Nuclear debate

Don Lawson
Financial Post
January 8, 2001

Re: Nuclear Power has a Future and Not in a Free Market World, Dec. 28.

The two contestants in your debate leave one confused as to whether nuclear electricity is alive or dead. A search of the Internet provides some interesting data. The energy company BP produces a yearly statistical review of world energy. The latest issue is for 1999 where they report that world energy grew by 0.2%. The fastest growing sector for 1999 was nuclear at 3.8%, followed by gas at 2.4% and oil at 1.6%. The reason for the high nuclear growth was a rise in nuclear output in the United States, Russia and Asia.

The U.S. Department of Energy gives more details and reported in March 2000 that “In 1999 U.S. commercial nuclear power stations generated more electricity than in any previous year….These records were accomplished even though the number of operable U.S. nuclear units has declined to 104 reactors from a peak of 112 in 1990.” The same source also gives monthly generation up to September 2000, and in the first 9 months of 2000 nuclear generation was up about 5% over the same period for 1999. In fact there was more nuclear energy produced in the month of July 2000 than ever before in the United States. U.S. electricity is produced primarily by coal (~50%), secondly by nuclear power (~20%) and thirdly by gas (~15%).

Somehow, it appears that at least the U.S. nuclear generating industry is alive although the general public is probably unaware of its progress. One could generate all sorts of conspiracy theories to explain this! However, other information suggests that this situation has not escaped everyone’s eyes. In the Jan. 5, 2001 edition of Investor’s Digest, Dave Skarica, an investment newsletter writer, says “Get into uranium, buy Cameco.”

I am left with two questions: Is nuclear power dead? and Is the public interested? The answer to the first question seems to be “no” from the above data, but the answer to the second question is probably more relevant and is also “no.” If the press and TV reported the above figures there would probably be a short response — “Oh, that’s interesting” — before turning to more meaty issues like trying to analyze the meaning of the words Alan Greenspan speaks!

Don Lawson, Oakville, Ont.

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Pushing wind

Andrew Hurst
National Post
January 5, 2001

I am writing to correct some false assertions you made in a recent editorial (Tilting at Windmills, Jan. 2).

First, to say that wind turbines produce a “scream like a jet engine” is misleading. The latest models of wind turbines produce a sound intensity of between 55 and 65 decibels, depending on the technology in use. (A jet engine of a plane taking off is 150 decibels. Normal conversation averages 60 decibels.) Yet this reduces to below 40 decibels within three rotor blade lengths from the turbine (about 130 metres away). This is in the absence of other sounds, which tend to mask wind turbine sound intensity anyway.

Second, there is no definitive scientific proof that wind turbines cause high bird fatalities. Even where avian fatalities might be an issue, for instance during migratory seasons or in areas with certain species of birds, measures can be taken. Siting wind turbines in appropriate places, changing the design of the turbine’s rotors or installing devices to ward off vulnerable species (as is done at airports) all reduce the risk to birds. To state, as you do, that “wind turbines are bad for birds” is spurious.

Finally, it is sheer dishonesty to say that wind power is expensive. One reader has already mentioned the issue of the externalities associated with other power sources. Factor in these externalities and wind power will be cheaper than the US$1,000 per kilowatt hour quoted by Lawrence Solomon on Dec. 28 (Not in a Free Market World). The existence of these market externalities, which allow power generators to send carbon dioxide into our atmosphere without paying a fair market price for doing so, amounts to a perverse subsidy in such generation technologies as coal-fired power stations. Furthermore, wind turbines cover the energy used to manufacture, commission and decommission them between two and three months, making their production costs extremely low. Few other power generating technologies can claim this.

Wind turbines are certainly not the only solution to our future energy challenges. But they are indeed a valid part.

Andrew Hurst, Energy and Environment Team, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, England.

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Nasty neighbours and the rise of housing tyrants

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
January 2, 2001

Neighbours don’t get along. They fight over parking spaces, they fight over the way their yards are kept, they fight over new additions to their houses and they fight over the rowdy late-night parties their teenagers hold. Neighbours are so fractious, in fact, that a mini book industry exists to help sort out the differences. The latest effort comes from The Lyons Press, a New York publisher, which recently brought out a new edition of Outwitting Neighbors (223 pages, $22.95 in Canada), a book by Bill Adler Jr. first published in 1994.

This book is not intended for policy wonks. It classifies itself as a “home improvement” guide, for the benefit of bookstore staff perplexed about where to display it, but it would also suit the humour section. It is a collection of anecdotes — many of them extreme — about how neighbours treat each other. In St. Louis, Miss., a quarrel over street parking — residents there consider the curb in front of their house their own — ended with a homeowner asserting his “property rights” by sledgehammering his new neighbours’ car windows. In a suburb of Chicago, a homeowner had a bulldozer remove a portion of a neighbour’s driveway that had been built on his lot.

The need to outwit your neighbor, Mr. Adler shows, exists wherever you may live. Those who don’t plan to leave a neighbourhood, he explains, often desire lower, not higher, property values to minimize the taxes they have to pay. Your tony addition translates into a rise in your neighbours’ taxes. In Canada, where property taxes are increasingly collected on the basis of market value assessment, this friction among neighbours can only increase: Property owners will be punished as never before when their neighbourhood gets upgraded, say, by civic-minded citizens who voluntarily plant rosebushes in common spaces.

Mr. Adler dishes out deliciously vicious advice — like putting cat food on the roof of offending vehicles late at night, to let the neighbour awaken to raccoon paw prints on the car’s shiny exterior. Or posting a sign that says, “Warning: Radioactive Waste Buried Here” to discourage neighbours from trying to claim disputed land along a property line.

But he presents these guerrilla warfare gambits in jest. Mr. Adler is, in fact, a peacemaker, and his preferred course, almost invariably, involves giving in for the sake of neighbourhood harmony. Resolve the conflict over parking by changing your work hours so you and your neighbour use the spot at different times. Wait out the troublesome teenagers next door — they’ll move out eventually. If all else fails, maybe you should be the one to move. Mr. Adler presents example upon example of petty conflicts getting out of hand, where the person who’s right in theory ends up the loser in practice.

The advice — bending over backward, having patience, accepting small or even large inconveniences — is sensible in society as we know it today. People have few absolute rights to use their property as they see fit. Almost anything out of the ordinary, even if entirely legal, is subject to being banned by new bylaws if a small group of neighbours is determined enough.

As Mr. Adler points out, this lack of freedom can be most severe in those supposed exemplars of private property rights: gated communities, condominium corporations and other homeowners’ associations. These now govern the lives of some 80 million U.S. citizens, often in the name of maintaining property values by gaining freedom from the vagaries of local governments. In reality, they tend to entrench the status quo and to regulate, regulate, regulate. Explains Mr. Adler: “Much falls under their purview — fences, paint, decorations and house additions — so much that you can hardly make a move without consulting them. You want a pet? Ask first. You want to hang Christmas lights? Submit your plans in writing. You want a new refrigerator? There’s no delivery Tuesdays or Thursdays.”

Rather than being bastions of self-rule and the free enterprise system, as their residents often imagine, community associations most suit those fleeing innovation. As Mr. Adler explains, these people often want to live in a controlled environment: “They crave rules and order — the exact height of hedges, the angle of handrails, and when leaves must be raked — and an association provides that.”

Yet neighbourhood associations, which are becoming common in Canada with suburbanization, may lead only to increased friction among neighbours, as seen by the legions of lawsuits in the United States between these associations and their residents. Anti-association advocates even dispute the associations’ claim to preserving property values. To members of this growing movement, associations are little collectives that are all too easily hijacked by local tyrants with the time to volunteer to sit on the board.

Neighbours will be neighbours, and in the end, the book is less a practical guide than a series of homilies about being a good neighbour. Mr. Adler’s one concrete exception: Avoid neighbourhood associations, which seem to breed intolerance and create conflict. “Frankly, it’s hard for me to fathom why somebody would want to live in a place that has more rules than their state and city.”

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A non-partisan political forum founded for freedom

http://www.bcseparatists.com

January 1, 2001

The need for British Columbia to separate from Canada is entirely different from than that of Quebec’s.

As Separatists our goal is not to dig a moat, or to build a wall, in order to separate from Canada. Our forests will still overlap, our rivers and streams will flow unimpeded and the climate will remain the same as it has since the dawn of time. It is not a land mass, or a people, that we want to separate from. We want separation from a sick and corrupt political system that has seized control of our lives, a system that has shamed us as a civilized people, a system that’s “possessed” Canada.

The need for British Columbia to separate from Canada is entirely different from than that of Quebec’s. Francophones want separation for cultural reasons, bigoted and racist to say the least. B.C.’s reasons are economic, social, judicial and environmental.

Our position: We consider Canada as a parent corporation and the provinces as the suppliers. Both are public corporations, but, instead of the shareholders and investors holding stocks and bonds they hold addresses. Their stock exchanges are called capitals and the brokers are supposed politicians.

A corporation’s management that consistently decreases shareholder’s profits and uses political influence to pass legislation contrary to shareholders and suppliers will at one point, or another, have to be re-structured. We are that committee. We are not some lunatic fringe in rebellion, we’re concerned partners in a business that’s falling apart at the seams. Provincially our businesses, industries and communities have been decimated. We find this fact, at the very least, unacceptable.

When a corporation mismanages funds so badly that its pensioned employees freeze in the winter and are forced to dine on pet food, its security personnel are forced through the doors of food banks to survive, and its shareholder’s children go to overcrowded schools with empty stomachs, it’s definitely time overhaul management. As British Columbia Separatists we don’t entertain illusions of “negotiating” with Ottawa and/or Central Canada under the current agreement. The only viable method remaining is to pull our participation until such time that we believe that negotiation is possible. We’re not angry at our Canadian neighbors, we’re angry at the Canadian political system..

The federal and provincial management teams have come to believe that the profits earned, or lost, are theirs. It’s this type of thought and action that bankrupts corporations. The time has come for “suppliers” to exercise a hostile takeover. A government’s sole purpose is to administrate public funds and services. It is not to legislate invasive laws and regulations that cripple personal and provincial potential.

Ottawa’s entered into global agreements that have left the west subject to ridiculously high hydro, oil, fuel and natural gas prices, when in fact we are in possession of the largest known resources in the world. There is NO REASON why we should EVER be subject to global price scams. We have the proven abilities and resources to operate and supply our needs at a fair price.

Our need to separate goes far beyond feeling slighted. It’s an economic NECESSITY if we’re to preserve resources and insure long term prosperity for our citizens. We’ve been subject to decades of eastern propaganda regarding the Americanization of Canada, but our biggest adversary is to the east, not the south!

The federal government has repeatedly slashed health care contributions to British Columbia leaving thousands of people to suffer and die needlessly. Our cities are suffering from massive traffic grid-lock that get worse every day. Our highways have fallen into decay. The bankruptcy rate for individuals and businesses has far, far, exceeded epidemic proportions. Our fishery, forestry and mining sectors have been virtually destroyed by people back east who have absolutely no compassion for what we are experiencing, and have in fact, consistently made decisions that escalate the devastation.

British Columbia has been forced, against its good nature, to finally say that enough is enough. Goodbye Canada, Hello Prosperity! It’s time to join together and move into a future bright with promise. A future that restores our children’s rightful legacy, a legacy of prosperity that BC’s always been known for. By seizing control of our assets we will have the ability to create an entirely new economy, an economy that’s competitive and strong.

We are already officially recognized by the media, and government of all levels, as “Western Canada”. We will still be Canadians, we will simply be called what we’ve always been called, “Western Canadians”. If the federal government, including Prime Minister Jean Chretien, officially recognize us as a separate entity, then why shouldn’t we? It’s only a matter of formalizing the arrangement.

Political parties have evolved into self-serving organizations managed by megalomaniacs and sociopaths hell bent on the suppression of rights and the prohibition of personal prosperity (excluding theirs). It is time to exorcise government of organizations that follow their own constitutions instead our nation’s.

We encourage large numbers of independent political candidates to run in the next provincial election and have every intention of supporting them at ballot boxes. People who have no “party” affiliation or control. Free to vote as directed by their constituents. Good and proud people who do the job they are paid to do, and do it very well. If the people of British Columbia direct them to separate, they will. Maybe they won’t agree with separatism, but they’ll do as they’re told because it’s an obligation of office to those who have hired them – the constituents.

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Chapter Three: Tests of the No-Fault Hypothesis

David S. Loughran                                                                                                                Rand Institute                                                                                                                        January 1/2001

The effect of no-fault automobile insurance on driver behavior and automobile accidents in the United States.

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