Sign in Subscribe
6 min read

UofWinds 430, Week 05 2026: The Impact of Canadian Public Libraries, On political power, You are being misled about renewable energy technology


Good morning. I am writing today's newsletter from my bed on about 5 hours sleep on account of a very late VIA train. I've returned for a short trip to Toronto where I attended the Ontario Library Association's annual conference. The conference theme was WE PERSIST and many sessions that I attended were delivered with a message that met this moment.

During one talk, I found myself sitting at a table with 5 or so librarians from the Toronto Public Library system, and I was so proud to tell them that I had started my librarian career there, back in '96, making websites for the Metro Toronto Reference Library and then working in its Periodicals and Newspaper Centre, with library workers who shaped my understanding of being a librarian. We persist.

The Impact of Canadian Public Libraries


I admit that a small part of the reason why I attended the OLA session that acted as a public launch of The Impact of Canadian Public Libraries survey was to listen to the Danish accents of the speakers from the strategic consultancies of Is It a Bird and It Depends, both of whom worked with the Canadian Urban Libraries Council to create this work. But I truly did attend to learn more what Canadians appreciate about libraries and to understand where we could improve.

Placing the individual experience at the heart of the inquiry

Information such as the number of people using the library, how many books are borrowed, and the popularity of certain books only tells us so much. But what imprint does the library leave on local communities? How do users engage with library services, and to what purpose?

Going beyond conventional metrics, this study aims to understand how library services impact and influence the lives of the people engaging with them.

I haven't spent much time with the study results yet, but from first impressions, I think it is an illuminating and extraordinary work of human-centered data collection and meaning making.

The Impact Profile of Collections is based on 12,725 users who have borrowed books or accessed online resources from a CULC library within the past year. With a profile average of 3.5, this service scores at the higher end of the expected range.

Users generally experience the greatest impact along the Emotional and Intellectual dimensions, with the ‘Knowledge’ parameter scoring highest at 3.9. This is closely followed by the ‘Well-being’ parameter with a score of 3.8.

Within the Social dimension, there is a distinct peak in the ‘Empathy’ parameter. This aligns with findings from the interviews that library collections foster empathy towards others by providing perspective on different ways of life

On Political Power


On Political Power is a short essay from Henrik Karlsson, which starts as a reflection on the weighty biography of American president Lyndon B. Johnson by Robert Caro. It begins with a useful metaphor:

I recently reread The Path to Power, the first part of the biography of President Lyndon Johnson, which Robert Caro has been working on since 1976. Before I first read Caro seven years ago, my understanding of how political power works was, as I recall it, very limited and flawed. I thought about power—to the extent I thought about it at all—in abstract and formal terms, along the lines of how it was explained in school. There were branches of government vested with different kinds of powers, and rules and laws governing how they can be used and by whom. If you got elected to a public office, you gained power; if you got a job as CEO, you gained another sort of power, and so on.
In Caro’s biographies, it is clear that the real political operators don’t think about it like this at all. To them, power is something you frack, something you force out of the stone by pumping fluid into the cracks. If you pay close attention, you will discover that there are drops of power everywhere—in the good feelings someone’s mother holds for you, in being able to get your college friend a job, in knowing embarrassing facts about your mentor, in having someone’s trust, and so on. To any normal person, these drops are so small that they barely register, and anyway, it feels wrong to treat someone’s mom as a reservoir to frack. But Caro’s subjects are willing to do anything to win, so they will, so to speak, pump fracking fluid into the ground. They will press it into every little crevice, forcing drops of power mixed with sand to the surface. And as it turns out, if you extract all the small things and pool them together, it can be a massive reserve of power, indeed.

I'm sharing this essay for a couple reasons, with the first being that I found the essay as quite informative. I had no idea that LBJ had started his life as a teacher. Can you imagine what kind of path to power you would need to start as a teacher and end up as the President of the United States? Now I understand why he was Caro's object for prolonged study.

In the city where I live our mayor has control over almost all of our most municipal boards and agencies – and most of this fracking occurred even before he was granted additional "strong mayor" powers. For the purposes of this newsletter, I'll concern myself here only with the fact that some years ago he made himself the chair of the Board of the Windsor Public Library despite legislation that sets out that library boards are to be independent from the city council.

Before our mayor was on the library board, it was a time in which my city had aspirations to follow the example of one finest public libraries in Canada. Now, almost ten years later, our Central library branch is once again gets being shuttled from one abandoned building to the next.

You are being misled about renewable energy technology


On Friday, an especially timely video from Technology Connections was published on YouTube: You are being misled about renewable energy technology. I downloaded and watched it on the train. I will watch it again later today.

I so very much want everyone who subscribes to this newsletter to watch this one-hour* video because it communicates the best expression that I've come across that explains why solar power is both economically inevitable and the best choice for our renewable energy transition even with all the batteries that it will require.

Let me tell you how committed I am to sharing the message that we all must transition to renewable resources and electrify everything: my household took advantage of the last federal interest-free loans and installed solar panels on our garage – which went online this month! – for the non-insignificant cost equivalent of a kitchen remodeling job.

I have plans to share more, in a blog post, of the numbers and the reasoning that I used to justify this significant investment, but as the You are being misled video uses gasoline as a means to communicate how much energy can be harvested by solar, I will also share with you some of my own car-related facts in this moment.

Last January, we bought a 2024 ID.4 VW eV and over the last twelve months, we have driven it about 12,500 km, using 2700 kWh of energy. As we charge our car during the lowest TOU (time of use) period when electricity is 9.3 cents per kWh, it means we probably paid just over $250 over the last 12 months to power our car instead of paying at the pump which would have cost us closer to $1500. This year, the cost of "gas" for us will be free as we will be harvesting the sun.

While I have your kind attention, let me add another ask: consider reading this short related 2,000 word essay by Deb Chachra entitled, Energy and the Matter Problem which I also consider essential reading. It is the best introduction why the future of plastic recycling will require solar power (sorry Hank).

What’s more, our home planet is absolutely awash in the energy that pours over it from the sun. If every human on Earth used the same amount of energy as those in the wealthiest, most economically developed countries, the total energy use of our species would still amount to only a fraction of a per cent of what arrives as sunlight. Every moment of every day, the incident solar energy reaching Earth dwarfs humanity’s total use. We now have the potential to build out a world where all the energy we use is not just clean, but also both cheap and abundant. And doing so would radically change the economics of energy. This is the powerful economic argument for decarbonising: replacing everything that is powered by fossil fuels with its electrical equivalent.

Member discussion