by Susan MacVittie

It seems that the brighter colours and sharper images that flat screen TVs offer come at a price. They are electricity hogs.

LCD (liquid crystal display) TVs, which account for 90% of the four million TVs purchased in California each year, consume 43% more energy on average than the older cathode ray tube TVs (CRTs), while plasma TVs use three times as much. A 60-inch plasma TV uses more power in a few hours than the largest residential refrigerator running 24 hours.

by Joyce Nelson

Across Canada, the US, the UK, Europe, and Asia, communities are facing an unprecedented onslaught of proposals for new incinerators. In July 2008, Friends of the Earth released a map showing dozens of planned new incinerator sites across the UK. The British government has committed billions to new incineration, while cutting budgets for recycling by 30 per cent.

Germany, which already has such an over-capacity of incineration that it imports millions of tonnes of garbage each year to feed its maw, is nonetheless planning 100 new incinerators. The Germany waste-disposal industry is lobbying fiercely to get the government out of regulating the sector.

by Anna Tilman

Reality Check

The nuclear energy industry has a dream of a new renaissance - but their dream could be our nightmare. Already there are large quantities of long-lasting highly radioactive waste at reactor sites sitting in cooling pools of water with nowhere to go. A nuclear renaissance would only make this desperate problem even worse.

Despite all the reports about leaks, shutdowns (temporary and long-term), construction woes, and financial costs, nuclear power proponents continue to portray it as safe, reliable and cheap. Worst of all, they portray it as the solution for climate change.

by Stephen Leahy

North Carolina's Scot Quaranda is terrified that the southern United States plans on becoming the Saudi Arabia of biomass. But isn't biomass a renewable source of clean and green energy?

"Not when you're burning trees," says Quaranda, the Communications Director of the Dogwood Alliance, a coalition of 70 citizens' organizations trying to prevent the South's remaining forests from being turned into tree plantations. Some 102 biomass/biofuel facilities are currently being built or planned in the region. A single facility could require millions of tons of biomass, mostly wood chips grown on the fast-growing loblolly pine plantations that already blanket the southern states from the Carolinas to Arkansas.

No one seriously argues that tree plantations have anything like the biodiversity, ecological function or spiritual essence of natural forests, be they first or even second growth, but have they reduced pressures on old growth forests?

This series of articles, "The Yellowcake Trail," tracks all aspects of uranium in Canada from the mining and milling, to processing and use, throughout its eighty-year history. The series begins with the history of uranium in Canada, from its initial discovery to the rapid development of mines that placed Canada as the prominent world leader in uranium production. Each mine has a story and each story has a common thread and legacy.

On the Yellowcake Trail

by Anna Tilman

Click here to download a large jpg of the map 

Click here to download the expanded and footnoted version of this text (Word doc)

Yellowcake is the bright yellow uranium powder produced when raw uranium ore is crushed and purified. It is actually a mixture of uranium oxides, mostly U3O8 (urania), and ranges in colour from yellow to orange to dark green. It is this yellowcake that is packaged in steel drums, traded and sent across the world to be further proc­essed, converted to different forms, enriched and used in the manufacture of nuclear fuel or bombs.

by Arthur Caldicott

Since 2000, BC Hydro has received dozens of small hydroelec­tric generation proposals. Fourteen are now producing elec­tricity. BC Hydro has signed Electricity Purchase Agreements (EPAs) with about sixty of them, totaling nearly 1500 megawatts (MW) of generating capacity, about an eighth of all provincial gen­eration. And there are many more proposals to come.

The largest small hydro plant in service so far is Rutherford Creek, just south of Pemberton, capable of generating 50 MW. The largest project is Plutonic's East Toba River and Montrose Creek Hy­droelectric Project, consisting of two interconnected hydro plants totalling 196 MW. On the micro-hydro end of the small hydro scale are numerous schemes under 10 MW. The smallest, at only 0.2 MW, is also the cleverest, West Vancouver's Eagle Lake. These are not the massive dam and reservoir projects of BC's "heritage" systems such as the G.M. Shrum generating station where the Peace River now begins, capable of pumping out more than 2700 MW at full throttle - by itself a quarter of BC's capacity.

by Barry Saxifrage

Almost all the energy we use to build the "good life" comes from fossil fuels, gas, oil and coal. But now that same fossil fuel use is tearing our good life apart. We can’t have both anymore. Time’s up: we have to choose now. We can promptly and purposefully create a new version of the good life without fossil fuels…or we can continue aimlessly into collective misery.

Fossil fuel emissions drive climate change and ocean acidification. Together they are inflicting thousands of cuts on our web of life. All 6.5 billion of us rely on this web for food, water, shelter, resources, health, jobs, security and plain old fun. Parts of the web are collapsing. According to top climate scientists, we’ve already emitted too much carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels. Unless North Americans seriously cut our emissions now, it may be too late.

At the same time, our oil demands now outpace supply. The rocketing increase in oil prices is eroding capital, jobs, lifestyles, and even access to food, heat, and shelter, in BC and worldwide. Top economists say that without massive preparation, peak oil will cause economic disaster.

by Susan MacVittie

Melamine

The nitrogen-rich industrial chemical was added to watered-down milk to mask the resulting protein deficiency and fool quality tests.

Offshore outsourcing has been a boon to the modern globalized economy, but regulating what happens in a factory half way across the world is difficult and - as in the recent case of the melamine scandal in China – can be deadly business.
Since September, well-known brands such as Cadbury and Nestle have been pulling stock from shelves in Asia. Melamine-laced baby formula and other dairy products in China are blamed for sickening nearly 54,000 children and leading to four infant deaths. The nitrogen-rich industrial chemical was added to watered-down milk to mask the resulting protein deficiency and fool quality tests.

by Will Horter

Scandal is not new to the private forest lands on Vancouver Island

Fortunes have been made – and are being made – by resource companies that benefit from sweetheart deals that privatize vast tracts of land in BC. A select few, with the right government connections, reap the benefits. The public, especially First Nations, pay the price. The BC government’s recent decision to privatize 28,000 hectares of forestlands previously in Western Forest Products (WFP) tree farm licences (TFL) is only the latest scandal in a sordid history that traces back to BC’s entry into the Canadian Confederation.

Few British Columbians are aware that a land privatization deal was written into the Terms of Union when BC joined Canada in 1871. As forester Ray Travers points out, “Clause 11 of the Terms of Union conveyed in trust to the federal government, provincial lands along the entire length of the railway across BC, some that later became the Esquimalt and Nanaimo (E&N) land grant on southeastern Vancouver Island.”

by Arthur Caldicott

Some commendable steps but all those flights don’t get counted