Teenagers aren't taking all the jobs anymore

asheffey@businessinsider.com (Ayelet Sheffey,Madison Hoff)

© Provided by Business Insider A Texas-based restaurant chain has promoted young workers to manager roles amid a labor shortage. Getty Images

Teenage employment in June dropped close to pre-pandemic levels, after trending higher in the spring.

This suggests they won't be taking as many jobs this summer as they did in the spring.

Workers in industries largely staffed by teenagers, like restaurants, are hiring more, at higher wages.

While the June jobs report exceeded expectations, adding 850,000 payrolls, it also blew up a developing narrative that teenagers were helping solve the country's labor shortage.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, teen unemployment rates in April and May were at 12.3% and 9.6%, respectively, signaling that in the spring, teenagers were jumping into the labor force. But the unemployment rate for the 16-19 age group sat at 9.9% in June, suggesting the trend might not continue throughout the summer.

The New York Times economics reporter Ben Casselman wrote on Twitter that in the spring, teen employment was well above pre-pandemic levels, but with their employment level in June fairly close to the pre-pandemic level, teens likely won't be boosting labor supply.

The following chart shows employment for 16 to 19 years old in May from 2015-2021:

Edmonton: Why Are People Snapping Up This $89 AC Unit?SEE MORESponsored by ARTICAIR

The following chart shows employment for 16 to 19 years old in June from 2015-2021. Employment in June 2021 seems to be similar to levels seen in 2019.

Video: Businesses Struggling to Find Workers Turn to Teens and College Students (Inside Edition)

US business owners have been flocking to hire teens amidst a labor shortage, according to a Wall Street Journal report in early June, as teen unemployment rates in the US were at their lowest level since 1953 following the May jobs report, and the number of teens in work had reached the highest rate since 2008.

The labor shortage had given teens the opportunity to cherry-pick for the best-paying jobs. As Ric Serrano, CEO of Serrano's Mexican Restaurants, told the Journal, "It's a perfect storm for them."

Another restaurant owner, Ben Eli - who owns Doris Metropolitan steakhouses in Houston and New Orleans, told the Journal that he had been significantly struggling to find workers, and he's only been able to hire teens.

"I've never seen anything like this," he said. "They are 100% of my staffing right now."

Employees are definitely coming back to work, though, and restaurants may not have to rely on teenagers to keep service afloat. June's jobs report revealed a 343,000 payroll gain in just the leisure and hospitality sector, largely thanks to increased wages for those workers in the industries that teenagers had mainly staffed.

And President Joe Biden saw this as a promising sign moving forward in economic recovery.

"More jobs, better wages - that's a good combination," Biden said during his remarks on Friday. "Put simply: Our economy is on the move, and we have COVID-19 on the run." While this may be true, teens may not be leading the charge after June.

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Alberta company fined in incident where Sask. worker's clothes caught fire
Theresa Kliem 

© Radio-Canada Blueforce Logistics Ltd. pleaded guilty to one count under Saskatchewan's Occupational Health and Safety Regulations in Estevan provincial court, shown here.

An Alberta company will have to pay a total of $65,000 after a Saskatchewan worker's clothing caught fire in 2019.

In January 2019, sparks from a grinder set a worker's clothes on fire in Oxbow, Sask., resulting in serious injuries, the province of Sakatchewan said in a Wednesday news release.

On June 21, Edmonton-based Blueforce Logistics Ltd. — which supplies welders other skilled trades to clients — pleaded guilty to one count under Saskatchewan's Occupational Health and Safety Regulations in provincial court in Estevan.

The fine was related to a section of the regulations that says an employer must provide and require the use of protective clothing when there is a risk of injury from sparks or molten metal.

One other charge was withdrawn.

The company was ordered to pay $46,428.57 plus a surcharge of $18,571.43 resulting in a total of $65,000.

According to the Ministry of Labour Relations and Workplace Safety, employers must provide approved protective equipment to their employees as required by regulations.

Oxbow is about 220 kilometres southeast of Regina.

GM shakes up lithium industry with California geothermal project

By Ernest Scheyder 

 Reuters/REBECCA COOK Logo of GM atop the company headquarters

(Reuters) - General Motors Co is investing in a U.S. lithium project that could become the country's largest by 2024, making the automaker one of the first to develop its own source of a battery metal crucial for the electrification of cars and trucks.

The deal, announced on Friday, comes as automakers around the world scramble for access to lithium and other electric vehicle (EV) metals as internal combustion engines are phased out.

Detroit-based GM said it will make a "multimillion-dollar investment" in and help develop Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) Ltd's Hell's Kitchen geothermal brine project near California's Salton Sea, roughly 160 miles (258 km) southeast of Los Angeles.

"This will supply a sizeable amount of our lithium needs," said Tim Grewe, GM's director of electrification strategy.

The company declined to be more specific on its investment amount, but said the project's lithium will be used to build EVs in the United States and that GM engineers and scientists will visit the site once pandemic-related travel restrictions end.

While other automakers, including China's Great Wall Motor Co and BYD, have invested in lithium producers before, none appear to have taken such an aggressive step to be part of the production process, as GM is taking with CTR.

The move could spark other automakers to follow suit with similar partnerships, especially as demand for the metal is expected to outstrip supply by 20% within four years, according to industry consultant Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

The Hell's Kitchen project could be producing 60,000 tonnes of lithium - enough to make roughly 6 million EVs, depending on design - by mid-2024 if all goes as planned, said Rod Colwell, CTR's chief executive. The company expects to obtain federal environmental permits by the end of next year.

That output would make CTR's Hell's Kitchen the largest U.S. producer of the white metal, with production roughly twice as much planned by a rival Nevada project from Lithium Americas Corp.

"There's a great window of opportunity here to develop more lithium in the United States," Colwell said.

The announcement comes two weeks after GM boosted its electric and autonomous vehicles budget by 75% to $35 billion.

The geothermal process involves extracting super-hot lithium-rich brine from reservoirs 8,000 feet (2.4 km) underground and using the heat to produce electricity, after which lithium is extracted from the brine.

The brine is then reinjected into the earth, making the process more sustainable than open-pit mines and brine evaporation ponds, the two most-common existing methods to produce the white metal.

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc operates geothermal power plants at the Salton Sea and has in the past studied ways to produce lithium there. The Salton area is estimated to contain more than 15 million tonnes of lithium, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

CTR, which received California state funding last year, said its project will emit 15 times less carbon dioxide than lithium mines in Australia, the world's largest producer.

GM is also talking with other U.S. lithium companies for supply, including those who plan to produce the metal from clay, brine and other geological sources, Grewe said.

The announcement comes the day after U.S. President Joe Biden promoted a video on his Twitter feed featuring U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy driving in a GM-produced electric Chevy Bolt.

GM said there was no connection between the tweet and Friday's announcement.

(Reporting by Ernest Scheyder; Editing by Aurora Ellis)

Heat waves kill people—and climate change is making it much, much worse

Heat waves, like the one that has held the Northwest United States in its grip for the past week, are deadly.

 PORTLAND, OR - JUNE 27: Portland residents fill a cooling center with a capacity of about 300 people at the Oregon Convention Center June 27, 2021 in Portland, Oregon. Record breaking temperatures lingered over the Northwest during a historic heatwave this weekend. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

The human toll of the record-breaking temperatures that slammed both coasts of the U.S. and Canada in recent weeks is already enormous. At least 80 people have died in the U.S during the past few days of extreme heat; in British Columbia, the number is in the hundreds. And, as more data trickles in, those numbers are likely to rise even further.

A mountain of scientific research has shown that climate change is making heat waves longer, hotter, more likely, and more dangerous. A recent study published in Nature Climate Change adds additional detail by assessing the human cost of that extra heat: In June, a team of some 70 researchers reported that for the 732 sites on 6 continents they studied, on average, 37 percent of all heat-related deaths can be pinned directly on climate change.

The study underscores the urgency with which we need to address human-caused climate change, says Ana Vicedo Cabrera, lead author of the study and a climate change epidemiologist at the University of Bern, in Switzerland.

“Climate change is not something in the future: It’s something in the present, and it is already affecting our health in very dramatic ways,” she says. Extreme, deadly heat events like the one battering North America are a foreshadowing of what will come. “We can expect that what we’ve seen in the past—that 37 percent—is going to increase exponentially in the future.”
Extreme heat is deadly

Extreme heat kills more people each year in the U.S. than any other kind of natural disaster. Globally, its impacts are enormous. During historic heat waves—like 1995 in Chicago, 2003 in Europe, or 2019 in France—thousands of people can die, and many more suffer severe health impacts that can last long after the heat dissipates, says Camilo Mora, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaii who authored a study titled “27 ways a heat wave can kill you: Deadly heat in the era of climate change.”

“These events can have long-term consequences, from kidney failure to your brain being damaged, to heart damage,” he says.

Previous studies have linked particular climate change-fueled heat waves that sweep through a city with higher deaths. In the sweltering 2003 heat wave in Europe, for example, human-caused climate change increased the risk of dying by 70 percent in Paris. This new study expands this type of analysis globally, looking at more than 700 locations across all inhabited continents.

The researchers looked at all the recorded deaths that occurred during summertime, as well as temperature data for those same places and times, in order to sift out all the deaths that were likely to be caused by extreme heat. There are temperature thresholds beyond which people are much more likely to die, but those thresholds are different in different parts of the world.

The team developed a mathematical formula that linked extreme temperatures—how hot it was beyond the comfortable average temperature for that city or town—to the number of people who might die if it got that hot. This approach allowed the researchers to figure out how many people have died because of extreme heat in each location they looked at.

Then, they used a climate model to simulate an imaginary world in which human-driven climate change hadn’t occurred. They used their formula to figure out how many people would have died of extreme heat in that alternate, theoretical universe.

The differences were stark. The planet has warmed roughly 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) since the late 1800s and stands to warm at least that much again by the end of the century without serious efforts to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.

Video: Historic heat wave raises concerns over climate change (ABC News)

Without just that 1.8 degrees of warming that have already occurred, heat-related deaths would have made up just under one percent of all summertime mortality worldwide on average. But instead, heat-related deaths made up an average of over 1.5 percent of all summertime deaths—roughly 60 percent more.

If extended world-wide, that would mean more than 100,000 deaths per year could be attributed to human-caused climate change, though Vicedo Cabrera cautions that much more data and analysis are needed to come up with an accurate global estimate.
Climate injustice

The study found that, on average, more than one in three heat-related deaths can be pinned on climate change. But in some South American countries, Kuwait, Iran, and parts of southeast Asia, the human toll is much higher: as much as 77 percent in Ecuador, or 61 percent in the Philippines. This disparity emerges not just because these places are particularly hot, but because there is often less access to air conditioning, well-constructed housing that manages heat distribution better, and other factors that can lower people’s vulnerability to heat.

The patterns of vulnerability the study uncovered reveal a profound inequity, says Tarik Benmarhnia, an environmental health expert at the University of California, San Diego.

“Think about who contributed to climate change over the last century, and who is seeing the most consequences today, and you see it is not fair. There is a huge environmental injustice in term of who is suffering the heat-related mortality caused by anthropogenic climate change.”

The U.S. is responsible for about 25 percent of all planet-warming emissions currently in the atmosphere, while Guatemala, for example, has contributed roughly 0.0002 percent. But more 75 percent of the heat deaths in that country can be linked to climate change.

The impacts in the U.S. are also devastating: About 35 percent of the U.S.’s heat-related deaths could be attributed to the climate change that has already occurred. Other research has clearly shown that those costs are not borne equally: in many cities, older people of color are twice as likely to die during extreme heat events than older white people.

“Worldwide, the effects are unequal. Within the U.S., the effects are unequal. At the county, at the city, in the neighborhood—the effects are unequal,” says Benmarhnia.
Deadly signs of climate change

Scientists are working to determine how much worse and more likely climate change has made this Northwest heat wave, but there is little question that it played a major role, says Mora.

“How many times do we need to prove that when it rains, we get wet?” he asks. “For decades now, we climate scientists have been hammering the drum that this is going to get bad. Now, it is that bad.”

Even if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped tomorrow, the planet will continue to warm well past the 1.8°F it already has. That would make the kind of severe heat events we experience today more in line with a norm, rather than an extreme. But how bad the heat gets in the future depends on the climate actions we take now, says Mora.

“Our choices for the future are more of this, or a lot more of this. We can still choose between bad and worse,” he says.

Either way, it is well past time to start helping people across the country prepare for extreme heat, says University of Washington’s Kristie Ebi, a global environmental health expert. Some actions can be simple, like making sure people have access to fans, air conditioning, and shade. Other actions, such as figuring out how to make the electrical grid robust enough to stand up to the extra stresses imposed by too much heat, will be much more complex.

But the basic message is simple, according to Ebi: We can choose to save lives.

“Heat kills, but it doesn’t have to,” she says.

Which Crops Can Survive Drought? Nanosensors May Offer Clues

Keith Gillogly 


For crops, climate change is literally a growing problem.

The warming of our planet has increased the odds of drought worsening throughout the world. In the US, it’s threatening soybean, corn, and wheat production, and the future isn’t looking much wetter. So with water in short supply, we might try to plant crops that manage it more efficiently. “A big focus today is breeding for a changing climate,” says Abraham Stroock, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell University. “We want to discover new traits and their genetic origins for resilience in a hot and dry climate of our future—of our today in many parts of the world.”

But first, researchers have to better understand how existing plants manage their water flow. Stroock and his colleagues have developed a nanoscale sensor called AquaDust that uses tiny fluorescent dyes to illuminate how water moves through plant tissue—a minimally invasive way for breeders and biologists to assess crops’ health at the microscopic level. Their work is described in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June.

Water is vital for plants. It keeps cells hydrated and is critical for photosynthesis. But it’s also under tension. Plants work to draw water out of the soil and up into their leaves. Meanwhile, the surrounding atmosphere is pulling that water out through evaporation, especially when the air is hot and dry. The measure of this tension is called “water potential.” Knowing a plant’s water potential matters because it correlates with its growth, yield, and the delicate balance between water loss and carbon dioxide uptake. During a drought, a plant with very negative water potential might dry up and die.

Currently, the gold standard for measuring this tension is a tool called the Scholander pressure chamber. It’s about the size and shape of an open lunch box, and it contains a pressure gauge and sample chamber, plus an external tank of pressurized gas. After sealing a leaf in the chamber, the researcher turns up the pressure, which forces the liquid out of the plant to get a reading. But this technology is decades old, it's heavy, and if you want to get a reading across an entire leaf, you have to cut it off and destroy it, says Stroock, a coauthor on the PNAS study and the associate director of the Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture.

So Stroock’s team is taking a different approach, one that keeps the leaves alive.

They started by developing nanoparticles they dubbed AquaDust, microscopic sensors made from a hydrogel that expands or contracts in response to changes in water availability. The particles can be mixed into a solution, creating a pinkish liquid.

© Photograph: Piyush Jain/Cornell University Pictured is a confocal micrograph of maize leaf highlighting array of stomatal cavities separated by vascular bundles where epidermal cell wall autofluorescence is false-colored as blue, chloroplasts as green, and hydrogel nanoreporter (AquaDust) of water potential in leaves as red

For the current study, the researchers injected the solution into maize leaves, which they chose, in part, because the crop is critical to worldwide food supply. The nanosensors coated the outside of the leaf’s cells, swelling or shrinking based on how much water was available.

The dye molecules in AquaDust fluoresce at different wavelengths, depending on their proximity to each other, and these wavelengths can be measured with an instrument called a spectrometer. When water is readily available, the nanoparticles swell, pushing the dyes apart and creating a peak in the green wavelength the dyes emit. When there’s not much water, the nanoparticles shrink, and the dyes move closer together, resulting in a peak in the yellow wavelength. Then the researchers can convert the emission spectrum readings into water potential measurements, all without harming the plant.

The technique can be applied to different locations along the leaf to track water flow, says Piyush Jain, a study coauthor and mechanical engineering PhD candidate at Cornell. “What that allows us to do is basically model the water flow through different tissues, starting from the stem to different parts of the leaf,” he says.

The researchers focused their AquaDust measurements on the area just beneath the leaf’s surface, where plants carry out important functions like taking in CO2, releasing water vapor into the atmosphere, and packaging sugars created by photosynthesis. To breed crops that manage water better, having a better grasp of the biology and behavior of water at such critical points will be very helpful, the researchers say.

Ultimately, the technology might be used in real-world situations, like for workers in fields or greenhouses. It might even be possible to someday spray AquaDust over a field and then use a multispectral camera to quickly measure water potential across hundreds of plants

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© Photograph: Siyu Zhu/Cornell University A researcher using AquaDust in a corn field.

And while that’s still a far-off development, AquaDust sounds like useful technology, says Irwin Goldman, professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Using any sort of remote sensing technology—in this case they’re using nanosensors—is an enormous leap forward,” he says. “My sense of this technology is that it is the future, really.”

Breeders have focused on developing drought-resistant crops for some time, says Goldman. “For at least the last 15 years, there’s been a sense in the plant-breeding community that we need to be incorporating selection for greater resilience in our crops as part of our breeding programs, that it’s not enough to just breed higher-yielding or better quality, or for disease resistance,” he says. But, he points out, it will be a long process to identify which plants best defy water loss and which genes are linked to that resiliency, before then pairing them with other desirable traits like good nutrition and flavor. “Once we identify the genes, that’s very helpful, but it doesn’t necessarily get us all the way to the end of the project,” he says. “We still have to find useful combinations.”

For now, AquaDust is primarily a research tool, not something that’s ready to be rolled out at scale that farmers or breeders could use to, say, assess 1,000 plants in an hour. For one thing, the injected solution itself contains water, which must evaporate before anyone can take a measurement. “We wait for about a day to get the leaf to come back into its natural state,” says Jain.

AquaDust’s application and readout methods would need to be refined before it could be ready for such high-throughput measurements or commercial products. But in the meantime, being able to precisely target the flow of water within plants might help researchers solve some mysteries. One of them, says Stroock, is whether plants ever allow the innermost layers of their leaves, called mesophyll, to dry out. For years, the conventional wisdom was that they avoid it, but indirect measurements by other labs now suggest that it’s a possibility. Being able to test this directly with AquaDust could fundamentally alter our understanding of how plants manage their water and how they handle the stress caused by dry inner tissue, he says.

“We believe there are very exciting questions to answer in the lab that take precedence over commercialization,” Stroock says. “Right now, Iowa farmers are not calling us to say, ‘Can we cover our field with AquaDust?’”

Those farmers are probably just hoping for rain. But, someday, technology like nanosensors might help them out when those hopes run dry.

Climate scientists blame Exxon lobbyists for disinformation that undermines efforts to reduce emissions and global warming

salarshani@businessinsider.com (Sarah Al-Arshani) 
© Pixabay Pixabay

A leaked draft report by top climate scientists blamed lobbyists for climate change disinformation.

The report said the disinformation is stalling efforts to curb emissions, Politico reported.

An Exxon official was previously caught on camera talking about the company's lobbying strategy.


Top climate scientists blamed disinformation and lobbying campaigns including those from Exxon Mobile for slowing down efforts to curb emissions, a leaked draft report obtained by Politico said.

The report, part of an upcoming review of climate science by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has a section called "resistance to climate change science" under its North American section.

The report blamed think tanks, foundations, and trade associations that represent fossil fuel companies for spreading fake science that misleads the public and hampers efforts to curb the climate crisis.

"Rhetoric on climate change and the undermining of science have contributed to misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, unduly discounted risk and urgency, dissent, and, most importantly, polarized public support delaying mitigation and adaptation action, particularly in the US," the report said.

This comes after Greenpeace investigation project Unearthed released videos showing an Exxon Mobil official who was tricked to believe he was in an interview speaking frankly about the group's lobbying strategies.

Keith McCoy, Exxon's senior director for federal relations, spoke about "shadow groups" working to influence senators to weaken parts of President Joe Biden's infrastructure bill.

"Joe Manchin, I talk to his office every week," McCoy bragged to the interviewer. He called the Democratic senator from West Virginia a "kingmaker" and discussed how "on the Democrat side we look for the moderates on these issues" in their efforts to stop policies that could hurt the company's business.

In a statement, Exxon Mobil Chairman and CEO Darren Woods said: "We condemn the statements and are deeply apologetic for them, including comments regarding interactions with elected officials."

Rep. Ro Khanna, who chairs the environment subcommittee of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, told Politico he's spoken to government leadership about subpoenaing leaders of groups like Exxon, Chevron, and other fossil fuel companies about disinformation efforts

Khanna also said he and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse will write laws that force these companies to disclose what money is going to groups that distort climate information.

"It is a major problem. One of the reasons that we haven't had action is that we don't have a common source of facts," Khanna told Politico. "Until we solve the climate disinformation issue or at least mitigate the issue, it becomes very hard to build a broad-based political consensus that is needed to take the kind of bold steps that are needed to tackle the crisis."

Insider has reached out to Exxon for comment.

Read the original article on Business Insider

A SCENE FROM HELL

Harrowing video shows the Gulf of Mexico on fire after an oil pipeline rupture.

Democrats point to that video as evidence of a need to fund the Green New Deal.

insider@insider.com (Lauren Frias) 2 hrs ago

 

Brian Kahn on Twitter: "The Gulf of Mexico is literally on fire because a pipeline ruptured https://t.co/J4ur5MNyt1" / Twitter

A fire raged on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico after an oil pipeline ruptured early Friday.

Videos of the blaze bubbling up like molten lava went viral on social media.

Democratic lawmakers used the incident to mock those who refuse to acknowledge the climate crisis.

Democratic lawmakers mocked climate crisis deniers after an underwater oil pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico ruptured early Friday, setting the surface of the water ablaze.

The fire raged in the Ku Maloob Zaap oil field, located near the southern rim of the Gulf of Mexico, around 5:15 a.m. local time and was completely extinguished by 10:30 a.m., according to Mexico's state-owned oil company Petroleos Mexicanos, also known as Pemex.

Videos of the blaze bubbling up like molten lava went viral on social media, with some users dubbing it as an "eye of fire" given the fire's round shape.

Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a proponent in the fight against the climate crisis, shared the video on Twitter with the caption: "bUT CAn wE aFFord CLimaTE aCtion."

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has also championed legislation to address the climate crisis, also shared the video of the Gulf of Mexico fire, criticizing lawmakers who opposed her Green New Deal proposal.

"Shout out to all the legislators going out on dinner dates with Exxon lobbyists so they can say a Green New Deal is too expensive," she tweeted with a thumbs-up emoji.

A representative for Schatz did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. A spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez said the congresswoman doesn't have anything additional to comment.

Read the original article on Business Insider

TC Energy seeks more than $15 billion in damages from U.S. over Keystone XL

(Reuters) -TC Energy Corp is seeking more than $15 billion in damages from the U.S. government over the cancellation of its Keystone XL (KXL) project, the Canadian pipeline operator said on Friday

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© Reuters/Terray Sylvester FILE PHOTO: A depot used to store pipes for TC Energy Corp's planned Keystone XL oil pipeline is seen in Gascoyne

The company earlier this month officially canceled the $9 billion project after U.S. President Joe Biden revoked a key permit needed to build it on his first day in office in January.

TC Energy said on Friday it had filed a notice of intent to begin a legacy North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) claim under the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement.

The project, which was planned to carry 830,000 barrels of heavy crude per day across the border from Alberta in Canada to Nebraska, had been delayed for over a decade following opposition from U.S. landowners, Native American tribes and environmentalists.

The company had booked a C$2.2 billion ($1.79 billion)impairment charge to its first-quarter results in May related to the suspension of construction on the project.

($1 = 1.2321 Canadian dollars)

(Reporting by Shariq Khan in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)

Researcher says N.L. wrong to 'double down' on fossil fuels with offshore subsidies

ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — Newfoundland and Labrador's federally funded subsidies for offshore oil are a "misuse of funds" and another step in the wrong economic direction for the cash-strapped province, says a political scientist who has studied the province's oil sector

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© Provided by The Canadian Press

Angela Carter, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, says it's increasingly difficult to watch the government offer hundreds of millions of dollars in public money to oil companies while not taking effective steps toward building an economy that isn't reliant upon oil.

"What oil producers are trying to do is get whatever they can out of the remaining reserves," Carter, author of the 2020 book "Fossilized: Environmental Policy in Canada's Petro-Provinces," said in a recent interview. "They're leaning on governments like Newfoundland and Labrador that are in distress … to be propped up or bailed out for those last few drops. And that's being done not in the interest of governments, but for private interests."

She worries the latest offer — $205 million in cash and a $300-million break in royalties for the owners of the Terra Nova oilfield — will encourage other oil companies to seek similar treatment.

The Newfoundland and Labrador government has offered oil companies more than $280 million since December 2020 to restart projects in peril or to keep them in play. The money comes from a $320-million fund provided to the province by Ottawa, earmarked for safety improvements, maintenance and upgrades for facilities, research and development and clean technology in the oil sector.

"This is about jobs in our province," federal Natural Resources Minister Seamus O'Regan told reporters last September when the funding was announced. "This is about the future of our sector."

Until a tentative deal was announced on June 16, the province had been bracing for the abandonment of the aging Terra Nova field. With the breaks provided to its owners, the government will collect $35 million in royalties — about one-tenth of the full amount expected from the 80 million barrels left in the field.

Premier Andrew Furey and Energy Minister Andrew Parsons have justified the aid by saying if the project didn't go ahead, there'd be no royalties at all. And with the money coming from Ottawa, the move hasn't cost Newfoundland and Labrador a cent, nor could it have been spent elsewhere, they said.

"We're going to get money back from the indirect jobs and the direct jobs that come from this," Parsons told reporters in mid-June. "I think it's a really good move for this province … we've protected the future, we've saved jobs and we're using the resource in the best interest of the province."

Rob Strong is a St. John's-based consultant with decades of experience in the industry. Like Carter, he believes government has set a precedent with the $300-million royalty break for Terra Nova. "If I was an oil company, I'd be looking for the same sort of deal," he said in an interview this week.

Strong said he worries Newfoundland and Labrador's bargaining position is "not as great as we were led to believe." Other jurisdictions, such as Guyana, produce the same light sweet crude with similar emissions but for lower prices, he said.

Carter questions whether governments should be giving public money to oil companies at all, especially based on promises of stability and jobs. "The sector is interested in profits from extraction, and yet we have been told … this is about jobs," she said. "This is a doubling down on the oil sector."

She points to a January 2021 study from economist Jim Stanford at the Centre For Future Work showing the Canadian oil sector has been shedding jobs since 2014, even though production has gone up. The oil industry, the report said, is not a reliable source of future jobs.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, direct employment with offshore projects fell from nearly 13,750 jobs in 2014 to about 4,500 in 2019, according to benefits reports filed by operators. That drop is largely due to the end of construction on the Hebron project, which began pumping oil in 2017. As of May 2021, production levels in the province are some of the highest they've been in decade, says a report from the provincial offshore regulator.

"A lot of the (oil) jobs are construction jobs, and they're temporary," said Chris Severson-Baker, Alberta's regional director at the Pembina Institute, a national energy think tank. Once construction is finished, companies are increasingly turning to automation and artificial intelligence to shed staff, he said in an interview.

"Everywhere they can, they're cutting costs," he said. "And this is before any kind of real reduction in demand, globally. This is in response to the competitive price environment that oil and gas has been in for a while."

In Newfoundland and Labrador, those jobs are particularly precarious with no meaningful efforts from governments to build new industries for workers to turn to when fields run dry or — as was the case with Terra Nova — when progress halts because owners want to pull out, Carter said.

She said the government's choice to hand the federal money to oil companies rather than support laid-off workers directly through retraining or retirement packages is a "misuse of funds."

"Furey has got to create a (team), and get the people in the room to figure out what the next thing is," she said. "We gave a lot of public support and research dollars … to figure out a way to join this oil boom. So, same thing now, we need to do that again."

A spokeswoman for Furey, Meghan McCabe, said work is underway on a green transition. "We are developing a renewable energy plan with a clear and sustainable long-term vision for our province," she said in a statement Tuesday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 2, 2021.

Sarah Smellie, The Canadian Press

Old-growth in contentious Fairy Creek region worth more standing than logged, says new study

A new economic study shows ancient trees in the contentious Fairy Creek region on southern Vancouver Island are worth considerably more standing to nearby communities than if they were cut down.

And it confirms investments and efforts by the former forestry hub of Port Renfrew to rebrand itself as an ecotourism hot spot are right on track, business leaders say.

Protecting all the old-growth forests in the study area near Port Renfrew could result in an additional $40 million in net economic benefits over the next 100 years compared to logging as usual, said Andrea Inness of the Ancient Forest Alliance, which commissioned the independent research.

The cost-benefit analysis indicates carbon storage or sequestration, recreation, tourism, coho salmon habitat, non-timber forest products like floral greenery and mushrooms, along with research or education opportunities are worth more than timber extraction alone, Inness said.

“The findings are significant because they tell us that old-growth forests are not being managed in the broader public's best interest,” Inness said.

“We need to see the province start making decisions around old-growth management that are in the best interest of all British Columbians — and not just the forest sector.”

The two-and-a-half-year study focused on the province’s Arrowsmith Timber Supply area in Pacheedaht and Ditidaht First Nations’ territories within a 35-kilometre radius of Port Renfrew, said Inness.

As only a portion of harvestable forests near Port Renfrew were analyzed, the study actually underestimates the overall value of standing old-growth, she said.

Ancient forests in the Port Renfrew region have been at the centre of old-growth logging blockades by Rainforest Flying Squad (RFS) activists since August.

Both the Pacheedaht and Ditidaht have asked the protesters to leave the region so they can develop a regional integrated resource management plan, but protesters have remained, with close to 350 people arrested as of Monday.

And the NDP government is under increasing public pressure at home and abroad to take more action to protect remaining at-risk, old-growth forests throughout the province.

The new study reflects the economic changes that Port Renfrew is experiencing on the ground, said Karl Ablack, president of the Port Renfrew Chamber of Commerce.

If all old-growth forests examined were protected, tourism itself would nearly make up for losses associated with timber extraction by adding an equivalent number of jobs and covering 66 per cent of the losses to GDP, the study said.

The economy of Port Renfrew, formerly a thriving resource community until the 1970s and ’80s, stalled with severe declines in forestry and the commercial fishing industry, Ablack said.

But the small community has revived itself over the last 20 to 25 years, first as a result of recreational fishing, and has since diversified into other ecotourism activities, including big tree tourism, he said.

In 2016, the community’s chamber put forth a resolution to the BC Chamber to support the protection of old-growth forests in areas where these forests had greater tourism value left standing. The resolution was unanimously adopted, noted Ablack.

Selling itself as the Tall Tree Capital of Canada, people flock from around the globe to visit the gnarly giants in the now-protected Avatar Grove, or Big Lonely Doug, a massive Douglas fir that stands alone in a clear-cut.

A strict visitor count has yet to be done, but approximately 5,000 cars a day travel to Port Renfrew during the height of summer via the Pacific Marine Circle Route — a loop on southern Vancouver Island featuring the region’s wild beaches and majestic forests, Ablack said.

“And there are days at Avatar Grove or at Lonely Doug where you can have 200 cars lined up on the side of the road,” he said.

“The numbers in the recent study have been very important to help quantify some of that data.”

Tourism is a core industry across the province, and virtually every community relies on revenue and employment generated from visitors, especially as pandemic travel restrictions ease, said Walt Judas, CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of BC (TIABC), in a statement.

International tourists in particular are keen to experience B.C.’s natural beauty not found anywhere else, he said.

“With much existing and potential tourism value to be gained from old-growth, it makes economic sense to keep what’s left standing,” Judas added.

Beyond a focus on tourism revenue, traditional economic analyses typically don’t tally up the valuable ecosystem services old-growth forests provide for free, and which are increasingly important as climate change intensifies, Inness said.

“If you only consider short-term job creation, revenues and impacts to GDP, the economics aren't telling the whole story,” Inness said, adding old rainforests store large amounts of carbon above and below ground and release carbon slowly as they decay.

And harvesting ancient groves sends more carbon into the atmosphere than can be compensated for by tree-planting or creating secondary wood products, she said.

Carbon storage is the biggest economic benefit to justify leaving old-growth standing and to reduce the massive financial burdens climate change is having, she added.

If old-growth in the study region was left alone, forest carbon emissions would be reduced by 569,250 tonnes, she said.

“This fact seems particularly timely, given B.C. is hitting record high temperatures,” Inness said.

Though the Pacheedahts recently asserted their right to determine how forest resources should be used in their territory, the nation is also heavily invested in ecotourism — owning a gas station, general store, and a resort, as well as recently securing $1 million in COVID-19 relief funding to expand and upgrade its campsite.

Mike Hicks, director for the Juan de Fuca Electoral Area, which includes Port Renfrew, said logging will likely remain part of the region’s economy no matter what decisions are eventually made around old-growth.

Even if some old-growth logging continues, Hicks believes Port Renfrew's economy is diversified enough to weather any limited damage to the community’s brand.

The area still boasts world-class recreational fishing, numerous beaches, surfing at Jordan River, excellent accommodations and restaurants, and Port Renfrew is still an entry point for the iconic West Coast Trail, he said.

And now with the availability of satellite internet services and the province's recent commitment to extend cell service along Highway 14 between Sooke and Port Renfrew, the town has everything it needs to consolidate its reputation as a destination location, Hicks said.

“There is no stopping Port Renfrew,” Hicks said.

“It’s not going to live or die on old-growth logging because it’s got so much going for it.”

But keeping old-growth in the region has greater inherent value economically, Ablack said, adding second- or third-growth logging is likely to continue.

“Do I see logging going away? Absolutely not,” Ablack said.

“Do we need to redirect it to better serve sustainability? Certainly, we can look at that.”

[Editor's Note: This story was updated Friday, July 2 to clarify the study examined harvestable old-growth in the provincial timber supply area within 35 kilometres of Port Renfrew – not all harvestable forests in that radius.]

Rochelle Baker / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer

Rochelle Baker, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, National Observer