He had been given a conditional offer by the Ontario Power Authority under a plan proposed and backed by the Ontario government.
So Aukema borrowed $85,000 rather than cashing in part of his modest RRSP and paid for the project and the electrical work needed to hook [his solar panels] to the grid.
Then he waited.
Oops. “The growing nightmare of McGuinty’s green-energy dream”
[T]he Ontario Liberal Government used Friday’s wall-to-wall coverage of Egypt’s revolution to announce yet another climbdown from its vaunted green-energy schemes. About the only thing left of Premier Dalton McGuinty’s obsession with converting his province from carbon energy to wind, solar, hydro and biofuels is sharply higher consumer energy prices. Higher power rates will be with Ontarians for decades after Mr. McGuinty’s green dreams have faded from memory.
Now is the time at SDA when we tried to warn you!
Wind has less than 1/10th the energy density of wood, wood half the density of coal and coal half the density of octane. Altogether they differ by a factor of about 50. Nuclear has 2 million times the energy density of gasoline. It is hard to fathom this in light of our previous experience. Yet our energy future largely depends on grasping the significance of this differential.
Think where we might be today if energy policy were less Magic Wand Suzuki and more Small Dead Animals? Now, if only some sort of technology existed that could carry information from Ontario (or Australia) to our own provincial energy minister.
h/t Maz2
Felis, agreed on all points. With respect to your first point, WB Yeats said it best in the Second Coming:
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world..”
cgh,
I do remember studying Yeats and that poem in particular, but little considered back then that he might have been prophesying the unravelling of Ontario. So, to complete the analogy, who is the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born?
Martin
Haven’t heard of these yet , but lets hope the madness ends before they are built.
Politician time is not like normal time. They don’t get the memo till years latter.
cgh, I’d be pretty happy if this turned out to be down to simple stupidity. Stupid you can fix, enemy action is something else again.
Good question Felis.
Perhaps the onset of the nanny state and the loss of personal liberties under an onslaught of national security regulations and terrorist protection laws?
Phantom, it’s an interesting philosophical difference we seem to have arrived at. I believe on the contrary that enemy action can be dealt with but that human stupidity is utterly intractable. Whenever I need reminding of this I simply go look up the latest Darwin Awards. I used the word “believe” because I cannot prove this assertion.
This is good:
“Now is the time at SDA when we tried to warn you!”
But this is better:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnOcycgXpms
cgh, if we can restrict the Yeatsian world of our discussion to Canada only, the rough beast probably slouched in quite awhile ago, and proceeded to deconstruct our civil society beginning in the late 1960s. Yes, I think Pierre is a pretty good candidate.
If we are looking at the wider western world, perhaps the rough beast is sitting on the throne in Washington right now?
Felis, in that context then, the ‘rough beast’ is ignorance, dilettantism and decadence. Because the west has lost any notion of progress and seems interested only in playing stupid games on their latest I-Phone. Pierre and Barrack, and indeed a host of others, are symptoms, not causes.
The causes go to things like post modernism arising out of post-WW2 exhaustion and its aftermath. Post modernism is particularly important. This mental disease does at least two things of key importance: it places self as the most important aspect of society; and it rejects logic and rationality as the tools to understand the universe and our society. What we feel becomes more important than what is.
cgh
How right you are. It even erodes those who know better in time. Its like a pretty Women walking into a bar of men only. No matter what or who, the whole atmosphere changes. Post modernism is the prostitute that changed our Culture with its
many many illnesses.
Its the REAL Aids of the West.
JMO
RD: that’s the most apt, accurate and pithy description of post modernism that I’ve ever seen. PM is indeed an intellectual whore.