Tomorrow is EARTH DAY 2010!

A lot of people often wonder how best to spend their Earth day. While there is an exhaustive list of events going around on the above link (and elsewhere!) pretty much no matter where you live, you can celebrate Earth Day without being with tons of other people. Go for a bike ride, head to the park and read a book, go for a walk, have a BBQ (don’t litter, recycle where you can, try to limit the garbage produced!), go for a swim — the possibilities are endless!

This Earth Day, just take a nice, relaxing day off and spend some time with nature, ’cause that’s what Earth Day really is all about. Shut off your computer (unplug it too), turn off your phone, and relax.

Enter NDP MLA John Horgan. Horgan has a long history of supporting the Site C Dam. In 2007 he said that it was “as clean and green as any dam in North America”. In 2006 he said that “We should pay a premium for renewables so that we can rid ourselves of technologies like coal, and [this is] why I get excited about the prospect of large projects like perhaps Site C.”

Monday, he changed his tune. In fact, this picture from his website kinda sums up his new stance:

Now, granted, there is something odd about flying five private planes to make the announcement, especially given that the announcement was that the process was simply moving into another phase (it was NOT a “ground-breaking” announcement; no shovels or hardhats to be seen). But this dam, at the end of the day, is a good thing.

Yes, there are drawbacks: it is expensive, it will have an immediate environmental impact (flooding, etc; anyone who claims otherwise is lying), and people who own land nearby may have to cash out.

But the benefits are innumerable, and oddly enough, the same people who are against Run-of-river IPPs are the same folks against this public power initiative. One of the complaints about IPPs is the myth that it will cause prices to soar because they’re “independent” and not publically owned. The Site C dam will be publically owned (BC Hydro!), so that should alleviate that concern — but of course, it doesn’t. And as for environmental damage? The Site C dam has to pass a provincial and federal environmental assessment before going ahead, so that’s that.

This is a fact: BC HYDRO is a NET IMPORTER of electricity. BC Hydro needs to IMPORT electricity to meet its demands. British Columbia, however, is a net EXPORTER because privately owned companys export more electricity (and these companies export more electricity than BC Hydro imports). In order for BC Hydro to stop being a net importer, they need to lower consumption but also increase production.

BC Hydro has a set of goals to meet by 2020 in terms of energy reduction, and they are to meet 50% of that goal through increasing efficiency and increasing conservation. Even if everyone uses less electricity, the fact that an increased population means demand for electricity will go up, not down. Certain groups have complained that we should conserve more electricity instead of building more dams — they’re right, but what they don’t know is that’s what we’re doing.

Site C will create jobs and green, affordable energy. Yes, there will be some environmental damage initially (any green power production project has a negative impact on the environment initially), but the benefits far outweigh the costs.

The NDP’s opposition to Site C is just spin, all smoke-and-mirrors. Site C will have an impact on people living near (or who own land near) the Peace River, and Carole James, John Horgan, and the rest of the gang see an opportunity to climb in the polls, that’s it.

People were opposed to the WAC Bennett dam when it was first proposed; people were deadset against it and raised the same arguments about it as they are about Site C today. But today it is impossible to think of BC without thinking of the clean, green, hydroelectricity we get from such dams as the WAC Bennett. And while the NDP and others are focused on such things as getting Burrard Thermal back up to maximum energy (and pollution) production, the government is focused on ensuring a clean hydroelectricity

Earth Hour is, as you may know, tonight. Starting at 8:30 PM (and I suppose this has already happened overseas!), people are being asked to shut off their lights for a full hour.

I’ve written about Earth Hour before, and rather than just repeat myself, I think it’s just a good idea just to link to that post from a year ago:

Tomorrow is Earth Hour. From 8:30 PM to 9:30 PM, millions across the globe are asked to shut off their lights and excess electronics. It has been a huge success since 2007, and more than 2100 cities are signed up for this year.

The big question is of course: does it make a difference? And the sad answer is, technically, no.

Even if everyone on the planet stopped using electricity for a single hour, it would be a simple drop in the bucket. Not even a splash. The fact is we use up so much energy as it is that, well, aside from reducing consumption, there really isn’t anything we can do to make things better.

But Earth Hour is not about saving the planet in one hour. Earth Hour is a symbolic gesture. It is a way of showing that you believe in standing up for the environment and that you are willing to do something about it.

Earth Hour has countless detractors who insist it will do absolutely nothing. These… misguided souls just don’t understand the point at all.

Earth Hour is one simple, easy to follow step to helping the planet. Same with changing your bulbs to compact florescent ones, same with shutting off the sink when you’re brushing your teeth, same with turning off the lights when you leave a room. They’re all small steps that every individual can take to lessen their impact on the earth. Like eating local – eating locally grown food (100 mile diet, anyone?) is not going to solve global warming. Neither is Earth Hour.

That is why Earth Hour detractors are completely and absolutely right when they say “Earth Hour is not going to solve global warming”. They are completely and absolutely wrong when they call it pointless or stupid. It has a point; it isn’t stupid.

We’re only going to solve global warming if we start from the ground up. We need to send a message to government and politicians and say, we care. Earth Hour is just one of the many ways to do that.

Anyone who tells you that shutting off your lights for one hour a year is going to solve global warming is lying to you.

Anyone who tells you that Earth Hour is going to solve global warming may very well be right.

At the very least, it would do people well to “unplug” for an hour. Seriously – spend an hour in the dark. Have dinner with friends or family, go for a walk. I suspect a lot of these detractors aren’t people who genuinely think it’s pointless, but people who think it’s too hard to shut off their lights, computers, televisions, etc, for one hour.

Earth Hour – Does it make a difference? – 46 days

So again, I’d just like to reiterate: it’s all baby-steps. There isn’t one solution that government is refusing to legislate that will solve global warming. There isn’t one cure-all. To solve climate change, we all have to work together, one step at a time, and Earth Hour is a fantastic symbolic step in the right direction.

So remember- tonight, at 8:30, shut off your lights, unplug your computer (really- computers use quite a bit of electricity plugged in even while turned off), and enjoy a quiet hour with friends, family, or even a good book.

I meant to post… well, awhile ago but never did. As regular readers would know I tend to get some periods of time where I’m incredibly busy, and others where I’m not at all. Which is a shame.

As we all know, the Olympics went off… with a few hitches. The last seventeen days were incredible, however, and many of the various structures that were built for the Olympics will continue to be used. Many of these, like the Richmond Oval, will be good for another sixty years at least, and given that they were already built to incredibly green standards, we have indeed left a “green” Olympic legacy.

I say “green” with some qualification. Obviously not every structure will be completely “green”. There always has to be some impact on the planet. Further, such impacts are hard to calculate in the first place (and more importantly, how far back in the manufacturing process can you go when calculating the GHG emissions and so on?). Not only that, but we don’t have the full numbers in yet, either.

VANOC and the IOC did their best to make this the greenest Olympics ever. Greener than Salt Lake or Turin — but when they say “greenest ever”, they’re not saying that no damage was done to the planet. It means they took as many steps as possible to ensure our impact on the planet would be as small as possible.

That said — our impact on the world is astounding. It’s hard to read negative reviews (ones from credible sources, at that), and even they are debatable at best. What happened here from the 12th to the 28th was nothing short of spectacular. Myself, like many others, did not get to buy tickets to the games (a friend, however, donated me one of his!), but they were still absolutely phenomenal. Seeing hundreds of thousands of people in the street just having a good time? It was unbelievable. Things may have started poorly with the tragic death of Georgian Luger Nodar Kumaritashvili (who is still in our hearts, thoughts, and prayers), but Vancouver overcame that.

Seeing our athletes ski, skate, slide and snowboard (and, for the curlers, shuffle) in our own country, in our own city? Unreal. And seeing Alexandre Bilodeau grab us a gold for men’s moguls, getting us our first Gold on home soil? Watching other athletes, other heroes, overcome adversity (personal and professional) to stand on that podium with the Canada flag waving in the background? Or how about that moment, with some 30 seconds left in the game, when that puck slipped in behind Luongo – only for Sid the Kid to sink it in past Miller minutes later in sudden death Overtime?

All these events were once in a lifetime. For better or for worse, I think they were worth it. The Olympics will cause environmental damage, and an event on that scope can’t be prevented. I think VANOC did the right thing by making this the greenest games ever. Sochi has a tough act to follow.

And not only were these the most green Olympic games yet, but they were also the most golden, too.

To all my readers (as irregular as reading has been recently!), thanks. Hope you had fun, cause I know I did. I’ll be getting back down to work on this site.

World leaders are gathering in Copenhagen this December to negotiate a new global climate agreement.

Between December 11th and 14th, Canadians will be organizing and attending events across the country to send a clear message: The world wants a real deal. That means a climate agreement that is fair, ambitious and binding. Rallies in support of a real deal are being held in major cities in Canada and around the world on December 12th as part of the Global Day of Action.

To see if an event is already scheduled in your town, or to create and register your own event, visit http://www.climateactionnetwork.ca/e/action/events/real-deal.php#map

The Copenhagen meetings are obviously a huge deal. Leaders from all over the world (including, interestingly enough, BC Premier Gordon Campbell) to discuss climate change and its effects. And hopefully, we’ll see some tangible results.

While I won’t be covering Copenhagen as in depth as some other sources (incredibly busy with school!), I will comment on any big news that pops up over the next few weeks.

Check it out here.

Really, it’s a bunch of garbage. My original opinion stands: the folks at East Anglia (if they did in fact manipulate data) screwed up. Global warming is still a very real threat.

Anyway, just thought I’d take a break from procrastinating on writing term papers to repost this from Graham Thomson of the Edmonton Journal. His piece called The cloudy air of Climategate was in The Province today and I thought it was great.

I’d like to thank everyone who has written to me the past week about the “Climategate” affair to tell me this is proof positive that the theory of climate change is a hoax.

After all, I always appreciate hearing from readers.

But I’m not sure you needed to make your point by putting your comments in capital letters followed by exclamation points, although I suppose “GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX!!!” has a certain flair.

However, no matter how large the type or all the exclamation points, the fact remains the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets continue to melt, the seas continue to rise, and the climate continues to change.

And the fact remains that no matter how loud the furor surrounding “Climategate” becomes, it does not disprove the theory of man-made climate change any more than the “Piltdown Man” fraud of 1912 disproved the theory of evolution.

“Climategate,” as it has been dubbed by global-warming deniers, involves the theft from the University of East Anglia of thousands of e-mails between several top climate change scientists. Cherry-picked quotations from the e-mails certainly make it appear the scientists acted unscientifically in trying to suppress contradictory research.

But many of the excerpts were taken out of context. The word “trick” in the e-mails, for example, has been played up as proof the scientists were trying to deceive the public, when in fact it’s a term used to describe a technique to deal with complex data.

More troubling, admittedly, are allegations the scientists conspired to suppress evidence that didn’t support their conclusions.

The scientists have denied any wrongdoing– but the scandal has forced Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit, to step down as an investigation starts up. Indeed, an investigation is needed to clear the air, so to speak.

The facts over Climategate are perplexing but what it clearly demonstrates is the lengths the denial industry will travel to in an attempt to to confuse the public over climate change. One Canadian climatologist, Andrew Weaver at the University of Victoria, says scientists face a well-orchestrated campaign of harassment by deniers of global warming. He says his office has been broken into twice and hackers have tried to break into his computer system several times. “They were trying to find any dirt they could, as they have done in the U.K.,” said Weaver. If they can’t find “dirt,” they manufacture it from out-of-context e-mails or skewed statistics.

Climategate has also demonstrated how inept scientists are at public relations. The moment the scandal broke the scientists involved tried to lay low, refusing to answer reporters’ questions. That gave the impression they had something to hide. When they did respond, the damage had been done.

The denial industry is ruthless, tireless and in more than a few cases well-funded by the energy industry. It is remarkably similar to the campaign launched by the tobacco industry over the years against scientific evidence linking cigarette smoke– first-hand and second-hand — to cancer. In fact, some of the very same people behind the tobacco-denial industry are behind the climate-change-denial industry.

Author George Monbiot wrote about this in his book Heat: How to Stop the World From Burning, and quoted a memo from one tobacco company saying, “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

Tobacco companies raised doubt by trotting out bought-and-paid-for experts who cherry-picked data. The tobacco industry and the climate-change-denial industry don’t have to prove that respected scientific data are wrong, they merely have to raise doubts about the data and confuse the public.

One favourite statistic used by deniers is that the Earth’s climate has been cooling, not warming, since 1998. However, the year 1998 was what Monbiot calls a “wild outlier,” where a strong El Nino effect combined with background climate change to create the warmest year on record. While no individual year has been as warm since then, the past decade has been the warmest on record.

Besides confusing people, Climategate has detracted attention from the latest evidence of climate change. A team of 26 scientists has released a new report called The Copenhagen Diagnosis that warns “several important aspects of climate change are occurring at the high end or even beyond the expectations of only a few years ago.”

Among the findings:

- Both Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets are losing mass and contributing to sea-level rise at an increasing rate.”

- Arctic sea ice has melted far beyond the expectations of climate models.

- Sea level has risen more than five centimetres over the past 15 years, about 80-per-cent higher than Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections from 2001.

The report concludes “global emissions must peak then decline rapidly within the next five to 10 years for the world to have a reasonable chance of avoiding the very worst impacts of climate change.”

Even if you were to take the handful of scientists tainted by “Climategate” and banish them to a disintegrating ice floe in the Arctic, the science of climate change wouldn’t disappear with them.

Researchers at East Anglia University, which houses one of the world’s leading research centres, the Climatic Research Unit, have been accused of “massaging” data over the years to make the plight of climate change seem more dire.

These e-mails (you can read them here) were hacked from the East Anglia servers.

Why is this a huge problem?

It should be pretty simple. Let’s assume that Climate Change is real (which, well, science has pretty well proven). This means that, as opposed to deniers, we have facts on our side. We can, after going through the evidence, come to the conclusion that we’re causing climate change and it is bad for the Earth. We can prove that 2+2=4.

What these… idiots have done has totally dealt a blow to the scientific community around climate change. When I say “idiots”, I don’t mean the hackers that got the e-mails (or even the climate change deniers saying “This is proof! This is proof!”). I mean the idiots who wrote the e-mails. The idiotic climate change researchers.

Their attempt to manipulate data, to massage it, to make their claims seem more real and the problems more dire, have put doubt on the whole movement and on its researchers.

Climate change, as I’ve said time and time again, is a moral issue. We have a responsibility. If climate change is a real problem, we have an obligation to fix it.

Let’s assume for a second climate change doesn’t exist, or isn’t a problem. Now imagine these e-mails never got hacked. Next, imagine that these researchers proved that climate change does exist, or is a problem — even though, in our hypothetical scenario, it isn’t. They will have committed a crime. What they will have done is immoral. It, simply put, is wrong.

What these scientists have done is just as bad. The discourse around climate change should be honest and open. If we assume ourselves to be on the “right” side of the battle (particularly that we are morally correct), and we fight dishonestly… well, we’ll win a battle we don’t deserve to.

Jon Ferry of The Province has a great article called “Self-righteous scientists threaten world economy”. It is one of the first level-headed pieces I’ve read.

It seems like half the authors out there either try to defend the plight of climate change, or try to attack it, and Ferry is one of the few authors I’ve seen critically examine the act of manipulating data rather than whether or not climate change is real.

Since things are still ramping up, I thought I’d post about the Olympic Rings at Coal Harbour. Have you seen these things? Not only are they bright but they’re incredibly energy efficient (just like the ones at YVR!); check out this article from the Vancouver Sun:

VANCOUVER – A set of 14-metre tall Olympic Rings floating in Coal Harbour that will shine throughout the Games were lit today by Premier Gordon Campbell to mark the start of the 100-day countdown to the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.

“The Olympic Rings are one of the iconic symbols of these Games and this inner harbour showpiece will be a visual focal point for billions of people watching 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games worldwide and for visitors and residents to our province during the Games,” Campbell said in a press release.

“When Canadian athletes win medals, these rings will put on a programmable light show that will spread the excitement of their success across the city, throughout British Columbia and across Canada. These rings were also designed and built by B.C. firms and showcase the kind of green-technology innovation taking place in our province.”

The rings have thousands of individual LED lights that can be programmed for complex light show displays and will be visible from around the harbour, the premier’s office said. They measure 13.7 metres (45 feet) high by 29.3 metres (96 feet) wide. As part of B.C.’s commitment to a green games the lights in the display use energy efficient bulbs that consume approximately eight per cent of the electricity of equivalent incandescent bulbs.

“As we kick off the 100-day countdown to the 2010 Games and as we celebrate the first days of the Olympic Torch Relay, the excitement is building in every corner of the province,” Campbell said.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for our communities, our province and our nation, and we will all share in the pride when those Olympic Rings light up in celebration of Canada’s first medal of the 2010 Games.”

There are now two sets of LED Olympic rings in the lower mainland. The other is near Vancouver International Airport.

The inner harbour rings are moored at Brockton Point and will be moved for lightshow events.

Now, these are innovative for a number of reasons. Number one is obviously the efficiency; these things are incredibly bright and very energy efficient.

What I feel is even more innovative however is the simplicity. These things can be programmed for very complex light shows. They’re bright, they’re in a high visibility location, and they’ll reflect off the water beautifully. In short, they’re a brilliant marketing move. They’ll catch your attention at minimal energy and financial cost to VANOC. Sure, it’s not huge, but it’s definitely innovative.

It’s been a long while. There’s been lots going on but I’ve been incredibly busy so I’m sorry for the lack of posts. Consider this the beginning of me resuming regular posting!

I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to my favourite e-mail subscription (again), and that is Sightline Daily.

These folks wake up at the crack of 5, read upwards of 40 newspapers from around the Northwest, and send out the best top ten articles on sustainability and e-mail them out.

I strongly encourage you to sign up. Anyone who signs up between now and October 28 will be entered to win a two night stay to Seattle including hotel costs, meals out, and activities.

Sign up here:
http://www.sightline.org/Sweepstakes/sign-up-sightline-sweepstakes