LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE:
The disqualification of BC NDP leadership candidate Anjali Appadurai last week was a blow. Nelson friends Sjeng Derkx and Ann Remnant talk about it and about the need for positive messaging on confronting our environmental crises. That’s in the second half of the show.
Ben Parfitt from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatifvs BC office hit a home run this past month when his reporting on the BC wood pellet industry was picked up by both CBC’s Fifth Estate and BBC’s Panorama who both aired documentaries on the scandal. Ben talks about how these major docs may impact the future of 13 wood pellet plants in BC. And update from Last Stand West Kootenay’s continuing efforts to protect local old forests and Fox Forest is back to keep us updated.
EVENTS AND LINKS
Tuesday, October 25
Nelson’s new city council hears a special presentation on the Nelson Next climate plan. The meeting starts at 7 at City Hall and you can actually watch it online as well at nelson.ca.
Tonight is also the AGM for Kootenay Coop Radio… at 5:30 in the Chamber of Commerce office in Railtown.
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Wednesday October 26 7 pm
You can Join the BC Climate Emergency Campaign as they release their report card evaluating the BC government’s progress on climate action. One year after receiving their joint open letter, has the provincial government addressed our concerns? What progress have they made, if any, towards achieving our 10 actions? We will also be launching our brand new website!
That event is coming up in the evening, 7 pm. next Wednesday, October 26. The link will be on the blog for today’s show.
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Thur. Oct. 27, 7 – 8 p.m. ETHow Big Foreign Oil captures Canadian energy and climate policy and gouges Canadians. Oil corporations in Alberta and Canada are overwhelmingly foreign-owned. This presentation with Gordon Laxer will examine how Big Foreign Oil (BFO) hinders climate action in Canada by capturing and controlling the lion’s share of the industry, policy-making, and profits.
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZErdOivrz4vEtLkkw-p-g0pAqeQR6bWh59W
All past Time4Action webinars can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK1_WQLaRtAxSTuR_o9OZdg/videos
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Wednesday November 06, 3:00 p.m.
The 3rd annual TEDxSelkirkCollege COUNTDOWN virtual event on Sunday, November 6th from 3:00-5:00pm.
What are locals doing to inspire a sense of possibility and accelerate climate action? A number of speakers will be there to talk about it.
The goal of Countdown is to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis, turning ideas into action. Let’s build a better future by cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 in the race to a zero-carbon world – a world that is safer, cleaner and fairer for everyone.
Register to attend this free, virtual event at www.selkirk.ca/tedxselkirkcollege
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CBC and BBC Documentaries on BC wood pellet plants
Last Stand West Kootenay events and actions
https://www.facebook.com/LastStandWestKootenay
Walk with the Ancestors on Russel Creek
https://www.facebook.com/events/5531880393515481
11 Wrong ideas about Climate
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/eleven-wrong-ideas-about-climate
ENVIRONMENT NEWS OCTOBER 25 2022
In a resolution passed last week on its demands for COP27, the European Parliament called on nation-states to “work on developing a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty”. The Treaty concept was launched by BC’s own Tzeporah Berman from Stand.Earth and several jurisdictionis and one country, Vanuatu in the south Pacific have already endorsed. It is an international mechanism that would complement the Paris Agreement by enabling an equitable phase-out of oil, gas and coal production, responsible for more than 80% of global emissions in the last decade.
The resolution reinforces the growing diplomatic support for a new international mechanism, less than a month after the World Health Organization urged governments to endorse a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
https://fossilfueltreaty.org/european-parliament
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The UK government has conceded that its plan to cut carbon emissions is inadequate, and must now come up with a better one.
Last week, business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg quietly dropped plans to appeal against a High Court ruling from July that found the government’s net zero strategy was unlawful.
Lawyers from ClientEarth, Friends of the Earth and the Good Law Project, had won their in the courts.
The trio of NGOs successfully argued that the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) failed to show how its policies will curb emissions enough to meet legally-binding targets next decade.
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Oslo is on course to become the first capital city in the world with an all-electric public transport system.
Norway’s capital hopes to reach this goal by the end of 2023 as part of its aim to become the world’s first wholly emissions-free city by 2030.
The transport push entails replacing the city’s diesel-fuelled buses with 450 electric ones. The City expects the 500 million crown (€48 million) programme will save the city money over the long term.
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Renewables met all of the rise in global demand for electricity during the first half of 2022, a report from Ember shows.
The London-based energy think tank found that an increase in solar, wind and hydroelectric power prevented a possible 4 per cent rise in fossil fuel generation and a resulting 230 million tonnes of CO2 emissions. That is the equivalent of taking more than 49 million petrol-powered cars off the road for a year.
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Spain has granted personhood status to Europe’s largest salt-water lagoon in a first for the continent.
Mar Menor lagoon has suffered massive die-offs of marine life due to degradation caused by coastal development and local farming.
The new law came into force after a citizen-led push to provide better protection for the threatened ecosystem.
More than 600,000 citizens backed the initiative, which was then voted in by the Senate in Madrid.
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A South African court has banned Shell from searching for fossil fuels along the country’s Wild Coast, a decision hailed by campaigners as a “massive victory” for the planet.
Last year, petroleum giant Shell announced that it would start searching for oil and gas reserves off the nation’s eastern coast. The government had granted the company exploration rights in 2014, renewing them in 2021.
But the plans met with fierce opposition on the ground, and activists took the matter to court.
On Thursday, the Eastern Cape high court revoked Shell’s exploration rights, ruling that they were granted illegally.
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A 5% threshold for renewable energy on the power grid might not sound like much, but it’s the milestone that could tip electricity systems in 87 countries into a rapid shift off carbon, a Bloomberg news analyst says.
Bloomberg Green Deputy Editor Tom Randall says “With all good technologies, there comes a time when buying the old tech no longer makes sense,” “Think smartphones in the 21st century, colour TVs in the 1970s, or even gasoline-powered cars in Henry Ford’s day.”
For the transition to clean energy, that tipping point may be as low as 5%, a level the United States hit in 2011 before pushing past 20% in 2021. “If the country follows the trend set by others at the leading edge, wind and solar will account for half of U.S. power-generating capacity just 10 years from now,” Randall writes. Years earlier than major forecasts.”
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Global carbon dioxide emissions are “defying expectations” and set to rise by just under 1% this year, far less than analysts predicted, due to record deployment of renewable energy, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reports.
CO2 pollution from fossil fuels will still rise by about 300 million tonnes this year, the Paris-based IEA says in a release this week. But that’s “only a small fraction” of last year’s two-billion-tonne increase, and a lot less than expected in the midst of a global energy crisis brought on by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“This year’s increase is driven by power generation and by the aviation sector, as air travel rebounds from pandemic lows,” the IEA says.
theecocentricblog.wordpress.com 
Many people, including me, would like a permanent NDP-Green Party alliance to be formed.
The problem is: the Green party essentially is focused on the natural environment rather than wealth inequality/inequity and therefore redistribution (in some form or another); and vice versa with the NDP. Of course both parties will CLAIM they’ll whole-heartedly support both causes, especially at election time.
I see this also occurring in B.C., with the provincial Green party and NDP, as well as with Green councilors on Vancouver’s city council. In regards to policies that would actually get implemented if elected into office, the Greens need to be more social-program-funding progressive, while the NDP needs to be more environmentally concerned. But I doubt they will.
Sadly, Canada will likely always have either a Liberal or Conservative minority or majority governance; and for this, we can basically credit our First Past The Post electoral-system dinosaur. From my perspective, FPTP barely qualifies as democratic rule within the democracy spectrum, though it seems to well-serve corporate interests. I believe it is basically why powerful corporate and big money interests generally resist attempts at changing from FPTP to proportional representation electoral systems of governance, the latter which dilutes corporate lobbyist influence.
Meanwhile, the political parties’ leadership elections are more-democratically decided by (I believe it is) a ranked-choice ballot system, that typically results in multiple counts. We, the commoners, apparently are NOT worthy of such democratically representative choice; we are unworthy of not potentially having 15 percent of the nation’s populace deciding how we all are 100-percent ruled?
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