February 2009 Archives
Peter Gorrie wrote an article in Sunday's Toronto Star criticizing the Harper government for rolling back "key" environmental protections by sneaking them into the budget bill.
I need to be about as circumspect as possible when writing about this issue, because for over five years I worked in an office dedicated largely to completing environmental assessments relating to the legislation Gorrie discusses in his article: the Navigable Waters Protection Act. Chances are I'll end up working there again. So you'll have to pardon me for being a bit opaque.
The Navigable Waters Protection Act is one of Canada's oldest pieces of legislation and was passed when Canadians still got around largely by canoe; in that era, the public right of navigation on waterways was uncontested. If someone put up a bridge that you couldn't navigate under and you couldn't get your kids to school or your logs to market, that was serious. Now we have sidewalks, trains, subways, paved roads--how many people do you know who commute to work by canoe? The law has essentially not been touched since.
But a few years ago a judge ruled that a navigable waterway included any waterway you could float a canoe in any section during even part of the year. That drainage ditch that floods during the snow melt to a level deep enough that you could theoretically float a canoe on it for 50 feet or so during April? It's now a navigable waterway. A river with a waterfall at one end and a non-navigable rapids twenty-five metres away that is theoretically navigable in between? Counts as a navigable waterway. Sure, you'd have to dunk your canoe in underneath the waterfall and drag it out of the river again in five minutes--but no matter.
Since a permit under the NWPA is a trigger for an environmental assessment under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act,anything crossing a drainage ditch is potentially subject to environmental assessment.
Here's the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency's EA Registry. A search shows 97 active EAs within Ontario alone of bridges and culverts triggered by the NWPA. In most cases, the implementation of best practices for bridge and culvert construction and repair will mitigate environmental impacts for these projects.
The definition of a "navigable waterway" absolutely needs to be changed.
Now, the method for doing so in this case is not the best, I agree. A budget does not seem the proper vehicle, and they did not consult as broadly as they could have. The potential for abuse through the use of ministerial orders definitely exists. But no, I do not believe that this was done as a broad-based assault on the public right of navigation--only as a way of undoing the absurd effects of a ruling which has hampered the proper application of this legislation for far too long.
I need to be about as circumspect as possible when writing about this issue, because for over five years I worked in an office dedicated largely to completing environmental assessments relating to the legislation Gorrie discusses in his article: the Navigable Waters Protection Act. Chances are I'll end up working there again. So you'll have to pardon me for being a bit opaque.
The Navigable Waters Protection Act is one of Canada's oldest pieces of legislation and was passed when Canadians still got around largely by canoe; in that era, the public right of navigation on waterways was uncontested. If someone put up a bridge that you couldn't navigate under and you couldn't get your kids to school or your logs to market, that was serious. Now we have sidewalks, trains, subways, paved roads--how many people do you know who commute to work by canoe? The law has essentially not been touched since.
But a few years ago a judge ruled that a navigable waterway included any waterway you could float a canoe in any section during even part of the year. That drainage ditch that floods during the snow melt to a level deep enough that you could theoretically float a canoe on it for 50 feet or so during April? It's now a navigable waterway. A river with a waterfall at one end and a non-navigable rapids twenty-five metres away that is theoretically navigable in between? Counts as a navigable waterway. Sure, you'd have to dunk your canoe in underneath the waterfall and drag it out of the river again in five minutes--but no matter.
Since a permit under the NWPA is a trigger for an environmental assessment under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act,anything crossing a drainage ditch is potentially subject to environmental assessment.
Here's the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency's EA Registry. A search shows 97 active EAs within Ontario alone of bridges and culverts triggered by the NWPA. In most cases, the implementation of best practices for bridge and culvert construction and repair will mitigate environmental impacts for these projects.
The definition of a "navigable waterway" absolutely needs to be changed.
Now, the method for doing so in this case is not the best, I agree. A budget does not seem the proper vehicle, and they did not consult as broadly as they could have. The potential for abuse through the use of ministerial orders definitely exists. But no, I do not believe that this was done as a broad-based assault on the public right of navigation--only as a way of undoing the absurd effects of a ruling which has hampered the proper application of this legislation for far too long.
I haven't been posting much lately, and I have no excuse except for my daughter's pneumonia and a really wicked cold for me. Whew. I think they're finally both over or on the way out, so let's see if I can write something fascinating before the next bout sets in:Of all the wild critters universally beloved by children, the one you have the greatest chance of seeing in the winter time is the squirrel. They run, they play, they chatter, they stand adorably on their hind paws with their front paws held in front of their bellies like small furry beggars. They're small and easily won over with a couple of peanuts. They're also, like chickadees, a lot tougher than they look, remaining active and outdoors throughout a Canadian winter. This might have something to do with all that black fur.
Until I met (via the internet) folks from various parts of the western and southern States, it never occurred to me that black squirrels might be unusual. Around here I'd say nine out of every ten squirrels are black and most of the remaining ones are grey; both belong to the same species, the Eastern Grey Squirrel.* So our black squirrels are actually grey squirrels, but they're considered a significant enough variation to have their own name: melanized grey squirrels. Black squirrels are most common in the northern parts of their range, basically throughout eastern and central Canada. Why the black fur? While no one knows for sure, in the 1970s scientists were able to show that black squirrels conserved significantly more heat in the wintertime than grey squirrels did.
Unlike larger mammals, they don't need large patches of undisturbed habitat and they are, patently, not afraid of people (or at least not for long--studies demonstrate that a squirrel's response to the approach of humans will depend on the amount of human activity in that neighbourhood); they flourish in city parks and backyards. Squirrels also lie, which might help them survive their larger primate neighbours: when in the presence of conspecifics (relatives and other squirrels) or humans digging around in their food-hiding spots, squirrels dig and fill holes without food in them to frustrate any attempts at finding their food caches. Not bad for an animal with a brain smaller than a pea. And thanks to all the nuts they find, bury and then forget about, they plant a lot of trees.
Squirrels are also the subject of one of my favourite poems, by Canadian poet Ann Carson in her book Men in the Off Hours:
New Rule
A New Year's white morning of hard new ice.
High on the frozen branches I saw a squirrel jump and skid.
Is this scary? he seemed to say and glanced
down at me, clutching his branch as it bobbed
in stiff recoil--or is it just that everything sounds wrong today?
The branches
clinked.
He wiped his small cold lips with one hand.
Do you fear the same things as
I fear? I countered, looking up.
His empire of branches slid against the air.
The night of hooks?
The man blade left open on the stair?
Not enough spin on it, said my true love
when he left in our fifth year.
The squirrel bounced down a branch
and caught a peg of tears.
The way to hold on is
afterwords
so
clear.
~~~~~
*If you're interested in grey squirrels, there's a wealth of information available at this link, and anyone looking for information on any wildlife species in Canada should make the Hinterland Who's Who their first stop.
References:
Cooper, Christopher A, Allison J. Neff, David P. Poon & Gregory R. Smith. "Behavioral Responses of Eastern Gray Squirrels in Suburban Habitats Differing in Human Activity Levels." Northeastern Naturalist, 15(4): 619-625.
Innes, S. and D.M. Lavigne. "Comparative energetics of coat colour polymorphs in the eastern grey squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis." Canadian Journal of Zoology (57): 585-592.
Steele, Michael A et al. "Cache protection strategies of a scatter-hoarding rodent: do tree squirrels engage in behavrioural deception?" Animal Behaviour, 2008 (75): 705-714.
It's no secret that Germany is the envy of climate change activists worldwide for its progressive energy policies; what may be a secret to you is what, exactly, those progressive energy policies are.
It's simple: their Renewable Energy Sources Act makes it easy for individuals, communities and corporations to get approvals to build green energy projects; makes it easy for them to connect to the grid; requires grid operators to buy their energy; and mandates electricity rates that make building those projects profitable.*
Unsurprisingly, Canadian green energy advocates have been working to pass Green Energy Acts of our own; so far, Ontario is in the lead with an existing Renewable Energy Standard Offer Program (RESOP) that sets profitable prices for renewable energy proejcts ($0.11/kwh for wind energy, $0.42/kwh for solar). Now Ontario is proposing a provincial Green Energy Act based on the input of organizations such as the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association that incorporates many features of the German legislation, not only to address smog and climate change but also to stimulate an alternative to the fast-disappearing manufacturing economy. What exactly the legislation looks like is unknown; we can see what advocacy organizations have proposed, and newspapers have been reporting on the imminent introduction of a new Act, but what's in and what's out and what will eventually pass is still something of a mystery.
But I can tell you one thing: it has little in common with this portrayal in the Toronto Star.
This is simply not true. Toronto Hydro is planning to install an anemometer, or wind-measuring device, in Lake Ontario for two years to see whether or not a wind farm of up to sixty turbines is justified in that location.
This, too, bears little relation to reality. All wind energy projects over 2 KW are required to have an environmental screening completed, as I wrote before. No one is being "bludgeoned" by legislation. Wind Turbine Syndrome is a fancy and scary-sounding name given to a condition that may or may not exist. There are reports in scientific journals; but they don't support Wind Turbine Syndrome. The health effects are being researched, but so far the studies do not support widespread effects of wind turbine noise on humans, as I also wrote about recently.
You'll notice, however, that the article mentions none of this.
"He-said/she-said" reporting does no one any favours. How is the public supposed to measure the pros and cons of these projects if the newspapers don't fact-check the stories given to them by proponents and opponents and report on the science behind them as well? If you didn't have any specific expertise on environmental issues and you read this article, you would probably come away from it quite scared about the scourge of wind energy and the Green Energy Act. That's not responsible reporting.
~~~~~
*This last point is a favourite target of anti-sustainable energy groups, who argue that sustainble energy must not be economically viable if it requires this kind of price support. A) Fossil-fuel generation receives a mountain of subsidies, everything from exploration, mining, transporting and, yes, generation, is heavily subsidized by government. The price you currently pay for coal- or natural-gas-fired generation is much cheaper than it would be if corporations had to do all their work by themselves. B) Many of the costs of fossil-fuel generation have been externalized. For example, the Ontario Medical Association believes that around 9,500 people died prematurely last year in the province of Ontario from poor air quality--some of that resulting from our electricity generation--yet you don't pay for that on your power bill, you pay for that through your health insurance taxes. I can't remember what the precise dollar figure was for the estimated cost of all that increased mortality--plus the sick days and lost productivity of people who don't die but who take time off work, go to the hospital, etc.--but it was in the billions. Every year. The same goes for the tremendous anticipated costs of global climate change, which will make everything from health care to infrastructure more expensive. (For instance, roads will need to be built to tougher specifications to handle the changes in temperatures). Again, none of that is included on your electricity bill. "Cheap" fossil-fuel electricity is in fact tremendously expensive. There's just no pricing mechanism for including that on your household electricity bill.
It's more accurate to say that the price supports level the playing field, giving green energy a fighting chance to establish itself in a market dominated by a wealthy, heavily subsidized, completely externalized and already entrenched status quo.
It's simple: their Renewable Energy Sources Act makes it easy for individuals, communities and corporations to get approvals to build green energy projects; makes it easy for them to connect to the grid; requires grid operators to buy their energy; and mandates electricity rates that make building those projects profitable.*
Unsurprisingly, Canadian green energy advocates have been working to pass Green Energy Acts of our own; so far, Ontario is in the lead with an existing Renewable Energy Standard Offer Program (RESOP) that sets profitable prices for renewable energy proejcts ($0.11/kwh for wind energy, $0.42/kwh for solar). Now Ontario is proposing a provincial Green Energy Act based on the input of organizations such as the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association that incorporates many features of the German legislation, not only to address smog and climate change but also to stimulate an alternative to the fast-disappearing manufacturing economy. What exactly the legislation looks like is unknown; we can see what advocacy organizations have proposed, and newspapers have been reporting on the imminent introduction of a new Act, but what's in and what's out and what will eventually pass is still something of a mystery.
But I can tell you one thing: it has little in common with this portrayal in the Toronto Star.
The article was skimpy on specifics, but I'm guessing that the "local bylaws and regulations" he refers to are the motions and resolutions passed by town and city councils prohibiting wind energy development within their boundaries, usually due to pressure from local wind-energy groups, often after they've presented their councils with error-ridden "reports" on wind energy. (For examples of such reports, see the article I published recently on Rabble.) Wind energy projects in the province of Ontario have been completely shut down by activists working on the basis of misinformation and biased statistics. That needs to be stopped. Yes, local communities should be involved in the planning process for these projects; no, they should not be able to block them by panicking people with ridiculous claims about increasing greenhouse gas emissions or flocks of birds falling from the sky.He's [McGuinty] counting on the act, of which few details have been released, to help create 50,000 jobs over the next three years and boost the amount of renewable energy feeding into the electricity grid to fight climate change.
McGuinty wouldn't say exactly how concerns will be overridden, but his office noted the bill will "address local bylaws and regulations that are used to delay or stop proposed renewable energy projects."
He stressed that, when it comes to safety and environmental standards for green projects, "we're not talking about compromising those one iota."
Toronto Hydro is proposing to put up to 60 wind turbines in shallow water on a natural reef two to four kilometres offshore, from Leslie St. to Ajax, to create up to 200 megawatts of electricity. One megawatt is enough to power 300 homes.
This is simply not true. Toronto Hydro is planning to install an anemometer, or wind-measuring device, in Lake Ontario for two years to see whether or not a wind farm of up to sixty turbines is justified in that location.
"If it's such a great idea, why not do an environmental assessment and prove there are no health risks?" said an angry Laforet. "Why do we need to be bludgeoned by legislation if the facts are on their (the government's) side?"
Laforet says he is concerned about "wind turbine syndrome," the term some use to describe the symptoms of people who say they have been sickened by the noise.
"Wind energy groups say it doesn't exist because there are no reports in scientific journals," he said. "It's why the health effects must be researched."
This, too, bears little relation to reality. All wind energy projects over 2 KW are required to have an environmental screening completed, as I wrote before. No one is being "bludgeoned" by legislation. Wind Turbine Syndrome is a fancy and scary-sounding name given to a condition that may or may not exist. There are reports in scientific journals; but they don't support Wind Turbine Syndrome. The health effects are being researched, but so far the studies do not support widespread effects of wind turbine noise on humans, as I also wrote about recently.
You'll notice, however, that the article mentions none of this.
"He-said/she-said" reporting does no one any favours. How is the public supposed to measure the pros and cons of these projects if the newspapers don't fact-check the stories given to them by proponents and opponents and report on the science behind them as well? If you didn't have any specific expertise on environmental issues and you read this article, you would probably come away from it quite scared about the scourge of wind energy and the Green Energy Act. That's not responsible reporting.
~~~~~
*This last point is a favourite target of anti-sustainable energy groups, who argue that sustainble energy must not be economically viable if it requires this kind of price support. A) Fossil-fuel generation receives a mountain of subsidies, everything from exploration, mining, transporting and, yes, generation, is heavily subsidized by government. The price you currently pay for coal- or natural-gas-fired generation is much cheaper than it would be if corporations had to do all their work by themselves. B) Many of the costs of fossil-fuel generation have been externalized. For example, the Ontario Medical Association believes that around 9,500 people died prematurely last year in the province of Ontario from poor air quality--some of that resulting from our electricity generation--yet you don't pay for that on your power bill, you pay for that through your health insurance taxes. I can't remember what the precise dollar figure was for the estimated cost of all that increased mortality--plus the sick days and lost productivity of people who don't die but who take time off work, go to the hospital, etc.--but it was in the billions. Every year. The same goes for the tremendous anticipated costs of global climate change, which will make everything from health care to infrastructure more expensive. (For instance, roads will need to be built to tougher specifications to handle the changes in temperatures). Again, none of that is included on your electricity bill. "Cheap" fossil-fuel electricity is in fact tremendously expensive. There's just no pricing mechanism for including that on your household electricity bill.
It's more accurate to say that the price supports level the playing field, giving green energy a fighting chance to establish itself in a market dominated by a wealthy, heavily subsidized, completely externalized and already entrenched status quo.
