Define ‘better’ in post-oil era
To the Editor,
Re: Preparing for the after-oil era, Letters, Feb. 28.
It’s refreshing to see that you had to go so far afield, Montreal, to find a aatastrophic anthropogenic global warming rant.
Have the local CO2 fear-mongers left?
Ms, Walden-Landry trivializes 100 million barrels of oil because it would only run the world for a day, but ignores that it would fuel her Quebec for probably three years.
Nonetheless, I agree oil is too valuable to waste and we should be moving to find better ways to run the motors of our industrial society.
Firstly though let’s qualify “better”: More costly and less dependable are not better.
In that vein, only natural gas, coal, and nuclear qualify as attractive means to generate industrial scale power. That algae thing, while carrying promise, fails to meet the cost objective.
Of course, today’s villain, plant food, rears its head. For the climate change purist, any increase in CO2 will tip us into that simmering pot.
Regrettably, the green accolades can’t seem to open a text on geophysical science and dig up some facts of earth’s atmospheric history.
Life on earth has flourished at many different concentrations of carbon and oxygen.
As to severe weather, a warmer earth gives smaller temperature differences between the equator and the poles, resulting in less severe weather.
But scary world temperature hasn’t been co-operating lately either. No increase in temperature for the past 17 years while CO2 concentration continues to rise —it’s enough to make the average climate doomsayer weep.
Gary Seinen,
Port Alberni
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