environmental future
Dear Editor: I’m not someone who spends a lot of time thinking about where my electricity comes from. But watching the events in Japan has really got me thinking: What kind of environmental future are we building for our children?
I know we don’t have to face the nuclear energy question here in BC because we’ve got so many natural green energy options. But what about the rest of the world? They don’t seem to be quite so lucky. That worries me.
Energy use is the single most important environmental factor that could make or break our children’s future. That’s where we really need to focus our environmental energies. There is only one environment, and if we can’t solve our energy problems then I fear for the future we may be handing to our children.
Marney Hogan
Langley BC
Dear Editor,
Whether we like it or not, a federal election is currently underway. And with municipal elections and an HST referendum, not to mention a potential provincial election, also coming up in British Columbia over the next several months, election fatigue is almost a certainty for the people of this province.
However, when Stephen Harper endorsed Newfoundland’s Lower Churchill hydroelectric project last week on the election trail and talked about supporting clean energy projects in every region of the country, my interest level went up considerably. Developing Canada’s abundance of clean energy resources is something that every party and every candidate should be able to get behind and agree on.
In fact, with a comprehensive national energy strategy Canada could easily become a global energy superpower fuelling jobs and economic activity across the country.
Canada does, of course, have an abundance of non-renewable fossil fuel resources such as oil and natural gas, and the global need for these is not going to disappear overnight. However, Canada also has abundant renewable clean energy resources, particularly clean hydroelectric energy in British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador.
With a national energy strategy in place, provinces that are rich in renewable clean energy such as British Columbia and Manitoba could potentially eliminate the need to burn dirty coal in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Quebec and Newfoundland could likewise supply clean energy to Ontario and the Maritimes.
Developing Canada’s renewable clean energy resources could also allow clean energy to flow from Canada to neighbouring American states, just as non-renewable fossil fuels currently do. That would allow these neighbouring states to considerably reduce their dependence on burning coal.
The overall carbon reduction from a national energy strategy such as this would be immense and it would undoubtedly result in hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of investment in the Canadian economy.
Canada is unquestionably a super country with super resources. Now all we really need to become a clean energy superpower is a national energy strategy that can bring it all together and get us there.
Yolanda Lora Vilchis
Surrey, BC
Dear Editor,
Gas prices in this province have reached unbelievable levels. Heavy demand for oil in China and political instability in some of the oil-producing countries in the Middle East are said to be to blame. But that just leads me to wonder why we are allowing ourselves to be controlled by outside forces when we have so many alternative resources available to us here in our own backyard: resources that we ourselves control.
Unlike a lot of other places in the world, we have an abundance of renewable energy potential in this province that could be used to electrify many of the vehicles we drive. So why are we paying $1.30 a liter when we could be filling up electric cars for mere pennies? China’s appetite for oil isn’t going to diminish anytime soon, and nor will political instability in the Middle East. So we need to give our heads a shake and wake up to the alternative energy abundance we have all around us in this province.
Trudy Gordon,
Burnaby, B.C.
Dear editor,
I just don’t get it. How can the federal Conservatives be so far ahead in the opinion polls when they are, of all the parties, the most apathetic (at best) towards the planet’s and humanity’s eco-systems?! These politicians simply do not care – as long as it appeases the Big Corporations which contribute so generously to the “the Harper government” election war chest, and as long as the resource-extracting sector has unimpeded access to all of Canada’s Earthly resources.
Other than the Green party, it seems that there’s not much of an environmentally-conscious party available for any voter who gives a damn about the future of spaceship Earth. Agreed, the Green party is not very promising in the ‘job-creation’ political department; however, all voters should consider the following pertinent question: What good is creating or preserving businesses and jobs when the planet is deathly polluted and people are getting sick and (usually slowly) dying because of mass industrial, and especially vehicular, pollution?
Or, are people – and especially worrisome, those who vote – so mesmerized by the electric-piano-playing and love-song-singing prime minister that they find him too irresistible?
Sincerely,
Frank G. Sterle, Jr.
White Rock, B.C.
Letter to the editor:
Parties need plan as 40% of municipal funding expires
With the clock running out on federal investments in our cities and communities, you’d think at least one of the federal parties would make this an issue in the election campaign.
But two weeks into the campaign, no party has shown Canadians a plan to replace the 40 per cent of federal investments in cities and communities that will expire over the next 36 months. That’s not stimulus money, that’s core funding—investments in roads, housing, and police.
Think about how losing this money will affect your neighborhood: the unfilled potholes, the cracked sidewalks, the closed pools and recreation centres, the disappearing bus routes. Think about your property taxes or rent going up. Then ask your federal candidates what they plan to do about it.
Ask them how they plan to replace transit funding, affordable housing programs, the Police Officer Recruitment Fund, and the Building Canada Fund. Together, these investments are worth $1.9 billion a year across Canada. Vancouver’s share of that is about $35 million. That’s quite a haircut.
It’s time all parties come down to earth and tell Canadians what they plan to do for cities and communities.
Hans Cunningham,
President of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities
Dear Editor:
I am always amazed by the number of regulatory hoops run-of-river hydro projects have to jump through in this province. It typically requires over 50 permits, licenses, reviews and approvals, from 14 regulatory bodies at the federal, provincial, local and aboriginal level, before one of these projects can be built. With so much red tape and bureaucracy to have to navigate it’s amazing that any run-of-river project ever gets built.
The part that really bothers me, though, is the amount of duplicated assessment work done between the various levels of government involved. In many cases, federal and provincial agencies are completely duplicating assessment and review work that has already done by another agency. That’s unacceptable because it wastes precious tax dollars and results in unnecessary delays to projects, which in turn increases the risk and the cost of projects.
To fix the problem the provincial and the federal governments need to establish a unified federal provincial review process, one that does away with duplicated assessments and reviews and unnecessary costs. A “one process-one project” approach would result in less government waste for taxpayers, less risk and uncertainty for run-of-river projects, and inevitably it would lead to more investment and jobs. That’s a win all around if you ask me.
Fred Reemeyer
Coquitlam B.C. V3K 1A9
In relation to nuclear power stations, writes Alfonso Luigi Marra, the terrible truth that is covered up is that both the ones which have been damaged (Fukushima, Onagawa and Higashidori, but there are probably others they are telling us nothing about), and nuclear power stations in general, when they stop working, require an infinite cooling of the radioactive materials, which, especially in the event of disasters, becomes very difficult to achieve, and which, for example, they are not managing to carry out in Japan.
It is essentially an unequal struggle against heat. Heat which, if it sooner or later prevails against the emergency systems adopted to halt it, causes fusion, or, as at Chernobyl, explosion, but in the meantime – until the final and perhaps unlikely cooling – causes the release of radiation.
A drama that cannot be resolved by covering the reactors with cement or anything else, because, at Chernobyl, it was possible precisely because the radioactive material had exploded, so all they covered was the debris of the explosion, which incidentally still continues to ‘burn’.
Here, however, this monstrous material, moreover in much greater quantities than Chernobyl, is still there, and should it explode or melt down, nothing would be able to contain it.
A struggle it will hopefully be possible to win, but which requires extraordinary means, which is why the media, governments and those working in the field must stop lying, because it can be won, maybe, only if the entire world community is alerted.
Raffaele Ferrante – Lawyer
