Green energy bubbles
That eerie hissing you hear may well be the air beginning to seep out of the green energy bubble. The sound is similar to the pfffffft and sshhhhsssssp noises we heard in the early days of the dot.com bubble collapse or the subprime mortgage meltdown. If you can’t hear it, you are not alone.
While investment analysts are telling their clients to get out of solar power firms and warning about the continuing risks in wind and bioenergy schemes, Ottawa and the provinces are on a mad populist stampede to throw billions of dollars at the green energy monster. The politicians don’t seem to be keeping up with the trends. “Don’t try to catch a falling knife,” warned J.P. Morgan this week in a report that told investors the market continues to fall out of the solar panel module market. It downgraded a bunch of solar companies that have already been in a tailspin since the fist signs of a solar crash back in 2008.
Other alternative energy sectors are hitting walls. Jurisdictions with wind power regimes face continuing issues related to the fact that the wind often doesn’t blow much, turning investments in wind farms into cash-draining albatrosses. In Ontario, the 1,100 megawatts of built wind turbine capacity are often running a few megawatts at a time, and even on the best of days have trouble producing 150 megawatts.
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‘Kill the Avatar bill!” That’s the cry at this week’s annual meeting of the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada in Toronto. Not quite in those words, mind you, but the private member’s bill in question, C-300, is based on the same lurid anti-capitalist, anti-mining fantasies that provided the psychic substructure for James Cameron’s mega-grossing but Oscar-short movie.
Slap a top hat on his head and Dalton McGuinty could have been a dead ringer for Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s brilliant 3-D adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.
So there was President
The Dominion budget tabled this week (or “federal” as we now say, in emulation of the Americans) was full of restraint. We have been assured of this by every media source I’ve seen, and the notion gains additional plausibility from the mild endorsements of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and other worthy, fairly independent monitors. “Baby steps in the right direction” was the message from another policy think tank, that focuses on family issues.
Who can offer the most help to the desperate children of Haiti? Is it Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Sachs, the World Bank or the UN? Is it the many experts who are calling for a Marshall Plan to “fix” Haiti once and for all, or the donor nations that have pledged billions for the task?
Jim Flaherty’s relentlessly sunny disposition made an early March day feel like July yesterday.
Canadian taxpayers will no doubt applaud the Conservative government’s plan to freeze MPs’ pay and bureaucrats’ budgets as a welcome move towards fiscal sanity.
Innovation – defined as new and better ways of doing valued things – is likely to be heavily stressed in this week’s federal budget. It is the key to improving the performance of Canada’s economy.
It must have been aggravating for Harper-haters the way the guy kept turning up in Vancouver, every time there was a limelight to hog.



Male, retired and the rest is of little interest to anyone. The site keeps me busy and if it helps others to stay abreast of daily events then my time is well spent.