Ontario gets in on the clean, green energy act
The word sustainability gets bandied about a lot, but what does it mean?
It means living within the productive capacity of the biosphere. We survive because our most fundamental needs – clean water, fresh air, soil, energy from the sun (through photosynthesis), and resources like trees, fish, and so on – can be replenished by nature as long as we don’t exceed its ability to replace them. Nonrenewable resources like metals must be used carefully and recycled because, no matter how plentiful they are, they will be depleted.
The current economic difficulties, a deepening ecological crisis, and energy problems provide an opportunity to radically reassess our current status and direction. Energy especially provides a chance to rethink our course. Fossil fuels are nonrenewable, which means that once we use them they’re gone and won’t be replenished within humankind’s existence. The major sources of gas and oil are in politically volatile areas like Russia, Africa, and the Middle East. And the rate at which we are burning fossil fuels exceeds the biosphere's capacity to reabsorb the carbon. Nuclear fuels are also nonrenewable, and their use in nuclear power plants generates radioactive wastes that will have to be stored for millennia. The global threat of terrorism adds to the dangers of this energy source.
Energy sustainability demands that we shift from dependence on nonrenewables to renewables like solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, wave, and biomass. Energy efficiency and conservation will be important parts of that shift. It’s an inescapable fact. And so, will we continue to deplete the nonrenewables and face the disastrous consequences of climate change and radioactive waste, or will we embark on a crash program to get onto renewables? The choice seems clear.
It’s no surprise that many of the advances in clean energy – technological and economic – have come from areas that don’t have many fossil-fuel deposits, and that some of the roadblocks have been from areas with large fossil-fuel reserves. Canada is among the latter. We have large supplies of uranium, coal, and oil (albeit the dirtiest oil) in our tar sands.
Given that our governments are elected for four- or five-year terms, it’ s almost forgivable that those in power often focus on what we already have over what we could be developing. But “almost” doesn’t mean it is forgivable. These people are elected to represent our interests, and it certainly isn’t in our interests to continue to rely on diminishing supplies of polluting fossil fuels for energy or for economic growth. [...] Take David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge and learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.
Posted by on 02/26 at 03:06 PM