So yesterday afternoon I dragged my girlfriend and her mom to the
Royal Alberta Museum, and when we exited the building we noticed a commotion of sorts out by
Government House, right next to the museum. There were a couple of limos, a few policepeople, a bunch of guys in suits (some of them wearing black sunglasses -- very Matrix!), a tv crew, and a group of schoolkids anxiously awaiting something. There was also a protest group brandishing signs; the group was made up of six college-age people who seemed to be wearing a lot of hemp. It was hard to tell what the signs said, or what they were chanting, or even what kind of hemp they were wearing, because the police had corraled them a fair distance down the street. The schoolkids were standing closer than the protesters! I don't get it; there wasn't a single Muslim-looking terrorist among them. Apparently you now need a megaphone to exercise freedom of speech.
We did not stick around, but I wish we had. Instead we watched the news that night, in which they ran a story about Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach holding a joint press conference with Prime Minister Stephen Harper -- at fucking Governor House! The protest group was the
Sierra Club. The two bigwigs announced plans for federal funding to help make Alberta industry more environmentally friendly without slowing down the economy (Here is a
crappy newsstory about the press conference, and it was the best one I could find. Newspapers suck).
Actually I lied: here is a better story, one that outlines Harper's spanky plan to help the environment that just so happened to be the brainchild of industry:
carbon sequestration. They want to capture carbon dioxide from emissions and then store it underground, or inject it into wells to help extract hard-to-get resources. That was not a typo; I wrote CARBON DIOXIDE. Granted, I'm not familiar with the process, but am I the only one who knows that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is GOOD? You know, the stuff trees breathe? Carbon MONOXIDE is the bad shit. This article also includes a great (and obvious) observation at the end: all this does is hide the problem. The best thing to do is produce less greenhouse gas emissions.
Actually, Wikipedia has a great article on
CO2 sinks and sequestration. It outlines things pretty good, including that carbon gas has to be stored as CO2. But my favourite section is about halfway down, in which they discuss gas storage. Sticking it under the ground isn't necessarily safe: the geological barries are only 'supposedly' sufficient. You also need high pressures and low temperatures to make this work --
under the sea is the best place, not the oilsands of Alberta.
All this reminds me of those stupid commercials about nuclear energy that are now all over the airwaves. They are saying that nuclear energy is a good alternative energy source because it doesn't produce any carbon emissions -- conveniently forgetting about all the toxic waste byproducts (This
Greenpeace article effectively kills that idea). And that reminds me of KFC commercials a couple of years ago, that claimed KFC chicken was a healthy food choice because it didn't have any carbs in it. Apparently grease and fat are okay to digest in large quantities. If you don't believe me
check this article.
Must we be constantly bombarded by the thought process of idiots?
