Category Archives: Aldyen Donnelly

Unfortunately, the Danish wind industry is living up to my prior forecasts—evidence can be found most easily in the fact that here were no new turbines built in Denmark between 2006 and 2009.  

In 2009 the Danish government approved applications for developers to site 1,300 MWs of capacity onshore—1/3 of which were replacement turbines, not incremental capacity.  But the condition of approval was that from then on all new wind power project developers would be required to compensate affected Danish landowners for declines in their property values.  
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The myth that carbon/energy taxes translate into green goods-producing job growth is namely that, a myth. In fact, 100% of the incremental job growth in carbon/high energy tax policy-dominated nations has been in the public sector, as goods-producing jobs flee.
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The Ontario government’s plan to turn off coal and switch to biomass at the Atikokan Generation Station is a VERY expensive way to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions.

I am all for the generation of electricity from biomass/pellets. But EVERY European biomass-fired and co-fired electricity generation unit also produces a significant amount of heat (steam and/or hot water) that is supplied into a district heating system.
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Implementing tariffs to discriminate against environmentally subsidized imports is a horrible—and very 1950s—idea.

When we decided that it was unhealthy to sell toys in Canada that were covered with leaded paint, did we: (1) prohibit the manufacture of leaded paint in Canada and (2) put a tariff on leaded paint and leaded painted toy imports? Certainly not. Everyone involved agreed that would have been a stupid idea. So why are we seriously contemplating such a stupid idea to address the damage of GHGs and other pollutants?

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A recent announcement that 50 members of Congress are opposed to growing imports from Canada’s “filthy” oil sands is a matter that can only be addressed by a federal, not provincial, government initiative—using data that Eddy Isaacs in the government of Alberta can provide. The problem appears to be, however, that our federal team does not know where and how they are supposed to be entering the US Congressional dialogue. 
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British Columbians instinctively know what the Brits and other Europeans started to discover between 1999 and 2004. That is that value-added and carbon taxes are highly regressive and no government can cost-effectively administer the follow-up programmes whose stated objectives are to mitigate the highly regressive nature of the original income-to-tax shift.
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Last week I had some rather enlightening conversations with a few very senior BC government officials. We talked about BC’s evolving GHG offset system (I raised concerns about offset protocols that doubt and triple count reductions) and the developing BC cap and trade regime.  

Two disturbing comments were repeated by most of the senior officials I talked to—even though the conversations were independent of each other and I did not prompt the comments:

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