From Cork to Toronto

As Environment Minister Baird muses aloud about how those pesky Liberals like Stephane Dion subsidised the tarsands and he can't figure out why, the U.S. House of Representatives votes 264-163, including 36 Republicans voting with the majority Democrats, to repeal US$14bn of oil subsidies and other financial benefits . (NYT, rego required) Garth Turner fires back at Baird, pointing out some interesting issues: Dion was not involved in the programme Baird mentioned the programme began when oil was at $21/bbl, not $50 as it has been recently tarsands get more financial benefits than conventional oil and gas - in fact the same incentives as renewables Turner goes on : what we don’t need is an environment minister who has started his mandate lying about who did what, when, instead of what he’s going to do, now. Indeed. However, it would have been good to see the Martin government think aloud about these subsidies when they had the chance. From when Martin took power in December 2003...

This isn't a follow up to Thursday's post but rather to Far and Wide's entry about Stephane Dion's speech on energy in Alberta during the week. I was posting in response to another comment by someone called "Sceptical Environmental": Answer me this: if Dion were sincere in wanting us to use less gas, why did he vote against California-style mandatory emissions standards last year? Dion also said his solution to climate change in the oil sands is to have nukes power the whole thing. Who says this guy's an environmentalist?? Dion said the absolute opposite - that while energy generation is a provincial matter, he does not believe nuclear is a viable option . I disagree. Given the size of the comment my disagreement seemed to be generating, I opted to move it here. Please note at this point - I believe in aggressive conservation, supply management and innovations like Deep Lake Cooling but this is a province where peak demand has grown 20% or 1646MW in...