I did a cumulative project on those windmill effects, again for Engineering & Society... They all turned out to be pretty bogus. The birds rumour was started because some of the largest, earliest windmill farms in the '80s were installed in a migratory zone, so the number of birds found dead underneath the windmill was large (this was in California). So then "windmills kills birds" became the popular generalization. So many ecological studies are done now, before installation, it's ridiculous. That's getting off topic though.

I still maintain that if our country is to maintain a leadership role in the world, while the world still has a chance to transition to something more renewable, we can't sit back and let private companies decide when to start investing more. If there were no incentive for private companies to go to space, do you think the private space race would be where it is today? There was the X-prize, and the promise of government investment in any private company's space technologies that could carry American astronauts to space.

Give me a reason for a private company to start investing in renewable research in Canada, if you, as Conservatives, are all "Yippe ki-yay!" about throwing all your eggs into oil sands.

Originally Posted by Misspolitics

No Problem, but I, as a tax payer, don't want to use billions of tax dollars to do this. The problem is that private industries are smart enough to know that such investments will lead to their financial ruin. This is because people are not willing to risk buying something that costs a lot and does not perform to the standards that they're used to. I'm glad our government is smart enough to govern, like their supposed to and not get into every industry at their whim like previous governments. If private industries get involved, then fine, there will be more innovation in 1 year that a government run agency could do in 15 years but until this happens, we should focus on more important issues.

How does the private sector tackle the problem if theres such an harsh resistance to it? If the status quo is such that we must be addicted to oil, and the biggest companies constantly prevent any change from happening, how is this a reasonable position to take? All I did was provide a reason for concerning oneself with the environment, and the fact there is money to be made and jobs to be created from it. The free market is not the be-all-and-end all, and its annoying that people of certain political persuasions (namely, conservatives) seem to worship it.

Ahhh yes. the more important issue is how Asia will fuel its unsustainable growth, and how Canada will profit from that (economically), rather than how to make the world sustainable... That's how Conservatives see it.

I see it as "We're F***ed before I hit middle age", if we fuel unsustainable growth. I don't think the economy will matter then. You can't make the "we have to balance economy and the environment" argument if you are only going to focus on the economy and rely on private industry to do the rest of the work, without incentive. So there's no rationalization that the conservatives are taking on a leadership roll that leads to a better world...