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Tags: Watch this Alberta Primetime Episode, where Sheila Muxlow of Sierra Club Prairie speaks about the health and environmental problems associated with Total's proposed upgrader in the Alberta Heartland. Muxlow discusses green alternatives by building a manufacturing industry that will diversify our economy in a clean and sustainable way.
Watch the video here.
Published May 27, 2010 by Trevor Scott Howell
Alberta is lacking green initiative and jobs, say environmentalists from Ontario and the U.S.
David Silburn, green building research associate at SAIT, says there's new green opportunities for trades. About a year ago, Alberta’s then-finance minister Iris Evans made a bold prediction while waist-deep in a global recession: Alberta, Canada’s economic engine, would shed only 15,000 jobs in 2009. And by 2010, the province’s economy would be well on its way to recovery. In the ensuing 14 months, 84,000 Albertans have lost their jobs — more than five times Evans’s optimistic prediction — many who had worked in the province’s bread-and-butter industry: oil and gas. But environmental groups say there is a solution to Alberta’s boom-bust energy economy: Renewable energy. Read more »
Canwest News Service
OTTAWA — Canada is losing out on about 66,000 jobs because the Harper government is not keeping pace with renewable energy investments made by the Obama administration, estimates a new report to be released on Tuesday at a green economy conference in Washington.
The report, Falling Behind: Canada's Lost Clean Energy Jobs, produced by Environmental Defence Canada and the United Steelworkers, says Canada needs to invest $11.5 billion in clean energy initiatives to match the U.S. on a per person basis. Read more »
Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice met last week with chief executives of energy companies in the country to push the phase out of coal-fired power plants. Prentice said the power companies must shutter their coal-fired facilities upon reaching the end of the plant’s commercial life, estimated to run for 10 to 15 more years.Prentice said the energy companies would not be permitted to refurbish their plans to extend the facility’s life or replace it with new units still running on coal. The only exception to that is if they would use carbon capture technology and trap the carbon dioxide emission underground. Read more »
Ian MacLellan has a message when it comes to renewable energy: “Canada needs to get with the program.”
MacLellan is the founder and chief technology officer of ARISE Technologies, which manufactures 35 megawatts worth of solar cells each year. The company is not producing cells anywhere near its home in Waterloo, Ont., however; instead it is doing so in Bischofswerda, a town in eastern Germany. The transatlantic flights may not be the most pleasant experience for MacLellan, but he had little choice when it came to deciding where to locate ARISE’s first factory. “Germany is where the action is,” he says.“Canada continues to fall further and further behind in renewable energy.” Others in the industry have similar stories.
When it comes to building a renewable energy industry, Canada is simply not really a go-to destination. That’s not to say there is no appetite domestically or that federal and provincial governments are ignoring the issue. Canada actually scores fairly high on the Ernst & Young renewable energy country attractiveness index, a ranking of nations based on the climate for clean power investment. Read more »
