Climate change effects hit Stevie's backyard

A brief but violent thunderstorm blew through Calgary yesterday accompanied by wind, funnel clouds and golf ball sized hail.

Calgary Southwest is the constituency of Stephen Harper, Our Glorious Leader and climate change denier extraordinare. Never saw a tar sands project he didn't like.

So far this year in various parts of Canada we've had insufferable heat, humidity and polluted air very early in the year, floods on the prairies - you know - where huge amounts of our cereal grains like wheat are grown, tornadoes in Ontario and Quebec, and on and on.

This is a video of what happened to the roof of the greenhouse at the University of Calgary in a few short minutes. Planning to get around climate instability by growing a country's food supply under glass? Maybe the climate deniers should check this out.

Dying to protect a pipeline

Gordon Prather on the reasons behind the wars that are killing our soldiers and impoverishing our citizens.

We die and go broke. The oil companies and their enablers make big bucks.

Regime Change Rationales by Gordon Prather

Quoting Eric Margolis in an article:

"Meanwhile, according to Pakistani and Indian sources, Afghanistan just signed a major deal to launch a long-planned, 1680 km long pipeline project expected to cost $ 8 billion. If completed, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline (TAPI) will export gas and, later, oil from the Caspian Basin to Pakistan's coast where tankers will transport it to the west.

"In 1998, the Afghan anti-Communist movement Taliban and a western oil consortium led by the US firm UNOCAL signed a major pipeline deal. UNOCAL lavished money and attention on Taliban, flew a senior delegation to Texas, and also hired a minor Afghan official, one Hamid Karzai.

"Enter Osama bin Laden. He advised the unworldly Taliban leaders to reject the U.S. deal and got them to accept a better offer from an Argentine consortium, Bridas.

"Washington was furious and, according to some accounts, threatened Taliban with war.

"In early 2001, six or seven months before 9/11, Washington made the decision to invade Afghanistan, overthrow Taliban, and install a client regime that would build the energy pipelines."

Don't worry. It's all under control.

Michael Klare says what all Canadians kind of thought anyway.

Thanks, Stevie, for further selling out the country.

From Thursday, Nov. 28th Democracy Now podcast:

Michael Klare, Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College. He is author of several books including “Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum.” Klare’s latest article for the Nation is called Beyond the Age of Petroleum.

"Well, there’s a lot going on all at once that ensures that this oil crisis is qualitatively different from those of the past. And this is much more long-lasting. And one of the qualitative differences is that we have used up, over the past thirty years, most of the remaining oil in the global north—in the United States, in Canada, in Europe and other places that are near at hand and relatively under our control."

Well, Professor Klare, you might have Stevie and the boys (and a few of the girls) under your control, but you don't have the majority of the Canadian population under the imperialist thumb...yet.

Waging war to get oil to wage war

People are willing to make sacrifices in the name of conservation - energy, oil, etc. - unless they feel like a chump, the person who makes the sacrifice while others continue on their merry, wasteful ways, destroying people and the planet as they go to obtain the fuel necessary to continue destroying people and the planet.

From Tom Dispatch on June 14th:

The Pentagon as Global Gas-Guzzler

...[M]ichael Klare, expert on war and energy, and author of the indispensable book, Blood and Oil...

...[A]nd foreign wars, sad to say, account for but a small fraction of the Pentagon's total petroleum consumption. Possessing the world's largest fleet of modern aircraft, helicopters, ships, tanks, armored vehicles, and support systems -- virtually all powered by oil -- the Department of Defense (DoD) is, in fact, the world's leading consumer of petroleum. It can be difficult to obtain precise details on the DoD's daily oil hit, but an April 2007 report by a defense contractor, LMI Government Consulting, suggests that the Pentagon might consume as much as 340,000 barrels (14 million gallons) every day. This is greater than the total national consumption of Sweden or Switzerland.