Back at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, life was relatively simple. Most people lived a short and frugal life, fully occupied with the tasks of securing food and shelter to support a family. If you survived childhood, you became a farmer or a blacksmith, or a home-maker based largely on your gender and the circumstances under which you were raised. No need for a lot of thinking or planning about future alternatives for...
There is a general sentiment against plastic materials, but is it rational, and is it justified? Most important, is it helping the environment?
How can we know whether the reasons we claim to be against plastics represent our real motives, driven by evidence or an irrational dislike of this new, synthetic material based on emotions? Here are some questions designed to differentiate between the two.
Are you against plastics because we are “drowning in them”?
Plastics actually...
Many people see hydrogen as a foundation of the zero-emissions energy sources envisioned for later this century. Hydrogen burns to create energy, producing only water vapour as a combustion product. So – no carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced by burning oil and gas, which so many worry about causing climate change.
Actually, water vapour is a greenhouse gas, too, but there is so much of it in the atmosphere already that burning hydrogen would...
The Canada Energy Regulator (CER) recently published Canada’s Energy Future 2023, Energy Supply and Demand Projections to 2050 which “explores how possible energy futures might unfold for Canadians over the long term.” The CER is a respected organization, and the report does a very good job of explaining the work that was done and the various outcomes that were generated. I enjoyed reading it (no, really) because its genesis, methodologies, and results are so...
Nearly every day, we see media stories about the limited lifespan of the oil and gas industry, primarily, it seems, from people in high-income countries focused on reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
Organizations such as Carbon Tracker suggest that “companies have not sufficiently factored in the possibility that future demand could be significantly reduced by technological advances and changing policy.” As a result, they project that oil industry investors will be left holding “stranded assets”...
Those of you who subscribed to BIG Media Ltd. in the news platform’s inaugural year of 2021 might remember a piece I wrote about the power of critical thinking. I examined the idea of a “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” (Taking a critical look at the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’) – an area in the Pacific Ocean reportedly the size of a small country, and so densely packed with floating garbage that it presents a...
Machine learning (also called artificial intelligence or artificial neural networks) was originally designed to help better understand how the brain works. For example, how does the brain recognize images? Have a look at the image above, and describe what you see.
At the most basic level, it shows a vase sitting on a table next to a wall, and containing flowers (specifically, sunflowers). At the next level, many of you will have recognized it as...
The most recent official tally of numbers and causes of death in Alberta (2021) is available publicly, and the trends are alarming. I must admit I got a sinking feeling when I saw the data reveal a large increase in the 2021 death rates over 2020, which were already the highest in the past 20 years.
Things did not go in the right direction, despite government-mandated pandemic interventions (e.g., social distancing, masking, business closures) and...
Adequate, affordable, and available energy lies at the centre of modern human existence.
Energy for food, shelter, warmth, and transportation enables long, healthy and productive lives. Yet many in our society have lost sight of this fundamental truth, caught up in a blinkered focus on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. As a result, people and industries in many high-income nations are experiencing energy shortages, or are paying so much for energy that they cannot...
In the past month, I have attended two scientific conferences, each addressing a key component of humanity’s transition to more complex and diverse energy systems.
The North American Helium Conference, hosted by the Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists in Denver, brought together helium explorers from Canada and the United States to talk about finding and developing new sources of helium in secure domestic markets. The Atlantic Canada Carbon Neutrality Forum in Halifax explored how to...
