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November 14, 2018
November 13, 2018
November 12, 2018
Too Many Polar Bears or … Can We Shoot More?
Too Many Polar Bears … or killing 600 a year isn’t keepin the numbers in check … or The Inuit want to sell more hides.
There are too many polar bears in parts of Nunavut and climate change hasn’t yet affected any of them, says a draft management plan from the territorial government that contradicts much of conventional scientific thinking.
The proposed plan — which is to go to public hearings in Iqaluit on Tuesday — says that growing bear numbers are increasingly jeopardizing public safety and it’s time Inuit knowledge drove management policy.
“Inuit believe there are now so many bears that public safety has become a major concern,” says the document, the result of four years of study and public consultation.
“Public safety concerns, combined with the effects of polar bears on other species, suggest that in many Nunavut communities, the polar bear may have exceeded the co-existence threshold.”
Polar bears killed two Inuit last summer.
The plan leans heavily on Inuit knowledge, which yields population estimates higher than those suggested by western science for almost all of the 13 included bear populations.
Scientists say only one population of bears is growing; Inuit say there are nine. Environment Canada says four populations are shrinking; Inuit say none are.
Read the rest.
November 11, 2018
November 10, 2018
Biomass : Accounting Fiction / Accounting Fraud
The big fraud:
It takes more than 30 tractor-trailer loads of wood a day to feed Nova Scotia Power’s Port Hawkesbury biomass plant when it’s running.
But according to the province’s new cap-and-trade carbon-pricing plan, nothing comes out of the facility’s stacks.
The plan classifies biomass as a carbon-neutral way to create electricity or heat.
The province is taking its cue from federal government policy, along with that of the United States and European Union.
All are attempting to meet promises they made at a much-touted 2015 summit in Paris to reduce carbon emissions to a level that would ideally slow global warming.
The problem is that a tremendous amount of greenhouse gases come out of a biomass plant – often more per unit of electricity than if you’d burned coal.
“It’s an accounting fiction,” John Sterman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s System Dynamics Group, said of the carbon neutrality of biomass.
“I’d go so far as to call it an accounting fraud.”
Last January, Sterman released a model for analyzing the life-cycle carbon emission of biomass.
He joined a chorus of scientists warning that in the rush to be seen to be doing something to reduce carbon emissions by subsidizing biomass, the western world will actually make them worse.
Read the rest …
