Green Energy Act: Taxation Without Representation

The worst element of Ontario’s Green Energy Act is its violation the basic principle of legitimate taxation, originally codified in English law with the signing of the Magna Carta Libertatum in 1215. This video focuses on amendments to the Ontario Energy Board Act contained within Bill 150, The Green Energy and Green Economy Act, which received Royal Assent May 14, 2009. The specific section addressed here is Schedule D, Section 6 that introduces into the OEB Act Sections 26.1 and 26.2. This video is a follow-up to the video Home Invasion David Suzuki Style.

Watch the video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZdKZJYjN6s

A better version of the video, ticker taped by www.windfarms.wordpress.com and posted by Atomcatt (thanks), is available here:

12 Comments

  1. Your concern is shared by many citizens, and we are all attempting to raise awareness of this issue. I cannot remember a similar situation where the Ontario government has shown such complete disregard for the health and welfare of the electorate. There is something very wrong here.

  2. It could be helpful if your videos were available to the associations for municipalities and planners. These people are now realizing the problems associated with wind energy and will have to work with the provincial government on projects. Your videos are an excellent counterpoint to the propaganda they will encounter.

  3. Knowledge is power and now that we have accumulated the knowledge that shows everyone how corrupt and anti democratic this new “Green” revolution actually is, we must call out those guilty of attempting to force their “twisted” logic unto innocent citizens. The Green Energy Act is the biggest affront to Democracy in my lifetime in this country and must be stopped now!
    Major damage has already been done to peoples homes, health and communities and regardless of the “psycho babble” that is given from the Wind Industry and Politicians the truth is that real harm has been done and will continue to be done if this scheme to destroy Rural Ontario is not halted immediately. David Suzuki has “sold his soul to the company store” and must be exposed to all that have “bought into” his vision of humanity and how they are just “disgusting viruses infecting the planet!”
    ENOUGH!

  4. The GEA, conceived and drafted mainly by the wind energy industry, is a blatent abuse of power by McGuinty and Smitherman. Our rights were seriously eroded before it came into existence and they took it a step further.
    In a very short 3 years, major wind projects have been put into operation. The health problems that surfaced can be attributed directly to the provincial govt.’s woeful ‘guidelines’ for turbine placement. This govt. did not do their homework, they let the wind industry do it for them. Municipalities with projects in their areas know, firsthand, how much trouble they are. When they tried to stop the projects, they were taken to the OMB where they were told they had to allow turbines because the provincial govt. said so.
    Rather than putting a check on wind energy development and setbacks, this liberal govt. has decided they will do MINIMAL homework with no independent study. They have wrapped dictatorship up in a ‘we care about the environment’ blanket and are using it to try to cover their lack of accountability and to smother our rights.
    There needs to be an inquiry.

  5. This ‘watershed’ legislation is nothing but an attention grab and a sanctimonious celebration of the ‘green revolution’. When it comes to an energy mix, I have never, nor will I, have faith in the judgment of environmental lobby groups who support unproven technology, purely based on idealism. As the GEA was being sculpted with the wind industry’s trowel, the organization that built, maintains and manages our grid -The Power workers Union – had some suggestions that suggested a wide variety of energy technologies to be used in our energy mix. They were ignored because special interest groups that the Ontario government financially supports had a ‘green’ megaphone.
    Indeed, we need to have an inquiry.

  6. Couldn’t agree more Tom. This is a complete erosion of individual rights and treats rural residents (especially) as expendable collateral. I call anything relating to green as the New Religion where people looking to latch onto doing something positive, become so disassociated with the reality of what this truly represents and alieniates anybody who applies a little bit of critical thinking as unbelievers of the doom (Global Warming) we are facing. Have a look at a series of basic questions asked by the residents in NY of NYSERDA which simply asks, is Industrial Wind energy the solution we need?? Please contact me if you wish a copy.
    http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2009/07/01/nyserda-is-sidestepping-concerns-regarding-wind-power/

  7. If anybody has taken the time to read my blog, would notice that I have very little love for elitist environmentalist, and this attempted rights robbery is the main reason why.
    To be frank, I am not suprised that, as I like to call him, “fuhrer mcguinty” would cave into special interest groups that threaten our very fabric of democracy, especially since the other neo-nazi provisions he’s pulled. He was doing it even when I still lived in Ontario, and that was over 2 years ago.

    I’m glad he made a concession to the search and seizure area, which shows that democracy isn’t pushing up daisies, yet. I almost wish he did, because it would have finally gave the Ontarians the boot in the ass they needed to pay attention to what their premeir is doing. Of course, Ontario is suffering from the same problem Alberta is. they’re stuck with the idea of voting in conservative or Liberal, that they can get away with 34% pay hikes, or passing rights-restricting legislation simply because the people won’t vote them out.

    the only way a premeir will run a province fairly, is if they are at risk of loosing their job for their bonehead actions. That’s probably the reason why you don’t see these kinds of draconian laws passed on parliament hill. the threat of being de-throned is very real. but..but..that would mean voting in *gasp* PC or NDP!!

    but I guess I make way too much sense for the average Ontarian

  8. You have the GEA, down here we have Waxman. This is all completely insane. Here’s a note I sent to aweo.org —

    Friends,

    Thank you for the excellent resources on your site. From any point of view, wind power is a complete engineering, consumer, and environmental disaster. We’re fighting for a half-mile setback; animals are smarter — in West Virginia and Wisconsin the deer, raccoons, and squirrels clear out for at least two miles around a wind turbine.

    But here’s something I hope you’ll consider: Most of the anti-wind sites are run by people generally sympathetic to the political Left. Fine; but the reality of the whole situation is that not only are wind turbines in themselves a wretched idea, but in fact the whole supposed rationale for them — reducing carbon dioxide emissions — is utterly unmotivated. CO2 is not a pollutant, it’s a fertilizer, and “anthropogenic global warming” is just a giant scam.

    Before you stop reading and dismiss this piece as right-wing propaganda, PLEASE understand that that’s the whole problem: anti-global-warming people tend to be on the right, anti-industrial-wind tend to be on the left, and the two rarely talk to each other. But the same giant corporations and financiers are backing Big Wind and carbon vouchers, and the same lapdog media that breathlessly push the wonders of wind farms would rather blow up their laptops than say a word against the global warming alarmists.

    The fact is that the world is warming at about half a degree C per century, with a quarter-degree variation more or less in phase with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Carbon dioxide has little or nothing to do with it; at the minimum level seen in all prehistory — about 200 ppm — the relevant parts of the infrared spectrum are already so close to saturation that additional CO2 makes essentially no difference in the greenhouse effect. The IPCC’s theories — expressed in their computer models — have been proven wrong on several levels and by several independent sorts of data, but the IPCC is a political, not a scientific, organization, so this makes no difference.

    Unless the hippies and the neanderthals can get together on this, we’re looking at a disaster for the environment, the economy, and the whole country. Please wander around some skeptic sites and actually look at the evidence for yourself. There are a lot of real environmental problems to be addressed — e.g. the smog on the western Pacific Rim due to the lack of scrubbers in Chinese power plants. But over the last two decades the US alone has spent more than $50 billion on utterly fruitless global-warming research; how many Chinese scrubbers or African irrigation projects could that buy? Do we really want to see poor households’ energy bills double to line the pockets of Al Gore and his friends at Goldman-Sachs and GE?

    We have to get together on this.

    Best, thanks again for a very useful site,

    Craig Goodrich
    Las Vegas

  9. Constructive Comment: Ontario Electricity Consumers subsidize exports!

    Electricity contacts are paid for through IESO market revenues and the Global Adjusment. Essentially the global adjustment is a top up for the contract. (i.e. Wind project at 11 cents which recovers 5 cents from the market (HOEP) gets 6 cents from global adjustment.

    Electricity exports do not pay the Global Adjusment! see http://www.ieso.ca/imoweb/b100/b100_GA.asp

    More wind leads to typically more surplus baseload which leads to dumping power across the boarders at a low price because the market is flooded with supply (possibly negative price); and the Ontario electricity payer is left holding the Global Adjustment Bag.

    This is not good. Renewables are supposed to be a “premium” energy supply, yet we give it away

    • It is true that Ontario’s aggressive power purchasing policies during a time of declining demand and surplus capacity are subsidizing out-of-province consumers buying our power, but we have to be careful how we try to fix this. Once the contracts are signed, our options are limited. If Ontario can find export customers who will pay a premium for green power, Ontario customers would benefit, or at least mitigate some of the costs we have taken on to develop renewable generation here. On the other hand, if we simply increase our export prices to reflect the high contract prices Ontario consumers are paying for renewables, the result will be to reduce export sales and to increase the ultimate costs imposed on Ontario consumers. Once Ontario consumers are on the hook for power purchases, our best approach with exports (from the perspective of consumers) is to sell anytime the export market will pay more than our spot price.

      The benefit that Ontario is conferring upon export customers by building surplus, non-dispatchable capacity is similar to the benefit that Denmark confers upon Norway by doing the same thing.

  10. Pingback: C.D. Howe Institute Attacks Constitutionality of Ontario’s Green Energy Taxation « TomAdamsEnergy.com

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