Searching for Tao

I'll start with the good news because it's quite exciting and I have a picture ;-)

According to Torontoist, there's a guy by the name of Gordon Graff who wants to build a massive vertical farm right in the middle of Toronto. Imagine, instead of trucking in our food from all of the place, we grow it right here, a 20min walk from our homes.

The structure above is designed to feed 35,000 people and would consist of growing areas for everything from potates, to wheat to chickens for meat and eggs. I've been talking about this sort of thing and people have been telling me that I'm crazy... I guess I'm not the only one :-)

For more information (and pictures!) of other designs by other architects around the world, visit Vertical Farm.

And now the bad news.

The Conservative minority government has seen fit to approve a plan to search for a site to permanently store nuclear waste. Note that I used the word "store" and not "dispose" as the article does, since it's important that we remember that you can't dispose of nuclear waste... ever.

This decision is going to live with the next 1000 generations of Canadians and our government is making it sound like we can just put this stuff in a hole and ignore it 'till it goes away. It won't. Not until it leaks into the groundwater and contaminates the biosphere. Sadly though, I'm not surprised.

I found this great article today about the future of energy production and of the country. Written by an economist, it begins with the good & bad about nuclear and then goes on to strongly support sustainable alternatives instead; not because they're better for the environment, but because they will generate more power, for less cost and better the country as a result. It's a good read if you have the time. Here's a snippet:

When asked about the nuclear waste element, one engineer took out a map of Ontario and made a minuscule little dot on it with his sharpened pencil. "You see that?" he said. "That is all the room we need to safely store all of Ontario's nuclear waste for ten generations."

But I'm an economist with a masochistic attraction to complex social conditions. So when I look at a map of Ontario, I don't see the little pencil dot. I see 630,000 MW of wind power (for scale: that's more than 20 times Ontario's current peak consumption) and upwards of 7,500 MW of new hydro, but almost all of it stranded in the northern part of the province, inhabited by First Nations communities living in poverty conditions with few wealth-building prospects. This vast power potential is stranded because there is no transmission grid to get it down to market.

Toby A.A. Heaps, A Green Power Corridor