The United Nations climate change talks in Durban, South Africa, ended 2011 with a whimper. After a year in which climate disasters rolled across the globe, major polluting nations like Canada chose to ignore them, seeking instead to disrupt the Durban negotiations, then blew the world a raspberry, by officially pulling out of the Kyoto [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Climate change'
Inequality and Climate Injustice: A Durban Post-Mortem
December 13th, 2011 · Marc Lee · 5 Comments · Climate change, Energy, Environment, resources & sustainability, First Nations & Aboriginal
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Time to give shale gas industry a closer look before we’re totally fracked
November 9th, 2011 · Ben Parfitt · Comments Off · Climate change, Economy, Energy, Environment, resources & sustainability, First Nations & Aboriginal
Despite the recent release by Canada’s natural gas industry of a set of guiding principles governing the controversial gas well “stimulation” method known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”, and despite the almost immediate endorsement of those principles by BC Premier and industry cheerleader Christy Clark, more and more British Columbians are justifiably worried about what [...]
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Are Smart Meters Worth the Cost?
October 12th, 2011 · Marc Lee · Comments Off · Climate change, Energy
A notice in my mailbox last week told me that smart meters are going to be installed in my neighbourhood. I’ll admit that the geek in me would like to see real-time information about my energy usage, but as an economist I’m interested in costs and benefits of the program. So far we have seen [...]
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Fighting energy poverty
September 28th, 2011 · Marc Lee · Comments Off · Climate change, Economy, Energy, Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare
Today we released a new Climate Justice Project report, Fighting Energy Poverty in the Transition to Zero-Emission Housing: A Framework for BC, by yours truly, Eugene Kung (a lawyer with the BC Public Interest Advocacy Centre and a steering committee member of the CJP) and Jason Owen (who worked on this project as a student at UBC, now with [...]
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“Climate change starts here: the BC dirty jobs plan”
September 19th, 2011 · Marc Lee · 4 Comments · Climate change, Economy, Energy
We are still on Day One of the Jobs Plan, and the afternoon news is all about proposed liquid natural gas plants in Kitimat, which will take pipelined gas and send it by tanker to Asia. Quoth the Premier: Creating a new industry with the capacity to export B.C.’s natural gas to overseas markets for [...]
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Jobs and BC’s Resource Extraction Mindset
September 19th, 2011 · Marc Lee · Comments Off · Climate change, Economy
Day One of the week-long BC’s Jobs Plan: the Premier was in Prince Rupert to announce a commitment to making the port a “gateway” to Asia. Quoth Premier Clark: I am in Prince Rupert today because if you are looking at Canada from Asia, with an eye to investing in our country, Canada truly starts [...]
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So Where is the Science?
September 8th, 2011 · Marvin Shaffer · 2 Comments · Climate change, Energy, Environment, resources & sustainability
The headline in the Globe today was certainly ominous — “Clark’s Hydro policy threatens to collapse B.C.’s climate change progress, scientist says”. The purported policy change seemed scary — the government might roll back the requirement for BC Hydro to be able to meet domestic electricity requirements in drought conditions. And the scientist’s description of [...]
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Decarbonizing BC homes and the price of gas
July 28th, 2011 · Marc Lee · 2 Comments · Climate change, Energy, Environment, resources & sustainability
Our climate justice framework for BC is to eliminate fossil fuels by 2040. In the household sector, this poses a significant challenge, not so much in terms of technology and knowledge, but because natural gas is much cheaper than electricity per unit of energy. Even though BC has among the lowest prices in North America, [...]
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Darkwoods, the murky world of carbon credits and a “carbon neutral” B.C. government
July 15th, 2011 · Ben Parfitt · 3 Comments · Climate change, Economy, Energy, Environment, resources & sustainability
It is spun in government press releases as a “first” for any jurisdiction in North America, an achievement that places British Columbia “on the leading edge” of efforts to combat climate change. But scratch the surface just a little and questions arise about the legitimacy of Environment Minister Terry Lake’s recent claim that “from this [...]
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Deconstructing BC’s carbon neutral government
July 13th, 2011 · Marc Lee · Comments Off · Climate change, Privatization, P3s & public services, Provincial budget & finance
Besides the carbon tax, one of the most important BC government climate action initiatives has been the adoption of Carbon Neutral Government. That is, count emissions from public buildings and travel, reduce them as much as possible and pay for carbon offsets to negate the rest. As of the 2010 calendar year, the BC government [...]
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