In the 1990s, I spent a year living in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne. My Dad was all for this plan, which I financed with student loans and a little help. “Go now,” he said. “You will never get another chance to just up and leave.”

Unlike Emily in Paris — on Netflix for three seasons now — who lives in a beautiful old apartment across a square that houses a Michelin-starred restaurant and a handsome chef, I lived more on the outskirts, in a student residence run by the Canadian government. It was part of international complex called the Cité Universitaire. Also unlike Emily in Paris, I was there to learn French. The Maison du Canada was full of students from Quebec enrolled at French universities, as well as those from across Europe.

The residence, this was 30-odd years ago, had sensor lights that turned off automatically if nobody was in the hallways.

I will never forget how absolutely scandalized my German roommate was by my heedless, Canadian approach to what I had been brought up to think was an endlessly renewable natural resource.

Electricity in Europe, like gas, is very expensive. It’s expensive here too. The difference is that Europeans must pay for what they use. There is a great deal more incentive to conserve.

One afternoon I was cooking pasta in our shared kitchen. Ariane came and impatiently turned the heat down, reducing the boil. “You don’t need all that heat just to cook pasta!” she exclaimed, full of German attention to detail. “It will still soften without having water on the boil.”

She was, of course, right, and that one gesture —combined with her shocked incomprehension at my leaving lights on when I left a room, a habit she quickly cured me of — illuminated a great deal, not just about waste, but about our whole approach to nature — our endlessly renewable natural resources — in glorious, huge Canada.

I learned in my year abroad that you could fit three Frances into Quebec alone. I also learned that we did not monitor our electricity consumption the same way, in part because it was subsidized by the government.

When the Ontario government tabled its budget last spring, there were shocked headlines about precisely those subsidies, which have ballooned in the five years since Ford came to power and cancelled the 750 wind and solar contracts he inherited from the Liberals.

At that time, the province subsidized electricity costs by about $1.2 billion a year. And it was promising a renewable future — with lower electricity bills. Yet Ford now spends $6 billion a year obscuring the real cost of electricity. It’s the single biggest line item in the Ontario budget. And the likely reason the County is still awaiting the funding announcement it’s been banking on for the rebuild of the H.J. McFarland long-term care home.

While Ford’s fossil fuel subsidies continue to balloon, everything has changed. Well, everything and nothing. A global climate catastrophe has been underway for decades, but now, as the forests burn up around us every summer, and a white Christmas seems really only a dream, we finally know what’s up.

Nature, it is now clear, is not an endlessly renewable resource, and electricity does not flow like water, or air. It has to be generated, at great expense and terrific environmental cost.

Or at least that is what we in Canada continue to think. Germany, meanwhile, leads the world in producing electricity from wind. Fully 55% of its electrical grid is produced by renewables. That is up from 48% in 2022. China, the U.K., and the U.S., along with Germany, are global leaders in producing electricity from renewable sources that are not only much less expensive than fossil fuels, but have a negligible environmental impact.

Wind and solar energy are, in fact, the endlessly renewable natural resources Canada has always prided itself on. The only real arguments against using them — other than those that come from the oil lobby — turn around the difficulty of storing the power they generate.

Even those arguments no longer hold up; battery energy storage systems are fast becoming a key element of the power grid across Ontario, if not in PEC.

Last year, 2023, is now being called the tipping point. The end of the fossil fuel era. The year global carbon emissions from fossil fuels peaked — and started to fall. The future is renewable. That is the slogan to emerge from COP28, the global climate summit held, improbably, in Dubai, and presided over, even more improbably, by Saudi Arabia.

Even the Ford government can no longer avoid the call. It sees the opportunity in EV technologies, from battery plants to making the cars themselves, and is preparing for a doubling of electricity demand in the coming two decades. Energy Minister Todd Smith can no longer afford to say no to cheap, safe power from renewable natural resources.

 And so, the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) announced in December that it wants 2000 megawatts of clean electricity, from wind, hydro, bioenergy, and solar, every year for the next four to six years. That’s enough power every year for two mid-size cities. The goal is a zero-emissions grid.

Only there’s one hitch: mindful of the bitter struggles over wind power here and across the province, struggles that turfed the Liberals from power in a humiliatingly total defeat, it has given veto power over renewable energy to the municipalities.

Every single battle, over every turbine and every solar panel, will now be fought in this province’s municipal councils.

The County turned down wind power five years ago. Just as it turns down every single BESS proposal to come before it. To Napanee’s glee. Just across the Adolphus Reach, major battery storage systems, and wind and solar generation plants, are underway. Over in PEC? Not so much. In fact, not at all.

The future is not just renewable, it’s now. As the County approves major new residential development and its infrastructure, it’s time it got its head around the words green and clean.