Essays in Idleness

Here is a fun fact for gentle reader. Without “fossil fuels,” Canada would be uninhabitable.

This is not a “rhetorical” assertion. The human body cannot endure, below a certain temperature. It varies between individuals, but when it stays below freezing for an extended period, the depopulation becomes universal. True, winter coats can help to delay the inevitable.

And true, our Indians and Eskimos could live here, in very small numbers, with wood fires and other technology of that sort; and bully for them. But thanks to coal, oil, and natural gas, there are probably more of them today than when the white man (boo! boo!) arrived. You see, even in Iqaluit they are now living in heated buildings.

Well, I am on record speculating that God put the polar bears here for a reason: to warn migrants off. And then he gave us Justin Trudeau, in case anyone hadn’t got the message yet.

But He also put extraordinary quantities of “fossil fuels” under the ground, in case we insisted. And we could all pray, that Justin Trudeau’s hair will fall out. When he looks in the mirror, his narcissism will take such a hit, that he will retire from politics and go into hiding. (I owe this suggestion to a gentleman from Nebraska.)

My Chief Texas Correspondent, who likes Canada for some perverse reason, quotes a piece by David Yager that he found somewhere:

“In the past twenty years, millions of Canadians have chosen to mentally leave Canada and relocate their minds to a fantasy northern country that can somehow wrestle the global climate change monster to the ground singlehandedly. This will be accomplished by a genius combination of virtue signalling, carbon taxes, renewable energy subsidies, expanded government, important conferences, passionate retelling of the enormity of the challenge, and ensuring that pension funds, mutual funds, and universities don’t own shares in fossil fuel companies.”

Down Stateside, a new president is taking a deep draught of this “climate change” kool-aid. Granted, it is usually warmer there, and people may survive in states like Texas. But let me guess they won’t be driving electric cars.

For it is a little-known fact — among progressive environmentalists and urban-dwellers generally — that batteries do not generate power. They have to be loaded, as it were, and after huge government subsidies, the solar generation of power has yet to reach one percent. There is hydro, but we’ve dammed everything already, except our toilets. There is clean, improved nuclear, but progressives are too superstitious to touch it. The amount of nuclear waste is already far exceeded by the landfill of solar panels, which contain a witch’s brew of rare, poisonous chemicals, and need replacement every few years.

In order to make these “sparky cars” move, we must generate huge amounts of electric power — overwhelmingly from coal, oil, and natural gas. And this is less efficient than using “fossil fuels” directly. Net of transmission losses, we will have to burn a lot more.

High-tech windmills also increasingly scar the countryside, killing off our bats and birds at an unconscionable rate, while generating landfill on the solar scale for a power supply that falls to zero when the wind isn’t blowing.

Perhaps I have overused the term, “batshit insane.” I need to research some elegant variations.

And did you know, that carbon dioxide is an essential constituent of our planet’s atmosphere? It is at historical lows, if we consider the long history of this planet before yesterday: a fraction of what it was in prehistoric times when the world filled with life. The Amazon rainforests need it to grow. Ditto for other plant life. We hose it into greenhouses to make our tomatoes grow bigger and faster.

One could know these things; or think that soymilk and quinoa grow under the pavement out behind the brightly-lit Whole Foods supermarket, while we are guzzling our fair-trade Starbucks. Good luck to the people who are “following the science” to the latter conclusion, and have forgotten to factor in the petrochemical styrofoam and shrink-wrap.

The sad thing is that these virtue-signallers are numerous in cities, and most of them have the vote.