Andrew Nikiforuk

Smith gambled that strong oil prices would deliver her chaos-making government a safe ride on the roller-coaster. But if Trump’s Venezuela gambit succeeds, Smith’s increasingly unpopular government could find itself flying off the track all together.

So the new year has arrived, and the world’s power dynamics are shifting in a new Cold War. A revolutionary U.S. government has revived the Monroe Doctrine, gunboat diplomacy and the primacy of oil. In so doing it has kicked old-fashioned notions of law and sovereignty in the shins with a Putin-like swagger.

Instead of floating grandiose export pipeline projects as solutions to a rising tide of problems, the Canadian government might want to change course.

An honest and imperfect response to the climate crisis would require a political, behavioural, economic and moral transition that would systematically reduce our energy and material consumption at an unprecedented pace. But that’s not an action any modern politician seems to be able to contemplate, let alone discuss.

In an unprecedented move Rob Morgan, the CEO of the Alberta Energy Regulator, has bowed to intense bullying from an Australian-based coal company and cancelled a planned public hearing on a large underground project near the town of Grande Cache.

The colossal energy demands of artificial intelligence have earth-shaking implications for everyone. Already rising steeply, they are set to accelerate at a dizzying pace as various global powers race to be the first to achieve supreme intelligence over everything.