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Why Has South Africa Plunged Itself Into Darkness — Again? – by David Himbara (Huffington Post – December 15, 2014)

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/

David Himbara is an educator, political economist and author.

Doug Kuni, a South African electricity expert, has advised his compatriots to buy candles and those who can afford it, to aquire a generator because “you are going to need it for the next five to ten years.” Kuni may be right. South Africa’s power system, including the utility company that runs it, Eskom, is in a mess. Shockingly, of the country’s installed 45,583 megawatts of electricity only 24,000 are available at present due to a series of old and new crises. There simply is not enough electricity to supply households and industry.

This is not the first time that South Africa has been plunged into darkness — the 2008 power crisis was equally painful.

What is the problem here? The money stops with the country’s leadership.

In the aftermath of the 2008 episode, the then president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, famously acknowledged his government’s failure to invest in energy infrastructure: “When Eskom said to the government: ‘We think we must invest more in terms of electricity generation’…We said not now, later. We were wrong. Eskom was right. We were wrong.”

The extraordinary leadership lapse in judgment becomes more evident when South Africa is compared to other mid-sized economies in terms of power-generation between 1994 and 2010.

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Ontario needs its pride back – by Kelly McParland (National Post – December 16, 2014)

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

I’m half-way convinced that some weird political inversion has taken place, so that Ontario and Quebec have somehow ended up with the other’s government.

It’s like The Prince and the Pauper, or any of the long line of imitations that have followed that tale, in which children are somehow switched at birth and end up in the wrong household. It feels like Quebec Premier should be running Ontario, and Ontario’s Kathleen Wynne should really be premier of Quebec.

There are new signs of this almost every day. The Montreal Gazette reported Monday that Mr. Couillard’s government is sharply reducing funding for Fete Nationale, one of the public celebrations the separatist Parti Quebecois poured money into as a symbol of Quebec’s detachment from Canada. It’s held a week before Canada Day, celebrated only in Quebec, and was to get $5.4 million from the PQ in 2016. Instead, the Liberals will provide 40% less, or about $3.4 million.

This is the latest cost-reduction measure introduced by Mr. Couillard as he tries to eliminate Quebec’s deficit – which is a mere shadow of Ontario’s – and end the province’s long tradition of chronic over-spending. He hasn’t shied from controversy in doing so, going so far as to reform the hallowed $7-a-day daycare program, introducing a sliding scale of fees in its place.

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Falling oil price puts Ottawa’s surplus at risk – by Bill Curry (Globe and Mail – December 16, 2014)

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 — Finance Minister Joe Oliver is acknowledging the dramatic drop in oil prices will take a further bite out of government revenues, making Ottawa’s previously declared surplus less certain.

The government already shaved billions off of its revenue forecasts when it released a fiscal update on Nov. 12, when the price of North American crude was around $81 (U.S.). That price closed Monday below $56.

As the price of oil continued to slip after his fiscal update, Mr. Oliver initially maintained that these adjustments were conservative enough to capture lower prices without affecting Ottawa’s bottom line. But he said Monday the further drop will have an impact.

“We’re not about to come out with a number at this point. However, we’re confident we will achieve a budgetary balance next year,” he said Monday, before a meeting of provincial and territorial finance ministers in Ottawa.

The government is forecasting a surplus of only $1.6-billion, which would be at risk of slipping into deficit territory should oil prices stay low. Ottawa has set aside $3-billion for unforeseen events, and several economists said Monday that should be enough to maintain a small surplus.

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NEWS RELEASE: Mining entrepreneur Julian Malnic Joins Deep Space Industries’ Board

Houston, Dec 16, 2014 (ABN Newswire) – Deep Space Industries is pleased to announce the election of Julian Malnic, accomplished entrepreneur and business leader, to its Board. Julian is a recognized leader in the global mining industry, having founded both Nautilus Minerals Inc. and Direct Nickel, an emerging nickel producer with a revolutionary and dramatically lower cost extraction technology. In his new role with DSI, Mr. Malnic will add invaluable experience, perspective and drive to the Board of Directors.

“Julian’s addition to DSI’s Board reflects the accelerating evolution of the Company” said Rick Tumlinson, Chair of Deep Space Industries. “Not only is he a geologist with a lot of processing experience, but he is also founder of the world’s first deep sea mining company. He brings us an invaluable level of experience in transformatory mineral resource ventures.”

In addition to founding both Nautilus Minerals Inc. (TSE:NUS)(LON:NUS) and Direct Nickel (ASX:DIR), Mr. Malnic is also the Founder and Chairman of the Sydney Mining Club, the managing director of Fluid Minerals Limited, and Director of Public Relations for the Constitution Education Fund of Australia. He is a well-known voice in mining and policy circles in Australia.

“Space resources is a fast-moving investment frontier and I really like DSI’s focus on using materials that are already out there,” said new Board member, Julian Malnic. “Deep Space Industries is not just an innovator in its industry, it is pioneering it. Using asteroid materials must be the primary basis for any serious development of space. I think DSI is very well positioned to do this.”

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Why B.C. desperately wants to fill your stocking with coal – by Jason Kirby (MACLEAN’S Magazine – December 15, 2014)

http://www.macleans.ca/

Coal, a major B.C. export, suffers from a global glut and falling prices. Sound familiar?

Hey kids, wouldn’t you really rather get a lump of coal this Christmas? That’s the message from the B.C. government, which sent out this rather odd email to reporters late Friday (excerpt)…

Stuff your stockings with B.C. coal

VICTORIA – No matter whether you light the menorah, trim the tree or setup the Festivus Pole, your holiday activities likely have a connection to a lump of coal mined right here in British Columbia.

From the planes, trains and automobiles that are used to transport holiday gifts, to the stores where those gifts are sold – they all require steel. That steel is made using metallurgical coal.

Planning to drive to the mall over the holidays? There are approximately three million cars in B.C. and it takes roughly 630 kilograms of metallurgical coal to produce a single vehicle.

Nothing says Canadian winter like lacing up the ice skates for a game of hockey. The steel blades that make breakaway goals possible start out as metallurgical coal.

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Cree walkers against uranium mining arrive in Montreal after 850 km walk (CBC News Montreal – December 15, 2014)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal

Group delivers message to environmental protection agency on final day of hearings into uranium mining

A group of Cree protesters have reached their final destination after completing an 850-km march to protest against uranium exploration and mining in Quebec.

The group arrived in downtown Montreal today to deliver a message to the province’s environmental protection agency, known as the BAPE, which is holding the last of a series of public hearings on uranium exploration. They will make a presentation at the hearings this evening.

About 20 people made the full journey, walking an average of about 30 km a day over a three-weeks period, often in frigid temperatures.

The group left Mistissini, Que., a town northeast of Chibougamau, in the James Bay region, in late November. Youth Grand Chief Joshua Iserhoff said those they met along the way overwhelmingly supported a ban on uranium mining.

Uranium extraction has been on the table in Mistissini since 2006. A Boucherville-based company, Strateco Resources, has invested $120 million into developing a uranium mine in Mistissini in the last ten years.

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NEWS RELEASE: Johnson Matthey sells Gold and Silver Refining business for £118 million

The business will be divested to Asahi Holdings, Inc., a collector, refiner and recycler of precious and rare metals from waste materials

15 Dec 2014 – Johnson Matthey announces that it has agreed to divest its Gold and Silver Refining business to Asahi Holdings, Inc. (Asahi), a collector, refiner and recycler of precious and rare metals from waste materials, for £118 million (US $186 million) in cash, subject to typical post-closing adjustments. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of March 2015.

Johnson Matthey’s Gold and Silver Refining business is a refiner of primary and secondary gold and silver materials. It serves customers globally from refineries in Salt Lake City, USA and Brampton, Canada. The business also provides investment casting services from its St Catharines facility in Canada. In total, the business employs approximately 340 people.

In the financial year ended 31st March 2014 the Gold and Silver Refining business had sales excluding the value of precious metals (sales) of £44 million and for the six months ended 30th September 2014, its sales were £19 million. Its return on sales is typically
around 25%.

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Transparency Act : Resource company payments to First Nations unveiled (CBC News Sudbury – December 14, 2014)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury

Most First Nations in northeastern Ontario receive funds from a mining, forestry or power company

For the first time, the amount of money northeastern Ontario First Nations receive from agreements with private resource companies has been made public. The figures were included in financial documents posted under the new First Nations Transparency Act.

Many bands have been reluctant to discuss specific figures in the past and the impact benefit agreements often prohibit the companies from discussing payment to neighbouring First Nations without band permission.

Some of the most surprising numbers in the newly released financial records are for Moose Cree First Nation on the James Bay Coast.

Its balance sheet shows $1.5 million coming from Detour Gold last year. Also listed under First Nation revenue is $3 million in company stock. But it also shows Moose Cree losing $6.2 million last year in the sale of Detour Gold shares.

Repeated phone calls and emails to the First Nation’s elected officials and administrative staff were not returned. Most First Nations in northeastern Ontario do get some amount of money from a mining, forestry or power company.

All of the bands along the James Bay Coast receive money from DeBeers, for its Victor diamond mine near Attawapiskat.

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Chrome, platinum prices likely to recover – Tharisa – by Martin Creamer (MiningWeekly.com – December 15, 2014)

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

JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – The price of chrome concentrate and the basket price of platinum group metals should recover in 2015, which could mean fourth-quarter profit for the JSE-listed Tharisa Minerals should it achieve its number-one priority of steady state production.

Tharisa CEO Phoevos Pouroulis told Mining Weekly Online in an interview on Monday that price recovery plus steady state production growth should see the company emerge from the red and go into the black before this time next year.

The Cyprus-domiciled company’s gross margin on platinum group metals was 24% in the 12 months to September 30 and 10% on chrome concentrates because of the chrome price drop over the last year. “The fact that we’re a low-cost producer is the key differentiator,” Pouroulis commented to Mining Weekly Online.

The company has a 23-year-life openpit from which it coproduces platinum group metals and chrome concentrate, enabling to split mining and overhead costs and put itself into the lowest cost quartile for platinum and chrome concentrate production at steady state levels.

“Generally, we foresee an increase in commodity prices coupled to a weaker exchange rate,” Pouroulis said. Also noted was China’s stocks of chrome concentrates being at their lowest in years, which pointed to the likelihood of restocking in 2015.

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Our Tarnished Maple Leaf – by Tom Sandborn (The Tyee.ca – December 15, 2014)

http://www.thetyee.ca/

Why the world sees an ugly Canada, and how to restore our image.

Remember when everyone seemed to love Canada? Travellers who displayed a maple leaf emblem on their shirts or backpacks could count on a friendly welcome in most countries in the world. Now, not so much.

We are perceived as ugly Canadians for reasons that include environmental foot dragging at home and complicity in death and destruction overseas.

Stare, for example, into the mirror submitted in October to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. A scathing document accuses Canada of failing to hold the many mining firms with head offices here accountable for the deaths and human rights abuses associated with their mines in Latin America.

”Canada has a very strong presence in the globalized mining industry with almost 1,500 projects in the region, and we’re aware of a great deal of conflict,” said Shin Imai, a lawyer with the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project (JCAP), commenting on a submission from the Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability.

”Our preliminary count shows that at least 50 people have been killed and some 300 wounded in connection with mining conflicts involving Canadian companies in recent years, for which there has been little to no accountability.”

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Oil, coal and iron ore at financial crisis levels – by Henning Gloystein (Reuters India – December 15, 2014)

http://in.reuters.com/

SINGAPORE – (Reuters) – Tumbling oil, coal and iron ore prices are now all at levels last seen during or before the financial crisis of 2008/2009, signalling not only the impact of a glut of supplies but deeper weakness in parts of the global economy, analysts say.

The raw materials are among the most sensitive to economic health, with oil and coal the world’s two most important energy sources and iron ore used to make steel.

Brent crude prices have almost halved since June to slightly above $60 a barrel, a level last seen in early 2009 during the financial crisis. In the coal market, the benchmark European futures contracts has dropped below $70 a tonne to levels comparable before the boom and bust of 2007-2009.

Iron ore prices have halved to under $69 a tonne as demand growth in the biggest market, China, wanes. Analysts initially pointed to rising oil and mining output, as well as energy efficiency and alternative sources such as renewables, as the main factors behind the drops.

But with no end to the price slide, it became apparent that a significant cooling of emerging economies as well as ongoing slack in developed markets such as Europe and Japan was also at play, especially after oil producer club OPEC said it would not cut output in support of prices.

“Softer global demand, coupled with unprecedented growth in supply are weighing on global oil indices, with prices falling to levels not seen since the Global Financial Crisis,” National Australia Bank said in a note on Monday.

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The Chinese Century – by Joseph E. Stiglitz (Vanity Fair – January 2015)

http://www.vanityfair.com/

Without fanfare—indeed, with some misgivings about its new status—China has just overtaken the United States as the world’s largest economy. This is, and should be, a wake-up call—but not the kind most Americans might imagine.

When the history of 2014 is written, it will take note of a large fact that has received little attention: 2014 was the last year in which the United States could claim to be the world’s largest economic power. China enters 2015 in the top position, where it will likely remain for a very long time, if not forever. In doing so, it returns to the position it held through most of human history.

Comparing the gross domestic product of different economies is very difficult. Technical committees come up with estimates, based on the best judgments possible, of what are called “purchasing-power parities,” which enable the comparison of incomes in various countries. These shouldn’t be taken as precise numbers, but they do provide a good basis for assessing the relative size of different economies. Early in 2014, the body that conducts these international assessments—the World Bank’s International Comparison Program—came out with new numbers. (The complexity of the task is such that there have been only three reports in 20 years.)

The latest assessment, released last spring, was more contentious and, in some ways, more momentous than those in previous years. It was more contentious precisely because it was more momentous: the new numbers showed that China would become the world’s largest economy far sooner than anyone had expected—it was on track to do so before the end of 2014.

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UN, aid groups overstretched by crisis in Congo’s mining heartland – by Aaron Ross (Reuters Africa – December 14, 2014)

http://af.reuters.com/

PWETO, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) – Faced with a dearth of United Nations peacekeepers, lack of funding and competition from other global crises, relief agencies are struggling to contain a growing humanitarian disaster in Democratic Republic of Congo’s mining heartland.

More than a decade after the official end of a 1998-2003 war that killed millions of people in Congo, mostly from hunger and disease, donors are keen to switch from emergency aid to longer-term development projects in the vast central African country.

But the deteriorating situation in the copper and cobalt-rich southeastern province of Katanga, which the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) labelled “catastrophic” last month, throws into sharp relief the gaping humanitarian needs.

The number of displaced people in Katanga has leapt to nearly 600,000, from 55,000 three years ago, mostly due to violence by armed groups, including the secessionist movement Bakata Katanga.

The crisis has taken Congo’s humanitarian community by surprise after a decade spent focusing on the eastern border provinces of North and South Kivu, a volatile patchwork of rebel and militia fiefdoms that never fully emerged from the war.

“Suddenly, we turn to a zone where there is a major crisis in the process of developing but where there are not enough humanitarian actors,” Moustapha Soumaré, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator in Congo, told Reuters.

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Asbestos revealed as Canada’s top cause of workplace death – by Tavia Grant (Globe and Mail – December 15, 2014)

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.

Asbestos exposure is the single largest on-the-job killer in Canada, accounting for more than a third of total workplace death claims approved last year and nearly a third since 1996, new national data obtained by The Globe and Mail show. The 368 death claims last year alone represent a higher number than fatalities from highway accidents, fires and chemical exposures combined.

Since 1996, almost 5,000 approved death claims stem from asbestos exposure, making it by far the top source of workplace death in Canada.

The numbers come as the federal government – long a supporter of the asbestos industry – continues to allow the import of asbestos-containing products such as pipes and brake pads. A Globe and Mail investigation earlier this year detailed how Ottawa has failed to caution its citizens about the impact that even low levels of asbestos can have on human health. Canada’s government does not clearly state that all forms of asbestos are known human carcinogens. Dozens of other countries including Australia, Britain, Japan and Sweden have banned asbestos.

Canada was one of the world’s largest exporters of asbestos for decades, until 2011, when the last mine in Quebec closed. The mineral’s legacy remains, as it was widely used in everything from attic insulation to modelling clay in schools and car parts and in a variety of construction materials such as cement, tiles and shingles. Health experts warn long latency periods mean deaths from asbestos will climb further.

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After conquering iron ore, BHP and Rio move to dominate in copper – by James Regan (Yahoo Finance/Reuters – December 14, 2014)

http://finance.yahoo.com/

SYDNEY, Dec 15 (Reuters) – Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton are amassing vast copper holdings in a push to capture a greater chunk of the $140 billion world market, apparently aiming to squeeze out high-cost producers just as they did in the global iron ore business.

Separately and in joint ventures, Rio and BHP intend to mine millions of additional tonnes of copper, despite seeing an oversupplied market for the next few years.

“For both companies, this is about wielding the greatest influence possible over the global marketplace,” said Gavin Wendt, senior resources analyst for Sydney-based consultants MineLife.

“Having said that, unlike in the highly concentrated iron ore space where the focus is squarely on one market owned in large part by Rio and BHP – China, copper is sold much more widely, leaving room for smaller producers to stay in the game,” Wendt said.

Several smaller producers contacted by Reuters declined to comment, saying it was too early to gauge the impact of the expansions. There have been no suggestions that BHP and Rio are working in concert to seize overriding control of global copper supply.

A worldwide supply surplus of 300,000 tonnes is forecast in 2015 by Australia’s Bureau of Resource and Energy Economics, equivalent to half a year’s output by South Korea.

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