Texas blackouts turn out to have been caused by gas plants, not wind turbines

The big freeze in Texas this week and the associated electricity blackouts, have led to some typical Republican false news. 

Several right-wing news outlets and the social media accounts of various Republican senators have been laying the blame for the blackouts squarely at the door of the state substantial wind energy sector. Because, for reasons I have never understood, Republicans (and conservatives in general) have a reflexive hatred of renewable energy, and a reflexive (and equally inexplicable) love of anything to do with oil, gas and coal.

Unfortunately for this narrative, although a few wind turbines did in fact ice up, the main underlying cause of Texas' blackouts was the state's gas power stations. Per the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which is the body responsible for overseeing energy production in the state and mixing and maintaining  its various sources: "It appears that a lot of the generation that has gone offline today has been primarily due to issues on the natural gas system". In a deregulated, profit-driven power system, the gas power stations in particular were woefully unprepared for temperature extremes. That, and the fact that Texas' grid has no links with other states that might be able to help out in this kind of eventuality.

And those pictures of helicopters de-icing wind turbine blades that have been making the rounds of conservative social media? They turned out to be from northern Sweden in 2014, not Texas in 2021 as billed! Oops. These days, wind turbines seem to work perfectly well in winter in Sweden, Canada, even in Antarctica. 

But I wonder why right-wingers have this innate suspicion any fear of renewables? And, equally, why do they all seem to support moribund industries like oil and coal? Is it just that they feel it incumbent on conservatives to protect the past and old things in general, and to be dismissive and mistrustful of anything new (relatively speaking)? It's a mystery to me.

Repeated ads work, so get used to them

If, like me, you hate - I mean HATE - that tedious, dated Rolex advertisement they insist on playing ad infinitum during every major televised tennis tournament you've ever seen in the last several years, you might have wondered, like me, whether it might not be counter-productive for advertisers to repeat ads quite so often.

Apparently, it has been shown that an ad needs to be seen 3.7 times before it "takes", or before a viewer "gets" it. It can then be seen up to 15 times with continuing good results, and after 15 "impressions", it ceases to be effective. But that doesn't means that it starts to actually have a negative effect, just that it does not further consolidate the favourable effects.

At no point, then, does repeating an ad seem to actually work against the advertiser. Many times, I have said things like, "If they show that ad again, I swear I will never buy x ever again". But apparently I don't mean that, and the old adage "there's no such thing as bad publicity" (a phrase originally attributed to showman P.T. Barnum), really does work in advertising - if not necessarily in politics - unless, of course, the publicity is so egregious and offensive as to be career-ending. Advertisers just want to get their name into your skull any way they can, even if only because of how much you hate it or how much it bores you.

So, sorry, there's likely to be no let-up from those annoying ads. They work. Anyway, why make five different ads when you can just make one and have the same effect. And advertisers wonder why people hate them.

Canada clamps down on border travel, but truck drivers still have a free pass

As of today, new rules belatedly come into force requiring a negative PCR COVID-19 test for anyone travelling by land from the USA to Canada (or a positive test taken 14 to 90 days earlier, which I'm less convinced about), to be followed by a mandatory 14 day pre-arranged quarantine period. Although Canadian citizens cannot be turned away at the border (unlike US and other citizens), they can nevertheless be fined $3,000 if they don't have the required paperwork.

From next week onwards, the requirements will be further ramped up, and arrivals will also be required to take a molecular test on arrival at the Canadian border, followed by a mandatory 3-day hotel stay at the border while the test is being processed (rules that are similar to those recently instituted for travellers arriving by plane).

This is all well and good - it's no coincidence that the countries that have dealt best with the pandemic have been mainly island countries, like Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan, that can more easily regulate their arriving travellers - but bear in mind that this only applies to "non-essential" visits to the country. 

CTV estimates that 93% of arrivals at the Canadian borders will be totally unaffected by the new rules, because healthcare workers and truck drivers (whatever they may be carrying) are considered "essential". So, a truck driver who may have travelled through 14 different states, picked up goods from suspect warehouses and food processing terminals, eaten at greasy spoon truck stops, and slept who knows where, can continue to just wander into the country and potentially proceed to infect any number of locals with complete impunity. 

All the hoopla about the new federal rules? Not such a big deal after all, then. Trucking associations and unions have been agitating for weeks to be exempted from any rule changes. They argue that truck drivers are ultra-cautious and rarely, if ever, leave the safety of their cabs, an argument that sounds pretty unconvincing to me, but then what do I know?

At the same time, Canadian provinces apparently have literally millions of unused rapid testing kits just sitting around. Why on earth would we not be insisting that truck drivers be tested before they enter the country? It may not be 100% reliable, but it's 100% better than no testing at all.

Stop the Steal! Oh, wait, this is Newfoundland!

As an outbreak of variant-laced COVID cases hits Newfoundland and Labrador, which has thus far largely managed to avoid the pandemix crisis that is laying the rest of the country low, the province has had to pivot on a dime to allow for all-mail-in voting in the provincial election, and to extend the deadlnes to accommodate the changes.

I was waiting for anguished cries of "Stop the Steal! Stop the Steal!",  until I realized, wait, this is Canada! There has been no outcry, no recriminations. There is absolutely no expectation of wholesale fraud. People are just getting on with it as best they can't. How different we are from the Americans!

Orphan oil wells should not exist

The province of Alberta alone has some 90,000 inactive oil wells (mothballed due to being no longer economic), and around 3,000 of these are so-called "orphan" wells (defined as a well "that does not have any legally responsible and/or financially able party to conduct abandonment or reclamation responsibilities").

Last year, the federal government ploughed $1 billion - a huge amount of money - into a program to clean up and/or repurpose those sites. Which maybe sounds like a good thing. But my question is why is so much tax-payers' money being pumped in to rectify a problem that is more properly the responsibility of the wealthy oil companies that created the wells in the first place?

Supposedly, the principle of "polluter pays" is already in force. Companies developing oil wells are supposed to be on the hook for reclamation liability for 25 years, after which time it becomes a federal responsibility, meaning that the oil companies are supposed to return an abandoned site "as close as possible to a state that's equivalent to before it was disturbed". But clearly they are not doing that, either going out of business, or just not attending to their responsibilities until their 25-year period expires, at which point they can legally just walk away.

Which is a rather ridiculous situation. Laws should be brought in to force them to attend to reclamation straight away, and not saddle tax-payers with their dirty work. This is just another example of the hidden subsidies that allow oil and gas companies to thrive.

Finnish snowshoe art

These are just beautiful: https://www.euronews.com/travel/2021/02/14/this-beautiful-piece-of-art-was-created-by-finnish-snowshoers.

Burkina Faso's unnoticed humanitarian crisis

Burkina Faso has been going through a humanitarian crisis for over five years now, and this is the first I have heard about it.

The small West African country is one of the world's poorest, finding itself in the bottom twenty by GDP by most measures. The current sectarian violence is happening at the hands of unspecified (at least in this article) "extremists". Most of the reports I have found seem to go out of their way to avoid using the word "Muslim" - I guess that's politically incorrect these days - although an MSF report does manage to describe the extremists as "jihadis", which is a bit of a give-away. So yes, sorry, this is another religious war.

At any rate, this is one of the world's fastest-growing displacement and refugee crises, with more than a million people displaced from their homes. An estimated 3.5 million of the country's 20 million inhabitants are in dire need of assistance, and more than 2,000 people have been killed in the last year alone.

You read about Yemen, Syria, Libya, Myanmar, and any number of other sad cases. This, I think, is the first time I have seen Burkina Faso mentioned in the news EVER, for any reason at all.

Trump acquitted, again

Sad, but true. Donald Trump has been acquitted in his second impeachment trial.

The vote was 57-43, so seven Republican senators also votes with the Democrats to convict Trump of inciting the January 6th riots in Washingon DC. But it was still along way from the 67 (a two-thirds super-majority) needed for a conviction, which also means that Trump wasn't able to be banned from standing for president in the future.

Shout out to Republican Senators Richard Burr (North Carolina), Bill Cassidy (Louisiana), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Ben Sasse, (Nebraska) Mitt Romney (Utah) and Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania) for voting with their consciences. Shame on all the others for not having the guts or the gumption to do the right thing.