LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD NOV 12 ECOCENTRIC HERE:
Slocan Valley forest ecology scientist Herb Hammond tells us about the new book he’s co-authored Nature First Cities.
Selkirk College’s annual Tedx Countdown on local climate action is coming up on Wednesday, November 20th. Kayla Tillabaugh the College’s Sustainability Coordinator and Steven Cretney from the West Kootenay Climate tell us about the speakers.
Last week Ottawa announced its long-delayed plan for caps (limits) on greenhouse gas pollution from the oil and gas industry. Oil and gas emissions are the biggest single sector in the country and are still going up. Aly Hyder Ali from Environmental Defence in Ottawa talks about the proposed limits on oil and gas pollution.
LINKS MENTIONED:
Selkirk College Sustainability TedX Countdown
https://selkirk.ca/events/tedxselkirk-college-countdown
West Kootenay Climate Hub
https://www.westkootenayclimatehub.ca/
Canada’s oil and gas emission caps: a backgrounder
ENVIRONMENT EVENTS
Wednesday, November 13th 11 am
Webinar: Cost-saving clean energy solutions for Canadian Households
Clean Energy Canada presents a new report showing that a few clean energy changes to a household can save hundreds of dollars a month for families.
You can join in online free this Wednesday, November 13th at 11 am.one of Canada’s leading climate think tanks offers informed insight on how we can open the door to cost-saving clean energy solutions.
https://cleanenergycanada.org/webinar-how-we-can-open-the-door-to-cost-saving-clean-energy-solutions-for-canadian-households/
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Saturday, Nov 16, 2024, 8:00 a.m.
Hope in Action – Facing Climate Challenges
Free community symposium hosted by the Creston Valley Climate Action Society.
Creston, 128 16 Ave N,
Speakers include:
Seth Klein, policy expert, climate activist and author of A Good War (joining remotely);
Robin Louie, Yaqan Nu?kiy traditional knowledge keeper and land user;
Laura Francis, community animateur and net zero grower.
Workshops featuring Kootenay-based experts will share the wisdom of Indigenous knowledge, ways to better manage our watersheds and forests, advocate to the government, and engage our community to work together to face the climate emergency. The day includes an expo of businesses, organizations and projects that are making a difference here in the Kootenays.
For more information please contact: crestonclimateactionsociety AT gmail.com
Saturday, November 17 at 1:00 pm
Online
Y2Y Wild Film Fest: The Rockies’ Wild Corridor
Join Yellowstone to Yukon and guests: Enjoy four incredible films sharing stories. Back by popular demand, the Y2Y Wild Film Fest returns this November! Join us online
Wednesday, November 20, 2024 | 4pm – 6pm
TEDxSelkirk College Countdown
Castlegar Campus, The Pit
Turn Ideas into Action
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx Countdown is a global initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis, turning ideas into action.
7 pm Monday, November 18
Argenta Hall
7 pm Wednesday November 20
Knox Hall, New Denver.
After the fires, what now? Michelle Connolly talks about the importance of natural disturbances in forests and the best approaches to take after a forest has burned. The Slocan Valley and Argenta communities, hit by terrible fires this summer, are already being approached with salvage logging proposals.
Michelle Connolly has a background in forest disturbance ecology and has worked for First Nations and other governments on land use and conservation planning for over a decade.She runs the grassroots advocacy group Conservation North, which educates the public about the importance of natural disturbances to healthy ecosystems.
10 am Saturday, November 30th
Everything “R” Festival
1765 Columbia Ave, Rossland
Rossland Refractory and Rotary Club of Rossland are hosting a day long festival with a market selling recycled and reuse products, an Earthbox building workshop, youth activities, a bike repair clinic, and more. Also bring your clean and unlabeled (cut them off if you need) plastic so the Refactory can turn it into useful products. Entrance by donation.
Evening dance featuring The Karli Harris band. Tickets $20 available at Out of the Cellar.
For more detailed information, contact Craig at koelsociety AT gmail.com.
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A new hardhitting documentary about the Wet’suwet’en struggle to defend their lands is available to watch anytime. The title of the film is Yintah, the Wet’suwet’en word for their lands. Yintah is free to watch antime on CBC Gem.
ENVIRONMENT NEWS SHORTS
Last week Alberta’s United Conservative Party passed a resolution to rebrand carbon dioxide — as not a pollutant but a good thing.
In approving the resolution, the UCP moved to abandon net zero targets, remove the designation of CO2 as a pollutant, and “recognize that CO2 is a foundational nutrient for all life on Earth.”
The resolution passed by a wide majority.
Edinburgh activists have targeted SUVs in solidarity with Spain’s flood victims.
The group called, Tyre Extinguishers, stencils ‘These cars kill Valencians’ on 4x4s to highlight the SUVs’ role in the climate crisis
At least 214 people have been reported killed in Valencia and surrounding areas after unprecedented rainfall last week caused flooding that swept away bridges, cars and streetlights.
Big loopholes in the regulation of emission Caps on the oil and gas industry were brought out in Ottawa last week. The issues are raising concerns with climate activists. One of the main problems is the regulations won’t be in place until 2026, and give the industry 4 years to work toward the targets. Most emissions reductions won’t happen until after the 2030 deadline for Canada to reduce emissions by 45%.
The draft regulations outline a cap-and-trade system. According to the federal government, most of those emission reductions are expected to come from regulations aiming to curb 75 per cent of methane pollution in the sector, electrifying facilities, and through technologies like carbon capture and storage.
But some of the emission reductions could also be achieved through what Ottawa calls “compliance flexibilities,” which would allow companies to pay into a decarbonization fund rather than reduce emissions themselves, among other things.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/11/08/news/pollution-cap-loopholes-election
Streams that run through Prince Edward Island’s potato country are contaminated with levels of an environmentally-destructive pesticide that exceed federal safety regulations, Canada’s National Observer has found.
Half of the creekside testing sites in the province that have been routinely tested since 2022 contain levels of the neonicotinoid pesticide, clothianidin, in amounts up to 4.5 times greater than the government’s safety thresholds. No enforcement action has been taken yet. And the Pest Management Regulation Agency says it is still working to identify the sources of the pesticide levels detected. But the reality is not which potato farm is releaseing them, it is in fact almost all of them.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/10/28/news/canadas-potato-province-streams-pesticides-PMRA
Coalspur Mines Ltd. wants to expand operations at its Vista coal mine, 10 kilometres east of Hinton, Alberta.
Fraser Thomson, staff lawyer at Ecojustice, says “If it’s allowed to keep going forward unchecked, it would be the largest thermal coal mine in Canadian history,” He noted the mine is only an hour away from climate change-fuelled wildfires tore through the town of Jasper.
Environmental groups sent a letter to the Prime Minister in October saying: “Exports of Canadian mined thermal coal have more than tripled and overall thermal coal exports through Canada have almost doubled since 2015. Theletter was signed by 36 organizations, including Environmental Defence, Ecojustice and Greenpeace Canada.
The letter also urges the federal government to commit to introducing legislation this spring to ban thermal coal experts in consultation with impacted trade unions and Indigenous communities. Thermal coal is burned to produce electricity, metallurgial coal produced in the Crowsnest Area coal mines is burned to manufacture steel.
“Thermal coal exported from or through Canada in 2022 alone caused 40Mt of GHG emissions when burned
Students with the youth-led Sunrise Movement walked out of over 30 high schools and universities across the United States on Friday to stand against U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s “extreme agenda” and promote “the fight for climate justice, workers’ rights, and democracy.”
“We won’t stand by while Donald Trump’s dangerous agenda threatens everything we believe in,” said one student.
The protesters carried signs and banners with messages including “This Is a Climate Emergency,” “Protect Our Futures,” “People Not Profit,” ”Together We Rise,” and “The Dems Failed, The People Won’t.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-on-climate-change
The amount of the powerful climate-changing gas methane spilling out of oil and gas equipment, coal mines and landfills globally is nowhere near fully documented and what is known is “only scratching the surface” according to the CEO of one the companies that tracks methane with its own satellites.
Rather than improving, the methane emissions problem is worsening according to Stephane Germain of GHGSat. “The past year, we’ve detected more emissions than ever before,” he said.
Since late 2023, GHGSat satellites detected about 20,000 sites worldwide that qualify as super-emitters, or sites hemorrhaging at 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of methane per hour.
That marks a major increase over the year before when the company detected about 15,000 super-emitting sites.
A new study, co-authored by NASA scientists, details where and how greenhouse gases are escaping from the Earth’s vast northern permafrost region as the Arctic warms. The frozen soils encircling the Arctic from Alaska to Canada to Siberia store twice as much carbon as currently resides in the atmosphere — hundreds of billions of tons — and most of it has been buried for centuries.
An international team, led by researchers at Stockholm University, found that from 2000 to 2020, carbon dioxide uptake by the land was largely offset by emissions from it. Overall, they concluded that the region has been a net contributor to global warming in recent decades in large part because of another greenhouse gas, methane
British Columbia’s planned liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects will be outcompeted on price, making them even more vulnerable as global markets muscle out fossil fuels, warns a new report.
Recent analysis by Carbon Tracker frames the province’s nascent liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry as “a case study in the transition risks inherent in LNG investments.”
In this shifting market, five LNG export projects are expected to come online in B.C. over the next decade. Two are fully sanctioned, while the others await regulatory approval or remain in the proposal stage.
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