BCSEA News & Views

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On February 15, the BCSEA's Victoria Chapter held their monthly meeting at the Burnside Gorge Community Centre. Our topic this month was "How can we provide input to the Bill 27 amendments to municipal Official Community Plans (OCPs) in the CRD?" Our guests this month were Sarah Webb, Climate Action Coordinator, CRD, and Mark Boysen, Sustainability Coordinator, District of Saanich

Hosted by the BCSEA Kamloops Chapter, the Fair is a community-based event promoting energy awareness. The Fair has been an annual event since 2007, bringing together 40-some exhibitors with an audience of 1500 people who come specifically looking for energy solutions.

Have you ever opened your mailbox to find it bulging with flyers, brochures and newsletters. . . none of it addressed to you? Or an avalanche of credit card approvals and catalogues in your name, all unsolicited? Does your local newspaper come with more flyers than news articles? If you are frustrated by the waste of paper and ink, but don't have the time to phone each company directly, here are some easy ways to drastically reduce your junk mail quandary.

 Students from Kindergarten to Grade 12 are invited to submit projects about Clean, Green Energy to the Kamloops Energy Fair. It’s simple; register as an individual, group, class, or even whole school and show up on our setup day June 18 with your project. Your project will be displayed at the Energy Fair and you could win a prize. The only rule is that it must relate to the theme: Clean, Green Energy.

SolarBC is happy to announce that incentives for solar hot water will double during February and March, from $1,000 to $2,000. This investment will support the installation of domestic solar water heating systems for the first 200 homes over the next 2-months. So, if you have been wondering about installing solar hot water but haven’t yet taken the plunge, now might be a smart time to do so.

Liz Kelly, from SolarBC did exactly that last week by installing solar hot water on her own home on the Sunshine Coast. "I just had to walk the talk," said Liz, "I could hardly live on the Coast and not take advantage of 2,400 of free sunshine we get every year. Our solar hot water system was installed in just a day and a half by Terratek, one of the SolarBC registered contractors, and comes with a neat little monitor that we’ve put up in the kitchen to tell us exactly how much money we’re saving."

Starting on January 1st, every vehicle in BC is using biofuel in its tank - 3% for biodiesel (rising to 5% by 2012), and 5% for ethanol. Is this good? Is it bad? What does it mean for BC’s emerging biodiesel industry - and why has the industry suddenly lost its 22% tax incentive?

In the big picture, the change is hugely important, spelling the first organized move away from fossil fuels to power our transport. We need such a move both because of the looming proximity of global peak oil, and because of global warming’s rapidly melting ice-sheets. Whichever way you cut it, we must break free of fossil fuels as quickly as we can.

In the wake of Copenhagen, what are we to make of all the confusion and mutual blaming?

Der Spiegel’s editorial said “What a disaster. The climate summit in Copenhagen has failed because of the hardball politicking of the United States, China and several other countries - and because people just can't seem to fathom how catastrophic climate change will be.”

But let’s step back a minute, and consider the difficulty of obtaining a binding consensus from the leaders of 193 fractious nations, each of whom has to answer to his or her own voters, on a change so enormous that it calls for nothing less than retrofitting the entire planet for zero carbon operations within 40 years. There’s not a nation on Earth that manages to govern itself by consensus.

From December 7th - 18th, the world’s leaders gather in Copenhagen, Denmark, for the most important conference our world has ever known.

To understand why, you have to lay aside the muttering of those believe global warming to be a massive hoax perpetrated by all the world’s climate scientists over 20 years, and pay serious attention to the facts.

The physics of climate science has been solid for over 100 years. Carbon dioxide and related molecules such as methane trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere, and their rapidly increasing presence is causing global temperatures to rise. All other contributing factors - such as the changing nature of the Sun - have been examined, and none has been found able to explain the steady although variable rise in temperature.