This one won't be popular or well-received for my blogs. Writing on society's ills, I must address the hot topics of guns and climate change. In the long list of things to get right, these aren't the significant issues we need to be worried about in Canada, Edmonton, OR at least not the way we are. So here are the two most giant nothing burgers we have today!
Climate change is 100% real; I will not deny that. My question is, do we matter in that? LA and NY have 20 million people. All of Canada has just cracked 40 mill. Our neighbors to the south are well over 330 mill. We are a drop in the bucket compared to them; in fact, we barely crack the top 40 for nations by population. India, China, Pakistan, Brazil, Russia & the States, if they don't change, we could change everything about ourselves, and it wouldn't matter. This does not mean we shouldn't try, but we should do helpful things. I have said I am for a sin tax on health issues and addiction. I am not for the carbon tax. I have to heat my house in the winter. Also, my job requires me to travel and use a lot of gas. My job pays my bills. It isn't like I spend hours, days, and weeks a year driving the same roads for fun! Carbon tax is a failure. The government and then our local city council were so happy about a single-use plastics ban that was overturned as unreasonable and unconstitutional. If that is the description it is given, it is a failure. It is like everything else we do; it was a bandaid. It is better to use those reusable bags for groceries. Even though the plastic ones did come in handy around the house, this is an annoying BUT good thing. The charge for paper is a cash grab for companies, though. It isn't costing them $.015 for the bag. Companies should make money, but we hear grocery stores charge too much these days; here is another cash grab. The straws that melt in your drink, the wooden? silverware that comes with take-out food that breaks, it was all a joke. None of that made the world a better, greener place. Just made money for companies and took down our quality of life.
EVs are brilliant; I will freely admit that they work great in major cities. They don't work for me; they aren't made yet for long trips without a long charge during the trip. If you want to do something good, work on that. Put the time and resources into making EVs useful for everyone! Or work on the infrastructure. MASSIVE infrastructure is needed if the goal is to have everyone in one in the next 20 years. You can't force a city of a million to switch beyond what we have now without preparing. That will be a disaster!! I have already said that Whitehorse runs heavily on electricity. They have rolling blackouts when people hit the grid hard. In Alberta alone, 14 cities are larger than Whitehorse; we are not ready for more electric use, and if a city much smaller can't do it, how can we? When a million people come home, plug in the EV, and turn on the heat pump, what do you think will happen?? Instead of working on single-use plastics, focus on something MUCH larger for Canada. Battling single-use plastics seems dumb when we have something so much more prominent on the horizon that could be useful.
I can speak with some knowledge of heating, and heat is a big thing in northern Alberta or any part of northern Canada. Heat pumps are great; they are the way of the future. 90% of the time, they are okay for the north. However, they lose efficiency quickly and flat out don't work below -29. We don't have snaps of constant -29, even if it feels that way, but I don't want an appliance that doesn't run at all times. My furnace right now will run year-round. A heat pump won't; they require a backup heat source. This is another example of where we are doing the right thing but stopping. Significant rebates for a heat source that isn't 100% reliable. Why not work again on the tech, making it work all the time? Of course, the government doesn't want to enter private industry, so why not put rebates or grants out so people are working to better the tech? Better the EVs, better the heat pumps. Yes, both are steps in the right direction, BUT they are half-measures. I also want to comment on natural gas furnaces. At this point, there is a 99% efficient unit. You can pair that with a programmable stat. It will only run when you want it to. This is a pretty damn good idea, and it works year-round. That is still better than a heat pump. We are so concerned with virtue signaling that we are doing our best with something not quite ready but sounds good; we ignore a great solution we have had for years.
(This part wasn't in what I was going to publish but the world threw a prime example at me Saturday January 13th 2024. An Alberta wide alert went out to stop using power. The grid was at max pull. To be fair people did, our neighborhood went black. From social media I heard many areas did as well. I also saw pictures of the downtown cores of Edmonton and Calgary completely light up. I have to ask why?? Also why are all those tacky neon signs still on? If we need power down, why can I still see ads but I am not supposed to have my oven on? Not the point I am after though. This is exactly what happens when we hammer through use electric and we aren't ready for it. Electric is the way of the future, I know that, even if I disagree. However we need a grid that can handle it. Imagine for a minute how much more drain if every house had an EV in the drive charging or more than one. If we were all using electric back up heat on our heat pump. We would have been sitting in the dark, with no heat in -40. That is a disaster. I get a few generators were down for scheduled work and I guess the cold put some down? Point being if we are moving to that system it better be able to run at the worst of Canadian winters. Before we push everyone onto electric we need to be ready. My high efficient gas furnaces worked great and I don't think it is nearly the drain an electric heater would have been. I don't think my block heater is nearly the draw from the grid charging an EV is. Again I get it is the future but we need to be ready for it. Instead of virtue signaling on the world stage we should be building for the future)
I want to quickly talk about Alberta's golden goose and the idiots against it. This isn't an attack blog, so I won't name names on certain "journalists" who seem obsessed with Alberta oil, our premier, and oil running out. This isn't news; this is someone's political agenda. Everyone knows this! Every major company knows this, and they will have to move away from it when it is no longer viable. However, as long as it is there, use it. Whether some parts of Canada want to admit it, Alberta has been a MAJOR economic engine of this nation for a long time because of oil and gas. The world still needs oil, which still has value, so we shouldn't stop producing it. We should be switching what we can, doing the right things, but still using what we have of value. Our current government is a joke on this. Steven Guilbeault is a prime example of what not to do. He is an excellent example of cramming political ideology down people's throats over well-thought-out ideas.
Also, guns, ahhh, guns! I watch Edmonton fall to shit, and it appears gun crimes are WAY up! The funny thing is we don't hear how many are illegal guns. You can be guaranteed if they were legal gun owners, we would be hearing an outcry about the evil of guns. This tells me the Liberal gun reforms are doing nothing useful. This is a bandaid on a bullet hole.... It might be time to relook at that. Crack down on gun crimes hard! I have 0 problem with gun control laws if they make sense. The fact is, I know a LOT of legal gun owners. I have both long guns and restricted permits. None of us have committed gun crimes. If we are making a big deal out of guns (and we should when they are illegal), do it right. Importing illegal guns, mandatory sentences. Gun crimes, compulsory high sentences, and losing the right ever to own a firearm legally. My point is if you are going after gun crimes, go after gun crimes. Don't go after the legal gun owners. Also, stop guns from crossing the border. Depending on what you read, there are 433,900,000 guns in the states. Or roughly 1.3 guns/person down there. I have already stated you can't put things back in Pandora's box once you take them out. Well, this applies to guns, too. When there are that many guns floating around in the States, I'm pretty sure people will see a way to make a buck smuggling some up here. Stop the flood if you are serious about fighting gun crime, at least.
So that was my little rant on illegal guns. The point is legal gun owners aren't the problem, but that is what governments target. The current government wants to appear tough on "crime" and is getting weapons off the street, but they are not. Again, it's a band-aid; they can say we took X number of guns off the "street." Look how good we are! It isn't off the street; it's from legal, safe gun owners. That's gun control everywhere in a nutshell. Canada is a great working model of gun control before this new gun grab. It is hard to obtain a license. We can't just pack guns around. I am not going into each part, but Canada has excellent gun control laws; it could be a model for other nations. Handguns are useless. Sure, they are fun to shoot, but they aren't for hunting. The only thing they kill is humans. Logic says that taking them out of people's hands would be a good idea. I don't support that, though. Legal gun owners have a right to defend their homes, hell, to take it out and have fun shooting targets. Do we as a society need them? No. I support your right to have them if you are careful and responsible. Do we need booze? Weed? Do we need to be able to gamble? No, but we are adults and should have the right to choose.
Going on about the legality and rights of guns, how about just the facts? Guns don't kill people; people do. That is 100% the truth. Personally, I would be fine loading a handgun, putting it on my kitchen table with the safety off, and carrying on with my day. (I don't condone this. I know it is stupid, and a responsible gun owner would never do that.) The fact is, no one would get shot. No one would be harmed if no human touched it. When a drunk driver kills someone, we go after them. They face charges, people will even try to go after the people who served the booze, and some will even stretch and try and sue the booze manufacturer. No one sues the truck or car... Yet, with guns, we go after the gun? I can see going after the person who pulled the trigger, or maybe even whoever sold them the gun if it was illegal, but the weapon? Yet again, it would not have done anything if someone didn't pull the trigger. People have been killing each other since Cain and Abel. They didn't gun each other down. The Middle Ages were full of war and murder, but no guns existed. I admit guns make it easier, but if someone wants someone else dead, it will happen with or without a gun. If you look at the James Smith Cree Nation tragedy, there is no gun. Still, 11 are dead and 17 were injured.
The last thing I will state on this is I HATE when we milk tragedies for political gain. Any shooting becomes about the guns. Not the person who did it. It becomes about the weapon, not the reason. It is a bandaid. No person just picks up a gun and kills a bunch of people. They do it for some fucked up reason, we don't dive into that. We politicize the tragedy, use it for our agenda, and move on to solving nothing but maybe gaining political points. Education sure would go a long way. People are terrified of an AR-15. You see them as a constant example of what people "don't" need. An AR-15 isn't far from the semi-auto I was given for Christmas at 14. They are darker colored, and yes, when you strap on an extended clip, they sure can look scary. (Yes, there are other more subtle differences, BUT) At the end of the day, they are just semi-automatic long guns.
So this climate emergency and gun control are two big nothing burgers. For Canada, I mean, I cannot speak to other nations, but I assume, to a certain degree, it is worldwide. They work great for politics. They induce fear and can be manipulated to make it "us" against them. "Those gun nuts are a real danger!" They can be used to make people act irrationally. "Yes, I will give that up because I have to, to save the world!" I am not saying these aren't issues; they are, which is why I bring them up. I feel we have much bigger things to deal with, and what we currently do is more for show than results. We could be doing more and better in the examples I know of. If that is just what I know, there must be a million other things we could be doing in other areas as well.
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