry and confused because of their life experiences.
Georgina went on to the Miss Canada Pageant in Montreal, a big adventure for a Northern girl. She finished second in all of Canada. Bill Wuttannee was at that pageant and afterwards told us that the buckskin costume which she wore did not look very fetching, and that in his opinion she could have won. Georgina was awarded many prizes and had to stand in for Miss Canada several times during that year. This gave her a few trips to major Canadian cities. This experience really helped her confidence and career and she finally held very responsible positions with the Territorial Government.
(Sandra speaking: I boarded with Gina and Duncan in 1971, at which time Gina worked for Gemini North, a company put together by Pat Carney.)
After we left the North, Georgina became a Bahá’í, and was a valued member of the Yellowknife community. Tragically she died at a very early age.
(Sandra: Gina was born in 1947; She passed away in 1990, I believe of pancreatic cancer.)
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Obituary: Duncan Pryde
Sarah Anderson
Tuesday, 30 December 1997
Duncan Pryde, trapper, explorer, writer: born 8 June 1937; twice married (one daughter); died 15 November 1997.
Duncan Pryde, who probably knew the Arctic better than any white man of his generation, was in the middle of the massive task of compiling a dictionary of the 26 dialects of the Inuit (or Eskimo) language when he died from cancer.
He was one of five brothers and one sister, who were brought up in various orphanages in Scotland. At the age of 15 he joined the merchant navy, where he learned to be extremely tough and covered himself with lurid tattoos. Forced to resign due to an eye injury, he went to work in a Singer sewing machine factory, and was feeling bored when, aged 18 in 1955, he spotted an advertisement in the Glasgow Sunday Post looking for fur traders to go to the far north of Canada for the Hudson’s Bay Company.
He spent three years working for the company in northern Manitoba and Ontario, where he learned to speak Cree, but found the life too cushy and asked for a transfer to the Arctic. When he arrived, he was determined to learn to speak Eskimo, and was told by his boss “to learn the Eskimo way, so you will know how they feel about things”.
The only dictionary he had access to was a little red book compiled by a Catholic missionary; it was so full of errors that he determined to write his own. He built up word lists and after a few weeks could communicate on a basic level, but reckoned it took him three or four years to become fluent in the language; for example there are over 25 different words for snow, because in a snow environment it is vital to be able to distinguish between the different types.
From Baker Lake he was transferred to the remote Spence Bay, before going to the even more isolated Perry River. Here he had to deal with drunkenness, laziness and murderers. He was much respected and soon adopted the Eskimo way of life, feeling part of one big family; a northern admirer wrote: “Duncan thinks and measures and becomes part of his environment just like an Eskimo.” He became involved in wife-exchange and had several children, writing that he could “always find a girl to sleep with. The problem is which one.” His obsessive womanising was the one black mark held against him: “He liked girls too much.”
He learned to trap, put together a dog-team and travel with dogs, and was taught to harpoon seal and hunt caribou in the ancient Eskimo way. He also saw shamanism and witchcraft at first hand. On various hunting expeditions he was attacked by a polar bear and even more frighteningly was once charged by a grizzly, said to be 10 times more dangerous than a polar bear. He never felt lonely in the Arctic, but equally never lost his love of the bright lights.
After 11 years with the company, Pryde left to work for the Council of the Northwest Territories, a job which involved travelling to all the settlements in the western Arctic by either sled or canoe. It also meant a much-reduced salary; realising he could not live on it, Pryde decided to live off the land with the Eskimos, as a trapper, a pattern of life he adapted to quickly. He was upset by the way the welfare system was run, feeling that it took away any work incentive.
In 1969 he married Georgina Blondin, the Centennial Indian Princess of the Northwest Territories, they had one daughter, Fiona, and lived in Yellowknife where they started a development business. Cliff Michelmore presented a television programme about Pryde in 1970 and Nunaga (“my land, my country”), a book about his life in the Arctic was published in 1972 and reprinted by Eland in 1985; whether or not he knew about the reprint will remain a mystery, as the publisher was unable to trace him. Ed Ogle, who wrote a long article about Pryde for Time magazine and helped with the book, said that many of his sexual exploits had to be cut as the original publisher was afraid that the book was “too sexy”.
In 1975 he resigned from the council and went to the Inupiat University of the Arctic, where he was commissioned to write his dictionary. He had to leave Alaska while his residency status was resolved and lived for a while with his brother Jack in London; he had so adjusted to life in the Arctic that he ate only when hungry, seeming to have lost all perspective of time.
While away he met his second wife, Dawn, and never returned to the Arctic. Instead, Duncan Pryde ended up quietly running a newsagent’s shop in the Isle of Wight, working on his dictionary between customers. He completely lost touch with his British family who tried to trace him, believing he was in Germany and never for a moment suspecting that he was living openly with a shop bearing his name, Pryde of Cowes, in the Isle of Wight.
Duncan Pryde, a fun-loving, sensual, and unreliable linguistic genius, died Nov. 15, 1997 at his last home, on the Isle of Wight. It�s unlikely the Arctic will ever again see anyone quite like him.
Duncan Pryde was a fur-trader, polyglot, legislator, writer and story-teller. He was also a legendary carouser and hard-drinking, fun-loving, unreliable rascal. For me, he was also a friend.
Pryde was born in Scotland in 1937 and raised in orphanages. In 1955 he answered a newspaper advertisement placed by the Hudson’s Bay Company: “Fur traders wanted for the far north.”
The ad asked for single, ambitious, self-reliant young men, and promised a life of isolation, hardship and adventure, all for $135 per month. Pryde was accepted and spent his first three years in Canada in northern Ontario and Manitoba. In 1958, he moved to the Arctic, serving first at Baker Lake. From there he was posted to more and more isolated locations: Spence Bay, then Perry River in 1961, and finally Bathurst Inlet in 1965.
Everywhere he lived, Pryde immersed himself in the language of the Inuit. His grasp of Inuit dialects was phenomenal, and his life’s ambition was to compile the definitive dictionary of the Inuit language as spoken in the Central Arctic.
In 1966, Pryde was elected to the Territorial Council of the Northwest Territories, the body that evolved into the present-day Legislative Assembly, for a one-year term. The next year he was re-elected for three more years. Audaciously , this man, who allegedly had a number of children in the Kitikmeot region through numerous relationships, campaigned on a slogan: “Every family should have a little Pryde in the Arctic.”
Pryde devoted his attention to those issues most important to the Inuit, hunting and game laws. He was the first to propose the sports-hunting of polar bears as a way of bringing extra dollars into Inuit communities. Charismatic and self-promoting, he was also the first person from the Canadian north to have his picture on the cover of Time magazine.
In 1969, Pryde married Gina Blondin, a Dene woman, in Yellowknife. They had one daughter, Fiona. Two years later, Duncan’s fame transcended the North and Canada when he published his autobiography, Nunaga – My Land, My Country.
It was an accurate portrayal of the life of a trader at the end of the era when Arctic posts were truly isolated. Perhaps it was too accurate. Extremely controversial, it unfortunately turned Pryde’s fame into notoriety in the North for his frank recounting of his sexual exploits. A best-seller, the book was translated into a number of languages.
Pryde’s marriage ended a few years later, and he left hastily for Alaska. There he taught Inuit languages at the fledgling Inupiat University in Point Barrow. When he ran afoul of the administration and was fired from his teaching post, he stayed on as janitor so he could remain in the academic environment. A few years later he suddenly left Alaska. And disappeared.
John MacDonald of Igloolik, who had first met Pryde in Baker Lake in 1959, eventually tracked him down. He was living in Cowes on the Isle of Wight, had a skipper’s ticket as a yachtsman, and had remarried. The man who had billed himself as “the Pryde of the Arctic” now ran a small news-agency called “Pryde of Cowes.” Appropriately, he lived at 6 Arctic Road.
With only a sixth-grade education, Duncan Pryde was fascinated by language. In addition to many dialects of the Inuit language, Cree, and some Slavey and Dogrib, Pryde spoke Gaelic, Italian and German, and a smattering of a number of other languages.
Before leaving the North, he had started often on his life-long ambition, the writing of a definitive Inuktitut dictionary, but Pryde was a poor manager of money and always the necessity to make a living – not to mention the temptations of women and booze – interfered. Indeed, “Duncan’s A’s” became a buzz-word in Canadian Inuktitut studies for, despite many starts, he had never gotten past the letter “A.”
Around 1994, Pryde was stricken with cancer. Chemotherapy put it into remission, but he was no longer as robust as before. Unable to work, Pryde returned to his dream, the compilation of his dictionary. Arctic College provided financial support for the first volume – of course it was the letter “A.” When completed in early 1997, it ran in excess of 280 pages.
Pryde was hard at work on the dictionary when his cancer returned and he suffered a stroke. Irreverent and feisty to the end, Pryde complained to his doctors that he needed four more years to complete his work. But it was not to be. He died on November 15, 1997 at the age of 60.
At the end of Nunaga, Pryde remarked: “There will never be a job such as the one which enticed me as a dreamy-eyed young man all the way from Scotland with romantic notions in my otherwise empty head. There will never be another fur trader in the old tradition, just as there will never again be an Eskimo in the old image.”
One might add that there will probably never be another linguist to match Duncan Pryde in the Canadian Arctic. Indeed John Sperry, former Bishop of the Arctic and an accomplished linguist himself, remarked to me, “We will not see his like again. I always felt humbled by his knowledge.”
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.
George Blondin: His family, Native tradition and caring for others mattered most to Blondin
Deceased: Oct. 12. 2008
By Dianne Meili
Dene author George Blondin was one of few Aboriginal people who spoke openly about medicine power because he felt young people should know where they came from.
The prolific writer passed away at the advanced age of 87 on Oct. 12 after suffering a stroke this year in his Northwest Territories home.
Blondin was candid about the past, going so far as to reveal his own medicine power story in his first book When the World was New. At five years old he was sent to get water early in the morning when an “old man with long white hair” rose from the lake and startled him. Dropping his pail, he raced back to the family tent and his mother’s lap.
Since he had not naturally embraced the spirit, his parents resigned themselves to the fact he wouldn’t be a medicine man and stopped trying to help him get power. Blondin writes that he should have welcomed the power-bringer, but instead, resigned himself to working hard in a mundane life like most people.
“My father wasn’t trying to be disrespectful when he spoke of these things,” said Blondin’s son, Ted, who explained his father grew up in times extremely different from today. Even in 1923, when he was born in the Great Bear Lake region of the Northwest Territories, people relied on medicine power – not money. Having medicine power meant having a successful life – perhaps being a good hunter or healer, or knowing about events before they happened.
“My father wrote about these things because they are important to being Dene,” said Ted, and he wanted young people to realize this part of themselves. “Medicine power is a phenomenon that is hard to understand and so it is not spoken of openly. But my father meant only to preserve this knowledge and he worked hard to explain it. He knew young people weren’t sitting around the fire listening and talking to the old people so much anymore, and so he wrote down stories so they could read them.”
Blondin preserved countless stories of life before contact in minute detail, indicating how precise his memory was right up until his passing.
“A lot of his stories describe how people could interact with animals, and how the spirit of a man could change into a caribou, for example. This man would then learn of caribou nature – how they reacted to certain things, how they moved on the land and where they liked to stay. Then, back in his human spirit, he would have a good idea of where to hunt for them,” Ted explained.
Due to mutual compliance, good hunters never failed to perform certain rituals for animals when they died so they could be reborn, thanking them for sacrificing their lives so humans could live.
Interpretation of the way the world works has been lost, Blondin believed, and so he published three books conveying stories with spiritual themes. The public is receptive to them, and his latest title, Trail of the Spirit; Mysteries of Dene Medicine Power Revealed, published in the fall of 2006, sits on publisher NeWest Press’s bestseller list.
“I found more of my father’s papers in a briefcase when I cleaned out his apartment,” said Ted, explaining his father was an incessant writer who had a fourth book in the works and enough material for a fifth. Many of his stories were also printed in a long-running weekly column in Yellowknife’s News/North.
“My father might be washing the dishes and thinking about something when he’d get the urge to write it down,” said Ted. “One time he left the water running and sat at the table scribbling away. When the water wet his feet, he just lifted them up and kept writing, that’s how focused he was.
“And he had a story for everything. At a bookfest in Whitehorse, he was interacting with his audience when someone asked him what earthly good were mosquitoes. Not missing a beat, he was able to launch into a story about a hunter sitting on top of a hill, near a lake, on a very warm day, looking to hunt a moose to bring meat to his family. Pretty soon, the swarms of mosquitoes drove the poor moose into the lake’s water and the hunter made his kill there. He was able to illustrate to the crowd how the mosquito is a hunter’s best friend.”
For his storytelling efforts, Blondin received the Ross Charles award in 1990 for Native journalism and was inducted as a member of the Order of Canada in 2003.
Keenly interested in the future as well as the past, Blondin attended political meetings dealing with issues from land protection to jobs in the Northwest Territories.
“He was set to attend an economic conference just before he died,” explained Ted. “He really cared about his people and he made sure all of his children were educated so we could go on to help people.”
But Blondin’s first love was the land, and he abandoned hunting and trapping only when he lost his first son to pneumonia in 1958. After that, he moved to Yellowknife to be closer to the hospital and schools for his other children. He holds no malice over the fact he was given underground jobs at Giant Mine that no one else wanted to do, because he was Aboriginal he surmised, and simply moved back to Deline (Fort Franklin) to resume hunting and trapping as soon as his children finished school. It didn’t take long for him to be elected chief of the Deline First Nation in 1984, and to serve as Dene Nation vice president later.
At the time of his death Blondin was living independently in Behchoko (Rae-Edzo) just outside of Yellowknife, though residential management didn’t want him cooking for himself.
“I took him a fresh whitefish and when I got to his unit, no one was there. Except there was this pot smoking away on the stove,” Ted recounted. “When I saw dad later, he laughed and said he had heard about a drum dance in the community – then just grabbed his coat and left.”
That was just like dad, getting all excited about a cultural event and forgetting about everything else, Ted said.
Predeceased by his wife Julia, sons Walter and John, and daughter Georgina, Blondin is survived by his children as well as many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He was laid to rest in Yellowknife on Oct. 15, 2008.
“Successful social movements are emergent, evolving, radically self-organizing, and involve the dedicated efforts of many people, each finding the role that best uses his or her gifts and passions.”
Rifkin’s most recent books: The Empathic Civilization and The Third Industrial Revolution.
The interview makes one painfully aware of the lack of enlightened political leadership in Canada. The back-up plan: we have to become informed ourselves. Drive the change from the bottom-up, if it’s not coming from the top-down.
The Third Industrial Revolution — an interview with Jeremy Rifkin
October 29, 2011
What was the real cause of the Great Recession? More importantly, in a country accustomed to robust rebounds from burst bubbles, why is our economy stuck in neutral?
In his latest book, the Third Industrial Revolution, economist and author Jeremy Rifkin argues that the crash of the US housing market was not the proximate cause of the Great Recession, but was instead an aftershock of crude oil hitting a price of $147 per barrel oil in July 2008 – 60 days prior to the crash of the financial markets.
Mr. Rifkin makes a compelling case that our economy reached the end of the second industrial revolution in the 1980’s, and has been largely sustained by debt and the consumption of savings ever since. He argues that the kind of growth witnessed after the first and second industrial revolutions will be impossible to achieve without a third energy-communications revolution – one that leverages Internet-esque smart grids to transition from a centralized “elite” energy paradigm to a highly granular, lateral model. He contends that, as was the case with the first two industrial revolutions, the third revolution will be the foundation of the next great wave of economic growth.
Our energy infrastructure may not be the only thing that requires a rethink. In his book, Mr. Rifkin takes on Adam Smith, challenging classical economic theory with the contention that it does not take thermodynamics into account. the Third Industrial Revolution presents economic theory that incorporates entropy and the relationship between commerce and the planet.
Mr. Rifkin is the principle architect of the European Union’s Third Industrial Revolution long-term economic sustainability plan to address the triple challenge of the global economic crisis, energy security, and climate change. the Third Industrial Revolution was formally endorsed by the European Parliament in 2007 and is now being implemented by various agencies within the European Commission as well as in the 27 member-states. He has served as an advisor to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, Prime Minister Jose Socrates of Portugal, and Prime Minister Janez Janša of Slovenia, during their respective European Council Presidencies, on issues related to the economy, climate change, and energy security.
Mr. Rifkin is president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and the author of seventeen bestselling books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. He has been a senior lecturer at the Wharton School’s Executive Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania since 1994, where he instructs CEOs and senior management on transitioning their business operations into sustainable Third Industrial Revolution economies.
Todd: so if we can, can we start by framing the discussion with the cause of the Great Recession. and I understand that your contention is that the Wall Street crash was not the proximate cause of the recession but was actually an aftershock of the real economic earthquake, which was $147 barrel oi
Jeremy: yes. I spend the whole first chapter on the book on it because I’m at real odds with my colleagues as to what’s going on here. I think what happened is that when oil hit $147 a barrel back in July of 2008, purchasing power plummeted all over the world and the economy totally shut down in July – completely shut down.
And the reason, of course, is that everything’s made out of fossil fuels or run by them – pesticides, construction materials, pharmaceutical products, synthetic fiber, power, transportation – everything.
So what happened is, in late 2007, crude oil started going over $75 a barrel. what we saw is all the prices started going up across the supply chain. and then at $120 a barrel you remember we had food riots in 22 countries because 40 percent of the human race is living on $2.00 a day or less. Wheat, rye, barley and rice were doubling and tripling. and you remember, the UNFAO put out a report saying “We have an alert. We’ve got a billion people who could be in big trouble here.”
so what happened is speculators came in to game the market around $100 a barrel. but the reason this is happening, this is peak globalization – at least in the business community. I chair a group of 120 global companies that are involved in this. we now know the outer limits of how far we can globalize this economy based on fossil fuel energies, the technologies that go with them, and the infrastructure. It’s about $150 a barrel, and it’ll shut down every time.
This is an end game. and the reason it’s happening is we’ve hit peak oil per capita, and now peak oil production – both. Peak oil per capita no one talks about much.
Global peak oil production per capita is not well known. it happened in 1979, it’s not controversial. BP did the original study, and it’s been confirmed by everybody else since. If we had distributed all the crude oil we had at that point to everyone alive in the planet, that’s the most each person could have. We’ve found more oil since then but population rose quicker.
So if you distributed all the crude oil we have now to 6.8 billion people, there’s enough to go around. but then add to this – we hit global peak oil production as well. That’s when half the crude oil was used up by the geological bell curve. When half your crude oil is used up, you can’t afford it. Prices aren’t affordable. and that’s been pretty controversial about global peak oil when it would hit. the optimists’ spot maybe mid-2020’s to 30s, the pessimists’ models show 2010 to 2020.
Well, the IEA dropped the bombshell last December. That’s the International Energy Agency, and they’re the authoritative body for the oil industry and the energy industry. They said “It looks like we now peaked in 2006 at 70 million barrels a day. and we’re going to plan for around 69 billion barrels of crude oil for the next 20 years, but it’ll cost $7 trillion to get the remaining oil out.
so what happened is this. When China and India made a bid to drag a third of the human race into the game in the last 10 years, at an 8, 10, 12 percent growth rate, the actual aggregate demand for oil has just shot through the roof – and then all the other prices went up.
So what I’m suggesting is every time we try to regrow the global economy at the same rate we were growing before July 2008, oil prices go up – all the other prices made out of crude oil go up – purchasing power goes down – we collapse.
That’s what’s happening right now today. the economy was dead flat in 2009, so oil was $30 a barrel. Nobody was using it. As soon as we started to try to restart the engine, to replenish it towards 2010, oil shot to $100 a barrel for crude. Brent crude. That’s how we measure – not Texas crude.
And now what’s happened is all the other prices are going up, and purchasing power is going down, and we’re headed toward a second collapse right now.
So these are wild gyration cycles that I believe are four-year intervals, or less. Every time we try to restart the engine, this process will happen and it’ll collapse within four-year cycles. It’s really a dangerous end game.
We can go to the dirtier fuels like tar sand, heavy oil and coal, but they’re more expensive and they’re dirtier – which gets to the second problem, which is climate change. right now the real problem is we’re now in it so it’s affecting agricultural yields dramatically, and it’s only 2011. and, we’re having infrastructure affected by extreme climate change.
And, obviously, that’s the elephant of the world because it is a crisis for the species – not a crisis for the civilization.
So the question is, what do we do about it? I advised the European Union. it began with discussions in 2002, and we said, look – what we now is a compelling vision, a deliverable game plan, that can be implemented within 40 years, that can move as quickly in a developing world as a developed world, and that will get us post-carbon. and we asked the question, “How did the great economic revolutions in history occur?” Because we wanted to get a scenario, a roadmap. In at least my read – I teach at Wharton – this is my read on how history occurs – at least with our corporate programs.
I think the big changes in history occur when new energy regimes emerge. They make possible more complex civilization because the new energy flows can bring more people together, can integrate bigger commercial and social units, etc. but when that happens, you have to have a communication revolution at the same time that’s agile enough to manage the complexity, the pace, the flow and the reach of the new energies. and when those two come together, communication and energy, those are the real paradigm shifts.
So, for example, in the 19th century, print technology became really cheap, when we went from manual to speed printing – linotype and rotary. so we could mass-produce print very quickly, cheaply, and lower the transaction costs.
Then we introduced public schools in the 19th century – Europe and America, and we created a print-literate work force with those communication skills. Print literacy demands the complexities of a centralized coal, steam-driven, rail industrial revolution. If they were illiterate, the work force, we couldn’t have done it.
The 20th century had another convergence of communication/energy for the second industrial revolution, centralized electricity, telegraph transitioned to the telephone, and then later radio/television became the communication tools to manage the complexities of an oil, auto, and suburban roll out, and a mass consumer culture.
Now, obviously, those energies are sun setting – coal, oil, gas, uranium– the prices have gone through the roof. the technologies are old, like the internal combustion engine, and the whole infrastructure is based on carbon. we are beginning to see the convergence of communication and energy in the European Union – we’re building for it, we’re not just seeing it. we had a powerful communication revolution with the Internet in the last 20 years. and what’s so interesting about this communication, from the point of view of a new third industrial revolution is it’s distributed/collaborative by nature, and it’s scales laterally. where as centralized electricity communication scales vertically top-down.
So what we’re seeing is the Internet, and what we’re moving toward is the Internet communication technology which is distributed, collaborative, and lateral in its management, is beginning to converge in the last 24 to 36 months Europe, and especially in Germany, which is the engine, to create a new nervous system for a new infrastructure, for a third industrial revolution roll out which will create millions of jobs, thousands of new business models, and hopefully get us post-carbon if we make it in time.
So we’ve committed in the EU to a five-pillar infrastructure for this technology revolution.
These five pillars I’m going to lay out are a mega technology. They’re a platform. Separately, they’re just components. together, their synergies create a completely new mega technology platform. so, we’ve committed to five-pillar infrastructure. First of all, we recognize that renewable energies are distributed. They’re found everywhere.
So, if you have Internet communication technology to manage them, you have a very, very interesting lateral shift in the economy. so, we committed to the following five pillars:
Pillar one – 20 percent renewable energy by 2020. That’s a mandate across Europe – not a suggestion – every country has to do it.
Pillar two – how do we collect the energies? our first thought, which now kind of is almost amusingly embarrassing, but our first thought was “Well, that’s interesting. go where all the sun is.” the Mediterranean – grab it. Spain, Italy, Greece – put a high voltage line in and ship it. the Irish have the wind, and the Norwegians have the hydro – centralize it and ship it in a high voltage line.
And then we began to realize we were using 20th century thinking, based on fossil fuels, which are found in a few central places. none of us oppose large concentration solar, wind, geothermal, and some hydro. we think they’re pretty essential for the transition. but we realize they’re a small part, a very small part, of a third industrial revolution.
And we began to ask a question a couple years ago that now seems naively simple. we said, “Look, if renewable energies are distributed and they’re found in some proportion everywhere in the world – the sun, the wind, the heat under the ground, garbage that can be decomposed back into energy through bio mass converters, ocean tides and waves, rural waste – they’re found in every square inch in some proportion. Why in heaven’s name do we think of collecting them in only a few central points – 20th century thinking. This got us to pillar two. Big pillar – buildings.
Number one use of energy: buildings, number one cause of climate change: buildings – number two, parenthetically, of course, is beef production and consumption – related animal husbandry. Number three is transport. I always mention two because no one seems to want to talk about two.
We got 191 million buildings in EU – all the offices, factories. the goal is to convert every single building, 191 million buildings, if possible, to green power plants. think mainframe computer, think Steve Jobs, and everyone at a desktop computer. think mainframe, centralized power plants – we’re now converting every building so people have their own power plants with solar on the roof, wind off the side wall, geothermal heat under the ground, bio digesters to convert garbage, tap the energy, etc.
Todd: and this is not just buildings, right? it could be distributed even further into people’s homes.
Jeremy: yes – homes, offices, buildings, infrastructure, every place where there’s a human infrastructure artifact, we can collect.
That’s happening in a very major way now across Europe. Germany is doing it all over the place, buildings, offices, homes. now, the new buildings are positive power. They actually generate enough energy for their own needs and can send surplus back to the grid. This is how we create millions of jobs in Europe, thousands of businesses to convert the entire infrastructure. we had to put in thermodynamic efficiencies and retrofit and convert them to power plants. That’s huge amounts of jobs, all local, over 40 years. and the boost starts immediately, day one, as soon as you begin investing into it.
Germany created a quarter of a million jobs in three years. and in the first month of these conversions, as many jobs in the renewable energy converting as the entire rest of the energy could buy, even if only 10 percent of the energy. It’s really a lot of jobs.
Pillar three is the toughest one – storage, because the sun isn’t always shining, and the wind isn’t always blowing when you need the electricity. and water tables can be down for hydro electricity with a drought or a climate change. They’re Internet energies, so we have to put in storage or we lose three out of four kilowatts. and that’s what’s happening in places where there’s no storage is that the electricity is not when you need it.
So the EU is committed to every kind of storage – water pumping, batteries, capacitors, flow batteries, everything. but, we are putting most of the money into hydrogen.
Todd: so the idea is that you use surplus energy to crack water into hydrogen, store it, and burn it for energy when the sun’s not shining?
Jeremy: you got it. you can burn it for energy or you can simply convert it back to electricity when you need it. the thermodynamic is infinitesimally small compared to fossil fuels and uranium.
Todd: and the byproduct is water.
Jeremy: and the byproduct’s water. and also, the reason hydrogen’s good is it can take any load. It’s modular. you can do little homes and huge factories, and whole utility systems. you can’t do that with batteries and the others. Water pumping’s probably the best of the others.
So we’ve committed 8 billion Euros to a public/private roll out of hydrogen to store the energies.
Pillar four is where the Internet converges with the new renewable energies. We’re taking off-the-shelf Internet technology and we’re including new apps every day that allow us to set up an energy Internet across Europe. Germany is testing six sites around the country. so that when millions of buildings are collecting their green electricity on site with the sun, the wind, the heat, the garbage, etc., they store it as hydrogen – like you store media and digital.
And if you don’t need some of that you convert it back to electricity, and if you don’t need it at a given moment, you can program your building – your own private power plant – to share it and send it across an energy Internet across Europe just like we create our own information – store it digitally – share it online. Same stuff.
Pillar five is electric plug-in transport. Electric vehicles out this year, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in mass production by Daimler, GM, Toyota – 2014. This is all in production. This is going to happen. so you’ll be able to plug in your vehicles anywhere in the infrastructure to get green electricity. and then anywhere you travel there are power charging units at every street corner, every parking meter. so you can plug back in and get green electricity. Or, if the price is right, your computer in your car will say “Sell.” You’re going to make a little money while your car’s sitting here.
The key here is these five pillars have to go together to form synergies that create the new technology platform and all the applications that come from it. If they stand alone, if they’re piloted, if one pillar gets ahead of the other – the whole thing collapses. That’s the lesson we’re learning in Europe – and that’s the lesson Obama didn’t learn.
For example, a memo was leaked purposely by the European Commission a few months ago saying, “Uh, oh. we need a trillion Euros for the energy Internet now within the next ten years.” Why? we put in feed-in tariffs across Europe, meaning you raise the electricity price slightly for the consumer. you don’t even notice it on the bill. but the funds that are available then allow early adopters to put these power plants on their buildings.
And then they get premiums for sending their electricities back if it’s green. They get better than what you get on the grid. And so thousands of places now are doing this, and are trying to send their energy, electricity, back to the grid. The grid is 60 years old, servo-mechanical – not digitized. It’s one direction, uni-directional and it’s leaking – it leaks 20 percent of the electricity.
Jeremy: so it can’t take the energy and we’re losing it. Then we realized – holy mackerel! We’ve got some regions because of the feed-in tariffs that are 20, 30, 40, up to 70 percent green electricities – seventy percent! Well, guess what? Because we don’t have storage yet for hydrogen, we’re just losing three out of four kilowatts – which is a bad investment wind blowing at the wrong time, the sun not there when you need it, etc.
So we have to incentivize pillar three – hydrogen storage. Then we realized pillar two wasn’t being incentivized – buildings for the little guys – the homeowners and the small businesses. Big companies in our group can put the big solar wind powers together, but how does someone afford to put a 30,000-Euro photovoltaic power plant on their roof?
Finally, Germany and Italy now – the banks have come together, and they’re doing green loans – very low interest rate green loans. you can get a power plant on your home in Italy, which is a pretty bureaucratic country; 60 days from the time you sign your loan. and the reason the banks are willing to do this now is they look at your electricity bill. They can see exactly month to month how much you’re going to save, based on the power plant on your roof, and when you’ll pay it back. and you pay as you save. and why aren’t we doing that? This is like a win.
And then (pillar) five, we realized with Daimler – Daimler and GM are in my group. We’re nervous because if we don’t have the other four pillars phasing in – the electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles – truck, busses, and cars, will be all orphaned. nowhere to go. so, this is where Obama – and I say this respectfully because I think he really wanted a green economy – he didn’t have a narrative. When he introduces his great economy, it’s a laundry list – a policy wonk laundry list of items. and they put billions into individual stand-alone items – batteries, solar factories, cars.
But he didn’t connect the dots and realize that a green economy is not just independent, stand-alone projects. It’s the infrastructure that creates industrial revolutions, and when you put the infrastructure together, it’s the synergies between, in this case, these five pillars that create the millions of jobs and thousands of new businesses, and a multiplier effect with a platform that’ll give you 75 years in it. He didn’t do it. He wasted a lot of money and the American public is now saying, “Where’s the pay off? where are the jobs?”
You could turn it around, but they’re not doing it at this point.
Todd: I’m curious about the relationship between the market and politics as they pertain to the third industrial revolution. here in the US we have large, entrenched energy companies that don’t seem to be particularly motivated to change the status quo. and it seems that if things are left up to natural market forces, nothing changes until the market completely collapses and then the third revolution rises out of the rubble. and so what do you think about that and what’s the role of politics in making the third revolution happen?
Jeremy: the fact is that in every communication-energy revolution, infrastructure’s a public/private deal. This whole libertarian myth that the marketplace has created America’s greatness – it never has in any country. In the first industrial revolution, the government seeded the public land. the government financed the first telegraph. the government, at the local and state local level put in the utilities and subsidized the electric coops in the agricultural areas. the government put in the FHA so people would have low interest mortgages so they could build suburbs on the interstates. the government created the interstate highway system. it goes on and on.
But this kind of myth is almost amusingly alarming about America. at least in Europe and other countries they understand it’s always a public/private venture. the infrastructure is a public good. it requires everybody ponying up a little bit.
Todd: please correct me if my facts are wrong here, but my recollection is that if we adjust it for inflation, it’s something like $30 trillion was invested in the great depression WPA and in war spending, and then later with the Eisenhower administration on public highways.
Jeremy: huge. yes.
Todd: and it seems, to a large extent, we’ve been coasting off of that public investment ever since.
Jeremy: Well, that’s why when you read chapter one you’ll see what I’m saying is how the financial crisis was connected to the oil crisis. what happened is that we put in the second industrial revolution – a juvenile infrastructure between 1900 and 1929. the oil pipe lines, the autos, centralized electricity. we built out the first highways and suburban tracks, etc. Then we had a hiatus, a depression and war. and then we put in the interstates – the biggest public-works project in history in the ‘50s. that allowed us to build out a massive suburban roll out of buildings and homes, which got FHA loans. and then we changed commercial incentives that allow depreciation for commercial building so big businesses could set up shopping malls, strip malls, fast food culture, traveling, tourism, etc.
That all peaked in the ‘80s. When we finished the interstates, the suburbs across the exits were finished. but what happens is we overbuilt, and we went in a huge housing recession in the late ‘80s in the South and the West because we overbuilt the shopping malls and the suburban construction. that was the end of the line with the interstate highways.
The question is – how did we get out of that recession in ’91? we didn’t have a third industrial in place with the same multiplier effect as the second industrial revolution. the IT and Internet revolution was only part of the equation – the communication part. by itself, communication doesn’t give you a multiplier effect for a new nervous system.
so in lieu of that, the way we got out of the recession in ’91 is by dipping into family savings that we amassed during the height of the second industrial revolution from the ‘50s through the ‘80s. we built globalization based on American savings from the second industrial revolution because we had peaked in terms of our industrial infrastructure in the late ‘80s. Wages started to go slightly down and remain stagnant from there on.
So the way we grew the economy is we went from a family savings rate of nine percent in 1990 to zero in 2005. Then we maxed out on consumer credit cards, and then we went to the sub-prime mortgage to keep it going, when you can get a house with no money down – start paying your interest ten years later. but in the meantime, your house appreciates in value on the positive scheme – you use it as an ATM machine and refinance your mortgage and then that all collapsed.
But the point is, we built all of globalization in the last 20 years on American purchasing power. but that was bought not by new productivity and massive new economic value, but by using up the entire largess, the savings that we amassed from the ‘50s and the ‘80s as we matured the second industrial revolution.
So what happened is when the real economy finally collapsed in July 2008, you couldn’t keep the fictional economy going. Because it was all based – that debt, that credit – on living off the largess and finally we used up the savings of the second industrial revolution. And if I’m wrong, I’ve asked my colleagues where I’ve got this wrong.
Todd: and so now we’re stuck in these diminishing return four-year economic cycles.
Jeremy: That’s right. and now you can no longer live off that debt fiction either. and what I’m saying in chapter one is the emperor has no clothes. the emperor is us. It’s society. That’s my analysis on how the two are connected. and so you can’t continue to live off debt because we’ve run out of money. all the savings that we amassed in all of our institutions for 40 years of the greatest economic burst forward in history, the maturation of the second industrial revolution infrastructure, it all peaked out and plateaued in the late ‘80s. We’ve been living off it for 20 years. It’s an old infrastructure. old technologies. old energies. Big entropy bill.
So anecdotally, I’ll share a story. When Chancellor Merkel came into office, she got a hold of me before the election. She thought she was – hoped she was going to win. She asked me to come to Berlin, early on, to address the question “How does the Germany economy grow and create jobs in the 21st century?”
Now here’s the most robust industrial economy in the world – employment-wise, job-wise, leading exporting power along with China. so when I got there, the first question I asked the Chancellor is, “Madam Chancellor, how are you going to build the German or European or world economy in the last stages of an energy era?” that Germany is moving toward the transition now. That’s what we’re doing in Germany.
And the fact is, what every American would have to ask is “How in heaven’s name – whether you’re a republican, democrat, homeowner, employer – how in heaven’s name are you going to regrow the American economy when the energies of this economy are all getting more expensive.” and if we have to go to tar, sand, heavy coal, they’re even more expensive and dirtier. the technologies based on those energies – like the internal combustion engine – are shot. the whole infrastructure’s made out of carbon and on life support. There’s no multiplier effect. They’re all sun setting.
but Germany realizes. You’ve got to get to the new sunrise energies, technologies and infrastructure quickly – and you can start from day one once you start placing these nodes in city-by-city and start phasing them in.
Todd: Why do you think Germany is more willing than the US to embrace these concepts? They seem to make so much sense. Speaking with you reminds me of W. Edwards Demming going to Japan in the ‘50s to teach companies how to make high-quality cars and other products that came back to bite us later on. I’m just wondering, is a prophet not without honor except in his own country?
Jeremy: Well, look. I don’t know. what happened was, I organized the first oil protest in 1973. and remember the 200th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. and we brought together – people’s bicentennial commission – 20,000 young people and middle-class professional people – at the 200th anniversary — the OPEC crisis that just hit. Oil was going through the roof. People were lining up at the gas stations.
We brought 20,000 people – working people, students, old people, on the wharfs – Boston Harbor that day – on the 200th anniversary of the Tea Party – and we threw empty oil drums into the water protesting the big oil companies. so it’s been a long haul from ’73 to 2011. I made a decision to go to Europe – I started to go very heavily in the ‘90s. and I realized that for all of its faults, Europe is the idea factory. I’m not naive about all the faults. but it’s the only place where they’re actually asking the big questions, even faultingly, on the future of the human journey. What’s our responsibility to the planet? how do we really envision life? With all of its faults and failings.
And at the point, some of the political leaders – Romano Prodi, he’s an old friend – was president of the European Commission at that point and twice Prime Minister – said, “this is a good place for you.” I stayed. I spend over half my time there. I still do. I commute. and it’s been a rewarding experience in Europe.
I’ll tell you where I’m just amazed. I’m amazed that America doesn’t get this story. Obama – he said he couldn’t give up his Blackberry – Internet president – why didn’t he get this? In other words, he didn’t understand the narrative. and I’ll give you a classic example. Dr. Chu, DOE Energy Secretary. the Obama administration comes up with a plan. Remember, they talk smart grid, but here’s their plan. the western governors and the midwest governors have a lot of solar and a lot of wind. so the idea was to build big wind and solar parks – and a lot of the companies in my group do this by making money in the west. and then raise everyone’s electricity price slightly in the country so you can build a high-voltage smart grid that’s one direction – to send the electricity to the urban population centers.
so, I could have told him what would happen. the eastern governors, the mid-Atlantic governors come together and they send a letter to Congress and say “No way! Not on our watch! we want to create our own electricity and energy here – create millions of jobs, new businesses, put in a distributed grid – so we can share our surpluses with the rest of the country. so it’s on hold. but it’s that centralized thinking. the only thing I can conclude is that the big energy companies have a big hold in Washington.
Obama has never shared what I’ve just talked to you about. He’ll say smart grid, but he never talks about an energy Internet. Because it’s power of the people – it’s a complete distribution of economic power. the good thing is it makes everyone an entrepreneur, but then we have to collaborate in social spaces. For the young kids who are on the streets of Wall Street today and across the country protesting – and the kids in the Arab Spring in the Middle East – this is their third industrial revolution. In other words, they grew up in power to create their own information on the Internet and share it. For them, the next stage is the big one, which is joining it with energy and creating a powerful new economic paradigm that fits their idea of power – which is lateral power.
Our power, which I grew up on, was centralized because the first and second industrial revolutions are based on elite energies. so they have to scale vertically because it costs huge amounts of finance capital to move them. Therefore, we have to have centralized factories in the 19th and 20th centuries for the first and second industrial revolutions, and centralized logistics.
The third industrial revolution, as young people know, it scales laterally. it enables millions of little players putting their little energies together, and it’s sharing it in vast distributed loads. It’s like the music companies. They just didn’t get file sharing. and distributing file sharing music wiped them out in five years. and the newspapers didn’t understand the blogosphere. now they’re trying to create blogs and they’re all going to be blogs.
So what I’m saying, I think in Washington you have not just the old energy industry, but you have the old politics. and what we have noticed – I advise Zapatero in Spain, Merkel, and some of the countries that are in trouble – Papandreou. some of them are center-right. some are center-left.
And what we found it has nothing to do with the old right/left split. Whether someone gets this or not depends on the new spectrum that’s emerging among the young people. the young people do not think right/left. I’m 66. I’m of the old school. They actually don’t even talk about right/left or conservative/liberal or capitalism/socialism. Their spectrum – their political scale – is very different. When they judge institutional behavior, they ask, “Is this institutional behavior centralized, patriarchal, top-down, closed, and proprietary? Or is this institutional behavior distributed, collaborative? is it open and transparent, and does it give us side-by-side lateral power?” you can see it in every kid under 25 or 30. That’s a revolution.
I think the kids on Wall Street and across the country, and the kids in the Middle East and around the world – China and everywhere else – I don’t know where they’re going to take this. This book is just the beginning of a frame. but I’m sure they’re going to take this well beyond. There could be a lot of bad bumps that take us off this trajectory and we could have a dark period, and we may not get there.
But pending all of those possibilities, I don’t think there’s a plan B. I think this is the way the younger generation is going to run. They’re going to bring the Internet to energy, and they’re going to share vast amounts of green energy and they’re going to create completely new business models that scale laterally. They’re going to go to lateral power.
Todd: I think the generation that has been raised with the Internet – they get the notion of distributed information. it seems that the piece that has been hiding in plain sight is the notion of distributed energy and the convergence of that with the Internet and smart grids.
Jeremy: Well also, realize that when energy and communication revolutions come together we really change history. That’s what changes consciousness. I wrote a longer book, the Empathic Civilization, last year. It’s an analysis of communication and energy revolutions through history, and how they change actual consciousness itself because they shift consciousness to fit the new temporal, spacial orientation that communication energy makes available.
If you like that kind of reading, it’s a long book, but these are big things when energy and communication revolutions come together. and the young people will get this in 20 seconds. and any politician worth their salt could introduce this in 30 seconds and turn around the whole country.
Todd: It’s more of a collective consciousness, isn’t it, as opposed to a centralized elitist approach.
Jeremy: it is. It’s funny you say that because in the Empathic Civilization, I actually had done years of research just on this whole idea of collective consciousness. and I didn’t go into it in depth, but I actually did say is that once these energy/communication revolutions come together, the collective consciousness shifts to the new temporal/spacial orientation.
For example, in forager or hunter societies, the energy was the human body. the communication was language to forage, hunt and grow, and they all had mythological thinking. and the basic biological drive and empathic distress – we now know it’s not the predatory, utilitarian drive and the enlightenment – at least our biologists have finally figured out that our neural circuitry is actually wired for a empathic distress. that drive only went to blood-kind because that was the communication-energy domain. If you were in another tribe in the next valley, you were a demon. and if you go to the hydraulic civilizations, the new energy was centralized irrigation, canal agriculture – very complicated. and they stored the sun’s energy in barley, wheat, and rye in Mesopotamia and Sumeria. and they had to create cuneiform, and added the complexities of the first urban civilization.
And everywhere they created these hydraulic civilizations – India, China, Mexico, independently people figured out some form of writing. and consciousness shifted from mythological to theological. all the great religions were formed back then because empathic drive evolves to a new fictional family – religious ties – because now you have a bigger domain because now you have a new family based on a religious affiliation. so Jews empathasized with Jews, and in first-century Rome Christians kept kissing each other on the face because they were brother and sister. that was considered pretty weird.
In the 19th century with the first industrial revolution, we shifted to ideological consciousness – the Enlightenment, the Romantic reaction. and the empathic drive shifted to a new fictional family – national loyalty. all of a sudden there’s something called France. it was a complete fiction. There were two other languages in France in the 1300s, but they create a common national state now because the markets could be national. They could have larger markets with the new communication energy revolution.
So now all French people think they’re French. It’s a fictional family and they empathasize with each other, but not the Germans. the Germans empathasize with each other but not the Italians.
So in the 20th century, the second industrial revolution, we shifted to psychological consciousness and people of like-minded associational ties bind each other as soul mates. That’s a bigger fictional family. and what we’re saying in this book, in the Empathic Civilization, is we may be on the cusp of a biosphere consciousness – a new border. Why do we stop at national loyalty?
The kids are thinking global. They’re in social spaces. and once they start to join the Internet with the renewable energies, those energy Internets cross continents. They like to run it until they get to the ocean’s edge – like Wi-Fi. and young people are going to become more and more aware as we move into the century, that they’re responsible for their part of the biosphere.
Because when you’re sitting there in your little power plant, and you have to monitor the sun every day, and the changing wind currents, and how the heat’s moving under the ground, and how the garbage is decomposing – we all become, again, in tune to the rhythms of the biosphere, which we divorced ourselves from with stored sun. so, it becomes second nature that we become embedded into the ecosystem dynamics. but then we have to collaborate across continents to make this thing work. so it is kind of biosphere consciousness.
And the kids are learning it in school; they’re learning that everything they do has an ecological footprint. it affects someone else – a creature on the planet – that’s a step in thinking. so, I’m guardedly hopefully, but I’m not naive. anything could derail it. we may not get there in time. I wonder when I see five year olds, what the hell is it going to be like for them in 2080 if we don’t get there?
So this is a shot. As my wife said, “This isn’t rocket science, these five pillars.” It’s what you’re gonna have to do.
Todd: it does seem like a no-brainer. and I just love the confluence of energy communications and economics. I do want to touch on economics just a bit more here – I think your chapter “Retiring Adam Smith,” is just fascinating.
Jeremy: That’s a big chapter. I think this chapter, to my mind, puts the gauntlet down.
Todd: I think it absolutely does – I mean – you can’t do that, right? Isn’t Adam Smith sacred? you can’t challenge Adam Smith.
Jeremy: We’re going to find out!
Todd: Well, can you talk about this notion of the relationship of economics and engineering, and thermodynamics versus Newtonian mechanics?
Jeremy: I can. Modern economic theory was developed in the Enlightenment. what was a rage at the time was Newtonian mechanics. and it was a metaphor for everything because every new emerging discipline wanted to use Newtonian physics to get a sound basic framework for legitimacy. so, all the metaphors were based in Newtonian physics.
And, of course, the classical, neoclassical economic theories are based on that. For each action is an equal and opposite reaction. That’s the pendulum of the marketplace, and on and on and on. They use all sorts of Newtonian metaphors.
The problem is Newton’s physics don’t tell you a damn thing about economic activity. Alfred North Whitehead, the great scientist in the early 20th century said to his students, “Mechanics – becoming mechanics just tells you about how fast that thing’s going and where it’s located. and after that there’s not much more of interest to be said on the subject.” the problem is economics is all about how energy flows, and it’s governed by the laws of thermodynamics, which weren’t discovered until the latter part of the 19th century by engineers and chemists studying energy flows.
So, the laws of thermodynamics really govern economic activity, but almost no economist ever studies the law of thermodynamics. They don’t have a clue. the engineers, the chemists, the biologists, the architects, the urban planners, the physicists – all of those professions, which actually create economic activity, they do so from a thermodynamic lens. so there’s a complete disconnect between them and the economists.
I’ll just give you one example. GDP – we think of gross domestic product as a store of wealth we generate. John Locke, an early Enlightenment philosopher said, “Look, ten acres of land in the commons that’s doing nothing is of no value. It’s waste. It’s only when you harness that land with your labor and transform it into productive property that you’ve created wealth.” He got it upside down. but that’s the basic Enlightenment theory, that we take nature’s waste, add labor to it, and ingenuity, and we turn it into productive wealth. He got it backwards.
Thermodynamically, economic activity is taking nature’s valuable, low-entropy, high-energy capability in energy form or energy based in material form. we transform it into goods and services. and every time we transform it we lose more energy in the transformation than we gain in the product or service. and then the product and service degrade back into the environment. and part of it can be recycled, but at a cost.
So GDP is not a measure of your wealth. It’s a measure of the temporary value that we have been able to engender at the expense of the value we’ve lost in nature and the entropy bill we’ve created. so if GDP is a measure of temporary value and it’s a measure of our debt that we build up with a natural environment.
There was a chemist at the turn of the century – Frederick Soddy, Nobel Laureate, early 1900s. He was the first to show the relationship between thermo dynamics and economics – he said “These are the laws that govern economics.” no one paid any attention to him.
Then Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the great Vanderbilt economist wrote several books on entropy in the 1960s. Then I wrote Entropy in 1980 – Georgescu wrote the afterwards. and Herman Daly wrote Steady-State Economics. He studied under Georgescu, known to the World Bank and the University of Maryland. we attempted, at that point 30 years ago, to generate a conversation. Georgescu has passed away now, but Georgescu, myself, Kenneth Bowling, used to be the head of the AAAS and Herman Daly, and we got nowhere.
What I’m saying now – the time is right, 30 years later. I think that the economic theories that reinforced the first and second industrial revolution are dysfunctional. They actually don’t give us a realistic assessment of our past, present and future. They’re not a helpful guide. some of the insides will be retained. They’ll be retained and we’ll find a synthesis to retain the insides of classical, neoclassical theory, placing it within a thermodynamic frame, a scientific frame, and we’ll begin to create a new synthesis that is different from classical, neoclassical economic theory, as it was different from the ‘just price’ theory of the late medieval age. I think that’s going to happen quickly in the next ten years as we transition into this new third industrial era.
Todd: I find it so interesting – it’s a global balance sheet, isn’t it?
Jeremy: It’s a global balance sheet. Everyone’s talking about balancing the budget. the real global financial crisis is connected to the oil crisis. what we’re paying now is the real debt.
Every society, early on, creates a new energy-communication mix. at the early stage before scale-up, the energy-communications’ expensive. Then it’s scaled. Then it’s adopted. Then the prices get cheaper. Then it plateaus. Then the entropy builds up for the past activity. Then prices go up. the cost for the entropy bill goes up. and the civilization eventually collapses or dies out. That’s the history of civilization.
Some of the guys that write these books, they have never really captured this – they’re good anthropologists, but they haven’t really looked at economic history. That’s how it happens. and so that’s what happening in the second industrial revolution now – it’s on the down side of its bell curve. and the key is you’re always constantly building up a debt against nature. and the question is: how do you find a communication-energy regime that allows us to live more in tandem with the rhythms of the planet so that we can learn to live sustainably and not produce and consume faster than we can repay the debt by allowing nature to replenish the stock its best it can?
(videos of the protest attended by Scott Olsen (war veteran) show a policeman lobbing a tear gas canister. Olsen’s back was to the police. He was hit in the head by the canister, causing a skull fracture. Olsen was in critical condition in hospital; Saturday the 29th, upgraded to “fair” condition.)
Valuable for Canadians, and if you’re in Saskatchewan, it is critical information for voting in Nov 7 Election.
Be clear: a vote for the status quo means we will have “small” nuclear reactors in Saskatchewan and high-level radioactive waste disposal.
Hear Rifkin before you vote.
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CONTENTS
1. CONNECT THE PLAYERS
GOVT OF SASK DEAL WITH HITACHI / GE FOR “SMALL” REACTORS
UNIVERSITY OF SASK, CCNI (CANADIAN CENTRE FOR NUCLEAR INNOVATION)
JEREMY RIFKIN ON NUCLEAR.
AND WHAT IS BEHIND THE “SMALL REACTORS”? … TAR SANDS DEVEL0PMENT.
2. MOVING SASKATCHEWAN FORWARD . . TO A TOXIC ECONOMY, Sept 2, Jim Harding, (re THE HITACHI / GE DEAL FOR “SMALL REACTORS”). Click on http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=3445
3. PREMIER WALL CAN’T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS, Oct. 28, Jim Harding. RE: High-level Radioactive Waste transported to Saskatchewan. http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=3453
4. URANIUM TAKEOVERS ARE OFFERING INVESTORS THE BIGGEST POTENTIAL PAYOFFS – – LESS THAN A YEAR AFTER FUKISHIMA. (Suckers, anyone?!)
5. AFTER THE OCTOBER MEETING OF SENATE (Sandra speaking) WHAT’S GOOD FOR CAMECO IS GOOD FOR THE UNIVERSITY
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = ==
1. CONNECT THE PLAYERS
The Canadian Centre for Nuclear Innovation (CCNI) with its thinly-disguised mandate is now established at the University. (I will post more info on it later.) The Brad Wall Government put in $30 million. Plus another $17 million in tied funding that makes it difficult to separate nuke and not-nuke funding. Who wants to forego $47 million?!)
The University Administration working with the Government has given away the autonomy of the University to decide how money is allocated.
Further, the SaskParty Government signed and funded $10 million with Hitachi/GE for “small” reactors. The “small” nuclear reactors for expanded tar sands development will be brought on-line through the University (CCNI). The CCNI reports directly to the Board of Governors, chaired by Nancy Hopkins with her approximately $2 million in Cameco shares, by-passing the normal reporting lines at the University. The composition of the Board of Directors for the CCNI is very convenient for industry interests.
I should not forget: • March 17, 2009 Energy and Resources Minister Bill Boyd . . . signed a Memorandum of Understanding between the government and Idaho National Laboratory (INL), a U.S. Department of Energy institution that is considered that country’s top national laboratory for nuclear energy research. (from http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=1211)
Recently, University president Peter MacKinnon endorsed SaskParty candidate, and the candidate, Rob Norris, was given permission by the president to use it in his campaign brochure: “Rob Norris is the finest minister responsible for post-secondary education that I have been privileged to work with in my (13) years as (president) – .”
The USSWORD infographic (more below) shows the connections between MacKinnon (University) and Norris (University / Government / Industry) and the Government.
(There is a lot happening. I will try to get more of it posted. Sorry – I cannot get it all circulated by email. Click on www.sandrafinley.ca ; go to right-hand sidebar, to the category “Energy”. )
Makes me sick. The Government and University of Saskatchewan are taking us down the UTTERLY wrong road. We will be so heavily invested in the wrong thing, there will be a very sad future. But big pay-offs today for a few people.
The good news: a Provincial Election on November 7th.
The Green Party was, is and always will be: renewables as the way forward.
Listen to the concise, clear, compelling statements by Jeremy Rifkin to understand why.
Everyone who is voting in the Saskatchewan Election should hear them.
Everyone should see it! (A very short first part is in French. Then it goes to English.)
The commentary by Jim Harding (item #3 PREMIER WALL CAN’T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS) is the best summary of what is happening in the Province that I have seen anywhere. His analysis, coupled to the USSWORD infographic . . .
(INSERT: The USSWORD “infographic” shows the connections between the players,
Several suggestions have been made as to how to stop them using the University as a ‘back door’ for their agenda. Unfortunately, the ‘UDP group’ (INSERT: Uranium Development Partnership established by the Wall Government) has gotten a toehold at the University through CCNI (Canadian Centre for Nuclear Innovation). Unfortunately, President MacKinnon considers himself bullet proof in the propaganda war (see Norris campaign literature for example). Unfortunately, he is probably correct in his assessment, as the ‘fix’ seems to be truly ‘in’ with the nuclear industry, the Wall Government, their re-election, the Harper Government and the shadowy murk of international capital/strategic national interests that husbanded and ushered in the Harper regime. The only aspect that they have not effectively muzzled as yet is the press – although one would wonder, seeing, for example, the StarPhoenix and Globe’s coverage of events so far.
… The ‘UDP group’ is now using time as a weapon to find and suborn a Northern community . . . (so poor) that they will eventually have to do as they are told. . . . I fear that they will be coerced into this gristly experiment to establish nuclear processing and storage facilities.
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2. MOVING SASKATCHEWAN FORWARD . . . TO A TOXIC ECONOMY (re THE HITACHI / GE DEAL FOR “SMALL REACTORS”). (posted at http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=3445 )
By Jim Harding
Published in R-Town News September 2, 2011
The Wall government is ramping up for the fall election with the slogan “Moving Saskatchewan Forward!” But is the direction it is taking us really forward at all? The recent announcement of a $10 million deal with GE-Hitachi to research “small” nuclear reactors and nuclear wastes won’t take Saskatchewan towards sustainability. Rather it will ensure a toxic future for our children’s, children’s, children.
GE-HITACHI ORIGINS
The companies that build nuclear reactors continue to decline. France’s Areva is still in the business but its huge cost-overruns and cumulating debt make it vulnerable. And Canada’s AECL, now privatized by Harper, will have increasing trouble justifying multi-billion taxpayer subsidies to build Candus. To try to enhance their competitiveness, the U.S.’s General Electric (GE) and Japan’s Hitachi formed a global nuclear alliance in June 2007. However this was premised on Japan and the U.S. continuing to build large nuclear plants, which is highly unlikely after the Fukushima catastrophe. So GE-Hitachi is now desperate for new markets to survive. Enter Saskatchewan, stage right!
UPDATE FUKUSHIMA
Before Fukushima the nuclear industry was regulated by the Trade Ministry, which promoted nuclear energy. Since Fukushima the Japanese government passed strong renewable energy legislation requiring utilities to buy any domestically-produced renewable energy regardless of cost. This is a green light for off-shore wind, geo-thermal plants in the earthquake-prone mountains and an expansion of photovoltaic (PV) electricity. (Japan along with China is already a world leader in PV technology.) This jump-starts the phase-out of nuclear power and puts an end to GE-Hitachi plans to build 20 more Japanese plants, so where does GE-Hitachi go? Apparently they are coming here, where the government is so irrationally-pro-nuclear that it won’t allow itself to face hard economic or ecological facts.
While other countries do a full nuclear phase-out and renewables continue to gain ground globally, our government cancels Sask Power’s net-metering program, which was just a baby step to bring more renewables onto the grid, and makes a nuclear deal with GE-Hitachi. Wall’s government seems totally out of sync with emerging trends. While Minister Norris was finalizing his Memorandums of Understanding with GE-Hitachi, Beyond Nuclear told us that that the situation at Fukushima continued to worsen. The scope of radioactive contamination widens, with high levels of long-lived radioactive cesium now found 62 miles from the plants. Japan’s monitoring agency calculates that the cesium contaminating the country is now 168 times that from the Hiroshima bomb (15,000 tera-becquerels compared to 89.) Both radioactive cesium and strontium are now in Chinese territorial waters, threatening sea life and sea food.
The Wall government not only refused to greet the 20-day walkers who came 820 km from Pinehouse to call for a provincial nuclear waste ban; it has turned its back on what’s continuing to happen to the Japanese people.
MORE SPIN
Always searching for a corporate way to “move Saskatchewan forward”, regardless of cost and risk, the Wall government ignores the role of its new partner-in-arms in building the flawed Fukushima plants. A deal with GE-Hitachi to study nuclear safety, after Fukushima being the second worst nuclear disaster in history, after Chernobyl, is simply unconscionable. There is something Orwellian when the Hitachi-GE head is reported in the August 25th Star Phoenix as saying, “our latest findings from Fukushima will greatly contribute to safety of nuclear power in Canada also”. I suppose it could also be argued that one way to study cancer is to cause more of it.
In spite of its lapse into “populism” to stop the BHP Potash takeover, the Wall government seems to fundamentally embrace the amoral worldview of corporate globalization. There seems little or no concern about GE-Hitachi’s direct involvement in Fukushima; no apparent concern that Cameco was a major supplier to the reactor company Tepco that operated these plants, or that Tepco is a partner in the troublesome Cigar lake uranium mine! As long as it’s about profitable business, apparently anything goes.
WALL’S CORPORATE PARTNER
What else has Wall’s corporate partner been up to? In 2010 GE-Hitachi signed an agreement with Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) to do research on small modular reactors (SMR) and on new nuclear fuels. Savannah, in South Carolina, is where the U.S. nuclear industry began; it did the refining-enriching for U.S. nuclear weapons. And when Minister Norris says that Saskatchewan is moving forward with a “peaceful, responsible, robust nuclear agenda”, he isn’t going to mention that Savannah, where GE-Hitachi operates, is the only place in the U.S. where tritium continues to be produced for nuclear weapons. Savannah has also been earmarked for a mixed-oxide (MOX) plant which would recover plutonium from nuclear waste spent fuel.
In reality the so-called peaceful and military sectors of the nuclear industry remain tightly interlocked. Semantic spin is also rampant in nuclear promotions. What does GE-Hitachi actually mean by “small reactors”? Do they mean small in comparison to big reactors, which produce up to 1,600 megawatts? The IAEA defines “small” as producing under-300 mega-watts electricity (MWe), and “medium” as producing up to 700 MWe. It’s clear that by “small” GE-Hitachi means fairly big, for in April 2011 they submitted a letter of intent to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to apply for a permit for a 311 MWe “small modular reactor”. Such a reactor, however, has not yet been proposed or approved.
SAVANNAH NORTH
Why hasn’t GE-Hitachi gone to Ontario, which produces most of Canada’s nuclear waste. Why has it come to Saskatchewan? Maybe GE-Hitachi thinks it can build its 311 MWe “small reactor” here more easily than in the U.S. After all, the Wall government seems willing to throw public moneys at waning nuclear companies. Maybe GE-Hitachi thinks Ontario’s, and even the U.S.’s nuclear wastes will someday be here too.
The MOU between the Sask Party government and GE-Hitachi makes us into Savannah North. GE-Hitachi needs a place to launch its “small” reactor industry using nuclear wastes as spent fuel. And the Wall government has welcomed them with open arms. This is what the nuclear industry-dominated UDP recommended in 2008, and in spite of the public consultations showing overwhelming opposition to this toxic vision of “moving Saskatchewan forward”, the Wall government carries on. It apparently can’t take “no!” for an answer.
NUCLEAR DUMP STILL ON
So take it with a big grain of salt when Premier Wall says he’s not sure whether we should have a nuclear waste dump in the north, because it is a Saskatchewan-wide issue, and there’s not much support. (He’s right about this!) He’s only begging time. He’s operating the same as the industry-based Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) when it tries to buy its way into a northern community like Pinehouse, with the rest of us not really knowing what is happening or the implications for our future.
The University of Saskatchewan, in this regards, is a little like Pinehouse, with a few people willing to be part of the nuclear agenda, if there is something in it for them. In the north NWMO tries to piggy-back its agenda on the crisis of youth; in Saskatoon GE-Hitachi tries to do this piggy-backing nuclear medicine. In neither case are they related. Economic impoverishment has remained in the north in spite of the uranium mining “boom”; and a nuclear dump would only aggravate the situation. And research on using the U of S synchrotron for producing medical isotopes has nothing to do with “small” reactors or nuclear wastes. In fact, it would make nuclear reactors even more obsolete.
To truly move Saskatchewan forward we are going to have to cut through the growing pile of nuclear spin! We can only hope this will start to happen in the fall election.
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3. PREMIER WALL CAN’T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS, Oct. 28, Jim Harding. RE: High-level Radioactive Waste transported to Saskatchewan.http://sandrafinley.ca/?p=3453
For R-Town News Oct. 28, 2011
BY Jim Harding
We could finish this election campaign without serious issues even being raised, which isn’t the way to practice democracy. One such issue is whether thousands of truckloads of highly radioactive nuclear wastes will be brought from Ontario’s nuclear plants to a nuclear dump in our north.
Premier Wall sidesteps the issue; there was no concern expressed when Pinehouse, Patuanak and Creighton were targeted as potential sites for a nuclear dump. On April 14th North Battleford groups delivered 5,000 signatures of people opposed to such a dump. Afterwards the Premier publicly acknowledged the “negative public opinion about a nuclear waste facility”, adding “I don’t think the mood of the province has changed, and frankly, what’s happening in Japan has got people thinking…” This left an impression that his government didn’t support a nuclear dump, but the industry-run Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) carried on with its monetary inducements in the north.
7,000 GENERATIONS WALK
The northern-based Committee for Future Generations then organized an 820 KM walk from Pinehouse to Regina to express its opposition to a radioactive dump. After 20 days on the road, the respectful thing would have been for Premier Wall to greet these hardy citizens. The walk got front page coverage in both big city dailies, but when the walkers got to the Legislature August 16th Premier Wall was nowhere to be seen. Not even the Deputy Premier or a Sask Party MLA turned out to welcome those who had just made Saskatchewan history with their marathon. Only a staffer came to receive the letter to the Premier.
By August end there was still no response. At the Legislature rally August 16th the NDP opposition took a position against a nuclear dump. And the northern Committee continued collecting petitions, now having an additional 10,000 signatures in addition to the 5,000 presented to the government in April. People across the province are apparently eager to say “no!” to a nuclear dump; private party polling will confirm the widespread opposition.
THE PREMIER’S LETTER
Wall’s advisors may have thought it ill-advised to continue ducking the issue, for on Sept. 6th Committee Chair, Max Morin, finally received a letter. Premier Wall “apologized for the delay in my response”; though he didn’t apologize for not greeting the walkers. He reiterated the industry position about the NWMO looking for “a suitable location for the storage of used nuclear fuel”, without mentioning that it would be far safer to keep the wastes close to where they are created. No mention that a main reason the industry wants central storage is to reprocess nuclear wastes to get plutonium in the future.
YEARS DOWN THE ROAD
What is Premier Wall actually up to? The clincher sentence in his letter is, “The Government will not make a decision on a particular proposal by a willing host community until a proposal has been developed and put forward…which could be years down the road.” If Premier Wall meant what he said in April, when he acknowledged the “negative public opinion” about a nuclear dump, then why is the industry-run NWMO continuing with its insidious process for “years down the road”? Does this explain why Wall’s government recently signed an agreement with GE and Hitachi, Cameco’s partners in uranium enrichment technology, to do research on nuclear waste fuel with the University of Saskatchewan?
Politically, Premier Wall can’t appear to be completely in the hands of industry. So his letter continues with the “on the other hand” answer to the northern Committee. His wording is deceptive. It is perhaps encouraging that he says “the decision on whether to host a site” will be decided “in relation to the level of support from the Saskatchewan people more generally”. However, he said that this is in addition to “the NWMO assessment and level of community support”. Premier Wall has already admitted what the polls show, that there is not any significant support for a nuclear dump here. So, again I ask, why is the industry being allowed to continue to animate, that is, try to buy “community support”?
ON CONTRADICTIONS
Premier Wall’s letter includes the seemingly unambiguous statement that “The Government will not support a proposal unless there is clear support from the people of Saskatchewan.” If he sincerely means this, if this is the government’s position, he doesn’t need to wait for “years down the road” to make a decision. There should be a process underway right now to see if “there is clear support from the people of Saskatchewan” for a nuclear dump. If not, he should tell NWMO to cease their monetary inducements in the north. He can’t have it both ways.
The burning question is: which comes first for Premier Wall? Is it Saskatchewan democracy? Or is it nuclear industry expansion? If Premier Wall was true to his words he’d already have come out against a nuclear dump. He talks as though he respects “the level of community support”, meanwhile a petition in Pinehouse has already shown that community support for a nuclear dump doesn’t exist there. So why is the “NWMO assessment”, with only one goal, of creating a nuclear dump, being allowed to proceed?
Premier Wall’s appeal to “community support”, like his appeal to “clear support from the people of Saskatchewan”, is apparently political rhetoric to buy more time for industry to penetrate the north. That way, by the time Saskatchewan democracy comes into play “years down the road”, the industry might have signed contracts and its dump be underway. Their strategy has always been incremental so the public doesn’t know their end-game.
PUBLIC BE DAMNED
We know from Manitoba that the “feasibility research” was inextricably tied to the actual planning of a dump. When people caught on and government changed hands legislation banning waste storage was passed. Why isn’t Premier Wall following the example of Manitoba in 1987 or Quebec in 2008 when they said flat out, “we won’t take Ontario’s nuclear wastes”?
The Wall government isn’t being proactive or protective because it wants the nuclear industry-driven process to succeed. It considers a nuclear dump to be “adding value” to the uranium industry, as was advocated by its own Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) in 2009. Though over 90% of the thousands participating in the UDP’s public consultations opposed a nuclear dump, the public be damned.
If Premier Wall meant it when he says in his letter that a nuclear dump “is not a priority to the province” and it is already clear that there is not “the support of provincial residents” for this, why is he being so permissive with the industry? Why is Premier Wall so interested in remaining “informed and engaged” with the nuclear industry, when he is unwilling to do this with the Saskatchewan public?
Premier Wall’s letter to the northern Committee appeals to rhetoric about popular democracy, but unless his government is challenged, it’s clear it will let the industry get its way. We can’t allow such smoke and mirrors to operate with an issue so vital to our future. The Premier and other Sask Party candidates need to be called on their “double-speak” on nuclear wastes.
4. URANIUM TAKEOVERS ARE OFFERING INVESTORS THE BIGGEST POTENTIAL PAYOFFS – – LESS THAN A YEAR AFTER FUKISHIMA. (Suckers, anyone?!)
Uranium Deals Pay Off on Nuclear Demand
Bloomberg News by Tara Lachapelle – Oct 24, 2011 6:58 PM CT
Uranium takeovers are offering investors the biggest potential payoffs, less than a year after the partial meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant.
Hathor Exploration Ltd. (HAT), the owner of a uranium deposit in northern Saskatchewan, is trading 8.4 percent above a bid from Rio Tinto Group that topped an offer from Cameco Corp. (CCO) That signals investors are now betting Hathor will extract the biggest price hike of any pending North American deal greater than $500 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Kalahari Minerals Plc (KAH), which resumed talks with China Guangdong Nuclear Power Group after a takeover was derailed by Japan’s disaster, would now hand shareholders a higher return than the pre-Fukushima agreement, even with a 5 percent lower offer.
Hathor has become the target of a bidding war, while talks to buy Kalahari, which owns a 43 percent stake in the developer of what will be the world’s third-largest uranium mine, have reignited as energy demand surges in developing nations. China, India and Russia are still constructing or planning to build at least 125 nuclear reactors combined in the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that caused radiation leaks in Japan.
“The Chinese and other emerging economies are going to need uranium to power their nuclear reactors,” Rob Chang, an analyst for Versant Partners Inc. in Toronto, said in a telephone interview. “When you start seeing consolidation, it’s usually a sign of the bottom. Buyers, they’re trying to snap these assets up on the cheap. Investors would be well served.”
Uranium Explorer
Kelsea Murray, a spokeswoman for Vancouver-based Hathor, and Murray Lyons, a spokesman for Saskatoon, Saskatchewan-based Cameco, didn’t respond to phone calls and e-mails seeking comment. Tony Shaffer at London-based Rio Tinto didn’t respond to a phone message or e-mail outside normal business hours.
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5. AFTER THE OCTOBER MEETING OF SENATE (Sandra speaking) WHAT’S GOOD FOR CAMECO IS GOOD FOR THE UNIVERSITY
As I understand the situation at the U of S and in Sask:
Industry
tar sands
NEEDS
nukes
The two industries are working closely together and have co-opted both Government and the University to be on-side with their agenda.
Scientists whose good work reflects poorly on either industry (nuke/uranium OR tar sands) are not particularly welcome.
But I would like to have a balanced view, especially because I am an elected representative on University Senate.
/Sandra
– – – – – – — – – – – – –
University Senate met Oct 15. The Govt of Sask recently provided another $30 million to the U of S for the newly-coined “Canadian Centre for Nuclear Innovation” (CCNI). The CCNI is a FUNDING body that reports directly to the Board of Governors. Bypasses all the normal reporting lines at the U. Has a Board make-up that is Industry. Has a mandate that covers all the things the industry wants, down to “small reactors” and “safe storage” (deep geological disposal of high-level radioactive waste). University Council recently pushed through the paperwork to move ahead, almost no debate. Deans jumping into the Administration’s lap. Only a couple of voices stood up in an effort to get the CCNI referred back for something as basic as analysis.
The CCNI did not appear on the Senate agenda. The Executive is working at re-wording Senate By-laws such that individual Senators will not be able to put items forward for inclusion on Senate agendas.
They are doing an end-run around public sentiment – public consultations (forced on the Govt) in 2009 were emphatically “no” to nuclear in Sask. The University is the vehicle for moving public money to the industry and lends an air of legitimacy.
Nancy Hopkins, chair of the Board of Governors of the U, has been on the Cameco Board since 1992 and had $1.8 million in Cameco shares as of the end of 2009. Ivany, President of the U before current President Peter MacKinnon was on Cameco Board until very recently, young Dean of the Business School became Senior VP at Cameco and was touted as heir-apparent to come back to the U and succeed MacKinnon. Dave Sutherland is on the Board of Governors – he is on the Cdn Council of Chief Executives and the Security and Prosperity Initiative. They are all about harmonization and integration with the U.S. – corporate interests in tar sands, electricity and water.
There is a long-established relationship between Cameco (which has a 30% interest in Bruce Power) and the Univ of Sask. Bruce Power was “run out of town” in 2009 when they tried to buy options on land to build a reactor near a large bend in the North Sask River near Lloydminster. Bruce also has a large interest in the high-level radioactive waste disposal site the industry has in mind for northern Sask and which we have been battling strenuously for some time. The nuke industry needs a place for the waste from Ontario, but also for all the waste from the U.S. – they have been promising for decades to truck the waste “away”. Saskatchewan is the “away”.
What’s good for Cameco is good for the University. What isn’t good for Cameco is not good for the University. University autonomy and service to the public interest have gone out the window, as far as I can see.
– – – – – — – – – – – –
The Green Party is ALL grassroots. No corporate or union or other funding. ONLY individual citizens. Maybe you will see why myself and others are saying vote green. Only citizens can take us off this insane road and put us on one that offers hope of a habitable world for our children.
We could finish this election campaign without serious issues even being raised, which isn’t the way to practice democracy. One such issue is whether thousands of truckloads of highly radioactive nuclear wastes will be brought from Ontario’s nuclear plants to a nuclear dump in our north.
Premier Wall sidesteps the issue; there was no concern expressed when Pinehouse, Patuanak and Creighton were targeted as potential sites for a nuclear dump. On April 14th North Battleford groups delivered 5,000 signatures of people opposed to such a dump. Afterwards the Premier publicly acknowledged the “negative public opinion about a nuclear waste facility”, adding “I don’t think the mood of the province has changed, and frankly, what’s happening in Japan has got people thinking…” This left an impression that his government didn’t support a nuclear dump, but the industry-run Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) carried on with its monetary inducements in the north.
7,000 GENERATIONS WALK
The northern-based Committee for Future Generations then organized an 820 KM walk from Pinehouse to Regina to express its opposition to a radioactive dump. After 20 days on the road, the respectful thing would have been for Premier Wall to greet these hardy citizens. The walk got front page coverage in both big city dailies, but when the walkers got to the Legislature August 16th Premier Wall was nowhere to be seen. Not even the Deputy Premier or a Sask Party MLA turned out to welcome those who had just made Saskatchewan history with their marathon. Only a staffer came to receive the letter to the Premier.
By August end there was still no response. At the Legislature rally August 16th the NDP opposition took a position against a nuclear dump. And the northern Committee continued collecting petitions, now having an additional 10,000 signatures in addition to the 5,000 presented to the government in April. People across the province are apparently eager to say “no!” to a nuclear dump; private party polling will confirm the widespread opposition.
THE PREMIER’S LETTER
Wall’s advisors may have thought it ill-advised to continue ducking the issue, for on Sept. 6th Committee Chair, Max Morin, finally received a letter. Premier Wall “apologized for the delay in my response”; though he didn’t apologize for not greeting the walkers. He reiterated the industry position about the NWMO looking for “a suitable location for the storage of used nuclear fuel”, without mentioning that it would be far safer to keep the wastes close to where they are created. No mention that a main reason the industry wants central storage is to reprocess nuclear wastes to get plutonium in the future.
YEARS DOWN THE ROAD
What is Premier Wall actually up to? The clincher sentence in his letter is, “The Government will not make a decision on a particular proposal by a willing host community until a proposal has been developed and put forward…which could be years down the road.” If Premier Wall meant what he said in April, when he acknowledged the “negative public opinion” about a nuclear dump, then why is the industry-run NWMO continuing with its insidious process for “years down the road”? Does this explain why Wall’s government recently signed an agreement with GE and Hitachi, Cameco’s partners in uranium enrichment technology, to do research on nuclear waste fuel with the University of Saskatchewan?
Politically, Premier Wall can’t appear to be completely in the hands of industry. So his letter continues with the “on the other hand” answer to the northern Committee. His wording is deceptive. It is perhaps encouraging that he says “the decision on whether to host a site” will be decided “in relation to the level of support from the Saskatchewan people more generally”. However, he said that this is in addition to “the NWMO assessment and level of community support”. Premier Wall has already admitted what the polls show, that there is not any significant support for a nuclear dump here. So, again I ask, why is the industry being allowed to continue to animate, that is, try to buy “community support”?
ON CONTRADICTIONS
Premier Wall’s letter includes the seemingly unambiguous statement that “The Government will not support a proposal unless there is clear support from the people of Saskatchewan.” If he sincerely means this, if this is the government’s position, he doesn’t need to wait for “years down the road” to make a decision. There should be a process underway right now to see if “there is clear support from the people of Saskatchewan” for a nuclear dump. If not, he should tell NWMO to cease their monetary inducements in the north. He can’t have it both ways.
The burning question is: which comes first for Premier Wall? Is it Saskatchewan democracy? Or is it nuclear industry expansion? If Premier Wall was true to his words he’d already have come out against a nuclear dump. He talks as though he respects “the level of community support”, meanwhile a petition in Pinehouse has already shown that community support for a nuclear dump doesn’t exist there. So why is the “NWMO assessment”, with only one goal, of creating a nuclear dump, being allowed to proceed?
Premier Wall’s appeal to “community support”, like his appeal to “clear support from the people of Saskatchewan”, is apparently political rhetoric to buy more time for industry to penetrate the north. That way, by the time Saskatchewan democracy comes into play “years down the road”, the industry might have signed contracts and its dump be underway. Their strategy has always been incremental so the public doesn’t know their end-game.
PUBLIC BE DAMNED
We know from Manitoba that the “feasibility research” was inextricably tied to the actual planning of a dump. When people caught on and government changed hands legislation banning waste storage was passed. Why isn’t Premier Wall following the example of Manitoba in 1987 or Quebec in 2008 when they said flat out, “we won’t take Ontario’s nuclear wastes”?
The Wall government isn’t being proactive or protective because it wants the nuclear industry-driven process to succeed. It considers a nuclear dump to be “adding value” to the uranium industry, as was advocated by its own Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) in 2009. Though over 90% of the thousands participating in the UDP’s public consultations opposed a nuclear dump, the public be damned.
If Premier Wall meant it when he says in his letter that a nuclear dump “is nota priority to the province” and it is already clear that there is not “the support of provincial residents” for this, why is he being so permissive with the industry? Why is Premier Wall so interested in remaining “informed and engaged” with the nuclear industry, when he is unwilling to do this with the Saskatchewan public?
Premier Wall’s letter to the northern Committee appeals to rhetoric about popular democracy, but unless his government is challenged, it’s clear it will let the industry get its way. We can’t allow such smoke and mirrors to operate with an issue so vital to our future. The Premier and other Sask Party candidates need to be called on their “double-speak” on nuclear wastes.
University of Saskatchewan President Peter MacKinnon delivers an address to grads at fall convocation, October 22.
Photograph by: Greg Pender, The StarPhoenix
A University of Saskatchewan professor says president Peter MacKinnon’s endorsement of Saskatchewan Party candidate Rob Norris in a campaign brochure is unprecedented and constitutes an “abuse of power.”
But the U of S president said the comment came at a public funding announcement and it is not uncommon for university officials to offer praise for politicians at such events. Len Findlay, a professor of English and the director of the U of S humanities research unit, said a personal endorsement by MacKinnon in a Norris brochure is in conflict with the role of the university president to stay neutral. MacKinnon is quoted as saying: “Rob Norris is the finest minister responsible for post-secondary education that I have been privileged to work with in my (13) years as (president) – .”
“It’s a publicly funded institution and it’s a provincial responsibility,” Findlay said. “Provincial governments change and the interests of the institution and the public interest is best served by the university not being seen to align itself with one party or one candidate or another.”
In an interview Thursday, MacKinnon said the comment was made at a plaque unveiling ceremony for the Academic Health Sciences Centre on campus in early September, well before the writ was dropped. The comment was a matter of public record and Norris “was entitled to use it,” he said. Norris’s office asked for permission and MacKinnon said he did not object.
“During election campaigns and other times you’re very careful, but at the same time in the work that I do, you have to know how to say thank you and the opportunities to say thank you are typically public occasions,” MacKinnon said. “Appreciation is very important and I was expressing appreciation well before the election campaign.”
Findlay said the comment is critical in a back-handed way of those who held the post before Norris. In September, the set election date made it widely known a campaign was forthcoming, Findlay said. University officials typically offer general appreciation and not personal praise at such funding announcements, he said.
“To single out a particular minister at a particularly sensitive time and to praise that minister in terms that seem to cast aspersions on his predecessors and cast him in a role of unmatched ability is something that I haven’t encountered,” Findlay said.
The comment was meant as a thank you to Norris for improving post-secondary education, MacKinnon said, and not as a jab at previous ministers of post-secondary education.
“How it’s interpreted is one thing. What I intended is another,” he said.
The comment could make it difficult for the U of S to deal with future governments, Findlay said.
“I think that universities have to live with the paymaster, whoever is in residence in Regina,” he said. “The distance from government and the distance from donors and from pressure groups in society is critical – and means that the university’s independence is not compromised.”
Norris, the Sask. Party candidate in Saskatoon Greystone, said Thursday he thought the comments were “generous in nature” and saw no issue quoting them in campaign material.
“(Endorsements are) appreciated as they arrive,” he said.
Saskatoon Greystone NDP candidate Peter Prebble declined to comment, but said he was aware of the endorsement and the concern of some on campus.
“Since taking over as president in 1999, he has not only transformed the University of Saskatchewan into a leading Canadian postsecondary institution, engaged aboriginal Canadians, overseen construction and operation of the largest science project in Canada, restored our historic College Building (with original cornerstone laid by Sir Wilfrid Laurier), served with wide national respect as chair of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, been short-listed for the Supreme Court of Canada and many other accomplishments, he has offered Canadians — by model and mentorship within our community and country — a notion of an engaged and mature Saskatchewan within a confident and dynamic Canada.”
With these words, Norris nominated MacKinnon as a “Nation Builder” in the Globe and Mail in 2006.
The next year, Norris became Minister of Post-Secondary Education, much to the delight of both I expect.
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10:58 AM on 10/28/2011
Premier Wall has attended numerous events and made many funding announcements, but has not been on the campus of the University of Regina once during his time as premier, and Mr. Norris’ track record isn’t all that much better. The U of S has received a disproportionate share of capital funding, receives more $ per student from the government, and is able to pay its faculty member significant more than that made by those doing the same work at the University of Regina. No wonder President Mackinnon wants to say thank-you and keep the money flowing.
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10:57 AM on 10/28/2011
This is just further evidence of the cozy relationship between the University of Saskatchewan and the Saskatchewan Party that has only been furthered by the unethical conflict of interest inherent in having Rob Norris as the minister responsible for post-secondary education. Mr. Norris was a University of Saskatchewan employee, and his wife is currently employed there and the U of S is deriving benefits from this fact, at the expense of other institutions (most notably SIAST and the University of Regina).
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10:38 AM on 10/28/2011
Half the senior admin at the UofS are also in over their heads. I’ll give P-Mac his due–he’s good at what he does and a smooth player. Unfortunately, I don’t agree at all with his vision of our university’s role (see his op-ed in today’s SP) and wish he weren’t so good at pimping our public facilities out to special interests.
Norris is a good example of how untalented people get ahead in this province: connections. Please the right people and don’t offend the wrong ones, and you can go far on luck and hot air. Heck, that describes the SaskParty itself.
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9:16 AM on 10/28/2011
The real irony here is that Rob Norris is completely incompetent as a Minister. From a low level administrative position at the U of S to a head role in the government. He’s in way over his head.
