Energy Probe

North of the border a controversy is starting to gain steam in the nation's largest city, Toronto. The city has proposed a by-law that would make ‘green roofs' mandatory in new construction of condos higher than 7 storeys and office or retail complexes greater than 54,000 square feet (about 1/4 of a Wal-Mart Supercenter). The proposed law would require 30-60% of the surface area of buildings' roofs to be green (depending on the size of the building) and violators would be subject to fines up to $100,000.

Toronto's plan to mandate green roofs on new buildings could seriously threaten the city's building stock.

The next commodity to collapse will be mass-marketed environmentalism, which will come to be disdained.

At 8:15 p.m. on Saturday, Mayor David Miller got into a car and drove from City Hall to a Shoppers Drug Mart on Eglinton Avenue West. He bought a card for the bar mitzvah of a family friend. Then he got back in the car, driven by his press secretary, Don Wanagas, and went to the bar mitzvah.

The Mayor did this during Earth Hour, after having called on Torontonians to "join me in the dark."

The Ontario government has promised to bring a giveaway of conservation to electricity usage. Conservation and demand management, aimed at reducing energy use, are the backbones of a 20-year plan to dramatically alter consumption..