Western Standard - June 21, 2022


CORY'S RANT： Fossil fuels aren’t going away any time soon

Topics
climate hypocrisy and energy realities
Mentioned
Sebastian Vettel Formula Coal
Multiple arrests after shooting incident CORY'S RANT： Smith’s aggressive campaign for the leadership.

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

193.84

Word count

886

Sentence count

52

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

For years, Germany was held up as an example of how green a nation could be. They had ambitious plans, and they were investing massive amounts of money into renewable energy forms such as solar, wind, and biofuels. Germany was apparently well-positioned to reach the still-mythical status of being a net zero nation with their emissions. We were told we have to follow Germany s example if we wanted to save the world from dreaded climate change. Well, Germany just quietly and pretty sheepishly announced their returning to coal-fired electricity generation.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 For years, Germany was held up as an example of how green a nation could be.
00:00:05.260 They had ambitious plans, and they were investing massive amounts of money into renewable energy forms such as solar, wind, and biofuels.
00:00:13.320 Germany was apparently well-placed to reach the still-mythical status of being a net-zero nation with their emissions.
00:00:20.240 We were told we have to follow Germany's example if we wanted to save the world from dreaded climate change.
00:00:25.220 I mean, otherwise oceans would rise, polar bears would die, and the world would run out of fluffy bunnies.
00:00:30.000 If one was to question Germany's energy path, of course, they'd be labeled as climate heretics, and surely these are people who want the world to burn. 0.92
00:00:38.060 Well, Germany just quietly and pretty sheepishly announced their returning-to-coal-fired electricity generation.
00:00:45.300 Coal is arguably the most emissions-incentive form of electricity generation of them all.
00:00:50.600 When the only alternative, though, is to bankrupt your nation while citizens freeze in the dark, coal suddenly doesn't look so bad anymore.
00:00:57.120 Now, this hasn't stopped German Formula One driver Sebastian Vettel from committing an astounding act of hypocrisy
00:01:04.600 as he arrived in Canada after having shipped an entire race car here along with his crew,
00:01:09.220 only to wear a shirt criticizing Canadian oil production.
00:01:12.940 Climate change cultists, like him, live in a world of denial. 0.94
00:01:16.340 Vettel was just one of the most visible and hypocritical of those examples.
00:01:19.480 The world is dependent upon fossil fuels, and they're going to remain so for many decades to come,
00:01:24.960 no matter how loudly green activists scream or how much governments pump into unrealistic renewable energy projects.
00:01:32.260 Germany can't blame Russia, the Russia-Ukraine war for their woes, by the way.
00:01:36.020 Their energy crisis was coming to a peak months before that broke out.
00:01:39.540 It shut down too many forms of energy generation, and renewable sources couldn't keep up with the demand.
00:01:44.300 Simple as that. Ideology is dandy, but reality will trump it every time.
00:01:49.720 Germany wasn't alone. The U.K. had been hitting energy shortages,
00:01:52.740 and in California there have been brownouts in power provision for years,
00:01:56.100 despite them being awash with oil and gas.
00:01:59.620 Now, Canada's been trying to move down the same path. 0.57
00:02:01.720 We've shut down and regulated countless energy projects to death.
00:02:05.160 New oil and gas infrastructure projects are impossible to complete,
00:02:09.020 even if they manage to somehow get approved.
00:02:11.400 We indulge in endless delays caused by extreme environmentalists,
00:02:15.200 as we've been watching with the CGL line in B.C.
00:02:18.160 Speaking of the most ethical, clean-burning natural gas on Earth, by the way,
00:02:21.460 Canada has deposits of it that could last centuries.
00:02:24.140 The world's screaming for it, yet we won't let ourselves produce it.
00:02:27.280 Quebec has shut down a pending LNG terminal that was slated for export,
00:02:31.980 and has banned development of gas fields in their province.
00:02:34.680 Canada's Arctic has huge natural gas deposits,
00:02:37.120 and thousands of capped wells just waiting to come into production.
00:02:40.580 We regulated the McKenzie Valley pipeline to death, though,
00:02:43.260 so we can't get the gas to market,
00:02:45.240 while government handouts remain the prime form of income in communities
00:02:48.200 such as Tuktuk and Nuvik.
00:02:50.600 Canada's drained billions of conventional energy companies
00:02:53.400 through fees and taxes over the years,
00:02:54.920 and it's been pouring that money into electric cars for over a decade.
00:02:57.940 And how's that worked out?
00:02:59.340 Fewer than 5% of Canadians drive electric vehicles.
00:03:02.140 So all this for what?
00:03:03.400 So countries can return to burning coal?
00:03:05.180 Well, let's not forget the countries that never stop burning coal,
00:03:09.180 and have always been expanding the use of it, by the way.
00:03:11.020 China, Russia, India, they don't care about our climate virtue signaling over here.
00:03:15.540 If we do want China and India to consider switching to better forms of energy,
00:03:18.460 we'd best start sending them natural gas.
00:03:20.460 Windmills aren't going to cut it. 0.95
00:03:22.320 The world needs to cut back on the irrational climate idealism
00:03:26.000 and embrace practical realism.
00:03:27.960 We can mitigate emissions through cleaner production of existing petrochemical products.
00:03:32.200 The oil and gas sector has made huge strides in emission reduction,
00:03:35.560 yet they get little to no credit for it.
00:03:37.620 Love or hate natural gas, it's abundant, reliable, and cleaner than other forms of generation.
00:03:42.000 Let's expand it.
00:03:43.180 I mean, maybe breakthroughs are going to happen that are going to allow us to wean ourselves
00:03:45.980 from fossil fuels one day, but we're nowhere close to that point yet.
00:03:49.640 Windmills are expensive, limited in what they can generate, and they're unreliable.
00:03:53.740 Solar, it's expensive, takes up huge tracts of land,
00:03:56.720 uses loads of rare metals, and is unreliable as well. 0.95
00:03:59.500 If the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine, you're shit out of luck.
00:04:03.120 The world is trying to put the cart before the horse,
00:04:05.800 but trying to shut down viable energy sources until the alternative is here.
00:04:10.340 Trying to force the issue is only leading to world energy insecurity,
00:04:13.560 human suffering, and is contributing to inflation.
00:04:16.880 Germany can still serve as an example for the world,
00:04:19.920 not as a nation saving us from climate change, though,
00:04:22.140 but as an example of what happens when a nation lets hopes and dreams
00:04:24.960 overtake their sense of reality.
00:04:27.140 Let's learn from them rather than emulate them.
00:04:29.500 Canada can power the world,
00:04:31.320 but we have to stop indulging the climate extremists first.