First the good news:

After spending months ignoring the recommendations put forward by British Columbia's Climate Leadership team, Premier Christy Clark has finally found someone to take charge of this very important file.  

For all the political noise coming from municipalities and provinces in opposition to various pipeline projects, in reality they may lack any legal leverage to stop the projects or insist on conditions.

If you’re trying to figure out how Alberta’s already hurting budget is going to get battered by the Fort McMurray wildfires, don’t get too bogged down in the reports of massive losses in oil production shutdowns. You’re better off keeping an eye on the way the oil price responds to the drama playing out in the Alberta oil patch.

April 13, 2016 - When Rachel Notley's NDP came to power last spring in Alberta, Gordon Laxer's book, After the Sands: Energy and Ecological Security for Canadians, on ecological renewal and Canadian petro-politics was already at the publisher. And so, he was given a week to do some major rewriting because he had not foreseen this political earthquake in the making.

[Webpage editor's introduction: Below are three articles about the Leap Manifesto and the NDP, first from the Jacobin.]

The impossible Dream

By Todd Gordon, Jacobin, April 15, 2016 

[Four articles on the reaction to the Leap Manifesto, first from Rabble]

Rather than fearing the Leap Manifesto, let's bring on the debate

That silly Leap Manifesto -- giving itself away right in the subtitle, which calls for "a Canada based on caring for the Earth and one another." No wonder it provoked fury and outrage.

It may scare some New Democrats, but this sketchy recipe for fighting climate change is not particularly left-wing.

The short document, available on-line, can arouse fierce passions.

“I won’t let up,” Alberta Premier Rachel Notley told delegates to the NDP’s national convention last week. “We must get to ‘yes’ on a pipeline.” She repeated that message Saturday, asking the convention to support “pipelines to tidewater that allow us to diversify our markets.”

In doing so, Premier Notley just became the latest Canadian politician to play games with pipelines. She’s telling Albertans a pipeline to tidewater can cure what ails the industry. It won’t — it can’t — because the problem a pipeline to tidewater was intended to address doesn’t exist anymore.

The idea that greater pipeline capacity and access to tidewater would maximize the value Alberta receives for its tar sands crude is a standard talking point for industry, politicians, and other commentators in the ongoing oil price-induced recession in Alberta.