Editor,
The ‘pungent’ prose of his opinion (letter to the editor, December 2, 2021) is marginally offensive and maybe libellous. He offers no evidence to support his belief that TCE’s communications efforts exhibit “criminality” and “propaganda”.
He laments that his inadequate engineering arguments have not even slowed down the project and implores someone with litigation skills to put a stop to it.
Ordinarily it would be a bit amusing, if the issue were not so serious. He offers no useful ideas or recommendations. The whole piece was basically a frustrated rant.
By attempting to appeal to higher authority (his talents and engineering skills) and to exploit Katherine McKenna’s quotes, he hopes to cast doubt on TCE and the environmental and energy value of the project to the community, the province and the country.
He fails to understand that his argument is a two edged sword. Clearly, he thinks, that if you say “No!”, loud enough, forcefully enough, often enough, for long enough, then people will believe that the project is of no value. This “BS baffles brains” approach is bogus.
The Big Picture…
Scientists have proven that excess CO2 in the atmosphere drives global temperature to rise. This drives climate change and extreme weather events. We have ample evidence of these problems in our own town and surroundings. Floods, High water, Drought, severe storms and power outages are in the news often. 100 year extreme weather events are now becoming 5 and 10 year occurrences.
There are 2 critical issues before us right now:
1) Global Warming and climate change is not going away unless we take action now.
2) We have inadequate Electric grid capacity and stability to meet future peak load demands.
Major automakers understand the CO2 issues and are investing heavily, right now, to produce electric vehicles to replace their current gasoline and diesel products. The increasing temperatures will increase the requirements for air conditioning. These trends will drive the need for ever increasing electric grid expansion and stability.
By expanding deployment of solar and wind energy sources we have got a reasonable start that needs to be accelerated.
The next big step is to eliminate, peak load, Natural Gas and diesel electricity generators.
Yes, we could wait for years for battery grid storage, or for factory built, community sized nuclear fission reactors or for Nuclear Fusion reactors
Or…
We could implement the Meaford pumped storage project as a practical, proven, way to strengthen and add peak load capacity to the grid. The pumped storage project is a great bridge to the future “Perfect” solutions.
When your kids and grandchildren ask you, “what are we doing to reduce climate change”, what are you telling them? They will be so disappointed and disillusioned in you if you tell them that we need to wait for a perfect solution. Perfect is the enemy of the good.
Dave MacDougall, Meaford
