Here we are in a season of counterweighting emotions. On one hand, the holiday season is close, the season of good cheer and all that other greeting card stuff. On the other hand, the sun is up for five minutes per day, it’s been horribly cold for more than a month already, and the entire landscape is either grey or brownish mud-grey. In the spirit of the dominance of the latter mood, it is a good time to descend into the septic tank that is the mainstream news flow. I won’t wallow for long, [Read more]
Column: The world as we know it ends if it can’t find its bearings
While growing up, I had the privilege of working at some manual labour/equipment operator type jobs. Now, I am aware that word “privilege” is currently a live grenade, when used by the “wrong people”, but I don’t care. The people I’d hate to offend are those that have no choice or path out of manual labour, and/or those whose work is under-appreciated by society as a whole. A stint of manual/blue-collar labour teaches more than you might think, if not at the time then most definitely down the [Read more]
Column: Wealthy Californians “Just Stop Oil” campaign – popular in Europe; has anyone asked, say, Bangladesh?
“Kindly let me help you or you will drown said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree.” – Alan Watts That’s a quasi-parable about how ignorance can maim helpfulness, turning well-being into harm, through pure innocence. But…that parable assumes the endearing conscientious purity of a mythical monkey. Sometimes, this works: “In his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, the Dutch clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet breaks down how generalized anxiety, often produced in part by overly [Read more]
Etam: Mexico is leapfrogging Canada in the LNG export race
The U.S. border with Mexico has a sadly cliched aura hanging over it. U.S. citizens head south for shopping, dental work, and other bargains (mild-adventure-seeking tourist buddies have even wandered south from Tucson to Nogales to purchase nothing more than a haircut (and once was enough)). The other way’s cliches are the long string of desperate people looking for a better life north of the border, sneaking across at night or under dangerous conditions. But times they are a changin’. I’m [Read more]
Canada could hire 100,000 nurses and provide First Nations universal clean water with far less than a year of LNG royalties/taxes from a single pipeline
Sitting on top of one of the world's largest and richest natural resource warehouses is turning into quite a disconcerting distraction. While much of Canada’s population - the heavily urban part for whom “rural” means Whistler, Muskoka, or Mont Tremblant - likes to view the country as something more sophisticated and tech-y, the fact remains that the country is nearly 10 million square kilometres filled with globally-critical raw materials/minerals/food/energy, and only 40 million people. Making [Read more]
“Dream big and dare to fail” is great high school valedictory advice but terrible energy policy
Writing about energy developments used to be fun and rewarding. It’s such a critical, complex, fascinating business that touches everything, and is everything we touch. No one understands all of it, not that I’ve ever met anyway. To write anything illuminating about energy required immersion in the energy world – the technical end, the geopolitical end, the marketing end, the production end, and on and on. It used to be a fascinating river to stand in the middle of, learning from the endless [Read more]
Did Henry Ford’s success come about because he demanded the execution of horses?
“In addition to such problems with the perception of risk, it is also a scientific fact, and a shocking one, that both risk detection and risk avoidance are not mediated in the “thinking” part of the brain but largely in the emotional one…The consequences are not trivial: It means that rational thinking has little, very little, to do with risk avoidance.” - Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness, p 38) Fire! Fear. Flood! Fear. Drought! Fear. There is a global shortage of natural gas! Blank [Read more]
Etam: Where the wild things are – exposure to “the doing class” will solve the global energy crisis
“Because one believes in oneself, one doesn’t try to convince others.” Lao Tzu Education or propaganda? Information or strategic communications? Clarity or wishful thinking? Quick Dick McDick or Gerald Butts? Homer Simpson or Al Gore? What is the purpose of raising a voice in the public square? To influence ideas? Support the troops? Bend policy? Entertain? Boost morale? Vanity? Bad actors cheat, in a sense - they manipulate the microphones, control the loudest ones, render others [Read more]
Column: Changing the world is pretty hard – a lifetime of dashed hopes and dead penny stocks
Some years ago, I had an epiphany: Popular Mechanics magazine was full of crap. Popular Science also. Oh sure, they were infinitely interesting, for the curious of mind. These publications cover the wildest assortment of scientific developments imaginable. The problem was, particularly for fans of new technology and progress, that the publishers tended to slap on the cover a steady stream of blindingly cool new stuff that “might just” revolutionize one thing or another. I’d get giddy at the [Read more]
Column: Why spend a trillion if you don’t have to? Hydrogen the smart way
Let’s say a hundred years ago some rattled soul emigrated from Russia to this country, fleeing, I don’t know, the Russian revolution or in-laws, whatever. Let’s say he/she became a wealthy industrialist and built a bunch of stuff, and among the accomplishments was the construction of a major airport that became a massive central link in a global distribution hub (hey, it's just a thought exercise, no judging). The hub grew to include warehouses and trucking operations and you name it, and wealth [Read more]
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