Doug Ford is operating at the height of hypocrisy. He claims his efforts to encourage the mining of cobalt, lithium, manganese, nickel, graphite, and copper, in the “Ring of Fire” in northern Ontario’s boreal forests will help our climate. These elements are used to produce batteries to power electric vehicles.
Meanwhile, we learn that he promises to use Ontario tax dollars to pay for the operation of Gas Plants that will use fracked natural gas to make electricity, even if they are banned from operating by the federal government!
Ford is working to ensure that CO2 intensive gas-based electricity rather than green renewable electricity is available in Ontario. This will undermine any imagined “green” benefits from mining in the Ring of Fire. Making batteries for electric vehicles while destroying boreal forests and then charging them using electricity produced by burning fracked “natural” gas is the Ontario PC’s only climate plan.
We need to ban the use of “natural gas”. Electricity needs to be carbon free. Legislation banning fossil fuel hook-ups in new buildings needs to be in place.
Our degrading climate cannot afford Ford’s hypocrisy.