The £700M (960M USD) spent on fish protection measures at Hinkley Point C would be a topical example [1]. It's expected to save an average of a few hundred twaite shad, six river lamprey, and eighteen allis shad per year, plus one salmon every twelve years, and a trout every thirty-six years.
The article you linked says "According to a government-commissioned review, Hinkley Point C’s suite of “fish protection measures” will cost more than £700 million".
I spent 10 minutes and have not been able to find said "government-commissioned review". Is this even true?
Edit: here's Guardian reporting on the report cited by Salmon Business https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/12/health-and-... . As somebody who has spent nearly all of my political activity in the past 8 years trying to change local regulations to allow more housing, the whole thing reeks of unfair analysis on all sides and hyper-partisanship. I largely think there should be a more rational evaluation of requirements all around, but it does sound like the 44 tons of killed fish per year is pretty small compared to other human impact, but $700M is not going to save Hinkley Point C.
The stilted phrasing in the report from Salmon Business definitely does not sound very credible, but marine life protection is definitely a real thing with nuclear and all fuel-burning electricity generation
The vast quantities of water needed to cool nuclear (for every kWh of electricity, 2 kWh of waste heat must be discarded) can have significant impacts on wildlife. In the past, we just devastated ecosystems but most modern countries decided they didn't want to do that anymore.
This is not a nuclear regulation, it's a "thermal plant" regulation, it's just that nuclear needs more cooling than, say, combined-cycle gas because nuclear's lower temperatures are less efficient at converting heat to electricity.
At a mere $700M, even dropping all marine life mitigations from Hinkley Point C wouldn't help much with affordability. If they could drop $7B of costs from Hinkley then it may start to have a halfway-competitive price, but it still wouldn't be very attractive.
Exactly. The problem is no one wants to address that maybe some of these business models just need to go extinct.
Like maybe ad supported infinite feeds can't be done in a socially responsible way and just need to be banned. If that takes down or substantially limits certain web service sizes...so be it.
Shade on older solar systems would impact energy production disproportionally. You would typically see dramatic reductions like 50%-80% reduced output due to 10-20% shade. New shade-tolerant solar systems are closer to being proportional.
This is because a string of panels in series are limited by the weakest link — if one cell is fully shaded, it blocks electricity flow through it, and therefore through the whole string. Bypass diodes mitigate that to some extent. But with electronics costs still falling, it's now possible to use more smaller inverters to connect the solar array to the grid, each one with its own separate string, or even an individual panel (which is a series string of cells).
The Greener Homes Grant and Greener Homes Loan you describe have ended, but the 160% tarrif on imported solar panels remains. Solar prices in Canada are still quite expensive, and regulations are needlessly strict. Solar fencing is illegal in many jurisdictions, balcony solar is illegal everywhere, and utility-scale solar is effectively prohibited in the regions with the most sunlight.
Solar production in Canada will continue to grow, but we're not doing nearly as much as Europe to encourage it.
I’m wondering out loud if you might be able to purchase what would essentially be the component parts of a solar panel but deconstructed (eg frame, cells, glass, wires; maybe the cells need further deconstructing) and do final assembly in Canada such that the final panel meets criteria to be “built locally”, potentially built of local and imported parts.
Surely local manufacturers don’t use 100% Canadian made parts.
Some provincial grants remain ($5k in BC last time I checked), but yes - Canada can and should do more. Balcony solar seems like such an easy win. Hopefully tariffs get dropped now that we’re talking to China again. And federal Liberals could force municipalities and provinces to reduce some of the red tape surrounding solar installations. Come on Canada, unlocking clean energy shouldn’t have to be a fight!
I would say 2 bills that won't pass from state assemblies in 2026 (after decades of school shootings) aren't exactly stellar examples of major legislation that has passed to restrict gun ownership.
There's been maybe 1 in the last decade. And really, providing an example of Democrats trying to reign in ghost guns sorta proves my point. You're average citizen can not only buy guns easily, they can make them too!!!!
> The next salvo is going to be US statehood for Alberta and Saskatchewan. There is already partisan support within those provinces, and Trump is going to offer money to push it.
The polling puts it at 20% support and 80% opposed. This is not going to happen. As a Canadian who was born in Alberta and has lived in Alberta all my life, I will be remaining in Canada.
A Mazda 3 has been my daily driver for the past decade and I really wanted to like the Mazda CX90 PHEV when I was buying a larger vehicle last year. It was pretty difficult to justify the CX90 PHEV, though. It gets 42 km of range on an 18 kWh battery (2.4 km/kWh). For comparison, the EV9 I ended up purchasing gets 450 km of range on a 100 kWh battery (4.5 km/kWh).
Don't get me wrong. The CX90 PHEV is still the most efficient CX90 by a wide margin. I had seriously considered buying one, but the efficiency was a deal-breaker. I don't love the giant touch screen on the EV9, but I can live with it. If I couldn't, I would have gone with the Ioniq 9 for more physical controls.
https://www.scribd.com/document/586237858/Pokemon-Red-Versio...
https://archive.org/details/NintendoPower1998PokemonRedBlue/...
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