Posts Tagged ‘Voters Taking Action Against Climate Change’
A Conversation with BC’s Minister of the Enviroment
SFU Carbon talks just sent me this:
Two weeks ago, Renewable Cities invited you to “A Conversation with B.C.’s Minister of Environment.” Due to exceptional demand, capacity was exceeded within 24 hours. Renewable Cities is pleased to announce that a larger venue has been secured. Clearly, there is an enormous appetite to discuss B.C.’s climate plan and the urban opportunity.
Please join Renewable Cities on Friday, February 9 from 12:30-1:30 pm at the Asia Pacific Hall at the SFU Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue at 580 West Hastings Street in Vancouver, BC.
The public dialogue requires prior registration. If you have already signed up, no further action is required. Individuals on the wait list will now be able to join the event.
Otherwise, register to attend the event or watch the online stream here.
Please share the event with your network:
So I am doing that, but I won’t be going. BC has decided to go forward with Site C which makes very little sense, but also is based on the idea that there will be a market for LNG exported from BC to Asia. Economically, LNG exports are nonsense on stilts. They require huge amounts of subsidies from us. We already collect next to nothing in terms tax and royalties from gas frackers, and this will only get worse if any one of these plants actually gets built. But in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, this plan is a disaster. GHG emissions in BC have been rising and the idea that we will hit any of our self imposed targets is unlikely. The LNG export boondoggle ensures that we won’t.
I see very little point in listening to a discussion about a “climate plan” that has already been undermined. I hope that the reason for the exceptional demand is that the people who are going will be making some very forceful comments about the recent NDP flip over its GHG commitments.
From Vaughan Palmer in the Vancouver Sun
“If B.C. starts to focus again on trying to land an LNG industry given all that has happened, I can tell you I am voting government down,” the Green leader vowed in a Dec. 31 interview with Carol Linnitt of DeSmog Canada, the online news service.
He repeated his line in the sand this week on Twitter: “If the B.C. NDP caucus continue their generational sellout embodied in the LNG folly of the B.C. Liberals, their government will fall.”
What about it? Horgan was asked Tuesday. The premier confirmed that during the coming trade mission, he has every intention of exploring support for the LNG Canada export terminal that Shell and its Asian partners are proposing for Kitimat.
I’ll be meeting with partners of LNG Canada just to let them know that we’re OK with LNG development, provided that there are benefits to British Columbians through jobs, there’s a fair return for the resource, our climate action objectives can be realized, and that First Nations are partners.
“You’ve heard this from me before, and you’ll hear it from me again,” Horgan added and he’s right about that.
Plan for deeper dredging in Fraser River has high environmental price
The story comes from Business in Vancouver and has a very even handed approach. I adapted their headline to be less even handed since I feel somewhat incensed by the behaviour of the Port Authority. As are the Voters Taking Action Against Climate Change. And it is also worth I think reframing this argument not so much about saving the planet as saving the place where we live from the inevitable consequences. It is not that dredging of the Fraser “may” reduce the protection provided by the wetlands. The mechanism described by Michael Church is readily apparent. The Port of course chooses to ignore it.
The problem is that the Port Authority has a very limited remit and no responsibility at all to the community within which it operates. The current Board’s view is that they only have to satisfy the “stakeholders” of whom the port businesses are about the only ones that get any attention. In exactly the same way the business in general is dealing with climate change – hoping it will go away or someone else will solve it cheaply and at public rather than business expense, all the while ensuring the greatest possible rate of return on capital employed for the shareholders rather than the stakeholders. It is this fundamental misconception – that the economy is somehow more important than the environment – that is the heart of the problem. A different kind of government in Ottawa could easily change this perception. We – the people of Canada – are in fact the shareholders of the Port. But our government – at all levels – chooses to ignore that and places the interest of short term financial profits above all else. Including the impact of tidal surges on the population of Richmond, where urban development was allowed against all common sense and the regional plan.
This blog has often commented on the port and Richmond. When I lived there I felt personally threatened. No I no longer live there its a more academic exercise – but I still feel that we ought to have public agencies that are acutely conscious of their broader responsibilities. A business like approach is NOT appropriate in any Public Corporation. That is why it is in the public sector, not the private. If all that mattered was profit, then it could be privatized. But even our right wing governments realize that there are public interests in controlling the operations of ports – and all the other kinds of transportation and its associated infrastructure.
It is hardly surprising now that people here do not see the decision to downgrade the protection afforded to whales not as scientifically driven (when has the Harper Government ever paid any attention to science?) but as a spectacularly inept gift to the oil for export lobby. The timing alone is terrible, but when they have a secure parliamentary majority, and the polls trending once again in their favour, what do they care about optics? On the other hand they have finally decided to something about DOT111 tank cars: what a shame it took the deaths of so many people fo force them into action. Whatever happened to the precautionary principle? I would take that approach to dredging deeper in the Fraser. If for no other reason than every dredging operation I have been in touch with was always temporary – since each time you dredge a hole it fills up again. As any kid with a bucket and spade at the beach will tell you.
Stephen Rees's blog 