I woke an hour earlier than usual this morning to head off to the west-end of Edmonton to locate what now looks to be the last bastion of free parking in the city of Edmonton – Beulah Alliance Church. At eight blocks north of the West Edmonton Mall it was an easy find but a long drive as Edmontonians were caught, not just with their pants down, but with their all-season-radials in all-winter weather. I sought out this particular church amongst the plethora of other Albertan evangelical options not, however, for salvation or bake sales, but for a free bus that would take me to meet none other than Prime Minister Stephen Harper at, what was at the time, an ominous undisclosed location, where he would be speaking about an unnamed topic. Tantalized, I braved almost an hour in slushy gunk to get to the upper-middle class and mostly white riding of Conservative party member Rona Ambrose.
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The Federal Government is dipping into the Clean Energy Fund (CEF) and assisting the Alberta Government with the funding of two major projects (totalling over $1.6 Billion). Both of the projects make use of carbon-capture technology and stand to reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, in a manner which doesn’t simply transfer them to another country, thereby helping to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

Carbon capture essentially results in waste CO¬2 being pumped into the depleted aquifers and stored there, rather than emitting them into the environment. Many of the comments that I have heard are quite negative, and relate to the fact that this is a lot of money going into an unproven technology, making it important to note that carbon capture and storage is used in Egypt by BP.
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Global trade in carbon is a growing business with quadrupling in international carbon sales in 2006 at over $25B USD according to the World Bank. The New York Times presented carbon trading as one of the fastest growing trades, with companies scrambling to get a slice of a market now worth about $30 billion and could grow to $1 trillion within a decade. Carbon trading is the new big thing according to “In London’s Financial World”. Carbon will be the world’s biggest commodity market, and it could become the world’s biggest market over all, it added.

Alberta Climate Change and Emissions Management Act 2007, and British Columbia Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act or Cap and Trade Act, 2008, pave the way for industrial plants in these provinces, to take action to mitigate their carbon intensity, including buying of carbon credits to offset and meet their greenhouse gas emissions intensity target, thereby pioneering carbon trading in these provinces and Canada at large.
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Of no surprise to anyone, it is now being reported that Canada’s environmental inspector has found that much of the federal governments plan to save the planet from global warming was nothing more than lip service paid to the Canadian public.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s administration has rationed billions of taxpayers’ dollars for environmental initiatives. All of which promise to reduce Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions by 80 megatonnes, which is roughly 10% nationally.

However, Environment commissioner Scott Vaughn has given our fearless leader and his cronies less than favourable marks in a failing-grade report card released on February 5th.
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In what will surely become a political issue, at least for the Green Party of Canada, scientists now report that Canadian forests – the “lungs of the planet” – have become carbon dioxide emitters rather than sequestering this greenhouse gas.

These 1.2 million square miles of greenery gained their fame, and their name, by covering seven percent of the world’s surface and absorbing phenomenal quantities of carbon dioxide, whose atmospheric rise since the industrial revolution is believed to be causing climate change, also known as global warming.

With two cold winters in a row, the global warming camp is currently facing serious opposition. In spite of that, 66 percent of Canadians still feel climate change is a serious and growing threat to the habitability of the earth in general, and their beautiful country in particular.
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