LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD THE APRIL 11 2023 ECOCENTRIC:
Stephenie Hendricks from Kootenay Morning sets up an interview with Johnny Strilaeff, the CEO of the Columbia Basin Trust partly about reductions in support for long-running environmental education in the region. Dave Quinn is one of the region’s educators who has worked with kids and adults in a range of programs. The viability of his program will be challenged by the pullout of Trust support.
The Nelson Public Forum on LNG, Fracking and Pipelines is on Thursday 13th. Judith Fearing from Doctors and Nurses for Planetary Health Kootenay Boundary tells us what’s coming up.
David Suzuki’s last season hosting The Nature of Things wound up with a special personal episode recently. It featured a cameo from Neil Young. Suzuki’s crucial observations about environmental crises feature in several episodes of this final season. We have some clips.
LINKS MENTIONED ON THE SHOW:
LNG NELSON PUBLIC FORUM Register for the Zoom event at:
WestKootenayClimateHub.ca/upcoming-events
Columbia Basin Trust Public Engagement
Columbia Basin Environmental Educators Network
David Suzuki’s final season on The Nature of Things
Starting with his sign-off show: Season 62. Episode 13. https://gem.cbc.ca/the-nature-of-things/s62?autoplay=1
Also mentioned: Season 62. Episode 6. https://gem.cbc.ca/the-nature-of-things?autoplay=1
EVENTS
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Thursday April 13. 7 pm
Nelson Public Forum on LNG, Fracking and Pipelines
We already talkd about the public forum on LNG and frackign coming up this Thursday, April 13th. I’ll just repeat the details here: at Nelson United Church at 7 pm Thursday April 13 A zoom link will also be available at the events page of the WestKootenayClimateHub.ca
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Friday, Apr. 14, 9:30 am PDT
WEBINAR: Shifting Power: Zero-Emissions Electricity Across Canada by 2035
Madeleine McPherson, Assistant Professor in the department of Civil Engineering at the University of Victoria will discuss stakeholder engaged modelling as a policy development tool. The “Shifting Power: Zero-Emissions Electricity Across Canada by 2035” study published in 2022 by the David Suzuki Foundation will be discussed as a case study in these approaches, along with a number of other initiatives.
https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAsc-GsrT8uHNa8B61Ii6HsVqQcTljy7t-j
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Saturday April 15, 10am-12 Noon –
4th Climate Action Provincial Assembly (CAPA)
The 4th Climate Action Provincial Assembly (CAPA) is coming up April 15th this Saturday morning at 10 am. It is an opportunity for climate advocates and activists in B.C. to share our campaigns and cooperate together to make them stronger. Breakout groups on current campaigns and initiatives in BC’s climate movement covering Old Growth Forests, Frack Free BC, Stop Liquefied Natural/Fossil Gas LNG/LFG, Gas out of New Buildings, Stop RBC / Fossil Fuel Finance, Stop TMX, Transportation, Food, Farming and Climate, the BC Climate Emergency Campaign, Youth Climate Corps, Labour Climate Organizing, Preparing for the Next BC Provincial Election, Climate Organizing within the BC NDP, and Climate Organizing within the BC Green Party (to be confirmed).
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Sun. Apr 16, 4 p.m. ET
Webinar: RCMP violence against the frontlines
Learn about the controversial RCMP “community-industry response group” and hear from frontline defenders and a journalist about their direct experiences with the C-IRG. With Molly Murphy on the C-IRG at the Fairy Creek watershed blockades; Louis Bockner on the blockade on the Salisbury Creek Forestry Road; a Gitxsan land defender; Shiri Pasternak or Tim Groves on ‘What is the C-IRG?’
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1gzzfxC3To-Ht9kzCYeXRg
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Friday April 21. NOON
Zoom Forum from the West Kootenay Climate Hub
The Kootenay CarShare Coop is highlighting some of its new services in a Noon Hour zoom webinar from the West Kootenay Climate Hub Friday webinar. Kootenay Carshare Cooperative is continually evolving and innovating to meet the needs of the communities it serves. Our mandate is to reduce greenhouse gases from privately owned vehicles and we have been taking this mission to new levels.
The Coop will talk about introducing electric vehicles and more recently, low speed electric vehicles, into our fleet. We have upgraded our sharing platform to allow others to share their vehicles through our platform, using our insurance and infrastructure to have certified drivers pay vehicle owners to rent their cars.
A zoom link will also be available at the events page of the WestKootenayClimateHub.ca
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Saturday April 22, 2 pm
Songs for the Earth: An Earth Day Celebration
Nelson United Church, 602 Silica Street
Please join the Nelson Interfaith Collaborative in celebrating Earth Day on April 22nd with Songs for the Earth. There will be musical presentations as well as a sing-a-long. They are inviting everyone to bring an item from nature to collectively create “earth art”.
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Saturday April 22, 2 pm
Taghum Hall’s Earth Day celebrations and market from 10 am to 3 pm.
Things get green at Taghum Hall’s Earth Day celebrations on Saturday, April 22 from 10am to 3pm. The annual family-friendly event is Taghum Hall’s way of welcoming spring, honouring the planet, and bringing folks together. The event features eco-information booths and fun eco-challenges, handmade, homegrown, and upcycled wares, live music, and a kidzone with green activities all day long. The Taghum Hall Youth Players present the play “Room in the Forest” at 1pm. Leftover seeds are requested for a seed exchange, and refundable bottle and cans may be donated to support the Hall’s activities. Admission is by donation.
ENVIRONMENT NEWS BITS
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The Narwhal reported last week that the problem of selenium pollution for Teck’s four giant coal mines got discussed by Trudeau and Biden a couple of weeks ago during the President’s visit to Ottawa. This was just before John Horgan announced he is joining the board of the Teck coal company.
The Prime Minister and President’s joint statement says:
“Canada and the United States also intend to reach an agreement in principle by this summer to reduce and mitigate the impacts of water pollution in the Elk-Kootenay watershed, in partnership with Tribal Nations and Indigenous Peoples, and in order to protect the people and species that depend on this vital river system.”
How they are going to do that is really up in the air. As The Narwhal says: “Teck has invested more than $1.2 billion in water treatment so far, provincial inspection records show the company has failed at times to meet even these more lenient standards.”
As we have reported recently on this show, Teck has paid millions in pollution penalities in recent years for failing to cut the pollution.
The B.C. government allows Teck to release selenium at concentrations well beyond what it considers safe for aquatic life under the Elk Valley Water Quality Plan. The plan, established in 2014, focuses on attempting to stabilize selenium levels in the water until 2023, but does not anticipate selenium levels in the watershed will decrease until the 2030s.
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Vancouver made headlines last year when it became one of the first Canadian jurisdictions to ban the use of natural gas in new residential buildings. Quebec implemented a similar rule late in 2021 to phase out fossil fuel-based heating systems.
Outside of Vancouver, which has its own charter, provincial laws make it impossible for other B.C. municipal governments to outright ban natural gas. To get around this restriction, municipal politicians have used bylaws to ban the use of natural gas in new buildings.
Last January, FortisBC fought back against these municipal rules. The company submitted a proposal to the B.C. Utilities Commission for permission to sell 100 per cent renewable natural gas to every new building in the province. FortisBC also requested permission to expand the types of gas it can call “renewable” to include other gases, like so-called “blue” and “turquoise” hydrogen, which are both made from conventional natural gas. Hydrogen can be blended with natural gas to be used in homes. The proposal is still being assessed by the commission.
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The Tilbury LNG proposed for the mouth of the Fraser River could be decided on by the BC government according to several reports.
LNG tankers would go 21 km down the Fraser past five narrow bends and populated areas like Steveston and South Richmond.
A recent poll says 64% – almost 2/3rds of the BC public – wants the province to invest in renewables, not LNG. This is a big change in public opinion. A new paper on the project says that in addition to climate pollution and fracking woes, LNG won’t produce the promised jobs or taxes for roads/schools, and its shipping will put the public at risk.
Organizers are asking for concerned people to contact MLAs and Cabinet ministers right away about the Tilbury LNG project.
You can download a great background paper on the topic. I’ll put a link up on the website.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AXRtsNp7A0qTXq1AaiuWvyq2A-DF1tBE/view
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Industrial logging is a significant source of GHG emissions, but its climate impact remains largely unacknowledged and unregulated. The clearcutting of climate-critical forests around the world, particularly in countries like Canada is incompatible with global climate targets and commitments. The Natural Resources Defence Council in Canada hosted a great webinar on the topic recently and it’s available on youtube now.
This panel of scientists and policy experts discuss these forgotten logging emissions, logging‘s culpability in the climate crisis, and the solutions. Canada’s boreal forest stores twice as much carbon as all the world’s oil reserves, and yet over a million acres are clearcut every year.
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It would take more energy than all the world’s houses will consume in 2100 to power a fledgling technology that captures enough carbon dioxide from the air to limit global heating at 1.5°C, according to British multinational oil company Shell.
In a Shell scenario where the world limits global warming in line with the Paris climate agreement, energy demand for direct air capture (DAC) technology rises “from about nothing today to almost 66 exajoules in 2100,” reports Bloomberg.
These models come nearly four years after researchers at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change wrote in a Nature Communications study that in 2100, DAC machines could needed 300 exajoules of energy annually, or 25% of total global energy demand.
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Offshore oil and gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico are releasing far more climate-changing methane than official estimates show, according to a new study published Monday.
Relying in part on data collected from aircraft, climate scientists found the additional methane coming from oil and gas platforms in the Gulf raises their carbon intensity—the amount of climate-changing gas or equivalent per unit of energy in the fuel—to twice as much as estimated by U.S. agencies like the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, The Associated Press reports. The study is published in PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Senator Ed Markey and Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib have reintroduced the Fossil Free Finance Act, that would direct the Federal Reserve to require major banks to stop financing activities linked to increased greenhouse gas emissions. The Act would require a 50% reduction in financed emissions by 2030; 100% reduction in financed emissions by 2050; prohibit new or expanded fossil fuel projects after 2023; prohibit thermal coal financing by 2025; prohibit the financing of all fossil fuel projects by 2030; prioritize lending to companies that provide benefits to workers impacted by the transition to a clean energy economy; and require reporting on progress. Read more
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Melting ice around Antarctica will cause a rapid slowdown of a major global deep ocean current by 2050 that could alter the world’s climate for centuries and accelerate sea level rise, according to scientists behind new research.
The research suggests if greenhouse gas emissions continue at today’s levels, the current in the deepest parts of the ocean could slow down by 40% in only three decades.
This, the scientists said, could generate a cascade of impacts that could push up sea levels, alter weather patterns and starve marine life of a vital source of nutrients.
A team of Australian scientists looked at the deep ocean current below 4,000 metres that originates in the cold, fresh and dense waters that plunge down off Antarctica’s continental shelf and spread to ocean basins around the globe.
Prof Matt England, of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales and a co-author of the research published in Nature, said the whole deep ocean current was heading for collapse on its current trajectory.
“In the past, these circulations have taken more than 1,000 years or so to change, but this is happening over just a few decades. It’s way faster than we thought these circulations could slow down.
“We are talking about the possible long-term extinction of an iconic water mass.”
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Ice sheets can collapse into the ocean in spurts of up to 600 metres (2,000 feet) a day, a study has found, far faster than recorded before.
Scientists said the finding, based on sea floor sediment formations from the last ice age, was a “warning from the past” for today’s world in which the climate crisis is eroding ice sheets.
They said the discovery shows that some ice sheets in Antarctica, including the “Doomsday” Thwaites glacier, could suffer periods of rapid collapse in the near future, further accelerating the rise of sea level.
The rising oceans are among the greatest long-term impacts of global heating because hundreds of major cities around the world are on coastlines and are increasingly vulnerable to storm surges and flooding. The West Antarctic ice sheet may already have passed the point at which major losses are unstoppable, which will lead eventually to metres of sea level rise.
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Record temperatures, devastating floods and superstorms are causing death and destruction across the planet but humans are failing to cut greenhouse gas emissions fueling the climate emergency, new US data shows.
Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide – the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity that are the most significant contributors to global heating – continued to increase rapidly during 2022, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).
Carbon dioxide levels rose by more than two parts per million (ppm) for the 11th consecutive year: the highest sustained rate of CO2 increases since monitoring began 65 years ago. Before 2013, scientists had never recorded three consecutive years of such high CO2 growth.
Atmospheric CO2 is now 50% higher than pre-industrial levels.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/06/greenhouse-gas-emissions-noaa-report-us-data
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