One thing the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated this last few months is just how corrupt and destructive the government of China truly is.

From chronic false information to suppression of information to their horrific treatment of their own people to their increasingly corrupt and predatory world business practices, China has been proving itself to be one of the most destructive countries on the planet.

The Western world has allowed itself to become desperately dependent upon inexpensive consumer goods of Chinese origin while letting Chinese companies buy up Western assets with the proceeds. With the pandemic bringing China into sharp world focus, most nations and consumers are realizing that they should be working to distance themselves from that corrupted state.

Canada meanwhile seems to be determined to immerse itself even more deeply into economic dependence with the Chinese. While throttling energy development in Alberta, the Trudeau government has approved a Chinese company to drill for oil off the Newfoundland coast. While Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig remain imprisoned for nearly 18 months on shaky charges in China, Trudeau refuses to consider holding back on the expansion of Huawei’s 5G network in Canada. The list goes on and on. China acts as a rogue nation internationally while Trudeau looks the other way.

Citizens have practically begged Trudeau to be critical of China but his silence remains deafening. Meanwhile, Trudeau’s communications teams work their utter hardest to shut down all critique of China and try to label it all as racism.

Why is Trudeau so terrified when it comes to standing up against China for the benefit of Canada?

The answer is sad and simple. Trudeau desperately wants a seat on the UN security council and he is willing to throw Canada under the bus to get it.

China holds one of the precious five permanent seats on the UN security council along with the very powerful veto ability that comes with it. While China can’t necessarily put their own choice on the security council, they sure can make it tough for a nation to get on the council if they choose to. With the veto ability and their sheer power on the world stage, China can quite easily pressure enough nations to ensure that another nation doesn’t get the 2/3 required support to get a seat. This of course terrifies Trudeau. He is kissing every international ass that he can in hopes of winning that oh so precious seat and China’s ass is among the most influential in the bunch.

What really is to be gained in having a temporary UN security council seat anyway?

In reality, nothing material. The seat is simply a vanity trophy and potential legacy for Justin Trudeau. Justin Trudeau really hasn’t any significant accomplishments under his belt as far as being a Prime Minister goes aside from being one of the only Liberal Prime Ministers to lose a majority government after just one term. If only Justin could secure a UN security council seat as his daddy did in the late seventies, he could feel like he accomplished something outstanding during his tenure.

A temporary seat on the security council of a corrupted organization dominated by dictators isn’t worth a piss hole drilled in the snow.

The heavy hitters with permanent seats and veto powers will always dominate decisions and the representatives from backwards, authoritarian states will dominate UN votes in any broader decisions. The organization in general is pretty impotent.

While the world faces an economic crisis like we haven’t seen since the 1930s, our “leadership” is unfortunately still more focused on an international vanity project rather than dedicating time, resources and policy towards our economic recovery.

Justin’s personal goal is also allowing China to walk all over us with impunity.

Canada is currently under the leadership of the most shallow, vacuous and vain Prime Minister in history. His pursuit of personal legacy projects is coming at the expense of us all.

It’s tough to break large monopolies, particularly in social media. The big players have staked out their turf. They jealously guard their territory and consumers tend to gravitate to the providers with the largest reach.

Facebook has the social networking wrapped up. Youtube has the videos cornered. Twitter has the short form communication dominated. Instagram owns the image sharing market and Linkedin has the business sector. How does an up and comer possibly chip into those markets.

Remember Myspace? Only 15 years ago it was the largest social networking site in the world and it held that title for years. It seemed that nobody would replace it. Facebook blew it out of the water and while Myspace still exists, it is essentially a backwater echo on the internet now.

The lesson here is that any current social media monolith can be knocked down even if it looks impossible right now.

We are due for a sea change among these providers and perhaps we are starting to see evidence that one is coming.

The news that Joe Rogan has signed a deal with Spotify and will be removing his content from Youtube and Apple by this September has rocked the social media world.

Joe Rogan is undeniably one of the top podcasters on earth with his show garnering a staggering 190 million downloads per month. Rogan’s video version is popular as well with 8.4 million Youtube subscribers. Apple and Youtube will now be losing that massive amount of traffic along with the associated revenue.

Apple and Youtube are massive and this move will hardly financially cripple them as platforms. The loss of such a prolific producer of content for them is significant and will have ramifications. People often follow the leader and other major content producers are surely re-examining where they distribute their productions now when they hadn’t considered it only a few weeks ago.

Content hosts such as Youtube, Twitter and Facebook have forgotten who draws that lucrative traffic to them. These platforms feel that they have become too big to fail and that has allowed a lot of arrogance to creep into how they treat people who create content. With ever increasing de-platforming taking place, particularly among conservative creators, social media giants are creating a demand for a new platform. The heavyweights have already forgotten the fate of Myspace and perhaps that is a good thing.

Spotify is hardly a lightweight in the social media world but it was tiny compared to Apple and Youtube. For them to have grabbed an exclusive deal with such a major personality as Rogan is an incredible coup. It has demonstrated that competition still exists and that social media giants can only take their content creators for granted for so long.

Tiring of the increasing squeeze from social media giants, some content producers have been working on creating their own platforms in order to get their shows out.

David Rubin, host of the “Rubin Report” has launched a new platform called “Locals”

De-funding conservative commentators has gone hand in hand with general de-platforming. Patreon provided a service where readers/viewers could directly sponsor the content providers they enjoyed. The problem was, Patreon notoriously and shamelessly shuts down conservative content creators.

Frustrated with this, Rubin created a whole new platform where people could create content and make money while remaining immune from censorship. Aside from outright illegal content, people can create, post and try to gain a following with whatever content they please.

Locals is subscription based. That does make things tough. People are programmed for “free” content and are often loathe to dig out their wallets and directly spend on content. This formula does inspire creators to make content which will grab and retain those subscribers. It can be lucrative and the creator won’t need to fear having the rug pulled out from under them.

With a subscriber based system, quality of discourse among platform users immediately improves as well. It is nearly impossible to have a rational discussion on a topic with a horde of anonymous trolls who flood Twitter and Youtube commentary. It reminds me of when I played online poker. When playing in the free games, the play was horrible. People went all in on a whim and didn’t really care about the game. When entering even a 25 cent entry tournament however, they play became incredibly better. With even that tiny investment, people felt compelled to take it seriously.

Its going to be a tough slog all the same. Time will tell if Locals takes off. I sure hope it does.

Thinkspot was created around Dr. Jordan Peterson and has a similar goal and subscription based platform.

The intent of Thinkspot is to have some uncensored and reasoned postings from thought leaders and to have reasonable debate and discourse on these postings.

Hopefully this platform grows as well.

No new platform is taking the social media world by storm yet but it is inevitable that one eventually will. Frustration with the de-platforming of voices will surely be one of the prime drivers in this change.

Who or what comes about to replace the current content hosting status-quo remains to be seen. When we see folks like Joe Rogan moving away from what was considered to be the traditional platforms, we see a shift in thinking beginning. Rogan can afford to go wherever he likes. It is tougher for smaller creators to do so. Rogan is blazing the trail though and hopefully it leads to a larger exodus from the social media heavyweights.

Without creators, Youtube, Apple and Facebook are nothing. Its time that they were reminded of that.

Mayor Nenshi and his collection of supportive mushrooms on Calgary city council are madly scrambling to set the “Green Line” boondoggle in stone before fiscal reality has a chance to scuttle their legacy project. The $5 billion dollar project has already been a gong show for years and has gone 100 percent over budget before it has even begun. How can this be? Well, while the inept city administration under the guidance of an incompetent city council pissed around over this mega-project for years, the costs simply kept exploding. Rather than admit that they blew the budget however, they simply cut the size of the project in half. That is another way of doubling the cost without the dollar figure changing. Rest assured that dollar figure will continue to explode if this ridiculous transit expansion goes ahead.

We are entering a period of austerity and every level of government has to examine what is a need or a want.

The green line is certainly not a need and in light of changes to things during the pandemic, not many people really want it anymore either.

Lets look at why Calgary’s downtown is in decline and why it won’t be coming back any time soon.

CROWDED OFFICES ARE OUT OF STYLE AS PEOPLE SHIFTED TO WORKING FROM HOME

The days of crowded cubical living are gone. This trend has been happening for years as modern communications took away the need for people to come into a common office space. With tens of thousands in Calgary having shifted to working from home in this last month, we can rest assured that they won’t be moving back to those offices.

Companies are saving money, people have found a better quality of work life and with new fears of infectious diseases, folks are no longer keen to work in close quarters with hundreds of others.

Calgary’s downtown offices had already been at 30 percent vacancy due to the slump in demand for fossil fuels and massive city taxes. That number will likely rise to 50 percent as oil demand remains low and people don’t return to their old offices.

That means tens of thousands fewer commuters going downtown. Why on earth should we spend $5 billion on expanding transit services downtown then?

DENSE URBAN LIVING HAS GONE OUT OF STYLE

Who wants to live in a densely packed building where you share countless surfaces which need touching along with being crammed into elevators and possibly even communal laundry services?

In light of the misery of trying to “socially distance” for this last few months, I suspect that many many people are looking to move to the less costly and far cleaner living options provided by suburban living.

How long will this lockdown last? How long will the next one last? Who will be the next person infected?

Demand for sardine can living downtown will drop. The lack of downtown jobs will contribute to this as well.

In light of that, why spend $5 billion on expanding transit downtown?

PUBLIC TRANSIT USE IS OUT OF STYLE

Riding on public transit was rather gross and unsettling even before the pandemic hit.

Now the thought of being jammed body to body on a train or bus with hundreds of other breathing, sweating, coughing, farting people holds less appeal than ever.

Private vehicles and rideshare were already the most popular means of transportation in Calgary. Demand for those options will only grow.

Funds are going to be tight. It will be tough for the city to maintain fire and police service, much less build a massive transit project which is meant to service a demand in decline.

Nenshi is upset in having lost his billion dollar Olympic vanity project. He won’t let go of this trophy easily.

The time to speak up is now. There is no justifying the green line at this time. Calgarians have to let the Mayor and council know that there will be a political price to pay if they lock taxpayers into this boondoggle when it is so clear they we don’t need it.

Will enough folks speak up though? I wish I could say I was confident that they would.

So much for government transparency. I have had to submit a FOIP request to get the report of the “Fair Deal” panel which was released to government days ago and which Jason Kenney refuses to share with the Albertans who own it.

It is not hard to tell that the government understands that they are doing something shameful when they put the release out on the Saturday of a long weekend.

The Kenney government wants Albertans to forget the time they took to attend winter meetings throughout the province to share their thoughts on Alberta’s role within confederation. The government doesn’t feel that Albertans have the right to see what was concluded after 40,000 people submitted their thoughts online.

It is pretty sad that I have to go to this trouble to see a document which I already bought as a taxpayer but I will not let this go nor will other Albertans.

I have also linked to an online petition. Albertans need to stand up and demand the information which is rightfully theirs.

Is the timing inconvenient for the Premier?

Too damn bad.

We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

There is no reason to delay the release of the “Fair Deal” panel any longer.

It isn’t Jason Kenney’s report. It is Albertans.

Please click though, sign and share the petition below.

We can’t let this slide under the radar.

Just as Obama used the Keystone pipeline as a punching bag to pacify the extreme environmental movement while moving into an election, Joe Biden is doing the same. With a current world oil glut and plenty of American shale oil supplies on hand, Creepy Uncle Joe won’t be taking too much flack for blocking Canadian supplies of oil even if it will likely cost the American people billions once the lawsuits are settled. Electoral victory is far more important than economic reality in the world of federal American politics.

The efforts to shut in one of the most ethical oil providers on the planet have been incredibly successful. Justin Trudeau regulated Energy East to death and shut down the Northern Gateway pipeline and was richly rewarded for doing so by voters in Eastern Canada. They are happy enough to buy Saudi Arabian blood oil while virtue signalling through blocking Canadian oil.

Trudeau made such a mess of the Trans Mountain pipeline that he was forced to buy the project with Canadian tax dollars before yet another company could bail out of Canada. So far it remains questionable whether that pipeline will ever be built. Canada managed to let itself become held hostage by criminal blockaders for months over a legal and low impact gas line in BC. I really don’t see this nation having the balls to stand up to illegal protesters on the Trans Mountain.

Through efforts from Trudeau and Obama, the price differential of Albertan oil has been brutal. Due to our really only having one major customer, we are at the whim of that purchaser. They can cut the price we get for our oil as they know that we haven’t anywhere else to sell it in volume and we idiotically appear to be trying to keep it that way.

While the price of oil today is low, world demand for oil is still projected to grow for decades. We would be fools to shut in our resources at the demand of environmental extremists.

Not only will global oil demand be rising for decades, demand will be coming predominantly from India and China. The USA is a fading customer.

With increased pipeline capacity to the West coast, Alberta could wipe out that price differential for our oil within a few years as hungry, growing nations bid for our product and our deposits remain vast.

Anti-energy folks love to squack about how Alberta should be diversifying its economy away from oil and gas. Well, the best way to do so ironically would be to further develop and sell our oil and gas products. This is how we keep our taxes low and maintain a business friendly environment. That in turn is how we draw, develop and retain new and diverse enterprises. The millions of square feet of office space that Calgary is sitting on thanks to Nenshi’s taxation policies are a draw as well. We just need to get our economy rolling enough to look attractive again. In sitting on billions of barrels of oil, we can do that. We just need to get it to the damn customers.

Even if Trump wins and supports the Keystone line to its completion, we still will remain at the whim of the American government when it comes to our energy exports. No business can do well when they only have one client.

We will have to fight tooth and nail against Ottawa and anybody else who may stand in our way, but it must be done. We need to make pipelines to tidewater priority one and can’t accept any more delays.

Otherwise, we will remain economically enslaved to folks like the man pictured below.

Slowly but surely I had been getting less confident in Kenney’s UCP as they seemed to stumble from one inept mess such as the energy war room to starting a war with Alberta’s doctors. They barely showed the courage to touch the deficit and have been all talk with no action when it comes to dealing with Ottawa.

Their lurching and cowardly approach to the non-pandemic has been brutal. Constant wretched projections from “experts” which proved to be utter pap. Our hospitals languish empty while our businesses have been driven to their knees.

This disgusting bait and switch on opening businesses today was the final straw.

How fucking stupid can these guys be?

Do they any idea what they just did to hundreds of small businesses in Calgary who believed them when they were told that an opening was coming tomorrow?

I owned a pub for five years. You don’t simply turn on a light switch and open the doors after having been closed for months.

What few business owners remained, just took what few dollars they may have left in order to deep clean their places, put up new barriers, pay staff for meetings in order to bring in new policies, buy and prep thousands in perishable stock and likely advertise their partial reopenings.

With less than 12 hours to go, Kenney just ripped the fucking rug out from under them.

Yes, Calgary is leading the province in infections. So damn what? We have less than 120 people in the hospital for COVID and less than 16 in ICU in the entire damn province of 4.3 million people! It is squat! We do not have a rampaging plague killing people.

We do have an economic crisis looming like we have never seen before though and this latest move has doubtless just killed countless businesses who were on their last legs.

What is the point in hanging in there now? Borrow more? Wait more? Put off your staff longer?

Why believe this government and prep for any re-opening now? An owner will have no idea until the last damn second if the re-opening is actually allowed or not. They can’t prep for that! They have already learned the price they will pay for believing the government on this.

Many are saying to hell with it today and they didn’t need to.

I am not sure who I will be supporting in the next election but right now the UCP is a hard no. They have three years to win back my support but I will be spending my time now looking for and developing an alternative.

If they can’t get something as straightforward as this right and they truly lack this much courage, I just can’t see a future with the United Conservative Party.

I don’t take party loyalties lightly and don’t give them up easily.

I find myself without a choice here.

I am politically homeless.

For now.

Naheed Nenshi and his crew of supportive slugs on Calgary’s city council are feeling vulnerable and as usual they are taking it out on the lone, dissenting voice of Jeromy Farkas.

Under the terrible guidance of Nenshi, the gormless gang has been taxing and spending Calgarians into oblivion for over a decade as they pursue pet vanity projects at the expense of citizens. While Alberta has been under terrible financial stress, Nenshi and council have ignored fiscal reality and continued with a campaign of fiscal bloat.

Jeromy Farkas (and often Sean Chu) were the lone voices speaking out against the spending sprees and they were regularly chastised and shouted down for their having dared to speak up.

Nenshi and his tax lapping council cartel were mortified when Farkas exposed their support for yet another pay raise for themselves back in 2018. While Albertans were taking pay cuts or being laid off, the highest paid Mayor (with two tax funded pensions no less) and council in the country were sidling up to the trough to gorge even more tax dollars for themselves.

Farkas was called every name in the book by the Mayor and council. They accused him of lying, grandstanding and breaking the code of conduct. Farkas was proven correct however.

Now, 510 days after the Mayor and Council failed to gag Jeromy Farkas for his daring to tell the truth about council compensation, Nenshi and gang are actually holding a secret meeting to try and have Farkas expelled from council meetings again.

Farkas has sought counsel on this move from the Mayor and council and the conclusion is below in Jeromy’s words:

“510 days have passed since the information I provided was proven to be correct. The Code of Conduct states that a ruling should have been made within 90 days. Since no decision was made within the time limit, I sought the respected ethical and legal perspective of the Honourable John (Jack) Major, C.C., Q.C., a retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. 

Justice Major states that, in his view, I did not violate the Code of Conduct, and that the Mayor and City Council cannot legally expel me from meetings.”

Jeromy Farkas was popularly elected by his constituents and it should be criminal for anybody to try and gag him or prevent him from doing his duties as a councilor.

The Mayor and his council goons surely know that they have nothing to legally stand on in trying to shut Farkas down over something that he was cleared for nearly two years ago. Why are they trying to do this now then?

The answer is simple and it is ugly.

The city of Calgary is broke and with the pandemic shutdown their books are in tatters.

The mushrooms on council have long been driven by their personal legacy projects rather than the interests or needs of Calgarians. Shane Keating’s pursuit of the green line boondoggle has become outright obsessive as he sees his tax funded trophy at risk of being shelved due to fiscal reality. Farrel sees her blesses East Village collapsing as Calgarians reject urban living en-masse. Nenshi sees his public art program approaching the chopping block.

It is repugnant when one can see that the Mayor and Council know fully well that the city can’t afford to continue with their pet projects but instead of responding by putting the brakes on spending, they are putting their efforts into gagging voices of dissent.

Nenshi and gang want to lock the spending in now before Calgarians can stop them. They know that they will probably finally be fired in the next general election but they don’t care. They have grossly inflated tax funded pensions to fall back on and they want to be able to point at their personal legacy projects as they go into a rich retirement on the backs of taxpayers.

Farkas is a fly in the ointment. He dares to break ranks and speak up. For this, we see Nenshi and company circling the wagons and trying to gag him rather than make their case to Calgarians for their tax and spending increases while we head into a deep recession.

Surely their effort to gag Farkas will fail in the long run as it is so counter to open democratic principles that only North Korea would applaud it. They unfortunately may gag him long enough to ram through their spending plans before he can get back though.

It is tragic and repugnant.

I guess it was inevitable.

With a captive audience locked in their homes and with an excuse to do it, Justin Trudeau (surely under the guidance of his handlers) has allowed his daily news conferences to morph from genuine pandemic response communication sessions into an election campaign.

I am not naive to the ways of partisan politics and do expect some degree of party self-interest to creep into the pandemic response. It is only natural and a principled party can do this while still maintaining the goal of keeping Canadian interests paramount in their actions. Unfortunately the Liberal Party led by Justin Trudeau is anything but principled.

In an election campaign, a party’s campaign team will build a platform and a plan well before the writ drops. No party will release their entire plan in the first week of the campaign. It would leave them with nothing to announce daily during the rest of the news cycle. They need something new and shiny to dangle before prospective voters every day and to feed the reporters at daily conferences. That is a wise strategy in an election but it is a disgusting one in an ongoing crisis response.

Every morning Justin Trudeau goes to the microphone and announces a new federal aid program in response to the pandemic. Are we expected to believe that the Liberals are simply only formulating one program per day and are releasing them as soon as they come up with them?

Of course not.

Trudeau and his handlers came up with the bulk of the federal government programs weeks ago. They are holding back on releasing them in order to score daily political points and it is nothing less than disgusting.

This morning Trudeau announced a financing package to aid medium sized businesses. How long have they known that they would be putting out such a package? How many medium sized businesses have folded in the weeks that the Liberals have been sitting on this package in order to announce it on a Monday in hopes of dominating the news cycle?

I understand that things change and some policy is made on the fly but lets get serious here. It is hardly a revelation that medium sized businesses are struggling right now. They all are! This damn package should have been announced weeks ago but that wouldn’t have been politically expedient for the Liberals would it?

As we observe Trudeau’s bizarre overtures to Canadian children in his conferences we see more of an electoral dog and pony show forming. The Liberals and Trudeau are trying to capture that camera lens as much as possible and the goal is not to aid Canadians. It is only to build the Liberal image under Trudeau.

The Liberals are standing with a basket of programs and packages designed to help Canadians economically survive the pandemic lockdown but they will only reach in and pull out one treat per day. They are purposely letting sectors of the public suffer while they model their response based on political needs rather than citizen’s needs.

This crisis and the political benefits associated with it also motivates the Liberals to drag it out as long as possible. They are in a minority situation and this could be just the thing which will aid them in winning back a majority if only they play the response right. When it is clear that the Liberals will withhold aid in order to pad their political capital, it is hardly beyond belief that they will want to keep this lockdown going as long as possible. It gags all of the competing parties while they get a campaign microphone to promote themselves from every morning.

The barking seals in the press gallery won’t call this out of course. They may lose the privilege of tossing Trudeau softball questions so he can respond with platitude laden word salads. Lets just hope that the public sees through this vile show and sends the Trudeau Liberals into electoral oblivion at the first possible opportunity.

The numbers are in.

It isn’t a guessing game anymore. We no longer have to project. We know where the pandemic is going.

Models created by supposed medical experts have proven themselves to be hopelessly wrong. We aren’t talking about a little bit. The models were grossly incorrect.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been incredibly overblown and the lockdown cure is becoming far worse than the disease.

Don’t just take my word for it though.

Lets look at the real numbers versus the “expert” projections only two weeks ago.

We were told in March that the pandemic would surely overwhelm our hospitals and mortuaries. We were going to run out of ICU spaces and respirators. Health workers would be run off their feet and the world would nearly end.

In mid April none of this had happened so what did the government do?

They put out a whole new and updated series of fear mongering projections and models as a justification for continuing to destroy our economy.

How did the new and improved modeling do?

It was utter shit. They predicted the best case scenario as having 300 people in the hospital. There are 74 today.

But what of those ICU beds?

The “experts” predicted under our best case scenario that we would have 100 people in ICU beds today. Currently there are 15!!

The pandemic is not a hoax. The virus is real and it is not harmless by any means. It has killed 116 people in Alberta in the last few months. While that is indeed tragic for the 116, it is a drop in the bucket in reality in a province with 4.3 million people.

How badly do the “experts” have to miss the mark before the government quits acting as if the projections will be accurate? How much more damage has to be done for a plague that clearly isn’t materializing?

How long will it take before we realize just how damn stupid it is to try and quarantine millions of people who have a tiny fraction of a percent chance of dying from this virus while their odds of dying from lockdown associated causes such as undiagnosed cancer rise?

This has grown into sheer idiocy.

The projections should all be tossed in the garbage right now and the “experts” sidelined.

Lets work with the real numbers here.

Of the few people who have had to be hospitalized due to COVID-19, the average age has been 60. Those younger than 60 almost all had pre-existing conditions.

Of those few people who have died, of COVID-19, the average age has been 80!

The risk of a healthy young person dying of COVID-19 in Canada is miniscule. Quit wasting time quarantining them! If we do want to pursue herd immunity, we may actually be making things worse with our efforts.

Most of our serious cases have been in care homes and with elderly and sick people. We need to focus on protecting the vulnerable while letting the low risk people out to get on with their lives and participate in the economy.

It is already clear that history will look back at this as having been one of the worst examples of mass panic and overreaction in human history. How bloody bad will it have to get before we face reality here?

The lockdown is not harmless. Far from it.

By the actual numbers though, COVID-19 is damn near harmless to the vast majority of the population.

We need to start working with the real numbers that we have now rather than the projections which are clearly pure bunk.

Elizabeth May may have resigned as the Harridan in Chief of the Canadian Green Party but clearly she still speaks for them and the Ottawa media eagerly gives a national platform to her vapid rantings.

This week it has been May’s bold declaration that “oil is dead” as a product and that the government should simply let the industry die in order to usher in a green new world of renewable energy generation.

Governments literally would have to kill the fossil fuel industry in order to force the world to move on to expensive, destructive and inefficient “green” renewable energy sources. Despite decades of subsidies, free land and lapse regulation from governments trying desperately to get renewable energy to take hold, it simply hasn’t happened.

Over 80 percent of the energy on earth is still coming from fossil fuels. Oil, gas and coal are still the most cost effective means of generating energy on the planet.

As we enter what will be a protracted period of world economic recession or possibly depression, only an abject imbecile would propose raising the cost of living for the entire planet by shutting down our main forms of energy generation. Elizabeth May stepped up to that plate however.

May and her ideological brethren are still reeling from the evisceration of their blessed renewable energies in Michael Moore’s film, “Planet of the Humans”.

Moore didn’t really expose anything new with his documentary. Energy experts and economists have long been pointing out the folly of wind, solar and biofuel projects. Moore however has long been a staunch ally of the hard left and his piece exposed the renewable energy scam to a whole new audience.

Renewable energy was a tough sell at the best of times. Between the record low prices of conventional energy sources and the revelations in Moore’s film, it is going to be nearly impossible to get the public onside with heavily subsidized wind and solar projects while governments go broke.

Here in Alberta we saw a stark example of this. Medicine Hat has some of the most abundant and cheap natural gas reserves on the planet. In light of this, somebody decided to pump $13 million into a solar project in the area.

It didn’t even make it four years before going broke.

Elizabeth May and her following had wrapped their world around promoting renewable energy sources as the solution to their perceived problems with the world. Their raison d’être has been obliterated and rather than changing their views, the “green” set has instead decided to go out kicking and screaming.

We have few bright lights to look forward to in coming years. While low prices for oil and gas are brutal on fossil fuel producers, they are great for the economic recovery of the world.

Energy impacts the price of everything in the modern world. Keeping the cost of consumer products low will be integral and having low energy costs will greatly aid in that. Other oil products such as fertilizer and plastics will maintain low prices as well and the struggling world will benefit.

Nobody reasonable is going to be switching to expensive Teslas with environmentally catastrophic batteries. No farmer is going to move to pure manure as a fertilizer product and no homeowner is going to invest in solar panels which will have to be replaced before they even come close to paying off their investment. The reason for all of that is simply that oil and gas are more efficient and cheaper than all the other alternatives at this time.

I am not big on the concept of government bailing out oil and gas industries. Canada just needs to get the hell out of the way. The ridiculous and pointless regulations make it nearly impossible to produce in Canada. Endless delays in major projects along with state cowardice allowing criminal protesters to block work has made Canada an awful place to do business. If the government would simply support the industry through getting rid of the absurd hurdles it currently has, the industry wouldn’t need a bailout. A smaller industry would remain and it would be ready for if and when fossil fuel prices inevitably recover.

Oil and gas are not going away. They are more important than ever and they will be for decades to come.

The only thing truly going obsolete is the past “green” movement and it’s outgoing leadership personified in folks like Elizabeth May.

Don’t go away mad Liz. Just go away.