WhileRomeBurnsVille
If you are old enough, you likely remember the one liner, above, that is supposed to have, especially according to the flack who coined it, James Carville, contributed to the election of the oldest living US'ian president, William Jefferson Clinton in 1992.
But never mind the bollocks, or a guy named Ross Perot, because I figure the time has come to re-work that one liner into the snowclone that is the header sitting at the top of this post because, according to those commie-pinko, tree-hugging Economist:
'It's the economy, stupid.'
If you are old enough, you likely remember the one liner, above, that is supposed to have, especially according to the flack who coined it, James Carville, contributed to the election of the oldest living US'ian president, William Jefferson Clinton in 1992.
But never mind the bollocks, or a guy named Ross Perot, because I figure the time has come to re-work that one liner into the snowclone that is the header sitting at the top of this post because, according to those commie-pinko, tree-hugging Economist:
Energy storage for the electrical grid is about to hit the big time. By the reckoning of the International Energy Agency (IEA), a forecaster, grid-scale storage is now the fastest-growing of all the energy technologies. In 2025, some 80 gigawatts of new grid-scale energy storage will be added globally, an eight-fold increase from 2021...{snip}...The IEA predicts that in 2025 the combination of solar-photovoltaic generation and battery storage will be cheaper than the cost of coal-fired power in China, and new gas-fired plants in America...
And likely cheaper, too, than any of these other 'bridge' fuels we here in CanuckistanMikitaVille are constantly being told, by those who will profit most, must be extracted, shipped, exploited and burned as fast as possible before the large scale transition to renewable energy can be made economically not stupid.
OK?
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14 comments:
There's one of these billboards heading North on Rupert, just after the Skytrain station, before you hit the Stupid Store, how appropriate.
That should be heading South on Rupert (Me Bad)
Meanwhile....
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/06/11/opinion/fossil-fuel-lobby-greenwashing-advertising-Canada
https://www.blg.com/en/insights/2024/07/false-advertising-and-greenwashing-bill-c-59-changes-to-competition-act
Happy new year one and all.
This is now my fifth start with this post.
It is all about profit for the big international companies and nothing more.
It is more than coal mining, it is an archaic economic system that extracts fossil fuels from the ground and sell is abroad for the sake of a few jobs.
Today we can make power from the wind, sun, the tides and from the ground itself via geothermal power production.
Do not get me wrong, fossil fuels will be with us for a long time but we are not doing what needs to be done. Far from it, we are paying lip service to global warming and our politcans and their bureaucratic masters are using global warming strictly for revenue generation, via the carbon tax and other taxes for the use of the fossil fuels we use.
We need a network of regional railways to move people and to carry freight, instead of transporting it via roads and highways.
We need the return of passenger intercity railways to do the same.
Talk all you want about cycle paths and bike trails, etc., if you want to get the car off the road, you must provide a viable alternative and we are not, not even close.
Most other countries have recognized this but our government at all levels civic, provincial and federal are anti-rail simply because well "oiled" lobbyists have made them so.
We must change; we cannot tax ourselves out of global warming and climate change; we must take the profit out of exporting fossil fuels.
they don't even care about the few jobs which are created. They are simply window dressing for the media so they can try to convince the public their schemes create jobs while making themselves even richer.
When I read about the storage, thought, oh, Greenland would be good for that.
The people who run these games are simply collecting money as trophies. Like how much money is enough for them? They aren't spending it. I'd suggest taxing them. Not us the consumers but those who make the profits. People use gas, because they need to get to work and cars in most cases are the most efficient way to get there, right now. Every time taxes on gas are raised it becomes more difficult for people. Doesn't bother the billionaires though. The get on their private jets and travel where they want, causing more pollution than quite a number of cars. It is doubtful any government will have the guts to increase taxes on the billionaires and there are also the dummies who actually believe the b.s. the media peddles to us, these are the job creators. No they are the enviornment destroyers.
In Europe things are different. Rail has it all, sort distances, long distances, you can get almost anywhere and not need a vehicle.
The pollution oil/gas cause has resulted in more climate change and that has to stop. We now have much larger storms and Ferries are cancelled. This year I missed Christmas dinner on the mainland. enough is enough.
What this boils down to is a large segment of the population is taxed and inconvienced by the gas/oil industry so a few billionaires can make more money. They don't pay much in the way of taxes on all their profits but we the tax payers are paying for the forest fires, the floods, the mud slides, the highways caving in. There is something wrong with this picture.
Anon-Above--
Very, very well said - thanks (and thanks for taking the time!).
I very much agree that this will take collective, not individual, will. And to move the collective forward will take political courage.
The thing is, it is now clear that the emergence of such courage can now be facilitated by the longterm economic advantages which was the purpose of the post.
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Ya - I know the one!
Thanks Keith--
It would appear that its all prop all the time with these fine folks.
Which isn't surprising given that that (and massive subsidies) is pretty much all they've got
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Happy New Year to you and yours.
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eaf--
Sorry you missed Christmas dinner. Hope the leftovers tasted even better on Boxing Day (or the day after).
The thing is...the jobs are real. It's just that those jobs are all there, and likely more, if we go all in and make the transition now rather than later.
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Didn't get over on Boxing Day either. Not only was there the turkey dinner but Triffle, triffle and I missed it. Now climate change has had a real impact on me. Now I have to wait until Easter for the next hallmark occasion dinner. At my advanced age I am hoping I make it or I'll have to come back as a ghost to deal with the polluters,
Yes, this bit by bit stuff, never results in real change. It would be better if society and business just bit the bullet now and made the change. It maybe expensive but at least the air quality will be better.
A parking spot at Whistler is on the market for $110K. A regular train running full time might be a better answer given the highway is accident prone.
eaf--
Missing trifle is not to be trifled with!
However, if you convert to Rastafarianism you don't have to wait until Easter because they've got all kinds of holy days comin'...Including a bunch next week...
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Troubling times ahead, indeed.
"Viable forward looking clean energy solutions clash with the status quo resource extractors"
Our Government(s)....From Christy Clark's LNG unicorns for all dream.....to John Horgan's beatdown courtesy of the trade-unions who fill the party's coffers.....From Alberta's uncooked tar promoters to Trudeau's claim to solve climate change by approving pipelines and LNG plants..
Down south, the orange menace promised to Drill Baby Drill and to lower everyone's energy bills by 50% in 12 months...
Now it seems, to lower energy costs one will have to endorse, promote and expand what you cited above...renewables and grid power storage.
The big LNG clean energy lie...
I wrote a little on the topic.....LNG is not clean and the energy expended from extraction, to piping, to liquefaction to shipping and then stored, warmed, and finally burned is near net negative.....With methane leaks all along the way.
Anywho....Our beholden to the power brokers media will stay silent as our politicians dither and fret while making promises to lower the price of eggs by doing more of the same.
On the bright side....With luck Asia and Europe will go all in on renewables leaving the robber barrons with much product and nobody to sell it to.
Cheers
That just may be the result Grant. Which, together with it just being the right thing to do, is why it might be best if we were to stop the subsidizing of carbonization sooner rather than later so that we don't keep throwing gobs of money into the sinkhole that could be used for much better things.
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If I recall correctly, there’s an old Inuit mythos about canoes embarked at the beginning of time on the primordial sea to the 4 corners of the Earth, each carrying the respective ancestors of the 4 mythic human races who eventually peopled the world. The whites race’s canoe, however [I forget now], had a hole in it, the supposed reason white people always seem in such a hurry all the time to people of other races. The denouement concludes that because the whites had to bail and paddle frantically, desperately searching for land before the hole sunk their canoe, and because they experienced it so soon after they were created, that the trauma inhered [by epigenetics, I guess] to all their descendants down to the present day. The veracity of this story aside, I always suspected globalizing neoliberals are in such a hurry to destroy public enterprises because voters in any sovereign democracy will eventually to twig to such sabotage, whether slow and stealthy or smash-n-grab. Either way, it’s very hard to get back a public enterprise once it’s gone—like BC Rail, even despite the proven corruption of its virtual sale. It’s like the pilferers of the public weal have a hole in their boat and only so much time to get their perfidy done. Alberta’s UCP is hell-bent on privatizing healthcare, seeming unconcerned about losing the next election because of this plainly impolitic policy. Harper ran out of time to undermine our sovereignty because two minorities closed too much of the window of opportunity he needed despite ignoring the Constitution, causing a constitutional crisis, circumventing environmental assessment mandates, and electoral cheating in order to rush his agenda under the wire (Northwern Gatweway never made it). BC’s Gordo presumed he had the mojo to jam a prop in that merciless Overton Window, to buy more time to squeeze through privatization of every public enterprise and authority in BC by the slower piecemeal bankrupting of Crown Corps after his much faster whole-hog sale of BC Rail got popped. Big Bitumen is ramping up production of the lowest-grade petroleum from the most condemnable petro-industry in the world as if to get while gettin’s good—EV’s is a-comin’! It’s more than suspicious stateless corporatocracy demands even more obscene profits to propitiate the capitalist god despite the impossibility of infinite growth. These outfits love the cover the era of fake news affords. But they’re obviously terrified of losing their hegemony.
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