To save Somalia from piracy, terrorism, hunger, corruption, warlordism and a third decade of anarchy, representatives from 54 countries, along with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, met in Turkey on Friday.

The root causes of Somalia’s many problems, and the remedies, should by now be obvious to all involved. Instead, the dignitaries assembled in Turkey — representing one-quarter of the nations on Earth — are proposing policies that would continue to doom the Somali people.

Somalia, the failed state in the Horn of Africa, was born in 1960 with the seed of its own destruction — a grandiose commitment to achieve the dream of a Greater Somalia at the expense of its neighbours. Somalia’s five-pointed flag demonstrated this commitment. Two of the points represented British Somalia and Italian Somalia, the only two foreign protectorates that merged to form the newly independent nation. A third point represented French Somaliland to the north, a French territory whose population in a referendum had just voted against joining the new state; a fourth point represented the Northern Frontier District of a soon-to-be-independent Kenya; and the fifth point represented territories of Ethiopia, a sovereign state, to the west.

Six months after Somalia’s day of independence, Somali hostilities against its neighbours began and, with few respites, have persisted almost continuously since. Somalia first precipitated attacks on Ethiopia and Kenya, then civil war broke out among the clans within Somalia. The upshot was untold suffering among the peoples of the region, secession by the former British Somaliland; and continuing chaos in what remains of Somalia.

The British and the Italians, who had bought into the Somali activists’ demands for a Greater Somalia, unwisely facilitated the merger of their two culturally different protectorates, then saw the region drown in blood as the Somalis attempted to capture territory from their neighbours.

Yet the demands for a Greater Somalia had neither historical nor cultural legitimacy — Greater Somalia was merely a post-colonial conceit. The Somalis — a dark-skinned people with Caucasian features — didn’t even exist until circa 1200 AD when the male Arab colonizers of the Horn of Africa formed new clans by marrying blacks, multiplying in number rapidly, and then squeezing most non-Somalis — those without male Arab lineage — out of the lands. The Horn of Africa did see some scattered clan-based Somali sultanates and empires, but mostly it saw colonization at the hands of Ottomans, Ethiopians, and Europeans. At no time were Somalis united in a Greater Somalia — the chief allegiances of these clan-based societies were to their own clans.

The culturally different Somali clans of the north — what was once British Somaliland — were the first to see that a Grand Somalia led to a deadly dead end. In 1991, it seceded to become the independent state of Somaliland, over the objection of Somalia’s central government, of Arab and African states that didn’t want to legitimize secessionist movements of their own, of the former colonial powers who didn’t want to admit their mistakes, and of the United Nations, which wins the support of corrupt regimes by guaranteeing their sovereignty.

Yet Somaliland has thrived, despite a brutal civil war that saw its capital city destroyed. Somaliland’s secret? Because the government of this breakaway state was ineligible for foreign aid, it became a self-reliant, peaceable and free-market state relatively free of corruption, unlike the official government of Somalia, which lavish foreign aid has made one of the most corrupt states on Earth. This week, World Bank auditors revealed they could account for only US$11-million of the US$94-million that the central government had received in 2009, and just US$22-million of its 2010 revenues of US$70-million.

But for dependency on foreign aid, the northern part of what remains of Somalia — an historically independent-minded region called Puntland — might also have seceded. Puntland, in fact, has already gone partway to independence, by declaring itself an autonomous region. Now Puntland may break off entirely, mostly because Puntland appears to have so much oil that it would become one of the richest countries in the Middle East.

To prevent a further breakup of Somalia, which would encourage breakaways by independent-minded peoples in other countries, the nations meeting in Turkey are promising to reward the leaders in Puntland if they’ll stay, and those in Somaliland if they return. If the Turkey meeting succeeds, it would create Somalia’s 15th failed government and set the stage for more like it. If it fails, the Somali people will have succeeded, by freeing themselves of the binds of foreign aid and false nationalism.

For a fascinating description of the origins of the Somali people, click here.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe. This article first appeared in the Financial Post.

Last in a series. Previously: Capitalist Haven

It’s the only African country that doesn’t rely on foreign aid from the world’s rich governments. It’s a Muslim country in Africa that has had a functioning democracy for two decades. It’s an oasis of relative peace in one of the most vicious regions of the world, with a growing free-market economy, low inflation and a currency that has been appreciating against the U.S. dollar.

This anomaly of a country, Somaliland, is unrecognized by any other country in the world, even though the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa touts it as a “success story” and the World Bank itself doesn’t formally recognize it. Somaliland’s story is all the more astonishing given that it is officially part of Somalia, a failed state best known for its piracy at sea and al-Shabaab terrorists on land, and given that it declared independence in 1991 after surviving a brutal repression by Somalia’s Marxist dictator that dispersed much of its population to the U.K., Canada and other safe havens.

While much of Somalia descended into an ungovernable anarchy over the past two decades, Somaliland miraculously found its feet. The miracle lay largely in the country’s good fortune to have been in British hands over most of the previous century, and in its good fortune to be deprived of foreign aid. Without foreign aid lavished on leaders in the central government and with a decentralized British colonial parliament, Somaliland’s local governments exercised meaningful rule, citizens were accustomed to local rule, and citizens had no choice but to be self-­reliant.

In the rest of Somalia, where foreign aid propped up a corrupt central government without benefiting the populace at large, self-reliance meant banditry on the roads and piracy at sea. In foreign-aid-bereft Somaliland, such lawlessness would have killed the country’s best hope for survival — exports from the deep-sea port of Berbera that the British left behind, coupled with roads able to carry to port local goods as well as goods from neighbouring landlocked Ethiopia.

The local clan-based governments calculated they would earn less by plundering the few merchants willing to risk the trip to port than by ensuring safe passage along the road system and sharing in growing port revenues. It was an enlightened business decision. Livestock exports of goats, sheep, cattle and camels, which account for some 60% of Somaliland’s total exports and GDP, has soared, almost tripling in the last five years alone, while Ethiopia — the dominant economy in the region — increasingly ships through Somaliland. The once-underutilized port has already undergone a major upgrade and, to keep up with the needs of its burgeoning trade, Somaliland has announced it will privatize the port.

Because Somaliland is unrecognized, credit has been hard to come by, the country has largely needed to rely on cash transactions, and foreign investment has been all but non-existent. Until now.

Although most of the world’s governments, fearful of encouraging other secessionist movements, are in solidarity with the central government of Somalia against Somaliland, the world’s capitalists are taking a second look. Somaliland may not have the official imprimatur of the United Nations or the backing of a major central bank, some investors ­reason, but it looks a lot more secure than a Greece, an Egypt, or many other countries blessed by officialdom.

This week, Coca-Cola opened a US$15-million bottling plant in Somaliland, the country’s first major industrial investment since independence. Others, including Toyota and foreign airlines, have announced plans to invest. And oil companies, too, are expressing interest — prior to the civil war, several oil majors were exploring in Somaliland.

But the biggest breakthrough for Somaliland may come from a sympathetic Britain, its former colonial master and present home to the world’s largest Somali Diaspora community. In a 21st-century twist on its colonial trading corporations such as the Hudson’s Bay Co. and the East India Co., the British parliament this year established the Somaliland Development Corp. as an end-run around countries that deny Somaliland the recognition, and investment, it deserves.

“The point of the corporation is to facilitate international investment in Somaliland and economic interaction for the benefit of the Somaliland people,” explained British MP Alun Michael in the House of Parliament. “As an unrecognized state, it is isolated. Despite its extraordinary achievements in stability and democracy, international donors cannot deal directly with its government, and foreign investors face uncertainty about whether contracts — the basis of secure business — can be enforced. The point of the corporation is to establish an entity to circumvent that problem.”

The Somaliland Development Corp. will be, in effect, an outsourced Somaliland ministry that will allow foreign investors to help Somaliland develop under the laws of the U.K. Fittingly, the U.K. is helping to advance the development of its former colony into a viable democratic state. The rest of what is official Somalia — a region that was Italian Somaliland, including the autonomous Puntland region, has had no such luck, not least because it lacked the British tradition of democracy. But the Somalis in the former Italian Somaliland also have a path to peace, as we shall see next week.

For some historical background on the Somaliland success story, click here. For economic and trade data from the Somaliland Ministry of National Planning and Development, click here.

Second in a series. Next: Drop Effort to Keep Somalia Together
Previously: Occupy Somalia

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe. This article first appeared in the Financial Post.

The Somalian capital of Mogadishu in 1977, before it degenerated into chaos.

The EU Naval Force made headlines this week by blasting a pirate base on Somali shores and pirate ships out of Somali waters. The well-publicized and logical rationale for the navy’s aggressive new stance: Somali piracy costs the world economy an estimated US$7-billion a year.

An unpublicized and equally logical reason for this action: On Somali land and under the waters now frequented by Somali pirates lies oil wealth that could rival Kuwait’s.

Many oil companies are manoeuvring for a part of this potential oil bonanza — they include firms from China, Australia, the U.S. and Canada, which are already engaged in drilling — but the inside track may be held by British Petroleum and the UK, which has a long history of resource extraction in both Africa and the Middle East. In recent months, British foreign secretary William Hague visited Mogadishu, the Somali capital, for talks on “the beginnings of an opportunity” to rebuild the country and British Prime Minster David Cameron hosted an international summit on Somalia attended by 55 delegations, including a U.S. contingent led by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton.

“There’s room for everybody when this country gets back on its feet and is ready for investment,” said Somali Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali after the conference, in offering a share of oil and other natural resources in return for help with reconstruction. “What we need is capital from countries like the UK to invest. If the private sector can come in and do the work, then we welcome them.”

But just who are the “we” Prime Minister Ali refers to? He heads the civil-war-wracked country’s transitional government which was installed in Somalia a decade ago by Western powers, which proved so unpopular that it soon needed an invasion by U.S. backed Ethiopian troops to remain in power, which relies for its continuance on U.S. drone strikes on the militants’ stronghold in the south of the country, and whose mandate expires in August of this year.

Not that the transitional government isn’t an improvement over the anarchy that reigned in the decades prior to its installation — Somalia, best known to many for Black Hawk Down, is the poster child of the failed state. Soon after it attained the status of a state in 1960 after a period of British and Italian rule, this anarchic country of warlords, of four major clans and several smaller ones, fell victim to a military strongman who imposed a Marxist government that ruined the economy.

Somalia is today a hotbed of piracy and al-Qaeda-linked terrorists; a country that over the last two decades has endured near-continual war causing hundreds of thousands to die from violence and starvation, and a million to flee to other lands; a country of the impoverished, almost half of whom live on less than $1 a day. In the absence of good governance, any attempt to divide Somalia’s wealth among BP, Shell, and the other large and small players that are jockeying for position is likely to spell doom, particularly now that the stakes have been raised.

Rather than maintaining the pretence that Somalia rates status as a sovereign country — it is in fact comprised of several autonomous regions — the Somali people would be best served by reverting to the only system in the region’s recent history that saw relative peace and prosperity — when order was imposed by colonial powers acting under the authority of the United Nations. The post-Second World War protectorate of British Somaliland and the trust territory of Italian Somaliland fared relatively well until in 1960 these areas merged to become a greater Somali Republic. Had these Western powers continued to rule and to develop the Somali territories, untold suffering would have been averted and Somalis would have been better prepared for ultimate self-rule, as occurred especially with former British colonies that enjoyed longer colonial rule, such as India, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

Today’s status quo — a U.S.-imposed government sustained by foreign troops bolstered by commando EU raids on pirates — is no way to run a country. Neither is it an option for the West to wash its hands of the anarchy. Into the vacuum that its departure would create could come Russia or China, countries with a poor history of governance. Better for the UN to step into this breach — this is one of the purposes for which it was formed — and when it next becomes time to relinquish rule in the Somali territories, their peoples through referendums should have viable options to live apart, in small states based on their autonomous regions, and not just in a greater Somalia that history shows has not been all that great.

To see the EU Naval Force explanation of its mission against the pirates, click here.

First in a series. Next: Capitalist Haven

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe. This article first appeared in the Financial Post.

A wind farm in the U.K., which now has 12 million people living in fuel poverty.

Global-warming-related catastrophes are increasingly hitting vulnerable populations around the world, with one species in particular danger: the electricity ratepayer. In Canada, in the U.K., in Spain, in Denmark, in Germany and elsewhere the danger to ratepayers is especially great, but ratepayers in one country — the U.S. — seem to have weathered the worst of the disaster.

America’s secret? Unlike leaders in other countries, which to their countries’ ruin adopted policies as if global warming mattered, U.S. leaders more paid lip service to it. While citizens in other countries are now seeing soaring power rates, American householders can look forward to declining rates.

The North American exemplar of acting on the perceived threat of global warming is Ontario, which dismantled one of the continent’s finest fleets of coal plants in pursuit of becoming a green leader. Then, to induce developers to build uneconomic renewable energy facilities, the Ontario government paid them as much as 80 times the market rate for power. The result is power prices that rose rapidly (about 50% since 2005) and will continue to do so: Ontarians can expect power prices that are 46% higher over the next five years, according to a 2010 Ontario government estimate, and more than 100% higher according to independent estimates. The rest of Canada may not fare much better — the National Energy Board forecasts power prices 42% higher by 2035, while some estimates have Canadian power prices 50% higher by 2020.

The story throughout much of Europe is similar. Denmark, an early adopter of the global-warming mania, now requires its households to pay the developed world’s highest power prices — about 40¢ a kilowatt hour, or three to four times what North Americans pay today. Germany, whose powerhouse economy gave green developers a blank cheque, is a close second, followed by other politically correct nations such as Belgium, the headquarters of the EU, and distressed nations such as Spain.

The result is chaos to the economic well-being of the EU nations. Even in rock-solid Germany, up to 15% of the populace is now believed to be in “fuel poverty” — defined by governments as needing to spend more than 10% of the total household income on electricity and gas. Some 600,000 low-income Germans are now being cut off by their power companies annually, a number expected to increase as a never-ending stream of global-warming projects in the pipeline wallops customers. In the U.K., which has laboured under the most politically correct climate leadership in the world, some 12 million people are already in fuel poverty, 900,000 of them in wind-infested Scotland alone, and the U.K. has now entered a double-dip recession.

The U.S., in contrast, will see power rates decline starting next year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, dropping by more than 22% by the end of the decade and then staying flat to 2035. Why the fall? Mainly because the U.S. will rely overwhelmingly on fossil fuels in the years ahead, not just coal, which dominates the current power system, but increasingly natural gas, which is expected to account for 60% of all new generating capacity in the future. Thanks to fracking, the U.S. effectively has limitless amounts of inexpensive natural gas to add to its limitless coal.

While the rest of the developed world was in thrall to global-warming rhetoric, the U.S. talked the talk but balked at following through. In 1997, then president Bill Clinton and his vice-president, Al Gore, happily signed on to the Kyoto Treaty, which coerced the countries of the developed world into compromising their economies in order to save the planet. While other nations then dutifully complied, the U.S. Senate — as Clinton and Gore knew it would — refused to ratify Kyoto by a 95-0 vote. Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, did an equally superb job of talking but balking at taking economy-killing measures. Bush successor Barack Obama, although a global-warming true believer, also put global warming on the back burner, preferring to make Obamacare, rather than climate change, his signature issue.

With the Republicans all but certain to control the purse strings following the November elections by dint of a majority in the House of Representatives, European-style legislation in the U.S. in aid of global warming will be impossible, even if the Republicans don’t also capture the Senate and the White House, as polls now indicate they will. In the event of a Republican sweep, the gap between power prices in the U.S. and the rest of the developed world will increase even more as “Drill, baby, drill” Republicans remove the existing restraints on the U.S. fossil-fuel industry, and slash the remaining subsidies on the U.S. renewable-energy industry.

To see how high power prices are in the EU countries, click here.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe.

This article first appeared in the Financial Post.

Last fall, after public opinion polls showed most of the Western world’s citizens had turned against global-warming alarmism, after governments started to slash their subsidies for renewable energy, and after whining from the alarmists showed that they, too, knew the game was over, I concluded that Al Gore et al. had decisively lost the global-warming debate. Global temperatures had stopped climbing, hurricanes hadn’t materialized in abnormal numbers, the Arctic ice had largely recovered while the Antarctic ice had steadily grown, polar bear populations were on the increase, and on and on — in effect, every major global-warming scare had been debunked. As important, the alarmists could no longer rhetorically ask, “If humans aren’t changing the climate through CO2, what is?”

There was now an impressive answer: cloud cover, caused by the interaction of cosmic rays and the Sun. To the distress of the alarmists, new research at the Danish Space Research Institute and Geneva-based CERN were affirming this cosmic ray-Sun theory, and other prestigious scientific bodies were giving it credence. Last week, in one of the few columns I’ve written in the last six months on the now-passé issue of global warming, I described the Royal Astronomical Society’s publication of an important new work that continues the ascendancy of this theory.

While most members of the general public by now realize that global-warming was overhyped, two groups lag behind: the large number who don’t follow the issue closely and the small number of true believers who do, but selectively and with outrage. For a sampling of the views of this latter group, see some of their letters here. They are among the many that responded to my last column about the press’s failure to cover dissenting global-warming views, such as the recent recantation of James Lovelock, the world’s best-known environmentalist. The peculiar object of some letter-writers’ outrage: my one-sentence comment on “ice in both the Arctic and the Antarctic — both are now at or above average levels.”

One of the letter writers cites the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., to rebut me on the Arctic. Ironically, NSIDC was my source. On April 25, the date I was referring to, NSDIC shows that the Arctic ice had expanded enough from its lows of 2007 to meet the average level that existed over the last three decades. Another source, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, shows the Arctic ice to have exceeded the three-decade average. The satellite graphic that you see shows the Arctic as a whole that same day — not much water up there for those polar bears to splash around in.

In fact, those polar bears’ ancestors had much more water to play in a little over a half century ago, when the Saint Roch, a boat owned by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, crossed the Northwest Passage. And a full century ago, when Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen also did so. Yet in the face of this incontrovertible evidence that today’s Arctic has been experiencing no unprecedented melting, the true-believing alarmists cling to their faith in the culpability of man, searching for data, any data, that might bolster their beliefs.

What of the alarmists’ disbelief in the extensive evidence that shows global temperatures to have stopped climbing, when NASA shows global temperatures continuing to rise? NASA seems like a credible source, until you realize that the scientist who controls the data also massages it — he is none other than uber-climate alarmist James Hansen, Al Gore’s sidekick and the object of a recent unprecedented protest by 50 former NASA astronauts and scientists who asserted that Hansen’s Goddard division at NASA was ruining the organization’s reputation: “With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from Goddard Institute for Space Studies leadership, it is clear that the science is not settled,” the 50 astronauts and scientists wrote.

The big picture: There is not a scrap of compelling evidence that points to man-made global warming representing a danger for society. The only scary “evidence” that exists, in fact, is based on computer models, none of which have been proven to work and all of which reflect the biases of the people loading in the data.

To see the Royal Astronomical Society’s publication on the role of cosmic rays in controlling climate on Earth, click here.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe.

This article first appeared in the Financial Post.

True to form, the overwhelming majority of press outlets failed to report the juiciest global-warming gossip of the week — a change of heart on the issue by one of the world’s most celebrated environmentalists. Also true to form, the press failed to report the most profound science story of the week — a startling theory that not only absolves humans of blame in global warming but sheds light on another taboo subject: shortcomings in Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Unlike their coverage of the political establishment or the corporate establishment, journalists will rarely be skeptical of the scientific establishment. Perhaps these ­unskeptical journalists don’t question scientists out of a belief that scientists’ pronouncements are free of the self-interest that taints politicians or corporations. Or perhaps these journalists, who are themselves rarely scientifically literate, blindly accept the views of scientific authority figures because they lack the training to assess rival views. Or perhaps these journalists fear being subjected to ridicule if they buck politically correct views. Whatever the reasons for journalistic deference to dogma in science, the victim is the information-consuming public, which at best is kept in the dark, at worst is duped.

British environmentalist James Lovelock now admits he was ­“alarmist” on global warming.

Take the juicy global-warming story I referred to. Several years ago, environmentalist James Lovelock made headlines when he announced that global warming would end the world as we know it — he predicted that “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” Google searches associating his name with global warming and climate change now exceed one million hits, and understandably so, given his reputation. Lovelock has infused environmental thought for decades through best-selling books describing Earth as a living organism — Lovelock is the one who coined the Gaia concept. Among many other honours heaped on Lovelock, Time magazine featured him in a series on Heroes of the Environment.

So, why, when Lovelock this week recanted his past views on global warming as being “alarmist,” did virtually every major news outlet on the planet ignore his change of heart? It wasn’t because he minced his words.

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago,” he admitted, adding that temperatures haven’t increased as expected over the last 12 years. “There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now.”

What else has the press, in its wisdom, decided to keep from the public in recent days? One eye-opener is the advance of ice in both the Arctic and the Antarctic — both are now at or above average levels. Another is an announcement by researchers at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Riken research foundation that the world may be heading into a prolonged period of global cooling — the Japanese study compared sunspot activity today with sunspots that preceded the Little Ice Age in the 17th century to find close similarities.

Had questioning of global warming not been taboo to most journalists, these stories would have doubtless merited ink and air time, not least because they tell a fresh story. Because the subject is taboo, the press censors itself.

The freshest story of all this week, which by rights should have rated stellar coverage, involved a powerful refutation of Darwin’s theory of evolution and its mechanism, natural selection. “Natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure, though slow steps,” Darwin wrote. Now, suggests a study published by the U.K.’s Royal Astronomical Society, life on Earth did not evolve smoothly at all: To the contrary, the planet owes its diversity to intense periods of productivity interspersed with immense periods of stagnancy. The mechanism for this evolving theory? Climate change on Earth, driven by galactic cosmic rays originating from exploding supernovas — the final act of stars.

This study, Evidence of nearby supernovae affecting life on Earth, does have a problem, although it convincingly correlates the development of life on Earth with the explosion of nearby stars over the past 510 million years. The problem is its author, Henrik Svensmark, a professor of physics at the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish Space Research Institute, who is reviled in the global warming science establishment for studies showing that the Sun and cosmic rays, not man, drives the current climate on Earth.

Reporters on the global-warming beat and their editors have long ignored if not disparaged Svensmark. His latest study, which shows cosmic rays to have also driven the ancient climate, provides most journalists with reason enough to continue to ignore him, even though his study has been published by the world’s oldest and one of its most illustrious astronomical societies.

There is hope, however, both for Svensmark and for the information-consuming public, which is not only starved of balanced information on global warming and evolution but on numerous other politically correct scientific subjects, popularly known as junk science. Svensmark has shown that evolutionary change can occur very rapidly after long barren periods. Journalists themselves may soon evolve into science-capable skeptical practitioners.

To see Svensmark’s study dealing with evolution and global warming, click here.

For a graph showing the correlation between cosmic rays from supernovae  and biodiversity, click here.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe.

This article first appeared in the Financial Post.

The first announcement on April 12^th was really more of the same but it was labelled Ontario’s “Clean Energy Economic Development Strategy” and included the appointment of a “Task Force” loaded up with the usual suspects that helped to shape the Green Energy Act and those who continue to benefit from it.  The 14 members of this task force will reputedly work at “facilitating collaboration” to identify export markets for Ontario’s clean energy industry.  They will lead “cleantech” (what MaRS Discovery District calls it) trade missions” to Asia, the Middle East and the US.  The task force will also be responsible for “Delivering on the province’s “Smart Grid Fund”  to “spur innovation”.  This fund was a $50 million dollar taxpayer fund when set up but it appears the fund has been fully depleted as they no longer accept applications so it remains to be seen what the task force can actually deliver.  In the interim IESO has applied for a rate increase to the OEB to fund their $250 million initiative to monitor the information coming from the smart meters.  This is the forerunner to IESO’s spending on their smart grid initiatives which they previously said would cost $1.6 billion and additional to those costs are IESO’s wind forecasting expenses which ratepayers are already paying for.  We can expect the task force to come back from those foreign trade missions and announce that the benefits of the trade mission will possibly lead to hundreds of million of potential benefits and we can expect that they will continue to push for the addition of more intermittent, unreliable wind and solar power to the Ontario grid.

The second announcement by Minister Bentley came only one day later and in that one it was about launching a panel “to improve efficiencies, including local distribution company (LDC) consolidation.”  The rumours about consolidation/privatization had surfaced in the media days before and perhaps had been leaked in order to set the table for what was to follow.   The panel is composed of one LDC insider plus Murray Elston, former Minister of Health under David Peterson’s Liberal government and Floyd Laughren, the former Finance Minister under Bob Rae’s NDP government.  In those days Mr. Laughren was referred to as “Pink Floyd” by the media.  While the announcement indicates the panel will launch a “comprehensive review of the province’s electricity sector” the focus of the press release is all about consolidation of the 80 LDCs and we should expect the panel to focus on that.

Looking at the “year book of distributors” on the OEB website; for the year ended December 31, 2010 (the latest available); indicates Hydro One (including Hydro One Brampton) and Toronto Hydro  combined; represented 54.5% of the total LDC equity base, 56.7% of the total net LDC revenue (total revenue less the cost of power) with only 42.5% of the ratepayers.  As a result these entities have the highest delivery costs.  The OMA (operations, maintenance and administration) of Toronto Hydro and Hydro One collectively represents 57.5%  of the total OMA for the 80 LDCs with only 42.5% of the ratepayers as customers.    Collectively the OMA for the 80 LDCs was $1,351 million  which is where the panel needs to find those efficiencies.  Even if they find 20% efficiencies (unlikely), the ratepayers will benefit by $270 million which is equivalent to $2.00 per Megawatt hour or 2/10^th of a cent per kWh ($4.80 per month for the average household).  Hopefully “Pink Floyd”, former Health Minister, Murray Elston and their fellow panel member will start with Hydro One and Toronto Hydro to find some of those efficiencies, or they will simply be wasting time and tax dollars.

If one looks further at the LDC year book numbers you discern that the collective “Return on Revenue” (RoR) was 15.5%  and the “Return on Equity” (RoE) for 2010 was 9.23%.   The LDCs  also contributed $105 million to the Provincial Treasury in the form of PILT (payments in lieu of taxes) in 2010, but in a budget spending scenario of $126 billion that is more like a “rounding error”.

The “panel “ will undoubtedly look long and hard at the concept of privatization, which would generate one time benefits for the municipalities who currently own 79 of the 80 LDCs (hydro one is owned by the Province) and who would be supporters thereby allowing municipal politicians to (temporarily) avoid municipal tax increases.   It is quite likely the willing buyers would be the large public sector pension funds like OMERS, Teachers, etc., who would surely love to acquire a company that delivers a vital commodity in a monopolistic environment and gets a guaranteed RoE blessed by the Ontario Energy Board.   The OEB on March 2, 2012 set the RoE at 9.12% effective May 1, 2012.   For comparison purposes the US publicly traded electric utilities were recently reported as generating an RoE of 7.10% or 2% less then the taxpayer owned Ontario electricity companies are allowed to generate.   The acquisition of the profitable LDCs by the large public sector pension funds would self perpetuate the generous pensions paid to the employees of these LDCs who generally receive indexed pensions and in the case of Hydro One can retire (under the rule of 85) based on their best 3 years of employment earnings.

If the panel look at OPG they will quickly note that the top five senior executives received pay increases totalling $846,000 or 21% (2010 versus 2011 Sunshine list).   It is also rumoured that the Power Workers Union just ratified a contract that will give them increases of 2.75% a year for the next three years.   The panel might suggest to Minister Bentley that the entities under his watch are simply ignoring the “pay freeze” the Premier imposed on Crown Corporation executives in the spring of 2010 and further are ignoring the “pay freeze” for the public sector workers announced in Minister of Finance, D. Duncan’s recent budget.

In the end it is the ratepayers who will have to pick up the tab no matter how much the “panel” are able to generate in the way of  “efficiencies”.

By Dr. Victoria Vexelman-Khodak for Israel National News.com

A different Middle East Conference took place in Canada, where for the first time Israel was not the nucleus of the conflict. The list of speakers makes one sit up and see the Arab Spring in clear perspective.

The Israeli public should get to know two Canada-based organizations, Advocates for Civil Liberties and The Atlantic Council of Canada – and for a very good reason.

These non-government organizations represent the voice of reason and common sense, clear strategic vision, true desire to contribute to the understanding of diplomatic strategies and promote civil liberties, as opposed to a number of the so-called ‘”human rights watchers” preoccupied with exposure of the Israeli “crimes against humanity”.

“Advocates for Civil Liberties (ACL) was established by an interfaith, ethnically-diverse group of legal and other professionals, together with concerned members of the community, to bring civility to the narrative surrounding the political, religious, social and economic issues confronting Israel and its neighbours, and to promote dialogue and interaction free from racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

It writes, “We intend to accomplish these goals, through community programming and advocacy.”

The Atlantic Council of Canada was founded in 1996 to promote knowledge and understanding of NATO in Canada and to promote the influence of Canada on the international scene.

The conference that took place in Hyatt Regency Hotel in Toronto in March 28 was called “Canada and the New Middle East”, probably an ironic association with Shimon Peres’ delusional vision as described in his book “The New Middle East”.

Indeed, the speakers expressed much concern and very little optimism about the current Middle East events.

The organizers invited first rate, world renowned experts and professionals to assess the most recent Middle East developments and their global implications.

Among the speakers were Nazanin Afshin-Jam, an international human rights and democracy activist; Doug Вest, RCMP Superintendent and Head of the National Security Section; Raymond Boisvert, assistant director, Canadian Intelligence Service (CSIS); John Thompson, international security intelligence expert; Boaz Ganor, the founder and president of the International academic counter-terrorist community, associate dean and executive director of the International institute for counter-terrorism, the Interdisciplinary Center – Herzliya; Peter Goodspeed, senior reporter on international affairs for National Post; Ramin Jahanbegloo, Iranian Political philosopher, University of Toronto Center for ethics; Andrew (Andy) Mahut, manager of the executive board of the Canadian industry program for energy conservation (CIPEC); Lawrence Solomon, columnist for the Financial Post and executive director of Energy probe, one the Canada’s leading environmentalists; Marina Nemat, best-selling author, human rights advocate, former Iranian political prisoner; Raheel Raza, author, human rights activist, consultant for interfaith and intercultural diversity; Mike Ward, consul and senior trade commissioner for the Consulate of Canada in Istanbul, Turkey.

The assessment of the situation in the Middle East was far from optimistic:

The Arab Spring is quickly and surely turning into the Arab Winter and Dark Ages, with dire global implications (Lawrence Solomon, one of Canada’s leading environmentalists).

The Iranian regime is turning into a military junta with a clerical face (Dr. Ramin Jahanbegloo, a noted Iranian-Canadian philosopher).

In the entire area, ethnic and religious minorities are persecuted, freedom of expression is suppressed, women are oppressed and humiliated, tortures and executions of women and children under the age of 18 are widespread (according to Lawrence Solomon, Marina Nemat, Raheel Raza, Nazanin Afshin-Jam).

The bright spot is that the enthusiasm about the Arab Spring has faded away, common sense has prevailed, and political leaders now realize that it had nothing to do with democracy and liberty.

Since the world is concerned about fuel and secure ways of its delivery, the recent discovery of gas deposits in economic sea-shelf zone of Israel and Cyprus, and the newly emerged diplomatic and military alliance of between Israel, Cyprus and Greece with the aim to protect their off-shore gas fields from Turkey projects optimism concerning the possibility of reducing the oil and gas prices and diminishing the role of the Gulf countries.

More than that, the honored speakers, and among them prominent representatives of the intelligence community, stressed that the Israeli-Arab conflict is not the nucleus of the Middle East turmoil.

In his opening speech, Lawrence Solomon, the founder and managing director of Energy Probe Research Foundation, as well as contributor to the Globe and Daily Mail and the Wall Street Journal, said that, in his opinion, “the Arab Spring was a disaster from the very beginning”. For the short and long term, he predicted “the Dark Ages” for the Muslim Middle East. Right now the economy of the North African countries is in jeopardy, the new political power – namely, the Muslim Brotherhood emerges – and the main indicator of what is awaiting Egypt is the drastic deterioration of the condition of ethnic and religious minorities.

But what is more important for the Israelis is his assessment that “the loss of influence of the Middle East countries has already began”.

Controlling the sources of energy in our world equals power and influence, and this power may be transferred to Israel, whose shale oil is estimated at probably as much as 5 billion barrels.

Tiny Israel is sitting on what may be the world’s third largest oil-shale deposits. With oil prices skyrocketing, development of the oil-shale deposits became profitable.

Now the serious group of investors thаt includes some seventy European bankers, hedge fund investors, captains of oil industry, including the former president of Global Oil, former president of Exxon Shell and the former president of Halliburton, have decided to break up the monopoly of the OPEC countries with the help of new technologies Israel and other countries invented.

These new technologies might reduce the price of Israeli oil to $30–40 a barrel. What is more important, this oil-shale may be exported to the other countries that are dependent on Middle Eastern oil.

Canada with its rich oil-shale deposits is highly interested in obtaining Israeli technologies.

Mr. Solomon predicted that these countries might become failed states and, in the case of such countries as Iraq and Syria, may fall apart into several smaller entities, following their constituency, because these countries are artificial creations of the colonial powers after the WWI.

In the long run, these processes might promote the Arab revival, but this revival will be preceded by a long, long Arab winter.

The role of Turkey is very ambivalent. On the one hand, it is one of the world’s most rapidly developing economies, with a potential market twice as bigger as Canadian, with an excellent investment climate and stable government. On the other hand, Turkey is viewing with grudging eyes gas resources of Israel, Cyprus and Greece.

Turkey has had a dispute with Cyprus and Greece for decades. Greece, for example, has vast off-shore deposits of gas and oil, their value would have been enough to eliminate Greece’ debt, but it has been afraid to develop them for years. Now that Israel has discovered gas, and its deposits are also substantial, the three countries formed economic alliance that is also a military alliance, to curb possible Turkish aggression. No one can predict further developments, but that is certainly a point of major contention.

The intelligence community has no illusions about the quality of friendship and cooperation of such countries as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. According to John Thompson, international security intelligence expert from Mackenzie Institute, “our friends and allies”, namely Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, pose a very serious problem. Pakistan is considered to be “our friend”, but the Western intelligence community and political leaders remember that Osama bin Laden lived in Pakistan, and both Al-Qaeda and Taliban operate from Pakistan with a knowing nod from the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency. The Pakistani government is confused, and its policy is changing quickly, that makes thing more complicated for the West.

Another such friend is Saudi Arabia. This country is predictable is a certain way, that is Saudi Arabia’s government is fundamentally interested in its own survival and retaining the family business of the ruling family. To this end, Saudi Arabia cooperates with the West, and it is worthwhile noting what Saudi Arabia says about Israel in public and what is says privately.

Although Saudi Arabian rulers heavily depend on the West for their survival, they spread Wahhabi teaching of the global supremacy of Islam, Sharia law and restoration of Caliphate. This teaching finds response among some young Pakistani and Arab immigrants in Europe and North America, who become increasingly radicalized and present a real threat to security. The Saudi royal family has long history of relations with Wahhabi. Saudis spend a lot of money to encourage this movement worldwide.

Non-interference in the Syrian uprising may be explained by the understanding that Syrian insurgents are inspired by the Islamist, Wahhabi ideology and are no better than Assad.

As for Lebanon, within a year the government in that country became a shadow cabinet for terrorist Hizbullah.

Boaz Ganor, associate dean and executive director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism of the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, presented his vision of the situation without political correctness, as he put it.

He started the analysis from the famous “Cairo speech” delivered by President Obama soon after his election. “The Cairo speech set forth a new American foreign policy referring to the Muslim and Arab world”, said Ganor. It was the policy of appeasement and a striking blow to the United States allies among pragmatic Muslim leaders.

The situation was aggravated two years ago when John Brennan, the President’s advisor on the counter-terrorist policy, was presenting a new American counter-terrorism policy, saying that “terrorism is not our enemy”, a statement totally unexpected from the counter-terrorism advisor.

The second statement was even more troubling, “Islamists and Jihadists are not our enemies”. That, in Ganor’s opinion, represented the embryonic problem, conveyed by the Obama administration.

The short-term consequences are evident. Before the revolution, we had states which, although under the rule of this or that dictator, were stable entities with integral territory;  the new governments are leading to something that can be called the failure of the statehood of the states.

Furthermore, we see that some territories are becoming ungoverned territories. Libya, Yemen, the Sinai Peninsula are now totally ungoverned territories.

When we have failed statehood and ungoverned territories, this is the recipe for Global Jihad, this is the recipe for safe haven for terrorist gangs, and that is what we are seeing right now.

Many experts worry about what has happened to the warehouses of the Libyan army. The weapons evaporated, and nobody actually knows where they are.

The world has begun to understand that the weapons fell into the wrong hands, as this sophisticated weaponry pops up in different conflicts.

The long-term consequences for the failure are evident. Flash mobs can conquer the squares for several days, but not the rulership.

These countries will be overtaken by the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists and Wahhabi. Despite some minor differences, they share ideologies and ultimate goals, and they will harness the state resources to serve the ideology of Global Jihad and the World Caliphate.

“We live in very tectonic times”, noted Boaz Ganor, and “the biggest challenge is to call a spade a spade”.

The writer, whose doctorate is in English literature, is news editor of Arutz-7′s Russian Internet Edition.

The better educated you are, the more likely you are to put your trust in science, or so says what scientists call the “knowledge deficit model” of scientific literacy. So why do conservatives become more and more skeptical of the scientific establishment on issues such as global warming as they become more and more educated? And why do conservatives, who once held science in very high regard, now hold it in relatively poor odour?

This rising distrust among better-educated conservatives “is a significant finding and the opposite of what many might expect,” said Gordon Gauchat, author of a study published last week in the American Sociological Review that portrays educated conservatives somewhat as a species of their own. Gauchat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina, offers several possible explanations for what makes conservatives tick in his study, Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010.

Unlike uneducated, ill-informed conservatives who are incapable of reconciling scientific truths with their ideology, Gauchat theorizes, “educated or high-information conservatives will hold hyper-opinions about science, because they have a more sophisticated grasp about what types of knowledge will conform with or contradict their ideological positions, and they will prefer to believe what supports their ideology.” Well-educated conservatives have boosters in this task, too, as the Los Angeles Times explained in an approving editorial that elaborated Gauchat’s views: “Right-wing think-tanks, funded by corporate interests to undermine the scientific consensus on such expensive-to-fix phenomena as climate change, have proliferated, as have conservative cable-TV networks, blogs and radio talk shows. In general, these outlets are talking to a well-educated audience. And they’re presenting a very one-sided view of scientific issues.”

Gauchat speculates that conservatives resent science-based government regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency for curbing the free-market ideology that conservatives cling to. He speculates that the religious right and moral issues such as stem cell research play a role. He finds significance in church attendance. The only possibility that Gauchat seems not to have considered is that these well-informed conservatives are not anti-science at all but are instead aware — as Gauchat and other pundits are not — that much of what passes for science today is deeply compromised. Scientists who answer to the political needs of regulatory agencies have a habit of following the exigencies of their political masters rather than scientific rigour. Well-educated conservatives are aware of the politicization of the climate-change debate and understand that a vast number of prestigious scientists, likely the majority of top scientists, are climate-change skeptics.

Gauchat in his study strives mightily to disentangle his subsets of data and explain the mysteries of conservative thinking. Yet had he not been obsessively preoccupied with conservatives in what advertises itself as a study of the broad public’s trust in science, he could have stepped back from his data and seen it for what it actually shows. The conservatives aren’t the oddity; the true-believing liberals are.

In 1974, the starting point for the study, all political groups that he considered — liberals, moderates and conservatives — held science in high esteem, with conservatives the most enamoured of science of the three, followed closely by liberals and then moderates. It was the moderates, not the conservatives, who first became disillusioned with the scientific establishment, and the moderates remain relatively disillusioned today. After the moderates began their disillusionment, conservatives, too, began to question the science that the establishment was purveying. Today the conservatives are more disillusioned than even the moderates, but only by a small margin. These two groups started at about the same place in 1974 and they have today arrived at about the same place. Nothing especially noteworthy here.

The liberals, on the other hand, never stopped being enamoured by the scientific establishment, never took seriously the complaints of establishment critics, never themselves questioned the science that the establishment produced.

Gauchat himself never asked why the liberals seem relatively impervious to change over time — they are today at about the same place as they were in 1974 — and why the liberals more resemble the uneducated conservatives and moderates in his cohort, who have also been relatively resistant to change. That is a mystery worth delving into.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe.

This article first appeared in the Financial Post.

To see Gauchat’s study of attitudes towards science by liberals, moderates and conservatives, click here.