Drugs

CARP research on politicians' drug plans gains huge media exposure
CARP’s revelations about the shocking discrepancies between drug coverage in the provincial formularies of BC and Ontario, and drug coverage available to politicians and civil servants in those two provinces, received wide coverage in Canadian media.

The story was picked up by major newspapers like The National Post, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Vancouver Province, Halifax Chronicle Herald, Hamilton Spectator, and Victoria Times-Colonist. It also ran on Global and CTV news.

In the study, CARP examined the 73 drugs that had been submitted to the intergovernmental Common Drug Review (CDR) by January 12, 2007:


Of 27 drugs that CDR recommended for inclusion in provincial drug plans, only 15 were covered in the Ontario plan and only 15 were covered in the BC plan. Yet politicians and bureaucrats in both provinces were covered for all 27 drugs under their own plans.

Of 26 drugs that CDR recommended not be included in provincial drug plans, only one was reimbursed under the Ontario plan and only two under the BC plan. Yet again, politicians and bureaucrats in both provinces were covered for all 26 drugs under their own plans.

There were 17 drugs that CDR was still reviewing, and a further 2 drugs in the queue to be reviewed. Of these 19, none were covered under the Ontario plan or under the BC plan. Yet politicians and bureaucrats in both provinces were covered for all 19 of these drugs.

“The optics stink,” said Halifax Chronicle Herald in an editorial. “The gold-plated political plans even reimburse MPs, MPPs and civil servants for drugs not recommended public coverage and – to top even that generosity – drugs still under or awaiting review… On top of politicians’ often lavish pension plans, the message yet again is one of being entitled to their entitlements.”

The Victoria Times-Colonist editorialized, “It’s troubling that Canadian politicians and government employees have benefit plans that give them access to prescription drugs they deny to ordinary citizens… Public support would be easier to command if politicians were leading by example.”

“The double standard should be an embarrassment to provincial and federal politicians,” said the Kelowna Daily Courier. “They receive the gold standard in care, while frail and elderly citizens make do with generic drugs, if they are even approved… If our politicians deserve the full treatment, why don’t seniors deserve the same treatment?”

And the Vancouver Province said, “The fact there’s a pampered elite indulging in the benefits of a two-tier health system is an affront to the principles of equal access to health care. It’s got to stop. Now.”





Published by CARP
Copyright © 2007 CARP, Canada's Association for the 50Plus. All rights reserved.


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Suzuki vs Crichton

David Suzuki vs. Michael Crichton

Barbara Kay
National Post


Wednesday, February 21, 2007


More Columns By This Writer
:: Happy Valentine's Day. Don't forget the pepperoni

:: My own private Barbaro

:: Training the conservatives of tomorrow

:: How I fell for PETA's gay ram scam



Last Thursday, environmentalist guru David Suzuki stormed out of a Toronto AM640 radio interview with host John Oakley because Oakley dared to suggest that global warming might not be the "totally settled issue" Suzuki insisted it was.

Oakley only reported a fact: Many accredited scientists -- some full professors from top universities, including Nobel prize winners and a former president of the National Academy of Sciences -- would argue that "global warning is at best unproven and at worst pure fantasy," according to novelist and independent scientific researcher Michael Crichton, author of the best-selling 2004 environmental techno-thriller, State of Fear.

Crichton, one of the first to expand on the theme of environmentalism-as-religion, would doubtless see Suzuki's gesture as a result of confusion of his role as environmental advocate with that of chief of Morals Police. Suzuki's very public censure of Oakley for his perceived blasphemy is disquieting because it smacks of the totalitarian impulse to silence and humiliate the dissenter --or even, as in this case, the dissenter's messenger.

Suzuki keeps high-profile company in his tendency to suppress environmental infidels. Al Gore called skeptics "global warming deniers," evoking (if only unintentionally) invidious and fallacious comparison with Holocaust denial. Rejecting the historical record of what has actually happened in the past is one thing ; expressing skepticism about events that are predicted to happen in the future on the basis of computer simulations is quite another. But once you get into the realm of reigning ideologies, such rational distinctions fall by the wayside. The object is to shame the one who questions the received wisdom.

Suzuki would have better served his cause if he had addressed skeptics' actual concerns. Such as:

- Why was climatologist James Hansen -- the father of global warming--off by 200% in his prediction that temperatures would increase by 0.35 degrees Celsius by 2008 (the actual increase has been .11 degrees); and why did he (and colleagues) say in 2001 that "the longterm prediction of future climate states is not possible"?

- Of the world's 160,000 glaciers, some are shrinking. But many --in Iceland, for example --have "surged" in the last few years, while most of Antarctica is getting colder; if warming is "global," why?

- Why haven't sea levels risen to the extent predicted? Why have the waters off the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean not only experienced no rise over several centuries, but an actual fall in the last 20 years?

- Where is the predicted "extreme weather?" There has been no global increase, and in many cases a decrease, of extreme weather patterns.

- From 1940-70, carbon dioxide levels went way up, but temperatures went down so abruptly that a new Ice Age was the prevailing fear; wherefore this disparity?

- The Sahara Desert is shrinking--purportedly due to the greening effects caused by man-made global warming; but isn't the greening of the desert a good thing? I know to ask these questions only because I've read State of Fear. And as the environmental hysteria burgeons, I continue to press the book on everyone I know. Forget the silly (but riveting) plot, which is to the embedded environmental science in the novel as blini to caviar. You cannot read State of Fear with an open mind and continue to believe global warming is a "totally settled issue."

Nor should readers be put off by Crichton's status as a "mere" novelist. Crichton's scientific research on environmental issues is so impressive he was invited to address the U.S. Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works. Even Crichton's most frenzied critics (the Los Angeles Times called State of Fear "the first neocon novel") did not repudiate his peer reviewed, impeccably sourced data.

Amongst the hundreds of books, journal articles and scientific reports in his bibliography, (no mention of Suzuki, strangely), Crichton lists every publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since its formation. He has read them all, and in the end humbly "guesses" -- the most one can do -- that we are experiencing mild warming, possibly more beneficial than harmful.

The remorseless pressure on Canadians to sign up for environmental orthodoxies that they are not cognitively equipped to judge is demoralizing and divisive. Tantrums by self anointed prophets do not help the situation. Whatever the eventual outcome on the global warming front, we could all use a little non-partisanship, maturity and attitudinal cooling on the behavioural front.

Bkay@videotron.ca

© National Post 2007








Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.

Kyoto

February 18, 2007

The Kyoto horror show
While the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters take a pass, Canada gets clobbered
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

Here's my list of the "top 10" problems with the Kyoto accord on global warming. Feel free to add your own.

1) The United States, the world's biggest man-made greenhouse gas emitter -- 20.6% of all global emissions as of 2000 -- refuses to participate, arguing it would irreparably damage its economy and makes no demands on the developing world.

2) China, the world's second-biggest emitter (14.8%), is exempt from reducing greenhouse gases because it's a developing country.

3) The 27-member European Union, collectively the world's third-biggest emitter (14%), undeservedly benefits from the economic collapse of East Germany following the meltdown of the Soviet Union in 1989, not because of anything East Germany ever did to reduce greenhouse gases.

4) Similarly, Russia -- the world's fourth-biggest emitter (5.7%) -- undeservedly benefits from having huge "emission credits" to sell to other countries, not because of anything it did to reduce greenhouse gases, but because its economy also collapsed around 1990 (Kyoto's base year) after the fall of the Soviet Union.

5) India, the world's fifth-biggest emitter (5.5%), is exempt because it's also a developing country.

6) Australia, the world's biggest per-capita emitter of carbon dioxide due to its heavy reliance on coal, refuses to participate in Kyoto. Even if it did, it would be allowed to increase its emissions by 8%.

This as opposed to Canada, a big, cold, sparsely populated, northern country -- necessitating the burning of more fossil fuels -- which must reduce its emissions under Kyoto by 6% compared to 1990, by 2012.

COAL FIRED PLANTS

7) Almost 850 coal-fired energy plants planned by China (562), India (213) and the U.S. (72) over the next few years -- none covered by Kyoto -- will pump an estimated five times more carbon dioxide into the air than Kyoto removes, even if every other country hits its 2012 emission targets, which they won't.

8) Canada, which produces 2.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions making us the world's ninth-biggest emitter, is 35% behind our 2012 Kyoto target due to years of inaction by the previous Liberal government -- which locked us into the treaty -- followed by a year of inaction by the Tories.

But even if we were to hit our target, which would mean savaging our economy and spending billions buying "hot air" from places like Russia, it would have no significant impact on global emissions, for the reasons cited above.

9) Kyoto is mainly about transferring wealth from the first world to the third through the purchase of "emission credits" and the like, not reducing greenhouse gases.

10) Kyoto's unenforceable.

Finally, do Canadians support Kyoto? Our national media seem to think so, based largely on a recent Globe/Strategic Counsel poll, which asked people whether we should "try" to achieve our Kyoto targets. That received a 63% to 30% favourable response. But surely, Canadians believe we should "try" to do many things. Whether we're willing to make unfair sacrifices in a doomed effort, is the real question.

Interestingly, when The Strategic Counsel asked the same people if they supported charging "significantly higher prices" for gasoline and heating their homes -- a far more relevant question -- the vote was 64% to 34% against.

A CanWest/Innovative Research poll which was in the field at almost the same time as The Strategic Counsel, found about seven in 10 respondents agreed with the statement: "I don't care whether the new federal government implements Kyoto or not, so long as they take real action to make our environment better." Hmmm.

The serious issue here is whether Canada's three opposition parties are crazy enough to force an election on implementing this worthless, unfair treaty.

If I was Prime Minister Stephen Harper, I'd be saying to Liberal leader Stephane Dion and the rest of them: "Go ahead, make my day."

Then I'd campaign on a "made-in-Canada" policy setting hard caps for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the energy and transportation sectors, while taking a chunk of the money we now spend subsidizing big energy companies and auto giants and using it to help people retrofit their homes.

Finally, I'd tell voters what's really in the Kyoto accord.

Diabolical, I know.

Pardoning Criminals

February 18, 2007

Pardon me for being astonished
An army of scumbags has been unleashed upon unsuspecting Canadians
By IAN ROBINSON

OK, I'll bite.

What in the name of all that's holy does somebody have to do to be well and truly punished by the judicial system?

A Sun Media investigation discovered last week that 100,000 convicted criminals have received pardons over the last six years.

That means this army of scumbags -- and an army it truly is; the Canadian Forces couldn't field that many combat troops if the life of the nation depended on it -- can get passports, work for any federal agency, including the Armed Forces (New slogan: The few. The proud. The perverted.), or any business under federal authority.

And they can tell prospective employers that they don't have a criminal record.

Fabulous.

I guess to be truly punished, you've got to videotape yourself raping high school girls that you kill later and then get caught and have your wife testify against you.

That would make you Paul Bernardo.

Of course, if you're Paul's partner-in-crime, Karla Homolka, you get a taxpayer-funded university degree in a prison so lax that you get to enter into loving, lesbian relationships -- and model lingerie.

And, when you get out, find a fella and have a baby.

On that note, can you imagine this poor kid's life?

How'dja like to have Karla volunteering as a concerned mom in your kid's kindergarten class?

And what about the poor teacher who has to grade little essays like: "I luv my mum. I am very proud of her becuz she doznt kill peeple aneemore. The end.

" P.S. If you don't give me a gold star on my papeer I will kill you."

In the U.S., they don't even let convicted criminals vote.

Here, the courts have decided it's their constitutional right.

Wonder who old Paul votes for?

Hint: It's probably not for Stephen Harper and the Tories.

If I had to guess, I'd say it would be for the party that has ruled this nation for most of the last century.

These people may be criminal scumbags, but they're not completely without brains.

(I'm talking about the criminals, not the Liberals.)

They must know who their political friends are -- the ones who created a system that goes easy on them, and installed judges to make sure nobody could do anything about it.

Thank you Liberal Party of Canada! Way to go!

Since 2000, one first-degree and one second-degree murderer got pardons.

More than 150 for manslaughter.

Not to mention the 28 people who had the slate wiped clean for sex assaults causing bodily harm. Other criminals saw their convictions virtually erased for killing babies and having sex with family members.

Let's get this straight.

You kill your baby or have sex with your son or daughter. And a few years later, Canadian society tells you it's OK by giving you a pardon.

Plus the ones who went away for: Armed robbery, arson, bestiality, bigamy, buggery, taking hostages, importing and distributing child pornography, producing child pornography and having sex with the feeble minded.

Look, I get redemption and forgiveness and all that stuff they jammed into my head back in Sunday school.

However. It's one thing to offer a pardon to some guy who got caught with a pound of grass in the trunk of his car on the border when he was 20 and is now 40 and has kept his nose clean.

I get that.

But killers and rapists?

And hostage-takers?

I don't know about you, but I've never put myself in a situation in which it seemed sensible to take hostages.

If you live anything even resembling a normal, decent life, the decision to take hostages pretty much never comes up.

Each pardon given to these individuals -- I find it hard to call them "people" -- denigrates the suffering of the victims.

There are simply some crimes that leave an indelible stain upon the victims and the criminal and society.

Producing child pornography is one of them.

So is distributing it.

So too making a withdrawal from a bank with a shotgun instead of an ATM card.

And people who have sex with animals?

Do we really want to make it easier for them to get passports and send them off to other countries as goodwill ambassadors for the nation?

Dear Lord, what have we become if we allow all of this?

Muslim's

Disturbing reality buried
Fear of causing offence and wilful blindness will only end the day innocent Canadians die
By LICIA CORBELLA

In the news business, it's called burying the lead.

It means you missed the most important or interesting part of a story and led with something less significant.

On Feb. 13, the CBC published and aired the results of an Environics poll, which on their website was billed as "Glad to be Canadian, Muslims say."

Apparently "more than 80% of Canada's roughly 700,000 Muslims are broadly satisfied with their lives here."

That's a nice and cuddly kind of story, but hardly surprising. I've been to Afghanistan -- where many of Canada's latest Muslim population comes from -- and even the upper-middle class in Afghanistan live in difficult conditions. I stayed in Kabul's only five-star hotel in December 2003 where hot water was available one-to-two hours a day, electricity was sporadic and my lovely room was utterly freezing.

Poor and middle-class Afghans -- the vast majority -- have no running water, no heat, no electricity and most are totally illiterate to boot.

They are handsome hospitable people -- and extremely resourceful -- but Canada's homeless shelters would look like luxury to your average Afghan refugee. But I digress.

Waaaay down in the online CBC story about this poll is the news that when "asked about the arrests last summer of the 18 Muslim men and boys who were allegedly plotting terrorist attacks in southern Ontario, 73% of Muslim respondents said these attacks were not at all justified." That portion of the poll ended there. No more details. Why? The Environics website made no mention about this portion of the poll either.

However, on CBC's The National television program on the same day, this part of the poll was fleshed-out and the results are alarming.

Fully 12% of Muslim Canadians polled by Environics said the alleged terrorist plot -- that included kidnapping and beheading the prime minister and blowing up Parliament and the CBC -- was justified.

Predictably, the CBC managed to find a talking head -- in this case York University sociology professor Haideh Moghissi -- who dismissed this disturbing revelation.

"It's really negligible that 12 percent feel that the attacks would be justified," said Moghissi. "I don't think it even warrants attention."

Clearly, other news agencies and those who put the poll results on the CBC website agree with Moghissi.

But just how "negligible" is 12% of 700,000 people.

Well, if Moghissi knew arithmetic like she knows denial, she'd know if this poll is accurate, 84,000 Canadian Muslims think it's justifiable to behead our democratically elected prime minister and blow up the very symbol and centre of our democracy!

The Environics poll interviewed 500 Canadian Muslims and 2,045 members of the general population between Nov. 30 and Jan. 5 and is said to be accurate within 4.4 percentage points with regard to the Muslim respondents and 2.2 points with the larger sample group 19 times out of 20.

So, let's err on the side of caution here. Let's subtract the margin of error -- 4.4% -- from 12%. That comes to 7.6%, so let's say, just to be really non-alarmist, we round that down to 7%. That still means 49,000 Canadian Muslims believe conducting a terrorist attack on their own country -- Canada -- is justified.

Is it just me, or does this not strike anyone else as the opposite of "negligible?"

Isn't this significant news?

Considering this poll was published on the same day it was learned al-Qaida -- the Islamic terrorist organization behind the 9/11 attacks -- was urging its followers to target all oilfields, including Canada's, should wake complacent Canadians up.

"We should strike petroleum interests in all areas which supply the United States and not only in the Middle East, because the target is to stop its imports or decrease it by all means," it states.

That threat was made on an al-Qaida online magazine called Sawt al-Jihad (Voice of Holy War) and was discovered by a U.S. non-profit group that monitors militant websites called Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE).

In other words, the Environics poll indicates anywhere between 49,000 to 84,000 Muslim Canadians likely would view attacks on our oilsands development justifiable, and if that's the case, it's safe to assume some portion of those tens of thousands of people might be prone to carrying out such an attack.

We already know calls to martyrdom and jihad have been made from Canadian mosques, including one in B.C. and the one in Ontario the 18 alleged wanna-be beheaders attended. It's safe to assume there are more.

But, hey, this is Canada, where in the interest of political correctness and fear of offending, the lead on these kinds of stories gets buried and our heads remain planted where there is no illumination and therefore, no truth.

That wilful blindness will likely only end the day innocent Canadians get buried instead of just leads by those who justify terror on their fellow citizens and country.

Education

Sliding into an abyss
By MICHAEL COREN

Sometimes we in the media merely play a game, making little ripples at the side of the water rather than diving right in to make an almighty splash.

In other words, we run around the edge of various problems and debates but are afraid to shine light on the authentic dilemmas of our age.

Whether it's politics, economics, culture or morality, the culture, society and various pundits always assume that things are getting better -- that we're making progress and that what we have and what is to come is superior to what was.

Problem is, it's mostly nonsense.

If anything, North American society is slipping into the abyss as the years go by.

Yet if any of us point to the past and argue that just half a century ago the world was more civilized, gentle, kind and moral we are dismissed --at best -- as nostalgic cranks. Facts, however, are more significant than abuse.

A few examples: Those much-despised 1950s were, we are told, oppressive, confining and prudish. Yet since then the teenage suicide in North America has increased by 5,000%, which is a figure so extraordinary that some of you probably think it a misprint. No, five times one thousand. The allegedly dark days of half-a-century ago seldom saw young Canadians and Americans try to, and often succeed, in killing themselves. Not now.

In 1958 a broad cross-section of school principals was asked what were the five most challenging problems they faced in dealing with students. The answers were as follows: Not doing homework; not respecting property, such as throwing books; leaving lights and/or doors and windows open; throwing spitballs in class; running in the halls.

In 1988 the same question was put to a similar group of teachers. This time the answers were a little different: Children having abortions; young people infected with AIDS; incidents of rape; widespread use of soft and increasingly hard drugs; a fear of murders and guns and knives in class.

We were told in the 1960s that the almost universal availability of the contraceptive pill and condoms would liberate women, increase marital happiness and lead to sexual fulfillment. In fact there has been a steady increase in so-called unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, divorce and the use of antidepressants.

Rather than empowering women, contraceptives have had the opposite effect and are used by men to have sexual intercourse without responsibility.

Every serious survey reveals that young girls today feel far more pressured to reluctantly agree to sex than their mothers and grandmothers did 20 and 40 years ago.

More children are raised by single parents now than was thought remotely possible by even the most pessimistic analysts 35 years ago. And those children fortunate enough to have both parents in the home see their fathers -- and especially their mothers -- substantially less often than was the norm in the '50s and '60s.

In schools we spend more money than ever before but genuine literacy levels have declined to such an extent that university teachers now complain that student essays are indecipherable. We abolished uniforms so that children could express their individuality and they dress in identical baggy pants and baseball caps.

The great writer G.K. Chesterton referred to the democracy of the dead. Listen to the past a little, it's amazing the wisdom and common sense you might hear.

Rex Murphy on Global Warming part 2

A great green bucket Jan. 18, 2007
Politics in Canada is becoming something of a St. Patrick's day miracle.
Every party wants you to believe it's green.
Stéphane Dion is evidently quite convinced that if the Liberal Party can sell itself as the Green Party, he can take Harper in the next election.
Of course, there already is a Green Party, which is one hitch in Mr. Dion's objective.
There's also the small problem that the Liberals were the government for almost a decade and a half, during which the Liberals may have done good things, but, on the environment, all it amounted to was talking a great game or having for a brief period, and it was an improvement, Rick Mercer talk for them.
On Kyoto, the Liberals, having signed on, actually performed much worse than the ecological great Satan George Bush who did not sign on. Being upstaged environmentally by president George W. Texas Oil Bush will not win you a tofu medal at the next meeting of the Sierra Club. Which may explain the urgency of some of Mr. Dion's recent claims that in the war against global warming, not only can Canada pull back on megatonnes of emissions but make megatonnes of money doing so.
This sounds like a very technical assessment of our green dilemma. And in the case of the Liberals, quite properly, raises the question why, with all this painless gain, it wasn't done before. Mr. Dion seems convinced, though we've been slackers up to now, we can still reach the Kyoto that are targets on time for 2012.
Outside of shutting down Alberta, fierce and swift regulations on the auto industry and half the population suddenly discovering the virtues of walking to work, how is that going to happen? Mr. Dion's plus is that he looks sincere when he makes such claims and most likely really is. But then a long while ago Jean Chrétien really looked sincere when he promised to abolish the GST. Liberal promises have more variables than even the weather.
Stephen Harper has gone green too. He parked Rona Ambrose and sent the Tory star John Baird out to refashion the Conservatives as newly-awake to the menacing of looming climate change. Mr. Baird promptly went on a walking tour of devastated Stanley Park in Vancouver. He was on another one just today. Good clips for the TV news.
The problem is Mr. Baird%

Rex Murphy on Global Warming

An inconvenient truth Feb. 1, 2007
Video (Runs 4:07)
Global warming is the biggest issue I can remember for quite a while.
Probably not since Y2K has there been the prospect of a crisis that has seized the attention of the entire world.
In the great Y2K alarms, you will remember there were all sorts of hideous scenarios... a great crash of all the world's computer systems, planes falling out of the sky at midnight as the millennium turned, security nightmares. Nothing happened, of course, except billions upon billions of dollars spent to avert a non-catastrophe.
The clock ticked over into a new millennium. The day after Y2K was very much like the day before Y2K.
But it was pretty big while it was going on, and a whole lot of very educated, scientific people kept telling us we were in for global chaos and turmoil.
I don't think global warming is another Y2K. Although it does share some of its wild properties. What it shares is a veritable industry of catastrophic prophecies and apocalyptic alarms, great gloomy portraits of the world's weather a hundred years from now.
Its loudest advocates possess a strident and quite impossible certitude about an immensely complex future outcome. Probabilities are argued as certainties. Disagreements are labeled as propelled by sinister oil interests. Science is made a handmaiden of world scale advocacy.
Beneath the noise, some things are absolutely clear. The earth is warming. It has been since the last ice age. No arguments there. Mankind has to some degree accelerated what we'll call the natural warming since the ice age.
I'm actually with Al Gore on this, although it's only fair to note that Al Gore is no more an authority on the process or the science than, say, Stephen Harper. The debate over global warming is not about the warming, but the projections of what that warming might mean, how radically it might affect parts of the planet.
It's also about what some nations, including Canada, are willing to do to slow it down. Well, what can we do, Canada? We can offer symbolic action, and, let's be clear, nothing more. Canada could shut down tomorrow completely, and if the projections of Mr. Gore are correct, it would have no meaningful impact on global warming. We're too small a country. We're not emitting CO2 gases in sufficient volume that our contribution, if it stopped, would tip the scales in any significant manner. But symbolically, if Canada were to cut its emissions drastically by choice, it might act as a signal to other bigger nations — the U.S., China, India — to give consideration to doing 0the same.
So the question for us is really, is the moral weight of our example worth the immediate, real costs to our economy and lifestyles? Will you drive 30 per cent less, buy 30 per cent less, approve putting a brake on the oilsands, offshore oil, the auto-making industry? In hard terms, will we use less energy, pay more for fuel, live less excessively, fly less often right now, just to show the world that we Canadians are willing to back up what we say about global warming by what we do?
This is not just a question for our politicians. It's a question for us all. Do we believe our moral leadership is worth the personal and public cost of providing that leadership? The answer to that question may be an inconvenient truth. But that's what the global warming debate for us Canadians is all about. For "The National," I'm Rex Murphy.

Climate Debate

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Tuesday » February 13 » 2007

The climate change debate

National Post
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Canadians are very aware of climate change, but I would challenge anyone to ask those same Canadians exactly what they know about "climate change" and the science behind it. Some basic questions, such as what percentage of CO2 emissions are natural? Which countries did not sign Kyoto? Of the countries that did sign, why do they not have any restraints on their CO2 emissions? How did the global climate cycle itself between ice ages and warm periods, before man? Why is it that some pro-warming researchers are not willing to allow other researchers to review their work?
Do people realize that the catastrophic climate predictions we hear about are merely the most extreme and unlikely examples of hundreds of possible different forecasts? Are people aware of the difficulty in determining and correlating temperatures and CO2 levels back thousands of years?
Anthropogenic global warming is at present a hypothesis, an unproven theory. Not only are we not being told the other side of the debate, but the media often completely ignore the fact that there is even another side to the debate. Instead, we are led to believe that it is a proven, undeniable fact and that the only debate is about how soon and how much we should spend on alleviating man-made emissions.
The cart has been put ahead of the horse. At present, we are trying to determine policy and spending priorities that will have huge impacts on our lifestyle and our economy, based on an unproven hypothesis. There is no prudence in acting before we have a more clear understanding of the issue.
Would you consider amputation a prudent treatment for a sore leg just in case it turns out to be cancer? Limited funds and resources used to meet our Kyoto requirements could be better used to fight more acute and immediate problems both here and abroad.
Tom McAuley, Winnipeg.
© National Post 2007

Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks

Dion's Kyoto problem

Stephane Dion's Kyoto problem

National Post
Monday, February 05, 2007
Stephane Dion, the Liberal leader, is in full-fledged denial of the obvious.
Last summer, he admitted to National Post columnist John Ivison that if he became prime minister, Canada would remain part of the Kyoto treaty through to when it runs out in 2012, but that it would never meet its emission-reduction targets. Specifically, Mr. Dion told Mr. Ivison: "In 2008, I will be part of Kyoto but I will say to the world I don't think I will make it." However, now that Mr. Dion wants to convince voters he is Captain Kyoto - the most environmentally committed politician in the country's history - he is claiming that he meant something completely different, and that he can still reach Canada's Kyoto targets providing he becomes prime minister in 2007.
For years, the Liberals -- who signed Kyoto in 1997 and ratified it in 2002 -- struggled with how to reach Canada's mandated target of a 6% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (not pollution) below 1990 levels. They never settled on a plan. Meanwhile, they watched as emissions rose to nearly 30% above 1990 levels.
Internally, many in the Liberal government admitted this country would never meet its Kyoto commitments. But publicly, no minister ever conceded that fact. They all clung to the charade that somewhere over the next hill or around the next corner lies a new technology that would enable Canada to dramatically reduce emissions without cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs and devastating the economy.
So Mr. Dion's admission of last summer was a stunner, somuch so that Mr. Ivison checked his tape of their conversation against the tape made by Mr. Dion's staff to make certain he had heard the new Liberal chief correctly. He had.
However, since becoming leader two months ago, Mr. Dion has invested somuch of his public image in his unwavering belief in the science of climate change, and in Kyoto as a necessary step to reversing global warming, that he cannot afford tohave voters thinking that just seven short months ago he was prepared to admit Kyoto was a bust. So on Thursday, in a letter to the editor, Mr. Dion claimed Mr. Ivison had misinterpreted his words. Mr. Dion now maintains that he did not mean Canada would fall short of its Kyoto goals. Rather, he claims he meant that Canada would not be able to meet its targets in 2008 if he did not become prime minister before that time. (Of course, even if he doesn't become PM till 2008 or thereafter, Canada would still meet its Kyoto target, we are told --just not until 2012.)
All of this serves to remind us of Bill Clinton's response under oath that the answer to a question asked by federal investigators depended "on what the meaning of 'is' is." Mr. Dion's meaning last summer was clear. There was no ambiguity. He is running from that confession now merely to save the cornerstone of his strategy for the next federal election.
Just how far Mr. Dion is prepared to go to capture the "green" sentiment of voters may have also been revealed, inadvertently, on Thursday by Ontario Liberal MP Mark Holland, the party's natural resources critic. Speaking on the nationally syndicated radio talk show Adler Online, Mr. Holland told host Charles Adler that the Liberals were prepared to place severe restrictions on the development of Alberta's oil sands in order to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas released in the mining process. "We're going to say [that] you cannot exploit that resource," Mr. Holland admitted, "[that you cannot] go in there and pump it out as fast as you can to give it to the Americans and sell out our national interests and blow apart our emissions targets."
Talk about a "hidden agenda." Mr. Holland's remarks revived the twin spectres of the Liberals' National Energy Program of the 1980s and their vehement anti- Americanism of the past decade, in one swoop. Meanwhile, Mr. Dion's denial of an obvious admission showed his party still has trouble giving voters the straight goods. All of this should give voters plenty of food for thought in the next election.
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The folly of Kyoto

The folly of Kyoto

National Post
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Pablo Rodriguez, a Liberal MP from Quebec, has a private member's bill proceeding through the House of Commons that has the backing of all three opposition parties. If it passes, as appears likely, the resultant Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act would require Ottawa to honour Canada's Kyoto commitments and reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions by more than a third over just the next five years.
Working Canadians and taxpayers had better hope Mr. Rodriguez's legislation fails, because there are only two ways to achieve his goal by 2012, both unpalatable. Either the federal government could force a radical change in Canadians' lifestyles -- restricting automobile use, limiting electrical consumption and shutting down industries employing hundreds of thousands of workers, thereby sending our economy into a tailspin -- or it could send tens of billions of tax dollars abroad to buy "carbon credits" from developing and underdeveloped nations.
Mr. Rodriguez, his Liberal caucus mates and environmentalists are reassuring Canadians that the emissions targets imposed by the new bill could be achieved with very little pain for ordinary Canadians. But that is a pipe dream. There is no magic new technology on the horizon that would enable a nation of 32 million to cut hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide output in five short years -- no hydrogen cars, no emissions-free smelters, no solar-powered 18- wheelers. In order to reach our Kyoto targets at this late date, Canada would have to shutter all its coal-fired power plants, plus all its auto plants and Alberta's oilsands. In the late 1990s, the Liberals' own economic forecasts projected 450,000 lost jobs from such reductions.
Mr. Rodriguez's bill is naive in the extreme. It would consign us all to freezing together in the unemployed darkness. And despite all this sacrifice, it wouldn't even do any good against global warming.
The Kyoto accords were more about symbolism than substance. None of the large developing nations -- China, India, Indonesia or Brazil -- is covered by its strictures. Not only do they not have to scale back their emissions under Kyoto, they are not even required to hold them constant. Their emissions may grow without penalty.
Russia and the former Soviet bloc states, which are covered by Kyoto, have since been exempted from its emission targets. Which means the only countries to which the reductions apply are Western industrial nations. And even if they all managed to cripple their economies to meet their limits, their actions would serve to delay the warming expected in the next century by only four years.
The other option is for Ottawa to buy emissions credits from other countries, notably Russia. (Russia has unused emissions room because since 1990, Kyoto's baseline, a lot of the country's old, dirty Soviet-era power and manufacturing plants have been closed.) This, though, is just a feel-good accounting trick whose only purpose would be allowing Canada to assert technical bragging rights about meeting its Kyoto targets -- it wouldn't result in preventing a single molecule of actual carbon dioxide from being emitted.
Canada has already spend about $1-billion buying up Russia's unused emissions room. To meet Mr. Rodriguez's targets, it would have to spend another $20-billion to $60-billion. As well as being a complete waste of money from the point of view of Canadian taxpayers, consider where the cash would be going: the authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin -- which is helping to protect Iran's nuclear program at the UN, turning Chechnya into scorched earth, bullying its European neighbours and rolling back domestic civil liberties to the Cazarist era -- would become Canada's biggest foreign aid recipient, larger than all others combined.
We have a question: If it were so easy to cut Canada's carbon dioxide output by nearly 35% -- the reduction needed to honour our Kyoto commitments -- why didn't the Liberals bring forward legislation when they were in government that obliged them to do so? The answer: Because it can't be done except by devastating the national economy.
The Liberals were in charge of the Kyoto file for over eight years. During that time, our greenhouse gas emissions went from 12% above 1990 levels to more than 30% above. From 1998 onward, the Liberals spent over $6-billion on environmental initiatives. But as former environment commissioner Johanne Gelinas said in her final report last fall, much of that money could not be accounted for, and none of the spending produced any measurable improvement in Canada's emissions. The Liberals -- including then-environment minister Stephane Dion -- could never figure out a way to reduce emissions, or even slow their growth.
Now for crass political gain, the opposition parties seem set to saddle the Tories with Pablo Rodriguez's pie-in-the-sky bill, and perhaps start a recession in the process. When the next election comes, voters should remember who set Canada down this road.
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A carbon trader who lost faith

A carbon trader who lost her faith
Pioneer warns Canada to avoid Europe's mistakes

Nathan Vanderklippe
Financial Post
Saturday, January 27, 2007
VANCOUVER - For more than a decade, Aldyen Donnelly has worked with the companies environmentalists love to hate. They are the corporations often accused in the court of public opinion as the villains of climate change: power suppliers and petroleum producers like Trans Alt aCorp., Ontario Power Generation and Trans Canada Pipelines Ltd.
Since 1996, she has advised 14 of them, each among Canada's top 20 producers of greenhouse gases. It may seem an odd fit for a dedicated environmentalist and ardent believer in global warming to draw her salary from the very emitters who are just as likely to deny that science. But the standard definition of "environmentalist" hardly fits Ms. Donnelly, who has carefully scrubbed the word "green" from her vocabulary in her bid to reform her clients.
She has argued instead that whittling down emissions ahead of coming greenhouse caps is an issue of risk management, and every bit as important as hedging against bad weather.
In so doing, she has helped lay some of the legal and theoretical foundations that will guide Canada's industry as it responds to the mandatory emissions targets Ottawa is drafting. And she has helped to devise a message that some companies --Trans Alta Corp. in particular --now use as a guiding principle. "Our underpinning strategy is we believe it's better to establish your bank of compliance instruments early, rather than wait for the rules to be put in place and everything goes nuts and the price goes wild," said Don Wharton, the company's director of sustainable development.
It's not a belief shared by all of Ms. Donnelly's clients -- some of whom have preferred to wait until they have actual targets to work toward.
But her work in establishing the principle of emissions as economic risk has earned her a reputation as a "pioneer" and a "maverick" whose unflinching commitment to her beliefs is nonetheless seen by some colleagues as narrow-minded arrogance.
She is nonetheless an unapologetic contrarian, and today she is preaching another disputed view: that the emissions trading markets she once saw as the glittering hope for companies in need of greenhouse reduction credits are bunk.
"They're expecting us to exchange Canadian dollars for Zellers coupons," she said.
She says markets such as the European Union's emission trading scheme, which in 2006 saw ?17.8-billion ($27.3- billion) in trades, are primed to crash -- their currency in trade, carbon credits, nearly useless because the market has been oversupplied with allocations by politicians wary of harming industry with deep emissions cuts.
And that conclusion, reached from years of watching the market, could help shape Canada's policy because, according to insider, "she's consistently had the ear of senior political people and, as far as I'm aware, she continues to have the ear of some people in the PMO."
A life-time Vancouverite, Ms. Donnelly, 52, began her work in drafting the history of emissions trading in Canada in 1994 when she took a contract to consult for West coast Energy, which is now owned by Duke Energy Corp.
Worried about the possibility of government-imposed emissions guidelines, many corporations had begun to conduct greenhouse gas inventories, and Ms. Donnelly soon began to participate in weekly conference calls with others in the industry who were trying to prod their superiors into cutting emissions.
"All this was lower management conspiring against their bosses," she said.
As their ideas began to coalesce, they realized they were duplicating each other's work. The solution: form a coalition of companies that, in the marketplace, were fierce enemies but had common needs when it came to responding to emissions pressure. Gemco, the greenhouse emissions management consortium, was born on April 14, 1996, with Ms. Donnelly as its president.
The members soon determined the best way forward was to buy credits from other companies who could meet their compliance obligations more cheaply. In other words, it might cost a power producer $35 per tonne of emissions saved to convert a coal-fired power plant to natural gas. If someone else could reduce emissions at a cost of $5 a tonne, the power producer could simply pay for that reduction, then sign a contract giving it credit for the lowered emissions, all at a far lower price.
But given there was no Canadian precedent for this, how exactly would it work? They decided the only way to figure that out was to do it. Ms. Donnelly settled on a wallboard plant in Surrey, B.C., that was drawing part of its energy from methane captured at a nearby landfill. She found an engineer who could double the plant's use of methane, thereby reducing much of the gas released into the atmosphere, and she began to draft the contract.
That document -- which guaranteed credit for the buying companies and imposed penalties if the wallboard plant did not follow through -- was the first of its kind signed in Canada. It became a template used by industry in similar deals, and led to other firsts.
"I did the first agriculture [carbon trading] deal in the world and I did the first carbon dioxide capture and injection to enhance oil recovery [for emissions purposes] in the world," said Ms. Donnelly.
By 2003, Gemco and its members had become the world's third-largest buyer of carbon credits. To date, carbon trading projects Ms. Donnelly has worked on have led to an estimated 50 megatonnes of greenhouse gas reductions.
But Ms. Donnelly has grown disillusioned with those markets, and today counsels the companies she works with -- a list that has dwindled to New Brunswick Power, Nova Scotia Power and Trans Canada Energy, as many companies take what they have learned from Gemco and go it alone -- to avoid international carbon exchanges completely.
And, she said, as Canada draws closer to establishing its own emission restrictions, Ottawa can avoid the mistakes made by Europe -- whose carbon market has been volatile, based in part on over-allocation of credits to emitters -- by refusing to develop a market here.
Companies desperate to meet compliance targets will develop a carbon exchange on their own, she said, just as they did with the futures markets that allow industry to offset other types of risk.
"I'm shifting my recommendations dramatically," she said. "I'm very close to saying that in Canada the government should absolutely not participate in any way in the construction of any infrastructure to support a market system. Just regulate."
Many in Canada -- especially those who work with international carbon markets -- say as those exchanges get past their growing pains, they will become mature trades that this country should attempt to replicate. But Ms. Donnelly, with the acidity that has made her both influential and controversial, disagrees.
"We don't need government to issue certificates or run a registry. Every time someone from a major exchange tells me we need that I feel like tearing my hair out," she said. "If Canada makes the same mistakes in our design that Europe and the U.S. made ? it's a disaster."
nvanderklippe@nationalpost.com
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Duplicitous or duped? Dion disaster

Duplicitous or duped?
Dion champions what would be an economic disaster

John Ivison in Ottawa
National Post
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Yesterday's column on the Liberal's environment strategy drew a riposte from the party's leader, Stephane Dion, who has written a letter to the National Post clarifying his position.
He said the key part of the comment he gave me in an interview last summer -- "In 2008, I will be part of Kyoto, but I will say to the world I don't think I willmake it" --is "in 2008."
He claims that the Conservative government's dismantling of the Liberal plan and the subsequent year of "inaction" means that if he Fdoes not become prime minister this year, the Liberals would find it hard to meet the target of reducing carbon emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012.
"If we continue along the path of inaction the Conservative government has set out for us for even one more year, through 2007, it will make it very difficult for a future Liberal government to meet our 2012 commitments."
The contention that the Liberals could still meet the Kyoto targets if Mr. Dion becomes prime minister this year is important since it could become the key battleground in the next federal election. After the Conservatives' Damascan conversion on the environment, the government has brought back many of the Liberals' programs; is close to releasing a plan to regulate large final emitters; and has said it is in favour of a carbon trading market in Canada. It is likely that by the time an election rolls around, the only significant difference between the Conservative and Liberal environment plans will be the latter's commitment to meeting Canada's Kyoto commitment.
Yet anyone who has checked out Canada's greenhouse gas inventory -- and we must presume Mr. Dion has --knows that living up to Kyoto would be economically ruinous for this country.
Aldyen Donnelly is a B.C.- based emissions management consultant to large final emitters who believes that Canada should take action on greenhouse gas reductions in as aggressive a manner as the economy can tolerate, without reference to Kyoto.
"Under the Kyoto protocol, even if Canadians agreed to send at least $10-billion offshore to buy 'hot air' credits, it would still mean that every Canadian man, woman, child, building and industrial plant would have to consume at least 20% less energy
than they do today, starting next January. Then every time we have a baby, accept a new immigrant, build a new home or buy a new hybrid car, we would have to cut back energy consumption further to fit this new addition under our hard national cap.
"The only way industry can do its 'fair share' under the Kyoto cap is to shut down at least 20% of existing manufacturing capacity and jobs over the next 36 months," she said. Even if a new government closed all of Ontario's coal-fired power stations, shut down all oilsands activity in Alberta and slapped a moratorium on new development, it would address less than one-quarter of Canada's current "Kyoto gap."
Is Mr. Dion prepared to let the Canadian public in on this reality check, or is he deliberately misleading an electorate that polls suggest is in favour of Kyoto, even though two in three acknowledge they don't know anything about it?
The Liberal leader is not alone in taking advantage of the public's ignorance. Nathan Cullen, the NDP environment critic, said at a news conference this week that his party believes Canada is duty bound to meet its Kyoto targets and that doing so will benefit the country.
"We believe in creating the type of economy that allows us to achieve our Kyoto target and will create jobs and wealth for Canadians. It's a false debate to consider jobs versus the environment -- a debate I believe is long since over," he said.
In the long term, there may be some truth in the argument that Canada could prosper by adopting new technology that replaces a greenhouse gas emitting energy supply with a zero emissions energy supply. But the problem is the Kyoto deadline. Ms. Donnelly estimates it would cost $80-billion in new capital spending projects (including building retrofits, manufacturing plant upgrades and redesigning vehicle and engine production lines) to achieve the transformation Kyoto compliance would require.
"The problem is that even if we had the skilled labour and cash in place to start construction on all $80-billion in capital projects today, most of the new clean energy supply would not be delivering energy product to Canadian consumers before 2013," she said.
The Liberals issued a news release yesterday accusing Stephen Harper of being a climate change denier, accompanied by a number of the Prime Minister's own quotes. Many suggest that he was -- and likely still is -- unconvinced about the science of global warming. Yet with one quote, he hit the nail on the head: "As economic policy, the Kyoto accord is a disaster."
Either Mr. Dion knows this and is being duplicitous for political gain or, worse, he doesn't and has been duped by the environmental lobby. Neither explanation inspires much confidence in him as a future prime minister.
- - -
KYOTO
6% The Liberal government under Jean Chretien committed Canada to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 6%below 1990 levels by 2012.
35% The Conservative government said in December that Canada's emissions have grown so rapidly since the Kyoto commitment was made that the country is now 35% above its target for 2012.
$10-billion The Liberals have suggested spending $10-billion on "credits" from other countries that have excess room under their Kyoto targets.
20% Assuming that $10- billion was spent, emissions management consultant Aldyen Donnelly suggests that in order to meet the 2012 deadline, every Canadian resident, building and industrial plant would have to consume at least 20%less energy than they do today, starting next January.
$80-billion Ms. Donnelly also suggests it would cost $80-billion in new capital spending to create a "clean" energy supply that would allow Canada to comply with Kyoto targets over the long term.
Ran with factbox "Kyoto" which has been appended to the end of this story.
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The green fervour

The green fervour
Is environmentalism the new religion?

Joseph Brean
National Post
Saturday, February 10, 2007
In his new book Apollo’s Arrow, ambitiously subtitled The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything, Vancouver-based author and mathematician David Orrell set out to explain why the mathematical models scientists use to predict the weather, the climate and the economy are not getting any better, just more refined in their uncertainty.
What he discovered, in trying to sketch the first principles of prophecy, was the religious nature of modern e nviron-mentalism.
This is not to say that fearing for the future of the planet is irrational in the way supernatural belief arguably is, just that — in its myths of the Fall and the Apocalypse, its saints and heretics, its iconography and tithing, its reliance on prophecy, even its schisms — the green movement now exhibits the same psychology of compliance as religion.
Dr. Orrell is no climate-change denier. He calls himself green. But he understands the unjustified faith that arises from the psychological need tomake predictions.
“The track record of any kind of long-distance prediction is really bad, but everyone’s still really interested in it. It’s sort of a way of picturing the future. But we can’t make long-term predictions of the economy, and we can’t make long-term predictions of the climate,” Dr. Orrell said in an interview. After all, he said, scientists cannot even write the equation of a cloud, let alone make a workable model of the climate.
Formerly of University College London, Dr. Orrell is best known among scientists for arguing that the failures of weather forecasting are not due to chaotic effects — as in the butterfly that causes the hurricane — but to errors of modelling. He sees the same problems in the predictions of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which he calls “extremely vague,” and says there is no scientific reason to think the climate is more predictable than the weather.“Models will cheerfully boil away all the water in the oceans or cover the world in ice, even with pre-industrial levels of Co2,” he writes in Apollo’s Arrow . And so scientists use theoretical concepts like “flux adjustments” to make the models agree with reality. When models about the future climate are in agreement, “it says more about the self-regulating group psychology of the modelling community than it does about global warming and the economy.”
In explaining such an arcane topic for a general audience, he found himself returning again and again to religious metaphors to explain our faith in predictions, referring to the “weather gods” and the “images of almost biblical wrath” in the literature. He sketched the rise of “the gospel of deterministic science,” a faith system that was born with Isaac Newton and died with Albert Einstein. He said his own physics education felt like an “indoctrination” into the use of models, and that scientists in his field, “like priests... feel they are answering a higher calling.”
“If you go back to the oracles of ancient Greece, prediction has always been one function of religion,” he said. “This role is coveted, and so there’s not very much work done at questioning the prediction, because it’s almost as if you were going to the priest and saying, ‘Look, I’m not sure about the Second Coming of Christ.’ ”
He is not the first to make this link. Forty years ago, shortly after Rachel Carson launched modern environmentalism by publishing Silent Spring, leading to the first Earth Day in 1970, a Princeton history professor named LynnWhite wrote a seminal essay called “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis.”
“By destroying pagan animism [the belief that natural objects have souls], Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects,” he wrote in a 1967 issue of . “Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not.” It was a prescient claim. In a 2003 speech in San Francisco, best-selling author Michael Crichton was among the first to explicitly close the circle, calling modern environmentalism “the religion of choice for urban atheists ... a perfect 21st century re-mapping of traditional JudeoChristian beliefs andmyths.”
Today, the popularity of British author James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis — that the Earth itself functions as a living organism — confirms the return of a sort of idolatrous animism, a religion of nature. The recent IPCC report, and a week’s worth of turgid headlines, did not create this faith, but certainly made it more evident.
It can be felt in the frisson of piety that comes with lighting an energy-saving light bulb, a modern votive candle.
It is there in the pious propaganda of media outlets like the, Toronto Star, which on Jan. 28 made the completely implausible claim that, “The debate about greenhouse gas emissions appears to be over.”
It can be seen in the public ritual of cycling to work, in the veneer of saintliness on David Suzuki and Al Gore (the rush for tickets to the former vice-president’s upcoming appearance crashed the server at the University of Toronto this week), in the high-profile conversion (honest or craven) of GeorgeW. Bush, and in the sinful guilt of throwing a plastic bottle in the garbage.Adherents make arduous pilgrimages and call them ecotourism. Newspapers publish the iconography of polar bears. The IPCC reports carry the weight of scripture.
John Kay of the Financial Times wrote last month, about future climate chaos: “Christians look to the Second Coming, Marxists look to the collapse of capitalism, with the same mixture of fear and longing ... The discovery of global warming filled a gap in the canon ... [and] provides justification for the link between the sins of our past and the catastrophe of our future.”
Like the tithe in Judaism and Christianity, the religiosity of green is seen in the suspiciously precise mathematics that allow companies such as Bullfrog Power or Offsetters to sell the supposed neutralization of the harmful emissions from household heating, air travel or transportation to a concert.
It is in the schism that has arisen over whether to renew or replace Kyoto, which, even if the scientific skeptics are completely discounted, has been a divisive force for environmentalists.
What was once called salvation — a nebulous state of grace — is now known as sustainability, a word that is equally resistant to precise definition. There is even a hymn, When the North Pole Melts, by James G. Titus, a scientist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is not exactly How Great Thou Art, but serves a similar purpose.
Environmentalism even has its persecutors, embodied in the Bush White House attack dogs who have conducted no less than an Inquisition against climate scientists, which failed to bring them to heel but instead inspired potential martyrs. Of course, as religions tend to do, environmentalists commit persecution of their own, which has created heretics out of mere skeptics.
All of this might be fine if religions had a history of rational scientific inquiry and peaceful, tolerant implementation of their beliefs. As it is, however, many religions, environmentalism included, continue to struggle with the curse of literalism, and the resultant extremism.
“Maybe I’m wrong, but I think all this is wrapped up in our belief that we can predict the future,” said Dr. Orrell. “What we need is more of a sense that we’re out of our depth, and that’s more likely to promote a lasting change in behaviour.”
Projections are useful to “provoke ideas and aid thinking about the future,” but as he writes in the book, “they should not be taken literally.”
The “fundamental danger of deterministic, objective science [is that] like a corny, overformulaic film, it imagines and presents the world as a predictable object. It has no sense of the mystery, magic, or surprise of life.”
The solution, he thinks, is to adopt what the University of Toronto’s Thomas Homer-Dixon calls a “prospective mind” — an intellectual stance that is “proactive, anticipatory, comfortable with change, and not surprised by surprise.”
In short, if we are to be good, future problem solvers, we must not be blinded by prophecy.
“I think [this stance] opens up the possibility for a more emotional and therefore more effective response,” Dr. Orrell said. “There’s a sense in which uncertainty is actually scarier and more likely to make us act than if you have bureaucrats saying, ‘Well, it’s going to get warmer by about three degrees, and we know what’s going to happen.’”
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Global Warming,not scientific fact

Global warming is a theory, not scientific factBy PETER WORTHINGTON
Last week — the day the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its gloom and doom report on greenhouse gases — Larry King Live had a bunch of experts hashing over what it all means.
Of six panelists, the one who made the most sense (I’m tempted to say made the only sense) was Richard Lindzen, a professor of “atmospsheric science” at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Lindzen looks a bit like how professors are depicted in cartoons — rimless glasses, a bushy beard and a bit unworldly. On TV, he is soft-spoken, courteous but fearless in challenging those who parrot conclusions no one can be certain about.
One woman, a TV meteorologist, insisted “the science is really solid” that man-made emissions cause the global warming that so agitates the IPCC and has Americans fretting about scrapping their SUVs.
Prof. Lindzen calmly replied he couldn’t dispute her assertion “because she never says what science she is talking about.” That’s one of the problems with the alleged danger of global warming, supposedly caused by excessive carbon dioxide being churned into the atmosphere by fossil fuels, cars and, judging from a recent report, the “emissions” from cattle.
Rarely mentioned is the global warming threat is not anchored in scientific fact or research, it is a hypothesis, a theory, that has yet to be proven.
Yet unlike most scientific theories, it is politically incorrect (and in cases politically prohibited) to question its validity or demand deeper research.
The IPCC report is based on writings of some 2,500 scientists (few of them climatologists, and many geneticists, environmentalists, etc.), and their findings are compressed into a “Summary for Policymakers” which is a political document, not a scientific one, compiled by UN spinmeisters.
This year’s report is the fourth since IPCC was founded in 1988. The 2001 report said it was “likely” global warming was man-made from carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, while this year’s report upgrades “likely” to “very likely.” And that seems to have even President George Bush retreating and promising to do something (one isn’t sure what), and commentators coming on side with global warming hysteria.
In Canada, Stephen Harper apparently feels his chance for a majority in the next election, hinge on his bending to the global warming/Kyoto gang, despite no evidence justifying the money it’s going to cost.
To dispassionate observers, the Kyoto protocols aimed at reducing emissions are an embarrassment to Canada, which already is 35% (and growing) over what it agreed to. Countries like India and China, horrible offenders, are excluded leading many to think Kyoto is more a wealth distributing ploy rather than an aid to the planet.
Talk of “consensus” in science is nonsense. Consensus is not truth, nor proof, it is compromise. In science, everything should be tested and becomes either true or false, or undecided.
Whether Earth is round or flat is not a matter of “consensus.” Ask Galileo. Consensus at Salem in 1692 was that witches took over childrens’ bodies.
Prof. Lindzen is a genuine scientist, ever probing and questioning. He cites scientists who’ve been fired, denied post on panels, or whose research has been rejected not for merit, but because they challenge the prevailing UN view that global warming is man-induced, and not a cyclical occurrence of nature. As for Canadians (and PM Harper), the Calgary-based website friendsofscience.org is more instructive than the IPCC.
In the 1970s, global cooling was the boogie man. In the late 1960s we were warned the world’s supply of oil was running out. Also the world could no longer supply enough food for rising populations. Hysteria and nonsense.
Complex science
Predicting climate change is more than computerized models — and far more complex than predicting the weather change — which is 50% wrong at best. Just witness no warning of the tornadoes that ambushed Florida last week.
Lastly, why the excessive fear of carbon dioxide, essential for agriculture and plant life? CO2 is not pollution. And it’s man-made pollution that threatens the environment, and planet. As for global warming, if indeed it is more than a cyclical event, surely more food will be produced and more people will have a more comfortable life.
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Comman sense global warming solutions

Jumping on the green bandwagonBy ROB GRANATSTEIN
The day before November’s municipal election, Gord Perks sat across from me at a Roncesvalles diner and started talking about the environment.
It seemed like a strange spot for someone on the verge of being elected to deal with everything from pot holes to planning to the TTC, to put on his last big push.
But the candidate for Parkdale-High Park, who has been immersed in the environment since 1987 and wears his NDP colours proudly, said locally is the place where the attack on climate change really begins.
Sure, all the big talk about Kyoto and the battles among the federal Liberals, Tories, NDP and Greens about how Canada is going to radically change its ways is an important part of this hot-button issue.
But at some point, it has to go beyond simply demanding better from the oil sands, shutting down coal-fired hydro plants and hoping cows stop farting and burping. None of these polluters can or will change overnight.
A giant part of easing off the greenhouse gas pedal will come down to what local governments do and the choices you make.
So, are you are in or out?
If you dare, tape your ankles and make the leap on to the green, hybrid bandwagon. Perks got on board early and he isn’t about to leave. We asked him to walk us through the best ways to reduce our carbon footprint. Here are his four suggestions:
n Green up your home. Get an energy audit done by a company like Greensaver, retrofit the place with a more energy-efficient furnace, add insulation. The Tories have reinstated the rebate program — finally figuring out they goofed the first time — to help with the costs.
“You can really cut your energy bill and save the planet at the same time,” Perks said.
Think about your transportation. Do you drive your car to get a bag of milk? Do you live close to where you work? Cut the number of miles you travel. See if you can shift modes from your car to cycling or walking or public transit. Look at what you’re driving. Can it be more energy efficient? Are you willing to dump your SUV for a hybrid?
Watch your water usage. “The city of Toronto uses more electricity to pump water than all the street lights, the entire transit system and lighting all of the city-owned buildings combined,” Perks said.
Get the most efficient toilets, faucets, shower heads and dishwashers, use a rain barrel instead of city water to water your lawn.
Buy locally. Perks says the average meal eaten by a Canadian travels 2,000 km to get to their plate. Shipping the food uses a lot of fossil fuels. Ask yourself if there’s a way to replace the foreign food with Ontario-grown produce, or even plant something in your yard. To do his part, Perks is re-examining whether sucking back some of Juan Valdez’s finest offerings from South America is all that smart, although we all know that kicking a coffee addiction is a hard thing to do.
The city has been doing a number of good things, everything from using Toronto Hydro to push conservation, to air conditioning buildings using deep lake water cooling through its large stake in Enwave, to greening the TTC fleet and city vehicles.
In the last 15 years the city has cut its own greenhouse gas emissions by 40%.
“That’s fantastic,” Perks said. “What we haven’t done is help people in the general community cut their emissions. That has to be our next step.”
In March, the city is expected to roll out its green plan. At that point it will start to look at the tools that can be used to make Torontonians greener.
This is where we all start to get the climate-uncontrolled sweats. How much will it cost us? What will be mandated? Will new powers in the City of Toronto Act be used to attack us? These are the typical questions.
It’s also where we decide how serious we, personally, are about climate change. Are we willing to pay to be green? Things like higher gas prices, higher water costs, enforcing water restrictions, new efficiency standards for new construction and the dreaded tolls?
It’s all on the table under Mayor David Miller’s watch. Whatever his plans, these must be region-wide. Any new Toronto-only fees or obstacles will continue to hurt a city that can’t afford any more weaknesses.
Feel free to jump off the bandwagon at any time.
Editor’s note: Starting Tuesday, you will notice some changes in our Comment section.
No longer will our editorials be anonymous. Instead, our finest columnists will bring their points of view to our pages in the editorial spot. We feel you deserve more than an anonymous corporate stance because times have changed. Most newspapers aren’t owned by a proprietor who wants to push his or her political stripe.
This piece — to be called the “POV”, for point of view — will still have the classic Sun flair, fight and opinion we’re known for, plus a byline.
We also hope to bring you more points of view, more debates, and really get people talking. We’ll debate Toronto issues, national issues, East versus West points of view.
Let us know what you think.
And that’s the next change. We have a new email address. Write us at torsun.editor@sunmedia.ca.
//

Chic Enviromentalists

Greens aren’t always goodBy LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
Global warming and the Kyoto accord are the crack cocaine of trendy causes for opportunistic politicians and chic environmentalists.
Since fighting man-made global warming involves “saving the planet,” or so they tell us, it is the King Kong of all environmental crusades.
Of course, the fact we have been warned in the past by this crowd that life as we know it was about to end over everything from “the population bomb” to “global cooling,” and that we survived, is now ignored.
Too many environmentalists know only one way of talking about these issues — hysterically — which has led to disaster in the past.
In this context, the history of the pesticide DDT is instructive.
DDT was rightly banned in the developed world a generation ago, specifically because of its misuse by modern agri-business in order to increase crop yields.
But it was then wrongly denied to the third world, despite the fact that properly-used, DDT was a life-saver.
As a result, millions of innocent people died or suffered life-altering illnesses due to malaria and other insect-borne diseases.
For the chilling story of what really happened when DDT was banned, which environmentalists have always boasted about as a great victory, read James Lovelock’s latest book, The Revenge of Gaia. In it, this brilliant scientist who is also the grandfather of the modern “green” movement, condemns ignorant, urban environmentalists, whom, he says, hysterically campaigned to ban all DDT use, with catastrophic results.
Ironically, Lovelock invented the electron capture detector, which first enabled the measurement of pesticides and other man-made pollutants in the atmosphere and which led to the birth of modern environmentalism.
Lovelock’s discovery also resulted in the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, warning of the dangers of pesticide use — the holy bible of the greens.
But as Lovelock angrily recounts in his book, “the indiscriminate banning of DDT and other chlorinated insecticides was a selfish, ill-informed act driven by affluent radicals in the first world. The inhabitants of tropical countries have paid a high price in death and illness as a result ...”
Lovelock is also an expert on global warming who believes the world is facing imminent catastrophe.
Because of that, he has again broken ranks with the greens, whom he accuses of hysterically campaigning against nuclear power, which, he argues, is mankind’s last, best hope.
Unlike the burning of fossil fuels, nuclear power doesn’t emit greenhouse gases.
As for the wind, solar and tidal power so beloved by the greens, Lovelock says it’s hopelessly naïve to think they’ll be ready in time at the capacities we need.
He compares the greens to clueless passengers flying on an airplane over the Atlantic who, having discovered that it is pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, tell the pilot to turn the engines off, thinking that will solve the problem.
“We cannot turn off our energy-intensive, fossil-fuel-powered civilization without crashing,” Lovelock warns. “We need the soft landing of a powered descent.”
Such straight talk — coming from one of the world’s leading environmentalists and climate change experts — will of course be lost on the braying jackasses in our House of Commons — on all sides — who are playing silly, partisan games on this issue, urged on by naive environmentalists playing fast and loose with reality.
Inevitably, our politicians will screw up Canada’s response to global warming which should lie outside of Kyoto — a farcical, money-sucking disaster — in the strict conservation of fossil fuels here in Canada, burning them as cleanly as possible and looking at every alternative, including nuclear power.
But it will never happen.
Remember, these are the same folks who can’t fix the long and often deadly wait times in our medicare system, despite years of promising to do so.
Now they’re going to “fix” the climate? God help us.

Politics first, science second

Politics first, science second

Terence Corcoran
Financial Post
Saturday, January 27, 2007
More Columns By This Writer

If you've been lifting intellectual weights and taking extra runs around the science track to build mental stamina for next Friday's release of the much-hyped 1,600-page science report on climate change, you can now take it easy. There will be no report. You will not need to know about or read any science, because there will be no science. Instead, we are going to get a few ginned-up pages of generalized political scaremongering.
The advance billing for the report has been immense and spectacular. It's the Fourth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, five years in the making and jam-packed with scientific, technical, social and economic research into climate change.
According to the usual sources, this latest official United Nations' science project, billions of dollars in the making, is the "smoking gun" that leaves no doubt that humans are the cause of a major wave of climate warming that is set to engulf the world over the next 100 years.
"The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said Jerry Mahlman, a U.S. government scientist
and long-time proponent of climate change theory. "The evidence ... is compelling."
The University of Victoria's Andrew Weaver, official Canadian government climate modeller --and the CBC's go-to scientist for suggestive but unproven links between bad weather and climate change --blew himself right out the galaxy over the Fourth Assessment Report. "This isn't a smoking gun; climate is a battalion of intergalactic smoking missiles."
Somebody else said the report to be released in Paris on Friday contained an "explosion of new data."
All of this, however, is just the usual stage-managed showmanship that surrounds all climate science. First of all, what we are going to get on Friday is not the smoking gun, but the smoke without the gun, an explosion of data without the data, an intergalactic blast that never gets off the ground, the proof without the evidence.
Despite all the advance promotion, the full 1,600-page report will remain in quarantine, embargoed and locked up in secrecy for another two months. While the science remains shrouded in secrecy and subject to leaks and speculation, the IPCC will stage a major event, webcast to a world that's been whipped into a frenzy of anticipation. Live on the Web, officials will produce a brief 12-page document called the "Summary for Policymakers." Everything else, including the official summary of the science in the assessment report, will be kept under wraps.
Here's the official IPCC release plan: Next week in Paris, behind closed doors, the IPCC will give final approval to the 1,600-page report. At the end of the sessions on Friday, the panel will release the brief "Summary for Policymakers." Then, for the next two months, the IPCC will subject the 1,600 pages of heavy science to "the final stages of review and revision to be carried out in a balanced way." This will take two months, with the final report to be released in May.
What do they review and balance? The words in the IPCC process document are not encouraging. "Changes ... made after acceptance by the working group or the panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the 'Summary for Policymakers' or the overview chapter."
Steve McIntyre, the Canadian statistics expert who blew the whistle on the IPCC's junk-science creation -- the 1,000-year-old climate record, the infamous hockey stick -- reads those words to mean the IPCC will go through the science to get the science to back up the summary. "IPCC insiders should not be allowed to change a comma of the [final] report after Feb. 2," he says.
We have, therefore, an extraordinary operating scheme in which brief sensational summary statements are produced, while the basis for the summary is kept confidential so they can get the science to correspond to the summary.
Will the government of Canada make any attempt, on behalf of Canadians, to get the IPCC to release the final report immediately? More likely, given current trends in Ottawa, the Tories have every intention of using the summary for their own political purposes.
These policymakers' summaries have a troubled history. One was once altered at the last minute to change wording that had already been approved by scientists. The summary release format also makes it clear that climate is a political issue first and a science issue second.
Another U.S. official says next week's summary will be an "iconic statement" rather than a sound science document. No surprise there. The policymakers' summary of the last report in 2001 highlighted the greatest climate icon of all, the 1,000-year hockey-stick graph. There it sits on page 3, the first graph, allegedly proof that 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium.
Today, the IPCC says the 1,000-year graph, the focal point of the February, 2001, summary, was a very minor part of the climate-science effort. The hockey stick, they say, played no big scientific role. But it played a major political role as part of the IPCC's campaign, which will be the sole purpose of next Friday's over-hyped event.
© National Post 2007

Simple truth about Global Warming

February 7, 2007
Simple truth about warmingBy LICIA CORBELLA
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."
-- Leo Tolstoy
(1826-1910)
Clearly, Tolstoy -- the great Russian novelist -- wasn't writing about man-made global warming, since he predated this relatively recent hysteria. Nevertheless, the quote certainly applies to the global warming debate -- or should I say the climate change consensus?
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summary released last Friday inflates the language of doom even as it deflates its predictions of temperature and sea level increases from previous reports.
The IPCC Climate Change 2007 report predicts world temperatures will possibly rise 1.8C to 4C (3.25 to 7.2F) from 1990 levels to the year 2100 and that sea levels might rise 28 to 43 cm (11 to 17 inches).
Just six years ago, however, the picture looked much bleaker.
The 2001 IPCC report predicted that from 1990 to 2100 temperatures would rise 1.4C to 5.8C causing sea levels to rise by .09 to .88 metres (3.5 to 34.6 inches or 9 to 88 cm).
In other words, in just six years, predictions about temperature increases have plummeted by one-third and predictions about sea-level increases at the high end have been cut in half!
At that rate, by my calculations, we'll just have to wait for two more reports and the IPCC will be predicting no measurable increases at all!
Incidentally, many climate scientists have been saying just that -- wait until 2025, when it's expected the sun's output may wane, leading to global cooling.
Another measurement has had to be slashed by one-third as well.
In 2001, the UN body said the global net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming with radiative forcing of 2.43 watts per square metre.
Oops. Now they're saying it's 1.6 watts per square metre.
Shouldn't someone at least be blushing? Shouldn't they apologize for getting all of this so wrong?
If a large automobile executive got his predictions wrong by up to 50%, he'd be fired. The IPCC, however, continues to fly around at great cost to the UN and the environment and they stay on board this great gig as long as they continue to tout the party line -- that Earth is going to hell, only it's going to be even hotter.
What's most troubling about all of this is the 21-page, much-hyped summary is not referenced at all.
The science that supposedly backs all of these predictions is nowhere to be found and won't be released until April and May.
This is problematic on many fronts, but as past IPCC reports have shown, the summary is not written by the scientists whose names appear on the cover, it's written by politicians and bureaucrats.
Indeed, some of those scientists after the fact have complained their work has been grossly misrepresented.
In 2001, two scientists complained publicly their work was misrepresented by those who wrote the summary, including MIT physicist Richard Lindzen.
In June 1996, Dr. Frederick Seitz, past-president of the National Academy of Sciences and president emeritus of Rockefeller University, wrote with regard to the 1995 IPCC report: "I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report."
He continued: "This report is not what it appears to be -- it is not the version approved by the contributing scientists listed on the title page."
In other words, past IPCC reports have proven to be fraudulent and yet, to paraphrase Tolstoy, they have been woven into the public policy fabric of our lives.

Wind Power

Hot air in Essex County wind powerJeff SanfordCanadian Business Online,
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February 5, 2007
You've got to feel bad for Dwight Duncan the Ontario Minister of Energy. Here he is he trying to keep the lights on in the province of Ontario and all of a sudden the constituents in his home region of Essex County are turning off on him over wind energy. Everyone is aware, of course, that Ontario faces a precarious energy situation. Electrical generation capacity is falling short of the province's needs — we're just one really hot summer from serious blackouts according to those in the know — and so a scramble has ensued to get new electrical generation online.
To that end, the Ontario government set up the Ontario Power Authority to oversee the implementation of new electrical generation capacity in the province. One of the first acts of the new organization (which by many accounts was rapidly created and staffed) was to promote the construction of wind-generated power through a promise to pay 11 cents/kMh for electricity supplied to the grid that came from a wind turbine (that's a premium on a typical wholesale rate of 8 cents/kWh).
At the time the subsidy sounded like a great idea. What¹s better than electricity generated from the wind? It's renewable, there are no CO2 emissions and the wind turbines themselves can even become a bit of a tourist attraction, as is the case in Port Burwell where locals suggest they've seen new visitors to the area now that a wind farm has been installed near their town.
But is the story on wind really so breezy? Not even close, says John Lee, a retired engineer living in Kingsville, Ontario (a town 45 minutes outside of Windsor). John's father had a long career at Ontario Hydro and Lee himself has a PhD in electrical engineering, so he's no neophyte when it comes to talk about energy. Normally a reserved fellow, Lee has felt the need to step out publicly and fight against the 18 wind-farm proposals that have touched down in Essex since the standing offer by OPA to offer 11 cents/kWh went into effect. Lee began taking an interest in the issue when he heard of a proposal that would see over 100 wind turbines dropped into Lake Erie near Point Pelee National Park, a globally recognized migratory flyway for all kinds of birds and butterflies.
He put his existing knowledge together with a little research and has now come to the same conclusion as Dr. David Suzuki: Wind farms have a place in Ontario's energy mix, but it's a small role, and the turbines need to be placed where the pollution from wind farms isn't a threat to humans and animals. One key point that needs to be understood, says Lee, is that the practicality of wind power is generally overstated in the public conscious. Wind power, of course, is only available when the wind blows, which means that when the wind isn't blowing you'd have to switch back to fossil fuel generated electricity anyway to keep the lights on — and that means wind power can't be built out to replace our fossil fuel base load.
In fact, countries in Europe that have installed wind power as base load find they end up buying power on the spot market when the wind isn't blowing and then selling their wind power at a loss when the wind is blowing (but air conditioners aren't being used as intensely). Denmark is often considered a leader in wind energy but according to Lee it ends up selling 84% of its power at a loss. "European countries that have put in a lot of wind power end up subsidizing their neighbors," says Lee. "Wind power has not yet enabled the closure of a single fossil-fueled generating station anywhere in the world."
The German energy agency recently suggested that increasing the amount of wind energy in that country would increase the cost of electricity to consumers almost fourfold and that a reduction in greenhouse gases could be achieved more cheaply by installing filters and condensers on existing fossil-fuel plants. According to Lee, it's often been suggested that the theoretical maximum for the amount of base load that can be derived from wind power is 15%, but even that seems to be a stretch. A more likely percentage seems to be 3% or 5%, says Lee.
But beyond unreliable supply is the problem of pollution. Don't be fooled: While the idea of wind-generated electricity is as pastoral as can be, wind farms, designed to generate industrial amounts of electricity, are themselves industrial installations. And like any other form of electrical generation on an industrial scale they give off pollution. In the case of wind farms it's in the form of noise or vibration. In Ontario wind turbines have been placed within 300 metres of homes (which would be against the law in many other jurisdictions) and some of those people who have allowed wind turbines that close are now complaining about the noise (which developers told them would be non-existent).
As well, concerns have been raised about the emission of low frequency vibrations from wind turbines. The diameter of the circle formed by the arms of the average industrial-sized turbine is longer than a jetliner. European studies have found the steady pulses emitted by the beating blades can be felt up to a kilometre away and cause headaches, depression and anxiety in humans. Hunters in the U.S. claim that prey migrates away from wind turbines and some farmers have suggested turbines disrupt their livestock. "Farmers have seen their property values affected," says Lee. "And we're building these things much closer to homes in Ontario than they allow in Europe." No wonder the list of countries that have stopped building land-based and near-shore farms (or that have begun shutting down existing farms) includes Norway, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
And no wonder Lee has become an anti-wind activist these days. He is a presence at many of the meetings held by developers to explain their projects to locals. Lee is offended that some of the developers are using young kids to make these presentations. "They've done this in other jurisdictions. I think they think it makes them less threatening." But he is most critical of the way the Ontario government has handled the file right from the beginning. Ontario's Bill 51 streamlined the process for wind farms by making the environmental approval process less onerous. That fact, coupled with the subsidy on offer, has created a gold rush of sorts in Essex County, says Lee; there are now reports that used European turbines are flooding into the province as opportunities overseas are shut down.
Alberta recently surprised wind farms developers in that province when the Alberta Electric System Operator, which overseas and operates the electrical market and distribution system, slapped a cap of 900 MW of wind-generated capacity on the province's system and put a potential $6 billion in investment on hold. According to Lee, the number of turbines that could be supported by the Ontario network — 500 to 1,250 — is quite close to the cap imposed by Alberta, but is far less than the number going up in Ontario.
"I wish wind power worked," says Lee. "In theory it's a good idea. But this is too much for an area the size of Essex County. If all of these go through we'll have more wind turbines in one county than Alberta does in the whole province." As of this writing the proposals in Essex County continue to go forward and the impression among locals is growing that they're paying the price for a government desperate to get any sort of electrical generation up and operating in a province headed toward an energy crunch.
It's no secret the McGuinty government made a huge deal about its promise to shut down coal generation in Ontario. It's also no secret that many large companies such as Brookfield Asset Management (formerly Brascan) have moved into energy generation (including wind) in a big way. It also appears that the OPA was set up in a scramble and was desperate to find solutions to the electrical generation problem.
Have subsidies, market pressures, inattention and desperation resulted in an unsustainable boom in a technology that is not been fully understood by the government? Has Essex County been sold up the river in a bid to help the provincial Liberals who are desperate to keep their promise on power?
"How can you not get that impression?" asks Lee. Indeed.templatedata\content\article\data\2007\02\20070205_163048_5260
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