Articles by John McGrath

The coming nuclear expansion in Ontario is absent from election debate

There's a bit of a, whatchamacallit, an election coming down in Ontario. So far a number of issues have come up (e.g. schools), but the governing Liberals' plan to increase nuclear power construction in Toronto isn't one of them. It's a shame, because a number of recent articles in the Toronto Star show how this plan is being undermined before it's even gotten off the ground.

First of all, there's the problem that the existing reactors are delivering sub-par performance this summer. The reactors at both Pickering and Bruce have been shut down unexpectedly, leading to a double-digit increase in coal generation. Yech. The plan has been to run the existing reactors to the end of their lives and refurbish or replace them, but with the existing problems it may be necessary to do so early -- or, if replacement is impossible, shut them down and rely more on ... what, coal?

A review

For a few days after reading The Upside of Down, I annoyed most of my friends and family by reciting chunks of Homer-Dixon's work back to them -- I couldn't get it out of my head. I do this a lot to people, but not usually for days and days on end after reading a book.

The Upside of Down isn't an environmental book, exactly, though it does deal with environmental and energy issues. While it shares some themes with more explicitly environmental books (like Jared Diamond's Collapse), the core of the book is more political and sociological. Homer-Dixon is asking why societies collapse -- what are the pressures our society faces today, and what, if any, are the positive results from the kind of collapse he's talking about?

Even in Canada

So, about a year ago I wrote briefly about Marc Jaccard, a Canadian economist whose book, Sustainable Fossil Fuels, has been exceedingly popular in Canadian policy-making circles. No surprise there -- any book that says we can have our cheesecake and eat it too is going to find a wide audience among politicians averse to making any tough decision, ever.

I was, you could say, less than charitable to Jaccard's ideas. But the latest news from Canada's Conservative do-nothing-about-global-warming government makes me almost feel sorry for him.

Why we gotta knock solar?

Can we please, once and for all, stop decrying solar energy for being too area-intensive? See, for example, the oft-cited statistic that to power its economy, the U.S. would need "10 billion meters, squared, of land." America isn't exactly short on square meters, and awfully sunny ones at that. But 10 billion square meters sounds a lot bigger than it really is.

10,000 square kilometers (100km x 100km) form a square you could drive around entirely, at legal highway speeds, in four hours. (Less if you speed.) 10,000 square kilometers is also roughly one-fortieth the area that the human species has already occupied for hydroelectric reservoirs -- all to produce, according to the IEA, 15 percent of current global electricity demand. (This certainly overstates the efficiency of large dams, which do not produce 100 percent of the world's hydroelectric power.)

Get that? For vastly less space than we already consume for the pittance we get from hydroelectric dams, we could power the world. Space is not the limiting factor -- and soon enough, cost won't be either. Which will leave mulish stupidity the remaining roadblock.