Dinosaurs in New Mexico thrived until the very end, study shows

Study challenges long-held assumptions, finding late-surviving dinosaurs lived in vibrant, regionally distinct communities

Baylor University

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Researchers analyzed fossils of the Alamosaurus found in northwestern New Mexico and discovered these dinosaurs were very different but the same age as dinosaurs found further north in Wyoming and Montana. (Dinosaur image credit: Natalia Jagielska) 

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Credit: Natalia Jagielska

For decades, many scientists believed dinosaurs were already dwindling in number and variety long before an asteroid strike sealed their fate 66 million years ago. But new research in the journal Science from Baylor University, New Mexico State University, The Smithsonian Institution and an international team is rewriting that story.

The dinosaurs, it turns out, were not fading away. They were flourishing.

A final flourish in the San Juan Basin

In northwestern New Mexico, layers of rock preserve a hidden chapter of Earth’s history. In the Naashoibito Member of the Kirtland Formation, researchers uncovered evidence of vibrant dinosaur ecosystems that thrived until just before the asteroid impact.

High-precision dating techniques revealed that fossils from these rocks are between 66.4 and 66 million years old – placing them in the catastrophic Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary.

“The Naashoibito dinosaurs lived at the same time as the famous Hell Creek species in Montana and the Dakotas,” said Daniel Peppe, Ph.D., associate professor of geosciences at Baylor University. “They were not in decline – these were vibrant, diverse communities.”

Dinosaurs in their prime

The New Mexico fossils tell a different story than originally thought. Far from being uniform and weakened, dinosaur communities across North America were regionally distinct and thriving. Using ecological and biogeographic analyses, the researchers discovered that dinosaurs in western North America lived in separate “bioprovinces,” divided not by mountains or rivers, but by temperature differences across regions.

“What our new research shows is that dinosaurs are not on their way out going into the mass extinction,” said first author Andrew Flynn, Ph.D. ‘20, assistant professor of geological sciences at New Mexico State University. “They're doing great, they're thriving and that the asteroid impact seems to knock them out. This counters a long-held idea that there was this long-term decline in dinosaur diversity leading up to the mass extinction making them more prone to extinction.”

Life after impact

The asteroid impact ended the age of dinosaurs in an instant – but the ecosystems they left behind set the stage for what came next, the researchers said. Within 300,000 years of their extinction, mammals began to diversify rapidly, exploring new diets, body sizes and ecological roles.

The same temperature-driven patterns that shaped dinosaur communities continued into the Paleocene, showing how climate guided life’s rebound after catastrophe.

“The surviving mammals still retain the same north and south bio provinces,” Flynn said. “Mammals in the north and the south are very different from each other, which is different than other mass extinctions where it seems to be much more uniform.”

Why the discovery matters today

The discovery is more than a window into the past – it’s a reminder of the resilience and vulnerability of life on Earth. Conducted on public lands managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the research highlights how carefully protected landscapes can yield profound insights into how ecosystems respond to sudden global change.

With a clearer understanding of the timeline of the dinosaurs’ final days, the study reveals not a slow fade into extinction but a dramatic ending to a story of flourishing diversity cut short by cosmic chance.

About the authors

In addition to Peppe and Flynn, the research team included scientists from Baylor University, New Mexico State University, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Edinburgh, University College London and multiple U.S. and international institutions.

• Stephen L. Brusatte, Ph.D., The University of Edinburgh
• Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, Ph.D., Royal Society Newton International Fellow, University College London
• Jorge Garcia-Giron, Ph.D., University of Leon
• Adam J. Davis, Ph.D., WSP USA Inc.
• C. Will Fenley, Ph.D., Valle Exploration
• Caitlin E. Leslie, Ph.D., ExxonMobil
• Ross Secord, Ph.D., University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• Sarah Shelley, Ph.D., Carnegie Museum of Natural History
• Anne Weil, Ph.D., Oklahoma State University
• Matthew T. Heizler, Ph.D., New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
• Thomas E. Williamson, Ph.D., New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science

Funding

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, European Research Council, Royal Newton International Fellowship, Geologic Society of America Graduate Research Grant, Baylor University James Dixon Undergraduate Fieldwork Fellowship (AGF), the European Union Next Generation, the British Ecological Society and the American Chemical Society – Petroleum Research Fund.

The researchers would like to thank the Bureau of Land Management for providing collecting permits and supporting the research.

ABOUT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY

Baylor University is a private Christian University and a nationally ranked Research 1 institution. The University provides a vibrant campus community for 20,000 students by blending interdisciplinary research with an international reputation for educational excellence and a faculty commitment to teaching and scholarship. Chartered in 1845 by the Republic of Texas through the efforts of Baptist pioneers, Baylor is the oldest continually operating University in Texas. Located in Waco, Baylor welcomes students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries to study a broad range of degrees among its 12 nationally recognized academic divisions. Learn more about Baylor University at www.baylor.edu.

ABOUT THE COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES AT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY

The College of Arts & Sciences is Baylor University’s largest academic division, consisting of 25 academic departments in the sciences, humanities, fine arts and social sciences, as well as 11 academic centers and institutes. The more than 5,000 courses taught in the College span topics from art and theatre to religion, philosophy, sociology and the natural sciences. The College’s undergraduate Unified Core Curriculum, which routinely receives top grades in national assessments, emphasizes a liberal education characterized by critical thinking, communication, civic engagement and Christian commitment. Arts & Sciences faculty conduct research around the world, and research on the undergraduate and graduate level is prevalent throughout all disciplines. Visit the College of Arts & Sciences website.

 

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adw3282 

Method of Research

Content analysis

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Late-surviving New Mexican dinosaurs illuminate high end-Cretaceous diversity and provinciality

Article Publication Date

23-Oct-2025

 

Dinosaur ‘mummies’ unlock secrets of life appearance

UChicago paleontologists unveil fossil duck-billed dinosaur specimens collected in Wyoming and carefully prepared in the Fossil Lab that preserve their fleshy external anatomy with sufficient detail to depict how this large-bodied dinosaur looked in life.

University of Chicago Medical Center

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Some 66 million years ago, just before the great extinction, the duck-billed dinosaur Edmontosaurus annectens walks in the soft mud of a coastline passing the sun-dried a carcass of another individual and leaving a set of footprints — before spotting its nemesis, the great predator Tyrannosaurus rex, and turning to run. Floodwaters would bury carcasses of the duckbill preserving its fleshy surface detail as a clay mask over skeletons of its fossilized bones in a small area located today in the badlands of east-central Wyoming. (artwork by Dani Navarro; storyboard by Jonathan Metzker; animation by Davide la Torre)

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Credit: Artwork by Dani Navarro; storyboard by Jonathan Metzker; animation by Davide la Torre

In a new paper in Science, experts from the University of Chicago describe steps that took place some 66 million years ago to transform carcasses of a duck-billed dinosaur, Edmontosaurus annectens, into dinosaur “mummies” preserving fine details of scales and hooves. Called clay templating, the external fleshy surface of the dinosaur was preserved over the skeleton after burial by a thin clay mask no more than 1/100th of an inch thick. Using an array of imaging techniques, the scientists reconstructed the fleshy appearance of the animal in life, from a tall crest over the neck and trunk to a spike row over its tail and hooves sheathing its toes. Combined with fossilized footprints, the appearance of a duck-billed dinosaur — long guessed at but never demonstrated in this detail — is now at hand.

“It’s the first time we’ve had a complete, fleshed-out view of a large dinosaur that we can really feel confident about,” said senior author Paul Sereno, PhD, Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at UChicago. “The badlands in Wyoming where the finds were made is a unique ‘mummy zone’ that has more surprises in store from fossils collected over years of visits by teams of university undergrads.”

From field puzzle to full profile

Using historical photos and field sleuthing, Sereno and his team relocated the sites in east-central Wyoming where several famous dinosaur mummies were discovered in the early 20th century, mapping out a compact “mummy zone.” In those stacked river sands, they excavated two new Edmontosaurus mummies — a late juvenile and an early adult — with large continuous areas of preserved external skin surface.

Sereno is quick to explain that his dinosaur mummies are not like the human-prepared mummies in Egyptian tombs; no organic material remains. Across both newly described specimens and previous ones labeled mummies (including those found at the same site in the 20th century), the skin, spikes, and hooves were preserved not as tissue, but as a sub-millimeter clay film that formed on the carcass surface soon after burial.

“This is a mask, a template, a clay layer so thin you could blow it away,” Sereno said. “It was attracted to the outside of the carcass in a fluke event of preservation.”

The team used several imaging tools, including hospital and micro-CT scans, thin sections, X-ray spectroscopy, clay analyses, and examination of the discovery site, all of which pointed to how this unique preservation occurred. After each sun-dried dinosaur carcass was covered up suddenly in a flash flood, a biofilm on the carcass surface electrostatically pulled clay out of the wet sediment to congeal a wafer-thin template layer, capturing the true surface in three dimensions, after which the organic material decayed away and the skeleton below fossilized over longer timescales.

Exposing such a soft, paper-thin clay boundary required hours of careful cleaning led by Fossil Lab manager Tyler Keillor, a co-author of the paper. Other researchers led by postdoctoral scholar Evan Saitta used 3D surface imaging, CT scans and contemporary footprints to follow the soft anatomy, characterize the sediment inside and outside the mummy, and fit the hooves back into a footprint. Digital artists then joined the science team to reconstruct the fleshy appearance and movement of the duckbill, walking on soft mud near the very end of the dinosaur era.

“I believe it’s worth taking the time to assemble a dream team in order to generate science that can be appreciated by the general public,” Sereno said. “We’ve never been able to look at the appearance of a large prehistoric reptile like this — and just in time for Halloween.”

Crests, spikes, and scales

Working with the two new mummies, the researchers reconstructed a complete, fleshy profile of Edmontosaurus annectens.

“The two specimens complemented each other beautifully,” Sereno said. “For the first time, we could see the whole profile rather than scattered patches.”

They identified a continuous midline feature that began as a fleshy crest along the neck and trunk and transitioned over the hips into a single row of spikes running down the tail — each spike positioned over a single vertebra and fitted to each other.

The lower body and tail had the largest polygonal scales, although most were tiny pebble-like scales just 1–4 millimeters across, surprisingly small for a dinosaur growing to over 40 feet in length. Wrinkles preserved over the ribcage suggest the skin of this duckbill was thin.

A hoofed dinosaur

The hind feet of the larger mummy held the biggest surprise: hooves. The tip of each of the three hind toes were encased in a wedge-shaped hoof with a flat bottom like that of a horse. The team used CT scans of the mummy’s feet and 3D images of the best-preserved duckbill footprint from the same time period, fitting the former into the latter. Using information from both sources, they accurately reconstructed the appearance of the hind foot. Unlike the forefoot that touches the ground only with its hooves, the hind feet have a fleshy heel pad behind the hooves.

“There are so many amazing ‘firsts’ preserved in these duck-billed mummies — the earliest hooves documented in a land vertebrate, the first confirmed hooved reptile, and the first hooved four-legged animal with different forelimb and hindlimb posture,” Sereno said.

Shaping the future of the field

Beyond the anatomical revelations, the study offers a toolkit for future research on dinosaur soft anatomy: new preparation methods, a clear lexicon for soft structures and scales, an imaging workflow from fossil to a flesh model, and a recipe for generating a dinosaur mummy. More than standalone discoveries, the team’s mummy research offers a new model for dinosaur mummification involving clay templating to test on future finds.

The authors also point to what comes next: targeted searches for similarly preserved specimens in the same Wyoming strata and elsewhere; biomechanical models that now have reliable external boundaries; and companion analyses that probe when and where clay templating takes hold.

“This may be the single best paper I’ve released,” Sereno said. “From field to lab to 3D reconstructions along with a suite of useful terms defined, it’s a tour de force, and it tells a coherent story about how these remarkable fossils come to be and what we can learn from them.”

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adw3536 

Article Publication Date

23-Oct-2025

THE HADROSAURUS IS THE OFFICIAL DINOSAUR OF ALBERTA

Mummy zone drone footage [VIDEO]

Drone footage of the “mummy zone” in east-central Wyoming, where a half a dozen dinosaur mummies have been discovered including the two new mummies of the duck-billed dinosaur Edmontosaurus annectens. 

Credit

University of Chicago Fossil Lab

Scene painting some 66 million years ago showing the duck-billed dinosaur as it appeared in life based on mummies discovered in east-central Wyoming which document its scaly skin and hooves. It had a fleshy crest over neck and trunk, a fleshy spike row over hips and tail and hooves capping the toes of the hind feet. (artwork by Dani Navarro) 

Credit

Artwork by Dani Navarro

Mummy of the juvenile duck-billed dinosaur Edmontosaurus annectens with fossil preparator Tyler Keillor of the University of Chicago. The dinosaur mummy nicknamed “Ed Jr.,” was covered by floodwaters some 66 million years ago, preserving its fossilized skeleton and, in a thin clay layer, large areas of scaly, wrinkled skin and a tall fleshy crest over its back.

Credit

Photograph courtesy of University of Chicago Fossil Lab

The scaly skin of a crest over the back of the juvenile duck-billed dinosaur Edmontosaurus annectens, nicknamed “Ed Jr.” The juvenile duckbill, estimated to be about two years old at the time it died, is the only juvenile dinosaur mummy ever discovered. 

Credit

Photograph courtesy of Tyler Keillor/Fossil Lab

The hoof, preserved in section as a very thin clay layer, caps the end toe bone in the foot of an adult mummy of the adult duck-billed dinosaur Edmontosaurus annectens.

Credit

Photograph courtesy of Tyler Keillor/UChicago Fossil Lab

Professor Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago marvels at the preserved hooves on the foot of an adult mummy of the duck-billed dinosaur Edmontosaurus annectens nicknamed “Ed Sr.”.

Credit

Photo by Kieth Ladzinski

TWO GOOD LOCAL HISTORY SITES FOR LEFT WING ALBERTA

The Edmonton Hunger March of 1932

Forgotten Edmonton

https://www.forgottenedmonton.com › blog › the-edmo...

Dec 20, 2022 — The Hunger March of 1932 is inextricably linked to the material and socio-economic conditions of Alberta during the Great Depression.

Bucking Conservatism

Athabasca University Press

https://www.aupress.ca › app › uploads › 12028...

PDF

by Poundmaker staff member, Eugene (Devil inside) Plawiuk.13 In contrast to ... founding meeting of Canada's first national socialist party, the CCF, was held.

368 pages' 

 

Monday, May 02, 2016

THE ALBERTA NDP THE PARTY OF OIL WORKERS

THE COINCIDENTAL BIRTH OF THE NEW DEMOCRATS AND THE OIL INDUSTRY IN ALBERTA

Rachel Notley warned New Democrats that adopting the LEAP manifesto which demands the end of oil extraction from the Tar Sands as well as conventional and shale gas plays, and NO pipelines, would put the Eastern arm of the party in direct conflict with a party that is proudly Albertan and directly involved in the oil industry history in the province even more so than the long ruling party the PC’s.

It was the development of oil and energy in Alberta that created new wealth and a new industrial province after WWII. The discovery of oil not only brought the oil industry but also the oil and energy workers union, a small American union that had an arm in Alberta, the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers OCAW. In Alberta it was beginning its organizing of workers in the field and in the new gas and chemical plants being built between Edmonton and Fort Saskatchewan.

This was the post war boom, the party in power was Social Credit, and while  there was no NDP there was an active labour political movement housed in the AFL and Edmonton Trades and Labour Council, members belonged to the Communist Party, the CCF and some still belonged to the OBU and IWW.

Edmonton had a history of electing labour council members as Mayor, Aldermen (women), school board trustees and Hospital Board members. Elmer Roper  longtime labour activist, CCF activist and candidate, owner of ABC Printing and publisher of Alberta Labour News would be elected Mayor of Edmonton after the creation of the NDP by the merger of the CCF with the newly created post war Canadian Labour Congress.

The sixties saw the growth of the labour movement in Canada and in Alberta, including the creation of an active movement of organizing public sector workers, provincially, municipally and federally. The Federal Workers Union originating in Calgary would merge with the Ontario based National Workers Union to create what we know as the Canadian Union of Public  Employees, the Civil Service Union of Alberta would become a union known as the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees.

But throughout the oil boom of the fifties and sixties the union most associated with the provincial NDP was the Oil Chemical and Atomic Energy Workers Union under the leadership of Neil Reimer and his assistant Reg Baskin

That’s right the party was brought to life in Alberta by Oil Workers in the provinces new Energy market. Its first party leader was Neil Reimer, who would meet a charismatic young politician a contemporary of Peter Lougheed and Joe Clark at the University of Alberta, Grant Notley who would go on to become party Leader and its first elected MLA.

Notley himself did not represent Edmonton but his home region, the oil rich north of Alberta, the Grand Prairie, and Peace River riding.

As it had since 1936 the Social Credit party of Alberta held power in the province as a one party state, under the permanent leadership of Premier Ernest Manning, Preston’s daddy.  The New Democratic Party of Alberta focused its energy not only on consolidating union power in the party as well as the voices of the left and progressives but in challenging that Social Credit domination of Alberta Politics.

This was also the time of the Cold War and the Anti Communist Witch Hunts, a time being anti war, anti nuclear war, pro labour, was considered suspect. Where union members who were left wing were exposed to police spying, where padlock laws in Quebec had been used to raid imprison and steal property belonging to those accused of opposing the Duplesis regime or who were suspect of being Reds.

Duplessis ‘s party in Quebec aligned with that provinces Federal Social Credit Party which was aligned with Alberta’s Party as well. In both provinces the left faced one party dictatorship which reminded many despite their democratic trappings of the forces they had been fighting against in WWII.

As in Alberta it would be the post war labour movement in Quebec under Louis Lebarge that would mobilize politically as well as economically against the Old Regime, his right hand was a young activist lawyer named Pierre Eliot Trudeau. And like Alberta they were building a provincial and national party; the Liberals.

This then is the historical basis for the differences between the left in Quebec and the rest of Canada and why it took so long to breech these two solitudes, as was done in 2012 under Jack Layton and the federal NDP.

Premier Rachel Notley, the daughter of Grant Notley, the first NDP MLA ever elected to the Legislature, the first opposition member elected against the Social Credit party of Ernest Manning  had this rich history as her prologue at this week’s national NDP Convention in Edmonton where the party adopted the LEAP manifesto which challenges the very energy economy that makes Alberta a modern industrial state.

This province created the NDP under the leadership of  Neil Reimer, an oil worker and oil union organizer.  Neil was the first leader of the Party, and Reg Baskin was his right hand in their union and the party.

Neil also created the modern Canadian Energy Workers union,  Neil and Reg first represented oil workers in the new industry in the province with the OCAW  oil chemical and atomic workers of Canada, which had one other base of expansion; Louisiana.  He and Reg made it the Canadian Energy Workers Union, which became CEP merging with the Canadian Paper workers unions in BC, and now has consolidated with CAW to create UNIFOR.

Neil’s daughter was Jan Reimer two term Mayor of Edmonton during the 1990’s and while party labels are not used in Edmonton municipal elections everyone knew that we had an NDP mayor.

Meatpackers, a union that disappeared in the eighties with amalgamation of the meat packing industry into a smaller and smaller oligopoly, was a militant base of union workers and activists including communists and socialists, that was a large base for the party, as was Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 488.

These were the post war unions that were the party’s base in Edmonton and across the province. Federally the postal workers were a strong backbone for the Federal Party, though there were two separate unions at that time, letter carriers and inside workers, the latter being more left wing and militant with OBU IWW communist, socialist and Trotskyist activist workers.

It was the discovery of tar sands oil that led to the growth of the province, the union and the NDP. It was also this discovery and its needed development during the Arab Oil Crisis of 1971 that led to the end of the Social Credit government, its movement, but not its essence. In its place came the newest members of the Alberta Legislature elected in 1967 for the first time, the Lougheed Progressive Conservatives. They would be joined by Grant Notley and the NDP in opposition in 1968, when Grant won a by-election in Spirit River.

The “Progressive” element in the Lougheed PC’s represented the post war Liberal base among the non Anglo ethnic communities in Edmonton and Calgary, such as the recent post war immigration of Ukrainians, Italians, Portuguese, Greek, European, Asian, and Displaced Peoples. The Liberals had no political existence in Alberta since they were wiped out by the United Farmers/ Labour Party coalition in 1921.

Even Lougheed’s conservatism was not the neo conservative Austrian school embraced by the republican lite Preston Manning cons of today, it was classical liberal capitalism, that progressive aspect of capitalism that sought to ameliorate through regulation what short comings capitalism itself may suffer from despite its idealism of being the ‘ideal’ system.

The history of the Alberta NDP is the history of the Oil Workers and the Oil Industry in Alberta, even more than it is for the current batch of Conservatives provincial or federal.  The NDP in Alberta grew up with the oil industry with its workers and their union. For the Alberta NDP to reject both the LEAP manifesto and those call for the end of pipelines is natural and should have been expected by those who know the party history in the province.

For those who fail to understand this historic base of the party in Alberta fail to understand the social democratic politics of the oil industry, the NDP has long supported a form of nationalization under public ownership and increased workers control through unionization.

This occurred in the case of Suncor which was the earliest of the oil sands operators, before the Syncrude conglomerate was created.  In the early seventies after the Lougheed government promoted the oil sands, Suncor began mining operations.  Neil Reimer’s new Canadian Energy and Paperworkers union, CEP, got its birth in a long and bitter historic strike at the Suncor operations.

CEP went on to organize refineries in Edmonton, Sherwood Park and Fort Saskatchewan.

It tried but failed to organize Syncrude due to its conglomerate ownership and its concerted anti union efforts over the decade of the seventies into the eighties. Today unionized Suncor has bought out Syncrude so this situation opens it up to unionization decades later.

The seventies and eighties saw massive growth in the province including growth in both private and public union membership.

This also saw the success of the NDP and the left in Edmonton. While Grant Notley was a lone NDP member in Alberta Legislature, Edmonton saw a left wing U of A Prof David Leadbeater elected alderman.  Notley was joined in the house by Ray Martin, from Edmonton.

The NDP elected Ross Harvey its first federal MP from Alberta in the eighties from the old packing plant and union district of Edmonton Beverly. This was at the height of the Arab Oil Crisis of early eighties, which the Conservatives in Calgary blamed on the NDP Liberal National Energy Plan, NEP, which included the creation of the Canadian Publicly Owned Oil and Gas Company PetroCanada.

PetroCanada was a success and saved Calgary and the Lougheed Government during this oil crisis, it was able to buy up, nationalize, American oil companies like Gulf Mobile, Texaco, Chevron,  as well as smaller Canadian and American oil companies that were going broke or bailing out of Calgary heading back to Dallas and Huston.

And CEP was there to unionize it. Today PetroCanada is no more the Liberals privatized during the Austerity crisis of the Nineties, and Paul Martins Liberal Government sold off the last of our shares prior to the 2006 election.

Ironically it is Suncor that bought them and then bought up PetroCan and absorbed it., just as it has done with its competitor Syncrude.

It would be during the late eighties and early nineties that under Ray Martin the NDP would gain a record number of seats, going from 2 to 23 and status of official opposition. But by the time of the middle of nineties and the Austerity panic of debt and deficit hysteria and the birth of the neo conservative movement that two city Mayors, Ralph Klein of Calgary and Lawrence Decore of Edmonton would battle it out for Premier of the Province, Klein for the PC’s and Decore for the Liberals. Both ran on Austerity budgets, one promised massive cuts the other brutal cuts. It was a close election the losers were the NDP who were wiped out as a third party.

In Edmonton we had a new NDP mayor to replace Decore, Neil’s daughter Jan Reimer, joined by another leftist alderman the bus driver Brian Mason. The NDP centred itself in Edmonton at this time and got elected the enormously popular  team of Pam Barrett and Raj Pannu.

The CEP was critical in supporting the NDP at this time, including having its past president Reg Basking become leader of the Party.

After the shocking early death of party leader Pam Barrett, former alderman Brian Mason ran in her riding, Highlands, which also covers the Federal riding of Beverly that Ross Harvey once represented and won her seat in the house. Raj Pannu became the first Indo Canadian leader of an NDP party in Canada.  After he stepped down Brian Mason became the leader of the party.

The party went from four seats to two to four until Brian stepped down and the party elected Grant Notley’s daughter, Rachel Notley, who had sat in the house with Brian through all those ups and downs in electoral success.

The party base is the labour movement and left across the province and no less important unions such as CEP, IBEW, Carpenters and UA488 all involved in the oil sands and the petrochemical industry in Alberta.

So why are the various wags and pundits surprised when the Alberta NDP does not LEAP off the edge of a cliff named STOP PIPELINES, STOP DIRTY OIL.

In the finest of social democratic traditions, the Alberta NDP will do no such thing nor should it be expected to. It will ameliorate the worst of the environmental damages that the fossil fuel industry has and can be expected to cause. They will create a green plan, and expand the carbon fuel tax the PC’s brought in.

 It will do what the conservatives would not do, and that is eliminating Alberta’s Socred PC dirty energy economic backbone: coal. And that is the real dirty energy in Alberta, coal fired utility plants. These plants are evenly divided between private ownership, with state support from the ruling Socreds and PC’s, TransAlta Utilities, and publicly owned municipal utilities EPCOR and ENMAX. TransAlta is the original P3 funded by taxpayers under the Socred and spun off to become a private company where government cabinet members retire to the board of.

Even Lougheed was tied to the coal industry representing his old employer Mannix Inc, as a board member of Luscar Coal, which during the nineties created a major controversy with its efforts to mine outside of Jasper National Park.

Contrary to Greenpeace and other environmentalists who claim oil sands are the dirtiest energy the real dirty energy on the Palliser Plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan is coal.

Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel that needs to be kept in the ground. There is no such thing as clean coal!

There is however clean petrochemical fuels, that is the nature of refining, creating finer and finer grades of hydrocarbons; ethenes, benzenes, oil and gas for plastic production, diesel etc.

That is the reason for both the Joffre and Scotford massive refining projects and the plan for the heartland refining project, which would allow the province to crack and refine bitumen into secondary and tertiary hydrocarbons.

That is what the future of the energy is in Alberta, stopping the use of coal, refining hydrocarbons and shipping them south, east, and west.

Why would the NDP limit the provinces ability to ship what it processes.

As I have pointed out the pipeline west will probably go through the Peace River Athabasca highway route to Prince Rupert, which coincides with BC Site C dam development and its LNG  pipeline development, giving pipeline companies an alternative to going to Kitimat via the BC Sacred Bear Rainforest.

Energy East will be built and the NDP will promote as it did in the eighties, the idea that Alberta energy for a fair price should go east. What occurred instead was it was shipped to refineris in Ontario and Quebec at discounted prices where it was refined and sold to the US while oil was imported from the Middle East.

This was the original idea of the NEP that the NDP and Liberals promoted to Lougheed, and he agreed to! And like the NDP this was his vision for Alberta oil before he died.

While the LEAP manifesto is suitably left wing green etc, even shudder, anti capitalist ( read anti corporations) it is not something either the labour movement or NDP in Alberta will agree to do much more about than debate. Debate will be welcome, dictat not so much.

LEAP like most environmentalism today fails to take into consideration that even if workers had control of publicly owned energy companies, we would still be producing hydrocarbons, and will be even after the glorious Socialist Revolution.

The dirtiest energy causing climate change is not oil sands in Alberta or Venezuela it is coal and wood burning worldwide.  That is the challenge we face to shut down coal, and wood burning, not to accept the myth of Clean Coal, and to make sure we ameliorate environmental damage caused through hydrocarbon production.

You want to keep something in the ground its coal, and the biggest fight back in Alberta today is the utility lobbies who oppose the Alberta NDP Government ending of coal fired utilities.

In Alberta the NDP is the party of oil and oil workers. Never forget it. The old Social Credit of Preston Manning’s daddy’s day and the PC’s of Lougheed Klein were both parties of coal.

Not Your Usual Left Wing Rant

No Taxes for the working class. That should be the watchword of the Left.

Left blogger a Class Act bemoans the state of the Canadian left on his blog. He says; "When is the left going to quit trying to be like its opponents,and begin to define itself by it's own actions and ideology?Give the people a real choice,a choice that stands for something,but above all principaled."

Exactomundo. When the Reform party was created it based itself not on the neo-conservatism of the Reaganites but on Western Canadian populism, a populism based on the Left. Recall, referendum, the attack on taxation, were all antebellum left wing causes at the begining of the 20th Century.

Socialism as Class Act calls it. It included the ideology of the producer republic, Georgism in the United States, the Cooperative Commonweal in Canada and the UK. It included syndicalism for the working class, and producer cooperatives for farmers and small producers. It was anti-monopoly and anti-rentier, pro land ownership. See Rothbard’s Reds Redux


Socialism at the begining of last century was not yet tainted with Bolshevism. And I use that term deliberately to distinguish it from communism. For within the anarchist and statist socialist movements were movements of communism, which went farther and further in their critique of capitalism than the anti-state socialists did.

Unfortunately the socialist dream, or vision, was lost in the coming forth of the social democratic movement and its statist ideal of the welfare state. Far from dying at the end of WWI in Canada the CCF called for social revolution, as did many of the socialists of the day. They still had only had a small taste of government, in this case the Socialist Party of Canada had been crucial to maintaince of power for the provincial Liberals in B.C, in the last days of fin de sicle 19th century.

The Socialist movement in Canada coalesced around the CCF, the Communist party and the OBU. With the destruction of the later and the success of the former in gaining political power provincially and representation federally came the end of the extra parlimentary left in Canada.

By the 1960's the CCF and the labour movement had purged the radicals and were now liberal social democratics just like their German predecesors of the century before.

The extra-parliamentary left was centred around the anti-Nuclear Bomb movement, Our Generation magazine, and what could be loosely called an anarchist left. One that was sceptical that state power could change anything.

Today the NDP and its social democratic ilk are really liberals in a hurry. And thus the plight that Class Act finds us in. We go back to the orginal debate between State Socialists and Anti-State Socialists. Is socialism a set of principles and and ideal to strive towards or is it the pragmatic logic of gaining state power.
It is of course the former since the latter has been a historic failure.

Since I of course do not believe it is the latter, I hardly consider the NDP or even the Trade Unions on the left. That is they cannot concieve of a program of workers and community control that is a radical challenge to the corporate/financial and state monopoly. They in effect are , as the left communists call them, the left hand of capitalism. They merely wish to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism while maintaining the status quo.

Expect no real answers from them on how to change or challenge the system.

But thank goodness the long march to Ottawa by the neo-conservative right in Canada has finally ended in a minority government. Because they too called for a revolution in politics as usual. And they too have ended up being no such thing, just business as usual.

Where the left failed during the past two decades was to see that what Reform had harnassed was a real grass roots disgruntlement of the working class towards politics as usual. Not always reactionary, it was based on feeling powerless and wanting to feel in power over our own lives.

The Left never got it. Whenever the NDP called for taxing the rich, the guys in the Alberta Gas Plants, unionized, and paid overtime saw it as an attack on their wages. It didn't matter that the NDP meant the Rich, as in the 1% of Canadians that own all the wealth, or the corporations, their message was lost on the working class. And for good reason.

We hate taxes. We love services. And we will pay for services, but we hate taxes. And why shouldn't we, over the past fifty years the federal and provincial tax base has moved from the corporations to picking the pockets of you and me.

The NDP finally realised this simple fact during the 2004 election and during the last sitting of the house. They called for more tax breaks for the working class. But because this runs counter to their state socialism, they were faint hearted in their calls, faint hearted in their attack on the Liberals and Conservatives as parties of the rich and entrenched power. The so called special interests.

The fact is that the Conservative government in Ottawa is about to launch a massive assault on the working class through taxation.

They will fund their 1% GST cut by eliminating tax breaks the Liberals brought in. They will give out a baby bonus that will be taxed. They will fail to transfer funds to day care programs clawing them back.

The Left should be calling for no taxation for anyone who earns $100,000 a year or less. Period. That is the mass of the working class in this country.

No party currently will call for this and for the elimination of user fees and the GST. For these are the little taxes that hurt, the death by a thousand cuts that so irritate each and every wage slave in Canada.

Tax the Corporations NOT the People, should be the watchword of the Left. Want Daycare and Medicare, the corporations should pay, out of pre tax profits. It is social capital that they directly benefit from in their bottom line, its what makes them competitive against the American capitalist model.

Eliminate all corporate tax loopholes. Eliminate offshore investment havens for the Rich. And in the process this will eliminate the Tax Department.

The Left should attack the failure of the Reformers, who are still out there as the recent Fireweed Forum on Democracy showed, and the parliamentary reformers,
to address the real issue of political reform in Canada.

The need for real democracy, directly elected revocable delgates to constiuent assemblies. To the right to referndum, to a renewal of Canada as constitutional confederation of the people not a con job. See my Abolish The Senate

On economic renewal we should be calling for the creation of peoples banks, the deregulation of banking from the hands of the State into the hands of the people as pools of capital for usage with institutional pension funds and workers investments to build small and medium sized worker/producer cooperatives.
See Michael Alberts Economic Participatory Democracy project; Parecon.

This deregulation would also eliminate large banks as holders of capital in the national interest. That role should be continued by the Bank of Canada, which delegated it to the national banks twenty years ago under the Mulroney Conservatives.

We don't need a state in Canada we need a confederation of peoples and communities in a federal system not of Trudeau's making or Harpers but in the Proudhonist model of self government.


And this cannot be done through electoral means, it takes a social revolution. The Reform party tried to do this from the Right and the NPI and other attempts to reform the NDP did it on the left and the result is Jack Layton and Stephen Harper. Nothing changed.

So Class Act I agree with you that the Left needs renewal. And the Left needs first to divorce itself from the existing liberal social democratic parliamentary mileu.
Then and only then will it become an authentic voice for Canadians who are frustrated and pissed off with the system as it is. We have been told to embrace change for twenty years by the neo-cons as they privatized public services. That change for change sake ideology is deeply embedded in all of capitalism corporate and managerial structures now. It gives us a window to challenge the very system of capitalism with a real Left agenda of People Power.


Also see:

Unite the Left
A Peoples Program for Alberta

Left, Right and Liberty

State-less Socialism

Social Credit And Western Canadian Radicalism

Rebel Yell

Plutocrats Rule

WRITTEN IN 2006

 

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