Dear Sir
"Birdman of Bay Street," an article in the Ottawa Citizen, June 8, moved me. Thank God for Michael Mesure, a modern St. Francis, and his followers who rescue migratory birds half killed by flying into lit skyscrapers in Toronto. A headline that might have shocked would have been "North American Businessmen kill tens of millions of birds". Because they can't be bothered to turn off the lights when they go home, this mighty slaughter takes place. It's a tragedy for the ecology. As a financial planner and engineer I looked at other costs and did some simplified calculations on killowatt hours. It takes about half a killowatt hour to power a flourescent tube from 8 pm to 8 am. If we assume 1000 tubes per skyscraper, 50 tall buildings per city and 160 cities (my guesses), that's 4 million KWh per night, or 1.46 billion KWh per year in North America alone. Adding the rest of the world would probably only multiply this figure by only three, such is the relative energy consumption by North Americans. Large users are charged about 3.9c per KWh. Now let's double the figure for all the computers left on unnecessarily each night, giving a total world bill of $341.6 million per year. Imagine the combination of fossil fuel pollution and nuclear waste involved in the unnecessary burning of 8.76 billion KWh. If this power were obtained from coal (and much is), it would take 4.4 million tons of coal, 2% of which is sulphur. Bottom line here is: turn your light off when you leave the office and help save the planet and its wildlife. Raised in Europe, turning off the light was drummed into me as a child, but I see little evidence that North Americans care about energy saving, and it wasn't mentioned in the wonderful "Birdman" article. No 1 culprit in Ottawa is obviously the DND HQ on Col By, where the slogan appears to be "We never switch off anything."
Tony Copple, Ottawa.