The City of Winnipeg: Can't it do anything right?

There is this thing called Water Wednesdays. I'm not sure how it started or exactly what it is, but I've see people tweeting about #WaterWednesday on Twitter for the past several weeks. From the 2 minutes and 40 seconds of research that I did, I have deduced that it involves weekly gatherings over the summer in Memorial Park aimed at promoting water stewardship.

Well, I am happy to proclaim that I am doing my part. At least I am trying to...

I have a small vegetable garden in my yard.

Proof: Beans from my garden

My intention has been to water it, not with a garden hose, but with rain water collected in my rain barrel.

The rain barrel I got from one of those mad one-day sales that the City of Winnipeg holds every spring. In an effort to encourage sustainable living practices, the city sells rain collection barrels and compost bins at a discount, but only for one day a year and at a few locations around the city. This results in massive lines as people wait, hoping the barrels and bins don't run out before they get their chance to buy one. If you miss your chance to get one that morning, you have to wait another whole year for the next sale (or go to a store and buy one for regular price, but honestly, who would do that?)

I was fortunately able to score a rain barrel in one of these sales, but here's the thing: it's a piece of shit.

A few days after a good solid rain this spring I went to draw water from the barrel, but there was none to be drawn. It was empty. How can that be, I thought. Then after the next rain I tried again, and again it was empty.

The problem: a big crack in the base of the barrel.

I was able to find time on a weekend some weeks later to wash out the barrel and fix the crack using some "fix-all" type of glue that I have.

That problem was resolved and the rain barrel once again filled up with water. And then one morning about a week later as I was walking to the garage, I saw this:

The weeds next to my rain barrel are doing very well this year.

If you can't make out the image, it is water gushing out of the side of my rain barrel.

I could fix this leak too, but the barrel is only 2 years old. How many more leaks will there be in year 3, 4 or 5? In addition, the lid to the barrel is cracking from UV damage and the overflow hose is getting brittle and cracking as well.

At first I blamed myself. Maybe I mistreated it somehow. Maybe I was supposed to rub lotion on it every morning to protect it from the sun or something. I was full of regret for having neglected this barrel in some way, until I found out that somebody else I know with the same City of Winnipeg rain barrel had the same sort of cracks appear in theirs as well.

From this, I can only conclude that the rain barrels are pieces of crap.

The city's heart might be in the right place when they hold their annual barrel and bin sale, but their execution is flawed, firstly by making it such a pain in the ass to get one, and secondly by selling faulty barrels.

This Wednesday, as you pause to reflect on our sustainable use of water, ponder this: the rain barrels that the city is selling us to conserve water and preserve the environment are all going to end up in a landfill as big plastic pieces of junk that never did their job.

Lakes and deserts

Related to my last post, I received this this in my inbox yesterday:

Media Advisory
March 28, 2013

Council of Canadians plans on-site protest at the Experimental Lakes Area this weekend

The Council of Canadians will stage a protest this weekend at the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) in a last-ditch effort to save the institution.

Mark Calzavara, the Council of Canadians’ Ontario organizer, will be on-site at the protest and available for interviews via satellite phone.

“Canada needs the ELA’s scientific research to develop sound and long term policies on water, climate and public safety,” says Emma Lui, Council of Canadians water campaigner. “Despite the Harper government’s reckless water policies, we’re not giving up yet.”

The ELA – a world-renowned water research facility – costs as little as $400,000 per year to keep open.

If a protest takes place in a forest and nobody is there to film it, are people still angry?

I hope that the media does turn out because I think it's an issue worth attention. Given the remoteness of the location and the Easter weekend timing I'm not sure how it will work out. In any case, I wish them well and hope people take notice.

 *****

Something else that came out recently -- the Canadian Government's decision to back out of the UN droughts and deserts convention -- is not unlike their move to cut the ELA.

The move was ostensibly to save money. "It’s not an effective way to spend taxpayers’ money" says PM Stephen Harper, but the amount of money being saved is negligible. The government has spent $283,000 over the past two years on this program according to the Maclean's article, although our commitment is for $350,000.

Harper claims that only 18% of the funds are being spent on anything useful. My question is: how is this different than any other UN program? In fact, with 18% of the funds surviving the UN bureaucracy and getting applied in a productive way, I would consider this astonishingly successful.

The point, of course, is not the money. The real story here is how this reflects the priorities of the current administration, the optics that a move like this generates among the public, and the impression it leaves on the other 193 countries (every other country in the UN, in case you're wondering) that are signatories to the convention.

The damage done to Canada's goodwill among other nations as a result of not being a team player on this matter, whatever that damage may be, must certainly exceed the $350k that we're saving, if one were able to quantify it.

I also find it bizarre that a government that spends $21 million per year on Economic Action Plan advertising would risk the negative publicity that a move like this generates to save a paltry $350k.

*****

The government might argue that these small and supposedly wasteful expenses add up to a significant amount, and at a time when the government is struggling to return to a balanced budget every expense needs to be carefully vetted (except Action Plan advertising apparently).

I agree that small things add up. Small polarizing decisions such as the two mentioned above, as well as others like the Conservative's reluctance to stop the importation of shark fins, combine to create a growing distaste of the government and it's intransigent approach to the environment and social issues.

This may be a miscalculation on the part of Harper. The negative impressions that these actions leave could accumulate to the point where they threaten to overcome people's fear of what Justin Trudeau might do to the country, and could spell the end of the conservative majority next election.

Experimental Lakes Area Travesty

In spite of my somewhat conservative leanings, I gotta say that I've been disappointed with a great many things that Stephen Harper and the Federal Conservative government has done. There have been a whole slew of things from wasting money on misguided "stimulus" programs to their embarrassing response to Palestine's promotion to non-member observer state at the UN.

Some things are big. Some things are small. The closure of the Experimental Lakes Area in western Ontario near Kenora could be considered small. A below-the-radar operation that survived on a budget of less than a million dollars for most of it's existence, the ELA is a modest operation but has had a tremendous impact.

Some people will cite research done at the ELA as being a fundamental part of the effort to reduce acid rain in the 1980's. (Interestingly, this effort was led by another conservative PM, Brian Mulroney, proving that being environmentally friendly and right-of-center are not mutually exclusive concepts.) This is a notable example, but at any given time dozens of research projects might be on the go, impacting many industries or aspects of life in some small way.

Source: http://www.experimentallakesarea.ca

The closure of the ELA strikes me as a particularly harsh move, simply because it costs so little and it does so much. Of all the things that the government spends money on, this operation must be near the top in terms of bang for the buck.

Money is not wasted at the ELA. That, at least, is my experience. As a summer student one year I spent some time there assisting with experiments and collecting lake-dwelling bugs for further study back at the lab. There was a communal eating area, small buildings with bunk beds, a sand volleyball court on the compound, and not a whole lot more. Our showers in the morning were limited to 5 minutes. There was a schedule, so if your shower lasted much longer than 5 minutes you risked having a naked biologist walking in on you.

The place was nerd central. Scientists from all over the place, dressed in cargo pants, would gather and chat about their respective projects over dinner, go to bed early, and wake up at ungodly hours to continue their research.

Most governments brag about supporting research. Besides directly providing science and technology-related jobs, research often leads to development and the additional jobs that go with that. Some research also leads to a better understanding of the world we live in, which in turn can lead to policy enhancements.

This is the primary objective of the ELA: a better understanding of how human activity impacts our environment, and this is why some people think the Conservative government has pulled the center's funding. They portray this as a "war on science":

“The Harper government is gutting all and any tools, rules, and science projects that stand in the way of corporate abuse of our freshwater heritage,” says Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians. “No ELA means that the damage done to water from extractive industries will forever be hidden.”

The language I would use would be less inflamatory, but it's hard to argue against the notion that this is an ideological move by the government, because there are few other plausible explanations. The government's purported reason, saving money, doesn't wash when you consider how little money is being saved in relation to the value of the research being done and the uniqueness of the operation. At the very least, this speaks to how little the government values environmental research.

The ELA may live on. The government is not locking the doors and throwing away the key -- they are just locking the doors. There is a chance that the Ontario government (yeah, they have money to spend ...) or some other party may take over the funding of the facility, but until that happens there is to be no research done there ... even if the federal funding agreement is still in effect and research grants are in place.

This may not seem like an tremendously important issue for many people, but to me the closure of the ELA and the government's handling of it has a spiteful tone. This is not an isolated thing either: the end of the mandatory long form census is another similar issue. As somebody who had to merge longitudinal data sets for quantitative studies in university, I can appreciate the value of having consistent information, and the census change will cause more problems than you might imagine.

While individually these issues may be small and you may not care a great deal about them, they reflect poorly on the character of the government, and you should at least care about that.

*****
Fun fact: if you fry these guys in pure acetic acid they become transparent.

Source: http://www.aquamerik.com/

Another fun fact: frying chironomus larvae in acetic acid does not smell good.


*** UPDATE ***

Also published in Winnipeg Free Press: Sorry, Harper, it just doesn't wash Blog of the week: Anybody Want a Peanut?

Another interesting link: As dismantling begins, shuttering of research station called a 'travesty'

"The doors of the old sleeping cabins at the 45-year-old Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) are being ripped off, the appliances are being taken away, and the personal belongings of researchers are being removed.
...
this brings into serious doubt the government’s sincerity to actually transfer the facility over to another operator."

Leaves. Damned leaves.

 
There is this giant maple tree behind my yard that always loses it's leaves after all the others. It's quite annoying. Some years it drops all it's leaves after it snows so I never do get a chance to rake them up, and I end up with a big mess in the spring including henna-like imprints of maple leaves on the patio for months afterwards.

That big maple is only a fraction of my lawn care woes. There is also a smaller maple, three ornamental maples, an apple tree and a birch tree, all either in my yard or directly adjacent to it.

There are plenty of leaves to rake up, but few bags to put them in. This is because we can't use plastic bags anymore with Winnipeg's new yard waste program, the Leaf It With Us depots are closed, and stores are largely sold out of the paper leaf bags because retailers were caught off guard by the new system. The city kindly provided free bags to home owners, but only two. That big maple -- my share of it -- would probably fill three times that many on its own. People around the city were left with piles of leaves and nowhere to put them. Some cleverly blew them onto the road with leaf blowers. There. Problem solved.

Fortunately for me I installed a new compost bin. Compost bins are awesome. You can pack the equivalent of THIS MANY bags into a composter. Throw all those leaves in, pack 'em down, throw more in, and more, and pack it down and throw more in. Just when you think you can't put more in, grab a shovel or snow pick and jab those suckers down and suddenly you can pack in another three bag's worth of leaves. The end result for me is that I was able to get by with only my two free paper leaf bags this fall, and I still have room in my bin for whatever leaves that big maple still has to drop.

It wasn't until I was live on the air last Wednesday on Winnipeg Internet Pundits that I came up with this belated idea: why didn't the city have a sale of compost bins prior to the fall? Every spring the city has a sale on compost bins and water barrels, but its only for one day and only in a handful of locations around the city. Accordingly it's a painful experience with excruciating line-ups. I've never understood these one day events. If you want people to have these things, why don't you make them available all the time so that people don't have to rearrange their schedules and waste hours of their time?

The folks at city hall knew well in advance that this new yard waste program was coming and that the old leaf depots were closing. Why not encourage people to buy compost bins? They could have provided subsidies for retailers or a rebate of some kind, or they could have set up special bin sales like the do in the spring, but for 4 or 5 weekends in a row. They don't have to be fancy-ass bins either. They could be something simple like this one.

It's too late now of course, but what do you want from me? Proactive solutions? Pfft. Much funner to criticize after the fact.

************* IMPORTANT MESSAGE *************

UMFM is raising money to keep the station on the air so that they can continue to provide unique radio shows, alternative music programs, and of course Winnipeg Internet Pundits. There are incentives for different levels of donations. See the UMFM Pledge-O-Rama page for more info, and call 204-474-6610 to donate.

The Great Outdoors: Gunn Lake

I've almost forgotten how to create a blog post, it's been so long. Just to get Blogger loosened up and moving again, I'll share my weekend hiking experience.

I've hiked before, but never overnight. Never having to carry all my provisions on my back. Last weekend me and two friends decided to give it a try, and picked the Baldy Lake / Gunn Lake trail in Riding Mountain National Park as our testing ground.

Riding Mountain is a great place to try out back-country camping, for a few of reasons:

1. The trails are very clear and well marked. It is impossible to lose the trail. Perhaps after a few decades of federal funding cuts the trails may get to be more ragged, but as it is, if you lose your way in Riding Mountain then you shouldn't be allowed outside of your house without a tether or GPS chip embedded in your skull.

2. There is lots of wildlife. (For some people this may be a con rather than a pro ..)

3. Firewood. The campsites and well stocked with dry chopped firewood. This is a HUGE bonus.

The trail we picked was very easy to hike. Mostly flat and grassy with only a few muddy spots or steep areas where you have to watch your footing. The 16.5 km hike each way is supposed to take 4-5 hours depending on who you talk to, but we did it in slightly less. Still, it's a long walk with 25 lbs on your back.

It rained for about 4 hours Saturday afternoon/evening, making for a nice green (and wet) campsite:

The rain sucked, but when the clouds broke you could walk down to the lake to catch a nice sunset

The final 1.9 km Gunn Lake portion of the trail is the most interesting, with some hills and a nice view of a swampy valley ...

... but it was the longer Baldy Lake / Central part where we saw most of the wild life, including two bears, a moose, a deer, rabbits, this weaselly thing ...

... and these salamandery things ...

Isn't he just precious? I googled Manitoba salamanders, and figure this guy is an eastern tiger salamander, or some sub-species thereof.

You can get an idea from the weasel picture of what the trails are like. See what I mean? Even the most incompetent hiker can't lose their way here, unless maybe they do bat spins and forget what direction they're headed in.

Unfortunately it was too cloudy to witness the Perseids meteor shower, if we could even stay up that late after driving for 3.5 hours and hiking 16.5 k, but the sunset and the wildlife gave us enough highlights to make us not regret the pain we were in afterwards.

If you do this trail, I highly recommend stopping in at the Olha General Store for an ice cream bar on the way home.

Olha Manitoba. Population: three old people sitting in a general store. It is a very well-kept little hamlet, actually.

Would I do this trail again? Probably not. I would look for something maybe a little shorter but more scenic and technically challenging, but it was a nice trip. That pre-chopped firewood at the campsite sure makes back-country camping a lot less painful.

Another Swiss Chalet for Winnipeg

Manitobans love their Swiss Chalet. It's amazing we went so long without one. We love Swiss Chalet so much that a blog on the return of the restaurant was "by far" John Dobbin's top post last year.

If you're a fan of the tasty half chicken dinner, you'll be happy to know that there's another location opening up in Winnipeg. This one will be at the corner of St.Annes Rd and Bishop Grandin Blvd in St.Vital, in a small retail expansion off the Home Depot parking lot. It's not that far from the first location, so if you can't get into one, you can always try the other!

With the addition of the Swiss Chalet and some other yet-to-be-determined business, What used to be a simple shopping area has suddenly become a "Festival". St.Vital Festival. Look out Seasons of Tuxedo, here we come!

Okay .. now a couple of things about this location:

1) The location seems terrible to me. You can only get to it by driving through a Home Depot Parking lot. If you're heading west on Bishop Grandin you can get directly into the Home Depot parking lot, but otherwise you have to get in from St.Annes which forces you to drive past a Boston Pizza, Sobey's, and Michael's before traversing the entire width of the Home Deport parking lot.

2) The area highlighted in orange below is owned by (who else) Shindico. However, the majority of the parking will on Hydro property in the red area just above. This area needs to be rezoned to commercial. That almost happened this past Monday, before representatives of Bishop Grandin Greenway fought to have it put off by a month.



We've been here before. A few years ago a similar development was proposed before being fought off and killed by Bishop Grandin Greenway Inc, but this time Shindico got all their ducks in a row and it's unlikely anything will get in their way.

3) If you enjoy walking or biking along the Greenway, you may enjoy it a little less with this development going up very close to the trail. There is also, I am told, a leopard frog population that will get paved over by the Hydro parking lot.

Coincidentally, Swiss Chalet is adding Rotisserie Frog Legs to its menu. Okay, I just made that part up.

Bipole disorder: What's a caribou to do?

You might be surprised to learn that caribou is not just a delicious beverage. It is also a species of large deer-like creature that lives in the bushes of Manitoba. I have never seen a caribou, but I am inclined to believe they exist, and that we should protect them so that they continue to exist.

I was reminded of caribou while reading this ChrisD.ca post about Manitoba Wildlands and their concerns related to Bipole III:

Seven woodland caribou herds are located in the study area, with greater risks for four herds ... Manitoba Hydro was allowed to define the project area, study area, and local study area so it can pick information to use, including to self assess impacts..

Kind of funny that one of the people responsible for putting the beasts in harm's way has his mug on page 2 of the 2006 study that shows they're in harm's way. Also funny that the 2011 Caribou Action Plan only covers the two herds in Eastern Manitoba. One might get the impression that we only have those two herds!

So, let's go back to the 2005 report. It includes a map that shows where the all the various caribou herds were located at the time:

While herds move around, the general area in which they're located tends to stay the same. (There is a map from 5 years prior in the report to illustrate.) I took the map and added the "final preferred" route for the west-side bipole III line as best I could:


As you can see, the route definitely cuts through at least three caribou ranges (6, 7 & 10), and likely impacts herds 3, 8 & 9 as well as they move around. The seventh herd that Manitoba Wildlands is likely referring to is herd 2 (Kississing).

Of the six herds that are impacted by Bipole III, four are listed as a "conservation concern" -- one "high" and three "medium". In spite of the fact that there is a "high concern" herd in western Manitoba, the government's Action Plan only addresses the two eastern herds. Why is that? They certainly planned on studying western herds. From the 2006 report:

Such plans will be developed initially for the high risk ranges and will include population and habitat monitoring, research and communication. This plan development process is well underway for the Owl-Flintstone lakes range and has been initiated on the Atikaki-Berens, Naosap Lakes and Wabowden ranges.

What the hell happened to Naosap and Wabowden? I'm going out on a limb here and saying that with west-side Bipole III impacting both herds, they suddenly became unimportant to the government. If you have a better explanation, please speak up.

I don't have a good map of the proposed east side route because Hydro seems to have removed it from their web site, and it was never finalized anyhow, but it would look something like this:
The Atikaki-Berens range would be impacted, and possibly Owl-Flintstone as well, although this report says that the range historically never got any nearer to the lake. Atikaki-Berens has the largest range, extending right from Lake Winnipeg into Ontario. I'm not a caribou expert, but that suggests to me that perhaps the caribou have a little more leeway in avoiding the HVDC line than the western herds which are more constrained.

Jon Gerrard might tell you that the caribou could be avoided all together by sending Bipole III down the middle of Lake Winnipeg, and he might be right. In any event, the concern here is that the environmental impacts of the western Bipole III route are being glossed over. Let's be nice to our furry friends and make sure they're protected on BOTH sides of the province, so that maybe .. maybe .. one day I can see one in the wild. And shoot it. (Just kidding! Yeesh ..)

Spring Cleanup in St.Vital

If you're looking to get out and do something Saturday morning, the Bishop Grandin Greenway organization is holding it's annual spring cleanup.

Meet us in the south-west corner of the Home Depot parking lot near Bishop Grandin Blvd. and St.Anne's Rd. We will supply garbage bags and free coffee. All you need to bring are boots, gloves, and yourself!

It starts at 9:30 and goes until round noon. Check in at the Home Depot at St.Annes & Bishop Grandin.

Shark fin soup

A post inspired by a picture I ran across on Deviant Art yesterday:

yuumei

You won't catch me doing this very often, but I'm going to get on a bit of a soap box for a second here. I saw a documentary about shark finning a while back and was honestly shocked by it.

Understand that I have no problem with killing animals. In fact, I even have a blog tag named "baby seals taste yummy" with 6 posts and counting. Killing and eating animals is how we as a species have survived for so long. These days there are alternatives, and if you choose to be a vegetarian then that's fine .. your call. But if you choose to eat meat, let it not be shark fin soup.

The fins are the only valuable part of the shark, so the sharks are caught, the fins are cut off, and the sharks are dropped back into the water. Having no fins, the sharks die a slow death from either starvation or bleeding to death. I don't know which and it doesn't really matter. The wastefulness of this is incomprehensible. If you kill an animal for food, you ought to eat the whole damned thing. All that protein that they're dropping back into the water could feed millions of people. Yes millions. Estimates are that 100 million sharks are killed every year so people can have this very specific soup, which leads into the next big problem: conservation. Some species of sharks are in danger of extinction as a result of finning.

I'll eat factory farmed chicken. I'll occasionally eat veal, which I understand involves raising a calf in conditions only slightly better than that of a bonzai kitten. I am sure I would eat baby seal too, if someone were to put it on a plate in front of me. But I can't support eating shark fin soup.

Thanks for listening. Getting off the soap box now.

fyi .. I just realized that I mentioned this issue once before, in the early days of this blog. fyi #2: there's also a picture of a hot chick standing on an ice flow at that link. Just thought you should know.

Of TREEs and inverted rates

If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? A willow? A boabab? A one-man environmental advocacy group?

In the Free Press story earlier this week Lower electric bill for poor urged, something seemed odd: why would environmental groups lobby the Public Utilities Board for lower rates for anyone? Lower rates encourage greater power usage, which is bad for the environment. So .. I decided to take a peek: Who are these groups? How can non-profit organizations afford to hire fancy American lawyers?

The first group -- Time to Respect Earth's Ecosystems (TREE) -- is very small. How small are they? They are soooo small that their head office is a nest. Haha. Oh, I kill me... Would you believe I just came up with that? Actually, this is their head office:

It turns out that TREE is actually just a guy: Peter Miller, Professor of Philosophy, University of Winnipeg. He doesn't even have a web site, but he does have a mission: "Advocacy for a sustainable forest agenda in Manitoba."

So he's a philosopher who is for sustainable forests, but he wants to help poor people. Okay. What about the other group?

Green Action Centre, formerly Resource Conservation Manitoba, is a much larger group. Or, I should say, they are a group. They have a web site with all kinds of information about their causes and activities, which include active transportation, recycling, reducing emissions, composting ... the list goes on, but oddly the list does not include anything about lower hydro rates for poor people. It's not on their blog, or their "events and actions" page, or anywhere else that I could find.

Why is this group hiring lawyers to lobby the government about a policy that's not even on their agenda? Well ... probably because the aforementioned Professor Peter Miller in on their board of directors. What appears to be happening here is that Prof Peter is leveraging the name of a well-known group to lend legitimacy to his personal quest.

On to the second question: how can they (he) afford to retain and pay these consultants and lawyers? Answer: he can't and he doesn't. Who does? You do. Indirectly.

It turns out that this thing about petitioning the Public Utilities Board isn't a one off. In fact, it's pretty much an annual event, and each time Peter Miller applies for and receives a full reimbursement of his costs:

Accordingly, the Board (Public Utilities Board) will award cost in full ... Costs shall be payable by Manitoba Hydro within 30 days of the date of this Order.

He did this in here, here, here, and here in 2008 when he was awarded an eye-popping $142,066 for lawyers and consultants from Arlington, MA, even though according to Hydro the value of their input was very questionable:

The evidence provided by Mr. Weiss to the GRA proceeding was not relevant ... Further, the evidence was duplicative, since it was virtually the same evidence provided by Mr. Weiss, through RCM/TREE, in the 2007 Centra Gas General Rate Application.”

142 Grand for redundant information. Nice. Now, in relation to something like, oh .. I don't know .. bipole III, $142k is peanuts. Nevertheless this is a very expense hobby that Peter Prof has -- it has cost over $300,000 in the last five years alone ... but it hasn't cost him a cent.

So that's who they are and how they get their money. Now ... why? Why is a guy/group whose mission is to protect forests intervening in a PUB hearing to reduce Hydro payments for low income people? This is somebody who once said that supplying power below cost was a "crazy policy", and that "if no one is feeling the pinch from energy prices, why bother?" (source)

It's a tough question to answer. It's not immediately apparent why he's doing this, though I suppose I could phone him and ask him if I really wanted to. I think he's just bored. You may have guessed from my subtly sarcastic remarks two posts ago that I think a two tiered rate structure is a dumb idea. I don't doubt that Peter Prof would agree that it's a dumb idea. He's just run out of good ideas to lobby PUB for.

I actually happen to think that a previous idea of his is a good one ... or at least not a bad one: an inverted rate structure. This is where the first X amount of power is charged at a low rate, and the excess power is charged at a high rate.

If you really want to promote conservation while not bankrupting poor people, this is the way to do it, because as economists like to say: people make decisions on the margin. That is, it's your marginal cost of the next unit that you take into consideration, not the cost of all the units you bought before. Let me illustrate: when you go your friend's social and buy tickets for the 60-pounder of booze, you really only want to buy one ticket because your friend is a cheap skate and his fiancée is a bitch. But you buy three tickets, because the marginal cost of the two extra tickets is half what the cost of the first ticket is. It just seems stupid to buy only one ticket.

Manitoba Hydro actually does have an inverted rate structure ... sort of. There is a slightly higher rate for electricity use in excess of 900 kWh per month. I just checked my past two hydro bills and I use about half that, even though I routinely waste gobs of electricity. I leave my computer on overnight and while I'm at work. I never unplug anything. I have incandescent Christmas lights still, and they're set to turn on at 11 AM. Actually, they're set to come on at dusk, but you get the idea.

A far better idea than having separate low rates for poor people, or capping their payments at 6% of their income, or whatever dude is suggesting, would be for Hydro to lower the rates for a basic minimum level of monthly electricity use -- enough to run your fridge, stove, and lights. Nothing more. Set that at maybe 3 ¢ per kWh. Everything above that should be charged at cost, whatever that is, or maybe a little more. Probably something like 9 or 10 ¢ per kWh. If I'm paying three times as much for my marginal power usage, I may be more inclined to power down my PC at night.

Low income people should save money overall because presumably they don't have 60 inch plasmas sucking up megawatts every evening, so most of their power usage should fall within the lower rate bracket. The catch is that people who heat their homes with electricity will get screwed. Maybe something else can be worked out for them. It should be easier for Hydro to keep track of who has baseboard heat than how much everybody's income is, after all, Hydro is the gas supplier too.

St. Joseph wind farm

In case you weren't aware, a new wind farm is springing out of the frozen tundra south of Winnipeg. It is just west of Hwy 75 near the town of St. Joseph, and it is about 35% larger than the St. Leon wind farm and will be the largest wind farm built in Canada this year, according to Manitoba Hydro.

They are going hard, working on that thing. I counted at least five cranes raising 5 different turbines, a few dozen already built and many more in various stages of completion. They really are quite a marvelous thing up close. The blades are over 50 yards from tip to hub, gracefully curving and reshaping the entire length. The total span of the blades would be about the same as a football field. It's hard to imagine these monsters being turned by nothing more than air.

Some pics:

I see they chose the Siemens X5600 flux capacitor. Good choice...

Ow ow ow my head is stuck. O0oo nice bearings!

This whole wind farm almost didn't happen. The original partners, Babcock & Brown of Australia, went bankrupt. The liquidated North American assets of B&B ended up in a firm called Pattern Energy, the current partner. This deal with Pattern only happened because Hydro threw them a $260 million line of credit.

It is hard to evaluate this deal because it is not straight forward, and as usual we don't have all of the information. I tried to make sense of it back in March. I am not going to redo all of those calculations, but knowing now that the going rate for hydro exports is somewhere around $0.03 / kwh, the break-even $0.08 / kwh I came up with back then doesn't look so spectacular. I don't doubt that there are errors in my assumptions or calculations as I was likely drunk when I wrote that. If anybody out there has better info please let me know.

There are benefits too: in the jobs created and money spent locally, and in having a more diversified energy grid.

Then there is the issue with sleep loss, headaches, diarrhea, spontaneous abortions, deformed skulls and missing eyeballs.

Spring cleaning, gonzo twins, privacy

Spring Clean-up

If you live in the St.Vital or south St.Boniface area of Winnipeg, here's something for you to do this weekend: Bishop Grandin Greenway is having it's annual spring clean-up, Saturday from 10:00 am to noon. Get outside, meet some people, and help clean up your neighbourhood.

***

Separated at birth?

***

Hey everybody! Don't look at me!

Whether you're a homeless person, or a multi-millionaire, if you value your privacy, stay the hell away from Gordon Sinclair. Gordon almost gave me a migraine this morning with his column about the couple who is listing a house for $7.4m:

the wife and mother of two -- who considers me a friend -- phoned Thursday ... she was fearful their otherwise private lives were about to become public.

... he writes, while dropping hints about who exactly the couple is (He owns a local business, recently expanded into the U.S., they have two daughters, one of whom moved to San Diego; they are well know for their local philanthropic and volunteer work; etc..), helpfully suggesting that people check it out on Google Steetview, and succeeded in getting a leader for the column on the front page of the Saturday Paper. Ya ... that's gonna help with the whole privacy situation.

Though one might suggest that by listing a, perhaps, $2m house for $7.4m, they were intentionally trying to generate buzz in media. I don't know ... you tell me:

Though it looks quite nice from the back. A nod to Modern Houses of Winnipeg blog for noticing this a week before the press picked up on it (not that it is necessarily newsworthy). See also New Winnipeg.

Bipole Disorder: Billion dollar insurance policy

Writing about the Bipole III debacle is like banging my head against the wall. People should be outraged about the apparent colossal waste of money, but instead the general public just yawns: "Oh there goes the silly government again, wasting money. Nothing new there."

Even though I know my efforts are futile, I still can't let it go. I had to try to find out more from our government about why they chose the much costlier and wasteful west side route. So, on goes my helmet ...

***
I spoke to an MLA and to a senior staffer in the department responsible for Manitoba Hydro. They essentially confirmed what I knew all along: that the UNESCO Heritage thing is just a red herring. It's a catchy and easily-consumable hunk of bull shit that they could toss out there instead of the dry, unpalatable truth. Not their exact words, but nor did they pretend that it was an important factor.

An important factor is the licensing process. This process includes a scoping statement and environmental impact assessment (the later not yet complete) followed by a one year period during which interested parties and communities can intervene. This is where the fun begins. Now, the people I talked to didn't actually say "we don't want to negotiate with the Indians" but it was made clear that doing so was expected to be an ordeal. That is understandable. Though some First Nations communities on the east side of the province supported the project, dealing with those that did not could certainly be painful. We know, for example, that the Hollow Water community can be a first class pain in the ass when it wants to be, and you can bet they're one of the communities opposing the project.

In addition, the government says it has a concern about opposition in the U.S. to the east-side route. Not from just one group, but from a coalition of interest groups including environmental groups, local power producers (imagine that, eh?) and others. It's not really about the trees though. It's an emotional issue. The transmission routing study on the Hydro web site refers at different points to the area east of Lake Winnipeg as an "upscale address" that has "emotional appeal" and could be a "cause celebre" should the opposition gain momentum. According to my government buddy, the combination of all of these factors that I cannot seem to type without using "quotation marks" threatens to elevate the opposition to the east side route from mere annoyance to something much bigger.

So strong is this opposition, says the government, that it not only threatens to derail future power sales to Minnesota, but all power sales to the U.S.. These groups are apparently just fine with the west side route, thus the additional cost of the west side route can be considered "insurance" for our exports. A $600 million insurance policy with annual payments in the tens of millions of dollars. This, I am told, is one of the major factors in selecting the west side route.
You would figure that a united coalition so strong as to threaten billions of dollars in exports of clean energy between two nations might warrant a story in a newspaper or something. So would I, so I ran some searches of the five highest circulation Minnesota newspapers (Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, Rochester Post Bulletin, Duluth News Tribune, Southwest Journal) and came up with no relevant reference to Manitoba Hydro at all. How do you alter government policy without getting your word out to the public? Maybe this coalition is a covert black-ops kind of opposition, where men in trench coats smoking cigarattes approach Minnesota politicians in empty parking garages and make veiled threats about buying power that requires pine trees in Canada to be cut down.
Let's consider the supposed opposition from environmental groups for a second. What environmental group would endorse a solution that would cause somewhere between 30-70 mW of electricity to be wasted? Enough power to light the city of Brandon, vanished into thin air in the form of heat from line losses, just to save a few trees? What about the scarce Boreal Plains ecozone on the west side that the transmission routing study says demands greater protection than the vast forest on the east side? What about the fragile Saskatchewan River Delta and other "Areas of Special Interest" on the west side that are not adequately protected?

So it amounts to this: If there is opposition from environmental groups, then that opposition has it's foundation in ignorance. Ignorance of the true environmental pros and cons of the two routing options. This is something that can easily be combated: "Hey, you in the hemp shirt with the granola bar. did you know that you're advocating the waste of 50mW of CLEAN electricity?"
Such granola-crunchers may be found in an organization called NRDC. This is not a Minnesota group. It is a large organization that opposes development of various ecosystems all over the western hemisphere, and like to interview native elders who say such things as "There's a big spruce tree that fell down in one of our rivers many years ago. And it's still there. Nobody's ever moved it." They have also interviewed Robert Kennedy about our forest, but if you read the related articles on their site there is concern about flooding, forestry and mining, but very little mention of transmission.

I am convinced that most environmental groups in the U.S. don't give a shit where we put our line, as long as they can buy our green energy. There is one exception: an organization called Fresh Energy. Fresh Energy is a non-profit organization that feigns environmental stewardship, but is a lobbying organization for certain Minnesota energy producers. It opposes exports from MB Hydro in general, according to the routing study, although it is very doubtful that they have the clout to actually stop those exports. However, the thinking is that disputes with native communities over east-side routing could give them additional ammunition, which brings us back to issue #1: navigating the hostile First Nations.

Yes, but let's also consider the difficulties negotiating the west side route: There are still First Nations Communities that need to be dealt with, but also farmers. Ukrainian farmers. (I have no idea what that's supposed to mean.) The point is, there is a great deal of territory that needs to be navigated including flood zones, parklands, and farms. Many many many farms. About that: Apparently* Hydro is committed to certain limitations in setting it's route through this farmland, including
1. Hydro will not expropriate any land. It will negotiate all settlements with the land owners.
2. Hydro will not run the line within 600m of any residence.
3. Hydro will not run the line diagonally across any farmland. Yes, you read that correctly. Yes, I do know what diagonal means.

I have input these limitations into an advanced computer model to simulate what the Bipole III route might look like on the west side of the province:


Who knows how much this will really cost and how much longer the line really will be when all is said and done. Why would Hydro, which is billions of dollars in debt already, incur all of this additional cost and hardship, rather than taking their lumps with the first nations communities (which they have experience with) thereby saving a freighter-load of money? A: They wouldn't. However, because this issue is so important to Manitobans, the Manitoba government took an "advisory role" in the process during which they advised Hydro to leave the east side alone. Why is this issue so important to Manitobans? Beacuse if the "coalition of environmentalists" in the U.S. (a.k.a. Fresh Energy/NRDC) causes all of our electricity export contracts to vanish, then the province will take a huge economic hit. We just can't take that risk, so it was critical that the province step in and direct Hydro on what to do. This is what I am told, anyhow.

Plus, Resource Management Areas (RMAs) are a provincial responsibility. These are arrangements whereby affected parties are consulted about development. However, they have to be managed properly, otherwise "rather than reducing conflict, these arrangements can create tensions whereby the government states that the relationship is one of consultation but in effect grants a right of consent to each First Nation."(pg16) In other words, there is work involved on the part of the provincial government to stick-handle the talks with the First Nations correctly. This requires effort, diligence, and intelligence. If the provincial government is unwilling to undertake these negotiations than perhaps they are lacking in one of those three areas.

What's the conclusion? I have seriously spent too much time on this and have to get back to my regular schedule of downloading anime porn. Also, I am not buying the idea that NRDC or any other environmental group would or could block Hydro exports to the U.S. -- a prospect that the routing study call "highly speculative" -- and I certainly don't agree with paying a billion dollars to guard against it. I think the real issue here is the willingness or the ability of the province to deal with the First Nations in a fair but firm manner, and to take a stand if necessary (as it likely will be). As always with this government, if there is a choice between making a tough decision or spending money, the choice will always be to spend money.

***

by the way, Hydro, thanks for the second bag of light bulbs. Is this going to be a weekly delivery? I probably shouldn't tell you this, but I can afford to buy my own bulbs.

***

*as discussed by Hydro personnel at recent open houses in Western MB.

h/t Mike Waddell

Devil's advocate on climate change

The Climate Research Unit scientists were right to fudge their climate change studies.

The cooked data, the exaggerated results, the black-listed dissenters, and the general bastardization of scientific process: it is all justifiable. In fact, it is essential.

The problem of global pollution and climate change is subject to something that economists call the Tragedy of the Commons. If the global climate were to go to shit, all nations would suffer. However, no one nation can solve the problem unilaterally, and attempting to do so would impart economic hardship on that nation. A collaborative effort is required involving all nations. If country Z refuses to participate, then country Y will as well, so as not to be at a competitive disadvantage. If Y does not participate than neither will X, and so on.

Thus you need all nations on board, and you're not going to get all those politicians in line with wishy-washy results, or "objective peer review", or "conflicting opinions" that self-interested leaders can latch on to as an excuse not to participate.

Furthermore, we all know how these international planning sessions go: leaders go in talking about a certain objective; after all the bickering and nattering they walk away with an agreement for 1/10th of that objective; and when it comes time to put the rubber to the road they may actually accomplish 1/10th of what they agreed to. So if you need to reduce emissions by a trillion tons to save the planet, then you have to tell everybody that they need to reduce emissions by 100 trillions tons. If oceans are going to rise by 6 inches, you tell them that they're rising by 50 feet. That's how it works. And if some pain-in-the-ass scientists say "Hey wait a minute, our results show ..." then you have to shut those fuckers up ASAP before they ruin everything.

Alas, some thieving thruthers who obviously don't have the best interests of the planet in mind have exposed the ruse, and as a result the climate negotiations in Copenhagen are doomed to fail. And because of that, we are all doomed.

Sigh...

Pollute the Earth Day

So what did you do for Earth day? I burned 1.2 litres of fuel waiting in a massive line of cars to drop off a 13" TV at the one-day-only e-Waste drop-off. I feel good about that. Does the planet love me now?

Actually, I ended up throwing my TV in the box of the pickup truck in front of me. He had all kinds of crap in there. Might as well take mine too. No point in both of us waiting in line. I did get his permission ... turns out he was dropping off a bunch of TVs from the Public Safety Building, including what must have been a 40" TV with a giant hole in the screen. Nice.

Anyhoo ... have to get back to watching hockey. TSN's Pierre McGuire tells me that the Flames / Blackhawks game could have an incredibly potential finish. I don't know what that means, but it sounds exciting.

Free water is good ... unless it's filling your basement

It's kind of ironic that, as flood waters are set to wreck a path of destruction throughout the Red River Valley, the students and President of the U of W are banning bottled water because it should not be "commoditized." What about when you have so much of it that it's destroying your house. Then can you commoditize it? I am a little bit surprised that Mr Lloyd Axworthy is playing along with this misguided starry-eyed idealism, but I guess taking away personal choice fits his ideology. (Maybe I was a starry-eyed idealist myself when I voted for him as an MP many years ago.)

There is also the environmental angle -- all of that plastic being used and thrown out or recycled: One thing that I remember quite clearly from my days in University is that when you pull a water fountain out of a wall and carry it into class with you, it doesn't work anymore. It needs to be attached to the wall in order to function properly. Therefore, it is very likely that students will continue to purchase bottled beverages from vending machines, even though water is no longer an option. They will simply have to choose from other alternatives like Iced Tea, Pepsi or Mountain Dew. Those atrocious plastic bottles will still end up in the recylcing bins -- the only difference being that the students throwing them in there will be fatter and have worse teeth than before.

Could this be another example of well-intentioned but heavy-handed policy having unexpected negative consequences? It is, if nothing else, a reminder of why it's a good thing that Axworthy is no longer in politics.

links: fp sun

Bipole disorder: It's not too late to go down the east side!!!

I am glad that Welch wrote her synopsis of Hydro's state of affairs. Allow me to comment of a few of her points:

on power rates:
"lawyer Williams said there could be a debate that starts percolating over just what Manitobans ought to pay for power -- the cheap rate we pay now or something closer to the real market value, which might spur people to conserve their megawatts."

Start percolating? Get with the program already. It's been debated on the internet many times already. YES we should be paying market rates, at least on marginal power consumption. If you maintain low rates on the first 200 kwh or so, and jack up the rates on the incremental consumption, you'll promote conservation without hurting the low incomers. You can employ market forces while feeling all warm and fuzzy about protecting the vulnerable people. That's the best of both worlds for a liberal province.

on wind power:
I don't know what's going on here, but there obviously isn't any motivation to make this happen. "The Doer government has promised to build another 600 megawatts of wind power." He also promised to get rid of hallway medicine. Next ...

The dams:
" 'We've got a lot of stuff going on, but everything seems to be under control,' said Hydro CEO Bob Brennan," who added: "NOT"

Cap and trade:
I am generally a fan of market-based mechanisms like this, but I was listening to a dude who works in the power industry in Vancouver and in his opinion there are major flaws with this plan. I must do more research to comment on this.

Bipole III:
"The province did finally table long-awaited legislation to help protect the east side's boreal forest from development, paving the way for a UNESCO World Heritage site and effectively killing any chance of a power line down the east side."

Grrrrrr. This is sooooo annoying. For those who are not familiar with the facts of the issue, let me summarize:
1. The east side of the lake aleady has development in the form of logging and mining and other such things. A new road is being proposed to access remote communities. The bipole line would not damage this area to any significant degree, and therefore this area does not need "protecting" any more than the Upper Fort Garry gates needed protecting.
2. The proposed west-side route will fell near as many trees as the west side route due to the longer distance. Some of those trees may be in protected aspen parklands. Plus, accoring to Jim Cotton (on some previous post), there is already a wide swath of land cleared down the side of the lake.
3. The Bipolee III power line does not preclude qualification for UNESCO membership, nor does the absence of said power line guarantee membership.
4. UNESCO membership means bugger all. What is it going to do? Fill the forest with eco tourists? No. The same hunters and fishers will visit the area then as they do now. Jake and Margaret from Vermont aren't going to vacation in the middle of a mosquito infested forest because it has a UNESCO designation. And the question has to be asked: do we even want tourists in this pristine area? Would it be better protected by keeping it below the radar? Why is this designation so important?
5. The proposed west-side route is far more expensive to build. According to Welch: the PUB "is a little worried about Hydro's financial future." As am I, by the way. Which is why I don't think we should be wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on a longer path for Bipole III.
6. The west-side route will waste thousands of megawatt-hrs of electricity per year, resulting in the loss of around $7-15m per year according to my calculations here, not to mention a shit load of GREEN power. If you are at all concerned about the environment, you should be outraged by this callous waste of green electricity. Every megawatt wasted will be replaced by dirty power somewhere down the line.

It's not too late to reverse this idiotic decision!!!

Icebergs and Algae

Icebergs
I'm no scientist, but I take an interest in science. I read New Scientist frequently. They tell me that the globe is warming and the ice caps are melting at an alarming rate. I know enough to understand that "global warming" is a misnomer -- that all parts of the planet will not be affected equally due to changing weather patterns. "Climate change" is a more accurate description. Yet, it is still pretty damn hard to reconcile this global warming stuff with the frost bite on my ass.

We had a less-than-spectacular summer, an average fall I guess, and then came December:

I couldn't find daily normals so I used monthly normals for the comparison vs. actual temps and forcasts up to Christmas. For a fair comparison, since the last 6 six days are missing you should exclude the first 6. If you do that, you'll see that only two days did we get above normal for our high, and even on those two the daily low was far colder than normal. This is bullshit. I demand a refund.

When I was dying of hypothermia last March I noted that "things are looking up" because the long term forecast called for above normal temps. What the hell happened to that? Have a look at the Free Press web site: "New Storm Strikes the Northwest", "Plows hit the Streets", "Winter Rolls in Coast to Coast", "Deep freeze continues". Part of that may be lazy reporting. Just like at a party, the weather is the go-to subject when you have nothing else to talk about. Still, you gotta think that if the average temperature of the globe is increasing, then somebody somewhere must be pretty fucking hot.

Algae
Gary Doer is also no scientist, but will he listen to them? A article in the Sunday Free Press revived the debate about the $50 million plan to remove nitrogen from Winnipeg waste water, in an apparently misguided attempt to clean up Lake Winnipeg. Will the NDP listen to the experts and back off the plan? Many argue that there wasn't a whole lot of scientific reasoning behind the crack down on the hog industry expansion which has cost the province jobs. My guess is he plows ahead with the project so that he can claim he's doing something, even if he's really just wasting money. I guess you could look at it as a $50 million fiscal stimulus package to get our economy going.

Just for fun

CBC: Your Unreliable Source

I just about pissed myself when I read this:

most CBC climate science coverage remains error-riddled and among the most biased in the English-speaking world.

I don't know why I think that is so funny. It's actually kind of sad. I have always been a little critical of news coverage from some of our mainstream media outlets, but I didn't think the problem was this bad! The English-speaking world? Heh.

For the record, I consider myself an environmentalist. But if we are going to make wise decisions and have an intelligent debate about the issue of climate change, we need to start with good information.


h/t: OMMAG

Keep our suburb clean!

I live in one of those ‘burbs with the man-made “lakes” amongst the houses. The ones that, this time of year, are like truck stops for geese, only the geese are noisier than trucks and shit all over the place. Anyhow, I was walking by one of these lakes yesterday when I noticed an older couple, most likely retired, strolling along the lake in a public space carrying plastic bags and picking up garbage.

Now I suppose it is possible that Mr. and Mrs. Whoever were actually performing community service for a B&E or auto theft, but I didn’t notice anybody supervising them. Plus, I don’t think the courts assign community service for those types of crimes anymore. I think you need to stab somebody to get community service, and these folks didn’t look like the blade-carrying types.

So, I am pretty sure they were doing it out of a sense of pride and responsibility to the community. Weird, huh? Well, it was good to see, and I am happy to have this couple living in my neighbourhood, so I just wanted to acknowledge their contribution to keeping our community clean and pleasant. Not like those bloody geese.