Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Monday, April 19, 2010

To Everything, Turbine, Turbine, Turbine

Funny to see Glen Debaeremaker on the wrong side of an environmental issue again. The Toronto city councillor has a reputation for being "green", but supports the installation of a huge wind farm -- 60 turbines -- in Lake Ontario, just off the shore of The Beaches and the Scarborough Bluffs. Advocates of the turbines have been lucky so far because the campaign against the plan has been so feeble and ham-fisted. Opponents have spent more energy undermining themselves rather than winning hearts and minds, even though the Star said:

... the wind farm opponents, thwarted so far at every turn, gave it everything they had.

No wonder they've been thwarted. Witness savethebluffs.ca, a website that reeks of "right-wing crank". You'll never find a larger collection of self-defeating arguments. Even the site's name is a flub ... the bluffs don't need saving, it's the lake, stupid!

The messaging on the site is all over the place and the muddle allows people like Debaeremaker to define their position for them:

"De Baeremaeker said he understands only the aesthetic argument against the turbines. "I think they’re grand. I think they’ll be a tourist attraction, and boats are going to weave in and out of them.""

Ok, if he thinks that then Glen De Baeremaker is an idiot.

Our aesthetic instincts often tell us when something is wrong, even if we can't quiet put our finger on it. The savethebluffs website shows that the opponents can't quite put their finger on why they really oppose the plan. They sense that it's wrong and don't know why so they grasp at statistics and theories. And it might be because it's just so damn simple.

The dog and I just got back from an evening walk on the boardwalk at the beach. It's a clear night and we could see a lot of stars and the entire beach was deserted and we walked for ages before passing other people. The contrast is the most striking thing in the evening; behind you are the lights and the dull groan of the city and on the other side there's ... nothing. The huge city just ends and there's just this big, empty void.

And that's where the opponents have fallen down: they've been "out-environmented". Their key message should be: the lake is a wilderness. Sure, it's a spoiled wilderness from years of pollution and invasive species ... but aren't we supposed to be working to correct that? What the wind farm does is take a huge amount of wilderness and turn it into large scale industrial space (the proposed turbine are something like 140 metres tall).

That's not an aesthetic change, that's a functional change.

Proponents of the plan are looking at the lake the same way the polluting industrialists in the mid-20th Century did. They see is as a vast entity that can absorb all sorts of abuse. Look how big it is! How could 60 wind turbines hurt it? It's greeeeeeeen! That view isn't green at all ... it's the same ol' industrial mindset. What's the point of green power if you're going to despoil a wilderness?

Instead of making that argument, the opponents posted this dumbass shit, making themselves look like a bunch of redneck morons:

At the referendum, a number of years ago, leading to Scarborough's forced amalgamation with Toronto, the majority of residents here voted against giving up our values to Toronto's vision.

Feel free to make yourselves look crazy.

Now, if you want to get a bit fuzzy, consider the precedent this sets and the message it sends to everyone within view of the turbines (the country's largest concentration of people): nothing is sacred. If you want to industrialize Mt. Everest, go ahead.

In the end, the real troublemakers are Toronto Hydro for exploring a project that will probably never be built. For one thing, there's likely not enough wind. And then there's this:

That entire shoreline is urbanized and I would bet real money that serious opposition would arrive if the project ever moved beyond the study phase. Those communities have already done their bit for king & country, hosting the stinkiest sewage plant in the history of the world, a natural gas plant and a nuclear power plant (with a second one just a bit further along).

Of course we need to be exploring sustainable energy options ... but we have to consider what the point is. If we develop every square inch of space without regard for the quality of that space, we've lost sight of the goal.

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