Toronto: Shuttering Ontario’s coal-fired power plants had very little effect on reducing air pollution, according to a January 17 paper by the Fraser Institute. Instead, the policy “helped fuel skyrocketing energy costs, and should serve as a lesson to policymakers across the country,” according to the think-tank.
“Ontario’s example should serve as a warning to the federal government, which is making the same grandiose claims about the benefits of eliminating coal while seemingly ignoring the crisis of Ontario’s soaring energy costs,” said Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Fraser Institute senior fellow, and co-author of Did the Coal Phase-out Reduce Ontario Air Pollution?
The study analyzed air pollution changes in Hamilton, Toronto and Ottawa from 2005 to 2014 and found that the coal phase-out had no effect on nitrogen oxide levels, an important component of smog, and produced only a small reduction in fine particulates, a common measure of air pollution.
Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault responded quickly, quoted the next day in the Toronto Sun as saying, “In 2005, Ontario had 53 smog days. These are days where we had to warn our citizens to be careful about just going outside to breathe. In 2015, the number of smog days was zero.”
The Ministry of the Environment and Climate in a statement cited a number of experts who support the policy. “Experts agree that getting rid of coal has made Ontario’s air cleaner, with support from the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario, Ontario Medical Association, Asthma Society of Canada, International Institute for Sustainable Development, Ontario Clean Air Alliance, David Suzuki Foundation and the Lung Association-Ontario.
Greg Evans, a chemical engineer and the director of the Southern Ontario Centre for Atmospheric Aerosol Research, said. “[the authors] don’t seem to understand the chemistry in the atmosphere.” For example, he explained, the report determined that coal contributes only a small portion of particulate pollution in Ontario, but particulate matter isn’t just what comes out of the smoke stack – most particulate mass is actually created by chemical reactions in the atmosphere, after the various emissions, including oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, have left the smokestack.
Lead author Ross McKitrick gained some notoriety a decade ago as co-author of a study in 2004 that sought to cast doubt on the “hockey stick” graph, a key finding in climate science that found the last several decades’ rise in average global surface temperatures are outside the pattern over the last 1000 years.