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Friday, February 18, 2022

Canada's Trans Mountain says pipeline expansion cost surges to C$21.4 billion

Steel pipe to be used in the oil pipeline construction of the Canadian government’s Trans Mountain Expansion Project lies at a stockpile site in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada June 18, 2019. REUTERS/Dennis Owen

CALGARY, Alberta, Feb 18 (Reuters) - The cost of the Canadian government-owned Trans Mountain pipeline expansion has increased by 70% to C$21.4 billion ($16.79 billion) due to the impact of COVID-19 and extreme weather in British Columbia, Trans Mountain Corp said on Friday.

The company said it expects to finish the expansion in the third quarter of 2023, nine months later than previously scheduled. The previous cost estimate, made in February 2020, was C$12.6 billion.

Once completed, the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) will nearly triple the capacity of an existing oil pipeline running from Alberta to the Pacific Coast to 890,000 barrels per day.

But since its conception the project has been beset by regulatory delays and fierce opposition from indigenous peoples and environmentalists. In 2018 the Canadian government bought it to help ensure it gets finished.

"I want to assure Canadians that there will be no additional public money invested in Trans Mountain Corp," Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said following the company's announcement.

Freeland said Trans Mountain Corp will instead secure the necessary funding with third-party financing, with public debt markets or financial institutions.

The government has engaged BMO Capital Markets and TD Securities to provide financial advice.

"Their analyses confirm that public financing for the project is a feasible option that can be implemented swiftly. They have also confirmed that the project remains commercially viable," Freeland added.

Freeland reiterated that the Canadian government did not plan to be the long-term owner of the pipeline, and would launch a sale process in due course.

Trans Mountain said Chief Executive Ian Anderson will retire from the company and its board, effective April 1.

The company blamed the delays and increased costs on the COVID-19 pandemic and devastating flooding in British Columbia in November that washed out roads across the south of the province and temporarily shut down the existing pipeline.

"The progress we have made over the past two years is remarkable when you consider the unforeseen challenges we have faced including the global pandemic, wildfires and flooding," Anderson said in a statement.

BREAKING: Federal government ceases funding to the Trans Mountain pipeline

350.ORG

This morning we received some huge news.

First, the government-owned Trans Mountain corporation issued a press release announcing that the cost of the project had nearly doubled from $12.6 billion to $21.4 billion.1 Within minutes, the federal government announced that it would cease any further funding to the publicly owned Trans Mountain pipeline project.2

This is a huge moment and it’s all thanks to you! You were part of a mass-movement of people that challenged this climate-wrecking project from Day 1.

Now, this is our chance to finally put an end to Trans Mountain once and for all. Send a message to Trudeau right now and tell him to cancel this pipeline once and for all.

Trans Mountain never made any sense to build during a climate crisis. Now, after a year where the pipeline was delayed by climate-fueled fires, heat, floods and landslides, the government is finally suspending public funding to this project.

The opportunity to cancel this climate-wrecking pipeline has never been clearer.

Since it was first proposed, the Trans Mountain pipeline has been opposed by a massive, national, Indigenous-led movement that has fought the project on the streets, in the courts, and on the frontlines. Ever since the Trudeau government stepped into purchase the project from Texas oil giant Kinder Morgan, people like you have spoken up to demand transparency around the true cost of Trans Mountain and immediate action to defund the project.

Without our pressure, today’s massive win would not have been possible: federal funding to Trans Mountain has been suspended. Let that sink in.

This victory has shown us what we can accomplish when we act together but we can’t stop now. We need immediate action in support of a just transition. Will you take action to demand that the Trudeau government deliver the Just Transition act they have promised us for years?

The Starbucks Union Drive Is Spreading With Impressive Speed

BY ALEX N. PRESS

JACOBIN

In just the last two months, workers at more than 50 Starbucks locations across 19 states have filed for union elections. The movement is being driven by rank-and-file workers and so far has brushed aside organizing challenges and management fearmongering.

A Chicago Starbucks became the first in the Midwest to request union certification. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

On December 9, 2021, workers at a Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, voted to unionize in an NLRB election. In doing so, they became the first of the company’s nearly nine thousand corporate-owned stores across the United States to go union (one additional Buffalo Starbucks union has since been certified; a third Buffalo store narrowly voted against unionization). In a development out of former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s nightmares, their decision inspired thousands of their colleagues, with the movement spreading like wildfire.

Fifty-four stores in nineteen states have now filed for NLRB elections. One location in Mesa, Arizona, just finished voting, with ballots set to be counted on February 16, despite Starbucks’ appeal to block the vote, with the company arguing, as it unsuccessfully did in New York, that a single store is not an appropriate bargaining unit.

The number of unionizing Starbucks locations is ticking up so quickly that it may well have changed by the time you’re reading this article. On the final day of January alone, Workers United, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate that is organizing the Starbucks campaign, announced fifteen new NLRB filings. On that same date, contract negotiations began at the first unionized Buffalo location.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the campaign’s speed thus far. Each Starbucks location employs a small number of workers (around thirty) and, had the victory remained isolated to one or two stores, the company could have closed those stores or otherwise stalled and derailed the bargaining process until the union deteriorated. Many unions in the United States never win a first contract, and plenty of restaurant and café owners prefer to shutter their locations entirely rather than cede the slightest ground to workers. Instead, Starbucks workers spread the organizing drive so quickly that it has become impossible for the company to send high-level managers to every location to dissuade workers. That means the company must rely on lower-level managers to be its shock troops, a role that some of them have objected to so strenuously that they have chosen to quit rather than wage a war they do not believe in.

The fanfare attending the campaign’s momentum also means Starbucks can’t dig in its heels without risking a major reputational hit. Starbucks markets itself as a liberal company — no matter that this has little relation to its actual practices along the supply chain, from slave labor on coffee plantations linked to the company to its low pay and stringent control over baristas’ duties. And it has drawn on downwardly mobile and highly educated millennials to staff its stores — the very class fraction moving to the left in recent years, as Bernie Sanders supporters and Democratic Socialist of America members, and now as organizers of the union drive. Live by the progressive image, and die by it.

Rather than negotiate a top-down brokered agreement, the sectoral bargaining that has been a goal of other low-wage service sector organizing campaigns such as the Fight for $15, the Starbucks union drive is going through the constricting NLRB election process: store by store, one at a time, but with a momentum that could ultimately set a national pattern.

The union drive sweeping Starbucks goes much of the way to explain why corporations fight the earliest hints of organizing with what can seem like an inordinate amount of firepower. This is what employers fear: workers coming up with an idea of their own and running with it, uncowed by long odds or management’s threats.

At Starbucks, this meant an aggressive anti-union campaign, with frequent captive-audience meetings, high-level executives rerouted to Buffalo to generally menace workers, and, eventually, Schultz himself coming to town to give one of history’s weirdest anti-union speeches. But in this heavy-handed response, Starbucks is not alone. When workers at a single Dollar General store voted four to two to unionize in 2017, the company shut down the location. The story of Amazon’s anti-union campaign in Bessemer, Alabama, is by now well known.

There are many more stores to go, and the battle for a contract has only just begun. To win the fight will take the collective resources of the labor movement, a recognition that it is in the interest of not only every union but every worker that the campaign succeeds. The food service sector in the United States is particularly resistant to unionization, with exceedingly high turnover making it hard to build momentum. But so long as these jobs are nonunion, the wages and working conditions will never be livable: the model is predicated on an endlessly renewable supply of labor from which employers can draw as locations churn through workers.

Despite those obstacles, Starbucks workers have gotten their feet under them. Whether they can keep it up is a question for all of us. So far, support has been significant: labor leaders are publicly cheering the campaign, and workers say the communities in which the stores are located have their back, too. Indeed, just this week a friend sent me a photo taken outside one of the unionizing Starbucks in Chicago: management was subjecting workers to a captive-audience meeting, so supporters picketed the location, holding pro-union signs visible to baristas through the store’s windows, a reminder that while workers may be compelled to hear managers’ fearmongering, they need not be cowed by it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Vox, the Nation, and n+1, among other places.

'The Informal Colonialism of Egyptology: From the French Expedition to the Security State', in: Marc Woons and Sebastian Weier (eds.), Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics, Bristol: E-International Relations Publishing 2017, pp. 182-202.

Christian Langer

2017, Marc Woons & Sebastian Weier (eds.). Borders, Borderthinking, Borderlands: Developing a Critical Epistemology of Global Politics

2023 ViewsPaperRank: 5.9241 Pages

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Location: Bristol

More Info: pp. 182-202

Publisher: E-International Relations Publishing

Publication Date: Jun 1, 2017

Publication Name: Marc Woons & Sebastian Weier (eds.). Borders, Borderthinking, Borderlands: Developing a Critical Epistemology of Global Politics

Theories of Resistance: Anarchism, Geography and the Spirit of Revolt

Simon Springer

Richard J White

6115 ViewsPaperRank: 7.0269 Pages

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Space is never a neutral ‘stage’ on which social actors play their roles, sometimes cooperating with each other, sometimes struggling against each other. Space is a product of interrelations, and is always under construction. Its co-constitutive role in the development of social relations is multiple and complex: a reference for identity-building and re-building; a material condition for existence and survival; a symbol and instrument of power. However, as much as space has been made instrumental for the purposes of heteronomy (from class exploitation to gender oppression to racial segregation), space (spatial re-organisation, spatial practices and spatial resources) is also a basic condition for human emancipation, i.e. for autonomy and freedom. Recognising the way space has been used for resistance, especially in those more specifically left-libertarian contexts (from the early anarchist organising efforts in the 19th century, to the Paris Commune, to the early kibbutzim, to the makhnovitchina in Ukraine, to the socio-spatial revolution during the Spanish Civil War, to the contemporary re-birth of left-libertarian and sometimes specifically anarchist praxis among social movements such as Mexican Zapatistas) is important. Here, a greater understanding of space can teach a great deal about both limits and potentialities, particularly in relation to the possibilities and tasks of re-purposing and re-structuring the built environment, changing images of place, and overcoming old and new boundaries of all sorts.

The militant media of Neo-Nazi enviromentalism

(in: The Environment in the Age of the Internet, Heike Graf ed., Cambridge 2016)

Steffen Werther

150 ViewsPaperRank: 1.638 Pages

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German Studies,

Environmental History,

Community Ecology,

Nationalism,

Ecology

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The idea of an ecologist neo-Nazi seems, at first, ridiculous. Is one to imagine skinheads biking, in formation, bringing their milk-cartons to recycling centers? Well, no, not exactly: but many neo-Nazi parties have an environmentalist side to their party platforms. Neo-Nazi politicians espouse many standard environmentalist planks; neo-Nazi websites condemn pollution; neo-Nazi youth spend time cleaning parks. Indeed, environmentalism and militant xenophobia seem oddly compatible. In this article, we will look at how neo-Nazi websites and print media wed the slogans, symbols, visuals and narratives of the radical patriot to those of the Heimat-loving environmentalist, resulting in a surprisingly coherent media frame.

Nature, the Volk, and the Heimat - Narratives and Practices of the Far-Right Ecologist, in: Baltic Worlds, 2013, Vol. VI:2.

Steffen Werther

Madeleine Hurd

53 Views7 Pages

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German Studies,

Environmental Studies,

Right-Wing Extremism,

Extreme and Far Right

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THE DEEP GREEN DELUSION:

Vitalism and Communal Autarky

DrChris A James

329 Views123 Pages

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Environmental Philosophy

A treatise on the contradictions in the environment movement, in particular deep green ecology.

https://www.academia.edu/36891699/THE_DEEP_GREEN_DELUSION_Vitalism_and_Communal_Autarky

Contents:

THE EMERGENCE OF DEPOLITICIZED GROUPS.

POST-MATERIAL ACTIVISM.

E.F.SCHUMACHER AND ENVIRONMENTCAPITALISM.

THE IMAGINED TRANSITION.

LIVING BY DEFAULT.

RETREAT FROM PROTEST.

THE APOCALYPTIC DISCOURSE.

THE ANTHROPOSOPHY OF RUDOLF STEINER.

COROLLARY.BIBLIOGRAPHYINDEX.

The Deep Green Delusion: Vitalism and Communal Autarky.

Since we can’t stop poor people from breeding, let’s build fences to keep them out. And let’s ask the world’s biggest polluters to pay for the fences

[David Attenborough]1

Introduction.

I have been in the social movements since the 1960s. I was still in school when I attended my first mass rally in London. I have been an environmental activist since the 1970s, but after so many years I have had to rethink my commitment, not because I have ceased caring for nature, but because I believe nature has become a euphemism for the re-enchantment of the world as myth and mystery, a tendency that has its roots in anti-Enlightenment Romanticism and the minority traditions.

I contend therefore that the deep green ecology thatches risen as a solution to fast capitalism, over-consumption and climate change, is a delusion. I argue that mainstream environmentalism has failed so it has been usurped by a more radical and discursive deep ecology movement; currently the fastest growing green movement across the western world. However, I contend that deep ecology is much more than a niche environmental formula; it is secular theology with connections to mysticism and the pessimistic philosophies, biological determinism and anti-humanism. I argue that the world needs growth and it needs environmental protections, it does not need cults and superstitions. There is nothing to be gained by a return to the wilderness except misery and an intense struggle for survival. Further, I argue that primitive localization coupled with pessimism and social biology would reduce the world’s food supply which could cost the lives of millions of people, especially in the underdeveloped world.

Indeed, deep ecology combined with archaic mysticism running alongside the authoritarian state has a dark history; there are always problems in creating states with states.

1 UK Guardian [2012] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jan/18/david-attenborough-big-business. Retrieved 22nd January 2012.

Geopower. On the States of Nature of Late Capitalism

Federico Luisetti

2019, European Journal of Social Theory

2307 ViewsPaperRank: 1.122 Pages

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The article argues that environmental planetary discourses have coalesced into the Anthropocene crisis narrative and reformulated the state of nature apparatus of Western political theory. The Anthropocene, as an ecological state of nature of late capitalism, casts light on the logics of geopower, which assembles species thinking, a fascination with nonlife and sovereignty, and the imaginary of extinction and mutation. Geopower shifts governmental technologies from human populations and their ‘milieu’ to nonhuman species, energy flows and ecosystems, from political economy and biopower to Earth science and systems ecology. This configuration of power suggests a shift in the neoliberal agenda and imposes the Earth as a political personage, generating threatening political myths and figures of chaos and sovereignty, such as Gaia, Chthulu and Climate Leviathans.

Gaia, Goddess of the Anthropocene?

Federico Luisetti

458 ViewsPaperRank: 2.23 Pages

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Feminist Theory,

Social Contract Theory,

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As one of the figures of the emerging states of nature, a symptom of the preoccupations of neocolonial and decolonial political animisms, Gaia confronts Western political philosophy, political theology, and political ecology. She is not the sovereign of the Anthropocene but the goddess of an age that is still searching for its rituals and shamans, it constitutions and insurrections.

Demons of the Anthropocene. Facing Bruno Latour’s Gaia

Federico Luisetti

1037 Views20 Pages

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As proposed in 2012 by the 3th International Geological Congress, the Anthropocene is the geological epoch of the Quaternary Period following the Holocene, the age that accounts for the transformation of humans into a force shaping the Earth, and of human actions into a geological phenomenon. Current debates on the Anthropocene are introducing new figures of impersonality, modes of political agency that are shaking the certainties of modern political philosophy. A key protagonist of this epistemic turn is Gaia, the Earth, the Greek Mother of most Western gods. Borrowing from James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis and addressing the Earth beyond the organisms/environments, humans/nonhumans divide, Bruno Latour has turned Lovelock’s planetary vitalism into the cornerstone of a new state of nature. Latour’s Gaia is a philosophical demon replacing Hobbes’s Leviathan and introducing a new political theology of nature. As in Roberto Esposito’s biopolitical naturalism, Gaia’s archaic relations with things and bodies suggest a return of animist and totemist paradigms and confront political philosophy with unprecedented questions.