May 22, 2001

Dear Friend:

Wind power has become economic, the Wall Street Journal reported recently. In areas blessed with steady winds and cursed by high gas and nuclear prices, windmills no longer need subsidies to compete against most conventional sources of electricity. In the Pacific Northwest, the Bonneville Power Administration plans to buy 1,000 megawatts of wind energy by 2003, enough to supply a city of 500,000.

We also have good news about reducing our oil dependency: Biofuels are becoming feasible throughout the world. To pick one Canadian example, Energy Probe is working with Resource Efficient Agricultural Production, an agricultural research institute in Montreal, to develop the enormous potential of energy crops. Our tests show that fast-growing grasses can be grown almost anywhere across Southern Canada, and then turned into a convenient fuel that does not create greenhouse gases. Within just five years, Canada could economically produce enough of this fuel to meet our home-heating needs and more, and at about half the cost of oil.

The stage is now set for a gradual phase-out of dangerous and polluting nonrenewable fuels such as oil, gas and nuclear power. There are only two worrying roadblocks: governments in Canada and governments in the U.S.

Our federal and provincial governments are continuing to subsidize uneconomic nonrenewable fuels. In the Arctic, for example, tax dollars are subsidizing a massive pipeline project to bring natural gas south for export to the U.S.; in Ontario, the government is spending almost $2 billion to revive decades-old coal and nuclear plants that haven’t run for years.

In the U.S., meanwhile, President George W. Bush is boosting subsidies to coal and nuclear power while slashing subsidies to conservation and renewable energy.

Despite such unfair competition in the past, renewable forms of energy have performed superbly. Wood fuel provides three times as much useful energy in Canada as nuclear power, and conservation continues to make impressive inroads. So impressive, in fact, that our economy now needs just a fraction of the fuel that it needed in 1980 to produce an equivalent value of goods and services. And last year, for the first time in decades, vehicles logged fewer miles than the year before, despite a prosperous economy and increased population.

With conservation and renewable energy having proven themselves in the marketplace, there is no valid reason under this sun to continue to subsidize polluting alternatives. A future based on nonrenewable fuels is simply not safe, clean, or affordable. A future based on solar and renewable energy is not only desirable environmentally, it is desirable economically and it is inevitable.

If you agree that governments should stop propping up yesterday’s technologies with tax dollars and other subsidies to the oil and nuclear industries, and that governments should let solar and renewable energy compete fairly, please help us get this message out with a generous, tax-creditable donation.

With your help, we can expand our work to promote conservation and renewable energy and we can level the playing field to usher in a safe and prosperous solar and renewable energy future.

Sincerely,

Tom Adams
Executive Director