‘Painful summer ahead:’ Gas prices reach 211.9 in Metro Vancouver, expected to rise

petros

The Central Scrutinizer
Nov 21, 2008
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Low Earth Orbit
Nobody wants a refinery in their area. They can smell and don't look pretty.
They don't need to be huge to make gasoline and diesel. Easy to hide. As for smell, that is dependent on the feedstock.
 

Ron in Regina

"Voice of the West" Party
Apr 9, 2008
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Regina, Saskatchewan
The public policy landscape is littered with the wreckage of ideas that didn’t work out the way their architects intended. It might convince lesser mortals than our politicians and their claque that good intentions are not sufficient. But at least they meant well. Which you can’t say about unaffordable gasoline.

We’re getting a major Bart Simpson from politicians over $2/litre gas, frantically blaming anything and everything for the soaring cost of essential energy including Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And they have a point … in the short run.

Just as rising food prices will be due partly to less Russian and Ukrainian wheat reaching world markets, as well as less Russian and Ukrainian fertilizer and fertilizer feedstock, the energy shock matters. But all these things are distractions, really, because while virtually nobody except Putin wanted Russia to invade Ukraine (which typically did not work out the way he intended), they all want gasoline to become prohibitively expensive.

To them, $2.22 a litre is just the beginning. And if you’re wondering how high they would go, just watch them.

In theory the figure is infinity. In case you hadn’t noticed, despite their endless hollering about it, the great and the good are united on climate change, as indeed on the Canada Health Act, abortion, deficits, euthanasia and every other important issue. It seems in Canada the greatest threat to sensible public policy is lively debate in which dissenting views are not promptly stigmatized and quashed. But I digress.

The point is, everyone who’s anyone believes in a man-made climate emergency crisis breakdown in which bad weather will destroy civilization by around 2050 unless we find refuge in the magical land of “Net Zero” where humanity gives off no more carbon “pollution” than it absorbs. Thus with transportation being a major source of “greenhouse gas” emissions, along with housing, farming and such like, it is crucially vital that you stop putting gas in your car. And since you will not stop doing so if you can afford it, unless they make gasoline-powered cars illegal, they must make it impossible for you to afford it.

Because a major point on which elite opinion is apparently united is that clarity in public discussion risks provoking insolent questions, this aspect of the situation has been persistently obscured by obscure rhetoric. Promises not to raise the carbon tax, to rebate it, or to remove it temporarily because expensive gas makes voters angry have been pumped into the air faster than man-made CO2. But they have all been nonsense since the sworn goal, and I challenge you to find a politician besides Maxime Bernier who doesn’t pledge allegiance to it, is to price gasoline out of reach.

Congratulations. It’s working. How do you like it now?


Again, in the interest of clarity, let me repeat something I’ve said often in the climate debate. If the emergency is real, and if fossil fuels are causing it, we must stop using them at all costs. But there is nothing explicit or implicit in that statement about having to deny those costs. Rarely in life do we get to overcome a major crisis without breaking a sweat.

The modern sensibility begs to differ. Hence all these social justice warriors “challenging authority” with the full support of authority. But that world of make-believe is poor training ground for the real world where even the most meritorious actions, and perhaps especially that kind, often bring pain, suffering, anxiety, danger and even death. As, for instance, if you really have to get rid of fossil fuels in the next three decades, a phrase which does not here mean virtue-signalling while kicking real action down the road for 25 years.

There’s an especially pathetic deathbed line from James Buchanan, the U.S. chief executive who presided helpless and hypnotized as the Civil War approached, that “Whatever the result may be, I shall carry to my grave the consciousness that I at least meant well for my country.” But talk is cheap and good intentions famously lead somewhere even hotter than anthropogenic global warming will supposedly make the Earth.

In the real world, you must replace existing sources of energy if you want to get rid of them without causing misery, hunger, cold and death. Which by and large our leaders do. So if you really can build a fleet of electric vehicles suitable to the Canadian climate, and a grid to charge them, and a vast array of shiny new Green Economy energy plants to power that grid, get to it, and spare me the windy verbiage and sunny ways. We’re talking next-generation nuclear here and pronto.

Whatever you do, don’t promise to make gasoline unaffordable and then when it works go “It wasn’t me.” It was. For once you did it on purpose. Congratulations. Sort of.
 
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Ron in Regina

"Voice of the West" Party
Apr 9, 2008
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Regina, Saskatchewan
What theory would that be?
To modify our behaviour through financial disincentives to make us travel less, and heat our homes less, by making everything more expensive with a carbon tax, to save the planet from Canada’s 1.3% contribution to global carbon emissions while still growing our population through immigration approximately 400,000 people annually through immigration each year.

To save the world, or at least to reduce our part in damaging it. Atmospheric CO2 has continued to reach record high concentrations, even after the COVID-19 pandemic brought much of the world’s air travel to a halt. The more the greenhouse effect accelerates, the sooner Canada will have to contend with disasters even worse than the ones it’s already faced, like intensifying wildfires in Western Canada, heavy spring floods in Quebec and Ontario and melting permafrost that drives northern communities into the sea. Canada’s pledge under the 2015 Paris agreement is to cut emissions by 30 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030, and to have net zero emissions by 2050. That’s the theory.

 
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pgs

Hall of Fame Member
Nov 29, 2008
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B.C.
Parkland Refinery in BB


is mothballed
To modify our behaviour through financial disincentives to make us travel less, and heat our homes less, by making everything more expensive with a carbon tax, to save the planet from Canada’s 1.3% contribution to global carbon emissions while still growing our population through immigration approximately 400,000 people annually through immigration each year.

To save the world, or at least to reduce our part in damaging it. Atmospheric CO2 has continued to reach record high concentrations, even after the COVID-19 pandemic brought much of the world’s air travel to a halt. The more the greenhouse effect accelerates, the sooner Canada will have to contend with disasters even worse than the ones it’s already faced, like intensifying wildfires in Western Canada, heavy spring floods in Quebec and Ontario and melting permafrost that drives northern communities into the sea. Canada’s pledge under the 2015 Paris agreement is to cut emissions by 30 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030, and to have net zero emissions by 2050. That’s the theory.

Yet our illustrious in his own mind PM flys daily in his government supplied Challenger while extorting us to reduce emissions.
 
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petros

The Central Scrutinizer
Nov 21, 2008
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Low Earth Orbit

Ron in Regina

"Voice of the West" Party
Apr 9, 2008
26,141
9,550
113
Regina, Saskatchewan
I'm sure y'all can cobble together a refining rig out of a 55-gallon drum. Being all Men of Westernesse, self-reliant Tuff Gize and all.
Well, a 55-gallon drum (we call them a 208 litre container) is probably the wrong place to start in all honesty. Something heavier, designed to handle heat & pressure, but readily available at CMS (our local scrapyard) in a cost efficient quantity, and repurposing which is good for the environment.

I’m picturing a series of stacked Residential Water Heaters, cutting off the tops & bottoms and welding them together like a vertical culvert, with them already having drain valving at the approximate relative heights….& a framework (pyramid like in shape) to support it in the prairie winds for stability for a small scale distillation tower. It’s really hard to blow over a pyramid that’s anchored into the ground.

Then a readily available feedstock of crude oil to feed it (Thank God we’re in Westernesse with a train running to Regina from Stoughten) heated using a combination of baby seals, endangered spotted owls, whale blubber previously used to power David Suzuki’s bus, and the tears of Green Peace protestors.

The actual mechanical process it a direct transference of Grade 10 Chemistry and some good old Westernesse grit and wherewithal, but the hold up would be permits & licensing in the current political environment of Justin/Jagmeet-land….& that’s where your experience and knowledge can become an asset to your concept of energy Independence for small scale nuclear reactors…I mean distillation towers…to overcome the legal & regulatory hurtles that would inevitably obstruct this project.
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taxslave

Hall of Fame Member
Nov 25, 2008
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Vancouver Island
I'm sure y'all can cobble together a refining rig out of a 55-gallon drum. Being all Men of Westernesse, self-reliant Tuff Gize and all.
Well since we have been making shine that way for generations I suppose we could. Could be difficult getting the environmental permits though.