Climate watch

by Douglas Hunter

Mild winters, high evaporation and low precipitation are being blamed for continuing declines in Great Lakes water levels. On December 6, 2007, Environment Canada’s Level News warned that in the summer of 2008, the levels of Lakes Michigan and Huron could sink past the record lows of the mid-1960s.

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Early this year, the Government of Ontario accepted applications for its Community
Go Green Fund, which will dole out $6.6 million over the next four years to community projects that reduce greenhouse gases.

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Sault Ste. Marie is becoming one of Ontario’s greenest energy centres, thanks to the announcement of a 60-megawatt solar farm project, the largest in the country. Algoma Steel has embarked on a joint venture to build wind turbine towers and also plans to have a cogeneration plant operating by late 2008. Just north of the city is the 126-turbine Prince I and II Wind Farm.

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According to the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think tank, Canada ranked 17th out of more than 200 nations overall in total carbon emissions produced by power plants in 2007, with the worst offenders listed first. The United States and China topped the list. Canada was significantly cleaner than most industrialized countries according to its carbon “intensity,” the amount of carbon released per megawatt-hour of electricity produced. France relies heavily on nuclear power and is the only G8 nation with a better intensity rating than Canada’s; the United States has an intensity rating about three times that of Canada. The coal-fired Nanticoke #2 plant is Ontario’s single largest emitter. It produces power at close to half the carbon intensity of the continent’s worst offender, the Scherer plant in Georgia, and releases17.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.