Climate Blind

I felt proud to be part of the Wellington community at last week’s public meeting for Cork and Vine. What a great turnout – attentive and respectful – and what great questions. A former councillor for Grimsby asked a question that resonated for me and with many others, ‘why do the County’s growth and cost numbers never seem to add up’? And why are we contemplating R4 re-zoning, now, which will lock us into the highest intensity development for the next 20 years? Others questions took on an air of almost requiem for the place we know we are going to lose, ‘we are not against growth but does it have to be so big’ – at four times bigger Wellington and seven times bigger Picton? The County will not change so much as be transformed – not because residents want it but simply because, well, the County’s time has come.

My focus, though, was on the climate crisis and I was heartened to hear a question from a friend, ‘if development is inevitable, will it at least use geothermal heating and cooling?’ The Cork and Vine reps duly took notes but when asked point blank, whether they planned to use natural gas or heat pumps (let alone geothermal), their answer was, “we haven’t decided yet”.

Let that sink in. Today, the signs of climate heating are all around us and they are accelerating. James Hanson’s latest publication tells us that heating will double in the next 25 years and we will be bumping up against 2°C heating – climate catastrophe territory. The Cork and Vine development will take place over the same 25 years. If developers have not decided now, then when? Sadly, it is not a hard question to answer. The Province’s energy plan, ‘Powering Ontario’s Growth’ does not mention geothermal – only more natural gas and nuclear, more power lines, and massive batteries. As for the County, I have written previously about an independent assessment that climate change planning at the municipal level in Ontario is in its infancy. And the County’s score was a failing grade of 25%.

As an example of what others are doing, I recently visited the small village of Swaffham Prior in Cambridgeshire, UK. To meet its net-zero targets, the local Council has implemented a geothermal heat network for the whole village. Everyone has the opportunity to hook up to carbon-free, cheap heating and cooling that will save a 1000 tonnes of carbon emissions over 10 years. As the questioner noted at Wednesday’s meeting, it would make far more sense to do this for a new development like Cork and Vine by adding geothermal heating/cooling pipes to basic services than retrofitting an existing village.

I felt proud to be part of the Wellington community, last week. But I felt despair over our short-sighted obsession with growth, money, and energy-intensive projects. At every level of government in Ontario we are blind to the climate crisis we are facing. And as the saying goes, ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’.

Don Wilford