… a Dipper supports it.
Click the above video ONCE to begin watching. If the video does not play, try clicking the link below.
Environment
I Love It When A Plan Comes Together
We all hate garbage. Some of us just want to deal with it better than others. But the hard work by some to change the views on how we handle our trash is paying off.
The corporation (Waste Management Inc.) wouldn’t budge. They worked every angle possible to move their plan of expanding the Carp Mountain (a garbage dump) forward. Then the city of Ottawa had it’s election.
And the new sheriff in town declared war on dump expansion.
A scant 6 months later, the plasma gasification pilot project is under way and the corporation feels competitors (like Plasco Energy Corp) nipping at their heals and Waste Management is now realizing that their lack of effort to be modern may end up costing them millions, if not billions, of dollars.
In a letter to council yesterday, the last holdout in the turnabout, Waste Management, has informed local politicians it’s withdrawing a proposal for the Carp dump and is coming back with something entirely new, with an emphasis on an energy-from-waste facility, more recycling and less of an emphasis on expanding the dump.
Sue Sherring’s article also points out the city councilors who deserve some credit.
Councillors, including the likes of West Carleton’s Eli El-Chantiry, Kanata’s Peggy Feltmate and Stittsville-Kanata West’s Shad Qadry have also played a role, and with their help, the taxpaying public found a way to voice discontent.
But there is one other person Sherring fails to recognize who may have played one of the most instrumental roles in all of this. Stittsville businessman Gilles Chasles, the man behind nodump.ca and one of the biggest advocates fighting the expansion of the dump.
I can just see Hannibal from the A-Team lighting up his cigar right now…
Mailbag
The following was sent to me by a friend and I just felt obligated to share.
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“Inconvenient Truth”, interesting we don’t see this on the evening news programs and the major newspapers .
LOOK OVER THE DESCRIPTIONS OF THE FOLLOWING TWO HOUSES AND SEE IF YOU CAN TELL WHICH BELONGS TO AN ENVIRONMENTALIST.
HOUSE # 1:
A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas. In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not in a northern or Midwestern “snow belt,” either. It’s in the South.
HOUSE # 2:
Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every “green” feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas, and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.
HOUSE # 1 (20 room energy guzzling mansion) is outside of Nashville, Tennessee. It is the abode of that renowned environmentalist (and filmmaker) Al Gore.
HOUSE # 2 (model eco-friendly house) is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas. Also known as “the Texas White House,” it is the private residence of the President of the United States , George W. Bush.
H/T to Frank C. in Ottawa for sharing this one.
EcoTrust Is A Made In Canada Approach To The Environment
In the past week, Stephen Harper has gone on a cross country tour making several announcements pertaining to the EcoTrust spending that is a “Made In Canada” approach to reducing green house gases, while at the same time working towards providing cleaner energy.
Coal fired plants to be taken offline in Ontario via Hydroelectricity piped in from Manitoba. Cleaner mass transit to the outskirts of Toronto. Hydrogen power programs in B.C.
The Liberals are claiming these programs were their ideas and that they were ready to fund them or they had indeed earmarked money to fund them. The Liberals are even stating they were going to give more to these environmental programs.
What’s funny is Stephen Harper did not have to “earmark” money for these, or even do any serious number crunching or increase taxes to accommodate these “Made In Canada” programs.
All he had to do was turn off the Kyoto payments to China and divert the funds. Something the Liberals were not ready to do. Of course, the Liberals were going to put an extra $3 to $5 Billion into the environment. They just don’t tell you that this was going to Maurice Strong’s China via a dog of a program named Kyoto. (on that note, I have to plug a friend’s blog, A Dog Named Kyoto. The name is quite fitting.)
How simple was this solution for the Conservatives? How awesome was this solution for Canadians? We get our cake (programs) and we get to eat it too (no higher taxes to do it).
First slice goes to Rona Ambrose for holding the fort.
Giving Students An Equal Perspective On Global Warming
Calling all sane people!!
For all of you who are up for an equal perspective education, I have made it easy for you to email all the current education ministers in the nation and ask them to show the British Channel 4 movie, The Great Global Warming Swindle to all students that were shown Al Gore’s Convenient Lie.
This would give the students two perspectives of the global warming debate and let them see what both sides have to say. Considering the global warming debate is so controversial, this would the right thing to do.
You can easily send this email with your own email program by clicking the link below.
I also encourage any other bloggers out there to include similar code on their website.
If you are interested, the following list outlines who is emailed via the link above.
British Columbia: Shirley Bond (Prince George-Mount Robson)
Alberta: Ron Liepert (Calgary West)
Saskatchewan: Pat Atkinson (Saskatoon Nutana)
Manitoba: Peter Bjornson (Gimli)
Ontario: Kathleen O. Wynne (Don Valley West)
Quebec: Jean-Marc Fournier (Chateauguay) (he was the last education minister before the election call
New Brunswick: Kelly Lamrock (Fredrickton-Fort Nashwaak)
Newfoundland and Labrador: Joan Burke (St. George’s-Stephenville East)
Prince Edward Island: Mildred A. Dover (Tracadie-Fort Augustus)
Nova Scotia: Karen Casey (Colchester North)
Yukon: Patrick Rouble (Southern Lakes)
Nunavut: Ed Picco (Iqualuit East)
Northwest Territories: Charles Dent (Frame Lake)
The Great Global Warming Swindle
I think many of you know my feelings about climate change. If not, my view is that climate changing is called “weather”. It occurs daily, it occurs weekly, it occurs seasonally, it occurs annually, and if you take it out far enough it occurs on the scale of thousands or tens of thousands of years.
There will never be the Tsunami because ice melts. There will never be a Tsunami because of the expansion of ocean water. There will never be a desert forming in a day or a week.
If you took the time to watch Al Gore’s Mockumentary, An Inconvenient Truth, then you really owe it to yourself to watch The Great Global Warming Swindle.
You will be shocked at some of the things Al Gore and his movie fail to discuss.
One item that sticks out clearly is the fact that numerous scientists have chosen to leave the IPCC and asked to have their names removed from the report. But barring the threat of legal action, the IPCC feels people who provided input, whether supportive or contradictive, are part of the committee, and as such should be listed.
Another point that really makes you think twice are some comments made right at the end of this documentary. They are based on the fact that we are now pushing the most expensive (wind and solar) energies on the underdeveloped third world. It actually brought a tear to my eye thinking of people with no electricity because we are not letting them burn coal or oil. When you think of American Democrats, you think of people who are supposed to fight for the rights of the underprivileged. Yet it is abundantly clear that Climate Change snake oil salesmen like Gore are out to keep the Third World in the dark.
I urge everyone to watch this movie and share it with friends.
H/T to A Dog Named Kyoto and a warm heart felt thank you to the BBC Channel 4. Click the play button below to watch the 75 minute show. It is well worth the time.
Places Al Gore And David Suzuki Won't Lick A Fence Post
So far, February 2007 is the coldest in more than 70 years
Despite the recent string of above normal readings, this month (February 2007) is averaging only 13.5° making it the 6th coldest February on record here since 1871 and the coldest February in nearly three decades.
– WGN Weather Center Blog
Coldest Russian Winter in Generation Kills Homeless, Drunks
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Moscow’s coldest spell in 26 years brought out the quirkiest in the Russian character with one animal trainer feeding an elephant a bucket of vodka to warm it up — only to watch the drunken beast set about wrecking the central heating system.
The milder weather will probably mean that this month will not end as one of the two or three coldest Februarys on record, but it’s not likely that the upcoming milder weather will be enough to keep the month from ending below normal in temperature.
David Suzuki Foundation Hides Poll Results
Their was a poll on the David Suzuki Foundation website that I blogged about here.
As of mid day Sunday, they had removed this poll from their site and the speculation is that the results did not match what their site supports. As Steve Janke points out, for a scientist like Suzuki to not show results that don’t match his expectations is, simply put, a sin against science.
The image below is the results as of 5:50 am EST Monday March 5th.
What I especially like is that the code can be put on other sites. So I urge you all to continue voting if you have not voted already.
H/T to Neo at Halls of Macadamia
Carbon Offsetters Fooling Themselves And Us
When the Tories released their Clean Air act, the biggest shot across the bow that the other parties made had to do with the reduction of green house gases with targets going out to 2050.
Well Lorrie Goldstein has done a bit of very smart math that may make people like Elizabeth May head for a washcloth to wipe the egg off their faces.
“Green” celebrities often claim to reduce their carbon imprint to zero when flying around the world by buying “carbon offsets”. One popular way of doing this is by planting trees.
Let’s do the math. It takes 15 trees 40 to 50 years to absorb five tons of carbon.
A return flight from Toronto to Vancouver injects 5.4 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per passenger. Carbon dioxide takes 50 to 200 years to dissipate naturally.
Therefore, to absorb most of the carbon dioxide caused by one passenger taking one domestic round-trip flight across Canada in 2007, requires planting 15 trees today that won’t complete the job until, assuming none is destroyed by fire, disease or insects. If they are, they’ll release their carbon back into the atmosphere.
(bolded emphasis mine)
This is one of those tidy little facts you keep in your pocket for when an environmentalist complains about the Tory play taking 45 years to reach fruition.
And if you happen to be one of those who believes that offsetting is a good plan then I highly urge you save your soul by taking part in my very own OfficiallyScrewed Offsetting Program.
Get Out The Vote
I think there could be more categories in this poll, but I think the fourth choice is the closest to my view.
I wonder if David Suzuki would change his view if no one cared. I find it quite a relief to see no one cares for carbon credit programs. That’s a big sigh of relief.
Go vote!!
H/T to Kate at SDA
ADDENDUM: I love the internet. I went to bed last night at 11:30 shortly after posting this, and the blogosphere has reacted dramatically to Kate’s call for a vote. It is now about 5:50 am, a mere 6 and a half hours later and the poll results are below. Quite a dramatic jump in the fourth answer!!
