Battlin' Robot Steves!

[pyat]

Well, American readers, a federal election has been called in Canada, so you won’t have to read my musings about your election as often.

Of course, the election up here is terribly dull. The issue everyone seems to be talking about most, right now, is whether not carbon taxes are a good idea. Have you ever heard an attack ad criticizing a carbon tax policy? I have. It’s not a very exciting thing. Carbon tax is not a visceral topic that one can get really angry about.

This election will pit a very, very, very boring Conservative minority government and our wax-dummy PM against an evidently disorganized Liberal party, led by a well-spoken egghead. The Liberals are also very boring.

Not quite as boring are the third and fourth parties!

We have the Bloc Quebecois, led by a charming and eloquent raving anti-monarchist who may or may not wish to see Anglophone blood running down the steps of Parliament Hill. Nah, just kidding. He's cool. They're something of a wild card, though. The Bloc will vote with the Conservatives or Liberals as they please, making outcomes hard to discern.

Finally, we have the NDP, the raving Socialist "Bible Billy and his Funny Money" party, led by Jack Layton, who is no doubt best known as my municipal politics professor from university. I am probably voting for them.

It is also quite possible that the Green Party of Canada will win some seats in this election.

One final note of Canadian smugness - this election was called today. We vote on October 14th. 24 hours later, the election is over. So, we can get back to complaining about US politics!

Comments

[zenten.livejournal.com]

No problem.

I do think that house is cool, and environmentally friendly, and if all houses changed to be like this it would be a very good thing.

I am just saying I don't see how everyone switching to these houses wouldn't mean that we don't still need non-solar and wind power generation.

[anidada.livejournal.com]

*nods* I can see that -- particularly when you factor in the potential energy use of fully electric cars. Currently (no pun intended), we don't have the ability to generate the kind of power we'd need if everyone switched from fossil fuel to electric vehicles, and plugged them into the grid (as would be ideal). At least, not to keep up the status quo in terms of amount of vehicle use -- but that's a whole other discussion (including reduction in home energy use, in general).

[zenten.livejournal.com]

Well, the problem I see it is if we say have a day without much wind, in the winter, that's overcast we're screwed for just wind and solar, and those happen often in the winter. That's even assuming we can be OK over night under ideal conditions.

As a side note, if we can pull off hydrogen fuel cells (or something like them) I'd prefer that. Just hook those up to the wind and solar plants, and have them generate the hydrogen. That way the inconsistent nature of those power systems won't matter.

I'm also a bit skeptical of an electric car working well here in the winter.