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 [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Environment, resources & sustainability'
About that Copenhagen award
February 5th, 2010 · Marc Lee · 1 Comment · Climate change, Energy, Environment, resources & sustainability, Taxes
BC’s Urban Housing (Un)affordability
January 25th, 2010 · Iglika Ivanova · 4 Comments · Agriculture, Environment, resources & sustainability, Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare
A new study published today by the Frontier Institute for Public Policy finds that Vancouver has the most unaffordable urban housing market not just in Canada, but in all of Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
This conclusion is based on a very simple, yet effective measure of housing affordability: the [...]
A Modest Proposal
January 23rd, 2010 · Marjorie Griffin Cohen · 2 Comments · Environment, resources & sustainability, Housing & homelessness
At some point before long, Haiti is going to be rebuilt. It occurs to me that we in BC have available wood to help in the effort. Most things are built of concrete there because there simply isn’t any wood. Rebuilding out of concrete will be massively expensive and massively polluting. [...]
Tags: Haiti·pine beetle wood
Thinking about zero
January 21st, 2010 · Marc Lee · 3 Comments · Climate change, Environment, resources & sustainability
I’m still coming out of my malaise following the Copenhagen climate conference in December. It’s easy to think that the stupid political brinksmanship is never going to end, and the focus of attention will shift to adaptive measures. But what is more likely is a few more Katrina scale disasters that will serve to spur [...]
Tags: greenhouse gas·sustainability
The business elite’s parking tax backlash
January 8th, 2010 · Keith Reynolds · 5 Comments · Environment, resources & sustainability, Municipalities, Privatization, P3s & public services
The media is reporting a “backlash” against the new parking tax in Vancouver. The Vancouver Sun reports it is a “slickly organized” backlash being run by Vancouver’s business elite. This is apparently a 30 member business coalition including the Board of Trade.
This is not the first time Vancouver’s business elite has gotten organized around the [...]
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Copenhagen and carbon budgets
December 14th, 2009 · Marc Lee · No Comments · Climate change, Environment, resources & sustainability
As Copenhagen heads into week two, most of the talk has shifted to targets and timelines, typically something like X% of emissions by 2020 or 2050, relative to 1990 levels. This dating is a legacy of the German delegation in the lead-up to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, who wanted a base year of 1990 [...]
Tags: Copenhagen·GHG emissions
Every revolution is about power
December 3rd, 2009 · Marc Lee · No Comments · Climate change, Environment, resources & sustainability
So what does a sustainable economy really look like, and how do we get there? Climate change essentially means a huge mitigation effort on greenhouse gases culminating in something close to zero emissions by mid-century at the latest. This means phasing out fossil fuels entirely; or minimally, if it comes out of the ground emissions [...]
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Property taxes: are major industries suffering?
November 3rd, 2009 · Keith Reynolds · No Comments · Economy, Environment, resources & sustainability, Municipalities, Taxes
Businesses across Canada have been complaining about what they pay in property taxes, well, since there were property taxes.
But the issue in BC came into sharper definition in July when Catalyst Paper hand-delivered cheques to four municipalities that only covered 25% of their property tax bill. Timberwest, Celgar and West Fraser Timber joined Catalyst and [...]
Tags: Castlegar·Catalyst Paper·Celgar·Kitimat·Timberwest·West Fraser Timber
BC’s GHG emissions shell game
October 30th, 2009 · Marc Lee · No Comments · Climate change, Environment, resources & sustainability
The BC government recently announced a new climate action of some consequence: the phasing out of the Burrard Thermal plant in Metro Vancouver. The unit was used largely for back-up purposes, producing electricity for BC Hydro to supplement hydropower during times of high demand. But at a large GHG cost per unit of energy — [...]
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Planning for a Green Vancouver
October 28th, 2009 · Marc Lee · 3 Comments · Climate change, Energy, Environment, resources & sustainability, Poverty, inequality & welfare
Last week, the City of Vancouver’s task force, the Greenest City Action Team, issued a plan for the city with short and longer-term goals and policy advice on achieving them. The report covers more than climate change, a good thing as it is important to identify win-wins that lead to improvement on other environmental, health [...]
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