Exporting LNG Through Churchill Would Be A Climate Disaster

• Manitoba's Climate Action Team
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• Prime Minister Mark Carney and Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew are pushing to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Churchill by 2030. Story here.

Exporting LNG Through Churchill Would Be A Climate Disaster

Manitoba's Climate Action Team

An oil explosion, location unknown.
“People think about LNG ike propane that we all use in our backyards when we’re barbecuing.
So, the idea of a leak or spill and the impacts on the environment,
it’s not really the same level of concern.” Premier Wab Kinew

Premier Wab Kinew and his government hope to ship liquefied natural gas (LNG) out of the Port of Churchill by 2030. This story explains why that's a bad idea.

The EPA Cooks the Books in Trying to Cook the Planet

Natural Resources Defence Council

The agency’s power plant rollback—right after the hottest summer on record—will raise your power bills and worsen the climate crisis. Story here.

Is Manitoba on the Right Course With its Churchill Plans?

 Manitoba's Climate Action Team

The grain terminal at Churchill. A PinP photo.

If Manitoba builds an LNG export terminal, most of the emissions from extracting, shipping, and burning fossil gas would not show up in it’s greenhouse gas emissions inventory. But the province would be directly complicit in facilitating the increased production, transportation and consumption of large volumes of fossil gas, further escalating global climate risks of catastrophic drought, wildfires, and flooding. Story here.

Exporting LNG through the Port of Churchill, Manitoba.

Manitoba's Climate Action Team

If Manitoba builds an LNG export terminal, most of the emissions from extracting, shipping, and burning fossil gas would not show up in it’s greenhouse gas emissions inventory. But the province would be directly complicit in facilitating the increased production, transportation and consumption of large volumes of fossil gas, further escalating global climate risks of catastrophic drought, wildfires, and flooding. Story here.

A last-ditch effort to revive salmon stocks takes shape on BC’s central coast

 Canada's National Observer

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Wuikinuxv Creek walkers navigate fallen logs and moss-covered rocks while making their way along the creek. Photo courtesy: Raven Walkus

Every summer, Wuikinuxv Nation crews walk the streams of Rivers Inlet on BC’s remote central coast, counting how many salmon have returned from the ocean to spawn.

This year, for the first time, the creek walkers — local members who monitor salmon and stream conditions — are using their observations to develop a plan to repair salmon habitat. 

The Wannock River system, which flows from Owikeno Lake into Rivers Inlet, once supported one of BC’s largest sockeye runs and remains home to four salmon species. But historic logging and increasingly unpredictable water levels have damaged the streams the fish depend on, said Raven Walkus, the nation’s salmon restoration co-ordinator.

She said crews had already noticed “a big drop” in returning salmon compared with last year, while lower water levels in many creeks were making it harder for fish to reach their spawning grounds. They had also seen flooding that can wash out stream channels and salmon eggs. 

“We can already tell it’s going to be a tough year,” she said. 

Local salmon stocks are struggling, with Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) expecting fewer sockeye to return to Owikeno Lake and Chinook numbers in the Wannock River system remaining uncertain. 

Those warning signs have led Wuikinuxv to expand its seasonal monitoring into a broader restoration effort.

The nation’s roughly 11-week creek-walking season runs until late October. This year, crews are using it to map where water is disappearing, banks are washing away and salmon habitat has been lost — information that will help Wuikinuxv decide where future restoration money should go. 

Earlier this summer, Tom Balfour, a biologist and field operations manager with the Redd Fish Restoration Society, joined the Wuikinuxv crews. They walked the streams together, reviewed sites the creek walkers had identified and used a drone to survey the river systems.

Balfour said two major river systems in the territory will require significant work. Logging removed the large trees that once slowed rainfall, stabilized riverbanks and supplied the logs that create pools and shelter for salmon. “Big trees are essential to the function of the river,” Balfour said.

Future restoration could include planting trees, stabilizing slopes and placing large logs in river channels. But the work will be difficult in Wuikinuxv’s remote watershed, where the roads, barges, trucks and heavy equipment once used by logging companies are no longer available. Moving machinery or large logs by helicopter could cost $20,000 to $30,000 a day, Walkus said.

For now, Wuikinuxv is piecing together government and other funding to keep creek walkers in the field and the Redfish Restoration assessment is expected to help the Nation find future funding.

Until that money is secured, creek walkers are taking on smaller fixes they can safely carry out themselves, such as opening drying pools, guiding salmon away from shrinking channels and clearing debris that blocks their passage.

Limited funding

The nation is making the most of its short field season at a time when funding for salmon monitoring is becoming increasingly uncertain across coastal BC. DFO provides support one year at a time and many neighbouring communities have lost funding or seen their seasonal creek-walking programs reduced.

“We are super fortunate that we are getting any funding at all from DFO,” Walkus said.

Wuikinuxv also has a much smaller stewardship department than some coastal nations, but Walkus said its crew has still managed to take on monitoring and early restoration work. 

Ted Walkus, a hereditary chief of the Wuikinuxv Nation, said creek walking is also a responsibility passed through his family. His nephew is the fourth generation of their family to monitor the streams.

For decades, Wuikinuxv members were mainly hired as trail guides or field workers while outside officials directed the monitoring program and controlled the information gathered from the rivers. Now, in the third year of running the work themselves, nation members are deciding where to send crews, what changes to record and how those observations can guide restoration. 

The program is also bringing younger people onto the land to learn how the territory is changing. They see where water levels are dropping, where salmon are spawning and where logging damage continues to affect the rivers.

Raven Walkus said that knowledge stays in the community instead of leaving with outside agencies or disappearing when a seasonal contract ends.

“It’s not just a job,” Ted Walkus said. “It’s a way of life and it’s a way of sustaining ourselves.”

Sonal Gupta / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada's National Observer.

This is how fast Swiss glaciers, the 'water tower of Europe,' are melting away

CBC News Water lost so far this year is 4 times Switzerland's annual consumption. Story here.

CLIMATE DENIAL OR HOLOCAUST DENIAL. WHICH IS WORSE?

by Larry Powell

The fire that forced the evacuation of Flin Flon, Manitoba last year. The Thunderhill Lake Complex Fire. Photo by US government

According to the Climate Risk Index, more than 832,000 people have perished worldwide from extreme weather events since 1995. With the war against climate change now lost, that toll will surely do nothing but escalate down the road, especially with an El Nino-from-Hell loose in the world!

In Canada, it's illegal under the Criminal Code - on pain of imprisonment (and rightly so), to deny the holocaust - when millions lost their lives in the Second World War. Yet those who deny climate change - every bit as real as the holocaust (and I include those who say they believe and understand it, but act otherwise, like Mark Carney) are being rewarded with top posts in government the world over, (perhaps nowhere more painfully evident than here in North America) and are actually busily engaging in behaviour that makes it worse. 

Perhaps it's time to treat climate-deniers in a manner similar to those who deny the holocaust!

After all, amid all this uncertainty over climate impacts, who knows which death toll will be greater in the longer term?

What do you think?

Please note the comment section below.

Glacier collapse caused Nepal’s deadly flash flood — a sign of things to come?

Journal nature

Global warming is making high-altitude regions unstable, and could trigger more frequent landslides and floods. Story here.

Oil and gas ambitions outshone caribou protection in Alberta

 Canada’s National Observer

Caribou flee for their lives to escape a large, industrial vehicle.
A Greenpeace photo.

Long-awaited plans to protect Alberta’s caribou ranges reflect a decade of lobbying efforts from the oil and gas industry, rather than the best available science for recovery of the threatened woodland caribou. Story here.

Canada's Federal Court clears way for youth climate lawsuit against federal government

Canada's National Observer

Young Canadians suing the federal government over its 2030 climate plan can proceed following a Federal Court judge’s rejection of a bid to dismiss the case. Story here. 

Soil Compaction a Major Concern for Farmers. Is it any Wonder?

                                  Source: Understanding Ag  

A tractor and air-seeder on a Manitoba farm. A PinP photo.

Soil compaction is climbing the list of concerns for dairy farmers, and a recent Iowa State survey backs that up: 80% of farmers polled are now worried about it, up sharply from a decade ago, as bigger equipment and shrinking fieldwork windows raise the stakes. Add in the billions of dollars extreme weather cost agriculture last year, and a broken water cycle gets expensive fast.                                            

Four years ago, the scientific journal, "The Conversation," revealed something startling. Entitled, "FarmVehicles Weigh almost as Much as the Heaviest Dinosaurs," its article describes why that's a problem, here.

Interview with former US Vice-President Al Gore on climate disaster

 

B.C.’s Militarized Wolf Cull is a Misguided Approach to a Complex Issue

The Conversation

While the government emphasizes predators’ effects on caribou, it glosses over the impact of human-caused habitat destruction. Details here.

The rise of end times fascism

The Guardian by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

Naomi Klein
The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them.
Story here.

IGNORE CLIMATE CHANGE & AI AT OUR PERIL

by Larry Powell

Chat GPT generated this image, representing AI. No humans are present. Author: Alenoach.

I see terrifying parallels between today's debate over AI & yesteryear's over climate change. More and more credible voices are coming forward to sound the alarm over what AI will very likely do to us. They SHOULD be taken seriously, especially coming as they are from the industry itself! But will they be? After all, alarms over climate change from our best scientists, sounded worldwide way back in the eighties were - with criminal negligence and malice aforethought - ignored. And look what we've ended up with! We've already passed the point of being able to stay within the Paris target of 1.5 degree C warming. I never thought I'd be saying this. But at least the AI moguls are warning us against the potential dangers of their own product. Oil industry execs on the other hand, being the devious cowards they are, lied and covered up theirs. (And continue to do so.) Could the price of ignoring these new ones be even worse? With monstrous, brainless idiots like Trump in charge (and also thanks to Canada's milk toast stance on the topic) no guardrails are in sight. So where does all this leave us? Guinea pigs in one gargantuan, twisted, grotesque "clinical trial," looks like, with "Big Brother" holding us in the palm of his hand.

A Must-See, in-Depth Video That Tells the Truth About Climate Change. PLEASE WATCH

 

Climate change past the point of no return, UN says, as worst impacts are now unavoidable

CBC  News

Global warming guaranteed to exceed 1.5 C limit and stay that way for 'many, many decades.' 

      The Thunderhill Lake Complex fire near the town of Flin Flon, Manitoba
last year.The town was evacuated & several
buildings nearby were destroyed.

Story here.

New Meta data centre could add up to $460 a year to Albertans’ electricity bills due to government policy

New Meta data centre could add up to $460 a year to Albertans' 

electricity bills due to government policy. Story here.

Alberta moves to stop data centres from using renewable energy

 Canada’s National Observer

Global Switch Data Centre at Canary Wharf, UK. Photo by 

Devokewater

Data centre developers in Alberta likely won't be able to use renewable energy like solar or wind to power their facilities — even if they want to. Story here. 

Lights! Camera! Action! Roll the Data Centre Sell Job!

The Tyee

Alberta Premier, Danielle Smith.

Notes on Premier Smith’s video attempt to reassure Albertans that AI tycoons are everybody’s friends. Story here.

Are Farming Practices Harming Farmers, too?

 by Larry Powell

A PinP image.

    Producers of cereal crops (wheat, oats and barley) are once again being plagued with serious fungal diseases. And the effects are being felt, not only in their fields, but in their wallets, too. 

    The headline in The Manitoba Co-Operator reads; "Western Canadian farmers fight heavy disease threat as harvest approaches. Cashflow reported to be a struggle as fungicide means extra expenses amid tight margins."

    This should come as no surprise. Norimitsu Onishi, The Times’s correspondent in Montreal, traveled to Umiujaq, Quebec, to report on the migration of beavers into Canada’s sub-Arctic. Drawn by a warming climate,Canada’s furry national symbols are colonizing new territory, evading Inuit hunters and reshaping the world they find. A study done in Saskatchewan by an international team of scientists (and published in 2009 in the European Journal of Agronomy) found "a persistent link" between the heavy use of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the popular herbicide, Roundup, and the serious, widespread and costly fungal disease, fusarium head blight (FHB) in cereals. 

    It should be noted that heavy rains this summer may well have played a role, as well. However the study's main author, Don Huber, Prof. emeritus at Perdue University (Indiana) believes, without glyphosate, the outbreaks would still not be as severe.    

    FHB is a significant disease, probably costing producers billions globally. It often slashes their revenues by downgrading their crops to "feed-grade"only. And it can be toxic to both livestock and humans. (The human form, known as fusariosis, is known as "an emerging infection that's difficult to treat.") 

    But the harm glyphosate probably does, does not end there. 

    A study by Italy's renowned Ramazzini Institute just a year or so ago, finds lab rats became riddled with cancers in multiple organs, even when fed glyphosate at levels considered safe by the European Union! 

    "These results provide robust evidence," the study concludes, "supporting the conclusion of the International Association for Research into Cancer (a branch of the World Health Organization) that there's sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity [of glyphosate] in experimental animals”.

    I believe world leaders need to immediately launch publicly funded, independent research to determine, once and for all, whether these findings are accurate, or not - then take immediate and appropriate action to protect the public. To do otherwise would mean they remain culpable for perhaps millions of deaths into the future.

The beavers are coming for Canada’s Arctic

 The New York Times

Beavers are turning streams into lakes near Umiujaq, Quebec,                                         disrupting ecosystems.