It's Official: Ontario becomes a have-not province, accepts charity payment from West

[Sharpe]

Alberta's gone through very rough bust times since then without a penny of equalization. Including one of the most pronounced bust-times brought on by ridiculously stupid Liberal policy decisions.

So has Ontario - for even longer than Alberta - and the government of Ontario didn't want equalization in that period - but this recession is hitting Ontario very hard.

If I recall correctly, Alberta did come close to getting equalization a couple of times especially when the price of oil declined to $20 US or below.

Yes, I can see the value of bringing this up. What happened in 57 to 64 is very important to this discussion.

Actually it is relevant - if equalization existed prior to 1957, Alberta would have gotten it every year. Prior to 1964, Alberta was a poor province.

[Asher]

But it is not at all relevant. Alberta back then is NOTHING like the Alberta now. Not even close.

Alberta's ENTIRE population in 1964 was 700,000 people. It was almost exclusively agriculture with a couple tiny wells only.

The point is Ontario is receiving money now. It's a far larger, far more diverse province than Alberta and it is a crapfest of suckiness. Ontario's premier is also the issue, since he's *****ing about how Ontario is always getting shafted by Canada even as he's about to receive billions in funding when his province needs it.

[Lancer]

Any news about Alberta joining the US? I heard there's a movement there for becoming USian and dumping all those Canadian leftists that want to steal their oil.

We would never do that.

[Ben Kenobi]

I'm just ashamed that during the NDP era BC recieved the same. At least we are finally off the dole now.

[Lul Thyme]

Originally posted by Asher

Energy is the engine of growth in western Canada. You halt the growth of energy, you halt the growth of the economy. Then everybody spirals into a massive recession, all for less than 0.1% of the world's greenhouse gases.

I'm not going to argue with your conclusion, but I don't see how bringing up "0.1% of the world's greenhouse gases" is relevant.

Canada, at least population wise, is a small country. Anything it does will usually have little impact worldwide. Let's take the ozone layer, for example. Whatever Canada did (cutting back on CFCs or whatever) was a drop in the bucket. Does that mean we should have ignored it? Why should we pay our dues to the U.N.? They are such a small part of the overall budget. etc...

Using that logic, you can justify anything. Each individual person or factory or what not is a drop in the bucket in any single environmental (or other) problem. Why take steps towards doing anything?


I'm not necessary advocating anything in particular, I am just wondering why you think that particular figure is relevant.

On the other hand, I WOULD be interested in what you think about this whole greenhouse gases thing.

-Do you think current worldwide growth is sustainable?

-If not, assuming worldwide cooperation, what would be a fair solution?

-Assuming, more realistic international relations, what do you think Canada should do about it?

[Asher]

I think Canada should let Alberta pump billions of dollars into Carbon Capture research, which is what they are doing.

Everybody wins. Greenhouse gases get reduced, energy can continue to grow, new jobs are created in the Energy Research field (we can already see this academically with ~$500M in new facilities being built for this purpose), etc.

[Lul Thyme]

Originally posted by Asher
I think Canada should let Alberta pump billions of dollars into Carbon Capture research, which is what they are doing.

Everybody wins. Greenhouse gases get reduced, energy can continue to grow, new jobs are created in the Energy Research field (we can already see this academically with ~$500M in new facilities being built for this purpose), etc.

This particular "solution" seems to be long-termed.

Of course, neither of us are experts in these fields, but, to me, it seems unlikely that this investment and no more immediate measures will allow Canada to reach its share of emission reduction that is considered necessary by most recent estimates I have seen to avoid temperature increase in any relevant time frame.

Such research has basically no short-term impact on GG gas emission so your solution is basically to do nothing for now. Carbon capture also costs money. Research in this area would hopefully decrease costs, but it would hardly make it free. It's at least arguable whether the investment is even cost-efficient compared to acting now.

I don't have the answer to the last question but you seem to think you do. I would like to understand why, which is why I asked these questions in my previous post, some of which you didn't answer.

For example, whether such investment is an efficient solution depends a lot on how urgent\serious the problem is in the first place.

What do you think? To put it another way, hypothetically, how long do you think the world could afford to do basically nothing (that is have GG emission rise at the same pace as if nobody knew about the problem) until say, a significant shift?

[Asher]

Why do you think it's not short term? What is your definition?

It can make real dramatic decreases within 10 years. That's short term to me.

I think we can afford to do nothing for a long, long time. But we're not doing nothing now, so it's not a big deal...

[Aeson]

Originally posted by Asher
I think Canada should let Alberta pump billions of dollars into Carbon Capture research, which is what they are doing.

Everybody wins. Greenhouse gases get reduced, energy can continue to grow, new jobs are created in the Energy Research field (we can already see this academically with ~$500M in new facilities being built for this purpose), etc.

[Lul Thyme]

Originally posted by Asher
It can make real dramatic decreases within 10 years. That's short term to me.

By carbon capture, I assume we mostly mean things like fitting industrial plants with equipment to capture most of the GG they emit and store it, and not things like simply planting trees.

By this definition, it is not used on any industrial scale at the moment although I agree that it probably could be used on a large scale within a few years.

On the other hand, even by the most optimistic predictions, the cost of such a large scale change would still be very high. From the (limited) information I have read on this, considering the cost compared to the reduction in power output, it's not even clear that this would be superior to simply building nuclear plants, for example. Now of course, there are other issues with nuclear plants, the point is that carbon capture will probably not change that much in terms of a much it will cost to reduce the emissions by 1 ton/year, say compared to currently.

Hence, whatever we will be ready to pay in 5 years to reduce emissions, to get results within 10 years, we could probably pay something similar to do it sooner, if we think it's necessary.

Basically, this means that it comes down to our estimate of the severity of the global situation, or our risk evaluation with respect to it and I think this is where we disagree:

Originally posted by Asher
I think we can afford to do nothing for a long, long time.
But we're not doing nothing now, so it's not a big deal...

I'd argue that we (I mean Canada here) are doing very little more than nothing, in the sense that I defined above. That is, if you try to guess what emissions would be if nobody gave a damn about this (based on trends from before this came to the public and politician's attention), I doubt that we would be very far from current emission levels.

Our emissions have rose greatly in the last 15-20 years (which is about the correct timeframe since this became a "major" issue in news, etc..), a lot more than most other industrialized countries. Of course, I understand the reasons for this and while I can't really argue that we have done literally "nothing", I think you would be disingenuous to argue that we have done anything serious yet to reduce our GG emissions.

As to the question as to whether we can afford to do nothing, remember that I asked this from a global perspective. Of course Canada can "afford" to do nothing, if others do something. Heck, as I said above, in a certain sense, it doesn't matter much what Canada does, as long as others do what needs to be done, and compensate a little for us if need be.

As to whether the world can keep going on the trend it's on, if you really think it can for a long time, then I disagree and I think that's really the issue. I was actually suspicious that we disagreed on this. Not that I mind that we disagree but I think it's important to bring this in the open. Let me explain why.

I have seen you argue before about people about the specifics of this or that emission reduction scheme (a bit like we are doing now about carbon capture). But in the end, you actually believe that we could do nothing (and therefore SHOULD, since there is an associated cost). Technically, from your perspective, a GG emission reduction scheme that accomplishes less at a lower cost is superior. In fact, it seems your ideal scheme would actually accomplish nothing at no cost (which is actually pretty easy to do).

Hence, it is very hard for someone who actually believes that something should be done soon to have a discussion with you about the pros and cons of different schemes and actually believe you are being honest.

To add some weight to this, I'll note that every single scheme I've ever seen you "praise" was always praised based on low cost and other economical side benefits (consider your comment about jobs and the academic benefits of Carbon Capture research in the current thread as an example). While there is nothing wrong with this per se, since these are definitely pros of a given scheme, you usually seem to almost ignore the weight ecological benefits in the balance.

Again, this does make sense if you really believe that we can afford to do nothing for a long time but, in that case, I think it would be more honest on your part to simply say "I believe we should do nothing or almost, but I would be willing to accept a scheme with very low economical net cost if it appeases you eco-freaks" rather than praise some schemes for their environmental values when you don't actually care about this.



Here is a similar example of something I see quite often in Quebec. I have met people who are so strongly separatists that they actually think it's a good thing anytime anything goes wrong with Canada (especially with the federal government) since it increases the chance that Quebecois will be fed-up and try to secede. For example, it is not too hard to find separatists Quebecois who were very happy about Harper being elected the first time (don't know about this time) even though he was the most opposed to them, value-wise, simply because they calculated his election provided the highest chance of an eventual secession.

I don't really want to explain why, even if I were separatist, I would disagree with the logic above to the same extent, but I want to point out that it makes anything they say about the federal government very suspect. For example, if gun control laws are relaxed, they might be mad because that is against their values or they might applaud because they think it is against most people in Quebec's value and hence, referendum blah blah.

In a sense, they are happy whenever something happens that they are unhappy about so you have to take any comment with a grain of salt.

I feel the same way about reading your posts sometimes. You'll make a post saying that scheme A is better than scheme B for GG reduction for this and that reason, yet, as I said above, it seems your ideal scheme would be to do nothing hence it's hard to take your comments at face value.

[Asher]

I'm not talking about building the CC&S just for power plants -- long term that's going to be nuclear power in Alberta.

It's also for the facilities at the oil sands, which are major polluters.

I'd argue that we (I mean Canada here) are doing very little more than nothing, in the sense that I defined above. That is, if you try to guess what emissions would be if nobody gave a damn about this (based on trends from before this came to the public and politician's attention), I doubt that we would be very far from current emission levels.

You (as in, the rest of Canada) are doing nothing. Alberta has allocated upwards of six billion dollars in the past year alone to study cleaner energy initiatives, including but not limited to CC&S. They're very aggressively recruiting academics in this field and giving them massive budgets at state of the art facilities in the universities to study it as well.

The problem is Alberta is NOT going to artificially limit growth of the energy sector -- that would be artificially limiting the growth of the province. Alberta wants that to grow while also reducing emissions.

All of the plans presented by the NDP, Liberals, and Greens would dramatically slow Alberta's growth without making much of an impact at all on emissions. Alberta is spending the billions it makes from the oil and pouring that into energy research and implementing solutions to reduce emissions -- this is far more useful than the Liberals' plan to just give tax cuts to mostly central/east-coast Canadians...

I don't know why you think my ideal scheme is to do nothing. Ideally, we can reduce emissions while growing the economy. It is possible. With wise investments, Alberta can create new "green energy" jobs while growing the energy sector. That's the approach they are taking. This is the ideal solution.

Shutting down the oil sands, as per the NDP, is ridiculously stupid.
Taxing Alberta more and giving tax cuts to people in Ontario is ridiculously stupid.
The cap and trade system just increases costs, which is ridiculously stupid.

There's one practical solution, and its the one that is in motion in Alberta.

I don't know why you can't take that at face value.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Heraclitus
I think canda should be divided into eastern and wester Canada, and make Quebeck an EU member, we Euro's don't mind supporting states with Union Euro's I mean why do you think we let eastern Europe in (except for all the cheap prostitutes ).

The whores you're appraising ain't cheap.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Oncle Boris


My proposal was a bit more moderate, I was merely suggesting to keep production at the actual level.

You can't mandate that.

During good times projects will move forward. During bad, projects will get shelved/cancelled and production shut in.

You can't manage it according to some ivory tower priorities. That's what you don't get.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Sharpe


1957 to 1964 - the first 8 years of the equalization program (would have received it before hand too if equalization existed before then).

Yeah, Ontario would have probably received equalization from 1979 to 1982 if they hadn't changed the formula from average of all 10 provinces to the average of the 5 main provinces - but it is bad enough with Quebec getting 70% of the total equalization payments.

Tell the frogs to get off welfare.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Lul Thyme


I'm not going to argue with your conclusion, but I don't see how bringing up "0.1% of the world's greenhouse gases" is relevant.

Canada, at least population wise, is a small country. Anything it does will usually have little impact worldwide. Let's take the ozone layer, for example. Whatever Canada did (cutting back on CFCs or whatever) was a drop in the bucket. Does that mean we should have ignored it? Why should we pay our dues to the U.N.? They are such a small part of the overall budget. etc...

Using that logic, you can justify anything. Each individual person or factory or what not is a drop in the bucket in any single environmental (or other) problem. Why take steps towards doing anything?


I'm not necessary advocating anything in particular, I am just wondering why you think that particular figure is relevant.

On the other hand, I WOULD be interested in what you think about this whole greenhouse gases thing.

-Do you think current worldwide growth is sustainable?

-If not, assuming worldwide cooperation, what would be a fair solution?

-Assuming, more realistic international relations, what do you think Canada should do about it?

Interesting you brought up CFCs. IIUC, there is a worldwide ban on them. It's not much skin off my nose, and even if it were everyone is sharing the pain without exception. OK. I buy in.

Now, let's talk energy use and life in a cold weather climate.

Canada's population is growing. Those growing numbers of people live in climates that are sub zero for lengthy periods of time every year. Growing numbers of them live in sparcely populated areas where long distances need to be travelled to be productive, to bring goods to them and to haul the products they produce away. Simply by population growth and making this land productive we blow Kyoto.

Now, let's talk energy production. Can you tell me of any major oil producer who is reducing GHGs? Anyone?

Finally, why should a country with a growing population in a cold weather climate inflict severe dislocation on itself when nations with much warmer climates are under zero restrictions and seem to put up a coal fired plant on a daily basis? Furthermore, why should said country inflict dislocation on itself that other important observers of some hypothetical pact had already suffered so as to bring themselves into compliance pratically before said pact was signed?

To move from the hypothetical, Kyoto is the biggest shell game ever perpetrated on gullible tree huggers since the tulip bulb bubble. It's redonkulous. To abide by it would be the height of stupidity for Canada. Maybe that's why the clowns who agreed to it never did a single freeking thing about it other than use it for political purposes and as a name for dogs.