Oil Prices: Three Different Takes; Forests; a new Fisker and Remembering the star of Today's Special.
February 5, 2024 Volume 4 # 38
You say potato, I say pot-ah-to
Two major Financial Papers had a different take on oil prices this week. First the Wall Street Journal said that the expanded pipeline to take land-locked Canadian oil from the Oil Sands in northern Alberta will mean an end to the discount for that oil when it could be sent south to a captive American market. Higher prices.
1-The U.S. Is Spoiled by Cheap Canadian Oil. That’s About to Change.
A long-awaited pipeline project promises to cut Americans’ discount
By David Uberti
Canadian oil companies will soon have the option to ship more crude through a 715-mile pipeline expansion from Alberta to the British Columbia coast
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2- The Financial Times had another take. Oil prices will never hit $100 a barrel again. Given the trouble in the Red Sea, that might be a dicey prediction. And who knows what calamities await. Statistics say the world is using more oil than ever.
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3- And then OilPrice.com came up the middle, with a story this weekend that the Saudis will not increase production. That could mean prices go higher. World oil consumption has never been higher, though this story says it may back off.
Countries that Depend on Resources
Australia is rich because it sells its mineral wealth to the world. At the other end of the scale, New Zealand is resource poor but also rich because of farming and productive, clever people. The United States is the world’s largest oil producer— this week— but its economy is diverse so a slump in energy prices wouldn’t hurt it.
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Where the Trees Are
Forests clean the air. There are places where tree cover is growing— China is doing a great job of increasing the size of its forests after Mao chopped them down in the Great Leap Forward to fire small pig iron furnaces. Indonesia’s forests are shrinking. Ditto the Amazon, for marginal farming in both cases.
French Forests
In the 18th century most of the forests in France were gone. But but by 2020 the forest cover almost a third of France. One reason: trees were once needed to make wooden war ships. The government made sure trees went to make Men of War.
Also, as in eastern Canada and the United States, marginal farmland returned to forests, either naturally or through re-planting.
Click here for a detailed analysis on the comeback of French Forests.
In No Man’s Land Where Only Trees Grow
Parts of this devastated landscape from the First World War are still dangerous.
Trees grow where there are No Lights
Europe by night.
Sacred Cows
Tractors and cows blocked the roads of France as French farmers appear to have intimidated the French and EU governments into making concessions that few outsiders can understand. Mob rule works. The tractors are heading home.
There is no long term solution. France is a rich country and the farmers can’t compete even with other European countries. Headline from Fortune: “Everyone in Europe supports the farmers, but it’s often just too expensive to buy French-grown food In a Paris market this week, Moroccan clementines and Polish mushrooms cost about half the price of their French counterparts.
Apple: the King of Brand Names in the US
The most popular brand in each of these 12 countries is usually the most famous worldwide. People equate Switzerland with Nestle and France with luxury conglomerate LVMH, the acronym for Louis Vuitton, Moet, Hennessy. Two odd ones: the most valuable brand in Canada is a bank, and a phone company in Germany.
Auto Correct Nightmare
An unfortunate sign at a Pizza Hut in Timmins in Northern Ontario..
The Fisker: A Rare Electric Vehicle
A friend of mine just took delivery of the Fisker Ocean, an all-electric SUV.
Here it is just before we head off on a test drive.
The interior is totally made of recycled materials. Feels like leather but it isn’t. And easy to clean. It also has the big screen in the middle, like Tesla, but the driver can see the basic info— like how fast you are going and range— right in front of you.
Speaking of range, the top of the line Fisker can go 360 miles or 580 kilometres. My friend has the top of the line model, which includes a solar roof, among other goodies. The price is about C$90,000, though there are two less expensive models. He charges at off peak hours and says so far he has spent $7 buying electricity at a home charger.
If there is a downside, Fisker is a startup. It is a gamble that the company will survive, though there is no reason to think it won’t
Essay of the Week
This is an obituary that appeared in this Saturday’s Globe and Mail. I worked with Nerene at the CBC, where she was a news announcer. She was great at her job, and cheerful. I never knew much about her life until I researched her obituary.
To a generation of Canadian children and their parents, Nerene Virgin was known as Jodie, the character she played on the popular TVOntario program Today’s Special.
Ms. Virgin, who died on Jan. 15 in Burlington, Ont., at 77, excelled in a variety of roles. A trained teacher, she began acting in Canadian television series and some commercials before moving to broadcast journalism, where she hosted a weekly program on CTV and then became an anchor for CBC Newsworld and Newsworld International.
Ms. Virgin’s character on Today’s Special was a display designer who worked in a department store when it had closed for the night. She shared the program with two puppet characters, night watchman Sam Crenshaw and Muffy the Mouse, as well as a mannequin, Jeff, who magically came to life when Jodie put a hat on him and said some magical words.
“The point of Today’s Special was to be entertaining and educational for young children in the age range of four to nine. There were four characters, and Nerene represented the big sister or the mother character, who was very stable and calm and worked out problems for everybody. Jeff was the mannequin, who was the most innocent and naïve,” said Nina Keogh, the puppeteer and voice for Muffy.
The program was a ratings success and also well-received by critics. A Globe and Mail headline said Today’s Special “combats mindless TV.” The review pointed out that Ms. Virgin turned down a job as news anchor to work on Today’s Special.
“In other shows, I’ve really just been a hostess. But here, I get the opportunity to sing and dance and act all on the same show. I’m also very impressed with the scripts. I taught school for years and ran a nursery school and I really feel that Today’s Special stepped out of the usual realm of children’s shows. It’s not condescending or insulting to kids the way a lot of other stuff is,” Ms. Virgin told The Globe
.“The other thing is that as a Black actress, I just know a chance like this isn’t likely to come around again. For Blacks in this country, most of the roles are secondary – they add you as an ethnic in some rinky dink role. But with Today’s Special I have a good, strong role and a character who runs the whole gamut of emotions. I’m really proud of what we’ve done so far.”
One of the things her fellow actors appreciated was Ms. Virgin’s ability to memorize scripts quickly and make adjustments on the fly,
“Nerene was very professional and had a photographic memory so she could learn lines incredibly quickly or if there was a change she could pick it up right away,” said Bob Dermer, the puppeteer who played Sam Crenshaw.
Ms. Keogh remembers them both working while they were pregnant. “Each of us had our little quirks, and she loved to knit. She was always knitting, even at our table reads,” she recalled. “I think it calmed her down.”
Today’s Special was produced by TVOntario (now TVO) and seen by Canadians on border stations when it was broadcast on PBS in the United States. It also played on Alberta Educational Television and the Nickelodeon cable network. The show was also broadcast in Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Australia and elsewhere.
“The show really exploded and we were all shocked at the reception [it] got,” Ms. Virgin said in an interview played at Toronto’s Myseum, in an exhibition on children’s television. She added that she was most proud of the fact that the show aired in the South African black enclave of Bophuthatswana in the early 1980s, when anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela was still in prison. “This is a show that shows a Black woman with a white man as co-star, singing and dancing together, sharing laughter, being sad together. And [that] the Bop Television Network in South Africa bought this show knowing that Black children and white children and adults were having this example showed to them of what the world could be was really gratifying.”
Nerene Grizzle was born in Hamilton on Dec. 27, 1946. Her father was a citizenship court judge; her mother, Kathleen Victoria Toliver, was descended from Lewis Toliver, an enslaved man who escaped from Virgina and made it to Southern Ontario via the Underground Railroad, which shepherded escaped slaves to freedom in Canada. Her family was active in the Black community in Hamilton through the Stewart Memorial Church, where Lincoln Alexander, Ontario’s first Black Lieutenant-Governor was a parishioner.
Ms. Virgin’s great-uncle, John Holland, was a pastor at the church.
After finishing high school in Toronto’s East York borough, Ms. Virgin went to Toronto Teachers’ College, where she had he second-highest academic mark and the highest practical score, according to her husband, Alan Smith. Ms. Virgin was married twice and kept her first husband’s family name.
After a stint of teaching at Fessenden Elementary School in Ancaster, Ont., Ms. Virgin decided to back away from teaching when, as the only Black teacher, she wasn’t invited to group get-togethers. An attractive woman and a natural performer, she drifted into television work, first working in a beer commercial, then landing a part of the dispatcher onPolice Surgeon, an American series shot in Canada.
“During that period, she met a lot of co-stars such as Leslie Nielsen and William Shatner,” Mr. Smith said.
She returned to teaching but was tempted back to television when offered opportunities to appear briefly on the children’s show Polka Dot Door and then Today’s Special, from 1981 to 1987.
Ms. Virgin was then recruited to be one of the original hosts on CBC Newsworld. But it would have meant moving to Calgary, and her mother was in poor health in Hamilton, so she decided to work in Toronto. She joined a public affairs show on CFTO, the Toronto CTV affiliate. The program was called Eye on Toronto, and she interviewed a wide variety of people passing through town, from the singer Harry Belafonte to the Toronto-born actor John Candy,
“We’re conscious of the content of the show, of variety. There’s a lot of cultural, economic and ethnic diversity in this city. It’s important that we cover all the bases,” Ms. Virgin told an interviwer doing a profile of her.
Ms. Virgin told the interviewer she thought of herself as a survivor.
“I have been divorced, I have been a single mom, I’ve been the breadwinner. I’ve been a stay-at-home mom; I’ve lived in a small town,” said Ms. Virgin, who always seemed to put a positive spin on things. “I’ve been fortunate. I’ve experienced a lot of ups and downs, and I’ve been in a lot of different places. Perhaps that’s given me the ability to tap into something for our audiences. I think that’s one of the biggest assets I can bring to the show.”
Following that program, Ms. Virgin did move to the CBC. She broadcast news programs on Newsworld and was prominent on Newsworld Intentional, the CBC’s attempt at an international broadcast, which went to the parts of the United States and the Caribbean.
In 2007, Ms. Virgin ran as a Liberal candidate for the Ontario Legislature. During the campaign a local reporter tarred her with a nasty racial slur. She sued the publication, and won, but she narrowly lost the election to the NDP candidate.
“Virgin began writing biographies of Black North Americans for Historica Canada’s online Canadian Encyclopedia,” said a family notice published after her death. “She successfully sought Ontario Trillium Foundation grants to preserve the history of Stewart Memorial Church, a Black Church and Heritage site, established in the 1830s in Hamilton, Ont. She worked alongside the distinguished staff at the Dundas Museum and Archives to promote the incredible history of talented Black Canadians who lived in that picturesque valley town.”
Ms. Virgin leaves her husband, Mr. Smith; their son, Thomas Toliver Smith; her two daughters, Yvette Virgin and Nicole Virgin; and her grandson, Jackson Virgin.