Earthwatch – Replacing Dirty Coal
December 2004
Articles
By Paul Henderson
What Will Power the Province After Coal?
Plans have been in the work for some time to replace Ontario’s coal-burning power plants with something else, but the nagging question remains: Replace it with what?
Currently Nanticoke is Canada’s #1 air polluter, and Lakeview in Mississauga is the Greater Toronto Area’s #1 polluter. Shutting these killers down is in everyone’s best interest, but coal provides about 25% of the province’s power, and the year 2007 (the Ontario Liberals’ date to shut the coal-fired plants) is just over two years away. To some it looks like we are either in for a broken election promise, or a disastrous and expensive transition to something that is a poor replacement: nuclear and/or natural gas.
(Since Vitality’s print edition went to the press, the Liberals indeed announced they won’t close all the coal-fired plants, thus breaking the aforementioned promise. While this is infuriating the NDP and many others, to some the move is simply prudent. William Kemp, author of $mart Power: An Urban Guide to Renewable Energy and Efficiency, who is fully in favour of shutting down the coal plants, says it has to be done intelligently, not motivated by political posturing as the Liberals had done announcing 2007 as the shut down date. For Kemp, the shut down of the coal-fired plants needs to be done gradually, and the coal-fired plants need to be used — as it looks like they now will be — in a reserve capacity, as backup, until a stable renewable system is in place and the burning of coal can finally be relegated to the history books.)
Keith Stewart of the Toronto Environmental Alliance, and co-author of Hydro: The Decline and Fall of Ontario’s Electric Empire, told Vitality that the coal-fired plants being shut down can be done, but it will take a “real heroic effort” to step up the conservation efforts needed.
“It is feasible but not with what the provincial government is currently doing, particularly on the conservation front,” he said.
Kemp says we need to look to the California example. There the state government took on conservation projects with gusto. One example was sending out millions of compact fluorescent light bulbs to make a serious reduction in wattage used statewide. Kemp suggests the Ontario government should send out 20 million compact fluorescents to residents. Even 10 million and Kemp does the math: At about 50 watts saved per bulb, multiplied by 10 million, equals 500 megawatts. “You just shut down a nuclear reactor at Darlington,” Kemp says.
While the recent announcement of just under 400 megawatts of renewable energy projects approved in Ontario is a step in the right direction, it is a baby step. The province’s call for projects was for 300 megawatts, and they received applications totalling 4,400 megawatts. “That is more than Nanticoke,” said Stewart of TEA.
The reason, according to Stewart, is that the government is trying to go slowly, and “they don’t really know how this is going to work.”
Stewart participated recently in a panel discussion put on by the St. Lawrence Centre Forum entitled “Options for New Energy: The Politics of Replacing Coal.” The discussion on this night drifted substantially away from actual answers to the question about what will replace the coal plants, and instead focused on the public-versus-private debate. On the one hand this seemed to be missing the point, but on the other whether Ontario’s power is public or private is a question that may well indirectly have significant environmental impacts.
The panel discussion included: Stewart (who did his PhD on environmental policy in Ontario); Samit Sharma of GAIA, a private wind energy firm; and Rick Coates of the Society for Energy Professionals, the union that represents 6,000 electricity employees in Ontario and who adamantly defend publically-owned power generation, but who have an addiction to nuclear and coal.
The key issue right now is that the Ontario Liberals have introduced Bill 100; the Electricity Restructuring Act. (As Vitality went to print with this issue, the house has passed second reading of Bill 100.) This bill could have disastrous effects on the province’s electricity system as it will almost certainly throw the power into the hands of private corporations.
“The good news is that the Liberals are saying all the right things,” Stewart told the crowd at the St. Lawrence Forum. “The bad news is that they are saying the right things to everyone.”
We can’t have tax cuts, big profits to power companies, reliable service and lower electricity rates for consumers, and clean air. That is what the Liberals are promising.
The current tack of the provincial government with the passing of Bill 100 is to put all new generation in private hands. Under this scenario, according to Stewart of the TEA, private companies would build all new generation facilities. If these were all going to be renewable energy projects that might not be a problem but they won’t. And guess how amenable private interests are going to be to the most imortant energy policy of all: conservation? Private companies want to sell more, not less.
Then, argues Stewart and others including Rick Coates of the Society of Enegy Professionals, if we start to impose conservation from the government this might just piss off the private investors who may then be able to file complaints under the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Remember NAFTA? While electricity is publically owned NAFTA does not apply. Once an industry is open to private competition all the subsidies and incentives have to either disappear, or become available to any business, be it from Mississauaga or Alabama or Tijuana. History has shown with agreements like NAFTA or the World Trade Organization that in every case economic interests are favoured over environmental decisions made at local levels.
So it appears that — despite the promises of the McGuinty Liberals — Bill 100 will lead to de facto privitazation. Or, as the energy expert from England hired by the Society for Energy Professionals to study Bill 100 put it, “privatization by default.” Then, for a number of reasons — not least of which is the fact that governments can borrow money much cheaper than industry — prices for consumers will rise. Experts from the European Union, California, anywhere where deregulation has come in, will say that prices have risen.
Another consequence of deregulation will not be small wind farms popping up all over the province as some would have us believe (and would be great) but it is more, dirty, polluting energy generation. There are hundreds of coal plants dotted all over the U.S. That is the effect of deregulation.
“Deregulation results in more coal, more nuclear, and a tiny bit of green,” said Stewart adding, “In a deregulated market conservation doesn’t make any sense.”
Coates of the SEP explained their support for keeping electricity in Ontario private. They, along with a coalition of former government bureaucrats and Bay Street big-wigs, have set up an organization called Citizens for Affordable and Reliable Electricity (not to be confused with the environmentally-minded folks at Citizens Advocating Renewable Energy) to fight Bill 100. Not obvious without some digging on their website www.bill100.ca, but clear from Coates’ talk at the Forum, is that these guys are big cheerleaders for nuclear and coal. On a published backgrounder on nuclear power from the SEP available on the bill100.ca website they say — presumably with straight faces — that nuclear is “economical, good for the environment, safe, and reliable.” These are the guys running the electricity in the province.
Economical? Nuclear power has cost taxpayers more than $6 billion to develop and left the province with a $20 billion debt. According to the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, Darlington Nuclear Station was 260% over budget, and repairs to Pickering Unit A were almost three times ove budget and years late. Not to mention the fact that Pickering Unit A’s current restart is probably already over budget. (OPG chair Jake Epp said in October that they had spent over $500 million on the restart but he refused to release the amount originally budeted to compare. A Freedom of Information request was filed by OCAA but rejected because OPG argued releasing the numbers “could cause commercial harm.” To that the OCAA asked, “how can it cause commercial harm if they aren’t already over budget?”)
Good for the environment? Well there are no greenhouse gases produced but it’s tough to argue that creating — as OPG has — somewhere around 40,000 tons of high level nuclear waste that has to be babysat for thousands of years can in any way be “good” for the environment.
Safe? There haven’t been any accidents yet in Ontario, but that nuclear waste being produced has to also be shielded from humans for thousands of years. The spent fuel rods, about the size of a loaf of bread, are so toxic that if a person were to stand one metre away from a rod they would be dead in an hour.
Reliable? Here they surely must be joking. Ontario nuclear stations ran at only 52% of their capacity in 2003. Because nuclear is so unreliable OPG has had to increase the burning of coal by 120% from 1995 to 2003 to fill in the electricity gaps.
SEP’s defence of coal? Well it isn’t really a defence of coal as much as a “they’re-doing-it-so-why-can’t-we?” response. The SEP claim that 50% of our Ontario pollution comes from U.S. coal-burning plants, 32% of pollution comes from automobiles and trucks, and 13% comes from industry. So, they argue, closing the coal plants will eliminate only about 5% of local pollution. They even show two maps of North America, one with red dots where coal-burning plants are located currently, and the other with the the five Ontario plants missing. There sure are a lot of red dots still. But this logic is a little like a petty shoplifter defending his behaviour based on the fact that there are much bigger thieves out there.
So What Needs to Happen
Making a transition to a renewable grid system is of urgent concern, but by far the most important shift that needs to be made in energy policy is towards conservation, according to the experts.
“The only way to protect ourselves is to do more with less,” says William Kemp. He means this at the micro, individual homeowner level, as well as the macro, government policy level. The Ontario government needs to follow California’s example and spend millions of dollars on conservation program. Use education, carrot, stick, whatever it takes to reduce the ridiculously high levels of energy consumption in this province.
With a growing population, and power plants coming to the end of their lives, some are advocating building more power plants. For Kemp this is foolish as it doesn’t address the real problem of over-consumption. Oil and natural gas are both running out worldwide and while coal-backers say there is lots to be found, it too can’t last forever and the planet can’t take much more.
A report from the David Suzki Foundation entitled Bright Future that came out after the 2003 blackout in Ontario (and was co-authored by Keith Stewart of TEA) pushes this point of conservation, and the California example.
Bright Future looks at the issue of electricity supply and how jurisdictions have successfully — that is economically viably — corrected problems with their systems by focusing not on the supply side, but on demand.
“Experience in California and other jurisdictions shows that helping consumers and industry to reduce demand for electricity is a cost-effective, environmentally friendly and viable way to restrain energy costs and achieve security of supply,” the report states. “California’s record shows that the average cost of reducing demand by one kilowatt-hour (kWh) is about 4.5 cents; to produce a kWh in Ontario costs more than 6 cents.”
Instead of arguing over how to make all the widgets we want, let’s look at why we are using so many widgets in the first place. It is an obvious yet revolutionary approach, and is the only solution to Ontario’s problems.
“Supply is the wrong approach,” Kemp says. “If you don’t address demand, you’re sunk.”
Some websites to find more about this topic:
• To download and read the full Bright Future report from 2003 go to the David Suzuki Foundation’s website, or click directly on www.davidsuzuki.org/Climate_Change/Solutions/Bright_Future.asp
• Another more recent report that focuses on how to eliminate coal, nuclear, and natural gas, and instead increase the use of wind, low-impact, hydro, biomass, geothermal, solar, entitled Smart Generation, and also produced by David Suzuki Foundation can be found at www.davidsuzuki.org/Publications/Climate_Change_Reports/default.asp
• www.eneract.org (Energy Action Council of Torono)
• www.cleanairalliance.org (Ontario Clean Air Alliance)
• www.torontoenvironment.org (Toronto Environmental Alliance)
• www.ontario-sea.org (Ontario Sustainable Energy Association)
• www.bill100.ca (Citizens for Affordable and Reliable Electricity)
• www.energyprobe.org (Energy Probe)
Why We Can't Afford to Procrastinate
Delaying is not an option. According to at least one report, smog is killing 1,000 people in the GTA every year. In addition to smog, greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere and one recent study by two U.S. scientists, Michael Oppenheimer, from Princeton University and Brian O’Neill from Brown University, suggest that something needs to be done — not just some time in the future — but now.
They used three computer climate models, one of which saw a controlled rise in CO2 levels, another that saw a rapid unchecked increase, then a sudden levelling off, and a third which saw a rapid unchecked increase overshooting CO2 targets, then a fast reduction to target levels.
The latter two scenarios are based on the proposed route that many think we ought to take: carry on business as usual until science comes up with cleaner technologies that can be implemented more cheaply than they can today.
Bad idea, according to the scientists who found that the models with unchecked CO2 levels — even if corrected later — could leave the planet with more warming and faster warming.
"The bottom line is that people and their governments ought to develop a sense of how much warming they think is too much," said Michael Oppenheimer. "Then appropriate limits on carbon dioxide should be set and countries ought to move promptly to achieve those limits. Not acting promptly or not sticking to the target could prove highly disruptive, if not devastating."
Surprise! — Air Pollution Does Long-Term Damage
A landmark study published in September in the New England Journal of Medicine found that regular exposure to air pollution can stunt the growth of children’s lungs, which leads to reduced respiratory, and even early death.
The study followed 1,759 school kids from grade four to high school graduation and found that children breathing polluted air were up to five times more likely to grow up with weakened lungs. This finding was true across the board, not just in children who already had asthma.
Somebody should do a study in Canada comparing the lungs of high school students who grew up in Toronto to those in rural communities. The findings might cause an exodus to the countryside.
SEEDLINGS OF HOPE & TOXIC SLUDGE
This Month In Earthwatch we begin a new section not unlike a “Darts and Laurels” for the environment. Each month we will award Seedlings of Hope to those individuals and organizations that are making a difference in the battle to protect our air, our water, and our earth. We will award a pile of Toxic Sludge to those who continue to poison the planet, ruin the physical environment, and generally seek profits over people, and narrow interests over ecology.
• Seedling: To CBC-TV viewers for voting David Suzuki in number 5 in the CBC’s Greatest Canadian show. Hockey players and politicians are fine and all but putting Suzuki in the top 10 shows where Canadian priorities really are at.
• Sludge: Kimberly-Clark — the makers of Kleenex — for refusing to amend their practices using fibre from ancient forests so we can blow our noses. According to Greenpeace — who have launched a website focusing on Kimberly-Clark’s refusal to change: www.kleercut.net — they can easily stop destroying ancient forests by getting the fibre that goes into their products from recycled sources.
• Seedling: McGuinty’s Liberals for creating a green belt, and announcing new renewable energy projects in Ontario.
• Sludge: McGuinty’s Liberals for handing $100 million to Ford so they can make more cars to pollute the new green belt, and for wasting hundreds of millions of dollars more on nuclear power; a few month’s worth of power for 10,000 years of toxic waste. Nuclear is not the “green alternative to coal.”
What Will Power the Province After Coal?
Plans have been in the work for some time to replace Ontario’s coal-burning power plants with something else, but the nagging question remains: Replace it with what?
Currently Nanticoke is Canada’s #1 air polluter, and Lakeview in Mississauga is the Greater Toronto Area’s #1 polluter. Shutting these killers down is in everyone’s best interest, but coal provides about 25% of the province’s power, and the year 2007 (the Ontario Liberals’ date to shut the coal-fired plants) is just over two years away. To some it looks like we are either in for a broken election promise, or a disastrous and expensive transition to something that is a poor replacement: nuclear and/or natural gas.
(Since Vitality’s print edition went to the press, the Liberals indeed announced they won’t close all the coal-fired plants, thus breaking the aforementioned promise. While this is infuriating the NDP and many others, to some the move is simply prudent. William Kemp, author of $mart Power: An Urban Guide to Renewable Energy and Efficiency, who is fully in favour of shutting down the coal plants, says it has to be done intelligently, not motivated by political posturing as the Liberals had done announcing 2007 as the shut down date. For Kemp, the shut down of the coal-fired plants needs to be done gradually, and the coal-fired plants need to be used — as it looks like they now will be — in a reserve capacity, as backup, until a stable renewable system is in place and the burning of coal can finally be relegated to the history books.)
Keith Stewart of the Toronto Environmental Alliance, and co-author of Hydro: The Decline and Fall of Ontario’s Electric Empire, told Vitality that the coal-fired plants being shut down can be done, but it will take a “real heroic effort” to step up the conservation efforts needed.
“It is feasible but not with what the provincial government is currently doing, particularly on the conservation front,” he said.
Kemp says we need to look to the California example. There the state government took on conservation projects with gusto. One example was sending out millions of compact fluorescent light bulbs to make a serious reduction in wattage used statewide. Kemp suggests the Ontario government should send out 20 million compact fluorescents to residents. Even 10 million and Kemp does the math: At about 50 watts saved per bulb, multiplied by 10 million, equals 500 megawatts. “You just shut down a nuclear reactor at Darlington,” Kemp says.
While the recent announcement of just under 400 megawatts of renewable energy projects approved in Ontario is a step in the right direction, it is a baby step. The province’s call for projects was for 300 megawatts, and they received applications totalling 4,400 megawatts. “That is more than Nanticoke,” said Stewart of TEA.
The reason, according to Stewart, is that the government is trying to go slowly, and “they don’t really know how this is going to work.”
Stewart participated recently in a panel discussion put on by the St. Lawrence Centre Forum entitled “Options for New Energy: The Politics of Replacing Coal.” The discussion on this night drifted substantially away from actual answers to the question about what will replace the coal plants, and instead focused on the public-versus-private debate. On the one hand this seemed to be missing the point, but on the other whether Ontario’s power is public or private is a question that may well indirectly have significant environmental impacts.
The panel discussion included: Stewart (who did his PhD on environmental policy in Ontario); Samit Sharma of GAIA, a private wind energy firm; and Rick Coates of the Society for Energy Professionals, the union that represents 6,000 electricity employees in Ontario and who adamantly defend publically-owned power generation, but who have an addiction to nuclear and coal.
The key issue right now is that the Ontario Liberals have introduced Bill 100; the Electricity Restructuring Act. (As Vitality went to print with this issue, the house has passed second reading of Bill 100.) This bill could have disastrous effects on the province’s electricity system as it will almost certainly throw the power into the hands of private corporations.
“The good news is that the Liberals are saying all the right things,” Stewart told the crowd at the St. Lawrence Forum. “The bad news is that they are saying the right things to everyone.”
We can’t have tax cuts, big profits to power companies, reliable service and lower electricity rates for consumers, and clean air. That is what the Liberals are promising.
The current tack of the provincial government with the passing of Bill 100 is to put all new generation in private hands. Under this scenario, according to Stewart of the TEA, private companies would build all new generation facilities. If these were all going to be renewable energy projects that might not be a problem but they won’t. And guess how amenable private interests are going to be to the most imortant energy policy of all: conservation? Private companies want to sell more, not less.
Then, argues Stewart and others including Rick Coates of the Society of Enegy Professionals, if we start to impose conservation from the government this might just piss off the private investors who may then be able to file complaints under the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Remember NAFTA? While electricity is publically owned NAFTA does not apply. Once an industry is open to private competition all the subsidies and incentives have to either disappear, or become available to any business, be it from Mississauaga or Alabama or Tijuana. History has shown with agreements like NAFTA or the World Trade Organization that in every case economic interests are favoured over environmental decisions made at local levels.
So it appears that — despite the promises of the McGuinty Liberals — Bill 100 will lead to de facto privitazation. Or, as the energy expert from England hired by the Society for Energy Professionals to study Bill 100 put it, “privatization by default.” Then, for a number of reasons — not least of which is the fact that governments can borrow money much cheaper than industry — prices for consumers will rise. Experts from the European Union, California, anywhere where deregulation has come in, will say that prices have risen.
Another consequence of deregulation will not be small wind farms popping up all over the province as some would have us believe (and would be great) but it is more, dirty, polluting energy generation. There are hundreds of coal plants dotted all over the U.S. That is the effect of deregulation.
“Deregulation results in more coal, more nuclear, and a tiny bit of green,” said Stewart adding, “In a deregulated market conservation doesn’t make any sense.”
Coates of the SEP explained their support for keeping electricity in Ontario private. They, along with a coalition of former government bureaucrats and Bay Street big-wigs, have set up an organization called Citizens for Affordable and Reliable Electricity (not to be confused with the environmentally-minded folks at Citizens Advocating Renewable Energy) to fight Bill 100. Not obvious without some digging on their website www.bill100.ca, but clear from Coates’ talk at the Forum, is that these guys are big cheerleaders for nuclear and coal. On a published backgrounder on nuclear power from the SEP available on the bill100.ca website they say — presumably with straight faces — that nuclear is “economical, good for the environment, safe, and reliable.” These are the guys running the electricity in the province.
Economical? Nuclear power has cost taxpayers more than $6 billion to develop and left the province with a $20 billion debt. According to the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, Darlington Nuclear Station was 260% over budget, and repairs to Pickering Unit A were almost three times ove budget and years late. Not to mention the fact that Pickering Unit A’s current restart is probably already over budget. (OPG chair Jake Epp said in October that they had spent over $500 million on the restart but he refused to release the amount originally budeted to compare. A Freedom of Information request was filed by OCAA but rejected because OPG argued releasing the numbers “could cause commercial harm.” To that the OCAA asked, “how can it cause commercial harm if they aren’t already over budget?”)
Good for the environment? Well there are no greenhouse gases produced but it’s tough to argue that creating — as OPG has — somewhere around 40,000 tons of high level nuclear waste that has to be babysat for thousands of years can in any way be “good” for the environment.
Safe? There haven’t been any accidents yet in Ontario, but that nuclear waste being produced has to also be shielded from humans for thousands of years. The spent fuel rods, about the size of a loaf of bread, are so toxic that if a person were to stand one metre away from a rod they would be dead in an hour.
Reliable? Here they surely must be joking. Ontario nuclear stations ran at only 52% of their capacity in 2003. Because nuclear is so unreliable OPG has had to increase the burning of coal by 120% from 1995 to 2003 to fill in the electricity gaps.
SEP’s defence of coal? Well it isn’t really a defence of coal as much as a “they’re-doing-it-so-why-can’t-we?” response. The SEP claim that 50% of our Ontario pollution comes from U.S. coal-burning plants, 32% of pollution comes from automobiles and trucks, and 13% comes from industry. So, they argue, closing the coal plants will eliminate only about 5% of local pollution. They even show two maps of North America, one with red dots where coal-burning plants are located currently, and the other with the the five Ontario plants missing. There sure are a lot of red dots still. But this logic is a little like a petty shoplifter defending his behaviour based on the fact that there are much bigger thieves out there.
So What Needs to Happen
Making a transition to a renewable grid system is of urgent concern, but by far the most important shift that needs to be made in energy policy is towards conservation, according to the experts.
“The only way to protect ourselves is to do more with less,” says William Kemp. He means this at the micro, individual homeowner level, as well as the macro, government policy level. The Ontario government needs to follow California’s example and spend millions of dollars on conservation program. Use education, carrot, stick, whatever it takes to reduce the ridiculously high levels of energy consumption in this province.
With a growing population, and power plants coming to the end of their lives, some are advocating building more power plants. For Kemp this is foolish as it doesn’t address the real problem of over-consumption. Oil and natural gas are both running out worldwide and while coal-backers say there is lots to be found, it too can’t last forever and the planet can’t take much more.
A report from the David Suzki Foundation entitled Bright Future that came out after the 2003 blackout in Ontario (and was co-authored by Keith Stewart of TEA) pushes this point of conservation, and the California example.
Bright Future looks at the issue of electricity supply and how jurisdictions have successfully — that is economically viably — corrected problems with their systems by focusing not on the supply side, but on demand.
“Experience in California and other jurisdictions shows that helping consumers and industry to reduce demand for electricity is a cost-effective, environmentally friendly and viable way to restrain energy costs and achieve security of supply,” the report states. “California’s record shows that the average cost of reducing demand by one kilowatt-hour (kWh) is about 4.5 cents; to produce a kWh in Ontario costs more than 6 cents.”
Instead of arguing over how to make all the widgets we want, let’s look at why we are using so many widgets in the first place. It is an obvious yet revolutionary approach, and is the only solution to Ontario’s problems.
“Supply is the wrong approach,” Kemp says. “If you don’t address demand, you’re sunk.”
Some websites to find more about this topic:
• To download and read the full Bright Future report from 2003 go to the David Suzuki Foundation’s website, or click directly on www.davidsuzuki.org/Climate_Change/Solutions/Bright_Future.asp
• Another more recent report that focuses on how to eliminate coal, nuclear, and natural gas, and instead increase the use of wind, low-impact, hydro, biomass, geothermal, solar, entitled Smart Generation, and also produced by David Suzuki Foundation can be found at www.davidsuzuki.org/Publications/Climate_Change_Reports/default.asp
• www.eneract.org (Energy Action Council of Torono)
• www.cleanairalliance.org (Ontario Clean Air Alliance)
• www.torontoenvironment.org (Toronto Environmental Alliance)
• www.ontario-sea.org (Ontario Sustainable Energy Association)
• www.bill100.ca (Citizens for Affordable and Reliable Electricity)
• www.energyprobe.org (Energy Probe)
Why We Can't Afford to Procrastinate
Delaying is not an option. According to at least one report, smog is killing 1,000 people in the GTA every year. In addition to smog, greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere and one recent study by two U.S. scientists, Michael Oppenheimer, from Princeton University and Brian O’Neill from Brown University, suggest that something needs to be done — not just some time in the future — but now.
They used three computer climate models, one of which saw a controlled rise in CO2 levels, another that saw a rapid unchecked increase, then a sudden levelling off, and a third which saw a rapid unchecked increase overshooting CO2 targets, then a fast reduction to target levels.
The latter two scenarios are based on the proposed route that many think we ought to take: carry on business as usual until science comes up with cleaner technologies that can be implemented more cheaply than they can today.
Bad idea, according to the scientists who found that the models with unchecked CO2 levels — even if corrected later — could leave the planet with more warming and faster warming.
"The bottom line is that people and their governments ought to develop a sense of how much warming they think is too much," said Michael Oppenheimer. "Then appropriate limits on carbon dioxide should be set and countries ought to move promptly to achieve those limits. Not acting promptly or not sticking to the target could prove highly disruptive, if not devastating."
Surprise! — Air Pollution Does Long-Term Damage
A landmark study published in September in the New England Journal of Medicine found that regular exposure to air pollution can stunt the growth of children’s lungs, which leads to reduced respiratory, and even early death.
The study followed 1,759 school kids from grade four to high school graduation and found that children breathing polluted air were up to five times more likely to grow up with weakened lungs. This finding was true across the board, not just in children who already had asthma.
Somebody should do a study in Canada comparing the lungs of high school students who grew up in Toronto to those in rural communities. The findings might cause an exodus to the countryside.
SEEDLINGS OF HOPE & TOXIC SLUDGE
This Month In Earthwatch we begin a new section not unlike a “Darts and Laurels” for the environment. Each month we will award Seedlings of Hope to those individuals and organizations that are making a difference in the battle to protect our air, our water, and our earth. We will award a pile of Toxic Sludge to those who continue to poison the planet, ruin the physical environment, and generally seek profits over people, and narrow interests over ecology.
• Seedling: To CBC-TV viewers for voting David Suzuki in number 5 in the CBC’s Greatest Canadian show. Hockey players and politicians are fine and all but putting Suzuki in the top 10 shows where Canadian priorities really are at.
• Sludge: Kimberly-Clark — the makers of Kleenex — for refusing to amend their practices using fibre from ancient forests so we can blow our noses. According to Greenpeace — who have launched a website focusing on Kimberly-Clark’s refusal to change: www.kleercut.net — they can easily stop destroying ancient forests by getting the fibre that goes into their products from recycled sources.
• Seedling: McGuinty’s Liberals for creating a green belt, and announcing new renewable energy projects in Ontario.
• Sludge: McGuinty’s Liberals for handing $100 million to Ford so they can make more cars to pollute the new green belt, and for wasting hundreds of millions of dollars more on nuclear power; a few month’s worth of power for 10,000 years of toxic waste. Nuclear is not the “green alternative to coal.”