Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Edmonton, Canada is hosting an international “Cities and Climate Change” Conference, to give city government officials and politicians a chance to discuss what they would like to do about climate change.
Cities will drive action on climate change, Edmonton council told ahead of international conference
‘You’ve renewed my sense of urgency but also my sense of hope,’ Mayor Don Iveson says
By Natasha Riebe, CBC News Posted: Mar 02, 2018 8:24 PM MT
Cities will play an integral role in curbing climate change in the coming years, Edmonton councillors heard at a special meeting Friday ahead of hosting an international climate conference next week.
Electric buses, public transportation, energy efficient buildings and reducing garbage are some of the initiatives that will drive change, councillors heard.
Council called the special meeting to get ready for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s three-day Cities and Climate Change Science Conference beginning March 5, when about 800 delegates from around the world are expected to attend.
“This is a huge opportunity for not just Edmonton, but for Alberta and Canada, to show our commitment to the world,” Mayor Don Iveson said.
…
Despite endorsing the conference, the Edmonton Journal accuses local city officials of falling behind on climate action;
… About 10 years ago, Edmonton adopted targets to help mitigate climate change. But as the city’s population grew and costs blossomed, the council recoiled. As time went on, the city pulled back on buying carbon credits to support renewable energy and slowed down the replacement of LED street lights.
Mayor Don Iveson said Friday that cities such as Edmonton that have a higher carbon footprint will have to do more. …
The proliferation of increasingly pointless taxpayer funded climate conferences is showing no signs of slowing.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Edmonton, poster child of climate catastrophe: https://www.yourenvironment.ca/climate/alberta/edmonton.
Perhaps the Edmonton Oilers hockey team could use the Edmonton city council members for a bit of slap shot practice?
Edmonton Oilers? Should they not make a start by renaming the hockey team?
No. The Oilers hockey team should take turns re-educating the city council, using the traditional open ice ‘check’ that leaves their opponent prone on the ice wondering ‘What happened???’.
Catastrophic warming would be a boon to Canada, opening up millions of acres of fertile land to farming and making untold regions that are currently uninhabitable. Canada would become the US, and the US would become Mexico.
It sure is very Canadian of them to spend money to make it less likely to happen.
Before the US could become like Mexico, we would first need to import a lot of Mexicans. Oh wait …
This is one of the reasons I am happy to have left Edmonton 20 years ago. Back then it was unions and safety nuts. Now it is greenies. They keep electing these nutjobs.
Edmonton is one of the coldest, most Northern major cities is the world. Yet they are happy to [waste] their citizens’ money trying to prevent warming? The entire 1.4 million people there (0.02% of the worlds population), if they reduced their carbon emissions to 0, would have NO effect on the total global carbon emissions. And in Alberta, there is no way to significantly reduce our CO2 emissions anyway. LED bulbs and other efficiency improvements can have a small effect, but the big ones like hydro power generation or nuclear are not available. Hydro because of our geography; well nuclear could be used, but so far Albertans have shunned it. At our latitude, solar is a hopeless waist of time. Wind works OK in a small portion of the province near the US boarder, but will never be a major contributor to our power grid. The fact is, coal and natural gas will always be the main eclectic and heating energy sources (and EVs will have to use that electricity).
So they are spending millions of dollars in a hopeless attempt to make their (ridiculously) cold city even colder. One of the stupidest things you can imagine. And really, this applies to the entire country of Canada. The 2nd coldest country in the world is trying to prevent warming? Imagine how much more forest and farmland we could support with even a measly 2°C of warming.
Edmonton City council has no interest in CO2 or climate per se. They have a keen interest in virtue signalling in exactly the same way they have dealt with the land fill crisis of the 80s. A crisis is declared, they go through all of the think tank, symposia, focus group steps to give them the political grounds to raise taxes and fees, something Edmonton has never been shy about.
A few years ago there was a gathering which required a fairly significant amount of volunteer time and as broad a profile of citizens as they could manage. And some surveyor had the good fortune to locate ME! An actual living ,breathing climate skeptic!
” Do you agree that the climate is changing, but the human influence is insignificant? ”
Ok, I’ll play along. I’ll volunteer 12 evenings to sit and talk about what to do about climate change. Then I receive the materials… The first paragraph in the intro states something like, ” Human induced climate change has been shown to be a problem, and we are gathering to find steps toward a solution, yada yada yada.”
They were REALLY un-happy that I could not participate under this premise….. sigh.
They also refused to acknowledge that a skeptic might not want to play along.
As I mentioned, they pulled the same crap about landfill in the 80s. Edmontonians now pay more for garbage removal and waste treatment than any other North American City.
For the last 20 years or so, Edmonton city council has been significanly more progressive than the good citizens they claim to represent. As such, they have consistantly exceeded their mandate, and caused considerable damage through progressive fiats that always result in taxes and fees climbing beyond the means of many Edmontonians to pay.
Edmonton has quite a number of “Green” initiatives underway, right now. A vast expansion of light rail which will jam traffic like never before. Infill housing projects to vastly increase population density, and my personal beef, the closure of the city center airport, to make way for a green development which may never see completion,( and some of the hands in the pie are not so clean. )
So, we pander to the greens and and the good citizens pay, pay pay.
Here’s a thought: Stop organizing climate conferences that require fossil-fuel based transportation to get to the conference site as well as associated increased travel during the conference that requires more shuttling of people who do not drive their own cars. Stop using time and resources for conferencing, and start spending this time and resources on something immediately useful. Maybe I need to organize a conference on how to to THAT.
And if you are going to have those conferences, perhaps you need to re-think the logic of holding them in remote places, in the middle of a cold winter.
This from the mayor of Edmonton who just presided over the multi $$ billion dollar completion of the Anthony Henday Ring Road 6-8 lane Freeway around the city. Or is just in the works of getting approval for the billion dollar upgrade of the old Yellowhead Trail into a major Freeway through the middle of the city. Don’t get me wrong, this was and is great investment in infrastructure for Edmonton. Especially by a city who is the gateway to some of the largest oil reserves on the planet. But this is just free green advertising for the mayor and council for the dedicated hard core enviro’s who vote in Edmonton.
Edmonton has alway had a bit of a yellow civic city council, probably because historically Alberta, the Province, has been so Conservative. I suspect this is the same old tired signal virtue politics we see everywhere where it costs nothing to spout all this nonsense about somehow saving the planet from a fatal fever by cleaning up the city and promoting some public transportation. Which won’t really work well in a city the geographic size of Edmonton…Or worse Calgary, whose city has the highest land size per capita of any city in North America. You would be half a day taking the bus across Calgary.
I suspect this is more about 800 people showing up with cash in hand to attend the conference at the newish Shaw Convention Centre, and all the hotel rooms and restaurant business this will generate. A 3-4 day convention like this is worth millions to the city, so hard to fault them for accepting the business. Hopefully they get some common sense stuff approved like better traffic flow computer software. That would be a great start in reducing traffic congestion in a large city, and actually do something about all those idling vehicles stuck in traffic. That would actually be a huge success if they could actually get something like that done, and prove that better traffic flow could be done in every other large city on the planet saving countless hours wasted in traffic as well as wasted precious fossil fuels getting no where fast.
As usual with the CBC, comments are restricted on the story… Says it all.
It really is a special kind of stupid permeating Canadian politics these days.
It is -10C here right now. It looks like the temperatures will be 5 to 7 degrees below average through the conference. Why not turn the heat inside the building down to 5C and conserve energy? I bet the temperature is kept toasty warm for all the southern folks who come from warm climates.
You get this in the US, the UK, Australia and Canada.
The idea is twofold. That what people do locally can lower the nation’s emissions, and that what these nations do unilaterally can lower world emissions.
Both are false. The bulk of our per capita emissions are overhead. They are from things that we as individuals or cities cannot change. There is no such thing as a low emission city. Its part of a country, with malls, freeways, industry, armed forces… These can be changed by central government, but cities cannot have any real effect.
Then there is the problem that the countries themselves are doing very low percentages of world emissions. The UK for instance is well under 2%. The US is only doing about 14%. Canada, don’t know, but its going to be tiny. So these initiatives end up making tiny reductions if any in tiny proportions of global emissions.
And yet people claim this is in some way doing something about global emissions? Its mad.
The question to ask these guys is, have you invited Beijing and Shanghai and Mumbai to your conference? And if not, why not?
The result will be an embarrassed silence. Because it challenges the false narrative that this is all about the West making reductions. Same narrative as in Paris.
The question you have to ask the Green movement is simple: why do you continually advocate doing at great expense things which will make no difference to the supposed problem?
Inquiring minds really want to know. They suspect it cannot be because the Green movement is very concerned about the problem and looking for the best ways for the world to fix it.
More than anything else, what cities can do is undertake measurements in their vicinity to determine the extent and degree of their urban heat islands. Since, outside the U.S., the great majority of long-operating met stations are located in urban areas, their historical temperature records usually provide a highly biased, non-climatic depiction of long-term temperature changes. UHI-induced changes are then blithely projected to the countryside through “homogenization,” thereby corrupting estimates of global surface temperatures.
It is only by incisive comparison with (often non-existing) temperature records from the undeveloped countryside that reliable, site-specicfic compensations for UHI effects can be made. The usual practice of ignoring the essential problem, or of rationalizing it away via superficial global statistical arguments, merely perpetuates an illusory view of physical reality.
So they are all going to use fossil fuel to get to Edmonton to figure out how to not use fossil fuel while pretending to be able to control the climate . Forget all those natural variables that have been driving the climate for Billions of years LED bulbs will ensure a cool climate . Come on … Albertans aren’t you tired of this complete BS by now ?
Yes, Albertans are tired of this BS. But let’s talk about Vancouver, BC where they are planning on outlawing all Natural Gas utilized for home heating, water heating and even the kitchen range stove top for cooking. This has all the restaurant Chef’s outraged, obviously. So His Worship, Mayor Gregor Robertson and some of his city council states that ‘green’ gas from landfills will be allowed for cooking and perhaps even gas fireplaces.
But no ‘carbon’ based natural gas. If they tried this in Edmonton where -40 is the same in Fahrenheit as it is in Celsius, there would be heads rolling. The stupidity on the West coast of Kanada is well, just like Kalifornia, but on steroids. Never, ever, allow a leftist marxist or even a progressive liberal to run a city, as it will soon be taxed to death and mismanaged beyond belief.
As always MUNDUS VULT DECIPI…
There’s a lot of wishful thinking here if anyone believes there will be any rapid shift in Canadian cities toward electric buses, increased rapid transit, energy efficient buildings, and major garbage reduction, or Green initiatives in general. Most of that country is plagued by long, cold winters that often begin by mid-November and last well into March, so energy demand is quite intense for four months of the year. As a result, few Canadians are going to be willing to depend on alternates like wind and solar, which are best described as intermittent power sources. They expect easy and inexpensive access to light and heat in extreme conditions and aren’t particularly concerned about climate change when they experience two weeks at a time of below normal temperatures during those four months. That light and heat has been provided best by hydro power and natural gas and this scenario is likely to continue for well into the future.
I am very impressed with those 800 delegates enduring all the hardships of travelling by sailing ship, horseback or on foot and sacrificing so much time, just to get to this conference so they can inspire us to live the way they do.
It gets worse.
An Edmonton paper interviewed Katherine Hayhoe.
Then it gets even worse. Bill Nye is interviewed with Justin Trudeau.
And if it cannot get worse.barbie shows up in Edmonton.
And why would Edmonton be “replacing LED street lights”? And what would they be replacing them with?