Wingnut in Alberta - Part III

Colour me unsurprised.

 

Danielle Smith has declared that a renewable-powered electrical grid by 2035 is "fantasy thinking".

The full story appeared here:  Alberta premier tells climate conference renewable powered grid by 2035 "fantasy thinking".

Frankly, the notion that we can keep on with business as usual is fantasy thinking, but we all know that Denielle doesn't believe that climate change is a real issue, just like Danielle doesn't believe that special practices need to be adopted for some viruses, instead believing that "Albertans view viruses differently than other Canadians".  What malarky.

First, even the Feds (remember the Feds?  That level of government that Danielle and her supporters love to hate?) have identified 2050 as their target date for a renewable powered grid.  I'm not sure where Danielle got that 2035 timeline.  Not that significant achievements by 2035 wouldn't be great to see, but that's another discussion.

Second, Danielle has claimed that 2035 is unrealistic "fantasy thinking", but has she even tried just to see what could be accomplished by then?  Last I heard, she shut down most renewable energy projects for 3 years.  How about encouraging rooftop solar?  How about prodding your electric utilities to start working on this "smart grid" that we know will be needed as we move to more decentralized energy sources?  How about encouraging more wind power on some of those foothills ridges that I know Alberta has available, or perhaps on some of those vast stretches of Alberta grasslands?  Has Danielle tried ANY of those?  Not that I'm aware of.  Why would a premier in climate change denial, one who believes the only reason there were so many forest fires last spring in Alberta was because of arsonists, try ANY of those things?

Third, even the International Energy Agency has suggested that peak fossil fuel use could be only a few short years away.  Danielle, of course, dismisses any such suggestions as "fake news".  I'd suggest that her position is a good example of fantasy thinking.  After all....

The International Energy Agency has 31 member countries and works with groups such as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the G20 and the United Nations in researching its reports, which make headlines around the world. [quoted from the article linked to above].

Danielle, of course, prefers to "get her information from private-sector analysts."  Yes, I can imagine who those might be.  The same people whispering in her ear about arsonists and discriminated-against anti-vaxxers.

What I see in a 2050 target date is simply the opportunity to kick the can down the road a ways because it allows you plenty of time to avoid facing the problem.  After all, by 2050, Danielle will be 25 years older (I'm approximating - it's not my lack of math skills), she will unlikely be Premier by then so it won't be HER problem.  It will be our kids' problem.  Our grandchildren will have to deal with the fallout of current inaction.  Why the hell should SHE care?

This is what happens when you have a wingnut in the Premier's office.

COVID - Nearly 4 Years On

 

I don't care what the experts say.  I'm convinced that COVID is more than a respiratory disease.  In fact, I'm certain the virus completely destroyed all vestiges of sanity in some people.

Case in point: Here we are, nearly 4 years after the beginning of the COVID pandemic and yet another deluded rant appears in the pages of the local rag (aka: The Valley Voice on page 5).  It goes by the title of "Open Letter to PM Trudeau et al".   I'm open to alternate theories as to why these people persist in their delusions and fantasies, but if anyone wants to convince me, they're gonna have to bring proof of actual functioning neural networks.

The World Health Organization, that UN agency that some people love to hate, comes in for the author's scorn and a dose of his special nonsense.

He mentions "International Health Regulations".  Never mind the fact that these have been in place for almost 2 decades and relate almost entirely to reporting and transparency and health documents for international travel.  The notion that the WHO and its IHRs will "...cost [Canada] our sovereignty over its health..." is laughable.

Readers need to remember that the WHO is an agency of the United Nations.  How well or poorly either entity operates is a direct function of how cooperative member nations are (or are not) prepared to be.  In the early weeks of the pandemic, China was NOT cooperative, resulting in more trouble than there needed to be.  And the fact that China's official COVID deaths seem low can be attributed to months and months of very strict lockdowns.

The author goes on to claim that the absence of vaccines didn't disadvantage countries in Africa because, he believes, death rates there were far lower than in North America and Europe.

You would think that people, like the author of this drivel, would occasionally stumble across some verifiable facts, like this one from Boston University:  Morgue Data Reveal Africa's High COVID Death Toll.

"The fact that the majority of COVID-19 deaths (more than 80 percent) occurred in the community—where cause of death surveillance is completely absent—“shows how easy it is to fall into the trap of misconstruing the ‘absence of evidence’ as ‘evidence of absence,’” 

Countries in Africa, for example, did NOT do better.  They did far worse and, sadly, most of how they did went unreported and unrecorded.  The fact is, countries like these are very poor and they mostly all lack any semblance of a functioning medical/public health system.

The author mentions "drugs with good safety records" as being available before the vaccines came online.  I'd hazard a guess he's thinking of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ, which is NOT recommended as a treatment for COVID), or perhaps Ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug that is also NOT recommended as a treatment for COVID.  That last article goes on to say:

"Other groups who were more likely to take these drugs were those who reported they trusted social media, those who scored higher on the American Conspiracy Thinking Scale as well people who said they trusted former President Trump.

People who reported receiving their information from sources like CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and Facebook were also more likely to say they had received a non-evidence-based treatment.

“In general, cable news sources regardless of perspective were associated with increased odds for both non–evidence based and FDA-approved antiviral treatment. Facebook did not follow this pattern: odds of non evidence based but not FDA-approved treatment were markedly greater with Facebook as a news source,” the researchers found."

Which brings us to more data.  From WorldOMeters comes an extensive list of COVID information, from which I selected 4 countries, sorting for deaths per million population.  This is what I found:

•  USA # 15 at 3520 deaths/million
• UK # 18 at 3354 deaths/million
• Sweden # 44 at 2439 deaths/million
• Canada # 82 at 1405 deaths/million

These are ALL developed countries with roughly similar access to advanced medical treatments, vaccines (eventually), expert knowledge, public health agencies...all the advantages.  So why the disparities?  The USA had 2.5 times the death rate as did Canada.  Sweden, that poster child nation for people who were upset about the various public health actions taken here in Canada rather than doing basically nothing, had almost twice the death rate we had here in Canada.

Why the differences?  I'm going to suggest something really, really simple.  Canada had (at least in the beginning) politicians who deferred to Public Health experts, federally and provincially.  Canadians are, by and large, a well-educated population with a relatively decent level of trust in our medical establishment and those running Public Health agencies.  In the USA, they had Trump.  Do I REALLY need to say more?  Well, perhaps one more thing....in Sweden, a decision was made early on to take very little direct public health action.  This was a conscious decision that the country later regretted, but by then it was too late.

Now, of course, we here in Canada have a political party lead by PP (aka: Skippy) who welcomed the so-called Freedom Convoy to Ottawa, Alberta has an avowed anti-vaxxer as Premier now and we STILL have publications like the Valley Voice giving column inches to idiots ranting from their rabbit holes.

This morning I just booked my next COVID shot.  I know Natural Selection is a slow, imperfect way of removing unfit (for whatever reasons) individuals from a population, but I've seen the data of COVID deaths which compare unvaccinated with vaccinated.  It's very clear which group I want to be in.  I'm thinking that absence of functional neural networks will be a disadvantage to future survival.  So far, the data seems to correlate well with my hypothesis.