John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY AARON WHERRY IN THE CBC NEWS

 

“Why Justin Trudeau’s main foe in 2019 is the Justin Trudeau of 2015

“A leader who frames every issue around ideals can expect blowback when he can’t – or won’t – live up to them”

 

That’s certainly true, but “ideals” can be much over-rated.

After all, some of the worst actors in world history had strong ideals.

What’s needed in an admirable leader is not so much “ideals” as a sense of decency, sound pragmatic judgment, commitment to fairness and justice, and dedication to principles of human and democratic rights.

Those are qualities where Trudeau has often failed despite having “ideals.”

I am very sad the other major parties have not offered us good alternatives. It is a truly barren election.

But I just would never cast a vote for this man who effectively has supported all the major policies of Trump and Company – from support for bloody Saudi Arabia and trying to overturn an elected government in Venezuela to Russophobia and insanely-destructive activities around China.

A very foolish man, I think.

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Response to a comment about Trudeau’s carbon tax:

I very much care about our environment, but I tend to agree with you that the carbon tax is something of a scam.

We know there is climate change for sure, but we do not yet know just what is driving it.

There are a number of scientific theories, from a changed level of solar radiation to small changes in our orbit.

Pretty hard to do convincing controlled experiments on a matter so huge as the entire planet, and controlled experiments are one of the hallmarks of genuine science.

Creating big, costly programs for something you do not understand is not my idea of good leadership. I just do not see it as even very smart. It’s a bit like Gwyneth Paltrow selling her Goop products.

And it is stylish, like giant corporations putting images of pink bows for breast cancer on their packaging.

There are many other important environmental matters on which we could focus until we do understand climate change better, including ones we largely ignore.

And even if we discover to a certainty that carbon is the driver of climate change, a solution may well be beyond us. Adaptation is how our ancestors for two hundred thousand years dealt with climate changes, of which there have been many.

Of course, such taxes are very attractive to deficit-prone politicians like Trudeau, ones with “ideals” to brag about too.

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Response to a comment:

I won’t go so far as you do in claiming a prediction, but I very much sensed and feared Trudeau’s lack of depth and ability. It was long apparent.

His father was a great national leader. Gifted. Justin simply did not inherit that set of qualities. Such is the throw of the genetic dice.

And I suspect Justin, the drama teacher and snowboard coach, long knew that, which explains his early reluctance to enter politics, but it becomes hard to say no when important people keep begging you to do something. We all have egos and like being flattered.

They did win, the Trudeau name and smile defeating a much-disliked Stephen Harper, but in a larger sense they lost.

They lost something precious for a Liberal Party which has given us a number of fine leaders.

Our cringing service to Trump and Company under Trudeau marks a terrible loss of 20th century Liberal traditions, things for which the world admired us, and especially those of Justin’s own father.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

“Keep it in the ground” is a modern Luddite expression. We don’t need slogans. We need intelligent scientific work and patience.

In twenty years or so, the way technology is going, we will be greatly off-oil, even with no special efforts.

But pushing premature efforts is just religion and may prove dangerous.

Windmills, for example, in many applications, are a poor source of electricity, but they have been pushed on people in many countries in large numbers because they are vaguely understood as being “green.” But costly and rather unreliable electricity cannot be green, rightly conceived. Costliness and unreliability are waste, and waste is never green, and it deprives us of our ability to supply other needs.

Windmills cannot supply base-load electricity (that capacity which allows you to turn on the lights anytime in 24 hours), and they are horribly expensive over their useful life expectancy. Maintenance is costly, as for example each time some minor matter goes wrong, you must get a specialized truck that reaches very high up in a remote place just to service one unit.

They also have been demonstrated as not standing up well in extreme conditions of cold and wind. And because you require base-load power, you still need conventional generators to back up windmills, no matter how many of them you have. So they require redundancy automatically, if you will. That also is not green, rightly conceived. I’m all for experimenting with them, but just rushing out to throw up thousands of them, as some jurisdictions have done, seems foolish.

Solar is showing new promise, but we are not there yet for most applications. I think we are getting close to being able to have a practical roofing or siding material for houses, a great concept, which will greatly reduce demands on the grid, with all the reductions in infrastructure that implies.

Storage batteries for homes, another great idea, are coming along, and I suspect will be quite important in not too many years. They too will remove demand on the grid as well as reducing waste.

If electric cars are to come into their own, we need a different way of distributing and/or storing electricity on a widespread scale. We do not have that yet.

As to the matter of global warming, I think caution is extremely wise.

Only recently, a very able mathematician discovered a couple of serious mathematical errors in the world’s main climate model. The errors make carbon dioxide seem far more important in warming than it is without the errors, thus greatly exaggerating its role in climate. The results seem dramatic but will need to be confirmed.

Now, if we run off and spend countless billions on a threat which may not indeed be quite such a threat, we will deliberately impoverish our societies, robbing our children. That too is not green.

Climate change has been happening for 4.5 billion years. It is actually a part of our evolution.

I don’t in the least doubt that climate change is occurring, but I rather doubt we are responsible for it, and I doubt even more that we can seriously alter it with deliberate plans of global scope. Such schemes resemble too much the old Soviet grand engineering schemes of the 1960s for altering rainfall in a region or for altering the course of vast rivers. Global engineering is potentially quite dangerous.

When you talk about a great and immensely complex thing like the earth, I think it more than a little foolish to pretend that we really do understand it enough to be playing with its mechanisms and fine-tuning this or that. It is as complex as the human brain, an organ we understand only in fairly rudimentary fashion even today, and with which our best medical people have made many errors over decades.

Further, we are entering a solar-minimum period over the next decade or so, and this will undoubtedly make things colder for a while. It might actually prove a useful offset to a general tendency to warming as we continue developing our approaches to energy. Again, show some patience and let our brightest creators do their work. Let’s have no slogans and no crash programs we will almost certainly regret.