But…everyone else is doing it!?!
A 100 Percent Renewable Energy Revolution
“Future-proofing our cities,” “renewable cities” and the “100 percent renewable energy region” — these are the big ideas making their way around Europe’s city halls, regional planning offices and departments of industry, energy, transport and housing.
This is how the latest instalment of the regular series “The Eco Voyager” started out in the Ottawa Citizen. It was written by David Chernushenko, past Deputy Leader of the Green Party of Canada, and freelance journalist for the Ottawa Citizen on a mission that makes me very envious. Chernushenko’s tagline in the series?
It’s not every Canadian traveller who passes by Europe’s museums and castles, seeking instead to view how ordinary people commute to work, how they deal with their waste, what they are eating, and where they are getting the energy to heat their homes. I am interested in what makes cities work, and communities more vibrant, and I am especially interested in the role people and their choices play in this. I want to understand what works, and how it works, with a view to imagining how my home town, and everybody’s home town, might be a better place, and what we would need to do to make this possible.
Can you imagine if the Windsor Star, the newspaper that continually boasts that “(i)t has attracted the highest readership per capita in its circulation range of any Canadian metropolitan newspaper” had the same foresight to commission a series like this? Or even if the Star would print news stories addressing sustainability issues like the rest of the mainstream press? I get dozens of emails daily from SD readers sending me links to news stories being reported in most other daily papers around the country that are keeping their readers abreast of newsmakers addressing, head-on, issues that are written about daily here on Scaledown.
Imagine how much further ahead the city of Windsor would be if our daily did the same thing? Maybe the local blogosphere wouldn’t be as popular as it is? And why aren’t they commissioning cutting-edge news stories like The Ottawa Citizen? Are they getting fat and lazy, since they are the only game in town?
Nah! Couldn’t be!
Tags: 
Post Feedback
Now what a second! You don’t need to go all the way over to Europe to get that kind of vision. Just come out to PEI. Some miscreant individual (who will remain nameless) has suggested to a certain city councillor in Charlottetown (who will also remain nameless) that they coat the top of the parking garages (where nobody parks anyway) with solar panels.
PEI has pledged to have 100% renewable energy in place by 2015. Now, that being said, their energy use will still heavily favour oil (people’s choice). However, they are going to a ‘carbon-neutral’ situation. Lots of people out here support that sort of idea.
The local newspaper loves to talk about renewable energy and sustainability live everyone is doing it. The new Veteran’s Affairs building downtown is LEED rated (I heard Platinum, but I haven’t been able to confirm that). More people walk here in the WINTER than walk in Windsor on the best weather day!
Now if I can only convince them that less cars are better then we’d be making some headway. Though I certainly empathize with the desire to live in the pastoral landscape that is most of PEI.
Anyone want to move to PEI?
Josh, with the coming of global warming, dramatic climate changes and the predicted rise in sea level, how much of the present PEI will be under water say in fifty years? If my thirty year memory of a visit to the island serves me correctly , there isn’t that much high land anywhere on the island. Just a question!
But it is great to hear that at least some newspapers and communities are addressing the current and future situations, the Windsor Star on the other hand is just very local paper, myopic, a reading level of grade 8, their biggest section is the sports section and growing used car and houses for sale sections. Imagine, you only have to read the first three pages of the Star and maybe the editorial page and that’s it!
I live in RSS feeds, at my last count about 43 of them, all on a specific topics of interest to me and most deal with the state of cities, Windsor hasn’t appeared but maybe once or twice in two years!
But with a literacy rate of 27% in Windsor, maybe that is all the Star can do to sell papers! With content Just above that of the weekly tabloids!
I am so tired of teh “carbon neutral” BS thathas come about in the last year. Buy carbon “credits” or “offsets” have shown exactly what they are; Lies and deception. Many of the music bands (crappy Coldplay comes to mind here) are buying these carbon credits to offset their ecological footprint for their tours.
However after intensive investigations by various media (certainly not my favourite profession) they have shown that much of the money has not gone anywhere except into some person’s pocket. Also even when the money was used to replant trees or clean up a river, the follow through was never done and the acres of trees planted either died or were mowed down anyway.
Just like Al Gore and his heating costs of his mansion, what does it matter if you “offset” your footprint? You still have done damage. how about NOT doing the damage in the first place, or to the best of your ability?