The deadline is coming up this Friday, January 14th to have input into the Canadian plan to reduce emissions by 2030. See links for your input below.
One of BC’s on-going crises is the failure to stop the destruction of our forests and old growth trees. Every week activists are mounting new actions to push the government to actually change the way forestry is done in the province, and save old growth forests. Last year a report came out showing that BC’s inland temperate rainforests are being pushed into oblivion by clearcutting. The forests we live in already are a critically endangered ecosystem. Prince George scientist and activist Michelle Connolly co authored a report on how endangered our interior forests are.
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives investigator Ben Parfitt tells us how an obscure forestry subsidy policy that started back in 2006 is still encouraging forestry corporations to take far more trees than their allowable cut every year.
LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD HERE:
LINKS TO RESOURCES AND MORE
EXCELLENT RESOURCE TOOLKIT for INPUT TO CANADA’S CLIMATE PLAN
From ClimateMessengers.ca this has a bundle of information to help steer Canada’s plan.
THE SURVEY PORTAL FOR ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE CANADA
This is the survey that needs to be completed by Friday, January 14 2022.
Sleydo’ speaks about the strategic retreat of Coyote Camp
ConservationNorth.org video on wood pellet production
This great short video includes Forestry Minister Katrine Conroy.
TheNARWHAL.ca piece on the peril to the interior rainforest
ENVIRONMENT NEWS FOR JANUARY 11 2022
A group of activists calling itself “Save Old Growth” planned to block the Trans Canada Highway in several places across B.C. on Monday.
The province-wide mobilization began with Highway 1 off-ramps in Vancouver, Victoria, Nanaimo and in the Interior near Revelstoke on Jan. 10, and plans to continue blocking the route “multiple times per week.”
“The frequency and scale of actions will escalate until all old-growth logging is stopped,” Save Old Growth said in its release.
The group calls itself “a new civil resistance movement that will see ordinary people risking everything to protect the lives of their families from the effects of the corporate destruction of our world.”
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Work continues on the over budget and behind schedule Site C Dam project on the Peace River. 2021 was the sixth year of construction on the project. Observers on site noted logging, clearing, and burning of thousands of brush-piles on the 128 km future footprint of the reservoir.
The strongest legal challenge to the project will begin in March when the infringement of treaty rights case from West Moberly First Nation’s is scheduled to begin.
https://mailchi.mp/b25cd7655678/namra-winter-2022-newsletter
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Premier John Horgan faced a mini-revolt within the New Democratic Party over its support for Coastal GasLink (CGL) and liquefied natural gas (LNG) development.
In early December, three NDP Members of Parliament “joined 15 former federal candidates and around 1,000 NDP grassroots members saying they [were] ‘angered’ by actions toward Indigenous protesters who oppose the pipeline in their traditional territories in northern B.C.,” The Canadian Press reported.
The petition called on federal NDP leader and B.C. MP Jagmeet Singh “to publicly denounce the violence enacted against members of Wet’suwet’en First Nation by the RCMP”. It expressed “dismay and anger at the federal NDP’s statement in response to these events, which obscures the oppressive role the RCMP and BCNDP are playing in perpetuating colonial violence.”
At the BC NDP’s two-day provijncial convention, 715 virtual delegates voted down a resolution aimed at ending lavsh fossil fuel subsidies.
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The Coastal GasLink project running through Wet’suwet’en territory was running behind schedule and over budget back. in July 2021, when The Canadian Press reported that the project could be delayed unless TC Energy and the multinational LNG Canada consortium could settle an ongoing dispute over project costs. LNG Canada said TC Energy had proposed cost increases and schedule performance that went “well beyond” what the two companies agreed to when LNG Canada made its final investment decision in October 2018.
By November, the cost overruns had hit C$3.3 billion. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) warned that LNG Canada, the biggest construction project in Canadian history, was on its way to becoming a “financial albatross” and “could be the last liquefied natural gas project built” in the province.
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Some residents of British Columbia have formed an organization, called: “Let’s Ride! – Make Public Transit BC Wide,” They are calling for a province-wide publicly-owned transportation service that could eventually link up with a national service.
Let’s Ride! says the current transportation system does not “adequately address the safety concerns or social needs of our citizens, many of whom live in rural areas, small municipalities or remote communities.” It further points out that instead “transit across BC is a patchwork of good service, poor service and no service at all, depending on where you live. Reliance on private companies to provide transit services has left [people] stranded when those companies shut down or move on.” What is needed is “a unified inter-community network that will guarantee all British Columbians access to the rest of the province.”
To find out more about Let’s Ride check the website: BCWIDEBUS.com
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Ontario is on track for a 375% increase in power sector emissions between 2017 and 2030 if it carries through with a plan to increase its reliance on natural gas power plants. That’s according to the Annual Planning Outlook from the province’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO).
Mark Winfield co-chair of York University’s Sustainable Energy Initiative, and Colleen Kaiser, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa, say its a dire prediction in a post for the Hamilton Spectator.
They say it’s “very bad news” on greenhouse gas emissions, air quality, and the future cost of electricity.
“The directions laid out in the report also present major challenges to the federal government’s plans to move the electricity sector to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2035,” they warn.
theecocentricblog.wordpress.com 
Greta aptly, poignantly described the global-warming (non)efforts of faux or neo-environmentalist politicos as just more “blah, blah, blah”. To me, though, she was also saying that mass addiction to fossil fuel products undoubtedly helps keep the average consumer quiet about the planet’s greatest polluter, lest they feel and/or be publicly deemed hypocritical. Meanwhile, (neo)Liberals and Conservatives remain preoccupied with vocally criticizing one another for their relatively trivial politics and diverting attention away from some of the planet’s greatest polluters, where it should and needs to be sharply focused.
Industry and fossil-fuel friendly governments can tell when a very large portion of the populace is too tired and worried about feeding/housing themselves or their family, and the virus-variant devastation still being left in COVID-19’s wake — all while on insufficient income — to criticize them for whatever environmental damage their policies cause/allow, particularly when not immediately observable. In fact, until about three months ago, I had not heard Greta’s name in the mainstream corporate news-media since COVID-19 hit the world.
Meanwhile, here in the corporate-powered West, if the universal availability of green-energy alternatives would come at the expense of the traditional energy production companies, one can expect obstacles, including the political and regulatory sort. If something notably conflicts with corporate big-profit interests, even very progressive motions are greatly resisted, often enough successfully.
Collectively, human existence is still essentially analogous to a cafeteria lineup consisting of diversely societally represented people, all adamantly arguing over which identifiable person should be at the front and, conversely, at the back of the line. Many of them further fight over to whom amongst them should go the last piece of quality pie and how much they should have to pay for it — all the while the interstellar spaceship on which they’re all permanently confined, owned and operated by (besides the wealthiest passengers) the fossil fuel industry, is on fire and toxifying at locations not normally investigated. As a species, we can be so heavily preoccupied with our own individual little worlds, however overwhelming to us, that we will miss the biggest of crucial pictures.
Humankind desperately needs environmentally conscious and active young people, especially those approaching or reaching voting age. In contrast, the dinosaur electorate who have been voting into high office consecutive mass-pollution promoting or complicit/complacent governments for decades are gradually dying off thus making way for voters who fully support a healthy Earth thus populace.
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