LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD FEBRUARY 7 2023 ECOCENTRIC:
Amber Peters from Valhalla Wilderness Society tells us about the big announcement to protect the famous Incomapleux Valley from logging. It’s a great victory for long running local campaign to save the valley. Long-time Kootenay logging activist Tom Prior tells us about his first trip into the Incomapleux back 1999 which led to the valley being protected until 2005. Then logging equipment was moving in, the activists blockade was taken out by police and, according to Tom, a miracle saved the valley.
And Interfor is pressing ahead with its plans to clear cut a forest of old spruce on the border of Kokanee Glacier Park. Teresa Smed a local farmer from Enterprise Creek brings us an update.
LINKS:
Learn more about Valhalla Wilderness Society’s campaign to protect the Selkirk Mountain Caribou Park larger landscape. Watch the film PRIMEVAL: ENTER THE INCOMPLEUX. VWS.ORG. HERE.
The BC Forest Defence website Tom Prior mentioned with his full account of early Incomapleux activism by Kootenay Forest Protection legends, videos and photos: BCFD.CA
That’s a Kootenay wolverine, on the logging road, high up Enterprise Creek. Despite local attempts to preserve the habitat, Interfor says it is going ahead clearcutting two blocks adjacent to Kokanee Glacier Park.
ENVIRONMENT NEWS
Global investment in the low-carbon energy transition reportedly surpassed $US1 trillion in 2022, “a new record and a huge acceleration” from 2021, according to BloombergNEF (BNEF).
Defying the econommic headwinds evident throughout the whole of 2022, low-carbon investment jumped a massive 31% on revised 2021 investment levels (which were originally reported by BNEF as reaching $US755 billion, but later revised to $US849 billion).
Maybe more importantly, however, BNEF believes that, for the first time, investment in low-carbon technologies appears to have reached parity with capital deployed in support of fossil fuels.
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Leonard Peltier, the Indigenous rights activist recently marked 48 years in US prisons after a trial riddled with misconduct and lies.
The FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office made a fall guy out of Peltier, now 78, when they convicted him of murdering two FBI agents during a 1975 shootout on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. They never had evidence that he murdered anyone, and the amount of wrongdoing that took place in his trial is mind-boggling: Government prosecutors hid exculpatory evidence. The FBI threatened and coerced witnesses into lying. Peltier was separated from his co-defendants, all of whom were acquitted on grounds of self-defense. A juror admitted she was racist against Native Americans on the second day of the trial but was allowed to remain on the panel.
Peltier has maintained his innocence for all of these years, even as it almost certainly prevented him from being paroled.
His decade slong parole process has been so problematic that United Nations legal experts last year made the unusual decision to revisit his case. Over the summer, they called on President Joe Biden to release Peltier immediately.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/leonard-peltier-prison-joe-biden_n_63e16682e4b0c8e3fc86b128
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Mexico has become one of the first countries to ban solar engineering experiments, after a start-up released balloons of sulphur dioxide particles meant to cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight back into space.
“The company’s behaviour plays into long-held fears that a ‘rogue’ actor with no particular knowledge of atmospheric science or the implications of the technology could unilaterally choose to geoengineer the climate, without any kind of consensus around whether it’s okay to do so—or what the appropriate global average temperature should be,” reports MIT Technology Review.
The balloons were released in Baja California last April by Make Sunsets, a United States start-up that says it makes “reflective, high-altitude, biodegradable clouds that cool the planet.”
The company sells US$10 “cooling credits” that each buy the release of one gram of cloud. In January, around four months after launching, CEO Luke Iseman said the fledgling company had raised $750,000 in venture capital and other funds, Mexico News Daily reports.
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Alstom SA, the transport systems developer that bought Bombardier’s rail unit in 2021 says it’s time for a Canadian version of the French-style TGV (train à grande vitesse) rail. Alstom is urging Ottawa to build such a system for Canada’s busiest transportation corridor between Toronto and Quebec City“rather than settling for a cheaper but slower alternative that would attract too few new passengers to make much of a difference,” reports Globe and Mail columnist Konrad Yakabuski.
The company says faster trains, up to 300 km an hour in the corridor would be more feasible than currently planned more frequent but much slower passenger trains.
Responding to Alstom and other potential private sector partners who asked the government to “aim higher” than its present High Frequency Rail (HFR) initiative, Ottawa has expanded its parameters and is now open to proposals for a “higher-speed” rail service that could reach
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Ontario’s “misleading and illegitimate” system of clean energy credits is “little more than greenwashing” and “should not move forward,” a team of three researchers writes for the Canadian Climate Institute (CCI).
The province’s new voluntary clean energy credit registry, first announced last year and critiqued through last fall, will allow companies to make their power “look cleaner than it is” at a time when the grid itself is getting dirtier, write CCI Mitigation Research Director Jason Dion, Associate Professor Nicholas Rivers of the University of Ottawa, and CCI Research Associate Nikhitha Gajudhur, in a post originally published in the Toronto Star.
“There are policies Ontario could enact if it wants to expand use of clean electricity, and ways of leveraging corporate support. Alberta’s power purchase agreements and reverse auctions could offer some great lessons,” the CCI authors write.
“But selling clean energy credits from a dirtying grid under an accounting framework that double-counts the clean parts is a bad idea.”
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Meanwhile in the US A leading climate action group just published a report revealing that the 94 clean energy projects announced since U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law last August are set to create more than 100,000 green jobs.
Climate Power—which published the report as part of a new six-figure national ad campaign touting the growing green economy—said that since the IRA became law without any Republican support last year, “companies are racing forward with massive investments to build our clean energy future.”
“New manufacturing in wind, solar, batteries, and electric vehicles—along with storage projects across the country—mean new, good-paying jobs for hard-working Americans,” the group continued.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/green-jobs
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One of the largest oil companies in the world, BP, just posted their profits from the final quarter of 2022, $5.1 billion, bringing their total annual profits to $29 billion. This marks a 110% increase in profit compared to 2021. While Big Oil profited massively in 2022, American consumers were hit with historically high gas prices at the pump.
BP’s fourth-quarter earnings call revealed that they had spent over $14 billion in 2022 on stock buybacks and dividends, further enriching their wealthy shareholders.
As we have previously noted, the fossil multinationals had all time record 2022 profits, with many doubling in profit from 2021. Phillips 66 profits went up by nearly four times.
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A first-of-its-kind study released last week warned that the transition to electric vehicles must go hand-in-hand with major investments in mass transit and other steps to reduce U.S. dependence on cars altogether.
The study notes that transition to electric vehicles (EVs) that the Biden administration is envisioning would require the country to mine three times the amount of lithium domestically than it currently does—all from the single U.S. mine in operation.
The report was published by researchers at the Climate and Community Project and University of California, Davis
“Replacing all of the [internal combustion engine] vehicles on the road with EVs on a 1:1 basis is infeasible, particularly on the urgent timeline needed for climate mitigation,” reads the report. “This would require significant increases in extraction of minerals like lithium and cobalt for EV battery packs and would also require an enormous amount of electricity.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/electric-vehicles-lithium-mining
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The Canadian Competition Bureau has opened an inquiry to see if forestry industry claims of sustainable management on vast stretches of Canadian woodlands are false advertising.
The inquiry, announced late last year, comes in response to a complaint filed by the environmental law firm Ecojustice on behalf of eight environmental groups. Ecojustice says that forest industry ads claiming the Sustainable Forestry Initiative sets rigorous harvesting standards are dishonest and misleading.
At stake is Canada’s most commonly used method of assuring consumers that the wood and paper products they buy are harvested in accordance with modern ecological principles. It is promoted by the Forest Products Association of Canada and purports to certify sustainable forestry on more than 120 million hectares.
But the Ecojustice complaint calls on the Competition Bureau to force the industry to retract those claims and pay a $10 million fine.
It says the initiative uses vague language that is too woolly to create any sort of measurable standard. Terms like “rare,” “ecologically important,” “significant” and “at risk” are not defined.
Ecojustice says companies are allowed to define for themselves what constitutes an old-growth forest. The initiative defines long-term as up to 80 years — too short to measure real sustainability and more in line with harvest schedules.
https://biv.com/article/2023/02/competition-bureau-investigate-industry-claims-sustainable-forestry-management
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