DOWNLOAD OR LISTEN TO SEPT 27, 2022 EPISODE HERE
Judy O’Leary from the West Kootenay Climate Hub about a candidates questionnaire on climate issues. She also talks about the important things local governments can to do reduce emissions.
The West Kootenay Cycling Coalition is holding public consultation sessions on building a special Nelson Creston bike and transportation route. Solita Work from the Coalition gives us an update on the sessions and the progress on the project… and on some other bike events coming this fall.
The Tyee journalist Geoff Demnicki has just come out with a new book, The Petroleum Papers, on the oil corporations’ attempts to fool everyone about the fossil fuel causes of the climate crisis.
EVENTS AND LINKS
The Nelson Chapter of Council of Canadians, West Kootenay Climate Hub, and Nelson Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health are sponsoring the evening forum on Wednesday, October 5th 7 pm at Nelson United Church.
The forum will be a chance for the community to hear directly from Mayoral and Council candidates on their commitment to the changes we need for a healthy future.
I am one of the crew that’s organizing the event and it looks to be a great chance to select your voting choices.
That’s the Nelson forum on Climate and Enviornment., 7 pm Wednesday, October 5 at Nelson United Church, 602 Silica Street.
Facebook: Nelson Chapter Council of Canadians
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Last week we heard from local artist Ron Robinson that is hold a special art show and sale of his work on Sunday, October 9th. Ron is going to donate half the proceeds from the sale of his original art works to the West Kootenay Climate Hub.
The show will be at The Big Brown House on Nelson AVenue. That’s 511 Nelson Avenue from 10 to 4 pm on Sunday, October 9th.
Details on WestKootenayClimateHub.ca
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Go By Bike BC is expanding its fall bike to work or school period to two weeks this year. Go By Bike Weeks are coming up October 3 to 16 and its a time to log your rides and join a team in doing so. You only need two bikes to form a team… but many more can join in.
There’s going to be an amazing prize for participation The Fall GoByBike Weeks GRAND PRIZE: “Cycling in Tuscany: Pisa to Florence”, a Self-Guided Cycling Adventure for 2 in
Italy sponsored by Exodus Travels!
All yoyu have to do to enter is register for Fall GoByBike Weeks.
And Log at least one bike ride during October 3 – 16, 2022 – ANY bike ride counts!
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The West Kootenay Cycling Coalition (WKCC) won a $50K grant to conduct a feasibility study for an Active Transportation Corridor from Nelson to Castlegar BC in the vicinity of Highway 3A. We will be conducting a series of public engagements with you, residents along this corridor. We want your feedback! View the proposed route, learn about our vision, offer ideas and complete a survey.
Session 1 – Taghum Hall, October 4th, 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Session 2 – Nelson Chamber of Commerce, October 7th, 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
Session 3 – The Dam, October 11th, 6:00 pm to 8:00m pm
More session to be announced. Please visit and like our Facebook page for regular updates:
https://www.facebook.com/westkootenaycycling
7 pm Friday Oct. 7… NELSON BIKE RAVE
Join our family friendly, rolling dance party. Come in costume, brings lights, enjoy dance music and ride in our bicycle parade through Nelson. Meet at Nelson Railway Station (91 Baker Street) at 6:30 pm, ride departs at 7:00 pm sharp, rolling to Lakeside Park Rotary Shelter for a BBQ. Grab your friends and family, bring food to cook and bring it all on your bike.
West Kootenay Cycling Coalition
ENVIRONMENT NEWS BITS AND LINKS
Coastal GasLink has now been warned more than 50 times about environmental violations during construction of its natural gas pipeline across northern British Columbia, according to the province.
The LNG pipelline company is about to begin drilling under Wed’zin kwa on Wet’suwet’en territory and the traditional chiefs have called for wide action to stop it.
The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change said it had issued a total of 51 warnings, 16 orders, and levied two fines — penalties of more than $240,000 “for repeated non-compliance” — since construction on the pipeline started in 2019.
Many of the warnings relate to the failure to protect sensitive waterways and wetlands from sediment and erosion that can harm fish habitat and water quality, a violation of the project’s environmental assessment certificate.
When complete, the 670-kilometre pipeline will cross about 625 streams, creeks, rivers and lakes, many of them fish bearing, according to Coastal GasLink.
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Adam McKay the director of last year’s hilarious climate satire “Don’t Look Up,” has announced a $4 million donation to the Climate Emergency Fund. The fund supports activists engaged in disruptive demonstrations urging swifter, more aggressive climate action. It’s the largest donation the fund has received since it started in 2019, and McKay’s biggest personal gift. He joined the organization’s board in August.
Climate change is “extremely alarming, extremely frightening, and quickly becoming the only thing I’m thinking about on a daily basis, even as I’m writing scripts and directing or producing,” McKay said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/09/20/news/director-mckay-donation-climate-activists
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A new film just premiering in the UK tells the story of a group of climate pilgrims who hiked 500 miles from the south of England to Scotland for last year’s climate conference in Glasgow. It’s called Of Walking on Thin Ice (Camino to Cop26).
More than 1,000 people joined the 2021 walk, some of them spending the whole 56 days sleeping on the floors of dozens of church halls, having conversations, making new friends and trying to find a way to make a difference. Much of the adventure was filmed on 16mm celluloid by the film-maker Benjamin Wigley using a hand-crank Bolex camera.
Wigley has produced a dreamy, black and white impressionistic vision of England and Scotland, full of flag-waving activists pounding the pavements, lanes and towpaths, with a haunting soundtrack of song and conversation, sometimes sad, sometimes optimistic.
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Canadian fossils are steadfastly refusing to invest significantly in new decarbonization projects, even though they’re flush with record amounts of cash, the Pembina Institute reports in a scathing analysis released last week.
“Canadian oil and gas companies’ free cash flow is estimated to reach C$152 billion in 2022,” their highest profits ever, Pembina writes in a summary of the report. But “this boom is not being accompanied by new projects in Alberta’s oilsands sector, or a significant expansion of jobs. It is also not being invested in decarbonization.”
Instead, the industry’s capital spending has hit an historical low as a percentage of available cash, while companies pay out dividends to their investors and buy back shares. That may be a fatal error, Pembina warns, since this may be Canadian fossils’ last chance to make serious moves to decarbonize their operations, as global oil demand declines through 2030 and competition for low-emission energy ramps up.
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A U.S. rooftop solar company is hitting bureaucratic resistance to a plan to build off-grid neighbourhoods that would be less dependent on established utilities.
Sunnova Energy—one of America’s largest rooftop solar companies— is now putting itself in direct competition with the utility industry and all the regulations which make micro grids illegal in much of the United States.
Sunnova “asked the California Public Utilities Commission to let it directly compete with investor-owned utilities to provide electricity to homes in new residential developments as a private ‘micro-utility,’”
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In an historic appeal that further affirms the South Pacific island country as a global climate leader, Vanuatu has thrown its support behind the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Vanuatu is the first nation-state to formally push for an international legal mechanism to end fossil fuels.
Vanuatu President Nikenike Vurobaravu said With fossil fuel production and use accounting for 86% of the CO2 emissions that cause climate change, “this emergency is of our own making,” Vurobaravu “Our youth are terrified of the future world we are handing to them through expanding fossil fuel dependency, compromising intergenerational trust and equity.”
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BC’s Caribou recovery plan has culled 156 wolves in the West Chilcotin mountains in last 3 years. Sixty-six wolves were culled in the Itcha-Ilgachuz caribou range in the first months of 2022 with more expected to be removed in the coming winter, confirmed the Ministry of Land, Water and Resource Stewardship.
The provincial government has been doing wolf culls since 2015 as part of an effort to restore caribou herds. In 2020, 90 wolves were removed from the Itcha-Ilgachuz area. At the time the population of the caribou herd was estimated to be 385. The ministry estimates the current population estimate is 508 animals,”
The ministry also reports some other wolf culls have restored caribou herds. In the Kennedy Siding herd, numbers have doubled since 2015 from 49 animals to 115, the Klinse-za herd has gone from 38 animals in 2013 to 114 currently and the Columbia North herd has gone from 124 animals in 2014 to over 200 currently.
A global analysis by international team of scientists and economists warns of rising social tensions. The analysis says that left unchecked, rising inequality in the next 50 years will lead to increasingly dysfunctional societies, making co-operation to deal with existential threats like climate change more difficult,
A new book, Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity. says he world can still stabilise global temperatures below 2°C and approach an end to poverty by 2050 by enacting five ‘extraordinary turnarounds’ that break with current trends.
“We are standing on a cliff edge,” said Jorgen Randers, one of the six authors of Earth for All and co-author of The Limits to Growth published 50 years ago. “In the next 50 years, the current economic system will drive up social tensions and drive down wellbeing. We can already see how inequality is destabilising people and the planet.”
https://www.earth4all.life/news/book-launch
The new Republican strategy on climate change is to admit it’s happening but argue that it’s good, actually. Voters may find that optimism compelling.
As heat waves, wildfires, floods, water shortages, and droughts ravage the country, Republicans have been forced to abandon climate denial. The idea that global warming is happening, it’s just not an urgent problem right now—a stance in which they are joined by many centrist Democrats, especially those funded by the fossil fuel industry.
Far-right Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a racist, anti-Semite who is up for reelection this year, is now offering one vision of what the Republican Party may switch to after climate delay, like denial, has outlived its usefulness. Greene argues that climate change exists, but it’s good.
Longest running Enviro News show on the Radio! 