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 and social objectives as we […]
Read moreDepending on who you talk to, carbon capture and storage (CCS) is either the face of climate salvation or the height of delusional behaviour associated with our favourite hallucinogenic drug, fossil fuels. I have read both cases and suspect that the truth is somewhere in between, but I’m not an engineer either so it has been hard to make up […]
Read moreBack in my home province, a legislative committee has begun a public inquiry on meeting future electricity demand. Written submissions and video of oral presentations are available online. Saskatchewan’s traditional reliance on coal-fired electricity is challenged by concerns about climate change and the prospect of federal charges for carbon emissions. The debate has recently been polarized between proponents of nuclear […]
Read moreI don’t get climate change deniers and skeptics. With the Copenhagen conference coming up quickly, there seems to be an upsurge of denial on-line. The skeptics are well-organized — any media post on climate change that allows comments is quickly tarred with their arguments. I get that we should not just accept the conventional wisdom, I do it all the […]
Read moreLast week the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) published an update for the G20 Summit on its call from earlier this year for a Global Green New Deal. Â This update showed that Canada is close to the bottom in the stimulus funds it is committing to green economic areas. According to the UNEP, only 8% of Canada’s stimulus spending is […]
Read moreAs everyone knows, BC has a lot of trees. From a climate change perspective the nice thing about trees (forests, really) is that they suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. In the jargon, forests are a “sink”, reducing CO2 emissions, rather than a “source” that contributes them. At least, that used to be the case. Thanks to some new […]
Read moreModels are often invoked when talking about climate change. Skeptics argue that the models are not sophisticated enough and are therefore wrong, which is technically true about any model, but other scientists argue that what has not been included in the models would make the outcomes in the future much worse. Still, the debate often sounds like one over how […]
Read moreAs someone deeply focused on climate change and the vast potential for bad things to happen in the future, the idea of peak oil strikes me a blessing. For the most part I have paid little attention to the nuances of peak oil arguments on the grounds that there is still so much of the black stuff in the ground […]
Read moreThe second half of 2009 is shaping up to be one of the most important periods for international policy development. Ever. The fragile state of the economy, which continues to throw up worsening data with each passing period despite more optimistic talk in the media, will continue to be top of mind. But the collective response to that other deep, […]
Read moreThree-peat. Hat trick. The media is full of jubilation for the re-election of the Campbell Liberals. But looking at the numbers, it was actually quite close: the BC Liberals got 45.7% of the popular vote, compared to 42.2% for the NDP. This slim margin validates the Angus Reid polling camp, which came closest on estimating the popular vote, compared to […]
Read moreI signed the following open letter published in the Globe on the weekend. I cannot take any credit for organizing or writing the letter (hat tip to Ian Bruce of the David Suzuki Foundation). On the other hand, I can say that I have co-published with David Suzuki! It’s time to put the planet before politics May 9, 2009 In […]
Read moreWe all know about Alberta, but BC’s green image is increasingly, um, tarred by the expansion of the oil and gas industry, with tens of billions of dollars in new investment in the past eight years. And according to some, the best is yet to come. In today’s Vancouver Sun, David Collyer of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers makes […]
Read moreWith my oped last week on the NDP platform making me less than popular over at NDP HQ, today the Sun published my take on the Liberals’ platform, thereby guaranteeing that the list of Christmas parties I get invited to dwindles to next to nothing. BC’s Economic Challenges and the Liberal Platform By Marc Lee The BC Liberal platform features […]
Read moreOne of the most striking contradictions in BC’s climate action plan is the oil and gas industry. Greg Amos in The Hook, quotes our “green” premier out on the campaign trail in the northeast: “Let me tell you what’s happened in the energy industry in British Columbia in the last eight years: thirteen billion dollars of investment,†Campbell told a […]
Read moreI’ve been thinking a lot about energy efficiency in buildings lately (in the BC context, anyway). About 11% of BC’s greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to residential and commercial buildings, so obviously efficiency has to come under the microscope as part of any GHG mitigation plan. Part of my reticence to look at this topic before is that there are […]
Read moreI am a big fan of stimulus packages for our ailing economy. But my pitch has been that we need to use the occasion to retrofit our economy to be on a more sustainable footing. So it matters a great deal on what we spend those stimulus dollars. If we launch projects that take us even further away from a […]
Read moreA year ago, in the 2008 BC Budget, a new tax was born. There was a hush over the House as its mother, the Finance Minister, prepared for delivery. The proud papa, the Premier, stood glowingly beside the new mom Carole and her baby tax, and basked in the glow of praise from climate scientists, environmentalists and policy wonks from […]
Read moreMy hot water tank blew out just before Christmas. I had no idea, just went down to the crawlspace to get some wrapping paper and found the floor flooded around the old tank. We’d been expecting this for a while, having never had to change the tank since we moved in seven years earlier. Contemplating my replacement tank I got […]
Read moreThere have been a lot of media stories about freak weather lately, all tacked on with comparators like “worst in 18 years” or several decades or ever. The latest from London is a snowstorm that shut down the city. Here in Vancouver we had a few weeks of heavy snowfall bookending the Christmas period that brought our rainy city to […]
Read moreI always enjoy Gwynne Dyer’s commentary on world affairs, but do not read nearly enough of it. Very few Canadian newspapers print columns by this Canadian-born journalist. Exceptions include Dyer’s hometown newspaper, the St. John’s Telegram, as well as The Hamilton Spectator and Guelph Mercury. Dyer’s lengthy year-end column combines a review of events in most corners of the world with […]
Read moreRalph Nader and Toby Heaps make an excellent case for a global carbon tax. With an Obama administration there is the possibility of such a thing happening, and it would be much more sensible that a complicated cap-and-trade system that will take years to get up and running. Even if a North American cap-and-trade system emerges that does not fall […]
Read moreThis is very good news, given concerns that the economic crisis would push climate change off the table: Barack Obama and congressional leaders are preparing rapid legislation to cut US emissions that cause global warming and to kick-start a clean energy revolution. Two bills are to be introduced as soon as the President-elect takes office in January. One will provide […]
Read moreThe CCPA released today a new study by myself and Toby Sanger on the distribution of BC’s carbon tax and recycling regime. I’ve probably leaked most of the findings in various blog posts in recent months, but the full meal deal is now available for download here. Toby and I modeled the carbon tax by quintile based on household survey […]
Read moreJeffrey Simpson dismisses Jack Layton in today’s Globe and Mail, “How can voters take the NDP seriously? †The first substantive critique appears about halfway through the column: “the NDP has not provided any costing for their platform.†As has been widely reported yesterday and today, the NDP is releasing its costed platform tomorrow. Since the platform is not out yet, how […]
Read moreWell, the Tories are nothing if not consistent. During the NDP’s BC campaign against the carbon tax, I wondered whether they would follow the logic – if you don’t like a carbon tax then it only makes sense to call for a cut in the provincial fuel tax. Federally, the Harperites have seized the initiative on this one, building on […]
Read moreThe bed having been made by the NDP, the Prime Minister not only takes it but moves in and changes the locks. All summer the NDP’s axe-the-tax campaign against the BC carbon tax has played on a classic conservative anti-tax theme (to the dismay of yours truly). The BC election is not until May 2009, and who knows what will […]
Read moreThe politics of the carbon tax, largely a BC phenomenon until now, have gone national in the face of a likely October federal election. Just last week in BC, a poll revealed the NDP ahead of the Liberals for the first time in several years — within the margin of error, mind you, but significant for a party that has […]
Read moreYesterday, the Premier’s hand-picked Climate Action Team released its final report to the government. As is often the case with government, the CAT consisted of a range of “stakeholders”, although with one glaring omission: no representation from labour. The CAT has been deliberating for several months on how to meet the 2020 target of a 33% reduction in greenhouse gas […]
Read moreA year ago, I was firmly on the fence with regard to carbon taxes versus cap-and-trade systems. My internal conversation was around abstract, theoretical versions of what might happen, and at that point it was premature to consider how the two might play together as part of a hybrid system. Since that time, we now have some real models to […]
Read moreThe CCPA’s Climate Justice Project released a new technical paper today on what BC’s targets should be in line with some notion of global equity. It is a nice collaboration between Colin Campbell of the Sierra Club of BC and Cliff Stainsby of the BC Government and Service Employees Union. The paper is, I have to admit, on the dense […]
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