{"id":59035,"date":"2018-07-11T14:00:49","date_gmt":"2018-07-11T18:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=59035"},"modified":"2018-07-11T14:48:41","modified_gmt":"2018-07-11T18:48:41","slug":"lorinc-doug-fords-un-greening-ontario","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2018\/07\/11\/lorinc-doug-fords-un-greening-ontario\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: Doug Ford’s un-greening of Ontario"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you take a quick stroll through the Government of Ontario\u2019s air quality tracker site \u2013 which I\u2019d recommend doing before it mysteriously disappears in a puff of cost-cutting \u2013 you will come across a few very revealing stats:<\/p>\n

Cast back to the hazy, smoggy summer of 2005, for example \u2014 a year when the City of Toronto had no fewer than 48 days<\/a> with air quality advisories. Two years later, there were 29 days with AQ advisories. I calculated that between 2003 and 2012, the City experienced an average of 15.6 bad air days per year.<\/p>\n

Now think about more recent history, including the past several weeks, which have been very hot and very humid. Despite the heat, that sickly orange haze that hung heavily over Greater Toronto is MIA. Since 2013<\/a>, in fact, the number of days with AQ advisories for Toronto totaled five. Over four and a half years, that\u2019s an average of less than one annually.<\/p>\n

Breath in those data, because they\u2019ll be gone soon enough. If Doug Ford\u2019s attacks on Ontario\u2019s green energy and environmental policies persist through this term — and there\u2019s little reason to think they won\u2019t — we\u2019ll soon be back to the bad old days when public health officials were issuing warnings about cycling or running on certain days and recommending to family members to keep an eye on older people with respiratory illnesses.<\/p>\n

Good times.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s always important to acknowledge, when talking about air quality in southern Ontario, that there are all sorts of externalities at play, not least of which involve the output of the coal-powered generating stations in mid-western states like Ohio, which are up wind of Ontario. Since 2009, and the U.S. government\u2019s bail out of the auto industry, fuel efficiency standards have improved, so those gains likely had some impact on our air quality. Lastly, weather is always a player because smog is produced from the chemical reactions triggered when sunlight interacts with airborne chemicals like nitrous oxide and volatile organic compounds.<\/p>\n

With all those caveats, however, there is obviously a causal connection between the Ontario Liberals\u2019 clean energy policies, the de-commissioning of OPG’s four giant coal-fired generating stations and the air quality we enjoy now. It\u2019s also worth saying that these clean air trends have accelerated despite<\/em> population growth, a lively economy, increased vehicle use and year-over-year warming trends.<\/p>\n

Something, in other words, went very right.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to forget that the Liberals\u2019 ground-breaking 2007 decision to phase out coal necessitated a bold response to replace all that lost base-load energy, which accounted for a quarter of Ontario\u2019s production<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As the International Institute for Sustainable Development observed in 2015, \u201cVery few jurisdictions have committed to coal-phase out, let alone implemented it. But the interest in the mechanics of coal phase-out has been growing, which makes Ontario\u2019s success and leadership on this issue particularly interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fast-forward a decade. During this past election, Ford was successful in stirring the pot with complaints about high electricity prices and the apparently appalling prospect of a cap-and-trade emission-reduction mechanism that hurt no one and aligned Ontario with low-carbon jurisdictions like California and Quebec.<\/p>\n

His alarmist rhetoric, inflected with dog whistles for the climate change denier set, has obscured an important reality, which is that if you take a quarter of the province\u2019s electricity supply out of the mix \u2013 a move supported, lest we forget, by an electoral (\u201cPeople\u2019s\u201d) mandate in 2007 \u2013 then something has to fill the void.<\/p>\n

Much ink has been spilled about the imperfections of the accompanying green energy policies, which provided very generous incentives for wind and solar companies and investors to establish a presence here at a time when you could count the number of Ontario wind turbines on the fingers of one hand.<\/p>\n

The armchair quarterbacks can and did criticize the inflated guaranteed rates provided to green energy firms and natural gas giants. Rural voters in areas with wind farms moaned and groaned about phony health problems and the horrors inflicted on their post-card views. But the truth is that the government had to create a market where none existed. To expect that the officials tasked with this challenge would get it right the first time is delusional.<\/p>\n

The broader point is that there was a price to be paid for taking all the crap out of our air, and that price turned up on our hydro bills.<\/p>\n

Where it belongs.<\/p>\n

Ford, of course, wasn\u2019t alone in exploiting electricity bills for political gain. Andrea Horwath\u2019s NDP banged that drum during the 2014 election, and Kathleen Wynne\u2019s Liberals \u2014 instead of defending their green energy policies and connecting dots that needed to be connected \u2014 opted instead to try to sooth voters with some three-card-monte<\/a> (the \u201cFair Hydro Plan\u201d) masquerading as policy.<\/p>\n

At this point, it\u2019s hard to say how far Ford\u2019s Tories are prepared to push this part of their agenda. As many other pundits have noted, the cancellation of the cap-and-trade looks to be part of an agenda to aggravate Justin Trudeau\u2019s Liberal government in the run-up to the 2019 federal election (Ontario’s cancellation decision, combined with the province’s promised participation in a court challenge to federal carbon tax policies, puts the climate change ball back in the feds\u2019 court). As well, the move yesterday<\/a> to cancel a large wind farm in Prince Edward County \u2013 at the reported cost of about $100 million \u2013 is as much about tending to local grievances as it is about a larger policy agenda.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not difficult to imagine that the Ford government is setting itself up to yank a lot more thread on this particular file, e.g., a costly digression into the suspect world of “clean coal.” And it\u2019s also easy to predict the direction of the other policy domains that will directly impact air quality in southern Ontario \u2013 transit, highway construction, land use planning, vehicle emissions testing, etc.<\/p>\n

The Tories will be working very hard to make sure that voters \u2013 The People! \u2013 don\u2019t connect the dots. Four years hence, however, the proof of the pudding will be in the breathing. I\u2019m guessing the era of hot summer days with clear, azure skies will be replaced by a period of choking haze, both atmospheric and rhetorical.<\/p>\n

photos by Kristen Kee<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you take a quick stroll through the Government of Ontario\u2019s air quality tracker site \u2013 which I\u2019d recommend doing before it mysteriously disappears in a puff of cost-cutting \u2013 you will come across a few very revealing stats: Cast back to the hazy, smoggy summer of 2005, for example \u2014 a year when theContinue reading “LORINC: Doug Ford’s un-greening of Ontario”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"featured_media":59042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13,50,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-green-space","category-infrastructure","category-politics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLORINC: Doug Ford's un-greening of Ontario - 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