Canada imports about 1 BILLION barrels of oil per year, nearly all into Quebec and Ontario in-spite of the fact that it exports 3.1 Billion barrels of oil per year. These are the specific numbers taken directly from the Canadian Federal Government from 2016: Canadian production: 3.9 MMb/d Imports: 0.9 MMb/d […]
The current impasse on the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion have many pundits, politicians and citizens taking entrenched positions insinuating that this issue has an easy fix the Trudeau Federal Liberal Government is not willing to pursue. We list eight options for the Federal Government below, but as a […]
After World War 2 the US (and West in general) supported its former enemies. Rebuilding cities, legal systems, and economies on a massive scale. Germany and Japan were the primary beneficiaries of that financial aid and guidance and today those two countries are large stable entities that improve the West’s standard of living by providing both solid trading partners and political allies.
Some argue that those countries now take “our” jobs when in fact the evidence is clear that those countries have expanded the global economy for all. It is true that the US, Canada and the UK have a smaller slice of the global economic pie in 2018 compared to1950, but the pie is many times larger, so the net benefit to those countries is irrefutable.
The rebuilding (not reconstruction) plan was named after then US Secretary of State George Marshall. Today the Marshall Plan is touted as the cure all for every failing state, from Afghanistan to Mozambique but, as this New Yorker article explains, for a Marshal Plan had a lot more to do with reassurance and a lot less to do with money than most people think.
Last year Chrysler announced the end of nearly all their cars, leaving the Chrysler 300 as the sole survivor. This week Ford announced they same thing by formally heralding the death of the Taurus, Fusion, CMax, and Fiesta leaving only the Mustang and Focus in development. General Motors will follow […]
Induced Seismicity is just another way to say ‘man made earthquakes’ and are sometimes referred to “induced earthquakes”. Induced Seismicity can be caused by many things humans do including:
but the focus of this article is Induced Seismicity caused by oil and gas exploration and production. There are some unexpected results in the latest research that governments and citizens should be aware of.
The picture to the right is the standard graphic used by industry to explain that when we search for or produce oil and gas near existing fault lines, the added (or reduced!) pressures can cause the faults to activate resulting in earthquakes. Nowhere has this been more pronounced than in Oklahoma over the previous decade and their citizens and governments are taking it very seriously.
The two major causes of oil and gas related Induced Seismicity are:
Hydraulic Fracturing or “fracking” is simply the process of injecting materials (often including water, sand, chemicals, CO2…) into a well under very high pressure. The idea is to crack the rock and release the oil and gas contained.
The video below shows Derek Fildebrandt at the Strathmore on Monday April 23rd, claiming that UCP leader Jason Kenney told him he could not run against a female UCP member:
…What Jason (Kenney) said to me. It’s not about me challenging other incumbents. It was only about me challenging female incumbents… And he said I could run against any other men… I don’t think it serves women well to have effectively affirmative action in politics…
https://youtu.be/rurP7iBkPPc
It should be noted that Mr. Fildebrandt is accused of many politically unsettling problems including:
It is well established that even well intentioned government intervention in industry very often ends up causing more problems than it solves. Today one of the issues facing the United States is a loss of jobs in the steel industry and so President Trump claimed this is a National Security Issue and so used his unilateral power to impose a 25% tariff on imports of steel into the United States.
On its face, this seems like a good idea. Simplistically, if decrease the ability of other countries to export their steel to the US will result in the creation of more US steel jobs. However, the world is not a simple place and what actually happened was:
The five points above are well documented oft discussed in the media. The video below however, points out two fascinating unintended consequences that we had not thought of:
UPDATE: Sept 14 2018 – We just added new TMX articles you will find interesting: How Big Is The Pipe In The Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion? How Big Are the Oil Tankers Heading to BC To Take Oil From Trans Mountain Pipeline? Are Oil Tanker Spills Getting Worse? Spill Statistics […]
GDPR is the acronym for Europe’s “General Data Protection Regulation” which is the toughest set of personal privacy regulations in the world. You can see from the GDPR Timeline on the right that companies have had about 3 years to get their systems into compliance, and it comes into full […]
There is a crisis at Facebook because of the constant negative media coverage of the Cambridge Analytica scandal causing users to question staying on the product and that has caused Facebook stock drop a truly staggering $70B in value in 11 days. It’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, owns 28.2% of the company so he has lost $20B personally.
There is a also crisis being experienced by some Facebook users that have finally realized Facebook and nearly all other ‘free’ online services are harvesting personal data to allow others to micro-target advertising at them. WHO DIDN’T KNOW THIS ALREADY? Apparently millions of people thought Facebook was some benevolent do-gooder, that provided a complex service for free because they were nice people.
The saying in the industry holds as true today as it did in the 1999 when it was coined: “You are not the customer; you are the product“.
The only ethically questionable behavior by Facebook in this current crisis, was corrected way back in the spring of 2015. That issue was the ability of users to share not only their own information, but that of their friends (if those friends had not changed default privacy settings).
Facebook made USD$40B in 2017 and that was another record amount for them. They did this by monitoring you, figuring out what you might be interested in and then allowing advertisers to target you personally, just like they said they would.
The along came Cambridge Analytica who used a large set of Facebook user data and figured out patterns they could use to apply to other Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica organized the social media efforts for the Donald Trump Presidential campaign and now it is a political crisis too.
It is important to note that:
Now that much of the dust has settled on Cambridge Analytica‘s misuse of Facebook users data the sad story can now be told.
It is critical to note upfront that Facebook was not hacked and that the information that was misused was provided voluntarily by Facebook Users. The only breach was a breach of misplaced trust.
270,000 people responded and at the time it was possible for users of that app to provide limited information on their ‘friends’, if those ‘friends’ Facebook privacy settings allowed it
If you are interested in fully electric cars or plug-in hybrids there is a myriad of misleading information to wade through. One of the big questions is, ‘Is it is cheaper to run own and operate an electric car vs a gasoline powered car?’.
Before we get into the numbers, you need to be aware of two things:
The most accurate, generalized, answer is to say electrified and gasoline vehicles are very competitive with each other and one does not (yet) have a major cost advantage over the other.
I drive a Cadillac ELR with a 60KM+ range (average of 55KM in winter and 65KM range in summer) before my gasoline engine generator kicks in. Because I used to track my expenses and my kilometers, I can say with certainty that the ELR save me:
We have two interesting sets of numbers for you to review. From the new for 2018 book ThePriceOfCarbon.com comes an interesting info-graphic:
There has been much talk in the recent decade about banning disposable plastic bags. The basic argument is that consumer grade disposable single use plastic bags are the root cause widespread environmental damage but have ready alternatives, so why are will still using them?
As is often the case with political issues, there is no simple answer to the question “Should single use plastic bags be banned?”. Below are some of the facts and you can decide for yourself if this is a crisis or not:
At the heart of the Canadian Federal Governments announcement today about fixing the process that determines if a large scale project is in the best interest of Canada or not, is a desire to limit ability Provincial, Municipal and interest groups (like ‘First Nations’) to stall approved projects. The idea is to:
These are clearly admirable goals. To achieve those goals there are now going to be three structures that industry must pass through to get Federal Government support:
So now the questions are, will these changes allow:
There has been much debate over the process and all agree something big had to change:
Dennis McConaghy, a former senior executive at Trans Canada Pipelines thinks these changes will not achieve the desired goals:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7tbmUNo0XA