Since all renewable energy projects were cancelled when Premier Doug Ford was elected, the province currently has no other way to compensate for the looming shutdown of a major nuclear reactor in Pickering, responsible for roughly 16 per cent of province-wide power. Only natural gas is available to meet rapidly growing demand for electricity, according to the IESO projections.The projections show that the province’s natural gas plants — which only operate about 60 per cent of the time now — will run non-stop by 2033.
“The province has ignored energy planning for the last four years because there was no need. We had an energy surplus,” said Gord Miller, Ontario’s former environment commissioner — an independent watchdog position eliminated by the Ford government. “But now we’re in an energy squeeze. When Pickering turns off, we have no plans … and the default option is to up the gas.”Green ideology is retarded because it is infested with central planning mentality and functions more like a religion. It fails on so many levels because it is irrational, faith-based and anti-scientific. Even if they were correct on the threat from CO2 emissions, which they wildly overstate, they are politically incompetent. Physics, logic, politics, on every level the plans are ludicrous.The story of how Ontario went from being a polluter to a beacon of green energy and back again is a political one that spans almost two decades and three premiers.
It starts in 2003, when then-premier Dalton McGuinty went out on a political limb to announce the complete phaseout of coal-fired generation. Over the next 12 years, carbon emissions from the electricity sector dropped precipitously — from more than 35 megatonnes of carbon in 2005 down to six in 2014, when Ontario became the first jurisdiction in the world to completely wean itself off coal.
But the cost of this achievement — a tripling of electricity rates — demanded a political price.
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