The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand

Dried-up Arctic ponds evidence of global warming, study says

A University of Alberta scientist has uncovered dramatic evidence of climate change in the Arctic, where ponds that have been part of the landscape for more than 6,000 years are drying up as global warming has nearly doubled the length of the brief northern summer.

Trust tax linked to private equity buyouts

The income trust structure was a major impediment to private equity firms buying up pieces of Corporate Canada, the Finance Department was told one day before Ottawa slapped a crippling tax on the sector.

"Private equity firms generally find it difficult to compete against the income trust alternative, said an Oct. 30, 2006, memo sent to Bob Hamilton, senior assistant deputy minister of tax policy at the Finance Department.

The memo was obtained by The Globe and Mail under access to information law.

For anyone at Finance who knew the trust tax was imminent, one conclusion that's easily drawn from the memo is that taxing trusts out of existence would likely usher in even more private equity buyouts by Canadian and foreign investors, which is what happened.

What Price Victory? (scroll down)

It’s reasonable to assume that, as professionals operating within a government department nominally charged with understanding affairs of finance, the folks working for Flaherty would have some rudimentary understanding of the way key players in the private space—private equity, for example—operate.

That is private-equity firms find undervalued, cash-generating businesses, strip them down and load them up with debt. Interest expenses basically wipe out taxes owed. That’s the nutshell.

What was that about “tax leakage”?

Either the professionals have no clue about their business, or they engineered the destruction of the trust sector. Secretive, incompetent and stupid is no way to run a government.

N.S. premier urges revolt against federal budget

The 2005 Atlantic Accord, a deal signed by the then-Liberal government between the governments of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador, protects those two provinces from having their offshore oil and gas royalties clawed back under the federal equalization plan.

However, to accept an enriched equalization deal, they have to abandon the accord.

World oil production has maxed out: Talisman

Talisman chief executive Jim Buckee has never been one to shy away from controversy.

An astrophysicist, Buckee was one of the first energy industry executives to challenge the precepts of global warming and the subsequent demonization of all greenhouse gas producers -- a position that earned him the ire of the environmental lobby.

An adventurer, he took his company into one of the most controversial oil plays in the world -- Sudan -- believing it was a good thing, financially speaking, for the Calgary-based explorer. Some industry analysts believe that decision earned the company a stock market backlash, even though Talisman exited Sudan with a healthy financial gain over four years ago.

So when Buckee suggests, as he did at Talisman's annual meeting Wednesday, that Peak Oil has arrived, we are not completely surprised -- even if that observation is likely to again land him in the eye of a storm.

The nuclear option

Sensing some reluctance from the crowd, Hawthorne later slips into passive-aggressive salesman mode. "I'm not here to sell you a nuclear plant. If you don't want a nuclear plant, I don't want to be here."

But he does want to be there, and he is selling something the idea that a nuclear renaissance is upon us, that emission-free atomic power will save local economies, keep global warming in check and pave the way to a nuclear-based hydrogen economy. The message in a nutshell: the construction of new nuclear plants in Canada is inevitable.

Nuclear power, once shunned, is back on the table in Canada and around the world. Its image as a risky, expensive, dangerous technology amplified by the Three Mile Island accident and Chernobyl disaster is clouding. Only emission-free nuclear power, proponents say, can keep global warming in check without hindering economic growth.

There's serious talk in Alberta about using nuclear power to reduce emissions during oil sands production. Behind the scenes, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has reportedly embraced the cause. And Ontario has already committed to building two new nuclear reactors totalling 1,000 megawatts in the province just the start, industry and political sources contend.

Mortgage woes could be 'tip of the iceberg'

For some, the lesson learned is: "buyer beware." But a series of interviews with subprime borrowers, mortgage lenders, appraisers, current and former regulators, and the inspector general of the Department of Housing and Urban Development paints a different picture - of a widespread pattern of questionable lending practices and outright fraud that has already sparked a wave of criminal and civil actions against various players in the $10 trillion market for residential mortgages.

Questionable mortgage practices can take on many forms, but the fall into two broad categories:

• Predatory lending. In this case, complex mortgage terms and interest rate risks were not fully explained as required by federal law. The borrower is usually the victim.
• Mortgage fraud. In these cases, often carried out by sophisticated swindlers, the lender is typically the victim.

Billions at risk from wheat super-blight

An infection is coming, and almost no one has heard about it. This infection isn't going to give you flu, or TB. In fact, it isn't interested in you at all. It is after the wheat plants that feed more people than any other single food source on the planet. And because of cutbacks in international research, we aren't prepared. The famines that were banished by the advent of disease-resistant crops in the Green Revolution of the 1960s could return, Borlaug told New Scientist.

The disease is Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust fungus (Puccinia graminis), discovered in Uganda in 1999. Since the Green Revolution, farmers everywhere have grown wheat varieties that resist stem rust, but Ug99 has evolved to take advantage of those varieties, and almost no wheat crops anywhere are resistant to it....

....What's more, Ug99 will find agriculture has changed to its liking in the decades stem rust has been away. "Forty years ago most wheat wasn't irrigated and heavily fertilised," says Borlaug. Now, thanks to the Green Revolution he helped bring about, it is. That means modern wheat fields are a damper, denser thicket of stems, where dew can linger till noon - just right for fungus.

Another worry is that travel has exploded in the past 40 years. There have now been several documented cases of travellers carrying rust spores on their clothing. Some fear Ug99 will hitchhike as much as it flies - and its spread need not be innocent. New Scientist has learned that the US Department of Homeland Security met in March to discuss the possibility that someone could transport Ug99 deliberately.

Searching for survivors of Spanish flu

The project is specifically targeting British Columbians, though the researchers would hope to hear from survivors from further afield as well, Dr. Skowronski said.

She believes that as well as safeguarding a piece of history, the project could help people contemplating future pandemics to understand how people cope when systems are overwhelmed and survival comes down to individuals helping individuals.

"I think it's really hard for people to appreciate -- and governments in particular -- to appreciate the potential enormity of a pandemic," she said.

"But the basic human capacity to cope, to draw on each other for support -- that hasn't really changed [since 1918]. And so we can really learn, I think, from people and what they have to describe about that."