Environmental Articles: 1) Red Hot October Almost Guarantees 2023 Will Be The Hottest Year On Record; 2)Electric-Vehicle Chargers Distributed Unequally In Canada, Environment Audit Finds; 2) Federal Emissions Reduction Plan Still Coming Up Short: Environment Commissioner
1) Red Hot October Almost Guarantees 2023 Will Be The Hottest Year On Record
“THE AMOUNT THAT WE’RE SMASHING RECORDS BY IS SHOCKING”
Courtesy of Barrie360.com and Canadian PressPublished: Nov 8th, 2023
Melina Walling, The Associated Press
This October was the hottest on record globally, 1.7 degrees Celsius (3.1 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the pre−industrial average for the month — and the fifth straight month with such a mark in what will now almost certainly be the warmest year ever recorded.
October was a whopping 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the previous record for the month in 2019, surprising even Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European climate agency that routinely publishes monthly bulletins observing global surface air and sea temperatures, among other data.
“The amount that we’re smashing records by is shocking,” Burgess said.
After the cumulative warming of these past several months, it’s virtually guaranteed that 2023 will be the hottest year on record, according to Copernicus.
Scientists monitor climate variables to gain an understanding of how our planet is evolving as a result of human−generated greenhouse gas emissions. A warmer planet means more extreme and intense weather events like severe drought or hurricanes that hold more water, said Peter Schlosser, vice president and vice provost of the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University. He is not involved with Copernicus.
“This is a clear sign that we are going into a climate regime that will have more impact on more people,” Schlosser said. “We better take this warning that we actually should have taken 50 years ago or more and draw the right conclusions.”
This year has been so exceptionally hot in part because oceans have been warming, which means they are doing less to counteract global warming than in the past. Historically, the ocean has absorbed as much as 90% of the excess heat from climate change, Burgess said. And in the midst of an El Nino, a natural climate cycle that temporarily warms parts of the ocean and drives weather changes around the world, more warming can be expected in the coming months, she added.
Schlosser said that means the world should expect more records to be broken as a result of that warming, but the question is whether they will come in smaller steps going forward. He added that the planet is already exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre−industrial times that the Paris agreement was aimed at capping, and that the planet hasn’t yet seen the full impact of that warming. Now, he, Burgess and other scientists say, the need for action — to stop planet−warming emissions — is urgent.
“It’s so much more expensive to keep burning these fossil fuels than it would be to stop doing it. That’s basically what it shows,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. “And of course, you don’t see that when you just look at the records being broken and not at the people and systems that are suffering, but that — that is what matters.”
2) Electric-Vehicle Chargers Distributed Unequally In Canada, Environment Audit Finds
Courtesy of Barrie360.comCanadian PressPublished: Nov 7th, 2023
Ottawa
A new audit of Canada’s national program to install charging stations for electric vehicles says it is too concentrated in a small number of provinces and has no data to show where the biggest gaps are.
Another report says the federal government has set lofty targets for converting its own vehicle fleets to electric, but the departments with the most vehicles are not making the transition fast enough.
Environment Commissioner Jerry DeMarco published the two reports today along with several other audits of Canada’s environment policies.
DeMarco says the Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program paid for nearly 34,000 charging ports as of last July, but almost nine in 10 were in Ontario, Quebec or British Columbia.
He also says the program isn’t monitoring how well the stations are operating after they are installed.
DeMarco says Canada wants eight in 10 of its federal fleet vehicles to be electric by 2030, but as of March 2022, only 586 of more than 17,000 vehicles had been replaced with electric models.
3) Federal Emissions Reduction Plan Still Coming Up Short: Environment Commissioner
Courtesy of Barrie360.com and Canadian PressPublished: Nov 7th, 2023
By Mia Rabson in Ottawa
The plan to enable Canada to reach its 2030 targets for greenhouse-gas emissions doesn’t quite measure up, the federal environment commissioner says in a new audit.
Jerry DeMarco did a deep dive into the government’s emissions reduction plan as part of a series of fall audits tabled Tuesday in the House of Commons.
The plan, published last year, is a requirement under the federal net-zero accountability law passed in 2021. It is supposed to lay out a road map for Canada to hit its emissions targets, including the next big one in 2030.
It’s “better than previous plans” but is still lacking in a number of ways, DeMarco said: Key policies have been delayed, it’s not clear how those that have been established will work and Canada remains several million tonnes short of its goal.
“The need to reverse the trend on Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions has grown only more pressing,” said DeMarco. “This is not my first time sounding the alarm, and I will continue to do so until Canada turns the tide.”
Canada’s 2030 target would require emissions levels that are 40 to 45 per cent lower than they were in 2005. That would require current emissions to be reduced by about one-third before the end of the decade.
The measures in the plan will only reduce current levels by about one-quarter by then, DeMarco said — and that’s using government modelling that lacks transparency and is based on what he called “overly optimistic assumptions.”
Those include a rosy view of how quickly some of the major policy pieces would be implemented, and fail to account for the impact of climate change in the meantime.
For example, the government’s modelling assumed there would be no new natural gas electricity plants without carbon-capture technology after 2023, because clean electricity regulations barring them would be in place.
But to date, those regulations have only been published in draft form, DeMarco said.
More than 80 policies and programs are listed in the plan, but fewer than half of them have a timetable for implementation, and only four have a specific target for cutting emissions, he added.
And even as some sectors are successfully cutting emissions, such as electricity production from the closure of coal-fired power plants, that progress is being swamped by increased emissions from higher oil and gas production, as well as transportation.
Overall emissions are about 14 per cent higher in 2021 than they were in 1990, but emissions from oil and gas production are up 89 per cent in that time frame.
“If they don’t get a handle on the total amount, there’s no way of meeting their target, which is a total amount,” he said. “It’s not just about getting more efficient at polluting, it’s about actually reducing the amount of greenhouse gas is being emitted.”
While all G7 countries, including Canada, have shown a decline in emissions since 2005, which is the baseline year for the 2030 target, Canada remains the worst performer on the list.
Emissions in Canada are down about eight per cent compared to 2005, while the reduction in the United Kingdom is about 40 per cent, 30 per cent in Italy, more than 20 per cent in both France and Germany, and about 15 per cent in both Japan and the United States.
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said he knows there is still a gap between the target and the policies necessary to get there.
“I agree with the commissioner, we need to do more,” he said. “We need to do it faster and that’s exactly what our government is doing.”
Guilbeault said the government is working on updating and improving its modelling so it can be more transparent in showing how it will reach the 2030 target.
He also said the government’s next progress report, which is due before the end of the year, will “have some good news to tell Canadians,” though he would not elaborate.
Patricia is the Business Mentor and owner of Grow Vantage and a Past President of the Barrie Chamber of Commerce. She applies over 30 years of business experience (from start-up to corporate) to mentor entrepreneurs. Since 2011, she has held over 6,500 coaching and training sessions in-person and online. Through Ask For Directions Training, her entrepreneurial training program (and parent company Grow Vantage), and as a business coach, she works with start-ups who are new (or who have lost traction) to design, launch and grow their businesses. Along with 20 other expert instructors she teaches strategies in marketing, sales, communications, and finance, as well as practical techniques to increase productivity, and manage their businesses. In other words, everything entrepreneurs need to learn to grow and run their businesses successfully, and avoid the costly mistakes they can't even see coming - that lead to delays in growth and getting stuck.
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