I know, I know, it is super-fun to hate the National Rifle Association. They say a lot of stupid things that really tick people off, like saying the answer to school gun violence is armed guards in every school.

Then there’s their unofficial leader, the Nuge, who told NRA convention goers last year that he would be either dead or in jail if Obama won the next election. Well, a year later, Obama is in office and Ted Nuget was a headline at this year’s NRA convention held last weekend in Houston. I guess the Nuge was either on a day pass from jail or, come to think of it, likely a zombie, brought back from the dead by a wealthy NRA donor. Freeze dried maybe?

Regardless, the NRA is great at ticking people off and drawing a lot of attention through their over-the-top rhetoric. And every time you or I react, or the media, or politicians react, we fall right into the game the NRA is being paid to play.

The NRA takes in tens-of-millions a year from gun companies, and I can tell you, as someone known for their spindoctoring past, the gun companies are getting their money’s worth. Case in point, would be the Newtown tragedy, something that still brings a tear to my eye and I hope always will. After Newtown, was it gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson or Beretta, that was suggesting the answer to school massacres was more guns in the form of more armed security guards? Nope, it was the NRA.

Was it Sig Sauer up on the stage at the NRA national convention, telling the audience that “more gun laws are not the answer?” Nope it was NRA board member Ted Nugent.

The NRA is a sock puppet, saying the things that the gun companies could never say. Or, if you will, in military parlance, the NRA is the flak jacket, paid to take a bullet for their corporate sponsors.

Want to win the war on guns in America? Stop fighting the NRA and start holding the gun company’s feet to the fire.

Part of the Vince Bayou, where a Shell Oil pipeline reportedly spilled this week.

While clean up continues on the Exxon oil spill in Arkansas, another oil pipeline burst was detected over the weekend – this time in Houston, Texas.

The Shell Oil owned pipeline burst was detected Friday by the US National Response Center and has dumped an estimated 30,000 gallons of oil into a waterway connected to the Gulf of Mexico (as if it needed any more oil dumped into it!).

Operators of the Royal Dutch Shell subsidiary West Columbia pipeline, a 15 mile long, 16 inch diameter line, received warnings from the US National Response Center of a potential 700 barrel release (nearly 30,000 gallons) of crude oil on Friday, March 29.

Yesterday, representatives from the US Coast Guard acknowledged at least 50 barrels of oil had entered Vince Bayou, a waterway connected to the Gulf of Mexico.

So far this latest pipeline burst has received very little mainstream news coverage, likely because there has been so many spills lately (3 in the last week alone), that it is no longer considered “news.”

Of course, this all comes at a time that the Obama administration is under great pressure to make a final decision on the new Keystone XL pipeline that will complete a span of pipe from Alberta, Canada all the way to Texas. The Keystone pipeline will transport diluted bitumen (also known as dilbit or “junk crude”), the same type oil that spilled from a burst pipe last weekend in Mayflower, Arkansas.

Record heatwaves, droughts, bushfires, rainfall, coastal erosion can all be expected in Australia in the near-term, reports the country’s Climate Commission. According to this esteemed group of climate scientists, the increased extreme weather events are courtesy of man-made climate change.

I must admit what really stood out to me after reading the Climate Commission’s most comprehensive evaluation of climate change’s effects on Australia was the report’s use of the seemingly non-descript term energetic climate.

It’s not that the facts aren’t important. People need to know the number of record heat days has doubled since 1960; heavy rainfall is increasing globally, which led to Queensland experiencing record-breaking floods in 2010 and 2011; between 1997 and 2011 dam levels for Sydney and Melbourne dropped 40% causing serious water restrictions; between 1973 and 2010 the Forest Fire Danger Index increased significantly at 16 of Australia’s 38 weather stations with none reporting a decrease, a strong indicator of increased bushfires country-wide. Even more, all of these extreme weather events have cost the country billions of dollars.

Yes, the data presents a bleak picture, especially when the Commission states:

“There is a high risk that extreme weather events like heat waves, heavy rainfall, bushfires and cyclones will become even more intense in Australia over the coming decades.”

With concerted, strong action, we can gradually slow the effects of climate change that are growing in intensity, the group says. Yet, this is not a new story. For years, scientists across the world have come to the same conclusions. The only thing that seems to have changed is the urgency of their tone: we must act, now. This is what made the term energetic climate jump out for me.

It reframes climate change into a more accessible form for the public. It informs us that climate change is not just “global warming,” but actually encompasses much more. It is the over-arching way in which we describe the earth’s climate becoming exponentially more dynamic and active.

This activity shows up in many forms of extreme weather events not just warmer ones, but more pervasively: floods, hurricanes, cyclones, heavy rainfall, drought, cold snaps, and rising sea levels. The term climate change does not hold the same power. In order for climate action to take place, people must feel its effects in their own community and be able to see their relationship to similar events in different places. Then it becomes the shared story for everyone. Uncovering the facts is only part of the story; communicating and connecting them is the other. The facts have been laid out, study after study. Nevertheless, we still choose just to dip our toes into solving the problem.

And, in some cases, we move away from taking any action. Canada, my homeland, provides a remarkable example of climate ambivalence. After serving as a global example for environmental action, over the last decade, the Great White North has pulled a complete policy reversal.

The country has slowly morphed into a petro-state, eroding its environmental principles, including international agreements on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, along the way. Last week, Canada became the first nation to pull out of a United Nations convention to fight droughts across the world.

This comes just a year and half after the country walked away from the Kyoto Protocol, the most comprehensive global climate agreement to date. Every UN nation — 194 countries and the European Union — is currently part to this agreement. Canada is setting a shocking precedent of climate ambivalence at a time when strong leadership is what is needed the most.

All of us live in a world governed by a climate whose energy is becoming more dynamic and expressive by the year; if we really “got” that, I wonder if we’d stand for inaction or regressive actions such as Canada’s withdrawal from the UN drought convention?

The climate is becoming more energetic, while Canada looks to be taking some pretty strong sleeping pills.

Tar Sands protesters in Canada. Support for the pipeline and extraction of Tar Sands is dwindling in that country.

The Helmholtz Association of Research Centres, a major German scientific body with more than 30,000 researchers and US$4.4 billion in annual funding, has dropped out of a joint Alberta tar sands project over fears that the project was damaging the institution’s reputation.

In April 2011, the Province of Alberta invested $25 million to form the “Helmholtz-Alberta Initiative” that would study ways to deal with leakage from the toxic tailings ponds that are a by-product of tar sands mining operations. The HAI was also tasked with finding ways to upgrade the energy extracted from bitumen and lignite coal in order to reduce energy consumption, and a few other “sustainable solutions” to Canada’s ongoing environmental and energy challenges.

Speaking on behalf of the Helmholtz Association, Professor Frank Messner, told EU media that: 

“It was seen as a risk for our reputation.  As an environmental research centre we have an independent role as an honest broker and doing research in this constellation could have had reputational problems for us, especially after Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol.”

The Helmholtz Association has come under fire recently for their work on Alberta’s tar sands operations, most notably in 2012 when Germany’s Green Party (a very powerful political player) filed a query to the German government, asking why German taxpayers’ money was going into a project that contradicts Germany’s official climate policy agenda.

The response at the time from government was very evasive and concluded that the project had only just started and that it was too early to say anything more substantial.

This recent news is the latest in a string of stories about the Alberta tar sands and climate policy damaging Canada’s reputation abroad.

Earlier this year, former BC Premier Gordon Campbell, and current High Commissioner to the UK, stated in a meeting that Canada’s tar sands are  “a totemic issue, hitting directly on Brand Canada.”

Republished with permission from DeSmog Canada

The climate change site, DeSmogBlog has found that Environmental Resources Management, the consulting firm behind the Keystone XL Pipeline environmental impact assessment, has been at the center of controversial pipeline projects in the past.

Activists working against the 2002 planned construction of British Petroleum’s Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline in Turkey, singled out Environmental Resources Management (ERM) for what they saw as ERM “grooming” the BP pipeline for construction. Like the Keystone XL pipeline assessment, ERM’s assessment of the Turkish pipeline was seen as flawed and drafted in a way that gave all but the green light for the pipeline to be constructed.

Environmental and human rights group London Rising Tide went as far as occupying ERM’s offices in London, handing out pamphlets to employees stating that:

Your employer [ERM] plays a crucial role if low-key, in grooming BP’s Baku Ceyhan pipeline for construction.

In recent days, similar concerns have been raised after the website InsideClimate News revealed that: 

The State Department’s recent conclusion that the Keystone XL pipeline “is unlikely to have a substantial impact” on the rate of Canada’s oil sands development was based on analysis provided by two consulting firms with ties to oil and pipeline companies that could benefit from the proposed project.

Researcher Brad Johnson writing on Grist then made the link to Environmental Resources Management, finding that,

The “sustainability consultancy” Environmental Resources Management (ERM) was paid an undisclosed amount under contract to TransCanada to write the statement, which is now an official government document.

The construction and operation of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline has impacted the livelihoods of local fishermen, as seen in this video:

Were David Koch (and his brother Charles) planning to astroturf the Tea Party even earlier than formerly suspected?

Shattering the public perception that the Tea Party is a spontaneous popular citizens movement, a new academic paper provides evidence that an organization founded by David and Charles Koch, attempted to launch the Tea Party movement in 2002.

The peer-reviewed study appearing in the academic journal, Tobacco Control and titled, ‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party,‘ shows that the group Citizens for a Sound Economy launched a Tea Party movement website, www.usteaparty.com, that went live in 2002.

According to the website DeSmogBlog.com, who broke this story earlier today, CSE was founded in 1984 by the infamous Koch Brothers, David and Charles Koch in 1984. David Koch sat on the board of CSE for many years and the group’s first president, Richard Fink, went on to become a senior VP at Koch Industries.

The common public understanding of the origins of the Tea Party is that it is a popular grassroots uprising that began with anti-tax protests in 2009.

You can find  a screenshot here of the archived U.S. Tea Party site, as it appeared online on Sept. 13, 2002.

The site is described as, “In 2002, our U.S. Tea Party is a national event, hosted continuously online, and open to all Americans who feel our taxes are too high and the tax code is too complicated.” There is also “Patriot Guest book” available for visitors to voice their support and write a message for CSE and the U.S. Tea Party movement.

The US Tea Party site is no longer online and appears to have been taken down sometime in mid-2011. A DNS registry search, finds that the web address usteaparty.com is currently owned by Freedomworks, an organization heavily involved in Tea Party organizing today.

How will John Kerry handle his first meeting with oil-obsessed Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird?

Newly appointed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will meet on Friday with his Canadian counterpart, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. In any such bilateral meeting, it is paramount that each participant trust the words of his counterpart. After all, when it comes to the world of diplomacy, where wars are settled and treaties are signed, there’s little more than words and trust. 

As a former employee in Canada’s Foreign Affairs I have attended many bilateral meetings with foreign dignitaries. If I were advising Kerry, I would suggest one question he should ask of John Baird to see if he is an honest broker.

The question is: “Is Canada committed to confronting climate change?”

John Kerry is, and has been for a long time, a vocal leader on the issue of climate change. Sources inside his former Senate office have told me Kerry regularly expresses his commitment to act on climate change and understands the imperative of curbing water and air pollution to safeguard the economy.

Canadian Minister John Baird has a very different stance towards the climate change challenge, preferring to express contempt for proposals to implement market-based solutions to Canada’s soaring greenhouse gas emissions. For example, just last year Baird told Parliament that the Harper government disbanded the National Roundtable on Energy and Environment because they did not like the Roundtable’s recommendation that Canada adopt a tax on carbon.

“Why should taxpayers have to pay for more than 10 reports promoting a carbon tax, something that the people of Canada have repeatedly rejected? It should agree with Canadians. It should agree with the government. No discussion of a carbon tax that would kill and hurt Canadian families,” Baird stated in Parliamentary debate.

For the record, polls consistently show that the majority of Canadians are in favour of a tax on carbon pollution. Even many of the companies operating in the tar sands are calling for a carbon tax.

When it comes to the issue of climate change, Kerry and Baird are diametrically opposed. If Baird is honest with Kerry he should explain to the freshly minted Secretary of State the rationale for the Canadian government’s backtracking on international commitments to address climate change. Perhaps he can also explain why his party is currently running a national attack ad campaign against the Opposition party for proposing a carbon tax.

On the other hand, perhaps Baird will instead try to steer the conversation to what the Harper government considers a much more important and dire issue: President Obama’s approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline that would pump millions of barrels of Canadian tar sands crude to U.S. refineries to largely serve an overseas market.

The Alberta tar sands is considered one of the dirtiest and most carbon intensive industrial projects on the planet. From extraction to upgrading, a barrel of oil derived from bitumen can be three to four times as carbon intensive as a conventional barrel of oil produced in the US or Canada.

Kerry, being the savvy diplomat he is, could (and hopefully will) point out to Baird, that any conversation about the fate of the Keystone XL pipeline is intrinsically tied to Canada evolving its postion on climate change. If Canada is serious about aligning with the U.S. on climate policy, as Stephen Harper has expressed, then Baird should be fully briefed and ready to cooperate based on President Obama’s stated commitment to tackle climate change in his second term.

In his inaugural address two weeks ago President Obama said:

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”

The Keystone XL pipeline poses a key test for President Obama’s commitment to fulfill his promise on climate action. Encouraging rapid expansion of Canada’s tar sands operations is irreconcilable with aggressive efforts to curb climate change pollution in North America.

If Minister Baird is honest with his counterpart, he will admit as much to Secretary Kerry. Anything less than honesty on Baird’s part will start Canada’s relationship off with the new Secretary of State very poorly. It is a tough position for Baird to be in, but it is one created by the Minister and the Conservative government itself.