Environment: The Future - is it here?

Facts do not lie:

1) There's no question that the climate is changing.

2) Canada is consistently in the 500-550 metric tons of carbon emitted yearly, so it's not Canada who's driving that change.

3) Canada emits just 1.6% of the world's carbon, so even if a tax magically lowered our emissions, it would have little to no impact globally.

4) If you tax the farmer who grows the food, the trucker who brings it to market and the store that sells it, you are taxing the family that has to buy it. That's gets less money to invest, not more, and you can't claim to be progressive without actual progress.

5) If we want real change, all action on the environment must begin with ways to help end other superpolluter nations' impact on the environment. Until China is helped to pull its' own weight, no amount of Paris Accords are going to mean a thing; typical politicians' "solutions" that solve absolutely nothing at all.

Real growth, real solutions, can only start when we're tired of our own decisions - and, back to the definition of insanity, we keep doing the same thing, expecting different results; a carbon tax just makes everyone poorer without delivering any actual results.

So, Mark...what's The Big Idea then? There are two that we need to get to work on NOW.

First...Our transportation infrastructure literally stinks.

A single train can take up to five hundred trucks and their pollution off the road, but to do that, we would need to bring our track systems and trains out of the 1980s.

Massive amounts of renewable-energy trains, running on high-speed rail, with separate commercial and passenger wyes, MUST BE STARTED NOW and cannot take twenty years to finish.

Our railway system must go from the afterthought it is to one Japan and Europe would recognize and approve of. Look, if they can do it, we can do it. Flat.

This is a national-security issue. It's not as 'sexy' as fighter planes or counter-terror ops, but we saw clearly during COVID that our supply chain isn't just vulnerable during world events but absolutely non-existent. One train crew in isolation during a pandemic can bring enough supplies to alleviate Windsor's emergency needs for a week, a task that would take thousands of truckers.

Next Gen: Innovation doesn't happen on its' own.

Imagine a Windsor where a wholly Canadian-owned Next Great Green Idea was invented and is manufactured, where we're no longer at the whim of non-Canadian companies and politicians.

Is there some legitimate reason why Ontario, the original home of the CANDU (love that name) reactor, can't aggressively jump forward on a research institute designed to transition us away from fission to fusion, which doesn't produce deadly spent-uranium rods?

Is there some real reason why Ontario hasn't taken the recently invented bio-solar panel that a) runs on food scraps and b) works on UV, hence works on even cloudy days (amazing!) and licensed it for research, improvement and mass-production?

I would immediately - can't be too soon, can it - take some of the money saved from stopping deficit spending and aggressively expand our higher education programs, attracting the very best and brightest minds from the world over to completely 'futurize' the way we learn, the way we research, the way we invest, the way we invent, so that the next generation of renewable-energy developments are OURS.

That way, we take care of the kids, we take care of the environment, and oh, by the way, we take MUCH better care of our future than we're (not) doing right now.

Let's get to work, Ontario - the work of the future.