The great American computer scientist John McCarthy, who coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” — also warned that “he who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.”
I’m reminded of this every time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson talk about climate change, and specifically about reducing Canada’s industrial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
‘you’re selfish, badly educated, virtue-signaling little turds inspired by the adults around you who crave a feeling of having a noble cause while they indulge themselves in Western luxury and unprecedented quality of life’.
Ever since Canadian politicians started making promises about reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change more than three decades ago, their political rhetoric has become increasingly divorced from reality.
The latest example is Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson telling the Globe and Mail last month that 2019 will be the last year that Canada’s annual emissions increase and that for the next decade they will go down.
A blue-ribbon group of American nuclear non-proliferation experts warns that Canada’s investment in new nuclear technology could lead to the spread of nuclear weapons and new threats to the environment.
“We write as U.S. non-proliferation experts and former government officials and advisors with related responsibilities to express our concern about your government’s financial support of Moltex — a startup company that proposes to reprocess CANDU spent fuel to recover its contained plutonium for use in molten-salt-cooled reactors.”
SMRs are one of the very few good ideas from the LPC though the practice of government picking economic winners and losers is a whole nother barrel of plutonium.
US experts are against it? When it comes to Canada’s energy development aren’t they always?
Greta Thunberg has ratcheted up her alarmist climate change rhetoric, warning of impending doom unless everyone stops eating meat. But her latest sermon was unappetizing to many.
In a sleekly edited video, complete with punchy music, the Swedish activist argued that the Earth’s ecological suffering could be greatly alleviated if humans stopped raising livestock. According to Thunberg, our “relationship” with nature desperately needs to change in order to end the alleged climate crisis – which she claimed is fueled in part by meat-eating.
By allowing governments to take unprecedented powers in imposing mandatory COVID lockdowns, the people have unknowingly stepped into a green trap – laid by the technocrats at the World Economic Forum and environmental activists like Greta Thunberg. Under a “climate lockdown” regime governments will be restricting freedom of movement, the use of privately owned vehicles, electricity and heating consumption, as well as ban the consumption of red meat, and impose extreme ‘green’ energy-saving measures.
At his recent World Leaders Climate Summit, President Biden repeated his claim that climate change presents an “existential threat.”
This pervasive climate alarmism is the culmination of persistent eco-anxiety over the past decades. Already in 1982, the United Nations was predicting that climate change along with other environmental concerns could cause a worldwide “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.
This week, the International Energy Agency made what was at least taken as a stunning announcement: Unless all investment in new coal-fired power plant construction and oil and gas development are immediately halted, the world will fail to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
In a sense, this headline item might seem obvious. It is literally true that carbon emissions will continue as long as we burn carbon-based fuels. But beyond that, the report is so filled with foolishness that it is difficult to know where to start debunking it.
The International Energy Agency’s stark position that new oil and gas development must immediately stop to meet global climate goals could boost momentum for governments to restrict fossil fuel production and cause investors to cut off funding for such projects.
“This will strengthen the political argument in many countries for restricting the growth of new oil production,” Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group and former oil official in the George W. Bush administration, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s going to raise the regulatory risk and scrutiny on oil companies and investors that plan to develop new oil fields.”
The federal government is looking to train 2,000 more people to do energy audits as it tries to get a new green home renovation program off the ground.
Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan says the government will provide up to $10 million in contracts to recruit, train and mentor 2,000 energy advisers to advise people how to cut their home energy use.
The government is issuing a call for proposals Monday to anyone wanting to take on the job of training and recruiting the new workers.
Some 2.7 million metric tons of plastic make their way into the oceans each year and a new study finds the trove of trash comes from 1,656 rivers.
The findings debunk previous research that suggested 90 percent of ocean plastics came just 10 major river systems – the latest concludes that the number is 100 times that.
Several institutions in the Netherlands and one in Germany found these systems contribute to up to 80 percent of all plastics dumped in oceans, with urban areas of South East Asia and West Africa identified as the main hot spots for plastic emission.
Make them clean it up Justin!
America’s climate envoy John Kerry has been ridiculed for saying technologies that don’t yet exist will play a huge role in stabilising the climate.
Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, he said the US was leading the world on climate change – and rapidly phasing out coal-fired power stations.
But he rejected a suggestion that Americans need to change their consumption patterns by, say, eating less meat.
A conservative estimate of the cost of a transition to “clean energy” is $1.7 trillion needed for mining of copper, cobalt, lithium and other rare earth and exotic metals and minerals. This transition will supposedly fuel electric vehicles (EVs) being cheaper than gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2027, and electric SUVs cheaper by 2026, according to BloombergNEF. Additionally, the International Energy Agency (IEA) in a new report found renewable installations for energy to electricity “soared to 280 GW globally in 2020, up 45% from 2019,” with “renewables (solar and wind) accounting for 90% of global electric capacity installations in 2021 and 2022.”
A prestigious intergovernmental organization created by the world’s advanced economies is pointing out the bottleneck in the plans to substitute so-called green energy for hydrocarbon-based energy: the availability of key minerals necessary for battery storage, wind farms, solar panels, and other gizmos necessary for the switchover. Simply put: the world can’t provide the quantity of those minerals that would be necessary, and the environmental and social impact of trying to mine them in sufficient quantities would be devastating.
The cure, in other words, is worse than the disease.
The Enbridge Line 5 pipeline confrontation is political theatre at its best and worst. But this doesn’t mean it’s inconsequential. There is virtually zero chance that the Governor of Michigan can unilaterally close down an existing pipeline that crosses both state and international boundaries. This type of issue is way outside any one state’s jurisdiction. But this doesn’t mean that Canada will have won. We may win this battle, but we are still losing the war to Blockadia — the well-organized, well-financed crusade to block oil pipelines out of Canada, and, by extension, to shut down the Canadian oilsands.
