Leader's Blog
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Untangling the Gordian Knot of NB Power
Posted by David Coon · March 05, 2025 1:57 PM
Just around the corner from me a neighbour installed solar panels on his bungalow. Free energy from the sun is becoming more appealing as the cost of everything goes up. Of course, there is the initial cost of the panels and the labour needed to wire them into the house, but affordable financing puts it in reach.
New Brunswickers are an independent lot. The increasingly frequent interruptions of power from the grid caused the ownership of home generators to go viral. Now we are seeing the spread of solar panels on modest homes. That is new.
Our power rates have reached the point where it is demonstrably cheaper to generate electricity from sunlight than to buy it from NB Power. If the financing is accessible and affordable, as is currently provided by the federal government, then more and more people are going to go solar.
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Energy Efficiency - The Key to Affordable Heat
Posted by David Coon · February 06, 2025 2:46 PM
Last week at one of my regular community gatherings, an elderly constituent asked me what I was going to do about her power bills. She lived alone in a mini-home and like so many other New Brunswicker, her most recent bill had spiked reflecting a jump in consumption for which she could not account. She had brought her bills to show me just in case I doubted her word.
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When the Wolf is at the Door
Posted by David Coon · February 06, 2025 2:44 PM
“When the hills of Los Angeles are burning
Palm trees are candles in the murder wind
So many lives are on the breeze
Even the stars are ill at ease
And Los Angeles is burning.”(Los Angeles is Burning by Bad Religion from their 2004 Album, The Empire Strikes First)
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Trump’s Designs on Canada Must be Treated Seriously
Posted by David Coon · February 06, 2025 2:40 PM
It’s no joke. President-elect Donald Trump says he would consider using economic force to take over Canada. Can you imagine the reaction if the German Chancellor said such a thing about the UK, or France? It would spark an international diplomatic incident leading to widespread condemnation of the comment by world leaders. This hasn’t happened in our case.
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Beware the Chimera of Climate Change
Posted by David Coon · February 05, 2025 3:20 PM
As the pretender to the imperial throne that exists only in his mind, Trump is working hard to overturn the order of the world, to steal a phrase from Leonard Cohen’s 1992 composition The Future. And the immediate consequences? “Things are going to slide, slide in all directions,” Cohen wrote.
A case in point. The very day that Trump was inaugurated he signed an Executive Order pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Summit Agreement.