Since beginning this blog, I have urged the federal Conservative government to claim credit for the Ontario Achievement in carbon dioxide (CO2) emission reductions. Ontario’s electricity generating sector, as I have pointed out, has reduced annual CO2 emissions by nearly 25 million metric tons. This was almost entirely due to the return of nuclear generating units, laid up in the late 1990s, to active service.
While electricity in Canada is a mostly provincial not federal affair, why could—and more important, why should—the federal government claim credit in this matter? Because Ontario is Canada’s (and North America’s) most nuclearized electricity system. And the technology on which Ontario’s nuclear generators are based is a federally developed technology: Canadian Deuterium Uranium, a.k.a. CANDU.
Seeing as no other sector in Canada has, under the current Conservative government, achieved anything close to the CO2 reductions that Ontario has, the federal Conservatives could legitimately claim a major role in these reductions. This is not spin, it is physical fact, and outside the realm of political spin.
And best of all: 26 million tons of CO2 per year about the size of the growth of CO2 emissions from the much-hated oil sands of Alberta.
Canada’s electricity is far, far cleaner than America’s. Nuclear, and nuclear in Ontario, is a big part of why.