Mid-Week Post

Your mid-week stroll ...




Petroleum is not just a fuel. Thousands of products are made from petroleum. Price fixes, a chief customer and no way to transport the oil quickly isn't just deleterious as a loss of fuel but of other things, as well. The estimated losses to the economy of oil exports, counting on-ground transportation, could be as high as $13 billion.

So, yes, $80 million per day is quite plausible:

When it comes to calculating the total economic damage caused by selling Canadian oil at rock bottom prices, the numbers are all over the place. Last month, GMP FirstEnergy analyst Michael Dunn estimated that the Canadian economy was taking a $100 million per day hit from the discount. A Scotiabank analysis from March, when the discount wasn’t as dramatic, was forecasting daily losses of $40 million. And, of course, the Alberta government is running with a figure of $80 million. However, a back of the envelope calculation by G. Kent Fellows at the University of Calgary determined that the damage is about $60 million per day — a figure he roughly got by taking the current discount and subtracting the “natural” discount. Say Alberta woke up tomorrow to a magical land where the Trans Mountain expansion, Keystone XL, Energy East, and even Northern Gateway were all built and operational. As mentioned, even under ideal conditions the average WCS barrel is still going to sell at a discount relative to most U.S. oil. However, that discount would only be about $15 — not $50 — and that extra $35 would all be in Albertan pockets. Notley may be highballing the number at $80 million per day, but even at lower estimates Alberta’s pipeline bottleneck is still causing the province to forego more than $2 million in oil revenue every single hour.

But this was all part of a plan:

There’s long been a view in Alberta that the Trudeau government is intentionally winding down Alberta’s oilsands, and ultimately the entire fossil fuel industry.

This belief has a basis in fact. Indeed, you could say it’s not a fake fact, but an honest-to-goodness fact fact.

It was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself who said in January 2017: “We can’t shut down the oilsands tomorrow. We need to phase them out. We need to manage the transition off of our dependence on fossil fuels.

“That is going to take time. And, in the meantime, we have to manage that transition.”

He said that to a friendly audience in Peterborough, Ont. A few days later he was in Calgary, where criticism had erupted.

Asked about his comments, he said, “um, I misspoke . . . I said something the way I shouldn’t have said it.”

But Trudeau didn’t say he’d been wrong. He just wished, it seemed, that he hadn’t made himself so obvious.

**

My belief in the importance of Canada-headquartered companies goes back to the early 1970s when, as a young engineer, I joined the Canadian subsidiary of a Nebraska-based oil and gas company. While I was treated well and given substantial responsibility, I yearned to work for a company where the decisions were made in Calgary, not Omaha. That opportunity came with a new startup called the Alberta Energy Company. I joined AEC to head the building of the oil and gas division.

The company grew quickly. But five years later, the entire oil and gas industry was struck a huge blow by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program that capped oil prices below world levels and slapped a confiscatory tax on the gross revenues of energy companies. Canada-headquartered companies were supposed to benefit from cash grants, provided we shifted our drilling to federally owned lands. But most of those lands were in the Arctic where drilling costs were prohibitive and access to pipelines non-existent. After the Mulroney Conservatives killed the Trudeau policies in 1985, AEC got back to the job of company building. ...

The past few years have been a nightmare for the Canadian industry, where every light at the end of the tunnel has turned out to be train driven by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau barrelling at us from the opposite direction. His oil tanker ban in northern B.C. and his refusal to allow a pipeline in the Great Bear Rainforest killed Northern Gateway. And his introduction of a post-regulatory hearing requirement to consider “upstream emissions” forced TransCanada to abandon its nation-building Energy East Pipeline that would have replaced foreign oil. Meanwhile, hundreds of tankers carrying oil from Saudi Arabia and other countries make their way up the St. Lawrence without any such emissions reviews.

That left the now-stymied Trans Mountain expansion as the only hope of getting Canadian oil to tidewater. As if this weren’t enough to deter investment in Canada’s oil and gas industry, Bill C-69, the so-called Impact Assessment Act, now before the Senate, will make the chances of accomplishing resource infrastructure projects seem near impossible to investors. And then there are carbon taxes that will hit the industry particularly hard. These are the disastrous actions that are killing what has long been Canada’s most economically important industry.

Justin is still stuck on dad and no one has seen fit to stop his Icarus complex from killing the country's industry.




Like you fought here, Doug?:

Opposition continues to grow towards the Trudeau government-controlled Stats Canada’s plan to invade the privacy of Canadians.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says it can’t be allowed, and an Ontario PC MPP is introducing a bill to defend the privacy of Ontario residents:

“The federal government wants to collect personal banking information from 500,000 Canadians. We can’t allow this outrageous invasion of privacy. @stcrawford2 has introduced a Bill to prevent the government from obtaining personal information from Ontarians without their consent.”

Also - so your excuse is incompetence?:

Navdeep Bains, the Trudeau cabinet minister responsible for Statistics Canada, said he first learned of the federal agency’s controversial plan to harvest the financial transaction data of potentially millions of Canadians as a result of media reports and not, as the law requires, in a written notification from the country’s chief statistician.

Justin and his useless cretin lackeys are protected and voted back in by people who don't care how corrupt the government is.

One must remember that before one criticises the Americans and how they vote.




Speaking of Americans:

A federal judge dismissed some charges Tuesday against eight people — including two doctors — in the genital mutilation of nine girls at a suburban Detroit clinic, finding it’s up to states rather than Congress to regulate the practice.

But ... but ... Singapore!:

The US expressed “strong support” for the two Koreas’ plan to conduct a joint study to connect railways across their border, a top South Korean official said Wednesday, after the first meeting of a South Korea-US working group on North Korea issues.

The US, however, reaffirmed its position that inter-Korean relations and the denuclearization of North Korea should progress in tandem, which analysts say shows Washington’s concerns over a potential difference with its ally.

I'm sure that will be as well-built as this:

Construction of a 30-story hotel on the North Korean border with China has been abruptly halted, allegedly because Beijing took issue with Pyongyang's plans to build a casino there, Radio Free Asia reported Monday.

One source in Dandong, China told RFA that construction was halted "suddenly" after more than 20 floors had been built, adding there are rumors that Chinese authorities belatedly found out about the casino plan.

The Chinese government is struggling to rein in rampant overseas gambling by its citizens and may not want a casino so close to its border.

The loss of coal and steel mines means certain death for most North Koreans in areas where it is the chief industry:

As early as June of 2017, the Daily NK reported that sanctions had put hundreds of coal miners out of work in South Pyongan, and that people were blaming Kim Jong-un’s missile tests for instigating the sanctions that cost them their jobs. There were also spillover effects on local markets. By March, a state trading company anticipated that the Kim-Moon summit would get sanctions lifted and imported conveyer belts, hard hats, and headlamps to restart shuttered coal mines. 

But China’s enforcement did not ease significantly, even after Kim Jong-un met Xi Jinping. By March, the children of unpaid miners were skipping school and hauling heavy sacks of unsold coal to make ends meet. By August, the Daily NK reported that the coal export ban had driven the price per ton from $16 to $6, and that the mines could only pay a few of their workers. At least one man in his 50s starved to death. There was rice for sale in the markets, but most people couldn’t afford it. Many food stalls were empty for lack of customers. People were taking their children and moving away. Amid an abundance of unsold coal, there were power shortages as the electricity was diverted to Pyongyang. Rimjin-gang could not report from the South Pyongan coal mines, but found evidence that the nearby markets were suffering a loss of business.  ...

By February, the iron export ban hit the Musan mine so hard that authorities begged local residents, who were down to two meals a day due in part to the 2016 floods, to contribute money to keep it running. Starting in the spring, miners began smuggling ore or finding other work. By August, Rimjin-gang reported that the mine only produced a small amount of ore for domestic steel mills. Rations stopped and absenteeism was rife. Miners punched in and left early to collect wild plants in the mountains. Others drifted away to find other jobs. Security forces threatened to send AWOL workers to labor camps, but they couldn’t keep the mines running.

Your population is graying. The children literally are your future. Give them the damn tablets:

Japan’s nuclear regulation body decided Wednesday to review the nation’s distribution system for iodine tablets against radiation exposure, with an eye on giving priority to children.

Current rules say iodine tablets should be in principle distributed in advance to all residents living within a 5-kilometer radius of 16 nuclear plants in 13 prefectures, where doing so is deemed difficult in emergency situations.

But some municipal governments have yet to hand out the tablets to all residents, including children who are more vulnerable to radiation exposure.

(Kamsahamnida)