BCSEA News & Views

More than 70 British Columbians from around the province have been selected as members of the Citizens’ Conservation Councils on Climate Action. Announced by Premier Gordon Campbell on September 24th of this year, the Citizens’ Conservation Councils will advise government on the best ways to encourage individuals, local business and communities in their regions to learn more about climate change, participate in climate action initiatives, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

BCSEA Board member Chris Eich has recently moved to Prince George and is energizing the Central Interior Chapter with his passion and commitment to a sustainable energy future for British Columbia. He attended the chapter meeting on October 16th where it was decided that the chapter would focus its resources on bringing the Climate Change Showdown to classrooms in the Central Interior.

It's been a busy month for the Victoria Chapter. The topic of the September chapter meeting was on urban backyard food production, in synchrony with the Local Food Festival put on by CommonEnergy at UVic. In addition to the chapter meeting, the Victoria chapter has been focusing on its projects in the last month.

The High School project, led until recently by Randyn Seibold, has been developing its strategies for informing and engaging secondary students. It has been extending its reach by working with the Sierra Club's Sustainable High Schools initiative.

Co-hosted by BCSEA-Kamloops and the City of Kamloops, Dr. Mark Jaccard spoke to a packed auditorium on Sept 17, 2008. Dr. Jaccard is a professor at SFU and an expert on climate change and energy policies. He talked about the economics of different climate-change solutions and explained that a carbon tax is one of the most effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Okanagan chapter of the BC Sustainable Energy Association (BCSEA) and the local affiliate of Habitat for Humanity have agreed that the local BCSEA chapter will provide a Habitat home with a solar water heating system. The system will provide the low-income working family who will live in the home with a high quality, low maintenance solar hot water system which will reduce their use of energy by several thousand kilowatt hours per year.

What can you do with 1 kilowatt hour?

It seats two and has a top speed of 90 kilometres an hour. When it arrived in Vancouver in early July, driven by a young Swiss adventurer and explorer of the future called Louis Palmer, who I’ll come to in a while, it had been driven 32,000 kilometres around the world, without using a drop of gas.

What does it run on? Pure sunshine, delivered free of charge to a small trailer with six square metres of photovoltaic cells. Louis calls it his “solar taxi” because he takes so many people for rides. It has turned heads wherever it goes and it has travelled from Europe to Saudi Arabia and to India, Bali (for the global climate conference), New Zealand, Australia (across the Nullarbor Plain), Singapore, Korea, China and to Vancouver. What does it cost? The car was custom-made so it’s impossible to tell, but similar, small electric vehicles sell for under $20,000.