Clips from students speakers at the Global Climate Strike and Greta Thunberg’s How dare you? speech. Heather McSwann from Glade Watershed Protectors gives an update on their legal initiatives and the on-going efforts to protect their watershed from planned logging.
Environment News for September 24, 2019
This Friday, Sept 27 Montreal will host the largest climate strike Canada has ever seen.
Greta Thunberg is going to be there!!!
Green Party leader Elizabeth May says she will attend and she’s challenging all the other party leaders to show up too.
Sept. 27 was the other identified day for global climate strike… and we can expect more large rallies around the world.
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Last week B.C.’s Court of Appeal ordered provincial ministers to reconsider the conditions hastily attached to the project by former Premier Christy Clark.
The case brought by the Squamish First Nation challenges the province’s approval of the pipeline… and effectively forces Premier Horgan to try a bit harder on what he called using
“every tool” to stop the pipeline.
First Nations are encouraging the province to partner with them and “jointly review” Trans Mountain’s threats to rivers, beaches, drinking water, neighbourhoods and human health.
“Premier Horgan and his government need to set the bar higher and rethink their approach to the TMX project,” said Khelsilem, an elected councillor with the Squamish Nation, which brought the appeal.
The core issue was that Clark’s government relied entirely on the National Energy Board’s first review of Trans Mountain to issue a provincial environmental certificate. But the 2018 decision by the Federal Court of Appeal invalidated the NEB’s process and recommendation.
“It only makes sense that a Provincial Environmental Assessment Certificate issued based on that fatally flawed report would have to be revisited,” says Khelsilem.
Provincial lawyers… working for the NDP government… fought the Squamish every step of the way in court. But all three appeal judges sided with the Squamish.
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For the 3rd time in 5 years, the Alberta government is changing how it monitors oilsands emissions
Last week, staff at Alberta Environment and Parks were informed that the Environmental Monitoring and Science Division (EMSD), which Donahue once helped lead, was being dissolved and rolled into a new structure. A stand-alone climate change office will also disappear.
The scientist who once oversaw the science division of an independent agency keeping tabs on the impact of industrial pollution in Alberta is leaving the province and speaking out about the politics that he says has come to permeate Alberta’s petroleum-based economy.
Bill Donahue says he fears the quality and depth of environmental monitoring in the province will continue to decline, imperilling the public’s understanding of potentially harmful pollutants produced by the oilsands and related industries.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/new-oilsands-agency-1.5287514
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Board to audit forest licence near Nelson and Kaslo
This week the Forest Practices Board of BC is examining the forest activities of Cooper Creek Cedar Ltd. on forest licence A30171 in the Selkirk Natural Resource District.
Auditors will examine whether timber harvesting, roads, silviculture, fire protection and associated planning carried out between Sept. 1, 2017, and Sept. 26, 2019, met the requirements of the Forest and Range Practices Act and the Wildfire Act.
The audit area is located in the Kootenay Lake Timber Supply Area (TSA), which includes the communities of Nelson, Balfour and Kaslo. Cooper Creek manages many resource values in the TSA, including water, timber, recreation, wildlife and visuals.
Once the audit work is complete, a report will be prepared and any party that may be adversely affected by the audit findings will have a chance to respond. The board’s final report and recommendations then will be released to the public and government.
Communications
Forest Practices Board
250 213-4705 / 1 800 994-5899
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Investors managing assets worth $35 trillion are sending a message to governments and companies: Do more to fight climate change.
A group of 515 investors last week urged policymakers to act with the “utmost urgency” to comply with the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which seeks to limit global warming.
“Much more needs to be done by governments to accelerate the low carbon transition and to improve the resilience of our economy, society and the financial system to climate risks,” the investors said in a statement ahead of next week’s United Nations Climate Action Summit.
The group urged governments to phase out thermal coal power and fossil fuel subsidies, and set a price for carbon emissions. T
Only 31 of the top 109 energy companies in the world are complying with the pledges made by national governments in Paris,
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/18/investing/climate-change-investors/index.html
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In 2010, Congress commissioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to study the impact of fracking on drinking water. The U.S. EPA released its long-awaited final draft of its report last week, assessing how fracking for oil and gas can impact access to safe drinking water.
The report found that fracking for shale oil and gas has not led to “widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States,” but it said fracking could contaminate drinking water under certain conditions, such as when fluids used in the process leaked into the water table, and found isolated cases of water contamination.
In response to these findings, Mark Ruffalo, actor and advisory board member of Americans Against Fracking, said, “Today’s EPA fracking water contamination study confirms what both the oil and gas industry and the Obama Administration have long denied—that fracking poisons American’s drinking water supplies. The EPA study reviewed hundreds of confirmed water contamination cases from drilling and fracking. It’s time to stop poisoning the American people and shift rapidly to renewable energy.”
Average global warming could hit 6.5° to 7.0°C by 2100, up to two degrees higher than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s latest scenarios, if humanity doesn’t get its greenhouse gas emissions under control, according to new modelling by two leading research agencies in France.
“The new calculations also suggest the Paris Agreement goals of capping global warming at ‘well below’ 2.0°C, and 1.5°C if possible, will be harder to reach,” Agence France-Presse reports.
“With our two models, we see that the scenario known as SSP1 2.6—which normally allows us to stay under 2.0°C—doesn’t quite get us there,” said Olivier Boucher, senior research scientist at the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace Climate Modelling Centre in Paris.
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The environmental group Stand.earth announced on Monday that 530 organizations have signed on to the Lofoten Declaration, which calls for rapidly phasing out fossil fuels on a global scale and transitioning to clean energy, as world leaders and activists gathered in New York City for the United Nations Climate Action Summit.
“True leadership in response to the climate emergency means having the courage to commit to ending the expansion of oil and gas production and make a plan to transition communities and workers to better opportunities.”
—Catherine Abreu, Climate Action Network
“If a house is on fire, you don’t add fuel. True leadership in response to the climate emergency means having the courage to commit to ending the expansion of oil and gas production and make a plan to transition communities and workers to better opportunities,” said Catherine Abreu of Climate Action Network, one of the hundreds of groups from 76 countries backing the declaration.
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Mining is always environmentally controversial in BC, look at Mt Polley, Elk Valley, the Banks Island, cases and more.
Now the province is taking public input on mining regulation.
THe government release says With a $20-million boost in Budget 2019, the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources has created a new Mines Health, Safety and Enforcement Division (MHSED). Independent from the Mines Competitiveness and Authorizations Division, MHSED’s priorities are health, safety, compliance management, enforcement activities and auditing.
They are also talking about
•« Formally separate specific authorities and decision-making powers under the Mines Act to ensure authorizations and permitting are separate from enforcement and auditing powers.
•Formally establish an independent oversight unit with an auditing function.
•Enhance compliance and enforcement provisions. »
To take part in the process the website, as always is engage.gov.bc.ca
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Nearly 3 billion fewer birds exist in North America today than in 1970.
While scientists have known for decades that certain kinds of birds have struggled as humans (and bird-gobbling cats) encroach on their habitats, a new comprehensive tally shows the staggering extent of the loss. Nearly 1 in 3 birds — or 29 percent — has vanished in the last half century, researchers report September 19 in Science.
“Three billion is a punch in the gut,” says Peter Marra, a conservation biologist at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The loss is widespread, he says, affecting rare and common birds alike. “Our study is a wake-up call. We’re experiencing an ecological crisis.”
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National Geographic magazine has a new feature out about the Tar Sands…. THe headline: This is the world’s most destructive oil operation—and it’s growing
Can Canada develop its climate leadership and its lucrative oil sands too?
And these days, even as Canada promotes action on climate change on the world stage, the Canadian and provincial governments are pushing to expand oil sands operations—which brings substantial economic benefits to the region—in the face of a chorus of opposition from environmentalists and indigenous people.
Great National Geographic pictures online
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