Adam Clare

Renewables Sweep Ontario’s Latest Energy Auction

solar retaining wall alongside a road

Ontario is getting more renewable power. Despite the best efforts of conservative Premier Doug Ford renewable energy keeps being a solid option for powering places. Ford has gone out of his way to mandate new homes to use gas, tear up wind turbines, make it harder for EV drivers, and so much more! Suffice to say For despises a clean economy that provides jobs and growth to the people of Ontario. It is with joy that renewable energy solutions are outperforming all the direct and indirect subsidies that the conservative party has given to the dying fossil fuel industry. Go renewables!

When it launched its latest call for bids from developers for new electricity generation, the provincial government said cost would be the deciding factor. That wind and solar beat other proposals — including natural gas — to every contract is another signal that the global shift towards clean energy is being driven by affordability above all else. Today, renewables are simply the cheapest source of electricity available.

Not Even Oil Megacorps Will Stop Clean Energy

Solar Panel School

Fossil fuels are unreliable due to political reasons and as such there is large price variation in fuel supplies, however on the renewable front the price just keeps going down. The economic success of renewables is clear and last year we saw renewables winning nearly every metric. Over at Canary Media they have a series of charts and stats that show just how well renewable energy is doing.

The latest data shows solar and wind made a speedy ascent this year — so speedy that they’re more than covering new power demand around the world.

Between January and September, power demand around the world rose by 603 terawatt-hours compared to that same time period last year. Solar met nearly all of that new demand on its own, and with a boost from wind, was able to cover all of it.

That’s a huge deal for the clean energy transition. When we produce more renewable power than is needed to cover growing demand, that’s when we can start chipping away at fossil fuels.

Tiny Gardens Everywhere: Let’s Get Growing!

When times get tough it’s time to get gardening! Actually, even when times are easy it’s time to get gardening. Even a small plot of land can produce a lot of benefit for you, your community, and improve where you live. Historian Dr. Kate Brown recently published a book Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City about how little plots of land made bog changes in our modern cities.

After hearing or reading what Dr. Brown has to say I’ll bet you’re going to start plotting out your plot.

From the eighteenth century to the twenty–first, the surprising history and inspiring contemporary panorama of urban gardening: nurturing health, hope, and community.

This manifesto for the next food revolution by acclaimed environmental historian Kate Brown speaks to nature lovers, food activists, social–justice warriors, urban planners, WOOFers, and the climate–concerned.

Ever since wage labor in cities replaced self–provisioning in the countryside, gardeners have reclaimed lost commons on urban lots. They composted garbage into topsoil, creating the most productive agriculture in recorded human history, without use of fossil fuels. The ecological diversity they fostered made room for human difference and built prosperity, too: in Nazi Berlin, working–class gardeners harbored dissidents and Jews; in Washington, DC, Black southern migrants built communities around gardens and orchards, the produce funding homeownership.

Check out the book here.

Fish Use Doorbells in Utrecht

Fish like to go anywhere the water is good for them, and sometimes that means urban areas. In the Netherlands the city of Utrecht has installed a doorbell for the fish to get in and out of a part of the city. Yes, a doorbell. Utrecht is a city with canals (no surprise for the Netherlands) and therefore a series of dams. Usually a fish ladder is used to help fish get across barriers but in many contexts and for many fishes the ladder just doesn’t work. Thus, a delightful doorbell has been added.

An underwater camera allows people to watch a livestream of the waterway and the fish that inhabit it. This camera transmits constantly during the migration season 24 hours a day. In 2026, this season will start on 2 March. The idea is that when someone sees a fish waiting to go through, they press the doorbell. Each time someone presses the doorbell a photo is automatically taken of the fish. This allows the fish to be tracked but is also a great way for people to try and identify the fish they have seen as well as learn more about that species.

Public Ownership of Public Transit Matters

Picture of the St. Pancras train station platform with trains waiting for passengers.

Right wing politicians love to sell public assets to the private sector to alleviate costs on the public, but in the long term that thinking is incorrect: in many sectors the costs still fall back on the public. The British railway system is one such example that public selling of their publicly built and run transit system resulted in an abject failure. It was so bad that people literally died as a result.

Many large public infrastructure projects take capital, time, and have ongoing costs directly due to the physical operation (think rails, engines, etc). This meant that the only place to save money as a private operator was in reducing labour costs, so layoffs occurred and with that came a crisis in a knowledge.

A decade-wide gap in skills was the consequence. With the growth in passenger demand came a huge growth in the number of infrastructure projects being carried out, and this skills bottleneck, combined with an industry structure that exacerbated costs by maximizing the number of organizational interfaces, meant work was being delivered too slowly and at too high a price. Cost escalations became unbearable for government in 2017 and resulted not only in the curtailment of the national electrification programme, but also in the abandonment of other enhancements across the country, particularly in and around the north of England. Meanwhile, there was a glut of new train orders, many for new electric trains for which there were no longer overhead wires planned to power them.
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The rail industry needs democratization, so that decisions about the railways we use are made closer to us. That means moving power, including over spending, away from Westminster. Democratic accountability at local and regional levels is key to unlocking the cycle of proposed and cancelled investment, and in pushing operators to do better. That means devolution of decision and funding powers to both the regions and cities, but also delivering sufficient industry funding autonomy so that it can respond quickly to these demands and rise above electoral cycles and fiscal anxiety.