Now that we’ve survived the O-pocalypse, with not a single unicorn or trumpeting angel in sight, hopefully the city can return to normal. And as cynical as I may be about Obama and his apparent messianic powers, and some of the ridiculous ways in which people were behaving, be glad I wasn’t heaping scorn upon people the way Maclean’s national editor Andrew Coyne did in this blog post. Ouch!
The big announcement, as you may have heard, was the “clean energy dialogue” between our two countries, which once again pitches technology as the solution to the climate crisis when we suddenly reach the level of technology where carbon will be magically removed from the atmosphere, rather than conservation and practical means that we are capable of today. Oh, right – that would cost money now, rather than putting it off for a future that may never happen (which is again, a flawed position because it has been proven that current conservation and energy efficiency technologies actually save money). Incidentally, critics of the much-ballyhooed “carbon sequestration” technology that was spoken of today quite rightly point out that it’s horribly expensive, unproven on any scale larger than a pilot project and is more of a false hope than anything. Which leads me to ask – does false hope count in all the “hope” and “change” that Obama peddles?
The biggest user of the carbon sequestration technology would of course be Alberta, especially in the tar sands developments. But the province has just gone into deficit for the first time in fifteen years. Of course, given the price of oil spiking their revenues for the past number of years, the province simply “forgot” how to actually budget and set money aside for when they didn’t have the high price of oil to rely on, and would just throw money at any problems that came up. Well, the price of oil crashed, and they haven’t exactly planned for this contingency. Oops. The new centre of the Canadian economy, ladies and flamboyant gentlemen.
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