This is an Energy and Environment Round-Up by ilargi.

As the tar sands royalties soap drags on, and we do have links to some really good articles on the topic, from Nature.org, Mother Jones, and many others, still, how could we not open with climate change, two days after Al Gore and the IPCC won the first ever Climate Change Nobel Prize, and Sheila Watt-Cloutier and James Hansen did not?

Everything that the winners stand for is rendered obsolete in one broad stroke by the article from New Scientist that we open with below. And that is the problem: the people who do the frontline work are snubbed, while the late arrivals get decorated. Yes, Gore raises awareness. But awareness of what, exactly?

And that’s not the only issue: both winners stand out for being repeatedly, if not incessantly, wrong on what they claim to be experts in, only to be corrected time and again by those they beat out for the award. Yes, it’s done, we know, and maybe we should just lower our standards, like everyone else. Problem with that is, we don’t trust there’s time left for any standards other than the real ones.

Macleans: Alberta stands accused
_{A huge fight between East and West -- over the oil sands -- is just starting}

Left unfettered, Alberta's energy sector will, by the end of this century, transform the southern part of the province into a desert and its north into a treeless, toxic swamp. Driven both by global warming and oil and gas developments, temperatures in Alberta will soar by as much as eight degrees. The Athabasca River will slow to a trickle, parching the remainder of the province's forests and encouraging them to burst into flame, generating vast quantities of CO2. "They're going to be the architects of their own destruction," says journalist William Marsden, whose new book outlines the environmental threats posed by Alberta's energy industry.

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The week after we saw bank runs in the UK, a measure of calm has returned to the markets thanks to a combination of central bank bailouts, government deposit guarantees and interest rate cuts. For all that heavy intervention, one derivatives market expert warns that we are still at the beginning of the beginning of the credit crunch.

On the Canadian energy scene, the debate over the Alberta oil and gas royalties review continues. Alberta, which has lower royalties than comparable jurisdictions, wants its fair share, but that could affect Ottawa's tax take. Investors concerned about the royalty issue seem keen to extract themselves from tar sands investments. With the Canadian dollar at parity with the US dollar for the first time since 1976, there are concerns about the ability of the Canadian economy to adapt and compete.

Concerns on the climate front center on the potential for methane-powered runaway warming thanks to new research on the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. The direct relationship between carbon offsets and increasing child labour in the third world is also worth highlighting.

Are we headed for an epic bear market?

One of the world's leading experts on credit derivatives, Das is the author of a 4,200-page reference work on the subject, among a half-dozen other tomes. As a developer and marketer of the exotic instruments himself over the past 30 years. He seemed like the ideal industry insider to help us get to the bottom of the recent debt crunch -- and I expected him to defend and explain the practice.

I started by asking the Calcutta-born Australian whether the credit crisis was in what Americans would call the "third inning." This was pretty amusing, it seemed, judging from the laughter. So I tried again. "Second inning?" More laughter. "First?"

Still too optimistic. Das, who knows as much about global money flows as anyone in the world, stopped chuckling long enough to suggest that we're actually still in the middle of the national anthem before a game destined to go into extra innings. And it won't end well for the global economy....

....When you add it all up, according to Das' research, a single dollar of "real" capital supports $20 to $30 of loans. This spiral of borrowing on an increasingly thin base of real assets, writ large and in nearly infinite variety, ultimately created a world in which derivatives outstanding earlier this year stood at $485 trillion -- or eight times total global gross domestic product of $60 trillion.

In her new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Canadian writer Naomi Klein uses the example of public sector dismantling in both New Orleans and Iraq as an illustration of Milton Friedman's idea that crisis presents an opportunity to push a pre-existing agenda and achieve sweeping change. This is both an important point and a timely warning, as the developing international credit crunch is arguably approaching a critical phase. The inability to roll over short term commercial paper, often backed by dubious loans, is presenting an enormous challenge to a banking system short of cash. The coming economic upheaval could be sufficient to precipitate far-reaching socio-political changes on a global scale.

On the energy front, CIBC World Markets claims that Canada has 50-70% of the investable oil reserves in the world, for oil majors increasingly shut out of producing regions. However, those reserves suffer from a shortage of pipeline capacity for both inputs and output. Saskatchewan decides against 'clean coal' on cost grounds, but continues to maintain a low royalty, low tax regime for natural resources. In the meantime, the Canadian wind industry is being consolidated in fewer and fewer hands, and there is strong resistance to uranium mining in rural Ontario.

As for environmental news, Holland is developing a 200 year plan for climate change, but with the assumption that sea-levels will rise very little despite evidence of rapid change in Greenland's icesheets. There is considerable concern over the potential for warming to activate microbial oxidation of the organic matter of the arctic tundra, which could ignite a devastating spiral of positive feedback.

Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine

In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism's core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as "the shock doctrine". He observed that "only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change". When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the "tyranny of the status quo". A variation on Machiavelli's advice that "injuries" should be inflicted "all at once", this is one of Friedman's most lasting legacies....

....I started researching the free market's dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on Washington's failed attempts to follow "shock and awe" with shock therapy - mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized government. Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating 2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.