My Twitter Account
Many of you have noticed that I suspended my Twitter account over the weekend. I expect that this will be a temporary decision, at least in some respects, although I am not sure what my re-engagement will look like. I’ve used Twitter for many years now, and I love the medium for news, learning, and interacting […]
Finite Resources and Infinite Growth
Today’s Globe and Mail featured a column by Gary Mason on a world without oil. “If you believe that the economy is structured in such a way that it needs to grow continually in order to survive,” it states, “then it will take an endless supply of energy to feed it. ” The article then […]
Extraction vs Upgrading
The NDP put forth a motion in the House last week which states that, “the Keystone XL pipeline would intensify the export of unprocessed raw bitumen and would export more than 40,000 well-paying Canadian jobs, and is therefore not in Canada’s best interest.” This motion provided me with the motivation to dig into a question – if […]
Fort Hills tale of the tape
This morning, Suncor held an investor conference call to discuss the decision announced late last night that it would proceed with the development of the Fort Hills mine – a joint venture with Total and Teck. Everything associate with this project is huge – it’s expected to produce 180,000 barrels per day and to cost […]
Chicken Wings and Beer
My latest at Macleans.
Transparency and Credibility
Tonight, I was a little surprised to read the following tweets from Marc Lee, Senior Economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), and Co-Director of the Climate Justice Project: “I’m appalled by your acceptance of Enbridge professorship. You’ve lost credibility.“ and “If I recall correctly you also own Enbridge stock. So a double […]
Common sense, sample selection, representative samples, and sample sizes
As Statistics Canada continues to roll-out the results from the National Household survey, I seem to become involved in arguments at least once a week as to the importance of sample selection in survey data. This week, my argument was with IPSOS CEO Darrell Bricker – someone who should know a lot about statistics. In […]
The Decline of Canadian (Academic) Economics?
The IRPP released a report today on the decline of economics papers by Canadian academics looking at Canadian issues. Today’s report, authored by the University of Calgary’s Herb Emery, the University of Manitoba’s Wayne Simpson, and the IRPP’s Stephen Tapp draws on earlier work by Simpson and Emery published in the journal Canadian Public Policy. The gist of the […]
Crude costs and Energy East
My latest at Macleans digs into TransCanada’s analysis on crude cost savings for eastern refiners from Energy East. Check it out here.
Marginal and average costs, and the price of bike commuting
One of the things which changed during my year in Ottawa is that I became a year-round bike commuter. I’ve decided to try to keep this up in Edmonton, despite some (potentially important) differences in climate and snow clearing between the two cities. One of the factors in my initial decision to ride to work […]