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by Cameron Smith
The latest bad news about global warming is that it’s going to slow recovery from ozone depletion, and that, in a round about way, makes Mayor Mel Lastman’s musings about selling Toronto Hydro bothersome.
The City of Toronto has been doing a good job in finding ways to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming.
But much more needs to be done, and Toronto Hydro, wholly owned by the city, could be an extremely powerful tool in promoting renewable energy that would lower CO2 emissions.
Until recently, it was thought that the ozone layer in the stratosphere would recover over the next 50 years, now that ozone depleting chemicals, such as the chloroflurocarbons (CFCs) once used in refrigerators, air conditioners, and aerosol sprays, have been banned.
However, a year ago, Environment Canada published a report on its ozone website (www.ec.gc.ca/ozone) explaining that, because greenhouse gases trap heat near the earth’s surface, they make the polar stratosphere colder. And when it reaches -80° Celsius -- which is happening more frequently because of global warming -- clouds of ice, nitric acid, and sulphuric acid begin to form that ``give rise to a series of chemical reactions that destroy ozone far more effectively than the reactions that take place in warmer air.’’
Last week, the British science magazine Nature published an article by Harvard University chemist Jim Anderson, one of the first researchers to examine the Antarctic ozone hole in the mid-1980s. Anderson concluded that, the chemical reactions spawned by global warming could delay recovery of the ozone layer ``decades’’ beyond the anticipated 50 years.
Stratospheric ozone protects the Earth from ultraviolet rays. The thinning of the ozone layer has been responsible for increases in skin cancer, and reductions in plankton, which are a first link in the food chain.
The Mayor wants to use the proceeds of a Toronto Hydro sale -- which could raise $1.4 billion to $2.8 billion -- to pay off the city’s debt. Already you can hear the usual arguments being made: that the private sector could do the job better than the public sector; and that solutions should be left to the marketplace, because it’s good at working things out.
But those arguments are not always confirmed in practice, and the classic example of their failure is the death of street cars in the United States. The removal of streetcars accelerated the vast urban sprawl that has afflicted so many American cities. It also accelerated global warming, since the alternatives to streetcars were cars and buses, whose exhausts added enormously to CO2 levels.
In the mid-seventies, U.S. legislators became concerned over what had been happening, and the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly published a report on ``American Ground Transport’’ by Bradford Snell.
Snell’s report found that General Motors Corp., and allied business interests, such as tire makers and bus companies, were responsible for killing off streetcars and replacing them with cars and GM buses. They ``bought local transit companies, scrapped the pollution-free electric trains, tore down the power transmission lines, ripped up the tracks, and placed GM motor buses on already congested…streets.’’
GM officials have denied any intent to kill off streetcars. Nevertheless, the question is raised: Could the city rely on a privately-owned Toronto Hydro that would be committed to getting customers to use less electricity; that would reduce the amount of electricity it sells that is generated from non-renewable sources, such as generators fired by coal or natural gas; and that would commit itself to selling less electricity by encouraging customers to install their own renewable energy sources, such as wind generators and photovoltaic panels?
My response would be no, no, and no. In every case it could result in lower profits. And, as Snell’s report attests, it was the pursuit of more and higher profits that drove General Motors to undermine the public interest and subvert the streetcar industry. Whether the undermining and subversion were intentional is beside the point.
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