COLD WAR 2.0 SINOPHOBIA

Satellite images show China working on nuclear reactor for new warship

Copyright AP Photo

By Tamsin Paternoster with AP

Published on 11/11/2024 - 

Numerically, China's navy is already the worlds largest and has been rapidly modernising.

China has built a land-based prototype nuclear reactor for a large warship, according to analysis of satellite imagery and Chinese government documents.

The images are the clearest sign yet that Beijing is advancing towards producing its first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

Beijing already has the world's largest navy in terms of numbers, and has been rapidly modernising its fleet. Adding nuclear-powered carriers would be a major first step in realising China's ambitions for a global naval that could challenge the US.

“Nuclear-powered carriers would place China in the exclusive ranks of first-class naval powers, a group currently limited to the United States and France,” Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said.

Domestically, such a development would symbolise national prestige and fuel "domestic nationalism."

The discovery was unearthed by researchers at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California as they investigated a mountain site outside the city of Leshan in southwest China.

Initially suspecting China was building a reactor to produce plutonium or tritium for weapons, they concluded Beijing was focusing its efforts on a prototype reactor for a large warship.

The reactor, which documents indicate will soon be fully operational, is housed in a new facility known as Base 909 which houses six other reactors that are either operational, decommissioned or under construction.

The site is under the control of the Nuclear Power Institute of China, a subsidiary of the China National Nuclear Corporation, which is tasked with reactor engineering research and testing.

Contracts for steam generators and turbine pumps indicate the project involves a pressurised water reactor with a secondary circuit — a profile that is consistent with naval propulsion reactors, the researchers say.

“Nuclear Power Development Project most certainly refers to a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier development effort,” researchers wrote in a detailed 19-page report.

The People's Liberation Army Navy is already the world's largest with over 370 ships and submarines.

However, it still lags behind the US Navy in some respects — with the Washington's navy having eleven nuclear powered carriers allowing it to keep strike groups deployed around the world at all times.

The Pentagon has become increasingly concerned about China's rapid modernisation of its fleet, saying that its efforts align with China's "growing emphasis on the maritime domain and increasing demands."

Neither China’s Defence Ministry nor Foreign Affairs Ministry responded to requests for comment.

China has built ‘prototype’ nuclear reactor for carrier

AP, BANGKOK

Tue, Nov 12, 2024 

China has built a land-based prototype nuclear reactor for a large surface warship, in the clearest sign yet Beijing is advancing toward producing the nation’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, according to a new analysis of satellite imagery and Chinese government documents provided to The Associated Press.

There have long been rumors that China is planning to build a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, but the research by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California is the first to confirm it is working on a nuclear-powered propulsion system for a carrier-sized surface warship.


A photo released by Xinhua news agency shows China’s third conventionally powered aircraft carrier, the Fujian, in a maiden sea trial on May 7.

Photo: AP

Why is China’s pursuit of nuclear-powered carriers significant?

China’s navy is already the world’s largest numerically, and it has been rapidly modernizing. Adding nuclear-powered carriers to its fleet would be a major step in realizing its ambitions for a true “blue-water” force capable of operating around the globe in a growing challenge to the US.

Nuclear carriers take longer to build than conventional carriers, but once in operation they are able to stay at sea for much longer because they do not need to refuel, and there is more room on board for fuel and weapons for aircraft, thus extending their capabilities. They are also able to produce more power to run advanced systems.

Right now, only the US and France have nuclear-powered carriers. The US has 11 in total, which allows it to keep multiple strike groups deployed around the world at all times, including in the Indo-Pacific. However, the Pentagon is growingly increasingly concerned about China’s rapid modernization of its fleet, including the design and construction of new carriers.

China has three carriers, including the new Type 003 Fujian, which was the first both designed and built by China. It has said work is under way on a fourth, but it has not announced whether that would be nuclear or conventionally powered.

The modernization aligns with China’s “growing emphasis on the maritime domain and increasing demands” for its navy “to operate at greater distances from mainland China,” the US Department of Defense said in its most recent report to Congress on China’s military.

How did researchers conclude China has built a prototype reactor for a carrier?

Middlebury researchers were initially investigating a mountain site outside the city of Leshan in the southwest Chinese province of Sichuan over suspicions that China was building a reactor to produce plutonium or tritium for weapons. Instead, they said they determined that China was building a prototype reactor for a large warship.

The conclusion was based on a wide variety of sources, including satellite images, project tenders, personnel files and environmental impact studies.

The reactor is housed in a new facility built at the site known as Base 909, which is under the control of the Nuclear Power Institute of China.

Documents indicating that China’s 701 Institute, which is responsible for aircraft carrier development, procured reactor equipment “intended for installation on a large surface warship,” as well as the project’s “national defense designation” helped lead to the conclusion the sizeable reactor is a prototype for a next-generation aircraft carrier.

What does China say?

Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has tasked defense officials with building a “first-class” navy and becoming a maritime power as part of his blueprint for the country’s great rejuvenation.

China’s most recent white paper on national defense, dated 2019, said the Chinese navy was adjusting to strategic requirements by “speeding up the transition of its tasks from defense on the near seas to protection missions on the far seas.”

Sea trials had not even started for the new Fujian aircraft carrier in March when Yuan Huazhi (袁華智), political commissar for China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy, confirmed the construction of a fourth carrier.

Asked if it would be nuclear-powered, he said at the time that would “soon be announced,” but so far it has not been.

Neither the Chinese defense ministry nor its foreign ministry responded to requests for comment.

Even if the carrier that has been started is likely to another conventionally powered Type 003 ship, experts say Chinese shipyards have the capability to work on more than one carrier at a time, and that they could produce a new nuclear-powered vessel concurrently.

Why Sweden nixed new wind farms for fear of missing Russian missiles

By Linus Höller

DEFENSE NEWS
Nov 11, 2024

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen looks at wind turbines of the Middelgrunden offshore wind farm, in Oeresund between Denmark and Sweden, outside Copenhagen, on April 22, 2021. (Emil Helms/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images)

BERLIN — Sweden’s government this month blocked the construction of 13 offshore wind farms over concerns that they would shorten the country’s early-warning window for a Russian missile attack.

The decision marks another example in Europe of national security factors seeping into political decisions that were deemed civilian in nature before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.


In this case, the issue is about two dueling interests: sustainable-energy independence and surveillance of the national airspace. That is because wind farms can interact with radar signals, reducing the quality of the situational air picture or even outright blocking out parts of the sky.

“The reaction time in the event of a missile attack could go from 2 minutes to 60 seconds with wind farms in the way,” Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson wrote in a series of posts on X, formerly known as Twitter. They were accompanied by a schematic drawing of the wind farms casting a “shadow” behind them in which missiles and cruise missiles would stay undetected.

The perceived threat clearly comes from Russia, with Jonson pointing out that “the proximity to the heavily militarized” Russian exclave of Kaliningrad was “important in this context.”

Experts speaking to Defense News for this story said wind farm radar interference is a known issue. And some expressed concern that as more and more wind farms are built, the effects could get worse unless countermeasures are put in place.

“Radar interference can impede air traffic control, weather forecasting, homeland security, and national defense missions,” U.S. Department of Energy spokesperson wrote in an email to Defense News, while also stressing that “the vast majority of wind projects … pose no significant impacts to radar missions.”
Radar performance

There are a number of ways that wind turbines, and especially large groups of them, can mess with the readings from a radar system. For one, they can show up on the screen because, just like any other object, they bounce back the electromagnetic waves that radar relies on. The fact that they are moving – the blades are spinning, and the turbines can change orientation – can make it more difficult for analysts to filter out the noise and find actual threats in the skies.

With the wingtips rotating at a speed of up to 370 kilometers per hour (around 230 mph), they move fast enough for doppler radars to sense them as moving objects, resulting in a false positive on an operator’s screen.

Benjamin Karlson leads the Wind Turbine Radar Interference Mitigation program at the American Sandia National Laboratories. His team has tested various concepts at mitigating the problem, he said, but “there’s no silver bullet.” Radar-absorbent coating is expensive and leaves the problem of a blind spots; temporary shutoffs lead to losses for the operators of wind farms; and infill, or fallback, radars are but costly workarounds.

Governments and private companies have been aware of the issue for decades, with the topic first being presented to the U.S. Congress in 2006. Considerable research has occurred in both the U.S. and U.K.

In the United States, “the communication between the developers and the federal agencies has grown over the years,” said Karlson. The Department of Defense, Federal Aviation Administration, the country’s weather service NOAA and others all have a stake in approving new wind farm developments. Despite these hurdles, Karlson said he wasn’t aware of a single case where a wind farm proposal had to be denied outright, though adjusting the placement of individual turbines, or tweaking their dimensions, is a more common practice.

“Most potential conflicts are dealt with through minor and routine mitigation measures in the federal project evaluation process,” the Department of Energy said in a statement.


Radar systems vary greatly so what might work for one can be completely ineffective on another. Over-the-horizon radars, for example, might be especially affected by offshore wind farms. As the name suggests, these systems have a much greater range than other radars, which are generally limited to the line of sight of the antenna and so cannot see past the curvature of the earth.

The longer-range variants bounce their beams off the ionosphere layer of the atmosphere before the waves travel back close to the surface – where wind farms can get in the way and may completely block out the signal. “There is no way of mitigating that aside from not building turbines,” said Karlson.

In his announcement, the Swedish defense minister did not specify what radar systems’ signals the country was concerned about blocking, and Karlson said that there was not enough information to make an educated guess.

Additionally, “the wind farms could also lead to reduced intelligence-gathering capabilities and disrupt sensors used to detect submarines,” Jonson said in his announcement. Altogether, the construction would have “unacceptable consequences for Swedish security.”


“Clearly, the Swedish government thinks there is a big concern,” said Karlson.
Energy requirements

Simultaneously, wind energy presents a crucial pillar in the clean energy transition, a topic that has gained exceptional pertinence in a Europe starved for energy since the Russian war in Ukraine. Traditionally, Europe obtained a large part of its energy from Russia, which controls vast oil and gas reserves and over decades built a network of pipelines to European countries to sell its hydrocarbons at a competitive price. While the green-energy transition predates the war, it has been turbocharged by it: Russia has used its leverage over European energy supply as a leverage and a weapon in its hybrid warfare, while European leaders have rushed to ween their countries off of Russian gas and oil.

According to the Swedish Energy Agency, the “supply of electricity in Sweden is stable.” Simultaneously, however, the government agency warned that “Sweden will have rising electricity prices” as a direct result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The planned wind farms would have had the potential to contribute significantly to Sweden’s renewable energy production, with the rejected plans seeing turbines stretching all the way from the Åland Islands along the east coast down to Öresund.

While the government blocked the construction of the 13 proposed wind farms in the Baltic, it also greenlit the construction of the “Poseidon” wind farm off the country’s western – NATO-facing – coast, with a maximum of 81 turbines producing up to 5.5 terawatt hours per year.

Sweden’s government has committed itself to double the country’s annual electricity production in the next twenty years, in anticipation of higher consumption. A buildup of the country’s nuclear power capacity is supposed to bear the brunt of this burden, though critics have pointed out that demand is expected to increase faster than new power reactors can go online.

Similar trade-offs between wind farm construction and radar visibility have had to be made in other European countries. The British and French ministries of Defense have objected to developments over similar concerns, and various other government agencies across the continent have issued guidelines for distances that should be maintained between wind farms and different types of radar stations.

Both energy independence and climate change have increasingly entered the realm of national security in national government across Europe and the world, with leaders seeing them as integral parts of their countries’ defense and prosperity. The Swedish government’s decision points the spotlight on one dimension of this interaction that has, until now, flown under the radar.

 Linus Höller  is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. He covers international security and military developments across the continent. Linus holds a degree in journalism, political science and international studies, and is currently pursuing a master’s in nonproliferation and terrorism studies.

Sweden Rejects 13 Baltic Sea Wind Projects on Risks to Security Against Russia Threats

By Lars Paulsson and Niclas Rolander

November 04, 2024 

(Bloomberg) -- Sweden rejected 13 offshore wind projects in the Baltic Sea deemed to pose a risk to the nation’s ability to protect itself against attacks from Russia.

Offshore turbines could hamper the activity of submarines and delay the ability to react to any incoming missiles, Defense Minister Pal Jonson said at a news conference in Stockholm on Monday. The security situation in the Baltic Sea is “extremely sensitive,” he said.

Sweden’s concern about Russian aggression has heightened following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which prompted the Nordic nation to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alongside neighboring Finland. The Swedish Armed Forces have also vetoed onshore wind parks on security grounds.

“It’s a very unfortunate decision,” said Hillevi Priscar, who runs Swedish operations at OX2 AB, one of the developers that had several projects rejected. “We are convinced that it’s possible to take advantage of Sweden’s unique conditions for offshore wind while at the same time build a stronger defense,” she said by email.

The Baltic Sea is an ideal place for offshore wind, with good and even wind speeds and a shallow seabed. Other nations in close proximity to Russia, including Poland and Germany, are expanding offshore wind, with a constructive cooperation between the industry and armed forces, Priscar said.

Other firms with projects that were rejected include Germany’s energy giant RWE AG and Norway’s state-owned utility Statkraft AS.

“Statkraft remains committed to developing offshore wind in Sweden and we continue our work with development of the five Swedish projects in our portfolio that are outside the Baltic Sea,” said Jakob Norstrom, head of Statkraft Sverige.

Despite the good conditions for offshore wind, hardly any has been built. Vattenfall AB, Sweden’s biggest power producer, has halted the development of a large project and threatened to pause another off the west coast, saying that they don’t make financial sense if firms have to pay for connections to the grid themselves.

The rejected projects would have had a combined output of about 140 terawatt-hours, or almost the same as the nation’s current demand. While all of them wouldn’t have been built, it’s a huge blow to the nation’s future power supplies, as concerns mount of the prospects of its planned nuclear revival.

While Sweden needs to roughly double its power production in the next few decades to meet the demands of the electrification of the economy, safety is the most important, Jonson said, adding that “the interests of the Armed Forces must weigh extra heavily on any decisions taken.”

With wind farms hampering signals, Sweden would have much less time to respond to any attack, Jonson said.

“Early warning is crucial, both to be able to counteract ballistic missiles and cruise missiles,” Jonson said. “It’s also crucial for the population to be able to seek shelter in the event of an attack on Sweden.”

One project on the west coast, known as Poseidon, was approved by the government.

(Updates with comments from developers from fourth paragraph.)

©2024 Bloomberg L.P.

Opinion

The U.S. could soon face a threat ‘more powerful’ than nuclear weapons

Researchers around the globe are tinkering with viruses far deadlier than covid-19.


Monkeypox mutation, a variant of smallpox. (Getty Images/iStock)

By Ashish K. Jha, Matt Pottinger and Matthew McKnight

THE CONVERSATION
November 11, 2024

President Richard M. Nixon’s bold 1969 decision to renounce biological weapons and spearhead a treaty to ban them helped contain the threat of a man-made pandemic for half a century.

But our inheritance from Nixon is now fading. And in this age of synthetic biology, unless we act quickly to deter our adversaries from making and using bioweapons, we could face disaster in the near future.



The nightmare of a biological holocaust is far from fanciful. A recent Post investigation showcased Russia’s reopening and expansion of a military and laboratory complex outside Moscow that was used during the Cold War to weaponize viruses that cause smallpox, Ebola and other diseases. In China, senior military officers have been writing for years about the potential benefits of offensive biological warfare. One prominent colonel termed it a “more powerful and more civilized” method of mass killing than nuclear weapons. An authoritative People’s Liberation Army textbook discusses the potential for “specific ethnic genetic attacks.”





At the same time, breakthroughs in gene-editing technology and artificial intelligence have made the manipulation and production of deadly viruses and bacteria easier than ever, for state and non-state actors alike. The 2019 outbreak of covid-19 in Wuhan, China, which might have involved an accidental leak of an artificially enhanced coronavirus, offers a sense of the stakes: Some 27 million people have died as a direct or indirect result of that virus. And researchers around the globe — civilian and military — are tinkering with viruses far deadlier than that one.
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The question is: How do we achieve bioweapons deterrence?



Treaties and conventions alone cannot solve this problem. Nor are nuclear deterrence models quite up to the task. The prospect of mutually assured destruction is unlikely to inhibit death-obsessed terrorists who have a better shot at acquiring bioweapons than nuclear weapons. Dictatorships might be tempted to unleash a bioweapon if they are confident the nations they target would struggle to pinpoint the source of the attack — and if the attackers believe they can do more damage to their enemies than to their own population. They might, for example, covertly vaccinate their people before launching an attack. Or they might succeed in developing pathogens capable of disproportionately affecting specific ethnic groups, as envisioned by Chinese generals.





The Cold War nonetheless offers useful lessons for democracies that have chosen to forgo bioweapons. Foremost is the importance of superior intelligence gathering and analysis. For deterrence to work, Washington and its allies must have a robust, pervasive system for tracking and, where possible, eliminating highly dangerous research around the world. This surveillance system must also harness cutting-edge technologies to quickly detect newly emergent pathogens, gauge their threat level and reliably pinpoint their source — whether natural or engineered.

Our current antiquated warning system depends heavily on foreign governments alerting U.S. health officials after cases of an unusual illness have begun to appear in clinics and hospitals. By then, it is sometimes too late to head off an epidemic, even where governments are competent, conscientious and transparent. Where governments are malign, callous and opaque, the results can be far worse. China, for example, deliberately concealed from other governments and the World Health Organization that covid-19 was highly transmissible, even by asymptomatic patients. Beijing also blocked all serious efforts to investigate the origin of the novel coronavirus.

This is why biological surveillance, detection and attribution must become a core national security function, and not merely a public health activity, of the United States and friendly nations. Congress, working in consultation with the Defense Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, should immediately establish and fund a new intelligence discipline: biological intelligence, or BIOINT, to mobilize allied governments and private companies to detect and assess high-risk scientific research and incipient biological threats.

The history of the U.S. nuclear forensics program provides a rough template. Fearing Nazi Germany’s potential to develop an atomic weapon, scientists affiliated with the Manhattan Project arranged in 1943 for the United States to scoop up German air and water samples to test whether that country was operating a nuclear reactor. A Cold War successor program equipped U.S. aircraft to sniff out radioactive particles over the Pacific Ocean, providing Washington with hard evidence that the Soviets had tested their first atomic bomb in 1949.

Nuclear intelligence, or NUCINT (a term that eventually gave way to a broader discipline called “measurement and signature intelligence,” or MASINT), was further refined to forensically discern the origin of nuclear materials used in bombs. The United States and its allies compiled databases of radiochemical and environmental signatures unique to individual uranium mines and processing facilities. The idea was to deter the covert sale of nuclear weapons by demonstrating that Washington could credibly trace the origin of a weapon even after detonation.

Similar experimental projects are underway today in the realm of biology. The United States has funded pilot programs to conduct environmental sampling and genetic testing of air and wastewater from laboratories, ships, military bases, embassies and key transportation hubs such as airports in several countries. (Full disclosure: Matthew McKnight, a writer on this op-ed, works at Ginkgo Bioworks, which has U.S. government contracts to conduct some of this work.) When combined with anonymized data from hospitals and pharmacies, a biological mosaic begins to emerge, providing analysts with a baseline of “normalcy” against which new biothreats can be quickly detected.

Techniques of molecular forensics mean a newly detected pathogen can also be sequenced and analyzed to determine whether it occurred naturally or through the machinations of scientists. As data libraries grow and AI models improve, analysts will become far less likely to be stumped by the origins of a new disease such as covid-19.

The main impediment to expanding and improving nascent U.S. BIOINT efforts isn’t technology but resolve. Congress recently watered down the Biden administration’s latest budget request for pandemic prevention. The “biosurveillance” network prescribed by the Pentagon’s 2023 Biodefense Posture Review also remains underfunded.

To be sure, effective BIOINT won’t by itself deter our adversaries. The United States must also show that it has the will to impose steep costs on those that pursue, much less employ, bioweapons. We must also learn how to respond to pandemics with vastly greater speed and dexterity than during the coronavirus pandemic. We must improve on the success of Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership that delivered coronavirus vaccines in record time, and replicate that model to mass-produce rapid tests, protective equipment and therapeutics quickly enough to mitigate the death and disruption that could be caused by a biological attack.

Yet these elements of deterrence won’t work unless they are underpinned first by world-class BIOINT. By proactively investing in robust biosurveillance, attribution capabilities and rapid countermeasure development, Washington and its allies can safeguard the promise of the life sciences revolution and ensure that biotechnology remains a force for good, not a new frontier of global catastrophe.

Ashish K. Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, was a White House covid-19 response coordinator in the Biden administration. Matt Pottinger, deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration, is chief executive of the geopolitical research firm Garnaut Global. Matthew McKnight is the head of biosecurity at Ginkgo Bioworks and a Belfer Center fellow at Harvard Kennedy School.

French pilots' union calls for strike over 

tax hike on flight tickets

Ben McPartland - ben@thelocal.com
Published: 11 Nov, 2024

France's national union of airline pilots (SNPL) has called for a strike on Thursday, November 14th to protest against a government plan to triple taxes on flights as part of its need to plug a hole in state finances.

The union has also called for a demonstration outside parliament.

The strike notice, concerns pilots for national carrier Air France as well as other carriers with pilots on French labour contracts.

On Monday it was not clear what disruption the strike would have on flights on Thursday. More information should be available by Wednesday.

A spokesperson for the SNPL said the strike was to protest "against the government's desire to raise an additional billion per year from the aviation sector."

The union is angry at the government's plan to increase the solidarity tax on airline tickets which was included in the 2025 budget.

The SNPL spokesperson said the tax will see a three-fold increase that was being put through "without consultation of stakeholders in the sector having taken place".

The solidarity tax is paid directly by the passenger, and is added on to the cost of their ticket - it is currently set at just under €3 per economy class ticket and €18 per first class ticket.

But under the new budget the tax will increase per passenger for a normal economy class ticket to €9.50 for a destination in Europe, €15 for flights to intermediate destinations, and will cost €40 for long-distant destinations.

There will be steeper increases for first class tickets and private jets. The cost of a business class ticket from Paris to New York would increase by €120, under plans voted through by MPs last week.

Flights to France's overseas territories and Corsica won't be included under the planned tax hike.

The SNPL pilots union believes the tax increase will ultimately lead to thousands of job losses in France.

"This social disaster will go hand in hand with the weakening of French operators or those operating regularly in France compared to their European and international competitors," said the union.

On Sunday, France's Transport Minister François Durovray defended this tax increase telling France Info that the benefits of the tax increase were two-fold.

"This tax has both the virtue of contributing to the restoration of state accounts, but there is also an environmental aim," he said referring to the huge carbon emissions from flights.

He believes this tax could encourage airlines "to put more sustainable fuel in planes".

Raising the levy, particularly for long-haul flights, is supposed to generate additional revenue of €1 billion.

But the final budget that will go into law is still subject to haggling and given Prime Minister Michel Barnier does not have a majority in parliament it is unclear if the levy will be part of the final text.

The myth that carbon dioxide can save us is not just an Alberta thing

By

• Adrienne Tanner
•  
• 
  

• Opinion

November 11th 2024

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith speaks at a Carbon Capture Canada conference in Sept., 2024. Photo from Danielle Smith's official Facebook page

Only in Alberta. That was the refrain when my colleague Natasha Bulowski broke the story that Alberta’s ruling party was considering striking carbon dioxide from the list of planet-heating pollutants and instead, embracing the gas as a "foundational nutrient for all life on Earth.”

Those types of broad-brush remarks about our fellow Canadians are unfair, of course. There are a good many people in my home province who wouldn’t buy into this line of thought for a second. However, Alberta is the powerhouse producer of oil and gas in Canada, and politically deserves its bad rap for thwarting efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Its premier, Danielle Smith, is an unabashed fossil fuel booster, who lashes out at absolutely anything that would make life more difficult for corporations mining the oil sands and fracking for gas.

She throws around threats of lawsuits against federal climate policy like a major league pitcher. Days before her leadership review, Alberta filed suit against the federal carbon pricing system, on grounds it was being unfairly applied across the country — pointing to the tax carveout on home heating oil in the Atlantic provinces. 

This week, Smith threatened another court challenge, this one against the proposed federal oil and gas emissions cap, claiming it encroaches on provincial jurisdiction and threatens to lead the country “into economic and societal decline.”

And of course there are the roadblocks the Smith government has thrown up to thwart Alberta’s thriving renewable energy sector, designed to ensure fossil fuel companies maintain their edge. 

But even against this backdrop, the CO2 love-fest motion by the United Conservative Party (UCP) seemed beyond the pale. But lo and behold, it passed. An overwhelming majority of UCP members voted last weekend to ditch the province’s emissions reduction targets and recognize carbon dioxide as “a foundational nutrient for all life on earth.” 

That put Smith in a bit of a quandary. She couldn’t wholeheartedly promise to back the resolution; giving up on emissions reductions all together would rob the giant oilsands companies of huge amounts of money they want for their carbon capture projects and place them at a disadvantage internationally, where carbon intensity is starting to matter.

Smith tiptoed through that dilemma by saying she would honour the spirit but not the text of her party’s resolution and promised to continue support for the oil and gas industry’s commitment to reach net-zero by 2050. 

All of this made us at Canada’s National Observer wonder where the motion came from in the first place. To be sure, some carbon dioxide is a foundational part of life on our planet; plants need it to grow. All animals exhale it when they breathe. Of course, just like coffee that eventually gives you the shakes, there is a limit to how much carbon dioxide is good for the planet. 

Only in Alberta, you say? Not really. The CO2 as a life giving force myth has been around a long time. #emissions #CO2 #carbon #climate #abpoli

The Alberta motion ignores entirely the fact we are well past the threshold. Carbon dioxide, produced when humans burn fossil fuels, and other greenhouse gases like methane, act like a blanket that traps more and more of the heat around the planet. As the planet warms, more energy is added to the atmosphere, creating more violent storms, less predictable weather patterns, drying forests and rising sea levels. The hurricanes, floods and forest fires tell you all you need to know about how far past optimum levels we have already gone.

Turns out the disinformation spreaders, who designed the pro-CO2 slogans and urged us to forget the facts, were from a front group for a coalition of American coal producers. They first blasted out the argument in 1997 to prevent climate policies curtailing coal. It has been in circulation ever since, used as a rallying cry by fossil fuel boosters, climate deniers, online conspiracy theorists, and now, sadly, some Canadian political parties. The same myth was propagated by at least two Conservative Party of B.C. candidates during the recent provincial election.

It all goes to show how persistent disinformation in the service of the fossil fuel industry can be, and how eager those who stand to profit from the economic status quo are to continue its spread. In this case, it is the political parties lacking foresight who are to blame. 

So, no, it’s not only in Alberta. The UCP is just the latest one to jump on this bandwagon. 

 SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for CCS

NATONAL OBSERVER

November 11th 2024

Adrienne Tanner

Editor-in-Chief

@AdrienneTanner