The Hook

Tzeporah Berman sucks for cash

Tzeporah Berman is about money and Tzeporah...

http://powellriverpersuader.blogspot.com/2009/08/t-silence-from-david-suzuki-and.html

David Suzuki is also a corporate sell out.

But what the hell,who cares about coal-bed methane,tar sand pipe lines,gas flaring,destroyed rivers and streams..

Alien Fish farms killing off BC Wild Salmon..Who cares...

Because we have a carbon tax,all is good(insert sarcasm here)

good on Sherrod

I think the Valhalla Wilderness Society has earned my donation... sorry Greenpeace.

Unless Greenpeace overturns

Unless Greenpeace overturns this appointment immediately (I mean today) this is one person who will donate to a different cause.

They'll reap what they sow.

The whole environmental movement needs to clean house starting with Berman. Frankly I can't find many people who still listen to anything Berman and Suzuki have to say. They might watch nature of things but when he gets into his preaching that's the limit.

Sad state of affairs

It saddens me how much infighting & negative energy is around green energy. Even just a few years back, energy issues were ignored by most NGO's. Unfortunately, very little of what is said by the anti-green energy folks about renewable energy is based on fact. There's more to green energy policy than Rafe's rhetorical sound bites.

The real problem here is the fossil fuel industry. They must be laughing all the way to their banks & shareholders. They must be incredibly happy that the BC "environmental" community is tied up opposing green energy projects. That lets continued expansion of the tar sands, sour gas wells in people’s back yards, and other highly destructive energy extraction industries to move ahead unchecked.

Let's consider what we could do if we were to all work together to create a realistic, achievable green energy plan for BC or Canada? Everyone jumping up and down about what they don't want leaves little energy left for advocating for what we DO WANT.

BC is one of the most difficult places on the planet to deploy green energy. Other provinces, such as Ontario, are rolling out the red carpet making it a very appealing place for green energy companies. Is this what we want for BC, to have a very strong fossil fuel industry and no green sector? We already lost an opportunity to have a world-class wind generator factory based in Squamish, BC thanks to Richard Neufeld, past minister of energy.

I design and install small-scale renewable energy systems, and have been doing this for 18 years. I employ 10 people. Last year, our projects resulted in the permanent elimination of approx 500,000L of diesel burned annually. We have several small-scale microhydro projects - and I am talking small - turbines can be carried by hand, all pipe and wire installed by hand, which have been not allowed to go ahead due to the hype over microhydro. Those projects could be permanently stopping 100's of thousands of liters of diesel burned in generators. Instead, the diesels keep running 24x7x365 polluting away.

According to some, as our projects are privately owned, and we are a corporation, we are evil and what we do is evil. I know that we have made significant permanent reductions to fossil fuels being burned and that’s more than most of the anti-green energy groups can say.

Skywalker- you forgot Pembina Institute!

Pembina Institute tweeted this article today.

These 3 groups (persons) are the big three Cdn.Enviros who receive 90% or more of their funding from US sources. Pembina being the energy experts.

I have to go, but what smells about Pembina thinking there is something good to come from the above linked article?

blue green energy

alas berman from my hometowm forest city where nothing ever happens halfway between to n detroit. let's cleanup our act and get off co2 without the bildergs.

kontrol uber alles

um i meant the bildergers social club for world domination.

not all RORs are the same

Solarguy, great comment. But not all run of the rivers operate ethically or with environmentally sound principles. And some are not so small or sustainable. The issue I have with Tzeporah Berman and PowerUp is that it was not until the election that she endorsed the Liberal's environmental policies and pitted Run of the River against other environmental issues as "support us or you aren't green". Wasn't it PowerUp that created the wedge? And I don't hear critique of the fact that BC emissions rose in 2009 and the Libs sure aren't cutting back support for the oil and gas industry.

bildbebergers secret xociety

gonna take over fat whiteys.

a matter of scale

Hey relax solarguy, you certainly aren't the target in this quest to reduce gigantic favouritism, eco-elitism, back-room collusion and secrecy in designing BC's energy future. While BC already has a pretty green electrical supply, much of the rest of our big suck is for thermal energy, and electricity isn't necessarily the best way to do it. Architects who don't design passive solar and low-E should lose their licenses, and people who drive hummers need therapy.

Why isn't there more localized geothermal, and why no incentives on the same scale of massive corporate handouts for a serious build-out of residential solar hot water? Instead, struggling homeowners pay full price on everything to rejig our plumbing while corporate execs hiding in tax shelters laugh at us. Hardly climate justice.

Your local scale of operation is what we need more of, and local ownership. Lets have less of the globo-corps flush with war-on-terror cash pulling our banana republicans around by the rings in their noses. Less ruin of river for export, less waste of energy in all directions. For most in BC, it's about time we powered down a bit, not power up.

This is nonsense

These attacks on Tzeporah are nonsense -and Greenpeace will soon discover that they have hired a fantastic campaigner.

Most of the hostility to Tzeporah and David Suzuki goes back to the last BC election, when the NDP chose to attack the carbon tax, deceitfully calling it a "gas tax" - a mistake they now acknowledge may have lost them the election.

Most people who understand just how serious climate change is, and just what an emergency is facing us, see the development of green energy as an essential means to help close down coal-fired power and power up electric vehicles. Tzeporah has faced the climate emergency, and I give her full credit for doing so.

Many of the charges against run-of-river power are based on anti-corporate hostility; even the ND has said that they won't stop run-of-river power; they just want it publicly owned. But the rapidly warming atmosphere does not care whether a green energy project is publicly or privately owned. For sure, there are some regulatory changes that need to be made - and that's the kind of work we should engage in.

When people claiming to be environmentally minded can write that "David Suzuki is a corporate sell-out", there's something seriously wrong with our movement - the desire to attack, coupled with negativity and cynicism, has way over-powered the desire to create a sustainable planet.

I'm proud to defend Tzeporah, the work she has done in the past and the work she will do in the future.

Come on, you guys! I'm with solarguy, above. Stop circling the wagons and shooting inwards - we've got real work to do! We're always going to disagree on some of the different ways we approach the need for change, but that's no reason to take a card out of the Tea Party crowd's playbook, and start indulging in Glenn Beck style nastiness.

Guy Dauncey, Victoria

Carbon Credits?

Here's what can easily happen playing the Carbon Credits Game.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100027173/global-warming-time-to-get-angry/

The Liberal's Carbon Tax is a much better idea for all BCers - and this was also prominent during the last election campaign that resulted in rifts within the enviro-movement.

Ha ha

Just look at the hacks coming out of the woodwork defending this appointment.

Sure thing, guys, ROR is all about being "green" and has nothing to do with selling power to the USA with BC Government subsidies in the form of overpriced EPA's!

Why is it that there are so few people that give a damn about this province? Bunch of crooked cheap sellouts, flushing BC down the shitter, and for what? Hack consulting gigs. What a culture.

The one nice thing about global warming is that some of these run-of-river scams will become untenable when the creeks run dry.

In fact

This calls to mind a fun slogan from the 1968 French General Strike:

"Warning: ambitious careerists may now be disguised as 'progressives.'"

It is a gas tax and a money laundry

Nothing more than a phony spin cycle laundry siphoning cash from working people and splashing it back at Campbell's friends. At enormous administrative cost.

It has not reduced GHG production one gram and never will.

Anyone who suggested it would - like Berman and Suzuki - are hollow opportunists.

Greenpeace and Suzuki will never get another penny from me after their pathetic performance on this file.

Not one truck was converted to Natural Gas not one additional transit space was provided

The suggestion that it is inappropriate to call these people on their dereliction of duty is absurd.

Really, Guy?

You and your friends Tzep and James Hoggan back a premier who:
-Supports offshore drilling
-Supports the tarsands
-Supports massive power projects in watersheds with little environmental oversight
-Refuses to address species at risk
-Refuses to take any action on fish farms
...
and we're the ones being obstructionist? Really? Really?

Wow.

Tzeporah Berman may be a great campaigner. But when she stands up in Copenhagen to give the environmental seal of approval to a guy with a pedigree which includes the above, she loses her green cred. What's the old saying about lying down with pigs?

Tarsands oil is not green energy

Just as I thought. The subject of the conversation immediately switches to "green energy". Some of the discussion on green energy is valid, but most of it is just a subject switch that detracts attention from the main subject of Valhalla's letter: TARSANDS OIL. Nobody thinks that is green energy. But we may be sure that that is what Tzeporah Berman and Greenpeace will be dealing with in the future.

Berman is an icon of the "collaborative" approach to conservation -- meaning to collaborate (which is different from cooperate) with government and industry. I ask again, do we need the biggest, best funded environmental group there is to be collaborating with Big Oil and Big Power Producers???

Solarguy says that he makes his living producing equipment for small power plants. That may or may not be green. These days the word "green energy" has been seized by industry and pasted onto project that are the very opposite of green: massive damage to rivers and logging forests for biofuel to replace fossil fuels, when the logging releases tons of carbon in the air and removes our carbon sequestration and carbon storage system on a huge scale. And how come privatization of our rivers and forests come with it? It's a big corporate feeding frenzy, that's why.

Just listen to Solarguy's message to the environmental community:

"It saddens me how much infighting & negative energy is around green energy ... They [industry] must be laughing all the way to their banks & shareholders."

For at least ten years now environmental groups have had it held over their heads that if they object to the practice of environmental groups collaborating with industry, they are just negative; they are infighters, backstabbers, they are stupid and industry is laughing at them. But you tell me what workers union could ever function properly if some of its members were regularly holding private meetings with the boss and making backroom agreements.

As environmentalists we need to shrug off this false threat that if we disturb the unity of the movement by objecting to certain kinds of tactics, our movement will fail, the public will dislike us and we will lose funding because we are not unified. No moral movement in the history of the world lacked internal dissent about tactics.

Twenty years ago, an environmental group would have been embarrassed and maybe outraged to be accused of collaborating with industry. Today it's done in broad daylight and celebrated by advertising agency PR. In my opinion, REAL environmental activists will be proud to declare they are not unified with that, especially when it comes to tarsands oil and the whole existence of life on Earth is at stake.

shift happens

Guy, it may be that our western angst about climate change does turn into a giant shooting circle, while most of Asia leaps merrily ahead at a staggering 8% growth in carbon emissions, totally beyond our control. We watch in frustration as the unstoppable juggernaut running on liquid capital leads us all off the ecological cliff, while our leaders happily shift the export of our forests and fuels to "emergent" Asian markets.

And tell me if any environmentalist or ecological economist has convinced a single western government that more economic growth isn't actually necessary for happiness?

Economic growth appears to be a bliss-resistant pandemic, especially if it's painted green, but as Tim Garrett points out, our global civilization is a massive heat engine that's constantly revving up, every single efficiency leading to more throughput.

The next green revolution could just be like the last one, the ultimate supercharger for human overshoot, and our brightest minds may regret being it's cheerleaders as our problems on a finite planet just get bigger. There's still no political will to bolt a speed limiter on the runaway Machine, and nobody in power dares to hit the brakes or put the transmission into reverse to save what's left of Gaia's community.

The world is indeed as crazy as Sherrod fears. Maybe Patrick Moore and Berman will find common ground and collaborate on nuclear powered heaters for the tarsands next? Much more "clean and efficient", and it would also allow the mildly worried inhabitants of chilly Canuckistan to switch their car culture to "cleaner" natural gas so we don't have to abandon beloved ICE's, drive-ins or freeways, or start another manufactured war to take over Bolivia for it's lithium.

A Pox on all your Houses

The Mid-Coast forest deal (there is no such thing as a great bear rain forest) is an absolute disaster, whichever way you look at it.

The BC Liberals gave up public policy making to environmental groups and forest companies in this case. The public was essentially left out of the planning process, which proceeded behind closed doors was only those two parties present. Ms. Berman was a big part of that sneaky, behind the scenes process

Ms. Berman is doing BC a favor by leaving. Environmental groups obviously don't trust her, and she certainly doesn't work in the public interest. One less ideologue on the environmental front can only be a positive thing.

Ontario = Environmental Disaster

solarguy

You're kidding of course. Ontario not only has the worst environmental regulations in Canada but also doesn't enforce them. As for green, besides having the some of the largest single sources of sulphur and nitrogen oxides air pollution in North America, the Ontario government has blind-sided local energy producers with secret deals with Korea.

Ontario could improve the environment simply by buying hydro-electricity from Quebec but instead encourages high carbon footprint and unstable wind power plus natural gas backups. BC is miles ahead of Ontario.

C'mon Guy!

That is the problem.

No discourse about the so-called environmental leaders allowed!

How green is any organization when the same person is the leader for 25 years!

A 'green' organization would allow for succession of leadership; bringing additional nutrients, not the same ol crap!

Thanks Anne!

Your comment hits the spot!

No more dialogue Guy Dauncey?

Hard to defend Ms. Berman isn't it?