Renewable Energy Rant

Wind Farm in Southern Alberta

Watercolour and crayon

©2016 Charlene Brown

I will begin by repeating what I said yesterday:

I agree completely with a rant by Eric Reguly in the June 18 Globe + Mail, titled "Unfolding crisis shows fault in putting biofuels before food."  He highlights the irrationality of continuing to subsidize the production of biofuels using food crops as the danger of widespread famine resulting from the war in Ukraine increases every day. 

The following is my own rant about ‘Renewables’, originally posted in April 2021:

Outdated analyses of the climate change mitigation potential of various technologies refer to ‘renewable’ alternatives to fossil fuels.  In these analyses, biofuels (or biomass), which do not result in significant GHG emission reductions* are combined with other renewables (solar, wind, tide) that have huge potential to make significant GHG reductions, and nuclear energy, which is a whole different class with unique disadvantages (public perception) and advantages (remote location can greatly reduce need for transmission lines or pipelines). 

‘Renewables’ should not be considered as a group with similar climate-change mitigation potential.  Alternatives to fossil fuels should be described as low-carbon, clean or green. These alternate energy sources include nuclear and do not include biofuels.

* Originally, biofuels were viewed as inherently carbon-neutral, assuming the carbon dioxide plants absorb from the air as they grow completely offsets, or neutralizes, the CO₂ emitted when fuels made from plants burn. However, this offset is largely negated by the GHGs emitted during the cultivation, harvesting, transportation, and refining processes.  When burned for power generation or heating, biofuels emit about the same amount of GHGs as fossil fuels. 

Climate Change Preparation

The Oilsands

Page from my haiku book, Inventing the Future

©2019 Charlene Brown

I agree completely with a rant by Eric Reguly in the June 18 Globe + Mail, titled "Unfolding crisis shows fault in putting biofuels before food."  He highlights the irrationality of continuing to subsidize the production of biofuels using food crops as the danger of widespread famine resulting from the war in Ukraine increases every day.  He points out that this procedure is a terrible waste of food.  And he argues convincingly that producing biofuels from food crops has almost no effect on carbon emission reduction – a fact I alluded to in the following blog post from December 2017:

Canada is gradually improving its ranking in environmental opinion polls, but we’re still subject to some derision, focusing on the Alberta Oilsands, which critics refer to as ‘tarsands that produce the world’s dirtiest oil.’

They may be right, but I think if we paid higher carbon taxes we could pay for whatever research it takes to clean up this energy source. And this would be far better than going to war over oil in the Middle East or using food to make biofuels.

In the meantime, I thought I’d present this ‘blot on the landscape’ as a ‘cleaned up’ semi-abstract design.  As for making sense of the rest of the overlaid haiku, Googling ‘climate change preparation’ will get you over a million results to read...

Tomorrow I will re-publish my own Renewable Energy Rant, originally posted on this blog in April 2021.

 

A Nice Surprise in Canmore

Canmore ArtWalk

Watercolour and crayon

©2022 Charlene Brown

Until my most recent visit to Canmore, I’d never heard of the Spur Line, despite having grown up in Banff, only a 26 km drive away.  My lack of awareness notwithstanding, the Spur Line was an important part of the Canmore’s history from the late nineteenth century until 1979, crossing the Bow Valley to connect the mine to the CPR mainline. 

The part of what became the Spur Line Trail from the iconic Canmore Engine Bridge to 7^th Avenue has, in recent years, been turned into an Art Walk showcasing paintings created by artists, some of them children, from the town of Canmore and the Stoney Nakoda First Nation at Morley. 

Paintings depicting wildlife found in the area and wide-ranging aspects of community history, are done on boards prepared from timber cut along the trail, then sealed to protect them from the mountain weather.  The collection is a nice surprise in an already spectacular walk.

 

Painting a Misty Memory

 

Na Pali Coast, Kauai, USA
Watercolour and crayon
©2022 Charlene Brown

I wrote several blog posts about the trips on which I took each of my grandchildren, back in the day.  Hawaii was our destination in 2005, and I wrote blog posts about that trip on Dec. 4, Dec. 14, Dec. 18, and Dec.23, 2016.

I started publishing stories about ‘My Travels With Our Grandkids’ online on Medium, beginning this March with my 2004 trip to Costa Rica. For that story I used the same photos and paintings I’d used on this blog. 

For the Hawaiian trip, however, I wanted to add a picture of the spectacular Na Pali coast on the island of Kauai. I hadn’t included any of my photos of it in the blog posts because they were very misty and totally unrecognizable to anyone but me  So I painted this picture showing details I had recorded only in my (not particularly photographic) memory.

 

Here’s something I didn’t have time to paint

The springs above the Cave + Basin

Watercolour and crayon

©2016 Charlene Brown

This painting has already been round the block a couple of times − in 2016, and then again in a slightly stylized version I used in a haiku book, in 2017 − but I’m going to use it again, just because I was at this spectacular location again  a few weeks ago, but this week I had to stay home for a Zoom meeting on my usual painting day at the seniors’ centre.

Should you be wondering, here’s an explanation of why we’re still meeting on Zoom, since pandemic restrictions have been lifted and most of us have had two shots and two boosters.  We have in fact started having in-person general meetings, but the meeting this week was an editorial meeting of the team working on our newsletter.  We’ve discovered it’s much easier to work on Zoom with the layout person (me, as it happens) sharing the screen where the publishing program is being run.  It seems people with real jobs are finding this too, and it looks like there will be huge changes in the way offices operate, now the advantages of not having to get together in the same place every day have been recognized.