LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD JUNE 27 2023 SHOW HERE:
Local premier is on at the Civic on June 29th It’s a great documentary about “the noblest invention” the bike. Kootenay Mountain Culture editor-in-chief Mitchell Scott talks about how the new feature length film came about.
Nicholas Sills to be able to ride into town safely from Blewett, with his family, and he has some great suggestions.
Kea Wilson from Streetsblog USA an online magazine about re-imaging street life talks about the tremendous cost of cars, to the owners, to the taxpayers and to the world.
LINKS:
STREETSBLOG. ORG A great website about improving the humanity of street life. Search for car-ownership-costs.
The Engine Inside. Watch the Trailer:youtube.com/watch?time_continue=21&v=P4odM4LMTuw&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fmountainculturegroup.com%2F&source_ve_path=MTM5MTE3LDI4NjY2&feature=emb_logo
ENVIRONMENT NEWS
Not only is dangerous sea level rise “absolutely guaranteed”, but it will keep rising for centuries or millennia even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, experts say.
Rising seas are one of the most severe consequences of a heating climate that are already being felt.
Since the 1880s, mean sea level globally has already risen by 16cm to 21cm (6-8in). Half of that rise has happened over the past three decades.
The ocean rose more than twice as fast in the most recent decade than it did in 1993-2002, the first decade of satellite measurements, when the rate was 2.77mm a year. Last year was a new high, according to the World Meteorological Organization. It is no coincidence that the past eight years were the warmest on record.
The numbers might seem small. Even 4.62mm is just half a centimetre a year. But it adds up and UN secretary general, António Guterres warned in February that sea level rise threatens a “mass exodus” of entire populations on a biblical scale.
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Good news on the Fukushima nuclear disaster in a recent edition of the journal Nature. Japan is pressing ahead with plans to release water contaminated by the 2011 meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. The resulting diluted radiation will be at “background level” and safe. The plans is for the next 30 years, Japan will slowly release treated water stored in tanks at the site into the ocean through a pipeline extending one kilometre from the coast.
The company, Tokyo Electric Power says that the resulting concentration of tritium is around one-seventh of the World Health Organization’s guidelines for tritium in drinking water. The carbon-14 in the tanks is currently at concentrations of around 2% of the upper limit set by regulations, TEPCO says, and this will reduce further with the seawater dilution that takes place before the water is discharged.
Jim Smith, an environmental scientist at the University of Portsmouth, UK, says the risk this poses to nations around the Pacific Ocean will probably be negligible. “I always hesitate to say zero, but close to zero,” he says.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02057-y
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A county government in Oregon is suing more than a dozen fossil fuel companies for the costs it incurred in a 2021 heat emergency that killed at least 69 of its residents. Legal experts say this could show the way for similar legal action in Canada.
Multnomah County seeks to hold colossal fossils ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, and a dozen other defendants responsible for a killer heat dome that hit the county on June 25, 2021 and drove temperatures as high as 46.7°C, up to 20º above the daily average for the region.
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A China-based start-up says it will be selling electric vehicle batteries with a range of 1,000 kilometres by next year. Gotion High-tech says it will begin mass production of its new lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP) battery by 2024. “The 1,000-kilometre range from a single charge gives the battery a potential lifetime range of four million kilometres, far exceeding the average lifespan of a car,” writes the Independent.
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Dutch cities weren’t always so great for cyclists and pedestrians. The current system came about thanks to a series of policy decisions stretching back to the 1970s that eventually led to national regulations for urban road safety and street design.
Transportation is the largest source of heat-trapping emissions and one of the largest globally, so there’s an urgent need to move away from fossil-fuel-powered engines.
But with relatively little fanfare, many government officials across the globe are cautioning that while EVs are necessary, they’re not sufficient, for a number of reasons. Research indicates switching to Electrical vehicles will only cut about a third of the total life cycle emissions.
Modal shift, the change from individual vehicle to active transportation and transit transportation will be essential to meet emission reduction targets, the experts say.
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Unusually hot and dry conditions were the common factor across the map for fires in Canada this year. Western Canada had its warmest and driest May on record, while the eastern provinces received 50% less precipitation this spring than usual. Those conditions “left soils and forests as dry as tinder, so when a fire ignites it can grow and spread quickly,” says the journal Nature. Some blazes may have been sparked by human carelessness, but earlier than usual lightning storms also hastened the fire season’s onset.
The record year for wildfire has already seen more than 47,000 Square Kilometres Burn Across Canada
In 2020, hundreds of fires burned across the western United States and Canada, other blazes torched Australia during the continent’s “Black Summer”, and Arctic wildfires shattered a record set the previous year.
In 2021, a fast-moving wildfire burned the town of Lytton, British Columbia to the ground in less than an hour amid a widespread heat wave.
Then in 2022 again, extensive fires burned along North America’s west coast in a longer than usual fire season, and Europe reported its worst forest fire season in history.
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Global fossil fuel demand falls steeply, Canadian oil and gas producers are in for a major price squeeze, electricity use more than doubles to become the “cornerstone” of the country’s energy system, and oil sands producers face higher transition costs in the net-zero by 2050 scenarios released Tuesday by the Canada Energy Regulator (CER).
In that future, “the types of energy that Canadians use will be vastly different than what they are today,” CER Chief Economist Jean-Denis Charlebois told a media briefing Tuesday morning. “In practice, this means a lot less fossil fuels.”
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Extraction from one of the world’s largest natural gas fields will end in October, the Dutch government announced Friday, turning off a lucrative source of revenue that also sparked unrest by causing a string of earthquakes.
“The gas tap will be turned off on Oct. 1. That means an end to extraction after 60 years,” Prime Minister Mark Rutte said.
However, he said it remains possible gas could still be pumped from the Groningen field after that date if there is a “perfect storm” of an extremely cold winter this year and a problem with storage of gas from other sources amid ongoing concerns about gas deliveries caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Thousands of households are still waiting for their homes to be strengthened after years of shaking that damaged buildings. Thousands more are awaiting compensation.
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The Autonmous Sinix’t have responded to the BC government announcement that the Ktunaxa, Secwépemc and Syilx Okanagan Nations and their members will benefit from new
interim agreements that share revenue generated from the Columbia River Treaty (CRT).”
Marilyn James, of the Autonomous Sinixt says, “How is it reconciliation when other Nations
benefit from the injustice and wrongful extinction of the Arrow Lakes Band (Sinixt) for purposes
of the Indian Act?” She continues, “There can be absolutely no reconciliation without the truth of
Sinixt existence and Sinixt tmxʷúlaʔxʷ (homeland) being acknowledged. Anything else is just a
shameful perpetuation of bureaucratic genocide.”
The revenue sharing agreement signed between the CRT will likely net the three Nations which
were included, $50 million per annum.
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