Category Archives: Social Constructs

We have some energy issues up here in Canada that we’re trying to sort out and get to the point of actually making decisions.  It’s difficult to understand the ramifications of all the potential decisions, so we’ve devised a rudimentary scorecard to help you get your head around it.

There are several issues.  One, our Oil Sands (or tar sands) contain the largest potential reserves of crude oil outside of Saudi Arabia.  Except the crude is mixed with mud, clay and sand in a bituminous mess that looks like, well, tar and sand.  We have managed to figure out reasonably effective ways of getting the oil out of the sand and making the crude usable for refining. 

There is an environmental cost, yes and it’s a steep one, but we also cannot uninvent petroleum products from our planet.  Too much of everyone’s life depends on oil, regardless of what the off-the-grid folks say.  That ASA tablet you took last night for your headache came from the petrochemical industry, so let’s agree that we need oil and will for the next several dozen generations.  The less we use, the better, is also agreed. 

Having oil, which Canada does, means we have two decisions to make.  First, who gets to turn the crude into things?  The KeystoneXL pipeline wants to move Canadian crude to Houston to refine it into things we need, essentially selling our stuff back to us at a monstrous profit.  There is significant blowback in the US about where the route will go. 

Line 9 is an older pipeline owned by Enbridge that runs more or less from Western Canada, eventually winding up in New Brunswick at a refinery there.  Enbridge wants to reverse the nearly 40 year old pipeline to work from the west to the east, instead of the other way round.  The line was engineered to do this and actually has been reversed once before, with no issues.  But Line 9 is nearly 40 years old and there is a risk of things going badly wrong.

Meanwhile a CN freight near Edmonton has derailed and thirteen oil and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) cars are now burning themselves out:  The fire department can’t safely get close enough to put the wet stuff on the red stuff.  We’ve been down that road earlier this year with the Lac Megantic derailment that destroyed the heart of the town and put the focus of safety on moving flammable goods by rail.

To simplify:  Moving crude by rail is not as safe as moving crude by pipeline.  Yes, Enbridge did have a pipeline break earlier this year in Kalamazoo that dumped a crapload of crude into the Kalamazoo River, which is also not good.  However, pipeline breaks tend not to explode and kill 47 people like Lac Megantic. 

The scorecard so far:  Move crude by pipeline is better than moving it by rail.  Both have an environmental cost, to be sure, but the first measure is safety for the majority of us.  Pipeline wins.

Now, where to move it to?  We’re very much in favour of not sending our raw materials out to be sold back to us.  Canada has been doing that for nearly 200 years and it has never worked to our advantage.

In a magic wand kind of way, we would punch two pipelines across Canada one going that way and the other going that way that Canada could use for their own interests.  This would lead to a handful of brand new Canadian refineries with the most modern technology and the smallest environmental footprint possible. 

Unfortunately, this is not going to happen.  Refineries have a seven to ten year lead time to engineer and build.  Pipelines, about a three to five year lead time, so we have to work with the infrastructure we have, which means Line 9 and a refinery in New Brunswick.  Not great, but not horrible either.

Getting our crude to a refinery in Canada means we make the gas, diesel, chemicals and goods out of it and sell it to the rest of the world at a significant profit.  We earn that profit by taking the risk of transporting it, refining it, selling it and taking the environmental hits that come from extracting the crude, using older pipelines and doing the grunt work to get the crude to the refinery with the infrastructure we have now. 

So here’s the scorecard now:

Still need oil

Pipeline safer than Rail

Line 9 better than KeystoneXL.

From the environmental perspective, only Line 9 can generate profits that can be used to improve and ensure the smallest possible environmental impact on the planet, including the extraction of the crude in the first place. 

Now, here’s the kicker:  Only government can put the conditions necessary in place to force the hand of private industry.  Private industry is not interested in funds being taken off the top to fund a clean-up of the oil sands. Private industry is not interested in building a new pair of pipelines with the most modern safety and environmental standards, to brand new refineries with the smallest environmental footprint.  Private industry is not interested in merely making offensive amounts of profit; they want grotesque, obscene amounts of profit.  And environmentalists hung from lamp posts.

Which is why government should step in..  Legislate the snot out of Line 9, as it is the most beneficial to the country as a whole, but also take 10% vig right off the top to fund the environmental clean-up of the oil sands and to ensure that the technology used in the next five to ten years is as safe and comprehensively monitored as possible.  Then take another 10% off the bottom to fund our own, new, safe, environmentally sane infrastructure to use Canadian resources for Canadian benefit. 

What this strategy means is we get the benefit of our oil and we dramatically increase the funding to fixing the environmental impact of the oil sands.  Both sides win.

Which is why it will never happen.

Monday morning a double-decker city transit bus collided with a passenger train in Ottawa.  Six killed and about 30 injured in one of those horrific things that happen in the world, in this case a little too close to home.  We’re going to overlook the tragedy for the time being and focus on what were the potential contributing factors as the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) sifts through several months worth of investigation.  By the way, the TSB is very thorough:  If there is a golden nugget, they’ll find it.

The OCTranspo bus, here, weighs in at 52,911 pounds, about 26 tons.  A passenger train weighs in around 60 tons per car, with the engine weighing around 268,800 pounds, or 134 tons.  Easy math, the bus will lose.  So will people walking on the tracks, or a car, or a tractor trailer full of steel beams.  The train is bigger, weighs more and can’t stop nearly as well as any bus, truck, snowmobile, ATV, hiker, moose, or scooter puke on a Vespa listening to Juice Newton bootlegs on his iPod with the volume up at 11. 

Train versus any thing usually ends poorly for the other thing.

A major contributing factor in Ottawa is what is called a grade crossing or a level crossing.  There are more than 40,000 of them in Canada, most of the white cross-buck warning, without lights, bells or barricades.  The vast majority are rural, off the beaten path and the locals know enough to stop, look and listen.  In urban areas, we get the full lights, bells and barricades treatment to keep us from being complete idiots.  Even then, there are idiots out there that this link gives you enough examples of just how dumb humans can be.

The fix is to keep trains away from vehicles.  Underpasses or overpasses cost money, but they work well at keeping the two apart.  High speed rail, by definition has no, or almost no level crossings to keep a 300 kilometer per hour passenger train away from everyone else.  They almost always have their own dedicated tracks to keep them away from other trains too, the engineering of complete separation ensuring more potential for safety.  Not safety as an absolute, but the potential for safety.  Barcelona is an example of the human overriding the potential for safety in high-speed rail accidents. 

Canada flirted with high-speed rail in the mid-60’s with the CN Turbo Train.  On its maiden trip, the Turbo clobbered truck at a level crossing near Kingston, ON, essentially pulling the plug on high-speed rail in Canada.  The costs were prohibitive to give the Turbo Train a dedicated, safe, right of way in the Quebec City-Windsor corridor.  Move the calendar to 2013 and the problem is still with us.  Land, bridges, overpasses, underpasses and infrastructure all cost a lot of money for very little visible return, except for that nebulous concept of safety.

Like pilots, train engineers and bus drivers, those people are always first at the accident and have a vested interest in things being as safe as we can make them.

The cheapest and fastest fix today is to legislate that any vehicle that carries more than 10 people or weighs more than 10 tons must come to a full stop at any railroad crossing, lights or not and only proceed when the way is clear.  It’s a simple, cheap fix the Provincial and Federal governments can put in place in a dozen phone calls, some emails and a couple of weeks work. 

Which is why it won’t be done.  Stop.  Look.  Listen.

We’re  not a fan of stirring up stuff but with the previous post Newtown, we think we hit a nerve.  Fair enough we hit a nerve and by way of acknowledgement, we’ve published the responses as they stand.  Not agreeing is perfectly acceptable behaviour in our books as well as vociferously backing up your argument with as many facts as is reasonable.  Being able to dish it out, means being able to take it and we accept that as part of genteel discourse.

Now, is America the problem?  By our judgement, yes and here come some facts that we left out of the published version for editorial reasons and we’ll take that criticism as given.

Population adjusted per 1,000 citizens, the Seventh United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice systems during 1998 to 2000, (the most recent figures readily available) lists Murders with firearms per capita, by country thusly:

#1 South Africa – 0.719782 per 1000 people

#2 Columbia – 0.509801 per 1000 people

#3 Thailand – 0.312092 per 1000 people…

Skipping Zimbabwe, Mexico and Belarus here..

#7 Costa Rica – 0.0313745 per 1000 people

#8 United States – 0.0279271 per 1000 people

#9 Uruguay – 0.0245902 per 1000 people

Skipping a bunch more…

#19 Switzerland – 0.00596718 per 1000 people

#20 Canada – 0.050297 per 1000 people

#21 Germany – 0.00465844 per 1000 people.

Our source is here if you want to look it up and feel free to.  We don’t mind being fact-checked.  We encourage it.

Some other facts. Number of guns per capita by country, 2007

#1 United States – 88.8 per 100 residents

#2 Serbia – 58.2 per 100 residents

#3 Yemen – 54.8 per 100 residents

#4 Switzerland – 45.7 per 100 residents

#5 Cyprus – 36.4 per 100 residents…

Skipping a few here…

#13 Canada – 30.8 per 100 residents

#14 Austria – 30.4 per 100 residents

#15 Germany – 30.3 per 100 residents

Interesting how Switzerland has the 4th highest number of firearms per 100 people and yet ranks only 19th in Murders with firearms.  Switzerland has mandatory military service and citizens who serve are expected to keep their weapons and ammunition at home, ready to go on two hours’ notice, which explains why they have such a high ranking in number of guns, but not their low ranking in the number of murders with firearms.  It proves that sensible, secure, trained gun ownership is not the issue.

As for rampant stereotyping, we’ll buy some of the critique, but hear us out.  It is no more stereotypical than saying the Swiss are neat and fiscally prudent, Italians passionate, or that all Scottish cuisine is based on a drunken dare at a slaughterhouse.  We’ll partially apologize and try to do better going forward.

Exceptions don’t prove the rule and the millions of sensible, safe, concerned and sane gun owners are not all ready to run amok at the slightest provocation.  If you’re interpreting our remarks that way, give you head a shake and go read our post again.     

Crazies exist, which is why we noted Anders Brevik from Norway, as a crazy, who in possibly the best, most progressive health care system in the world, was not identified beforehand as a loon.  Health care can’t do that job, no matter where.  If we tripled American mental health spending tomorrow, we still can’t identify individuals who are likely to flip out and kill people.  Health care is not the issue.  

It was and is American media that stuffed a microphone in the face of the kids who survived the shooting and had the unadulterated gall to ask a child what they felt and heard during the shooting, parental permission or not.  This link from twitchy.com lists several of the comments from others regarding the media vultures who have wrapped themselves around this story.  Read some of the links and be embarrassed for your country rewarding that kind of corporate media behaviour.  Bloodthirsty and sensationalistic are the terms that come to mind. 

This doesn’t mean the UK, or Canadian media are any less culpable in our own back yards, or somehow ‘better’:  It means the US media as a whole needs to stop and think a moment or two and ask the hard question:  Is this the right thing to do, now, or can it wait?  We’d love to hear their argument as why they didn’t and we bet it comes down to Freedom of the Press as the reason and a Competitive Marketplace as the excuse. 

Using that same logic we expect to soon see Bill O’Reilly violating a giraffe, live, because Piers Morgan molested a mule and pulled a 12 share last night that beat Fox with a measly 4 share with O’Reilly talking to a vending machine about foreign policy.  “Dammit Bill, we need that 12 share to make our numbers for the quarter!”

To close the loop, as others have noted, it is the need for a discussion about National US Firearms laws to end the knobby melange of contradictory laws and standards that have mutated across the US, pushed and pulled by lobby groups and think tanks with more disparate agendas that Carter has little pills.

We’ve stood on the firearm platform before.  We’ve got no issue with firearm weapons more than 18 inches long, with a mag that holds no more than 8 rounds (or so) and can fire semi-auto.  Anything else you want, apply, wait for the background check and probably the firm, but polite ‘no’ from the authorities.  We are in favour of extensive, mandatory training of anyone who wants to have a firearm weapon so they can operate them in a prudent, safe and responsible manner.  Military re-enactors?  Apply, your reason is good enough (to us anyways) assuming you pass the background check and you have passed a firearms safety course.  Do expect to be audited once in a while, but not onerously so.   

We’ve also promulgated a societal and legal change using something called a “Double Double” meaning. committing a crime with a firearm weapon doubles the sentence.  Discharging the firearm doubles it again. No time off for good behaviour or parole.  You serve the full sentence.  The concept being to discourage the criminal use of firearm weapons as harshly as possible.  It will take a generation to get that to sink in, much like it has taken a generation to curtail cigarette smoking, drinking and driving, having a martini to cure morning sickness or using seatbelts in your car.  It is time consuming and is not an instant fix.

Which is what all the nattering is really about.  Everyone wants an instant fix to prevent a copycat, or another loon from going off and finding the readily available tools, cheap-jack rationale and attendant media coverage to slaughter innocent people.  Most have glommed onto “Gun Control” as the Instant Fix, but that’s not the whole story or even half of the fix. 

Where the blame lies is in the inability of America to have a peaceable, dignified, sane, learned, fact-based discussion about how they want the citizens of their country to behave with each other.  There is too much sensationalism, knee-jerk reactions and political axe-grinding in the media to have anything but sensationalism, knee-jerk reactions and political axe-grinding by their citizens.  It has to stop and you have to fix it.

Goddammit, you’re Americans, you know better, you’re smarter than most and you have the will to take back your own media from the cretins.  Open a dialogue, in all directions, come to a consensus, make the decisions and get on with life where you aren’t being manipulated every 12 seconds by the circus you call a media telling you what you think and how to react.  Ignore the political manipulations from the Right and the Left and make up your own minds. 

Get this fixed.  You deserve better.