Canadians need to make the most out of the country’s energy resources
By Lethbridge Herald on September 9, 2023.
Editor:
I’m writing to thank the Herald for publishing letters expressing some optimism for our future, from Braum Barber and Rachael Thomas last week. Braum emphasized a need to plan for the ecosystem health of the province. Rachel indicated “human flourishing” should be the goal of our governments.
I do have a question for Braum: He expressed a concern re: diminishing water supplies in Alberta.
I recall making a presentation some 20 years ago to the Canadian Energy Research Institute in Calgary, which pointed out a huge amount of water flows out of northern Alberta via the Slave River, and ultimately to the Arctic Ocean via the McKenzie River.
Just half of that water would enable an order of magnitude increase in irrigation in the southern arid parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan and allow for capture and utilization of carbon from the atmosphere through increased growth of life supporting food.
At the time I suggested that 12,000 MW of nuclear capacity would suffice for the heavy lifting of water.
Perhaps solar electricity has developed to the point it could do the work more economically than nuclear energy?
The intermittency of solar power would not be so much of a problem for this water storage based application as it is for the supply of electricity for house
hold and industrial use.
As Rachel suggests, it is time for Canadians, and Albertans, to stop living in fear of their carbon shadow and endeavour to make the most of our energy resources to help enable human flourishing throughout the planet.
Duane Pendergast
Lethbridge
13-12
Good letter Duane, hope at some point we can overcome the “carbon cult” and revert to some sense of normalcy with common sense.
‘Normalcy’ like the continued dumping of carbon waste into the atmosphere, warming the planet, intensifying weather events, driving hundreds of species to extinction each year, raising sea levels, melting the arctic, on so on? Sounds like common sense to me. No point sacrificing my winter holiday in Mexico for a habitable planet.
So Sophie just how low in ppm of CO2 are you willing to go. Bear in mind there is a number at which point the planet begins to die. What is your number?? 100 ppm, 50, 250, let’s see your wisdom.
Chemistry lesson. Carbon is C. Carbon dioxide is CO2. Learn the difference.
Sometimes I can’t tell if you are joking. I’m using ‘carbon’ to refer to carbon-based molecules (ghgs like CO2 or Methane). It’s not unlike your use of ‘freedom’ to designate fringe libertarian entitlements.
we seem to have knack for dumping wherever we venture. yes, alberta and canada, burn baby baby burn! let us consume, and consume to the max…leave no fossil fuels behind!
Chicken little stuff.
All of human progress over the past 200 years would never have happened without the use of hydrocarbons. We owe our present standard of living to the use of these fuels . Without them we can only look forward to an expensive and impoverished future. Just look at what is happening in europe, We are witnessing the deinstrialization of Germany. Better waken up before it is too late.
Agreed, but the battle isn’t over CO2, the battle is against the climate cult and their subsidies. Like yanking a sucker out of a two year olds mouth.
Canada has also been undergoing a process of deindustrialization, and it has had nothing to do with climate-change policy. Between 1981 and 2019, the number of workers employed in manufacturing went from 1 in 10 to 1 in 5. The sharpest year-over-year declines in manufacturing employment came in the aftermath of The Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (1987) and NAFTA (1994).
Interestingly, the 1987 agreement brought an end to Canada’s US Branch Plant Manufacturing Sector, a sector that owed its existence to Macdonald’s National Policy of 1879. That policy resulted in an expansion of manufacturing in Canada, mainly in Ontario and Quebec because that’s where Canada’s population was concentrated, but it also sowed the seeds of Western Alienation.