Repeat After Me: Canada is Uninhabitable Without Fossil Fuels
If you remained in Alberta during the first major cold snap of the year and are alive to read this article, you owe your continued existence to fossil fuels; coal, oil and natural gas.
Using Red Deer as an example, from January 12 to 18 the average daytime high was -25.9oC and the nighttime low -34.7oC. It was a bit warmer in the south and colder in the north, but high/low ranges for the entire province were similar.
Without heat from carbon-based plants and animals – either long dead in the form of coal, oil or gas or not yet fossilized wood or grass – we’d all have frozen to death.
And that was January.
If u release great quantities of co2, it will warm up! ….scientists say
the world is inhabitable without CO2
Actually no;
The world is not inhabitable without CO2. It would be quite uninhabitable.
Without CO2 all plant life dies and without plants all animal life including humans die.
wallstone, Just because you state a very simple basic truth it is irrelevant, it doesn’t fit the woke social justice narrative, therefore you will be cancelled from all platforms for your sinister unwelcome comments!
Oxygen is a greenhouse gas. Produced in a greenhouse from carbon dioxide and sunshine.
Carbon DiOxide is a vital source of Oxygen.
Seems like everyone’s a Racist Oxygen denier these days!
I agree.
Canada is inhabitable without fossil fuels.
Our current alternatives takes fossil fuels to create them.
And at times incompatible when trying to mix alcohol to fuels is difficult on machinery.
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forget about alberta… check out texas.
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If we are to save this planet it is incredibly vital that we compile a great list (to be called “The Great List”) of brave climate warriors who will have their access to fossil fuels and byproducts rescinded by law. It is the only way. Completely voluntary by the way. Let the listing begin….
I think this would make for an interesting man on the street petition. Asking agw believers to volunteer to give up fossil fuels. Start with trudy.
Johnboy, How about beginning with having them give up their access to CO2, I bet you could get em to enthusiastically sign a petition for that idea!
Trudeau, Singh and May DO NOT CARE.
Your survival is way down on their list of priorities.
Our MSM, university’s, all the left excel at only one thing. Denying reality!
Earlier this week Alberta’s windmills were operating at 3% of capacity.
Demand was 11400 MW.
At 2 MW per turbine, and 3% operating load, we’d need about 190,000 wind turbines!
But wait, with this number of windmills, we still haven’t provided any electricity to heat our homes! Or to charge our EVs!
Funny how the greens, Trudeau, or Biden, have not built a single pilot town where all the power comes from windmills, solar panels, and batteries.
Even if you were more generous and designed on the basis of the spring/summer average capacity factors (25%) and were using modern 4.5 MW wind turbines, you would still need over 13,000 of these monster towers to replace the 15,000 MW capacity from coal and natural gas. Those 13,000 wind farms would need a land area of roughly 30,000 square kilometres, a vast area equivalent to 37 times the area of Calgary and over 14% of all agricultural land in Alberta. The cost would be somewhere north of $75 billion. And after all that there will be days such as January 15th where those 13,000 turbines essentially generate no electricity. The world is truly crazy.
Totally agree with your numbers Sam, but I’d like to avoid my water pipes freezing, and wearing a parka inside when it goes to -25C or lower. So I’m interested in having electricity 24/7 in the winter.
Joe, So hook up your exercise bicycle to a generator, and have your family pedal in shifts to keep the joint warm. If you have no family or room mates I guess you’re screwed. Have a great day!
One would need backup power plants for when the wind doesn’t blow. Also at low temperatures these things wear out due to poor lubrication and material failures.
Math is easy if one ignores all the hard parts…
And without global warming, we’d all be living somewhere south of Missouri, in the shadow of a mile high glacier.
Well duh.
Consider this….I drilled 423 natural gas, or oil wells from NE BC, down the eastern flanks of the Rockies to the US border and east to Manitoba, in a big wedge south of the Canadian Shield, over 40 years as a Geologist. And that was just oil and gas, never mind the holes drilled for uranium, gold, Cu Pb Zn. A lot of it drilled in winter at temps of -40 to -60. Just so you can drive your car and heat your home and generate electricity and power industry. Especially that uranium. The French and Japanese love that stuff. Cheapest operating costs per pound, per kilowatt hour generated.
Snooty NDP John Horgan of BC and CAQ François Legault of Kaybec don’t want our “dirty oil” and the Liberal Party of Canada, led by PM The Turd Trudeau would rather leave our oil in the ground and import oil from places you wouldn’t want to live in, least of all your daughters. He’s owned by Power Corp. who has offices in China, home of the Wuflu and operates oil and gas wells in some shady parts of the world where women wear bags over their heads, or are less than equal to men. That oil is the same color as western Canadian oil….black and just as “dirty”. California is a hypocrite on oil. They produce from wells right downtown Los Angeles cleverly disguised to avoid detection. The oil they produce is actually worse than the stuff loaded into trucks in Fort MacMurray. It is actually called the La Brea Tar Pits. Look it up. Venezuela produces similar oil to western Canada and some of it is from the Orinoco Oil Sands ….imagine that! They are saints compared to us, I gather and their women are worshipped, too. Texas refiners love our oil, same as Venezuela oil with less friction, politically. Gery Butts thinks we can “go green”, with windmills and solar. Ever calculate the life cycle for that stuff? None of it is recyclable….they bury it when done with it.
CO2 is plant food. Look up “the carbon cycle”. Without CO2, plants die…..just about everything else dies too. Bill Gates wants to depopulate this planet. Remember that saying “don’t mess with Mother Nature”? People like him should go first and set an example. After you and your kids, Bill and Melinda Gates et al. Your “carbon footprint” is bigger than some countries. I don’t even drive a car. I’m more “carbon efficient” than you are, with just one house. Not that I want to measure stuff.
Great Post PO’ed.
Haven’t drilled any wells, But QC – QA’d plenty of Heat Exchangers, Ovens, Piping systems, Hydrogen Plants, Pressure vessels…and a shit ton of structural…….all involved in providing that which powers our transportation and heats our homes…+27 yrs worth.
In Warm n Cold temps…always,2-3 month Shuts, and 13 HR shifts with less than decent sleeping arrangements or food.
No regrets…
There’s Good People out there…I met plenty. Labourers, Boilermakers, Pipe fitters and Welders…and even the odd decent Safety guy…lol
Conklin (Meg – Kirby)
Ft Mac Suncor Base Pl
Horizon
Anyone that thinks we don’t need CO2…???, knows nothing.
If you check out greenhouses growing veggies commercially, they pump in CO2 to “boost production”. Up tp1100 ppm CO2. There are fields of them SE of Calgary. Check out some of the local back roads in summer.
I drilled a lot of Fort Mac wells at Liege, Horizon and some others I can’t remember, back in the early 80’s, when the Peter Pond was the only decent digs in town. We’d run two drilling rigs at a time, 24 hrs a day..
Bam!! Plants are there because of CO2 if I remember my science right, and they created the oxygen we breathe.
A guy named Tyndall speculated CO2 might have similar greenhouse capabilities to water vapour but never studied it.
Maybe he was right, and that could matter – if you live on Venus with 95% atmospheric CO2 not Earth at .04%.
In the 70s Margaret Thatcher hoisted out the junk science, crackpot notion of global warming, fresh off the heels of global cooling theory, to nail UK unions in an election campaign.
And that’s the science of it folks, all of it.
The rest is in the imagination and the models and the fact that yes, climate does change.
That’s what real scientists study, global warming, or cooling, but not one who cares about their reputation thinks humans are a large input into climate change.
But for the charlatans, rent seekers, influence peddlers and power mongers it’s a gift that keeps on giving. You don’t have to accurately count CO2, or store it, or trade it, or pay wholesale for it, you can just make it all up and pretend it has value.
It’s non intrinsic, a created commodity, immeasurable, so perfect as an imaginary hobgoblin and the cerise sur la sundae – covid cases. Throw in gender equality, white supremacy and saving jobs and you’ve got a non-quantitative regime.
Leave the oil in the ground is the granddaddy of non-quantitative combining its fiction with that of solar and wind turbines.
Programmed peace, imposed order and fictional government; not what we signed on for in 1867, their history be damned.
That leaves more time for soaking up the regal beauty of the Laurentian set when not collecting from Lavalin and China.
But I repeat myself. What’s truly repeating here is the gong show the DeMarxists just gave us with their peekaboo Trump is a white supremacist campaign, now lurched leftward with John Gill signing EOs as DeMarxists bypass a Congress they control.
But they don’t and they know it; so load more hobgoblins to keep the populace alarmed and clamorous to be led to safety.
The only value it has it what taxpayers paying their penance are willing to fork over. They pay carbon taxes and order trucks.
I am a CAC member at William Head Institution. I asked around if funding levels increased under Trudeau, as they had hoped.
No need to give you answer. The robber barons ride in from the left, willing to risk it all in ways they would never have tried.
All with the approval of their consciences, aka their egos, aka their lust for power and wealth and control over us.
Kind of like the imperialist capitalists Lenin described in his epically myopic essay “Capitalism, Imperialism and War.”
Searching for and securing monopolistic markets for their profit. Making strange alliances and using conflict for gain.
Coming soon to the Dystopian of Canada. Lady justice’s blindfold of impartiality replaced by sunglasses and blinders.
Shamrock, I am continually delighted and amazed by your very valid, and succinct thoughts and observations. I loved that last line about Lady justice now wearing sunglasses and blinders, what a great comment.
Solar and wind is the Frye Festival for climate change cultists…they’re balls deep in the doctrine. The same scientific numbnuts who wear masks while alone in their cars will soon be in charge of this country’s energy policies and are going to drive a stake into fossil fuels once and for all and along with it, show the boomers how it’s done. It only took a couple of generations of 24-7 scare porn to make it a fait accompli.
Brace yourself.
I’ve lived in Saskatoon my whole life and can confirm the above weather report. One of the things that make it such a nice city is that a hundred years ago someone had the foresight to plant thousands of trees of multiple varieties.
When they cut off the fossil fuels there won’t be a tree in the whole province.
Saskatoon was one of the nicest places I’ve lived. At least back in the late 70-80’s. Folks would stop and chat you up on the street and not recoil in horror if you did the same. The older parts of town had no stop signs at intersections. That was 40+ years ago.
Saskatoon is not the same as it once was. We are at the top or very near the top for crime and murders nowdays. Our mayor and council are socialist/communists. Fortunately I live a short distance from Saskatoon but can still enjoy the amenaties.
Uninhabitable is the whole point. Tough to get to 30% land mass conservation with a rural / small town population in the way.
I propose that all Arts & Humanities university buildings in the Prairie Provinces take the full plunge into renewables for power and heat energy. Further that the water those buildings use is sourced from hand dug water wells and that sewage waste is handled using septic fields. A month or two of -20’s and -30’s every winter would make for some valuable learnings to the fake woke when battery storage flatlines, the water lines freeze and toilets turn into mini ice rinks.
Relax and enjoy.
Western Separation is a near certainty.
Driven by the ideological madness of the Virtue Signalling Class.
Who by no coincidence form the Parasitic Overload.
Everything,in nature and human affairs moves in cycles.
We are cresting the wave of stupid,because it is now costing people their jobs,businesses and lives.
For what cannot go on will not.
Look at our Professional Parasites.
They know other people money has run out.
So now they are following the age old path of Fools,Thieves and Murders..
Using force of government to declare citizens with real wealth,to be prohibited persons.
“Terrorists.”
“Enemies of the “State”.”
Banishing them,imprisoning them and seizing their assets.
And once that wealth is squandered,they turn on the fools who permitted these outrages.
Every damn time.
So here we go again.
Unless we cut through the blather and discard all the illusions that imprison us.
For the Fools and Bandits,wealth is a zero sum game,the concept that real wealth can be created and grown,is not part of a parasites world view.
So every time these kind control power,they curtail wealth creation in favour of Rule and Regulation..which always gets set up to protect their comrades and punish the creative and productive.
So if you want a future for your retirement,your children’s opportunities to grow..And profit from their own hard work.
Leave The Con of Confederation.
Form a new country where sanity is demanded and crazy incompetent persons are not protected by the State.
The ecotards are all talk. They need to be forced to do the walk.
When they freeze to death they should buried in a bog or dropped into an active volcano.
I wondered why things in the article seemed a little off, including the mentioned temp here in Prince George. We were well above normal for all of January.
So I checked the date.
That article is over a year old.
Still relevant, but this year the cold hit us in February.
Just so you know.
When I was a kid, electricity hadn’t come into our community yet. My father spent a couple weeks or more cutting, hauling, and sawing up wood for the winter, then probably 100 or more hours splitting it periodically. We had to keep a couple stoves in the house going plus a stock tank. We still froze our asses off every morning. We had unlimited forest. Today the cities would run out of wood in a couple weeks. Our whole civilization was built on cheap energy. It would be gone without it, but then that’s what the globalist communists want.
Nah. Lots of wood in the cities. I’ll just tear down the liberal stick frame houses right on top of their frozen corpses and feed it to my wood stove. SPF but nice and dry.
I was with the author until he asserted, probably out of fear, that climate change science is real.
The relentless corruption of data and the total lack of correlation between temperature and CO2 in geological history demolishes that argument. Climate hysteria the biggest propaganda triumph in history, driven by the Left’s desire to take down capitalism.
Climate hysteria has been taught in the schools for 30 years, along with all the Marxist critical theory/privilege/identity politics/ Woke BS. I feel sorry for our kids’ generation. Mass financial illiteracy, hypersensitivity and a total absence of critical thinking are a fatal combination. This is why we have Trudeau, Horgan and Biden winning elections and Notley poised to become Premier of Alberta again. It’s a nightmare.
I remember when “An Inconvenient Truth” came out. I felt mildly guilty, but I was too consumed working for a living, being a single dad for my two children. When I had more time to do the research, I taught my children that “Global Warming” was happening… on Earth, on Mars, on Neptune. Now that my children are mature and I am effectively retired, I have more time to dispell the myths of apocalypse due to our fossil fuel consumption. Sadly, most people do not want to listen to reason.
Nonsense. Once fossil fuels are removed from Canada, the political elites will ration the “green” energy to select politburo elites. The remaining citizens will then have to live “natural”, native Canadian existences. They will live in igloos, covered with multiple layers of (synthetic) seal skin parkas. Synthetic, because it will be illegal for anyone other than First Nations to kill actual seals for survival.
Think how glorious that future would be! Living gently, and naturally, on the land. Mass death from freezing and starvation thus cutting the parasitic human inhabitation of the planet. And all peoples will be “equal” … living in the same size and type of igloo … how progressssive.
Oh. Wait. You actually thought life would go on as currently constructed when you remove virtually ALL the energy that makes it go? Hahaha ha ha ha ha ha ha. idgiot!!
I been saying that for a long time now. I no longer even try to expand on why, it just is not necessary. Any fool who thinks we can survive without fossil fuels is welcome to stand stark naked in my back yard for 24hours.
Planting billions of trees for Adolf will keep everyone to busy to worry about the cold.
As it so happens I was looking up temperatures last night with my younger son, including temps in Saskatoon, and I was explaining to him how important fossil fuels are to our survival.
This is what should be explained in school on cold days, but now that job is left to those parents who care and who want their kids to grow up thinking sensibly using their brains.
As an added bonus, we brushed up on our Canadian geography as we went hunting for the cold spots!
As usual, the big player that always gets omitted is SDG’s ( sustainable development goal) re named from Agenda 21 / 2030. One of the 29 chapters talks of 3 large cities in Canada. The rest would be returned to nature or government run super farms to feed the population of the mega cities. So when put in context, the hydro, wind solar could be employed on vast scales because there would be no humans in the way to complain. In the U.S. it would be much the same. Fly over country as they call it would be cleared and there to would be mega cities on the coasts.
Yes, we cannot survive without fossil fuels, but that is beside the point. The global elites at the U.N and elsewhere want us off the land, period. Not sure how fast they can accomplish the feat but their plan is in the works.
tewchip, The Davos and UN global elites can’t put us all in cattle cars to remove us as that would be socially unacceptable, so they have a multitude of ideas they have convinced the muddleheaded are acceptable, but the end result is the same. They not only want us off the land, they want us gone from the planet. There are too many peasants using up the planetary resources they want preserved for themselves. They simply want just enough of us to serve/service their needs into the future. I suspect also, that once they have achieved their goals, and are living their privileged lives just as they are now, but without an unneeded six billion peasants eating up those precious resources, they will then rediscover the location of “new” oil reserves in Fort MacMurray, Oklahoma, and elsewhere, they can tap into again to fuel their private jets, and their privileged lifestyles. Why on earth do you think they continue to fly those jets indiscriminately, yet demand we all obey their green mandates! We don’t matter, and they are now willing to pull back the curtain on their plans, as they have taken things too far for any of us to turn things back, they have won, and they know it.
A pox on them and their ilk, I for one will not accept their reset plans, and will fight them if I must.
The average power consumption for Canadians is approximately 14,000KWH to maintain our lifestyle. The average consumption for Americans, being a little south of us is 12,000 KWH. How the politicians can expect to keep importing people from subtropical climes and at the same time tell us we have to reduce our power consumption is beyond the Twilight Zone. I have educated(?), friends(?) and acquaintances back east that firmly believe that the carbon tax going to solve this globull warming catastrophe by penalizing the big polluters not realizing that they are eventually paying all of the costs. So the upside to all of this is that with the temperature in Toronto running in the minus scale for most of the month, which I hope is driving the point home that they are now aware that they have been sold a pile of BS in a bag, or colloquially the proverbial pig in a poke.
Heh, I was going to post something, but I gave up. Got groceries delivered today and a load of fresh bread from a great local bakery. Planning the meals for the next while. It’s -26 C at 640 Pm. House is paid for and it doesn’t have one of those “high efficiency” furnaces that ice up their plastic exhaust line up at -15 C, or lower. There was a feature on them on the 6 PM news to night. My exhaust goes straight up through the roof, like it should. Some people shouldn’t live in this country.
Industrial civilization is not possible without fossil fuels.
The Chinese don’t want the blue eyed devils living above a pre-industrial Chinese level.
North American food and fuel is to be exported to the Middle Kingdom, leaving the blue-eyed devils to live as natives do in Chinese client states in Africa—hand to mouth, with only a roi nègre and his court kept well-fed as a reward for enforcing China’s will.
When the Chinese exhaust a mine, we will get to keep the toxic tailings.
I thought I had died and gone to heaven because it warmed up to -38C from -52C in the Arctic last week.
Add a bit of wind chill to that and pretty soon we’re talking about real cold…
Take a day off Greta, FFS.
You too, Justy, that’s enough carbon tax for now.
Give us a frikkin’ break already.