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.