From a Gary Mason article in the Globe and Mail, Whistler residents discuss the massive financial and ecological drain of hosting part of the 2010 winter Olympic Games. A highlight of the unintentional irony:
Environmentalists were angry when a sensitive wetlands habitat became the chosen site for a new bus facility that will be used to accommodate a fleet of hydrogen buses Premier Gordon Campbell promised to showcase at the Games. Even the mayor admits an Olympic deadline forced a decision on the location that wasn’t the best. Then, more trees had to come down near the town centre to build Celebration Plaza, where Olympic medals will be handed out.
Yes, because nothing says environmental sustainability like inviting several million people to come and watch a sporting event in hydrogen buses.
Read the comments, too. The rage over the imminent Olympic Games is palpable. But hey, we all know what the Olympics did to put Lillehammer, Norway, on the map, right? Er, right?
h/t Jack’s Newswatch
July 11, 2009 at 5:17 pm
B.C., and Vancouver and Whistler in particular didn’t have to be put on the map of anyone who counts, like the Chinese,Japanese, and all other Asians.
The “Expo” in 1986 did that quire well, and begat the Leaky Condo fiasco we’re going to be paying for forever.
The Olympics, it seems, is to be Gordon Campbell’s “legacy”,we’re to always revere the memory of Gordo as “the guy who brought the world to B.C.”, except for the fact that Bill Bennett brought the world here 24 years earlier, at a much lower cost, and with way less inconvenience.
We’re ON the bloody map! B.C. leaders needn’t fear we’re a “backwater” any longer!
Personally, I enjoy watching the Olympics,such as the past one in China. I never felt the need to go there to see them, and watched them on TV,like most people in the world, and like I’ll watch the 2010 Olympics.
Campbell’s quest for a legacy is going to cost the Province for years, maybe decades, as every venue has come in WAY over budget, and now even the cost of security is soaring, to possibly a BILLION dollars!
Campbell’s old fashioned attitude, “give the peasants a circus”, instead of the badly needed development in areas outside Whistler and the Lower Mainland, has always spoken of his incredible hubris. The government has just pissed away several billion badly needed tax dollars on a two week sporting event designed to dazzle us peasants.
The money could have been far more effectively used for hospitals, highways, housing, ferries, and tourism development in ALL areas of the Province, instead of concentrating all the spending in an area that was already well known, and a world class destination.
The cost overruns in the Olympic Village are staggering, and again, it’ll take years to recover building and development costs.
But, none of that matters, because for TWO WEEKS, we’ll “welcome the world”, and the politicians will bask in glorious photo-ops,while most of us sit at home and wonder how in hell we’re going to pay for it.
July 11, 2009 at 5:20 pm
You know the supreme irony? The only reason I’m employed right now is that I’m working at the OIympic village. lol
July 11, 2009 at 9:05 pm
The GOOD part about it all is the employment it gives us in the construction industry, but we could have spent the money on infrastructure without the Olympics.
Work hard,Raph,make us proud.
July 11, 2009 at 9:41 pm
I did some research on this “BullFrog” green power scam in Toronto and guess what?
It appears that Ontario has re-classified some Power generation as “Less-harmful” and ERGO….becomes Eco-friendly.
But the BullFrog power that David Miller claims is 100% GREEN renewable energy is a Over-Priced Wind-Turbine system that consumes more Energy to make them and causes more Pollution to ship than what they are intended to to cut down GHG’s and smog.
My Website posted the report from the EPA where it exposed what I already knew about the Kitchen Appliance scam to pad the GREEN label for a EnergyStar rating .
But the real GREEN scam is all the products in canada from Mexico and China because our Government does not rate all the Environmental Damage done to the Earth prior to the item arriving in canada.
Some Kitchen Appliance travel about 4000 miles by Diesel powered vehicles spewing soot and toxins into the air, others travel amost 6000 miles by Cargo Ship just to reach canada and then go by Diesel trains another 3000 miles to Ontario and then Toronto.
Check out the BullFrog website and then read it for yourself , only 20% of the Power comes from Wind Turbines when they are working during a breeze,but the 80% + power when the wind is gone is from Hydro generators built to the new standards as “Less-harmful” .
BTW
The big secret about these Turbines is that they are killing bats and birds that fly into the blades, the Bats eat thousands of flying bug during the nigh time and keep the Mosquito population under control.
I’m not sure if the Global flu’s are connected to more Mosquitos growing in population to carry ilnesses, but I don’t trust the Politicians to tell us if it was the dead bats causing the unbalance in nature for Insects to flurish and infect more Humans.
July 12, 2009 at 3:56 am
Isn’t it great to know that these green idiots are destroying the earth and we are letting them.WHY??Because it is not politically correct to to beat the crap out of them and put them in jail.I just hope it wont be too late when the majority,who think they are being good little law abiding citizen’s,start to ask questions and start to punish people like Gore,Dion,Chretien for the scam they are pulling on the world.The guilt these rock stars are trying to place on the world with their food aid concerts that never end up helping anyone but the rock stars.When will we ever learn,that man does not control anything,and mother nature certainly is not going to be changed by something as insignificant as man.
July 12, 2009 at 7:28 am
Rage on a blog’s comments? Say it is so Raphael!
I’m sure the games are a waste of money, but the fact remains that they’re a waste of money that we’ve committed to and that we cannot back out of. The problem I have with saying that hosting the Olympics was a bad idea is the people you get lumped in with. The so-called “anti-poverty activists”, better described as badly behaved anarchists make funding the Olympics seems like the wisdom of Solomon with their behaviour.
July 12, 2009 at 8:50 am
So what if you’re “lumped in with undesirables”, join any political Party or service club,church, mosque, and the same thing will happen. It’s a fact of life that whenever you get a large group of people together, some will have lunatic ideas, that’s why we call them the “lunatic FRINGE”.
B.C.’s governments have been lobbied for years by taxpayers to build more hospitals, improve highways, especially the joke we call a “Freeway” heading east out of Vancouver, tourist destinations, upgraded camping facilities in all Parks, etc.,etc.
We were told we couldn’t afford any of these projects. Suddenly, the idea of a massive party hosted by Campbell and his cohorts came up, and cost was no object. Let’s party!!!!
Estimates were deliberately lowballed, and critics were stomped down by the government, VANOC, and the spectacle-mad MSM. Just like Bob Ward was trampled when he dared to question the wisdom of building “Fast Ferries”, under a different government. Different Party in power, same tactics, only this time the Allmighty Olympics is so enticing to all us Romans, naysayers are hardly heard from any more.
Anyone speaking against the Olympics in B.C., is treated exactly the same way the MSM treats Global Warming deniers, ridicule, specious counter argument, and vast amounts of outright hatred, and VANOC goes about their merry way, bullying anyone who gets in their way. Ask the business owners who’ve suffered or gone bankrupt due to Olympic projects.
I voted for the Liberals, as the alternative is even worse, but I will NOT sit by and acquiesce to their every idea. The Olympics will cost us billions, and in march of 2010, the long,long hangover is going to start.
July 12, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Roger,
You do raise some interesting points about how environmentally-friendly labelling is based on some dubious math. It’s similar to the concept behind ethical abstinence of meat consumption, which fails to take into consideration the animals that die in the harvesting of plant-based foods. But the energy star rating is based on the energy efficiency of the appliance, not on the cost of shipping it to North America.
As for your theory that wind turbines are contributing to global mosquito-borne illnesses, I think that one is a little bit far-fetched.
July 12, 2009 at 12:12 pm
DMorris,
The problem with the alternative argument to the Olympics, being that the money could have been better allocated in infrastructure or programs, is that we are notoriously tight-fisted about such things under normal circumstances. The amount of money we’re pumping into the Olympics is all based on some vague future notion of paying for it, sort of like when you go to the Brick and pick up that no-money down Plasma screen. No property taxes have to be raised, or money allocated from an existing budget. Because the Olympics have to go through, as Issachar says, they have a blank cheque to do whatever they want. The Olympic Village “has” to get built, so it’s being built at the expense of the city with countless over-time hours and extra loans. If there weren’t any Olympics going on, then the infrastructure to build a new hospital in Burnaby or Delta or Vancouver would be mulled over based on existing money.
It’s basically like a wedding. You spend $20,000 with the understanding that it’s a one-day event, and you’ll be paying for it long after the party is over. So after the Olympics, certain municipalities can expect to pay the war reparations in higher taxes, even though as is likely, the local economies will take the post-event slowdown that is an inevitable part of the speculative investors in this. The real estate market is bound to crash as well, which means that the value of all this money they’re spending on buildings now, won’t be worth the same when the market goes south.
July 12, 2009 at 2:48 pm
*”We don’t have a clear idea of what a bad site for wind turbines is in terms of bat fatalities,” Cryan adds. “We’re not to the point yet where we can suggest solutions.”
The full impact of these bat-killing pressure zones extends far beyond the wind farm, however. Such migrating bats travel from Canada as far as Mexico, eating thousands of insects en route, including crop pests such as moths and beetles. “They are one of the only things that fly around at night and eat bugs,” Baerwald notes. “Bats killed in Canada could have a detrimental impact in America or Mexico. It’s not local. It’s an ecosystem-wide issue.”
The about comment is from the site below “Scientific America” which has magazines I started reading back in 1983 , now I do know the “Dan” refuses to accept any theory he didn’t create but I’ll just point out that it is not very wise to quickly Condemn an opinion just from a lack of personal knowledge of it.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=wind-turbines-kill-bats
here’s another site dan may object to but maybe there is truth to my claim that bats do keep us healthy by consuming bugs and mosquitos drawn to the City Lights.
http://www.mesc.usgs.gov/BatsWindmills/
I still don’t use the CBC for my news or facts for the GREEN movement.
Plus my point about imported Appliances is that they already do more damage to the earth than all the save damage by being ECO-friendly, and I read a EPA report that LG got nailed big time for 5 fridges that they lied about for power use because they didn’t include the Ice-Cube maker for the tests and only reported the Food storage cabinet use of power to keep it around 36F degrees .
Cargo ships often Purge their Bilge tanks in our lakes or Ports , they also have poor Human Rights for workers and low paying jobs to man the ships outside of the captain and some full-time Coporate Employees on the trip.
Since we all breath the same air at some time during our lives, we should think about the toxins and soot spewed from every Plant or Diesel vehicle anywhere on earth because it will end up right here in canada some day.
July 12, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Sorry, my lead-in should be ” The ABOVE” comment is from site below.
July 13, 2009 at 2:14 pm
@ Raph
“As for your theory that wind turbines are contributing to global mosquito-borne illnesses, I think that one is a little bit far-fetched.”
While I wouldn’t go as far as saying there is a link between wind turbines and mosquito born illnesses ( though the flu isn’t a mosquito born illnesses as Roger implies) turbines can be a threat to birds and bats.
Of course this depends on many factors so a generalization cannot be made for all wind farms.
As I have said before, all ‘green’ energy sources have some environmental costs. The real question is do the benefits outweigh those cost? And do we even have a handle on what those costs might be?
This was actually one of the first topics I wrote about on my blog.
Am I actually agreeing with Roger? Dear god, what have I done!
July 13, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Oh my god, I better check my sanity to make sure my post is correct, I faint easily and having someone agree with me means I must mark this on my calander and check outside for the 4-Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
BTW
Ralph;
I too have notice double entries or Typo’s that i know I corrected, unless the issue is the Cyber-cafe keyboard with the “Macro” key in the ON position for MS Word.
The Backspace or Delete function may only Space the error or save it to paste elsewhere.
I’m sure most people can spot the typo and not condemn the whole message since they could figure out what the persom meant.