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Support for the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline continues to rise and now has the support of more than 2/3rds of Canadians. Further, another poll released on May 18 2018 shows support for the expansion has also continued its surge in BC, now sitting …
In “The West” we don’t often discuss or even consider Africa. However, over the next 20 years the population of Africa is going to double and we will all be paying attention to that. Without doubt Africa’s population explosion will lead to two things:
What is in question is:
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This week Donald Trump took credit for fulfilling a campaign promise to move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. That was likely an inevitable move, so what could be wrong with doing what Jared Kushner says is taking that …
The current impasse on the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion have many pundits, politicians and citizens taking entrenched positions insinuating that this issue has an easy fix the Trudeau Federal Liberal Government is not willing to pursue. We list …
After World War 2 the US (and West in general) supported its former enemies. Rebuilding cities, legal systems, and economies on a massive scale. Germany and Japan were the primary beneficiaries of that financial aid and guidance and today those two countries are large stable entities that improve the West’s standard of living by providing both solid trading partners and political allies.
Some argue that those countries now take “our” jobs when in fact the evidence is clear that those countries have expanded the global economy for all. It is true that the US, Canada and the UK have a smaller slice of the global economic pie in 2018 compared to1950, but the pie is many times larger, so the net benefit to those countries is irrefutable.
The rebuilding (not reconstruction) plan was named after then US Secretary of State George Marshall. Today the Marshall Plan is touted as the cure all for every failing state, from Afghanistan to Mozambique but, as this New Yorker article explains, for a Marshal Plan had a lot more to do with reassurance and a lot less to do with money than most people think.
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You would expect that if petroleum products can not be efficiently transported to world markets, that there would be an oil and gas oversupply in Canada and that would drive the prices down. However, it turns out that two factors …
If you live in the United States or Canada and you feel less safe than you did 20 years ago, you are likely either in one of the very few geographic bubbles (like Chicago or rural Alberta) or you are a victim of politicians and social media trying to manipulate your natural fears. The fact is that crime, violent and otherwise is waaaay down.
Below are the Canadian statistics and they roughly concur with the US crime statistics in that crime peaked near the year 1990 and then declined between 30 to 80% in all categories and in nearly all regions. This despite the fact that it is more likely a citizen will report a crime today than they would have 30 years ago.
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Interviewer: You’ve got a lot of work experience, but what are your degrees in? Interviewee: We’ll I’m from Canada so my degrees are in Celsius
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 …
Induced Seismicity is just another way to say ‘man made earthquakes’ and are sometimes referred to “induced earthquakes”. Induced Seismicity can be caused by many things humans do including:
but the focus of this article is Induced Seismicity caused by oil and gas exploration and production. There are some unexpected results in the latest research that governments and citizens should be aware of.
The picture to the right is the standard graphic used by industry to explain that when we search for or produce oil and gas near existing fault lines, the added (or reduced!) pressures can cause the faults to activate resulting in earthquakes. Nowhere has this been more pronounced than in Oklahoma over the previous decade and their citizens and governments are taking it very seriously.
The two major causes of oil and gas related Induced Seismicity are:
Hydraulic Fracturing or “fracking” is simply the process of injecting materials (often including water, sand, chemicals, CO2…) into a well under very high pressure. The idea is to crack the rock and release the oil and gas contained.
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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:
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It is well established that even well intentioned government intervention in industry very often ends up causing more problems than it solves. Today one of the issues facing the United States is a loss of jobs in the steel industry and so President Trump claimed this is a National Security Issue and so used his unilateral power to impose a 25% tariff on imports of steel into the United States.
On its face, this seems like a good idea. Simplistically, if decrease the ability of other countries to export their steel to the US will result in the creation of more US steel jobs. However, the world is not a simple place and what actually happened was:
The five points above are well documented oft discussed in the media. The video below however, points out two fascinating unintended consequences that we had not thought of:
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The oil tankers to be used near the Port of Vancouver to transport oil from the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline, are definitely large. However, some groups are claiming that are massive super tankers the we need to be terrified …
You can draw your own conclusions from the charts below but it is not debatable that Oil Tankers used to get into a lot of serious accidents and spill a huge amount of oil. That is just not the case today.
As you can see in the chart below, the oil tanker business has become dramatically safer in the last 35 years since tanker traffic became popular in the early 1970’s:
The 2017 the tanker oil spill numbers look very similar to the 2010/11 numbers with:
If you do the math, this calculates to oil tanker accidents have been reduced 92% while there has been a 55% increase in their use. That means late 2010’s oil tanker traffic is about 20 times less likely to have a spill than they were in the early 1970’s.
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