It’s curious Health Canada has taken an interest in studying the health impacts of something as benign as wind energy when for years health and environment experts have been cautioning about the negative impacts of fossil fuels on human health.
Medical authorities in Canada and across the globe have given wind energy a clean bill of health, making Health Canada’s proposed study superfluous – a waste of time and a waste of public funds.
The medical community is confident wind turbines are safe and they produce no toxic emissions and no radioactive waste. When you harness the wind to create electricity, you are not relying on dirty fossil fuels that pollute our air and water and fill our lungs with asthma-inducing, cancer-causing, neurologically harmful pollutants.
For these reasons, Canada’s health community is asking: Why not spend our tax dollars to help transition away from dirty coal, nuclear or the tar sands?
In a 2010 report, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health reviewed 40 years of scientific research on wind turbines and human health. Dr. King’s report concluded “the scientific evidence available to date does not demonstrate a direct causal link between wind turbine noise and adverse health effects.”
She also found that “community engagement at the outset of planning for wind turbines is important and may alleviate health concerns about wind farms.”
This puts any physiological impact from the very ordinary sound of a windmill into serious doubt.
On the flip side, Canada’s health community is shocked at the growing evidence of illness connected to the fossil fuels industry. In 2009, the Alberta Cancer Board reported cancer rates in Fort Chipewyan, downstream from the tar sands, were 30 per cent higher than expected. Yet our Federal government continues to allow tar sands operations to expand at an alarming rate.
According to the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, in 2009 Ontario’s coal plants were connected to 246 deaths, 342 hospital admissions, 406 costly emergency room visits and almost 123,000 illnesses such as asthma attacks.
We are certain of the health impacts of coal and applaud the Ontario government for their precedent-setting commitment to shutter their plants in 2014 and encourage them to close them sooner.
But we are still burning coal in Alberta, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan and the federal government has shown no leadership to help transition to a clean energy mix.
Nuclear plants are notorious for their radioactive waste. This industry’s spent fuel remains highly toxic and radioactive for thousands of years. But nuclear reactors, even in their normal day-to-day operations, emit radiation. A 2008 German government study found an elevated risk of leukemia for children living within five kilometers of the country’s 16 nuclear plants.
Without the threat of a natural disaster, calculated attack or human error, nuclear energy puts our health – and especially our children’s health – at risk.
Any form of energy production inevitably has some negative impact on the planet. Wind turbines are not perfect. They generate some sound and their appearance is not pleasing to everyone.
But coal-fired generating stations, nuclear power plants and the tar sands all contribute to serious illness. We’re comparing a minor annoyance from the sound of blowing wind to the severity of cancer, asthma and brain damage.
Our energy choices do impact our health and renewables like wind are our safest bets.
Farrah Khan, interim executive director, Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment
Wind generation is intermittent at best, huge costs for both purchasing and maintenance, enormous taxpayer subsidies without which the projects would not be viable. Currently, wind energy represents less than 0.5% of Canada’s production base and thats assuming 100% duty. Hydro is the only worth while investment in “green” energy. Solar has been plagued with premature degenerative problems reducing the already low effiency rate. Why are Canadians being forced to pay for technology that isn’t here yet? I support small scale, localized wind and solar but on a large scale it is a proven failure on both sides of the border and overseas. The only ‘green’ alternative in our future electicity needs will have to come from nuclear fusion but thats still a long ways off.
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Letter to the Editor: Brant News
August 15, 2012
The letter to the Editor of August 9, 2012 written by the interim Executive Director of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) contains some interesting claims and does so while trying to stifle debate and an upcoming Health Canada Study relating to the impacts of industrial wind turbines on human health. CAPE is prone to making extensive medical claims including some that appear in the aforementioned letter.
On most occasions Kahn’s letters/articles name studies or reports prepared by others to add weight to her claims as in this article where it states; “ “According to the Ontario Clean Air Alliance [OCAA] in 2009 Ontario’s coal plants were connected to 246 deaths, 342 hospital admissions, 406 costly energy room visits and almost 123,000 illnesses such as asthma attacks.”
The exact numbers laid out in the article are presumably to give the reader the feeling that this information; being so precise, must be right! If one laboriously goes through all of the reports that the OCAA have on their website it is impossible to find any reference to the precise numbers Kahn purports they have connected.
That Kahn would use the OCAA as her source of affirmation is worth examining. The former (currently on sabatical) Executive Director of OCAA (Jack Gibbons) sits on the Board of Ontario Clean Air Alliance Research Inc. a registered charity with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and presumably is the OCAA’s research arm. Gibbons sits on this Board along with Gideon Forman and Angela Bischoff of CAPE and a Richard Smith (the writer assumes that this is the Rick Smith, Executive Director of Environmental Defence).
When it comes to using Ontarians tax dollars CAPE and OCAA have different targets which, in my opinion, appear to be almost orchestrated. CAPE seems to favour the Trillium Foundation from whom they have obtained almost $600,000 in grants over the past few years whereas OCAA target the Toronto Atmospheric Fund or TAF, a City of Toronto owned not-for profit (perhaps its the Miller connection but as noted he is actually on the CAPE Board), from whom they have received grants of approximately $525,000.
CAPE is not registered with the Ontario Lobbyist Registrar however OCAA is, and they disclose that some of their past funding was provided by TAF. It is also interesting to note that OCAA disclose in their filing that private funding (over $750 per annum) comes from; Union Gas, European Power Systems (gas equipment), Northland Power (wind developer), Sky Generation (wind developer), Enbridge Gas and the Canadian Health & Environmental Research Foundation (CHEER). The latter is the registered charity of CAPE and according to its filing with the Canada Revenue Agency lists its activities as “General environmental protection, recycling services”; whatever that means.
The foregoing demonstrates to a limited extent, the scare mongering that ENGOs practice in their religious zeal to follow the preaching of the green zealots and plaster the Ontario countryside with industrial wind turbines 400/500 feet high that damage our health and increase our electricity bills!
Yours truly,
Parker Gallant, Toronto, Ontario
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