It has been a while but this week climate change is back in the news cycle. The front page of today’s Globe reports on the latest climate impacts tally: The report … concluded 2000 to 2009 was the warmest decade ever, and the Earth has been growing warmer for 50 years. Each of the past [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Climate change'
Western Climate Initiative: another baby step
July 29th, 2010 · Marc Lee · No Comments · Climate change, Energy, Environment, resources & sustainability
Tags:
Marc’s Summer Reading
July 22nd, 2010 · Marc Lee · No Comments · Agriculture, Climate change, Economy, Environment, resources & sustainability, Poverty, inequality & welfare, Recommended reading
With summer comes a lightening of my work load, so I’ve finally found some time to dive into a few interesting books. These are all related to my ongoing research interests (I do have some fiction sitting around waiting for a real holiday, with Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna at the top of the pile): The [...]
Tags:
Gas prices and consumption: BC vs Pacific Northwest
July 12th, 2010 · Marc Lee · No Comments · Climate change, Energy, Poverty, inequality & welfare, Taxes
On a weekend getaway to Washington state, I was alarmed at how much cheaper gas prices are south of the border. Typically, we paid $3 per gallon, whereas the price in Vancouver upon our return was $1.16 per litre, which is $4.39 per gallon (with the exchange rate roughly parity over the weekend). This is [...]
BC’s carbon tax turns two
July 5th, 2010 · Marc Lee · 3 Comments · Climate change, Taxes
With all of the attention focused on the HST implementation on July 1, most people seemed to miss the next increment of that other much-hated tax, BC’s carbon tax. As of July 1, the carbon tax is now $20 per tonne of CO2, or about 4.6 cents on a litre of gasoline. And like any [...]
Tags:
‘Green’ Summer Reading
June 3rd, 2010 · Karen Cooling · 1 Comment · Climate change, Energy, Environment, resources & sustainability, Recommended reading
As I was wandering through the airport this spring I succumbed to my one true addiction: books. Yes, I know that a good environmentalist uses the local library, but I’m working on it….. Anyway, as always, I try to pick up something that I’ve read a review on or something that just jumps out at [...]
Tags: Summer Reading
Keeping emissions underground
March 26th, 2010 · Marc Lee · 3 Comments · Climate change
I was intrigued by a quote in a recent Globe Foundation report on BC’s green economy that BC has 1000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, a “low carbon resource opportunity for both transportation and for export to other economies around the world.” Converting to metric, and using BC government emission factors for combusting [...]
Tags: GHG emissions·natural gas
Peddling GHGs: How much does BC export?
March 16th, 2010 · Marc Lee · 9 Comments · Climate change, Energy
Bill Rees, the father of the ecological footprint, likes to say that fossil fuels are a powerful hallucinogenic drug. We are all addicted to cheap and abundant fossil fuels, and so have reshaped our economy and society in fundamentally unsustainable ways. When emissions are reported for BC or Canada, there is an accounting convention that [...]
Tags:
Climate inaction and BC’s budget
March 3rd, 2010 · Marc Lee · 2 Comments · Climate change, Provincial budget & finance
The 2010 BC Budget was a disappointment on the climate action front. Even as Premier Campbell waxed poetic in the Globe about the impact of climate change on the 2010 Spring Games – with its sunny days, crocuses, daffodils and by the end, cherry blossoms making it fun for people on the street but a [...]
Tags:
Will the Olympics boost long-term tourism to BC?
February 15th, 2010 · Seth Klein · 21 Comments · Climate change, Economy
“We’ve invited the world, they’re coming, and the place is a mess.” That was the tag line the CCPA gave to our BC Solutions Budget back in 2004. At the time, we argued as strongly as we could that if BC was to change the story the world would tell of us this month, we [...]
Tags: Olympics
About that Copenhagen award
February 5th, 2010 · Marc Lee · 1 Comment · Climate change, Energy, Environment, resources & sustainability, Taxes
Back in December, during the Copenhagen negotiations, a group of environmentalists provided BC Premier Gordon Campbell with an award for climate leadership. Based primarily on the creation of a BC carbon tax two years ago, the Premier has gotten a lot of brownie points from the greens – in spite of the fact that there [...]
