Articles by John McGrath
John McGrath is an intinerant student and sometimes reporter currently living in Toronto, Canada. He mainly writes about Canadian and International Politics from an energy and climate perspective
All Articles
-
Ontario has higher capacity for renewable energy projects than the government estimates
The Toronto Star has been doing some excellent work on the environment and energy issues in Ontario lately -- I pointed to some not too long ago. Many of those stories come from the Roberts-endorsed Tyler Hamilton.
Yesterday, Hamilton had an excellent piece in the front of the business section. It's on the alternatives to nuclear construction that the province is ignoring; it tallies up all the missed opportunities. The conclusion is that Ontario could build ten times as much renewable energy as the government currently estimates, more than enough to displace the planned and allegedly necessary nuclear reactors.
-
The coming nuclear expansion in Ontario is absent from election debate
There's a bit of a, whatchamacallit, an election coming down in Ontario. So far a number of issues have come up (e.g. schools), but the governing Liberals' plan to increase nuclear power construction in Toronto isn't one of them. It's a shame, because a number of recent articles in the Toronto Star show how this plan is being undermined before it's even gotten off the ground.
First of all, there's the problem that the existing reactors are delivering sub-par performance this summer. The reactors at both Pickering and Bruce have been shut down unexpectedly, leading to a double-digit increase in coal generation. Yech. The plan has been to run the existing reactors to the end of their lives and refurbish or replace them, but with the existing problems it may be necessary to do so early -- or, if replacement is impossible, shut them down and rely more on ... what, coal?
-
A review
For a few days after reading The Upside of Down, I annoyed most of my friends and family by reciting chunks of Homer-Dixon's work back to them -- I couldn't get it out of my head. I do this a lot to people, but not usually for days and days on end after reading a book.The Upside of Down isn't an environmental book, exactly, though it does deal with environmental and energy issues. While it shares some themes with more explicitly environmental books (like Jared Diamond's Collapse), the core of the book is more political and sociological. Homer-Dixon is asking why societies collapse -- what are the pressures our society faces today, and what, if any, are the positive results from the kind of collapse he's talking about?
-
Even in Canada
So, about a year ago I wrote briefly about Marc Jaccard, a Canadian economist whose book, Sustainable Fossil Fuels, has been exceedingly popular in Canadian policy-making circles. No surprise there -- any book that says we can have our cheesecake and eat it too is going to find a wide audience among politicians averse to making any tough decision, ever.
I was, you could say, less than charitable to Jaccard's ideas. But the latest news from Canada's Conservative do-nothing-about-global-warming government makes me almost feel sorry for him.
