'" A Crude Awakening"

We all need to change our lifestyle...we are in worse shape than we think. Don't believe me?

Run- don't walk to your local video store or better yet library and get "A Crude Awakening" http://www.oilcrashmovie.com/to

This doc spells it out what is going to
happen-we cannot go on like this. We are all petroleum "junkies".
Arrange a public showing of this doc.
If your library does not have it put in a request for it. Or buy it if you can and share it.

Start taking transit, for gawds sake get rid of that gas lawnmower and bar b q.

Don't fly- "in a few years flying will be viewed as smoking is today".

Try to buy local or second hand. Do you need that cheap thing from China...what was the cost to the environment to get it here?

Get active in your community.

Question your local politicians about TILMA-TILMA can destroy any environmental progress governments make. Are they going to oppose TILMA?

Do you really think Gordon Campbell cares about the environment? He like nearly every other politician knows that he has to have environmental policies and plans in order to get re- elelcted.

Remember this is the same guy that is trying to push through Gateway and the Deltaport expansion despite community oppposion and the environmental degradation and devastation that will result from these projects.

Big rallies on Saturday

Two big rallies this Sat. in Vancouver

Come out and oppose the Gateway project and the Deltaport expansion this Sat. Sept 29

Gateway Rally- Sat. Sept 29 3:30
Unitarian Church 49 and Oak

Welcome Al Gore to B C
Hello Al Gore and Goodbye Gateway-
5 P M outside the Westin Bayshore Hotel

For more info on Gateway and the Port expansion:
Bahttp://www.stopgateway.ca/
http://www.againstportexpansion.org/
http://gatewaysucks.org/

Great speakers-bring your banners!

"GREENWAYS NOT GATEWAY"

Maybe he will "get tough".....

....but will he get effective? We need manufacturers to take some responsibility for re-using/re-cycling the products they line the store shelves with. We need the fast food industry (and industry in general) to accept some responsibility for the packaging they use.

But I think Campbell & Co. will be putting the heavy burden on the consumer - sort of like the leaky condo farce and how it became the fault of the buyer for the leaks and making them bear the burden of the repair bills.

I hope he's serious

I really hope Campbell is serious about combating climate change. He has an enormous opportunity to be a role model for the entire world.

But, in order to do this, he is going to need to make some tough decisions and some that may not be politically popular. So far, however, it seems that he is failing.

The BC Liberals' Gateway project would be a massive setback for climate change because of all the extra roads added to the lower mainland. Anyone who wants to see this province succeed in reducing its emissions should be very concerned about Gateway.

As southdeltawalker mentions above, there are two rallies back to back this weekend. They should be interesting at the very least.

Start small

I don't know... it's looking pretty grim when we can't get our heads around the most simple things... when, every morning at Starbucks, I am the ONLY person in a line-up of 30 people who has a reusable mug. EVERY DAY... it's pretty depressing, actually.

What will we see?

I am predicting Campbell will expect the individuals and not the big business to carry the burden of cutting green house gases. Campbell is not one known to make big business spend any of their profits. He does seem to think the low end of middle class and lower can afford to spend for everything though.

Flashy but flimsy

You've got to admit, the Campbell crowd is good at putting on a show. The premier will get lots of media coverage in his appearance with Al Gore, which will buy him plenty of room for hypocrisy and half-measures. Al himself lives in a huge house and jets around the world, dubious choices for a climate-change hero. Will Gore dare to comment on the Gateway project, or will he just pretend that the rally outside the Westin didn't happen?

Cool It 2

Second, it shows that the Kyoto approach of spending some $180 billion each year to end global warming would reduce CO2 by such a small amount that few lives would be saved or improved, even if the United States had signed on and even if every signatory nation met its CO2 targets (which few have). If instead the resources were used for combating malnutrition, HIV/AIDS, indoor and outdoor air pollution, and dirty drinking water, the world would be a far better place for humans.

Finally, he gives a perfect example of why the Kyoto approach is foolish and an adaptation approach would be far better.

Global warming is supposedly killing people. The 35,000 deaths from the August 2003 European heat wave were, in Al Gore's view, an example of what "will become much more common if global warming is not addressed." But the actual data put things in perspective. Whereas 2,000 people died in the United Kingdom in that heat wave, last year the BBC reported that deaths caused by cold weather in England and Wales were about 25,000 each winter, and 47,000 a year, in the winters of 1998 to 2000. Similarly, in Helsinki, Finland, 55 people die each year from heat and 1,655 from cold. In Athens, Greece, a much warmer place, the deaths from excess heat are 1,376 each year and the deaths from cold 7,852. All told, Mr. Lomborg calculates that about 200,000 people die in Europe each year from excessive heat, and 1.5 million from excessive cold.

So global warming will save human lives. "While cutting CO2 will save some people from dying from heat," Mr. Lomborg concludes, "it will simultaneously cause more people to die from cold."

Mr. Lomborg believes that while we must develop low-carbon technologies, "many other issues are much more important than global warming." Malaria kills more than one million people each year, and some four million die from malnutrition, three million from HIV/AIDS, 2.5 million from various air pollutants, and nearly two million from lack of clean drinking water. Solving these problems would save more lives and do more to improve the human condition than spending money on global CO2 reduction.

The final table in the book dramatically makes the case. Fully implementing Kyoto would cost $180 billion per year, but for $52 billion per year we could do much better by tackling the challenges Mr. Lomborg mentions. The world would avoid 28 billion malaria infections (and 85 million deaths) over a century, instead of Kyoto's avoidance of 70 million infections (and 140,000 deaths). There would be one billion fewer people in poverty instead of Kyoto's one million fewer, and 229 million fewer people would suffer from starvation rather than Kyoto's two million.

Cool It 3

Consider Mr. Lomborg's traffic example. In the U.S. each year, 42,600 people die and 2.8 million are injured from traffic accidents. If we were to lower speed limits to five miles an hour, almost no one would die. But automobile transportation is important to our economy and our people, so we work on seat belts, speed limits and better highways rather than 5 mph speed limits. Like traffic accidents, "global warming is strongly caused by people, and we have the technology to reduce it to zero," so we could curtail our use of fossil fuels and thus sharply reduce global warming. But Mr. Lomborg points out that "the benefits from moderately using fossil fuels" for "light, heat, food, communication and travel" vastly outweigh the cost to our society.

"Cool It" makes the case for helping the world's individuals rather than the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change goal of reorienting our lifestyles away from consumption and individual ownership and toward free time instead of wealth.

"Our ultimate goal," Mr. Lomborg says, "is not to reduce greenhouse gasses or global warming per se but to improve the quality of life and the environment."

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pdupont/?id=110010626

Gateway to nightmare existence

Unfortunately, Gateway and Delta Expansion jettisons us back to the Gaglardi days with the "50's" mentality to pave over the farm and let the transports rip up and down a wide, wide expanse of hiway billowing fossil fuel carbon into our living airspace.A significant percent of our Lower Mainland population experience breathing difficulty, already; many kids carry emergency (asthma) puffers around, at this end of the Valley.
Previous,historic residents of this end of the Fraser Valley had an efficient, electric Inter Urban rail system set up delivering produce and people daily to and from the Vancouver area and stops along the way.We need to get back to that future and follow the example of many European city (and Sydney, Austr.) centres that have set up clean efficient transit systems that service the needs of the tax paying public, while preserving local producing farmlands.
Long term planning is what is needed here; not only for the health of the planet but for the health of the taxpayers . Go to www.railforthevalley.com

Gateway = Wrongway

But that has nothing to do with CO2 generation.

Grist is just another product of Fenton Communications, the giant PR firm which handles the AGW/CC issue from the funding foundations to the NGOs pushing the false paradigm of CO2 being responsible for climate change. A very efficient propaganda machine. There is now so much money involved that new agencies must be recruited. "Four elite agencies -- Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the Martin Agency and Y&R -- are squaring off for the business and are expected to present to the former vice president himself early next month, according to executives familiar with the review. The budget for the "historic, three-to-five-year, multimedia global campaign," as the request for proposals puts it, is contingent on how much money the alliance raises. Media spending will likely be more than $100 million a year."

http://mobile.adage.com/blackberry/go.php?article_id=120088

Of course they are trying to discredit Lomberg, who points out that even if CO2 were a "culprit", there are better ways of approaching the non-issue (since climate change is natural) than restricting production of a trace gas. So much lather about .038%(380 part per million) of the atmosphere to which we contribute less than 2-5% of the total.

You are being scammed. Just because Gore is not Bush, does not make him any more trustworthy.

Go Deeper!

I have to agree that controversy abounds regarding "Global Warming" but not for the reasons put forward by skeptics. The reasons as reported for the last 20 years not only point to over development and the ecology of land and water being compromised but over population and of course an economy gone insane. Natural systems are not going to be able to handle the increased man made CO2 any more than they can handle the removal of forests, the acidification/desertification of land and sea. At what point will someone actually bring sheer numbers of consumers into the equation? The ability of natural systems has been and continues to be compromised as we boldly go forward with more, more, more. This society has become so short sighted and narrow focused on an economy so specialized that it's not just "global warming" that will bring it down. The health of the environment does not depend on the economy, but try and have economy without a healthy ecology. We're just at the beginning of problems that will make "global warming" seem like the moot point it really is. No solutions of any magnitude will be anything more than bandaids until ecology comes first. End of Story.... Kyoto, I suppose we have to start somewhere... Dig deeper on this one and find the disease, not just the symptoms.

CO2 in the Oceans

When CO2 dissolves in the oceans, the acidity of the oceans increases. This is now occurring and the reprocussions for marine life may be enormous. Read the article in the March 2006 Scientific American "The Dangers of Ocean Acidification" by Scott C. Doney

Pooee

One sow and her piglets can produce 9 tonnes of CO2 equivalent annually from methane emissions from their waste. The effluent collects in lagoons which smell bad and sometimes overflow into water supplies. Now Bunge, a US company, builds lined, enclosed pools to collect effluent and capture methane, which farmers then use to generate electricity. By preventing methane from escaping, the company gets a carbon credit to sell on the carbon market; the farmer keeps 25%.

Leave the carbon out

CO2 is not harmful in the minute amounts we produce. Giving out the amounts in tons is really impressive if you are trying to snow people. When translated into percent .038% or parts per million, 380ppm, it ceases to be a monster and remains what it really is....a trace gas plants use to produce carbohydrates through photosynthesis.

Greenhouse gases don't exist on the rest of the planets of the solar system, neither do pigs producing methane, yet they are all warming.

It is a terrific idea to capture and burn methane though. Saving money is always a good idea.