Time to crunch numbers on carbon footprints

The Canadian Press explores the benefits of using a carbon calculator to monitor and reduce carbon footprints. 

Full Story [The London Free Press]

Eco-friendly? Canadians want to see the proof

A new survey finds that Canadians want better labelling for products touted as “green,” “organic” or “low emission.”

Full Story [The Globe and Mail]

Five Things Humans Can Do to Help Polar Bears

To commemorate the Year of the Polar Bear, Polar Bear International is urging individuals to reduce their carbon emissions and energy use. 

Full Story [CNW Group]

Vancouverite wins Greenest Canadian

Twenty-two year old Emily Jubenvill of Vancouver is the Canadian winner of the Greenest Person on the Planet contest. An overall winner of the contest, created by a professor at Simon Fraser University, will be announced in September. 

Full Story [The Province]

Windsor drivers are the most gas-guzzling in Canada

According to a new study by DesRosiers Automotive Consultants, residents in Windsor drive more energy inefficient cars and SUVs than any other city in Canada. 

Full Story [The Windsor Star]

Living off the grid: ‘It was like camping at home’

The National Post profiles a Quebec couple that lived without driving and using electricity for a month and only bought food grown within a 100-kilometre radius of their home.

Full Story [National Post]

Prowling the Pumps – July 29, 2008

On the case, lurking at service stations across the country to find the lowest and highest gasoline prices in Canada.

Average across Canada

The average price of gasoline in Canada rose by 0.5¢ per litre. The end of the slide? Probably not. A technical correction? Maybe. A significant event. Definitely not. The cost of our hypothetical 80-litre gas tank only rose 40¢ over the past week. And even that may be a blip.

Least Expensive Gasoline in Canada (per litre)

Again, Ontario places four cities in the low-cost five versus Alberta with one. With the summer driving season now in full swing, Canada’s most populous province benefits from the large quantities of gasoline sold compared to other Canadian markets.

Most Expensive Gasoline in Canada (per litre)

For the second week in a row, Quebec has been shut out of the pricey five. Probably no crying there. British Columbia places two cities in the pricey five as it did last week. The B.C. carbon tax of 2.4¢ per litre initiated July 1, 2008 is not the culprit here. Even without the tax, Victoria and Fort St. John would still among the five most expensive Canadian cities in which to buy gasoline.

Tuesday, oil was trading as low as $118.60 US per barrel, closing at $119.17. That’s a $28.67 US per barrel slide since crude trading peaked at $147.27 on July 11. Slowing economies have reduced demand for petroleum products and consumers are opting for less expensive means of travel – public transit, more fuel-efficient personal vehicles and car co-ops. One analyst summed it up by saying that the market was focusing more on supply and demand and less on geopolitical and weather-induced factors. What a concept!
We’ll see what happens next week.

Under the sea

In early July, Alberta’s government announced billions of dollars in funding for carbon sequestration, potentially trapping the province’s millions of tonnes of annual greenhouse emissions in abandoned oil wells or coal seams (4.9 MB PDF). One of the dangers in these kinds of projects, some say, is that the gas could leak, causing a disastrous dispersion of oxygen (“outgassing”) and, therefore, suffocating any animals or humans nearby. Sequestration projects’ costs, often government subsidized, are also a bone of contention.

But for landlocked prairie province like Alberta, there’s nowhere to go but into the ground when it comes to burying emissions. Likewise, most research money is currently being directed toward land-based storage. But for those with access to the ocean the options could go much, much deeper.

Researchers at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have published a paper titled “Carbon dioxide sequestration in deep-sea basalt” (1.6 MB PDF) suggesting that porous volcanic rocks off the coast of Vancouver Island could be used to contain gigatonnes of greenhouse gas, enough to offset almost 150 years of US CO2 emissions. These formations of basalt, 2,700 metres below sea level and about 160 kilometres away from shore, would be able to absorb the gas in their pores, eventually forming “solid carbonate.” Any gas not absorbed by the rock, say the researchers, would simply remain contained below water, which is lighter than the gas.

Unlike land-based sequestration, the undersea storage proposed in the paper still just conceptual. The paper notes that the next step would be a pilot project to test injection and the resulting effects on the surrounding water, as well as the viability of transporting billions of tonnes of CO2 out into the ocean. But as places like Alberta begin to look at storing their greenhouse gas emissions, often plugging emissions back into the same sites that produced the fuel releasing them, the sea may eventually be an attractive alternative.

Pushing animals to higher ground

While as human beings we’re doing our best to conserve energy by turning our thermostats down, the world is full of organisms without the same luxury. For them, rising temperatures represent fundamental shifts in their native ecosystems, ecosystems their bodies have been specifically adapted for. Not to mention the difficulty of removing a fur coat that’s attached to your body.

As consumers, we can reduce the effects of climate change to a point, retrofitting our homes to use energy more efficiently, cutting back on our vehicle use and even changing the way we go camping. But for those wit an eye to more drastic changes, there’s also a proposal that would see us actively assisting our distant biological relatives in a very literal way.

By looking at the logistics of literally moving populations of affected animals, Professor Chris Thomas and other researchers are confronting the dilemma of changing climates and intransigent animals head-on, suggesting that they might need to be moved to stave off the worst effects of a changing climate. But best intentions might not be enough, with the article, “Assisted Colonization and Rapid Climate Change,” suggesting that, for some species, the task would simply be too large. Instead, the paper looks to captive breeding programs, small relocation sites and even frozen egg samples as a way of preserving these delicately balanced species.

But not every organism on the planet is staying put.

Among the organisms already moving is an unlikely class of migrants — trees. With the mobility of their reproductive cycle allowing their seeds to blow up, below or beyond the areas affected by changing climates, trees are shifting with a natural drive that their animal counterparts can’t always “reproduce.” And so long as neither trees or their ground-bound animal friends are able to adjust the global thermostat, it might be time to get while the getting’s good.

Fuel cell cars at least 15 years away at best: Study

The U.S. National Research Council predicts that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will only account for less than one per cent of vehicles on U.S. roads by 2020.

Full Story [National Post]

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