Adam Clare

Ontario Just Made it Clear: Get Solar or Pay More

solar retaining wall alongside a road

Homeowners in Ontario are about to pay a lot more electricity with no sign of rate increases stopping anytime soon. The far right Conservative government has torn up renewable developments (at a cost to taxpayers of $231 million) and done very little other than make announcements about nuclear power. You’re probably wondering where the good news is in all of this. Surely, a government hellbent on destroying the planet and people’s pocketbooks isn’t good. To spin the news: there has never been a better time in the history of Ontario than now to get on renewables. If you own a home then you should be investing in solar, wind, or geothermal to save tons of money (and the planet); otherwise you should at the very least get better insulation so you pay less for heating and cooling.

Ontario’s electricity market needs a deeper conversation, one that goes beyond time blocks and rebates.

How do we make energy fair? How do we protect households from volatility? And how do we incentivize solutions—like rooftop solar, battery storage, and smarter appliances—that put power back in people’s hands?

These aren’t fringe questions. They’re central to the future of energy in Ontario.

Because if the last few years have shown us anything, it’s this: betting on lower hydro bills is no longer a safe strategy.

198 Methods of Nonviolent Action

protest

More than 7 million Americans hit the streets to protest the authoritarian Trump regime in the USA, they rallied under the banner No Kings. Unsurprisingly, the protests were peaceful and looked nothing like the pro-Trump attempted Jan 6 insurrection from years ago. It’s a good thing to see Americans out on the streets expressing their discontent with their federal leadership. In a thriving democracy protests are connected and intertwined with adjacent efforts to change whatever problem there is (in America’s case it’s the rise of authoritarianism), plus individuals can make their own difference in their workplace or community. The Albert Einstein Institution has a list of 198 methods of nonviolent actions that people can take to ensure that we continue to live in democracies.

Undoubtedly, a large number of additional methods have already been used but have not been classified, and a multitude of additional methods will be invented in the future that have the characteristics of the three classes of methods: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation and nonviolent intervention.

It must be clearly understood that the greatest effectiveness is possible when individual methods to be used are selected to implement the previously adopted strategy. It is necessary to know what kind of pressures are to be used before one chooses the precise forms of action that will best apply those pressures

Read the list.

Forget Cremation, Get Eaten When You Die

hands

You will die. It’ll happen to everyone, yet too often people don’t think about the practical aspects in advance. One often overlooked question is what to do with your body when you’re done with it. In North America popular ways to be rid of one’s body are cremation (which requires oodles of energy and is quite bad for the planet), and displaying the corpse (which is requires oodles of chemicals that are bad for the planet). A safe, clean, and fast way to help bodies decompose is a burial container filled with mushrooms and it’s now available in Canada.

“If you compare it to wood [coffins] or even metal, those things take decades. And here, we’re talking about days or months,” he explained to me from Delft, in the Netherlands. On its website, Loop Biotech claims the coffin adds to the “biodiversity of the soil” around it as it degrades, and Hendrikx says other coffins may also contain chemical additives that could leach into the soil. Hendrikx estimates Loop Biotech has sold more than 2,000 cocoons in Europe, and has just started in North America.
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Valentine, also on the board of the Green Burial Society of Canada, sees natural burials as inclusive of different family rituals and desires, but can be as simple as burying a body in a shroud and ensuring native grasses and plants grow above. What’s more, an environmentally conscious death doesn’t need to be about measuring emissions.

Eat More Veggies to Help the Economy

If you still ear meat you may be sick of hearing that cutting out meat is good for your diet, health, and particularly good for the planet. If none of those reasons weren’t enough to convince to give up the flesh then maybe saving money will do it:

This 2022 study in Portugal found that vegan consumers spent the least among the groups examined.

A 2025 Austrian study found that vegan diets can save up to 41% of shopping costs (225 euros) for a family of four.

This 2021 German study found that monthly grocery bills for vegans cost 91 euros less compared to omnivorous diets, or about 11% less.

What’s more, getting people to switch to plant based proteins can make national economies more robust and better performing:

This 2023 Nature study found that “a dietary shift away from animal-sourced foods could greatly reduce these ‘hidden’ costs, saving up to $7.3 trillion worth of production-related health burden and ecosystem degradation while curbing carbon emissions.”

This 2016 study found that a global shift away from animal products could save “1–31 trillion US dollars, which is equivalent to 0.4–13% of global gross domestic product (GDP) in 2050.”

This 2020 FAO report found that vegan diets could avoid $ 1.3 trillion in healthcare-related costs and between $0.8 and $1.3 trillion in climate change emissions mitigation. Bonus, the report found that “a vegan diet could save “13.7 (7.9-19.4) million avoidable deaths globally in 2030.”

This 2024 report estimates that the NHS (England’s National Health Service) could save £2.2 billion in medical fees if the British population ate meat-free for weekday lunches.

This 2024 report estimates that factory farming costs British taxpayers over £1.2 billion annually, in the form of subsidies, environmental pollution, respiratory illnesses, and lost farming jobs.

A 2023 UK preprint estimates that if everyone in the UK adopted a plant-based diet, the NHS would save a total of £6.7 billion per year.

Solar Soars Above Coal as World’s Biggest Source of Electricity

Solar panels on grass

Believe it or not there are places love coal so much that they seem to despise their citizen’s health and wellbeing. The rest of the world is moving to renewables rather quickly and this year marks is the first that solar is now the biggest single source of electricity. That’s right: just one source of renewable electricity has overtaken the most harmful source of electricity. The future is 100% renewable!

Solar power delivered the lion’s share of growth, meeting 83% of the increase in electricity demand. It has now been the largest source of new electricity globally for three years in a row.

Most solar generation (58%) is now in lower-income countries, many of which have seen explosive growth in recent years.

That’s thanks to spectacular reductions in cost. Solar has seen prices fall a staggering 99.9% since 1975 and is now so cheap that large markets for solar can emerge in a country in the space of a single year, especially where grid electricity is expensive and unreliable, says Ember.