Long Distance Green Electricity, Oil Production and a Pipeline and the History of Porsches.
October 9, 2023 Volume 4 # 20
Long Distance Electricity
The Sun doesn't shine much in Britain in the winter. Even in the summer it rains a lot. In December London gets 52 total hours of sunlight; for the year it gets 1,633 hours of sunlight. Not great for solar power.
This is the largest concentrated solar farm in the world in Ouarzazate, Morocco.
Ourrzazate get 248 hours of sunlight in December and 3,416 sunny hours a year.
So, sun-powered electricity — with a little help from wind— from Morocco is going to be pumped to Britain. It will be 3,800 kilometres, the longest subsea power cable.
It will be shipped in a cable like this one in shallow water near coastlines.
It is enough juice to power 7-million heat pumps as Britain dumps oil and gas boilers. That is about 8 per cent of total electricity demand in Britain.
Where the Competition Comes From
Many countries are aiming for Net Zero but are getting a lot of pushback. In Canada people, especially in the poorer Atlantic provinces, say the carbon tax is killing them. In Britain there is a revolt in Wales where the speed limit was set in September at 20 miles an hour— 32kmh. It generated the largest petition in Wales’s history.
President Macron in France is backing off heavy net zero rules.
Oil is still being pumped out around the world and here is who is doing the pumping.
Canadian Oil Exports Set to Rise in 2024
The Trans Mountain Pipeline will triple its output to 890,000 barrels a day, bringing Alberta oil to a terminal on British Columbia’s Pacific coast. Protests failed to stop it.
Here is how the online news site OilPrice.com reported it:
“We expect commercial operations to commence near the end of Q1 2024,” Trans Moutain said in a Friday statement. The timeline was disclosed following the company’s victory in a dispute with the Stk’emlupsemc Te Secwepemc Nation First Nation over Trans Mountain’s request to reroute its pipeline through a 0.8-mile segment of the indigenous group’s territory. In that case, the Canadian regulator CER sided with the pipeline, clearing the way for a new route, and avoiding months of possible delays should the route change not receive approval.
Where Carbon Emissions Come From
Green Investing
The American Inflation Reduction Act was supposed to push green activity in things like wind and solar. Since it passed 14 months ago investing in things green has not been a winner, by the looks of Exchange Traded Funds, (ETFs) baskets of green stocks.
The purple line is a Wind ETF, down 27%; the blue line is a global clean energy ETF, it’s down 41%; the green line is a solar ETF, down 46%.
Life Expectancy
Things were going along just fine until Covid hit. Lifespans uo worldwide.
Housing Blues USA
High mortgage rates and rising house prices mean fewer people can afford to buy. The last time this happened, 34 years ago, Adam Smith’s invisible hand slipped in and prices fell.
The 911 Family
The first Porsche from 1948 still bears some resemblance to the latest model.
But the innards are something different. I owned two Porsche 356s and one 911S, 1977 version. I wish I had kept the second one, a 1965 356 C. It had a four cylinder engine putting out 75hp. Zero to 60mph in 13 seconds. It sill seemed fast, especially when you were on a winding road in New Hamsphire. Primitive car. I seem to remember it had no gas gauge. When you ran out of fuel you flicked a switch for a reserve tank. Sold it for $12,000 in 1987. Cleaned up it would be worth around $150,000 today. Boo-hoo.
Essay of the Week
This is from a book I wrote on Sam Ciccolini, an Italian immigrant who came to Canada and with his brothers created a huge insurance business. I have told parts of his story before but this is about how he started studying to be a priest when he was just 9 years old.
Chapter 2
The Seminary
Italy is still a Catholic country but in the 1950s it was even more fervent, harbouring a faith of such intensity that was matched in just a few other places in the Christian world, perhaps in Poland, Ireland, and Quebec.
As the second youngest of six sons Sam Ciccolini was chosen for the priesthood. In 1952, at the age of nine, he was sent from his village of Pescosolido down the hill to a seminary in the cathedral town of Sora, six long kilometres from his home. Putting a nine-year-old in a seminary may seem startling to some people, but no more than a young boy being sent to boarding school on a scholarship.
“In our area there was a lot of poverty so if you were picked as one of the ones who were a little brighter, you were sent to the seminary, because your parents couldn’t afford to send you to further higher education,” says Sam. “One of the reasons I went was we have a history of priests in our family. The rector at the seminary, just before I entered, was one of my father’s cousins and the priest in the town, Don Lino Ciccolini, was a second cousin. He’s still a priest and he’s 92 years old.”
Sam Ciccolini remembers his three years in the seminary with fondness. It was perhaps the most intense period of learning in his life, and certainly much more rigorous than what he would later face at Clinton Street Public School or Harbord Collegiate Institute in Toronto. At the age of 11 he could speak and write Latin, something few, if any, high-school Latin teachers could match.
There were about 20 boys in Sam’s class at the seminary. Days started at 6:30. The boys would rise, wash and bathe in cold water--there was only one bathtub, no showers--then they would put on their long cassock that had many buttons from the neck to the ankles. The boys would also wear a biretta, a black square clerical hat. They were dressed like little priests, as they expected to be dressed for the rest of their lives.
Mass was at 7 a.m. without having had breakfast since they would have to fast before taking communion. Then at 7:30 came the first meal of the day, almost always a brioche and coffee, though Sam says that as a young boy he didn’t like coffee.
Class would start at eight o’clock. The study was rigorous. The teachers, all priests, ruled with strict discipline though there was little if any physical punishment; the novices knew their place and that obedience was their lot in life. It was not a totally cloistered life: they were allowed walks in the street, they could talk with each other, and there were long periods of play, extended recesses where boys could be boys.
“The priests believed in physical activity and health,” said Sam, who was athletic as a boy and an adult. “The one thing that the seminary taught you was discipline. It’s a great trait because then you’re not scared of anything. It gives you a lot of self-confidence and I think you’re better off than someone who is timid.”
The young seminarian was certainly not timid; his personality was already fully formed and young Sam Ciccolini exhibited the self-confidence and exuberance that sometimes got him into a bit of trouble.
“Sam was in the seminary in Sora and he was always being reprimanded because he always wanted to do everything and sometimes he would even get into problems,” remembered his mother, Filomena, in an interview in 2003 for a video tribute to Sam.
Sam left the seminary on November 5, 1956, and within a week was sailing to his new life in Canada. But the lessons he learned there stayed with him for life. It may even account for his self-confidence and ability to speak with ease in front of large crowds. It certainly implanted a solid value system.
“I think my life, my faith, and the way we comport ourselves even when we lost our daughter comes from my upbringing in the seminary and it (his Catholic faith) is a bit of a soft spot in my heart,” says Sam.
Salvatore Ciccolini 1953
Chapter 3
Preparing the Way
Pasquale Ciccolini sold his taxi to his brother and came to Canada in 1948. Post-war Italy was a shambles. The country was in a perpetual recession as it had to repay $360 million in war reparations; infrastructure was being rebuilt after being destroyed in the long war fought on Italian soil, and there was political turmoil as the Communists tried to take over.
The Marshall Plan, the American program to rebuild Europe and save many from starvation, was only starting, but from1948 to 1949 Italy received $594 million of the $5 billion the U.S. spent that year, more than any other country in continental Europe, except France.
None of that money seemed to trickle down to Pescosolido. The southern and central part of Italy where the Ciccolinis lived was hit particularly hard; most of the fighting had taken place there and there was little industry, poor agriculture, and no jobs. If there was any work it was in the industrial north.
Canada beckoned, even if Italians were classified as enemy aliens after the war. Toronto was already a magnet for Italian immigrants and Pasquale found work in the construction industry through connections he had from his home village. He made 50 cents an hour, with part of his paycheque going to re-pay the $250 to finance his move to Canada, money put up by his Canadian sponsor, Giuseppe (Joe) Macciocchi, who also provided him with work
Every two years Pasquale would return to Italy for a month to live with his family. In 1951 he took his eldest son Frank back to Toronto and two years later his second eldest son Mario returned with him to Canada as well. All three men lived together in a crowded boarding house at 595 Euclid Avenue in the heart of what was then Toronto’s Little Italy. All along he planned to reunite his family and bring them to Canada. It was a complex process that demanded time, hard work and, above all, patience.
In Toronto Pasquale was a truck driver in the construction business. He was a steady, reliable employee and only drove for two companies for his entire working life in Canada: Macciocchi Construction and Valentine Enterprises, the company he stayed with until he retired.
“The usual thing was that whoever was in Canada would work and just pile up the money and come back to Italy,” says Sam’s brother Max. “My dad came back in 1955. We were still in our small hometown of about one thousand people and he wanted to see if we could move to a place like Rome and get an apartment there. But it didn’t work out so after he came back, he decided that in the next year he was going to bring everybody to Canada, my mother and my brothers. So during 1956 we went to Rome three times for our visas and every time we went, they asked my mother questions and we all had to pass the physicals twice.”
Filomena Ciccolini chose the precise moment to book passage on the ship to New York. It was a tumultuous period; 1956 was perhaps the most dramatic year since the end of the war in 1945. There was the Suez Crisis, the Hungarian Revolution, the sinking of the liner Andrea Doria, and a tuberculosis epidemic raging in Europe, perhaps the reason the Ciccolinis were given such rigorous physical examinations before leaving Italy.
They made their trip to the ship in the old Balilla that Pasquale had sold to his brother.
“Our uncle drove the four of us to Naples where we boarded the ship and set sail for l’America,” says Max, the youngest of the three boys making the trip.
The patriarch of the Ciccolini family was a quiet man, devoted to making sure his family had a better life in Canada than he had in Italy. In that he was more than successful, but in his working life he never made much more than the minimum wage paid in the construction business.
“If you could have a million people in a room my father would be the last one you would notice,” said Sam. “His demeanour was very low-key and very seldom did he say anything.”
This modest, hard-working man’s goals were more than met in his lifetime. By the time Pasquale Ciccolini died in 1991 he had lived to see his family established in Canada and his sons vaulted from the poverty of rural Italy to positions of comfort and respect in their adopted country. He had truly prepared the way.