Alberta’s environment minister, Rebecca Schulz, was in Germany, getting set to celebrate the opening of a large geothermal electricity-generating project that uses technology designed by a Calgary company.
At the same time, back home in Wild Rose Country, geothermal projects are among the categories of renewable electricity generation projects, along with solar and wind, that the Alberta government is refusing to approve for a seven-month period.
This is more evidence that irony is dead in Alberta.
“I look forward to strengthening relationships with key partners and celebrating a successful geothermal project in Germany made possible thanks to made-in-Alberta technology,” Schulz enthused in the canned quote assigned to her in the news release published just before her trip. “The world needs more secure, reliable energy, and Alberta can help deliver it.”
Meanwhile, the corporations, that just short weeks ago were in a rush to build renewables projects in Alberta, are said to be contemplating heading for the exits, which may actually be what the government of Premier Danielle Smith had in mind when it declared the seven-month moratorium on August 3.
The Reuters news agency reports that the seven-month freeze “has caused four major international companies at various development stages to stop work on their plans.”
The London-based international news agency’s source didn’t name the companies, but it quoted the Calgary-based Pembina Institute saying the freeze has already stopped 15 projects that were awaiting approval and put 91 at risk.
The Wall Street Journal also published a story on the weekend, unfortunately behind its impregnable vault-like paywall, describing Alberta as pushing back against renewables projects – you know, like the one in Germany that Schulz’s news release was touting.
The Alberta government’s news release marvelled that Chancellor Olaf Scholz will be at the opening of the $290-million project tomorrow in the Bavarian town of Geretsried, located about 40 kilometres south of Munich. Maybe he’ll get a chance to chat with Schulz and ask if they’re distant cousins.
On Friday and Saturday, the release says, Schulz will be in “meetings and briefings” in Munich, the nature of which was not disclosed. Not, one would hope, with the Munich-based International Democrat Union, the sinister neoliberal internationale headed by Stephen Harper that works to undermine Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, among others.
News media in Alberta, however, were much more taken with the revelation federal finance minister Chrystia Freeland got a ticket in Alberta for going 132 km/h on a stretch of highway between Grande Prairie and Peace River in northwestern Alberta.
That’s 22 kilometres over the posted speed limit and – oh my gosh! – Freeland says she doesn’t own a car and likes to ride her bicycle!
Virtually all reporters who wrote breathless accounts of the ticket noted this, apparently unaware that many people who ride bicycles, and even walk a lot, have nevertheless learned how to drive a car and some of them even have drivers licenses in their wallets. Licenses are also handy in Ontario liquor stores, which insist on checking everyone’s IDs, even obvious septuagenarians like yours truly.
But I digress, this unironic irony explains why the story of a speeding ticket on a highway where, well, everybody speeds, makes this newsworthy, embarrassed scribes explained.
Naw, it makes them look petty and unaware of the real ironies that abound in Alberta.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
