I Nailed it to Your Door
The title is from a song by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. I’ve been listening to it several times a day for the past few days as it resonates. Most of all it rings excellence in music making. Last year I sent out a challenge on Linkedin for everyone to give their absolute best work. That with the pandemic on top of us, we needed to become extraordinary wherever we could. This was especially true for me in regard to seeking solutions, and mobilizing people around the world regardless of who they were or what they did. Encounters that changed my course as well.
This year, we have once again crossed a threshold of increasing temperatures and those temperatures have sent forest fires out of control within minutes of ignition.
And so that call for all of us to give our best work has made a difference, at least in the involvement and planning departments around the world. How do we coordinate efforts? I advocated quickly for engaging the entire economies of the world as the initial fight. It became clear in this part of the world many years ago, that the industry everyone believes is most critical here, is not the answer. It will end up in attrition and may be the first one in the West to fail. It’s the nature of things. Oil in Alberta needs extensive processing in order to be viable as a fuel stock. It is at a huge disadvantage to all other producers of oil. It's also the one that is farthest from its potential export markets.
Alberta Oil Industry in Crisis
It's not the first time that this industry in Alberta did not sufficiently prepare for a downturn in economic activity. They have failed repeatedly to mitigate property and environmental damage for most of 75 years past. They will vacate as soon as the money dries up. But they will never put any money into mitigation, therefore we need to include those costs in the Alberta Oil Royalty program. Also, something I recommended over a year ago, to increase the royalty immediately as we will stand to lose and have already lost billions on our future 20 years of available production. If the rest of the world goes off oil in a big way, we will also go off oil. It will occur naturally without any government intervention. If no one wants your product, or needs your product, you normally go out of business. Expect that to be the case frequently in the years ahead. They will bankrupt themselves before paying for environmental damages.
The Future of Energy
It isn’t coal, it isn’t oil. It’s electricity.
Not only electricity for your car, but also new ways to deliver electricity to the homes and businesses around the world. It was proposed by Nikola Tesla years ago that electricity could be wireless for these purposes. Wireless charging for small devices is a reality, but to transmit significant amounts of power wirelessly poses a much larger problem. Other possible solutions are being tested and some great success is beginning to take place for EV’s. Some of those things we learn can be adapted to home use. In fact the EV represents a great opportunity to expand our knowledge, improve the automobile and make an impact on the climate issues we have with carbon emissions.
A breakthrough that will change how we create and deliver electricity. An appliance. It’s called an electric motor, and we’ve had them for a very long time. Like all innovations, sometimes we need to go backwards and see if we missed something important along the way. In the case of electric motors, we can improve them substantially and the long term would be for EV’s to produce all the electricity they need without the use of large battery packs. That is one of the breakthroughs already close at hand. And that breakthrough came about in the last year by looking into the past. If we can create enough electricity on demand for a car or a home or an aircraft, we don’t need oil and gasoline fuel derivatives, or we don’t need the volume. Perhaps Hydrogen may prove economical and easier to implement in the future. Perhaps a hybrid hydrogen/electric motor. Hydrogen can be split from water. That poses an environmental problem of other sorts — — water is super precious. If we were to desalinate water in huge quantities perhaps the oceans would be a source to produce hydrogen, or perhaps we don’t need to desalinate it in converting to hydrogen and oxygen (+sodium).
That change alone would reinvigorate the Alberta economy, the Canadian economy and the entire world's economy. And yes, oil workers would have to learn new vocations — -and they won’t have any problem to find a better job than they had before. I completed several job analysis scenarios for Alberta last year. The number of jobs that could have been created by Alberta business if the UCP hadn’t gambled 9 billion of our dollars away, anywhere between 50,000 and 300,000. (180,000 jobs at 50,000/year)
The New Economy Revisited
The New Economy is a simple premise. It’s a shift in the underlying driving force of an economic engine. In Alberta and oil producing states, its oil and gas presently. In an agricultural country its growing fruits and vegetables. The shift will take a few years to really grab hold, because we need to redesign thousands of different engine requirements, for automobiles, for powering your home, for your lawn mower engine — -a note on small gas engines. I read one statistic that put the number of those engines, global manufacturing, at 330 million per year. This one thing alone will drive thousands of engineering jobs worldwide, and ultimately thousands of spin off jobs in every supply chain. This is especially true of the technology sector. One prediction is that over the next 5 years alone, 149 million jobs will be created in software that will be focusing on security. The goal must be clear — -eliminate the use of petroleum products wherever possible and as quickly as possible. If we have an alternate source of energy that can substitute, we must choose it over gasoline, and we continue that process until we defeat 95% of oil product derivatives entirely. Hopefully it won’t take the full 29 years until 2050 (not far from 28 years as this one remains lost to the pandemic)
If we don’t win that challenge, which is to replace the entire global fleet of gasoline and diesel vehicles with zero emission vehicles, we will have a hard time achieving the more difficult transitions. We need to start immediately. Another positive side effect is that we must build manufacturing plants around the world, including Canada, in order to make this conversion or transition. More jobs. The manufacturing plants will be situated increasingly where cheap electricity is available. Most automobiles and consumer products will increase the use of aluminum to cut weight and costs of steel. The reason goes back to the properties of the two metals. Aluminum is in greater abundance in the earths’ crust than iron ore. Iron ore takes considerably higher temperatures to become liquid. Aluminum smelters use electricity. And if Quebec starts to build an awful lot of EV’s they might have to limit exports of electricity. If things go well, and we find some science that improves how we harness electricity, all will turn out well. Once again, balance between Canada and the USA must be fair and equitable for both countries and manufacturing autos will be back in Canada in a big way. We need them being built here to keep up with demand.
Crypto-A Final Word
The eventual digital US dollar will come about and if Canada takes a leap of faith right now, we can easily close the gap on the dollar. I’ve heard this argument so many times it makes me sick. Our dollar being lower than the US dollar helps us. Totally untrue. Our dollar always goes farther when its equal to the US dollar. Especially noticeable in the price of fruits and vegetables which largely are American imports. There is no reason Canada should continue to take 20–30% haircuts on the dollar because forex traders manipulate the foreign currency markets unfairly.
Crypto currencies like Bitcoin and others. Understand that this is another form of Ponzi scheme using wire fraud. There is no asset. There is nothing there. Just your foolish grin after you realize all your money is gone.
