Governmental Leadership?

There are many ways for our government to support energy efficiency and promote the use of environmentally sound technologies. One of them would be to lead by example in all aspects of government procurement.

There are also ways not to do it.

As reported in the Chronicle-Herald on May 11, 2007, the Nova Scotia government is spending $204,000 dollars at Home Depot so the store can give away energy saving fluorescent bulbs. While this is intended to promote better energy use, which I support, it appears to me that our government is providing Home Depot with a very nice publicly funded loss-leader item with which to attract customers for other purchases. Our local, home based, building materials suppliers are left out. The program is also only available in Halifax, Dartmouth and Sydney which is not very convenient for the rest of us in the province.

To me, this is a poorly thought out action and I object to having my tax contributions going to support Home Depot’s marketing and the lucky bulb recipients who happen to live in the metro area. If the government has that much money to spend on energy efficiency perhaps they could have purchased bulbs through the bid process to be distributed to publicly owned buildings throughout the province.

While on the subject of fluorescents, the government could also lead by working out a system for return of expired bulbs for safe disposal and recycling of toxic materials in the bulbs. They could do the same for the used batteries from consumer electronic devices.