Gang Green in the Cities; the War on Methane; and Trudeau's Battery Boondoggle
Gang Green in the Cities; the War on Methane; and Trudeau's Battery Boondoggle
Enemies of the People: Rashida Tlaib
This week at The Pipeline, Elizabeth Nickson contributed an article on the consequences of environmentalist policies on local governance, and especially the cost of living in cities.
'Green' Kills
Afriend of mine is building four high-rise condo and rental towers in Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia, where I live. It is a charming city, founded in the 1840s, its core an almost classic English village around which a modern city was slowly built. Not so slow now. It's the warmest, prettiest city in Canada, surrounded on three sides by ocean, and retirees are flooding the place. Young families are choosing the city to raise their children because it is still small, relatively crime-free and filled with charming neighborhoods.
Here is a view from the marketplace by someone who borrowed $150 million to build housing for the newcomers:
Green energy policies have added maybe $700 a month to the cost of a one bedroom rental unit. It takes over two years to get approval for a rental building in Victoria. Then, another year after initial approval to final approval. That adds another sum. Maybe $300? So rents in theory could be $1000 a month less. That is $1,000 that could go to piano lessons, hockey gear. Private school? And so on. Then Justin let in ONE MILLION people last year into Canada. All unvetted. Canada builds various amounts of housing each year. But 275,000 units is a reasonable average. One million people require 350,000 or so housing units. You want to see upward price pressure on rents? You have not seen anything yet”
In fact, “we are two to three million houses short,” says Wendell Cox of Demographia, which has been tracking housing affordability for 25 years across the world. Canada’s two principal cities, Toronto and Vancouver, are among the top four most unaffordable cities in the world, Hong Kong and Sydney being the other two. In my region, everywhere you look, we have tent cities and trailers parked by the side of the road; our economy has been strangled by Covid, debt, inflation, and regulatory madness, so like nearly everywhere, we have a substantial complement of the desperate, despite living among a stunning abundance of resources and talent. Throw in the sharp rise in interest rates and the solution moves from difficult to impossible.
Rich Trzupek provided us with a history of the Left’s war on methane.
Who's Afraid of Cow Farts?
Methane is a compound about which environmental groups can’t seem to make up their minds. Thirty or so years ago, methane was touted as a "cure" for “climate change” according to the Sierra Club and many like-minded environmental groups. More recently, it’s become the focus of massive new environmental regulatory efforts because it is a somewhat more powerful greenhouse gas when compared to carbon dioxide. Accordingly, the importance of global methane emissions have increased from “who cares?” to “Enviro freak-out Def-Con Level 2” in recent years. But interestingly enough, new evidence suggests that higher concentrations of methane in the atmosphere might actually be good for the environment, even by environmentalist standards.
As you may already know, methane is the primary ingredient of natural gas. It's also produced naturally, and in great quantity, when biological matter decays. When active human or animal life is involved the product of this decay is typically emitted as flatulence, which is rich in methane. This is a matter of endless amusement to those of us involved in the environmental industry, but also a matter of great concern to people worried about "climate change." Particularly where cows are concerned. Should future historians wish to define the current environmental movement, we can only hope that they start here: the environmental movement in the early twenty-first century was not only obsessed with cow farts, they spent untold amounts of money researching schemes to reduce their supposed environmental impact.
Thirty years ago many environmental groups were focused on carbon dioxide emissions generated from the combustion of coal. In that context carbon dioxide emissions from the combustion of natural gas were much preferable. When one burns natural gas, energy is generated from the oxidation of carbon and from the oxidation of the four hydrogen atoms that accompany each carbon atom in methane. Even better, environmental NGO's used to believed, one can burn natural gas using a technology called "combined cycle" that is roughly twice as efficient as burning coal to generate electricity. The two effects combined would lead to a massive reduction in carbon dioxide emissions if natural-gas-fired power plants replaced coal-fired power plants. The Sierra Club and other environmental organizations recognized this and for a number of years were champions of the natural gas industry and combined cycle power.
But at the start of the the new millennium those groups were faced with a conundrum. They had been too successful. It became more and more difficult to get people worked up about coal-fired power when the industry had been essentially decimated in America. Environmental groups, like all special interest organizations, require an evil antagonist if they are going to survive. With coal becoming increasingly irrelevant and natural gas filling the gap, natural gas transitioned from being the solution of the 1990s to the problem as it is portrayed today.
Tom Finnerty contributed a piece on Justin Trudeau’s massive tax-payer funded investment in Volkswagen’s new E.V. battery ““gigafactory.”
Canada's New Battery Boondoggle: It Ain't Peanuts
Things have been rough in St. Thomas, Ontario for more than a decade now. Two of the area's major employers -- Ford's St. Thomas Assembly plant and a Sterling Trucks factory -- shutdown for good in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, putting more than a thousand people out of work. And their famous Jumbo the Elephant statue, which commemorates the circus elephant who was struck by a train and killed in the city in 1885, doesn't attract as much business as you might think.
But that's all about to change, says Justin Trudeau. Canada's prime minister has proudly announced that Volkswagen has selected St. Thomas as the site of its brand new “gigafactory,” which will manufacture one million E.V. batteries a year once it's fully operational, and bring “up to 3,000 direct jobs and up to 30,000 indirect jobs” to the area. Speaking at the announcement, Trudeau's Industry Minister, François-Philippe Champagne said,
[This] is a true testament to our highly skilled workforce and Canada’s strong and growing battery ecosystem. Volkswagen’s decision to establish its first overseas gigafactory in Canada speaks to our country’s competitiveness when it comes to attracting major investments. It is also a vote of confidence in Canada as the green supplier of choice to the world.
Which must sound great to a lot of Canadians. But when they look at the details, they might begin to wonder if perhaps Trudeau is selling them a lemon. Or, more accurately, if Volkswagen has sold Trudeau a lemon and he's used their money to pay it off.
The first tip-off is in the claim that this will bring in "up to 3,000" jobs. As John Robson points out, "the “up to” is a giveaway that these numbers are fantasy." But even if they end up being accurate, they wouldn't be all that impressive considering the price tag. The Trudeau Government is "subsidizing" (that is, bribing) Volkswagen to the tune of $13.8 billion to bring this plant to town. That's a whole lot of loonies! Blacklock's Reporter website comments this "giveaway is nearly triple the average annual cost of all federal aid for all corporations nationwide." And Robson again: "At $13 billion, how much did each [job] cost? A mere $4.3 million per. We’d have saved money by picking 3,000 random Canadians and giving them a million each to stay home."
The Trudeau government has defended the massive outlay, saying that Canada is competing with Joe Biden's America, which allocated hundreds of billions of dollars towards so-called "green energy" projects in the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act. Indeed, the contract is reportedly written in such a way that leaves Canada on the hook only as long as the I.R.A. remains in force south of the border. So conservatives can dream of a world in which Republicans repeal the act to the benefit of both Canadian and American finances. Extremely unlikely, but theoretically possible.
Peter Smith spent some time parsing the baseless claims of environmentalist politicians concerning energy prices.
No Cheers for 'Renewable' Energy
In the olden, golden days, electricity primarily flowed from the grid to the furthest reaches of the land. Not so now. The requirement now, akin to requiring that blood is pumped from our pinky toes to our heart, is that electricity flows from far-flung wind farms to the grid before being redirected. What is anatomically impossible is of course possible when it comes to inanimate things like national electricity networks. But you have to think it might be unwieldy and costly. Unless you’re a snake-oil salesman offering a cure for carbon dioxide poisoning. Then renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy, however intermittent and distant from the grid.
Hence the election pitch of Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese. Household electricity prices will fall by $275 a year he repeatedly promised. Since then, under his watch, electricity prices have not fallen but risen steeply with more rises on the way. Has this experience led to self-reflection? Not a bit.
Snake-oil salesmen can’t afford to entertain doubt. If their medicinal treatments make their customers sick, they dissemble and move quickly to the next town. Unfortunately we, in Australia, are stuck with continuing quackery from Albanese. He's going nowhere. And, in the unlikely event he reconsiders his ruinous plans, the Greens on whom he depends to get legislation through the Senate will use blackmail to bring him into line. Albanese has no escape route. Leaving the Al Capone gang on the pretext of being troubled by your conscience would be easier.
But I can’t pin it all on Albanese, even if I’d like to. The U.N. will tell you. Klaus Schwab’s mob, the World Economic Forum, will tell you. “Renewable Energy is the cheapest form of energy.” There is no end of official and non-official sources which will convey the “fact” that renewable energy is as cheap as chips. Then how come my electricity bills have risen so much, you might have the audacity to say? Politicians don’t miss a beat. They reach for their inner Kenny Craig, hypnotist extraordinaire. “Look into my eyes, look into my eyes, those soaring power bills which are leaving you out of pocket have nothing to do with renewable energy. When we snap our fingers you’ll blame it on the neglectful previous government and on Putin the terrible.”
Consider the Australian state of South Australia. It has self-righteously ridden itself of dirty coal power. Ergo, it has by far the highest electricity prices among the states. And it regularly needs to import electricity from states which still have coal power. What happens when they don’t? Get thee behind me, skepticism.
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by David Cavena, Tom Finnerty, and Jenny Kennedy. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!