SaskPower’s 2016-17 annual report, released last summer, states, “We will see our emissions profile rise slightly until 2020.”
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Tag Archives: environment
Husky Might Be Fined
Husky has only been charged now by the Crown, for a spill nearly 2 years ago. Federal charges may be pending too. The provincial charges carry a possible fine of only $1M. Great deal for an oil company, to operate and ruin the water supply of Saskatchewan’s 3 largest city and many other people too.
A report from the province is being delayed until after a possible appeal, making it many years since the spill until others can learn important details and possibly solutions.
Here’s a blog post from way back about the spill.
Don’t Make It Sound Like There’s More Than One Thing
“recognize its own climate change efforts, such as carbon capture and storage. ”
Effort, not “efforts”. There’s only been one effort made, and arguably the CCS project increases emissions since it’s an Enhanced Oil Recovery project that enables Cenovus to extract more oil which will be burned. Whether the net CO2 from CCS is a reduction or an increase has not been officially confirmed, probably because it is an increase in pollution overall.
The federal Ministry of the Environment sent Manitoba a letter in December giving it until the end of February to sign on, or else lose its share of a $1.4-billion clean energy fund.
The fund is only available to provinces that ratified the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, which Manitoba and Saskatchewan refused to sign in December 2016.
The Premier and Environment Ministers are arrogant, stubborn, anti-science mutton heads. How else can anyone sum it up better than that?
Layin’ Pipe
A Tale About Buying an Electric Car
There’s no place to buy a used Electric Vehicle in Regina, in 2017. This is a problem. It’s one I don’t have the ability to solve, but it affects me because I’m interested in helping people know how to get an electric car if they live in southern Saskatchewan.
There was a site my friend had directed me to, and it had less selection and higher prices than I was looking for. I started looking earlier this year, and the prices on Auto Trader, although better, were still a few too many thousands of dollars out of my price range. I put the project on hold until the new Nissan Leaf was set to be announced in early September. After patiently dealing with a sluggish salesperson for a couple days in Port Moody over phone-tag, I found a 2014 Leaf SV in Vancouver for $16000, with the features I was looking for, and put a $500 down payment on it easily by credit card. Then, the real difficulties began…
I bank with several different banks. The one with the money for the car is not a Big 5, but it’s owned by the Big 5. They don’t have a SWIFT code, which is apparently required to send money by wire transfer. It would have been at least 2 days to move the money to another bank, and $50 to wire it, or $10 to buy a bank draft and courier it to me. I chose the latter, and Purolator didn’t successfully leave me a notice of the delivery. I phoned the bank 3 days later asking what was going on, and they said it was already in Regina. The following morning I went to pick it up, and courier it to the auto dealer in Vancouver. That evening, I got word that my Dad had passed away.
The following week, I got a paper to sign and send back, which I did electronically, and was soon told the car would ship and be in Regina at Regina Honda by “mid-week”. When Wednesday rolled around, and I didn’t get a phone call, I got in touch with the sales person (who was the 2nd I dealt with, as the first one left employment at the Vancouver dealer in the meantime). They noted the car hadn’t been picked up by the shipping company yet! They got a new promise of 7-10 days from the following day when it would be picked up, he assured me. I suggested a partial refund of $200 may be in order. He and his manager were not eager to make such a deal.
Day 10 was about to roll around, so I called to get some facts, and they said it was set to be delivered on Monday. I was hoping for the Friday, but close enough. On Monday, no phone call arrived. I called the Regina Dealer, to check it hadn’t been dropped off, and it hadn’t. The Vancouver sales person emailed the shipping company and asked them to contact me with what happened. They suggested that they hoped it would be in Regina a week later!
I was not pleased. I suggested that was unacceptable. My salesperson agreed, and also demanded better of the shipping company Car-Fre’.
3 and a half weeks waiting for it to arrive was too long. The dealer/shipper missed 2 self-imposed delivery dates. The Port Moody dealer finally admitted they were taking too long, and promised a $500 refund of the $1000 to ship it, which I happily accepted.
It arrived October 19, 2017, at Regina Honda on Broad St. The truck operator unloaded it, it was conveniently placed at the back of the semi trailer. I went to Galon Insurance down the street, they collected the PST, the conditional 28 day registration, gave me a plate, and I bought an AutoPak from SMI, it was about $40 less than SGI’s. I didn’t have a wrench with me to get the new plate on, so a salesperson at Regina Honda helped me out. As we walked to the vehicle, they asked why we didn’t buy directly from them, “You don’t sell it, unfortunately.”
I got back to work, and parking was temporarily free in the lot I picked, BONUS! It should be free-ish for EVs anyway, at this point in Regina’s history, at least until they become much more common.
I’d hoped to be able to offer a template to others so they could copy my experience, but it’s better if they don’t. While the Port Moody Honda dealer eventually made things better with the partial shipping refund, they weren’t really keen on shipping out of province, and only do it a few times a year.
The shipping company dropped the ball completely. They only came through at the end because an auto-dealer lit a fire under their butts. Their latest review on Yellowpages was from another unhappy customer. If your expectation is that it’ll arrive sometime long after promised, they’re good enough. If you want it the same month, try another method.
If you’ve enough money for a new car, a more immediate method of getting an EV to Regina would be to buy one at Evergreen Nissan in Prince Albert. It’s 400km away though, so you’ll still need to ship it, or take a full day or two to drive it down to Regina. Maybe Regina Nissan will catch on, or be dragged into the future not too long from me writing this.
UPDATE: The PST and shipping refunds arrived at the end of October by mail.
“Flabbergasting”
“Flabbergasting”
If you need to hear every Conservative talking point repeated without a thought in the world, try the Regina Chamber CEO’s take on CTV: “Nation building” “tidewater” “energy independence” “What’s in the best interest of the country” “a lot of money that comes from the United States that fuels these environmental groups” “Stand up when we need to stand up”
Why would getting our oil to tidewater, so it can be shipped overseas, play into us being energy independent?
His hand-waving, saying we’ll now not have energy independence, is totally false. We can build renewable energy systems, and storage systems that will provide Canadians with true independence from Big Oil which takes subsidies to keep it economically viable.
#CrudePower The Price of Oil tonight at #UofR
Yet then-economy minister Bill Boyd’s ministry made no mention of Bunz’s death, and documents obtained by journalists through freedom of information requests and other sources show repeated “failures in performance by oil and gas companies, including serious infractions, failed safety audits, daily H2S readings beyond provincial air quality standards.”
This, from a government highlighting all OH&S violations weekly? This, from a government from which the lone and most important news release Tuesday was about a Saskatoon moose-poaching case?
After the Toronto Star-led investigation Monday, there was no public news release or ministerial press conference.
