****
Jim Jones was a charismatic cult leader with a colourful past who – amid allegations that he’d been physically, emotionally, and sexually abusing his acolytes at his San Francisco compound – fled the US and set up a new camp at “Jonestown”, Guyana. Close to 1,000 of his “disciples” followed him South – lured by socialist utopian promises of a “new dawn” for all those who believed in him – putting the “blind” into “blind faith”.
Jones’s cult status started early – his mum, Lynetta claimed that she’d given birth to the Messiah. He was an avid Communist and fancied himself a preacher in the league of his heroes, Billy Graham and Oral Roberts. Jones never lacked self-belief – telling worshipers he was the reincarnation of Mahatma Gandhi; as well as Jesus of Nazareth, Gotama Buddha and Vladimir Lenin: a lineup of alter-egos that most preachers would find hard to top.
In November 1978, Jim Jones encouraged his faithful band of followers to gulp down gallons of sickly-sweet, grape-flavoured Kool-Aid. Problem was, it was cordial with a “kick” – 910 of his devoted followers (including 303 children) perished from cyanide poisoning. Oops! So much for “blind faith”.
Since then, “drinking the Kool-Aid” has been a figure of speech used by Americans to cover any person or group holding an unquestioned belief, argument, or philosophy without critical examination; and also covers anyone knowingly going along with a doomed or dangerous idea because of peer pressure. Hmm, sound strangely familiar?
Well, around the globe many of our political betters have already “drunk the Kool-Aid”.
Lured by ridiculous promises of “free” energy and tens of thousands of wonderful, new “green” jobs, politicians of all hues have willingly entered economic suicide pacts – by signing up to completely unsustainable wind power policies – in Spain, Germany, the UK, the US, Australia and Canada, to name a few.
In Canada, however, there is at least one politician who obviously didn’t drink the Kool-Aid.
Tim Hudak heads up the Progressive Conservative party – which, unlike Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals – has made the obvious connection between Ontario’s giant fan roll-out and spiralling power prices.
****
Hudak has also rumbled the fact that – not only did Ontario’s wind rush fail to produce the promised “green” employment bonanza – but that the wind-power-driven escalation in power costs has killed thousands of jobs in the real economy.
Wynne’s Liberals were early Kool-Aid consumers – committing Ontario to fork out for wind power subsidies, which are among the most ludicrously generous on earth.
In the lead up to Ontario’s upcoming election Hudak is going head-to-head with Wynne and has slammed the economy-killing energy policies dreamed up by her Liberals.
Hudak is all set to take the axe to wind power subsidies – in an effort to bring spiralling power prices under control and to return Ontario to a position of economic competitiveness.
Here’s the Toronto Sun on Hudak’s plan to restore some economic sanity to Ontario’s energy policy.
Hudak will end wind, solar fiasco
Toronto Sun
13 May 2014
It’s amazing only one leader in the Ontario election campaign – the Progressive Conservative’s Tim Hudak – has promised to end the subsidization of inefficient, unreliable and expensive wind and solar power.
This is an obvious way to save taxpayers and hydro ratepayers billions of dollars in future costs.
Premier Kathleen Wynne can’t make that promise because to do so would be to admit the Liberals’ naive infatuation with green energy has been a financial disaster, as the non-partisan Auditor General of Ontario concluded in 2011.
The auditor general said the Liberals blundered into green energy with no business plan and no economic research, ignoring the advice of their own experts and costing taxpayers and electricity consumers billions of added dollars on their hydro bills for decades to come.
The auditor general not only found Liberal claims their Green Energy Act would create 50,000 jobs between 2009 and 2012 were nonsense, but that experience around the world has shown so-called green energy destroys more jobs than it creates because it inevitably leads to higher electricity prices.
As for NDP leader Andrea Horwath – who says she’ll rescind in 2016 the Liberals’ 2010 decision to add the 8% provincial sales tax to hydro bills – she propped up the Liberals as they were signing more and more wind and solar deals, literally throwing more and more public money down a black hole.
Incredibly, Wynne is promising to keep doing this if she’s elected, which is utter madness.
Hudak is the only leader of the three major parties telling the truth, noting he can’t break existing contracts the Liberals have already signed with wind and solar energy developers.
But he can stop throwing good money after bad.
Hudak is also promising to return local autonomy to municipalities so they can decide if they want wind turbines and solar panels in their communities, instead of having them rammed down their throats by the Liberals through their dictatorial Green Energy Act.
As for Liberals’ claim they replaced coal power with wind, it’s utter nonsense.
The Liberals replaced coal with nuclear power and natural gas.
Wind and solar are just another multi-billion-dollar Liberal boondoggle, to go along with their eHealth, Ornge and cancelled gas plants scandals and financial disasters.
Toronto Sun
Energy policy based on nothing more than “blind faith” was always bound to end in tears; as the Toronto Sun’s editor put it in the piece above:
[T]he Liberals blundered into green energy with no business plan and no economic research, ignoring the advice of their own experts and costing taxpayers and electricity consumers billions …
Australians needn’t consider themselves any smarter than the Canadians, on that score.
Our Federal Government signed us up to the mandatory Renewable Energy Target in 2001 without any economic research – let alone a proper cost/benefit analysis of a policy which perversely favours insanely expensive, intermittent and unreliable wind power. That process will be undertaken for the very first time in 2014 – as part of the RET Review. Better late than never, as they say.
Fortune has, however, smiled on Australia – it is, after all, the “Lucky Country” – because the RET Review panel is made up of people who clearly didn’t drink the Kool-Aid (see our posts here and here).
From what we hear emanating from Canberra, STT predicts the imminent demise of Australia’s now beleaguered, bitter and angry Wind Power Cult – and a return to energy market sanity in the very near future.
STOP THESE THINGS 
I am a hard core liberal, and a lifelong environmentalist. I also know enough mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology to see that the true and only alternative to fossil carbon is pre-fossil nuclear energy.
That said, it horrifies me to find myself applauding Tories because so many of the Labour and Liberal persuasions think that wind is a useful resource for a century that will have ten times the energy demand of the 18th.
My own fair share of the Sun’s energy bounty today is less than half what it was at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it has to supply my food and water in addition to luxuries like electric light, this computer, and the comfort of air conditioning .
If the Liberal party in Ontario had the good sense to revitalise their nuclear, what demon possessed them to embrace solar origin stuff (other than the Niagara River)?
Is Ketan Joshi Jim Jones’ love child?
He has a striking resemblance, inflated self opinion and self righteousness, fancies himself as a Preacher of the Saviour of Wind and makes an awful lot of green Kool-Aid!
I’d like to highlight the negative health impacts some experience over time from giant Industrial Wind Turbines. It is not everyone and it is not immediate, but it is a direct cause and we have the testimonies of many who could not sleep in their homes and developed serious health issues and could not perform at work without sleep. Why is this not the top priority? Money is secondary.
Thanks to all at “Stop these things.” The Industrial Wind Complex try to tell our city folk that rural Ontario are “the only ones on the planet” opposed to these things, so it is great we can help each other fight this UN Agenda 21 step which hurts people, but is intended to pressure them to move into cities.
I am not the frog in the pot.
The wind industry were no fools, they saw an opportunity to make a very handy pocket full of cash for little work. They talked the talk and spruiked the lies to gullible Governments, who were only too eager to appease those delivering messages of doom.
The problem is these Governments didn’t stop to ask themselves ‘does it sound too good to be true’. They just went along spending tax payers money to this very wise industry.
Not only did Governments fall for the fast talk but so did investors who happily invested in the industry. Most coming from the savings and superannuation of those forced to put money aside for their retirement, many of whom know nothing of the share market or where their money is being invested.
Electricity supply companies can be spared the full brunt of our condemnation because they were told by our Government to buy electricity from these spruikers of lies, but they were remiss in not warning of the dangers of the costs they would have to pass on, or that they would not be able to source sufficient energy to meet the needs of the country, and would continue to need back-up supplies from other sources. Some energy suppliers actually joined the flurry and became producers as well as suppliers to maximise their profits.
But wind energy companies were too slow to realise Governments could and were beginning seeing the errors of their ways. The industry has now started rushing around in circles like dying blow flies, trying to find someone who can stop them falling from the lofty heights of influence they had reached – TOO LATE – the truth has been exposed and the demise of this industry is near.
Governments are realising the need to act to stop spending tax payers money on this fake energy producing industry, which has and has always had nothing to offer other than hot ‘spinning’ air, lies and deceit.
If lies and deceit could produce electricity enough energy would have been produced without the need of turbines.
Thank you so much everyone at “Stop These Things”, for recognizing our wonderful Conservative candidate, Tim Hudak, in Ontario, who knows wind turbines are not cost effective, and do not improve our environment!! He has vowed to stop the wind turbine scam, by cancelling the Feed-In-Tariff program, rescinding the Green Energy Act, and restoring Democracy, to rural Ontario! The other parties have vowed to continue the devastation, that is currently being perpetrated on our rural communities! So glad we are supporting each other!
Yes– thanks STT! and ’57Chev! and all Mothers Against Wind Turbines!
If I may offer another perspective: Mr. Hudak isn’t widely trusted, some would say. And I think it’s because he hasn’t ‘gone far enough’ to recognize and end ‘the biggest and worst economic and environmental fraud of all time!’
But there’s still opportunity for improvement– the Ontario election is June 12.