Ottawa’s suicidal climate plans a cautionary tale for governments everywhere

Energy Probe believes that the Energy Evolution Plan is unrealistic and the residents of Ottawa will be using natural gas for home and water heating for many years to come and that Enbridge will need the pipeline to supply them.

Equally astonishing is the magnitude of the "renewable" energy projects that the City of Ottawa says it will engage in to meet its "net-zero by 2050" target:

• 36 square kilometers of rooftop solar will be required, they say, a 161,485% increase over today's levels;
• 710 industrial wind turbines, each taller than the UK Parliament's Elizabeth Tower that houses Big Ben, and
• 122 large shipping containers of lithium batteries for power storage.

No one seems to have considered how such monumental constructions will ever be disposed of.

According to numerous studies, cold weather kills 10 to 20 times as many people across the world each year as does hot weather. One international study of 74 million deaths at 384 locations in 13 countries found a ratio of 20 to one as to cold-related or heat-related deaths. The findings were published in the peer-reviewed general medical journal The Lancet. Yet the City of Ottawa's leaders focus only on possible detrimental effects of warming, completely ignoring the far more dangerous, and indeed more probable, dangers of cooling. It doesn't seem to cross their minds that, as the seventh coldest national capital city in the world, their citizens might enjoy a couple of extra degrees of warming every winter.

The price tag for Ottawa's coming self-induced crisis is incredible. They are committed to spending $57.4 billion through 2050 to fight global warming. That's about $60 thousand for every man, woman, and child in a city of only a million souls. The revenues to finance these expenditures would come largely from additional taxes and fees imposed on Ottawa residents, including road tolls ($1.6 billion), congestion charges ($338 million), road user fees ($188 million), and land transfer tax increases ($130 million). In addition to major increases in electricity costs, property taxes are expected to rise by almost 40%. Ottawa residents would also pay much higher parking fees for much reduced public parking spaces.

In contrast to the city's overarching vision to transition "Ottawa to a clean, renewable, and resilient city by 2050," its current plans would transform Ottawa into a polluted, fragile and bankrupt city suffering from regular dangerous blackouts and business failures. Few people would voluntarily choose to live here.

In one way, the City of Ottawa has done the world a great favor, not with respect to stopping climate change, of course, a totally impossible objective, but because the city's actions are a cautionary tale of what can and will inevitably happen when fiscal policy and hard-nosed science and engineering are subordinated to ideology and special interest, pressure politics. No one should follow Ottawa's example.