Climate Change & Renewable Energy

Hi Everyone,

For some time now, many people have been asking me to help them keep up-to-date with all of news about Climate Change and Renewable Energy. These are very critical times in both Canada and Nova Scotia and I would like to do what I can to help people be aware of the important issues. From my work with Chebucto and Scotian WindFields, as well as the Ecology Action Centre's Energy Issues Committee, I see a lot of news articles and press releases come across my desk, and I'd like to do my best to share them with everyone.

It's not always easy to make sense of climate change and renewable energy issues since there are many powerful groups on both sides of the story, so I'll try to point out which statements I agree with, and which I don't.

I thought the upcoming G8 Summit would be a good place to start from. When Stephen Harper attended the last G8 summit, he was a freshly minted Prime Minister, with no established environmental policy. Since that time, his Conservative government ("Canada's New Government", as it likes to be called) released its Clean Air Act, which was promptly sent to committee for an all party review. That committee came back earlier this year with the revised and renamed Clean Air and Climate Change Act, which committed Canada to meeting its Kyoto obligations, including implementation of Carbon Credit trading and a Clean Development Mechanism for encouraging renewable investment. The Conservative's have since neglected to bring this bill (C-30) back to House floor for a vote, and will most likely attempt to implement their "Green Plan" through regulation changes, and not though a legislation in the House of Commons.

This means that George W Bush will have a new ally in Stephen Harper at next week's meeting as the only two members of the G8 who oppose the Kyoto Protocol. While the other 6 members, including Angela Merkel of Germany who is chairing the meetings and has promised to push the EU for even further emissions cuts, will be looking to extend Kyoto and discuss methods of bringing in larger developing nations such as China, India and Brazil. I don't think that Stephen Harper will be acting in the interests of most Canadians at this meeting, and it is important that we are all aware of how he is representing us.

To that end, I have attached two items. One is an article detailing the uncertainty of Canada's position from yesterday's Globe and Mail, and the other is a petition looking to raise support of addressing Climate Change at this upcoming meeting.

Globe: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070527.wcanenviro0527/BNStory/National/home

Petition: see below

An interesting response to Environment Minister John Baird's comments about Canada being a bridge between the US and the rest of the G8 came today from Stephane Dion, who said that Canada shouldn't be the bridge between right and wrong (http://news.yahoo.com/s/cpress/20070528/ca_pr_on_na/climate_g8_canada;_ylt=AkvPoBsuX1zZnxCswEeSoUD0kPUI)

I would like to thank all of you for your interest in Climate Change and Renewable Energy (whether implicitly expressed or just assumed on my behalf) as they are topics which I am very passionate about. Please let me know if you have any comments, questions or would like to find out more about a specific topic. I will include articles specific to Nova Scotia from time to time, so please bare with me those of you outside of my fair province and be happy your province or territory (GQ) uses less than 75% Coal for their electricity supply. And lastly but not leastly, please let me know if you know of anyone else that would like to be included in this list.. the more the merrier.

Cheers

Dan