UK secretly helping Canada push its oil sands project

The UK government has been giving secret support at the very highest levels to Canada's campaign against European penalties on its highly polluting tar sands fuel, the Guardian can reveal.

At the same time, the UK government was being lobbied by Shell and BP, which both have major tar sands projects in Alberta, and opened a new consulate in the province to "support British commercial interests".

At least 15 high-level meetings and frequent communications have taken place since September, with David Cameron discussing the issue with his counterpart Stephen Harper during his visit to Canada, and stating privately that the UK wanted "to work with Canada on finding a way forward", according to documents released under freedom of information laws.

Charles Hendry, the energy minister, later told the Canadian high commissioner: "We would value continued discussion with you on how we can progress discussions in Brussels," with Hendry's official asking the Canadians if they had "any suggestions as to what we might do, given the politics in Brussels".

Canada's vast tar sands – also known as oil sands – are the second largest reserve of carbon in the world after Saudi Arabia, although the energy needed to extract oil from the ground means the process results in far more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil drilling, as well as causing the destruction of forests and air and water pollution.

Nasa scientist James Hansen says if the oil sands were exploited as projected it would be "game over for the climate".

The European proposal is to designate transport fuel from tar sands as resulting in 22% more greenhouse gas emissions than that from conventional fuels. This would make suppliers, who have to reduce the emissions from their fuels by 10% by 2020, very reluctant to include it in their fuel mix. It would also set an unwelcome precedent for Canada by officially labelling fuel from tar sands as dirtier.

The UK and Canada's shared opposition to the European plan puts the UK in a minority among EU countries and will be deeply embarrassing as a new round of global negotiations on tackling climate change begins in Durban, South Africa on Monday. Chris Huhne, the energy and climate change secretary, claimed on Thursday that the UK was showing "leadership" in the UN negotiations, while Canada's prime minister has blocked climate laws. The revelations are also the latest blow to Cameron's claim to be the "greenest government ever".

The vote to approve the European fuel quality regulations takes place on Friday. In advance of that, William Hague, the foreign secretary, has also given support to Canada, sending an "immediate action" cable in September to the UK's embassies there asking "to communicate our position and seek Canadian views on what might be acceptable".

However, the Department for Transport, in which the Liberal Democrat minister Norman Baker has responsibility for tar sands issues, has released only two presentations made to it by Shell, both heavily redacted. The DfT rejected requests to release at least six other relevant documents on the grounds of commercial confidentiality and adverse effect on international relations, as did the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), where Shell also met ministers.

BP has lobbied ministers, too. Its vice president in Europe, Peter Mather, has been, in his own words, "bending the ear" of Baker. Mather also sent a letter in which he wrote: "The regulatory burden would be considerable at a time when the industry is already creaking under the weight of a heavy regulatory regime."

John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said: "The scale of oil industry lobbying exposed in these documents is quite extraordinary. It's especially worrying that Baker held a secret meeting with Shell about this key European vote on tar sands. But worse still, he's now covering up what was discussed."

Colin Baines, toxic fuels campaign manager at the Co-operative, the UK mutual business group which targets tar sands as part of its climate change campaigning, said: "It is very disappointing that the UK government is supporting Canada's efforts and we hope it has a rethink and puts tackling climate change ahead of Canada's trade interests when it comes to vote on the European commission's commonsense proposal."

The documents were obtained by the Co-operative under environmental information regulations, a type of freedom of information law. They include letters to and from ministers, diplomatic correspondence and notes of meetings.

Baker said: "The government is staying true to its aspiration to be the greenest ever by seeking to secure the best deal it can for the environment from the discussions ongoing in the EU about the fuel quality directive.

"We believe that means tackling all highly polluting crudes equally, not simply oil sands from one particular country. These certainly represent a problem, but so do other crudes, and it makes no environmental sense to ignore these.

"This is not about protecting one particular country – we want to deal with all crudes, not just one type, and in a way that is based on robust and objective data, related to their carbon emissions."

Like Baker, Canada also argues in the newly revealed documents that it is unfair to single out one nation and that other types of oil can be as dirty as tar sands.

But Baines says these arguments are "myths", as the European proposal does not name any nation and on average fuel from tar sands is a greater source of carbon by a clear margin, according to a Stanford University study for the European commission.

Furthermore, the European commission proposal allows for changes in the emissions designated for fuel types.

Canadian ministers and diplomats state they support an "overarching ambition" to reduce carbon emissions. But Canada has admitted it will fail to meet its Kyoto protocol target of a 6% cut compared with 1990 levels: in 2009 its emissions were 34% higher.

In September, Lord Sassoon, the UK Treasury minister for commerce, spent two days in the Albertan capital Calgary, a few hundred miles from the vast oil sand pits excavated by 1,500-tonne diggers. The International Energy Agency expects production to treble in the next 20 years. Sassoon met politicians and oil executives to discuss boosting trade with the UK and told reporters that Alberta is "one of the main focuses of British business". Alberta's energy minister, Ron Liepert, told Sassoon privately he "was grateful for UK efforts" on the tar sands issue in Europe.

The new British consulate-general in Calgary was announced by Hague on 18 October, the same day as Canadian energy minister Joe Oliver said: "[The British] have been very, very helpful and we're pleased about that. Many European companies are heavily invested in the oil sands and they also would be concerned." The new documents and diplomatic sources suggest the Netherlands, Spain and Poland are among those backing the British-Canadian position.

In London, a senior Canadian diplomat, Sushma Gera, told BIS: "Canada will not hesitate to defend her interests," perhaps via a World Trade Organisation dispute, a possibility also raised by Shell in its presentation to DfT.

Bill McKibben, a leading US environmentalist, who was arrested in August protesting against a major oil sands pipeline called Keystone XL said: "The UK seems to have emerged as Canada's partner in crime, leaning on Brussels to let this crud across the borders. This will be among the biggest single environmental decisions the Cameron government makes."

Greenpeace's Sauven, along with the head of Friends of the Earth, Andy Atkins, and David Nussbaum, leader of WWF-UK, have written to Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister and Lib Dem leader.

The letter says: "We ask you to intervene personally on this, to ensure that your party's green ambitions are more effectively upheld across Whitehall."

Source http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/27/canada-oil-sands-uk-backing?newsfeed=true

Can the left stage a Tea Party?

Why hasn’t there been a Tea Party on the left? And can President Obama and the American left develop a functional relationship?

That those two questions are not asked very often is a sign of how much of the nation’s political energy has been monopolized by the right from the beginning of Obama’s term. This has skewed media coverage of almost every issue, created the impression that the president is far more liberal than he is, and turned the nation’s agenda away from progressive reform.

A quiet left has also been very bad for political moderates. The entire political agenda has shifted far to the right because the Tea Party and extremely conservative ideas have earned so much attention. The political center doesn’t stand a chance unless there is a fair fight between the right and the left.

It’s not surprising that Obama’s election unleashed a conservative backlash. Ironically, disillusionment with George W. Bush’s presidency had pushed Republican politics right, not left. Given the public’s negative verdict on Bush, conservatives shrewdly argued that his failures were caused by his lack of fealty to conservative doctrine. He was cast as a big spender (even if a large chunk of the largess went to Iraq). He was called too liberal on immigration and a big-government guy for bailing out the banks, using federal power to reform the schools and championing a Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Conservative funders realized that pumping up the Tea Party movement was the most efficient way to build opposition to Obama’s initiatives. And the media became infatuated with the Tea Party in the summer of 2009, covering its disruptions of congressional town halls with an enthusiasm not visible this summer when many Republicans faced tough questions from their more progressive constituents.

Obama’s victory, in the meantime, partly demobilized the left. With Democrats in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, stepped-up organizing didn’t seem quite so urgent.

The administration was complicit in this, viewing the left’s primary role as supporting whatever the president believed needed to be done. Dissent was discouraged as counterproductive.

This was not entirely foolish. Facing ferocious resistance from the right, Obama needed all the friends he could get. He feared that left-wing criticism would meld in the public mind with right-wing criticism and weaken him overall.

But the absence of a strong, organized left made it easier for conservatives to label Obama as a left-winger. His health-care reform is remarkably conservative — yes, it did build on the ideas implemented in Massachusetts that Mitt Romney once bragged about. It was nothing close to the single-payer plan the left always preferred. His stimulus proposal was too small, not too large. His new Wall Street regulations were a long way from a complete overhaul of American capitalism. Yet Republicans swept the 2010 elections because they painted Obama and the Democrats as being far to the left of their actual achievements.

This week, progressives will highlight a new effort to pursue the road not taken at a conference convened by the Campaign for America’s Future that opens Monday. It is a cooperative venture with a large number of other organizations, notably the American Dream Movement led by Van Jones, a former Obama administration official who wants to show the country what a truly progressive agenda around jobs, health care and equality would look like. Jones freely acknowledges that “we can learn many important lessons from the recent achievements of the libertarian, populist right” and says of the progressive left: “This is our ‘Tea Party’ moment — in a positive sense.” The anti-Wall Street demonstators seem to have that sense, too.

What’s been missing in the Obama presidency is the productive interaction with outside groups that Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed with the labor movement and Lyndon B. Johnson with the civil rights movement. Both pushed FDR and LBJ in more progressive directions while also lending them support against their conservative adversaries.

The question for the left now, says Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future, is whether progressives can “establish independence and momentum” while also being able “to make a strategic voting choice.” The idea is not to pretend that Obama is as progressive as his core supporters want him to be, but to rally support for him nonetheless as the man standing between the country and the right wing.

A real left could usefully instruct Americans as to just how moderate the president they elected in 2008 is — and how far to the right conservatives have strayed.

Source http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/can-the-left-stage-a-tea-party/2011/09/30/gIQA35GMGL_story.html

Obama again presses for a 'grand bargain' on debt ceiling

Buoyed by a new bipartisan proposal to raise the debt ceiling, President Obama continued to press congressional leaders Wednesday for a "grand bargain" that would reduce the federal deficit by nearly $4 trillion over 10 years.

Obama met separately at the White House with Democratic and Republican congressional leaders in an effort to break the impasse before Aug. 2, when the government is expected to run out of money to pay its bills if the ceiling remains at $14.3 trillion. It was not clear if the meetings produced any developments.

Hopes for a sweeping deal on the debt and federal deficits were revived by a proposal offered this week by the so-called Gang of Six senators who have been working all year on budget changes.

The plan would achieve nearly $4 trillion in deficit reduction in the next decade through spending cuts, entitlement reform and an overhaul of the tax code, which includes generating $1.2 trillion in new revenue.

Republican senators' interest in the plan appeared to crack part of the logjam over taxes that has stymied a broader deal. Before now, the GOP had refused to consider more tax revenue as a way of reducing deficits, preferring to rely on steep spending cuts alone — an approach Democrats reject.

But time is limited to achieve such a deal. The Treasury Department has said the government risks default next month, which would cause an economic upheaval and raise U.S. borrowing costs. The proposal from the six senators represents a framework that could take weeks to move through committees and Congress.

Obama has repeatedly said he would reject a debt ceiling increase that falls short of the $2.4 trillion the Treasury needs to pay the government's bills through 2012, arguing that the political environment would grow only more challenging with the coming election cycle.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that the president still adhered to that position. But for the first time, Carney seemed to leave the door open to a short-term deal to raise the debt ceiling if it would help achieve "something significant" in the way of a larger agreement.

Obama met late Wednesday with GOP leaders — House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the majority leader — and separately with congressional Democratic leaders.

During the meeting with Boehner and Cantor, the president reiterated his opposition to a short-term deal that Cantor and some Republicans have pursued. Obama also spelled out the terms under which he would consider a short-term arrangement, according to a Democratic official familiar with the talks who would describe them only on condition of anonymity.

Democratic leaders voiced support for a larger package, as long as it did not "balance the budget on the backs of seniors through cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries," according to a House aide, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly.

Liberals in the House have complained that the Gang of Six's outline would alter the federal safety net and entitlement programs.

Also on Wednesday, the Senate announced it was taking up the House-passed debt ceiling bill that Obama has said he would veto. That measure would substantially cut spending and cap future outlays.

It would allow the debt ceiling to be increased only after Congress also sends to the states for ratification a constitutional amendment that would require balanced budgets. A Senate vote is expected by Saturday, but the measure is not expected to pass.

Source http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-debt-white-house-20110721,0,6044288.story

Oops! Obama messes up his daughter’s age

They grow up so fast. But not that fast, Mr. President.

In a news conference Wednesday, President Barack Obama twice referred to his oldest daughter, Malia, as being 13 years old.

Not quite. She's 12.

Perhaps the president was already thinking ahead to Malia's approaching birthday: She turns 13 on July 4.

Obama spoke about both of his daughters as he characterized congressional Republicans as procrastinators who only get work done at the last minute. The president is prodding Republicans to reach a deal on raising the national debt limit before the government taps out its borrowing ability on the expected date of Aug. 2.

"You know, Malia and Sasha generally finish their homework a day ahead of time," Obama said. "Malia's 13, Sasha's 10."

Source http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/43585752

Obama signs disaster aid for tornado-hit Massachusetts

President Barack Obama on Wednesday signed a disaster declaration for the Massachusetts counties hit by June 1 tornadoes that killed three people and caused damage in the tens of millions of dollars.

The move frees up federal funding to residents and business owners in Hampden and Worcester counties and will help supplement state and local recovery and rebuilding efforts, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said.

Assistance includes grants for temporary housing and home repairs, low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses and unemployment payments for workers who temporarily lost jobs because of the disaster and do not qualify for state benefits, such as self-employed workers, it said.

Funds in the form of low-interest loans also are available to help cover losses from damage to homes, businesses, farms and ranches, cooperatives and other organizations, FEMA said.

The tally of damages from the tornadoes that ripped through western and central Massachusetts nearly two weeks ago was at least $90 million, the state Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation has said.

Source http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/15/usa-massachusetts-disaster-idUSN1511632920110615

Palin confident she could beat Obama

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was met by a gaggle of reporters outside of Philadelphia's Independence Hall Tuesday, on day three of her "One Nation" bus tour.

The question du jour: Will she or won't she run for president?

The would-be-candidate once again refused to "put a timetable" on when she will announce her decision, but when asked by CBS affiliate WKYW if she could beat President Obama, Palin replied, "To put it concisely - yes."

Palin also noted her belief that most of the Republicans in the field "have a very good chance" of beating the president, and specifically said she liked Texas Governor Rick Perry, who told reporters last week he was contemplating his own bid to unseat Obama.

"This isn't all about me; it's about the real change that our country needs, and not just me but other potential candidates and candidates declared," she said.

Reporters who have been following the bus tour have been given little guidance by Palin's team, and have accused Palin of being coy with the press.

Not so, Palin said, before visiting the Liberty Bell behind closed doors.

"It's not really an intention to play cat-and-mouse or to have you guys guessing or anything else. Really it's a genuine concern for our country, making sure we're highlighting the history of our country, learning our past so we see a straight way forward in these challenging times, and that's what our tour is all about," she explained.

Palin is expected to travel to New York City later today, where she is expected to meet with reality television host Donald Trump.

Source http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20067684-503544.html

Fox News Anchor Accidentally Announces President Obama's Death

Wow! Talk about a slip!

Check out this clip of a Fox News anchor giving us all the news that Osama bin Laden "President Obama is in fact dead."

OOPS! That's not something you want to announce on live television!

Was definitely just an accident, but we're sure this guy was just a LITTLE embarrassed after they went to commercial break.

Source  http://perezhilton.com/2011-05-02-fox-news-anchor-accidenta