News keeps getting Worse! Muskrat Exports?

Below please find an excerpt from a recent Globe and Mail article: Should we continue to ignore this?

This “over my dead body” attitude from a former engineer and environmentalist made Natural Resource Minister is emblematic of what former Parti Québécois premier Bouchard refers to as the “new religion” of Quebec. In a province where the gas industry’s first and often tactless developments have divided the population, gas wells – and even hydroelectric dams – have come to symbolize man’s self-destructive appetite for energy, at the expense of land, water and air.

It is a fine debate. Yet for all its sociological, environmental and economic considerations, it is somewhat vain. The valve on Quebec’s gas industry is shut for a foreseeable future that extends well beyond the current ban on gas exploration – which will last until environmental studies are completed, by 2014. Blame it on the shale gas boom in the United States. Blame it on the low gas prices that have ensued.

And the consequences of these depressed prices are felt not only by the province’s nascent gas industry, which had already drilled before the ban some 30 wells in Quebec in the hopes of creating a 5,000- to 19,000-job industry.

They also hurt the venerable Hydro-Québec, the state-owned electricity producer that has seen its export revenues since 2008 melt even as it is pumping more electricity into the northeastern U.S., its main export market. Gas-powered thermal electricity plants are heating up Hydro-Québec’s competition.

The price of natural gas has rebounded in recent months after it cratered in April under $2 (U.S.) per million British thermal units (BTU). As gas prices rise while the mercury falls on the eve of the winter heating season, it now trades close to $3.50 per million BTU in New York. However, Quebec’s gas industry estimated in earlier public hearings that the price of gas needs to trade between $5 and $6 for it to cover its production and delivery costs.

Even if gas-powered plants replace coal plants, even if diesel trucks are converted to gas, it will likely take a decade before the increased demand allows the price of natural gas to rebound significantly – it spiked at close to $9 in 2008. Quebec’s main gas distributor, Gaz Métro, expects prices to hover around $5 for the next 10 years. Jean-Thomas Bernard, guest lecturer at the University of Ottawa’s faculty of economics and an energy expert, thinks the depressed prices could even last 15 years.
This presents a headache for Hydro-Québec, which is already swarming with electricity surpluses as the recession weighs on industrial demand, especially from the pulp and paper mills that are in the midst of a structural downturn. And the problem will only be made worse as the state-owned electricity producer brings new capacity into service.

The complex project Eastmain-1-A-Sarcelle-Rupert, which includes the construction of two plants, four dams and the diversion of the Rupert River in the James Bay region, will add 8.7 terawatt-hours of electricity production. The Romaine hydroelectric complex in the Côte-Nord region will add another eight TWh on average a year.

Hydro-Québec‘s electricity exports have steadily gone up since 2007 to 26.8 TWh from 19.6 TWh. Yet as electricity prices have fallen while the Canadian dollar has shot up, the revenues the state producer collects from these out-of-province sales have gone down – although they slightly rebounded in 2011. The trend has continued in the first quarter of 2012: The year-over-year exports shortfall accounts for Hydro-Québec’s 28 per cent drop in revenue and 18 per cent reduction in profit.
And with any fall in Hydro-Québec’s profits comes a reduction to the dividend it pays the government, as 75 per cent of its profit are funnelled to Quebec.

To paraphrase the title of an acclaimed Louis Bélanger film, Quebec is suffering a severe case of “Gaz Bar Blues.”

So as Western Canadian energy producers are lamenting the surge in U.S. shale gas and oil production, which are threatening their exports south of the border, this time around, they will find a sympathetic ear in Quebec.

Stupidity

Do you want a definition?

Figure this out - and then figure out how groups like the Humane Society and the likes of Rebecca Aldworth get away with it.

Read the following about joining a boycott to protest our Seal Harvest:

Marie Weir, general manager of Cy's Crab House in Buffalo Grove, which has also joined the boycott, said costs may be slightly higher to buy fish from elsewhere in the world, but the options are out there.

Even the famous Canadian snow crabs can be replaced with those from Russia and Alaska, she said.

"I think it's a good thing to do to help out," Weir said of the boycott. "Everybody in the world thinks they can do anything they want, and then when the world falls apart, it's never their fault. Look at global warming."

This snippet was taken from a story in the Daily Herald in Illinois.

This individual and company is going to buy seafood from other countries despite the price - despite our Canada - USA "connection" because the Humane Society told them the seal hunt was cruel.

This is out of America - suffering through tens of millions of recalled toys - toothpaste - tires - and medical devices/medications from China - yet no boycott of Chinese products - in fact the great American corporate elite flocks to Asia to get dirt cheap labour - in countries with no labour standards or human rights. Their precious stock markets filled with corporations paying children slave wages and working them endless hours - so they can deliver to America - tainted - unsafe - and some cases deadly products. China gets the Olympics and American investment - we get a kick in the guts because we harvest - humanely and sustainably - seal.

That - people - is the definition of stupidity - and probably why an NFL superstar can illegally fight and kill dogs - while "fans" try to forgive him.

That is why the slaughter houses in the United States are not open for unscheduled visits by animal activists - unlike the seal harvest in Canada which is prosecuted in the open on ice flows and waters of the North Atlantic.