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Exclusive: Chile indigenous group likely to appeal Barrick ruling -lawyer – by Alexandra Ulmer (Reuters India – July 19, 2013)

http://in.reuters.com/

SANTIAGO – (Reuters) – A Chilean indigenous group will likely ask the Supreme Court to review a lower court decision on Barrick Gold Corp’s Pascua-Lama gold mine, because the ruling does not go far enough to protect the environment, a lawyer representing the group told Reuters on Thursday.

The appeal will probably also seek a re-evaluation of the suspended $8.5 billion project and ask that Barrick present a new environmental impact assessment study, a potentially lengthy and costly process, the lawyer, Lorenzo Soto, added.

The Copiapo Court of Appeals on Monday ordered a freeze on construction of the project, which straddles the Chile-Argentine border high in the Andes, until the company builds infrastructure to prevent water pollution.

“It’s very likely we appeal the decision,” Soto said. “What we’re interested in is that the project be re-evaluated. What is optimal, in our opinion, is for the project to present a new environmental impact assessment.”

Soto said the decision on whether to appeal would be made on Friday. The Diaguita indigenous group has until Monday to file with the court, he added.

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Carbon tax floated as an option for covering flood cost – by Gillian Steward (Toronto Star – July 17, 2013)

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Former Calgary councillor thinks the unthinkable in the heart of oil country. The devastating flash floods that swamped much of southern Alberta — including Calgary’s downtown core — have suddenly made the projected effects of climate change quite tangible.

Climate change is no longer just a concept or a gaggle of statistics. It means soggy, smelly houses, apartment and office towers without working elevators, and shuttered restaurants.

The costs are also quite tangible. Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi estimates that restoring city infrastructure and facilities will cost between $250 million and $500 million. Estimates of the total damage in Calgary run between $3 billion and $5 billion. Premier Alison Redford has pledged $1 billion for immediate aid, cleanup and reconstruction throughout the province.

But where is this money going to come from? And if extreme weather events are to become more frequent, how are we going to pay for the damage from future disasters? This is the second major flood in Calgary in seven years. Bob Hawkesworth has an answer that seems obvious, especially in Alberta.

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North American oil prices surge toward global levels – by Shawn McCarthy (Globe and Mail – July 19, 2013)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

OTTAWA — The Cushing logjam has broken, and with its opening, North American oil has lost the bargain-basement status it has sustained for the past two years.

Since early 2011, oil producers in the United States and Canada have suffered from large discounts in the market – the trendsetting West Texas intermediate (WTI) was priced well below international benchmark North Sea Brent, while a larger-than-normal gap opened up between WTI and Canadian heavy crude.

The boom in U.S. tight oil production, on top of growing oil sands volumes from Alberta, created a glut at Cushing, Okla., a terminus that served as a traditional pricing-point for WTI but had virtually no pipeline access to the massive refinery capacity at the Gulf Coast. As a result, companies invested heavily in new transportation – pipelines, rail cars, barges, even trucks – to move landlocked North American crude to coastal markets where it would fetch international prices.

Now, that investment in transportation is providing a big payoff. Along with the stronger economic news in the United States, the increased ability to get western oil to markets on the U.S. Gulf Coast and East Coast is credited for driving North American crude higher, even as Brent prices lag.

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TransCanada ramps up effort to sway U.S. on Keystone XL project – by Jeffrey Jones (Globe and Mail – July 19, 2013)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

CALGARY – TransCanada Corp. is seeking to bolster its case with U.S. President Barack Obama for the long-delayed Keystone XL oil pipeline, firing off a laundry list of reasons the company says the contentious project will have minimal influence on rising North American greenhouse gas emissions.

TransCanada sent data from various studies on Canadian oil sands, carbon intensity and power used by pipelines to the U.S. State Department in response to Mr. Obama’s recent remarks that elevated climate impact to the top of the list of criteria for approving or rejecting the project.

The Calgary-based company remains intent on winning approval for the $5.3-billion (U.S.) pipeline in the face of opposition from environmental groups, though chief executive officer Russ Girling warned on Thursday that the slow pace of the regulatory process would make it hard to achieve the current start-up target of late 2015.

That would represent another in a string of delays since TransCanada first applied to build the export conduit to Texas refineries from Alberta nearly five years ago.

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St. Lawrence oil and gas well proposal has Farley Mowat ‘hopping mad’ – by Gloria Galloway (Globe and Mail – July 15, 2013)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

OTTAWA — There is no denying the amount of fight still left in Farley Mowat. Just let him get going on the “evil forces” who are sacrificing the environment in their lust for oil.

The writer, conservationist and conversationalist, who completed what he declared to be his final book nearly three years ago at the age of 89, is irate. A proposal to put an offshore oil and gas well in the Gulf of St. Lawrence will not go away, and Mr. Mowat is aghast at the depths of human folly.

Back in 1984, he wrote a book called Sea of Slaughter that detailed a litany of environmental wrongs in the gulf and on the Atlantic seaboard. The looming development, known as the Old Harry Prospect, holds the potential to unleash more of the same, Mr. Mowat said this week in a telephone interview from Cape Breton, where he and his wife, Claire, spend their summers.

“I was so appalled by what I discovered when I wrote this book, I could hardly believe that human beings could be so thoughtless, so destructive, so devilish, just plain devilish, all in pursuit of money,” he said of Sea of Slaughter. “It took me five years to write the damn thing, and I have never been able to fully reread it since, I get so upset about it.”

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UPDATE 2-Atlas Copco to shed more jobs as mining slump deepens – Niklas Pollard and Helena Soderpalm (Reuters U.K. – July 18, 2013)

http://uk.reuters.com/

STOCKHOLM, July 18 (Reuters) – Engineering group Atlas Copco announced more job losses on Thursday as spending cuts across the mining industry hit demand for its trademark drill rigs and loaders and raised worries the sector’s downturn may have further to run.

Robust activity in services and industrial equipment stemmed a fall in group profit and orders but the company forecast that demand for mining gear would slip further in the near term.

Mining is suffering a hangover from years of booming expansion and has slashed capital spending as softer prices for commodities such as coal, copper and gold have raise doubts about future investment returns.

The likes of BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto have cut billions of dollars from outlays. For Atlas Copco and its cross-town rival Sandvik, which together supply more than half the global market for underground mining gear, this has brought a sharp drop-off in equipment orders though a thriving services business has cushioned the blows.

Unlike Sandvik, which is due to report on Friday, Atlas’s single biggest mining exposure – around one third – is to gold whose price has slid more than 20 percent since year-end.

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COLUMN-BHP, Rio gamble on iron ore, but they’ve stacked the deck – by Clyde Russell (Reuters U.S. – July 18, 2013)

http://www.reuters.com/

Clyde Russell is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own.

LAUNCESTON, Australia, July 18 (Reuters) – Ramping up output in the face of an expected easing in demand growth may seem like an odd tactic for a miner, but it’s exactly what Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton are doing in iron ore.

The world’s second- and third-ranked producers both said this week that their expansion plans are on track, notwithstanding the expected slowdown in China, which buys about two-thirds of global seaborne iron ore supply.

But there is method in the seeming madness of increasing production when the demand outlook is less than rosy. Both Rio and BHP are effectively betting that their low-cost operations in Australia will be able to dominate the market, squeezing out both Chinese domestic production and higher-cost mines elsewhere in Australia and around the globe.

They are also betting that the fears of a slowdown in Chinese demand growth are being overstated, and that import volumes will remain healthy. While these may look like risky assumptions for the two Anglo-Australian mining giants, they stand a good chance of being correct.

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Detroit Slides From Industrial Might to Bankruptcy – by Steven Church, Dawn McCarty & Margaret Cronin Fisk (Bloomberg News – July 19, 2013)

 http://www.bloomberg.com/

Detroit, the cradle of the automobile assembly line and a symbol of industrial might, filed the biggest U.S. municipal bankruptcy after decades of decline left it too poor to pay billions of dollars owed bondholders, retired cops and current city workers.

“I know many will see this as a low point in the city’s history,” Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a Republican, said in a letter yesterday authorizing the filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Detroit. “Without this decision, the city’s condition would only worsen.”

Michigan’s largest city joins Jefferson County, Alabama, and the California cities of San Bernardino and Stockton in bankruptcy. The filing shattered the presumption of many bondholders that local governments, eager to continue borrowing at reasonable rates, would do whatever it took, including raise taxes, to come up with the money to meet bond obligations. Kevyn Orr, the city’s emergency manager, said the debt is $18 billion.

While under court protection, Detroit can stop paying some debts, is temporarily immune from most lawsuits and may be able to ask a judge to cancel contracts, including union agreements. Under Chapter 9 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, the first step is likely to be a court fight over whether the city was entitled to bankruptcy protection, a challenge that would ask if the city was truly insolvent and it had no alternative to filing.

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Ring of Fire negotiator starts First Nations visits – by CBC News Thunder Bay (July 18, 2013)

http://www.cbc.ca/thunderbay/

Frank Iacobucci aims to build a relationship with First Nations before Ring of Fire negotiations start

Ontario’s chief Ring of Fire negotiator says he is making a series of trips to Matawa First Nation communities as a way to ensure good lines of communication with First Nations. Frank Iacobucci says he’s already visited Eabametoong and Marten Falls this week — and will be going to other Matawa First Nations as well.

“I’ve been up in the north before, but I haven’t been to all these First Nations,” he said. “I want … First Nations [to] know who I am and what my mandate is — and they get it from me and not from just reading about it.”

Iacobucci said it’s important for him to learn more about the communities as he prepares to start formal negotiations with Bob Rae.

‘No one side that sets the agenda’

Iacobucci was accompanied Thursday by Northern Development and Mines Minister Michael Gravelle. The pair met with reporters at Thunder Bay Airport before boarding for a two-hour flight to Neskantaga. “I’m very pleased to spend time travelling with Mr. Iacobucci,” Gravelle said.

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Sulfide mining’s jobs are temporary, but its pollution will stay in our waterways – by JT Haines, Lee Markell, Dylan Nau and Ijaz Osman (Minn Post – July 18, 2013)

http://www.minnpost.com/

Like many Minnesotans, we’ve been camping in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) every summer for years, several of us for a quarter century or more. Some of us used to live in the Arrowhead, but all of us share a certain unspoken feeling heading north, when deciduous turns to boreal. We appreciate that our great state can still offer us a place where you can catch a fish, and drink the water – right out of the side of a canoe! (A lotta guys don’t favor the exclamation point. Or sarcasm. But it hasn’t escaped our attention that we can no longer do either of these things in the Twin Cities, which we think merits an exception.)

Without exaggeration, we feel that the Boundary Waters enhances our humanness. The question that challenges us today is: How many places like it do we need? How many are left?

In their excellent July 7 letter to the International Joint Commission regarding sulfide mines, the Minnesota Backcountry Hunters and Anglers express their opposition to proposed sulfide mine projects in Northern Minnesota, which would leach sulfuric acid into waterways, the lifeblood of Northern Minnesota’s economy, for up to 2,000 years. The group points out, correctly, that the jobs are temporary, the bulk of the profits will flow elsewhere, and the “toxic legacy of damaged waterways” will remain with us here, in Minnesota.

We thank the Hunters and Anglers for their letter, and couldn’t agree more. It passes our understanding that we would threaten this environment at all – let alone at the demand and benefit of foreign companies and mostly non-local investors.

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Aboriginal relations enter new dynamic with Ring of Fire development – by Simon Rees (MiningWeekly.com – July 18, 2013)

http://www.miningweekly.com/page/americas-home

TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – In Ontario the relationship between the mining sector, the provincial government and the First Nations is changing rapidly. Once often viewed as an afterthought, consultation with aboriginal communities is now critical for the success of a project and entails constant dialogue.

But the process still has hurdles to overcome. This is particularly true for the north of the province, an area that includes the Ring of Fire region, where world-class chromite deposits abound.

THE RING THAT BINDS

On June 11, Cliffs Natural Resources announced that it was freezing work on the feasibility study for its $3.3-billion Black Thor chromite project within the Ring of Fire. One of the issues cited by the company was the need for greater clarity relating to First Nations negotiations and the position of the government. Several commentators argued the outcome was a major setback.

“But Cliffs hasn’t stopped discussions with the First Nations communities and I don’t have a sense that they’ve backed away from their interests,” chief negotiator for the Matawa First Nations Bob Rae told Mining Weekly Online.

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Commodity hedge funds suffer longest losing streak on record – by Tommy Wilkes (Reuters U.S. – July 18, 2013)

http://www.reuters.com/

LONDON – (Reuters) – Funds betting on commodity price moves have lost money every month since January, their joint longest losing streak on record, raising more doubts about their ability to make money at a time when the commodity “supercycle” may be over.

The average fund slid 3.58 percent in the first six months of the year, according to a widely watched Newedge commodity index. Funds have only suffered five consecutive losing months once before, in 2002-2003, the index shows.

Hedge funds market themselves as capable of making money in all markets, yet funds trading commodities as varied as gold, grains and gas, have failed to turn an annual profit in the last three years.

The weak performance will put more pressure on the industry to lower fees and introduce clawbacks, which enable investors to reclaim some performance perks paid to hedge fund managers in boom times if the returns they hope to achieve fail to continue.

Worries about cooling demand in key markets like China, and a huge shift in the supply-side from shortage to glut, has sent prices tumbling in recent years, and left many warning that the end of the commodity “supercycle” – the long period of rising commodity prices – is here.

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Staying cool? Thank nuclear power – by Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail – July 18, 2013)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Hot out, isn’t it? At least for some of us, anyway. Southern Ontario is sweltering in temperatures that have soared into the 30s. Toronto has declared an extreme heat alert, and the air conditioners are running at full blast.

Thank god for air conditioning. Or rather, thank nuclear power – that’s what’s keeping us cool. Wednesday morning at 7 a.m., Ontario’s nuclear plants were generating more than half of the province’s electricity: 11,148 megawatts. Gas, hydro and coal accounted for another 8,608 MW. Wind power, at 97 MW, barely moved the dial. Those mighty turbines (for which we will be paying dearly for many years to come) contributed less than half of 1 per cent of the total power output.

Of course, wind energy is green. But so is nuclear. Unlike coal and natural gas, nuclear power creates zero greenhouse gas emissions.

“Nuclear energy is the most powerful weapon in the war on global warming,” Steve Aplin, an Ottawa-based consultant in energy and the environment, told me in a phone interview. He points out that if Ontario’s environmental lobby had succeeded in having nuclear power replaced by natural gas, the province’s carbon dioxide emissions would have soared.

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Poll finds Keystone XL enjoys broad support in U.S. – by Paul Koring (Globe and Mail – July 18, 2013)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

WASHINGTON — Despite renewed rallying efforts from environmentalists intended to stir broad opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and extensive media coverage of several serious spills involving Alberta oil sands crude, Americans still solidly back the controversial project to funnel Canadian crude to Texas refineries, according to a new poll.

Even after president Barack Obama defined a new bar for approving Keystone XL — that it not add significantly to carbon emissions driving global warming — more than two-thirds of Americans (67 per cent) want the long-delayed project approved.

Public support is up slightly since January while opposition to TransCanada’s $5.3-billion pipeline from Alberta to sprawling refineries on the Gulf Coast remains stuck below one-quarter, at 24 per cent. While Republicans were more strongly in favour, the poll found a solid majority – 56 per cent – of Democrats also backed Keystone XL, suggesting that even among his base, Mr. Obama faces no serious threat if he gives the project a green light.

The president is expected to decide sometime later this year. Opponents had vowed to create a new groundswell of opposition over the summer, with funding from billionaire turned climate-change activist Tom Steyer.

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Mega quarry land north of Toronto bought by burgeoning farm fund Bonnefield – by John Greenwood (National Post – July 18, 2013)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

A controversial plan to build a massive quarry in rolling farmland north of Toronto appears officially dead in the water after a US$20-billion hedge fund in Boston agreed to sell the land on which the project was to be located.

Bonnefield Financial, a farmland investment company based in Ottawa, announced this week that it has acquired about 6,500 acres of lush Dufferin County potato fields in what it called one of the largest farmland transactions in Canadian history.

Financial details were not disclosed however Tom Eisenhauer, the president, acknowledged the price was “more than $50-million, a lot of money.” Speaking in a phone interview, Mr. Eisenhauer insisted Bonnefield is only interested in agriculture. “Our investors want exposure to farming,” he said. “They don’t want exposure to oil and gas, or quarries for that matter.”

Formed in 2010, Bonnefield calls itself Canada’s only national farmland investment management company. Typically that involves buying up farms and leasing them back to farmers. So far it’s raised about $150-million from accredited investors, acquiring about 35,000 acres in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and New Brunswick.

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