Western Standard - Saying the unsayable about coal... it's still the way to go

00:00:00.000 China's killing our canola.

00:00:05.360 $45 billion gone.

00:00:08.480 Western farmers bleed.

00:00:10.980 Mark Carney?

00:00:12.720 Silent.

00:00:14.260 Made millions off Beijing's dime.

00:00:17.300 He won't fight.

00:00:18.840 He's Beijing's banker, not our prime minister.

00:00:30.000 Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show.

00:00:50.800 I'm Nigel Hannaford. It is Friday, April the 20th, and my guest today is Dr. Joseph Fournier,

00:00:59.000 a longtime columnist with the Western Standard, specializing in controversial subjects, let's say.

00:01:05.200 Welcome to the show, Joseph.

00:01:08.040 Why, thank you, Nigel. Appreciate you having me.

00:01:10.420 Oh, we've been wanting to do this for a long time.

00:01:13.700 Joseph, you're a PhD physicist.

00:01:17.040 You're an energy industry veteran.

00:01:19.220 Worked in Calgary in the oil sands at Fort McMurray down in Utah.

00:01:23.660 Do they have oil sands down in Utah?

00:01:25.840 We were trying to make a run at it.

00:01:27.920 They have got every kind of hydrocarbon under the sun in Utah.

00:01:31.420 But 2020 happened, just put it that way.

00:01:35.040 Oh, I see.

00:01:35.940 All right.

00:01:36.500 Well, 12 years in the pit, and you've gone deep on some of the things that affect our lives deeply.

00:01:42.980 energy security, coal mining, climate science and policy.

00:01:47.160 Basically, for nearly three years now,

00:01:50.240 you've tried to make clear to our readers

00:01:51.920 what doesn't seem obvious on first reading.

00:01:56.220 It's quite a challenge.

00:01:59.220 Joseph, first a word from our sponsors.

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00:02:38.240 So, Joseph, let's get right down to the meaty stuff.

00:02:41.960 You got kicked off LinkedIn recently for a while.

00:02:45.060 Nobody gets kicked off LinkedIn.

00:02:46.660 What do you do?

00:02:49.260 How deep did you go?

00:02:51.380 You know, the thing is, LinkedIn, the professionals, white-collar professionals,

00:02:56.640 town square, social media is where lately I've been,

00:03:00.280 the last couple of years where I've been usually posting my comments,

00:03:04.700 my articles I write for Western Standard.

00:03:08.240 other long form pieces um i have no idea what it was that i posted sad uh that got me restricted

00:03:18.400 for a few weeks this is the second time this year and you know one thing that i did you ask them

00:03:27.360 many times yeah and how does it go when you take things up with linkedin well it's

00:03:31.920 It's not like you can pick up a phone, right?

00:03:35.400 It's like an automated help desk.

00:03:37.820 You try to send them a message.

00:03:42.100 I tried both through the help desk on X as well as try to get back in through a identity verification step on LinkedIn.

00:03:53.200 And probably about 36 times I tried.

00:03:57.420 But I had.

00:03:58.040 You've tried 36 times.

00:04:00.700 Yeah.

00:04:00.880 to find out why you have been restricted on your use of linkedin right and with and you still don't

00:04:08.160 have a any idea no i think one of the things that happened was i've got about 14 000 followers on

00:04:14.480 linkedin and you know and pretty avid avid group of people who really high five me a lot of course

00:04:20.960 there's a lot of people who push back on some of the things i say but a lot of my followers were

00:04:25.280 really quite disappointed and they were they were sending me emails and some and people who had my

00:04:30.720 texts were were also relaying information to me but make a long story short i had there was dozens

00:04:38.400 of people who were writing linkedin demanding that they re uh unrestrict my account but i think in

00:04:45.920 the end that helped a bit just people i think maybe linkedin started getting tired a little bit

00:04:50.480 but this is a common thing uh that linkedin does and it doesn't matter sometimes if you've got only

00:04:56.080 500 followers or 50 000 it's if you if you start to talk about topics that are not it's usually

00:05:07.440 criticism of left to center ideas right those ones are usually will be what gets you you restricted

00:05:16.880 they usually will let you back

00:05:19.460 sometimes they'll give you a permanent ban

00:05:21.680 it could last years

00:05:23.480 but

00:05:24.820 in the end

00:05:26.380 it's just a technique

00:05:28.180 to

00:05:29.400 intimidate you

00:05:33.040 and to discourage you

00:05:35.000 from using the platform

00:05:36.680 to talk about

00:05:37.420 their favorite narratives

00:05:40.940 yeah well I mean we're very

00:05:42.740 familiar at the western standard

00:05:44.540 with the risks of publishing on social media i mean it's one thing when you are an old-fashioned

00:05:51.020 newspaper if you've got your printing press you you run it you take your newspapers out and sell

00:05:57.180 them deliver them to the door that's pretty hard to interfere with but here it can be somebody

00:06:03.180 who's um you know does linkedin have fact checkers no thank god what for the benefit of

00:06:11.100 of people who may not be quite as into this stuff as we are what is a fact checker well fact checker

00:06:18.540 you saw them come out really and really a lot in 2020 it's just if you post something a link to

00:06:26.320 western standard article that uh is flagged as having some keywords say maybe talking about

00:06:33.180 covid lockdowns they'll give you post that article the algorithm automatically goes oh

00:06:40.200 western standard article it's talking about something that we don't want them talking about

00:06:44.960 so we're going to attach a warning label yeah and and some facts that are accepted you know the first

00:06:54.320 joseph the first time i heard of fact checkers i thought of some genial old gentleman with glasses

00:07:00.220 in a library with a bunch of leather brown books and something comes across the screen that he

00:07:05.540 thinks is questionable and he actually checks to see whether it is true or not but the impression

00:07:11.380 that i've got since and you've only helped to solidify that impression is that it's probably a

00:07:16.660 25 year old kid whose last job was serving coffee with pink hair and they just know what to take out

00:07:23.300 and that's what they do it's you know fact checking they're censoring to your point you know the the

00:07:28.820 what my followers like the most of what of all the things that i talk about or the contact i

00:07:37.260 create they love it when i take a scientific paper something that's hot off the press

00:07:44.420 and i will pull out a figures a couple figures or two i'll make a meme a simple meme because

00:07:51.880 no one has the time of day to find their way around paywalls and to sit down and read a dry

00:07:57.760 scientific paper but they don't tell a story Nigel about a complex thing to break it down

00:08:05.360 so the average person can understand it people just love that you know and but so I'm a PhD

00:08:11.060 scientist breaking it down condensing it providing relevant commentary on publications

00:08:19.620 and that gets me banned that was not banned but restricted well restricted I mean it's a ban

00:08:25.380 yeah it's a bad and you can't put your word out so finally now you know thank you know i'm glad i

00:08:30.260 was allowed back because my profile is also my curricular vitae right if you want to see who i

00:08:35.620 am and what i've done you can go to my account so if i get restricted from it it's a bit of an

00:08:40.420 inconvenience i think you said 14 you had 14 000 followers yeah how many impressions in a year do

00:08:46.100 you i had 10 million you had 10 million impressions on linkedin in a year in in about 18 months so

00:08:53.860 So it was about $7 million I had in 2024.

00:08:59.840 But then something happened.

00:09:01.520 I got restricted in the new year, and then I got restricted again.

00:09:05.360 Each time I got allowed back.

00:09:06.640 But when I'm allowed back, my analytics plummet.

00:09:10.680 They just get totally throttled.

00:09:12.700 So if I have someone share my post or my article,

00:09:17.780 they'll often generate about 1,000 impressions,

00:09:20.480 meaning about 1,000 people saw it go through their feed.

00:09:23.860 it's about a thousand to one but now that i'm back i'm getting about it's about 150 to one

00:09:29.980 but do you know what's so cool it's like my my followers who are a high five in me for the last

00:09:36.040 week about hey thank god you're back on we missed your content now they are even more supportive

00:09:43.940 now they're the number of reshares i'm getting okay so you're obviously you've got a relationship

00:09:48.780 of going with the people who follow you,

00:09:52.200 you know, we all know Facebook will drop you

00:09:55.120 like a brick if they don't like you.

00:09:58.640 But is your experience typical on LinkedIn

00:10:02.400 or a little on the unusual side?

00:10:05.560 It's a bit unusual because of the fact

00:10:07.520 that I focus so much on science.

00:10:09.840 That's okay.

00:10:10.620 That's the great thing.

00:10:12.240 If we have a columnist here at the Western Standard

00:10:16.360 who is unusual that he gets dropped off LinkedIn for writing about science,

00:10:21.060 that tells me we are bringing a fresh perspective.

00:10:24.240 I think so.

00:10:25.140 Or you are bringing a fresh perspective to us.

00:10:27.900 So in the last year, I know you've been writing a fair bit about coal mining.

00:10:35.220 And back three years ago, you were very detailed on energy security

00:10:41.460 with a focus on Alberta.

00:10:42.720 At the time, Mr. Trudeau, the then prime minister, was insisting upon net zero by, I think, 2035.

00:10:52.180 The provincial government was willing to work with it, but not to meet that particular goal.

00:10:58.180 And you drew attention to the fact that we didn't have enough generating plants of the kind that you can just switch on when you need power.

00:11:05.880 I mean, wind, solar, you know, if it's a cold, dark night, you're not getting any power.

00:11:10.000 So that's what you need to generate.

00:11:14.180 And you really brought that subject forward.

00:11:17.460 And I saw very soon after that announcements from the provincial government,

00:11:22.660 maybe they were in the works all the way, I don't know.

00:11:25.220 But it wasn't long after that that they started announcing the development

00:11:30.140 of more natural gas generated.

00:11:33.540 Now, correlation causation, I don't know.

00:11:36.740 How's it going now?

00:11:37.940 Is Alberta catching up with its needs?

00:11:42.200 Well, power markets have improved substantially over the last, you know, Daniel,

00:11:47.080 Premier Smith has been in for two years plus, right, on an exact date.

00:11:52.760 Some of the initiatives that she's had put through her and her ministers.

00:11:57.380 Plus, over the last year, there's been two large gas plant power generation facilities that have been commissioned.

00:12:05.700 And that's really brought prices down, at least on the generation side.

00:12:11.260 You know, transmission fees and distribution fees are still through the roof, which is like 40 percent, 35 percent of your monthly bill.

00:12:19.000 But at least we've walked away from the edge of the abyss a bit in terms of risks of blackouts.

00:12:27.500 And, you know, it's, you know, Premier Smith is a hardcore supporter of natural gas power generation.

00:12:35.700 um i support coal because you know i moved back to by roots no last six years seven years i moved

00:12:43.340 out to rockyford area and um you know just you can't drive around alberta without understanding

00:12:49.980 number one coal built this province and you know like there was a time in rockyford where up to

00:12:58.360 the early 80s where you could hop on a train a coal-powered train and it would take you basically

00:13:03.480 downtown calgary for shopping you could be home by the end of the day and you know it's rural

00:13:09.940 rural alberta is is got deep roots in coal and i'm i'm very much as a philosopher as someone who

00:13:18.760 sees down the road a long ways at least i'd like to think i do um i think we're going in the wrong

00:13:25.500 direction as a society and i very very much want to see a reinvestment in rural infrastructure

00:13:31.520 I'm sure we're probably kicked off LinkedIn.

00:13:33.920 You're praising coal.

00:13:36.280 I'd say the most craziest things, according to some people, yeah.

00:13:39.500 Okay, well, all right.

00:13:40.340 You obviously like coal, and as a matter of fact, I do as well,

00:13:43.080 but that's not a here nor there.

00:13:48.000 Everybody says that coal is just a terrible generator of carbon dioxide.

00:13:53.320 Natural gas is better.

00:13:54.340 Well, that may be so.

00:13:55.920 um so why you obviously that argument doesn't doesn't interfere with your thinking much what

00:14:03.580 is it about coal that you like and it gives you the allows you to overlook the the knock on it

00:14:10.100 that it's just right gonna burn up the earth everything has costs and benefits you can't

00:14:16.320 look at just the negatives you have to look at the positives as well okay from point the third

00:14:22.560 highest cause of death in Canada is accidents by frontline healthcare workers. You know,

00:14:30.740 only a mentally unstable person would focus on that fact and demand we shut down hospitals, 0.83

00:14:39.400 right? But we've done that with coal. I'm assuming that you're, I've never heard that.

00:14:45.100 Did you say the third highest rate of accidents among that line item of accidents?

00:14:52.800 It's a dangerous thing going into a hospital in an emergency room.

00:14:55.420 You go spend the night in the ER, and you can see how easy it is for our overworked, critical,

00:15:01.400 frontline health care workers to make accidents and bad diagnoses by, you know, just they're overworked or they're over, you know.

00:15:07.980 Okay, so is it the patients who are dying or the frontline workers who are dying?

00:15:12.800 Patients.

00:15:13.300 Patients.

00:15:13.760 Oh, okay.

00:15:14.240 That makes sense.

00:15:15.100 I was also saying that you meant that that was a dangerous profession.

00:15:18.060 Oh, no, sorry.

00:15:20.280 It was just an example.

00:15:21.660 We have to get back to looking at pros and cons, costs and benefits.

00:15:26.380 And the benefits of coal are absolutely immense.

00:15:31.280 In North America, if you look at the resource base of coal versus oil versus natural gas,

00:15:39.780 there's more energy in coal than there is in oil and gas combined.

00:15:45.100 And so the future is coal, unless we find an alternative primary energy source like uranium or thorium.

00:15:57.360 And so I try to provide this counter argument to remind people that we've lost perspective on coal because it has some negative things.

00:16:09.600 Some people think CO2 emissions is a bad thing.

00:16:12.700 I don't.

00:16:13.300 I think there's actually more benefits to CO2 emissions than any measurable negative.

00:16:20.980 Definitely coal can be a problem when it comes to ink.

00:16:24.620 You know, if you don't got good technologies on your stack, on your exhaust, you can have pollution in certain cases.

00:16:33.760 That was not the case here with Alberta's coal power plants.

00:16:37.060 And they were decommissioned early.

00:16:39.900 they were they were operating quite well okay so this actually takes us to the stuff of the

00:16:48.300 election that's coming up in in 10 days mr mr carney has obviously been famous for a long time

00:16:59.260 for being an advocate for shutting in energy not just coal coal first but but also oil also natural

00:17:08.460 gas uh he what is he missing when he he thinks that the the emissions are going to uh fry the

00:17:19.820 earth he thinks that although canada's contribution to the overall level of carbon dioxide in the

00:17:29.160 atmosphere is pretty small nevertheless we should do it i guess to set a good example

00:17:34.160 So if you could have Mr. Carney here and you could talk to him for two minutes about it, knowing that he probably isn't going to agree with you anyway, but what would you tell him?

00:17:47.860 What is it that you would wish he understood or wish he would acknowledge?

00:17:52.100 Well, if I was to speak as a citizen, I probably wouldn't want to say on Hannaford what I would say to him, but as a scientist.

00:18:01.880 It's good for ratings.

00:18:04.160 um it's i'd tell him to stick stick with um monetary policy and quit trying to be a messiah

00:18:12.000 because he does not know the science the science i don't even like using that word but it's thrown

00:18:17.760 around a lot uh the the truth of the matter is the literature is showing that satellite data

00:18:25.620 has been monitoring every square inch of our top of the earth's atmosphere now for

00:18:30.420 I don't know, 40 years. And I just posted an article, a publication that came out last year

00:18:37.900 that shows that there is no evidence that heat flux out the top of the atmosphere

00:18:47.240 is declining as we add more and more CO2 into the atmosphere. That's a problem for people like

00:18:56.800 carney because he says your tailpipe is trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere so you should see

00:19:04.320 less heat escaping into space we're gonna boil we're gonna burn because you're trapping heat

00:19:10.380 with greenhouse gas so-called but there's no evidence of it in fact the what measurements

00:19:19.020 show is the opposite.

00:19:22.340 Heat flux

00:19:23.300 out the top of the atmosphere

00:19:25.260 is increasing

00:19:26.780 quite fast. The Earth

00:19:29.440 is releasing heat. There's no

00:19:31.420 evidence of heat being

00:19:33.600 trapped. The only place

00:19:35.560 the evidence exists

00:19:37.340 is in computer models.

00:19:40.820 And

00:19:41.100 one of my favorite climate scientists is

00:19:43.300 Dr. Curry, Judith Curry.

00:19:45.400 And on this topic, she just says

00:19:48.400 we need to do a lot less modeling and a lot more observational observations.

00:19:55.760 Get back to the basics. But there is no evidence of the boiling effect that the alarmists,

00:20:06.240 politicians, activists, even academics who need the funding, claim is there. It's just not.

00:20:13.040 Okay. See, there's no evidence.

00:20:16.900 People point out all the time that glass ears are melting.

00:20:20.380 Oh, there's your evidence.

00:20:22.280 How do you answer them?

00:20:23.760 Well, because there's a big difference between a warming climate

00:20:28.500 and a climate that is warming because heat is being trapped by CO2, as an example, gas.

00:20:40.200 Well, what is the difference?

00:20:41.480 because some people probably wouldn't say, well, it's a distinction without it.

00:20:44.880 There's a question I'll ask you.

00:20:46.420 The question should help you answer your own question.

00:20:50.340 In the morning, you get up just before the sun rises,

00:20:55.980 and you go aside for, you know, start your car and come back out an hour later.

00:21:03.920 It's gotten warm.

00:21:05.580 Why has it gotten warm?

00:21:08.640 Sun's up.

00:21:09.840 Sunshine.

00:21:10.240 Right. Exactly.

00:21:14.240 Another thing that you'll notice is a night that has a lot of cloud cover versus a night that has no cloud cover.

00:21:22.400 The cloud cover, the cloudy night will have a warmer temperature.

00:21:25.840 Yeah. So the crux of it is there's increase in sunshine, changes in cloud coverage, changes in the types of clouds like a low stratoform cloud right on the deck or cirrus cloud way, way up in the air.

00:21:41.940 different types of clouds scatter incoming shortwave radiation back to space or let

00:21:48.480 solar radiation hit the ground and warm up to dirt melt glaciers the hydrological cycles driven by

00:21:55.580 sunshine and clouds is a mediator and what we're finding from the satellite record now is that

00:22:02.860 we don't understand the physics clouds cloud dynamics and um it's i'm really quite excited

00:22:11.140 about it. We don't know the math, so we can't write a computer code to describe what it is we're

00:22:17.240 seeing. But what we're seeing shows we don't have the answers. Well, Joseph, I'm glad you're

00:22:23.900 monitoring this. And, you know, these, although it sounds very, you know, it's a great discussion,

00:22:31.600 but people say, well, tell me about the election. The fact is we are having an election, and this

00:22:39.460 is an issue in the election as to how we deal with the our atmospheric policy in in the years

00:22:48.500 going forward i'm going to ask you this last thing and then we're going to we're going to be out of

00:22:52.820 time okay but um when you have watched what mr polyev has to say about the uh about this subject

00:23:00.500 of climate change are you at all reassured by his answers no why not i'm not i don't see a single

00:23:06.740 conservative out there yet who's who is able to speak

00:23:14.340 probably jen from a genuine point of a genuine position on this topic um

00:23:21.460 maybe scott moe's get the closest i've found yes right like last year what was it the the

00:23:26.820 rural municipalities to saskatchewan all voted like 97 in favor to co2 is not a pollutant it is

00:23:36.340 the gas of life net zero is not zero like crazy talk right so it's very clear the the conservative

00:23:44.000 base in saskatchewan wants the saskatchewan party to go in a certain direction but he

00:23:50.200 politicians have to pivot to the center they have to represent the fuller spectrum

00:23:54.240 of their citizens right so pierre probably is doing the same thing he's he's he's trying to

00:24:01.940 get elected right so he can't actually speak to the science and um you know at least he's not

00:24:08.420 advocating for penalizing energy use and i'm sure and he is he is advocating for pipelines

00:24:16.580 so that's the good jobs and jobs and all that goes with it yeah joseph this has been great

00:24:23.860 really appreciate you coming in thank you for the western standard i'm nigel hanaford

00:24:30.980 what does success mean to you peace of mind financial freedom generational wealth what do

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Western Standard - April 19, 2025

Saying the unsayable about coal... it's still the way to go

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