Military Madness > America's manipulation of Europe is insanely funny, unless you're an European; Will Trump blow up another Russian pipeline?

 

Please read my comments between these two stories

Moscow slams West for ‘fantastic hypocrisy’

The Russian Foreign Ministry has accused the EU and NATO of pearl-clutching over Baltic cable incidents

FILE PHOTO: Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. © Sputnik / Pelagiya Tikhonova

The West is spinning incidents in the Baltic Sea as purported evidence of a Russian threat, while putting a smoke screen over real attacks that undermine European energy security, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday. The EU and NATO have alleged that Moscow was behind cases of Baltic sea power and communication cables being damaged in recent months.

Western officials have argued the incidents justify bolstering NATO's regional presence and sanctioning the so-called ‘shadow fleet’ – ships allegedly involved in Russian oil exports in defiance of unilateral restrictions issued by Western nations.

Western claims that Moscow is waging a sabotage campaign in the Baltic Sea fit a wider pattern of baseless accusations against Russia, Zakharova said. She told a regular media briefing: “Accusations directed against our nation are being habitually voiced before the circumstances of what had happened are established. We have seen this many times.”

Read more

 NATO steps up patrols in Baltic Sea

She accused the West of “fantastic hypocrisy,” pointing to what she described as the “non-investigation” of the September 2022 attack on the Nord Stream pipelines. The energy links built under the Baltic Sea were intended to deliver Russian natural gas directly to Germany, before being blown up in what Moscow calls a “terrorist attack.”

The US benefited the most from the incident and was likely behind it directly or through a proxy, Russian officials have claimed. In early 2022, US President Joe Biden declared that “there will be no Nord Stream,” if Russia used military force against Ukraine.

Zakharova criticized Brussels for swiftly demanding action against Russia over the cable incidents after showing no such reaction to the Nord Stream sabotage. “It seems that since Biden said that he would destroy this project, the EU believes that what happened was all proper,” she said.

She also condemned the EU for reacting meekly to Kiev’s drone attack on a Russian compressor station last week. The facility pumps natural gas under the Black Sea to Türkiye and multiple consumers in Southern Europe.

READ MORE: Lavrov blames US for TurkStream attack

Attacks like that are seemingly being “condoned by the part of the EU, which has been acting against the interests of their own people for many years,” she stated. Such people would rather stoke fear in Europe over the “myth” of supposedly dangerous Russian ships than address genuine security threats, she added.

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The attack on Nord Stream pipelines was an attack on Europe, but they are too dumb to see it. Russian pipeline gas had to be replaced by LNG mostly from the USA. That, in itself, was sufficient reason for NATO pushing Putin to attack Ukraine. But it wasn't the only reason. Breaking promises to not recruit Russia's immediate neighbours into NATO, and, I suspect, the extraordinary proliferation of bioweapons labs in Ukraine, sponsored by the Pentagon, add to the breaking of the Minsk Accords, and the 2014 American sponsored Maidan coup were enough reasons and then some.

But the funny part is that Russia was no threat to Europe at all until Europe and NATO threatened Russia, as above. Nevertheless, NATO, the West's war industry storefront, has sold hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons systems to hapless European countries to protect them from a non-existent threat. Or, at least, a threat that hadn't previously existed until NATO created it. American war industries are getting filthy rich, and I mean filthy.

While Greta and other fools get hysterical about carbon entering the atmosphere, American LNG, because of its intensive extraction process and shipping across the Atlantic creates a carbon footprint that is many times larger than Russian pipeline gas all over Europe. Greta, why don't you calculate how much carbon that involves?

And now, after no investigation of the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, NATO wants to increase security in the Baltic Sea. Security that will make the filthy war industry oligarchs even more filthy, and will end up costing Europeans even more money and increasing pollution from ship traffic in the Baltic and EU ports. 

It seems that whoever is pulling the political strings in Europe (Great Scot, I've forgotten his name or initials), is amazingly successful at getting the stupidest people in the world to run them. Fortunately, some voters are waking up to this reality even as democracy is being circumvented by far-left oligarchs and other fools.

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Will Trump blow up another Russian pipeline?

Should TurkStream go the way of Nord Stream, it will prove that it doesn’t matter who is in the White House

By Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory

©  Isa Terli/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

On January 11, nine Ukrainian drones attacked the “Russkaya” compressor station near the town of Anapa in Russia’s Krasnodar Region. The station, situated on the north-eastern coast of the Black Sea, is a key installation in the TurkStream gas pipeline that crosses the Black Sea’s seabed to emerge on land again north of Istanbul.

To be precise, TurkStream consists of two parallel pipelines, just like the Nord Stream 1 and 2, which used to link Russia and the EU. Most of these two trans-Baltic pipelines were destroyed in a massive act of eco-terrorism; the perpetrators are certain to have included Ukraine and the US, in one way or another. 

The attack on the compressor station did not achieve its aims. Russian air defenses shot down the drones, and despite some minor damage, the station remained intact. However there were important consequences, and this story is far from over.

Three days after the Ukrainian strike, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused Washington of being behind Kiev’s assault. In particular, Lavrov charged that the US is seeking to demolish TurkStream, just as it made sure Nord Stream was taken out of commission. If Lavrov is right, the unsuccessful January 11 drone attack could turn out to have only been the beginning: Further attacks may follow, perhaps including an underwater bombing of the pipelines, as was carried out against Nord Stream in September 2022.

Context is essential here: At the beginning of this year, pipelines carrying gas from Russia via Ukraine to the EU were switched off after Kiev refused to prolong a transit agreement.

Read more

 Merkel blows a hole in Washington’s Nord Stream narrative

That has left TurkStream the only remaining pipeline sending gas from Russia to, ultimately, the EU, in this case mostly Hungary. Importantly, Lavrov believes that the US is aiming to have its Ukrainian clients sabotage this last remaining link, not only to hit Russia but also in order to fulfil the broader strategy of disrupting the EU’s economies.

It's interesting that the very conservative PM of Hungary, Viktor Orban, has just announced that he will not be attending the inauguration of President Trump next week. Is that decision connected to the fear of America blowing up Turkstream and leaving the landlocked Hungary in a very difficult position?

It is true that we won’t know for certain whether there is a dedicated US project to sabotage TurkStream and, if so, how far it will go – unless, of course, we wake up one morning to learn that “mysterious” explosions have occurred at the bottom of the Black Sea. In any case, Lavrov’s reading of the situation and warnings – not made for the first time – are plausible and should be taken seriously as a matter of due diligence, especially by Washington’s so-called European partners, that is, vassals.

This is so for several reasons: First, what happened to Nord Stream showed that the US and Ukraine accept no limits, even and perhaps especially among “allies.” Even more important is what happened after their Nord Stream attack, namely, in essence, nothing, at least to them. Instead, there was a prolonged period of falsely (and absurdly) blaming Russia, while the Europeans frantically helped cover up their “friends’” assault as best they could.

When that strategy of denial and disinformation became untenable, some Ukrainians were officially blamed but, as it happens, never apprehended – with the convenient side effect of letting Washington off the hook entirely. It’s a story that makes no sense, but then, making sense is not a thing Western elites and mainstream media consider obligatory. In any case, their failure to defend national interests and retaliate against a brutal attack on those interests can only have emboldened the perpetrators.

Read more

 The Nord Stream cock and bull story sums up Western Europe’s Stockholm Syndrome

Then there is Donald Trump, of course. The returning US president’s explicit policy of making the US “energy dominant” has various domestic aspects, from privileging the fossil fuel industry, which has contributed greatly to his campaign funds, to degrading environmental standards. But it also has foreign policy implications. One is the fact that Trump is continuing and escalating his predecessor Joe Biden’s policy of making the European vassals buy expensive American liquefied natural gas (LNG). 

Trump wants them to take even more LNG, using the threat of punitive tariffs as a very American-style sales argument. In essence, this is just the latest phase of that other economic war that Washington has waged: While the one against Russia has backfired quite spectacularly, leaving Moscow stronger and more resilient than before, this one, against Washington’s own NATO-EU vassals has been successful.

Comparatively inexpensive Russian energy has been replaced with expensive American (and other) substitutes – as of 2021, 47 percent of the EU’s gas supplies still came from Russia, for instance. The Europeans have submissively crippled themselves economically and greatly reinforced their dependency on the US. From Washington’s brutally selfish perspective, what’s not to love? At least as long as the Europeans do not rebel. And it seems they never will, astounding as that is.

Finally, there is a broader but no less pertinent context. Lavrov made his remarks about the danger to the TurkStream pipelines at a much longer press conference, which was dedicated to a review of Russian diplomacy in 2024. Against that backdrop, he also restated his views on Washington’s general approach to other countries and, really, the world as such. His crucial point in this regard was that America is not interested, in principal, in equality between sovereign states, balance between their interests, or fair competition between their economies.

Read more

 Blast from the past: Why the Nord Stream sabotage may yet have its day of reckoning

Instead, we can add, it keeps pursuing what Americans themselves call “primacy” and what the rest of the world experiences as a relentless policy of domination, intimidation, interference, and continual, usually extremely destructive, warfare. The US, Lavrov summed it up, does not accept any “competitor in any sphere.” We might add again, under any conditions, except when it is compelled to do so.

Is there anything remotely Christian in America's supreme hegemony policy?

Washington’s ruthlessness – and lawlessness – in controlling energy resources and infrastructure and, if necessary, in destroying them, too, is merely one aspect of this strategy. A strategy that seems so deeply ingrained in the collective mind of America’s elite that they cannot even imagine a less confrontational approach to their neighbors on planet Earth anymore. If Trump intends to “make America even greater,” Lavrov warned, the world will have to pay close attention to the methods he will employ to do so.

One test will be what will happen – or not – to TurkStream under Trump. If it should go the way Nord Stream went under Biden, that would be more – if unsurprising – evidence that, ultimately, it makes little difference to the rest of us who is in the White House. Because in America you can have any foreign policy – as long as it’s bossy.

European Politics and Energy Madness > Will Norway's new pipeline fare any better than Nordstream?

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New gas pipeline begins full service to Europe

The pipeline helps break Russia's grip on the energy sector of Europe's Baltic states

It also helps reduce the need for American natural gas in northern Europe

By Daniel J. Graeber

The Baltic Pipe is ready for the full capacity of natural gas, helping to address some of the lingering energy security concerns in Europe. Photo courtesy of Energinet.

Nov. 30 (UPI) -- It's a "huge day" for European energy security as full natural gas flows began Wednesday on a pipeline connecting Norway to the continental economies, the operators of the Baltic Pipe announced.

It took three years to build the pipeline network connecting Denmark, Norway and Poland and even longer for preparation given that it was proposed first well over a decade ago. Formally commissioned in October, the pipeline is now ready to operate at its full capacity of 350 billion cubic feet per year.

Progressing in earnest since suspected sabotage on the Nord Stream natural gas network, a Russian pipeline running through the Baltic Sea to Germany, Baltic Pipe goes a long way toward addressing European energy security concerns.

Does it really? After the British, so it appears, blew up Nordstream to stop Russian gas, do you think Putin will sit back and do nothing? While there is some evidence that Britain bombed Nordstream, they had little to gain from such an act of sabotage. America had much more to gain in creating new European markets for its gas. That, I suspect is one of the primary drivers of this proxy war.

With that in mind, Russia might not be the only country interested in sabotaging the Baltic Pipe. Whoever sabotaged the Nordstream pipeline set a really stupid precedent. 

"It's a huge day for us in Europe," said Torben Brabo, the director of international relations at Energinet, a Danish gas transmission operator. "After a very intense process, we have reached the target and can open the valves on Baltic Pipe."

For Europe, Baltic Pipe helps break Poland's heavy dependence on Russia for its natural gas, diminishing the Kremlin's clout in the former Soviet republic. It also supports others in the Baltic region that may be connected to Poland through pipelines.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that, before the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February, the EU relied on Russia for 40% of its natural gas supplies.

That's been reduced, however, thanks in part to a diversification effort, from imports of U.S.-sourced liquefied natural gas and now the Baltic Pipe.

The operator said that 80% of the pipeline's total capacity is booked for the next 15 years. All of the Baltic states have the option to bid for the remaining capacity to supplement the natural gas coming already from Norway.

"There has been excellent cooperation across the countries, and we can build on this, when we are going to work even closer together on energy and the expansion of renewable energy in future," Brabo from Energinet continued. "Cross-border cooperation is not only a necessity in order to overcome the energy crisis, but also to ensure that we achieve a safe and efficient green transition."

Baltic Pipe is a collaboration between Energinet and Polish gas transmission system operator GAZ-SYSTEM.

Canadian Convulsions > CSIS Covers up Trafficking Teens to Syria; Liberals Out-of-Touch - Rex Murphy

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CSIS persuaded Turkey to hide recruitment of operative

who trafficked teens to Islamic State

Globe and Mail, 

September 29, 2022

The most senior intelligence officer in charge of covert operations at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service went to Ankara in March, 2015, to persuade Turkish authorities to stay silent about the agency’s recruitment of a Syrian human smuggler who trafficked three British teenage girls to Islamic State militants, according to three sources.

The sources said the officer, Jeffrey Yaworski, who was at the time CSIS’s deputy director of operations, was carrying out a discreet but high-level campaign to prevent the spy agency from being publicly blamed for using the smuggler as an operative. The Globe is not identifying the sources because they were not authorized to discuss national security matters.

One of the sources said Turkey eventually agreed to Mr. Yaworski’s request, but punished Canada by limiting the number of CSIS agents operating at the Canadian embassy in Ankara. CSIS also promised that any further clandestine activities in the country would be conducted as joint operations with Turkish intelligence, the source said.

The smuggler, Mohammed al-Rashed, was arrested by Turkish authorities on Feb. 28, 2015, within days of when he helped the girls cross the Turkish border into Syria. His capture threatened to place Canada at the centre of an international incident, after Turkish media reported that he had shared the girls’ passport details with CSIS, and that he had smuggled other British nationals seeking to join the Islamic State.

At the time of his arrest, Britain’s Scotland Yard had been frantically searching for the girls, and Turkey was unaware that CSIS had an Islamic State double agent operating in the country.

Turkey never publicly confirmed CSIS’s involvement with Mr. al-Rashed after Mr. Yaworski‘s travels to Ankara. The sources said he visited Turkey at least two times to meet senior Turkish officials in the aftermath of the operative’s arrest. One of the sources said Mr. Yaworski was trying to put the operational mess “back in the box.”

During the first visit, another source said, Mr. Yaworski apologized and asked the Turks to release Mr. al-Rashed, which Turkey declined to do because of the intense publicity in Britain about the missing girls. Turkey also did not want to be blamed for freeing an Islamic State human smuggler, since Ankara had been heavily criticized for failing to stop the flow of foreign fighters into Syria, the source said.

Mr. Yaworski declined to comment on his interaction with Turkish authorities, saying through an intermediary that he is bound by the secrecy provisions of the Security Information Act.

CSIS also declined to discuss the matter. “There are important limits to what CSIS can confirm or deny given the need to protect sensitive techniques, methods and sources of intelligence,” spokesperson Eric Balsam said in a statement.

Around the time Mr. Yaworski was holding secret talks with Turkish authorities, CSIS convinced British counterterrorism officials to cover up the agency’s role in the handling of Mr. al-Rashed. Those discussions were revealed in The Secret History of the Five Eyes, a new book by author Richard Kerbaj that recounts parts of Mr. al-Rashed’s story.

Mr. Kerbaj interviewed Richard Walton, the chief of Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command, who said two CSIS officials came to see him shortly after the arrest of Mr. al-Rashed. They informed Mr. Walton that CSIS knew about the trafficking of the three teens and asked the British to obscure the spy agency’s role.

In his book, Mr. Kerbaj also wrote that CSIS sent an unidentified top official to Ankara to beg Turkey’s forgiveness for running a counterintelligence operation in their country. Mr. Kerbaj subsequently learned that the official was Mr. Yaworski, and that he had travelled to Turkey on at least two occasions after the arrest of Mr. al-Rashed. As deputy director of operations, Mr. Yaworski was responsible for all undercover missions, including recruitment and running of spies.

Mr. Kerbaj provided Mr. Yaworski’s name to The Globe and Mail last week, and the three sources later confirmed that he had travelled to Ankara.

The Globe has reported, citing a source with direct knowledge, that Mr. al-Rashed was freed on Aug. 5 after serving years in a Turkish prison on terrorism and smuggling charges, including for trafficking the three British girls, who were aged 15 and 16 at the time. The source said CSIS had planned to relocate him to Canada after his release. The government will not say if he has been granted asylum.

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Rex Murphy: The Liberals are so far out of touch

it probably can't be measured

Canadians need the Trudeau government to deal with the realities of

skyrocketing fuel, food and mortgage costs

Author of the article Rex Murphy

Publishing date: Oct 03, 2022 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during a Countdown to COP15 leaders event about climate change in New York City on Sept. 20, 2022. Rex Murphy wishes the Liberals would concentrate their energies on such domestic issues as inflation, soaring fuel costs, lack of clean drinking water on First Nations and government inefficiency. PHOTO BY BRYAN R. SMITH / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The greatest and most characteristic failure of the Trudeau administration has been its war against the oil and gas industry. It was so-early signalled. There is, for example, this brilliant pat-on-his-own-back — a yoga twist Mr. Justin has perfectly mastered — from nine years ago:

“I am pleased to announce that we will keep our commitment to implement a moratorium on crude oil tanker shipping on British Columbia’s north coast.”

From out of that deep but callow mindset came the blocking of pipelines, the wretched, useless (and in this time of rampant inflation) insulting so-called “carbon taxes,” the supine genuflections to the international global warming extremists, the hobbling of a mighty natural resource, and latterly the incredible elevation of a one-time Greenpeace activist and tower-climber, Steven Guilbeault (name his other qualifications), to a ministry in a supposedly mature national government.

The second greatest failure is a corollary of the first, the disregard, perhaps reaching to contempt, for the interests of the Western provinces. It amounts to the prime minister establishing a two-tier Confederation.

I am very well aware that I have made this observation many times before, but that puts no halt on my restating it: If oil and gas were the principal industries of Ontario, or especially Quebec, a drawing of an oil pipeline, or better yet that of an oil barrel, would long ago have supplanted the maple leaf on the Canadian flag.

How ever did global warming become the principal policy and obsession of the government of this vast, cold, main northern nation? If Canada were one of those tiny islands that shoot out warnings that they will be submerged in the apocalypse-to-come, it might be understandable.

The Maldives, for example, have staged their worry on this point. They held a televised “underwater cabinet meeting” to “raise awareness” of global warming. They gurgled very impressively, air bubbles drifting upwards, but, note, they still have land-based governance.

Of the thousands of islands in the Maldives that are barely above sea level, none have disappeared yet.

But Canada? Here’s a raw question too rarely asked — what’s our concern in all this? Why is global warming the principal and sternest policy of a Canadian government? Can we change China, India, Russia by our example? Beyond the burnishing of Trudeau’s credentials as the most self-advertised woke politician, what is it all about? Is Canada a heat furnace? Does Newfoundland threaten the global thermostat?

With the Canadian press asking stern questions about “carbon emissions policy” and which party has the “best” one, will no one ask the essential question: What benefit to Canada flows from “carbon reduction” schemes? Why does the Canadian government embrace global warming as the principal theme of national governance? Most succinctly, will no one in the press gallery ask the prime minister this question: What does it matter what we do?

Are there not wells to clean, passport lineups to shorten, inflation to worry about, estrangement from the Confederation to address?

Next question: Why has an international agenda, supported by every liberal billionaire and dogmatist of the warming crusade, become the key, near genetic, policy of the Trudeau administration? As Hillary Clinton so famously asked, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

Can no one in the national press ask why it is important, or in any way consequential, or has any impact on any other government in the world, that Trudeau taxes Canadian gasoline and heating fuel in the “fight against global warming?”

Are there not wells to clean, passport lineups to shorten?

Why his personal and shallow preoccupations, and those of his ideologically driven mentor, Gerald Butts, are shaping the destiny of our nation? Canada is not a footnote to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It may be fine for cabinet ministers flying abroad, a PM with his private air accommodation, and MPs with solid salaries not to care about pump prices or the jump in food costs and mortgage payments, to ignore reality and stick with the global warming fixation. But it is not for most Canadians, and certainly not for the poorest of them, which should always be our care.

And equally to the point, now that the blizzard of scandals and missteps, the airport clogs, the passport shambles, the WE scandals and the summoning of the near wartime Emergencies Act, have precipitated a drastic fall in the polls and signalled the “horror” of “Trumpian” Pierre Poilievre in the ascendant, would it be possible for the Trudeau government to stop role-playing on the international stage and tend to the less glamorous business of keeping Canada secure and stable?

It's my contention that Trudeau has always considered the Prime Minister of Canada as being a stepping stone to something more grand and fitting to his ego.

The current administration is so far out of touch I am not sure a measurement for the distance is available.

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How America is Strangling the Canadian Oil Industry, and We're Helping Them

Anti-pipeline campaign was planned, intended, and foreign-funded: Vivian Krause

Great Bear Rainforest is the size of Ireland, to protect 100 bears. Krause says it's a trade barrier

Brian Zinchuk / Pipeline News

Weyburn Oil Show 2019 - Vivian Krause

Weyburn, Sk., – Vivian Krause has spent the better part of a decade, digging into foreign funding backing campaigns to block Canadian salmon farming, and then Canadian oil. She was one of the headline speakers at the Saskatchewan Oil and Gas Show on June 5.

Krause pointed out Texas’ oil production had more than doubled, and it is now exporting oil to 20 countries, but in Canada, there are protests against further oil and gas development.

“How is it that we got to this place? How is it that pipelines, of all things, are now a major election issue? We’re not talking about fentanyl, or drug prices,” she said. “What are we talking about? Pipelines? They used to be out of sight, out of mind. No one ever had a pub conversation, or dinner conversation, over pipelines. But now we do.

“This didn’t happen for no reason. It was planned. It was the intended outcome of a campaign, a campaign with a name,” Krause said, explaining she first stumbled on it eight years ago with three little words: “tar sands campaign.”

It started with fish

Originally working in the salmon farming industry, Krause first worked on discovering the roots to a campaign to discredit farmed salmon from British Columbia. She soon found commonality with that campaign with the one against the oilsands.

She dug into tax returns of charitable foundations in the United States. She first found efforts to shift people away from farmed salmon. Activists were “demarketing” farmed salmon, getting them to buy less, and they were being supported by these foundations. “Demarketing is done by instilling FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt,” Krause said.

The fight against aquaculture, or farmed fish, was used to prop up the market for commercial fisheries, principally in Alaska, under a banner of sustainability.

These tactics would later be used against Canadian oil.

The organizations she found backing these efforts included the Tides Foundation, based in San Fransisco, and Tides Canada, based in Vancouver.

“It was in the course of this fish farming research that I found in the tax returns of the Tides Foundation an organization called Corporate Ethics got $700,000 one year for something called the tar sands campaign,” Krause said. She noted that the Tides Foundation took money from other donors and passed it along, so she sought out the origins of the money. “I found it, in the tax returns of the Rockefellers Brothers Fund.”

She noted that it was meant to stem demand for Canadian oil, the third time a resource-based industry had been targeted. First it was forestry, then aquaculture, and now oil.

Tar sands campaign

From 2007 to 2012, money poured into Corporate Ethics for the the coordination of the tar sands campaign. Then the Rockefellers Fund switched to the New Venture Fund, based in Washington, D.C.

“The interesting thing is the purpose for which the money was being provided. The grants database said the money was specifically to cap tar sands production in Alberta,” she said. And in 2015, the then-new NDP government in Alberta did exactly that.

The money kept coming for the tar sands campaign.

Another area of concern was a new park along the B.C. coast to protect the “Great Bear,” and became known as the “Great Bear Rainforest.”

She pointed to payments that had been made to Indigenous groups in opposition to pipelines. Others organized students and youth. For a while, much of the money went to opposition in the United States to the Keystone XL pipeline.

“Over the years, I’ve traced the funding of all these reports, all these stunts and celebrity appearances and many more, all these protests. Every single one of them is funded as part of the same campaign. I can’t find one single organization that’s not funded as part of the same campaign,” she said.

The CBC did a story on her efforts earlier this year. In that story, the Corporate Ethics webpage was highlighted, noting from the very beginning, the campaign strategy was to “to landlock the oilsands so the crude could not reach international markets.”

Days after that story aired, that verbiage was removed from the website or rewritten to talk about “educating voters.”

It took credit for delaying the Northern Gateway and Keystone XL projects. She added that 11 years ago, even the Mackenzie Valley pipeline was targeted.

“If we don’t respond differently to the activists against the current pipeline projects, that is, Line 3, Trans Mountain, Keystone, expect the same fate that happened against the Mackenzie Valley pipeline. It’s the same campaigners, the same money, the same funders. It stands to reason the results are going to be the same, unless there is a different response,” Krause said.

Living Oceans was another organization involved, and it was a key participant in the court challenge which stymied the Trans Mountain Expansion project last summer. She noted that $63,576 was spent in one year on the application to the Federal Court of Appeal. She said, “What this means is that that court ruling was brought about as part of a campaign to landlock Canadian crude, and keep Canada out of the oil market. Now, I’m not saying the judge was influenced by the money. I am saying that the application, the legal work that brought that application to the court, was partially funded as part of this campaign.”

Three organizations got $700,000 from the Tides Foundation, she said. The leading applicant of the court challenge was funded specifically to oppose and stop the Kinder Morgan pipeline project.

“What this means is that when the judge ruled that government needed to consult, and meaningfully, with the First Nation, what she was telling the government was that it was needing to consult with the very same First Nation that was getting funded to shut down the project. Of course, in the ruling, none of this was mentioned.”

Krause said she didn’t come across this until after the ruling came about.

“I can go through every single court ruling that has slowed down or stopped all the pipeline projects, and there isn’t one single court ruling that has been brought about, that has not been funded. Every single court action slowing down these pipeline projects is part of this campaign,” she said.

A small amount of money has been spent on door-to-door campaigns during elections, she asserted. Other money was spent to set up “fake grassroots campaigns” run from a private company run out of a treehouse office on Salt Spring Island, B.C.

The funding foundations, she said, are all members of an umbrella group called the “Consultative Group on Biological Diversity,” created in the late 1980s by the U.S. government, which still provides a very small amount of funding.

Large scale initiatives vary from protecting bears to another which includes two-thirds of Canada, half of which they want no “extractive industries,” no logging, roads, mining, hydro, oil or gas. Protecting large tracts of land, from the beginning, was about protecting the habitat of iconic species like caribue and grizzly. It was also about restricting oil and gas development in Canada, Krause said.

In the U.S., the initiative only affects states that don’t produce 95 per cent of America’s oil.

Great Bear Rainforest

Coming back to the Great Bear Rainforest, Krause said that was the basic premise of Bill C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, which passed into law a few weeks after the presentation.

She noted there are about 100 blonde-coloured black bears, the Kermode Bear, in a small area. They are of spiritual significance to some First Nations people. The original idea was to protect those bears. But the area was expanded, from the northern tip of Vancouver Island, to Alaska.

(The British Columbia website for the Great Bear Rainforest notes it is the size of Ireland).

“Now we have this huge area that’s called the Great Bear Rainforest, but in most of it, there are no Great Bears,” Krause said. “Now we’re told we can’t have any tankers there. The bears don’t like it.”

“What started off as a good idea, a protection of the habitat of a special bear, that idea has morphed and become a great trade barrier. Something is being protected here, and it’s not the bear. It doesn’t even live in most of the area. What is being protected is the American monopoly on our oil, that is keeping our country over a barrel. That is what is being passionately protected,” she said to applause.

She noted that of the Moore Foundation (Gordon Moore co-founded Intel) has put $267 million into organizations operating in Canada, of which 90 per cent was for activism. Tides Canada got $83 million, and First Nations groups got a combined total of $58 million. 

She noted the Moore Foundation’s $267 million, $115 million went to developing four marine plans for the West Coast of British Columbia, which want no pipelines, no tankers, and no trade infrastructure for exporting energy products off the northern B.C. coast, in the name of protecting the Great Bear.

OPEN and SAFE

“What concerns me most is that this campaign hasn’t kept one barrel of oil in the ground,” Krause said. That oil is simply being produced by other countries.

She said the Online Progressive Engagement Network (OPEN), based in California, said they ended 2015 by moving the needle in the Canadian federal election and contributed greatly to the ousting of the Conservative Party of Canada as government. It is the parent organization of Leadnow, which was active in that election. She provided information about this to Elections Canada, but got nowhere.

All the various components of the anti-pipeline campaign trace back to 2003-04, not long after the beginning of the Iraq War and the California energy crisis Krause said. “These two events are really what triggered this group of California philanthropists to say, ‘Hey, we’ve got to get control of our global energy supply, our policy.’”

One of the organizations established at the time is Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), which was funded by some of the same foundations who funded the tar sands campaign. It is to protect American businesses from high and volatile oil prices.

In 2004, the Packard Foundation made a $15 million payment to start the Great Bear Rainforest. Another payment for $12 million were made to start the Canadian Boreal Initiative. 

“As I was studying the history of this, it was very clear to me that the same charitable foundations who wanted to get the West off Mideast oil. It was geopolitics, and it’s very clear in their explaining this,” she said. But she couldn’t explain the campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline.

But the 2013 strategy paper she found made it clear to her that not only did they want to get the West off Mideast oil, “They also wanted to discourage investment in Canada. And if you think about it, 10 years ago, we were the best place to invest. The goal was to turn us from the best to the worst. That wouldn’t have happened if Keystone had gone ahead. Part of the strategy was to make investors nervous.”

Harper-era Canadian Revenue Agency audits into related charities found 41 of 42 in non-compliance, and many got funding they weren’t supposed to get. “All these charity audits were put on hold in 2015,” she said. The law has since been changed and charities are now unlimited in this regard.

In summary, she said there were four motivations of the American funders. “They want more renewable energy. They want more energy efficiency, and they want more energy security. All of that is good stuff.

“But then they have this fourth objective, and that is to landlock our country and keep Canada out of world oil markets. And that’s where I think we have to say no. Because we all want to make the very best use of every barrel of oil that we need to burn. But as we go on this green transition, no country, least of all Canada, should be benched out of the oil market.”

She said she was encouraged by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, saying, “Finally, we have Canadian politicians with the courage to take on the Rockefellers. So I think we need to make sure we continue to support them, let them know they’re not alone in this fight. This is no small ordeal. It’s a huge, daunting challenge.”

Especially when the Prime Minister's good friend and former Principal Secretary, and one of the most powerful men in the country, was Gerald Butts, former CEO of WWF. He was involved in many of the projects listed above.