Friday, June 15, 2012

Tyler Hamilton's "Gambling"

Heading to the casino with a pocketful of fairy tales should not be akin to designing energy policy, but it is in Ontario.

Tyler Hamilton's international wind day column is titled: Time to double down on clean energy investments - thestar.com:

The gambling reference is accompanied by an offshore wind turbine image, ignoring that again and again jurisdictions with substantial wind capacity fail to lower emissions much.

We know reducing consumption works
We know nuclear energy does too.



We know the Canadian Wind Energy Association ,CanWEA's, members include TransCanada (of the Keystone XL pipeline)
We know TransCanada just received a $4 billion contract to construct a pipeline to facilitate liquefied natural gas shipments to Japan (and elsewhere)

We know Germany is working out the subsidies to construct new coal and natural gas capacity as an integral part of their energy turnaround.

We should know wind turbines aren't about reducing emissions at all - they are about displacing nuclear.

We know coal now has a greater share of the world energy production than it has had since 1969.
We know that's because people prefer emissions and dirtier air to poverty.

We know effective prioritizing requires choices - and we know, frankly, that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is primarily a priority to people who couldn't conceive of being poor.

The challenge is cheap, clean and abundant energy.
It's not a gambling challenge, it is an innovation and engineering challenge.

Gambling on the twirling, inefficient Trojan Horses of the traditional energy rent seekers won't help.

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