Arctic Circle is a daily cartoon strip by Alex Hallet about three penguins, Oscar, Ed and Gordo, who have emigrated from Antarctica to the Arctic. The comic has an underlying environmental theme and regularly sees the humour in trying to live a more eco-friendly life in a 21st century world.

 

Clean Air Day is a celebration of environmentally-friendly activities that promote clean air and good health across Canada. It is a great opportunity to make environmentally-friendly lifestyle choices, for you, your family and your community. This year Clean Air Day is on Wednesday June 3rd.

The Transit will be free. Tell the driver it's Clean Air Day. There will be complimentary breakfast from 7:00 to 8:30 AM at Queensway, Orchard Park and Westbank Transit exchanges.

Choices made by businesses, communities and individuals can lead to meaningful reductions in air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions.

Tips to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions:

• Leave the car at home. Walk or bike for short trips;
  
• For longer trips, take the bus; one busload of passengers takes 40 vehicles off the road, saving 70,000 litres of fuel, 175 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions and nine tonnes of pollutants per year.
• Don't idle your vehicles; Ten seconds of idling uses more fuel that restarting your engine and produces more air pollution
• Keep to the speed limit. Driving at 100 km/h burns 10 per cent more fuel than driving at 90 km/h. 
• On the highway, use cruise control to maintain a steady speed and reduce fuel consumption. 
• In the city, stop-and-go traffic means that your air conditioning can increase fuel consumption by as much as 20 per cent. At low city speeds, open windows can be a fuel-saving alternative.

 

If each one of us makes a commitment to make a change to help the environment, collectively, it will amount to alot.

If we recall a statistic from before, if every American home replaced just one light bulb with an Energy Star bulb, we would save enough energy to power more that 3 million homes for a whole year and save $600 million in annual energy costs. Not only that, we would also prevent greenhouse gas emissions accounting to more than 800,000 cars.

Another simple thing to do is to use cold water to wash your clothes. Hotter water does not mean cleaner clothes; in fact the only difference that can be seen is in your utility bill. Did you know that 90% of washing machine energy consumption is in the heating of water.

Canadian families do an average of 416 wash loads per year which amounts to 1,281 lbs to 2,407 lbs of CO2 in the atmosphere. If we switch to cold water, not only will be prevent that CO2 from entering the atmosphere, but we will also save an average of $61 per year on our utility bill.

Isn't it a good time to save money and at the same time help the environment?

Source: Article by Maggie Calloway in the column "Smart Choices for Our Future"

At the next UBC Okanagan's Distinguished Speaker Series, on November 26th 2008 at 7PM at the Rotarty Centre for the Arts, Jeffrey Simpson, a Globe and Mail award-winning columnist will discuss the impact of Climate Change on Canada.

His presentation is called Hot Air: Fixing Canada's Climate Change Catastrophe and it will examine the threats of the climate change on Canada.

Simpson will explain how he believes Canadians have been betrayed by their politicians, industrialists and environmentalists. He will also outline simple policies that should be adopted right away to significantly reduce short-term greenhouse gas emissions.

Tickets are available for free by calling the Rotary Centre for the Arts box office at 250-717-5304.

The 21 member Climate Action Team made a few recommendations which include raising the carbon tax in 2012 if necessary from it's planned figure. (The carbon tax rate is expected to triple from 2.3 cents per litre of gasoline by 2012).

They believe that higher rates must be imposed to achieve the province's greenhouse gas reduction targets. With the current plan, BC hopes to cut 1/3 in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 but according to the Climate Action Team, the current planned rate will take BC only 73% of the way to achieving its goal.

They say that the tax needs to be expanded to include other untaxed industrial emissions or those emissions be taken into account via a cap-and-trade system. They ask for greater efficiency in transportation and use of rail when moving freight; the need to move away from dumping garbage in landfills which generates methane gas.

They also outlined interim targets to ensure the 2020 goals are met:

• By 2012 emissions should decline to 5% below 2007 levels. And houses and buildings should have a energy efficiency rating when they're sold.
• By 2016 emissions should decline to 15-18% below 2007 levels. And publicly funded buildings should have net-zero greenhouse gas emissions (and by 2020 that should be expanded to include all new houses).

The report is available until October 6th for public viewing at LiveSmartBC.ca

Source: Article by Jeff Nagel titled "BC advised to hike carbon tax"

"The number one cause of global warming gases worldwide is animal agriculture" - Dave Way, EarthSave President.

EarthSave Canada is a non-profit organization that outlines to people the environmental, health and ethical consequences of what people eat.

Dave Way is touring the Okanagan discussing the facts brought up in the 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations called Livestock's Long Shadow. Basically, the main issue is that raising animals for food affects climate change more than people think.

There are lots of concerns about using food grains as biofuels but not much for using those grains as animal feed. Last year, 100 million tonnes of grain were used to make biofuels but 760 million tonnes were fed to animals. The raising of animals for food contributes significantly to the release of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

For instance, 18% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to the raising of livestock, compared to 13% for transportation. Fossil fuels burned to raise animals range from running tractors to supplying electricity for their operations. Also, the 1.5 billion cows and tens of billions of pigs, chickens and goats release methane gas which is 20 to 25% stronger than carbon dioxide.

Providing grains for the livestock requires clearing out forests to plant feed, then fertilized with petroleum based chemicals that contain nitrous oxide which is 300 times stronger than CO2.

Diets heavy in protein are also causes of many diseases. Thus, we should limit the amount of meat we eat and take part in programs such as Meatless Mondays etc. Even if we reduce our meat intake by 20%, there would be a significant impact on climate change.

Source: Article by Adrian Nieocyzm titled "Food activist says we need to cut down on animal protein"