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Opinion: The New Environmental Master Plan means City must move some major developments away from 30th Avenue

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This opinion piece was submitted by Red Deer Opinion Writer Garfield Marks

July 8 2019 Red Deer city council unanimously accepted an updated Environmental Master Plan which if followed would reverse a serious environmental misstep in their east end plans.
The city’s current plans and discussions could see maximum traffic noise, commuting and emissions, unintended consequences committing too much in one small area.
The potential trouble spot is a 4km. stretch or 40 blocks along 30th Avenue, at the east end of the city. Currently the discussion  and plans suggest the locating of 4 shopping centres, 4 gas stations, 4 grocery stores, numerous restaurants, bars, liquor stores, 5 high schools, 2 fire halls, pickle ball courts, Collicutt Centre and possibly the new multi-use aquatic centre.
Forget the downtown, forget Gaetz Avenue, the new “Strip” will be 30 Avenue between 28 Street and 68 Street.
The traffic on 30 Avenue will be heavy, the noise loud and the emissions extreme for the residents along that stretch but then comes the commuting from the other 2/3 of the city.
A city of over 100,000 residents to plan 5 out of 6 high schools in such a small east-end space with the 6th high school only 10 blocks away on 40th Ave.  is contradictory to the new updated Environmental Master Plan they unanimously accepted, so there is hope. The plan suggests building facilities like high schools throughout the city.
Collicutt Ctr. is the most popular recreation centre in Red Deer, used by 60% of the recreational sector of society and it is as I previously mentioned on the south-east corner of the city. This is unfortunate for those who do not live in that quarter of the city.
If the city continues down the road of focusing on the 4km. stretch of 30 Ave, then everyone could suffer. The long commutes, the increased traffic, the congestion, the emissions and the noise will affect everyone especially those living near 30 Ave.
There is hope. Perhaps the next high school will be built on the other side of town, perhaps the new aquatic centre will be built on the north-west corner of the city to book-end the highly popular Collicutt Ctr.
There is hope, the city spent $150,000 updating the Environmental Master Plan that the council unanimously accepted, so there is hope.
Or it could just sit on a shelf but I hope not.

​Garfield Marks​

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Energy

Can we not be hysterical about AI and energy usage?

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From Resource Works

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Data centres use far less power than EVs or heavy industry, and Canada’s hydro grids and natural gas make it ideal for hosting them.

It was inevitable that artificial intelligence would become the next villain in the global debates about electricity and climate impacts. Examining the numbers shows that the fears about AI, “devouring” power, as some contributors to the Toronto Star have fretted about, are truly unwarranted in the context of industrial energy usage worldwide.

The numbers of the International Energy Agency (IEA) find that all data centres worldwide used about 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024. That is roughly 1.5 percent of global demand, with consumption expected to rise to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, which is under three percent of the total.

A recent IEA analysis found that the extra 530 terawatt-hours of data-centre demand to 2030 would account for only about eight percent of global electricity-demand growth. This number is far less than expected from the growth from electric vehicles, air conditioning or heavy industry in general.

Putting consumption in context

AI workloads are just a small slice of that. AI has driven about five to fifteen percent of data-centre power use, with the rest going to other tasks like online searching, video, cloud storage and everyday digital services. Will those be shut down too?

Other sectors of the economy suck up far more power. In 2024, the world’s electric vehicles used about 180 terawatt-hours of electricity, or about 0.7 percent of global energy consumption. Bitcoin mining alone consumes roughly 120 terawatt-hours per year, accounting for up to nearly one percent of global electricity use.

Established industries like aluminium smelting industry’s smelters, long run with cheap hydro dams, are responsible for about four percent of global power consumption.

Against that backdrop, it is silly to treat AI as a uniquely intolerable new industry on the basis of energy consumption. The world’s demand for electricity grew by more than 1,200 terawatt-hours in 2024, with over 80 percent of that increase met by renewables and nuclear power production.

Canada’s clean energy advantage

In that “age of electricity”, the main drivers of consumption are the electrification of transport, buildings and industry, not data centres in isolation. For Canada, the situation regarding AI is very favourable.

The Canada Energy Regulator notes more than half of Canadian electricity as coming from hydro, with provinces such as Quebec, British Columbia, Manitoba and Newfoundland and Labrador routinely generating over 85 percent of their power from water. On the whole, more than 80 percent of Canada’s grid is already non-emitting.

The growth of AI data centres is manageable. A recent federal market snapshot counts roughly 239 data centres operating in Canada, in our low-cost hydro regime and cool climate make it, which is attractive for low-carbon computing. Hydro-Québec’s latest supply plan anticipates about 4.1 terawatt-hours of additional demand from data centres between 2023 and 2032 That is growth in the low single digits. Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator expects the province’s total electricity use to rise by 75 percent by 2050, driven “in large part” by broad electrification and industrial growth. Data centres are just one of these among several major loads.

Avoiding the coal trap

If Canada does not host AI workloads, it will go elsewhere, perhaps to jurisdictions that are still packed with coal-heavy grids. Relocating AI production will only shift the industry away from hydro-based systems in British Columbia and Quebec, provinces that have ready-made supplies of natural gas as backups, if needed, not heavy oil or coal.

As an exporter of electricity that wishes to help lead an energy transition, spurning such a high-value digital industry like AI on the grounds of climate action is a strange way to reduce global emissions.

We can, and should, still exercise diligence and caution when it comes to energy usage, but the evidence points towards electrification only increasing. Solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear power are already doing the heavy lifting for clean energy generation, and Canada has plenty of room to use its natural gas reserves to cover any shortfalls.

It is not rational to single out AI as a pariah in the world of energy and emissions. AI is just one more industrial customer in an electrifying world, not the great threat to Canadian climate goals that some would have us believe.

Resource Works News

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Bruce Dowbiggin

NFL Ice Bowls Turn Down The Thermostat on Climate Change Hysteria

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Oh, the weather outside was frightful. But the football was so delightful. Week 15 of the NFL season was a cryogenic success of snow and sub-zero temperatures. Here were the temperatures at game time this weekend.

Chicago: -11 degrees C.

Cincinnati: -12 degrees F.

Kansas City: -8 degrees C.

New England: -2 C (with an 87 percent chance of snow).

Philadelphia: -2 degrees C.

New York -1 degree C.

Pittsburgh: -7 degrees C.

For fans of NFL football none of this seemed out of character with late-season football. There are legendary games played in arctic conditions. The windchill for the 1967 Dallas/ Green Bay NFC championship was -25 C.

Chargers at Bengals: Jan. 10, 1982 (-24 C, feels like -39 C).

Seahawks at Vikings in NFC wild-card matchup Jan 10, 2016. -21 C with wind chill -25C

Dolphins at Chiefs: Jan. 13, 2024 (-4 degrees, feels like -27 degrees)

As recently as last week’s Bills win over the Bengals games are often played with drifts of snow on the field and the mercury bottoming out. While Canada’s Grey Cup game is played at the end of November it’s still had some brutal weather history of its own.

The point of this meteorology meandering is that, according to our good King Charles III and many other doomsday cultists the concept of snow and cold was supposed to be a figment of the past by now. For almost half a century Michael Mann and the climate prophets of IPCC have been predicting the end of snow and the onset of warmist floods and burning forests. They gambled trillions of the public’s dollars on the certainty that the public would buy computer modelling and data-distortion predicting doom.

For decades it has worked. The careers of people like critic Mark Steyn have been ruined, heretics declared and fortunes dissipated by the trust-fund fanatics who bankroll wackadoodles like Stephen Guilbeault, the convicted felon who Trudeau made Minister of the Environment. No matter how absurd or devious the source, it was a gospel that the fiery inferno was coming next Tuesday. But the weather has remained stubbornly resistant to Elizabeth May’s catechism of climate.

Yet, some dedicated climate advocates and their followers are finally changing their tune in the face of their own observation of lying liars like Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. The share of Americans who say climate scientists understand very well whether climate change is occurring decreased from 37 percent in 2021 to 32 percent this year. A similar October study from the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute found that “belief in human-driven climate change declined overall” since 2017.

Reports the uber-liberal L.A. Times: “The unraveling of climate catastrophism got another jolt recently with the formal retraction of a high-profile 2024 study published in the journal Nature. That study — which had predicted a calamitous 62% decline in global economic output by 2100 if carbon emissions were not sufficiently reduced — was widely cited by transnational bodies and progressive political activists alike as justification for the pursuit of aggressive decarbonization. 

But the authors withdrew the paper after peer reviewers discovered that flawed data had skewed the result. Without that data, the projected decline in output collapses to around 23%. Oops.”

Even stalwart media apologists for climate hysteria like the Times are starting to have doubts. Under the headline “The left’s climate panic is finally calming down” they describes “Erstwhile ardent climate-change evangelist Bill Gates published a remarkable blog post addressing climate leaders at the then-upcoming COP30 summit. Gates unloaded a blistering critique of what he called ‘the doomsday view of climate change,’ which he said is simply “wrong.”

Trump-besotted American Democrats seeking to soften their Woke image before the 2026 midterms are likewise carving out more moderate positions on climate “that could well deprive Republicans of a winning political issue with which to batter out-of-touch, climate-change-besotted Democrats. But for the sake of good governance, sound public policy and the prosperity of the median American citizen, it would be the best thing to happen in a decade.”

Sadly Canada under Mark Carney remains a staunch climate warrior. The removal of Guilbeault as federal Environmental Minister may have seemed a step toward sanity, but there is no hint that the billions of dollars from hidden money spigots will be closed down any time soon. The B.C. government’s acquiescence to the climate propaganda of Indigenous bands shows no sign of abating. Indeed, it is just ramping up in the land claims that threaten to make home ownership a thing of the past.

PM Mark Carney is a dedicated temperature fabulist going back to his days as governor of the Bank of England. His first fights in Canada were over taxing carbon and hobbling her energy industry. As we wrote in this November 2024 column, the certainty in which the Canadian Left revels is actually dividing, not uniting citizens.

So perhaps if enough citizens spend an afternoon shivering in the stands of a wintertime football game we might achieve a small piece of sanity and learn that that , while climate is always changing, it’s not worth the price we’ve paid this century.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his 2025 book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books.

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