Tag Archives: environment

Saskatchewan Party Produces Pollution

Posted on by John Klein

Back in 2012, there was a problem:

Provincial water too polluted, says research

Back then, the SaskParty was promising to address climate change with a plan that included a 20% emissions cut below 2006 pollution levels, by last year, 2020. They soon deleted that target.

Then this happened, and continues to happen:

Sask. leads country in per capita greenhouse gas emissions

“Provincial environment minister says climate plan needs time to work”

No! It doesn’t. When we give the SaskParty time for their plans to work, they make emissions worse, not better. And they promote their failed Environment Ministers to party leader too.

Other jurisdictions are too Canadian/polite to give us the F grade our Petrostate deserves.

https://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/provincial/environment/ghg-emissions.aspx

Co-op Refinery VOC emissions 10x higher than average of other refineries

Sour gas emissions at refinery ‘problematically high’ says expert

That’s from back in 2015, and my understanding is that it’s been addressed to some degree. For the latest be sure to follow an expert like Prof. Eaton.

Anti-carbon tax Government attacks hundreds of EV owners with a new tax

Posted on by John Klein

Saskatchewan Government will start charging EV owners $150 a year. The Minister who removed the EV incentive almost a decade ago took his next job as Canada’s top oil and gas lobbyist. If that doesn’t scream Conflict of Interest, what does?

This is an “anti-#carbontax“, as it encourages people to stay away from a zero emission technology without directly regulating against them, and without collecting sufficient money to make a solid impact on most consumers. It’s still worth getting an EV, and gas burners will be mostly gone by the end of the decade, but the Sask Petrostate Party will still implement this unpopular tax to give a figurative middle finger to the hundreds of families who’ve decided to move on to better technology and leave oil in the dust.

SGI is sending back money, but the government is collecting over half of it back from anyone smart enough to choose a zero emission vehicle (that the federal government offers $5000 off to buy). It’s a cash grab by the desperate Sask Party. It sucks to live in a Petrostate some (most) days.

Conservatives Reject Reality

Posted on by John Klein

Sucks to be a country where the Official Opposition party rejects longstanding science that a grade school kid can understand. For ideological and economic reasons, the Conservative Party of Canada won’t accept that air pollution is bad. They won’t even accept that it’s air pollution, instead, the veg-heads erroneously call excess carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion “plant food”. And this is the party that was in charge of Canada between 2006 and 2015. Horrible.

Conservative Party members reject policy to recognize that ‘climate change is real’

On Saturday, Conservative Party delegates voted by a margin of 54% to 46% to reject a policy that would add the statement “climate change is real” to the party’s policy book, and recognize that “Canadian businesses classified as highly polluting need to take more responsibility.” The vote came just hours after Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole told delegates that the party “cannot ignore the reality of climate change.””

With how terrible the Conservatives are, the Liberals’ lacklustre, and even bad, management of the climate crisis has been getting a pass. Should Trudeau’s minority government fall during the pandemic, there’s a chance that the anti-science, racist CPC could come to power again, so I get why partisan Liberals are nervous. It’s not like there’s anything concrete for them to point to 5 years into their mandate to do far more, when their hero bought a pipeline, and has yet to build a solar or other renewable power grid where Canada still pollutes with coal burning. Emissions are up, not down.

And the carbon tax fight the ridiculously Conservative SK Government is leading the charge in, goes to the Supreme Court next week. Will the top court side with the stupid people who don’t care if the world burns?

USA Debates Its Existence

Posted on by John Klein

Trump’s lies about wind power, and solar, and natural gas are over the top.

In a debate where the candidate had to point out that people need to be able to breathe to be successful, there isn’t much hope for America when the pro-suffocation candidate still has a shot.

In Trump’s opinion, the country was on top of the world in January. And the plague is the only thing that went wrong, and he says it was China’s fault. Even though Trump praised Xi for handling the virus early in the year.

AOC, Fauci, Bernie Sanders, all will likely have strong responses to the litany of Trump’s lies tonight, having all been named by the Republican candidate. Lincoln would have wanted his turn at the poor pitiful Trump pinata too.

Added:

Plague Update: Fixation on Ventilators morphs into Ventilation

Posted on by John Klein

“There’s no perfectly ‘safe’ level of ventilation because we don’t actually know what ‘safe’ is, since we don’t know how much exposure leads to transmission,” Angela Rasmussen, a Columbia University virologist,”

That is from an article recommended by a virologist studying airborne diseases. The result is predictable: Stay Home to remove the risk. If you want to get into the nuts and bolts and use HEPA filters, cleaning theater, and HVAC wizardry, read all of the interesting details. Then even if you can master the air in your indoor spaces, will you have the money, equipment, and expertise to do it? And there will be an environmental cost if you don’t recapture the energy with a heat recovery ventilator (HRV). I know many are willing to put our environment second to health, but that payment is coming due soon anyway too.

Plague Update: Post-lockdown

Posted on by John Klein

Even though everything isn’t re-opened, the Saskatchewan Government very much wants people to think and act as if everything is back to normal. They’ll deny that if asked. There’s no evidence of the Premier wearing a mask though to set a good example in public.

As a result, the infection rate started spiking upward here, and in BC and Alberta too. Infamously, the Texan and Floridian Goveronors who Right-Wing media were heaping praise onto for reopening their states, are faced with stuffing bodies into freezer trucks as there is a shortage of morgue space in the Lone Star State. Go to Disney World? Maybe not such a good idea.

Even though masks and lockdowns have been shown through science to save lives from COVID-19, what are the pressures on political leaders, particularly far-right ones, to reopen and oppose the use of masks?

I can think of the following reasons:

  1. Capitalist Greed
    -Professional sports leagues intend to force most of their players through peer pressure to participate in games that are unsafe. Some notable players have opted out, they’ve the financial means no doubt to forego a year or two of play, to give them and their family a better chance at remaining healthy until a vaccine is available to protect them instead of social distancing.
    -You’ve probably noticed that COVID-19 Deniers have popped up, and there’s a Venn diagram of them with Climate Deniers, yielding a near perfect circle. My theory for why this is, despite the Climate Deniers at first participating in lockdowns, is it took a few weeks for the Climate Denial Machine to be turned to the pandemic. As it became more clear that an economic crisis was underway, the kind not seen in generations or more, the capital holders who stoked the sort of misinformation that has manipulated people thinking CO2 is harmless “plant food”, changed gears to create doubt about the pandemic so people would go back to work rather than demand a Universal Basic Income so they could stay safe at home.
    Many people are back to making useless doo-dads, traveling around on vacations in fuel burning vehicles, and going to restaurants and bars. Larger realignment of daily life will need to take place to build a carbon negative economy, and having a taste of what it could look like in the polluted skies of our major cities like Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Paris was re-energizing opposition to fossil fuel supremacy. California has made more electric trucks and vans a requirement by 2024. That’s one election cycle away, and before the #carbonbudget is used up (we hope). That’s real legislative progress, except they don’t require a complete switch until 2045, which is too late.
  2. Male Chauvinism
    -From Brazil’s fascist leader, to Great Britain’s Brexit nationalist Tory leader, the countries that are faring the worst so far, have notably terrible leaders. These men like to project an air of male superiority and bravado, and their latest way of puffing up their chest is to heartily shake hands, and appear to be stronger than the virus. BoJo narrowly missed having his chest puffed up manually by a ventilator a few months ago.
    I don’t think you could describe Elon Musk as a Climate Denier, but he certainly has made really questionable comments during the plague in North America, so I’d chalk up those to this latter reason.

Is Oil Profitable? Negative.

Posted on by John Klein

Effing petroleum-heads and their cockamamie get-rich schemes have left us holding the bag.

We’ve got former Premier, and current Premier a-holes making total asses of themselves to defend their long held positions of stupidity and ecocide.

Look at this guy saying to put more gas on the fire in an effort to get the inferno under control.
Some rats know when to keep their mouths shut.
Look at Mr. Former Premier with his hand still out for more.

The best way to make money in oil now? Do like I’ve been saying for years, and Leave It In The Ground!

BoJo Unwell, Like The Economy And Environment

Posted on by John Klein

Boris Johnson is at death’s doorstep. This would otherwise be an unremarkable point, except he’s inexplicably the Prime Minister of the UK.

It turns out to be a bad idea to ignore the best advice by the world’s best epidemiologists and doctors.

We’re all familiar with politicians ignoring the advice of scientists, it’s just rare that we so quickly see the consequences of that haughtiness bite one of them so squarely in the ass.

If someone puts the economy before the survivability of our species and public health systems, they’re unfit to lead. This isn’t new, I’ve felt this way about leaders long before Greta Thunberg got well deserved global press for pointing that very obvious point out so clearly to so many.

I Was Worried For a Moment

Posted on by John Klein

When I saw Google/Pocket recommending this article on batteries for the grid, I was a bit concerned. It was contrary to what I understood to be the truth, so I read a bit to get a sense if it was new information. It turned out to be 4-2 year old information, and seems to favour fossil fuels and nuclear. It’s safe to discount as FUD, at this point.

“This article was originally published on July 27, 2018, by MIT Technology Review, and is republished here with permission.”

Fluctuating solar and wind power require lots of energy storage, and lithium-ion batteries seem like the obvious choice—but they are far too expensive to play a major role.

MIT Technology Review |

  • James Temple

It’s simply old information. Obsolete.
A coworker last night sent me this story about batteries as a huge success on the grid.
Yes, a peaker battery isn’t the same as 100% battery, but no one is saying that the entire supply should rely on only batteries.

Battery prices are falling at a pace of 22% per year for the last decade. Imagine what they’ll cost in 2022, in only 2 more years?