JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY THOMAS HOMER-DIXON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

This is pure Dr. Feel-good stuff, not genuine analysis.

Several generalizations strung together with unwarranted conclusions drawn.

I don’t see anything so special about Ontario’s resources, human and natural, that guarantees a bright future.

And I certainly do not agree that windmills mean good things for our future.

Quite the opposite seems true: windmills are a costly dead-end technology, and investing heavily in them is foolish for the long-term.

And as everyone who understands the matter knows, you can’t have lots of windmills without back-up base-load (on call 24 hours a day) generating plants.

Ontario has picked gas-fired plants, but cannot even get its act together concerning where to build them, backing down at the first NIMBY pressure.

Besides, gas-fired plants are not free of greenhouse gases.

Even more important, the heavy use of gas in the tarsands plus the opportunity to export liquefied natural gas from the west Coast mean that Ontario’s long-term supply of gas is not all that secure.

When job-creators of any kind – hi-tech or industrial or food-processing – consider a place to establish themselves, competitively priced and reliable energy are of first importance.

A windmill/gas plant energy economy does not fit that description.

Europe has already discovered some serious drawbacks with windmills.

And you must consider that Europe started on windmills from a base of a much higher-cost energy economy (high taxes on energy) so windmill costs did not seem so terrible as they do in Ontario.

Also, very importantly, the education system, which is our most important investment in human capital, the writer thinks so highly of, I would never describe in his glowing terms.

We are not terribly competitive on a world-scale.

Most of our public schools are staffed with out-of-date teachers who do not even know how to use a computer or how to exploit the great resources on the Internet.

Our teachers are paid at rates which not only are not competitive, they are not in any way reviewed and evaluated: they have highly-paid jobs for life with no demands for performance.

We’ve had a generation of nonsense like social promotion.

And our kids go to school for only about half the year (170-odd days).

Our colleges and universities are admitting students now who should not be admitted, just for the money represented by bodies in seats.

Take just teacher education: 12,000 graduates a year for 7,000 jobs (and I doubt that). You simply could not be more wasteful and inefficient.

Ontario is a good place in which to live for many reasons, but, no, the future does not look all that bright.

The last thing we need is the kind of feel-good complacency this piece represents.

We need lots of tough-minded changes for a continued bright future.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ADAM RADWANSKI IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

What’s green about McGuinty’s energy policies?

His policies remind me of all those manipulative marketers who make naïve people feel good by slapping pink-ribbon images on their products.

McGuinty’s policies are in fact a threat to our future.

He is closing efficient coal-fired plants, which means that in future when we need extra power, the economic situation now helping keep demands down, we’ll buy it from the very people who actually cause Ontario’s air-quality problems, the scores of less-efficient coal-fired plants in the American Midwest.

The closing of those plants won’t change Ontario’s air in any serious way, except possibly making it worse when we need to buy extra electricity, at high rates, from those Midwestern plants.

Not only that, but those coal-fired plants provide what is called base-load power, available twenty-four hours a day.

Windmills are not base-load power. They provide only intermittent power, and at very high cost per unit of energy.

New base-load gas-fired plants are in the works, but Western Canadian gas is not so plentiful as it once was. There are big exports and a huge current, and even bigger future, use in extracting and upgrading the tarsands. Gas prices will rise.

But even there, McGuinty shows his unpleasant blundering in acts like his recent NIMBY backing-off from building a new gas-fired plant in one area.

Ontario’s energy costs are being driven needlessly higher by McGuinty’s short-sighted policies, and we’ve only seen the beginning.

Industry always gets preferential rates, so how is Ontario’s future high-cost electricity going to lure industries to locate?

Simple, they’ll be given preferential rates subsidized by even higher bills for ordinary consumers.

McGuinty’s energy policies are aimed only at buying votes, the votes of those ready to embrace anything labeled as “green” even if it is far from the truth.

It is the same kind of smarmy thinking he did in getting re-elected last time: give people holiday, which cost us hundreds of millions of dollars, and let every department in the government run stupid ads at public expense for six weeks.

McGuinty green? God, the guy has tolerated the spectacle of years of fleets of diesel trucks rumbling down 401 every day to dump Toronto’s garbage somewhere else.

He has contributed nothing to the shameful fact that Toronto’s thousands of high-rises do not even have recycling programs.

And if he wanted genuinely to improve Toronto’s air quality as well as lessening great waste and ugliness, he would do something to stop suburban sprawl and daily long-distance commuting.

McGuinty is a green phony.