- At CDN we try not to bore you. But sometimes things are at once technical and important. Including Parker Gallant’s tireless spelunking into the Ontario power system and the complacent failure of the allegedly conservative administration of Doug Ford to clean up a mess against which it campaigned in vivid language in 2018. And it’s worth sitting up and taking note, even if you don’t live in this province, that the weird system we use for subsidizing the supposedly cheaper new power sources via the allegedly obsolete older ones cost Ontario ratepayers $138 million in April alone (because we dump unneeded costly modern power at a loss to neighbouring American states). Because almost certainly wherever you live similar follies are occurring, protected by a thick layer of official obfuscation and protective dullness. (Oh, and Hydro Ottawa just let us know that it’s applied to its buddies at the Ontario Energy Board to, wait for it, raise our rates again. And here you said alternatives were cheaper.)
- Speaking of dull, few subjects offer a more instantly reliably snore-fest than statistics. But as Roger Pielke Jr. recently argued, when it comes to climate, understanding the difficulty of telling a trend from random fluctuation, let alone plausibly ascribing a cause to the trend, absolutely positively requires you to understand that you must have long reliable datasets to know what’s normal, what’s changing and what’s just going back and forth. “Given what we have learned about these sources of long-term persistence, we need to be very careful to avoid falling into the trap of seeing a pattern that plays out over several decades and calling it a trend.” Or not, if the goal here is to panic people into agreeing to act before we can check it out properly.
- Among our objections to the climate obsession is that it diverts time, money, effort and thought away from real environmental problems. For instance plastic pollution. The Atlantic “Weekly Planet” recently took a look at “How the World Became Awash in Synthetics”, which regrettably involves a paranoid tale about DuPont in 1934 hyping nylon to cover its tracks as a merchant of death. It’s pretty silly, since plastics were invented in the late 19th century and became popular because they were incredibly useful and versatile. However partly because of a recent trip to Senegal, which turns out to be absolutely inundated with plastic trash, we do concede that there’s a lot of it about and it would be great if ways were found to clean it up, both the big ugly visible pieces and the in some ways more troubling microplastics that really do seem to be everywhere. Alas, all the money’s going to trying to suck CO2 out of the air instead.
- Speaking of wasting money, the Canadian federal Liberal administration and the Ontario “Progressive Conservative” one have been sticking their hands into citizens’ right and left pockets to fund those wonderful EVs we’re too dumb to buy at full cost. They promised Honda $5 billion between them for a factory in Alliston, Ontario to focus on the “EV supply chain”, which is now, uh, on hold for at least two years due to, of all things, lack of what we are tempted to call the demand chain. The Ontario government denies having handed over any actual cash and the premier is blustering about holding car firms “accountable” who dare make rational business decisions. But where are the photo ops of yesteryear?
- Speaking of failed Canadian green subsidies, another one just bit the excess legs: the London, Ontario-based Aspire Food Group, which aspired to make us and our little dogs too eat crickets, and to get government money for doing so, got the government money, some $8.5 million from the federal AgriInnovate program that nobody ever heard of except those handing out state largesse and those scooping it in, and then folded anyway. Another triumph for transpartisan subsidization of everything in Canada, especially climate-related. But a bit of a blow to long-suffering taxpayers. And if you’re looking for an apology from the politicians, well, we’re afraid it’s… crickets.
- Taking a brief break from climate alarmism, Scientific American goes for the cosmic kind with “The Universe May End Sooner Than Scientists Had Expected”. Aaaack! What? Better get the laundry in. But no, because “A new study suggests the universe's end could occur much sooner than previously thought. But don't worry, that ultimate cosmic conclusion would still be in the unimaginably distant future”. Quite, since apparently the demise of the cosmos is now slated to occur 10 to the power of 78 years from now instead of 10 to the power of 1,100. Aka they really have no idea. (And NB it seems to hinge on when the feeble remains of white dwarfs and neutron stars go dark, not when the place becomes uninhabitable.) So the piece falls into the usual trap of presenting wild speculation as sober calculation. But it also strikes us that if the topic is anything, anything at all, other than climate change, challenges to the settled science are greeted with excited enthusiasm. But on global heating, even if they are reported, it’s always with a sour declaration that the conclusions remain the same even if the science changes.
See Comments 
Tidbits
21 May 2025 | News Roundup
