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.
