The flaming right

The attraction of using Wind to produce electricity is obvious: you put up a tower, you get endless free power with no environmental negatives.

Unfortunately it’s a mirage: there’s no free lunch and the unhappy reality is that windmills (installed, grid connected, single tower assemblies) are affected by three groups of problems that together make them among the most polluting, environmentally damaging, and highest cost forms of public power generation available.

The first group involves direct environmental or public health impacts. These range from trivial concerns over scene pollution and the opening up of otherwise protected lands to abuse through the construction and maintainance of the roads needed to emplace and maintain the windmills; to the bird, bat, and bee deaths traceable mostly to rotor turbulence.

Among these, the effects on protected species are the most politically important because governments in both Canada and the United States routinely jail people for killing individual birds while simualtaneously subsidizing wind farms known to kill them at wholesale rates.

It seems likely, however, that the most environmentally important impacts will ultimately be found among those which are currently least understood and least studied. For example, the health effects of microscopic abrasion products carried down wind from wind farms have not, I believe, been explored, and yet many of the materials involved are individually known to be highly toxic.

The second group of issues focuses on the greenhouse gas production caused by the decision to buy, emplace, and use a windmill. In its debt form, the question is under what circumstances the greenhouse gases not produced because a windmill is used to generate energy exceed the total greenhouse gas produced during its manufacture and placement.

The key thing to remember in this context is that commercial windmills are big: very big. Seen from a highway as you drive through Alberta’s Crownest Pass they may look like rows of child size whirlygigs, but in reality typical rotor wings could lift a Boeing 747, weigh up to forty tons, and give you, up close, the feel of three highway tractor-trailer combinations attached to a hub by their front bumbers and then whirled over your head.

A windmill’s energy (or greenhouse gas) debt is expressed through the bill of materials going into it from raw material through to eventual decommissioning.

Consider, for example, the fact that the typical 90 meter tower needs a 160 cubic meter foundation with each of the 140 or so cubic yards of concrete going into it containing about 700 pounds of portland cement. Making that cement took a lot of energy, and released a lot of CO2 - depending on process and source materials this means that the windmill starts out more than about 100,000 pounds of CO2 and 50,000KWH in debt before the concrete for the tower foundation even gets mixed and trucked out to the site.

The rest of that foundation is even more energy intensive - nearly twenty tons of rebar, a four ton steel mounting sleeve, high strength bolts - the list goes on and the power debt mounts. Add it all up, convert CO2 debt to KWHs of generated power at the 2:1 rate appropriate to the average 20 year old coal fired power plant, and you get rough estimates in the range of 1200 MWH for smaller assemblies rated at or below 200KW, and something like 3,200MWH for assemblies in the 1MW range - and all of that is before considering site construction, long term maintainance, and power distribution.

Since windmills rarely average more than 70% of rated capacity one third of the time, what these numbers mean is that smaller units almost never reach break-even and should be regarded simply as batteries for stored pollution, while larger units will usually breakeven before distribution costs in just over two years - or, in other words, whether they ever break even depends most directly on how far they are from the power consumer.

That’s bad - but the second form of CO2/Power debt is worse. The problems here are the effects of power displacement and the need for standby power.

Consider a simple scenario: imagine a public power grid fed from one coal fired generating plant to which enough windmills are added to reduce the coal plant’s output by enough to take it out of its efficient range - typically plus or minus about 3%.

Two things happen in that situation: first, because coal fired generation is designed to operate most efficiently at capacity, the decrease in CO2 output from the coal plant is less than the decrease in the number of KWH it puts on the grid - meaning that the use of wind power makes every KWH in the baseload dirtier.

Second, because it takes from hours to days to bring a coal fired generator back up to capacity but customers don’t want their air conditioners dying when the wind falters, the utility has to provide alternate sources of standby power - and that usually means gas fired generators.

Since all of the combustion products from the alternate power source are incremental to those produced by the coal plant, the net effect of adding wind power to the system is always to increase total emissions - by how much depends on many factors including plant efficiencies, utilization rates, and the utility’s ability to manage demand by cutting deliveries to some customers - but the result is always to add both more cost and net new greenhouse gas emissions to the system.

The question of how much cost it adds brings us to the third set of problems with wind power.

Because wind power is expensive and unreliable, utilities invest in it only in response to external presures - almost always in the form of government mandates expressed through some trade-off between the regulatory and tax systems.

The largest and most common component in these saw-offs, in both Canada and the United States, is the separation of power distribution costs from power generation costs - something that allows the green power advocates driving this at the political level to completely hide the single biggest cost of windpower from the customer.

Consider, on this issue, this bit from a recent NRO article by Drew Thornley:

Robust wind power expansion is expected, as Texas Senate Bill 20 (2005) mandated 5,880 MW of renewable energy by 2015 and set a 10,000-MW target for 2025. To this end, $700 million went into new wind Texas farms in January, thanks in part to government subsidies.

In addition to generous federal assistance - namely a 2 cents/kWh production tax credit and five-year, double-declining balance accelerated depreciation for wind-generating equipment - the state of Texas entices wind developers with a franchise tax exemption to manufacturers, sellers, or installers of wind devices; a corporate deduction from the state’s franchise tax for renewable energy sources; and a 100-percent property tax exemption on the appraised value of an on-site wind power generating device. But even with these federal and state subsidies, electricity from wind is more expensive per kilowatt-hour than that generated by fossil fuels.

ERCOT’s [Electric Reliability Council of Texas] estimates for transmitting West Texas wind energy, under four different scenarios, range from $3.78 billion to $6.28 billion. ERCOT estimated costs by using as-the-crow-flies distances for transmission cables. Thus, transmission costs were estimated using a best-case-scenario approach and, as such, should be considered the absolute (and unlikely) minimums. Add to this ERCOT’s estimates of $410 million to $1.03 billion for connecting wind generation to the new collection substations.

Additionally, ERCOT’s transmission-cost estimates do not include right-of-way costs or the costs of building transmission stations, which will be passed through to consumers, in the form of higher electric bills.

The second most significant of the accomodations typically reached between regulators, tax authorities, and utilities is one in which the official blended average price for output power comes closer to reflecting the nominal capacity of the windfarm than its actual power production.

To see how this works imagine that a system has one coal fired plant producing 100MW of continuous power at a cost of $0.032/KWH and a 22MW rated capacity windfarm that, on average, puts 3MW on the grid at a unit cost of $0.176/KWH. On the numbers, the blended price should be $0.0373/KWH (= 3.2 + 3 x 17.6/100) but the utility’s interest in maximimizing cost recognition can combine with the regulator’s interest in claiming the name plate capacity of the wind farm to produce negotiated pricing much closer to $0.071/KWH ( = (3.2 + 22 x 17.6/100).

The details on how both major forms of price manipulation are implemented vary by jurisdiction, but any complex financial system that can be gamed, will be gamed; especially if, as is the case with politically mandated wind power, both sides win by doing so - and the inherent complexities involved mean that everything can be done completely in the open with very little risk that the consumer will ever understand what’s happening.

So what’s the bottom line? Add it all up, and what you find is that the immediate bottom line on windpower is on everyone’s power bill - and the long term environmental bottom line is unknown, but just on greenhouse gases they’re dirtier than almost any other form of power generation.

I can’t fucking believe it -what a disaster this move has been. Talking to Edie just now, not only is the bitch not dead - they’ve got a fucking nuclear bomb: He’s not even an American!

Edie says they have proof his mother renounced their American citizenship during their stint in Indonesia and then lied about it on their return to Hawaii. Sins of his mother? yes, but he’ll get crucified  on it and pull a dean - wound a little tight our boy is - oh God, how the hell did I get into this mess?

I see no escape: Josh turned me down; have to live in his district - with the rubes, like that’ll happen. Terry won’t help me - I wonder if Maggie will think I’ve learned enough here to be worth bringing back?

I’ll make the call, but what a hopeless fucking mess I’m in.

It’s my belief that when the history of $100 oil is written it will be seen as a great good thing: a case of political collateral damage happening to coincide with a very bad decision by the Chinese leadership and then illustrating the law of unexpected consequences by working out to the world’s immense benefit.

The first major thread in this future history will look at how oil prices got this high. It’s not a consequence of demand exceeding supply: on the contrary, the world’s awash in oil and the market has so far abandoned the logic of supply and demand that short term refinery shutdowns in the American market now cause lasting worldwide price jumps for crude.

In the normal course of things the futures market for oil responds quickly to short term supply changes and slowly to longer term trends to produce minor daily price changes while damping out everything but the most basic long term trends in supply and demand. Look at the period from the Reagan recovery through to early 2004 and you’ll see this: an upward trend corresponding nicely to the pincher pressures of increased worldwide energy demand and decreased supply flexibility, mainly in response to environmental activism, in key American and European markets.

The obvious answer to rising oil prices in the 90s was to increase flexibility by re-introducing more efficient forms of energy generation, particularly nuclear, into the American market; but the bitter democrat reaction to their losses in the 2000 elections led first to the shouting down of the May 2001 Bush/Cheney energy plan and then to the triggering event behind today’s price run-up: the media amplified democrat allegation that a deal between the Bush whitehouse and the Saudis on oil price stability was somehow intended to enrich Republicans and therefore bad for America.

The charge was absurd, but the media circus led the Bush whitehouse to cancel its cost containment effort while talking heads on CNN spoke endlessly and sincerely of $100 oil in the short term and the end of the carbon economy in the medium term.

Unfortunately most of these people were simply using oil pricing to leverage a nihilistic political viewpoint in which the right answer on every issue is less for everyone else - and so they were wrong about oil supplies, wrong about demand changes, wrong about alternatives, wrong about market response, and wrong about the political consequences - but enough people bought into this that some of the world’s biggest trading houses started betting on $100 oil.

The ultimate basis for betting on $100 oil is scarcity - and in the case of the world’s oil industry that really means betting against a market response to higher prices. At $10 per barrel, for example, the Texas oil fields are about 90% depleted - but the reality is that less than 10% of the oil in place has been recovered, and at $40 per barrel another 10% becomes economically recoverable. Similarly the Bakken deposits stretching from southern Alberta to South Dakota contain an estimated 400 plus billion barrels with perhaps 3% recoverable at $45 oil - and a dozen similar deposits from Siberia to Finland have similar characteristics.

Equally importantly, environmentalist barriers against nuclear and clean coal alternatives that were insurmountable when pump prices ran $1.29 a gallon start to look weak as consumer prices push past $3.00 - meaning that the constraints on energy supply flexibility accounting for most of the oil price change in the 24 years prior to mid 2004 look weak today.

On net, therefore, those bets on $100 oil were utterly without foundation, but bets in the hundreds of billions exert their own influence - and as the pressure built throughout the financial and trading systems something had to give. What gave way was exchange rates - but not in the simple way that this has happened in the past.

The Chinese have consistently tried to peg the Yuan to the dollar for trading purposes while re-valuing it to accommodate their growing economy - but the upward pressure on world oil prices has largely defeated this to force repeated revaluations against both the dollar and the Euro.

On net, therefore, the American resource dollar has fallen against most world currencies, including the Yuan and the Euro - thus making American products and services more price competitive worldwide and raising price barriers for Chinese and other multi-national organizations selling into the American market.

From a communist Chinese national economic perspective the gains in trading internationally come from using low cost labor and environmentally unconstrained manufacturing, mining, and forestry practices to add value to natural and imported resources - but the exchange rate shifts have caught this process between the rock of ever increasing resource costs and the hard place of increasing American competitiveness on pricing.

At some point pressures like these force margins into the negative - meaning that every dollar brought into the economy through foreign sales ultimately costs the producing economy more than a dollar. It’s not clear whether China has reached that point, or, if it hasn’t, when it will - but what little information we do have suggests that their economy as a whole is stretched extremely tightly and correspondingly at risk.

Unfortunately for China, and particularly so for the people involved, there may be no way back - because in 2004 the Chinese leadership made the horrendous error of over-committing to their military in the expectation that a John Kerry win in the U.S. presidential elections would give them Taiwan first and Siberia second.

When that didn’t happen, the Chinese were left feeding a monster - one that’s grown in power and budget every year since, and now directly or indirectly controls much of the civilian economy it depends on.

You can’t feed a monster forever - especially when external forces reduce your margins on the one resource you have lots of: labor. As a result the Chinese can already see coming, and will soon face, a use or lose it situation with respect to their military, and they’ll either act, or not.

Right now military action does not appear sustainable. The obvious resource areas are off limits: early and consistent American action in support of the Putin administration in Russia has left the Russian military strong enough to deter an attack on Siberia; more recent support for India is having the same effect, and consistent American support for Taiwan has left them strong enough to resist an attack in the short term while creating the reasonable expectation of American intervention in the longer term. Since North Korea has neither the resources nor the space needed to be of much interest, the only remaining logical targets for military expansion are the original inland kingdom states: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar- all of which are heavily populated, partially industrialized, and inoculated against takeover by hundreds of years of embedded racial hatreds against Chinese ethnics.

The most likely thing, therefore, is a Chinese re-enactment of the fall of the Soviet Union - and the big question there is a simple one: how bloody will it be?

The answer, I think, is that the sooner it happens, the fewer people will be killed in the upheavals - and since the higher the oil prices, and the lower the American dollar, the quicker the dominoes: energy flexibility, an American manufacturing resurgence, and the end of the communist Chinese government; will fall - we should all be cheering the emergence of $100 plus oil.

So after much yanking of chains and general sucking around I’m now working on the Obama campaign - and oh my God what a mistake. He’s Howard Dean all over again - a seething cesspot of hatred and ambition.

He believes his own press! I mean, crap - this guy doesn’t even know he’s the spice girls all over again. He’s been told and told and told to just read the fucking speeches - but no, his goddamn ego is starting to hyperinflate and every time we leave him unguarded he shoots his mouth off to some adoring idiot - usually on camera.

It’s getting out of control - if the election were tomorrow we’d win, but it’s seven months and if the fucking candidate would just stfu we’d make it -McCain’s a dream, just a bitter old man still fighting W, and nobody here thinks he has the grace to pick Romney - but it’s seven months and that ego is getting out of control. The man fucking believes his own fucking press releases!

And it’s getting harder and harder to write for him - I mean, how many ways can we have him say “My policy is me” without people figuring out that it’s true?

I mean it’s unbelievable - and that wife: makes the preacher look like a moderate, a worse narcissist than he is - every time she opens her mouth the repubs get more ammunition: sooner or later McCain or Hillary will get him into a TV debate and force him to disavow either his wife or his platform - live, on national TV: pissing off all the little housewives who love him so much now.

I made an ass out of myself getting here - pulled every string, sucked up all over the place, paid out every favor I know - and now the bitch isn’t dead and I’m working for the absolute incarnation of American self loathing over race, poverty, and the occasional victim of capitalism - we could even win, but sooner or later Americans are gonna tear this guy a new one and for sure I don’t want to be nearby when it happens. Well, I hear Josh Romney might run for Congress - it’s longer term, but maybe I think I’ll make come calls.

---

Paul Murphy lives in Lethbridge and writes a daily technology blog for zdnet.com.

My local PC candidate is a guy I’ve never heard from - I didn’t hear from him or his supporters when he ran for the nomination, I haven’t heard from him or his supporters during the current campaign - and I’ve been a PC party member on and off for almost thirty years, including the last one.

I’ve met the local NDP candidate - and he’s a decent guy: community roots, a sensible world view, and clearly both willing an able to make a case for himself.

The Liberal candidate is the usual one: looks good, sounds good, but my guess is that there isn’t an ounce of sincerity or moral fiber there.

The Wildrose Alliance candidate really should be running for the PCs - articulate, committed, and a bit naive.

Now, of course, one of the fun things about Canada is that we have a presidential system without the checks and balances that go with it, so in voting for one of these candidates I’m really voting for a premier - and they’re all pretty bad.

I met Ed Stelmach a number of years ago at a PC convention in Red Deer - I took him as one of Klein’s weaker hangers on: a polished, sober, and less intelligent version of Steve West. I think that’s how he won the leadership race: nobody hated him - more directly, I think Oberg got putsched early on because a few influential people saw him as a threat and correctly counseled Stelmach to just hang back until there was nobody else left for the Dinning and Morton people to pick as their second choice.

I met Mason at the University of Alberta where he led some student organization I had to deal with - and what I saw was naked self interest and an apparatchik’s political agenda. It’s frightening, but that’s the NDP schtick: run decent people as candidates, but centralize power in the hands of idealogues; people who really believe that “come the revolution” they will have the absolute right and power to fix everything -by fiat and their way. Unfortunately when this has happened in countries with more scope for extremism the result has usually been mass murder; and when it’s happened in Canada the result has usually been economic disaster and out migration.

In the early seventies, for example, Manitoba had Canada’s most vibrant and diversified economy - and then came Ed Schreyer, an honorable man who believed his own agenda and killed Manitoba’s economic growth for twenty five years. Similarly, when Dave Barret -think of him as Mason with sex appeal- came to power in BC, BC was doing well. When he left, BC had been gutted - and that economy took twenty years to recover. Saskatchewan has enormous natural resources - and is a perennial, NDP driven, economic basket case.

Bottom line: I like the local NDP guy, but I love Alberta - and that vote’s just not going to happen.

So my choice comes down to this: vote for a PC guy I know nothing about and thus indirectly to support Ed Stelmach and the people who put him in place, or vote for the alliance guy and hope this doesn’t help the NDP or liberal to get elected.

The chance that my vote makes a difference is miniscule - but it’s a risk I don’t have to take. So I’m going to hold my nose, vote PC, and hope that the next round of internal blood letting takes out most of the careerists and political power seekers now blocking PC party renewal.

The problem is a simple one: consumers want big, heavy, fast vehicles that feel safe on American highways while Congressionally mandated CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards are designed to force the American car industry to make small, light, and relatively low powered vehicles.

Here’s a solution: produce, for each vehicle Americans want to buy, a matching high mileage vehicle for export to second and third world economies.

The two key issues here: whether such a vehicle counts toward fleet averages, and what it would look like, are very closely related. Make the thing important to the national economy, make it fit overt green beliefs, sell it with the American vehicle (while contracting a broker to re-sell it overseas), and the combination of a 80 MPG replacement for a world war II era jeep with a 12 MPG H2 produces a 46PMG global fleet average.

The original GPv weighed 2,160 pounds, had a 60 HP engine, a heavy duty transmission, and four wheel drive. It went just about everywhere, hauled just about anything (including an optional Willy’s trailer), hit top speeds of 60 MPH, came with a removable canvas top, and perfectly matches both roads and loads in most of the under developed world today.

There are economic opportunities in designing a modernized GPv - because the fewer and more sophisticated the components, the bigger the American manufacturing advantage.

I’d look, therefore, at using some leading edge technologies like a pistonless diesel generator and motors integrated into the wheels in part because these offer weight reductions and in part because they offer reliability improvements, but mainly because manufacturing quality dominates labor cost in making these - meaning that third world players cannot effectively copy the product.

There are big potential gains here: a multi-billion dollar foreign market; freeing the American car maker to make what American consumers want; and the long term positive consequences of putting a cheap, powerful, development tool with an American flag on it into the hands of the entrepreneurial classes in second and third world countries.

All that - and global emissions averaging makes it a global environmental solution: meaning that the liberal facists behind the CAFE standards won’t have a complaint to scream from.

Dear Diary:

We’re in deep trouble. At senior staff today we discussed ways of helping Huck get the nod - as someone said he’s everything we’ve been saying Bush is: a mush for brains redneck with a God agenda; someone who can make Hillary look good.

If Armitage didn’t have the goods on Powell we could just run him out front and trump Oprah’s race card - God I’m dreaming a beautiful accident: live on our cable network, of course: Billy boing and bimbo in one car slam into Armitage: bang - both dead, weeks of national coverage, outpourings of sympathy, and we’re in with a lock.

If only, sigh.

Got an email from that flaming right guy up in Canada - says the difference between left and right is that Republicans believe in incentives and doing things themselves while we believe in regulation, enforcement, and having others do our work for us. What an idiot - no, no, no - they’re hung up on this God crap while we carry the burden of progress - look at the work Bill is doing for the drowning victims in, oh, I forget, some place.

Al too - saving the planet no less - God if he runs, Nash is talking to Plouffe next week - there’s a combination that could win big - send those Bush bastards to jail: every single one of them.

Still, we’re in deep trouble -unless Bill dies or we get a good crash and $200 oil, I mean I don’t know if Carville’s working for us or Osama, Patti never did trust that guy -

Early days, I guess - but still, maybe update the resume tomorrow.

It’s my belief that the greatest danger facing American democracy isn’t coming from al Qaeda, Iran, or North Korea; it’s coming from the extent to which the left’s demonization of all things Republican has divided the country and left it weakened.

Look at today’s democratic contenders: as a group they consider truth inconsequential, patriotism contemptible, their own corruption forgivable, and rejection at the polls a matter for the courts. The threat they pose goes to the heart of American democracy because people like Al Gore, Christine Gregoire, and Christine Jennings are viciously bad losers - and democracy depends on an endless supply of good losers.

There are some good people on both sides, but they all face the same problem: the primary system forces candidates first to seek the support of extremist, single issue, voters  and then to repudiate those positions during the rush to the middle characteristic of the election itself. That process compromises the candidates and costs money, lots of money: Mrs Clinton, who spent 35 Million dollars getting re-elected as an incumbent senator for New York, confidently expects to blow through half a billion of someone else’s dollars on her way to the Whitehouse - and will be spending even more if Al Gore runs against her.

She isn’t getting that half billion dollars for nothing: money corrupts and a fish rots from the head - it’s no coincidence that Enron, Dean, Berger, and the democratic party’s complete abandonment of decency all emerged in slick willy’s wake.

Canada needs a healthy American democracy: they’re not just our best friends or our biggest market, they’re the world’s standard bearer for democracy and its failure there would let tyranny triumph around the world.

But what can be done? Well, we can’t do anything directly: to us American elections are a spectator sport - but there is something Americans can do to revitalize the two party system that’s fundamental to their democracy: get Rudy Guiliani and Joe Liebermann to run for president and vice president respectively - and do it as an independent team.

There’s enough common ground: both of these guys are Republicans on foreign policy, democrats on social issues, and middle of the road moderates on the economy.

As independents they would bypass the primaries - and thereby avoid getting locked into fringe positions by the extremists who drive primary victories on both sides.

As independents they could run a low cost campaign - getting media coverage simply for eschewing attack ads, cheerfully agreeing with the centrist parts of agendas thrown up by both their Democrat and Republican rivals, and grabbing up all those middle of the road voters who think both parties embarrass themselves during elections and just want to get someone they can trust into the oval office.

Both Rudy Guiliani and Joe Lieberman fill that bill - they’re sane, they’re smart, they’re honest, and they’re their own men: representing typical, mainstream, American values.

The electoral bottom line is simple: if the financial deals can be made, if the Republican party can agree to focus its efforts on other races while using its presidential nominee to force the Democratic candidate further to the left, the result could be a devastating defeat for the Pelosi democrats.

The collaterals are pretty simple too: the thought of facing an America united behind New York’s 9/11 mayor should seriously hurt Islamic terrorism’s ability to recruit among the literate, the Chinese aren’t going to invade Taiwan on his watch, and, the mullahs are going to see Lieberman coming in 2016 -meaning that some serious political recalculations will be happening from Paris to Palestine, and from the Boston Globe to the New York Times.

And why the latter? Because a crushing defeat administered by an honest democrat is exactly the silver bullet to the heart the democratic party needs if it’s going to survive its current infatuation with self destructive extremism and return to its original role: providing a political umbrella for liberal ideas I often disagree with, but can respect.

The publicity given Alberta’s recent oil and gas royalty review, coupled with the sympathetic auditor general report, have made it politically impossible for Alberta politicians to listen to saner industry voices.

On the surface this seems to be just one of those situations: neither side is wholly right, one side has a political agenda, the other an economic one -and the government has to choose between riding the wrong decision to victory at the polls or facing possible defeat for doing the right thing.

Look a bit deeper, however, and there’s real opportunity here to meet the needs of both sides.

Some bits of that solution are both obvious and inevitable: backing off on de-grandfathering, some minor percentage adjustments to the rates here and there, a re-investment incentive of some kind for drillers - nothing earth shaking or terribly interesting for those not directly involved.

Suppose, however, that the government did something wholly different, starting with the nearly trivial: making the grandfathering aspect voluntary for the energy companies would eliminate many of the inequities now present while largely eliminating the need for a new drilling incentives program.

The centerpiece, however, would have two seemingly unrelated parts: a decision to go ahead and impose the higher royalties with as little change as makes sense during the transition; and, a decision to dedicate every cent of the new revenues to public power and transportation infrastructure in support of the energy industry.

Industry gets what it needs, the public gets what it wants, and Alberta, in twenty years, will be much the better for it.

Specifically, the government could dedicate the revenue to a pair of multi-purpose mega projects: nuclear powered hydrogen generation in or near Fort McMurray, and a fully twinned MagLev system ultimately stretching from Lethbridge through Calgary, Red Deer, Edmonton, and on to both Fort McMurray and Grande Prairie.

Why hydrogen first rather than power first? Although we’ll get a power tap no matter what, the key reasons for the hydrogen focus are, first: that a hotter design allows the reactors to use waste from older nuclear reactors as fuel - meaning that, on net, they will contribute to a North American environmental cleanup - and, second, because hydrogen generation reduces natural gas consumption while allowing significant on site bitumen upgrading - all the way up to high quality light crude. That keeps upgrading jobs in Alberta, raises provincial returns on our energy resources, removes the federal government’s chokehold (via its control of the Mckenzie gas pipeline development processes ) on oil sands development, and dramatically lowers the industry’s net environmental impact.

Why MagLev? because it’s the fastest and because a MagLev line offers a low cost transmission route bringing electrical power from the nuclear generation stations to customers - and without a new right of way, without significant environmental impacts, and without most of the energy loses incurred with traditional transmission lines.

Why twinned? because trains run faster, operating costs are more contained, and because special cars could move assemblies up to forty feet wide from manufacturing sites in the major centers all the way up to Fort McMurray or Grande Prairie.

Why go from Grande Prairie to Lethbridge? because we’re part of Alberta too.

Why stop in Red Deer? because that’s where the new Alberta International Airport should go - making the railway positive for Westjet, freeing land and people for more valuable roles in the two major centers while cauterizing the tax and spend wound inflicted on our cities and air travelers when the federal government’s airport privatized airport operations.

I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture: take the two billion dollars a year  or whatever it will be, spend it on things the industry needs - and make Alberta better in the process.

Everybody wins - and in politics it just doesn’t get better than that.

I happened to catch a David Suzuki commercial on the weather channel the other day - “There is no debate” he intones magisterially as baby animals drown on screen in horrific images of the polar melt down.

Gosh, if that were true I’d park my Volvo; but the truth is that many scientists are now backing away from the certainties he expresses and that no one really knows whether a long term global warming trend exists, whether this would be good or bad, or whether human activity contributes significantly to it -and therefore whether political action based on assumptions about all of these things makes any sense.

In politics data may be selected and interpreted to support pre-existing opinion: thus left wing environmental opportunists can present a warm day in April as prove positive of their thesis, while skeptics can as reasonably point to growing ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica as contrary evidence.

In contrast, the people who work on climate science don’t have that freedom: their responsibility is to reconcile all the data through a unified theory of causation - and that’s hard because the data they have is both incomplete and inconsistent and the foundational greenhouse gas theory of causation, while intuitively appealing, has not been demonstrated in realistic laboratory experimentation.

We do know that short term climate change occurs: both the little ice age of the 14th through 17th centuries and the Medieval Warm Period in the 400 years before that are well documented on a known world basis, while American municipal data from about 1890 forward suggests a north American warming trend into the 1930s followed by consistent cooling into the 70s and some warming since. More generally we know that, worldwide, the local climate has never been stable over geological time: it doesn’t matter where you stand, at some point the land beneath your feet has been flooded, glaciated, covered with tropical jungle, and dried into desert.

What science doesn’t know includes what causes climate change; whether there are clearly repeating cycles, what time scales change happens on; or how to measure it.

In science, theories have consequences - and if the consequences fail, the theory is considered wrong. The human causation theory has just such a testable consequence: if human activity is causing global climate change, than that change cannot reasonably be syncronized with change elsewhere in our Solar system.

This consequence fails: anyone with access to google can find dozens of articles documenting things like shrinking ice caps - on Mars; increasing atmospheric energy - on Jupiter and Pluto, and denser cloud caps - on Venus.

In response environmentalists have argued that this synchronisation is coincidental, that it’s non existent, and that it’s irrelevant because human economic activity is dramatically accelerating natural change, but all of these responses strain credulity to the point that the human causation argument can be largely dismissed - along with political responses like the Kyoto Agreements.

Basically, if you want to buy what the people who see political opportunity in global warming are selling, you must first accept an unproven theory of causation, then agree to ignore a billion year history of climate change on earth, and finally find a way to discount accumulating evidence suggesting that climate change is a syncronized system wide phenomenon.

Fundementally, theirs is a pitch based on smart mob politics, but poor science - and the cynicism with which those involved treat the public shows up even more clearly if you look beyond the headlines at their assumptions about the effects of global warming.

Jokes about Winterpeg aside, history tells us that a warmer, more humid, earth has larger jungles - the most fecund life generators known- and brings significant rainfall to huge areas now considered arid or semi-arid: meaning that we’re entitled to assume that flooding Manhattan would do more than create economic opportunity for Calgary and Denver, it would bring agriculture and settlement to the most barren third of the earth’s current land area.

So would the people involved be better off if Bangladesh became a fishery and India’s Thar Desert a densely populated agricultural region? It’s both a key part of the policy debate and a question the left wing opportunists trying to create a political panic over global warming are careful never to ask - because if the global climate were really under our control, we’d almost certainly opt for exactly the warmer, wetter, more life-friendly world real global warming would bring.