The future is going to be a lot of fun in Ontario. Just a few years from now, millions of us will be liberated from our evil fossil-fuelled transportation network. Millions of government-subsidized electric cars will whisk us silently to work. Our buses will run on biofuels. Our retrofitted geothermal-powered homes will keep us warm at prices much higher than today’s natural gas (which would be banned). Vast tracts of land will be diverted to solar panels, which will transform the sun’s rays into clean, green, righteous energy – as soon as we can figure out how to store it and attach it to the grid. Unicorns will frolic in our gardens, and pigs will fly.
Ontario’s new draft Climate Change Action Plan is a breathtaking work of fantasy, wrought by folks who evidently never met an engineer, an economist, or anybody else who knows how the real world works. Glen Murray, the Environment Minister, is a notoriously Big Thinker. There is nothing necessarily wrong with government ministers who majored in social work and community development. But they absolutely should not be allowed to run amok unsupervised.
The provincial government will reduce our carbon footprint by micromanaging every aspect of our lives and our economy. Its plan will throw our auto and energy industries into chaos, and further enrage every small town in Ontario, whose rights have been trampled by German salesmen selling giant industrial wind turbines. It will drive some of the highest electricity prices in North America even higher.
Not everyone will lose, though. The Action Plan will be a gravy train for subsidy seekers, lobbyists and hawkers of green schemes, who show up in droves whenever free money’s being handed out.
It’s hard to pick out one wrong thing with this plan, because all of it is nutty. Let’s start with electric cars. The plan says 12 per cent of all new cars should be electric by 2025. (The market share of electric cars in Canada is currently 0.35 per cent.) How will this happen? Subsidies! You too can drive a Tesla.
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