Canada already had several Gold Rushes that left environmental devastation and abandoned towns. China’s BitMain is opening a server farm in Quebec and others are trying to open in Manitoba. Manitoba is thinking this could be another path to destruction that they do not want to participate in.
Autonomous cars and trucks are steaming at us at a surprisingly rapid pace. Fully autonomous vehicles are not the stuff of 2025, they are the stuff of late 2018. Seven US States already allow GM, Tesla, Uber and other autonomous car makers to drive limited numbers of vehicles with no driver. In Canada, Ontario allows autonomous vehicles in approved cities and towns.
GM executives told investors in 2016 that by 2025, autonomous vehicle cost reductions and increased consumer adoption would combine to drive the price down to less than $1 per mile, or about a third of current ride-hailing prices.
In 2017 GM had more autonomous vehicles on the road that any other company in the world. In California 20 of the autonomous cars were involved in accidents but not a single one of them was found to have the autonomous car at fault.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4y09TnE4QE
On January 15 2018, the Canadian Federal Government laid out the details of it plan to implement a $50/tonne carbon tax in proposed legislation named the “Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act”. The highlights are:
Do you want to understand Global Warming without the political hype? Dr. David Maenz has written and important book for 2018 explaining the science of global warming, it’s impacts and viable solutions. The Price of Carbon is an easy read. You don’t have to be a climate scientist to understand his clear explanations and simple charts.
The book includes a brief history of the earth, where we are today, future climate scenarios and how to fix the problems. It also covers the Paris accord without the political furor.
There is a global crisis with municipal recycling programs that is affecting YOUR community as of January 1st 2018. China is now rejecting all used plastic, except “high grades”. High Grades are used materials that are fully sorted. This means mixed plastics, aka Low Grade, will no longer be taken. The problem for us is that we rely on China’s cheap and efficient labour force to sort low grade plastics for us.
This video explains the Chinese “National Sword” policies that bans 24 different types of products (read: mixed paper, mixed plastic and mixed clothing) and how the US is beginning to deal with this.
We talked to Dr. Christina Seidel, Executive Director of the Recycling Council of Alberta about this issue earlier today. She said that “… (consumer) education is good. We need to be more careful about what goes in…(to the recycling system).
It used to be very clear that Alberta had a spending problem and not a revenue problem. However, since the 2014 oil crash, the world and Alberta have forever changed. Historically, oil ‘busts’ were the result of a downturn in some key economy that reduced the demand for oil & gas products. Today we have the worlds first notable price downturn caused by over production of oil, with no end in site.
This over production was started intentionally by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in an effort to kill shale oil fracker’s and other non-state owned small players. The idea was to have OPEC lead an over production that would drop the price of oil for a few years and force the marginal upstart players (i.e. US based frackers) out of the industry. Then Saudi lead OPEC would reduce supply and drive the price back up. Well, the Crown Prince was wrong and it didn’t work.
More importantly it won’t work in the future. Saudi Arabia and friends can reduce the global price of oil by increasing production but they can no longer raise the price because they no longer control the global output, here’s why:
Much has been said about the Trump administrations lack of a coherent foreign policy plan. He seems to have changed to tone to an us vs them winner takes all approach without considering even the near term negative consequences of such an approach.
Even if that is correct, Trump definitely got something right on US Foreign Policy: US citizens stopped buying in the notional that the US should be the ‘Global Global Good Guy’. Somewhere in the George Bush, Bill Clinton era, citizens saw an ever expanding, less than fully-coherent foreign policy that directly cost them billions of dollars, thousands of lives and the respect of many foreign citizens outside of the political class.
The US Government has thrown its weight around, with a view that it can do little wrong, since the end of World War II while US Citizens see and feel the losses. The US Government has lost the ability to explain the vast positives that come from such interventions:
In this short video Grant Thomson explains how Alberta Provincial politicians can work collaboratively. He uses UCP Leela Aheers private members bill 206 as an example of the NDP and UCP (conservatives) working together to modernize adoption rules.
There is a debate over what REVENUE NEUTRAL means. The NDP claims that spending new money makes it revenue neutral. Most everyone else, thinks revenue neutral thinks raising one tax will reduce another.
The Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion from Alberta to the BC coast has been stalled for the last 6 months. Today Rachel Notley received a standing ovation at a talk in BC in which she explained the economic and environmental argument for the pipeline.
Alberta announces another $1.4 billion in spending at a time when the Province is billions of dollars in debt.
This short video has Michael Geist explain Net Neutrality on CBC’s ‘On The Money’ with Peter Armstrong.
A brief panel discussion about the legal (and therefore political) implications of data collection in cars.
Bill Clinton appealed to both working class whites AND the educated elites. Working class whites, don’t mind billionaires but they hate ‘bossy professionals’ and they just could not vote for Hillary.