The Insidious Nature of the Environmental Movement

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Groups like Extinction Rebellion are not concerned about the welfare of mankind, they are concerned with the extinction of the Earth. The extinction of Man is their ultimate anti-humanist goal. (Photo – Getty)

Mission Creep is Bringing Western Civilization to a Halt

There is a YouTube video making the rounds of social media of an older clip of Dr. Jordan Peterson chatting with Joe Rogan over the gradual loss of our personal freedoms. It is a fresh take on boiling a frog where you gradually heat his water and he does not realize until too late that he is cuisses de grenouilles.

Maybe you have not realized it yet but the Environmental Movement has nothing to do with making the environment better for you and I to live in. Their mission is to remove humanity from the environment with just a few chosen human caretakers leftover. Gradually, these anti-humanists have taken over our cultural entities, the media, our schools and universities, and have infiltrated their way into our various levels of government. The ideals of Marxism enthrall these eco-socialists and it does not take too much digging through history to see what happens to the masses when they get in the way of their dogma.

Here are a few examples to illustrate my point but just think of how your own personal or business life has been gradually hemmed in with increasing government oversight, regulations, and dictates.

Former building from the Mount Agassiz Ski Resort
Former building from the Mount Agassiz Ski Resort (August 2021)
Source: George Penner

On the Eastern edge of Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba, there used to be a ski hill called Mount Agassiz. It is long gone and the site has been turned into a picnic and day use area. The ski hill’s lodge was repurposed as a cook shack. Unfortunately, the inside of the building is being steadily covered in Barn Swallow feces as Park staff are purposely allowing the birds to nest in an area that was designed for cooking and eating.

An outfit called The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), described as ‘an independent advisory panel to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada’, deemed in May 2011 that despite the Barn Swallow being the most common swallow in the entire World (over six million in Canada) that it needed to go on the endangered species list. The Canadian population had dipped for some unknown reason but because they exploit structures for nesting spaces, places like buildings in National Parks stopped taking their nests down. In fact, it is illegal to do so anywhere in Canada.

Man-made structures are not a natural nesting area for Barn Swallows. They adapted to their environment when Natives first started building structures. In fact, upon further study, no one knows the exact carrying capacity or reasons why their populations fluctuate. But in the Federal Government’s opinion it is more important for a common bird to shit all over your food prep and eating area instead of just putting up a screen door.

Back in 2018 while I was a beat reporter for South Mountain Press, I wrote a series of articles on the FOUR WINDS ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT PARTNERSHIP which was trying to create a super garbage dump to take care of the waste needs of a pair of local Rural Municipalities (RMs) and a pair of First Nation (FNs) Reserves. The Province had dictated that existing dump sites were to be decommissioned so there was impetus to find solutions. Extra Federal monies had been freed up through Indigenous Services Canada for projects like this hence the unique partnering of RMs and FNs. Years of meetings, public consultations, and hundreds of thousands spent later, the project was finally about to put spades in the ground.

Unfortunately, the FOUR WINDS PARTNERSHIP came up against their bête noire in the form of a vocal NIMBY group who literally shouted down Council and was able to elect a slate of new council representatives whose mandate was to kill the project. I spent quite a bit of time interviewing the opposition group. Despite a very expensive engineering study and numerous consultations, they were vehemently opposed to the dump site. The original problem with the area’s garbage has still not been solved, large amounts of taxpayer monies were spent spinning wheels, and a few score of people are going to inconvenience thousands.

The handling of waste in Canada has become a major issue with RMs coming under very strict guidelines. But when novel solutions are sought, the lead time for all the consultation and study runs into political considerations. At best, projects which seem straight forward are delayed interminably or at worst after considerable time and money, they are outright canceled. Meanwhile, the original problem has not been solved and continues to get worse and more expensive as time goes on. Environmental groups are famous for successfully delaying and ultimately cancelling projects through political pressure, judicial lawsuits, protests, and civil disobedience.

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Nuclear Chemist, Galen Hulet Winsor, 1926-2008

Our ability to measure has exceeded our ability to understand.

Galen Winsor – Nuclear Chemist

Back in the 80’s before the internet, YouTube, TED Talks, or social media, people went on lecture tours to get their message out. But unless you were picked up by one of the few networks, it was a hard slog to gain any notoriety or publicity. One man, Galen Hulet Winsor, a long time Nuclear Chemist who started refining plutonium back in the 40’s after his war tour, was working hard to get his message out. Thankfully, there are a couple of videos surviving of his lectures and I highly recommend taking the time to watch them before the links get broken.

A Free Nuclear Economy – Galen Winsor Lecture (1985)

Ben Williams Presents Galen Winsor (1986)

While watching the lectures, a quote of Mr. Winsor’s jumped out at me. “Our ability to measure has exceeded our ability to understand.” He was referring to nuclear radiation and the fearmongering which has mothballed the nuclear industry. Michael Shellenberger expands on this theme when he explains in his 2017 TED Talk, ‘How Fear of Nuclear Ends‘, how the environmentalist movement struck gold when they invoked the fear of mothers. All sorts of organizations employ this tactic to great effect. MADD lectures no amount of alcohol is safe. Moms Against GMOs are dead set against agricultural progress. Moms Across America are concerned about parts per billion of glyphosate residue in their kids Cheerios. The list goes on because emotional arguments more easily sway this particular demographic.

Getting back to nuclear energy, as Mr. Shellenberger explains, ironically the Sierra Club was all for nuclear energy because it was cleaner compared to fossil fuels. But radicals in the group went the other direction, tied nuclear energy to nuclear weapons, and despite the fact that you can run the plants at greater than 100% efficiency, nuclear has stagnated.

Mr. Winsor finally got so fed up with the misinformation and needless safety measures, he tossed away the remaining years of his long career in the nuclear industry and incurred the wrath and censure of the Federal government. As he graphically explains, there is no need to be so afraid of nuclear power plants or nuclear materials. He advocated that every small community could easily have a small plant (similiar to those that have been employed for decades onboard US Navy carriers and submarines) producing cheap, abundant electricity for pennies. Nuclear is just not that dangerous.

Of course, despite the fact that Mr. Winsor should know what he is talking about considering his extensive experience, he is in the solid minority. The narrative is nuclear is scary and too expensive compared to wind and solar. Of course, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when ‘safety’ standards, environmental groups, and political opposition jam up the process of building nuclear plants. As an example, the Diablo Canyon (Nuclear) Power Plant which Mr. Shellenberger speaks of, took 19 years before it was allowed to produce electricity. In 1950, Mr. Winsor described how the plant he worked at was up and producing plutonium in a year and within five years, they had produced enough material that the States would not be able to use it all. But instead of embracing this technology, the World is dead set on anemic wind and solar generation for our energy needs.

The masses are easily swayed by emotional arguments made by nefarious actors within the environmental movement. Their motivations range from genuine concern to monetary enrichment. But the end goal appears to be the ranking of Mother Earth over that of their fellow man whom unless you are one of the Chosen, is seen as a blight to be curtailed and/or eradicated. As Dr. Jordan Peterson explains, millimeter by millimeter, these people are stealthily encroaching and then all the frogs are surprised when they look up and realize they have been pushed back by miles.

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ENERGY REALIST

At the Regional Test Center in Williston, Vermont, researchers are examining how framed (in the background) and frameless (in the foreground) solar photovoltaic modules handle snowy conditions. | Photo Courtesy: Sandia National Laboratories
The Real world inefficiency of wind and solar

Update – Don’t believe me, well listen to an acolyte of the radical Lefties. Better watch Michael Moore’s film, ‘Planet of the Humans‘ before it gets successfully banned.

For Canadians suffering through this bitter winter cold snap, I thought I would crunch some actual numbers to see how some various forms of power generation were performing.

As a preamble, when it comes to generating electricity there are a few terms to understand. For example, just because a wind turbine or a natural gas generating station is rated for ‘X’ amount of Megawatts (MW), that does not mean that it is the constant output. It is a maximum output. In reality, the wind is not constantly blowing, the sun does not shine at night, and power plants get taken offline for repairs and maintenance.

The following chart shows the relative ‘efficiency’ of US power generation facilities. Note that nuclear power far and away is the most efficient power source.

But let’s see how some real world Canadian energy sources stack up against one another.

My analysis for the following graphs comes directly from the Alberta Utilities Commission Annual Electricity Data reports which can be accessed here. I took the last five years of data (2014-18) to determine the efficiencies of each type of power generation.

The first graph lists the percentages of each type of power generation in Alberta over the five year time period. The total installed capacity added up to 80875 MW.

Solar installations totalled 30 MW for 2017 & 2018. The Others category was power from fuel oil, diesel, & waste heat.

The total output of electrical generation over the time period was 415,652 GW and below is the percentages of how the power was produced.

Solar accounted for .1 GW of power generated in 2017 & 22.4 GWs in 2018

For comparison purposes, I produced a graph from just the 2018 energy production statistics.

After crunching the numbers, I came up with the following efficiency factors for Alberta’s energy sources.

Solar efficiency for 2018 increased to 17% with 30 MW of installed capacity

Compared to the US figures, the Alberta numbers are all more or less in the ballpark.

Environmentalists would have you believe that Canada should divest themselves of all fossil fuels and make the switch to renewable, ‘green’ energy such as wind and solar. Well here are some numbers regarding that type of action.

In 2018, Alberta coal and natural gas produced just over 76,000 GWh of power. Alberta has 900 wind turbines with a maximum output of 1500 MW. In order to replace coal and oil using the Alberta efficiency rating of 31.2%, the province would need 17,000 extra turbines. Using numbers obtained from SaskWind, each turbine would have a footprint of about .75 acre/MW which equates to 32 sq miles. Now because of turbulence, landscape, environmental, etc. issues, you can’t just jam all the turbines together so they need to be spread out. SaskWind figures about 87 acres/MW which translates to turbines being scattered out into a 3750 sq mile area.

Working through the same exercise with solar being used to replace coal and natural gas, I used Suncyclopedia’s average of five acres for one solar MW installation. Using the US solar efficiency number of 25%, the land area needed would be 273 sq miles. Using the Alberta efficiency number of 17%, land area is just over 400 sq miles.

So what’s the big deal with switching over? Well there’s many inherent problems with wind and solar that do not seem to justify the incredible amounts of money that have been thrown at the technologies. But they are the darlings which every Western government seems intent on promoting.

The following Alberta energy graphs prepared by Reliable AB Energy for December 2019 illustrate better than words why wind and solar are poor energy alternatives. Follow Reliable AB Energy on Twitter for daily updates on the state of Alberta’s energy sources.

Imagine if you were relying only on electricity from solar from Dec 8 – 16. What about the Dec 11 – 15 time frame for wind? These power sources are too unreliable to be counted upon especially during a brutal cold weather event such as what regularly occurs across Canada at this time of year. The back-up power plants would make the wind and solar systems redundant. So why would we have them in the first place?

Wind and solar energy are expensive boondoggles that will never replace better forms of energy, particularly nuclear or even clean-burning technologies for coal. It is time to stop wasting Canadian’s money on these pipedreams.

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Blair is a personification of a ‘Jack of All Trades and Master of None’. He has held several careers and has all the T-shirts. Time to add the title Blogger to the list.

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