Suncor Energy selling North Sea offshore assets in deal valued at $1.2B

Amanda Stephenson, The Canadian Press

Suncor Energy Inc. has taken another step toward streamlining its business, signing a deal to sell its offshore assets in the North Sea to Equinor UK Ltd. in an agreement valued at about $1.2 billion.

The deal announced late Thursday comes after Suncor put the assets up for sale last year.

"The decision to sell our UK Exploration & Production business is a clear example of our commitment to optimize our asset portfolio," interim CEO Kris Smith said in a news release.

The deal includes Suncor's non-operated 29.9 per cent stake in the producing Buzzard field as well as its 40 per cent stake in the Rosebank development, which is operated by Norwegian multinational Equinor and located about 130 kilometres northwest of the Shetland Islands.

The transaction is expected to close in the middle of this year.

Suncor has been selling non-core assets to focus on its main oilsands and downstream businesses.

Last year, it announced it would sell its wind and solar assets to Canadian Utilities Ltd. for $730 million and in another deal agreed to sell its exploration and production assets in Norway for $410 million.

The company also considered the possible sale of its Petro-Canada retail chain, but announced in November it would keep the business as it was unlikely to receive the price it believes the chain is worth.

Suncor's efforts to streamline its operations are part of an overall plan to boost performance at the Calgary-based energy giant. Last year, the company reached a deal with activist investor Elliott Investment Management LP, which had expressed frustration with the company's lagging share price, safety record, and streak of operational challenges.

Suncor will also soon have new leadership, as Rich Kruger -- who led Imperial Oil Ltd. as president and CEO from 2013 until 2019 -- will become CEO on April 3.

Kruger was named to the post after a months-long search, and will replace Smith who has been doing the job on an interim basis since Mark Little resigned in July 2022 amid investor pressure.

KOREA

[Editorial] Embarrassing subsidy standards

Just two years ago, big Korean companies’ aggressive investments in the United States were flagged as the symbol of the Korea-U.S. alliance. U.S. President Joe Biden mentioned Korea’s household corporate names for their generous investment every time he met with Korean presidents. During his summit with president Moon Jae-in in May 2021, Joe Biden saluted the representatives of Samsung, Hyundai Motor and SK.

While stopping in Korea for his summit with President Yoon Suk Yeol in May last year, Biden went straight to the chip factory of Samsung Electronics in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi, to highlight the “tech alliance” of the two countries. The chip alliance was dubbed a “win-win strategy,” as the U.S. can strengthen its chip ecosystem on home while Korea can penetrate deeper into the U.S. market.

But the provisions of the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act confound us. Under the terms, foreign companies receiving U.S. subsidies must share their excess profit with the federal government and report their finances, including cash flow, in detail. They also cannot expand their chip production facilities in China for 10 years. The U.S. government claims the conditions are necessary in return for the $39 billion tax fund to foreign chipmakers ultimately desgined for the interests of the U.S. economy and security.

But the demands can seriously infringe on corporate sovereignty. Chipmakers are sensitive in disclosing their chip processing technologies. Korean companies could be victimized by the “Make America Great Again” slogan by Biden. He has been as demanding as his predecessor Donald Trump, albeit in less blunt rhetoric.

The Korean government must stand up for its companies. The economy and security must move as one. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Trade and Industry last year fought over who should have the jurisdiction over trade diplomacy. They must prove their worthiness if they mean well.

Korea must not make any concessions with its chip competitiveness to maintain the edge over China and the U.S. The most advanced processing technology and R&D facilities must not leave the country. The legislature must hasten with the chip support legislation to help secure the competitiveness of its semiconductor industry.

Multibillion-dollar investments in the U.S. mean less jobs for Korea and less exports for the country. Still, Korean companies went on with massive-scale investments in America on expectations of mutual benefits. The U.S. solely seeking its own benefit while stressing the tech alliance for the realignment in supply chains is not acceptable. The two governments must strike a good balance if they really do not want to damage their bilateral relationship for the future.

Sunday
March 5, 2023

Why Buses are Key to Improving U.S. Public Transport

Rapidly extending bus networks would be the fastest, most economical way to grow transit ridership in the sprawling landscape of American metros.

By Nicholas Dagen Bloom
March 5, 2023

Buses lack the flashiness of other modes of mobility, but they're the most efficient for expanding public transport to those who need it the most.


Public transit in the United States is in a sorry state — aging, underfunded, and losing riders, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Many proposed solutions focus on new technologies, like self-driving cars and flying taxis. But as a researcher in urban policy and planning, I see more near-term promise in a mode that’s been around for a century: the city bus.

Today, buses in many parts of the U.S. are old and don’t run often enough or serve all the places where people need to go. But this doesn’t reflect the bus’s true capability. Instead, as I see it, it’s the result of cities, states, and federal leaders failing to subsidize a quality public service.

As I show in my new book, “The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight,” few U.S. politicians have focused on bus riders’ experiences over the past half-century. And many executives have lavished precious federal capital dollars on building new light, rapid, and commuter rail lines, in hope of attracting suburban riders back to city centers and mass transit.

This was never a great strategy to begin with, and the pandemic-era flight of knowledge workers to home offices and hybrid schedules has left little to show for decades of rail-centric efforts. Meanwhile, countries in Europe and Latin America have out-innovated the U.S. in providing quality bus service.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Many U.S. cities are coming around to the idea that buses are the future of public transit and are working to make that vision real. And the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law enacted in 2021 is providing billions of dollars for new buses and related facilities. The car-centered U.S. transportation system has impoverished public transit and left many people’s transit needs unmet.

Buses as Disruptors

A century ago, motorized buses were the technological wonder of their day. Rolling fast on tires over newly paved streets, buses upended urban rail transit by freeing riders from aging, crowded, screeching streetcars. In 1922, American buses carried 404 million passengers; by 1930, they were carrying 2.5 billion yearly.

At that time, transit lines were mostly privately owned. But this model was failing as riders became car drivers, new zoning laws prioritized car-friendly single-family housing and government regulators battled transit companies over fares and taxes.

Transit executives trying to eke out a profit saw buses as a way to reduce spending on track maintenance and labor costs for “two-man” operated streetcars. City leaders and planners also embraced buses, which helped them justify removing streetcar tracks to make streets more navigable for cars. From the 1920s through the 1960s, nearly all U.S. streetcar lines were replaced with buses powered by either internal combustion engines or electric overhead wires.

This wasn’t just a U.S. trend. Toronto massively extended bus service across a vast metropolitan area between 1954 and 1974, using buses to feed suburban riders to a new subway system and a few remaining streetcar lines. By 1952, London’s managers had replaced streetcars with the city’s signature fleet of double-decker buses, which complemented its legendary Underground service.

Across Europe, cities relied on buses to support and complement their modernizing tram or subway networks. Political leaders provided deep subsidies to deliver better bus and rail service.

The Auto-Centric U.S. Path

In the U.S., however, federal investments in the same time frame focused on building a national highway system to serve private automobiles. Lacking tax subsidies, bus networks could not compete with cheap cars and government-funded highways. Aging buses and infrequent service became the default postwar reality – and those buses had to travel on local streets crowded with private cars.

Between 1945 and 1960, U.S. transit companies and agencies typically lost half or more of their riders as white Americans moved to urban fringes or suburbs and became car commuters. Bus service remained concentrated in older, central-city neighborhoods, serving a disproportionately nonwhite, low-income ridership.

Many public systems had to cut bus service year after year to balance their books. Only a few cities that were willing to provide significant operating subsidies, including San Francisco and Boston, were able to maintain better bus networks and some trolleybuses.

New, Better Buses

Today, there’s renewed interest in improving bus service in the U.S., inspired by innovations around the globe. The Brazilian city of Curitiba, which is well known for its innovations in urban planning, set a model in the 1970s when it adopted bus rapid transit — buses that run in dedicated lanes, with streamlined boarding systems and priority at traffic signals.

Curitiba helped popularize bi-articulated buses, which are extra-long with flexible connectors that let the buses bend around corners. These buses, which can carry large numbers of passengers, now are in wide use in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

A bi-articulated bus in Metz, France.

 (Image Credit: Florian Fèvre)

Cities across the globe, led by London, have also aggressively expanded contactless payment systems, which speed up the boarding process. Advanced bus systems and new technologies like these flourish in regions where politicians strongly support transit as a public service.

In my view, buses are the most likely option for substantially expanding public transit ridership in the U.S. Millions of Americans need affordable public mobility for work, study, recreation, and shopping. Car ownership is a financial burden that can be as serious for low-income families as the shortage of affordable housing.

The average yearly cost for U.S. households to own and operate a new car reached $10,728 in 2022. Nor are used cars the bargain they once were. Used car prices are high, financing is often subprime and older vehicles require expensive maintenance.

Rapidly extending bus networks would be the speediest and most economical way to serve these families and grow transit ridership in the sprawling landscape of American metros. U.S. roads and highways are already maintained by the government, eliminating the need to build and maintain expensive rail lines.

There are promising domestic models even amid the pandemic ridership crisis. In the past two decades, Seattle’s Sound Transit has upgraded its bus network, aligning these improvements with increased residential density, low fares, and a carefully considered light rail expansion. San Francisco and New York have developed exclusive bus lanes that move riders along popular routes at higher speeds. Indianapolis is expanding an effective bus rapid transit system. Many cities, including Denver and Boston, are investing in “better bus” upgrades that emphasize frequent service, easy transfers, and better geographic coverage.

Innovations like these will only succeed long-term with sufficient subsidies to maintain innovative services at reliable levels. The history of bus transit is littered with pilot programs that were abandoned on cost grounds just as they were gaining popularity. As I see it, buses don’t need to be faster or more convenient than cars to attract and retain riders — but they need to be, and can be, much better transit options than they are today.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Pandemic spurs tribes to diversify

SUSAN HAIGH Associated Press

MASHANTUCKET, Conn. — When the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut for three months in 2020, its owners, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, had to reckon with decades of relying heavily on gambling as the tribe's main source of revenue.

"The fact that the casino revenues went from millions to zero overnight just fully reiterated the need for diverse revenue streams," said Tribal Chairman Rodney Butler.

The 1,000-member tribe has since expanded its efforts to get into the federal government contracting business, making it one of several tribal nations to look beyond the casino business more seriously after the coronavirus crisis.

Tribal leaders and tribal business experts say the global pandemic has been the latest and clearest sign that tribal governments with casinos can't depend solely on slot machines and poker rooms to support future generations.

In Michigan, the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians, or Gun Lake Tribe, recently announced a 25-year plan to develop hundreds of acres near its casino into a corridor with housing, retail, manufacturing and a new 15-story hotel.

A non-gambling entity owned by the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, also in Michigan, is selling "NativeWahl" burger franchises to other tribes after forming a 2021 partnership with Wahlburgers, the national burger chain created by the celebrity brothers Paul, Mark and Donnie Wahlberg.

Some tribes, with and without casinos, got involved in a wide range of non-gambling businesses, such as trucking, construction, consulting, health care, real estate, cannabis and marketing over the past decade or longer while others branched out more recently.

"While enterprise diversification can come with costs, its necessity became clear during the early phases of the pandemic, when tribally owned casinos were shut down to mitigate COVID-19 transmission and gaming-dependent tribes were left with little incoming revenue," according to a new report from the Center for Indian Country Development at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

The report found that tribes are increasingly doing business with the federal government, especially the U.S. Department of Defense.

The Mashantucket Pequots' non-gambling entity, Command Holdings, last year made its largest acquisition to date: WWC Global, a Florida-based management consulting firm that predominantly works with federal agencies, including the defense and state departments. WWC announced in December that it was awarded a $37.5 million contract supporting the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

WWC Global CEO Jon Panamaroff applauded the Mashantucket Pequots' casino and hospitality business but noted that it can be subject to the "ups and downs of the market," making it important to branch out economically. A member of the Sun'aq Tribe of Kodiak, Alaska, he credited the Mashantucket Pequots' tribal leaders with doubling down on diversification efforts during the pandemic instead of "shying away and trying to hunker down."

Butler said the tribe hopes non-gambling revenues, including from a planned family resort with a 91,000-square-foot water park that's expected to open in 2025, will eventually comprise 50% to 80% of the Mashantucket Pequots' portfolio, providing "stability and certainty" when another challenging event undoubtedly will happen.

"You think about the financial crisis in '08 and now COVID. And so, something's going to happen again," Butler said. "We've learned from past mistakes, and we want to be ready for it in the future."

Even before the pandemic hit, some tribal casinos were facing competitive pressures from the advent of other gambling options, including legalized online wagering on sports and casino games in some states. At the same time, traditional patrons of brick-and-mortar casinos are getting older.

"Tribal economies are at an inflection point because gaming markets are maturing across the U.S.," said Dawson Her Many Horses, head of Native American banking for Wells Fargo and an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota. "As casino revenues flatten, tribes will be looking for new business opportunities in other industries."

That doesn't mean tribes are giving up on gambling. Some are even expanding it.

The National Indian Gaming Association reported in August that $39 billion in gross gambling revenue was generated in fiscal year 2021, the most in tribal gambling history. That figure, which accounts for 243 tribes across 29 states, increased 40% over the previous year.

Patrick Davison, vice president of Native American gaming and finance at PNC Bank, said he's been working with tribal officials who still want to build casinos but also want to avoid overbuilding. He said the pandemic was "a real eye-opener for tribes" as officials consider their tribes' futures in the gambling business.


More than 5 million Native Americans live in the United States as members of 574 federally recognized and 63 state-recognized tribes. That number is projected to rise to 10 million people by 2060. A federally recognized tribe is a sovereign entity with a government-to-government relationship with the United States, as well as the rights of self-governance in such areas as tribal law and taxation.

About half of Native Americans live on reservations, of which there are about 326, comprising roughly 56.2 million acres. The 16 million-acre Navajo Nation Reservation in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah is the largest, and the 1.32-acre Pit River Tribe cemetery in California is the smallest.

Stacker ranked the states with the biggest Native American populations and looked at some of the characteristics and conditions for each community, analyzing data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey one-year estimate. The U.S. Census Bureau’s definition of “Native Americans” includes Alaskan Natives but excludes Native Hawaiians.

Compared with other U.S. races, American Indians have a life expectancy that is shorter by more than five years. The suicide rate among American Indian youth is 2.5 times higher than among youth in the rest of the country. American Indians are 2.5 times more likely to experience violent crimes than the national average, and more than four out of five American Indian women will experience violence in their lifetimes. Holistically, these issues can be seen as symptoms of several larger issues, including access to social services, educational opportunities, nutritional food, and health care. Property rights pose more significant problems, insomuch as residents who don't have deeds to the land they live on struggle to build credit, which throws a significant barrier in front of upward mobility. Meanwhile, tribal lands are tough sells for franchises and other commercial developers that would bring jobs to reservations, as these companies are often resistant to negotiating contract terms under tribal law.

One effort to mitigate the aforementioned statistics came with the 1968 establishment of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in Minnesota, which advocated for sovereignty and rights. The group famously occupied the Wounded Knee battle site at the Pine Ridge Reservation for more than two months in 1973.

Looking ahead, Rep. Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, has been tapped to head the U.S. Department of Interior for the upcoming Biden administration. She would be the first Indigenous cabinet secretary in the nation. Among her responsibilities will be the underfunded Bureau of Indian Education and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the latter of which oversees 55 million acres of tribal land.

Can hydrogen solve Canada’s energy woes?

There is a future for hydrogen, but it is not a panacea


A hydrogen filling station

Ongoing events in Europe, including the war in Ukraine and natural disasters, have raised many questions about the future of energy supply both in Canada and internationally. This, in turn, has placed Canada’s role as an energy supplier in doubt. If you were to believe the Canadian government, hydrogen presents a significant opportunity to both reduce emissions and create a new export product. However, a deeper examination of this strategy reveals some potentially insurmountable problems. These are outlined in an open letter penned by 110 academics and 55 civil society groups which calls on the Trudeau government to reconsider and limit the proposed hydrogen investment tax credit (in the spirit of full disclosure, the author is a signatory to that letter).

When considering hydrogen’s potential, the first, and biggest question is where are we going to get hydrogen? Alberta, currently Canada’s largest energy producer, plans on creating hydrogen from natural gas (the resulting fuel is known as ‘grey’ hydrogen). While this approach is effective in exploiting an existing resource which is plentifully available, the production of grey hydrogen still produces significant amounts of greenhouse gasses (this can be abated using costly carbon capture and storage, or CCUS, technologies to turn it into ‘blue’ hydrogen). A better path is to use existing natural gas, coupled with CCUS—eliminating the extra (and more expensive) process of transforming natural gas into hydrogen. Though even this solution presents challenges, due to the ongoing debate as to whether CCUS is viable in these circumstances. In other words, why build expensive technologies and infrastructure as a stopgap, when those investments could be channeled into other solutions?

The UK has also explored the use of ‘green’ hydrogen, which is produced through electrolysis (the separation of water into hydrogen and oxygen) powered by renewable sources. However, reports have found that it is far more effective to use new renewable energy capacity to take ageing conventional energy systems (such as coal plants) offline, and meet the needs of increasing demand. The International Energy Agency had similar findings, noting that by 2070, using electrolysis to create hydrogen could end up consuming 20 percent of global electricity production. The Canadian Climate Institute anticipates that Canada will need to increase its electricity generation capacity by up to three-and-a-half times by 2050. Will we have the resources to expand our electricity networks to meet consumer needs and build out renewables to create hydrogen?

The second question confronting hydrogen’s potential is what are we going to use hydrogen for? While the uses in industrial cases such as chemical production (including fertilizers) and steel making are significant, the hype behind hydrogen as a transportation fuel lacks supporting evidence. The 2021 Canadian Energy Outlook produced by McGill University’s Institut de l’énergie Trottier finds that hydrogen will comprise a small share of total transport fuels even in 2060, “in part due to current difficulties in assessing the exact technical role it can play.” Obviously, innovation and technology breakthroughs are difficult to predict, but there are some obvious challenges which should be considered.

One challenge is that hydrogen is only a useful fuel in certain contexts. This is not because hydrogen is a poor fuel in general (though its energy density is much lower than gasoline, thereby requiring a larger tank for equal energy or range) but because it is difficult to move around. While current research shows that hydrogen can be safely blended into natural gas by up to 17 percent, pure hydrogen gas cannot be safely transported using existing pipeline infrastructure. When blended, however, hydrogen plays a minor role in the energy provided, as demonstrated by a recent report by BTU Analytics.



What about building new hydrogen infrastructure? A report by the Transition Accelerator suggests that the future of a hydrogen economy will “rely on developing infrastructure for low-cost distribution and delivery of hydrogen.” To this end, the report states, “pure hydrogen pipelines hold the most promise for large scale and low-cost transportation of hydrogen. Nonetheless the construction and installation of pipelines is a costly, complex, and time-consuming process that requires substantial demand for fuel movement to attract private investment.”

Canadian Dimension readers hardly need reminders about Canada’s repeated problems building pipelines. Without extensive physical infrastructure, transporting hydrogen would have to be done by road or rail, options which are significantly less efficient (and more expensive) and already feeling the strain of more demand than capacity.

Other suggested uses include aviation, however, again hydrogen faces steep criticisms. One analysis suggests that powering a single airport (in this case the Paris Orly Airport), would require 18 gigawatt-hours every day, equivalent to the full production of one typical nuclear plant of 900 megawatts. “If, to ensure that hydrogen production actually reduces carbon emissions,” the authors write, “the electricity is produced through solar power, 44 square kilometres of solar panels would be needed—a footprint representing three times the entire surface area of the [Paris] Orly airport itself. Covering the entirety of an airport such as Orly would only produce enough fuel for two to three aircraft a day.” Problems such as these have caused the former CEO of Rolls Royce (the world’s leading manufacturer of aircraft engines) to conclude that relying on hydrogen as a sustainable aviation fuel is simply not an option.

Outside of aviation, contexts in which the volume of hydrogen as a fuel is not restrictive opens up opportunities. The 2021 Canadian Energy Outlook suggests that both marine shipping and rail (and possibly heavy land transport) will be areas where hydrogen will likely become dominant.

Finally, an ambitious claim put forward by proponents is that Canada could become a hydrogen exporter, particularly to Europe, to shore up continental energy demands in the face of distrust of Russian oil and natural gas. While admirable in concept, the problem here is one of time. It is true that Europe is currently in need of alternative energy suppliers, but Canada does not yet possess the aforementioned requisite infrastructure to export hydrogen (or even existing natural gas) to Europe in effective volumes. The necessary export infrastructure would be vast and expansive, and as with Canadian pipelines, would take time to build. An ambitious timeframe would demand that export infrastructure be completed in a matter of years. However, it seems unlikely that European countries would not have adapted or built their own energy supplies (likely renewable energy) in the meantime. This would leave Canada with expensive sunk costs, and no ready market.

While there is potential for decarbonization in industry (the Canada Energy Regulator suggests that the industrial sector will account for 65 percent of hydrogen use by 2050) the idea that Canada could become a hydrogen exporter is currently unrealistic. Rather than focusing on single technologies as ‘silver bullets’ for our climate and energy problems, the Government of Canada needs to broaden its outlook and target specific energy sources for specific uses. In its Big Switch report, the Canadian Climate Institute concludes that a broad mix of energies and technologies, with comprehensive policies and infrastructure to support their roll-out, is necessary for a net-zero transition.

There is a future for hydrogen, but it is not a panacea. Nor is anything about Canada’s energy pathways certain. Further research and modelling is necessary, and upcoming reports like Canada’s Energy Future 2023 (produced by the Canada Energy Regulator) will help guide and inform policy and decision making. What does seem certain, however, is that Canada’s current hydrogen strategy is based on implausible ambitions and fails to grasp the very real obstacles standing in the way of mass adoption.

Burgess Langshaw-Power / February 15, 2023 / 

Burgess Langshaw Power is a former policy analyst currently completing his PhD in Global Governance at the Balsillie School, University of Waterloo. His policy expertise includes climate interventions and energy technologies. Views expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of his school or employer.

https://canadiandimension.com/

Why news of population decline and economic slowdown isn’t necessarily a bad thing

Humanity faces an imminent survival dilemma

Richard Heinberg / March 2, 2023 /
https://canadiandimension.com/


On January 17, 2023, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced that the country’s population fell in 2022 by 850,000 people from 2021, which was the first population decline witnessed by the country in six decades. This has mostly resulted from low birth rates stemming from the imposition of China’s one-child policy from 1980 to 2015, as well as from voluntary family decisions, rather than deaths from COVID-19.

On the same day, the NBS reported that China’s GDP grew by only three percent in 2022, which is less than half the previous year’s 8.1 percent expansion pace.

International news outlets greeted these bombshells with worry bordering on horror. Time noted that “[e]xperts are alarmed” by these trends; the Wall Street Journal said the slowdown was “disappointing” and posed a “major future challenge” for China and the rest of the world—language often reserved for articles on climate change. Hardly any major news coverage explored why China’s lagging economy and shrinking population might actually be good things.

Yes, the reversal of China’s growth trends may eventually have real and unfortunate impacts on Chinese families. But much if not all of that harm can be averted with appropriate policies. Moreover, for anyone aware of environmental limits, China’s economic deceleration and population decrease are actually welcome developments.

Humanity faces an imminent survival dilemma. Not only are we destabilizing the climate with carbon dioxide released from our burning of fossil fuels, but we are also taking habitat away from other species, to the point where wild animal (including some insect) populations have declined by about 70 percent in the past 50 years. Further, humanity is depleting natural resources, ranging from mineral ores to forests, while polluting ecosystems with plastics and toxic chemicals in ever-burgeoning quantities. According to the World Bank, “Global waste is expected to increase to 3.4 billion tons by 2050.”

In 2015, scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Center calculated that, of nine critical global ecological thresholds that define “the safe operating limits of our planet,” humanity has already crossed “at least four.” A related effort by the Global Footprint Network, which tracks our “ecological footprint” (how much of Earth’s biological regenerative capacity is being used by human society), currently shows humanity consuming resources “as if we lived on 1.75 Earths”—which can only be sustained temporarily and will, in effect, result in robbing future generations of a fair chance at survival. As the human population grows (for decades we’ve been adding a billion people every 12 years), we use more land and resources. As the economy expands (it’s doubling in size every 25 years), we use more energy and therefore make it harder to reduce carbon emissions.

It hasn’t always been this way. Humanity’s addiction to rapid growth started in the 20th century as a result of having access to enormous amounts of cheap fossil fuel energy. Abundant energy enabled more resource extraction, more manufacturing, and more food production. Once the economic growth engine revved up, industrialists, economists, and politicians decided it was an unmitigated marvel, they attributed the growth to human ingenuity rather than fossil fuels, and restructured the global economy to depend on industrial expansion continuing forever.

This was a foolish thing to do since nothing can increase endlessly on a finite planet. Ecologists have warned since the 1960s that a reckoning is in store sooner or later. The only way to avoid it is to voluntarily and deliberately reduce growth—reversing it in some instances—and aim for what pioneer ecological economist Herman Daly called a “steady state economy” that helps maximize the benefit to humanity without depleting and polluting nature.

For decades, China’s economy has grown more rapidly than that of nearly any other country. And since China was the world’s most populous nation until 2022, this breathtaking growth has had an outsized impact. China has become the top greenhouse gas emitter and the foremost devourer of natural resources on the planet. It burns more than half of the world’s coal supply each year and is busy building even more coal-fired power plants.

But China isn’t polluting out of a lack of concern for the environmental damage caused by its actions; its coal burning is part of an economic strategy in which the US and other wealthy nations have been complicit. The flourishing of Chinese manufacturing resulted from a grand bargain struck by multinational corporations, in which American consumers got cheaper products (thanks to China’s inexpensive energy and massive low-wage labor pool), US corporations got higher profits, and the Chinese people got more economic opportunities than they had enjoyed previously—opportunities for which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could take credit. Everybody seemed to win, except the planet and its nonhuman creatures.

But coal is not endless, nor are raw materials required for manufacturing, nor is new farmland to feed an expanding population. Therefore, the growth of offshored production, and a Chinese economy based on it, can’t go on forever. In fact, the longer such growth continues, the deeper the hole that humanity is digging for itself. Yes, we can make our consumption marginally “greener” by recycling more and building more solar panels and wind turbines. But the math tells us that any serious effort to return society to a balanced relationship with nature must eventually require less overall consumption by fewer consumers. Seen in that light, China’s slowdown both in terms of economy and population looks like an event worth celebrating. So, why the hand-wringing?

In the view of conventional economists, fewer workers and consumers mean more anemic economic output. And for growth-oriented economic theory, that’s a catastrophe. But it needn’t be. Why not reorganize the economy around human happiness and the protection of nature, as opposed to the endless expansion of resource extraction, production, consumption, pollution, and human numbers?

China’s slowdown presents the country and the world with a chance to manage a decline that must inevitably come, sooner or later. It’s a chance to identify and seize opportunities while minimizing the pain entailed in a major directional change.

With fewer people, it should be easier to ensure that everybody in China has housing and access to basic necessities. At last, officials can ease up on building new cities, highways, and shopping malls. New construction can focus on replacing fuel-guzzling technologies with more efficient renewable energy replacements. China could even stop manufacturing throwaway consumer gadgets and start making long-lasting products designed for the dawning era of eco-restoration and regeneration.

A soft landing is possible: Several smaller countries have declining population levels, including Croatia, Japan, Portugal, Poland, South Korea, and Lithuania. Each of these nations is seeing stable or rising wages and historic lows in unemployment.

True, the transition to the post-growth era won’t be easy for the CCP or the Chinese people if income and wages level off or worsen, and if a declining tax base can’t sustain an aging population. The Chinese people have tacitly accepted an authoritarian regime with great restrictions on personal freedoms in exchange for promises of material betterment. If those promises fail, political instability could follow, possibly leading to widespread hardship and loss of life. To avert that catastrophe, the CCP will have to rethink its entire economic and political strategy.

Globally, in the shift to a post-growth economy, the financial sector will face the biggest risks. Vast tranches of debt that have been incurred during the past few decades are, in effect, bets that the economy will continue to expand. If the number of workers and consumers shrinks, then our global financial house of cards could come tumbling down.

But why have we put the fate of humanity in the hands of gamblers? A major retooling of our financial system is long overdue. The deleveraging of the global economy could be accomplished largely by reducing the assets of the world’s multimillionaire and billionaire classes. There might be side benefits from doing so: Economic inequality is warping our politics and making many people jealous, resentful, and unhappy.

Sure, the end of economic expansion and population growth is a challenging prospect. But it’s not nearly as daunting as the crisis we are setting up for ourselves if we continue to destroy nature through wasteful consumption and pollution. China’s slowdown is a welcome opportunity for global leaders and policymakers to get our priorities straight and set ourselves on a path of sustainable happiness and wellbeing.

Richard Heinberg is a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and the author of Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

BC’s logging industry is using mill closures as a political tool in its fight against regulation

Closure announcements are a core component of a political strategy designed to influence the government’s future decisions

Nick Gottlieb / March 3, 2023 

https://canadiandimension.com/

Timber harvesting in British Columbia. Photo from iStock.

Two narratives about BC’s disappearing forests and logging industry have made national news over the last few months. On the one hand, headlines report that the province’s NDP government, under the new leadership of David Eby, is finally getting serious about protecting old growth. On the other, we read that the industry is on the verge of collapse as sawmills shut down in rural, industry-dependent parts of the province—due primarily to a lack of available wood.

The latter of these stories has some truth to it: BC’s “fibre supply” in indeed shrinking for a number of reasons, including both the century-long mismanagement of the province’s forests and the more recent short-sighted response to the mountain pine beetle epidemic.

But the coincident timing of the announcements—the mill closures and the government’s plans to improve the sustainability of BC’s logging industry (what activists call “talk and log”)—suggests that logging companies aren’t just responding to market conditions. They’re sacrificing workers and communities as a political threat designed to scare the government out of implementing any meaningful new regulations.

It’s helpful to look at what the industry is telling us here.

In investor materials, Canfor, West Fraser, and other major operators in BC all identify potential regulation as a risk that could limit fibre supply in the future. Canfor’s annual reports consistently raise the spectre of Indigenous sovereignty as a threat, highlighting BC’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act and recent legal decisions like Yahey v. British Columbia, the cumulative effects case that the Blueberry River First Nation fought and won. They also cite former Premier John Horgan’s old growth deferral plan (which has yet to be fully implemented) as a potential hit to future fibre availability.

But what’s key is they identify these as risks and uncertainties, not already existing problems. This is important for two reasons. First, it means that regardless of what is claimed by industry representatives, escalating environmental regulation is not the driving factor behind the mill closures. And second, it means that these companies recognize that future access to timber depends on a politically mediated open question: whether the government will actually implement regulations that significantly limit their operations.

Which brings us to why the industry is announcing so many closures just a year removed from posting record profits. The announcements are a core component of a political strategy designed to influence the government’s future decisions. Of course, one should recognize that falling lumber prices, driven mostly by rising interest rates and the impact that is having on new construction in North America and Asia, is a major economic headwind facing most logging companies. Expected reductions in annual allowable cut in the wake of the mountain pine beetle-induced logging frenzy is another.

But the fact that we are seeing this flurry of closure announcements at the same time as a new premier is announcing his intent to pursue forest policy changes is no coincidence. The industry is sending signals precisely because these stacked closure announcements, in aggregate, make a national news story that can easily be cast as a direct result of the NDP government’s intent to pursue policy reforms that will impact logging.

These announcements also stand on their own as effective tools for getting the media to uncritically repeat corporate propaganda, spreading the message that government overreach is driving mill closures. And they serve as a shot across the bow aimed at the BC NDP itself: Horgan himself once said that the industry had leveraged “capital strikes” against past NDP governments. Shuttered mills act as a warning about what industry could do if the province seriously pursues new regulation.

While the companies themselves generate buzz through synchronized closure announcements, industry trade associations are pursuing complementary media strategies. In the latest issue of Truck Logger BC, published quarterly by the BC Truck Loggers Association, an industry executive said, “We need an ongoing stream of stories about how we care for the forests and the timber harvesting land base.” According to the article’s author, “industry leaders” agree, and are “unanimous in their commitment to funding efforts to invest in the kind of marketing activities needed to shift the narrative.”

Industry ads are everywhere, often using the relatively new “sponsored content” model where advertising content is dressed up as reporting and published alongside real journalism with only a small label distinguishing it. And industry friendly columnists like Vaughn Palmer—employed by industry friendly corporations like Postmedia—are writing articles explicitly connecting Eby’s NDP government with the mill closures.

Conservationists and progressive media are failing to meet this head-on, and as a result, are ceding ground to the industry’s preferred narrative. Most responses have focused—not wrongly, I should say—on the ecologically and economically unsustainable nature of BC’s forestry policies over the last century. That’s an important part of the story, but it’s not the whole story, and we need to bring attention to this blatant exercise of corporate power.

The industry knows it’s “running out of trees,” as Ben Parfitt put it in The Tyee. That reality can’t be changed, not even by stripping away what little protection our forests do have. But at the same time, companies are trying to maximize profits by squeezing the remaining value out of the region’s failing ecosystems—exerting political power through synchronized mill closures, media campaigns, lobbying, and regulatory capture.

Is it important to highlight how BC’s forest policy (and logging industry) created the situation that is now playing out? Absolutely. But doing so without also identifying how industry is taking advantage of economic turbulence to lobby against new regulations allows them to proceed unchallenged—right up until the last tree is cut.

Nick Gottlieb is a climate writer based in northern BC and the author of the newsletter Sacred Headwaters. His work focuses on understanding the power dynamics driving today’s interrelated crises and exploring how they can be overcome. Follow him on Twitter @ngottliebphoto.

State-sanctioned violence in Peru and the role of Canadian mining

Canadian firms benefit from state-sanctioned police protection and impunity at the expense of human rights and the environment

Kirsten Francescone / March 4, 2023 / 

https://canadiandimension.com/

Protests against the Tía María copper mining project in Islay, Arequipa Region, Peru. Photo by Diario Correo.


On January 18, 2023, as thousands of Peruvians were taking to the streets in Lima to denounce the spiralling political crisis in the country, Canadian Ambassador Louis Marcotte was meeting with the Peruvian Minister of Energy and Mines. Protests have been ongoing since December when populist President Pedro Castillo was deposed from office by congressional vote, a move which was almost immediately condemned by Castillo’s base. Demonstrators have been met with widespread arrests and brutal violence. According to Yves Engler, since former Vice President Dina Boluarte assumed power (a move which the Canadian government endorsed) the Canadian mission has met with numerous top-level Peruvian officials in unprecedented fashion.

Since Boluarte assumed the presidency mobilizations have exploded across the country. Although they differ in their diversity of demands, they coincide along four main points: a call for new general elections for 2023, the closure of congress, Boluarte’s resignation, and the calling of a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution. But these immediate political demands have historical roots. As one collection of Peruvian NGOs stated, the mass movement of Peruvians from the south and peripheral regions is born out of a sense of indignation at a political and economic system which is highly racist and discriminatory. In Puno, the epicentre of protests and extreme police repression, delegations of rural community members travelled to Lima to demand political reforms and solutions to the toxic environmental liabilities which have contaminated their water sources with heavy metals and led to dangerously high toxins (many of which are present in children). With few exceptions, these communities have had their waterways affected by mining and industrial activity.

Ambassador Marcotte tweeted several photos from the meeting, using the occasion to promote mining as a benefit for communities and to express Canadian support for the upcoming Peruvian delegation who will attend the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada’s (PDAC) annual conference in Toronto from March 5 to 8. Each year, the world’s largest mining convention draws tens of thousands of industry experts, company officials, and government representatives to talk industry trends and promote an expansion of mining—with little concern for the consent of those most affected, including in Peru.

At the time of the meeting, Lima was gridlocked with demonstrations calling for new elections and a constituent assembly. Only days prior, 17 people were killed by police in the cities of Juliaca and Puno. And in the days following the meeting, the oldest university in the country, San Marcos, was invaded by armoured tanks. Hundreds of students and rural protestors were detained, strip searched, assaulted and deprived of their rights. Fifty-nine people have reportedly been killed during the last few months—the overwhelming majority of them civilians from rural and periurban Indigenous and mestizo backgrounds—at the hands of an unbridled police force. It’s unlikely the ambassador could have moved around the city without observing repression and police violence.

For years, MiningWatch Canada and the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project (JCAP), alongside organizations including Red Muqui, Cooperacción, Derechos Humanos Sin Fronteras-Cusco and Derechos Humanos y Medio Ambiente DHUMA, have documented the many harms caused by industrial large-scale Canadian mining to rural communities, as well as the associated police violence that often accompanies the imposition of these projects. While the current protests in Peru are not explicitly about resource extraction, calls for a new constitution to address the systematic and often violent exclusion of Indigenous, peasant and rural peoples from the political economic system, as well as the legacies of land dispossession and contamination, are indeed linked to centuries of extractivism. The ambassador’s tweet has to be taken within a context of centuries of colonial and decades of post-colonial violence against rural peoples at the behest of resource extraction.

The Canadian embassy could have used the moment to publicly denounce police violence and insist the rights of Peruvian protestors be protected. Instead, Ambassador Marcotte chose to promote more Canadian mining investment in the country and plug PDAC 2023—where a session dubbed “Peru Day” promises to discuss “opportunities in the context of enhancing the virtues of the Peruvian mining industry and overcoming the flaws that have slowed down its dynamism in recent years.” Canada’s priorities in Peru could not be more clear.


Canadian Ambassador to Peru and Bolivia, Louis Marcotte, left, with Óscar Vera, Minister of Energy and Mines of Peru. 

Photo courtesy Ministry of Energy and Mines of Peru/Twitter.


The economic importance of Canadian mining in Peru

According to the Peruvian Ministry of Energy and Mines, Canada was the third most important investor in mine construction in 2021. Canadian companies invested over $8 billion in 10 projects, representing 15 percent of total investment in mine construction in the country. Canadian companies were the second most important player when it came to exploration (unsurprising, given Canadian companies typically focus on prospecting and exploration) representing 28 percent of the total investment in exploration, with $165 million spent on 21 projects.

Canadian companies are also operating mines in Peru. Toronto-based Hudbay Minerals operates the Constancia mine; Vancouver’s Pan American Silver operates the Shahuindo and La Arena mines; and Teck Resources’, also headquartered in Vancouver, operates the Antamina mine, with a 22.5 percent ownership stake in the project. Antamina is Peru’s largest mine, ranking among the top 10 producing mines in the world in terms of volume, and is the single most important producer of copper, silver, and zinc in the country. In 2021, the mine generated over $6 billion in revenue and nearly $3.7 billion in gross profits.

Canada also ranks high in terms of importing Peruvian metals and minerals. Of the total value of Peruvian mineral exports in 2021, Canada was the third most important global importer after China and India—coming in at 6.5 percent of total exports. This importance becomes even clearer when considering gold, as Canada was the second largest importer of Peruvian gold. Canadian imports represented over $3 billion in 2021, just shy of two percent of Peru’s GDP for the same year.

When it comes to making statements about egregious human rights violations in the country, however, Canada’s position has been lukewarm. Canada signed the most recent OAS statement on the political crisis in Peru—a watered-down declaration which assigns blame, and thus responsibility, to both protestors and the government of Peru as if they were equal players. The Canadian government continues to parrot this position, even as almost all the victims over the past several months have been civilians killed by an indiscriminate use of police violence—by the same national police force that has signed contracts to provide security to Canadian mining companies.
Private contracts with police

When Canadian mining companies are embroiled in a conflict with local communities outside of Peru, they often depend on henchmen or paramilitary forces to repress dissent. In Peru, companies benefit from state-sanctioned police protection and impunity. Companies can sign service contracts directly with the National Peruvian Police, and off-duty police officers are permitted to work for private security companies while using state property, such as weapons, uniforms and ammunition. Police are guaranteed immunity from criminal prosecution in the event that they fatally injure a protestor. They have the authority to use live ammunition and shoot to kill. And they’ve used it.

Mining companies also benefit from unfettered securitization of their assets. According to local sources, Hudbay’s Constancia mine and MMG’s Las Bambas operations have been fortified under the pretense of “preventing attacks on the mine camps”—effectively state-provided protection that serves to solidify the dominance of these companies in the regions where they operate.

Violence isn’t only used against rural peoples at blockades or during massive marches; it’s a daily occurrence which, according to several international and Peruvian non-governmental organizations, threatens the safety of human rights and environmental defenders and prevents them from exercising their rights. As one report notes, the “existence of these [security] contracts [with the police] creates a hostile scenario that puts human rights at risk.” As the Cusco-based organization Derechos Humanos Sin Fronteras has demonstrated through several environmental and social impact studies related to Hudbay’s Constancia mine, these contracts not only permit explicit state violence, they also form the backdrop of racialized and class-based intimidation and threats against community leaders to prevent them from speaking out against these contracts in the first place.

Promoting Canadian mining at PDAC

During the 2022 PDAC conference, the Peruvian Episcopal Commission for Social Action (CEAS) wrote an open letter to the conference delegates expressing that, contrary to the promises made by Ambassador Marcotte and others, mining has “not brought the promised improvement in quality of life” for most communities in the mining areas. On the contrary, she wrote, “it has resulted in corruption and environmental contamination and has infringed on people’s rights to life and health, leaving behind social conflict, disease and even death.”

These harms are not minimal: contamination of agricultural lands and waterways around Pan American Silver’s Quiruvilca mine and the criminalization of community leaders and land dispossession due to environmental contamination at Shahuindo; violation of Indigenous self-determination and the right to a clean environment around Plateau Energy’s proposed lithium and uranium mine, sitting atop the region’s most important tropical glacier; undercutting of economic benefits for communities most affected by mining operations, and more.

Yet the Canadian embassy in Peru has a track record of ignoring the concerns of human rights and environmental defenders affected by Canadian mining projects in the country—even ignoring the concerns of Canadian citizen Jennifer Moore who was detained in 2017 by Peruvian police while screening a documentary film with Quechua communities affected by Hudbay’s Constancia mine. Moore, who was subsequently banned from re-entering the country and labelled a threat to national security, is the focus of a recent report by the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project (JCAP) on the role of Canadian embassies in prioritizing the interests of Canadian mining companies at the expense of their own policies and commitments regarding the protection of human rights defenders.

The Canadian embassy in Peru will no doubt continue to work alongside the Peruvian Ministry of Energy and Mines to promote more Canadian mining investment in the country. But it should be made clear: when the embassy chooses to promote mining in Peru during PDAC, it is doing so knowing the reality of what these activities mean for people who are facing ongoing threats, intimidation, and explicit state-sponsored violence.

Dr. Kirsten Francescone is an assistant professor in International Development Studies at Trent University and former Latin America Program Coordinator for MiningWatch Canada.

Hugo Chávez’s vision of a communal future will inspire generations

The legendary Venezuelan leader died 10 years ago today

Owen Schalk / March 5, 2023 

https://canadiandimension.com/

Hugo Chávez in uniform, 2010. 

March 5, 2023 marks the ten-yar anniversary of the death of legendary Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Only four days earlier, the Biden administration had renewed an executive order, issued by Barack Obama and continued under Donald Trump, labelling Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

While ten years without Chávez has brought innumerable challenges to Venezuela (many of which still persist) it is evident that even without the singularly charismatic persona of El Comandante at the helm, the future envisioned by the Bolivarian Revolution—one of socialism, anti-imperialism, and communal production—remains a tremendous threat to US hegemony in the hemisphere.

Revolutionary, educator, president

Hugo Chávez was a deeply impressive leader whose political adroitness, mediatic skill, and commitment to radical new visions of democracy have not been equalled in the hemisphere since he assumed the presidency in 1999. Not since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 had a Latin American head of state combined the qualities of president, revolutionary, and popular educator so seamlessly—a uniqueness that most Venezuelans admired, as evidenced by the vote shares in every presidential election he contested (he won 56 percent of votes in 1998, 60 percent in 2000, 63 percent in 2006, and 55 percent in 2012).

In his widely viewed Aló Presidente broadcasts, Chávez worked to educate the population about democracy, communes, socialism, and more. Asserting that “it is impossible to have a revolution without revolutionary theory,” Chávez inaugurated a new series in 2009 called Aló Presidente Teórico in which he hosted discussions on socialist transition, guiding the broadcasts using wide-ranging references including Simón Bolívar, Karl Marx, István Mészáros, and José Carlos Mariátegui.

Unsurprisingly, Chávez was a lightning rod for the hatred of Venezuela’s traditional ruling class. A man from a poor family and an Indigenous and Afro-Venezuelan background, his enormous popularity provoked an existential crisis of sorts in the Venezuelan oligarchy that continues to this day. They demeaned him, degraded his supporters, and fear-mongered about his supposedly dictatorial aspirations. Often their attacks were overtly racist.

In 2005, Chávez stated, “Racism is very characteristic of imperialism and capitalism. Hate against me has a lot to do with racism. Because of my big mouth and curly hair. And I’m so proud to have this mouth and this hair, because it is African.”

Officials in Washington shared the Venezuelan opposition’s hatred for Chávez. Their anti-socialist alliance culminated in a failed coup d’état by the Venezuelan oligarchy in April 2002. The coup was supported by the George W. Bush administration.

During their two days in power, the right-wing opposition acted with the flagrant aversion to democracy of which they constantly accused Chávez, dissolving the National Assembly and Supreme Court, dismissing Chávez appointees, suspending all governors and mayors elected during Chávez’s time in power, and voiding the 1999 constitution, which was approved by popular referendum with 72 percent support.

Fortunately for Venezuelan democracy, supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution took to the streets in such force that the military returned Chávez to the presidency. Population mobilization would also be key in opposing the 2002-2003 opposition oil lockout and the failed 2004 recall referendum against Chávez.

The Bolivarian Revolution endures

With Chávez gone and a terrible economic crisis roiling Venezuela, the Bolivarian Revolution under Nicolás Maduro continued to triumph in most major elections, with Maduro winning the presidential vote in 2013 and 2018, despite the opposition’s victory in 2015 parliamentary elections.

The Bolivarian Revolution continued to triumph even as left-wing political projects across Latin America fell one by one to a resurgent right. Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was removed in a military coup backed by the US and Canada in 2009. Embittered elites in Paraguay used a conflict over peasant land rights to remove President Fernando Lugo in 2012. Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff fell to a US-backed lawfare campaign in 2016. The Bolivian right-wing led a coup against Evo Morales after he won the 2019 presidential election, leading to one year of dictatorial right-wing rule characterized by massacres of pro-Evo protestors and the persecution of MAS supporters.

Despite some significant gains including the overturning of Bolivia’s right-wing coup in 2020 and the victory of Lula da Silva in Brazil’s 2022 election, the Latin American left remains on its back foot. In Argentina, the popular left-leaning politician Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has faced a lawfare campaign aimed at preventing her from running for president, an election she would likely win. Former Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa remains locked out of his country’s politics by the governing conservatives (although local elections bode well for the future prospects of the left in Ecuador). And the elected president of Peru, the socialist-oriented Pedro Castillo, was recently deposed by congress in what most Peruvians recognize as a coup.

But through all this regional turbulence, plus the growing strength of opposition attacks during Maduro’s tenure, the Bolivarian Revolution persists in Venezuela. Why? Venezuelan journalist Clodovaldo Hernández identifies several important reasons:By prioritizing the passage of a new, participatory constitution in 1999, Chávez was quickly able to sideline the Venezuelan right and place more power in the hands of the population, “allow[ing] the Bolivarian Revolution to armour itself against the typical conspiracies of the recently displaced elites.”

The revolution’s progressive policies, including in the areas of literacy, housing, health care, and land reform, have led to a large degree of popular support, even in the midst of economic crisis. “Without this popular support,” Hernández writes, “the imperialist forces and the domestic right wing would have long ago achieved their goal of destroying the Venezuelan revolutionary process.”

The strength of Chávez’s leadership and his national prestige as an individual.

Chávez reworked Venezuela’s military doctrine and reformed the armed forces to reduce the influence of the United States through its training facilities like the notorious School of the Americas. This “civic-military alliance” foreclosed the possibility of another coup.

The revolution recognized the importance of the domestic media war and encouraged the organization of popular media as a way to break the information stranglehold of large news companies, which were uniformly against Chávez.

Despite having “almost unanimous support from the conglomerate of global capitalism,” the Venezuelan opposition remains a clumsy and schismatic coalition that has proven unable to fundamentally challenge the revolution.


A billboard of Hugo Chávez’s eyes and signature in Guarenas, Venezuela.

 Photo by Wilfredor/Wikimedia Commons.


“Not a one-man show”

When examining the successes of the Bolivarian Revolution, and potential explanations for its endurance, one topic we must take seriously is Chávez’s commitment to a communal future. The Venezuelan communes, often ignored in North American media coverage, represent the backbone of the revolutionary process and one of the most militant, organized, and politically conscious socialist assemblages in the Western Hemisphere.

Chávez himself described communes as “the space from which we give birth to socialism” and the cellular tissue of the Bolivarian Revolution. However, the movement toward local autonomy and worker self-management had been developing for decades before Chávez.

Since at least the 1980s, the traditional political parties in Venezuela had been discredited, and when the state dispatched security forces to massacre hundreds (possibly thousands) of protestors during the Caracazo, the liberal model of representative democracy revealed itself as the velvet glove around the iron fist of capitalism.

The “rejection of the logic of representation,” as Dario Azzellini calls it in Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below, caused the goals of the popular movements to crystallize into “self-determination, self-management, and constituent power,” as well as “direct democracy, expressed in the [1999] Constitution as ‘participatory and protagonistic democracy.’” By aligning himself with these pre-existing forces and empowering them through his progressive reforms, Chávez was able to earn the revolution a key ally against the opposition’s assaults.

Due to the often fraught alliance between the state and these grassroots organizations, the Bolivarian Revolution has never been a process dictated by centralized authority. Azzellini characterizes the socialist transition in Venezuela as one of “two-track construction”:
We are speaking of a new way, unheard of in previous struggles and strategies for social transformation, that combines concepts ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ to pursue an anti-imperialist politics of national sovereignty. In this process, the state and its institutions are strengthened, and follow a strategy of active regulation of economic process in a mixed (capitalist) economy. On the other hand, according to the declared normative orientation, movements must assume the central role in the process of change and must have autonomy.

Azzellini adds that the persistence of the Bolivarian Revolution since 2013 proves that it is “a solid transformation project and not a one-man show based on populism.” Rather, it embodies a dynamic alliance (and occasional opposition) between multiple forces, the primary ones being the Chavistas in the state and the comuneros outside of it.

Towards a communal state

Of central importance to the ongoing revolutionary process is the idea of the communal state. The Organic Law of Communes, passed by the National Assembly in 2006, defines the communal state as a “form of social political organization… in which power is exercised directly by the pueblo, by means of communal self-governments with an economic model of social property and endogenous and sustainable development.” The commune is defined as “the basic structural cell of the communal state.”

The theorization of a communal state has a long history in Venezuela. As George Ciccariello-Maher points out in Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela:
It was no coincidence that those who fought against colonial rule and slavery from the very beginning often did so by building communal societies beyond Spanish control, from indigenous communities to the cumbe communities founded by runaway slaves. It is likewise no coincidence that those who today draw upon their inspiration continue to pioneer new forms of communal living and collective production that are compatible with older traditions, showing the ways that this new communal culture—by emphasizing local sustainability over consumerism—is also deeply anticolonial.


When Chávez described the importance of communes in 2007, one of the influences he borrowed from was Simón Rodríguez, an influential teacher of national hero Simón Bolívar. Rodríguez, who lived from 1769 to 1854, “urged the destruction of the existing religious and military powers dominating Venezuela” and the creation of a “toparchy,” or a form of “decentralized local rule” comprised of “small, self-governing units.”

Reinaldo Iturizza, the former Minister of Communes and a strong champion of the communal state, has described Venezuela’s transition to socialism as “toparchic,” indicating the influence of Rodríguez’s thought on communal politics today.

Kléber Ramírez was another influence on the notion of the communal state. Ramírez worked with Chávez during the planning of the failed 1992 coup against neoliberal President Carlos Andrés Pérez. His role was to draft the political documents that would form the basis of the new government if the coup succeeded. In this position, he emphasized the importance of constructing a “commoner state” in Venezuela, which would mean a “broadening of democracy in which the communities will assume the fundamental powers of the state.”

Ramírez described the commoner state as a “government of popular insurgency,” stressing the dialectical relationship between the state and the movements, between those “above” and those “below,” in transforming bourgeois rule into the rule of communality. Needless to say, Ramírez’s idea of the commoner state bears a striking resemblance to the two-track character of the communal state put forward by the Chávez government from 2006 onward.

Chávez lives

As Vijay Prashad wrote in a recent Tricontinental Institute newsletter, Chávez is still very present in Venezuela. His images are ubiquitous in barrios, poor neighbourhoods, and the communes that were the central tenet of his political philosophy.

“[T]he legacy of Chávez was not in his own life,” writes Prashad, “but in the difficult work of building socialism.”

While Chávez’s idea of the communal state was deeply rooted in Venezuelan history, it is certainly a theory that is applicable to life elsewhere. In North America, examples of communal living abound in the cultures of Indigenous peoples, the Métis, and some settler groups.

For many, modern life in Canada and the US may feel socially atomized, thoughtlessly technologized, and politically hopeless. But these ideas of communality can be reclaimed, expanded, knitted into global struggles. In this process, the Venezuelan vision of a communal future is one of many guides.

Even though Hugo Chávez is in his grave, he remains a revolutionary thinker and a popular educator. In his speeches, his writings, and his theories of popular empowerment, Chávez lives.

Owen Schalk is a writer based in Winnipeg. He is primarily interested in applying theories of imperialism, neocolonialism, and underdevelopment to global capitalism and Canada’s role therein. Visit his website at www.owenschalk.com.

E-bike lithium battery investigated as cause of 5-alarm Bronx blaze, fire department says

By Artemis Moshtaghian and Isa Kaufman-Geballe, CNN
 Sun March 5, 2023

The fire blazes in the Bronx on Sunday.FDNY/Twitter
CNN —

At least seven people have been injured in a five-alarm fire in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City thought to have been caused by a lithium-ion battery, according to fire officials.

A civilian and an emergency services worker were seriously injured, and five firefighters received minor injuries, the New York Fire Department told CNN Sunday.

Almost 200 firefighters have been fighting the fire, which started in the roof of the rear part of a single-level commercial building on Grand Concourse and 181st Street, according to the New York Police Department.

FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh told reporters at the scene Sunday the cause of the fire was a lithium-ion battery, which powered a scooter.

Lithium-ion battery sparks apartment building fire

“In all of these fires, these lithium-ion fires, it is not a slow burn there’s not a small amount of fire, it literally explodes,” Kavanagh said. “It’s a tremendous volume of fire as soon as it happens, and it’s very difficult to extinguish and so it’s particularly dangerous.”

Kavanagh said firefighters arrived at the fire around 10.41 a.m., under four minutes after the first call. All seven of those injured in the blaze are considered stable, she said.

“We have been able to not have a loss of life today, but there is extraordinary damage. This entire building behind me is completely destroyed,” Kavanagh said. “The roof is caved in, there’s nothing left, and it is all because of this one single bike.”

The commissioner said more investigation needed into why the bike burst into flames. She said it may have been using an illegal battery.

The scooter was parked inside the rear part of a grocery store. Officials said it’s not yet known who owns the bike.

The worst fires in New York City history have something in common: Immigrant victims

The fire department tweeted video of the fire igniting. The footage appears to be taken from a security camera and shows someone responding to the blaze and shifting the scooter before the flames intensified.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams told Sunday’s news conference: “Our real push is to inform the public that something as simple and seen as recreational can be extremely dangerous and can take the lives of innocent people. This is a real problem we are having in the city.”

Adams added, “A simple battery operated scooter like this, people are leaving in their homes, they’re leaving in their place of businesses, they’re leaving in their restaurants, they leave it parked for the most part in places that really they should not be parked in.”

“The video is chilling, when you see how fast this fire started and spread, it’s just really going to give you a point of pause,” Adams said. He advised the public to only use legal lithium-ion batteries and to not place lithium-ion battery devices inside the home.

Fire officials said the blaze has been mostly extinguished but “pockets of fire” remain. Firefighters will stay on site through the night to make sure the fire doesn’t escalate.

On Friday, Kavanagh said there had been more than 400 fires caused by lithium-ion batteries in New York City in the past four years.

In an opinion piece for a local website, Kavanagh said: “These fires start quickly, grow rapidly, offer little time to escape, consume everything in their path, and are very difficult to extinguish.”

CNN’s Susannah Cullinane contributed to this report.