WASHINGTON D.C.: Repeating past mistakes has long been a part of Washington’s energy policy, but Congress used to wait a while before making the same blunder again. Not anymore. New legislation requiring wind energy closely resembles the ethanol mandate that sparked a backlash just last year.
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Monthly Archives: May 2009
Only city hall can alleviate condo owners’ concerns over double dipping
Hardly a week goes by of late without some aspect of garbage collection or recycling muscling their way into headlines.
A particularly thorny issue for council is the so-called double-dipping faced by condominium owners and apartment tenants (although the solution is clearly a simple matter of will as is evident once you read further).
To shed light on this aspect of the municipal waste contract between the city and BFI Canada, this corner sat down with Bob McCaig, the former owner/operator of the Green Lane landfill site and provider of municipal garbage collection, but now just a concerned private citizen eager to provide insight.
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Wind turbines still a health concern for group
For Sandy MacLeod and a group of 11 neighbours living in the Ripley industrial wind turbine project (within the townships of Huron-Kinloss near the Town of Ripley, in southwestern Ontario), it’s been a very long 18 months. They just want the healthy home environment they had enjoyed for some three to 32 years returned.
“We just want it to be over,” said MacLeod.
The simple request goes out to the companies Acciona and Suncor that own the project and to the provincial Liberal government who approved the operating standards. The group also includes John and Erin MacLeod, Brenda and Glen Wylds, Helen and Ross Forster, Barbara Basser, Melissa Cammaert, Kent Wylds and their daughter Keiara plus David Colling who has been helping the group by testing electrical pollution at their properties.
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Wind power initiative on Lake Erie passes feasibility test
No red flags that could stop the efforts of the Great Lakes Energy Development Task Force to build a handful of wind turbines in Lake Erie appeared in a feasibility study the task force released today, though major obstacles remain.
Chief among them are paying for the project, which should cost between $77 million and $93 million unless its scale is reduced, and winning OKs from the host of organizations that must approve the work.
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The answer’s still blowin’ in the wind turbine
Erie Shores Wind Farm
Posted by Ian:
The subject of the Toronto Star report is the Erie Shores Wind Farms, located about 30 minutes east of St. Thomas in the Port Burwell area. More than 80 gleaming wind turbines spread out through farmers fields above the north shore of Lake Erie …
“Had a foot that (didn’t) heal before I moved out of the house.”
Could wind turbines be to blame?
“Yes,” says Glen Wylds, whose southwestern Ontario farmhouse is less than a kilometre from a dozen of them. “They took life away as we knew it before the wind farm,” Wylds, 56, added in a survey that drew substantial media attention.
The ripple of controversy prompted Premier Dalton McGuinty to vaguely promise to investigate: “We’ll take advantage of the very best information that’s out there to make sure that we’re doing something that’s intelligent,” he said after Dr. Robert McMurtry, a former dean of medicine at the University of Western Ontario, presented the survey results.
Blaming a bad foot on wind turbines sounds far-fetched.
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Leadership is action, not position
On Oct. 18 of last year this corner editorialized on the need for our municipal officials to gather with their counterparts throughout the county to hold an economic summit to deal with the staggering job losses in St. Thomas and Elgin.
They have failed to act on this, instead Mayor Cliff Barwick jetted off to Japan for a two-week junket that accomplished little. In fact, Barwick would have been far better off visiting Pittsburgh to see how that former rust belt city has magnificently transformed itself.
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Lessons to be learned from jump-starting an American car town
Thanks to Julie Leeds for the wonderful heads up on this. Instead of Chrysler, substitute Ford and the location is not Kokomo, Indiana but instead St. Thomas, Ontario. However the comparisons, challenges and high stakes mirror each other …
Reviving an American car town has got to be one of the toughest jobs in the country. It may also be one of the most important.
In Kokomo, Ind., ground zero for auto industry layoffs, this job falls on Jeb Conrad.
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