On February 25, 2010, Naomi Klein gave a lecture on the issue of climate debt, organized by the CCPA.
This was the first in a series of lectures in honour of David Lewis (1909-1981), a leading labour lawyer, life-long social democrat, a founder of the NDP and its national leader from 1970 to 1975. His grandson Avi Lewis introduced the lecture series.
The lecture series will focus on issues that were important to David Lewis: social democracy, organized labour, and income inequality.
Environment and sustainability
At the “Waste-Based-Energy” industry conference in Toronto last November, the tony Yorkville hotel meeting room was filled with consultants, lawyers, company reps, and municipal bureaucrats, all talking trash: waste tonnage spread-sheets, the seeming evils of landfill sites, the supreme benefits of burning municipal solid waste (MSW) to make energy.
Inside this issue:
Managing BC’s Forests for a Cooler Planet: Carbon Storage, Sustainable Jobs and Conservation by Ben Parfitt
How Big is BC’s Public Sector? by Iglika Ivanova
Communities in Crisis: A Case Study of Campbell River by Blair Redlin
2010 and All That by Marvin Shaffer
Public or Private — How the Choice for P3s Gets Made by Keith Reynolds
Food Bank Use Takes a Distressing Jump by Seth Klein
In the fight against climate change, few natural assets are as important as forests. Healthy living trees store enormous amounts of atmospheric carbon.
The same is true of many forest products: every two-by-four in a house stores the carbon that the tree it came from stored. Depending on how well the house is made, that carbon remains locked up for decades, if not centuries to come.
But here in BC, we face enormous hurdles to managing our forests in ways that maximize carbon storage.
Few events offer as compelling an example of what climate change may mean for British Columbia as does the mountain pine beetle and its impact on our forests.
In the aftermath of the beetle attack, more than one billion dead pine trees are now spread across a swath of the province equal in size to England.
Almost every source of data, from the volunteer-based Breeding Bird Survey to university-lead research, as well as broad-based summary documents such as the recent “State of the Birds Report” (a U.S report by many partner organizations) point to widespread declines in many bird species in North America. Declines are being documented not just in those species already known to occur in low numbers but also in widespread and “common” species such as the Barn Swallow and Common Grackle.
Vancouver — Forest industry unions and leading environmental groups have united behind a plan that calls on the BC government to conserve more forest, halt rampant wood waste and promote wise use of forest products — all as part of a concerted effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
https://vimeo.com/8623368
Mountain pine beetle attacks have decimated BC’s pine forests, seriously damaging their ability to store carbon and protect against global warming. An effective response to the beetle attacks will involve much more than just clearcutting dead trees.
A technology used by the oil and gas industry to obtain natural gas is raising major concerns across the United States and is equally suspect for areas being drilled in Western Canada. Called hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking” in the trade), it allows drilling companies to access “unconventional” natural gas deposits trapped in shale, coal-bed, and tight-sand formations – potentially at the expense of underground water supplies.