I enjoyed your article but I still do not see where the energy is going to come from to power this new world that folks are speaking of.
Current technology is not there yet. Wind and solar do not appear to be the answer unless we plan to cut usage. Natural gas can only decrease the GHG emissions of coal by a third.
Nuclear will face the same back lash from the environmental folks. The same stuff that currently is dished out to pipelines. This will happen after the first hint of a radiation incident anywhere in the world.
Once the oil companies have been soundly beaten by environmentalists, I suspect their next target will be bio-mass projects. A poor alternative at best. Environmentalists who support these should be ashamed.
Today, I can jump into my old Ford and drive from here in Edmonton to Vancouver in a long day. I don't believe that would be possible with an electric car, even with the infrastructure in place to recharge when needed. If I need to run the heater or wipers, the difference might be measured in days or weeks.
Personally, I think that less frivolous travel on aircraft and cruise ships would be fine. Using less power will be a huge change in lifestyle but I could manage and might enjoy some of the challenges.
Moving from oil and gas seems inevitable. I just think our leaders need to let us know where we are moving to. The world will not look as it does today.
By the way, never voted for Kenney, never will. His constant whining embarrasses Alberta.
These days, in the absence of free press and proper journalism, we must rely on opinion pieces and internet "Influencers" to provide facts. You don't gain followers by suggesting that we need to be careful as we move on from Hydrocarbons.
If real journalists cannot question our direction, I can only hope hope that they will start asking questions and providing facts about the destination.
That trip you mentioned is possible today, and it will be even more possible as the months and years pass and companies bring on new models (including an electric F-150) with longer ranges and faster charging.
Nobody is suggesting that the transition has to happen overnight -- and anyone who pretends otherwise is being deliberately dishonest. Nobody is pretending that people will have to give up their gas-powered cars tomorrow. But this transition IS happening, and a place like Alberta has to be particularly sensitive to it and aware of its impacts. Look at what's going on in Texas's power sector. And the cost of renewables will only continue to drop, especially as storage technology scales up.
The COVID situation has made me much more skeptical of other branches of progressivism. I have taken undergraduate level courses in epidemiology, and in my opinion the threat of COVID was and is being grossly oversold by the government and Canadian press. The "solutions" (lockdowns, border closures, masks) are sacrosanct. (For example, reading 2-3 layers deep in the now freely available medical literature on masks will tell you why Dr. Tam wasn't recommending them.)
Not having a background in economics, environmental science, or renewables, I now wonder if the COVID formula (grossly overstate the problem + coercively impose solutions -- regardless of their practicality and efficacy) applies in any way to the climate "crisis."
Thank you for sharing this with me, Max. I enjoyed reading the article you wrote on this in MacLean's. One thing that's been really interesting about COVID is how quickly it's unfolded; you can see behind the curtain a lot more -- how people and institutions respond to things. You identity this in your criticisms of Ingraham and Malcolm.
I think you and I are both right. More Canadians would have died from COVID-19 at this point in time if we had done nothing, and the threat was grossly overestimated from the beginning. We seem to disagree about the relative contribution of each of our points.
Furthermore, Ontarians were told that if we didn't lockdown, then 100,000 of us would die from COVID-19 (see April 3rd report above). At the time, armed with two undergraduate courses in epidemiology (that had been collecting cobwebs since 2008) and the best data then available*, I agreed with the points made by Dr. John Ioannidis** and opined then that the figures realeased by the Ontario government were a gross overestimation of the virus' actual threat. So did Anders Tegnell. Sweden was going to lose 85,000 of its citizens if they didn't lockdown! Of course we all know by now that they didn't and they didn't. As of today they are sitting at 5,580 COVID deaths: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-boris-johnson-needs-to-speak-to-anders-tegnell.
(Not being a journalist, academic in this field, or even on social media, my opinion was not documented but rather was limited to chats with my progressive friends who are all in their 20s and 30s and who were truly scared about this virus in April and May. They do find it a bit odd now that someone who barely has any training in epidemiology came to a more accurate opinion than Dr. Tam or our various provincial public health officers about the true mortality risk of this virus.)
Max, I agree that the discrepancy between the originally stated threat from COVID and what has actually materialized is going to make it harder to generate the public will to enact progressive climate policies. But, in my view, the single biggest reason for this is not the prevention paradox but rather progressives' own sensationalism and exaggerated harm around the novel coronavirus. If this does limit buy-in on climate stuff, the scientific community will have themselves to blame.
*see Iceland having the highest test rate in March and infection fatality rate vs. case fatality rate. I swear I read a freely available paper about this in the New England Journal of Medicine at the time, but I can't for the life of me find it now.
I remember what I did now re: the Iceland data. In April I reconciled the below article (which was available by April 14th on NEJM's website for free and which estimates the percentage of Icelanders who were infected with COVID at that time) with the number of COVID deaths in Iceland at that time from Worldometer.
I can't remember exactly what I calculated the mortality rate to be, I just remember that it was logarithmically lower than what the WHO, Canadian government, and Canadian media were reporting at the time (and continued to report for months afterwards).
If you think my arguments are without merit, great! Push back.
Your current reply, in my view, is antithetical to the type of discourse the fine folks at "The Line" are fostering (regardless of whether or not you think I exemplify the Dunning-Kruger effect).
I am always surprised at the lack of forethought that all the green energy promoters have. India is a relatively warm country with a massive population. Canada is a cold, large and sparely populated country with the majority of the population on the border of the US trying to get as warm as possible. After watching the fiasco in Texas and their green energy in the cold I think perhaps a little more thought must be put into this. I am thinking you must live in one of the warmer cities in Canada and not the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, or the prairie provinces. Where the cold can gel propane and oil along with freezing the water in your pipes in less than an hour when the power shuts down at 40 below. Where the Canadian shield or tundra are a swarm of insects can drive you mad if you work outside. With much covered in rock, muskeg and water where you have to wait until the water freezes solid to build an ice road to get to some remote communities. No roads except a few and where the only way to get to communities is by air. Yes I am sure they will be pleased when you show up to put in windmills and solar panels or attempt to put in a power grid. It will be a trial just to get anything there, let alone the fact that when the darkness of winter descends its for 24 hours a day for months on end. Yes. Please I am waiting for your green energy where you may have to work at 40 below with nothing but ice fog due to no wind when the temperatures dip to those low, low, low points. I am always amazed at how small some Canadian minds can reach and only take into consideration their personal area of where they live and work and forget that an entire country of massive proportions and cold climates that can vary to the extreme is the majority of this country.
I enjoyed your article but I still do not see where the energy is going to come from to power this new world that folks are speaking of.
Current technology is not there yet. Wind and solar do not appear to be the answer unless we plan to cut usage. Natural gas can only decrease the GHG emissions of coal by a third.
Nuclear will face the same back lash from the environmental folks. The same stuff that currently is dished out to pipelines. This will happen after the first hint of a radiation incident anywhere in the world.
Once the oil companies have been soundly beaten by environmentalists, I suspect their next target will be bio-mass projects. A poor alternative at best. Environmentalists who support these should be ashamed.
Today, I can jump into my old Ford and drive from here in Edmonton to Vancouver in a long day. I don't believe that would be possible with an electric car, even with the infrastructure in place to recharge when needed. If I need to run the heater or wipers, the difference might be measured in days or weeks.
Personally, I think that less frivolous travel on aircraft and cruise ships would be fine. Using less power will be a huge change in lifestyle but I could manage and might enjoy some of the challenges.
Moving from oil and gas seems inevitable. I just think our leaders need to let us know where we are moving to. The world will not look as it does today.
By the way, never voted for Kenney, never will. His constant whining embarrasses Alberta.
These days, in the absence of free press and proper journalism, we must rely on opinion pieces and internet "Influencers" to provide facts. You don't gain followers by suggesting that we need to be careful as we move on from Hydrocarbons.
If real journalists cannot question our direction, I can only hope hope that they will start asking questions and providing facts about the destination.
D.E. Wright
That trip you mentioned is possible today, and it will be even more possible as the months and years pass and companies bring on new models (including an electric F-150) with longer ranges and faster charging.
Nobody is suggesting that the transition has to happen overnight -- and anyone who pretends otherwise is being deliberately dishonest. Nobody is pretending that people will have to give up their gas-powered cars tomorrow. But this transition IS happening, and a place like Alberta has to be particularly sensitive to it and aware of its impacts. Look at what's going on in Texas's power sector. And the cost of renewables will only continue to drop, especially as storage technology scales up.
Thank you for your reply.
I hope you are correct. I have some friends with Tesla's. I will get their opinion on the Vancouver drive.
The COVID situation has made me much more skeptical of other branches of progressivism. I have taken undergraduate level courses in epidemiology, and in my opinion the threat of COVID was and is being grossly oversold by the government and Canadian press. The "solutions" (lockdowns, border closures, masks) are sacrosanct. (For example, reading 2-3 layers deep in the now freely available medical literature on masks will tell you why Dr. Tam wasn't recommending them.)
Not having a background in economics, environmental science, or renewables, I now wonder if the COVID formula (grossly overstate the problem + coercively impose solutions -- regardless of their practicality and efficacy) applies in any way to the climate "crisis."
I strongly suggest you look into something called "the paradox of prevention".
Thank you for sharing this with me, Max. I enjoyed reading the article you wrote on this in MacLean's. One thing that's been really interesting about COVID is how quickly it's unfolded; you can see behind the curtain a lot more -- how people and institutions respond to things. You identity this in your criticisms of Ingraham and Malcolm.
I think you and I are both right. More Canadians would have died from COVID-19 at this point in time if we had done nothing, and the threat was grossly overestimated from the beginning. We seem to disagree about the relative contribution of each of our points.
The main reason we were given for doing the lockdown was to preserve ICU capacity and on April 3rd the Ontario government published modeling indicating that the best case scenario (with all lockdown measures) was 90%+ ICU capacity for weeks in April/May: https://files.ontario.ca/po-covid-19-technical-briefing-en-2020-04-03.pdf. Here is what actually happened, courtesy of the Ontario Government and via Line contributer Dr. Matt Strauss: https://twitter.com/strauss_matt/status/1250053075940843520?s=20.
Furthermore, Ontarians were told that if we didn't lockdown, then 100,000 of us would die from COVID-19 (see April 3rd report above). At the time, armed with two undergraduate courses in epidemiology (that had been collecting cobwebs since 2008) and the best data then available*, I agreed with the points made by Dr. John Ioannidis** and opined then that the figures realeased by the Ontario government were a gross overestimation of the virus' actual threat. So did Anders Tegnell. Sweden was going to lose 85,000 of its citizens if they didn't lockdown! Of course we all know by now that they didn't and they didn't. As of today they are sitting at 5,580 COVID deaths: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-boris-johnson-needs-to-speak-to-anders-tegnell.
(Not being a journalist, academic in this field, or even on social media, my opinion was not documented but rather was limited to chats with my progressive friends who are all in their 20s and 30s and who were truly scared about this virus in April and May. They do find it a bit odd now that someone who barely has any training in epidemiology came to a more accurate opinion than Dr. Tam or our various provincial public health officers about the true mortality risk of this virus.)
Max, I agree that the discrepancy between the originally stated threat from COVID and what has actually materialized is going to make it harder to generate the public will to enact progressive climate policies. But, in my view, the single biggest reason for this is not the prevention paradox but rather progressives' own sensationalism and exaggerated harm around the novel coronavirus. If this does limit buy-in on climate stuff, the scientific community will have themselves to blame.
*see Iceland having the highest test rate in March and infection fatality rate vs. case fatality rate. I swear I read a freely available paper about this in the New England Journal of Medicine at the time, but I can't for the life of me find it now.
**https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/eci.13222?utm_campaign=buffer&utm_content=buffer2bc30&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com
I remember what I did now re: the Iceland data. In April I reconciled the below article (which was available by April 14th on NEJM's website for free and which estimates the percentage of Icelanders who were infected with COVID at that time) with the number of COVID deaths in Iceland at that time from Worldometer.
I can't remember exactly what I calculated the mortality rate to be, I just remember that it was logarithmically lower than what the WHO, Canadian government, and Canadian media were reporting at the time (and continued to report for months afterwards).
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2006100
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a hell of a thing.
If you think my arguments are without merit, great! Push back.
Your current reply, in my view, is antithetical to the type of discourse the fine folks at "The Line" are fostering (regardless of whether or not you think I exemplify the Dunning-Kruger effect).
I am always surprised at the lack of forethought that all the green energy promoters have. India is a relatively warm country with a massive population. Canada is a cold, large and sparely populated country with the majority of the population on the border of the US trying to get as warm as possible. After watching the fiasco in Texas and their green energy in the cold I think perhaps a little more thought must be put into this. I am thinking you must live in one of the warmer cities in Canada and not the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, or the prairie provinces. Where the cold can gel propane and oil along with freezing the water in your pipes in less than an hour when the power shuts down at 40 below. Where the Canadian shield or tundra are a swarm of insects can drive you mad if you work outside. With much covered in rock, muskeg and water where you have to wait until the water freezes solid to build an ice road to get to some remote communities. No roads except a few and where the only way to get to communities is by air. Yes I am sure they will be pleased when you show up to put in windmills and solar panels or attempt to put in a power grid. It will be a trial just to get anything there, let alone the fact that when the darkness of winter descends its for 24 hours a day for months on end. Yes. Please I am waiting for your green energy where you may have to work at 40 below with nothing but ice fog due to no wind when the temperatures dip to those low, low, low points. I am always amazed at how small some Canadian minds can reach and only take into consideration their personal area of where they live and work and forget that an entire country of massive proportions and cold climates that can vary to the extreme is the majority of this country.