Current plan leads to burdens like degradation of water and air

THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR: September 11, 2003

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With an election in front of him and a blackout behind him Ontario Premier Ernie Eves could use a new energy policy. Fortunately he already has the basis of a good one in his old Tory party play book.

When he was the finance minister, Eves told us that government must act responsibly and spend only what it earns so taxpayers are not burdened with accumulating debt. The energy portfolio and our environment would benefit from similar thinking. If we consumed only what we produced without creating new burdens, like the degradation of our water, air, and atmosphere, we would all be better off. But Ontario has been doing quite the opposite for a long time, and some of the bills are already coming due.

 

Our coal-fired plants produce about a quarter of Ontario’s electrical energy supply, but not without creating some heavy burdens. These plants release toxins that contaminate our air, poison our lakes, and contribute to climate decay. Air contaminants like nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide cause smog in our cities that leaves children suffering from respiratory ailments like asthma.  In the present regime, turning up the air conditioner borrows from the quality of life of our children. Mercury, a potent neuro-toxin, from these power plants accumulates in the breast milk of mothers who regularly eat fish, like women of First Nations. In Ontario, today, keeping the freezer humming can lead to the diminished mental capacity of some children, a burden they will carry for a lifetime. 

 

Living according to our means should not sound like a radical idea to Eves. He was finance minister when Ontario passed the Taxpayer Protection and Balanced Budget Act in 1999. The Act prohibited the Ontario government from spending more than it raised in revenues; taxes could not be increased without a referendum. The idea was to prevent future governments, under threat of penalty to its leaders, from burdening taxpayers with higher taxes or the interest payments of accumulated debt. Today Premier Eves should be the first to understand the logic of limiting consumption to what we can produce without burdening people in Ontario or downwind, today or in the future.

In the long term, Eves’ policy of balancing the books would also lead us away from nuclear power. Nuclear power looks clean but it too creates burdens on our environment, principally in the form of radioactive waste that is stored without a means of disposal. It’s like moving out of a rented house and telling the landlord everything was left the way you found it, except for barrels of toxic sludge in the basement. Eliminating our dependence on nuclear power sounds like a daunting task, but even Germany, without the benefit of Niagara Falls-sized hydro assets, has committed to slowly phasing out nuclear power. In any case, the best argument against nuclear power is nuclear power itself with the billions of dollars in (financial) debt it has created along with its continuing safety and reliability problems.   

 

In sum, we are a long way from balancing the books on Ontario’s energy supply. Only our renewable energy is produced without burdening the environment, but Ontario produces very little of it.

Hydroelectric power is renewable and often, depending on how it was created, loads no new burdens on the environment but it accounts for only 23% of our power supply. Other renewable energy, like wind power, amounts to less than 1%. This leaves us with a significant shortfall, even without including the 40% contribution of nuclear power, most of which is filled with fossil fuels including dirty coal-fired power (22%) and less dirty oil and natural gas-fired power.

The blackout did, however, have some benefits. Not only did we see the stars and meet our neighbours but we started talking seriously about how to reduce power consumption and increase supply. Many of the solutions could be no surprise to Eves’ given they had been detailed over a year earlier in his government’s own Select Committee on Alternative Fuel Sources. The Committee made over a hundred recommendations including higher efficiency standards, mandating retrofits to convert buildings to alternative energies, encouraging solar panels for new homes from which excess power can be sold to the provincial grid, and investing in wind and other renewable energy.

The blackout did not change our world. It simply brought certain things to light. Eves’ primary strategy had been to ask people to voluntarily conserve power but we don’t need a premier to ask our neighbours to please turn down the air conditioner. We need the government to use its many regulatory tools to direct individual conduct for the community’s benefit. 

 

How long should it take to balance the books? Eves has already made a procrastinator’s promise to close the coal-fired plants by 2015; the Liberals and NDP have committed to 2007. An even earlier date would be possible with a new energy policy that eliminates waste and creates new power. And a complete balancing of the books with a fully renewable supply to meet our energy demand should take no more than 20 years, if we start to move forward today.  

As with many political issues, the issue of our energy supply is not primarily one of feasibility, technology or resources but rather of choices. Many, even those who fought for balanced budgets, will say that a clean energy supply in Ontario, one of the richest places on earth, is naïve and unrealistic. Perhaps they should simply admit they believe it is justifiable to degrade our air and water because it is too inconvenient to change. The question is not how or whether to change our ways but whether there is a communal and political will to do so and how the costs and benefits of that change can be fairly shared.

 

In a democracy we choose realities. The one we should insist on is an exciting new energy policy that no longer loads burdens on our health, our environment, and our future. Our children will not thank us for keeping their bodies chilled to 21⁰ C on borrowed power. They will appreciate that we lived according to our energy means and prefer to remember us for the environmentally debt-free world we left them.