Canadians have to get something through our thick skulls. Every time voters in Ontario BC and Quebec tell Alberta they can’t develop their oil, they are being incompetent hypocritical assholes.
It’s easy to tell another province what they can and can’t do. It’s cheap hollow rhetoric. What’s hard is getting Ontario, BC and Quebec to be oil free. If Quebec with virtually unlimited electric power still has gas stations and extensive commercial natural gas oil refining and pipeline capacity, then how the fuck is the rest of the world supposed to?
Everyone should push hard to decarbonize their own economies before telling others what to do. As a Torontonian, I care more about GO electrification, public transit expansion, EVs, nuclear expansion, closing gas plants, making the building code close to passive house levels of insulation and airtightness and heat pumps galore.
Until everyone can fix their shit, oil and gas are neccessities. You don’t fix this by constraining supply. You kill demand, then supply follows. Alberta has the right to develop it’s resources. We have the right to not buy it.
In the mean time, Europe, who are far ahead of us on decarbonizing, needs our energy to get off Russian O&G. Same for all our real partners.
I care more about GO electrification, public transit expansion, EVs, nuclear expansion, closing gas plants, making the building code close to passive house levels of insulation and airtightness and heat pumps galore.
While Doug Ford cuts fuel taxes and increases highway speed limits 10%, to burn 20% more fuel.
Canadians have to get something through our thick skulls. Every time voters in Ontario BC and Quebec tell Alberta they can’t develop their oil, they are being incompetent hypocritical assholes.
It’s pretty rich calling the Québécois hypocritical assholes when we effectively destroyed an entire resource extraction industry in that Province that was on par with Alberta’s oil sands extraction operations.
Canada used to be the world’s largest supplier of chrysotile asbestos, with Quebec alone producing nearly 50% of the global supply from the 1940s through the 1970s.
Unfortunately, like oil we discovered this valuable mineral was — you know — killing people, so we wound that industry down. Quebec lost a very valuable industry where they had a commanding portion of the world supply.
So it’s pretty fucking rich to call people in Quebec “incompetent hypocritical assholes” when they went through the exact same thing in the last few decades, for very similar reasons.
Everyone should push hard to decarbonize their own economies before telling others what to do.
And it’s pretty hard to get that done when you keep putting more and more money into the infrastructure to maintain the oil economy. It de-incentivizes people from making the necessary changes to decarbonize. Building more pipelines to make it cheaper and easier for people to burn it in greater and greater quantities doesn’t slow climate change, and it doesn’t incentivize governments (or their voters) to make the changes this planet needs if we want to ensure it remains inhabitable for humans in the future.
And for those who think “our stopping pumping oil when so many other countries do it won’t change anything”, I’d like to point them to the current situation in the Straight of Hormuz, which itself has caused EV sales to be up nearly 3.5% globally from prior to the war and prices to spike globally.
All interesting points, yet if you turned off fossil fuels tomorrow Quebec would be crushed economically. You can’t do it yet we can’t do it yet. If you tried with an autocratic wave of a gun you would also be killing millions.
Your ambulances, firetrucks, restaurants and farms etc, all use it despite having a superabundance of alternative energy. The rest of the world have a much less opportunity to switch.
Until we do make the switch, without killing millions upon millions, it’s a neccessary evil. We must end it. Until we do, it has to come from somewhere.
I was a big fan of the carbon tax. It was a politically expedient, but ultimate mistake to remove it that shows a lack of leadership and quite frankly, shows how stupid your average Canadian is. It’s going to set our transition back a decade.
Europe couldn’t do without even in a proxy war over Ukraine, they were buying it from Russia! That should help you understand how not ready we are.
I think their point is that it’s not just energy that we get from oil, but lubricants, rubbers, solvents, asphalt, plastics, and so on…
EV only tackle the energy part. They still need tyres, seals and gaskets, insulation, road surfaces, and more…
To be rid of oil is a huge undertaking comprising thousands of individual cases of finding renewable alternatives or stopping use entirely. Which is why we need to be working to remove oil from every step today, not partially removing three steps because it’s cheap and distracts environmentalists from the other 14,962 steps.
Maybe everyone should decarbonize? Why should Alberta get special treatment and get to be the last ones in the world to get off of fossil fuels? This is a GLOBAL problem, not an Ontario, BC, Quebec, Alberta problem.
Anyway Alberta is being dumb. There are companies that want to develop wind energy in Alberta, but Danielle Smith blocks them. What happened to letting the market decide? Maybe Alberta could at minimum just let the market decide. But their leaders are in the pocket of oil companies… American oil companies. They’re willing to sell out their own country to get the last scraps of oil revenue and then they’ll move to the US leaving their province to economic depression in the future.
Peak oil for electricity was last year. Peak oil for transportation is coming soon. It’s all downhill for fossil fuels.
It’s an economic imperative for Alberta to transition it’s economy. But they’ve been scammed by the oil industry into thinking they’ll be making big money from oil forever and Global Warming was invented by Justin Trudeau or some such bullshit. If they continue to believe everything the oil companies say, they will be left behind by the world and become the poorest and most backwards part of Canada.
Yes. Everyone must decarbonize asap, Alberta included. However, as I mentioned this is not easy, nor are we close to doing it. I provided a link for quebec’s fossil fuel consumption and even they are no where near ending fossil fuels. If they haven’t yet, how can anyone else. It takes time. Yes we must move at all haste.
My concern, is that as a general rule politicians are great at pointing fingers as a useless misdirection. A city councillor taking a strong stance on federal gun control is a great way to appear to be doing something, while really just doing nothing. Feds and provinces bark at each other all the time rather than doing the right thing in their jurisdiction.
This is much the same. I want Alberta to shut down the fossil fuel economy, but I’m not Albertan and resources are provincial. I’m in Ontario and I want us to shut down gas power plants, home furnaces and cars and keep our industrial heartlands with cool clean electricity. That is where my fight is.
Worry about shutting down the Alberta fossil fuel economy when my province doesn’t depend on it.
We are in a national housing crisis, and we aren’t building homes/neighbourhoods/cities ready for the fossil fuel free future. Our economies can’t do it, because we aren’t ready.
Peak oil for electricity generation was last year. Peak oil for transportation is soon, and the Iran war has hastened the timetable since ending dependency on oil is now strategically imperative for every country in the world.
You keep banging on about the fact that some gas is still used, trying to cling to some “hypocrisy” narrative. The fact is Alberta is trying to cling on to a dying industry and there is no hypocrisy to say that they need to transition from a dying industry. People still own horse and buggies today, that’s not evidence that it’s not obsolete technology.
We are in a national housing crisis, and we aren’t building homes/neighbourhoods/cities ready for the fossil fuel free future.
Everyone in my family has converted to heat pumps. Considering the rebates the government provides, it doesn’t take too long to pay off an investment in a heat pump.
Though maybe Ontario sucks at this because of Doug Ford sucks.
While you aren’t entirely wrong we could also do actual realistic things to disincentivize fossil fuel extraction like remove government subsidies from it. Pass laws that not only require O&G companies to remediate the land (which we have but don’t really enforce), but require that they put money into a fund proportional to the expected cost of remediation vs. the lifespan of the field. Or have the companies build the single-use transportation system to their ports of choice. Why do I, who would really like there to be a world for my kids in 50 years, have to pay for those things, or let companies absolutely devastate the land with no repercussions whatsoever?
And yes, before you say it, I’d like the remediation plans to apply to just about all resource extraction methods, not just the fossil fuels. Although if we just internalized the cost of releasing all that carbon into the atmosphere, O&G would die out in a couple years.
Canadians have to get something through our thick skulls. Every time voters in Ontario BC and Quebec tell Alberta they can’t develop their oil, they are being incompetent hypocritical assholes.
It’s easy to tell another province what they can and can’t do. It’s cheap hollow rhetoric. What’s hard is getting Ontario, BC and Quebec to be oil free. If Quebec with virtually unlimited electric power still has gas stations and extensive commercial natural gas oil refining and pipeline capacity, then how the fuck is the rest of the world supposed to?
https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/province-territory-energy-profiles/quebec.html
Everyone should push hard to decarbonize their own economies before telling others what to do. As a Torontonian, I care more about GO electrification, public transit expansion, EVs, nuclear expansion, closing gas plants, making the building code close to passive house levels of insulation and airtightness and heat pumps galore.
Until everyone can fix their shit, oil and gas are neccessities. You don’t fix this by constraining supply. You kill demand, then supply follows. Alberta has the right to develop it’s resources. We have the right to not buy it.
In the mean time, Europe, who are far ahead of us on decarbonizing, needs our energy to get off Russian O&G. Same for all our real partners.
While Doug Ford cuts fuel taxes and increases highway speed limits 10%, to burn 20% more fuel.
It’s pretty rich calling the Québécois hypocritical assholes when we effectively destroyed an entire resource extraction industry in that Province that was on par with Alberta’s oil sands extraction operations.
Canada used to be the world’s largest supplier of chrysotile asbestos, with Quebec alone producing nearly 50% of the global supply from the 1940s through the 1970s.
Unfortunately, like oil we discovered this valuable mineral was — you know — killing people, so we wound that industry down. Quebec lost a very valuable industry where they had a commanding portion of the world supply.
So it’s pretty fucking rich to call people in Quebec “incompetent hypocritical assholes” when they went through the exact same thing in the last few decades, for very similar reasons.
And it’s pretty hard to get that done when you keep putting more and more money into the infrastructure to maintain the oil economy. It de-incentivizes people from making the necessary changes to decarbonize. Building more pipelines to make it cheaper and easier for people to burn it in greater and greater quantities doesn’t slow climate change, and it doesn’t incentivize governments (or their voters) to make the changes this planet needs if we want to ensure it remains inhabitable for humans in the future.
And for those who think “our stopping pumping oil when so many other countries do it won’t change anything”, I’d like to point them to the current situation in the Straight of Hormuz, which itself has caused EV sales to be up nearly 3.5% globally from prior to the war and prices to spike globally.
All interesting points, yet if you turned off fossil fuels tomorrow Quebec would be crushed economically. You can’t do it yet we can’t do it yet. If you tried with an autocratic wave of a gun you would also be killing millions.
Your ambulances, firetrucks, restaurants and farms etc, all use it despite having a superabundance of alternative energy. The rest of the world have a much less opportunity to switch.
Until we do make the switch, without killing millions upon millions, it’s a neccessary evil. We must end it. Until we do, it has to come from somewhere.
I was a big fan of the carbon tax. It was a politically expedient, but ultimate mistake to remove it that shows a lack of leadership and quite frankly, shows how stupid your average Canadian is. It’s going to set our transition back a decade.
Europe couldn’t do without even in a proxy war over Ukraine, they were buying it from Russia! That should help you understand how not ready we are.
https://electricautonomy.ca/fleets/first-responders/
Already EV alternatives exist.
I think their point is that it’s not just energy that we get from oil, but lubricants, rubbers, solvents, asphalt, plastics, and so on…
EV only tackle the energy part. They still need tyres, seals and gaskets, insulation, road surfaces, and more…
To be rid of oil is a huge undertaking comprising thousands of individual cases of finding renewable alternatives or stopping use entirely. Which is why we need to be working to remove oil from every step today, not partially removing three steps because it’s cheap and distracts environmentalists from the other 14,962 steps.
FFS…the solution does not have to be binary, and people who claim it is are just trying to defeat efforts.
We don’t need to eliminate hydrocarbon use, we just need to reduce it to a level the planet can buffer.
But the amount we could buffer was 400ppm and 1.5°C. We’re way past that. We need to go to zero emissions, then negative emissions.
Maybe everyone should decarbonize? Why should Alberta get special treatment and get to be the last ones in the world to get off of fossil fuels? This is a GLOBAL problem, not an Ontario, BC, Quebec, Alberta problem.
Anyway Alberta is being dumb. There are companies that want to develop wind energy in Alberta, but Danielle Smith blocks them. What happened to letting the market decide? Maybe Alberta could at minimum just let the market decide. But their leaders are in the pocket of oil companies… American oil companies. They’re willing to sell out their own country to get the last scraps of oil revenue and then they’ll move to the US leaving their province to economic depression in the future.
Peak oil for electricity was last year. Peak oil for transportation is coming soon. It’s all downhill for fossil fuels.
It’s an economic imperative for Alberta to transition it’s economy. But they’ve been scammed by the oil industry into thinking they’ll be making big money from oil forever and Global Warming was invented by Justin Trudeau or some such bullshit. If they continue to believe everything the oil companies say, they will be left behind by the world and become the poorest and most backwards part of Canada.
Yes. Everyone must decarbonize asap, Alberta included. However, as I mentioned this is not easy, nor are we close to doing it. I provided a link for quebec’s fossil fuel consumption and even they are no where near ending fossil fuels. If they haven’t yet, how can anyone else. It takes time. Yes we must move at all haste.
My concern, is that as a general rule politicians are great at pointing fingers as a useless misdirection. A city councillor taking a strong stance on federal gun control is a great way to appear to be doing something, while really just doing nothing. Feds and provinces bark at each other all the time rather than doing the right thing in their jurisdiction.
This is much the same. I want Alberta to shut down the fossil fuel economy, but I’m not Albertan and resources are provincial. I’m in Ontario and I want us to shut down gas power plants, home furnaces and cars and keep our industrial heartlands with cool clean electricity. That is where my fight is.
Worry about shutting down the Alberta fossil fuel economy when my province doesn’t depend on it.
We are in a national housing crisis, and we aren’t building homes/neighbourhoods/cities ready for the fossil fuel free future. Our economies can’t do it, because we aren’t ready.
Peak oil for electricity generation was last year. Peak oil for transportation is soon, and the Iran war has hastened the timetable since ending dependency on oil is now strategically imperative for every country in the world.
You keep banging on about the fact that some gas is still used, trying to cling to some “hypocrisy” narrative. The fact is Alberta is trying to cling on to a dying industry and there is no hypocrisy to say that they need to transition from a dying industry. People still own horse and buggies today, that’s not evidence that it’s not obsolete technology.
What are you talking about? We’re spending billions on transit. We’re building high speed rail. We’re expanding electricity generation. There are tax incentives for converting to a heat pump. See here: https://natural-resources.canada.ca/energy-efficiency/home-energy-efficiency/canada-greener-homes-initiative/canada-greener-homes-initiative
Everyone in my family has converted to heat pumps. Considering the rebates the government provides, it doesn’t take too long to pay off an investment in a heat pump.
Though maybe Ontario sucks at this because of Doug Ford sucks.
Doug Ford sucks because Ontario sucks.
And Ontario sucks because Doug Ford sucks. It’s a vicious cycle that needs to be broken somewhere.
Doug Ford did not take over Queens park in a coup d’etat, he was elected in, twice. Doug is not the disease, he’s a symptom.
Good for you. Provincially no one is ready for the post fossil fuel world.
I can see you’re very attached to this false narrative and no amount of facts will make you let go of it.
That’s barely an opinion let alone an argument. Saying “na anh!” isn’t the discussion you think it is.
Try one. You might like it
While you aren’t entirely wrong we could also do actual realistic things to disincentivize fossil fuel extraction like remove government subsidies from it. Pass laws that not only require O&G companies to remediate the land (which we have but don’t really enforce), but require that they put money into a fund proportional to the expected cost of remediation vs. the lifespan of the field. Or have the companies build the single-use transportation system to their ports of choice. Why do I, who would really like there to be a world for my kids in 50 years, have to pay for those things, or let companies absolutely devastate the land with no repercussions whatsoever?
And yes, before you say it, I’d like the remediation plans to apply to just about all resource extraction methods, not just the fossil fuels. Although if we just internalized the cost of releasing all that carbon into the atmosphere, O&G would die out in a couple years.
Fully agree across the board. (Except the partially wrong bit, heh.)
Paid shill drinking an expensive coffee in aisle five.
If you had anything of value to say, that would have been the time.