Columnists
Going green
We are finally awakening to going green. I’m a booster, as much as I can be. We recycle. I know this because there are blue bins on the sidewalks everywhere in the County. What we do is just a part of the bigger picture.
We are well beyond the ‘climate change deniers’. They now look like idiots, just as they did 20 years ago. What we have done to our planet is becoming increasingly undeniable. Droughts, floods and wildfires are widespread. Fortunately not here on God’s Green Acre. But even we say: “It’s February. No snow. Above zero daytime temps. Does this mean something is out of whack?”
The world is waking up. We realize we can’t go on like this.
A TINY BIT OF HISTORY
W.P. Niles brought electricity to Wellington before the 1900s. He also had one of the first automobiles. It was electric. Talk about being 150 years ahead of your time!
Sadly, we ended up with Henry Ford. Though steam-powered and electric cars were all competing for market, Ford’s Model T set the stage for gas-powered vehicles. His inventive assembly line technique pounded out hundreds of cars per month. And that, as they say, is how the whole thing started.
Since then, as we know, crude oil became ‘liquid gold’. Countries were invaded and occupied to get it, governments were toppled by it, and wars were fought to gain control of it. Corporations played with it, being in control of supply and demand. Cargo ships and deep water oil rigs had ‘accidents’ that played havoc on our seas.
Poor Henry had no idea of the catastrophic economic and environmental damage his dream would cause.
GOING LOCAL
I’m sure everyone knows my stand on the local windpower fiasco. I stand today as I did then. Good idea; wrong place. Endangering the fragile ecostructure of the south shore in order to get cheap power? And would it be cheap power? No. It would be the same old ‘cost recovery’ thing that corporations do. In my experience, big corporations who invest millions want big returns, and real fast.
Some people bemoan the loss of all that money that went into erecting and dismantling the south end towers. Don’t buy it. Bad ideas are bad ideas. We paid the cost of someone else’s bad ideas. Enough on that.
GOOD NEWS
On the global front, the think tanks are looking ahead. They see the times they are a’changin’. The best tech people all over the world are working on new and innovative technology.
This is ages away from W.P. Niles sprocket and chain electric car. The new cars are slick and sleek. Tesla broke a barrier, making electric cars ‘hip’. They had problems, but most innovations do.
Even the tied-to-tradition American automakers are seeing the rising sun. Canada has already announced that fully-gas-powered vehicles will be removed from the market in a few years.
So, yes, finally the people who can make change are making change. Is it a great fix? Not entirely. Though electricity is considered ‘clean’, it has its costs too. Best we can hope for is that electric will pollute less than the millions of cars blowing out carbon monoxide. Kind of a win.
Not surprisingly, all tech eyes are on China. They have the amazing ability to see what we do, replicate it, and improve on it. This used to be Japan’s role, which is why you have a Samsung TV. Sorry, just checked that and Samsung is a Korean company.The point is the major innovations no longer come from us.
To me, this is not a bad thing. We are moving closer to sharing technology globally. Former me hated Mulroney’s plan to ‘export our brainpower’ to the US, and outsource Canadian jobs to other countries, because their people worked for cheap. I’m still pissed about that. Another bad, but probably inevitable, deal.
BACK TO LOCAL
We are at a turning point in technology. Electric cars are out of my reach price-wise, but that is changing. I feel like I was around when the first automobiles hit the County. People were upset, because the noisy crapboxes scared the horses.
[Believe it or not, when the early autos appeared here, if they met oncoming horses, they were required to pull over and cover their vehicle in tarp, so as not to spook the horses. True story. Don’t know where I got it. Another weird County story: A woman in Milford was killed in our first auto accident. She had never seen an auto before, and froze in her tracks. Braking being as it was, bad news all around.]
LOOKING AHEAD
If you follow my columns, you know I see two things: Change and Progress.
These are not the same. Change happens; it is inevitable. Progress can only be determined after the fact. Whether change is progress only comes out in the wash. If Henry Ford had been a fan of electrics, our whole world structure would have changed. Everything following that would have given us a different world.
Progress. Hard to define. Good? Bad? We can only see it while looking back. We never see it looking forward.
We’re smarter now, since we don’t get mowed down by automobiles while standing in the street. [Those who do are not reading this column.]
We also have an opportunity. Powering the world has changed. CountyFM tells me that the Pickering Nuclear Plant is getting upgrades, over maybe 5-10 years. I’m not particularly comfortable with this, since this is not exactly a long-delayed kitchen reno. Meanwhile, experiments are being done on small ‘household’ fission reactors to power your home. Stand by to watch Hydro One get in the way of this. It won’t be fun. Big Oil will jump in too. Mark my words.
The world we will get after I’m dead is beyond my control. I do have an idea, just for us. The County is planning on building so many homes we will look like the Star Wars Death Star in 10 years.
How about we ask, or force, Council to install solar panels on every new build? It’s a simple ask. Developers will resist, because it costs them extra money. Make them an offer they can’t refuse. Go solar, or don’t build.
The County has retrofitted solar panels on some of their properties, along with many local businesses. Much easier to get it done while homes are under construction.
This should be a County mandate: Build it green, or go home. We need to be joining the rest of the world, and perhaps stand proud that we can do more than blue box our paper.
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