Reserving Judgment

I'm going to reserve judgment on this "leaked speech" until I get more details. From what I've read on it so far the Tories have finally bowed down to the golden calf of carbon emissions cuts - though not the cuts the Kyoto treaty requires.

I sincerely hope otherwise. I wonder though if this is just a "goal" much in the same way the former Liberal government made it a "goal" to meet Kyoto targets though many knew the whole concept of making over 30% reductions was unrealistic. My thinking leans towards this being a ploy to placate the environmental issue by agreeing to "goals" that no one can enforce in the first place.

Lip service or capitulation? Only time will tell. Either way I think the end result is bad for Canada.

One thing I'm not reserving judgment on is the plan to ban energy inefficient light bulbs. This is rampant state interference in our daily lives and can only lead to no good.

A couple months ago I was facing hydro bills that were out of this world and I couldn't imagine how I could be getting bills like this unless I was running a grow op.

Perusing through the hydro one web site I found a calculator for home electricity costs. It listed wattages for common appliances along with estimated usage times per month.

Being an engineer I took down the wattages and did my own calculation to satisfy myself.

On my energy inefficient light bulbs how much did I pay? About $3/month.

Over 68% of my hydro bill was attribute to one item: electric home heating. Light bulbs are nothing to save money over and I bet that this initiative won't show any appreciable difference in energy consumption anywhere in the Great North.

But It's gets better. A good deal of the energy in these so-called inefficient light bulbs are apparently dissipated in heat.

So that means that the $3/month light bulbs that were saving me money on my hydro and were cheaper than my electrical heating are being replaced with $1.50/month light bulbs that won't save me any money on heating.

What if electrical heating proves to be a less efficient method of heating than what I got from my "inefficient" light bulbs? Then it means electricity usage will go up and not down.

That's government interference at work.