Focus is on global, not local, issues says Ian Lee

June 23, 2021

Professor Ian Lee with the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University told radio talk show host Rob Snow with 1310 City News yesterday that Ottawa’s City Council is concerning itself with issues driven by ideology such as the “climate emergency” and not taking care of business at home.

On the issue of the $1B plan for electric city buses, Lee said that is a good idea—who doesn’t want “green” vehicles, he said—but it is far too soon to be approving such a plan. “Post-COVID, I don’t know how many people are going back to the workplace,” he said. “I don’t know, nobody knows. Is it 10 percent? Is it 30 percent? Nobody knows.”

The issue is best left for three or four years, he advised, when we are well out of the global pandemic and cities can look at how they are evolving.

Ottawa actions are too often driven by “ideologues” he said, and not by analysis and facts.  

Worsening that is the presence of Ottawa’s “Sugar Daddy,” the federal government, which is now funding “green” schemes aimed at votes.

That certainly applies to the Energy Evolution document approved by the City last fall with little or no attention, or public feedback. The document is full of questionable assumptions such as that population will increase by 50 percent in fewer than 30 years, as well as highly political statements such as it’s up to Ottawa to “offset” emitting power sources on the Ontario grid.

There is no cost-benefit analysis, no impact analysis, and no full honest accounting of what reliance on costly intermittent renewables such as wind and solar will cost Ottawa’s energy consumers.

Read the Energy Evolution document here, and pay attention to page 68 where the real author Pollution Probe calls for 3200 megawatts of wind power for the city to achieve Net Zero.