John Ford's Blog

I took a very small bit of credit for cajoling the McGuinty government into adopting a bit of green policy into the energy sector - it's the entire reason I spent four years in politics and ran against the premier.

Last night the Lotto Max lottery picked the winning numbers for this week's draw. There was a $50,000,000 draw and 45 $1,000,000 draws. Nobody won the big one. We shouldn't be surprised, the numbers show it isn't very likely.

I'm not a big fan of lotteries, in fact I think they should be banned because they don't really serve a useful purpose. As many have said, they're a tax on the stupid (or the poor).

From this article:

“The technology in high efficiency (low-flush) toilets is an example of how Ontario companies are leading the way and selling water technology around the world,” John Gerretsen, Minister of the Environment, said in a release.

The difference between a 13-litre per flush toilet and a six-litre model saves the average household about 35,000 litres of water annually.

I like math quizes.

Just announced is the new pricing scheme for electricity in Ontario. There is the over-used cliché of the perfect storm of increasing energy costs, increasing distribution and other costs, a hefty tax increase, and a move to time-of-use costing.

(Note that the numbers cited are for Ottawa Hydro customers using Ottawa Hydro as their energy supplier as well.)

The Ontario McGuinty government loves to make a big splash on environmental and sustainability issues thinking nobody will look behind the curtain and see they aren't nearly as green as we might think.

The following animation uses a set of numbers which represent a fairly close approximation to the amount of oil we know the earth holds. We have been using it at an increasing rate, and the rate of increase was held as a constant for demonstration purposes. Changing how much oil we estimate the earth holds and the rate don't actually change the visuals much since the important factor is the exponential growth of consumption, and that we likely reached peak oil in the last year or so.

A couple of years ago I sat down with an economist and asked which indicators were used to measure inflation. The answer was that there were a few different tools and indicators used, and that some were supposed to strip out the volatile elements that would skew indicators for the short term (like energy and food).

A couple of years ago I had the privilege of sitting down with Al Bartlett for a chat. He isn't a household name, but he should be. He has taught (virtually) the same lecture with the same message on growth and energy over 1,600 times since 1969. At no time since 1969 has this message been more important than today. It's a message we need to digest and understand now.

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential
function." - Prof. Al Bartlett

We're now starting to see various people declare that the recession is over and that we're going to see a guarded recovery.

The reality is that we're going to bounce up until oil prices rise and whack us back down again.

The 2008 recession was not caused by a banking crisis but rather by the price of oil. See any interesting correlation in the following graph?