On Friday, March 25, the youth group Fridays for Future joined a global day of action on climate and they invited a number of local speakers including our MLA Brittny Anderson. She answered questions from Fridays for Future member Miguel Pastor on provincial climate and forestry action. Judith Fearing has joined the local Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health and she explained why she now must become a ‘climate nurse’ to protect the future of our communityh.
Julia Levin from Environmental Defence Canada talks about the announcement of the federal government’s Emissions Reduction Plan
The federal Liberal-NDP deal included climate action. Mitchell Beer from The Energy Mix.com talks about that deal and climate targets as well.
Nominations have opened for this year’s Suzy Hamilton Award, we have the details.
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LINKS
Analysis of the federal Emissions Reduction Plan from The Climate Action Network.
The Energy Mix.com has full coverage of Canadian climate policy and action.
https://www.theenergymix.com/category/jurisdictions/canada/page/2/
Healthcare professionals in the Kootenays working to better human health by protecting the planet.
ENVIRONMENT NEWS SHORTS
Dozens of Hollywood celebrities are joining Indigenous leaders calling for big banks to stop funding the Coastal GasLink pipeline in B.C.
Actors Mark Ruffalo and Leonardo DiCaprio are among the celebrities who have signed on to the No More Dirty Banks campaign.
They are throwing their support behind Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs and other leaders who are calling on the Royal Bank of Canada to withdraw its support from the northern B.C. pipeline.
According to the organization, RBC has invested more than $160 billion since 2015 to finance tar sands, fossil fuel extraction and transport.
RBC is also the lead financier of Coastal GasLink, the campaign states.
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The big oil state of Texas is already the top wind power producer in the United States and is on pace to become number one in solar electricity in a few years.
Last year’s winter storm knocked out about half the state’s power plants, triggering broad swaths of outages that pushed electricity prices to exorbitant levels and left more than 200 people dead.
Fingers were pointed at frozen wind turbines as the main reason several parts of the state plunged into darkness for days, including by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
But the problems were much broader as other power plants, mainly natural gas-fired facilities, were also knocked offline and the state’s grid wasn’t able to move available power to where it was needed.
Overall, most of the renewable solar and wind system performed exceptionally well during that storm. You had wind producers down in the south that were not impacted by the storm.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bakx-texas-wind-solar-1.6390107
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Everyone on the planet should be covered by an early warning system against extreme weather and climate-related disasters within five years, the UN secretary general has said.
About a third of people around the world are not now covered by early warning systems, but in Africa the problem is greater, with about six in 10 people lacking such warnings.
As climate breakdown takes hold, more people are likely to be affected by extreme weather, including flash floods, heatwaves, more violent storms and coastal storm surges, made worse by sea level rises.
António Guterres said it was unacceptable that so many people were still not covered by early warning systems, and pointed out that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had recently found half of humanity was “in the danger zone” for climate breakdown.
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Rich countries must end all oil and gas production in the next 12 years, while the poorest nations should be given 28 years, to provide a fair transition away from fossil fuels, according to a study.
The report, led by Prof Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University, found that wealthy countries such as the UK, US and Australia had until 2034 to stop all oil and gas production to give the world a 50% chance of preventing devastating climate breakdown, while the poorest nations that are also heavily reliant on fossil fuels should be given until 2050.
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90 prominent scientists have written a letter urging it to ensure that old-growth forests are a big part of Canada’s climate plan.
“We are deeply concerned by the evidence of continued deforestation and degradation of primary forests globally and in Canada because of the resulting impact on greenhouse gas emissions and the biodiversity crisis,” says the open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“Canada’s primary boreal and temperate forests have a vital role to play as natural climate solutions, and it is important that their protection is central to Canada’s climate and biodiversity policies.”
Nature-based solutions are expected to play a large role, in the Emissions Reduction Plan being announced today in by the federal government.
Not only are old-growth forests much more biodiverse, they contain up to 50 per cent more carbon than replanted forests, says the letter. Reforested stands can take more than a decade before they become net absorbers of carbon and the carbon released from the soils and old trees may not be replaced for centuries.
“As soon as you log, you’ve lost more than 70 per cent of that carbon,” said Risa Smith, co-chairperson of the Protected Areas Climate Change group for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the world’s largest group of conservation scientists.
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