EDITORIAL: Guilbeault blunders on green energy


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Germany provides a textbook example of why Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s opposition to nuclear power is not in the best interests of Canadian energy security.

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Germany’s abandonment of nuclear power over the past decade and pursuit of wind and solar power as an alternative forced it to burn more coal for energy – the most carbon intensive fossil fuel – and made it overly dependent on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin for 40% of its natural gas imports.

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel started shutting down Germany’s nuclear plants in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, a blunder Canada should not repeat.

Canadian nuclear technology is safe, our domestic supply of uranium to power it is plentiful and secure within our own borders and we know how to store radioactive waste safely.

Nuclear power was a key factor in one of North America’s most successful and rapid reductions of greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change in the modern era.

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That was the elimination of coal, which provided 25% of Ontario’s electricity generation, by the former Liberal provincial government between 2003 and 2014, replacing it with nuclear power and natural gas – the cleanest burning fossil fuel.

All of which makes Guilbeault’s decision to exclude nuclear power and natural gas – where we also have plentiful and secure domestic supplies – from a $5 billion government “green bond” fund intended to encourage investments in green energy technologies, not in Canada’s best interests.

Neither exclusion, in a Canadian context, makes any sense.

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Nor does Guilbeault classify nuclear and natural gas energy – which literally keep the lights on in Ontario – as the moral equivalent of arms manufacturing and the gambling, tobacco and alcohol industries, in explaining why he banned nuclear and natural gas power from green bond investments.

Guilbeault’s objection is clearly ideological, going back to his days as a Greenpeace activist, even though many environmentalists today say that decarbonizing industrialized countries on the scale and in the time frame needed to avert catastrophic climate change is impossible without nuclear power and natural gas.

The European Union, which considers itself the global leader in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, recently classified the responsible use of nuclear power and natural gas as forms of green energy.

Guilbeault should do the same.


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