Last year Chrysler announced the end of nearly all their cars, leaving the Chrysler 300 as the sole survivor. This week Ford announced they same thing by formally heralding the death of the Taurus, Fusion, CMax, and Fiesta leaving only the Mustang and Focus in development. General Motors will follow Read more…
The video below shows Derek Fildebrandt at the Strathmore on Monday April 23rd, claiming that UCP leader Jason Kenney told him he could not run against a female UCP member:
…What Jason (Kenney) said to me. It’s not about me challenging other incumbents. It was only about me challenging female incumbents… And he said I could run against any other men… I don’t think it serves women well to have effectively affirmative action in politics…
It should be noted that Mr. Fildebrandt is accused of many politically unsettling problems including:
Alberta is used to energy shocks and can quickly adjust to the environment, especially an oversupply. BC gets 80% of its gasoline from Alberta which cannot possibly be replaced with tanker trucks from the US… because BC does not have any pipelines their either. Also, yesterday the Premier of Saskatchewan Read more…
China’s State Forestry Administration announced that they will add 66000 square kilometers of of trees in 2018 in an effort to reduce pollution. That is nearly the size of Ireland. This massive investment is part of their Paris Accord commitment to forest the area about three times the size of the entire United Kingdom by 2030.
To make this happen, China will use state employees and tens of thousands of soldiers.
Part of this unparalleled tree planting effort will take place in what China calls Forest Cities in 6 key regions of the country:
Should the Province of Alberta buy the Trans Mountain Pipeline from Kinder-Morgan if they want to walk away from the project? That question was posed to Alberta Premier Rachel Notley today and she responded with an emphatic ‘Yes!’.
It has become abundantly clear, whether you are for or opposed to this particular pipeline or not, that having the relatively simple twinning of the existing Trans Mountain pipeline fail to be built would signify the end of even medium scale infrastructure projects in Canada.
There will always be interest groups and affected people that have some legitimate claim against a large project. The standard for projects should not be keeping everyone happy. The standard for infrastructure projects MUST be if they are in the national interest. That national interest contains a giant list important factors including:
Below is a list of current serious Facebook legal issues:
The Canadian Federal Government and the Province of BC agreed to join the separate investigations into Facebook user data being sent to AggegateIQ (part of the Cambridge Analytica scandal)
In the last decade the Dutch have reduced prison inmate populations by 50% and those sentences average to about 90 days in jail. Many people expected this drastic reduction of inmates to lead to a notable increase in crime because:
Contrary to this expectation the fact is that Dutch system has also reduced crime by nearly 40%.
As you can see in the image to the right, the Dutch now use their old prisons as temporary housing for some refugees.
How can that be? In simple terms, it turns out that after thousands of years of trying different forms of incarceration and punishment that Europeans have figured out:
GDPR is the acronym for Europe’s “General Data Protection Regulation” which is the toughest set of personal privacy regulations in the world. You can see from the GDPR Timeline on the right that companies have had about 3 years to get their systems into compliance, and it comes into full Read more…
Today Bloomberg’s Michael Bellusci wrote an article explaining that Canadian oil and gas companies are in deep trouble. Here is an excerpt:
Canada’s Energy Industry Faces ‘Extinction’ Without M&A, BMO Says
On the same day, Global News reported:
Feds to spend $280k to study why Canada’s oil and gas sector is falling behind
The federal government plans to spend up to $280,000 for a new study on Canada’s competitiveness in the oil and gas industry as investment lags and the United States offers new incentives for companies to move south…
Source: globalnews.ca/news/4123026/oil-and-gas-canada-falling-behind-study/
In general terms the issue is that with low oil prices, oil companies see better places in the world to put their money than Canada. Oil & Gas “activists” will initially claim a victory here because they have had some impact on making it difficult to get Canadian Oil and Gas to both international and domestic markets.
Now that much of the dust has settled on Cambridge Analytica‘s misuse of Facebook users data the sad story can now be told. It is critical to note upfront that Facebook was not hacked and that the information that was misused was provided voluntarily by Facebook Users. The only breach Read more…
Below is an 11 minute interview with Dr. David Maenz about his new book The Price of Carbon. Unlike all climate change books we have reviewed in the past, The Price Of Carbon is the first one to pull together the serious science of Global Warming from Earths formation until today, explain the three likely outcomes of Global Warming, and then detail the PRACTICAL solutions to the issue.
This book is definitely not a casual read but for the educated person that is still open to thinking about this critical issue, it will be an eye opener:
At the heart of the Canadian Federal Governments announcement today about fixing the process that determines if a large scale project is in the best interest of Canada or not, is a desire to limit ability Provincial, Municipal and interest groups (like ‘First Nations’) to stall approved projects. The idea is to:
These are clearly admirable goals. To achieve those goals there are now going to be three structures that industry must pass through to get Federal Government support:
So now the questions are, will these changes allow:
There has been much debate over the process and all agree something big had to change:
Dennis McConaghy, a former senior executive at Trans Canada Pipelines thinks these changes will not achieve the desired goals:
On Monday January 22, 2018, the Trump administration brought in a 30% tax on imported solar panels. This new solar tax will last four years and decrease over time to 15% in its last year.
“Over the last 5 years, nearly 30 American solar manufacturers collapsed; today the President is sending a message that American innovation and manufacturing will not be bullied out of existence without a fight… This is a step forward for this high-tech solar manufacturing industry we pioneered right here in America.”
pressreleasepoint.com/trump-imposes-tariffs-solar-panels
Of the few that have heard of this new tariff, the common misconception is that it is an attempt to punish China from dumping (selling below cost, to kill competitors) panels but the US only imports 10% of its solar panels from China (see the last 30 seconds of the video below). As you can see in the video below, the US solar industry did not ask for and does not want this tariff.
Autonomous cars and trucks are steaming at us at a surprisingly rapid pace. Fully autonomous vehicles are not the stuff of 2025, they are the stuff of late 2018. Seven US States already allow GM, Tesla, Uber and other autonomous car makers to drive limited numbers of vehicles with no driver. In Canada, Ontario allows autonomous vehicles in approved cities and towns.
GM executives told investors in 2016 that by 2025, autonomous vehicle cost reductions and increased consumer adoption would combine to drive the price down to less than $1 per mile, or about a third of current ride-hailing prices.
In 2017 GM had more autonomous vehicles on the road that any other company in the world. In California 20 of the autonomous cars were involved in accidents but not a single one of them was found to have the autonomous car at fault.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4y09TnE4QE
