January
19, 2009 - No. 13 - Morning Edition
On the Eve of Obama's
Inaugural and
Forthcoming Canadian Visit
Energy Blackmail of the Rich
- Gary Zatzman -
• Energy
Blackmail of the Rich - Gary
Zatzman
For Your Information
• Agenda for Obama's Meeting with
Harper
Who Said What
• Ottawa Must Harmonize
Environmental Plan with One Proposed by Obama Administration
- Toronto Star
• Obama's Green Team - Globe and Mail
On the Eve of Obama's
Inaugural and
Forthcoming Canadian Visit
Energy Blackmail of the Rich
- Gary Zatzman -
Part One
On Tuesday
January 20, 2009, Barack Obama will
be sworn
in as the 44th president of the United States. Soon after, he is
expected to undertake his first foreign visit as President to Ottawa
to meet Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Among the urgent issues on the table will be the
demands
and expectations placed by the United States on the Canadian government
regarding the further ongoing development of the Alberta tar sands. The
U.S. energy sector and its principal financial backers have especially
acute concerns at this particular
time of deep economic crisis. These include:
- any interventions by environmental or other
regulatory bodies in Ottawa and Edmonton;
- government financial support for the synthetic crude oil industry
that this resource development has spawned;
- the extension of additional pipelines from Alberta to oil refining
centres in the U.S.;
- the future of Canadian natural gas exports to the U.S. from Alberta
and northeastern British Columbia;
- the prospects of nuclear reactor construction projects in the tar
sands region; and
- the completion of an "energy corridor" across Canadian territory to
ensure secure supplies of imported natural gas especially for
manufacturing and other heavy industry in southern Ontario and the
northeastern United States.
Tens of thousands of Canadians have already become
engaged in recent years in opposing the severe environmental insults,
from compromising groundwater supplies to complete disruption and
destruction of the terrain, resulting from the strip-mining of bitumen,
the raw material source of what is turned
into synthetic crude oil. There is deep-going concern about the impacts
of the additional pollution load created by the industrial "upgrading"
of bitumen to extract the tar. There is also rising anger over the
increasing diversion of the raw bitumen itself to facilities in the
U.S. for "upgrading," at the cost of Canadian
jobs. Over the last 15 years, the reliance of the upgrading plants on
natural gas as their fuel source has greatly expanded and accelerated
drilling for and extraction of natural gas throughout western Canada,
in or near many populated areas, leading to widespread problems with
"sour gas" -- pollution from the hydrogen
sulfide emitted during the extraction phase -- and persistent and
growing demands on governments to step in and regulate.
The huge expansion of the oil sands as other
industrial
sectors have shut down or downsized across Canada has unleashed
enormous social turmoil and pressures on workers' families. From
Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, where the coal-mining, steel-making,
fisheries and forest products industries
were wiped out during the 1990s, thousands have been
"commuting" every several months between their home towns in the East
and work in the tar sands of the Athabasca. They have been joined by
thousands more as manufacturing jobs have disappeared in other
parts of Canada in more recent years.
"No to American dictate"
|
The social dislocation unleashed in the wake of
erecting
Fort McMurray as some kind of renewed Klondike Gold Rush -- thousands
of workers regularly "commuting" thousands of miles across the country
-- hints at the exacerbation of the contradictions attending uneven
economic and political development
of developing and developed economies which is built into the U.S.
imperialist course. Inside a so-called developed economy like that of
Canada, we have another version of this uneven development. At bottom,
it is the U.S. domination and dictate over how the country's energy
sources are plundered that is responsible
for engendering enormous distortions in the Canadian social fabric,
whether it is the long-distance "commuting," the schemes for importing
indentured labourers from offshore, or the TILMA-type schemes to "level
the playing field" of the mobility of certain classes of skilled
labourers.
The media have played a most insidious role in
shaping
people's consciousness as to the basis of this transformation in social
and economic existence and conditions occasioned specifically by the
especially rapid expansion of tar sands development in recent years.
The impression has been created that
oil and gas are running out, permanently, and such "affordable" sources
of future development as there are at this time -- the oil of the tar
sands is virtually lying on the surface of the earth, simultaneously
eliminating both the need to drill and the risks of failing to find oil
or gas -- are humanity's last hope until some
alternative energy sources as powerful as oil and gas can be developed
to replace them.
Not a word is mentioned in any of
this, however, about
the principal net effect of the large-scale commercial exploitation of
tar sands as a source of synthetic crude oil. The
principal effect is that this development has enabled the U.S.
imperialists to keep their war machine fuelled and ready to
strike anywhere on the planet without forcing rationing of non-military
uses of oil and gas in their North American home area. The rate of
expansion of tar sands development since 2001 has had to keep pace with
the expanded demands on the U.S. war machine in unleashing aggression
and occupation in Iraq and
Afghanistan. The claims about oil and gas "peaking" or running out
while imperialist aggression and occupations proceed feverishly apace
constitute the energy blackmail by the rich of the working class and
people, intended to engineer public compliance with an unsustainable
status-quo.
Part Two
Harper's
Further
Development of "Harmonious Relations"
with the Obama Administration Signals Deepening Dogfights
among Contending Energy Cartels
The current posture of the incoming Obama
Administration
on energy matters is a combination of words and deeds. Hopes have been
built up in certain circles that the Obama group will address serious
problems of environmental pollution and its industrial sources that the
Bush Administration was too mobbed
up with representatives from Big Oil to seriously attend to.
(Frequently cited on that point is the fact that outgoing
Vice-President Dick Cheney is a former CEO of Haliburton Corp., one of
the leading companies in contract drilling and other oilfield services
around the globe, and the fact that Cheney was personally
deeply involved in arranging the U.S. aggression in Iraq to advantage
U.S. corporate oil interests to the maximum.)
In December 2008, Obama nominated Stephen Chu to
serve
as his Secretary of Energy. Chu, a Nobel Laureate in theoretical
physics, has headed the Lawrence Berkeley Radiation Lab (a nuclear
energy research facility at the University of California-Berkeley).
Endorsing certain lines of thought put
forward by former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, Chu serves on the
Copenhagen Council, which advocates government-industry cooperation on
a global scale to regulate carbon emissions with a view to arresting
some of the negative short-term impacts of perceived climate
change.
Although Chu apparently has no direct ties to
Obama
personally or any part of his campaign for office, he has been involved
since 2007 with British Petroleum (BP), the major oil multinational
owned by
the British government. Chu was instrumental in getting BP to fund an
Energy Biosciences Institute,
to house most of its activities at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and to
spend 80 percent of a budgeted $500 million per annum for the next 10
years on research projects at UC Berkeley. The research is to be
conducted by 50 BP scientists, and the university-corporate
collaboration is the largest ever yet recorded in
the United States. A major preoccupation of the envisioned research
program is to genetically engineer agricultural crops into biofuels or
biofuel feedstocks. In the hands of monopolies which dominate the
political economy of the present day, of course, the grave danger
implicit in this program is that normal agricultural
food production will be increasingly sacrificed around the globe on the
altar of profits for Big Oil. There is mass opposition to this scheme
in the Berkeley community, the subsidy expected from the California
state treasury has not been forthcoming in the current economic crisis
and the project has been delayed.
However, BP is one of the globally-operating multinationals that has
reached the stage where it cannot ensure future production at current
levels without a major breakthrough in drilling technology or in
extracting energy from unconventional sources. BP's CEO was forced out
a couple of years ago after the company's
share price was discovered to have been grossly inflated on the basis
of deliberately exaggerated estimates of the company's available oil
and gas reserves. Generally speaking, the same scenario that brought BP
down is still unfolding for all the other major private corporate oil
and gas multinationals from the United
States and Europe. Their profit levels of the previous decade are not
sustainable without major investments in new exploration with
as-yet-undeveloped modifications in drilling and other methods of
detecting or extracting the raw material.
Meanwhile, the solution which so-called
unconventional
reserves like Canada's tar sands was supposed to supply has bumped up
against a different but no less formidable obstacle. The rate at which
Canada's supplies of natural gas are being consumed as the fuel for
upgrading bitumen into synthetic
crude oil has sharply reduced its export market prospects. During the
current decade, Canada's exports of natural gas were supplying 16
percent of U.S. demand -- that country's largest single external
source. Before syncrude upgrading began in Alberta and
Saskatchewan, Canada's natural gas reserves were estimated
to have a 50-year lifetime as an export commodity in Canada-U.S. trade.
By 2005, the Energy Information Administration, a statistics-gathering
agency of the U.S. Department of Energy, had revised its projection of
Canadian natural gas exports to last only another 8.8 years (at rates
of consumption then current).
Far from addressing the problem in a straightforward way, officials in
Ottawa and Edmonton shifted gears and started looking at possibly
building and situating nuclear power plants in the tar sands and
retaining the remaining natural gas reserves for export to the U.S.
This "solution" comes not just out of the panic
on the Canadian side about the future of its gas exports; the U.S.
nuclear industry is very hungry for new business, and interested to
break the monopoly enjoyed up to now by Atomic Energy of Canada
Ltd. (AECL), a Crown Corporation, over the installation of nuclear
facilities in Canada.
A deception being maintained in public opinion is
that
the U.S. Department of Energy has significant preoccupations either
with fossil fuels, either in the general commercial marketplace of the
United States or the world as a whole, or with priorities about
replacing fossil fuels with green alternatives
-- so, not to worry: "somehow" these things will be looked after on
Obama's watch. The facts are starkly different. The U.S. Department of
Energy's central preoccupation with fossil fuels is actually quite
narrow and specific, viz., the Strategic
Petroleum Reserve.
Even on this, it serves mainly as the watchdog
and accountant for one principal customer of that supply source, viz.,
the Pentagon.
It is this deception about the U.S. Department of
Energy
that has reached the extent where some denounce it for uncritically
tolerating or encouraging development of synthetic fuels, e.g., Alberta
tar sands development, as though the main damage is the despoiling of
the land by giant draglines digging
up the bitumen, wrecking ground water sources, etc. Although these are
indeed serious environmental insults, one of the main reasons the U.S.
Department of Energy in fact became interested in promoting synfuels in
the first place was as a new market for nuclear reactors. Nuclear power
is conceived of as supplying
an unlimited energy source to power the upgrading of the bitumen into
synthetic crude oil.
The Athabasca tar sands in effect are being
prepared as
an experimental testing ground for this idea. In Canada, meanwhile, all
the U.S. birthmarks of this idea of powering syncrude upgraders with
nuclear reactors have been effaced. Nuclear power in the tar sands is
being sold in the engineering community
as a cost-effective alternative to the upgrading sector's current
reliance on natural gas as its fuel source. Indeed, at the level of the
Canadian, Alberta and BC governments, the justification is being
dressed up as a way of staving off the exhaustion of Canada's
exploitation of the natural gas resources of Alberta and
northeastern BC.
All these existing contradictions are being
further
strained by the collapse in the world oil price. This is having
divergent effects on investment in oil sands development projects. For
the moment, it appears that those developments that propose to send
bitumen to the U.S. for upgrading into synthetic
crude will get the green light. On the other hand, those that were
looking for expanded investment in pipeline projects to send synthetic
crude upgraded in Canada to the U.S. for refining into petroleum
products are being taken off the table. It is in this context that a
fight is now breaking out between Canadian and
U.S.-based upgrading operators over who can develop soonest the most
efficient highest-volume nuclear-powered upgraders. The Canadian
"advantage" is that the working people's tax dollars can be looted in
vast quantities very quickly to give AECL an edge in this competition
over General Electric, Westinghouse
and other major U.S. private monopoly suppliers of nuclear reactors and
nuclear technology.
Further complicating this contradiction is the
fact that
the U.S. Department of Energy is the formal proprietor of the U.S.
nuclear arsenal. The office of the Secretary of Energy is thus uniquely
positioned to dictate the empire's nuclear policy under the guise of
energy conservation, fighting global warming
and you-name-it. This has indeed been the case since the Department's
establishment by the Carter Administration in 1977 under James
Schlesinger, who was also Carter's Secretary of Defence. What this
means is that the entire discourse and all its deceptions have already
been worked out. Part of it is given implicitly
already in Al Gore's Academy-Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient
Truth," where not a single word is uttered against the dangers of
nuclear power as the so-called "green alternative" to fossil fuels. As
a Senator, Gore had represented the State of Tennessee, where the Oak
Ridge Facility, a major institute
for researching nuclear weapons and nuclear power systems design, is
located. Chu has stated for the record his belief that nuclear is "less
toxic" in the short term than continued relatively unrestricted
expansion of the use of carbon-based fuels.
"No to war and the destruction
of our planet"
|
These contradictions among the energy cartels
continue
to drive the empire ever more urgently towards unleashing new wars and
interventions. Amid the euphoria over Obama's accession and the relief
over the departure of the Bush-Cheney gang, it is instructive to recall
the words of Dick Cheney while
he was still CEO at Haliburton Corp. From the rostrum of an offshore
oil and gas seminar in Halifax, Canada in May 1999, he declared that
"we do War and Peace." ("Eastern Canadian Natural Gas Conference
Report," Atlantic Progress, June 1999). As the
Obama era gets
under way, this is what the
energy cartels will still do. No one can afford to underestimate the
dangers inherent in such manipulation of the rhetoric and discourse
about "green alternatives" by this ruling class.
For Your Information
Agenda for Obama's Meeting with Harper
According to Prime Minister Stephen Harper,
environmental concerns and the need for clean, secure energy will be
top priorities when he meets with U.S. President Barack Obama on his
first foreign visit to Canada shortly after his inauguration.
Speaking on a Calgary radio station January 13,
Harper
stated, "We will be making the point ... of saying we want to work
together with the United States on environmental and energy issues."
He pointed out that the U.S. is "an
energy-deficient
country, and a country with enormous security needs and issues. There
is no more reliable and secure supply of energy than from Canada. They
need us in that sense."
Referring to concerns about the environmental
impact of
the oil sands, Harper stated, "To be frank on the oil sands, we've got
to do a better job environmentally. We hear a lot of pressure on that.
At the same time, the development of these things is pretty important,
in our judgment, to North American
energy security."
According to Harper, coal-powered electrical
generation
used extensively south of the border, "is pretty dirty, too," and the
two countries should work together to find solutions. Obama has said he
will fight America's "addiction" to dirty oil, which media reports say
may include crude
from
Alberta's oil sands.
Harper was in Calgary January 13 for a meeting
with
members
of the business community to get their input on what sort of economic
stimulus should be in the January 27 federal budget. Those included in
the business round table were oil company representatives Randy Eresman
from EnCana, Murray Edwards
of Canadian Natural Resources, Hal Kvisle from TransCanada, Rick George
from Suncor and Ron Brenneman from Petro-Canada.
Following the Calgary meeting, Environment
Minister Jim
Prentice said the meeting with Obama will be a chance to bring the two
countries together on an approach to climate change.
"I think there's enormous opportunity for Canada
right
now to take leadership, to work together with the new administration in
the United States, and to do this in a way that suits our industry and
our jobs," he said.
Who Said What
Ottawa Must Harmonize Environmental Plan
with One Proposed by Obama Administration
- Allan Woods, Toronto Star,
January 15, 2009 -
Don't tell Canada's environment minister about
"Hope" and "Change," the rallying cries of Barack Obama's election
victory.
In the coming months, Jim Prentice must steer a
complex proposal to
essentially harmonize his government's much-criticized climate change
plan with the one proposed by the Obama administration. The result will
be a North American market for trading greenhouse gas emissions
credits, giving companies
the incentive to cut their carbon footprint.
To do that, Prentice will have to change
considerably the Tories'
environment blueprint and hope that the hoopla over Washington's
re-engagement in the global warming fight will bring the Conservatives
the breathing room they have been denied for the last three years.
"The election of Mr. Obama and the determination
and the clarity
with which he has spoken on climate change really is a fundamental
change in terms of the situation," Prentice said Monday.
"I think it's fair to say that we are now in a
position where the
policy framework we're talking about as Canadians and the policy
framework the new president has spoken about are very consistent."
Prentice believes Obama's America has come around
to the Tory way of thinking on climate change.
But faced with a new U.S. administration that is
stacked with
climate change fundamentalists -- people on a first-name basis with
former vice-president Al Gore -- it will be up to Ottawa to find
religion.
The Obama team includes the likes of retired
Marine Gen. James
Jones, the proposed national security adviser, who touts the primacy of
energy security and is well connected in Alberta's oil sands. But it
appears more weighted with appointees like climate czar Carol Browner,
who dubbed President
George W. Bush's team "the worst environmental administration ever."
Obama's energy secretary nominee, Steven Chu, is a
Nobel-prize
winning physicist, a sign that science will regain supremacy over
politics when it comes to issues such as climate change.
It's unlikely to have escaped the new
administration's notice that Canada has been a Bush ally on climate
change.
Watch for the Harper government's conversion to
global warming
orthodoxy that includes more stringent goals for cutting emissions,
scrapping "intensity targets" -- a measure that allows overall
emissions to rise -- long before the 2020 date it had planned, and
signing on with some of the widely accepted
standards that have left Canada isolated internationally.
Two previous environment ministers have spilled
copious amounts of blood in the Commons defending such controversial
policies.
"All of this is very technical but ... certainly a
North American
approach would have to start with reasonably consistent standards or
targets, if you will," Prentice said. "Whether you talk about baselines
or targets levels, there's a need to have a discussion about all of
that."
One former official with a government agency said
Canada is "going
to be policy-takers on some of this stuff, but that does not mean that
it does not serve our interests."
A North American pact to cut emissions could
secure the U.S. as a
destination for oil from Alberta's oil sands at a time when Congress is
trying to cut reliance on what an Obama spokesperson once termed
"dirty" oil, said John Drexhage of the International Institute for
Sustainable Development in
Ottawa.
"Many of the advisers on this issue to Obama have
been quite
critical and skeptical about the whole oil sands issue," he said,
adding that it would be tough to imagine the U.S. shutting off the oil
supply from both the Middle East and Alberta.
The biggest challenge for Prentice and the Tory
government could be
keeping pace with the change expected to grip the U.S. once Obama hits
his stride on the environment.
Compare the scope and ambition of Washington and
Ottawa's respective
plans: Obama has promised $150 billion over 10 years to push the
private sector toward clean technologies like solar and wind power and
clean coal; the Conservatives pledged $700 million over three years in
last year's budget
to turn Canada, in its words, from an energy superpower to a
"clean-energy superpower."
"The U.S. is going to lean on clean technology and
they are about to
make it an economic issue and a fiscal stimulus issue, and they are
about to clean our clocks competitively in those sectors," said one
Ottawa lobbyist.
There's also the challenge of corralling the
provincial governments
into a unified national position that could put most of the burden on
oil producing regions. Already, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach is
complaining that he was blindsided by the Tory overture to Obama.
Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Manitoba, on
the other hand,
have already signed on to a cross-border cap-and-trade system with a
number of U.S. states, and appear well-positioned for the proposed new
pact.
Under the system, government sets a limit on
carbon emissions as
well as a cap for each major polluting industry. Industries below their
cap can sell emission permits to those that exceed their limit.
Transition at the Top: Obama's Green Team
- Shawn McCarthy, Globe and
Mail, January
16, 2009 -
After eight years of Republican rule,
environmentalists
now believe they have a keen ally moving into the White House next
week, and Canada's oil sands are high on their list of targets.
But they'll have to deal with General James Jones.
As a monumental battle over energy policy shapes
up
within the new administration of president-elect Barack Obama, Gen.
Jones, a former NATO supreme commander who retired from the U.S. Marine
Corps, may turn out to be Canada's best ally.
After next week's historic presidential
inauguration in
Washington, D.C., he will be the new president's national security
adviser, and has sent clear signals that he considers energy security
to be a key part of his mandate.
The fate of Canada's carbon-heavy oil sands
projects
hangs on the outcome of the fight over U.S. energy policy and climate
change, which pits the "hawks," pushing for tough new standards to cut
greenhouse gas emissions, against the "pragmatists," urging a go-slow
approach to ensure nothing undermines
the economy or energy security.
Gen. Jones, as it turns out, delivered a message
to
closed-door meeting of business and government elites in Banff this
fall that was music to the ears of his Alberta hosts.
Energy security is a critical and growing concern
for
American national security, Gen. Jones said in his keynote speech to an
audience that included Americans and Mexicans, as well as Canadians.
His message in Banff this fall dovetails with
Prime
Minister Stephen Harper's pitch to the new administration for a
continental climate change agreement that reflects the need for energy
security and growing oil sands production.
When he accepted his role in the Obama
administration,
Gen. Jones was chairman of the Institute for 21st Century Energy, a
business-backed think tank that has several Canadian oil companies as
supporting members.
Among its lengthy list of proposals aimed at
boosting
supply and reducing U.S. energy demand, the group warns against
aggressive climate change policies that would undermine energy security
or impose undue costs on the economy.
And it advocates that the United States look to
Canada
and Mexico as strategic partners in providing growing sources of crude
oil as it attempts to reduce its reliance on Middle East supplies.
Soon after his inauguration, Mr. Obama will travel
to
Ottawa to visit with Mr. Harper, his first foreign visit as president.
The Prime Minister will make similar arguments to those put forward by
Gen. Jones -- that Canada is a critical source of secure energy and
that the two countries need to work together
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without hamstringing either the
economy or Alberta's oil industry.
But while Gen. Jones and Mr. Harper will be urging
caution in Mr. Obama's right ear, the new president will be getting a
very different message from environmentalists in his left.
Mr. Obama has promised aggressive action on
reducing
greenhouse gas emissions, by boosting low-carbon sources of energy,
improving energy efficiency and adopting national emissions standards
that could penalize high-carbon sources like oil sands projects.
He has loaded his cabinet with advocates of
action,
including former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Carol
Browner in a new post as adviser for energy and climate change, and his
energy secretary Stephen Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who has
urged adoption of national emission
caps.
But Gen. Jones and several economic advisers are
expected to urge caution in moving ahead with costly regulations that
could weaken an already fragile economy or interfere with the country's
energy security agenda.
Included in that group is Lawrence Summers, Mr.
Obama's
top economic adviser, who clashed with Ms. Browner over environmental
rules when he served as former president Bill Clinton's treasury
secretary.
Gen. Jones's Institute for 21st Century Energy is
part
of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and has provided one avenue for
Canadian oil companies to use to help counter the opposition in the
United States to oil sands development. At the same time, Canada's
Ambassador Michael Wilson and Alberta's
representative Gary Mar have aggressively lobbied senior members of the
U.S. Congress and senior advisers surrounding Mr. Obama.
Alberta is spending $2-billion to develop the
means of
sequestering large amounts of carbon dioxide underground, and the
federal government is expected to unveil new incentives in its upcoming
budget.
At confirmation hearings this week, Ms. Browner,
Mr. Chu
and EPA administrator Lisa Jackson vowed to move quickly on climate
legislation, in some cases granting states the right to impose their
own standards.
This week, a group of Canadian and American
environmental groups wrote to the president-elect and key members of
his cabinet, urging them to resist Ottawa's push to grant "a pass" to
the oil sands in meeting greenhouse gas emission targets.
Congress is expected to tackle climate change
legislation in the first half of this year, after Mr. Obama's stimulus
package and a broader energy bill, says Liz Barratt-Brown, a senior
attorney at Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council, whose
group was a signatory to the letter.
She expects the new president to rebuff any
Canadian
effort to water down emission targets to protect the oil sands.
"This is a president who instinctively gets how
serious
the climate change threat is," Ms. Barratt-Brown said.
Even some business groups are pressing for climate
legislation that could force oil companies to spend on costly emission
reductions programs, far beyond what the Alberta or federal government
are requiring. Yesterday in Washington, the U.S. Climate Action
Partnership issued a call for action that
would include tough emission targets -- including on imported oil --
and low-carbon fuel standards that environmentalists insist would
disadvantage the oil sands.
The USCAP includes blue-chip companies like
General
Electric Co. and Dow Chemical Co., and even heavy emitters like utility
giant Duke Power Co. and oil major ConocoPhillips Co.
Obama's "Green Team"
Energy/Environment
CAROL BROWNER: Assistant to
the President for
Energy and Climate Change. Former EPA administrator under president
Bill Clinton supported U.S. signing on to Kyoto Protocol, and was
active in environmental groups backing a national cap-and-trade system.
STEVEN CHU: Energy Secretary.
Former head of
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Nobel Prize-winning
physicist, he directed research on renewable energy. A staunch advocate
of national greenhouse gas emissions standards.
LISA JACKSON: Administrator,
Environmental
Protection Agency. New Jersey state environmental administrator,
chairwoman of the northeast Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which
established a cap-and-trade system among northeastern power utilities.
National Security
JAMES L. JONES: National
Security Adviser.
Former NATO supreme commander, Marine Corps four-star general, CEO of
business-backed Institute for 21st Century Energy, which backed
offshore drilling and energy trade with Canada and Mexico and opposed
aggressive
emission caps.
HILLARY CLINTON: Secretary of
State. Former first
lady and senator, who supported Senate legislation for national
emissions standards, but insisted foreign countries must also embrace
standards. At confirmation hearing said climate change and energy
security are joint challenges.
ROBERT GATES: Defence
Secretary, served as
President George W. Bush's defence secretary. Department is world's
largest consumer of fuel, and was prohibited in 2007 energy bill from
buying unconventional, high-carbon fuel as secure alternative to
imports. Many see it applying to oil
sands.
Economy
LAWRENCE SUMMERS: Director
of the National
Economic Council. Former Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Opposed
the Kyoto accord, is a backer of a carbon tax, rather than the
cap-and-trade system proposed by most of the Obama team.
TIMOTHY GEITHNER: Treasury
Secretary. Former
head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (part of the U.S. central
bank), participated in bailout of financial institutions last fall.
Lobbied heavily by businesses who say new carbon emission caps would
hurt weakened economy.
Read The
Marxist-Leninist
Daily
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
|