Ninguém muda ninguém. / No one changes anyone.

(Uh oh ... Have I said this all before?)
Up, Down, Appendices, Postscript.

---

There is a process at the Toronto Public Library (TPL) to ask that a title be purchased - worthy of Kafka so I don't very often indulge. Anyway, it payed out this time - four copies have been ordered and it is now available to be 'held' (sounds like a 21st century sex act).

So, go with your trusty TPL card and 'place' a 'hold' on Our Dying Planet: An Ecologist's View of the Crisis We Face by Peter F. Sale.

Speaking of sex acts ... two Toronto women (I want to call them 'blonde bookends' though both are competent in the extreme; and one has no idea what colour their DNA is): Jane Pyper, the City Librarian; and Karen Stintz, TTC Chair; bracketing (as it were) two ultimately important front-lines ... I'll leave it there.

---

A sweet girl once said to me (with a smile), "Ninguém pertence pra ninguém." / No one belongs to anyone. She is a devotee of candomblé and this song by Virgínia Rodrigues, Depois Que o Ilê Passar, brings that moment to mind (another was sitting together at Teatro Rival in Rio listening to her sing it):

     Rebentou, Ilê Ayê Curuzu
     Toque de Angola Ijexá
     Vamos pra cama meu bem
     Me pegue agora
     Me dê uma beijo gostoso
     Pode até me amassar
     Mas me solte quando o Ilê passar
     Quero ver você, Ilê Ayê passar por aqui
     Não me pegue não me toque
     Por favor não me provoque
     Eu só quero ver o Ilê passar
     Quero ver você, Ilê Ayê passar por aqui

[Teatro Rival (aka Petrobras Teatro Rival) is just a few blocks away from the buildings that collapsed on Avenida Treze de Maio this week in Rio (Treze de Maio / May 13, was the date in 1888 when slavery was 'officially' abolished in Brasil, though it has yet to be accomplished); here's a map. It happens every few years (always during renovations it seems) - a big piece of Hotel Canadá fell onto the street in 2007, and a building on Rio Branco near Assembléia collapsed in 2003 sometime. Strange I know but it is one of the things I like about Brasil.]

---

Ilê Ayê is a musical group, a huge one, formed in the 70's - a big part of Carnaval in Salvador (where Gilberto Gil comes from). Ilê Ayê might also be a Yoruba (a kind of people, a tribe, uma nação from Nigeria) expression meaning 'the house of life'. Curuzu is a neighbourhood in Salvador where Ilê Ayê (the group) began. Ijexá is a kind of music, a rhythm, also a(nother) kind of people from Nigeria, and a kind of Capoeira (which some people call 'Brasilian ju-jitsu' but it is more like a dance).

     It burst (busted) out, Ilê Ayê Curuzu
     A touch of Angola Ijexá
     Come to bed sweetheart
     Take me now
     Give me a delicious kiss
     You can even crush me
     But let me go when Ilê passes by
     I want to see you, Ilê Ayê passes by here
     Don't hold me, don't touch me
     Please don't tempt me
     I just want to see Ilê pass by
     I want to see you, Ilê Ayê passes by here

---

It is looking like I am entirely wrong about despair not necessarily leading to paralysis. I still don't think it's 'necessary' but here I am, paralysed, stopped, parado; QED.

Best not to mess (I guess) with bourgeois notions at all unless you have a fireproof floor. I had the ætiology all screwed up - ignored (at my peril) certain social feedback effects. (Could it possibly have to do with Karma? Fear is more like it - 'It's catching y'know'.)

But there's paralysis, and then there is just not moving - hard to distinguish from the outside - catalepsy vs some kind of voluntary renunciation ... a form of, say, transcendental meditation? Or a convoluted passive-aggressive response to isolation, shunning (implicit and explicit)? Or ... a simple lack of resonance?

One of Fernando Meirelles' early films, Domésticas / Maids, includes a fellow who loses his life somehow and winds up in a chair watching TV; until one day his wife comes home (from her job as a maid) and finds him still sitting in the chair, dead. The next husband seems to be going the same way until she realizes that 'It's the chair!' and gets rid of it (it's a comedy y'unnerstan').

---

I admit it! When I first saw 'Lake Titicaca" in the headline (Urban population boom threatens Lake Titicaca) I thought it was Mexico City - didn't there used to be a famous lake there?

Of course Titicaca is really on the border between Bolivia & Peru, not far from the Bolivian capital La Paz - here's a map (you knew all this already right?).

One of the highest lakes on the planet - high enough that there are measurable climatic effects associated with increased insolation.

A-and it turns out there is a smallish island in Lake Titicaca, Isla Amantaní, with two hills on it and (naturally) two hilltops: one dedicated to Pachamama and one to Pachatata; and even a hint of love in the name 'Amantani' don't you think? Earth Father doesn't show his face too often but ... yeah.

There is evidence of liminality stretching back over some longish period of time in the form of at-least-partially corbelled stone arches (a tradition carried on admirably by the tourism marketeers and the Catholic Church - but with concrete).

---

Mr. Alexander J. Pourbaix has been President of Energy and Oil Pipelines at TransCanada PipeLines Limited (aka TransCanada Corp.) since July 2010. ... Mr. Pourbaix is a 2002-2003 recipient of Canada's 'Top 40 Under 40' Award for leadership excellence (see Bloomberg).

In the first picture there do seem to be several lackeys trailing behind; so, four million a year is about right then?

A lawyer with a name like 'FromBeneath' working for Transcanada; wedding ring on the finger there; an honourable man, no doubt about it.

---

Then I went to the barber for a haircut and read this as I waited: 'CEO of the Year: Cool under pressure' from October 2008 (see below) - Hal Kvisle CEO (now past-CEO) of TransCanada. An engineer with an MBA and the instigator of Keystone & Keystone XL. Not a tall man.

In the interview he says, "... I’ve always been determined that anything I’m involved in is not going to be built in a way that harms the environment." I expect he believes it. Eight million a year and worth every penny.

---

The story of Terry Gou and Foxconn; weaving as it does around Steve Jobs and his iStuff (iShit?).

Which brings us back around to the last sentence of Limits to Growth:

The crux of the matter is not only whether the human species will survive, but even more whether it can survive without falling into a state of worthless existence.

[The last chapter of Limits to Growth can be found here (.pdf, pages 17-21).]

Without knowing what things were like before, our grandchildren may very well view the state of the planet they inherit as 'normal' (because yes, some of our grandchildren will still be on it - extinction, even when a meteor strikes, doesn't happen overnight). In that sense, Terry Gou's mistake (not a 'mistake' exactly, but you know what I mean) might have been just - moving too quickly.

---

Some perspective on 'quickly': David Suzuki is reported here:

After 50 years of working in Canada and the world for a planet he revers he told the audience that our Earth is in "far worse shape" than it was when he began and that progress "has gone backwards."

[I trust he actually said 'reveres'.]

It is about the same story with John Porter (a generation before Suzuki) on social inequality: The vertical mosaic: an analysis of social class and power in Canada in 1965, and The measure of Canadian society: education, equality and opportunity in 1987.

---

Some perspective on jumping to conclusions: Ol' Simon wazizname ... Critchley (whom I was dissing in the post on Peter Sale's book).

I remember some (almost forgotten) when, picking up Simon Critchley and putting him down again for some reason. Then recently a friend mentioned him so I went to the library and ordered up Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance from 2007.

But it was slow coming, so in the meantime I got Very Little... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (1997), found it impossibly opaque, threw it at the wall and moved on.

So that when Infinitely Demanding finally arrived I nearly skipped it. Glad I didn't - more on remedies for nihilism next time.

This video from September 2008 (before Obama's election) is interesting (he's more than a bit of a show-off): Branding Democracy: Barack Obama and the American Void (and at Fora TV). (But I like it when he disses Charles Taylor.)

But, seriously folks ... the idea of fundamental politial myth, fiction, a ficção ... of course it is; the power of the people is real enough, while Divine Right of Kings and Perfect Union are management inventions.

---

Blancmange (speaking of fiction): The only video I could find is at MSN; transcripts can be found here & here; and I grabbed (poor but watchable) videos of the speech and the Q&A session following (in case they take the MSN one down).

I include a picture of Shawn Atleo ... well, why not? A pawn in the game. Pawns are important too.

Who was that economics guy? Chicago School was it? ... Oh yeah - Milton Friedman; and he and his colleagues, students, tap dancing with Augusto Pinochet in Chile. It is clear that our Milton is not very tall from that first photograph - and his feet are not even in it!

Watching Stephen Harper's Davos speech a few times (as I had to do to grab it) I was remembering certain sermons by certain preachers I have known - they way their mouths go when they are nailing it down tight around sin (or lemons). Times're gonna stay tough ... yup; gotta do what we gotta do to ensure growth ...

---

These two verses (15 & 16) in Matthew only work in isolation for me. He embeds them into a procedure which effectively leads to shunning. Taken out of context they make (a bit) more sense:

Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.

But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.

Well ... even the second verse already seems to be headed off somewhere compulsive. What exactly could it mean to 'establish' a word in someone's mouth I wonder? Don't know, and only a very limited subset of the possibilities is appealing - if it means the equivalent of 'point taken' then I am with it, otherwise not.

Even that 'gained' in the first verse could be a trap - why not 'regained'? Or 'restored'?

I think someone told me once that the Amish (or the Quakers was it?) use this verse as a prime mover, and even not knowing any more about it than that has endeared them all to me (to a degree).

---

Who orders this shit is me.
KOÉ?! / Say what?!

The existential-self-referential pork sausage version of Oroborus.

I can't find much on the artist, Luimau (maybe a nick-name?); the only website I can find is Osso Vozes, which stopped in 2009.

The trail led from Benett to Salmonelas to Porko Parade and Issi Vizes/Osso Vozes and stopped with this editorial:

Osso Vozes destrata a vida de um cartunista que quase nunca desenha, troca o incerto pelo errado mesmo, mistura minas com bombas e, principalmente, não tem uma idéia geral do que seja essa tira. Lui, um cartunista desproporcional.

[... Ah, his name is Lui Duarte, and indeed, he is still busy, just last week in Fortaleza (in the Brasilian state of Ceará - map) at Sobrado Dr. José Lourenço.]

---

No one changes anyone? No one belongs to anyone? Au contraire, mon cher frère! Infinitesimally small as they may be, the only changes that occur (like the shoreline and the sea) are there in the interstitial zone (or in the possibly imaginary one involving God). There is no other there ... there. Is there?

Be well gentle reader.

[Is that 'interstitial' or 'intertidal'?]

---

Postscript: Le Rendez-vous (refrain)

Garderez-vous parmi vos souvenirs
Ce rendez-vous où je n'ai pu venir?
Jamais, jamais, vous ne saurez jamais
Si ce n'était qu'un jeu ou si je vous aimais.
Les rendez-vous que l'on cesse d'attendre
Existent-ils dans quelque autre univers?
Où vont aussi les mots qu'on a pas pris le temps d'entendre
Et l'amour inconnu que nul n'a découvert?

[paroles: Gilles Vigneault, musique: Claude Léveillée - on an album in the early 60's]

This one is not so good. The original studio version (audio) is much better but there is no way to link to it directly - you have to scroll down and click on it. And a couple of rounds of Frédéric while we are at it: here & here.

---

The first one was: They say, "sing while you slave," but I just get bored. Then there was this one: Who am I? Who are you? ... said Moses to the Lord.

I think the next one will start soon: I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet. And with a subtitle: "Je me fous du monde entier."

---

Appendices:

1. CEO of the Year: Cool under pressure, FPM, October 2008.

---

CEO of the Year: Cool under pressure, FPM, October 2008.

TransCanada Corp.’s headquarters in downtown Calgary is striking for its high ceilings and blond, blue and white hues. It’s a coolness that seems to rub off on CEO Hal Kvisle, Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year for 2008. Since taking the top job in 2001, Kvisle has led the transformation of a poky, regulated western Canadian gas pipeline company into an agile, continental gas (and soon to be oil) pipeline operator and power producer. The volume of deals and announcements has been especially high the past two years, but at no time have things been any more hectic than the Monday of our interview in mid-September. Over the weekend, Lehman Brothers announced it was filing for bankruptcy and Bank of America bought the ailing Merrill Lynch. At the same time, Hurricane Ike pounded Houston and the Gulf Coast refinery region. As it turns out, TransCanada had big stakes in both Texas and Wall Street. A few days later, the company would announce US$250 million worth of exposed contracts with Lehman Bros. This morning, however, we begin by talking with Kvisle about TransCanada’s other “exposure” — to hurricanes like Ike in the Gulf.

FINANCIAL POST MAGAZINE: Last year, you bought U.S. pipeline company ANR for US$3.4 billion. That gave TransCanada 17,000 kilometres of new gas pipeline in the U.S., primarily in the Midwest and Gulf Coast. It also means you now have a direct interest in what happens there any time a hurricane hits or tornadoes strike. What are you going through today?

Hal Kvisle: Now that we’ve been involved in ANR, tornadoes and hurricanes are of much more material interest than they were before. The western segment of the ANR line gets hit by a lot of tornadoes. They never hurt the pipeline, but we now have employees who have their houses destroyed by tornadoes going through. They’re in Tornado Alley up through Kansas and places like that. The other line is in Hurricane Alley coming in through the Gulf. Twice now in two years we’ve been hit by big hurricane activity. This one, Ike, has really caused quite a bit of disruption and damage. Many of our people in Houston are unable to use a telephone. It’s been a big job on our part just to check on everyone and make sure all of our people are okay.

FPM: How many people do you have there?

Kvisle: We have roughly 400 people in Houston and we have roughly an equal number of people in locations like Nashville, Greensboro, different places all up and down the system.

FPM: Is expansion into the U.S. the biggest change in TransCanada during your tenure as CEO?

Kvisle: Yes and no. TransCanada was initially an east-west company connecting Alberta to the Ontario and Quebec gas markets. If you roll back the clock to the year 2000, we had some small assets in the United States, but virtually all of our net income and our business activity was related to the transmission of Canadian gas. Today, while our U.S. pipeline business is not as big as our Canadian business, it will be soon. The completion of the Keystone oil pipeline system — our first oil pipeline — will really add to our presence. The game plan is for the U.S. pipes to become as significant to TransCanada as the Canadian pipes.

But we’ve also grown in the power business, in both Canada and the U.S. Officially, we just break our company into two — the pipeline division and the power division. And the pipeline division is still bigger than the power division. But if you break the pipeline division into Canada and the U.S., power is bigger than either of them. So that’s been quite a remarkable development. Since the year 2000, we’ve grown a power business that is bigger than TransCanada was at the time of the 1998 merger with Nova Energy.”

FPM: You’re capping a year of home runs. You won the bidding for the Alaska gas pipeline, announced the Keystone project expansion and bought the Ravenswood power plant in New York. Is this the company you envisioned when you took over in 2001?

Kvisle: I don’t know that I would have foreseen exactly this. But what I did foresee was that we could no longer be a one-trick pony with all of our eggs in the Canadian National Energy Board-regulated, Mainline-plus-Alberta basket. We had to diversify beyond that. We said we’d need to grow in areas where we have some kind of competitive advantage. So those two areas were pipeline throughout North America and big investments in power generation. Power generation was an ideal capital-intensive business to invest in — same capital structure as pipelines, no real limitations on growth. We move about 20% of all the gas in North America and you can’t get a lot bigger than that, but we’re today 1% of the North American power-gen market, so there’s lots of room for growth. Beyond that, working on things like Alaska and the Mackenzie Valley pipeline was just part of the longer-term plan.

FPM: You worked for Dome Petroleum in the 1980s, which was big in the Arctic. Now you’ve got a green light on the Alaska line, and we even hear talk of progress on Mackenzie. Has the North’s time finally come? Are we finally going to see these pipelines built?

Kvisle: It is time for the North. The market needs the gas. It’s time for us to develop the Mackenzie Delta and offshore regions. It very clearly puts a Canadian stamp on all that. It’s time from a reservoir perspective, for Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to go on gas sales.

That said, I don’t know whether we’re going to see those pipelines built or not. I’d say it’s highly certain that the Alaska project will go ahead. And if everything turns out in the correct logical way, there will be a pipeline through the Yukon and B.C. to Alberta. And it will connect that gas through to North American markets. The only issue that I raise about that is that there are challenges in Canada to getting that pipeline permitted and built in an expeditious manner. I think Canada has to pay a lot of attention to this, because if we don’t stand behind our commitment to get the Canadian section of that pipe built on time and on budget, there is the risk that Alaskan gas could go to the LNG market.

FPM: LNG — liquid natural gas — is shipped by tanker, correct?

Kvisle: That’s right. Now, we don’t think the LNG market through Valdez, Alaska, is economically the right answer, but it might be the answer if Americans start to perceive that there’s too much risk building through Canada. And why would they perceive that? I think it would revolve around the Mackenzie. The Mackenzie has been an incredibly difficult project to move forward. We have real challenges on the regulatory front in Canada. Things just get bogged down. And no question we’re bogged down in the Mackenzie. We’re talking about a multi-billion-dollar impact on the cost of the Mackenzie project. It’s the complexity of the regulatory process — and the fact that it’s still not over — that has added something like $3 billion to the cost of the Mackenzie project.

FPM: Besides Alaska, what have been the biggest recent highlights in your mind?

Kvisle: Home run No. 1 from my perspective was the successful integration of ANR. It’s all well and good to go around doing these $4-billion deals, but it takes an enormous effort inside the company to make it part of TransCanada. The fact that we’re generating excellent profitability and getting good financial results from what was a pretty big investment, that makes us happy. The second big win for the year was the regulatory rate approval that we got through on the TransCanada GTN system to California and the renegotiation of certain terms there. That was a real positive outcome that we’d been working on for two years since we acquired GTN. The third big home run is Keystone. And there are two parts to it. We are under construction on the main Keystone project. So for me that’s really significant. And then on the Keystone expansion, which is the short cut across and the extension to the Gulf Coast, we’ve announced significant, binding, long-term contracts. My fourth one would be Ravenswood, the New York power deal. Financial results will tell the story of Ravenswood and it’s too early to say. We remain very optimistic. That is a very significant asset in a very significant market. There’s also the Bruce nuclear plant in Ontario. We’re now two-thirds of the way done the biggest nuclear construction project in North America.

FPM: A lot of what we’re talking about in terms of the deals and the transformation of the company led to your selection as Outstanding CEO of the Year. Can you tell us a bit more about your role in the process, your footprint on these things?

Kvisle: The merger between TransCanada and Nova occurred in July 1998, about a year before I joined. And when I started talking to TransCanada about coming to work here — not as the CEO but to run the trading and business development department — I was attracted to it in part because I’d been through one of these big mergers before. I was there for the Dome-Hudson Bay merger in 1982. And one of the things I learned then is if you bring two organizations of people together and you keep all the right people and you keep the right projects and you get the right focus, things can work out really well.

People always talk about the cost synergies. Or they talk about the heft of the company in the financial markets or the business community or whatever. But to me, the single biggest upside of a merger is the coming together of two teams of people that actually might see the world a bit differently, might have better ideas. If you can get them properly organized you’re going to have a winner.

FPM: How did things play out after you arrived?

Kvisle: We discovered after I joined and Doug Baldwin had stepped in as stopgap CEO that much of what I’d been hired to run had to be sold. TransCanada had quite a bit more debt than anyone expected coming out of that merger, and less revenue, and we had to do something about that. I essentially spent my first 18 months at TransCanada selling off businesses that I’d been hired to run.

I took the CEO job in May 2001. The No. 1 job at that point was to establish what strategies we were going to pursue and get the organization focused behind those. A real key to our success has been our executive leadership team and some of the changes that have occurred on that team over time. This includes people like Alex Pourbaix, whom I elevated to the senior team and gave a mandate to grow a very significant power business. Similarly, we identified the big northern projects as a priority. And so I elevated Dennis McConaghy as the guy to carry those forward. Russ Girling was the CFO and it was seen to be very important that we maintain our standing in the financial community and our credit rating, so Russ agreed to carry on in that job. But we started thinking about who might be the successor to Russ, as he really wanted to run a business unit. A couple of years ago that occurred, when Greg Lohnes came back after five years at Great Lakes and became the CFO.

What I’m trying to convey is that there was a whole lot of important organizational work that was required over that period: What are the strategies of the company going to be? How much money do we have for investment in big opportunities? How are we going to cultivate the best opportunities? To me it was a question of getting the right people into the executive leadership team and then working with them to make sure that they each had the strongest possible department.

FPM: Is there a point through there where it all started to click?

Kvisle: I’d say all of that started to come together in ’03. It took us a couple of years of really focusing on the operation of the existing assets to try to increase cash flow. Our investments in energy got us through that early period, when there weren’t many opportunities on the pipe side. And then starting in about 2006, a whole bunch of stuff started to come together in pipelines. We did the GTN acquisition. We acquired effectively 100% of Great Lakes, we acquired ANR, we took over operatorship of Northern Border, we kicked off the Keystone project — all of this happened in the last two years.

FPM: What does that mean in quantitative terms?

Kvisle: We generated a billion dollars a year in cash flow in year 1999-2000. Today, we generate almost $3 billion a year in cash flow. So the cash coming out of our existing assets has gone up two and a half times. Our capital program was about $400 million then. We’ll invest just under $6 billion this year. And lately, our finance team has had an extraordinary run. We’ve issued over $3 billion of equity, of TransCanada common stock, in an 18-month period. And we’ve issued twice that much debt.

FPM: Do you see the market meltdown affecting TransCanada and other companies like it?

Kvisle: I do. In times of uncertainty, everybody pulls their horns in a little bit. And it’s so uncertain what is going to happen in the world next. Five months ago, if you’d have asked anybody what could possibly happen to Lehman Brothers, bankruptcy would not have been on the radar screen. Yet today, here we are. To see Merrill Lynch taken over by Bank of America, it’s an astounding thing.

FPM: Let’s talk more about the Keystone pipeline. It’s slated to carry oilsands oil into the U.S. starting in late 2009 and to refineries in the Gulf by 2012. The price tag: US$12.2 billion. How did it come together? Why is it important?

Kvisle: Clearly, there’s a big supply of oil being developed in Alberta. That supply needs an outlet. So we looked around and said, “Where is the market in North America that would most likely want this crude oil?” A lot of people put pressure on us to look at the Pacific market. But I’ve just never been a fan of pipelines to the Pacific coast. Why go there and compete head on with all the middle-east crude when we could deliver the crude into the middle of North America — a close-at-hand market in which we have more advantages than disadvantages in serving? So we landed first on the Wood River-Petoka market, near St. Louis. Secondly, the Cushing, Okla., market. Thirdly, it was always our plan to ultimately extend to the Gulf Coast and hook into the biggest refining market in the world.

FPM: As a gas pipeline builder, you’ve had lots of experience with protestors and opposition to your plans. But while these hurdles are mostly local with gas, opposition to oilsands oil — aka “dirty oil” — is global. Does that concern you?

Kvisle: It just makes things more complicated. It’s not unlike getting involved in Bruce Nuclear. All of a sudden now we have to deal with the issues related to nuclear power plants. There are foes out there to nuclear power. Generally, there are foes out there related to anything an engineer might ever do. And so you have a certain number of well-organized parties that are very opposed to the development of Fort McMurray. I don’t agree with any of their criticism. I’ve spent a fair bit of time up there. I know quite a bit about it. I know that Fort McMurray is not devastating the boreal forest of all of northeast Alberta, and yet that’s what they say. I know that Fort McMurray uses less than 1% of the water that flows in the Athabasca River, but you know the Kennedys would have you believe that it’s something much more than that. And the latest one is this issue of “dirty oil,” that somehow oilsands production is dirtier than any other production, when the truth is that between 85% and 92% of the CO2 emitted from any barrel of oil is emitted by the end user. And the other 8% to 15% is emitted during production, transportation and refining. So, is a barrel that has a little more emission in the production phase really a dirty barrel compared to any other, when between 85% and 92% of the CO2 is emitted by the person who uses the barrel at the end of the process?

Our position is that we move what the market wants us to move. If the market wants us to move that crude, we are to move it and we are going to do it without having an impact on the environment.

FPM: One can’t help but think of the global attacks Canadian forestry companies faced. And how that hurt the whole sector.

Kvisle: We appreciate the global elements of this. Nowhere is that a bigger issue than on the CO2 front. In the world, generally, people want to dramatically reduce the amount of CO2 we emit and I don’t have an issue with that. But if mankind wants to dramatically reduce the amount of CO2 it emits, we need a 30- or 40-year program of shutting down plants that emit a lot of CO2 at the right point in their lifecycle and replacing them with something new, and we need to do it in the normal course of capital replacement. On the other hand, having us proceed in a direction where many of these high-quality, long-life plants are going be required to shut down prematurely is an enormous mistake.

I think we are in a very difficult situation in Canada, where a whole variety of governments have led the electorate to believe that we can solve the CO2 problem relatively easily and that the burden of doing so will be borne by somebody else. In fact, we have a situation where everyone is going to pay enormously if we don’t proceed in a much more careful manner and respect the lifecycle of these big assets that we have. There’s no way of meeting Kyoto targets, Canada should know that by now. It’s a very serious public policy failure in Canada, firstly, not to recognize the reality of what you can and have to do, and secondly, to head off in a direction that’s different than the United States, not recognizing that we’re 90% integrated with the U.S. in terms of our economy. This is a very difficult thing. It’s the toughest issue I deal with in my job.

FPM: Tell us about your personal environmental ethic.

Kvisle: I grew up in west central Alberta. My father was a biologist and a school teacher and he was really involved in conservation. He would research things like how do you provide better habitat for the moose and elk in the Alberta foothills. So I had a lot of exposure to that and I’ve always been determined that anything I’m involved in is not going to be built in a way that harms the environment.

I’ve spent decades working in oil and gas development in the foothills region of western Alberta, and I think it’s a real credit to the companies that work in that part of Alberta that the landscape isn’t destroyed by oil and gas activity. There’s no other industry where you can make a $3-million investment and all you see is a wellhead sticking out of the ground. You know, we invest $30 billion or $40 billion a year in the oil and gas sector, and with the exception of Fort McMurray, the surface disturbance is really minimal.

FPM: We hear you’re applying those principles at your ranch, too?

Kvisle: A big part of what we’re doing on the ranch is preserving the nature of the area. I share the view that we need to maintain these different ranching areas in Alberta in a very pristine condition. We can’t overgraze them. We can’t let the cattle ruin the creeks. All of that stuff has to be done in a long-term, sustainable way. There were no buildings on this particular property. So we went out there and said we’re not going to develop this in a big grandiose fashion. We’re going to have minimal impact. All the electricity is supplied through solar panel systems. It’s entirely off the grid. All the heat is wood heat. We just find all the trees that are going to fall down and rot and turn into CO2 anyway and burn them.

FPM: When did you build there?

Kvisle: I’ve had a farming property up by Innisfail for about 15 years. We picked up this cattle-grazing operation five years ago.

FPM: It sounds like a nice place for retirement. You’re now 56. You’ve been CEO of TransCanada for eight years. Have you given any thought to how much longer you’ll want to stay in the job?

Kvisle: I think it’s important that you don’t stay longer than you’re really significantly contributing to the leadership of the company. In my case, I look at it in terms of a half-dozen different projects that we’ve got on the go here. I see things like reaching commercial agreements on Alaska — that’s a job that I take very seriously and I think I can contribute to. Second, we have acquired this Ravenswood asset that is essential to electricity supply in New York City — so making sure that we get through the full integration of Ravenswood, that we run it really well. I want to see oil flowing through the Keystone pipeline. We did all the work to get that going. I don’t leave part way through something like that, that’s got a few years to run. Similarly, Bruce Nuclear. I am convinced that we’re going to have a tremendous success story when we get A1 and A2 refurbished and we start them up and get them running. Those are the kinds of things I think about before retiring.

---

Down.

I can't think anymore about k-k-Canada

so I will think about Brasil today :-)
Up, Down.

snow mixed with rain yesterday, and frost on the rooftops this morning ... "winter is icummen in, lhude sing Goddamm,"

Canada, land of such complacency, land of callous & hypocritical & cynical politicians & bureaucrats complicit in torture, where a man is killed by police in the Vancouver airport more than two years ago and the RCMP weasels are still waffling over it, so I just don't want to think about it anymore ... maybe Prince Charles had a similar thought (if he didn't, he should have):


not that simple of course, some weedy pundit, Christie Blatchford, has now examined Richard Colvin's emails and not found enough to back up his allegations, she thinks, if she can be said to think ... but it echoes with a feeling I had that Richard Colvin was too convenient, that maybe he was put up to it as a smoke-screen while Harper the cockroach wiggled out from under Global Climate Heating - now that is really silly isn't it? could they be that cynical? I am obviously losing it ... nutbar ...

"At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realise I am fighting for humanity."
     Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, aka Chico Mendes, 1944-1988.

"I don't call it anything," said Frankie Lee with a smile."
     Bob Dylan, The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest, 1968.

Bob Dylan, Must Be Santa, 2009.




The Rich at Play
And how much can we charge for the use of the swing?
But who would pay to use a swing Dr. Hermés?
OK then, tell them to take it down.

they played this today, and it was like the answer to a prayer:

Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming from tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming, as men of old have sung.
It came, a floweret bright, amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.

Isaiah ’twas foretold it, the Rose I have in mind;
With Mary we behold it, the virgin mother kind.
To show God’s love aright, she bore to men a Savior,
When half spent was the night.

The shepherds heard the story proclaimed by angels bright,
How Christ, the Lord of glory was born on earth this night.
To Bethlehem they sped and in the manger found Him,
As angel heralds said.

This Flower, whose fragrance tender with sweetness fills the air,
Dispels with glorious splendor the darkness everywhere;
True Man, yet very God, from sin and death He saves us,
And lightens every load.

O Savior, Child of Mary, who felt our human woe,
O Savior, King of glory, who dost our weakness know;
Bring us at length we pray, to the bright courts of Heaven,
And to the endless day!
     15th Cen­tu­ry German car­ol, on YouTube: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7.

Isaiah 11:1 - And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

a very difficult piece to sing ...

Brazil, where hearts were entertaining June
We stood beneath an amber moon
And softly murmured "someday soon"
We kissed and clung together
Then, tomorrow was another day
The morning found me miles away
With still a million things to say
Now, when twilight dims the sky above
Recalling thrills of our love
There’s one thing I’m certain of
Return I will to old Brazil

That old Brazil
Man it's old in Brazil
Brazil ...
     Frank Sinatra - Brazil (1981),      Terry Gilliam - Brazil (1985).


Appendices:
1. E-mail trail only adds to Afghan questions, Christie Blatchford, Nov. 28 2009.
     1a. CPAC video of Richard Colvin at the Committee.
     1b. of Os Tres Amigos, aka the Generals.
     1c. of David Mulroney, Bob Rae's chum.
     1d. Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan (AFGH).

Dessima M. Williams:
2a. AOSIS - Alliance of Small Island States.
2b. GRENED - Grenada Education and Development Project.


***************************************************************************
E-mail trail only adds to Afghan questions, Christie Blatchford, Nov. 28 2009.

Richard Colvin's secret correspondence provides little light on detainee issue after a week in which Ottawa rejected his claims

For a week, diplomat Richard Colvin's accusations about Canada's handling of its Afghan prisoners – and their subsequent alleged torture at the hands of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security – dominated headlines and Parliament, despite the fact that no one had seen the e-mails in which Mr. Colvin said he had tried to wake Ottawa to the problem he saw as so serious.

The Globe and Mail now has what appears to be the entire collection of the e-mails Mr. Colvin sent on the subject during the 17 months he spent in Afghanistan from April of 2006 to October of 2007. A couple are virtually completely blacked out; some are heavily redacted, others rattle on at such length they could have done with a little more redacting.

It seems to have been Mr. Colvin's visit to the provincial prison in Kandahar city on May 16, 2006, that first triggered his concern. But that inspection and an earlier one upon which he relied, made in December of 2005 by the International Committee of the Red Cross, were, in the Afghan context, practically sunny about their findings.

The ICRC rated the Kandahar prison the best of the four it inspected; it was “not that bad” and “not the worst in Afghanistan,” that honour going to the facility in Uruzgan, the Dutch area of control. Even to Mr. Colvin, the Kandahar prison seemed “to be in reasonably good condition,” inmates got “enough food” and, he said, most were through the courts within 15 days (unlikely, as the courts in Afghanistan were at that time almost non-existent).

And though Mr. Colvin was careful to note that his guide at the prison was guarded and speaking “in code,” the guide's harshest characterization of detainee treatment was that some were being held in “unsavoury” or “unsatisfactory” conditions.

Of a five-page e-mail, Mr. Colvin devoted four paragraphs, most of this not blacked out, to the treatment of detainees by Afghan authorities.

It is a long way from that mild pronouncement to Mr. Colvin's testimony last week before a special parliamentary committee, where he said unequivocally that most of the Afghans detained by Canadian soldiers weren't “high-value targets” but rather “just local people, farmers, truck drivers, tailors, peasants, random human beings in the wrong place at the wrong time” and that Canadian troops had “retained and handed over for severe torture a lot of innocent people.”

How he got from one polar extreme to the other isn't much clarified by the dozens of e-mails he sent in the interim.

He wrote only three of them in 2006, only one more in the first three months of 2007. The vast majority were written in April that year, about the time The Globe and Mail's series on abuses in Afghan prisons appeared – or afterward – and prompted the government to stop handing over prisoners to Afghan authorities until a new protocol could be arranged.

As context for Mr. Colvin's tour in Afghanistan, it should be noted that he arrived at Kandahar Air Field on April 28, 2006, and went several days later to the Provincial Reconstruction Team headquarters on the outskirts of town, where he spent about seven weeks – leaving the compound, as comfortable and safe a place as there is in that country, only once for a few hours.

That was his “outside the wire” tour, which means that in his information gathering, he would have relied heavily upon phone interviews with Afghans, contacts with the ICRC and other non-governmental agencies, and any journalists, local or foreign, he may have met at the PRT.

Mr. Colvin then headed off for a month's leave in July, spending the remainder of his time in Afghanistan at the Canadian embassy in Kabul, finally heading home in October of 2007.

By the kindest reckoning, he would have spent a grand total of a half-day outside the wire in Kandahar.

Certainly, this does not diminish his time in that hard country – and he was there as a diplomat, not as a soldier or journalist – but it does mean he got nowhere near what's called a “point-of-capture” on a battlefield and had no visceral sense of who it was Canadian troops were detaining.

Once in charge of Kandahar Province in January of 2006, Canadian troops were in the thick of battle almost immediately. Depending where in the province they were, they were either in gunfights or getting blown up, or trying to avoid being blown up, virtually every day.

And they took a lot of prisoners – many more than either the British, who were at the time in Helmand Province where things were then relatively quiet, or the Dutch, who were later moving into Uruzgan.

From the start, Canadian soldiers were using gunshot residue tests (this was mentioned by the former chief of defence staff Rick Hillier in his testimony to the committee this week, but the significance of the remark went unnoticed) to sift the wheat from the chaff.

They detained only those who tested positive for GSR (meaning they had recently either fired a weapon or been right beside someone who had), were found with guns or bomb-making parts or near IED strikes or were otherwise highly suspicious, such as well-dressed men carrying large amounts of Pakistani cash.

Mr. Colvin's claim that innocent farmers were being cruelly dispatched to torture suggests he paid scarce attention to the “Taliban by night” phenomenon, whereby the man who farms by day becomes, under cover of darkness, a low-level fighter in the insurgency. Whether he acts out of need or is coerced into fighting with the Taliban, once he begins shooting or planting bombs, for the soldier, he is the enemy.

The only real clue in the 30-item e-mail and report trail to Mr. Colvin's increasing urgency is that – after The Globe series – his impatient pleas for swift change and better prisoner monitoring won him no friends in the Ottawa bureaucracy. In these demands, he was proven right, and in his anger about being muzzled by a hyper-secret government, which he made most strongly in an end-of-assignment report he never sent his superiors, he was hardly alone.

With these e-mails now, finally, in the public domain, albeit in a redacted form, Canadians may have more information but they know less.

In condemning with the same brush highly professional Canadian soldiers, and to complain that they were complicit in breaches of the law of armed conflict and knowingly buried his reports, it is Mr. Colvin who has some explaining left to do.

XXV ... not long now

Up, Down.


Annual Meeting of the Masters of the World
You mean to say that we can generate fear ...
... and then sell protection!
Wow Henry. Your idea gives me shivers ...
Look at that, already we have our first client!



from Elvira Madigan, a Swedish movie from the 60s ... interesting the way screen-grabs from DVD movies are sort-of washed out, so I brightened them with Photo Editor, Pia Degermark & Thommy Berggren, it came to mind the other day (XXI - I guess XXX will be a fitting end then) so I ordered a copy and it came today and I watched it - I had no idea that it was a true story, Hedvig Antoinette Isabella Eleonore Jensen & Count Bengt Edvard Sixten Sparre, but I remember that it hit me like a ton of bricks and as I watched it again I saw some of my emotional touchstones turning up, that shade of yellow dress, taking a bit of bread and almost crying, other things ... I guess you could call it extreme romanticism but I am not going to get into the analysis

last words ... his "I can't," and her "You must." was Bo Widerberg clever enough to know that these phrases would sound as in English? likely was I guess ...

louche: adjective, Oblique, not straightforward. Also, dubious, shifty, disreputable, from French louche/lousche squinting, Latin lusca, feminine of luscus one-eyed.



I can imagine some phony intellectual like Woody Allen, or even an almost-real one like Rick Salutin, saying, with an exquisite sneer, "He was like some 60s refugee, still trapped in Elvira Madigan ..." something like that ... whatever

here's a rogues gallery: Jack Layton, Jim Prentice, Marcel Coutu, Michael Martin, & Maude Barlow (alphabetically by first name :-)

Maude Barlow was selected last for this list, it was not balanced, I thought there should be some distaff in there, some visual interest :-) ... and now that she is a Heroine of the Environment, doh!? ... no waidaminit it's the "2009 Planet in Focus International Eco Hero Award," so we need to see what Maudie looks like ... Eco Hero, another Caped Crusader I guess, like the Pope :-)

why is Jack Layton in there? just another vain bourgeois son of a bourgeois son from Hudson Quebec, just another 'it's about ME' guy from Toronto ... wringing his hands in the national media about his pretty little Bill C-377/C-311C-311, all good except that 80% in 2050 is too little too late, I bet that somewhere he has claimed to be following the science ... but the science I am aware of says 80% by 2020, 90% by 2030, with the tipping year of 2015

I trust the rest of them are obvious ... well, maybe Michael Martin ... oops, poor Michael has not made it into Wikipedia, but the OED tells me that an 'envoy' is a second-rank diplomat (first being ambassadors and third being chargés d'affaires) so maybe that's it ... one day in Bangkok some people get up and leave a Canadian presentation of some kind, I don't really know why - maybe someone needed to use the bathroom? but our Michael says so publicly seconded by some other diplomatic son of a diplomatic son and all is well until Jim Prentice hears of it, oh my! so, it is the joint public denial which explains nothing that has earned him this flying fickle finger of fate award :-)


Samsø Island in Denmark almost looks like a good place to go to :-) except that Denmark is flat, highest elevation in the country is 550 feet, on Samso ... can't find the number, but not high enough for the long term I'll bet.

I have been thinking about the Vancouver Winter Olympics, collected some good cartoons ... there are some issues, in fact I think it is a sham ... and I noted the news of elementary school teachers effectively offering courses in terrorism with a smile, and this editorial by Cam Cole didn't change my mind but it caught my attention: It's elementary, my dear children: The Olympics are a sham, entertained me, made me laugh ... all good :-)


Appendices:
1. Pia Degermark - You always get another chance, Pia Lundgren, January 2004.

2-1. Canada envoy sees draft climate treaty achievable, Jeffrey Jones, Sept 22 2009.
2-2. Walkout over climate talks, Steve Rennie, 13th Oct. 2009.
2-3. Statement by Minister Prentice on Bangkok Climate Change Talks, Jim Prentice, Oct. 14 2009.
2-4. Copenhagen climate deal unlikely: Jim Prentice, Kelly Cryderman, Oct. 15 2009.
2-5. Allow higher oil sands emissions: CEO Marcel Coutu, Shawn McCarthy, Oct. 15 2009.
2-6. On a cost basis, carbon-capture projects are madness, Jeffrey Simpson, Oct. 19 2009.
2-7. Pass climate bill before UN summit, Layton says, Heather Scoffield, Oct. 19 2009.
2-8. Ottawa dashes hope for climate treaty in Copenhagen, Shawn McCarthy, Oct. 22 2009.

3. International Eco Hero – Maude Barlow, Planet In Focus International Film & Video Festival.

4. An Ecotopia for Climate Protection - Samso Island, Clemens Höges, 10/22/2009.
4-1. Part 1: Samso Island Is Face of Danish Green Revolution.
4-2. Part 2: 'Everyone Can Do What We Are Doing'.
     4a. Samsø Island, Denmark, Wikipedia.
     4b. Samsø Kommune in Danish.
     4c. Getting a Green card.

5. It's elementary, my dear children: The Olympics are a sham, Cam Cole, October 16 2009.



***************************************************************************
Pia Degermark - You always get another chance, Pia Lundgren, January 2004.

We remember Pia Degermark as the beautiful young girl in the film Elvira Madigan. At 17 she became world famous and flirted with the King. On the surface, she was a glamorous jetsetter but behind the facade lay deep sadness. Anorexia, drugs and eventually prison. Today, however, Pia Degermark is finally back on track.

"I have regained my faith in my fellow man."

"I suspect I would perhaps have had an easier life without Elvira Madigan" says Pia Degermark. "Perhaps I would have avoided anorexia, hyperactivity and substance abuse" and in her next breath "But of course you can't change the past"

She was born to the heights of society and descended to its depths, she has been to hell and back. Still, she looks fresh and healthy. Her face is still as beautiful as when she made Elvira Madigan, but the once innocent and trusting eyes now reflect a reality shaped by a decadent lifestyle, homelessness and life down and out coping with a drug problem.´

There is pain in her glance, but also happiness at having survived despite everything. There is even a mischievous sparkle that bubbles forth at times.

"My life began to improve about five years ago when I began cognitive therapy, when I regained a closer contact with my mother. I have broken out of my more destructive patterns of behaviour and found my faith in mankind renewed."

Now her handmade cushions are on display in a Stockholm gallery, a real comeback if you consider that the last news we had of Pia was of her being awarded 630,000 SEK for lost income after a traffic accident which crushed her right leg.

The Traffic Insurance Society has appealed this decision however and Pia still hasn't seen a penny of it. The past year she has been unable to work but for two years prior to that she was working as a cultural assistant for an Athletics foundation.

"I would rather work with handicrafts. I find it difficult to work for someone and know that I must be at the office every day at 8.00".

She points at the cushions in the room: "These are a form of therapy, that one symbolizes my mother and the one in the corner, that's for Ann Zacharias. We have known each other for twenty years but only really began to socialise this autumn. There's no competition or jealousy between us, she's a dear friend."

Two huge armchairs dominate the living room; Pia serves tea and buns, and sits herself down in the armchair with studs on the armrest.


She has been making cushions for years. Traces perhaps of her hyperactivity?

"It provides both an outlet for my creativity and something to occupy my hands."

She suffers continuous, severe pain after her accident and says that the only thing that really helps to ease the pain is swimming:

"So I swim almost every day. The pool here at Hägersten is the best in Stockholm, and part of the reason I chose to move here two years ago."

Her godfather helped her with the money necessary to get the contract on the apartment. Pia gives the impression of being five, fifteen and fifty, all at the same time, a child, a precocious teenager in a mature woman's body. Just after the success of Elvira Madigan, an English journalist asked Pia's mother "How was Pia as a child?" The reply? "Pia never was a child"

"It just wasn't for me" says Pia. "I have always been stubborn, as a six year old, my constant dieting forced my mother to put me into the Princess Lovisa Hospital, it took me a long time to learn how to play, to be a child, to explore boundaries."

"I grew up in such a incredibly sheltered environment. When I was just ten, we all moved to Switzerland, apart from my brother who was attending the International School at Sigtuna. I went to a little village school before attending a boarding-school for girls."

Pia carries on to tell of the materially rich life they had, whatever she pointed at, she got except for what she really needed, the security of family life. Her family was not fully focussed; she got no clear guidelines or clarity, only mixed messages of what was and was not acceptable.

"But I got huge amounts of love from my mother!"

Pia and her mother still enjoy a close relationship; they celebrated Christmas and New Year in Lucerne, Switzerland at her mother's home, with her son Cesare, from her relationship with Pier Caminneci.

When they met, he was heir to the Siemens' millions, a divorced father of two and a notorious European playboy. In 1971, came a fairytale wedding, 8000 carnations in four different colours where flown in from Cannes to titillate such luminaries as Christina Onassis and the then Crown Prince Carl Gustaf.

Whilst Pia was at that time anorexic and excitable she was at least temporarily free from the more serious symptoms of hyperactivity. She had graduated with excellent grades and even managed to appear in two films, not quite in Elvira Madigan's class but even so!

"Father took care of the money. That was how he exercised control over me."

Pia tells how her father was an alcoholic and the more he drank, the worse his jealousy became, how he treated her more like a girlfriend than his child.

"He couldn't stand my husband, so when I married, he divorced my mother. Then my husband sank so far into alcoholism I just had to leave him.

They lived an extravagant jet set life, light-years away from the suburban tranquillity that characterises her life these days. In their heyday Pia and Pier would think nothing about hiring a jet with 25-30 friends just to get to a party.

After the divorce, Cesare lived with her father in Germany. She speaks of her son with tenderness and love. They meet two to three times a year and talk on the telephone every week.

"He's very social, funny, loving and has a good dose of commonsense. Cesare, he's very thoughtful and human. He has studied law and works as a property broker. He has just got a girlfriend so am looking forward to becoming a grandmother."

Pia says it was tough to leave him when she returned to Sweden. She felt like a bad mother, but she herself chose to let her son's father take care of him. Her second son, Robbin, on the other hand, was taken from her by the Swedish social services.

"For the last 10 years, I have only been able to see him once a month for 3 hours. He was placed in a foster home when he was little, the foster father is always there when I meet Robbin. I have tried everything to get custody of him again. I have been in a stable situation and drug free for over six years now but I have a stain on my character as far as the social services are concerned, one I don't deserve.

The explanation for this is simple, life just spiralled out of control for Pia.

When Pia returned to Sweden she had met a new man, together they ran a conference centre at Djurgården. This relationship ended, Pia went to America and worked in the film industry, it was there she was introduced to amphetamines.

"They helped to control my hyperactivity, I took them just to get through the day, without them I probably would have killed myself"

On returning to Sweden at the end of the 80's, Pia went to work for an Anorexia foundation.

"It took too much out of me, I invested too much of myself in it and when one of the girls died, I just couldn't cope anymore"

In 1991 Pia was convicted to 14 moths in prison for drugs and fraud offences and assault on a civil servant. She had amongst other things succeeded in getting money out from her father's bank account and was reported to the police by his new wife. At this time, she met Janne, a criminal and drug abuser, and became pregnant with Robbin.

When he was born, both her first son Cesare and her mother were present:

"It was wonderful, even though I had a caesarean, I was fully conscious and could see everything, I was so happy."

When Pia and Janne ended up in prison, they received family therapy but to no avail, Robbin was taken by the social services. When Pia got to see Robbin at Helsingborg's hospital, she took him in her arms, climbed out through a window and fled with him to Helsingör. There they enjoyed three months together before an acquaintance turned them in to the police.

Pia began injecting amphetamine after this and became infected with Hepatitis C. She will soon under treatment for this, an unpleasant process with side effects similar to those of chemotherapy but she is determined to go through with it.

"Even though Robbin loves his foster family and the social services have promised them he can stay till he is 18, I will not give up the fight."

"He is such a fragile boy" says Pia. We have changed scenery, moving to a favourite restaurant in the local square.

"He seems so pure and unaffected, even though I cannot say I know him so well, we often go to a film so it is hard to really talk. Mind you, he is less anxious now he has got a girlfriend, he has got over the "girl terror" so we can hug and kiss a little more now!"

There are no other distractions in Pia's life now, it is Robbin that counts.

She lights a cigar, a couple of men sitting in the restaurant turn and scrumptiously glance over, they point and whisper "Isn't that Pia Degermark?"

"I am often recognised" she says, sounding both gratified and troubled.

The fair weather friends are long gone. They disappeared as soon as Pia landed up in jail.

"They didn't dare hang around after that" says Pia "and I think a lot of them were jealous and thought I pretty much deserved what I got because I had had it so easy, as the ex girlfriend of the King and a 17 year old world famous film star. I have felt their spite.

"All I have ever tried to do is survive" she continues, "I have survived partly because I feel there is another life, that you can come back, perhaps to something better. My involvement with sport and my enjoyment of nature has helped, when I was at my most depressed, I saw no colours, now I see every nuance and shift of shade. Incidentally, do you know how many colours there are in a tree?"

I have no idea, but as Pia says, miracles do happen.

She smiles.

"I am alive and I can still laugh."



***************************************************************************
Copenhagen climate deal unlikely: Environment Minister Jim Prentice, Kelly Cryderman, October 15 2009.

Less than two months from key global climate-change talks, federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice says he has doubts that an agreement will be hammered out in Copenhagen.

Less than two months from key global climate-change talks, federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice says he has doubts that an agreement will be hammered out in Copenhagen.
Photograph by: Grant Black, Calgary Herald

CALGARY — Less than two months from key global climate-change talks, federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice says he has doubts that an agreement will be hammered out in Copenhagen.

"Increasingly, people are being realistic — that it's hard to see a full and complete agreement being arrived at," Prentice told the Calgary Herald editorial board this week.

"There's probably too much work to be done in the time left to achieve that."

U.S. President Barack Obama's administration is working on alternative bilateral agreements with countries such as India and China, with the aim of reviving a process that appears increasingly deadlocked between developing countries and advanced economies.

Prentice said the Copenhagen meeting is still important, but "it's more likely we'll be working toward some agreed principles."

Regardless, the minister said, Canada will go ahead with its own plan of reducing climate-changing emissions by 20 per cent below 2006 levels by 2020 — and each province will individually have to live up to that target, including the home of the oilsands, Alberta.

"There will have to be a parity of effort across the country," Prentice said.

"We're all in this together. If that's going to be Canada's national target, then each province is going to have to share their share of the burden."

Prentice added the caveat that specific agreements have not been worked out between Ottawa and the provinces.

But there's no doubt the federal government has more ambitious targets than Alberta. The Stelmach government's plan allows for increases in emissions — called absolute emissions — until 2020.

While a difference in greenhouse-gas strategies has been a source of contention between Alberta and Ottawa, provincial Environment Minister Rob Renner appeared unfazed by Prentice's comments.

"It's a very complex discussion," Renner said. "I'm comfortable that we will have a unified position when we get to Copenhagen."

Renner added the province hasn't shied away from being proactive in making CO2-reduction targets — based on how much industries produce rather than absolute caps on emissions. But he said more ambitious targets are possible.

Alberta's "legislated reductions are relatively modest," Renner acknowledged. "Once everybody else comes on board, there's no reason to believe that we can't increase the effort . . . but we can't do it now because it would put us out of sync with everyone else and it would make our industry totally uncompetitive."

Canada's position is to replace the Kyoto accord with a new agreement.

In that vein, Prentice also commented on a controversy about whether developing countries walked out as Canadian representatives spoke in Bangkok earlier this month.

The minister said that didn't happen; those countries chose not to participate in the technical discussion.



***************************************************************************
Allow higher oil sands emissions: CEO Marcel Coutu, Shawn McCarthy & Richard Blackwell, Oct. 15 2009.

Move would impose greater burden on others, but strict limits on producers would stifle the industry's growth, says head of Canadian Oil Sands Trust

Ottawa, Toronto — Alberta's oil sands producers should be allowed to significantly increase their greenhouse gas emissions, even if that means forcing other sectors to take on additional expensive obligations to meet Canada's climate change targets, an industry executive says.

Marcel Coutu, chief executive officer of Canadian Oil Sands Trust, (COS.UN-T32.20-0.27-0.83%) travelled to Toronto Thursday to spread the industry's message about climate change. The oil industry stance highlights the dilemma facing the federal government as it prepares regulations to meet its commitment to reduce emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 from 2006 levels.

If the oil sands were allowed to expand production with only marginal improvements in their per-barrel emissions, the rest of the country faces a much harder and more expensive challenge in meeting Canadian targets.

The Alberta government and the oil industry argue for “intensity-based” targets that would require lower per-barrel emissions, but allow growing industries to increase their overall output of carbon dioxide.

Critics argue the oil companies should face absolute caps on their emissions, but Mr. Coutu said such an approach would stifle growth in Canada's most important resource development.

Strict emission limits would “put a very, very heavy burden on a business that is [in] a growth mode” and is a key engine of the Canadian economy, he said.

Mr. Coutu – whose company owns 36.7 per cent of the Syncrude oil sands project – acknowledged other sectors would have to take up the slack if the oil sands have only intensity-based requirements and Ottawa imposes a national cap on emissions.

“That's the math and there is no escape from that,” he said. “What we have to do is prioritize what is most important to the economy and our quality of life. At the end of the day I don't think there is a single element of our economy that is more important than energy.”

The math is clearly daunting.

Driven by its need to keep the oil industry growing, Alberta has set regulations that will see emissions continue to grow between 2006 and 2020, even as Ottawa attempts to cut levels by 20 per cent over that period. With Alberta representing more than a third of Canadian emissions in 2006, the failure by that province to cut back will require the rest of the provinces to reduce their emissions by more than 35 per cent from 2006 levels over the next 10 years.

Environment Minister Jim Prentice has been consulting with provinces on the pending federal regulations, and has encountered resistance from outside Alberta that its industry would either be bound by different rules than others, or would be allowed to increase emissions to the detriment of other sectors.

In a meeting with The Globe and Mail's editorial board, Mr. Coutu played down the oil sands' contribution to the country's climate change challenge. He noted the vast majority of emissions occur in the consumption of energy – driving cars, flying airplanes, heating homes and commercial buildings – rather than in its production.

He said that oil sands currently represent only 5 per cent of total Canadian emissions. However, that figure could triple if planned expansions proceed and other sectors rein in their creation of carbon dioxide and other climate change gases.

Mr. Coutu said it's necessary to look at those figures from a global perspective, because additional Canadian petroleum production from the oil sands would be replacing production – and emissions – from elsewhere in the world.

The fact that Canada is a net exporter of energy must also be taken into account, Mr. Coutu said, because Canada could end up taking the environmental responsibility for a product that is eventually purchased by a foreign user.

While it is up to the government to make the call on carbon policy, the oil sands industry needs to “emphasize the importance of energy [and] the importance of crude oil in the mix,” he said.

Environmentalists agree with the oil industry on one point: that an effective climate change policy must target energy consumers as well as producers. But the growth of emissions in the oil sands would make the overall effort far more difficult, said Dale Marshall, a policy analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation.



***************************************************************************
On a cost basis, carbon-capture projects are madness, Jeffrey Simpson, Oct. 19 2009.


The small reductions gained by staggering per-tonne costs illustrate what every independent analyst knows: The Harper government's 20-per-cent reduction target will not be met

Prime Minister Stephen Harper makes so many spending announcements, flying like Mary Poppins on speed around the country to distribute billions of dollars, that the news media have given up analyzing any of them.

For the heck of it, let's look back to last week, when Mr. Harper dropped into Edmonton to announce $343-million of federal money for a coal-fired TransAlta Corp. carbon-capture and storage (CCS) project. Simultaneously, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach announced a contribution of $436-million, for a total investment of $774-million of taxpayers' cash.

That Harper-Stelmach announcement followed an earlier Ottawa-Alberta one for a coal-fired Shell carbon storage project. In that case, the combined federal and provincial contribution was $865-million.

The two announcements – both for coal-fired facilities, the oil sands therefore remaining untouched – mean about $1.6-billion in taxpayer money in the years ahead, or about $220 for a family of four.

What do we get for that sum?

We get, at best, a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions of 2.1 million tonnes. “At best” because the announcements were tempered with hedging words such as “could” achieve and “up to one million tonnes.” Therefore, something less than 2.1 million tonnes might actually be captured.

Let's be generous and assume the two projects costing $1.6-billion do in fact bury 2.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, the most-prevalent gas contributing to global warming. Such a reduction would mean a per-tonne carbon-reduction cost of about $761 – staggeringly, wildly, mind-blowingly higher than any other conceivable measure designed to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Want a contrast? Alberta has a piddling carbon tax on emissions over a certain level that companies can avoid by paying $15 a tonne into an technology fund.

What does 2.1 million tonnes mean in pan-Canadian terms? Canada emits about 720 million tonnes of CO{-2}. Mr. Harper has pledged by 2020 to lower that amount by 20 per cent, or about 144 million tones. The two carbon-capture projects just announced, by lowering emissions 2.1 million tonnes, will therefore achieve about 1.4 per cent of the reductions the Harper government has pledged at a cost, remember, of $1.6-billion. At this rate, achieving the 20-per-cent reduction would cost almost $110-billion between now and 2020.

For Alberta? The province, with 11 per cent of Canada's population, is responsible for about 30 per cent of the country's emissions. Taking 2.1 million tonnes from Alberta's emissions will represent about 1 per cent of the province's total emissions. As the province's emissions rise, courtesy of further development of the oil sands, the predicted carbon-capture and storage gains will necessarily represent less than 1 per cent of total emissions.

But wait. After these announcements, Alberta has more money left in its $2-billion fund for encouraging capture and storage. This is the fund the province whips out to show critics that it is serious about global warming.

There remains about $800-million in the fund, but if future projects are like the two just announced, once the entire $2-billion is spent, Alberta might have lowered its emissions by maybe 2 per cent.

On a cost-benefit basis, these carbon-capture and storage projects are madness, leaving aside the fact that taxpayers are picking up the bill. They are wildly expensive for the small amount of carbon they will (might?) prevent from entering the atmosphere. They are most definitely not a substitute for a serious climate-change policy that, however structured, must put a price on carbon emissions by those who produce them – either upstream emitters such as industrial concerns and/or downstream consumers.

The small reductions gained by such large sums also illustrate what every independent analyst has concluded: The Harper government's 20-per-cent reduction target will not be met; indeed, it is increasingly being seen as a joke.

Can anything good be said for these announcements, apart from the nice public relations they brought Mr. Harper and Mr. Stelmach?

At a stretch, these projects will test technologies that, if successful, could eventually bring unit costs down and perhaps be exported overseas, although plenty of other companies and jurisdictions are now in the race to develop carbon-capture and storage technologies.

CCS will be part of the long-term effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, but the possibilities of its contribution have been hyped by promoters and political actors beyond what is reasonable to expect. And the initial costs, as these projects show, lead to staggeringly expensive per-tonne reductions.



***************************************************************************
Pass climate bill before UN summit, Layton says, Heather Scoffield, Oct. 19 2009.

Delaying vote on greenhouse-gas legislation until after Copenhagen conference would force Canada to ‘stand naked before the world'

Ottawa — NDP Leader Jack Layton says parliamentarians have a chance this week to restore Canada's reputation as a protector of the environment, just in time for the high-stakes Copenhagen meeting on climate change.

Mr. Layton said all the MPs have to do is vote down a Conservative motion on Wednesday. The motion would delay an NDP bill to set out strict greenhouse-gas reduction targets for Ottawa, and require the government to give progress reports.

“We have another delay tactic being proposed,” Mr. Layton said Monday in a message meant to target Liberal MPs in particular.

“If that motion passes, it would be impossible for the bill then to come back before Copenhagen. And Canada would simply have to go and stand naked before the world, with Stephen Harper's terrible position on climate change.”

The bill has gone through the House of Commons before, with the backing of the Liberals, but never made it into law because of last year's election.

Now, the bill has been rejuvenated, gone through second reading and committee hearings. But the Conservatives are asking for a delay that would send the bill back for more study, and the NDP suspect the Liberals will agree to the Tory “foot-dragging.”

Mr. Layton wants MPs to reject the delay, so that they can vote for the bill and send a strong message, before the crucial meetings in Copenhagen take place in December.

That summit is hoped to yield a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, a global greenhouse-gas treaty ratified by dozens of countries, including Canada but not the United States.

The Harper government has been non-committal in the process leading up to Copenhagen, Mr. Layton said. But if MPs pass his Climate Change Accountability Act, it would send the world a strong message that the Canadian public and its elected representatives want to take action.

The bill sets strict targets for greenhouse-gas emissions and calls for an 80 per cent reduction from 1990 levels by 2050. Mr. Layton says he has the backing of the Bloc Québécois, but needs the support of the Liberals in order to make any headway.

The Conservative government has pledged to lower greenhouse gases 20 per cent from 2006 levels by 2020.

The Liberals supported the NDP bill last year. By highlighting the Tory motion for delay, and the NDP is indicating that if the Liberals side with the Tories, Mr. Layton will hammer Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff for lack of action on the environment.

Mr. Ignatieff made it clear last week that the environment will play a centre role in his next election platform.

Liberal environment critic David McGuinty said Monday that the bill is being divided into two parts, and so requires more study.



***************************************************************************
Ottawa dashes hope for climate treaty in Copenhagen, Shawn McCarthy, Oct. 22 2009.

Best possible outcome of climate talks is smoother path to later deal, Prentice says

Ottawa — Hope is vanishing that a historic deal to address climate change can be concluded in Copenhagen, and Environment Minister Jim Prentice says the best chance is for a political agreement that would pave the way for a treaty to be signed later.

But Canada will continue to insist that it should have a less aggressive target for emission reductions than Europe or Japan because of its faster-growing population and energy-intensive industrial structure, Mr. Prentice said in an interview Thursday.

Canadians must also recognize that any national emissions cap has to reflect differing conditions across the country so as not to punish high-growth provinces, he added. The minister has been consulting with provinces on a plan that would impose a cap on industrial emissions, but allow Alberta's energy-intensive, emissions-heavy oil sands to continue expanding.

“The Canadian approach has to reflect the diversity of the country and the sheer size of the country, and the very different economic characteristics and industrial structure across the country,” he said in a telephone interview.

However, Ottawa will not release its detailed climate-change plan, including its proposed emissions caps on large emitters such as oil sands and power plants, until there is more clarity on how the United States intends to proceed in global climate-change talks in Copenhagen in December, and on what an international treaty would look like, the minister added.

“Copenhagen is a very significant factor in how matters will be approached continentally, and how matters will be approached domestically,” he said.

The Harper government has been criticized for undermining the global talks by insisting on smaller reductions for greenhouse gases than other developed countries, by demanding that emerging economies such as China and India agree to binding caps on their emissions, and by not tabling a plan for meeting Ottawa's own targets.

Mr. Prentice insisted Canada remains committed to reaching an agreement but was not hopeful it could be concluded by December.

“I have to take a realistic view that, given the amount of work that remains to be done, we're running out of time,” he said.

Top United Nations officials are expressing similar pessimism. Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said Thursday it is “unrealistic” to expect a treaty to be negotiated in the weeks before Copenhagen.

In New Delhi, Indian and Chinese environment ministers agreed to a common stand, rejecting binding limits on emissions but pledging to reduce the rate of growth of emissions.

On Wednesday, John Podesta, a prominent Democratic adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama, told an Ottawa audience that it is doubtful a treaty will be signed in Copenhagen, but that there may be an overarching political accord that would pave the way for a treaty.

Mr. Obama is battling to get climate-change legislation through Congress before Copenhagen to strengthen his negotiating hand, but that too appears unlikely. The President plans to travel to China and host India's Prime Minister next month in hopes of finding common ground that would allow the two Asian giants to accept binding limits tied to their need for growth. Without some commitment from the emerging economies, Mr. Obama will have a much tougher job winning passage of the bill now before the Senate.

In Canada, environmentalists and federal opposition parties have slammed the Conservative government for adopting an emission target that falls well short of the country's commitment under the Kyoto Protocol, and far short of what many other developed countries are doing.

Ottawa proposes to reduce emissions by 20 per cent from 2006 levels by 2020. If achieved, Canadian emissions would be 3 per cent below 1990 levels; under Kyoto, Canada committed to cutting its greenhouse gases by 6 per cent from 1990 levels by 2012.

The European Union has said it would reduce emissions by 30 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020, if other developed countries would accept similar reductions. The U.S. climate legislation sets a target of a 17-per-cent reduction from 2005 levels by 2020, but is more aggressive than Canada's in subsequent years.

But Ottawa's chief climate negotiator, Michael Martin, said Canada's economic and population growth over the last 20 years was much stronger than EU growth, meaning Canadians would pay a higher cost to meet the same emissions targets.

The government's 2020 target represents a 26-per-cent reduction from 1990 emission levels on a per-capita basis, after adjusting for population growth.

Mr. Martin addressed a parliamentary committee which is studying a New Democratic Party bill that would commit Canada to reduce emissions by 25 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020, a target that is consistent with both Kyoto and the EU's approach for the next round.

However, the climate ambassador said Canada's targets are “comparable” to more aggressive ones because they will be just as costly to achieve.

Liberal environment critic David McGuinty said the Harper government is avoiding responsibility for addressing climate change, both globally and domestically.

“We're negotiating without a plan” to achieve the reductions Ottawa has already committed to, he said. “They're ragging the puck, killing time and hoping to avoid the issue until after the next election.”



***************************************************************************
Canada envoy sees draft climate treaty achievable, Jeffrey Jones, Sept 22 2009.

CALGARY - Countries struggling for a deal on combating climate change are likely to overcome divisions and agree on a draft treaty to serve as a basis for upcoming talks in Copenhagen, Canada's chief negotiator said.

Countries must winnow down a 199-page negotiating paper at a series of talks before the Copenhagen meeting in December. Key players, including UN Climate Change Secretariat head Yvo de Boer, have expressed fear that it may not happen given the slow pace of discussions to date.

"I believe we can do that," Michael Martin, Canada's chief negotiator and ambassador for climate change, said a meeting hosted this week by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. "To help us get there, there will be a lot of ministerial engagement between now and Copenhagen."

There had been optimism that countries could streamline the negotiating text at meeting in Bonn, Germany, in August, but longstanding divisions between developed and developing countries and other issues prevented that.

After a United Nations summit on climate change on Tuesday, meant to spur the talks among 190 countries, a total of three weeks of meetings in Bangkok and Barcelona remain before the Copenhagen talks.

Discussions leading up to Copenhagen have put rich and poor nations at odds over how to distribute cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

Developing countries are pressing developed ones to contribute hundreds of billions of dollars annually to help them cope with rising temperatures.

Participation of the United States and China, which are responsible for up to 40 percent of the world's emissions, are seen as key to success in a treaty.

For Canada, it is important to harmonize its targets with the United States, said David Runnalls, chief executive of the IISD, a Canadian-based environmental think tank.

"I think the lesson that the Canadian government learned from Bush's decision not to go forward with Kyoto is that you can't get that far distant from the U.S.," Runnalls said, referring to former U.S. President George W. Bush.

"It's essentially a continental market, and one of the problems we had after Bush withdrew was that all Canadian industries started complaining they weren't going to be competitive anymore."

He said he was not concerned about the lack of progress to date in reaching a draft treaty.

"If you got a half a dozen key governments -- China, Brazil and South Africa, along with the U.S., Japan and the European Union, you could get an agreement. Everybody else might not like it, but they wouldn't kick and scream and yell," he said.

For its part, Canada has set a goal to cut emissions by 20 percent from 2006 levels by 2020. That is after failing to achieve a Kyoto commitment of reducing emissions 6 percent from 1990 levels by now.



***************************************************************************
Statement by Minister Prentice on Bangkok Climate Change Talks, Jim Prentice, Oct 14 2009.

OTTAWA - The Honourable Jim Prentice, Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Envoy, Michael Martin, refute reports by Canadian Press that there was a "walk-out" by developing G77 countries at a UN climate change meeting in Bangkok to protest Canada's position.

In particular, they want to clarify that there is not, and never has been, any discrepancy in their respective accounts of what transpired there.

An informal discussion was convened one evening among interested Parties on the possible legal outcome of the negotiations.

During that discussion, some developing country representatives indicated that they were not prepared to discuss this subject and chose to leave the meeting. They did not "walk out on Canada's address" as has been reported, their decision to leave was taken before Canada spoke during the meeting.

It is important to note that not all developing countries left the meeting. Many African countries, South American countries and members of the Alliance of Small Island States did not leave the meeting. All Parties returned to the negotiations the following day.

Since 2008, Canada has called for the outcome of the UN climate talks to be a single legal undertaking, building on the Kyoto Protocol, with GHG commitments for all major emitters, including the U.S., China & India. Canada's position in this regard is widely shared by other developed countries, including the U.S., the European Union, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Russia.

Canada is taking action to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions at home, in North America and internationally. Canada is engaged in the ongoing negotiations under both the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, with the objective of achieving, at Copenhagen, an ambitious, environmentally effective international climate change agreement.



***************************************************************************
Walkout over climate talks, Steve Rennie, 13th October 2009.

OTTAWA -- The government's push to abandon much of the Kyoto protocol prompted dozens of developing countries to walk out on Canada's address during recent climate talks in Thailand, The Canadian Press has learned.

The mass walkout came after the Canadian delegation suggested replacing the Kyoto Protocol with an entirely new global-warming pact, according to one of the negotiators and notes taken by others at the meeting.

A widening and bitter rift between rich and developing countries over climate change was laid bare last week when delegates from 180 nations met in Bangkok to shape a successor to Kyoto before its first phase expires in just over two years. The United Nations hopes to broker a draft deal in time for a meeting in Copenhagen this December.

The developing countries want a new climate deal to complement Kyoto, but Canadian officials told the room they would rather replace Kyoto with one agreement, according to meeting notes.

Canada's delegation was apparently open to putting "some or all" of Kyoto in a new climate pact, the notes say.

At that point, the South African delegation stood up and led the Group of 77 developing nations -- except for a group of small island states -- out of the room.

"The conversation, in our view, at that point in time was effectively over and the G77 left the room," Joanne Yawitch, a South African negotiator at the Bangkok talks, said in an interview.

Talks resumed the next day, she added. "We're not going to walk out of any negotiating process," Yawitch said.

The developing nations were perturbed that Canada and other industrial countries would consider copying parts Kyoto into a new treaty. "You can't do a cut and paste on a ratified treaty," Yawitch said.

"You have to re-open it and negotiate what you would cut and paste. And we think that the risks are that you might end up with something that might be considerably weaker."

Environment Minister Jim Prentice declined comment.



***************************************************************************
International Eco Hero – Maude Barlow, Planet In Focus International Film & Video Festival.

This award is given to an individual who has demonstrated outstanding leadership and made a lasting contribution to environmental awareness, action and change on the international stage.

"The life of an activist is a good life because you get up in the morning caring about more than just yourself or how to make money. A life of activism gives hope, which is a moral imperative in this work and in this world. It gives us energy and it gives us direction. You meet the nicest people, you help transform ideas and systems and you commit to leaving the earth in at least as whole a condition as you inherited it.” Maude Barlow, Trent University, June 2009.

Maude Barlow is a visionary and inspiration to environmental activists the world over. Undaunted in the face of opposition, she has gained the ear of the powerful while empowering the powerless. Through her tireless efforts over four decades taking action on behalf of women, against free trade and now, water rights, she has become a true Eco Hero advocating on behalf of the planet, for all.

Maude Barlow is the National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and Senior Advisor on Water to the President of the United Nations General Assembly. She Chairs the Board of Washington-based Food and Water Watch and is a Councilor with the Hamburg-based World Future Council. Maude is the recipient of eight honorary doctorates as well as many awards, including the 2005 Right Livelihood Award (known as the “Alternative Nobel”), the Citation of Lifetime Achievement at the 2008 Canadian Environment Awards, and the 2009 Earth Day Canada Outstanding Environmental Achievement Award. A best selling author or co-author of 16 books, she recently released Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and The Coming Battle for the Right to Water.

The film Blue Gold: World Water Wars based on her book that she co-authored with Tony Clarke opened the Planet in Focus Festival in 2008. Barlow has worked indefatigably advocating that we should never forget about the world’s most precious resource, H2O. It sustains us all and is the source of life.



***************************************************************************
An Ecotopia for Climate Protection - Samso Island, Clemens Höges, 10/22/2009.

An Ecotopia for Climate Protection
Samso Island Is Face of Danish Green Revolution

Part 1: Samso Island Is Face of Danish Green Revolution

The Danish island of Samso is a mecca for climate protection experts, because its residents generate more energy than they consume -- with wind turbines, solar panels, straw combustion and heat exchangers that extract heat from cow's milk. The small ecotopia will be held up as a model at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Six years ago, Paul Erik Wedelgaard decided it was high time to set a new course for his future, even though he was already 70 at the time. The sun, the cold and the sea have carved deep furrows into his face. His wooden fishing cutter, the "Kyholm," is plowing southward through the Baltic Sea, to the place where the symbols of this future -- wind turbines -- stand off the coast of Samso.

Even today, Wedelgaard is almost as agile on deck as he was at 14, when he began fishing. But his catch of cod has declined sharply in recent years, and the small salmon farm he was operating with a partner wasn't sufficiently profitable. And then along came those young men who had decided to start something of a revolution -- on Samso, of all places. They had ideas, and they had an ambitious plan.

They were concerned about the world and the climate. Most of all, however, they were interested in Samso and all the money they hoped could be made there. For people like Wedelgaard, it seemed like a relatively safe bet.

Part of their plan included erecting 10 giant wind turbines in the Paludan flats, at a cost of 24 million kroner, or about €3 million ($4.4 million), each. The machines were to be owned by the Samsingers, as the island's residents are called.

'We Have to Do Something for the Children'

Wedelgaard knew, of course, that the Paludan flats are located in a particularly windy area. It could work, he thought to himself. He sold his half of the salmon farm, took out a bank loan and invested 3.5 million kroner in one of the turbines, unit No. 6. Wedelgaard will have recouped his investment in four years. "We have to do something for the children," he says. He is referring to his four children and the others on the island.

Samso is a laboratory where the Danish government launched a social and technological experiment 12 years ago. Before that, heating oil was brought to the island by ship and electricity, mainly from coal-burning power plants, was transmitted through cables. For each Samsinger, 11 tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide were pumped into the atmosphere each year. The goal was to reduce those 11 tons to zero within 10 years, without special subsidies.

The Samsingers joined forces, erecting the wind turbines and attaching solar panels to their roofs. They built central straw burners, and they installed machines to harness geothermal energy and the heat from cow's milk to heat houses, and to extract rapeseed oil from plants grown on the island to produce fuel for their tractors.

A Climate-Neutral Island

Eight years later, they were already producing more energy than they consumed, which made them climate-neutral, and today they produce 40 percent more energy than they consume. Only two questions remain. Can the approach used on the island, which comprises 22 villages, 4,000 residents and a small cannery, work elsewhere? And does the rest of the world even want to emulate the Samsingers?

These are the sorts of questions that will be asked on Dec. 7, when politicians from around the world gather in Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Their goal is to prevent worldwide temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). This is only achievable if emissions of carbon dioxide and the consumption of coal, oil and gas are drastically reduced. Experts are already at odds over just how drastically.

"It's important to negotiate, but then they have to go home and do something," says the man who organized the small miracle on Samso Island. "We don't wake up every morning thinking about how we're going to save the polar bears. No, people think about themselves." But this isn't a problem for Soren Hermansen; it's the solution.

A Climate Change Guru

Hermansen has become a guru of sorts for climate experts and politicians. Last fall, his name appeared on the cover of Time, together with the names of other "Heroes of the Environment." The cover image featured circles of different sizes to indicate the relative importance of each name. Hermansen's circle was about four times the size of that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California.

It isn't easy catching Hermansen on his island. He spends a lot of time flying around the world. He has just returned from Copenhagen, where he appeared before the Danish parliament, and before that he was in Japan, Korea, Italy and Brussels. José Barroso, the head of the European Commission, was at the Brussels meeting, where the Russian energy minister quarreled with his Ukrainian counterpart on the sidelines. And Hermansen, a former farmer from the village of Kolby Kaas on Samso, sharply criticized them for not making a sufficiently serious attempt to do what his fellow islanders have accomplished.

Hermansen, 50, his short hair slightly graying, has the physique of an athlete and is quick to flash his big smile. Now he is sitting in a building that, with its shiny metal skin, looks a little like the Starship Enterprise -- in the middle of a rural village. Hermansen plays the role of Captain Kirk, as director of this "energy academy" in Ballen, an old fishing village. Visitors from around the world come to Ballen to examine the equipment the Samsingers use and the infrastructure they have developed. Of course, the building itself is also a model, with its solar panels and a computer that occasionally opens and closes ventilation flaps in the roof.

Hermansen describes how the Samso concept works. In 1997, the Danish Energy Ministry announced a contest. A region was to be selected to test how effective renewable energy can be in a real environment. It was a clever contest, requiring the winning region to achieve a carbon footprint of zero with existing technology and without special assistance or subsidies from Copenhagen. This would make the results more readily transferable to other places, and the whole project wouldn't cost the government a single kroner.

An engineer in the city of Aarhus, across the water from Samso, hit upon the idea to write a plan for Samso. He analyzed how much electricity and oil the Samsingers consumed, how much biomass grows there each year, how strong the wind blows and how long the sun shines. Then he wrote his plan -- and won the contest.

Samso was dubbed an "eco-energy island," a title not unlike a brass medal -- well-intentioned, but almost worthless. It helped in obtaining the necessary permits for the new equipment, but the Samsingers themselves had little use for the designation at first. When TV reporters came to the island to interview the mayor, he was at a loss for words and had to consult the concept before answering their questions.

The engineer advised a few people on Samso to establish an association, or else, he said, the plan would never materialize. Fifty Samsingers attended the first meeting in Tranebjerg. But the island's remaining 3,950 stayed home. They were simply unable to see the engineer's concept as a profitable enterprise.


***************************************************************************
Part 2: 'Everyone Can Do What We Are Doing'.

Hermansen saw it right away. He had already had a wind turbine installed on his father's farm in 1984. He is a good talker, and he loves to persuade people. Pumpkins make poor conversationalists, which was reason enough for Hermansen not to spend his life working as a farmer. He was looking for a project, and this was it. The 50 islanders at the Tranebjerg meeting quickly agreed that Hermansen was to be their representative.

He went from house to house to promote the plan, drinking vast amounts of coffee in the process. Then he bought a cider press. Almost everyone on Samso has apple trees, he reasoned, and offering them fresh apple juice was the perfect way to get them to listen to his pitch and calmly discuss the project. "The question was: How can we all continue living on Samso? In the year before, the slaughterhouse had closed down, putting hundreds out of work. It was our Great Depression," he recalls. The plan is better than the slaughterhouse, he said, and soon his argument began having the desired effect.

Three heating plants were built between villages in the southern part of the island, and pipes were laid into the houses. Now the farmers bring the straw that they used to burn in the fields to the plant, where it is burned to generate heat. The farmers are paid for their hay, building the three plants created short-term construction jobs, the villagers are saving money -- and their money stays on the island.

'Everything Has to Belong to the People'

They also built a solar heating plant on the northern part of the island, as well as the wind turbines. Eleven were to be built on land and 10 on the Paludan flats. Big companies were not to be permitted to own any of the windmills, says Hermansen. That was his most important selling point, he says. "You can't do anything from top to bottom. Everything has to belong to the people. It has to become their project."

One of the first islanders to understand the concept was Jörgen Tranberg, a man with an angular head and bushy eyebrows. He owns 150 black-and-white Holstein cattle, which makes him a major dairy farmer on Samso. He is a smart man. His cows crowd onto two ramps to his left and right, as the milking machines click uniformly. He earns less than 22 cents per liter, he says -- in other words, not much.

But Danish law requires electric utilities to buy wind energy at prices significantly higher than production costs. This turns wind turbines into significant moneymakers, an insight that didn't escape the attention of Tranberg's bank. He invested €2.5 million.

He built a turbine on the hill behind his silage tank and invested in half of Turbine No. 8 on the Paludan flats. The community now owns five of the offshore generators, using part of the proceeds to fund the Energy Academy. About 400 Samsingers own the remaining offshore wind turbines and the turbines on land, of which Tranberg owns a very large share. "I think the weather here is always good," he says. "When the wind blows, the rotors turn. When it rains, the feed for my cows grows. And when the sun shines, I take my boat out for a spin." He laughs and calls his dog Vaks. Vaks means shrewd in Danish.

The wind turbines provide Tranberg with about €3,000 in gross daily revenues, while his cows earn only about €1,000 a day -- and have to be milked twice.

Extracting Heat from Cow's Milk

Even the cows do their part to save the world's climate, and they contribute to Tranberg's bottom line in more ways than one. A cow's body temperature is 38.5 degrees Celsius (101.3 degrees Fahrenheit), and the milk has to be cooled down to 3 degrees Celsius. Tranberg, like other farmers, has installed a heat exchanger near the milk tank. The device is as large and angular as a refrigerator, and it even works like one: It cools the milk, releasing heat that is used to heat the house. The wind turbine provides the electricity to run the heat exchanger.

The only remaining net emitters of carbon dioxide are Tranberg's and the other island residents' cars. The ferry to the mainland consumes 9,000 liters of diesel fuel a day. Nevertheless, Samso's overall energy production is still CO2-free, because the island exports more electricity than it imports oil.

But Hermansen isn't finished yet. Automakers Citroën, Peugeot and Mitsubishi plan to start building electric cars next year. Hermansen is negotiating with the electric utility DONG Energy and the wind turbine manufacturer Vestas. He envisions a technology that would allow electric cars to be connected to the generators, and would include computers that charge the cars' batteries when the wind is blowing and tap electricity when it is not.

"We are completely normal people here. Everyone can do what we are doing," says Hermansen. But then he adds: "In the countryside, that is. Cities are a problem."

The Egyptian ambassador visited the island some time ago. After touring the facilities, he said that the number of people living on Samso could fit into three apartment buildings in Cairo -- buildings with no abundant source of cheap straw nearby and not surrounded by the sea.



***************************************************************************
It's elementary, my dear children: The Olympics are a sham, Cam Cole, October 16 2009.

I wish I were a kid again, so I could correct all the ways I went wrong.

Mrs. Pardely, my Grade 1 teacher -- actually Grade 1 and half of Grade 2, because I was accelerated through Grade 3 in two years (I'm not saying I was brilliant, I'm just saying) -- was a terrific early influence and made going to school every day a treat.

Her only shortcoming, sadly, was her utter failure to promote critical thinking in her six-year-old pupils.

So I went through elementary school believing that the three businesses my dad ran out of his office, the Vegreville Land Co., were so that our family could have a better life. Mrs. Pardely never told me he was, in fact, an instrument of the capitalist real estate conspiracy that was buying and selling property ... for money! Not having all the info at my fingertips, I was stupid enough to think he was a pretty good dad.

In my ignorance, I thought our yellow '58 Chevy station wagon was a fun car to go on holidays in, when in fact, if she'd been doing her job, Mrs. Pardely would have made me feel guilty about riding in such a big, unwieldy, gas-guzzling monstrosity whose component parts no doubt were built in factories that oppressed the working man.

I thought John Diefenbaker was a swell prime minister, but Mrs. Pardely neglected to tell me that the economy was in the toilet because of him and his fellow Tories, nor did she mention that the beloved war hero who was president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was a member of a golf club, Augusta National, that did not have a single female member. If only I'd known that stuff at the time, I'd have been a lifelong supporter of those egalitarian economic wizards, the NDP, and never taken up golf.

In fact, looking back, I was a pretty clueless kid and now I feel guilty about having been so happy, swimming and playing baseball and hockey and golf -- and field hockey with tennis balls and broken hockey sticks, and tackle football without helmets or pads. I blame it on my teachers.

It's a wonder I wasn't killed, with no one warning me of the dangers of having fun irresponsibly.

But the worst, by far, was how taken I was with my first exposure to an Olympic Games -- Rome, 1960 -- watching on television the exploits of the larger-than-life American athletes of the era: sprinter Wilma Rudolph, boxer Cassius Clay, decathlete Rafer Johnson.

If only I'd had the kind of teachers Vancouver's six-year-olds have today, I'd have grown up knowing there was nothing admirable about Olympism and the sacrifice and achievements of Olympic athletes.

I'd have seen the Olympic movement for the sham it was, and is, because Mrs. Pardely would have set me straight, told me the Olympics were "not about the human spirit" and that they "have little to do with athletic excellence" and that "they are a multi-billion-dollar industry backed by real estate, construction, hotel, tourism and media corporations, and powerful elites working hand in hand with government officials and the International Olympic Committee."

And me, running around wishing I could be an Olympic athlete some day. What an idiot I was, when I was six.

Thank goodness the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers' Association (VESTA) is looking out for today's Grade 1 kids, making sure they don't grow up with such inappropriate dreams. Or any dreams at all, really.

With the help of the Olympic Resistance Network (ORN), the women and men in charge of forming our kids' impressionable young minds want to ensure that children will not leave their classrooms thinking Olympic athletes are good role models, or that the Olympic movement is a positive force.

Today's Mrs. Pardely will make sure her six-year-olds have no illusions. It's never too early to trample on a kid's ignorant glorification of something as clearly destructive as the Olympics.

Why, right here in Vancouver, not only have the 2010 Games already failed to cure homelessness and ruthlessly trampled on the rights of professional protesters to organize vandalism, they have been responsible for the building of a SkyTrain line, a navigable highway to Whistler, and a condo project -- currently known as the Olympic Athletes' Village -- that may result in citizens paying an extra $5 each a year in taxes because, scandalously, it turns out to have cost money to build.

Little Johnny and Sally need to be told these things, pronto, or they could grow up scarred by pleasant thoughts and uncomplicated views of the amazing athletic feats that will take place here in four months. They could reach puberty thinking that it was pretty neat, having played host to the world, having staged the planet's largest cultural exchange, a gathering of great athletes in their hometown such as they will never see again in their lifetimes. We can't have that.

So thanks, VESTA, for not waiting until the kids are teenagers, say, when they might actually be able to process the negative information you and your "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It" pals are about to feed them.

Nip those dreams in the bud, I say. Get 'em early. That's the kind of preventive action that makes us all proud to pay your salaries.