Scott Luft beat me to it, but I cannot let the irony behind a hilarious (possible) typo in today’s Toronto Star pass without my own comment. The Star published an op-ed originally and possibly inadvertently entitled “No one can’t make electricity cheap again.” (Yes, can’t appeared in the headline when I clicked on the story at eight this morning.) The body of the op-ed constitutes about the worst litany of error-laden BS I have come across in my forays through the Ontario electricity file. It was written by Bruce Lourie, a former director of the Ontario Power Authority and Independent Electricity System Operator, and most importantly, drafter of the Ontario Green Energy Act.
On the latter note, Scott Luft’s main website, the truly excellent Cold Air which is a top notch example of applied data science by someone who knows his domain, well, cold, has a 2012 article guest-written by Parker Gallant that goes into some of Lourie’s comings and goings as a taxpayer- and ratepayer-funded shill for just about every form of electrical energy that is both low quality and hyper expensive. Read the Cold Air article and Lourie’s TorStar op-ed, and you will understand why we are where we are. This is who planned the electricity system?
It is rare to encounter propaganda that contains a falsehood in just about every paragraph. The Lourie op-ed contains twelve paragraphs. Each one contains at least a minor falsehood. At least seven paragraphs contain major ones.
For a former electricity planner to get it this wrong boggles the mind. Of Lourie’s utterly false claim that the Darlington nuclear station was “10 years late and almost $12 billion over budget,” Luft in his comment on Lourie’s piece says this:
Uninformed bullshit or a deliberate lie.
I find it difficult to believe it’s anything but the latter.
You may have noticed I don’t care much for the renewable energy crowd. Why such a jaundiced view, you ask? Maybe it’s because I spend so much time with them. They are essentially the same crowd as anti-nukes, and anti-nukes are liars. They can’t get through a simple conversation without misrepresenting and deflecting, claiming that one plus one equals three, and that night is day.
Theatricality and deception! Powerful agents to the uninitiated! —Bane to Wayne, The Dark Knight Rises, 2012
But we are initiated. Aren’t we, Bruce.
Hilariously, the TorStar let the headline typo lie there until somewhere around ten or eleven a.m. I would love to think that an iconoclast headline writer did it on purpose, you know, fight The Man and up the working class. But it’s the Star. I fear the likelier story is that the typo was inadvertent, a result of the Star’s rushing this garbage into print so they can fulfil their mission in life, which is to run cover for the Liberals.
The purpose of Lourie’s litany of facile BS is to get us Ontarians to believe we are simply stuck with high electricity prices.
We are stuck with high prices like Oakville is stuck with its 900 megawatt gas plant.
Meaning: no, we are not stuck with high electricity prices.
Scott Luft didn’t miss the opportunity to point out that, prior to the Star fixing the typo, the headline was quite literally correct.
We can make electricity cheap again. By, for starters, cancelling the contracts Bruce Lourie got us into.
Caveat Venditor.
What awful thing did Ontario do to deserve Bruce Lourie? His role in life seems to be twisting public perception to suit his particular ideology and loading the costs of the resulting misdirection on the innocent.
According to OCAA articles he is the clever mind that devised the misleading “Ontario’s coal use is killing us” campaign. Then played his role in helping design the environmentally/economically disastrous GEA.
While on the board of Canadian Association for Physicians (and other unqualified folks) for the Environment, CAPE, they ran an anti-nuclear/pro GEA advocacy campaign to support the stupidity.
Only the Star desperate to delude people on the Liberal electricity policy $#%t-ups would give this guy a voice at this stage. These are the influential folks that have sent Ontario down the road of “Death by Ignorance of Fact”.
Give Bruce Lourie’s role in the GEA, I find it strange that he is on the Board of Clean Prosperity, an organization tasked with advancing the ‘Conservative’ case for putting a price on carbon. In fact, a quick look at Board and staff of this group reveals its President was a former McGuinty senior policy advisor. Other Board Members have links to the David Suzuki Foundation and Bullfrog Power. Conservative?