Category — Environment and Sustainability

In China’s polarizing economy, where a tiny few have become fabulously wealthy, minimum wage workers would spend half a day’s pay to buy a small Starbucks caffe latte.

To put that in perspective, a small latte at the Georgia and Granville Starbucks was priced today at $3.05. Anyone here tried to get by recently on $6 a day? 

That’s the lot of millions of Chinese workers. Increasingly, however, they are winning raises, very large raises.

That’s good news. Their lives will improve. China’s economy will become more consumer, rather than export-oriented. Downward pressure on wages globally will ease. But how many consumers can one planet support?

Toronto’s Board of Trade says that city has the worst average commute times anywhere, at 80 minutes a day. That means the average Toronto commuter spends about 18 24-hour days in a car or on the bus each year, spending money and time, but earning none.

Think of it as a forced unpaid vacation, about a month long in terms of working days, spent in a car. That’s worse than Los Angeles, which manages an average daily commute of 57 minutes.

The costs in economic and environmental terms defy calculation.

The Board of Trade report, completed by the Conference Board of Canada, triggered an outcry in Toronto about the lost economic opportunity. It also spurred Canada’s big city mayors, gathered at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, to seek a gridlock-busting summit with Ottawa to discuss public transit investment.

The mayors have been asking  Ottawa to commit $2 billion a year to a national transit strategy since 2007, a relatively modest sum given the needs. [Read more →]

The continuing talks among Victoria, Translink and the Council of Mayors about new transit investments — particularly the Evergreen Line — may produce action this fall, a year after the province slammed the door on a $450 million a year expansion program in favour of a stand-pat $130 million increase.

The opportunities Canada is missing by delaying these investments and others like it are summarized in a recent paper by economist Andrew Jackson of the Canadian Labour Congress. With a national transit investment program, as proposed by the Big City Mayors, among others, we could reap tens of thousands of jobs and avert further increases in greenhouse gas emissions. But Canada, unlike many other nations, lacks a national transit strategy just as it lacks a national housing strategy.

Jackson leans heavily on this recent study by the David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute, which makes the case in greater detail, proposing carbon pricing as a funding mechanism to break the current undue reliance on fares.

In this morning’s mail, this intriguing find from Lynn Kisilenko: a plastic bridge, capable of supporting a battle tank, made almost entirely of recycled plastic bags.

Could it, she wonders, be converted to peaceful uses as a pedestrian bike bridge across False Creek, an idea that just won’t go away?

For this project, the US Army used ”94 percent recycled materials including glass, vehicle bumpers and about 85,000 pounds of high-density polyethylene plastic. That’s equivalent to about 550,000 one-gallon plastic milk jugs which, laid end-to-end, would extend nearly 82 miles.”

Why not a bridge with recycled tanks?