The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
Steve May is an officer of the federal and provincial Nickel Belt Greens.
Picture this: You’re riding a silent, electrically-powered railway northward into the heart of Ontario’s largest industrial project, the Ring of Fire. Occasionally, the landscape of trees and rocks is interrupted by one or two wind turbines or ground-mounted solar arrays.
As you near the end of the line, you can see that the ore processing facility looks as if it were on fire, thanks to the thousands of solar panels affixed to just about every building surface. Here, chromite and other minerals are being extracted and processed in the world’s first zero-carbon mining project, deep in the heart of the James Bay lowlands.
Impossible? Hardly. Impractical? Not at all. A zero-carbon mining project would be good for the environment and for job creation. Sustainable, net-zero development may be the only option for “getting things right” in the Ring of Fire as we go deeper into the 21st Century, thanks to Canada having taken a back-seat on climate change reduction initiatives.
The 2009 Copenhagen Accord recognized the need to hold global warming at no more than 2 Celsius. Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report established a global carbon budget for burning of fossil fuels up to the year 2100 – a budget that must be followed to keep warming below the 2C threshold. If warming continues beyond 2C, we risk triggering positive feedback loops which could lead to runaway climate change. To remain within budget, it is estimated that two-thirds of the world’s proven fossil fuel reserves must remain buried in the ground.
Canada, one of the world’s worst per capita producers of greenhouse gas emissions, is on track to exceed our extremely weak 2020 emissions reductions targets. Real gains made at reducing emissions, such as closing Ontario’s coal plants, have been offset by the expansion of tar sands developments in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Without a national energy strategy, there is no compelling mechanism in place that parcels out our carbon budget based on provincial needs. Right now, each province pursues its own emissions reduction strategy in isolation of its neighbours – with the result that emissions from Alberta and Saskatchewan will continue to skyrocket and eclipse reductions made in each and every province.
For the rest of this column, click here: http://www.thesudburystar.com/2014/01/31/column-a-zero-carbon-ring-of-fire-is-needed