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

Harper right to streamline ­pipeline regulations
 
Although this week’s amendment-packed “slumber party” to hold up passage of omnibus Bill C-38 focused on Stephen Harper’s alleged contempt for Parliament, perhaps the most contentious element of a contentious bill related to the streamlining of environmental regulation for new resource infrastructure, in particular pipelines.
 
This reflects the fact that the petroleum industry is more politicized now than at any time since the 1980 National Energy Program. Then, the issue was a fight between Pierre Trudeau’s Ottawa and Peter Lougheed’s Alberta over the spoils of higher oil and gas prices.

Now, it is a struggle between the Harper government’s aspirations to facilitate and enhance Canada’s status as a petroleum superpower, and an environmental movement that wants to kill the fossil-fuel industry. Meanwhile, old-style interprovincial jealousies have also been stoked by NDP leader Thomas Mulcair’s invoking “Dutch disease:” the suggestion that an oil-boosted Canadian dollar is costing manufacturing jobs.

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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.

A monster British Columbia well just south of the 60th parallel is pumping a tremendous volume of natural gas from a globally significant new play that stands to dramatically boost Canada’s gas resources.

Until Thursday, it was a secret, drilled in 2009 and kept under wraps while Houston-based Apache Corp. snapped up more potentially prolific land around it. Revealing results from the well, Apache called it “the most prolific shale gas resource test in the world.”

And the Liard Basin where the well is situated, about 150 kilometres northwest of Fort Nelson, B.C., stands to be the “best unconventional gas reservoir in North America,” the company said. Initial results show it contains enough gas to match Canada’s entire current output for nearly a decade.

That’s based in part on that single well from 2009, which produced 21 million cubic feet per day during its first month, after being “fracked” – a technique used to free shale gas – six times. In other shale gas reservoirs, companies use 18 fracks – and more – to cause even more gas to flow.

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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.

Something good is happening in the United States. All of a sudden, energy is getting much cheaper and cleaner. Dirty old coal-fired plants are shutting down because they no longer make economic sense. In fact, the U.S. appears to be the only major emitter that’s actually reducing emissions.

Since 2006, U.S. emissions have fallen by 7.7 per cent, according to the International Energy Agency – despite the absence of a global carbon treaty, or stiff new regulations, or a cap-and-trade regime. To be sure, the recession helped. But even when the economy comes back, greenhouse-gas emissions are set to fall even more.

You’d think that environmental groups would rejoice at this great news. Instead, they’ve gone to war. The main reason for the fall in greenhouse gasses is a new technology known as hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), which they claim is a menace to the planet. Fracking promises to unlock vast new reserves of shale gas, which emits roughly half as much CO2 as coal, and 30 per cent less than conventional oil. But environmentalists warn that fracking will poison the water, pollute the air and trigger earthquakes that will bring doom and destruction raining down on us all.

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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.

It’s hard to say at this point just how many times the world has ended. We’ve killed it off so often, it’s hard to keep up. Certainly, we have been predicting its demise since we’ve been around.
 
Depending on whom you believe, it’s apocalypse now, then or tomorrow. These days, the doomsayers tend to be environmentalists as well as religious cranks. Although one can dismiss the latter, not so the former.
 
The truth is that to deny global warming in 2012 no longer makes sense. The evidence is everywhere around us, like it or not. The effects are already catastrophic. But does that mean the end of life as we know it?
 
“We’re destroying the planet,” declared journalist, author and Greenpeace co-founder Rex Weyler. In Toronto to address the 13th annual Ideacity conference, he painted a bleak picture of the Earth’s condition. Running through a checklist, he made it clear we’re in bad shape.

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