Energy poverty Getting Worse in Rural Ontario

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Energy rates in Ontario have climbed 100% in the last decade.

So-called “energy poverty” is getting worse in rural Ontario, a Global News investigation has found, with even small households paying hundreds of dollars a month to keep the lights on.

Officials, residents and experts are all sounding the alarm after electricity rates in the province rose 100 per cent in the past decade.

A range of factors are fueling the increases, including subsidies for clean energy, dealing with aging nuclear plants and maintaining and modernizing the province’s vast transmission and distribution system. But the problem is especially acute in rural Ontario, where steep delivery charges are the norm.

“The worst affected are customers in rural Ontario,” said energy analyst Tom Adams. “Compared to the ordinary urban household, the delivery charge alone is usually two to three times higher.”

NOT CO2????

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Wait. It isn’t CO2 causing an early spring?

Human use of artificial light is causing spring to come at least a week early in the UK, researchers at the University of Exeter in Cornwall have found.

New research led by a team of biologists based at the University’s Penryn campus highlights for the first time and at a national scale the relationship between the amount of artificial night-time light and the date of budburst in woodland trees.

The study, the result of a long term collaboration with independent environmental consultants Spalding Associates, in Truro, made use of data collected by citizen scientists from across the UK, after the Woodland Trust asked them to note down when they first saw sycamore, oak, ash and beech trees in leaf as part of the charity’s Nature’s Calendar initiative. The research team analysed this, information, correlated with satellite images of artificial lighting.

The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that buds were bursting by up to 7.5 days earlier in brighter areas and that the effect was larger in later budding trees.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160628221707.htm