Terry Etam

On a surreal day late last week, I stopped by the nearest supermarket at what I hoped was a quiet time. I wasn’t expecting serenity, but holy mackerel I wasn’t expecting such an anthill either. While many were shopping in a normal fashion, others were rattled and prepping. Toilet paper was of course long gone. A woman next aisle over piled what looked like about 30 pounds of bananas onto the belt. Another had about ten cans of olives. Panicked weirdos, I muttered to myself, as I hoisted twenty [Read more]

What a strange feeling to be talking about good old energy markets again, after months lost in the advocacy wilderness (Canadian Energy Centre, if this is your idea of help, please go wait quietly in the cigar lounge with all the others from whom we expect more, and you know who you are). The mind-bending challenge of trying to defend Canada’s place as a worthy supplier of the energy the world needs and demands against people that don’t understand that is overwhelming. It is, therefore, a relief [Read more]

Thank heavens for the Wet’suwet’en crisis. No, really, we might soon be saying that. To put one’s mind in such a place of relative peace, we need to park a few things first. Let’s park the discussion about the legality of the cross-country protests for a moment. Let’s park the puzzling presence of the likes of Al Jazeera as a fitting commentator in the discussion (as in, “While it is obvious that the indigenous blockades occurring throughout Canada rattled the foundations of the current [Read more]

It’s been a very tiring week of energy madness, so this post is full of bafflement and the sentences are too long and there’s cultural generalizing and geographical stereotyping and just see if I give a crap. Imagine you landed in England in the middle of rainy season, that is, a month whose name includes a Y or an A or an E. Imagine you find an active and antagonistic battle going on between people using umbrellas and people providing umbrellas, and the really weird part is that the people [Read more]

As we are now firmly underway in a new year, the welcoming ascension of the sun above the horizon provides a much-needed jolt of spring hope. On the other hand though, all that sunshine also provides a better view of the train wreck that is our nation’s economy/industrial future. More daylight brings into full view the whole mess grinding to a halt, felled by a few random objects on a few railway tracks, or a handful of not-imperilled protesters. While Ottawa devotes itself to finding a way to [Read more]

It’s showtime, everybody. Anyone that’s spent much time observing the ever-more bonkers climate dialogues has suspected a day of reckoning would come when the irresistible force/fear of climate change meets the immovable object of people trying to live their lives. It looks like we’re here; get ready to watch the fireworks. For the past several years, climate activists have become ever more emboldened because no one has made any effort to slow their progress. In fact, the opposite has [Read more]

In the poorly understood world of electrical generation and transmission, a strange tale is unfolding. The media won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole, for a number of reasons – first, it is miles over their head, and second, the conclusions run counter to their current bombastic narrative about the “renewable energy revolution”. There is a risk in even discussing the situation, because in the powder-keg debate of climate change vs. lifestyle, the denier police are on high alert to brand your [Read more]

Oh no, I can feel it, another diatribe coming on. Like a developing migraine, there's no point fighting it, the looming inevitability.  My trigger is inadvertently stumbling on blistering displays of energy ignorance, which set me off, and out comes the Incredible Hulk. Look, I don’t want to go there either. I’d rather write about secure and reliable energy supplies, birds chirping, sunshine and koala bears. I keep my nose clean; I stay away from the CBC and similar to avoid the obvious [Read more]

To: Dr. Jason Carmichael, Associate professor of sociology, McGill University Dr. Carmichael, A friend forwarded me your recent interview on Global TV, where you discussed research on petroleum industry advertising. Normally I don’t watch such news items, but after doing so, I thought your research was worth commenting on since it reached such a wide audience, one that in general is not aware of petroleum industry issues, and may therefore form opinions based on seemingly authoritative [Read more]