I am pretty sure (although there might be an exception) GFL is a transportation company and they don’t own the landfills. GFL does transport waste though.
I believe that most landfills are owned by their respective municipalities.
Yep, definitely Orwellian. When the government can convince people that heavy metals and wreaking the environment for batteries are good, and oil is bad, yep. Define Orwell is happening. I guess it’s the way its looked at. 
Naw, it’s nothing like that. I have seen many ‘new’ purposed green technologies come and go. It always seems to end the same - someone in government made money and you and I (the taxpayer) ended up paying for it with new taxes and lower standards of living.
Electric vehicles were created back in the 1920’s or so. Lots of government people made money, and the working class (you and I) had to take care of the bill with more taxes.
Wasn’t WWI or WWII supposed to have temporary taxes? I see how that worked out.
GFL owns the landfills
I kid you not I READ the quarterlies
They own & operate MANY facilities across canada & the USA
and not ONE mention of ANY income from crude sales etc
hence I am skeptical of your claim that landfills earn income from this source
I know this is not true since GFL literally lists their assets
Waste Mgmt Corp also owns & operates their own landfills
Some municipalities do own & operate their own landfills (red deer for instance owns & operates its own)
Hmm . Very interesting. I have worked with many of the folks who look after this, and GFL does have many transfer transfer stations, and I haven’t known of any landfills. I’ll dig into this a little more.
I just tried to look up Calgary on my phone and could only see transfer stations.
Edit: oil comes from the leachate recovery system.
Yeah no one has ever done that with the O & G industry
We still foot a LOT of bills for the O & G industry
This report is VERY likely quite biased but its not hard to find current evidence of how we still subsidize O & G
Or a recent one in the Calgary herald
And there are others from other sources like
As an Albertan I’m truly PISSED OFF that we’re subsidizing such a rich industry to the tune of billions a year
And picking up the tab when they decide to abandon wells and other facilities
And that we’ve screwed ourselves by NOT collecting proper royalty rates and putting them aside in the Heritage Fund like Norways Sovereign wealth fund
Norway fund is now so large it generate 177 BILLION in returns annually
Imagine Alberta hadn’t stopped putting money into it was back when …
GFL and WM dont mention ANY revenue from it
And how much of that is simply from the products (like old oil) in the landfill and NOT from rot ?
I would imagine that is hard to determine
Are there bad actors in any business - you bet there are. Just recently I had to go through approval of Wells and the business is required to prepay for all wells and cleanup and removal BEFORE any permits are authorized. My guess is that these wells were quite old and we’re grandfather licenses.
The solar industry is quite mad because the same strict licensing for the oilfield is happening with them, and rightfully so - because of bad actors in the sokar business.
Its quite the opposite. The oilfield industry is very heavily regulated in Canada. To relate it to another industry would be accounting. If your accountant made mistakes, they lose their license. If you make mistakes in the oilfield industry, you lose your license, the company is shut down, and the government sues you on top of that.
Oil (down to the parts-per-million) is measured in water and all attempts are made to recover the oil. If oil is claimed without the proper paperwork, someone is literally going to lose their job - zero tolerance.
I see what you are saying… and yet people are only getting part of the story.
If I have to pay 20 dollars in taxes and you ‘give’ me 10 dollars in subsidization, am I heavily subsidized?
Lets take the example where Blocking Ambition: Fossil fuel subsidies in Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador | International Institute for Sustainable Development mentions that fossil fuel subsidies are $2.5 billion for 4 provinces. It sounds like a lot, and yes it is.
How much did one larger company in Alberta pay in income tax in (2022)? $2.49 billion (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SU/suncor-energy-/total-provision-income-taxes#:~:text=Suncor%20Energy%20annual%20income%20taxes%20for%202021%20were%20%241.158B,a%20381.21%25%20increase%20from%202019.) . This does not count any other oilfield company, fuel taxes that you and I pay at the pump, or any of the other three provinces with oilfield companies, or the remaining other provinces where you and I pay at the pump.
Just things that make you go hmmmm…
Edit: Sorry, $2.49 Billion was paid in 2022 not 2021… corrected information.
Oil field sure
But that wasnt what I was referring to any way
Yes 50% of your tax bill
I’d love to be subsidized by the govt so lightly
What you and I pay at the pump ISNT relevant to how much Suncor is subsidized
Taxation of those products from production to the pump is a totally different subject and has no bearing on "did Suncor get a subsidy/tax break/royalty holiday or whatever other form of reduced payment TO the government, and citizens of Alberta, of their business from the government ?
The better question is IF these companies make so much money WHY are we subsidizing them at all ?
From the other thread, I see that we will respectfully disagree.
Bringing this conversation back to the original topic, do you have any suggestions or thoughts on the final outcome of green energy? Possibly what may be a truly green source in 10, 100 or 1,000 years?
Warm regards.
For planet earth it will probably be solar IF I had to guess
Whether its gathered here on the surface or in space I cant guess - but either works
The amount of energy from it is truly mind boggling (more terra wats of power dumped on the planet in an HOUR than we generate & use in a year)
The sun will outlast us, and when it finally dies it really wont matter here as everything will die anyway
IF by then we’ve actually escaped our earthly bounds & ventured to space it has to be something else like fusion
But that’s so far off from being practical its hard to imagine it being available in 10 years - maybe 100 or 1000
A little bit of humour in this serious thread was worth it. Your neighbour capable of turning dogs to hogs just by a typo 
Well, back to serious.
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Ugh
Good morning @npalardy,
Just thinking out loud, maybe this is where the disconnect or confusion may be with this type of conversation.
Oil and gas is just that … natural oil and natural gas. Chemical components of a freshly decayed manure and the oil and gas mined from below the surface are similar, if not the same. Sure there is increased pressure and temperature (think of a pressure cooker which tenderizes meat) except this has been going for a long time - possibly 10’s 100’s, thousands, or millions of years.
Jokingly… when I wear coveralls and have an H2S and CO2 monitor (required for working in the oilfield in Canada), and I fart in my coveralls - my fart (methane gas from my last supper) will trigger the methane gas sensor that I am wearing and provide a warning that I have entered an ‘area with hydrocarbons’.
There will be small differences in the composition of oil (or manure), as the chemical makeup of trees is different that the chemical makeup of cows. This is similar when comparing the subsurface crude oil composition. Oil and Gas is not spontaneously created - we (my body and your body) are oil and gas.
Naw… this is all waste and all hydrocarbons. Everything from soup, to nuts, dissolved metal, dissolved chairs, computer parts, tables, chairs, an old oil filter from a truck - literally everything that is in a dry landfill. What it is not - is liquid oil from Lube City (a place where engine oil is changed and dumped).
I am glad that we can keep humour in this conversation.
I have been doing this for too many years, so I fall into the trap of ‘since I know this, then everyone else knows this’, which often isn’t the case.
get out of your natural lgreen oil bubble and look at the reality
Eugene this is just misleading
Its like saying coal is also diamonds because both are largely carbon
But thats NOT factually true
Diamonds are the result of long geological processes, or man induced processes, that alter that carbon from one structural form to another with vastly different chemical properties
We are NOT the same hydrocarbon molecules that comprise “crude oil or natural gas”
Through geological processes, or other mechanical processes (like Changing World tried to create), what we are composed of could possibly be altered to be those same long hydrocarbon chains
But to say we are oil & gas is just misleading
Thats what I expected
So its not “crude oil” like what gets pumped out of the ground at the jack pumps around here
At best the volume is extremely low - so low I cant find any mention of revenue from it reported by either company (as already mentioned)
And certain plastics are unlikely to ever decompose into anything else (at least as far as research can figure out today they dont decompose)
I know some things
When I dont I ask people who I trust to know these things - like my cousin at Pew, my sister at the Ontario Govt Ontario Environmental Commissioner’s Office, or friends at the AER
And they can put me on to sources that are what I would call reliable and unbiased
I dont tend to trust O & G companies to report honestly about things like wind, solar energy or alternatives. Same as I dont expect Xojo to report or comment honestly about VS, C#, LiveCode etc
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Sorry @npalardy, this is not misleading.
It is not at all like saying coal and diamonds are the same. Not at all. Sure there is degradation over the years, and it is fairly close.
Agreed - this is true, that diamonds are different. Using your example, its more like saying that a birch tree and a maple tree are completely different. The coal and diamond example is misleading.
Sorry to disappoint - yes we are. Each oil and gas pool is different - each body and tree is different. So to say that it is the same is misleading. Lets say one oil pool is a mixture of 50% trees and 50% cows. It will have a different composition than a pool of oil that is 90% trees and 10% cows. Thats the great part about nature, is that it is very dynamic.
I guess this definition of crude that is being used is different than the the EPA (environmental protection agency): Crude oil means a mixture of hydrocarbons that exists in liquid phase in natural underground reservoirs and remains liquid at atmospheric pressure after passing through surface separating facilities.
https://www3.epa.gov/carbon-footprint-calculator/tool/definitions/crude-oil.html
Its really interesting that you mentioned this exact example. A few years ago I created a simple reactor to convert various plastics into crude oil. The total time was about 5 minutes.
Sorry to say, but we (bodies) are just crude oil.
Right - I’m not ANY of that - therefore I am NOT crude oil in any sense that YOU cited
I’m not liquid and I dont remain liquid at atmospheric pressure etc
Feedstock to become crude oil one day maybe (like dinosaurs were)
But we are NOT crude oil (using the EPA term you cited)
That doesn’t show turning plastic into oil though ?
I can light lots of plastics up already without doing anything.
Some I depend on being flammable (Ptex for my skis)
But they’re not crude oil like you claim
Nor can I power my vehicle from it
Changing World Technologies ALSO made such claims about converting feedstocks of various kinds into crude oil + other products. Thermal depolymerization I think was the term for their tech.
Basically a pile of giant pressure cookers & extraction facilities.
And it seems too be effectively the same kind of tech you’re describing.