Ernie has worked for months on keeping people alive while his city is without a proper shelter. His trailer burned down.
Tag Archives: news
SaskPower Plots To End Drinking Water Availability
Corb Lund is among the Albertans who’ve had to fight mountaintop mining to maintain drinking water safety for Alberta and Saskatchewan. SaskPower is eager to find a path to creating social acceptance of nuclear power. Nuclear power is costly, and is planned to be delivered too late to address the climate crisis, even before we get to addressing its other serious problems or potential benefits. If they can convince people that it’s not important to maintain drinking water availability, that would aid their goal in promoting water-thirsty nuclear power.
Monopoly utilities conscript beholden ratepayers into partisan fights against the climate and our ecosystem. David Roberts of Dr. Volts podcast discusses the problem from an American perspective. The problem clearly extends well beyond Saskatchewan’s Crown corporation (monopoly) SaskPower. Here, Chris highlights how SaskPower’s utility bill serves as anti-Trudeau and anti-carbon price propaganda for its SaskParty masters:
This is not a new problem. Here’s a tweet from 4 years ago about the Sask Government’s Crown utilities interfering in a transition to renewable energy as they fought in court against the price on carbon required by the federal government.
ComeupPence
Pun is from a friend. What are all 3 of these ex-executive dorks doing with classified documents in their homes anyway??
SaskTel’s email bait and switch
After offering free email since the 1990s, to start charging per email account is an absurd insult to customers and should probably be illegal. The problem is the provincial government who could potentially do something about it, is hoping to sell off the crown corp, so they won’t do something to keep it affordable and popular.
Fusion on Earth is Working, but Decades From Daily Use
There’s a big problem, however. Despite being able to do fusion, it’s not commercially viable, possibly for decades. This isn’t going to save us from fossil fuels in time like renewable power can this decade. Fusing Hydrogen into Helium takes a lot of energy, a lot of technology, and the attempts are limited when they need to be continuous to work for a power plant that boils water for steam turbines.
“”It is a big scientific step,” says Ryan McBride, a nuclear engineer at the University of Michigan. But, McBride adds, that does not mean that NIF itself is producing power. For one thing, he says, the lasers require more than 300 megajoules worth of electricity to produce around 2 megajoules of ultraviolet laser light. In other words, even if the energy from the fusion reactions exceeds the energy from the lasers, it’s still only around one percent of the total energy used.
Moreover, it would take many capsules exploding over and over to produce enough energy to feed the power grid. “You’d have to do this many, many times a second,” McBride says. NIF can currently do around one laser “shot” a week.”
“It’s not very easy to see how you scale this into a power reactor quickly,” he says.
By then most climate experts believe the world will have to have already made drastic cuts to carbon emissions to avoid the worst effects of climate change. To limit warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, the world must nearly halve its carbon output by 2030 — a far shorter timescale than what’s needed to develop fusion.
Betti agrees that the timeline to building a fusion plant is “definitely decades”. But, he adds, that could change. “There’s always a possibility of breakthrough,” he says. And the new NIF results could help spur that breakthrough forward. “You’re going to get more people to look into this form of fusion, to see whether we can turn it into an energy-making system.””
FTX O’Leary Loves
Watched an AOC Facebook story that mentioned the freshly arrested head of FTX had admitted to donating as much to the GOP as he openly did to Democrats. Is that going to stop the GOP from musing that FTX was a Democrat plot?
Former CPC leadership candidate and CBC TV star O’Weary still backs SBF and FTX. Maybe being paid millions by the platform SBF stole customer money from, has something to do with that?
Plague Update: Can’t Handle The Truth
One of the best doctors in the country, not only for the health services he provides, but for his outreach regarding the climate crisis, is Dr. Joe Vipond. Here he is explaining the current health crisis and what can be done about it, while many others in his field shirk their responsibility to clearly communicate.
It wasn’t even 3 years ago that everyone made an effort to #FlattenTheCurve as our healthcare workers faced impossible odds to help everyone through a crisis like no other. Now, with Conservative governments sworn to avoid public health measures to satisfy their anti-masker bases, we’re amplifying an already bad situation and children are suffering because of it.
@trudykeil · “I can tell you why leaders aren’t saying the “A” (airborne) word.. capitalism and pressure from the far right. Conspiracy theorists were loud, obnoxious, and threatening and politicians weakly bent to their will. Now here we are in dystopia as kids get sick and few people care.”
@AndersonBooz · “Speaking the uncomfortable truth: politicians and other adults refuse to protect children because it is inconvenient to do so. They say sentimental things like “Kids are our future” but then their actions betray their self-interest.”
It shouldn’t be limited to only people reading my blog, or following the best people on Twitter, to know that science has answers to the current crisis.
@Sitarj · “Safety culture was one of the defining Canadian characteristics that I used to point to in contrast to Mexico and COVID absolutely murdered that. I’m looking at you @WorkSafeBC.”
@ProHealth4MyKid · “You summarized 3 years of complete failure & strategic misinformation in a few minute interview. Well said & well done.I’m so tired of living in this vile society that forces children to be repeatedly infected with viruses when the tools are in front of us.”
We don’t hear Conservative Premiers back down from their ultimatums against public health protections, even when kids’ lives are on the line. They can’t bear the taste of crow, not even to save kids? It’s hard to imagine more ideologically despicable human beings.
If they gave a damn, here’s what would happen:
They’d have a TV suppertime announcement with a public health leader explaining that COVID-19 is airborne, and infected people need to be isolated while the source of their infection is traced. They’d required people wear respirators in public indoor spaces, and start distributing them. They’d issue a cell phone alert advising people to wear respirators, and limit social contacts for a few weeks. They’d admit that COVID-19 is an ongoing pandemic emergency that is not over and pretending it is done has caused harm.
Possibly Close The Schools temporarily. Offer UBI or CERB to parents losing income to care for their children. Extend sick leave benefits.
We’ve done it before, we know it works to delay infections and give the healthcare workers time to catch up.
November
There are things going on. From absurd numbers of kids home sick from school, to the Grey Cup going on today in Regina.
The most vocal civilian critic of the SaskParty’s support of abusive religious schools (who were teaching dinosaurs were around with Creationist people), had their home vandalized with bible verse graffiti. They fled, and their home was torched, killing some of their pets and destroying their belongings! A fundraiser is attempting to help them. I’d like to see it exceed their goal, to show that the governing party’s thugs can’t chase good people away.
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Doug Ford in Ontario kicked an ant hill and almost got bit. He legislated workers back to work with the Notwithstanding Clause in the Charter, overriding their Charter right to collective bargaining. He caved when he saw a general strike was imminent. The fines were so big, the unions had to fight to the mat and beyond to win.
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The US election looks like the Democrats will take the Senate and the Republicans the House. Fingers crossed that the GQP doesn’t take a majority in the House, so it won’t be tied up with stupidity for quite as long. The counting and recounting is taking quite some time, and there’s a runoff in Georgia again between Walker and Warnock this time. Walker is a complete idiot, so he’s got a chance.
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Russia just launched missiles into Poland the other day, a dangerous escalation of their war against Ukraine. There are Russia supporters claiming this was disinformation, and that Russia didn’t launch an attack, even accidentally, on Poland.
Methane EMIT
There’s a European satellite watching for methane pollution. It spotted a big leak in Alberta.
ISS has a camera called EMIT attached and it can see methane plumes on Earth. The data is public, but not as easy as surfing around like on Google Earth to map it.
“Jan Gorski, director of the Pembina Institute’s oil and gas program, said consistent regulation is vital to spotting emissions.
“The source, location, and generation of methane emissions is unpredictable, which is why we need good measurement and monitoring to catch these rare events,” he said.
“If it’s something caught by satellite it shows that it was a pretty significant source of methane emissions.”
Gorski said the current data on the average level of methane emissions from the gas sector is based on studies from more than a decade ago.”
Hammer Fox News
Fox News would like its viewers to think that political assassination is an everyday occurrence, and the perps walk the next day.
Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff 