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CLIMATE West Van library prioritizes climate awareness

by Martin Dunphy

The West Vancouver Memorial Library has announced its first climate writer in residence.

The District of West Vancouver library said in a December 13 release that the appointment of Katłįà (Catherine) Lafferty will be effective January 3, 2022, and run until April 15.

The new position is in support of the library’s Climate Future initiative—a program of events, readings, and a resources toolkit designed to stimulate community response to the climate crisis—which it instituted after the District of West Vancouver declared a climate emergency in 2019.

Lafferty is an author (Northern Wildflower, Land-Water-Sky/Ndè-Ti-Yat’a), a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation in the Northwest Territories, and is studying law at the University of Victoria.

The library announcement said that Lafferty will provide an Indigenous perspective to the climate crisis through writing and planning workshops and events for the community, especially for youth and seniors.

“My vision for engaging the community during the residence at the library will be to start by hosting open and interactive sharing circles with members of West Vancouver’s community,” Lafferty said in the release, “including different spaces for youth and seniors to gather input on what they hope to learn from me during the residency.”

The library said that Lafferty’s first event will be via Zoom on January 22, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. The introduction will feature a traditional welcome, a reading, and a moderated Q&A.

“We are looking forward to furthering our library’s work around the climate emergency with Catherine’s expertise and take it to the next level,” library spokesperson Tara Matsuzaki said in the bulletin. “Given the recent extreme weather events we’ve been seeing, this work feels more important than ever.” g

Yellowknives Dene First Nation member Katjà (Catherine) Lafferty, author of Northern Wildflower and Land-Water-Sky/Ndè-Ti-Yat’a, will become the West Van library’s climate writer in residence.

My vision…will be to start hosting open… sharing circles…

– Katjà (Catherine) Lafferty

from page 4 building a cleaner economy for everyone.”

The emissions for 2020 have not been released, but they’re likely to post a decline, given the impact of COVID-19 on the economy. Consumption of oil fell sharply worldwide in the months after the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in March 2020.

However, the 2021 B.C. wildfires have led to massive emissions of carbon dioxide, as Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives B.C. office senior economist Marc Lee pointed out earlier this year in a policy note.

“Wildfire numbers are not counted in our official GHG tally because they supposedly represent ‘natural disturbances’ rather than impacts of human economic activity,” Lee wrote on the CCPA website. “But these wildfires are not acts of God, they represent climate change in action—the consequence of human use of fossil fuels for energy. And our over-heating atmosphere makes no distinction between the GHG emissions we choose to count and those we choose to ignore.”

So how big of a contributor are B.C. wildfires? Lee noted that in 2017, they released an estimated 163 million tonnes. That was followed by another 200 million tonnes in 2018—almost three times the “official” total.

B.C. must achieve official emissions reductions of 40 percent below 2007 levels by 2030 and 60 percent reductions below 2007 levels by 2040 under provincial legislation.

The report outlines many measures that are intended to reduce the province’s greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030.

They include 1.4 million annual tonnes being curtailed by reducing methane emissions from upstream oil and gas operations by 45 percent.

The government also expects to achieve 1.1 million annual tonnes of reduced emissions by providing clean electricity to planned natural-gas production in the Peace region and by increasing access to clean electricity with new transmission lines and interconnectivity to existing lines.

The province is also betting big on “renewable gas”, suggesting that it can achieve a 1.9-million-tonne annual reduction by 2030, according to the report.

Earlier this year, however, the Seattlebased Sightline Institute listed four “fatal flaws” to renewable gas: availability, cost, carbon intensity, and industry obfuscation.

“While many electric utilities in the Northwest are beginning to understand that clean, renewable power is their only possible future, the gas utility sector is taking a different tack with a new pipe dream: renewable natural gas (RNG),” wrote Laura Feinstein and Eric de Place on the Sightline website. “These utilities aim to position RNG as the answer to decarbonization.

“It’s an answer that would allow them to continue to grow their customer base, lock in profits from new infrastructure investment, and green up their image,” they added. “Unfortunately, their RNG strategy rests on faulty assumptions and fuzzy math, plus a bit of deception.” g