About 550 environmentalists, and others attended the sold-out conference which featured speeches and workshops.
“There´s a huge opportunity out there to put people back to work and to rebuild Ontario´s industrial base, its manufacturing base,” said Ontario New Democrat environment critic Peter Tabuns, who was one of the speakers at the gathering.
“250,000 people in Germany work in renewable power, while in Toledo, Ohio, 6,000 people work in the solar industry, many of whom used to make windshields for cars. In Pennsylvania, the government signed a $650 million alternative energy bill into force in July, he said, and the state expects renewable energy will employ 10,000 people.
Billions of dollars have been invested in producing electric car batteries in Michigan and $1 billion has been invested into electric car production in Australia.”
“Wind turbines, solar panels, biogas generation plants, or expanding deep-lake water cooling are just some of the green technologies Ontario should be taking more advantage of to jobs, said Tabuns.
Tabuns cited a recent study that said up to one million trades jobs could be d if every home in Canada was retrofitted to make it more energy efficient.
The former utive director of Greenpeace Canada said the conference was not so much a discussion about technology as one about how to get our society moving on a green jobs initiative and how to secure investment and government support _ both financial and legislative.
The reality is people are going to need jobs and we have to deal with climate change, said Tabuns, adding the most productive to take on those issues is investing in renewable power.
Tabuns pointed to Denmark´s $6 billion-a-year wind power industry which employs more than 20,000 people.
The government Premier Dalton McGuinty has said it hopes its Green Energy Act will 50,000 jobs and generate billions of dollars of economic growth in communities across Ontario within three years.
John Cartwright, president of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council who also spoke at the meeting, said greening the economy is not without its challenges.
“We´ve got a number of challenges and one is the influence and power of Big Oil,” Cartwright said in an interview.
He said the federal government listens too much to oil companies.
But Cartwright also said people´s attitudes must change.
“We´ve got to connect people and move them away from cynicism to saying we can and must adopt ways of living and ways of making things that are more in tune with the long-term environmental needs of this planet,” he said.
“Some of those old habits die hard.”
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