Sunday, March 17, 2024

Shock, horror - Putin wins election, again

Wow, Vlad Putin won the Russian election with nearly 88% of the vote! That's even better than in the last election in 2018. And a record voter turnout! He must be really popular!

He thanks the country for "your support and this trust", and praised Russia's voting system as "transparent and absolutely objective". Right. And all that stuff about ballot-stuffing and milluons of dead people? False news.

Good job, Vlad! We were wondering who would win.

Saturday, March 09, 2024

Paying off the Two Michaels makes the whole incident look more suspicious

The Two Michaels were a cause célèbre in Canada for the best part of three years, since they were arrested and arbitrarily detailed by China in December 2018 in revenge for Canada's unwilling detention of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou. 

At least that was the language we used, and the language that Justin Trudeau is still using today as details start to emerge about a multimillion dollar compensation settlement the government has struck with Michael Spavor (and possibly also with Michael Kovrig, that part seems uncertain). 

Trudeau insists that the fact that the government is paying big money out to Mr. Spavor should not be interpreted as meaning that either Spavor or Kovrig were actually engaged in espionage, but it has certainly muddied what once seemed to be pretty clear waters.

All this comes as Spavor is threatening to sue both the Canadian government and Mr. Kovrig for the intelligence on North Korea and China that Kovrig "unwittingly" shared with Spavor. So, at least Kovrig (who worked for a controversial intelligence unit at Global Affairs Canada) DOES seem to have been spying after all, just like China was claiming all the wa through. And Spavor? Who knows? And who knows what "unwitting" sharing of sensitive intelligence actually means?

All of a sudden, China's "arbitrary detention" doesn't look quite so arbitrary, and the outrage with which Canadians met the news of the Two Michaels' unfair and illegal imprisonment is starting to look somewhat creaky. Maybe they were not just "pawns in geopolitical games", as the government has characterized them, after all. The fact that China "arbitrarily" released the Two Michaels in September 2021, straight after Canada was allowed by the USA to release Meng Wanzhou, certainly made China's conduct look suspiciously petty and spiteful, but now we're not really sure.

At the bottom of it all, the question remains: why is the Canadian government willing to pay an unspecified large sum of money to Mr. Spavor to avoid a court case? The Michaels spent a long time languishing in horrible Chinese penal accommodation (compared to Ms. Wahzhou's comfortable house arrest conditions), but should the government - and the Canadian taxpaying public - be paying them off for this? 

A cause that Canadians once righteously rallied around now looks that bit more tarnished and sullied.

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Biden is fighting against unrealistic memories of Trump

A recent CBS poll gives a good idea of just what Joe Biden is up against when he tees off against Donald Trump later this year.

65% of respondents remember the economy under Trump as being good, while only 38% considered it good now, under Biden. In the same way, 59% think the economy today is bad, compared to just 28% under Trump.

So, this is nothing to do with anything that Trump has actually done or said. This is all about people's faulty perceptions and memories. Of course, Trump had the advantage of not having to deal with a pandemic, and rampant inflation due to global geopolitics (and the lingering after-effects of the pandemic), all of which Biden has had to deal with. Plus, Trump was riding the coattails of Obama's strong economy, while Biden inherited Trump's weaker one.

One other thing the poll says is that many more people think that prices will miraculously go down under a Trump administration. Wake-up call, guys: prices will not go down under ANY administration, that's not the way inflation works. 

There's some other stuff in there, like 83% of people leaning towards Trump believe (or say they believe) that he tried to stay in power legally, and Trump supporters are much less critical of Trump than Biden supporters are of Biden. No real news there - Democrats are always going to be more critical and analytical, and less driven by sheer emotion and sentiment, than Republicans.

But the perceptions of the economy under Trump are key. In actual fact, the US economy is showing surprising resilience under Joe Biden, considering the challenges it has been presented with, challenges that, for the most part were wholly outside of Biden's control. It is showing a stronger-than-expected GDP, low unemployment, and falling inflation. God only knows how it would have fared under Trump.

But the other element is: presidents actually have a pretty limited influence on the country's economy. They tend to get credit when the economy is good, and get blamed when it tanks, but the boom and bust cycles actually don't have much to do with who's actually in the White House at the time. 

For what it's worth, a Forbes analysis of historical stock markets shows that, since the Second World War, they do MUCH better under Democratic presidents than under Republican ones, with Clinton and Obama being particularly big winners, and G.W. Bush and Nixon being big losers. Trump comes middle of the pack.

As for what Nikki Haley is up against in the Republican primaries, you could do worse than to hear what this Trump supporter says out loud in an interview: "A woman is not going to be a good president. She don't have no balls to scratch. She's just gonna scratch her head. All a woman is good for in my book is having babies and taking care of the house ... Don't get me wrong: females know what they're doing, but they still got to have a little bit of guidance."

Well.

There's not much you can do against that kind of ignorance, is there? And this guy is probably a not untypical Trump supporter. I wonder what his wife is like?

Monday, March 04, 2024

The environment is pretty bad, but it could be much worse

I've been pretty gloomy about our environmental and climate change progress recently - check out this doom-laden screed from a few days ago - but maybe I need to lighten up a bit. Not too much, because things really are quite dire, but let's see what happy things I can say about the situation.

Well, here's one. Although global energy-related carbon emissions continued to increase in 2023 (when we need it to be decreasing, and fast), it didn't rise by as much as it did in 2022. Which is something, right? 

And the reason the pace of the increase slowed was because of the continued expansion of solar and wind (and nuclear) power, and the steady adoption of electric vehicles. Without that trend, the increase in global emissions over the last 5 years would have been three times larger, according to the latest annual update by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

I have to say I'm not looking forward to next year's update. But we should celebrate small victories, right?

Sunday, March 03, 2024

Trump's problem with language(s)

It has been pointed out many times how Donald Trump's language is changing of late, and how he is openly espousing more White Nationalist ideology, such as his Hitler-esque talk about immigrants "poisoning the blood of our country", and his vow to proceed with "the largest domestic deportation operation in American history". Plus, he has been having some cozy chats at Mar-a-Lago with a bunch of very suspect characters, including Kanye West, Nick Fuentes and Victor Orban.

Mot recently, he has been waxing most unlyrically about foreign languages, and how "we have languages coming into our country". So, immigrants are not just bringing drugs and crime to America, they are bringing ... languages. "These are languages - it's the craziest thing - they have languages that nobody in this country had ever heard of. It's a very horrible thing." (That, right there, was English, in case you were wondering.)

So, to be clear, Mr. Trump elaborated further. These are "truly foreign languages", and "nobody speaks them". Well, presumably the people that speak them do, but leaving that aside, Trump worries about "pupils from foreign countries, from countries where they don't even know what the language is". Because, after all, "these are languages that no-one ever heard of". Finally, for ultimate clarification: "There are migrants invading from countries that we know nothing about, which is the point". Riiiight... Clearer now.

If that is how the English language is butchered in America, God help the poor benighted souls who are moving there.

The race to leave space litter

I have written before about Elon Musk's (and others') cavalier strewing of near earth orbit with thousand of satellites. Now, it seems there is a distinct possibility that the process of destroying satellites by forced re-entry into the atmosphere may be affecting our atmosphere, and resurrecting a ozone hole problem that we thought we had fixed.

This comes as Musk's SpaceX company casually mentions that they are deliberately scuppering 100 satellites over the next few months because of a design flaw that may cause them to fail. Now, 100 out of the 5,000 or so SpaceX satellites that are already up there is not a huge number, and it pales into insignificance against the 440 tonnes of meteorites that burn up daily in the atmosphere (who knew THAT?)

But there is just something very wrong with this kind of throwaway attitude to space junk. You'd think we had evolved sufficiently to learn from our past mistakes, and to br a bit more circumspect about what we put into orbit. Those satellites that burn up in the atmosphere don't just disappear, they just get broken up into smaller pieces, similar in some ways to the break up of plastics into equally dangerous microplastics here on earth. 

The other option is to move the satellites outwards to what has been labelled the "graveyard orbit", which sounds like an even more suspect solution. I hate to think what, and how much, is floating round the earth out there.

It's a similar glib attitude to what is happening in the Moon, our natural satellite. I was taken aback during the media coverage of the recent spate of unsuccessful Moon landings, to learn just how much stuff we have strewn across the face of that otherwise pristine planetoid. 

Wikipedia estimates there is over 187,400 kg of human "stuff" scattered across the Moon, much of it from those early Apollo missions. But we are still adding to that total, the latest addition being the much-lauded (for some reason) Odysseus privately-funded semi-failed landing. (Why we would celebrate the fact that private, commercial companies are getting in on the space game is beyond me. It's one of the more scary developments I can conceive of.)

We're even starting to leave litter on Mars now

Having made a mess of one planet, we are now starting to mess up others. Have we learned nothing?

Friday, March 01, 2024

Do beer cans and bottles actually get recycled?

Ever wonder what happens to all those cans and bottles we take back to the Beer Store? I did, so I looked into it. Maybe you thought it was all a scam and they just end up the landfill, but it turns out they don't - they actually DO get reused and recycled.

Ontario's Beer Store has had a very successful recycling system for decades now, since long before recycling was trendy. Today, about 1.8 billion alcohol containers are returned to the Beer Store each year, and about 98% of all refillable beer bottles sold in Ontario are reused and/or recycled.

Beer bottles have the best journey as this Beer Store video explains. You take the bottles back to the Beer Store and get your 10c deposit. The bottles are sorted by hand by colour and standard and non-standard shapes and sizes. They are then returned to the original brewers for refilling and reusing, after washing and sanitizing (yes, really!) Bottles are typically reused in this way about 15 times, after which time they are broken up and recycled like other glass. This all happens quite quickly, usually within a few days. Imported and "non-standard" beer bottles, however, are only used once and then sold to recycling facilities to be ground up and recycled. Another good reason to support local breweries!

Cans, on the other hand, can't be reused in the same way. But aluminum and steel are among the easiest and most cost-effective materials to recycle, as this Beer Store video explains. So, after you get your 10c deposit back, your cans are consolidated into truckloads and then hydraulically crushed into cubes for more efficient shipping. These cubes are sold to can manufacturing factories, where they are melted down into aluminum ingots, then rolled flat into sheets to be made into brand new cans, all within about six weeks. They can be recycled over and over again. Because they are not actually reused directly, cans can be brought in to the Beer Store crushed to save space. 

Of course, the Beer Store also collects alcohol containers of any kind, even if they are not sold through the Beer Store itself, provided they are actually sold in Ontario. So, under the Ontario Deposit Return Program, the Beer Store also recycles wine and spirit bottles, coolers and alcopop cans, but also wine boxes and bladders, even ceramic containers, not to mention  packaging like bottles caps and pull tabs, plastic wraps and rings, and carrying boxes.

Wine and spirit bottles are not reused, though. They are just broken up and used as road-building materials and for other recycled glass purposes. Better than them ending up landfills, of course, and it does take some pressure off municipalities own recycling systems. Plus, you get the 20c deposit back, so it's a no-brainer.

As an aside, you may have noticed that beer bottles are becoming rarer and rarer as most breweries move to cheaper and easier-to-handle cans. In particular, as more beer is now being sold in grocery stores and the LCBO as well as at the Beer Store, these stores are insisting on cans rather than bottles because they are easier for them to handle and store, and they take up less space on shelves. 

So, it is commercial interests rather than consumer preferences that have driven this change. I must admit it's a shame - I always preferred bottles - but it seems that cans are here to stay.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Renewables projects are now welcome in Alberta, provided...

I don't actually like that I spend so much time writing about Pierre Poilievre and Danielle Smith - God knows, I begrudge them the airspace - but they do need to be called out on some of their worst policies.

7 months after Ms. Smith unceremoniously called a moratorium on renewable energy projects in Alberta - because, well, it's an oil-and-gas province, don't you know? - the Alberta government has now technically lifted the moratorium, but has effectively just reimposed it in a different way. Because, well, it's an oil-and-gas province, don't you know? (I stress this because no-one can figure out any other good reason for it.)

Technically, renewable projects can proceed in Alberta: provided they are not on (private) property the province deems to have "good or excellent irrigation capability" (undefined); provided that it can be demonstrated that crops or livestock can co-exist with the power infrastructure; provided developers post bonds or securities with the government for future clean-up costs; and provided they are at least 35km from "protected areas and other pristine viewscapes" (also undefined), and subject to a "visual impact statement" before approval.

It has escaped no-one's notice that these obstacles have been put in the way of clean, profitable renewable energy projects, but not in the way of dirty, moribund oil-and-gas development. Nor that Ms. Smith, one of the most outspoken proponents of the free market and small government, is telling private landowners what they can and can't down with their land and property (but then we've seen before her inconsistency on that issue).

How tempted would you be as a developer of renewable energy projects to do business on these terms?  Might you not just move along to the next more welcoming province? Despite Ms. Smith's insistence that "renewables have a place in our energy mix", that place is clearly a long way down the pecking order. Utilities Minister Nathan Neudorf claims that the move will strengthen investors certainty by providing clear expectations, but that's not how past and potential future energy developers are seeing it.

Once again, Alberta has drawn the lucky straw in the energy stakes; southern Alberta in particular is blessed with not only oil and gas, but with copious amounts of sunshine and prodigious wind resources. Renewable energy projects have been a game-changer for many struggling rural municipalities in the south of the province. But its booming wind and solar industries - 92% of Canada's new renewable energy capacity  was built in Alberta in 2023, and there are at least 26 large projects awaiting approval as we speak - just came to a grinding halt. For example, the 35km buffer zone around "protected areas and other pristine viewscapes", automatically puts 75% of Southern Alberta (ideal wind-generating territory) off limits to wind farms, although not to new oil and gas projects. 

Of course, provided you jump through all these hoops, and do not blight the "viewscapes" of Alberta's giant monoculture farms and its dead orphan wells, you are welcome to do renewables business there. Unless they change the rules again, that is... The whole province is in thrall to the fossil fuel industry, and its government is shot through with current and former oil-and-gas executives and lobbyists (including Ms. Smith herself), so it's hardly a surprise.

Michelle Smith's new rules, tilting the playing field firmly away from renewables and towards oil and gas, constitute an attack on private business, an attack on landowners' rights, and an attack on the entire free market that she claims to hold so dear.

UPDATE

I see the Globe and Mail's cartoonist had a very similar image in mind to mine above: