From James Bligh:
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This is in the wake of a campaign led by people such as Rob Shirkey.
Is this a small step in the right direction?
A spokeperson for the Canadian Convenience Stores Association suggests: “If municipalities are truly serious about increasing climate-change awareness and effecting behavioural change among consumers, then perhaps every home, business and public institution consuming energy linked to fossil fuels for heat, power or air conditioning in a municipality should be required to have a climate-change warning label on the front door.”
The labels may not by any more convincing than cigarette warnings, whose effectiveness has been investigated in a myriad of studies. Perhaps these labels will not reduce emissions, however they may be a signifier of further change to come.
For the stickers to be effective there need to be good alternatives to driving. Transit isn’t bad in the City of North Vancouver, if the buses take you where and when you need to go to places. The bike network isn’t anywhere near the quality and safety what Vancouver is building. The stumbling block seems the city doesn’t want to change current driving and parking patterns in any way, lest anybody gets confused or angry. So no space remains for safe bike lanes. Will the stickers change anything?
Exactly. North Van City should have thought about this when they built the massive new auto corridor called The Esplanade. 4 empty lanes of traffic and indented parking. Wake up North Van and learn what a Road diet is
This is the recently built section of Esplanade with “sorry no space for protected bike lanes”. Traffic volume in the Google snapshot is typical.
https://goo.gl/maps/Zf1RaWsjVdR2
The main function of Esplanade (through the heart of Lower Lonsdale and close to the SeaBus) appears to store cars when an incident on Hwy 1 backs up traffic past Lonsdale.
Yep the new section. Just what happens when old crusty roading engineers dictate everything. What a joke
The gas pump sticker in combination with the new Esplanade/Low Level Road is like telling somebody sugar is bad while offering them a freshly baked cake.
… and airlines need to add climate change warning to all airline tickets.
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/issues/climate-change/science/climate-change-basics/air-travel-and-climate-change/
And, of course, any item which you purchase, and arrived in your hands via aircraft, ship, truck or train transportation would require a sticker as well.
Exactly. And every yoga mat, Nike shoe, PC, cell phone, food item (as they use fertilizer), soap, furniture, drugs, paints ..
More here for a longer list: https://chemicalsoup.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/products-made-from-petrochemical/
Why live ? You are toxic to the enivornment. Oh, no wait: you are part of the environment !! Aren’t petro-chemoicals also part of the environment. They are nature.
We should re-label gasoline a “natural oil product”.
Or was living with 100,000 humans in the caves and the woods so much better than today ? So organic, no fertilizer, no soap, average life expectancy at 30, no dentist, no warm water .. beautiful !
That’s just so — what’s an appropriate word for ridiculous exaggeration? — …… alarmist.
Or was living with 100,000 human in the caves … so much better than today?
Of course we all know Neanderthals were lifted out of their primitive state and became advanced Homo sapiens with the advent of Coke in a two-litre plastic jug.
We must have these stickers on all transit vehicles. Especially the buses and the subways. Also, big stickers on all ambulances, fire engines and police vehicles. Not to forget on all school buses. In fact, on the schools themselves; big banners (not made with. Polypropylene, thank you). We should also have these stickers on all plastic bottles, that includes all detergents and cleaning products. All appliances, since all plastics are derived from petro-chemicals, all toys too. All taxis, all tvs, all fleece clothing. You name it bubba.
Must not forget, every vitamin and pharmaceutical bottle, all bicycle tires, all Spandex and Lycra clothing and, unless it’s 100% cotton, all undies too.
Even the stickers themselves will almost certainly be made of petroleum based plastics.
I think you’re confusing products made from fossil fuels with the burning of fossil fuels.
Eric and Tom do seem to be conflating burning fossil fuels and thus contributing to greenhouse gas production, with producing products made from fossil fuels.
They are not acknowledging that plastics can be made from other than petroleum products
They are not acknowledging that many plastic bottles do have a label on the bottom, an SPI code that states what the plastic is made from, so that if we choose to do so, we can decide which plastic to buy, and know if or how it can be recycled.
They are also not acknowledging the difference between burning a fossil fuel and creating a higher value product from it. A US government estimate puts the share of petroleum consumed by the US that is used to create plastics at 2.7%. Compare that to transportation uses of fossil fuels. Also, a higher value plastic can be used repeatedly, not consumed once.
Absolutely correct, Adanac. Transportation fuels account for between 75%-95% of all oil products, depending on location.
Increasingly, when we make oil-based products for homes and businesses, we are finding ways to reuse those products or recycle the materials they are made from (think: recyclable plastics). But, burning oil is always a one-time, irreversible act that leaves nothing of value behind and produces greenhouse gases and pollutants that harm us. And yet, because oil remains the most cost-effective and widely available source of liquid fuels, we are hooked on it for transportation with little prospect of substitutes on the scale we would require–unless we consider electricity.
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Oil-is-too-Precious-to-be-Used-as-Transportation-Fuel.html
The best use of oil is probably in transportation. All other uses of oil can be fairly easily replaced with other materials and energy sources. There is much room of course to cut oil use in transportation by using other personal transportation modes and making more fuel efficient cars and trucks.
Oil is an excellent energy source for long distance and heavy haul transportation. Batteries for e-cars are ok for lighter vehicles or short inner city vehicles. That is why trucks, trains, planes, most cars and ships ALL use some sort of oil. Only in dense Europe where there is an electric repeater station every 20-30 km allows trains to be electrified, unlike North America, as electricity on a wire loses power fast.
Go back to physics in high school. Not everything can be electrified, and certainly not effectively.
Canada is also cold in the winter, and natural gas provides efficient heating for 90% of Canadians during the fall to spring. But, good news: global warming will reduce that gas consumption somewhat.
An all-electric food chain exists for the top 1% that can afford $10 apples, the $2 strawberry, $15 bread loaves and the $300 wine bottle, but not for the bottom 99%.
Tessa’s do not work in 90% of Canada in the winter, and not for a family of four even here.
I recently bought a hybrid. 50% less gasoline consumption in Vancouver stop-and-go traffic. Eventually that is the affordable future, and that is why 90% of Vancouver cabs are hybrid.
I’d love to see an e-bus or fuel cell bus in Vancouver, but even green and top1% catering Whistler recently abandoned their fuel cell bus as far too expensive. Diesel stinks. No wonder the diesel bus based transit plan failed.
Look to Europe for alternatives, many of which are NOT desired by many who live in spacious, wealthy and energy rich & energy independent North America: smaller, lighter cars with smaller engines. Smaller houses, apartments & condos. More public transit. More taxes. Lower net wages. More nuclear. Higher unemployment. Even more overpaid civil servants than here. More local grown terrorism. Far far higher electricity and gasoline prices. Road tolls. Vast gas imports from Russia i.e. not energy independent. Lower net worth of its citizens. A dying populations due to too much social welfare relying on refugees for population growth. France ” military” budget is state welfare as 25% of it is pensions to former soldiers or desk “soldiers”.
Raise energy prices and be more like Europe ? Many in NA say no. I get it that many on this blog say: yes, please.
Go back to high school physics. Not everything can be electrified ….
Thomas, you are downplaying the best alternative to highly subsidized, economically-overestimated and mightily toxic fossil fuels with poorly-researched assumptions. $10 “all-electric food chain” apples? Who knows what flimsy tree you picked that nugget from. Geothermal heating supplemented by captured waste heat will produce veggies and fruit for decades without the troublesome price volatility and supply disruptions of oil, coal and gas.
High voltage direct current conductors lose ~3% of their load every 1,000 km. That means power shipped from BC to Ontario at the speed of light will lose less than 10% through resistance. It is possible to interconnect the provinces and territories with smart grids and renewable electrical energy for both domestic use and export by mid-century without the severe externalities that surround fossil fuels.
Focus attention on building greater energy efficiencies in our cities (on transit we can agree) and on electrifying overland intercity passenger and freight rail service and we end up with a stronger country.
Please, this boy from Tronna that went to school in Victoria is a classic enviropocalyse NGO. His presentations are full of tar sands, pipelines and tanker pictures. He’s another spaced out dreamer that wants to shut down Alberta. It’s just that this week’s target is gas pump handles.
Hit the donate button if you want to buy him yet another latte.
It’s a cute gimmick. His 15 minutes will soon be up.
LOL!
Yes, the world price of oil set in international markets is set by dreamers who maliciously target Alberta.
In my view placing warning stickers on petroleum fuel products is a lame, cheap and ineffective way to counter climate change. The really effective mass behaviour-changing strategies revolve around increasing the cost of oil dependency. I don’t see that happening as long as demand is low, supply is temporarily high (i.e. the current glut ends), the market price is down and carbon pricing inadequate.
Municipal governments don’t have much say in changing the cost of oil dependency, except in two main areas: building energy efficiency and transportation. The City of North Vancouver has done quite a bit to promote energy efficiency in new construction and they run a district energy system using gas, solar and geothermal. But the city could do much more to make it safer and more convenient to walk and bike in this small municipality – it covers barely 4km x 4km.