As seen in The Daily Gleaner on October 30th, 2010.
I spend a lot of time talking to people who want to put solar panels or wind turbines on their homes to reduce their environmental impact. It is great to hear that so many people actually want to take action to reduce their personal footprint, but also reinforces the fact that we are lagging in our ability to adopt cost effective solutions first.
Let’s simplify things and say our goal is to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions – namely carbon dioxide. It is a task of diminishing returns.
The Gaia Project, a Fredericton-based charity providing sustainable engineering education programs to students, has been piloting a new sustainability program developed at several New Brunswick high schools.
I have been wanting to write about Lepreau for some time now, but the timing has never seemed quite right. We can’t pick up a newspaper without seeing how far over budget and behind schedule the project is. What I haven’t been seeing throughout all of this is anything putting the project into context.
The last few years have seen a dramatic increase in companies that market their environmental actions as a way to increase sales. The problem, however, is that many of those marketing activities are not backed up with real action. If they were, perhaps we’d be further ahead in dealing with our current environmental situation.
Saint John Mayor Ivan Court recently announced that he opposes the expansion of the Mackay Highway. This got me thinking - just what is the true cost of owning and operating a vehicle in Canada?
The past several months have provided a lively discussion on energy in New Brunswick, and regardless of your personal feelings on the subject it has ignited a conversation that has been long overdue in this province. Energy has never really been a dinner table conversation topic, but with a looming convergence of issues facing it, perhaps it is time it should be.
A recent McKinsey study estimated that employing profitable energy efficiency measures (i.e. measures that actually pay for themselves) in US homes could reduce energy consumption by 28 per cent by 2020.
The savings are likely to be similar for Canadian homes. Many of the changes are straightforward, cheap and effective, such as programmable thermostats, which were present in only 31 per cent of Canadian households in 2007.
Property taxes have gotten a lot of attention in this election campaign, and I wanted to add my voice to that debate from an environmental perspective.
For most people in New Brunswick, the idea of time-based pricing of electricity seems pretty foreign. We're used to a flat rate per kilowatt-hour for the electricity we use. However, just like any other product we use, the cost of generating that electricity varies quite dramatically based on how it was made - we just don't see it at our end.
Watt is a word most people have seen - from their electricity bills to the labels on many electrical appliances - but it is also a word that many of us don't have a good understanding of. We can't pick one up, like a kilogram; or walk one, like a kilometre.
We just have to trust that the light bulb we put into the light socket really does consume 60 watts of electricity. So what is a watt?
