Congratulations, British Columbia!
Some absolutely incredible news in yesterday's Vancouver Sun. BC has experienced a 2.4% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions in 2005--while the economy still grew at a 3.7% rate.And this happened before a lot of the attention turned to climate change and GHG emissions! The numbers break down like this:
Environment Canada's preliminary analysis shows B.C.'s greenhouse gas emissions fell 2.4 per cent from 2004 to 2005. Here are the sectors.
Manufacturing -11.7%
Personal vehicles -5.2%
Marine -7.4%
Agriculture -3.8%
Landfill -2.0%
It's not a huge drop, but it's a start. And the best is yet to come, as we remove idling cars and trucks from freeways, continue to improve port efficiency, educate residents on the benefits of transit, cycling, and reducing household emissions, build more HOV and cycle lanes, open the Canada and Evergreen Lines, attract more ships to BC that would otherwise spend two extra days polluting the air as they sailed to San Francisco, develop hydrogen and biofuel alternatives, see cars become more and more efficient, phase out gas mowers, educate the agriculture industry, and more. There are hundreds and hundreds of things--big and small--that can be done to bring these GHG levels even lower over the next several years.
It's a beautiful time to live, work and play in British Columbia!
posted by Jordan Bateman @ 9:18 AM
8 Comments:
This is great news.
It is good news but still a long ways from the 33% reduction that Premier Campbell has set. Now, we need to start asking the tough questions of how we are going to get to the 33% reduction.
“...remove idling cars and trucks from freeways...”
Which is why we need to prioritize transit and not expand freeways. All the evidence suggests that expanding freeways simply adds more idling cars and trucks and more greenhouse gas emissions.
From the article... (*** my comments ***)
--Some of the reasons for the reduction included a decreased use of personal vehicles, which saw emissions drop 5.2 per cent, or half a million tonnes. (*** 1/3 the total drop ***)
Boating also saw a major decrease of 7.4 per cent, or 200,000 tonnes and manufacturing decreased by 11.7 per cent, or 750,000 tonnes.
(*** was this due to cleaner manufacturing, or just shifting it to China? ***)
"We've actually seen people driving less," said Penner. "Higher gasoline prices likely encouraged people to reduce unnecessary trips in their personal automobiles and/or move to more efficient vehicles," he said. --
(*** Thank God we didn't twin the Port Mann bridge 7 years ago...
Stop the nonsense about more highways resulting in less GHG emmissions. We don't need more freeways in a world where people "drive less". Our region has far less GHG emmissions than freeway dependent Seattle (per capita) and Vancouver residents have half the per capita emmissions of those in Langley. It all has to do with the type of communities you build and the type of transportation choices you have.
Now give people some real transportation choices and complete communities, and you'll see an even bigger drop in GHGs. It is clear that twinning the Port Mann 7 years from now, will reverse any real progress we've made today in getting a handle on GHGs.
Another note: we haven't seen any recent numbers on Port Mann traffic in the past couple years. I expect traffic volumes are leveling out there too. Only expanding the bridge capacity would cause volumes to increase signficantly. People find other things to do... ***)
Good points agf.
Clearly the ghg emissions dropped during a period when we were NOT adding additional road capacity. Meanwhile cities that were adding road capacity saw their ghg emissions go up. The idea that we should reverse this trend and start expanding highways is just crazy.
I also wanted to comment more on some of the solutions proposed in original post:
“...more ships to BC that would otherwise spend two extra days polluting ...”
The final destination of the cargo is what would determines if this really results in a net reduction in pollution. Transporting cargo by water is actually more efficient than land transportation. So if you save two days at sea but then have to add an extra two days transporting cargo by land it could actually increase pollution.
Does anyone actually have figures on how many ships could use Vancouver instead of San Francisco where there would be a net reduction in overall transportation distance?
“...develop hydrogen...”
Hydrogen is really a storage mechanism rather than a energy source because it requires energy to extract hydrogen. In fact it is a net energy sink – more energy is required to produce the hydrogen then you wil ever get out of the hydrogen. Currently most of the energy used to produce hydrogen comes from ghg producing sources.
“...biofuel alternatives,...”
Some biofuel alternatives actually have a fairly large ghg footprint. Fossil fuels go into the fertilizers, the harvesting and the transportation of the biofuels.
Both hydrogen and biofuels will probably play a small part in the solution to climate change. But we can't look to either as a panacea.
Wow. Do you folks ever have anything positive to say?
What is not poistive about cleaner air, better health and leaving our environment better for our children?
There is nothing positive about this Government's plans for Gateway.
The South Fraser Perimeter Road Environmental Assessment review states that the Gateway program will cause an increase in GHG emmisions by 42%.
Technical Volume 16 pg. 60
You can be certain that 8,000 diesel trucks per day won't be bringing pollution levels down in Delta. We don't want Gateway. Try routing the trucks through your neighborhood.
Truck You Kevin Falcon.
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