Tag Archives: energy

Fifty Ways to Bring More Urgency to BC’s Climate Action Plans

September 25, 2020Climate, Democracy, Economy, Education, energy, Natureagriculture, British columbia, climate crisis, climate emergency, climate pollution, energy, forestry, GHGs, methane, transportationGuy Dauncey

For a printable PDF of this paper, click Download

fifty-ways-to-bring-urgency-3 Download

“We are facing a disaster of unspoken suffering for enormous amounts of people, so please, treat the climate crisis like the acute crisis it is, and give us a future.” – Greta Thunberg

For years, Guy Dauncey has tirelessly warned of the urgency of tackling the climate crisis and provided practical ways to achieve reductions in our emissions. While the crisis has only worsened, the window of opportunity to shift direction has shortened. Here is a blueprint for concrete action. Read it and act! – David Suzuki

Continue reading →

Six Green New Deals: How Do They Compare?

September 13, 2019Climate, Democracy, EconomyBernie Sanders, business, community, ecology, electricity, Elizabeth Warren, energy, finance, food, future, Green New Deal, Green Party, jobs, money, Nature, Oil, politics, transportationGuy Dauncey

This blog was updated on September 27th 2019 to TEN Green New Deals – see here.

The Climate and Ecological Emergencies – What Can We Do?

September 12, 2019Climate, Naturebusiness, Climate, community, electricity, energy, food, housing, money, Nature, transportationGuy Dauncey

Emergency

By Guy Dauncey

There are massive forest fires in Siberia. Greenland’s melting is accelerating. Record heatwaves are roasting Europe. The world’s insects are dying off. The scary news keeps accumulating.

We are living on the edge of an emergency that is just getting started, and climate is only the half of it. There’s also an ecological emergency. How are we to respond? It’s easy to slip into complacency, or to be overcome by fear, followed by a sense of impotence. You know the crises are real, but the children are coming to visit, there’s a holiday to plan, and don’t get me started on the problems we’re having at work.

The first step to end complacency and neutralize fear is to put the crisis on your weekly to-do list:

Weed the garden
Visit your friend in hospital
Sign the kids up for karate/soccer/piano/dancing lessons
Do something to tackle the climate and ecological crises

Continue reading The Climate and Ecological Emergencies – What Can We Do? →

Trump and Trudeau: Spot the Difference

September 5, 2018Climate, EconomyClimate, energy, Oil, Tarsands, Trudeau, TrumpGuy Dauncey

Trump & Trudeau

Trudeau: ‘No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there’

Trump: “We’ve got underneath us more oil than anybody … and I want to use it.”

I have very little to add to this. Emotionally, culturally, empathetically, educationally and behaviourally, Trump and Trudeau are as different as different can be. Trump is a bully, a braggard and a boor. Trudeau is a refined classical decoration on the carpet of civilization. Trump is a dirty stain.

Yet when it comes to energy and oil, their brains and their political instincts think alike. Trump is a proud climate denier. His “Grab them by the oil-wells” thoughts are at least consistent with his larger outlook, which is nationalist and mercantilist, as if the eighteenth century had never ended.

Continue reading Trump and Trudeau: Spot the Difference →

BC’s Climate Intentions Papers: A Timid Response – and the Twelve Solutions We Really Need

August 20, 2018Climate, Economy, energyBritish columbia, buildings, climate crisis, economics, electric vehicles, energy, jobs, NDP, politics, transportationGuy Dauncey

Timid Response

August 20, 2018

I wish I didn’t have to write this. I count myself a friend of the NDP/Green Alliance, and I had high hopes for the government’s new climate action plans. [1]

BC’s Ministry of Environment has published a series of Clean Growth Intentions Papers, with a deadline for public feedback of August 24^th, in the heart of this fire and smoke-filled summer. In my head, I can see that they have been framed in a very positive way, emphasizing the multiple economic benefits of engaging in climate action, reframed as clean growth.

But the policies floated contain little that is new. They are really timid. And by downplaying the climate crisis almost to a state of mental non-existence, they have written the urgency out of the picture. In my heart, I feel as if they have been written by a holiday season policy-drone operating on auto-pilot. Hard words, but that’s what I feel.

Continue reading BC’s Climate Intentions Papers: A Timid Response – and the Twelve Solutions We Really Need →

Canada’s Choice

May 29, 2018Climate, Economy, energycanada, Climate, economics, electricity, energy, jobs, Kinder-Morgan, Pipeline, Wind energyGuy Dauncey

by Guy Dauncey

$4.5 Billion Dollars to Subsidize Fossil Fuels? Here’s a Much Better Idea

$4.5 billion of Canada’s money, to buy a bitumen pipeline? Some suggest that it could rise as high as $12 billion, including future construction and legal costs.

So what if the money was invested in solutions to the climate crisis, instead making things worse by being invested in the primary cause, which is our use of fossil fuels? When Canada signed the Paris Climate Agreement most people presumed that it was being signed honestly, not as an act of laugh-behind-your-hand hypocrisy.

Thirty to Fifty Times More Jobs

That much money could leverage enough electricity to replace most of Alberta’s coal and gas-fired electricity, and generate between 30 and 50 times as many jobs. It could also power 18 million electric vehicles for 25 years. Continue reading Canada’s Choice →

The Birth of a New Cooperative Economy

February 14, 2018Economya new story, banks, business, Cooperative, debt, ecology, economics, energy, finance, food, housing, jobs, money, taxes, transportationGuy Dauncey

They say we are self-interested, we’re always out to win.
Always individualistic, though it used to be a sin.
They say we need free markets, the better to compete,
and the economy will flourish if we only think of greed.

This is Economics 101, the way it’s taught today. Not a word about nature, community, caring, sharing, or cooperation.

During the mid 19^th century, advances in science, democracy, education, literacy, public healthcare, labour unions, technological breakthroughs, banking, and the power of fossil fuels to generate rapid economic growth certainly made it seem that after ten thousand years of economic stagnation the competitive pursuit of profit was improving life for all. In the 1760s it took eighteen hours of human labour to transform a pound of cotton into cloth. By the 1860s it took one and a half hours. Today, it probably takes five seconds.

Continue reading The Birth of a New Cooperative Economy →

Canada’s Housing Crisis: A Permanent, 100-Year Solution

June 14, 2017Economyaffordable housing, AirBnB, banking, canada, community, community land trust, cooperatives, couch-surfing, credit, ecovillage, energy, homelessness, housing, housing crisis, Housing First, inheritances, money, Passive Home, planning, politics, quantitative easing, tax evasion, tiny homes, zoningGuy Dauncey

100-Years

Guy Dauncey is the author of Journey to the Future: A Better World is Possible and nine other books. He is an Honorary Member of the Planning Institute of BC and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.

June 2017. This is an updated and expanded version of Canada’s Housing Crisis: 22 Solutions, originally published on The Practical Utopian in December 2016.

A PDF Version of this essay can be downloaded here: Canada’s Housing Crisis – Guy Dauncey.

Executive Summary

Canada’s housing crisis is far more severe than most people realize. The fundamental problem is an excess of money pouring into the housing market from various sources, combined with an abdication of responsibility by all levels of government for the past 30 years.

There are many on-the-ground solutions, demonstrating positive ways to build affordable housing. And there are seven new housing-related taxes that could raise the funds needed for a massive expansion of affordable housing.

The fundamental cause of the problem is the excess of funds flowing into the market, and until this is solved house prices will continue to rise, and most other solutions will seem like never-ending sandbagging.

The money supply problem can be solved. The money can be obtained to restore safe, sustainable, socially designed affordable housing as a fundamental human right.

And by establishing an Affordable Housing Social Justice Connector, a permanent, hundred-year solution can be put in place that will guarantee that Canada need never confront a housing crisis again. Continue reading Canada’s Housing Crisis: A Permanent, 100-Year Solution →

A New Cooperative Economy

May 3, 2017Economybanking, business, community, cooperatives, energy, finance, food, housing, jobs, new economy, planning, politics, poverty, renewable energy, solidarity, sustainability, taxGuy Dauncey

Guy Dauncey, April 2017

essay-3

This essay was submitted to The Next Systems Project Essay Contest, in which it won second place. “We received hundreds of submissions from 30 different states and 26 countries, proving that many around the world not only believe system change is necessary, but have thought long and hard about what a new system should look like and how we might get there.” http://thenextsystem.org/announcing-the-winners-in-our-essay-competition/

http://thenextsystem.org/…/2017/04/Dauncey_AtLargeSecond.pdf

You can download the essay as a PDF here. A New Cooperative Economy

Our task is to fashion a political vision and a political narrative that is a compelling answer to neo-liberalism and the ideology of competition, free markets, and the primacy of capital. We need a political economy of cooperation, solidarity, of mutual benefit. – John Restakis, Civil Power and the Partner State, 2016

Our modern economy is in crisis. Can we build an alternative economy as our ancestors did in the transition from feudalism to capitalism? It’s a question that takes us deep into our values, culture, history, politics—and visions of the future.

Continue reading A New Cooperative Economy →

A New Economy for Small Communities

April 3, 2017Economybusiness, children, community, Cooperative, energy, food, jobs, new economy, sustainabilityGuy Dauncey

by Guy Dauncey

When the future teenager walks down the future Main Street in future Smalltown BC, be it Williams Lake, Smithers, Houston, Creston or Kimberley, which of these thoughts might she or he be thinking?

“I can’t wait to get out of this place—it’s so, like, basic.”

“This place is so cool. I wish there was work, so that I could stay.”

“This place is so über-cool. My friends in the city are so jealous that I get to live, work and play here.”

British Columbia has many communities that built their economies around traditional resources that are now either collapsing or going into decline. Unless there’s a strong impulse for community economic renewal, there’s a risk that working people will leave and young people will follow, never to return.

Continue reading A New Economy for Small Communities →

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Trudeau: ‘No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there’

Trump: “We’ve got underneath us more oil than anybody … and I want to use it.”

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$4.5 Billion Dollars to Subsidize Fossil Fuels? Here’s a Much Better Idea

Thirty to Fifty Times More Jobs

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Executive Summary

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