Clinging To Myths
Far from sleepwalking into an unmitigated disaster, farmers appear to have adapted quite well to the challenges posed by climate change. Or maybe climate change was just a fiction all along. Note how routine advances in crop genetics and machinery design are presented as responses to climate change as opposed to something that the ag industry, driven by the profit motive, has always done.
Spring wheat, used to make high-quality bread, yielded 58.8 bushels per acre this year, according to the government data release. That’s a gain of 77% from 30 years ago, based on a three-year average. Canola yields nearly doubled, reaching 44.7 bushels per acre, also based on a 1994-1996 average.
While most climate science paints a bleak picture for global food supply, with a study in Nature this year forecasting up to 40% reduction in North America’s wheat harvest by 2100, the agricultural experts Reuters interviewed said that with climate adaptation strategies the prairies can continue to produce bigger and bigger crops in the future.
It’s A Monorail!
All that’s missing is a discussion about how much money the train is going to lose. Even in Japan, only one line of the entire high speed rail network runs at a profit.
The federal government says the first segment of its proposed high-speed rail project would connect Montreal and Ottawa. The segment would be about 200 kilometres long and construction would begin in 2029.
More fer it then agin it at public hearing
RM of Weyburn public hearing into Seven Stars wind project hears 6 supporters, 3 opponents.
No lynchings took place at this time.
Predictable Behavior
With the Bloc Quebecois now falling into line with its ideological soulmates on the west coast, how much life is left in the Memorandum Of Understanding?
Blanchet offered his help to B.C. last week — seeing that the MOU was negotiated without the province’s input and offers to relax key climate policies such as the tanker ban — and Eby’s team and his quickly came into contact to coordinate a virtual meeting.
Blanchet said they quickly agreed that, on certain subjects, they were on the same page.
Y2Kyoto: News They Can’t Use
Some huge news dropped today that will reverberate through climate science and policy. Nature has finally retracted “The Economic Commitment of Climate Change,” by Kotz et al. (KLW24), more than 18 months after first learning that the paper was fatally flawed, with the authors acknowledging that its errors are “too substantial” for a correction.
It is not just the retraction that matters — that’s long overdue — but the reaction to the retraction, which indicates that while the old ways still have a grip on the climate discussion, things may be changing for the better.
Back in August, I explained the growing scandal around KLW24: It wasn’t just a fatally flawed paper, but a flawed paper that had taken on outsized influence in climate advocacy and policy.
I’ll Huff and I’ll Puff…
Protection Racket
Well, that response took all of about ten minutes to develop. Maybe fifty percent unemployment across the country would change their attitude, but I’m not too confident about that.
Assembly of First Nations chiefs voted unanimously on Tuesday to demand the withdrawal of a new pipeline deal between Canada and Alberta, while expressing full support for First Nations on the British Columbia coast that strongly oppose the initiative.
The resolution also urges Canada, Alberta and B.C. to recognize the climate emergency and uphold the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Much Needed Relief
While ending such needless mandates is welcome news, the administration also needs to end the Obama era mandates for essentially zero emission diesel engines as well. They force buyers of highway tractors, farm and construction equipment to shoulder the cost of tens of thousands of dollars in useless ingredients.
The proposal would significantly reduce fuel economy requirements, which set rules on how far new vehicles need to travel on a gallon of gasoline, through the 2031 model year, according to a White House official and several people familiar with the plan.
Update from Kate.
.@POTUS: "Now under the new rules being issued today by @SecDuffy, the @USDOT will rescind the Biden fuel economy prices… These policies forced automakers to build cars using expensive technologies. It drove up cost, drove up prices, and made the car much worse." pic.twitter.com/4o9QFIvyiJ
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) December 3, 2025
Y2Kyoto: Planetary Fever Watch
Steve Milloy’s Global Warming Alert: “Low temperature records from the 1800s are forecast to be broken on Thursday and Friday as an air mass from Nunavut, Canada, reaches the Midwest and Northeast.”
COP30: The After Party
Private jets gone. Raw sewage still runs in the streets. The shiny new ‘Freedom Avenue’ is already a smugglers’ highway for illegal timber and cocaine. The 56,000 delegates partied on floating 5-star hotels, then vanished. The bill: $2 billion for a ghost convention centre and a 13 km scar through the rainforest that’s already driven deforestation alerts up 15% (INPE).
Guilbeault walks the plank – Zinchuk column
Brian Zinchuk: All out of CN towers to climb and economies to ruin, Guilbeault walks the plank
If he had continued down his radical path, and was given the power to do it, as Trudeau had done, we could have lost the country. We still might.
Kinda…
…but not really.
CTV- Guilbeault resigning from Carney’s cabinet on same day PM signs Alberta pipeline MOU
Guilbeault plans to stay on as an MP in the Liberal caucus, according to the source.
Coulda Had A Pipeline
Seems like a lot of steps go into not building a pipeline.
Here is a breakdown of the most important parts of Danielle Smith's deal with Mark Carney aka MOU between Alberta and Canada:
* will make a pipeline a National Interest Project – "if"
* one or more pipeline.
* clean electricity regulations will be suspended – the best part of…— Kirk Lubimov (@KirkLubimov) November 27, 2025
Told ya so: The fundraising emails are already flying.
Eby’s NDP party put out a fundraising email Thursday morning slamming Ottawa and Alberta for undertaking negotiations on a new pipeline project without involving B.C. and saying the province will fight to make sure it isn’t built.
Time to change the locks on Alberta, Premier Smith.
Green lining: Guilbeault resigns
A carbon tax increase is guaranteed, though.
If you’re serious, be serious
Brian Zinchuk: If you’re serious, put your Grandma’s old folks home on the prioritized list to turn the lights off in January
Update: Honestly, I didn’t plan this. But 12 hours after I posted the column, this happened:
Alberta wind generation falls to 0.12% capacity late Wednesday night
Car Loan Blues
Yet more evidence that the marginal consumer, in this case the marginal car buyer, simply can’t afford that shiny metal anymore.
Scott Terrio, manager of consumer insolvency at Hoyes, Michalos & Associates, says that in his 17 years on the job, this is the first year he’s seen people contacting the firm with the intention of returning their vehicles.
“It’s very non-typical,” he said. “They’ve recognized that their car is killing them financially.”
Not to worry. I’m sure that tweaking EV mandates from 100% of new car sales to 90% will fix all of that.
COP30: Now That The Smoke Has Cleared
In all the excitement of our plucky Climate Summiteers running for their lives from a battery fire, these pages somehow overlooked this Carney government achievement: Canada Receives Fossil of the Day Award at COP30 Climate Summit
(h/t AH)
COP30: Schadenflamen!
The article doesn’t say it was a battery fire, but from the video in the BBC article above, it was a pretty impressive blaze for a simple electrical fault. Of course the intensity of the fire might have been caused by all the disposable single use petroleum based plastic used to construct the climate conference pavilion.
Well that was surprising
If you build a wind farm in SK vs AB, you will get roughly one third more megawatt-hours out of it. Build the same turbine, get one third more return. That’s a surprising conclusion from analyzing wind capacity factors in SK and Alberta, seen in this story.
Zero still means zero, but this was rather eye-opening.
It’s also interesting to see how some wind farms in Alberta don’t perform worth a damn. Take a good look at the graph. You see several with capacity factors as low as 16 per cent.
Protection Money
If you pony up enough money to the paleolithic set, maybe your project can go ahead.
Jonathan Wilkinson, a B.C. Liberal MP and a former federal environment minister, said today that “a number of things” would need to happen before the tanker ban could change, including discussions with the B.C. government and coastal First Nations.
Scroll down to see the Financial Post point out the errors in Eby’s arguments.
As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own opinion but not to your own facts. Premier Eby’s objections to another Alberta pipeline are rooted in fallacies, not fact. The Carney government should recognize that and decide soon whether or not another pipeline to B.C. tidewater is “in the national interest” — which apparently is how you get a permit to build major projects in Canada these days.