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A Response To: An Open Letter To Canadians From Oil And Gas Workers

Published

5 years ago

5 minute read

Update –  April 13th 2020: View Eavor Technologies CEO – John Redfern’s response here

A letter in response to this:

https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/an-open-letter-to-canadians-from-oil-and-gas-workers

 

 

Dear Albertan oil executives,

 

Canada’s oil and gas workers need your help. For decades, we have been asking you to diversify our economy and look for ways to avoid the boom and bust cycle. We are now in a perfect storm with oil prices falling and workers in isolation from a deadly virus. We need your leadership more than ever. 

 

Unfortunately for us, you’ve chosen the least imaginative path possible: stay the course. In your April 6th Op-Ed in the Financial Post, you argued that the fossil fuel industry needs federal support in order to maintain a skilled workforce. For a province that prides itself on hard work and innovation, don’t you think we can do better? 

 

The underlying assumption that you have made is that oil prices will return to a level that’s profitable for Alberta. But the historical trend doesn’t support your argument. 

 

When you look at the historical price of WTI, Alberta’s golden years came from a bubble. In 2008 analysts all over the province were claiming oil would climb to $200 and Alberta would become the crown jewel of Canada. That turned out to be wishful thinking.  You have dusted off that same playbook, claiming that oil will keep going up in price. The more likely scenario is that prices will return to their historical average. 

 

We cannot rely on high oil prices for our economic survival. 

(The picture was taken from https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil But any 30-year graph will do. )

 

I agree with you that we need to ensure that we can maintain our workforce. It’s essential that Alberta has skilled people working in our province so that we can develop our resources. Canada as a whole needs to maintain our skilled labour force and keep our economy functioning so that we can rebound once the pandemic is over.


But putting those 200,000 people back to work into fossil fuels is a terrible idea.

 

So what do we do with hundreds of thousands of unemployed people and billions of dollars of idle equipment? 

 

My suggestion is we find markets outside of oil and gas that require very similar skill sets. We leverage our existing infrastructure, supply chains, and experience to build new industries here in Alberta.

I’ve got three examples. 

 

Geothermal Energy

Geothermal energy needs the same drilling rigs that the oil service industry has sitting idle. You can use your existing geologists, roughnecks, pipefitters, and welders to drill geothermal wells instead of oil wells. The end result is clean baseload power that can replace coal in this province and all over the world. The added benefit of developing geothermal is that we repurpose orphan wells into sources of heat and electricity. Companies like Eavor and DEEP have already started. 

Battery Manufacturing

As we move to cleaner energy sources, batteries will become more important to the sustainability of our economy. Batteries need a lot of material to be manufactured and companies like E3 Metals are developing extraction techniques to create a lithium industry here in Alberta. There are plenty of technicians, engineers, and fabricators in our energy community that are entirely capable of working on projects like this. 

Nuclear Power

While we are brainstorming ideas, let’s think big. If we are serious about providing clean, low carbon, environmentally friendly energy we have to look at nuclear. The folks at Terrestial Energy have designed a modular reactor that’s small, safe, and could absolutely be manufactured here in Alberta. I bet the mod yards would be jumping at the chance to have a backlog of work. 

 

I agree with you that we absolutely need to support our workforce. However, I don’t think keeping our oil industry limping along can be the full answer for our skilled and versatile workforce. Our talented population needs options.

 

Please stop looking in the rearview mirror and start building for the future.

 

Update – April 13th 2020: View Eavor Technologies CEO – John Redfern’s response here

This article was originally published on April 8, 2020.

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RFK Jr. says Hep B vaccine is linked to 1,135% higher autism rate

Published on July 1, 2025

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They got rid of all the older children essentially and just had younger children who were too young to be diagnosed and they stratified that, stratified the data

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found newborn babies who received the Hepatitis B vaccine had 1,135-percent higher autism rates than those who did not or received it later in life, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Tucker Carlson recently. However, the CDC practiced “trickery” in its studies on autism so as not to implicate vaccines, Kennedy said.

RFK Jr., who is the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, said the CDC buried the results by manipulating the data. Kennedy has pledged to find the causes of autism, with a particular focus on the role vaccines may play in the rise in rates in the past decades.

The Hepatitis B shot is required by nearly every state in the U.S. for children to attend school, day care, or both. The CDC recommends the jab for all babies at birth, regardless of whether their mother has Hep B, which is easily diagnosable and commonly spread through sexual activity, piercings, and tattoos.

“They kept the study secret and then they manipulated it through five different iterations to try to bury the link and we know how they did it – they got rid of all the older children essentially and just had younger children who were too young to be diagnosed and they stratified that, stratified the data,” Kennedy told Carlson for an episode of the commentator’s podcast. “And they did a lot of other tricks and all of those studies were the subject of those kind of that kind of trickery.”

But now, Kennedy said, the CDC will be conducting real and honest scientific research that follows the highest standards of evidence.

“We’re going to do real science,” Kennedy said. “We’re going to make the databases public for the first time.”

He said the CDC will be compiling records from variety of sources to allow researchers to do better studies on vaccines.

“We’re going to make this data available for independent scientists so everybody can look at it,” the HHS secretary said.

Health and Human Services also said it has put out grant requests for scientists who want to study the issue further.

Carlson asked if the answers would “differ from status quo kind of thinking.”

“I think they will,” Kennedy said. He continued on to say that people “need to stop trusting the experts.”

“We were told at the beginning of COVID ‘don’t look at any data yourself, don’t do any investigation yourself, just trust the experts,”‘ he said.

In a democracy, Kennedy said, we have the “obligation” to “do our own research.”

“That’s the way it should be done,” Kennedy said.

He also reiterated that HHS will return to “gold standard science” and publish the results so everyone can review them.

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The Tesla CEO warned that Trump’s $5 trillion plan erases DOGE’s cost-cutting gains, while threatening to unseat lawmakers who vote for it.

Elon Musk has reignited his feud with President Donald Trump by denouncing his “Big Beautiful Bill” in a string of social media posts, warning that it would add $5 trillion to the national debt.

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it,” Musk exclaimed in an X post last month.

Musk renewed his criticism Monday after weeks of public silence, shaming lawmakers who support it while vowing to unseat Republicans who vote for it.

“They’ll lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth,” he posted on X, while adding that they “should hang their heads in shame.”

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO also threatened to publish images branding those lawmakers as “liars.”

 

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Musk responded by saying that even subsidies to his own companies should be cut.

Before and after the 2024 presidential election, Musk spoke out about government subsidies, including ones for electric vehicles, stating that Tesla would benefit if they were eliminated.

This latest exchange marks a new escalation in the long-running and often unpredictable relationship between the two figures. Musk contributed more than $250 million to Trump’s reelection campaign and was later appointed to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which oversaw the termination of more than 120,000 federal employees.

Musk has argued that Trump’s new bill wipes out DOGE’s savings and reveals a deeper structural problem. “We live in a one-party country – the PORKY PIG PARTY!!” he wrote, arguing that the legislation should be knows as the “DEBT SLAVERY bill” before calling for a new political party “that actually cares about the people.”

In June, Musk deleted several inflammatory posts about the president, including one claiming that Trump was implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein files. He later acknowledged some of his comments “went too far.” Trump, in response, said the apology was “very nice.”

With the bill still under Senate review, the dispute underscores growing pressure on Trump from fiscal hardliners and tech-aligned conservatives – some of whom helped deliver his return to power. Cracks in the coalition may spell longer term problems for the Make America Great Again movement.

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