A Reasonable Contrarian

Every public issue has two or more sides or viewpoints. Often, however, one side dominates and not always for good reasons. Ideology plays a big role, and the public narrative gets taken over by the loudest voice, whether or not the evidence and logic support that position. There are many issues in the news or floating around the Canadian context where one side has effectively been silenced by political correctness, the cancel culture, the supposed consensus, or other public power plays and pressures. In many cases, the other side needs to be heard, if only to balance the discussion and clarify the issue so that wise decisions can be made. 

I often find myself taking the minority perspective on public issues, sometimes at my peril. As a result, I cast myself as a contrarian. But rather than just being a curmudgeon against popular views, I feel that my views have quite reasonable arguments in their favour, which are often ignored, denied, dismissed, or insulted by those latched onto the official viewpoints and narratives.  I have written about some of these topics earlier, so will not repeat myself: evolution theory and Intelligent Design, global warming and climate change, atheism and scientism, capital punishment, the "gender gap" in engineering, the mainstream media, renewable green energy, and residential schools. Taken together, those posts should serve as my contrarian credentials regarding political issues and modern society!

But there are many other subject areas! The following are a few other issues on which I hold what may seem to be unpopular opinions. You may or may not agree with me, but reading the views of the other side is always a useful exercise toward better understanding. And in any case, surely I have the right to express my own views on my own blog without risking attack and cancellation? In no particular order then, here are some further contrarian positions explained briefly:

The Origin of Life:
The official status of OOL research is that science is making progress toward understanding the basis for life: the physics and chemistry, and biological processes involved. Multiple possibilities for how life got going on planet Earth have been proposed or are being actively investigated. Science publications hype up every supposed 'breakthrough' and will tell you that progress is being made and soon they will have a good idea about how life arose on planet Earth, and will be able to reproduce it in the lab. 

What they do not tell you is that most of the true 'progress' so far has been in finding out how many ways undirected, natural abiogenesis is impossibly difficult. Most reports on 'progress' are hypothetical theoretical looks at one aspect or other of the early Earth, of simple organic-chemistry building blocks, or other incidental aspects of the big picture - mostly just hand-waving speculation. Indeed, there has been no real progress toward creating life by credible processes using materials available on the early Earth. 

Some of the road blocks to true progress in this subject include: the chemical makeup of prebiotic Earth; the hard chemistry of forming suitable carbohydrates, lipids, amino-acids, and other necessary biological molecules; the total lack of homo-chirality (only left or right-handed molecules), which is needed for life; the natural unwanted reactions and thermodynamics  that work against biochemistry outside of cells; the difficulty of properly linking simple chemicals into the polypeptides and nucleic acid strings essential to all life; and of course, the total lack of any process to provide the vast amount of genetic information required for even the simplest protein, much less an credible protocell's DNA or RNA. None of these hurdles has been overcome in any credible lab research.

James Tour has done a huge service to explain these roadblocks, as well as to reveal and derail the biochemistry of pretentious OOL research in a series of YouTube talks. Another set of OOL refutations can be found here. The bottom line is that science is farther away than ever from finding out how life could really have begun by natural means on our planet. Their search for spontaneous generation of life (abiogenesis) has come up short by several orders of magnitude. 

Abortion:
This was probably the original issue in the ongoing and ever-expanding culture wars! It has been in the news a lot recently, especially in the USA with the SCOTUS Dobbs decision, so of course, it has to be on my list here. The issue is polarized into two opposite positions: Pro-choice argues for women's "reproductive rights" and unencumbered access to abortion through the entire nine months of pregnancy, while the pro-life side argues for the rights and life of the unborn child from the moment of conception. Many people fall into one of these camps, but a sizable group - perhaps even the majority, properly understood - would like to see some resolution between these two extremes.

The pro-choice side - essentially demanding autonomy for women mostly for reasons of convenience - is pushed by feminists and numerous "progressives" with full support in the media, governments, medical establishment, universities and most other institutions. They dominate Canadian politics and public discussion. Meanwhile, biological science, long-standing morality, most religions and, many would argue, responsibility and decency, largely support the pro-life side. As a true contrarian, I have leaned toward the pro-life side for decades, but recently have shifted away from the conception end of the nine months of pregnancy. Thus, I disagree with both extreme positions.

Some time ago, I wrote a small book on the subject, Finding the Balance, which takes a scientific and logically reasoned look at the issue and comes up with an objective, quantitative way to balance the rights of the pregnant woman against those of her developing child in a fair and defendable manner. I won't divulge the results here; the book is available at a the lowest possible price on Amazon as a readable Kindle publication. See also my earlier post about the book.

Systemic Racism:
This topic exploded with the Black Lives Matter movement a few years ago. While no one claims there is no racism in North America, advocates of 'systemic racism' have gone to extremes to make everything about racism: microaggressions in every conversation, implicit racism in every public statement and public institution, violent uprisings in several cities, demonizing all whites as racists,  even calling out math, logic and science as inherently racist. This focus on racism has just made the problem exponentially worse in many people's minds, by polarizing society and identifying everyone first and foremost by the shade of brown on their skin. Martin Luther King's progress against true racism has now been derailed by extreme ideological positioning.

In reality, and until 'systemic racism' became a thing, there was probably less racism in North America than at any previous time. Yes, there were long-standing statistical inequalities, and some subtle racist effects in society, as well as the usual outright bigotry from the few bozos, but overt racism had been on the decline for decades. Here in Canada, true racism was very rare, in my biased opinion. Such as existed was probably felt more by our First Nations peoples than by Blacks, Asians, or other visible minorities. However, with the claims of 'systemic racism' that situation has morphed into ideology, identity politics, and virtue signalling, driven by narrowly-focused social-justice warriors pushing their own agendas.

By various definitions of both words, you may claim 'systemic racism' exists, but it is pretty low level and hard to pin down in ways acceptable to most. From reports of overt racial discrimination elsewhere in the world, racism seems less of a concern here. Yet we now have newly racist policies to preferentially hire and seek out certain people based primarily on skin colour. Universities have racially designated processes, employers actively seek more visible minorities, whites are disrespected in some situations, and treatment is purposely different depending on one's race. While these changes claim to counteract past racist tendencies, they cannot help but be seen as codifying a different sort of stark racism.

Societal equality will never be reached (even if that is a meaningful goal) by forced inequality. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) seem like good goals at first, but those ends do not justify the means being employed and will probably end up making the inequalities worse. So let's please back away from the 'systemic racism' trope and focus on true equality and fairness for all before the law, and in every institution, just as Martin Luther King and his followers wanted.

Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide:
This issue has been growing for a long time; another campaign by 'progressive' groups pushing the ultra-libertarian perspective of personal autonomy. Preceded by several European countries, Canada softened its position against assisted suicide a few years ago, pushed on by left-leaning courts and the mainstream media. The argument has always been that people in extreme pain from terminal diseases, with no hope of relief should be allowed to end their lives, and if necessary, to receive 'help' in doing so from willing medical professionals.

Such was the theory and there may be some moral and reasonable merit to that argument. However, that was just the starting point. Anti-euthanasia groups have warned all along about the "slippery slope" of assisted suicide, and time has proven them right. In Canada, it has not taken long for the law to be relaxed and amended to allow more and more cases of what is now referred to as "medical aid in dying" or MAID. The law now allows more people to be killed at their own request, from the disabled and mentally ill, to the depressed, to people just lonely or unhappy with their lives. And now there is pressure to extend MAID to sick children and even disabled new-borns, as if they can give informed consent to being killed. 

The slope has indeed been slippery as we approach the moral nadir of allowing almost anyone at all to ask to be killed. Not only does this go against centuries of moral and religious discouragement, medical ethics, and legal tradition, but it opens the gates for widespread abuse, notwithstanding the rules that are supposedly in place to prevent that - rules that often get bent or ignored as soon as they are signed into law. We how have hospitals suggesting MAID to patients who are expensive to care for, and to veterans of wars facing PTSD, as well as seniors who have lost their spouse, or people who cannot find suitable accommodations for managing their disability. Indeed, one of the arguments for expanding MAID is the savings in health-care costs that come from killing the patient!

Then there are the seniors who feel, often under subtle family or societal pressure, that they should just get out of the way, or that their life is meaningless now. When MAID is easy, this option will be taken more often, or even become normal or expected. Inevitably, however, mistakes are made, which of course, cannot be corrected after the fact. Moreover, some jurisdictions now require doctors and others to participate in MAID despite their personal ethical values against it, thereby undermining their freedom of conscience. On one hand, our society gets upset about drug overdoses and suicide attempts by young people, setting up hotlines and education for susceptible youth. Yet on the other we have now turned around and offer MAID to other people, including soon, some of those same youth.  

In my opinion, MAID was wrong from the outset. There are ways for doctors to sedate patients in severe pain, and if that leaves them unconscious or even hastens their passing, no real harm has been done. There is no need to kill people, even if that is what they supposedly want. Proper medical support and counselling usually improve people's quality of life so that they no longer wish to die, but you cannot give them that after they have been killed!

Darwinian Evolution:
Once life on Earth began, by whatever means, it is almost universally assumed that Darwin's theory of common descent, random variation and natural selection, fully accounts for the complexity and diversity of life we find around us today, as well as for the fossil record of extinctions and new species through the past billion years or more. The "neo-Darwinian synthesis", has been updated from Darwin's time to include genetics and other biological advances, and is the now the standard explanation in textbooks, science publications, and most media presentations.

Yet this monolithic perspective on "origin of the species" is, to put it bluntly, far from the truth. While the  Darwinian mechanism can explain minor shifts and adaptations in populations over time (like Darwin's famous finches), and simple mutational changes ("microevolution" such as antibiotic resistance in bacteria), it cannot explain major changes, new genetic information, and novel features in the creation of new and different species over time ("macroevolution" at the phylum, class, order and family levels). All attempts to apply the Darwinian mechanism analytically have come up short in terms of probabilities, credible processes, the available time, and the fossil record, which shows very few truly intermediate forms with gradual changes. 

The limitations of Darwinian evolution theory have been discussed and presented at considerable length for several decades now, and more and more evidence is accumulating showing the impossibility of new genetic code, new features in plants and animals, and any new families of organisms coming about through naturalistic Darwinian means. I have written about this in previous posts, (and here) and there is a wide range of material referenced there for those who wish to look into this subject. Sooner or later, the biological mainstream will shift away from Darwin's theory and be forced to look at alternatives.

Transgenderism:
If adults want to dress up and act like the opposite sex, that is their prerogative. If they do that well and can pass for the opposite sex in public, then let them do so and the public need not be any wiser. If they go further and seek drugs and surgery - at their own expense - to make them more like the sex they want to be, I will not stand in their way, but please don't ask me to knowingly affirm and encourage their gender dysphoria.

Unfortunately, here too, we now have a very one-sided narrative in the media and society at large, causing much confusion, disrupting societal norms, spreading public bewilderment, and even destroying more than a few children's lives. All manner of institutions have jumped on the 'trans' bandwagon for fear they will not be seen as sufficiently woke. People are being forced to use ungrammatical pronouns; men claiming to be women are gaining access into women's change rooms, sports programs, and even jails, with predictably disastrous results. Counsellors and even parents are legally prevented from advising mentally troubled youth and children against "transitioning". Children are being encouraged to doubt who they are, take hormone treatments and undergo mutilating surgery, only to become even more troubled, as well as permanently sterile and unhealthy. Any voices speaking against this seeming insanity are silenced or cancelled without being heard.

Transgenderism for children is unscientific and should be called child abuse in my opinion. It is based on a one-sided narrative pushed by special interests and the ever-eager media. Fortunately, some jurisdictions have begun to backtrack on blanket acceptance of transgender ideology, having woken up to its dangers and disastrous results for many. Alas, Canada has not yet seen reason in this area and presses ahead with laws and policies, school curricula and employee training, institutional pandering and media celebration, all in 'support' of anything LGBT, and especially 'trans'. Meanwhile, those of us wanting to hold onto sanity are judged, condemned and usually silence ourselves out of fear, or for lack of public places to turn to. We wonder how and when this departure from reality will end.

Israel vs. Palestine:
From a western, democratic perspective, this issue should be a slam dunk: one small country, the only open and stable democracy in the region, is surrounded by dysfunctional, backward, tyrannical  countries that want to destroy it.  Do you side with the democracy or their enemies? Founded after holocaust, Israel defends itself effectively and by necessity against attacks from three sides, and hateful diatribe from many other nations who should know better. Support for Israel should be a social justice cause, but it is not.  Instead, the left and progressives in general support Hamas and Hezbollah, recognized terrorist groups who continual threaten Israel, unwilling to negotiate in good faith, while unable to support their own people, giving them fewer human rights, unstable governments, conditions of poverty despite ongoing international aid and nearby oil wealth.

Yes, Israel is sometimes guilty of bad behaviour, including heavy retaliation for armed attacks, and building Jewish settlements on land claimed by Palestinians. But they also provide for Palestinians within their borders, allow them to live, work and vote peacefully, and even to serve in the government. Meanwhile, surrounding countries do not want the Palestinians in their lands and provide little actual support to them. (Such is my understanding from my limited exposure to Middle-East political reality.) I may be wrong in siding with Israel for the most part, but I do not understand those who side with Palestinians to the point of demonstrating on campus, denouncing Israel, or demanding that nations and corporations stop dealing with Israel. 

Okay, that's enough for now!

This, of course, is just a brief and partial collection. Any one of these topics deserves a full blog post (or even a book?) and perhaps I'll expand on a few of them later, or just add a few more briefs here. There are other subjects I could expound on, such as feminism, other LGBT aspects, additional woke causes, and a few more technical/scientific subject areas, but the above entries will have to suffice for now. They will certainly serve for many to pigeonhole me, without thinking, as a "far right monster", or something similar, but I prefer to be a 'contrarian' and a very reasonable one at that!

On many of these topics there are, of course, grey in-between positions, and perhaps I myself do not entirely hold the views outlined above. Is it also possible that you, if you've read this far and have studied these issues, may hold some of the same views yourself, at least in part? Indeed, it is my secret hope that many, perhaps even most reasonable people secretly hold some version of these same opinions; that the world has not gone completely crazy and that sanity may one day again prevail, at least on some issues.

Residential Schools Narratives

I have held off writing this for a while, unsure how the issue would play out, but also concerned about how my views would be received, including possible negative reactions. However, the subject keeps gnawing at me, so I will leap into it regardless. Please don't judge me too harshly.

By now the standard "Residential Schools" narrative is well known to Canadians. In the pre-confederation 19th century, the then British government decided to set up schools for Indian children in order to assimilate them into Canadian (mostly English) culture - "to take the Indian out of the child", as it was understood. After confederation, the government expanded the program, building more "industrial schools" to house and educate children from several reserves. Church groups signed up teachers and other staff to run the schools. Native children were taken, by force, if necessary, from their homes and families to distant schools where they had their hair cut off and clothing burned. They were given English names (or even just numbers) and school uniforms, forbidden from using their own languages, and forced to speak English, while undergoing harsh discipline as they attended and lived at the schools. The children were mistreated, undernourished, given little medical care, and prevented from returning home. Many were emotionally, physically and even sexually abused, and all were mistreated in various ways by the white adult staff, who looked down on them. Some were even beaten or starved and frozen to death, then secretly buried and never heard from again. 

In all, spread over more than a century, around 150,000 native children attended over 100 of these schools, some of which remained open into the late 20th century.  Of those children, several thousand died at the schools, and many were then buried on site in unmarked graves. Most of the children who attended these schools were emotionally traumatized and permanently bear the scars as victims of this "cultural genocide" - the stamping out of their native values, tribal history and beliefs. The government has since apologized repeatedly for the whole debacle and justifiably paid large sums to the survivors and their offspring as partial compensation for the widespread and long-term suffering that still carries over today in succeeding generations. Non-native Canadians, referred to as "settlers" - are now expected to acknowledge the widespread mistreatment and atrocities, and undergo continuing education and penance for this sad part of our national history.

Such is the story as pulled together over the past few decades and captured in the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commision report, and its follow-up work. This narrative has been almost universally adopted by our governments, schools, churches, service agencies, and of course, the mainstream media, who have made it their duty to refer to it in news and opinion pieces as often as possible. All Canadian "settlers" are expected to accept the narrative as part of the reconciliation work and making amends. Churches are regularly shamed for their past roles, and often held to blame for most of the problems. The narrative is now part of Canadian history taught to all school children, and officials everywhere regularly acknowledge this shameful past.

Here is a somewhat different version of the story. In the 19th century the British, and later, Canadian governments were concerned that there was no public education for native children. Tribal leaders and native parents were mostly eager to have their children educated so that they would not be left behind in the burgeoning Canadian culture. Many native reserves were too small or remote to sustain schools, so the government organized and built the residential schools in more central locations, where the children could stay during school sessions. Wanting to educate and children in the faith and give them better lives and prospects for success, church groups agreed to fill the administrative and teaching posts in these schools. Many native children attended other schools in their own communities while living at home, but most who could not were transported to the residential schools, where they lived and learned together.

The schools were largely underfunded by the government, but the often-untrained staff did their best to make do with what they had and provide good education and care. Resources were often short however, the schools were understaffed, and medical care largely unavailable. Many children arrived with infestations, diseases like tuberculosis, or other health conditions. They had to be thoroughly cleansed and given new clothing, school uniforms being the norm in those days. Some of the staff were native adults, and some non-native children attended the schools as well. As the teachers could not speak the various native languages, English was taught and used in class and group activities, although most children could speak their native tongues outside the classroom. Most of the children were also able to return home between sessions, or even on weekends. 

Unfortunately, with childhood diseases uncontrolled in those days, some children did die and when they could not be sent home to their families, had to be buried in cemeteries at or near the school, with Christian burial rites and wooden markers. Records were kept at the schools and there was communication with the parents and reserves when possible. With high student-teacher ratios, including the work of food preparation and supervising the children, activities and residences 24/7, close oversight was limited. As a result, discipline had to be strict, as it was in most other schools at the time. While there were, no doubt, cases of abuse, most of it was from older to younger students, as was typical for any boarding school of that period. 

While it was understandably difficult for small children to be taken from their culture, language and family, most of the children at the schools did well enough and received a fair education. There are records and photos of happy teacher-student relationships, pleasant group outings, neat classrooms, and even hockey teams and other special activities. Many students went on to use their newly learned skills and education to help their reserves and First Nations groups, or to enhance Canadian culture. Yes, in hindsight, the rationale for the schools was partially wrong, and mistakes were doubtless made. As in any culture, some children were emotionally damaged, and the whole program could probably have been improved in numerous ways.

The former, negative narrative was developed over decades as "survivors" stories were collected and sometimes perhaps embellished with hearsay and rumours. The TRC was founded to collect and publish the history and native experiences, to put together a case for government and church apologies and reparation payments. With compensation on the table, more stories came out and the news media started to focus on the horror stories; the tragic abuse and deaths, culminating in the hyped-up reports of "unmarked graves" at various school sites in the summer of 2021.

The reader will notice that these two stories are very different. It stretches credibility to claim that both are entirely true, but both are probably mostly true, albeit biased in very different ways. While the latter story may be somewhat sugar coated, yet to publicly present only the former narrative puts a very negative spin on the residential schools issue. The fact that this is the only story the public constantly sees and hears about skews the truth and makes true reconciliation elusive.

I am not an expert on this subject but have read enough to know that the standard narrative is not the whole truth and that it is being used beyond reason - at least from my (admittedly biased) perspective - to push for repentance, apologies and reparation payments. The full truth and true reconciliation will only occur when all involved act and speak honestly. Clearly, a more balanced picture is needed, one combining both of these stories, comparing the different perspectives, while deleting any false or badly unbalanced aspects. 

The following are some questions I'd like to see answered in getting to the full truth and then to move on from the issue, so that native and non-native Canadians can live together without this hanging over their relationships forever.

1. First, what was the alternative? Everyone involved at the time wanted native children to be educated. Even in hindsight, how else could that have happened within the limitations and available resources of that century? How else could thousands of children from several hundred tribes and reserves have been educated? Who else would be willing to staff the schools if not nuns and other dedicated Christians, working far from their homes for a pittance? Where would the money to make the schools themselves, and the children's care better have come from? Which medical professionals would have been ready to live in the schools or nearby for improved medical care? How could children have been schooled in their various mother tongues? Even if the intent was colonialist and seems racist from our current perspective, at the time the residential school system seemed the best approach to address the native education problem.

2. Overall, what was the outcome for most native children: those who attended these schools compared to those who stayed home on the reserves, with or without schooling there? Have there been any statistical comparisons of how those children subsequently fared as adults in the Canadian milieu? Less than half of native children attended the residential schools, so there should be a large control group to provide such comparisons. 

Did those on reserves learn useful skills for living in Canada? Did they suffer less sickness, abuse and death than in the schools? Comparing them as adults today, can any trends be seen in personality, mental health, and other measures of well-being? Surely some of this data must exist, but have we seen it presented in an unbiased fashion? Not all residential school reports are negative. Many children did well, learned a lot and graduated as educated youth. Many staff and teachers treated them well, within the constraints of a formal school. The whole program was not entirely wrong as implied by the narrative. (See below for various references about this.)

3. How many children actually died at the residential schools and what did they die of? Compare that with deaths back on the reserves, or even with deaths in white communities of the same areas. Recall that tuberculosis was rampant on the reserves (and many other places) along with influenza (the 2019 Spanish Flu epidemic, for example). Then there were pertussis, diphtheria, measles and various other childhood diseases, each taking its toll without vaccines or antibiotics available back then. And of course, accidents and misadventure were more common as well, with fewer safety regulations in force. Children dying was altogether too common everywhere a century or more ago. Indeed, even in settler communities, 20% of children might have died before reaching adulthood.

4. How many children's bodies have actually been found in the "unmarked graves" so often reported by the media? Not how many disturbed plots of ground there seem to be, but actual exhumed skeletal remains? As I write this, I have heard of none! There is lots of talk and speculation, but no actual diggings. Not all of the graves we actually know about may have children from the schools. Adults must have died at the schools, as well, and some of the cemeteries were also used by the local communities. Moreover, one wonders, if it is not wrong to ask, how many "unmarked graves" there are for children on the reserves? Should we take a look?

Were the graves truly unmarked, or just minimally marked and the markers lost over time? Many cemeteries across Canada have lost grave markers, and some have even been bulldozed for development!  In any case, it is likely that almost all of the children buried near residential schools died from diseases rather than any mistreatment or violence at the school. We won't know until we do forensic digging or delve through whatever records still exist.

5. What other institution, active over 120 years, that kept 150,000 children 24/7 does not have a history of abuse, as viewed from the 21st century? There has been child abuse in every arena of life, and some things we call abuse today were normal disciplinary policy or children's treatment back then. Every institution has its horror stories, from English boarding schools, cadet training camps, boy scouts, hazing of college students, etc. Was the apparent mistreatment of children in residential schools worse than that seen in those venues? Or how about the legendary stories of mistreatment by nuns in Catholic schools in the last century? Any setting having children of varying ages together with few adults around the clock is going to yield abuse, especially in the years before child abuse was widely recognized and preventive measures put in place. Yet you never hear of reparations for all children who participated in those institutions. 

6. Which other country has had no historical problems dealing with its indigenous populations? Canada did not have widespread "Indian wars" like in the USA. Many countries had true genocides (mass killings) in their past, which they generally downplay. I expect that Canada's record of treating native peoples, although not stellar by 21st century values, would look better than most colonizing powers, or even many modern countries. Yet the negative media hype about our residential schools has given Canada a black eye internationally, even with China; hardly a bastion of human rights. However bad the residential school experience may have been for some, it pales in comparison with past events in other countries: six million purposely killed and burned or dumped in truly mass graves in Germany in the early 1940's; millions killed in Soviet Russia from 1920 to 1950; tens of millions dead in Mao's long march and great leap forward; the killing fields of Cambodia; the massacre of Armenians in Turkey; the Rwandan massacre; the list goes on. And all of this came after the colonial period of mass slaughters, forced slavery, tribal conflicts, slavery, etc. - atrocities stretching back into pre-history. Even our peaceful First Nations are not without guilt: the Mohawks wiped out some of the Huron tribes and killed many a settler. No people or nation is innocent in this regard!

7. Are we unfairly judging the 19th century based on 21st century values, mores and cultural norms? Regarding disciplinary measures, nutritional standards, health care, class size, human rights, family structure, pedagogy, expectations on children, social welfare, communications, and so on, the norms in past centuries were very different from those today. It is chronological arrogance and grossly unfair to judge people, processes and decisions from a hundred years ago by today's standards! How much of the supposed mistreatment being remembered is largely a projection of today's views onto the past? What aspects of today's Canadian culture will be severely judged a hundred years from now?

8. How much of the negative reporting can be counted as objective truth? Any five-year-old taken from her family to an alien culture and people, given a scrubbing and haircut, unfamiliar clothing, a set of rules and procedures in an unknown language, with strict discipline, would surely feel emotionally traumatized, however well the school staff tried to make her happy. Such treatment would loom large in her memory and, when discussed with other children, would surely grow in scope and import. Later in life, those memories would serve well as the presumed cause for her ongoing problems in life, and would be recalled when solicited, to bolster the narrative and justify payments from the government. I'm not saying that many native children were not ill-treated, but many settler children also bear scars of childhood abuse and emotional trauma, without blaming Canada and the entire school system, or expecting compensation.

9. Does repeating and promoting the standard narrative today resolve the issue for our native peoples? Has it led to proper reconciliation? Hyping incomplete stories, sensationalizing poor treatment with rumours and embellishments to gain attention is surely not the way to deal with past issues. Terms like "genocide", "settlers", "mass graves", "survivors", "murder", "victim", etc. are not conducive to reasonable discussion, freely given empathy, and mutual efforts to assess and sort through the past and its effects on the present. The churches involved in the residential schools are unfairly demonized despite their best intentions at the time, as well as various recent apologies, compensations and public repentances, including now, a visit from the Pope. Meanwhile, several churches have been burned down or vandalized, alternative reports are ignored, and little evidence has been provided for the worst parts of the standard public narrative. This is not the way to resolve the deep-seated and complex issues about the residential schools.

One could go on asking questions, but the above is summarized as follows. The residential schools were well intended, even though in hindsight, apparently misguided, poorly done, and pushed too far. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the subsequent public narrative are one sided, painting an incomplete and somewhat unfair picture of the past. Many native children had good experiences, learned a lot and came out ahead. Not all were abused, damaged and scarred for life. Most of the staff did their best in difficult circumstances with what they had, based on the standards of the day. The current narrative is unhelpful in that most people can see how skewed it is and may therefore, be inclined to take it with quiet cynicism, rather than full acceptance. Without looking into these matters using hard evidence in addition to the usual verbal reports of childhood memories, we will never clarify and sort out the full truth about the residential schools.

Canadians today are surely not to blame for what happened 100 years ago, and yet, we are now trying to make amends and work with the First Nations to improve their circumstances. When he expanded the residential school program, John A. McDonald (Canada's first Prime Minister, back in 1870's) was trying to do the right thing, based on what was then known and within the resource limitations of the day. But what "the right thing" looks like is hard to sort out even now in the current melee of media hype, biased presentations, expanding grievances, shifting reserve realities, and other aspects of the issues surrounding Canada's First Nations peoples. Indeed, all recent attempts to sort out and come to agreeable terms with Canada's indigenous peoples have been mired in confusion and disagreement. No government seems to have a plan that First Nations will accept and support.

One final clarification must be made. This piece - or rant, if you prefer - is only about the residential schools issue. It is not intended to reflect my views about First Nations in Canada or indigenous peoples in general. There is no doubt that when Europeans arrived in what is now Canada, the result was devastation for the indigenous population, primarily through diseases unknowingly transmitted, but also through mistreatment and abuse. Then there were the treaties which carved more and more of the native lands away, and which were often not implemented by the settlers. Add in the cheating and swindles that went on, and the racist presumption of white cultural superiority, as well as the technological disadvantages, and the native peoples of Canada have had very poor treatment over the centuries. 

Fortunately, however, this has largely shifted in recent decades as First Nations have come into their own, rebuilding much of their varied cultures, and now flexing their political power to assert their rights and wishes. But many cultural scars and serious problems on and off the reserves remain unresolved. The history of the residential school system probably contributed to both sides of this journey but adopting only the negative narrative is not fair and will probably not help the native peoples in the long run. Yes, Canada like many countries, has a problem dealing with its indigenous peoples. There are valid historical and ongoing grievances that need to be addressed, and no comprehensive solution is in sight. But there will not be a just and settled reconciliation until the full truth is available and all sides behave fairly and honestly with each other. 

This piece reflects my current opinion, based on incomplete readings and partial data, so I doubtless have some errors and am likely in need of correction in some details. My writings are not entirely original, of course. I have been greatly educated and aided by various pieces written by brave souls questioning the standard media narrative, mostly through smaller publications. Here are some of the ones I have collected for further reading and edification:

http://www.edmontonchina.ca/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=756776

https://c2cjournal.ca/2018/04/letters-to-senator-beyak-uncensored/

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/12/15/tomson-highway-residential-schools_n_8787638.html

https://fcpp.org/2003/05/01/residential-schools-story-more-complicated/

https://tnc.news/2022/01/19/an-honest-conversation-about-canadas-residential-school-system/

https://tnc.news/2021/12/19/the-misleading-claim-that-150000-indigenous-children-were-forced-to-attend-residential-schools/

https://tnc.news/2021/07/13/can-we-discuss-those-unmarked-graves-expert-panel-counters-the-uncritical-media-narrative-about-residential-schools/

https://tnc.news/2021/07/12/six-things-the-media-got-wrong-about-the-graves-found-near-residential-schools/

https://www.dorchesterreview.ca/blogs/news/the-false-narrative-of-irs-burials

https://www.dorchesterreview.ca/pages/mysteries-of-kamloops

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/rescued-from-the-memory-hole-some-first-nations-people-loved-their-residential-schools

https://hymie.substack.com/ 

Some Green Energy Reality

 There is a big push everywhere to reduce our use of fossil fuels, replacing them with renewable energy sources, such as solar or wind power.  This pressure, of course, is driven by climate change ideology and related concerns about a warming planet.  The most eager folk hope that we will be "carbon neutral" by 2030, urged on by the United Nations and recent IPCC edicts and warnings.  Regardless of how important you think the issue, the push for "clean energy" will doubtless continue unabated for a long time.  Under the guise of "net zero", to stop emitting carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and gas, many governments and industries are slowly installing more wind and solar power.  Those both produce electric power, so there is also a push to switch vehicles and various industrial processes over to electricity. 

The often unrecognized problem with wind and solar energy is that they are intermittent; the sun doesn't shine at night, the wind often does not blow, and clouds come by at random intervals.  To make up for the times when renewable energy is unavailable, requires some form of backup energy storage medium; a system that can easily convert from electric grid power and back again in a controlled and practical fashion.  Replacing all other electric power sources with wind and solar would require absurd levels of backup storage for many days, or even weeks -- to get us through a Canadian winter, for example. 

To explain this better, consider a modest city of one million people, which typically requires 2 gigawatt (GW) of electric power on average, with likely variations between 1 and 3 GW. If all of that must come from wind and solar, the city would need at least 6 GW of solar and wind generating capacity to get an average around 2 GW, and a minimum of 30 GWh (gigawatt-hours) of backup storage just to make it through one windless night.  That is equivalent to more than 500,000 electric car battery packs.  Even then there would be a high probability of frequent outages.  Maintaining a truly reliable grid solely with wind and solar power would increase these numbers further.

Of course by 2030 wind and solar will NOT provide all our electricity no matter how loud the alarmists shout and the green people dream.  Nuclear energy will still be around, providing constant base generation (24/7), and with new technology, nuclear may be pressed into moderate, long-term growth, if governments can deflect or appease the anti-nuclear crowd.  However, nuclear power cannot easily be dispatched; that is turned up and down at a moment's notice to match the instantaneous demand in the power grid.  Nuclear takes days to start up or shut down properly and works best operating at a constant output power - hence the base supply.

Then there is hydroelectric power, which is somewhat or partially dispatchable, providing some limited "energy storage" by way of water reservoirs - not nearly enough, of course, to replace reliable and fully dispatchable fossil fuel plants, but some.  And hydro-power cannot be expanded much since all the good sites are already in use.  In addition to solar and wind, there may be other renewable energy sources that can run on stored energy; e.g. fuel cells and hydrogen, although I personally would not invest in that (see more below). 

Dispatchable loads may also come into play: allowing your air conditioning or electric vehicle recharging to happen at the whim of the grid controllers, so as to shift their loads into times when power is abundant - all for a modest reduction in your cost per kWh.  Mind you, industry and commercial enterprises have so far not been keen to accept brownouts in return for reduced rates, but some degree of "load shifting" should be palatable to most people if done well.  In addition, there will continue to be modest improvements in process efficiencies: better insulated homes, tightened up industries, reducing energy and heat waste a bit. Together these may reduce or flatten peak loads through the day.

These changes, together with the inevitable residual natural-gas generating stations (which are very dispatchable), other traditional generating plants, and possibly newer power sources such as biogas, ethanol and biodiesel, would greatly reduce the amount of energy storage required as we move toward a more sustainable future.  Nevertheless, huge investments in energy storage for electric power will have to be made if we want to continue adding wind and solar capacity while keeping our power grids reliable, as every consumer expects. 

The obvious choice for electric energy storage is batteries.  When grid power is plentiful, AC power is rectified to DC and used to charge electro-chemical battery cells.  When extra power is needed, the batteries discharge through inverter circuits to feed AC power back into the grid.  The current front-runner in this regard is rechargeable lithium batteries of varying internal chemistries and constructions.  Encouraged by the growing EV market, lithium cells are slowly getting better and less expensive.  They have a high round-trip efficiency (kWh returned to the grid vs. kWh required to recharge them) around 80%, are rapidly dispatchable in either mode, and have a decent usable life.  Potential problems with limited materials resources can probably be worked around over time, and the cells can be recycled. 

Large (gigawatt-hour - GWh) battery storage plants are currently in planning or under construction. They are intended to shift loads by a few hours at most, not by days or weeks, and even so, they will be expensive.  Many such plants would be needed (terawatt storage!) to do away with fossil fuel generation altogether, so that is unlikely to occur by 2030. 

There are other, often-hyped energy storage media possibilities, such as pumped water, compressed air, hydrogen, thermal storage, flywheels, artificial fuels, raised heavy weights, and so on.  However, they all suffer from either low round-trip efficiency (e.g. hydrogen, air, thermal), capacity and scalability issues (pumped water, raised weights), or large capital costs (most of these).  These technologies will find small, niche markets, but are unlikely to provide grid-wide backup power at the required level.

Combined with their low operating factor (less than 40% of the time storing and less than 40% releasing stored energy) means that any stored power supply is expensive on a dollars per delivered kWh basis (both capital and operating) compared to raw solar/wind or most traditional energy sources.  As far as I am aware, no other energy storage technology can match batteries for high efficiency, flexibility, and response time.  Yet even batteries can provide backup power at less than 33% utility (80% efficiency, combined with < 40% discharge time).  Thus, if a battery plant and nuclear plant cost the same on a per kilowatt rating basis (I doubt if they do, but just suppose), then the long-term cost per delivered kWh of the battery plant would be at least three times that of the nuclear power plant, depending on other assumptions and variables.

Ultimately, of course, reality will have its way.  Yes, we will get additional solar and wind energy, some large (but limited) battery storage plants, some percentage dispatchable loads, more nuclear, and slivers of additional hydro and other sources, but we will also keep many clean gas-fired turbine generators; and probably more than a few other carbon-based power plants will continue operating after 2030. Perhaps by then the "climate change" demands will become sufficiently subject to reason that the push for "net zero" will fade, diminish, or quite reasonably be pushed out a few decades more.

In the end, reality always wins, and we will continue to have a mix of energy sources and storage media going into the future.

The Bad Design Argument

 In the study of the history of life on the Earth, there are two and only two reasonable explanations. Either a mind - AKA intelligent agent - played some role in directing evolution over the past 4 billion or so years, as claimed by Intelligent Design theory (ID), or else there was no intelligence involved and life evolved by random chance, natural selection, and other unguided, natural processes, as held by modern Darwinists. Any proposed alternative must be one or other of these, and of course, any mix of these two is still ID at some level. 

At some point in debates about Intelligent Design, you will likely hear comments about how badly the human body (eye, hand, reproduction, etc.) or some other animal is designed. A brief statement will usually follow to the effect that, "God would have made a better design if he was the designer, therefore there is no designer and evolution is true." This presumptive "logic" can come in different guises, usually with along with some supposed examples of "bad design". However, for a variety of reasons, which I will explore, this is a bad argument.

The "bad design" argument is usually brought up by atheists or materialists who do not believe in God. Yet here they pretend to know what God should have done, based on their own ignorance of the design and of any relevant theology. The hubris and irony here are thick! They assume a series of "bad designs" and suggest that those must have come about by an unguided, and hence imperfect, process; i.e. Darwinian evolution. Note however, that even if their examples of poor designs in life were true, even poor designs require a designer! An incompetent designer is still a designer and the "no designer" conclusion does not automatically follow from the "poor design" judgement. ID theory does not require that the designer be the God of the Bible, even if he is the obvious candidate.

Nevertheless, such summary judgements about "bad design" are usually also wrong in the sense that a detailed study often shows that the particular feature in question is in fact a good design for reasons not appreciated by the accuser. One example is the supposedly "reverse wired" human eyeball, where the optic nerves are in front of the retina, thereby blocking some of the light. The human appendix is another example offered as an unnecessary evolutionary left over serving no purpose. These and many other "bad design" claims have been refuted. See this article for some examples.

This raises another point; the person making the "{bad design" call is usually just passing along some meme that he has read or heard and has no real understanding of the biology or physiology in question, much less the alternative explanations. Thus it is often merely an argument from ignorance. A wiser approach would be to learn more about the feature or design in question before passing judgement on it.

In general and especially in engineering design practice, it is impossible to judge someone's design without knowing the design specifications and constraints behind it: the purpose, capabilities, cost, schedule, regulations, available materials, limitations, and so on imposed on the design process and resulting product. As an erstwhile systems design engineer, I can state unequivocally that there is no such thing as a "perfect design". All designs are an attempt to optimize some aspect of the designed item within the constraints of the project. All designs can be "improved" by additional effort and cost, but once a design is deemed "good enough" it is usually released to meet the schedule. 

All designs also involve trade-offs among various parameters and constraints. Without knowing all of those, it is unwise to judge the resulting product or process. Of course, we all complain about products that don't work properly, or that break because they were cheaply made. But those are human-designed products, none of which come close to the complexity and integrity of even the simplest living creature. Humility is therefore a better starting place in judging the fitness and merit of any human design, and even more so for designs found in nature. Indeed, more and more these days engineers are looking at design in nature for ideas on how to improve their own products.

Another point is that no designed thing operates in a vacuum, apart from the rest of the world. Everything is part of some larger system which it must interact with and perform within. Every living thing is part of a broader ecosystem where it plays different roles, and those interactions raise additional constraints that need to be taken into account from the design perspective. For instance, in principle, herbivores could be made faster or more powerful than the carnivores preying on them, but then the carnivores would die out, unbalancing the ecosystem. From the herbivore perspective, they might feel they are poorly designed, but a higher level viewpoint shows that ecological balance is more important.

Since the "bad design" argument is usually an attack on Theism, some additional things may be said about their ultimate target: God and (usually) Christianity. Note that God never claimed that creation was "perfect", he only judged it as "very good". Perfection apart from God is not possible. Moreover, once creation was completed, things started to go down hill quickly, initially due to the Fall and the entrance of sin into the world, which messes with everything (see Genesis 3). 

Moreover, due to entropy, all of the created world, including humans, began to break down and collect imperfections. As with any designed item, wear and tear, environmental effects, usage past its best-before date, abuse, and other realities cause even well-designed things to stop working, break down, or work poorly. Some seeming design problems in humans can be traced to errors finding their way into our genome. For example, humans cannot make Vitamin-C due to a genetic defect, and of course, many diseases can be traced to errors that have crept into our genome over time.

The next time you entertain (or are tempted to make) this "bad design", anti-ID argument, think first and ask yourself, "What have I designed so that I can judge a complex system like the human body?", or "Have I examined the design constraints and purposes for this particular item being judged?" That should slow down the negativity and allow the debate or discussion to proceed in a more useful and meaningful direction. By all means, keep up the discussion, but please base it on defensible evidence and reasonable arguments.

Two-Dimensional Time?

The space-time continuum we inhabit has three spatial dimensions and one time dimension - as far as we know.  For us, it is easy enough to visualize fewer spatial dimensions.  A one dimensional world is merely a straight line.  A two-dimensional world is a plane; e.g. x and y axes on a graph.  In 1884 Edwin Abbott published a fun book called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, exploring how life might be for two-dimensional creatures, and how mystified they are by a 3D visitor to their plane.  Some mathematicians claim to be able to visualize a four-dimensional space with tesseracts, hyperspheres, etc., but that is difficult for us, stuck as we are in 3D space.  Some cosmological theories of reality; e.g. String Theory, call for 6 or 10 or even more dimensions in all, but some of those are supposedly curled up so small that we cannot detect or experience them.

In all of these cases, however, there is but one temporal dimension.  Aside from relativistic time dilation effects, we all share the same passage of time, and the time where you are is the same - apart from time zones - as for me.  We all pass through time - which no one fully understands - at the rate of 60 minutes per hour, and your hour is the same length as mine, even if they feel different subjectively.

One temporal dimension is well understood, even if we do not quite know what time itself is (a deep philosophical conundrum).  An existence having no time - a zero time dimensional reality is easy to think about as a fixed space where nothing ever happens: no movement, change, or even thought, as in a still photograph - not a very interesting existence.  Looking for more complexity, we can ask, could there be more than one time dimension, even in principle?  I have spent some time trying to wrap my mind around what that might mean and how it would work, and finally chanced on a simple way to express and visualize an existence with two temporal dimensions - 2D time.

Consider a teen playing a video game.  The teen has his own passage of time, and the game has another, virtual timeline as events in the game occur.  These two times need not be the same, indeed, they often are not, yet they exist together.  In the game, hours may pass in a few minutes of the teen's time, or the game time may slow down, taking several player minutes to get through a few seconds of intense action in slow-motion.  What's more, the player may save his game and then shut it down, effectively freezing time inside the game, while his own clock continues to tick.  With the "save game" feature, he can even go back to an earlier game time if his avatar "dies" in the game.

Such a game is an example of a computer simulation.  An engineer develops a program in some software to simulate some physical process, in order to better understand what is going on, or to test and optimize his design.  The time dimension in the simulation does not begin until the engineer starts the simulation running at t = 0.  Note that in the simulated reality, there is no "before" this time.  Simulated time does not exist before the simulation begins - or alternatively, it is stuck at t = 0 until the engineer presses the "go" button.  Meanwhile, of course, the engineer's own timeline continues undisturbed; he works, goes home, eats, has coffee breaks, sleeps, etc.

This two dimensional time reality can be visualized in the following graph.  It has two independent time dimensions, te for the engineer's time in the real world, and ts for the timeline in the simulated world.  In this example, there are no spatial dimensions shown; size, shape, motion, etc. do not matter for this explanation.  Of course, a spatial dimension could be added, but that is harder to do on a 2D screen, and unnecessary for the description.  We can walk through events in this 2D temporal plane as follows:

1. At te = 0, the engineer has not yet started the simulation, so ts is stuck at zero, while his te proceeds at the usual rate.

2. the engineer presses "go" and the simulation begins.  If the rate of time passage is the same, the line would then rise at 45 degrees, but in this case, the simulation time runs faster than the real time te.

3. the engineer decides the simulation was running too fast, perhaps missing some details. So he slows down ts to run slower than his own time.

4. the engineer doesn't like what he sees, so he shuts it down, resetting ts to zero.

5. after a break, during which he tweaks some initial conditions or parameters of the simulation, he starts over, this time with a different ts speed.

6. stopping the simulation, he spends some time looking at the results.

7. liking what he sees, he sets ts back to an intermediate value, so that he can watch it again, 

8. finally, the engineer lets the simulation carry on for a longer simulated duration.

With this example, it is easy to see how different realities could experience different time dimensions in the "same" world.  In such a situation, the simulation "experiences" one time dimension, as programmed by the engineer.  The engineer however, experiences, or at least understands, two time dimensions; his own and that inside his simulation.  Note that the engineer's time, te always increases at the same rate.  He cannot stop or go back in time, only move forward at the normal rate.  Note too that other engineers may be running other simulations, each with its own timeline, but presumably those simulations do not interact with each other on different timelines, and so, while there may hypothetically be other parallel time dimensions, they are just different versions of the 2D time discussed here and do not truly add more dimensions.

Another way of considering 2D time is while reading a printed fiction story.  Time begins in the story when you begin reading the book, and it passes as you turn the pages, until you put the book down, which freezes the story's timeline.  The story time may pass quickly or slowly as you read, depending on the context of events in the book.  Indeed, many books jump back and forward in story time as one reads, but you understand the book has a single unified timeline.  In principle, after reading the book through, you - like the author - can consider all of the story timeline at once, at least in memory.

Having understood this approach to two-dimensional time, we could postulate a third time dimension; perhaps God's own timeline above us, in which his eternal time dimension encompasses but transcends ours.  Whether time truly "passes" for God, we do not know, because we cannot envisage, much less experience God's time.  However, he may see all of our timeline at once as we do for the engineer described above, by looking at the above graph.  Over all, in addition to his own divine time dimension, td, God may experience or at least observe and control our created time line, te, along with that in the engineer's simulation, ts, if he is interested in that detail.  Hence, in some sense, for God there can be three-dimensional time!

In principle, the engineer could "play God" by programming a simulation that includes a built-in simpler simulation with its own separate timeline, tss, but that gets rather convoluted, so I won't go there.  Suffice it to say that the concept of a simulated reality makes thinking about two or even three dimensional time more understandable.  Now if your timeline and mine were different, yet we could somehow interact when they came together, that would be closer to actually experiencing two independent time dimensions at once.  That is harder to wrap our minds around, although some sci-fi tales and superhero movies try to do that; e.g. stopping or slowing time for the world while the superhero action continues.

For some further exploration of the weird possibilities that God's control of our timeline might allow, see my previous posting at: https://thopid.blogspot.com/2019/01/our-simulated-world.html  For example, as in the engineer's simulation, God could perhaps stop or even reset our timeline for his own purposes, and we would never know!

Renewable Energy Sanity

 

I like wind power and solar power, I really do. I taught a course on alternative energy once and I worked for years in photovoltaics. I am all for using these technologies where they make sense. Home use, remote sites, and small additions to utility grids are great. But they run into serious problems when trying to fill more than perhaps 20% of the demand load on a power grid.

Any AC power grid has to balance supply (electrical generation in watts) against demand (the total load on the grid in watts) continuously, second by second in order to maintain the voltage and frequency of the grid. A grid consisting of soures and loads has almost no energy storage capacity. If the load exceeds the supply even for a fraction of a second, the voltage will dip, reducing the power to all loads, thereby dropping the total load down to match the instantaneous supply. If the generators push out too much current for the total load at any moment, the voltage will increase and the load will rise to compensate.

A grid with variable sources and varying loads is kept stable by having some control mechanisms, and by adding some storage elements to ride through instantaneous variations less than a second or so. Overall grid loads are somewhat predictable: typically peaking during the afternoon and reaching their minimum in the middle of the night. Weekends and weekdays provide other changes, as do high and low ambient temperature extremes. But any grid needs quick control mechanisms to handle sudden load changes, line faults, or sudden generator shutdowns.

Power generators have different control time frames. A nuclear power plant can be slowly adjusted on an hourly basis, but takes a day or so to properly shut down, and longer to start up. Thus nuclear plants usually provide a steady base load, perhaps up to 40% of the maximum load for the grid. Always on, and almost always the same power supplied into the grid.

Hydroelectric and coal/oil fired plants can be adjusted more quickly, but still take minutes to ramp up or down smoothly. Gas turbine generators are quicker, and are may be used to make minute-by-minute changes to the supply side, in response to other grid changes. Those supplies can therefore make up the variable parts, or peak loads, during the day, often being scheduled (dispatched) ahead of time for the expected changes.

Most grids now have some capacitors or batteries for sub-second control of small, fast changes. These are electronically switched in or out as needed. In some cases, certain loads can be placed under grid control to shut them down if the net supply cannot meet the instantaneous load demand. In this way, a large grid keeps the voltage and frequency within tight constraints as required by the government regulators.

Now add alternative energy into the mix. Solar power drops precipitously when clouds cover the sun, and of course falls to zero at night. Winds are notoriously variable, so wind power output is constantly changing in unpredictable ways. This is not a problem if the sources are a small part of the grid; the existing storage and control mechanisms can make up for the variability using other sources or shutting down loads as needed. However, as governments and people seek to use more "green energy", the percentage of the grid supplied by these alternatives goes up and starts causing major problems for the utility.

Some examples: California, in the summer of 2020 when rolling blackout had to be used because there wasn't enough power from the renewable supplies to meet the demand. Ontario has a similar problem: its contracts with wind and solar require it to pay top dollar for "green energy", whether it is needed or not. As a result, Ontario must often give away megawatts of power to other jurisdictions when the supply exceeds the demand, even as they pay for solar and wind energy, losing money overall in the exchange.

To maintain a stable grid in Ontario, the utiliy keeps gas turbine generators spinning with zero output, to kick in quickly when the wind or solar drops out suddenly. Clearly this is inefficient, and the resulting emissions detract from the supposed pollution-free wind and solar generation.

To grow the percentage of the grid beyond say, 20% wind/solar requires adding massive energy storage capacity. This isn't just a few batteries here and there. If the grid was 60% renewable, for example, it would need many hours of backup storage for those cloudy days, or weeks with little wind, to meet the peak load demand. Worse, when winter comes, there isn't much sunlight: in Ontario, for example, November averages two hours of direct sun per day, compared with perhaps 6 plus hours in June. Trying to balance supply and load over the seasons would require ridiculous amounts of energy storage.

This raises another issue. If you want a 100% renewable energy grid, you need to size the peak supply to more than 200% of the peak load. That is needed to average out the day-night cysles on the solar and the calm/windy weather for wind turbines. That becomes rather expensive, of course. Even if a watt of rated solar power is cheaper than a watt of rated nuclear power, the nuclear can run 80% of the time or more, year round, while the solar can barely operate 30% of the time at that level, at best, and much less in the winter.

For a 100% renewable energy grid in Ontario, the grid would have to provide Terawatt Hours (TWH) of backup energy storage to ride through the ups and downs of the solar and wind generators, while meeting the load demand and matching the load variations. Doing that with batteries would be insanely expensive, even if Ontario could find that much capacity to purchase. 

There are other energy storage technologies. Flywheels, compressed gas and hydrogen storage have all been touted, but they too are pricey or the round-trip efficiency is poor. The best current method is pumped water storage: pump large volumes of water up a high hill to a big reservoir when power is plentiful, then let it run downhill through a hydroelectric turbine when peak power is needed. This can be fairly efficient, and can store lots of energy if you invest in huge pumps, reservoirs and infrastructure. But even so, there are not that many suitable locations.

Fortunately, for places like Ontario, the situation is not quite so dire. Nuclear power plants provide the base supply around 50%. Hydro power provides about 40% of Ontario's supply, and hydro-power sites are often good candidates for pumped storage: you already have the volume, the turbines, and gravitational head, at least in some places. Mind you, you cannot back up or turn off a river very far or for long. 

Most utilities in North America are not so fortunate as Ontario, depending as they do on fossil fuel (coal, oil, gas) for most of their electricity generation. Using nuclear and hydro as your principal sources, and adding solar and wind, with significant storage of some sort, is probably the most practical way to go to get up over 60% non-fossil-fuel supply mix in most locations. Even so, pushing wind and solar beyond perhaps 20% of the total will require massive additional storage of some kind. 

Perhaps at some future time a more steady renewable energy source will be developed, or maybe the cost of large-scale energy storage will drop significantly. Something like that would be essential to get to a fully renewable, reliable utility grid without nuclear and hydro power. Until then, we can make marginal improvements, supply mix adjustments, and storage additions as feasible and financially practical. But until then most utilities will depend on various forms of fossil fuel power generation to keep our electric grids running reliably.

Mental Reality Theory

In philosophy, there is a long-standing debate - very long standing, over thousands of years! - about the fundamental nature of reality. On one side, realists claim that the world we think we see and experience around us is indeed real, made of matter and energy, and that the things we see around us exist apart from our awareness of them. Idealists on the other hand believe that the only reality we know for sure is what is in our minds. Everything else is simply sensations we experience with our minds. There may be no external reality, or it may be quite different from what we think we experience. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_realism

While idealism seems very odd to most at first glance, it is actually a well-founded position, giving rise to the "brain in a vat" idea, or more recently, The Matrix movie series, where what we experience inside our heads does not correspond with what is really happening. Indeed, everything we think we experience is merely nerve impulses coming into our brains. Who knows whether those impulses relate to anything real? Maybe some mad scientist is sending us prepared nerve signals as part of his experiment. Moreover, even the concept of nerves and a brain are based on a supposed external physical reality (EPR) that we have no direct access to. We could, in principle, be a simulation in a computer, or worse, a scripted fictional character just passing through the plot as someone else turns the pages. As weird as it may seem, there is no way to be absolutely certain that one of these situations is not true.

In one current manifestation, idealism is sometimes called Mental Reality Theory (MRT), the claim that all of reality is mere mental activity in some non-physical reality. There is no EPR, no external world. The entire world consists only of mental activity, perhaps shared with other minds at times, but nonetheless, devoid of any actual physical matter or energy. Everything we claim to experience is just sensation of mental activity in our minds.

The proponents of MRT claim that they can prove their case, and they point to a variety of evidence in support. As well as the above fact that all experience is based on sensations perceived only by the mind, they have related arguments. For instance Descartes' "cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) is the only thing anyone can know for absolutely certain. Any other "fact" is based on assumptions, tenets, or presuppositions that cannot be proven.

Recently, MRT advocates also point to quantum physics to "prove" that matter does not truly exist - it is all just interacting wave functions. And they apply the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics to say that mental activity - the observer effect - determines even physical reality.  By discounting matter and energy and expanding the role of thought, they claim support for their views.

But no so fast! While the alternative of believing in an external physical reality cannot be "proven" mathematically, I believe there is considerable evidence available to each of us to cast MRT into doubt and perhaps balance the debate again. I will present several such arguments: consistency, interactions with others, shared reality, children, and surprises, as well as countering the quantum arguments.

First of all, my experience of the apparent external physical reality (EPR) is very consistent over time, far more consistent than I could maintain in my own mind. The room I'm in seems to me very solid, detailed and unchanging except for the normal coherent changes with my movements and attention, and the passage of time. When I wake up each morning, the world seems just as I remember it from the previous day, even if I cannot describe all the details. To create and constantly maintain such consistency only in my mind would be far more than I feel capable of doing. What a waste of mental energy if it is not real!

Of course there are counter arguments. How do I know what I remember is what actually existed the last time I looked? Maybe my memories are being adjusted on the fly. And if my mind is incapable, then some sort of Universal Mind existing in the same mental reality would be more than capable of maintaining the illusion of consistency, which I only tap into from my smaller mind.

Next, there is the question of other minds. Unless I am a solipsist (believing mine is the only mind in existence), then MRT has to account for other people - or rather, other minds. They assume the other minds exist in the same mental reality universe. That is OK, albeit rather vague, but look at how these minds interact. If MRT is true, one would think telepathy would be the obvious way for minds to interact. However, that does not seem to be the case in our experience. Rather, we seem to need to convert thoughts into nerve impulses that control muscles and body parts to create speech, which then goes as sound waves to the other person's ears, to be converted to nerve impulses into his brain before becoming a communication. Interaction at a distance involves additional transducers and physical signal media, like telephones, computers, wireless and electrical circuits, etc. Why depend on such cumbersome, convoluted methods for mind-to-mind interaction if it isn't real? And what does "distance" even mean in a mental reality?  If all of this apparent physical reality is an illusion, how did it come about and why does it seem so real to each one of us?  Perhaps some demon mind is running the experiment, having better control of mental "space" than we have managed, and using it to fool us all?

When these two arguments are combined, they provide a third one: shared experiences. When two people sit down together, they can communicate sufficiently well to be sure that the EPR they experience is identical. The table between us is this colour, that material, an agreed size and shape, and so on, to an almost arbitrary level of detail. They can see, touch, hear and experience the same things and events, without unexplainable differences, aside from the obvious ones of precise location, which way they are each looking, and so on.  In an MRT world, how would that work? How could two minds "move" to meet together, see the world shift as they move, and then experience the same "reality" around them from slightly different, but compatible perspectives, all without prior collusion?  That is never explained, other than by some reference to the Universal Mind controlling everything; perhaps the same mad scientist or demon?

In philosophy, it is often useful to reflect on how children grow and develop in order to address deep questions. MRT has no problem with minds being immature or minds learning and maturing - that is what minds do.  But how does that apply to what children actually do while learning?  Almost all of their learning is based on interaction with the EPR, through touch, sight, movement, sound, etc. Despite parents' and teachers' best efforts, children do not learn much by direct, verbal communication. Nor do they soak up wisdom by osmosis from some Universal Mind.  And then there is the question of how such children come to exist? What is the mental reproduction process that seems to require physical interaction between two and only two different minds? While I haven't read a lot from them, MRT proponents would seem to provide little help there.

An interesting consideration is the concept of "surprise". All through life, unexpected things happen to us all. We stub our toe, we lose our keys, we find a long lost book, we have a surprise party, or an unexpected visit from a friend (or the police!), and so on.  If MRT is true, where are these surprises coming from?  I cannot be creating them myself or they would not be surprising.  One could argue that my subconscious is creating them, but what does that even mean in MRT theory?  Does my mind have purely mental "parts" that work together? The other answer would, again be the Universal Mind creating these situations for me.

The last point, regarding quantum physics, is somewhat different.  MRT people seem not to notice the irony of depending on the results of physics experiments done in the EPR as evidence that the EPR does not exist.  If MRT is all there is, then particles, waves and energy, not to mention all of physical reality, including physics itself, are illusory.  How can an illusion be used to prove its own non-existence?  I expect MRT has some explanation for this seeming contradiction, but at first blush, it looks like an odd approach.

As I see it, to be credible, MRT must fall back on some sort of Universal Mind, which to us would be indistinguishable from "God". This suggests that MRT is metaphysical at its core, and perhaps religious as well. That is OK as long as MRT people do not then try to debunk actual religions and other people's metaphysics.  Indeed, there are related theories that the EPR we experience, including ourselves, is a simulation at some god-like level. That may be conceivable, but it is not quite the same as MRT. In any case, personally I am going to stick with realism, trusting the existence of an EPR, as my view of reality.  And I suggest that MRT advocates operate 99% of the time as if they too accept EPR as the basis for their ongoing existence and experiences.

I did say the debate has been around for awhile. These few paragraphs will not settle it, of course, but it was fun exploring some aspects of the two competing views, and I now wonder, are there only two, or is there a third possibility?