Tag Archives: Fossil fuel subsidies

Environment

Canada’s Environment Minister says the federal government will take a ‘long, hard look’ at upping its climate target following IPCC report

By Natasha Bulowski, Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

As the world stares down an ongoing and rapidly worsening climate crisis, wealthy countries like Canada must hit the “fast-forward button” and push up their net-zero emissions deadlines to 2040, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said Monday.

Guterres’ remarks accompanied the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the last of this decade — which shows the goal of keeping global warming under 1.5 C “is achievable,” he said. “But it will take a quantum leap in climate action.”

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Energy

Trans Mountain expansion’s price tag surpasses $30-billion threshold

By Natasha Bulowski, Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

The Trans Mountain expansion project is now expected to cost $30.9 billion in yet another sign it is becoming a fiscal disaster for Trudeau’s government.

“Buying and building this pipeline will go down in the history books as one of, if not the, worst infrastructure decision a Canadian government has ever made,” said Greenpeace Canada senior energy strategist Keith Stewart. “It was always a disaster from a climate change perspective, but this is now an economic crime that has stolen $30 billion of public funds from real climate solutions.”

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Environment, Waste

Seven ways to include nature in our economic choices

Guy Dauncey’s Big Solutions: The COP15 biodiversity conference in Montreal has ambitious goals. Here’s how we could embed these goals into our economies.

Originally published on Corporate Knights

By Guy Dauncey

From nature’s perspective, human civilization has been a disaster.

It has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and 50% of plants. Between 1970 and 2016 alone, humans wiped out 68% of the world’s mammals, birds, fish and reptiles. The world’s governments support this destructive activity with subsidies worth between US $1.8 trillion and $6 trillion a year ($5 billion to $16 billion a day).

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Energy, Forests, Opinion

Talk Is Cheap, Part 1: BC Fails to Fulfill its Carbon, Climate, Forestry Promises

The government of Canada, and the BC government, state publicly that they are committed to carbon reduction and proactive responses to climate change; yet both Canada and BC remain consistently among the world’s top carbon emitters per capita. In 2019 Canada was the world’s highest carbon emitter per capita.

On the one hand, our government proposes initiatives that would improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions — in sectors like transportation and construction. But on the other hand, they continue to subsidise existing and new fossil-fuel projects such as LNG Canada and the Coastal Gaslink pipeline — to expand fracking.

Canada’s Liberal government spent $4.5B to purchase the Trans-Mountain Pipeline in 2018, only to announce in Spring 2022 that no further funding would be allocated to the project as cost overruns neared 70%. But wasting money may be the least of our problems. These fossil-fuel projects have huge carbon impacts.

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Politics

Mark Vonesch 5: Issues that divide us

Mark Vonesch hopes to bring a new kind of politics to Cortes Island if he is elected Regional Director on October 15, 2022. 

“One of the biggest things I want to do with this campaign is bring people together who think differently than each other,” he explained. “What I can do is initiate conversations and get people talking about them.”

He then went on to outline the same issues that our current Director has been wrestling with: housing, climate change, ecosystem protection, economic development, land use planning, parks and recreation, and truth and reconciliation.

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