Modernity Faithful : Rex Murphy

Modernity is all about faith, not facts --- its about you what you want to think is true and not what is actually true.

Case in point, commentator Rex Murphy and seemingly everybody at Canada's CBC, that James Fenimore Cooper of news accuracy.

He and they have been insisting for that last few days that if the federal NDP has its way, Canada's 'energy' sector will be closed down and 'all' its jobs lost.

How true ?

(Not that the truth ever mattered much to Murphy, not when faith could make anything he wanted seem factual.)

As long as Oil holds the whip hand, so does Notley & Harper's Alberta

Now it easy to see why the provinces of Alberta and to a lesser extent, Saskatchewan, Big Lie to the world, whenever they claim that to close down their provincial petroleum industries would be to shut down Canada's energy industry.

Believe me, dear reader, if every province in Canada had huge oil and gas reserves, Albertans would not be so intent on saving the processing of globe-killing fossil fuels.

Alberta really fears losing its unique hold on a revered Canadian resource - the only stuff that currently fuels our all important personal cars.

If you think Albertans hate the NDP LEAP Manifesto, you should hear all the death threats they make against Musk's Tesla electric car.

A trendy popular car car that uses Quebec hydro power, not Alberta gas : "the horror, the horror !!!!"

Back to the odious Murphy.

Hydro dams won't shut down under the NDP plan, nor wind farms, solar farms, the burning of wood chips and extracting heat from air or ground via heat pumps.

The real problem I have with Rex is that there is far far more energy powering life on Earth than petroleum or indeed all the forms of directly human harnessed renewable energy.

For a start the sun does most of our heating for us ---  heating up the soil, water and air enough to make it possible to easily grown corn in southern Ontario -------- but not at icy cold CFB Alert or on icy cold Mars, even under glass.

It fuels the liquid-vapour water cycle, so necessary for any form of life.

As well it powers the photosynthesis system that feeds us all and gives us enough new oxygen to replace the stuff that daily slips off for good into outer space.

Send Rex to Mars --- to prove up his fatuous claims

If Rex doubts, he should just try to heat, feed and supply with oxygen and liquid water a small glassed-in city on ice block Mars, using only fossil fuels (I include uranium among them), to begin to appreciate what old-fangled solar energy already does to keep this planet viable for life.

In point of fact, all the fossil fuels contribute far far far less than 1% to the Earth's annual total energy consumption.

So Rex & CBC relax.

We humans will need all the energy we did before we shut down coal and oil and their direct jobs for a few generations, and we still be able to consume the same amount of energy as before.

It is just that now that energy would come from renewable energy : hydro, wood & straw, wind, solar, geothermal.

All which take a lot of human employees to manage - most of their new employees will probably come from the former fossil fuel industries.

Yes, energy use will shift and yes jobs titles will shift , but there will be no basic change in either energy use per capita or in energy industry employees per capita.

But Alberta - financial  and electoral heartland of the Canadian Conservative Party - will then be reduced to just one province among all ten energy producing provinces.

That dire possibility ---- for the Tories --- is what is truly driving  (former Conservative party candidate) Murphy's animus against LEAP ...