Kern County Hit Hard by Coronavirus

I had no idea the town of McKittrick, in Kern County west of Interstate 5, had so many oil wells --- especially wells that are still operating.

But the town's been hit hard, along with the rest of the county.

See LAT, "Kern County city gets hit with triple whammy: Lockdowns, oil slump and prison closing":

#KernCounty city gets hit with triple whammy: Lockdowns, oil slump and prison closing: #McKittrick #California 😷https://t.co/XBOjpp4p7c

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) May 6, 2020

TAFT, Calif. —  The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic is slamming cities and towns across the state.

But for Taft, a city of roughly 9,300 people in far western Kern County, there have been a few extra punches to the gut.

With prices and demand for oil down, the thousands of pump jacks that ordinarily bob up-and-down on the horizon are at a virtual standstill. That is adding to the misery on main street, where restaurants, gyms, stationery shops and other stores have been ordered closed.

And then there’s the fact that another major employer, the privately owned Taft Correctional Institute, closed its doors on April 30 after sending hundreds of uninfected prisoners to coronavirus hot spots across the country. The decision to close the federal prison was made last fall, long before the pandemic struck, but now the economic pain is hitting.

“It’s been a rough couple of months,” said Mayor Dave Noerr, who is pivoting as fast as he can to get his town’s economy up and running again.

Taft sits at the base of the San Emigdio and Temblor mountain ranges, between the Midway-Sunset and Buena Vista oil fields, in the southwest corner of the San Joaquin Valley. The smell of oil in the air along Mocal Road, just to the northwest of town, is unmistakable.

Once known as Siding Number Two — a stop off the Southern Pacific railway — Taft was subsequently named Moro, then Moron, before town leaders settled on naming the area after then-President Taft in 1912.

It’s been the geographical center of the California oil industry, where companies such as Chevron and Aera siphon up crude from the vast reserves pooled under this remote, dry region dotted with sage brush, clover and buckwheat.

On April 27, Taft’s City Council voted unanimously to open up for business on May 3, in defiance of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s orders.

But two days later, Kern County officials asked Noerr to stand down.

Unwilling to give up, the mayor penned a letter with four county supervisors and state Senate Minority Leader Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield), requesting the governor modify stay-at-home orders.

“Local government should have the flexibility and discretion to navigate reopening stages in a timeline that works best for their communities,” wrote Noerr and those co-signing the letter. Noerr sits on a Kern County advisory board that is evaluating how best to respond to the governor’s orders.

“I hate to say it, but the civil unrest we have been seeing seems to be having a positive effect,” he said, referring to protests over the weekend and the governor’s decision to reopen beaches around the state.

Several counties and cities have pushed back against Newsom’s emergency orders. In the far northeastern part of the state, Modoc County opened up for business on Friday. Sheriffs in Del Norte and Humboldt counties announced they would not enforce the orders.

Kern County has also opted not to enforce the restrictions.

“I see no reason why we should remain closed,” Noerr said in an interview, last week, not wearing a mask. He said the overall economy of the town likely has shrunk by 40%. He doesn’t yet have the numbers to show the true impact.

Sitting at the base of a bronze statue dedicated to the 20th century oil worker pioneers who built the city and the region’s oil industry, Noerr pointed to Kern County’s COVID-19 numbers, which show that Taft now has 16 cases, and that hospitalization rates in the county have started to dip...

More.

Less Than Zero: U.S. Oil Prices Drop to Negative Territory as Markets Crash

Following-up, "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Deletes Tweet Cheering Crash of Oil Markets."

Summary at WSJ, "U.S. Oil Costs Less Than Zero After a Sharp Monday Selloff."

U.S. oil futures plunged below zero for the first time Monday, a chaotic demonstration that there was no place left to store all the crude that the world’s stalled economy would otherwise be using.

The price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude to be delivered in May, which closed at $18.27 a barrel on Friday, ended Monday at negative $37.63. That effectively means that sellers must pay buyers to take barrels off their hands...

More at NPR, "Free Fall: Oil Prices Go Negative."

And at CNBC, "Stock market live Monday: Stocks drop more than 1.5%, oil turns negative, stay-at-home stocks rise."

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Deletes Tweet Cheering Crash of Oil Markets

See, at Memeorandum, "AOC cites need to ‘play hardball’ on coronavirus relief packages, in push for $2,000 per month payments."

And NYDN, "Ocasio-Cortez deletes ‘absolutely love to see it’ tweet about oil price crash amid conservative outrage."

And on Twitter:

Think of the COUNTLESS idiotic tweet AOC has posted and never deleted.

She deleted this one. She meant every word, but sometimes you can't be THIS honest. pic.twitter.com/e6bQlW5qet

— Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) April 20, 2020

Never let a crisis got to waste. Sigh.

Meghan L. O'Sullivan, Windfall

At Amazon, Meghan L. O'Sullivan, Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America's Power.

Democrats Will Destroy America’s Energy Sector … And Economy

At Issues & Insights:

Democrats’ Campaign Promise: We’ll Destroy America’s Energy Sector … And Economy https://t.co/iltNzul7Um pic.twitter.com/wE7A2oXz4b

— Issues & Insights (@InsightsIssues) September 30, 2019

Fossil Fuels Are Not an Existential Threat (VIDEO)

Here's Alex Epstein, the author of the The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, for Prager University:

President Trump Approved Strikes on Iran, Then Pulled Back From the Brink (VIDEO)

At the New York Times, "Strikes on Iran Approved by Trump, Then Abruptly Pulled Back."



And at Free Beacon, "U.S. Expected to Strike Back for Iran’s Downing of Drone":

The United States is likely to take military action against Iran in the coming days for Tehran's downing a U.S. drone in international airspace on Wednesday near the Strait of Hormuz.

The Central Command said an RQ-4 Global Hawk drone aircraft was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile system while operating in international airspace around 7:35 p.m. on Wednesday.

President Trump suggested retaliation for the attack is coming. "Iran made a very big mistake," the president tweeted.

Later during an Oval Office meeting with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, Trump was asked about a military strike against Iran and repeated that Iran "made a very big mistake" because the drone was flying over international waters.

"Iran made a big mistake. This drone was in international waters, clearly," he said. "We have it all documented scientifically, not just words. And they made a very bad mistake."

Trump suggested that the drone was mistakenly shot down and noted that "I have a big, big feeling" an Iranian air defense operator erred in attacking the drone, someone "loose and stupid who did it."

Asked what will come next, the president said "You'll find out."

Air Force Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, commander of Central Command air forces, said the RQ-4 drone was conducting surveillance over the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz in international airspace near recent IRGC attacks on two tankers. The drone was struck by an IRGC surface-to-air missile fired from a base near Goruk, Iran, he said.

"This was an unprovoked attack on a U.S. surveillance asset that had not violated Iranian airspace at any time during its mission," Guastella said in a statement. "This attack is an attempt to disrupt our ability to monitor the area following recent threats to international shipping and free flow of commerce."

The three-star general also said that Iran falsely claimed the aircraft was shot down over Iran. "The aircraft was over the Strait of Hormuz and fell into international waters."

"At the time of the intercept, the RQ-4 was operating at high-altitude approximately 34 kilometers from the nearest point of land on the Iranian coast," he said. "This dangerous and escalatory attack was irresponsible and occurred in the vicinity of established air corridors between Dubai, UAE, and Muscat Oman, possibly endangering innocent civilians."

"Iranian reports that the aircraft was over Iran are false," said CENTCOM spokesman Capt. Bill Urban. "This was an unprovoked attack on a U.S. surveillance asset in international airspace."

Tensions have increased with Iran since last week when the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Tehran's shock troops, were caught removing a limpet mine from the hull of a Japanese tanker that had been hit by other mines the United States has concluded came from Iran.

Another tanker also was attacked with the magnetic mines last week.

Several earlier Iran-linked attacks were carried out, including mines on the ships, an attack on a Saudi pipeline, a rocket firing near a U.S. embassy, and an attack on a NATO convoy in Afghanistan.

White House National Security Adviser John Bolton said in an interview last week the United States is set to retaliate for Iranian military provocations.

"The National Security Strategy lists Iran as one of the four top threats and we just need to be sure we've got the capability to deter them from these kinds of activities, threatening American lives and facilities, threatening the international oil market," Bolton said when asked about the Pentagon's plan to dispatch around 1,000 additional troops to the region.

"They would be making a big mistake if they doubted the president's resolve on this," Bolton added, echoing the president's tweet.

The latest confrontation sent crude oil prices higher over concerns of a new Middle East war. Oil prices increased more than $3 to $63 a barrel, Reuters reports.

U.S. national security officials have been debating how to respond to the recent Iranian military attacks carried out through proxies in a bid to avoid a head-on conflict with the United States.

Options are expected to range from covert action against Iranian military targets using special forces commandos to airstrikes against Iranian bases.

The administration is weighing what it regards as proportional responses to recent Iranian actions...

Iran Shoots Down U.S. Military Drone Over Strait of Hormuz (VIDEO)

Following-up, "Assessing the Iranian Threat to the Strait of Hormuz."

At the Washington Post, "Iran shoots down US surveillance drone, heightening tensions." And "Iran shoots down U.S. naval drone in Persian Gulf region amid tensions between countries."

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s Revolutionary Guard shot down a U.S. surveillance drone Thursday in the Strait of Hormuz, marking the first time the Islamic Republic directly attacked the American military amid tensions over Tehran’s unraveling nuclear deal with world powers.

The two countries disputed the circumstances leading up to an Iranian surface-to-air missile bringing down the U.S. Navy RQ-4A Global Hawk, an unmanned aircraft with a wingspan larger than a Boeing 737 jetliner and costing over $100 million.

Iran said the drone “violated” its territorial airspace, while the U.S. called the missile fire “an unprovoked attack” in international airspace over the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf and President Donald Trump tweeted that “Iran made a very big mistake!”

Trump later appeared to play down the incident, telling reporters in the Oval Office that he had a feeling that “a general or somebody” being “loose and stupid” made a mistake in shooting down the drone.

RTWT.

Also at ABC News, via Memeorandum, "Trump says Iranian shootdown of US military drone may have been a ‘mistake’."

Assessing the Iranian Threat to the Strait of Hormuz

This piece, from Professor Caitlin Talmadge at International Security from 11 years ago, remains timely.

See, "Closing Time: Assessing the Iranian Threat to the Strait of Hormuz":

How might Iran retaliate in the aftermath of a limited Israeli or U.S. strike? The most economically devastating of Iran’s potential responses would be closure of the Strait of Hormuz. According to open-source order of battle data, as well as relevant analogies from military history and GIS maps, Iran does possess significant littoral warfare capabilities, including mines, antiship cruise missiles, and land-based air defense. If Iran were able to properly link these capabilities, it could halt or impede traffic in the Strait of Hormuz for a month or more. U.S. attempts to reopen the waterway likely would escalate rapidly into sustained, large-scale air and naval operations during which Iran could impose significant economic and military costs on the United States—even if Iranian operations were not successful in truly closing the strait. The aftermath of limited strikes on Iran would be complicated and costly, suggesting needed changes in U.S. force posture and energy policy.

The full article is available in pdf format here.

Bethany McLean, Saudi America

At Amazon, Bethany McLean, Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World.

Democrats to Prohibit the Sale of Gasoline-Powered Internal Combustion Vehicles by 2035

I'll move out of state.

At a time when America has gained not only energy independence, but global dominance of the energy industry, which is improving the lives of untold millions upon millions of people, making the cost of living less expensive and improving the quality of life for the nation's poorest and least well-off, California's Democrats are pushing in the exact opposite direction, pushing a fad technology that has not shown to reduce so-called climate emissions.

What a total disaster.

This is the problem with living in a one-party state. The majority becomes diabolically infected with the most ugly hubris, thinking their notions of "what's best" is the only way things should be done. For example, how's that bullet train working out, pfft?

And these freakin' electric vehicles leftists are promoting? People will die driving those human death traps. People will die!

In any case, I swear I'll move.

At LAT, "At Jerry Brown's climate summit, one deadline will overshadow all the others":

California plans to ban sales of internal combustion cars by 2035, outlaw them completely by 2050; assuming anyone will still be living there https://t.co/m0ERMMdZuP

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 12, 2018

from my cold dead hands, motherf***ers pic.twitter.com/rfbt7rk4ZS

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 12, 2018

The political leaders coming from around the world for Gov. Jerry Brown’s climate action summit this week will grapple with a lot of urgent deadlines to drive down emissions, but one date is especially exasperating.

It is 2035 — the year advocates aim to kill off production of gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles.

Keeping global warming to levels society can tolerate could hinge on meeting that target. But even clean-tech-nology capital California has no clear path for getting there.

The question of whether drivers should be gently persuaded or forced out of their internal combustion engine cars and trucks over the next 17 years will weigh heavily on the landmark summit, which runs from Wednesday through Friday in San Francisco.

States, cities and companies will try to chart a course to carry the country and the world toward meeting the goals in the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change, which President Trump has disavowed.

Transportation is the most vexing problem the summit will confront. The sector sends more greenhouse gases into the air than any other, recently outpacing power plants, which are getting cleaner every year. Internal combustion engine cars need to be off the roads altogether by 2050 to meet the Paris goals. Dealers would need to stop selling new models 15 years earlier.

“Even during the Obama administration, when the country was pushing as hard and fast as it could onclimate policy, it still wasn’t enough” to meet the goals on auto emissions, said Kate Larsen, a director at Rhodium Group, a Bay Area research firm.

Rhodium’s modeling shows that just 8% of U.S. drivers will be in zero-emission cars, pickups or SUVs by 2025, a depressing projection for the climate movement.

The urgency is not lost on Brown. Last year, he directed the state’s chief air regulator, Mary Nichols, to look into stepping up the state’s timetable to phase out gas and diesel vehicles. It gnaws at him that other nations are already catapulting ahead.

Electric vehicles account for 5% of cars sold in California and 1% nationwide. In Norway, they make up 40%. Bans on the sales of new gasoline- and diesel-powered cars are scheduled to take effect there and in several other countries as soon as 2025. China has put automakers on notice that a ban is on the horizon.

But it is a much tougher sell in America, even in California. A state legislative proposal this year to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars and trucks by 2040 went nowhere.

“You want me to issue a press release saying, ‘No more combustion engines’?” Brown said in an interview Monday. “There are 32 million in California. It doesn’t work that way. We have to provide an alternative…. We have to get that in place.”

The shift toward electric vehicles in parts of Europe and Asia is bolstered by government subsidies and tax structures that few American politicians would consider. They include tough gas-guzzler penalties for those who drive high-horsepower, climate-unfriendly pickups and SUVs, and large cash grants and tax breaks for those who buy electric.

The U.S. approach is grounded in requiring automakers to meet steadily more ambitious mileage-per-gallon targets, a process that has gone a long way in cutting carbon emissions...

Still more, if you can stomach the idiocy.

California Looks to Block Further Offshore Drilling for Oil

Hey, I say, "Drill baby drill," lol.

But this is California, which has been taken over by far-left progressive nutjobs. It's hard out here, man.

At LAT, "First came the proclamations against Trump's offshore drilling plan. Now comes the legislation":

First came the proclamations against Trump's offshore drilling plan. Now comes the legislation https://t.co/KMoG4CuZd5 pic.twitter.com/IpuxNVTwYh

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) August 16, 2018

When the Trump administration proposed opening California waters to drilling on an unprecedented scale, state leaders said they would do whatever it takes to keep new oil operations at bay.

But promises only go so far.

So some in Sacramento now are trying to lock those pledges into law — safeguarding the coast from offshore drilling no matter the whims of future administrations.

Despite decades of lawsuits and regulations, the state’s ability to block offshore drilling hinges largely on who’s in power in the state Capitol. Even with staunch opposition by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and pledges from both candidates vying to be the next governor, future leaders could still allow new drilling if they choose.

Two bills that could live or die Thursday would close that possibility by barring state land managers from allowing the construction of new pipelines, piers, wharves or other infrastructure necessary to transport the oil and gas from water to land.

In a state where polls show 69% of residents oppose more drilling off their coast, such legislation may seem like a shoo-in. “But unfortunately it’s not,” said Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi (D-Torrance), acting chair of the Assembly’s Natural Resources Committee.

A similar Senate bill last year failed amid pressure from powerful oil and business interests that said stripping the state of this decision-making authority could do more harm than good.

Muratsuchi said he agreed to team up with state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) and seven coauthors this year to reintroduce the issue as nearly identical bills in the Assembly and the Senate, and overcome what he said were the key challenges: “Oily Democrats,” a more business-friendly Assembly than in years past, and powerful lobbying alliances in Sacramento.

The stalling of the legislation last year marked an instance in which California, famous for leading the charge on environmental laws, left other states to pave the way. New Jersey and New York picked up and adopted similar legislation this year. Delaware and Maryland are also looking to pass laws that would bar new drilling in state waters.

But with mounting public pushback against the Trump administration’s efforts to upend California’s environmental protections, backers say the bills have a new urgency this year.

“We need to take control of what we can control — and what we can control is our state land and waters,” said Richard Charter, a senior fellow at the Ocean Foundation who has worked on oil issues for 40 years. “I have never seen this level of danger to California’s coastline.”

Bills AB 1775 and SB 834 would prohibit the State Lands Commission, which has jurisdiction over tidelands and waters extending roughly three miles offshore, from granting leases for new pipelines and infrastructure — the most economical way to transport oil and gas to land. The Senate version of the bill goes a step further, banning the commission from renewing an existing lease if that action will result in increased oil or natural gas production from federal waters.

Currently, the commission’s oil decisions are subject to the vote of two elected officials, the lieutenant governor and the state controller, and one appointee of the governor, the director of the state Department of Finance.

Both Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic candidate for governor, and John Cox, the Republican candidate who has Trump’s backing, have declared that the commission’s current commitment to barring new leases would not change under their leadership...

More.

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California Mounts Resistance to Trump Administration's New Oil Drilling Proposal

California's the center of "The Resistance" against the Trump administration, and more pathetic examples are coming fast and furious since the new year came around.

Another reason to get out of this state as fast as you can (and unfortunately, I can't right now; not until I retire, if then, depending on what my wife wants to do; hopefully we'll bail out for more conservative/libertarian pastures).

In any case, at LAT, "California has many weapons in its arsenal to block new offshore oil drilling":

California has many tools in its arsenal to block new offshore oil drilling https://t.co/y2Mo6Pmc0R pic.twitter.com/W4iXwAzFdn

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) January 6, 2018

There are two things working against the Trump administration's proposal to open up California coastal waters to new oil and gas drilling: state regulators and simple economics.

California has powerful legal tools to head off new offshore development, and the price of oil offers little incentive to the energy industry to pursue expensive drilling projects next to a hostile state.

"I don't think there's any reasonable chance that there will be any leasing or drilling along the coast," said Ralph Faust, former general counsel for the California Coastal Commission. "This just seems like grandstanding" by the Trump administration.

The Interior Department on Thursday released plans to open vast areas off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to new oil and gas exploration and drilling through a five-year leasing program that would begin in 2019.

But there are myriad obstacles opponents can throw in front of the proposal, not to mention questions about whether the oil industry has much of an interest in California's offshore reserves at a time when domestic oil production is at its highest level in decades.

Under the plan, the federal government would offer 47 leases in U.S. waters on the outer continental shelf, including two each off the Northern, Central and Southern California coasts and one off Washington and Oregon.

The governors of all three states issued a joint statement Thursday saying they would do whatever it takes to block new leasing off their shores, which include some of the nation's most pristine coastlines.

The first hurdle for the Trump plan is a period of public comment and an extensive environmental review under federal law, which opponents can use to challenge the proposal as ecologically harmful.

In California, the state coastal commission also has the authority to review activities in federal waters to ensure they are consistent with the state's coastal management plans.

"The commission has extremely broad and very powerful authority to say 'no' to federal actions that would harm the coast of California and harm coastal waters," said Steve Mashuda, an attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization.

The commission is ready to use it.

"Nothing galvanizes bi-partisan resistance in California like the threat of more offshore oil drilling," coastal commission Chairwoman Dayna Bochco said in a statement. "We've fought similar efforts before, and we will fight them again."

While the U.S. Secretary of Commerce could override a commission finding that new oil drilling violated the state's management plan, federal courts have tended to side with states in such contests...

More.

The Next Energy Revolution

A great piece, from David G. Victor and Kassia Yanosek, at Foreign Affairs, "The Promise and Peril of High-Tech Innovation":

Three trends are driving the new energy revolution: management, data analytics, and automation. https://t.co/ft3nbboy1O

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) June 18, 2017

The technology revolution has transformed one industry after another, from retail to manufacturing to transportation. Its most far-reaching effects, however, may be playing out in the unlikeliest of places: the traditional industries of oil, gas, and electricity.

Over the past decade, innovation has upended the energy industry. First came the shale revolution. Starting around 2005, companies began to unlock massive new supplies of natural gas, and then oil, from shale basins, thanks to two new technologies: horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (or fracking). Engineers worked out how to drill shafts vertically and then turn their drills sideways to travel along a shale seam; they then blasted the shale with high-pressure water, sand, and chemicals to pry open the rock and allow the hydrocarbons to flow. These technologies have helped drive oil prices down from an all-time high of $145 per barrel in July 2008 to less than a third of that today, and supply has become much more responsive to market conditions, undercutting the ability of OPEC, a group of the world’s major oil-exporting nations, to influence global oil prices.

That was just the beginning. Today, smarter management of complex systems, data analytics, and automation are remaking the industry once again, boosting the productivity and flexibility of energy companies. These changes have begun to transform not only the industries that produce commodities such as oil and gas but also the ways in which companies generate and deliver electric power. A new electricity industry is emerging—one that is more decentralized and consumer-friendly, and able to integrate many different sources of power into highly reliable power grids. In the coming years, these trends are likely to keep energy cheap and plentiful, responsive to market conditions, and more efficient than ever.

But this transition will not be straightforward. It could destabilize countries whose economies depend on revenue from traditional energy sources, such as Russia, the big producers of the Persian Gulf, and Venezuela. It could hurt lower-skilled workers, whose jobs are vulnerable to automation. And cheap fossil fuels will make it harder to achieve the deep cuts in emissions needed to halt global warming...

More.

President Trump Signs Executive Order on Offshore Drilling; Leftists Go Nuts

This will affect California, and I'm for it, of course.

At the San Francisco Chronicle, "Trump order could open California waters to oil drilling."

Trump signs offshore drilling order that may open coast waters https://t.co/fCBCufamNI pic.twitter.com/igmZ5iuXRa

— SFGate (@SFGate) April 28, 2017

Also, at LAT, "Trump's directive on offshore drilling will face solid resistance in California," and "Santa Barbarans are angered by Trump's order that could lead to new offshore drilling."

Christy Clark, British Columbia's Conservative Premier, Backs Off Province's Carbon Tax (VIDEO)

Heh.

Canadian leftists must want this woman dead.

At the Los Angeles Times, with the hilariously biased headline, "British Columbia was once a leader in fighting climate change. Now, it's embracing fossil fuels":

British Columbia promotes itself as “Super, Natural,” and for many years it was praised for walking that talk.

Nearly a decade ago, the province enacted North America’s first tax on carbon emissions, putting it on the cutting edge of government efforts to fight climate change. The economy grew even as emissions declined. Climate activists around the world admired the move, but so did conservatives like former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who sought market-driven solutions.

Now, however, Canada’s West Coast is striving toward a very different kind of cutting edge: British Columbia is positioning itself to become a global leader in exporting fossil fuels, with plans to nearly triple crude oil exports through a controversial new pipeline and vastly expand production of liquefied natural gas to be sold in Asia.

And although the revenue-neutral carbon tax is still in place, the province’s current political leadership has halted the annual rate increases built into the original plan. Emissions, meanwhile, are rising again.

“They definitely have horses on either side of the wagon,” Tarika Powell, who studies fossil fuel exports for Sightline Institute, a Seattle think tank, said of the British Columbia government. “And they are going in opposite directions.”

In a province that has been influential in shaping environmental policy in Canada and beyond, the question is which horse will prevail — and one clue to the answer is expected to come next month, when Premier Christy Clark faces reelection.

Clark, who took office in 2011, leads the conservative but incongruously named BC Liberal Party. Her predecessor, Gordon Campbell, was also a member of that party, yet while Campbell pushed the carbon tax to approval in 2008 and still takes pride in it, Clark has shown little interest in climate leadership.

She instead has championed liquefied natural gas, which involves cooling natural gas into a dense liquid to make it easier and cheaper to ship.

If all 19 of the current LNG proposals in the province were built, according to Powell’s research, British Columbia would become the world’s largest LNG exporter many times over, dwarfing the current leaders, Qatar and Australia. Emissions from LNG terminals and refineries could drastically increase the level of greenhouse gas emissions within the province — and much of those emissions would be exempt from the carbon tax, according to analyses of Clark’s plans.

It was Clark who froze the carbon tax in 2012 and has refused to raise it since then, essentially ignoring the advice of a special task force she created to make recommendations. Although Clark does highlight the province’s leadership on the carbon tax, she has cited concerns among some business groups and others that increasing it would hurt the economy.

Her closest challenger next month, John Horgan of the New Democratic Party, has said he supports raising the carbon tax because “it’s the right thing to do,” and he has lashed out at Clark for accepting millions in campaign donations from fossil fuel companies and other industry groups.

Yet a New Democratic Party strategy document obtained and leaked by the BC Liberals made it clear that even Horgan’s party is wary of being cast as supporting tax increases, regardless of the benefits. It also expressed concerns that the province’s Green Party would peel away votes if it took no action.

“The BC Liberals will call it a tax increase — and they’ll holler from the rooftops in rural B.C.,” the leaked document said.

“We must holler back with: ‘Our plan puts more money in the pocket for a majority of B.C. families. Hers doesn’t. Our plan actually accomplishes the goals of a carbon tax — reducing carbon pollution. Hers doesn’t. Our plan creates good jobs that last in a more sustainable economy with more opportunities for the future. Hers doesn’t.’”

The political sensitivity over the carbon tax within the province is striking given its influence outside it...

Keep reading.

'Dirty Hippies' No Match for Donald Trump (VIDEO)

At the Rebel, "U.S. grants Keystone XL permit: “Dirty hippies” no match for President Trump."

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's the author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, which I've got on my reading list.

She's got an interesting interview, at ISR, "A Sense of Hope & the Possibility of Solidarity." She's a full-blown, unabashed revolutionary Marxist. Remember, my motto is "know your enemies." I'm constantly surrounded by people just like this at my college, and lots of students suck this stuff up like so many ganja fat ones:

The struggles of Indigenous people have a rich history, and really came together in the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s with other movements for liberation. In your books, it’s clear you are making the connection between land dispossession, labor, and class—basically Marx’s approach of historical materialism. You even quoted Marx from Capital in the beginning of chapter two, entitled “Culture of Conquest.” Why is this approach important to struggles for liberation?

I think Marxism is a hard sell in the Native movement and for African Americans but less so for Mexican Americans because of their political genealogies. Today it’s even difficult for Chicanos, as well as Native Americans, because Marxism is deemed just Western epistemology or a Western worldview. There is of course a lot of Eurocentrism in Marx’s early writings. There is the idea of progress, but people don’t look at his later work enough, when he was getting into ethnology.4 He didn’t know much about non-European peoples, yet making generalities about the whole world can seem imperialist. However, I found out when I was doing my dissertation, that using Marxism to look at the history of land tenure in New Mexico at different stages from Spanish colonization through US conquest and colonization was essential. Marx describes the initial looting of the Americas as reckless abandon, as well as the enslavement of Africans, and the genocide of Native Americans, and this describes the initial Spanish invasion and occupation of New Mexico, which led to the All Indian Pueblo Revolt driving the Spanish colonists out for more than a decade.5 The second period of eighteenth-century Spanish colonialism was far more of a negotiated relationship. It was still colonialism but it wasn’t the most vicious kind, and the Spanish army was there to defend that zone from French and British expansion.6

Through the history of Mexico becoming independent and then New Mexico being taken by the US, I tried to look at capitalist development and to link this with imperialism. I read all kinds of things from Marx and participated in Marxist study groups. At the time I hadn’t done a real study of Capital. I started reading about Oriental despotism, and Marx’s analysis of how the pyramids were built. These grand public works were built by forced labor, and I connected that to what I was seeing in precolonial Indigenous New Mexico—they had elaborate irrigation systems, which were also throughout Mexico and Central America. You have almost a dictatorship to control water, but the way Indigenous peoples organized it was with serial dictatorships. The ditch boss would be elected for one year and had total control of the water in each pueblo. These ninety-eight city-states along the Rio Grande and its tributaries also went to war with each other periodically over water, so it could be very serious. They could starve as a result of being in the desert. With the water supply, they had an absolute autocratic ditch boss and everyone had to contribute labor. There wasn’t a class of laborers, and after a year the ditch boss could never again be in that position. It had to change every year so that they didn’t get used to the power.

This history shows how people can organize themselves in different ways; capitalism and exploitative labor were not inevitable in human history. Just because capitalism came to dominate the world through European and United States imperialism, forcing the world to live under capitalism does not mean it was inevitable. We need to build upon Marx’s brilliant comprehension of how capitalism arose in Europe and how it works. But the social and political systems that produced ancient irrigation systems and widespread agricultural production in the Americas were not despotic.7 It has been said the beginning of the class system started in ancient Egypt, but I found things that didn’t fit that mold. I tried to apply the basic tenets of Marxism and especially what is known as “primitive accumulation”.

I want to mention here that there are a lot of words Marx used that should be retranslated. For instance regarding primitive accumulation, it’s just easy to say “primary” or “higher” but Marxists don’t know what you’re talking about unless you say primitive. In other languages, primitive means primary.8 It doesn’t necessarily have the baggage that the word “primitive” does for Indigenous peoples subjected to European ethnography. It became clear to me while working on my thesis that the first big onslaught of the primitive accumulationprocess that set off capitalist development happens over and over again, even today. This has entered into a part of Native studies with Glen Coulthard’s book, Red Skin, White Masks, in which he makes that argument.9 Coulthard identifies with the anarchist tendency, but he takes on Ward Churchill’s piece in Marxism and Native Americans.10 Coulthard says it’s ridiculous to not use such an important tool as Marx’s work.

In all my work, I try to apply historical materialism. However, I don’t think any of the original Marxists and following generations of European Marxists dealt with colonialism as the avatar of capitalism. Lenin theorized imperialism, but he dealt with it in the most technical way of financial capital, which is really important. And he did deal with national liberation. But I don’t think Marx or Lenin even began to understand the role the US was playing throughout the nineteenth century as the vortex of capitalism, and what I try to show is that from the very beginning the United States was based on colonial conquest, and on overseas imperialism following their independence from the British Empire.

*****

We’ve been trying to use Marxism as the framework to talk about Indigenous issues. If you merely say Marxism is European, you miss the point of the theory. People forget that Marx actually talked about who was expropriated, how people were actually dispossessed, and how that created the material basis ultimately for colonization, and how the vast majority of settlers and migrants who came to the US ended up in factories as low-wage workers.

I worked hard on the first chapter of my book about the precolonial era in the Americas, where there were prosperous and urban civilizations without capitalism, and that is so hopeful. Most radical forms of anarchism now are anticivilization, and they often look to Native people as the inspiration. They use Indigenous peoples, especially Native people in the Americas, pulling out what they want to justify their ideology. They are creating fantasies as evidence and even calling it science. Anarchists, especially the primitivists, view agriculture as the basis of all evil, because they are looking at agribusiness, and they don’t want to know at all that 90 percent of Native people in the Western hemisphere were agriculturalists—they don’t want to know that fact. So they romanticize Native people as “hunter-gatherers.”

This viewpoint distorts the reality in the Western hemisphere. The civilizations of central Mexico and the Andes were still developing before the Europeans intervened. The civilizations of the Americas were going in a different direction than Europe or Asia. I think had Marx really been able to study or know what was hardly even knowable at that time, he would have said that capitalism in the Americas was not inevitable. I always say that 500 years ago with the invasion of the Americas, a wrong path was taken for humanity. So let’s say that capitalism is wrong and destructive, not that it was inevitable. For example, with the ancestral Puebloans, it was clearly a choice. They had a large civilization up on Mesa Verde [in present day Colorado]; they had irrigation ditches for miles and were overusing the wood, because everything was built of wood. They were probably becoming less democratic, and they made the choice to migrate to the Rio Grande area of northern New Mexico and break down into smaller villages. They continued to function like city-states, but they were smaller than the one large civilization up at Mesa Verde. And why not say that was a choice and just maybe that the Americas were going in a different direction, rather than interpreting this or the Maya devolvement as “collapse?” This is something to learn from: civilization without capitalism and how can it work. This is tied with the concept of humans being a part of nature; for example, conventional Marxist thinking argues that private property began with the domestication of animals in Africa. However, in America the ancestral peoples did not domesticate animals for food or as beasts of burden. In the civilizations of Central America, parrots and dogs were domesticated but were considered sacred. The Spanish invaders noted that the Aztec dogs did not bark, but they learned to bark from the Spanish war dogs.

Can you talk more about the relationship between settler colonialism and capitalism? What do you define as settler colonialism? What is the difference between settler colonialism and outpost colonialism?

Yes, it is really important. I am not sure I entirely succeed in the book on this because the tendency of European-based Marxism is to separate the two, and of course in the United States they are like two separate worlds. Because of Lenin, we have a good connection between capitalism and imperialism, and most people assume the connection. But with colonialism, bourgeois history tends to call things colonialism that weren’t colonialism, such as the Roman Empire. Yes, they had colonies, but it wasn’t capitalist-based. It was a different era; so people like to say “people have been colonizing each other forever,” but colonialism is just a different system under capitalism. In settler colonialism, Europeans export people with the promise of land, and private property, so that land itself becomes the chief commodity in the primitive accumulation of capital, and in North America, colonists also enslaved Africans as both market commodities and unpaid and unfree labor. This is a distinct form of colonialism, which obviously proved to be the most effective in building the most powerful capitalist state, the United States. The main form of European colonialism was to exploit resources—precious metals, African bodies, spices—in which Native labor was organized with European overseers and bureaucrats, as well as Native middlemen. This form of colonialism, of course, produced great wealth for the European monarchies and later European states and created the structures of unequal global markets that persist today.

I want to make clear that there is not one “settler colonial” or “colonial” experience. Each has to be analyzed on its own terms, depending on many factors, such as which colonial state and which period of time is being considered. The European fetish for gold that developed during the Middle Ages drove nearly all of the early colonial ventures, but rare spices were also worth their weight in gold. And most importantly, the study of any colonial situation requires understanding the level and nature of resistance to these invasions. In making general conclusions regarding the Anglo and Anglo-American colonization of North America, it is essential to keep in mind that each of the hundreds of Native nations had a unique experience of colonialism, always destructive, but varying in details and survivability.

It’s inaccurate to speak, for instance, of “the California Indians.” The eighteenth-century Spanish colonization of the coastal region from San Diego to San Francisco was carried out by Franciscan missionaries with the use of the Spanish army in seizing people in the whole region to be incarcerated in the missions, and to work for the missionaries in their commercial pursuits. So these weren’t typical settlers, but it was settler colonialism. On the other hand, the nearly half of California north of San Francisco was not colonized until the United States confiscated the northern part of what had become Mexico, and the rush of settlers arrived as gold seekers with the 1850s gold rush. These were not typical settlers either, combining extraction with genocide.

Colonialism in general is disruptive, destructive, damaging, sometimes depopulating entire areas, such as the Natchez villagers of the Mississippi Delta, and the Nahuatl-speaking villagers of western Nicaragua and western Honduras who were seized by Spanish slave traders in the sixteenth century, then transported to work in the mines of Peru. European settlers didn’t arrive to those nearly depopulated areas until later. This was similar to the way villagers of West Africa were captured, enslaved, and sold in the Americas, losing their existence as particular nations and peoples.

I would say that settler colonialism was an exceptional mode of colonialism. English settler colonialism in the North American colonies took its specific form from the mid-seventeenth-century English conquest of Ireland, in which English forces under Oliver Cromwell drove subsistent Irish farmers off their land and gave land grants to English and Scottish settlers. The developing English capitalism based in the wool industry required surplus labor to work in the factories, as well as large swaths of grazing land for commercial sheep production. The process of fencing the commons and driving English farmers off the land created that surplus labor force, but also a pool of settlers who were promised free land in America. The Protestant Anglos and Scots, who settled Northern Ireland, made up the majority of frontier settlers in the British North American colonies.

The Portuguese and the Spanish were specifically seeking gold and silver. Their hoarding of gold and silver actually limited their ability to develop capitalism. They didn’t really have a basis for that in the Iberian Peninsula after they deported all the farmers, craftsmen, architects, and other producers who were Muslims and Jews. Only in the eighteenth century did Spain begin establishing settler-colonies in the southern cone of South America, employing the same genocidal methods of eliminating or driving out the Indigenous peoples, which continued when Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay became independent.

However, only the United States developed effective capitalism outside of Britain. By 1840, it was already the largest economic power in the world on the basis of the global cotton trade and textile factories, also providing cotton to the British textile industry. Until recently, economic historians have dated the development of US capitalism to post–Civil War industrialization in the North. Several recent books have convincingly made the case for the cotton kingdom in the Mississippi Valley being the site of the birth of full-blown capitalism prior to the Civil War, based on slave labor and the capital generated by the value of the slaves’ bodies.13 This development included the parallel expulsion of the five large Native agricultural nations from the Southeast during the 1830s and 1840s, generating huge amounts of capital in land sales.

Donald Trump's Cabinet Picks Are Among the Most Conservative in History

Following-up from a little while ago, "Trump to Make Energy Policy Major Theme of Administration."

Like I said, I'm pleased as punch.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Trump's Cabinet picks are among the most conservative in history. What that means for his campaign promises":

Donald Trump promotes himself as a man divorced from party ideology, a president-elect just as open-minded to input from Al Gore as from Newt Gingrich.

But with his Cabinet nearly complete, he has chosen one of the most consistently conservative domestic policy teams in modern history, setting himself up for hard decisions and potential conflict with some of his supporters when he begins to govern.

The internal conflicts have emerged with nearly every pick.

Trump campaigned against the big banks, then chose a former Goldman Sachs partner, Steven Mnuchin, to run his Treasury Department. He pledged to save Medicare and Social Security, then chose Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), who has advocated sweeping revisions in Medicare and Medicaid, to run Health and Human Services.

Trump has placed the burdens of working people at the top of his agenda, yet chose as Labor secretary an executive, Andrew Puzder, who talked in an interview about the advantages of replacing human workers with machines because they are “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.”

And even as Trump aides put out word that the president-elect’s daughter Ivanka would be an influential administration voice in favor of curbing global warming, Trump named a man who has repeatedly expressed skepticism about the scientific consensus on climate change, Oklahoma Atty. Gen. Scott Pruitt, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

“This is a big mystery to a lot of people, and it’s going to be one of the hardest things about this presidency,” said Elaine Kamarck, a former advisor in the Clinton administration now at the Brookings Institution in Washington, who has written extensively about the inner workings of White Houses.

Trump has so far shown a deftness at drawing attention away from sticky policy debates with bold, attention-grabbing strokes, a tactic that may help him deflect controversies when he moves to the Oval Office. On Monday, he announced he was delaying until next month a news conference at which he had promised to address his business conflicts of interest, then on Tuesday morning, he staged a photo opportunity at Trump Tower with entertainer Kanye West.

He defied some ideologues in his party, and won goodwill from many supporters, by dramatically persuading Carrier Corp. to keep some of the air conditioning company’s manufacturing jobs in Indiana rather than ship them to Mexico.

Despite criticism over singling out an individual company with tax incentives and implicit threats to its government contracting business, Trump was able to use the publicity over the deal to promote a message that workers, particularly those in manufacturing, were at the top of his agenda.

“We are going to see a lot of symbolic politics,” said Lara Brown, a professor of political management at George Washington University. She expects gestures like the Carrier deal to prove effective for some time.

Trump’s supporters, Brown said, are more invested in shaking up the system than a particular policy agenda.

But the splashy moves could wear thin if Trump fails to deliver on signature promises, like a jobs boom...

It's all going to be fine.

I'm sure of it.

But keep reading, in any case.