Urban Renaissance Institute

How to pack for a Cuban vacation

Posted on December 18, 2004 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
December 18, 2004

Although Cuba welcomes more tourists from Canada than from any other country, some of us don’t know what to expect when we travel to that island paradise. Some travel tips:

Bring a flashlight. Power rationing and cuts, voltage drops and frequency fluctuations, have been getting worse. Blackouts lasting hours are now routine and the government this week hinted that worse electricity shortages may be on the way.

Bring Canadian currency. Cuba now charges a 10% tax to convert U.S. currency. The Canadian dollar can still enter the country duty-free.

Bring toilet paper. But don’t unthinkingly flush it! The little plastic pails commonly found in toilet stalls, including in major buildings such as the Habana Libre (formerly the Havana Hilton), are for soiled toilet paper. Because water pressure is often so low that it slows to a trickle, the burden of paper down a toilet can clog a building’s plumbing system.

Don’t bring bottled water. Bottled water is plentiful in Cuba, even if water from the tap is not.

If you’re travelling with children, you’ll notice that public playgrounds tend to be locked during much of the day and that, in any case, most have such meagre equipment, and it is in such disrepair, that you wouldn’t want your children on it. Well maintained public playgrounds for more privileged Cuban children do exist, however, offering not only the swings, slides, and teeter totters common to Canadian playgrounds but also carousels and other more elaborate playground toys. These public playgrounds require a fee for general admission and additional fees to use the more elaborate equipment. The fees exceed a day’s wage for a Cuban, more than sufficient to keep Cuban riffraff out. If you chance upon a nice playground that doesn’t charge user fees, you’ve probably found a private playground for the children of government officials. Poor children can only watch but the attendant won’t object if you let your children try out the equipment.

Many independent tourists get to know ordinary Cubans in their travels and develop a sympathy for the Cuban people, once the most prosperous in the Caribbean, now among the poorest. If you would like to help, there are several ways to do so, even if travelling on a budget:

Bring lots of pharmaceuticals. Cuba has drugs aplenty for those who count – senior officials in the government or military and tourists bringing foreign exchange – but ordinary Cubans are out of luck if they need help, even in life-threatening situations. Drugs are in such short supply, in fact, that the state has ordered doctors not to prescribe medicines that aren’t available to the general public (although many will quietly slip their patients a note describing the medication they need, in hopes they can somehow obtain it). Hospital care is free but patients are expected to bring their own bandages, sheets and food.

By cleaning out your medicine chest at home of supplies that you’re unlikely to use, you can do great good at little trouble and expense. With the collapse of socialized medicine, Cuban churches have become major distributors of donated pharmaceuticals and medical supplies. They will gladly receive any health care products that you can drop off, and bless you for it.

Take a Cuban family out to dinner. Cubans who work in tourism and other government patronage jobs fare relatively well but less favoured workers in the Cuban economy often don’t get enough to eat – their monthly ration cards will only meet about one-third of their food needs. Consider asking them out to dinner. Many Cubans will refuse, both out of fear to be seen with you and from a sense that they won’t be allowed into a better restaurant. But others will jump at the chance to give themselves and their family a treat and enjoy, for example, a piece of chicken or true Cuban coffee (the government exports Cuban coffee, or reserves it for tourists, to earn foreign exchange, and imports cheap Vietnamese coffee, which it mixes with ground chick peas, for distribution via ration cards – less than one ounce of coffee per month).

Leave excess clothes behind in Cuba: Travellers to Cuba often lug spare clothing, to accommodate the variable weather – hot days, cool nights – that they’re likely to encounter. These clothes can become a liability if packing space is required for gifts, souvenirs, and other finds that they want to bring back home. To make room for those souvenirs, consider bringing clothes with you that you can leave behind for needy families (they’re virtually all needy). Don’t worry about offending them. Cubans will receive such gifts with grace and dignity, genuinely grateful even for clothes in need of repair. These industrious people have lots of labour with which to renovate clothes but little fabric or much of anything else.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

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Sowing the skyline

Posted on November 13, 2004 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
November 13, 2004

Cities are the once and future centres of agriculture. That’s true in spades for cities that are chic and sophisticated, and chock-a-block with people.

Paris until a century ago was an agricultural powerhouse, producing some 110 pounds of produce per person per year in the area known as Le Marais, now a trendy district of residences and museums. Other major cities, on both sides of the Atlantic, were also large food producers, meeting much of their own food needs and exporting their specialties to each other. But Paris was in a class by itself, not only because of the scale of its operations – one-sixth of its area was turned to food production – but also because it perfected the high-input, high-profit, niche farming phenomenon known as la culture maraichere. During its heyday from the 1850s to the late 1880s, a period during which its population doubled from one to two million, this intensive form of market gardening produced more than 100,000 tons a year of lucrative, out-of-season salad crops as well as other vegetables, fruits and flowers. Much of this cultivation employed advanced greenhouse technologies, occurring under glass-covered frames and bell-shaped glass cloches that trapped the warmth of the sun.

London, a more populous city, was less of an agricultural power, not because it lacked technology – England had launched the Industrial Revolution – but because it lacked an essential present in Paris: an appetite for fine food in a great number of citizens willing to pay a handsome premium for it. In the Paris market, competition for fresh produce was so acute that, for example, a mere one-day delay in getting apricots to market cost one-seventh the sale price. This demand for culinary excellence drove innovations that let the Paris maraichers overcome the chief impediments to farming in the city, namely the high cost of urban land and other inputs.

The maraichers’ solution lay in replacing the technology of the farmer – the plow, the horse – with that of the gardener. To get more produce out of each tiny plot, Parisian gardeners germinated seeds separately, then transplanted them into beds of loam, often under glass, to develop their rootlets. Sickly plants would be discarded and successful ones bedded in the scarce, open ground, where they would be tended until ready for next day, and often same day, consumption. Using this intensive method of cultivation, Paris gardeners obtained three to six growing seasons in a city that had been considered “two degrees of latitude” too north to grow vegetables year round.

The heat needed to emulate the soils of more southerly climes came only partly from the sun. Horse manure – 100,000 tons of it a year, much of it from the city’s extensive horse-drawn public transit system – not only formed new soil and provided nutrients but, more importantly, warmed the soil as it fermented. Carbon dioxide from the fermenting manure also aided plant growth. Water, a commodity often scarce in cities, came from the sewers, pumped by steam engines through the maraichers’ personal irrigation pipes.

The rise of public transit, in effect, fuelled an urban farm industry, but improvements in public transit also spelled the farm industry’s demise. When motorized vehicles replaced the horse-drawn car, urban agriculturalists lost their cheap fuel and fertilizer. Coupled with the high cost of city land, urban farming was doomed. By World War I, Paris’s once plentiful market gardens – 1,800 of them on 3,500 acres at their peak – had all but disappeared. In other western cities, urban farming also died out.

Yet urban agriculture has never lost its potential, as can be seen in affluent Hong Kong, the world’s densest city. Because Hong Kong’s Chinese population places a high premium on fresh produce and freshly killed animals, the city produces two-thirds of the poultry, one-sixth of the pigs, and almost half of the vegetables eaten by its citizens and visitors on about 5% of the city’s land. Dense, affluent Singapore, which even farms between highrises, similarly shows agriculture’s viability: Singapore’s 10,000 urban farmers produce 80% of the poultry and one-quarter of the vegetables consumed locally.

Without the zoning laws that now outlaw agriculture in western cities, and without the subsidies to inefficient rural agriculture, many of our cities, too, would see farms on underused lands. Urban farming could be ubiquitous in cities, including in dense downtowns, by tapping into free energy, free water, and free land that now goes wasted.

The city’s abundance of plots, suitable for growing fruits, vegetables, and flowers, are found atop its office towers, condos, and apartment buildings. There reside the buildings’ heating and cooling systems which are often placed on roofs to dispose of their waste heat, among other reasons. Greenhouses located next to this roof equipment, or on platforms built above the equipment, could capture an inexhaustible amount of waste heat year-round, giving them a competitive advantage over rural greenhouses, whose energy costs are often their single-biggest operating expense. Rooftop greenhouses, as well as open-air plant beds, would have other advantages, too. Their produce could be delivered by elevator directly to stores and restaurants at ground level, and to customers within the buildings, rather than requiring trucking and warehousing. Unlike rural farms, which often vie for water with residential and recreational users, urban farms would tap into plentiful supplies of treated “grey water” – the waste water from kitchens, washrooms, or other facilities suitable for irrigating plants. Pumping grey water up to roof nurseries instead of disposing of it by sewers, and diverting rainwater to roof crops instead of carrying it down pipes below ground, would also relieve pressure on municipal water works. Only one major impediment prevents rooftop farms: urban zoning laws that ban commercial agriculture in cities. Rescind the laws and plantations would become a fixture of the urban skyline.

As it is, many high-end restaurants already plant at roof level – it’s legal to do so if they use their crops in their own operations – and hydroponic gardening and balcony crops have become a billion-dollar industry. Vegetation atop buildings provides environmental benefits. In many European cities, these “green roofs” are used to insulate buildings from heat and cold, cleanse air of pollutants, and prevent roof runoff from entering the sewer systems. These amenities also save money for the building owners and for society as a whole, largely justifying the expense of the green roof installation and convincing many North American cities to join the trend. One more amenity – fresh, high quality produce – would put the economic calculation over the top.

This is last of a series; Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer PolicyInstitute, divisions of Toronto-based Energy Probe ResearchFoundation. www.urban.probeinternational.org

Related article:

Let every roof bloom

Posted in Agriculture (Urban) | Leave a comment

Let every roof bloom

Posted on November 6, 2004 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
November 6, 2004

Sod atop a building shields it from cold in winter, from heat in summer, and from sound year round. It makes buildings more hospitable for those who live or work within them. Roof vegetation also makes cities more hospitable for the general population: It cleans air of dust and rainwater of heavy metals, reduces smog, ground-level ozone and other pollutants, and moderates the “heat island effect” that raises city temperatures above that of the surrounding countryside.

For these and other reasons, dozens of cities in Europe and a handful in North America have become green-roof friendly. What started as a fringe environmental movement in Germany in the 1960s has grown to achieve mainstream acceptance. The Gap’s new headquarters in San Bruno, Calif., and Ford’s in Irvine, Calif., both use green roofs to improve acoustics and save resources, and many North American governments fund demonstration projects. The latest convert – Canada’s new Environment Minister, Stephane Dion – may well be right in saying last week, “This will be the future in 10, 20 years from now. You will see that everywhere.”

Green roofs may not bloom everywhere for long, however, under the approach of Mr. Dion and other government backers. Most green roofs are net money losers, even after counting savings for their owners in heating and air conditioning costs, and in lowered maintenance costs. To make up the shortfall, governments provide subsidies and other preferences, some of them sensible. For example, real estate developers must often provide a city with free parkland to win permission to proceed with a project. In lieu of green space at ground level, politicians have begun to accept green space above.

But politicians can be fickle, and preferences granted today can be withdrawn tomorrow, when green roofs are supplanted by another trendy technology. To make the future of green roofs safe as houses, they would need to be financially self-sufficient, by generating revenue. In many large cities, this already happens: Entrepreneurs are turning a profit from their rooftops, often surreptitiously and without need of government programs, through niche agricultural operations that capitalize on niche urban markets.

Many downtown restaurants tend their own rooftop gardens to obtain the freshly picked herbs and vegetables that their specialty dishes require. Toronto’s Royal York Hotel has one of North America’s most extensive open-air rooftop garden, growing enough organic parsley, sage, tarragon, basil, peppermint, spearmint, chives, marjoram and hot peppers to satisfy its restaurants’ 100 chefs from July to September. Speaking for chefs everywhere, John Cordeaux, the hotel’s executive chef, said “Everyone’s dream in any kitchen is to have their own herb garden [because] as soon as something’s cut, it will start to lose its flavour.”

Apprentice chefs pick herbs for immediate use and, between meals, kitchen staff tend the garden, which also grows vegetables such as runner beans and lemon thyme. Being 14 stories up has growing advantages, too. The taller downtown office towers provide shelter from the wind, and some insects and other pests don’t find their way to the roof (“There are no deer here,” the hotel quips), aiding the garden to be organic, a strong selling point in upscale markets.

The Royal York’s rooftop operation is legal – but just. Toronto’s zoning laws, like those in most cities, generally outlaw commercial agricultural activities within city boundaries. Because the Royal York’s agricultural output is peripheral to its restaurant and hotel business, and because it doesn’t sell its produce to other merchants, the city doesn’t enforce its prohibition. But many restaurants don’t have roof space at their disposal, or the staffing flexibility required to economically tend a garden. Urban farmers that opernly tried to set up commercial rooftop farms to service the city’s many tony restaurants, fine grocers, and chi-chi caterers would quickly be put out of business.

Remove these prohibitions and rooftop farms become financially viable without need of government subsidies. They would become a common feature within cities, alleviating the immense demand that now exists for urban gardens. With this new industry would come new jobs, mostly in small operations, many of them providing an important source of income for retirees, home workers, and others who don’t have 9 to 5 jobs. As green roofs became rooted in urban life, food freshness, food quality, and food variety would grow.

Green roofs would provide another quality-of-life amenity, too. Ever since King Nebuchadnezzar decided to please his queen by building the Hanging Gardens of Babylon – one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – atop a large brick building south of present-day Baghdad, roof gardens have been planted in the human imagination. Roman architecture featured hanging gardens and rooftop vegetation, as did the city of Genoa during the Renaissance. In 17th century Russia and 18th century France, many constructed vertical gardens for their beauty. More recently, two of the greatest architects of the 20th century, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, extolled rooftop vegetation. This timeless vision has never been closer.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Toronto-based Energy Probe Research Foundation.; www.Urban.probeinternational.org; Next week: Urban agriculture’s immense potential.

Related article:

Sowing the Skyline

Posted in Agriculture (Urban) | Leave a comment

Time to move energy-intensive industries offshore

Posted on October 16, 2004 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
October 16, 2004

To counter the high energy prices that consumers now face, governments in Canada and the U.S. have been subsidizing domestic energy production. This dirty government business lowers the bill a little for consumers but raises it a lot for taxpayers, making us worse off in the exchange.

Much better to offshore our unproductive industries, most of them energy guzzlers, to reduce energy demand. That would lower both our energy bills and our tax bills. Magnifying the benefits, such offshoring would also eliminate the subsidies our bad businesses receive.

The latest money sinkholes come in the form of Arctic pipelines. Earlier this week, the U.S. Senate provided an 1,800 mile Alaskan pipeline project with US$18-billion in loan guarantees – fully 90% of the cost of the project’s estimated costs – all to bring natural gas to southern markets a decade from now.

The generosity shown the pipeline’s backers – a consortium including BP, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips – may be just the beginning of the immense subsidies this project will need. The companies, worried that energy prices may plummet after the Middle East conflagrations pass, have been lobbying for floor prices for their natural gas. Should the price of the project increase as expected – TransCanada’s competing and also uneconomic Arctic pipeline project has just seen its cost rise by one-third – the invisible corporate hand that guides much of the economy will again be outstretched, in demand for fresh subsidies.

Arctic pipelines are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to subsidizing the continent’s energy systems. Since the 1960s, most major energy investments – whether in tar sands, nuclear plants, hydroelectric dams or ethanol – have had no economic justification. Rather, they have typically met two political needs – direct support for unviable energy industries and indirect support for unviable energy-intensive industries, often in resource sectors. Continent wide, perhaps one-quarter of all energy is consumed in uneconomic industries, with Canada the disproportionately bigger wastrel.

The Quebec government, one of the most aggressive subsidizers, has long attracted electricity intensive industries with offers of cash and deep-discounted power, provided courtesy of state-owned Hydro-Quebec. Two years ago, for example, the previous Parti Quebecois government convinced aluminum giant Alcoa to spend US$825-million expanding a smelter at Baie Comeau. The price? An US$128-million interest-free loan, a 10-year provincial tax holiday, and dirt-cheap power. The estimated cost to the provincial purse per job created? Some $100,000.

The deal came unstuck this year after a newly elected Liberal party reneged on the agreement and in its stead offered a mere US$100-million interest-free loan and 50 years of “low-cost electricity” with annual rate hikes no higher than inflation. The estimated cost per job? $60,000.

The prospect of electricity costs rising with inflation was too much for Alcoa to contemplate. “We could not reach an agreement on a formula that would have ensured long-term affordable energy for the Baie-Comeau modernization project,” Alcoa Canada Primary Metals president Jean-Pierre Gilardeau said in June, in announcing the breakdown of negotiations. “With energy representing more than 30% of our operating costs, we simply cannot invest $1-billion [Canadian] in a project with the risk that energy prices will rise considerably over the life of that project. Over 40 years, even with only moderate increases, energy would represent a $10-billion cost.”

The story will have a happy ending, but only if the negotiations aren’t revived and Alcoa builds its smelter elsewhere. In Quebec, taxpayers will be spared and electricity rate-payers, too – to pay for Alcoa’s cheap power, Hydro-Quebec has been raising electricity rates on its residential customers. The additional money in the pockets of Quebec citizens will be spent in more productive ways, creating more jobs than those lost at the smelter.

Alcoa would then move on, as it has already begun to do, to the many countries that can intelligently host energy-intensive industries. Often these are developing countries with vast natural gas reserves that don’t lend themselves to ready export. Alcoa this week announced that it would be building a 322 tonne aluminum smelter in Trinidad and Tobago, an island nation that can’t easily bring its vast natural gas reserves to market. The smelter industry will create jobs in Trinidad where it would cost jobs in Quebec, and it will help the island develop rationally, where it prevents Quebec from developing rationally.

For such reasons, Alcoa and other energy-intensive industries are slowly vacating the continent, their rate of departure slowed only by their access to below-market energy supplies, and to the public purse. Cut off their access and they’ll more quickly gravitate offshore, where they’re wanted and needed. Cut off their access and North America won’t need to subsidize energy megaprojects because we, too, will become awash in energy.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Toronto-based Energy Probe Research Foundation. http://www.urban.probeinternational.org

Posted in Energy | Leave a comment

Wind at our backs

Posted on October 8, 2004 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
October 8, 2004

In a pinch, Canada could meet 100% of its electricity needs with wind power, numerous studies indicate. A report released last week by the authoritative General Accounting Office in the United States shows just how attainable a 100% wind power society would be.

The United States, with a smaller land mass than Canada, already meets the needs of two million households through wind power and is adding to that total by putting the equivalent of about 500,000 additional homes on wind power each year. If those windmills were in Canada instead, we would be meeting the needs of about 2.5 million Canadian households through wind by the end of the year. That 2.5 million represents about one-fifth of Canada’s households.

Germany, with an area one-thirtieth that of Canada, blows even stronger, having built more than twice as much wind capacity as the United States. If Germany’s windmills were in Canada, we could now be meeting the needs of about five million households with wind power – more than 40% of all Canadian households. The land mass of just two and a half Germanies, in other words, would be enough to meet all of Canada’s household needs, using existing wind technologies.

Wind technologies haven’t been standing pat, however. Year after year for more than two decades now, this fabled but long-ignored technology has been getting more and more efficient, relentlessly driving down costs. In the 1980s, power from wind often cost US30 cents a kilowatt-hour. Today, says the U.S. Department of Energy, the cost is between US3 cents and US6 cents, allowing it to out-compete many conventional technologies on both sides of the border. In Alberta, for example, the cost of wind power being built by TransAlta is about 5 cents to 6 cents a kilowatt-hour, well below the 9 cents-plus the governments of Manitoba and Ontario may spend to bring power to market from Conawapa, a proposed new mega-dam on Manitoba’s Nelson River. Wind has long been cheaper than nuclear power and at today’s fossil fuel prices, wind power competes well against both oil and gas.

Even before the recent run-up in oil and gas prices, wind power was sweeping the world, with a five-fold increase in capacity since 1997. In the United States, wind power has been increasing at a 28%-per-year clip, far exceeding U.S. government expectations, and there’s no let-up in sight. As it is, 90% of U.S. wind power is generated in just 10 states, more than 50% in just three states. According to a U.S. Department of Energy study, three states alone – North Dakota, Texas and Kansas – could meet the entire energy needs of the United States.

Wind power, of course, currently meets an insignificant part of the power needs of most Western countries. The reason? For almost a century, wind power has suffered a great curse called Public Power. In the early decades of the 20th century, before governments landed hard on the electricity business, windmills were ubiquitous in many farming regions of Canada and the United States, generally to pump water. Because electricity could not be economically brought to rural areas from city power plants, entrepreneurs successfully adapted windmills to small-scale farm use. By the mid-1920s, such companies as Parris-Dunn and Jacobs Wind-electric were electrifying farms throughout the rural areas of the Midwestern prairies, first by providing lighting and charging batteries for crystal radio sets, then, as the technologies advanced, by powering refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, power tools and other appliances. The future seemed bright for windmills; they were the most economical source of power for much of rural North America.

Public Power then blew on to the scene, in the form of rural electrification programs that offered farmers power at deep discounts if they switched from windmill-generated electricity to power from a centralized grid, brought to rural areas at great expense. The windmill entrepreneurs, unable to compete against the government-mandated subsidies, were snuffed out, ending their innovations and replacing their renewable-energy technology with power from remote power utilities that typically relied on burning coal. Wind technology remained extinguished for decades, until the environmental movement resurrected it in the late 1970s. Now wind technology is roaring back, logging the fastest growth of any energy technology in the world.

Wind has many selling points, apart from its availability. It doesn’t pollute, it doesn’t run out. And unlike most of its competitors, its cost keeps falling. Yet despite these attractions, a crash program to switch us to wind would be a mistake. Other energy forms also have their attractions, and they, too, are plentiful. Canada’s tar sands have enough petroleum to run our power plants indefinitely. Our natural gas is also endless for all practical purposes, as are our uranium, our coal and our solar-energy resources. The availability of energy is not at issue, only the cost, cleanliness and safety of our energy choices.

In all these areas, governments have spoiled the electricity marketplace by subsidizing all energy forms – oil and gas, wind and solar, coal and nuclear. The subsidies have enabled dirty fuels, such as coal, to compete and dangerous ones, such as nuclear, to exempt themselves from legal liability. The subsidies have turned reality inside out, making the implausible seem normal and the normal seem impossible.

Without subsidies, windmills would be a commonplace that dotted our countryside and perhaps our cities, too, while nuclear power would be a rarity, mostly limited to the university and government research labs that could afford them. Without subsidies, we would consume less natural gas and oil, and be much more efficient in our use of power, using perhaps half as much as we do today to enjoy the same standard of living.

Without subsidies, we would have assured energy supplies. Instead, we subsidize energy and suffer periodic shortages. All because our politicians have no principles to guide them, and go whichever way the wind blows.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Toronto-based Energy Probe Research Foundation. www.Urban-Renaissance.org

Readers’ respond

Tilting at windmills

Lawrence Solomon seems to think that we can install thousands of wind-turbines and get all the electricity that Canada requires from them. It’s a nice dream, but dream it is.

In Britain the aim is to achieve 20% of their requirements from wind power. They are beginning to realize that they can’t even approach 20%. Even that windy environmentalist, the Prince of Wales, is crying enough already. The Brits have had enough of those ugly things cluttering up their countryside and killing songbirds. The Germans are also saying they want no more.

It doesn’t matter how inexpensive wind power gets – it will never approach the cost of conventional methods of generation.

The wind is fickle and cannot be controlled by mere man. When the wind doesn’t blow, or blows too hard, we get no power. If the breeze is light we get very little power. For every watt of wind power there must be an equal amount of conventional power available. So we must install conventional backup power. If we are to avoid blackouts this backup power must be what is known as spinning power. In other words, the backup generators must be running consuming energy ready to switch in instantly.

Jim Brennand, Regina, October 18, 2004

Re: Lawrence Solomon, “Wind at Our Backs,” Oct. 8. Mr. Solomon states “In a pinch, Canada could meet 100% of its electricity needs with wind power, numerous studies indicate.”

“The pinch” would be after closure of about 80% of all major heavy industry (auto, aircraft, mining, smelting, sawmills, pulp and paper, shipbuilding, refining, manufacturing etc.), with the accompanying loss of jobs. It would also require draconian government interference rationing us all to no more than a couple of 100 watt light bulbs for light, and outlawing electrical heating, and most electronic toys and electrical tools for home use. The same government would also have to change a few natural items, like banning some of the winter weather that we in Canada are exposed to each year, and put a hold on the cold winter months.

Those industries that managed to plug along would have their “hours of work” tied to those days and times when the wind was blowing steadily, with work disruptions at unpredictable hours, and with numerous days and weeks when sometimes there would be no work at all. Welcome back to the Dirty Thirties.

There are some uses where wind power has real value (pumping water, charging batteries, and maybe even electrolyzing water (eventually) to produce hydrogen, but putting electricity onto the grid is not one of them unless you have no other choices.

Yes, wind-power is the fastest growing source of electricity. When you start from close to zero, any addition is a massive percentage. However, in terms of megawatts added each year, it cannot even keep up with the required annual growth in electrical demand in most advancing countries.

Other environmentalists decry windmills’ blight on the landscape. The major rare bird kills (which is why windmills are also called the “cuisinarts” of the bird world), and now, as revealed in Texas, stupendous killers of bats. They are also great lightning rods.

Contrary to Mr. Solomon’s selective view of history, the prairie farmers welcomed the electrical grid as an assured and affordable source of electricity, and were mostly glad to let their rattling windmills rust out if they did not need them to pump water. No-one had to twist their arms.

John K. Sutherland, energy consultant, Fredericton, October 18, 2004