Ontario joined the "plant-IQ" levels of environmental thinking

It's always funny when a country wants to be environmentally friendly and safe, and then proceeds to do astonishingly stupid things that do the exact opposite of that goal.

There is, for example, Australia, which has completely banned nuclear power plants. This even though Australia has a wealthy uranium mining industry that produces nuclear fuel for other countries (which means that it would be extraordinarily cheap for Australia to run nuclear power plants because they don't need to buy the fuel from other countries, as they are producing it themselves.)

So if there are no nuclear power plants in Australia, how are they producing their electricity? With coal power plants, of course. What did you think? And a good portion of it is actually using so-called brown coal, which is even more polluting than black coal (because brown coal is more abundant in Australia). And, indeed, Australia is one of the biggest polluters and contributors of atmospheric CO2 in the world.

Not to be left behind, Germany has also phased out all nuclear power production. And where do they get the bulk of their energy? Well, you guessed it. (Sure, Germany has a lot more green energy production than Australia, but still the majority of their energy production comes from coal power plants, much of it imported from other countries.) And, indeed, Germany is one of the biggest polluters and contributors of atmospheric CO2 in Europe.

What Ontario did recently is child's play in comparison, and has a microscopic effect on anything likewise in comparison, but in terms of a low-IQ move it might even surpass those other two.

You see, Ontario wants to phase out diesel-run ferries on their regional waters. To do this they replaced two of their ferries with electric ones, costing them 94 million dollars (although, to be fair, by governmental standards that's pocket money.)

Ok, so far so good. What's the problem?

The problem is that they seemingly forgot they don't have any sort of infrastructure for charging those ferries. Nothing. There's nothing to plug them into in order to charge them.

The problem? Those ferries need to actually run. They provide a vital service, and they can't just sit idly, doing nothing.

The solution? Charge them using, of all possible things... diesel motors.

So it turns out that the ferries are still running on diesel, except that now they are consuming (and thus polluting) significantly more than before. Because there are always losses, the fuel consumption rates are significantly higher. Not only is this quite expensive, with a monthly bill of 150 to 200 thousand dollars, but it obviously pollutes significantly more than before.

Great job, Ontario: You get the "plant-IQ-level counter-productive environmentalism" award of this month.