LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD THE JULY 5 2022 EPISODE HERE:
We speak to Last Stand West Kootenay activist CROW who is now on his 20th day of a hunger strike to demand a moratorium on old growth logging in BC. Torrance Coste from the Wilderness Committee sorts out the details on how much of BC’s Old Growth forests is really protected. Not very much. Andrew Gage from West Coast Environmental Law talks about the new campaign to SueBigOil.ca to cover some of the extensive costs of climate crisis damages.
LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/LastStandWestKootenay
How much Old Growth in BC is actually protected? Webinar:
https://sierraclub.bc.ca/forestwebinar/
ENVIRONMENT NEWS
Less than a year after Petaluma, California, became the first city in the world to ban new gas stations, four others have passed similar policies, and at least six more are working on it, including the infamously car-centric Los Angeles—and the British Columbia town of Comox.
“We cannot meet our climate goals unless we stop expanding fossil fuel infrastructure,” said Daniel Arbour, director of the Comox Valley Regional District, who is spearheading efforts to amend Comox’s zoning bylaws to forbid new gas stations.
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Environmental groups have urged world leaders to keep promises they made at the UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon this week, to do everything in their power to save the world’s seas.
Attendees at the conference assessed progress in implementing a UN directive to protect marine life.
The WWF told leaders to seize the momentum and resolve longstanding issues surrounding the protection of the high seas such as plastic pollution by swiftly enacting and ratifying “robust global treaties”.
Lisbon is the last major political gathering before member states meet in August to try to hammer out a long-awaited treaty to shield open seas beyond national jurisdictions. Greenpeace’s Laura Meller said the success of the Lisbon conference would be measured in August.
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Two days after the 30th anniversary of the 1992 cod moratorium that decimated the Newfoundland and Labrador economy, Ottawa has closed commercial cod fishing in the northern Gulf of St. Lawrence.
On Monday, Fisheries and Oceans Minister Joyce Murray announced a one-year ban on directed commercial fishing in the northern Gulf of St. Lawrence in order to give young fish time to reach maturity.
“I do understand just how important the cod fishery is for people in the Gulf area,” said the minister in an interview with CBC News. “This is going to be a disappointment to many fish harvesters and their communities.”
Murray says cod stocks in the northern Gulf are “deep in the critical zone,” and the closure will give the stocks time to recover.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/gulf-st-lawrence-cod-moratorium-nl-1.6509634
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A new study into British Columbia’s endangered southern resident orcas says that the animals have for years faced diet deficiencies — getting 17 per cent less food than what they need.
The killer whales’ ongoing malnourishment could help shine light on why they haven’t been able to rebuild their population, according to the study’s lead author, Fanny Couture, with UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries.
Only about 75 southern residents remain, despite several promising pregnancies and births in recent years.
Another study, published last August in Ecosphere journal, found that between 2008-2019, southern resident orcas with “depleted fat reserves” faced double or triple the deaths rates of those with healthy body conditions.
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Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi joined scientists in pointing to the climate emergency as the cause of a deadly glacier collapse in the Italian Alps on Sunday afternoon, saying policymakers must act to ensure avalanches don’t become a more regular occurrence.
A huge chunk of the glacier broke off and slid down the mountain during a heat wave that’s hit the region earlier in the year than normal.
The glacier that collapsed Sunday shrank by 30% between 2004 and 2015 according to a 2019 study by the National Research Council in Italy.
“Combined with the unusually high temperatures across the region over the summer, glaciers are melting fast.”
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In a piece in The Guardian, former tobacco lawsuit lawyer Sharon Y Eubanks says more than 1,800 lawsuits have been filed over climate liability worldwide. Many of these cases concern the misleading fake science that the industry purposely distributed to the public for decades, denying that its product was the leading cause of global climate change. Eubanks this is exactly like the tobacco industry denying the harm of its products. Exxon knew the reality of climate change in the late 1970s and then later invested in telling the public it was not happening. The French giant Total knew and similarly funded efforts to mislead the public at around the same time.
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Methane is four times more sensitive to global warming than previously thought, a new study shows. The result helps to explain the rapid growth in methane in recent years and suggests that, if left unchecked, methane related warming will escalate in the decades to come.
The growth of this greenhouse gas – which over a 20 year timespan is more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide – had been slowing since the turn of the millennium but since 2007 has undergone a rapid rise, with measurements from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recording it passing 1,900 parts a billion last year, nearly triple pre-industrial levels.
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Canbriam Energy wants to increase the CO2 emissions at its Altares fracked gas processing plant, north of Hudson Hope, by 100,000 tonnes per year without any environmental review.
Activists are calling for immediate submissions to the BC Environmental Assessment Office calling for an environmental review of the expansion.
The deadline is tomorrow June 6th, Here’s the link:
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The inventory of offshore wind projects in development or under production has nearly doubled in the last year, to an astonishing 846 gigawatts, according to the latest market intelligence data report from RenewableUK.
“The global growth of offshore wind over the last year is nothing short of staggering,” said CEO Dan McGrail.
The report shows China with the biggest offshore wind project pipeline, at 98 gigawatts, followed by the United Kingdom at 91 GW, the United States at 80 GW, and Germany at 57 GW, ReNews.biz reports. Europe as a whole accounts for 350 GW of the global total.
Other countries with major offshore wind developments include Brazil, Sweden, Ireland, Vietnam, and South Korea.
The overwhelming majority of that capacity has yet to go into service.
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Climate leader Peter Kalmus writes in the Guardian to deplore the US Supreme Court ruling in favor of a lawsuit brought by fossil-fuel-producing states against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The decision strips power from regulatory agencies and advances the Republican goal to end government oversight. The decision, he says, eliminates one of the only remaining avenues for systemic federal climate action: using the Clean Air Act to phase out fossil fuel power plants. As a result, Peter Kalmus writes, it may now be mathematically impossible for the US to achieve its goal of halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
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