This letter is about Kaslo adopting a 100 per cent renewable energy plan by 2050. Climate change is increasing rapidly. Changing jet streams, melting ice caps, recent wild fires in Australia and California only add to an increasing carbon load in our atmosphere. Our unusually warm and quite dry first half of our winter may result in a low snow pack. If our mountains continue to dry out, we will be in deep trouble.
Kaslo’s far-off and unrealistic goal of zero carbon emissions by 2050 doesn’t cut it. Tech Corp has plans to open a new coal mine and the federal government is continuing the twinning of the Enbridge pipeline. The continued fracking and development of liquified natural gas are all going ahead. It is mental illness to allow these projects to continue. Far-off local goals may make us feel good, but we don’t have any time to spare. Local reduction of carbon consumption is a tiny fraction of what these projects are spewing into the atmosphere.
We continue to rely on an outdated and unjust financial system. William Aberhardt, premier of Alberta in the 1930s, issued a form of currency, prosperity certificates. They were used as partial payment of goods and services in the province of Alberta. T. H. Douglas, an Englishman, published a book on the social credit form of finance. It was a way of distributing the profits to the people, that are attained from the advancements of technology. We urgently need a monetary system that is not based on debt and over-consumption. Rather, it should be based on credit and conservation.
Brian Zacharias
Nelson