BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter from Oro-Medonte resident Hartley Woodside criticizes the need for future global climate meetings.
Now that it is clear Cop 28 is a neutered failure, an event of meaningless posturing, it is time to ignore this global idiocy and to cure the future locally.
We have at our fingertips the cheapest source of energy available, one that will not foul the air and empty the future of hope and that is not in the monopoly interest of greedy industrialists and their subservient politicians and that can with relative ease fuel future growth, hope and prosperity. What politician can resist such a sirens call?
Crisscrossing rural Ontario are hydro transmission corridors, a nearly unending supply of land, accessible to large machinery, not needed for development and little used for farming which could provide the basis for a new economy of solar capture and storage. Imagine a future where thousands if not millions of solar panels attached easily to the grid power our electrically dependant society with few emissions.
What Alberta and Saudi Arabia have trapped in the ground is the energy of the sun converted to oil. What we have is the sun, the land, the technology, the need for jobs, the real and terrifying prospect of a hotter future and an attainable solution. Hydro One could be the builder or it could lease to entities who themselves build out the infrastructure and float solar bonds to finance the build out and maintenance of the solar arrays.
Let the engineers and financial experts figure out how to make this happen. I know as a senior that purchasing a reliable source of dividend income while building a more hopeful future for my grandchildren checks all the boxes.
What we need is the will. Summerside, P.E.I. has done it. We ignore the wealth at out finger tips while pursuing the destructive goals of the wealthy few. We do not need COP 28 to seize the day, accept that the dinosaurs who cling desperately to a fossil fuelled past are not going to go away and get on with what is best for Ontario.
Hartley Woodside
Oro Medonte
