HardThrasher
Published 6 Jan 2024If you’d like to be a cool kid, then become a Patreon or if you’d like to email me send a message to lordhardthrasher@gmail.com
0:00 Intro
4:30 We’re Going to North Africa 1st
8:36 But you’re not doing it properly
16:16 Play it Again Ira
22:30 Mid 1943 – The Crisis Begins
26:53 The Black Summer
28:03 Operation Tidal Wave
34:21 Into The Valley of Death – Schweinfurt
41:34 What Now?
48:37 Survivors Club
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May 28, 2025
Masters of the Air – The Bomber War Episode 4 – 8th Air Force 1942-1943
QotD: Communitarianism
Communitarianism is on the rise. The Left has its “Blue Labour” project, and writers like Giles Fraser and Paul Embery. The Right has its “One Nation Conservatism” project, and writers like Nick Timothy and Tim Montgomery. They differ in emphasis, but the commonalities outweigh the differences. It appeals to both right-wingers looking for an alternative to economic liberalism, and to left-wingers looking for an alternative to “woke” hyper-moralism.
What is communitarianism? Communitarians would probably define themselves as people who recognise the importance of community and social relations, but that is a bit like saying that environmentalists are people who care about the environment, or that feminists are people who believe in gender equality. Defining a political outlook in motherhood-and-apple-pie terms, so that you could not disagree with it without coming across like a complete psychopath, is not particularly useful. Apart from Britain’s four or five Randians, everybody recognises the importance of community and social relations. (And presumably, Britain’s four or five Randians tacitly recognise it too.)
In practice, communitarianism is little else but a knee-jerk anti-liberalism. Communitarians define themselves in opposition to an imaginary hyper-materialistic, hyper-individualistic liberal, who sees life as no more than a long string of financial transactions, and society as no more than a bunch of isolated individuals who happen to live side by side. Communitarians never identify any specific person who actually holds that view, which is not too surprising, because, apart from Britain’s aforementioned four or five Randians (who, on a bad day, might come a little bit close to that caricature), no such person exists.
Kristian Niemietz, “Communitarianism: the art of passing off trivial clichés as profound wisdoms”, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2020-02-14.
May 27, 2025
The Revolution is Crushed – Greek Civil War Part 3 – W2W 30
TimeGhost History
Published 26 May 2025The Greek Civil War ends in 1949 — in fire, blood, and betrayal. This episode explores how the Communist Democratic Army was defeated, why Yugoslavia and Tito cut off support, and how American-backed government forces brought the conflict to a brutal conclusion.
This is the final part of our Greek Civil War trilogy in War 2 War — TimeGhost’s Cold War series following the battles that refused to end even after WW2.
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Four years on, and the media still haven’t been honest about the Residential Schools claims
At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies looks back to the bombshell claims that horrified the nation, yet went unquestioned by pretty much all of the mainstream media:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.
This week marks the fourth anniversary of the day Canada’s media broke faith with the public that funds it.
May 27, 2021, was when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” discovered at the former Kamloops Residential School site. Most, if not all, media reported this statement, which was based on anomalies shown on ground penetrating radar, without challenging its veracity.
Not long after, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan announced that ground penetrating radar had located 751 unmarked graves in a community cemetery adjacent to the former location of a residential school.
Talk of “mass graves” ricocheted across the country and the world. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Saskatchewan in a flash on bended knee with teddy bears. It didn’t matter that the markers in the cemetery had been removed decades ago by a rogue priest; Anderson Cooper and a 60 Minutes crew were already flying in to Regina. The impression left by the coverage was that children had been murdered en masse. Statues were toppled or put in storage and close to 200 churches were burned — many to the ground — or vandalized in the months and years that followed. Pope Francis visited Canada in 2022 to atone once again for the Roman Catholic church’s role in operating many of the schools.
All because no one had the courage to ask: “This is a very serious allegation – how can you be certain?” and then, in the immortal words of the City News Bureau of Chicago, check it out.
The coverage at the time showed little evidence journalists looked for proof beyond the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc allegation or gave sufficient play to Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme’s efforts to establish context.
Since then, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc have revised their confirmation of bodies so that they now maintain the radar showed anomalies that possibly could be graves. No bodies have been found or, for that matter, searched for. The band has received millions of dollars to assist it with its investigation and the school is now a national historic site.
The original stories remain online and, in many cases, uncorrected, leaving the public’s understanding of the matter unchanged. Here’s one example from CTV/Canadian Press. The headline — “Remains of 215 children found buried at former B.C. residential school” — is still there. CBC has made an effort to update its stories, but its original headlines remain and recent incidents suggest staff still believe the initial version.
As Marco Navarro-Genie of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently wrote, media may even have been enlisted as allies to ensure the allegations went unchallenged:
“According to The Knowing by Tanya Talaga, “select journalists” were given embargoed details to ensure “sensitive and impactful” coverage. CBC journalist Angela Sterritt admitted she was in contact with the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc the day before the announcement and was one of only a few journalists granted access to the June 4, 2021, video conference, where live-streaming was prohibited. This raises serious questions about whether the CBC acted as a passive reporter or an active participant in promoting an unverified claim.”
Shamed domestically and internationally, the nation’s flags went to half mast for months before being raised only in deference to Remembrance Day. A new holiday was declared for federal employees and the Prime Minister took advantage of the first one to go surfing.
There is no question that children died at residential schools. I have stood by and honoured the once unmarked graves — including those belonging to children of the school’s principal — at the reclaimed site of the Indian Industrial School outside Regina. Nor is there doubt that many students suffered from cultural dislocation, shaming and abuse. But that is no excuse for media not reporting the original Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc claim and the Cowessess news professionally and instead wildly and widely misinforming the public, raising the spectre of mass murders and traumatizing many. It’s one thing to make a mistake, quite another to leave it uncorrected because you prefer the impression it made.
Augustus and his family – the start of the Julio-Claudians
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 17 Dec 2024An extra session for the Augustus and politics episode, with a look at Augustus and his extended family, using family trees from my biography of Augustus.
QotD: Refuting the “state of nature” argument in Leviathan
Leviathan is a brilliant book, well worth reading, in fact one of only two political philosophy texts anyone really needs (Machiavelli’s The Prince is the other), but for all its brilliance it can be summed up in a sentence: Peace at any price. The only thing worse than a civil war is a religious war, and Hobbes got to see a war that was one and the same, up close and personal. The problem is, without that context — without the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War fresh in your eyes and ears and nose — Hobbes’s conclusions become unacceptable. Peace is nice, yeah, but surely not at that price …?
Alas, Hobbes’s method is so seductively useful, and his “state of nature” so seemingly correct (if you don’t think about it too hard, which is easy to do, as Hobbes’s prose is entrancing), that in their haste to reject his conclusions, later thinkers like Locke didn’t stop to question whether or not the premises behind the method are actually true. It helped, too, that Locke (born 1632) came of age as the civil wars were winding down (his father was briefly a Parliamentary cavalry commander); he made his philosophical bones with the Restoration (1660). […]
It’s easy to get too far into the weeds with this stuff, but I trust everyone takes my point: Because Hobbes presented such a seductive vision, and because he took such sustained criticism by such high-level guys as Locke even as they were adopting his premises and methods, we — later generations of thinkers, almost without exception — behave as if Hobbes really had done what he said he did, which was to naturalize political philosophy. Political science, he would’ve said, and unlike the pretentious dweebs who staff those departments in modern universities, he wasn’t kidding — he really thought the arguments in Leviathan were as unassailable and compelling as geometry proofs.
But they weren’t, and even he knew it. Hobbes is a fascinating personality, but he’s a hard man to like, not least because he’s so irascible. I sympathize, Tommy, I really do, I’m no mean curmudgeon myself, but dude, you were wrong. Recall the fundamental premise of the “state of nature” thought experiment: All men are functionally equal.
That’s not just wrong, it’s arrant nonsense. It’s hard to think of a statement this side of Karl Marx that’s so backasswards as that one. Far from naturalizing political philosophy, Hobbes made it totally artificial, completely mechanical. His social contract requires a bunch of armed-to-the-teeth free agents, of sound mind and body, all ready and willing to defend themselves to the hilt at all times. Women have no place in Hobbes’s world. Nor do children, or the weak, or the halt, the sick, the old …
In short, although Hobbes is a brilliant observer of human nature, full of acute insight into man and his works, the most famous passage of Leviathan, the one to which all modern political philosophy is mere footnotes, has nothing at all of Man in it. It’s baloney, and therefore, everything derived from it is also, on some deep philosophical level, horseshit.
Severian, “Range Finding III: Natural Law”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-23.
May 26, 2025
Card Scraper Guide | Paul Sellers
Paul Sellers
Published 17 Jan 2025A Dual-Purpose Aid That’s More Than It Looks!
It’s not always easy to successfully establish a good cutting edge to a card scraper, and we woodworkers just love DIY over almost everything and anything else we do.
You will not regret the ten minutes it takes to make this lifetime aid that guarantees pristine cutting edges to your card scraper every single time you need it.
Any scrap of wood will do, so now you have no reason not to master sharpening card scrapers for the rest of your life.
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QotD: A Slop manifesto
Slop is a creative style that emerged around 2023 with the rise of generative AI. Slop art is flat, awkward, stale, listless, and often ridiculous. Slop works are celebrated for their stupidity and clumsiness — which are often amplified by strange juxtapositions of culture memes.
These Slop works are widely mocked by the audience — and even by the people who create and curate them. Yet they are the results of hundreds of billions of dollars in tech investment.
Slop is all about wastefulness!
Let’s put this in context: In the current moment, there’s no money for serious artists — in filmmaking, fiction, painting, music, whatever. But there’s an endless supply of dollars to create Slop technology.
In fact, no artistic movement in human history has soaked up more cash than Slop.
This seems like a paradox. Why is so much money devoted to churning out crap?
Ah, that’s part of the appeal of Slop. The audience’s gleeful mockery is actually enhanced by the fact that a huge fortune has been wasted in creating pointless and bizarre works.
In other words, this mismatch between means and ends is a key part of our aesthetic movement. Hence a certain degree of cynicism is embedded in both the production and consumption of Slop.
So it’s stupid. It’s wasteful. It’s tasteless. It’s cynical.
And that’s all part of the plan.
Long live Slop!
Ted Gioia, “The New Aesthetics of Slop”, The Honest Broker, 2025-02-25.
May 25, 2025
Rommel’s Dark Secrets in North Africa – WW2 Fireside Chat
World War Two
Published 24 May 2025Indy and Sparty handle your questions on the German intervention in North Africa. Why did Rommel make such an impact so quickly? What was the war like for the local populations? How deeply involved was Rommel in the persecution of North African Jews?
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When NATO “stopped being an effective military alliance” and instead “became a kind of social club”
In UnHerd, Edward Luttwak says that Europe (however you might prefer to define it) needs a new Great Power:
All through European history, the intervals of peace, during which reconstruction and progress overcame the ravages of war, were secured by a temporary equilibrium between the Great Powers of the day.
It is obvious that there was no such equilibrium on 23 February 2022, when Russian columns started rolling towards Kyiv, and Russian President Vladimir Putin had just described Ukraine not merely as Russian, but as the homeland of the very first Russian state: Kievan Rus’.
[…]
But when the moment came, and Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, there was no cohesive and determined power ready to respond quickly and effectively. Nato had done just that several times during the Cold War, by promptly reinforcing threatened allies with thousands of air-lifted troops from the so-called “Allied Command Europe Mobile Force”.
That, however, was the old, pre-enlargement Nato, which was still a veritable military alliance of countries capable of defending themselves, and help weaker allies in trouble, and whose chronically weak Mediterranean member states, with the most resplendent uniforms and least combat strength, had no Russian troops on their borders.
But once very deserving yet utterly indefensible countries such as Estonia were included in Nato — along with Poland, which mustered just 42,000 combat soldiers out of its population of 33 million a mere three months before Putin’s full-scale invasion began — it stopped being an effective military alliance.
Instead, it became a kind of social club. The Nato calendar is full of meetings at the “Supreme Allied Headquarters” in Mons in Belgium, where all manner of military and related issues are addressed often very professionally and quite freely — except that nobody is allowed to mention, however politely, even the most glaring military shortcomings of fellow allies, which undermine important war plans.
The highpoint of the Nato calendar is the splendid summits with all flags flying, in which the arrival of new countries is greatly celebrated, regardless of their ability to actually defend themselves. Both heads of state and heads of government are invited to those gatherings on the premise that there is strength in numbers, with no concerns about the inherent difficulty of reaching any agreements in such a vast crowd.
In the last summit, held in Washington DC in July 2024, Biden’s confusion of President Zelensky with Putin added a touch of humour to otherwise gloomy proceedings: nobody in attendance offered any suggestions on how to end the war in Ukraine.
What proves that Nato is no longer a genuine military alliance was that nothing was done in the last pre-war days before Putin’s invasion finally began. The satellite intelligence that revealed Russian forces on the move also showed that they were already in assault formations. But even then, five days remained to fly fighter-bomber squadrons to forward bases.
Yet even inaction would have been better than what actually happened. Instead of ordering the rapid deployment of tactical airpower to bases in Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, the Biden administration instead evacuated US diplomats from Kyiv, starting a panic that induced the evacuation of some 20 other diplomatic missions.
Comparing Japan’s supply management system to the Canadian version
Colby Cosh considers the fate of a Japanese government minister who accidentally told the truth about a subject near and dear to Japanese consumers’ hearts (well, stomachs, actually):

“Japanese Girls at Work in the Rice Fields – Grand Old Fuji-Yama in the Distance, Japan” by Boston Public Library is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .
I’m sure some of you saw Wednesday’s NP headline for an Associated Press wire story: “Japan’s agriculture minister resigns after saying he ‘never had to buy rice’” AP’s Mari Yamaguchi explained this international-news nugget. A cabinet minister in a shaky minority government made a flippant comment indicating that he was light-years out of touch with ordinary people facing high grocery costs in a developed country.
Taku Eto’s political survival thus became impossible within a matter of hours, and his prime minister hastily swapped a congenial young star into the agriculture portfolio. Japan is a constitutional monarchy with a system of parliamentary government more or less like ours, so there’s nothing incomprehensible about any of this to a Canadian …
… but, of course, one almost couldn’t help flashing back to our recent election campaign, wherein the prime minister had half-boasted to a Radio-Canada reporter that he doesn’t buy his own groceries and has no earthly idea how the stuff in his fridge gets there. It struck me at the time that this was a classic mistake for an electoral neophyte like Mark Carney. Fans of the legendary American columnist Michael Kinsley will surely think of it as a “Kinsley gaffe”, i.e., an obviously true statement that is nevertheless bound to get a politician in trouble.
[…]
Eto was talking about rice because the prices for it in Japan have gone through the roof, the clouds and the stratosphere. And rice plays a role in the Japanese culture and diet for which there is no analogue in omnivorous Canada. For precisely that reason, rice is supply-managed there in much the same way our dairy, eggs and poultry are — i.e., through confiscatory tariffs on foreign products, along with a mafia of politically powerful producer cooperatives who operate under supply quotas.
If you read Canadian news, you can recite the effects of this, whether or not you’re capable of finding Japan on a map of Japan. Their supply-management system is, like ours, a major headache for counterparties in trade negotiations. Their farmers, like Canada’s, are dwindling in number and aging out of the business. They are sometimes paid to destroy crops. Farm costs for machinery and supplies are subject to inflation. And sometimes the system for domestic demand forecasting blows a tire.
It’s a constant high-wire act for Japanese governments, who still have official responsibility for the national rice supply under wartime statute. If store-shelf prices get too high, and consumers start to make trouble, the cabinet must consider loosening tariff barriers and releasing rice from the national strategic reserve. The LDP ministry has done both these things in the face of hallucinatory prices, and so the farmers are now just as ticked off as the buying public.
BD-44: The New Semiauto Sturmgewehr from D-K Productions
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Jan 2025D-K Productions is a collaboration between the German company Sport System Dittrich (SSD) and an American partner. SSD has been making reproductions of German World War Two small arms for something like 20 years — including Sturmgewehrs. Their guns are really good recreations of the 1940s originals, but there have long been issues importing them into the US. This was solved at last by forming a US company and doing the receiver manufacturing here in the States. While the company has plans to offer a whole bunch of different models, the one currently available is the BD-44, a copy of the standard production model of MP-44/StG-44.
I was really impressed by the use of not-finish-machined forgings for parts like the stacking rod and gas block, correctly duplicating the original German production. The stampings look good, and the handling matches the original guns (don’t expect it to be AR-level ergonomic!). The gut “feel” of the gun is an excellent match for an original MP-44. The 8×33 chambering and use of original magazines (alongside new-production magazines made by D-K) is the correct choice, of course.
I did not like the mismatch between the magazine well and magazine stops, and I did have a couple malfunctions in the two magazines I ran through it so far. Note that the gun I have at the range is my second one; the first one (which is what you see on the table) had consistent feed problems and D-K replaced it when I sent it back to them.
Whether the gun is worth the steep asking price is a personal decision, naturally. Hopefully this video gives you the information necessary to make your decision if you were considering getting one!
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QotD: Cancellation of the Avro Arrow and destruction of the prototypes
On Friday, February 20, 1959, 14,000 employees were immediately fired and sent home, after a project they had been working on since 1953, was abruptly cancelled. That project was the military, supersonic, advanced interceptor, the Avro Arrow. The company they worked for, A.V. Roe Canada Limited, had come into being just after the war, with the express purpose of designing and building both commercial and military aircraft in Canada. Its subsidiaries included Avro, responsible for developing and building the platform and Orenda, for developing the engines.
The first project of this new company was the C-102 Jetliner, the first commercial inter-city jet to fly in North America in 1949, and the second [civilian] jet to fly in the world, behind the trans-oceanic British Comet. After being test flown successfully for three years and with potential orders pending, the Jetliner project was cancelled, allegedly in favour of committing all company resources to the development of the military sub-sonic CF-100. The Arrow was to be the successor to the latter, designed to intercept and destroy if need be, incoming supersonic bombers coming across the North Pole, from the then Soviet Union.
The Arrow was a sleek, twin engine, delta winged aircraft embodying many advanced features such as fly-by-wire controls, titanium and magnesium alloys for light weight and resistance to frictional heat, transistorized electronics and an advanced engine, the Iroquois. While some other aircraft may have included some of these advanced features, what made the Arrow unique was that all of them were built into this one singular aircraft.
Adding insult to injury, the five flying preproduction aircraft, including all technical documentation, tooling and jigs and fixtures and others in various stages of assembly, were ordered destroyed. Why was a project being hailed by aviation experts around the world, suddenly cancelled? In the absence of clear facts and in the presence of rumour and innuendo, debates have raged back and forth as to the reasons, sparking a series of myths and misconceptions about the entire affair.
In 1988, the late Canadian historian, Professor Desmond Morton, lamented the fact that he could not obtain any government archival documents on the Arrow, assuming they even existed. Out of interest, I decided to try my own hand in this endeavour. Since then I have uncovered and have had declassified thousands upon thousands of records including many Secret and Top Secret, ranging from memos, reports both scientific and financial, to minutes of meetings and letters. The list includes some from the United States and Great Britain as well.
Those documents which I deemed more critical, I have either quoted from or have reproduced in my books, with full references. Following is a discussion of some of the myths and misconceptions that the documents have helped clarify.
Arrow Destruction
Perhaps one of the most enduring myths is that the destruction of the completed Arrows and all else, was ordered by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, due to his hatred of the President of A.V. Roe, Crawford Gordon. Alternatively, it has been argued that it was Gordon who had everything destroyed as a spite against the Prime Minister. Neither account is true.
The government records from the Department of National Defence clearly show the order to destroy came from the Minister of National Defence, George R. Pearkes, after receiving that recommendation from Hugh Campbell, Chief of the Air Staff, and after conferring with numerous others including the Deputy Minister of National Defence and the Minister of the Department of Defence Production. The documents contain the signatures of those involved, all of whom would later deny publicly having any knowledge of the destruction, leaving the Prime Minister to be subsequently vilified for it. In fact, the paper trail ends with Minister Pearkes. The matter was not discussed with the Prime Minister at all.
Even today, when the Department decides to dispose of something – it does not matter if it is an aircraft, a tank, a ship or some other equipment – there is no need to seek approval or even advise the Prime Minister as to the manner of its disposal. In fact, all departments dispose of their equipment through an arm of the government. At the time it was called Crown Assets Disposal, but today it is renamed GC Surplus. The name may change yet again.
Palmiro Campagna, “The Avro Arrow: Exploding the Myths and Misconceptions”, Dominion Review, 2025-02-20.
May 24, 2025
German democracy trembles as the extremely extreme extreme right AfD aren’t going to be banned
eugyppius updates us on the continued shaky state of German democracy, as the scary extremely extreme right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party seems to have somehow escaped being banned from participation in politics due to some ridiculous “lack of substantive evidence” excuse:
Last week, a supersecret assessment of Alternative für Deutschland by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) leaked to the press. This document was supposed to prove, in excruciating detail, why the AfD are so evil and so fascist and so Nazi and so Hitler, and in this way make a preliminary case for banning the party. In fact its contents turned out to be such an arrant joke that it sapped all remaining momentum within the German political class to prohibit the AfD. I suspect even the “right-wing extremist” classification of the AfD is now in jeopardy and may well be thrown out by the courts, that is how bad this much-heralded supersecret assessment turned out to be.
It took a few days for the full impact of the report’s idiocy to really sink in. That’s how it is with really stupid things – the incredulity they inspire must first dissipate. Finally, though, on Tuesday of this week, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt announced that the dubious evidence marshaled by the BfV was “not sufficient” to support ban proceedings. Dobrindt also said that the whole debate had become “counterproductive” and that it was time to begin finding ways to “end social polarisation”, whatever that means. Hours later, it emerged that Chancellor Friedrich Merz had ordered the entire CDU leadership never to say another word about banning the AfD. If everyone will just shut up, Merz believes his party can “avoid further debate” and avoid “giving voters the impression that the CDU is aiming to eliminate a rival party” – which is of course exactly what the CDU were hoping to do until the BfV fucked everything up with their retarded 1,108-page collection of dyspeptic Facebook-grade political takes.
There’s still a few scattered calls for ban proceedings coming from the left, but their heart isn’t in it and they don’t matter anyway. Without Union votes, no ban application will ever get to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. Raed Saleh, an extremely obnoxious politician who heads the SPD faction in the Berlin House of Representatives, whined to the press this morning about how “appalling and disgraceful” it is that outlawing the opposition is no longer on the table and that his party is now being asked to “engage in political debate” with the AfD instead. Federal Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig, also of the SPD, likewise fervently hopes that the AfD might still be banned and she thinks the Interior Ministry should spend more time “evaluating” that BfV dumpster-fire assessment. Since Hubig is Justice Minister and not Interior Minister it doesn’t really matter what she thinks the Interior Ministry should be doing. I don’t understand why so many are citing Hubig’s remarks like they mean anything.
The implosion of this ban-the-AfD arc seems like kind of a big deal to me. Since 2021, the party have been “under suspicion” of right-wing extremism, but despite four years of snooping the BfV have been able to come up with nothing that is not some combination of legally irrelevant, harmless, banal, uninteresting, stupid and a complete waste of government resources. At some point, you have to put the question: If the AfD are so evil and so Nazi and so fascist and so Hitler, why can’t anybody, anywhere, adduce any evidence of their evil Nazi Hitler fascism?
Forget it, Fraser Institute: as Trudeau explained, there’s no business case for Canadian LNG
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper reports on a recent Fraser Institute study on the benefits of expanding the production of Canadian liquid natural gas, but as the meme might put it, the feds don’t want benefits, they want to eliminate Canadian LNG production:
A new report says that if Canada really wanted to save the climate, the most effective thing it could do would be to sell as much natural gas to Asia as humanly possible.
The 46-page study, published on Thursday by the right-leaning Fraser Institute, is premised on the notion that Canadian natural gas exports could singlehandedly reduce Asian dependence on coal.
If Canada could double its LNG production, write the authors, it would divert enough coal from Asian power plants to stop 630 million tonnes of greenhouse gases per year from entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
For context, that nearly represents Canada’s entire carbon footprint. According to the most recent figures from Environment and Climate Change Canada, the country was responsible for 694 million tonnes of carbon emissions in 2023.
“Instead of focusing on reducing domestic GHG emissions in Canada by implementing various policies that hinder economic growth, governments must shift their focus toward global GHG reductions and help the country cut emissions worldwide,” the report says.
The Fraser Institute’s calculation is based on the simple fact that natural gas is an easy substitute for coal, and can produce the same amount of energy with far lower emissions.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration maintains a ranking of fossil fuels by the quantity of emissions they produce for every one million BTUs (British Thermal Units) — roughly the amount of power needed to heat a standard house for several days.
Generating one million BTUs by burning coal will produce between 93 and 103 kilograms of carbon dioxide. Doing the same with natural gas will produce just 53 kilograms.
Canada currently produces about 17.9 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas. Most of this is consumed domestically, while 39 per cent is exported, mostly to the United States via pipeline.
The Fraser Institute calculated that if Canada could double production and “send the surplus … to Asia”, it could potentially supplant more than 200 million tonnes of coal every year.






