It’s the reason no one in Saskatchewan lives past the age of 32;
According to Environment Canada, dust from unpaved roads in Ontario puts a whopping 90,116 tonnes of PM2.5 into our air each year, nearly 130 times the amount from coal-fired power generation. Using the Clean Air Alliance method for computing deaths, particulates from country-road usage kills 40,739 people per year, quite the massacre considering there are only about 90,000 deaths from all causes in Ontario each year. Who knew? That quiet drive up back country roads to the cottage for a weekend of barbecues, cozy fires and marshmallow roasts is a form of genocide.
Luckily for green advocacy groups, one of the chief job requirements of mainstream journalism is innumeracy. (h/t TimR)
Perhaps that calculation includes road kill.
No wonder it’s so hard to get up in the morning. I should have been dead 29 years ago. There oughta be some sort of compensation I can claim, if I fill out the correct form.
McKitrick’s article should be standard reading for all Ontarians.
Lets the asphalting begin.
Math and common sense are hard concepts to master, obviously.
Snark off.
Yep, the media’s unquestioning regurgitation of environmentalist’s facts and fictions is wonder to behold.
My favorite is that ‘dirty’ coal kills X amount of people due to particulates. If one actually believed this nonsense then the most secure job in a place like Estevan (mining, coal plants and agriculture) would be a guy in a Cowboy Cadillac going up and down the streets yelling “Bring out yer dead, bring out yer dead”.
WUWT, Ross McKitrick, Stephen McIntyre and many others have done a great job of showing how the environmentalists numbers rarely add up. Too bad they are completely ignored by journalists and other true believers.
LC Bennett I was thinking that as a kid on the farm I probably breathed in, or ingested, more dirt in a single day of helping with the harvesting, or plowing and/or planting the fields in the summer than most city slickers get in a lifetime, yet I’m still alive and almost kicking.
He!!, we even had a road running right beside the house which wasn’t paved until I was a teen.
Journalism . . . because math is difficult.
Save the earth! Pave every road immediately! Pay for it with gravel taxes.
This Financial Post article was written to counter act a recent push from the propaganda arm of the Ontario Liberals. Check it: phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/2011/05/liberal-propaganda-machine-in-full.html
The Usual Suspects have been raging for a week that Hudak is going to destroy the universe by killing people with deadly “DIRTY COAL FIRED POWER.” That’s a direct quote from a headline, I did not make that up.
Incidentally I live pretty close to DIRTY COAL FIRED POWERstation Nanticoke. On a gravel road. No wheezing yet.
Where have the conservatives been the last few years while McKitirick and Watts have taken apart the fraud that AGW is? Hmmmm? Looking to cash in, the same as Liberals/NDP/BLOC/Greens? none of this needed to happen and we didn’t need to be subjected to the crap that AGW is.
Spare me the tripe that they had a minority, the USA was gonna do it, blah, blah, blah. They suck almost as bad as the Cap and Traders do on this.
As for the “perps” at Environment Canada, I’d take anything that they publish with a few tonnes of road salt, which I’m sure they have a report on the shelf stating that 205,361 Ontarioans die from annually. Just Ontario, though.
don’t let the kiddies play in the dirt, might kill ’em!
DIRTY COAL FIRED POWER – you mean the ones McGuinty was “supposed”, nay “promised” to have already closed?? Those ones?
I have to agree that dust from gravel roads is deadly. In my parent’s youth,the 1920’s, all the roads were gravel and the folks travelled over them with alarming regularity.
Not ONE of those folks is alive today!
Dalton,shut down the fireplaces and barbecues,electricity’s cheap from installation of all those green windmills.
Do it for the children!
Hold on Phantom, that headline reads:
“Tim Hudak to Scrap Green Energy Programs and Return to Dirty Coal Fired Power”
It says “RETURN TO” dirty coal…..does that mean we’ll have to reopen those coal fired plants that McGuinty has already closed….oh wait….
jcl, yep. Those ones. Nanticoke power station is still turnin’ and burnin’. McGuinty is planting a bunch of windmills in front of it to fool the goofs in Toronto, but that plant is still there, cranking away. Has to, there’s nothing else built or even planned to take up the load. Like, -nothing-.
I think the real news to take home from all this is that our national and provincial scientific establishments have been suborned by people who are 100% dedicated to the destruction of our way of life, our traditions and our nation. Pretty much everything that comes out of the Ontario and Ottawa ministries is pure Greenie/Watermellon propaganda. They get caught doing things like planting wolf hair in bushes all the time, to get the results they want.
That’s one more job the CPC has to get done the next few years, fix that. Its going to be hard too, given the state of the universities. Where are you going to find an environmental sciences PhD who isn’t a perfectly indoctrinated watermellon?
I knew they should never have outlawed dumping PCB laced used transformer oil on the backroads for dust control..Even tho we didn’t like it when it stuck to our barefeet walking to school.
@Louise – ” He!!, we even had a road running right beside the house which wasn’t paved until I was a teen”.
FQ rich folk – some of us, even today live further North and most of the roads are still NOT paved.
So…”dirty coal” kills X people per year, does it? How many lives does the power produced by “dirty coal” extend and improve?
Good news, Randall Denley will be running for the Conservatives in the upcoming provincial election:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Randall+Denley+Tories+election/4793900/story.html
The Alberta oil sands have a cure for that. 🙂
puddin n pie at 12:09 PM: “don’t let the kiddies play in the dirt, might kill ’em!”
When my older sister and I were kids, after a big rain we used to “swim”, in our clothes, in a ditch on either side of the dirt road that ran through the farm yard.
Our poor mother. All she had as a ringer-washing machine which she had to fill up with water boiled on the stove top. In addition to the mud, there was also a lot of iron in the water. After the first wash, the whites were never white again.
But we grew up, strong and healthy. And then there was the time I fell out of a tree. And the one when I fell out of the loft onto the concrete floor of the barn. That was before medicare, so the treatment consisted of laying down on the couch in the living room.
And did I tell you about walking to school – up hill both ways?
Seriously, the school was just across the road, but I still managed to be late a few times.
And the time I put a pitchfork, covered with manure, through my toe?
Well,LS from SK, the “paved” road has now been returned to it’s original gravel state. There’s progress and there’s decline.
guess I must’a died 17 years ago, driving on them dirt roads
Are you truly incapable of understanding the difference in toxicity between road dust and the toxic particulates from coal fired power plants which contain radioactivity, murcury and other heavy metals, and cancer producing toxins just to name a few? Spouting ignorance doesn’t contribute to the credibility of your cause.
There are much cleaner alternatives to coal fired power. Canadian designed nuclear for example.
po’ed in AB @ 11:53 nails it. The Conservatives are keeping one foot in that cap and tax door door.
Louise says it well. Most country raised folk know exactly what she speaks off.
The green wackjobs just get loonier everyday.
dmorris at May 17, 2011 12:13 PM: I can vouch for the same experience in my own life. Most of the folks from the Cypress Hills who lived there in the 1920’s have already died; they drove on dirt roads, all the time. Da proof is da proof.
I agree with po’ed in AB and Ken Kulak re: the Conservatives ‘acceptance’ of the Globull Warming/ Climite hopie/changie thingie. It is a commi plot to enslave all free people (as PMSH said in the past about Keeotoe): full stop. As supporters of the Conservative Party, we should all be squawking loud and long about this acceptance of a hoax designed to rob people of their Liberty. The Conservatives should be obliged to say what the PM said; out loud, in the HOC, in Canada. Put that hoax and all hoax supporters right out of business.
Just say ‘No’ to supporting lies and hoax based fairy tales. No $$, no media, no recognition, no no no. A few jail terms and big fines for the lies that have cost this country money and stress.
“A few jail terms and big fines for the lies that have cost this country money and stress.”
I second that emotion.
Nice try with the hard luck story, Louise, but I’m afraid my misadventures with damaging particulates is far worse. I spent the better part of two years as a coal handler (waiting impatiently for someone in the lab to retire or expire), then a decade or so analyzing pulverized fuel and coal ash. Adding in a lifetime of country road travel and dust blowing in the prairie wind I’m surprised I’ve made it this far. Top that, eh.
LC, I sneer at your road dust. I, the Invincible Phantom, once worked in a QUARRY where the deadly limestone has its genesis. Verily did I blast it from the cliffs, loaded it into trucks, saw it broken in titanic engines of doom which left no stone un-turned, breathed it and ate it.
And yet, here I stand, unbowed! Or sit anyway, its hard to type standing up.
Hah, you ain’t seen dust until you’ve cycloned cement out of a cement bulker and things don’t work quite the way they should.
Oh, the humiliation that comes from defeat. 🙂
Nothing beats grain dust and mouse sh!t.
This is why old-fashioned journalism is useless; the guy quotes reams of numbers, yet provides no means for verifying any of them. Even searching for the name of the publication which he’s supposedly quoting returns only a 1990 publication on the Environment Canada website – obviously the incorrect document if he’s quoting 2009 statistics. So the reader is left with the option of either credulously believing everything this guy says, or flatly rejecting the article based on lack of information. Without at least a half-decent citation, the “information” he provides is completely useless.
Dust!!!!! Man you ain’t seen dust until you get under the beds in my house. HOOOOOOOEEEEEEE!
Sorry, best I could do.
Most likely, the authors drive front wheel drive P-pots that can’t handle gravel roads. A well maintained gravel road is just as safe as a half-assed paved road. About 15 years ago, many paved roads in Sask were ripped up and put back to gravel, because they weren’t built very well. The length of road in SK is hard to imagine, and most of it was paved right over top of some very unstable ground. Putting them back to gravel may have saved a number of lives, and definitely saved a lot of steering assemblies, shock absorbers, trailer springs, etc. A few windsields took one for the team, but they’re fairly cheap.
Be warned.
Activists – especially in EPA and Environment-type government depts have worked out that dust is the other great potential show-stopper for the developed world.
Either in parallel with the anti-CO2 push, or as the fallback position – get dust set as a precedent as toxic – and you can bring the world to its knees.
No mining, no construction, limited agriculture – the list is endless that could be stopped by environmental regulations on dust. Just mowing your yard could become a prohibited activity if it raises dust.
Watch for a lot more on what looks like a frivolous distraction.
I used to live next to the railway tracks, and developed a constant cough from the fine dust raised by the train. Started using a air-filterer in my bedroom, and my cough stopped. I am sure that any coal plant if they do not already have them could use a economical filter system to eliminate fine dust particles like my $200 air-cleaner did.
Alan, all coal plants are equipped with electrostatic precipitators. They extract all particles larger than about 10 microns from the flue gas. The days of coal plants emitting smoke disappeared at least 40-50 years ago. The visible stream from a stack is virtually all water vapour.
“PCB laced used transformer oil on the backroads”
When I was much younger, I spent a summer working on the development of a golf course on a regional park in the middle of nowhere. The greens were nothing more than sand to which we added gallons of used transformer oil courtesy of SaskPower.
So far the PCB’s haven’t got me.
They extract all particles larger than about 10 microns from the flue gas. … The visible stream from a stack is virtually all water vapour.
…and a host of particles smaller than 10µ which include radioactive particles, mercury and other heavy metals, carcinogenic toxins, etc. Yes, technology exists to scrub these from the flue gas, however people don’t want to pay the higher electricity rates that would finance cleaning the toxins from stack gasses.
As well, most of the world’s coal is burned in China where almost no stack gas cleaning is used. In case you haven’t noticed we all breathe the same atmosphere. Pollution in the Arctic is rapidly increasing due to Chinese coal pollution. Of course if you don’t live there it’s easy to ignore.
A little dust from the road nothing….I know people that are in their early to late 80’s….all of them threshed grain in the barn..now thats real dust….they are all heathly..governments useless people pretending to be a scientist////
@Louise – “Gravel to Gravel’ amen.
But we were so poor we could not afford gravel so had to use Peat Moss.