Carbon Capture? Map Gambling with the Future?
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Choosing a Low Carbon Car • Can Nuclear Save the World? Environmental News from BC and the World November/December 2009 Newstand Price $4.50 101 Solutions FREE Dauncey on Climate Climate Impact Carbon Capture? Map Gambling with the future? Pulp Mill Pork Barrelling Managing the Commons The Achilles Heel of Incineration Vol 19 No 5 ISSN 1188-360X THE MAPPING CENTRE A Social Enterprise of Project Watershed Maps Training GIS & GPS Services Equipment We put your ideas on the map! Rental maps.projectwatershed.bc.ca wilderness &wildlife matters Purchase a Wilderness Committee calendar and be part of our campaigns to protect threatened wilderness and wildlife. To buy call 604-683-8220 today or check our online store CANADA`S ENDANGERED WILDERNESS There’s a full line of beautiful greeting cards, books and 2009 CANADIAN GOLD AWARD MOST PROGRESSIVE posters to view online! ENVIRONMENTAL PRINTING PROJECT Print Action Canada 2010 CALENDAR Only $15.95 Bulk orders available! wildernesscommittee.org WatersheD seNtiNel November-December 2009 Watershed Sentinel November-December 2009 The Land 6 Back Country Wreckreation Why BC needs all terrain vehicle licensing and regulation to help protect the wilderness Energy & Climate 7 Four Degrees of Devastation Four degrees of warming would be hotter than any time in the last 30 million years, and it could happen as soon as 2060 to 2070 14 101 Solutions A short excerpt from Guy Dauncey’s new book on solutions to the climate challenge News & Regular 16 Climate Impact Map 4 Letters 23 Books The British map of the multiple impacts of a global temperature rise of four degrees 3,5 News Briefs, also 15 18 Flat Screen TVs 20 MillWatch on greed and black liquor 19 9 Tips for Greener Electronics 32 Wild Times 24 Desperate Times, Desperate Measures Joe Foy on beach seine fishery and wild salmon Canadian taxpayers are putting $1.6 billion into a Printed on 100% recycled process chlorine-free paper, (minimum carbon capture and sequestration experiment 40% post consumer) with vegetable inks. Cover printed on 100% post-consumer recycled process chlorine free coated paper. Society & Technology 8 Incinerators: The Next Generation Waste-to-energy incinerators are back, with Not a dozens of new proposals around the world. Subscriber Author Joyce Nelson examines the business model, in the first of a three part series Yet? Check out our 12 Tragedy of the Commons? special gift Garrett Hardin was wrong about the inability to calendar and manage common resources for sustainability, and subscription now we know the design features community offer! management need 32 28 Status of Nuclear Reactors Today Cover painting: Carbon Victims, Far from providing more electricity, it is going to October, 2009 be a struggle to keep the ones we have going by garcilazo (after Banksy) Water Cover Design: 11 MTBE Ester Strijbos When good fuel additives go bad 12 November-December 2009 GUEST EDITORIAL A Terrible Ambivalence Watershed “….We are not going to have a future better than the present: not in our lifetimes, and not in those of our grandchildren’s grandchildren. We collectively Sentinel closed the door on that possibility decades ago, and none of the rapidly narrow- Editor Delores Broten ing range of choices still open to us now offers any way of changing that…Once Publisher Watershed Sentinel a car goes skidding off a mountain road into empty air, it requires neither a Educational Society crystal ball nor a faith in predestination to recognize that nothing anybody can Associate Editor Don Malcolm Graphic Design Ester Strijbos do is going to prevent a terrific crash. Circulation Susan MacVittie “It’s nonsense to claim, as some inevitably do, that this realization makes Advertising Pieter Vorster taking action pointless. Our efforts, given hard work, wisdom, and a substantial dollop of luck, may well succeed in making the future less difficult than it will Special Thanks to Arthur Caldicott, Hugh McNab, Sue Fox, Gloria Jorg, otherwise be.…During the age that is coming to an end, the billion or so of us Norberto Rodriguez de la Vega, Anna who have lived in the industrial world have enjoyed comforts and opportunities Tilman, Mike Morrell, Maggie Paquet, that our species had never known before and almost certainly will never know Clara Broten, Kathy Smail, Ray Wool- again. Those could never have been anything but temporary, they were distrib- lam, the writers, advertisers, distribu- uted no more fairly than anything else passed around by human hands, and a tors, and all who send information, wiser species would likely have had more common sense than to launch itself photos, and ideas. on the trajectory we followed, but it’s as distorting to dismiss the extraordi- Published five times per year nary achievements of our age as it would be to ignore the terrible cost for those Subscriptions $25 one year, achievements that will be paid by us and our descendants. $40 two years Canada, $35 US one year “So many of us want things all one way or the other, all good or all evil, Electronic only $15 a year without the terrible ambivalence that pulses through all things human as ines- Distribution by subscription, and to capably as blood. So many of us want to see today’s civilization as humanity’s members of Friends of Cortes Island only hope or as ecocide incarnate, and long for a future that will be either the and Reach for Unbleached! Free at apotheosis or the final refutation of the present. It’s far less popular, and argu- Vancouver Island and Vancouver area ably far more difficult, to embrace that ambivalence and accept both the wonder libraries, in BC colleges and universi- ties, and to sponsoring organizations. and the immense tragedy of our time. Still, it seems to me that if we are to face up to the challenges of the future that’s bearing down on us, that difficult reali- Member BC Association of Magazine Publishers and Magazines Canada zation is an essential starting point.” ISSN 1188-360X John Michael Greer, September 2009, For photocopy reproduction rights, contact http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com CANCOPY, 6 Adelaide St. E., Ste. 900, Toronto, Ontario M5C 1H6 In this humanity Publication Mail Canada Post Agreement PM 40012720 In this humanity, In which we all live, We are all A part of each other. What a wonderful world Return Undeliverable Canadian Addresses We will inherit, to: Watershed Sentinel When we recognize ourselves Box 1270, Comox When we meet. Don Malcolm, 2009 BC, Canada V9M 7Z8 Ph: 250-339-6117 When you Want your message to reach thousands of Email [email protected] concerned and active readers, please contact us for http://www.watershedsentinel.ca our rate sheet and media kit at Disclaimer: opinions published are not , necessarily those of the publisher, editor or [email protected] or phone our office at other staff and volunteers of the magazine. 1-250-339-6117 or see www.watershedsentinel.ca WatersheD seNtiNel November-December 2009 NEWS encapsulating curcumin and fed them to laboratory rats. Encapsulating Association found one genetically more than quadrupled absorption of modified seed out of every 10,000. curcumin, and also boosted antioxi- The GM flax has been illegal dant levels in the blood. The encapsu- to grow in Canada since 2001 when lating process could be an answer to flax growers forced the government the problem of increasing curcumin’s to take the product off the market to absorption in the digestive environ- protect their export markets. How the ment of the gastrointestinal tract, they GM flax got into the crop this year is suggest. a mystery. —American Chemical Society, —Globe & Mail, October 27, 2009 November 4, 2009 Tamiflu Found In Water Results from water treatment plants in Japan have found Tamiflu, the most important flu-fighting drug, in its active form in every sample. Round-Up Ready Beets River residues showed lower amounts. In September, a US federal judge The test was not conducted during a overturned approval of a sugar beet pandemic, when Tamiflu prescription genetically engineered to resist Mon- rates might be 10 times higher. santo’s Roundup. Noting that pollen Scientists from Kyoto University from genetically altered sugar beets are concerned that ducks and other could be blown by the wind long dis- water birds, which are natural influ- Talcum Powder Linked tances to related crops, such as chard enza carriers, may develop and spread to Ovarian Cancer and table beets, the judge ordered Tamiflu-resistant strains of seasonal The US Cancer Prevention Coali- an environmental impact statement and avian flu, although not H1N1, tion warns that genital talc dust- examining the issue. which bypasses birds. ing is a dangerous, but avoidable, A similar ruling in 2007 forced —Science News, September 30, 2009 cause of ovarian cancer. Since 1992, a ban on planting Roundup Ready over a dozen major scientific articles alfalfa until a re-examination was Curry-cure? documenting the link between talc done. That environmental impact Scientists are reporting, in the and ovarian cancer have appeared in statement is not yet done. Journal of Agricultural and Food leading medical journals. The cap- The plaintiff, an organic farmer, Chemistry, the development of a nano- stone of research against talc came says steps were taken to keep similar size capsule that boosts the body’s in 2003 when the journal, Antican- crops apart to prevent cross-pollina- uptake of curcumin, an ingredient in cer Research, published a large scale tion, but Roundup Ready seed grow- yellow curry now being evaluated in review of 16 previous published ers would not divulge which fields clinical trials for treatment of several studies which found a 33 percent were growing genetically altered diseases.