I s it a late Christmas present, left over from our recently departed 2011?

Or is it an early Yule gift for Christmas of 2012 - which quite certainly will arrive despite dire tidings of disaster and mayhem from the ancient Mayans?

In any case, PM Stevie Harpo's promise of greater environmental ignorance is sure to be welcome in the counting houses of the petroleum giants.

After all, the oil companies and other development-mad agencies are run mostly by old men who won't be back-packing through the desolation they are bound and determined to create.

And Stevie must feel that he's also old enough to beat the heat of global warming, too.

It's no surprise that the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers would be among the first to come out announcing its joyful anticipation of the call for new federal Oil Ministry .

. . er . . . I mean Environment Ministry review guidelines, which incidentally, Stevie suggested, should cut in half the enormously prohibitive length of an environmental review for the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline project connecting Alberta's tar pits to waiting tankers on B.C.'s soon-to-beformerly pristine mid-northern coastline.

And anyway, why should Enbridge's two-pipeline proposal - over mountains, across rivers, past remote villages, through untouched valleys - require any environmental review at all?

The company has such a great environmental record already, that all we really need to do is take their word that they'll be careful.

And why would any oil transportation company ever take a chance with the environment?

Of course, a goal of streamlining the federal government's environmental review process for oil and other resources seems quite laudable, on its slick surface, at least.

As the petroleum producers association objectively notes, in response to federal Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver's call for regulatory reform to improve the federal government's "slow, complex, and cumbersome" project review process, it's a question of balance.

The oil industry's chief grease monkey, Dave Collyer, notes three areas that need work in the whole environmental review process (actually, he calls it "project review" - perhaps the word "environment" doesn't roll quite so easily off his tongue) needs revamping on "three broad themes."

The feds need to balance environmental concerns with economic considerations, he says.

However, in current economic theory, as exercised by the bigmoney boys, environment does not show up as a legitimate cost item. So balancing the cost of a pipeline or two against zero should not take a whole heckuva a lot of time-consuming calculations.

Collyer also wants to see improvements in "government coordination."

I suspect that's included for comic relief.

And he would like to see some work done on "tightening process timelines and effectiveness."

The tighter the timeline, the sooner the money flows into the oil developers' pockets, and hence, the increased effectiveness of the overall outcome.

Like the oil companies, PM Harpo and the HarpoCon government have a proven track record when it comes to exemplary environmental awareness - they have numerous Fossil Awards as testimony.

No word yet in my email in-box from environmental organizations in response to the HarpoCons' latest suggestions for reform - I suspect that they trying to catch their breath.

- Bob Groeneveld is the editor of the Langley Advance.