I was recently forwarded a link by a kind reader to a story about how “cleaning up Alberta’s oil patch could cost $260 billion.” Like many who do not have $260 billion, the article caught my eye. The startling number, as many of you now know, comes from a presentation made by an Alberta Energy Regulator executive last February to a “private audience.” It appears to have been some sort of rogue presentation, because the number exceeds the AER’s estimate by $200 billion. That is, [Read more]
Making Canada Great Again: Ignore smear campaigns, higher per capita emissions are the noble price we pay as the world’s natural resource pantry
Please send this message on to everyone in the world: Not one more word of apology. No more flustered grovelling because our per capita emissions are higher than average; they are that way for a reason. No more bowing to demands that Canada enforce outsized emissions cuts, when the reason for the emissions in the first place is that we hand other countries their building materials - we do the dirty work for them. As we wobble on our axis as an exporting nation, cross-threaded on everything [Read more]
Not too late for Thanksgiving: two BC incidents highlight the quality and value of the petroleum infrastructure that keeps us alive and unfrozen
Thanksgiving is a multipurpose holiday. It is a chance to see how much food can be inhaled in a single sitting, and to see how much of it can be turned to fat by watching football for the rest of the day. At some point though, it’s always nice to take a walk in the fall air, see the fall scenery (or wade through knee-deep snow if in Calgary), and mull over the things we should be grateful for. We all take a lot for granted, but this year BC provided a few crystal-clear examples of some [Read more]
You’ve blown it IPCC: Social engineering is not science, and no one believes you
I had a weird reference sheet that I carried around forever, one that represented a chink in the armour of academia. It was a photocopy of a page from a manufacturing cost accounting textbook I kept from university days. The page contained a cost-volume-profit problem about a washing machine manufacturer. If the manufacturer used a cheaper component, profit margin would increase by a certain percent, but sales would go down because the machines were less reliable. It was a simple profit vs. [Read more]
Call it what you want, but the National Energy Program is back
Not everyone is a market hawk. Not everyone enjoys watching the prices of everything from orange juice to pork bellies to crude oil bounce around like tennis balls in a dryer. Not everyone gets swept up in the nuances of hourly price changes, and that is a good thing – such short-term small fluctuations are often trader-driven and borderline irrelevant. On the other hand, some market data is pretty shocking and worth taking a peek at. For those that don’t pay much attention to markets, I [Read more]
BC’s LNG, a major natural gas pipeline and more crude by rail – Canada’s products finally get moving to a world that needs them
A few weeks ago, one of my columns spoke of the pall or lethargy that seems to have been cast over Canada. Whether through over-regulation, over-consultation or over-inhaling, Canada seems unable to rise to the challenges of keeping the nation moving forward. Many wrote to say how much the message resonated (thanks), and a few semi-coherent emails came in that missed the message but defended cannabis (and that resonance, between the garbled messaging and the defense of weed, seemed touchingly [Read more]
Mock you like a hurricane: “How about you drive a Prius, we’ll hold climate conferences in various tropical paradises, and we’ll let you know where you’re coming up short, ok?”
“Climate change is real, it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating.” Leonardo DiCaprio “And there’s no question that there are contradictions. I just flew in from Japan. And flying is a very carbon-intensive activity…I contribute to putting green energy in continents like Africa. This is just to compensate for what I’ve put out – it doesn’t mean I’ve reduced my footprint.” [Read more]
The downward spiral – a stoned Canada quits its job to sit on a park bench and feed the birds
“Have you been making your mortgage payments?” “Relax dude, have you tried this stuff? It’s the bomb.” “I asked you a question.” “Yeah yeah, I made some payments.” “How?” “The money was still flowing in, so it was, like, easy.” “What about next month’s bills?” “Dude, relax, something will come up. We got all sorts of resources.” “Why did you quit your job?” “Man, that job was bogus. It was working for the man and it was killing the environment. I’m doing good now, [Read more]
World’s largest man-made CO2 sequestration project, world’s largest boreal forest reserve, a carbon tax, an oil sand emissions cap: Not bad for a “stupid to the last drop” province
Bragging sucks. It makes most decent people itch to brag, even at the thought of it. It’s generally the hallmark of little people trying to look big. On the other hand, if someone takes a picture of you sitting in your car and simultaneously looking at your cellphone, and they paste it all over social media and insinuate that you’re texting and driving and that you habitually do it, is it bragging to deny it? Is it bragging to point out that you have no traffic tickets, that you don’t text [Read more]
Guilty until proven innocent – If we could burn the endless stream of oilsands disinformation we wouldn’t need fossil fuels
Falsehood will fly, as it were, on the wings of the wind, and carry its tales to every corner of the earth; whilst truth lags behind; her steps, though sure, are slow and solemn, and she has neither vigour nor activity enough to pursue and overtake her enemy… Thomas Francklin, 1787 This quote, while a bit poncy and dour and unfunny for these parts, is also a pretty useful one to keep in mind. It may be maudlin, but it is also in turns useful and fascinating and disheartening. And Homer [Read more]
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