Other Initiatives

The EFS program helps to develop special energy initiatives for students and teachers alike, including:

• Sir John A. High School- EFS presentation January 7th, 2011

• AST's Professional Development Day October 2010

• Citadel High School- EFS in school presentation

• South Woodside Elementary School- EFS in school presentation November 6th

If you have an idea for an energy related initiative for your students, school or group please contact us at info@energyconsultant.ca or by calling us at 902-454-4329.

RELATED ARTICLES

Warden Proud Of District’s Green Improvements

Warden Linda Gregory says it has been a green year for the Municipality of the District of Digby.
She is pleased to see a community-owned renewable energy project approved for Digby Gut, to see Packard Bell investigating a biomass plant here, to see the municipal offices saving real money on energy after switching to geothermal heating and natural lighting.
“That’s all a benefit to the taxpayer and to the environment,” says Gregory. “We need to make things more sustainable here or we won’t be here. Green is the future.”
As far as the wind turbines in Gulliver’s Cove go, she says she wishes they had been built farther from existing residences but believes the municipality has a good by-law now moving forward.
To investigate further programs to make the area greener, the municipality hired Terry Thibodeau as a coordinator for renewable energy and climate change.
“Now we have someone working here full time to make this community more sustainable and to make sure we have role to play in our future.”
Another big success this year was finishing third out of 55 in the Nova Scotia municipal performance report.
“That shows that staff are working with council and working diligently to serve the residents here. I couldn’t be more pleased.”
She says council is doing a great job of working together as well.
“We don’t always agree but we always remain on good terms. I wouldn’t want to see us always agree—there would be something wrong with council. I like hearing the pros and cons and all the different opinions.”
She says the town and municipality are doing a great job working together as evidenced by their work together on the Digby Area Recreation Commission, on the Industrial Commission, and most recently the joint wastewater treatment facility in Smith’s Cove.
“I think we are the envy of the province,” says Gregory. “I respect all the councilors of the town and I feel its mutual coming from them.
“Okay, sometimes Ben and I torment each other. But both councils I think realize the importance of doing what’s best for the people and that means working together. Personally I find the relationship just keeps getting better over time.”
In the future she foresees more joint ventures but says it will be a while before anyone seriously considers amalgamation.
“Everything is functioning really well right now,” she says. “It’s working, it’s effective. There’s no need to change this. I’m not saying it won’t happen in 20 years but not in my time. I don’t see any need for it.”
She is proud that council has managed to hold the tax rate steady and maintain quality services. She has worked to improve communication with constituents—she points to The Coastline newsletter and says council is always available to hear from constituents.
She has in fact accomplished all her goals as warden but one: jobs. The area needs more steady well-paying job s to keep the youth here she says.
That’s why se believes in supporting the regional development agency, the Annapolis Digby Economic Development Agency. She believes in the new CEO there, Liz Morine and her approach of looking for ways for local municipalities to work together to find solutions to common challenges.
Coming up early in 2012 the warden is looking forward to public policing meetings.
“It’s not there is a problem necessarily with our policing, but people sometimes have a problem communicating with the police and this gives them an opportunity to tell the police what’s on their mind, ask any questions they may have.”
She says these meetings will make sure the RCMP are aware what the community sees as priorities.
Gregory says, yes, council knows the municipal elections are coming in October.
“Does it change what we do for the year? No. What we plan to do is what we do. Some councilors are talking about running again, others I don’t know. Me, I plan on running.”
 

http://www.novanewsnow.com/section/2012-01-04/article-2853985/Warden-proud-of-district%26rsquos-green-improvements/1

STARS OF 2011: CANADA’S YOUTH CLIMATE DELEGATES

Canada’s reputation as a country that cares for the environment took a pasting at the Durban climate talks.
Environment minister Peter Kent made few friends before he had even arrived in South Africa, having promised to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol.
This stance, allied to statements calling climate financing ‘guilt payments’ saw the Canadians finish as joint winners of the ‘colossal fossil’ with the USA.
The prize is awarded by the Climate Action Network to countries who have made the least effort to help the talks progress.
And yet while their government appear content to disengage from the UN negotiations, Canadian youth groups in Durban were vociferous in their condemnation of that policy.
The Canadian Youth Delegation at COP17 played an important role in reminding delegates that despite their government’s hostility to the talks – there was still a strong seam of green in Canada.
They took their campaign into the main plenary hall, wearing ‘Turn your back on Canada’ T-shirts. One protest, which coincided with a speech from Kent, saw them ejected from the Conference Centre.
It also ensured that their message spread from Durban back to the streets of Canada, where the campaign continued weeks after the negotiations had ended.
It was for this reason that RTCC has decided to award our inaugural ‘climate campaign of the year’ medal (it’s still being minted) to the Canadian Youth Delegation at COP17.
Proof of their impact could be seen in continued protests against the government’s stance leading up to Christmas.
“Just because we are unable to vote, it doesn’t mean we don’t have a voice”
That was the message of a group of Canadian climate campaigners, as they put together a flash mob in Vancouver just before Christmas.
To the tune of ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ the children stopped festive shoppers in their tracks with their tune about Climate Change.
With lyrics including ‘Climate Change sucks,’ and ‘It’s better to work together to change earth for future days’, the Kids for Climate Action group said they wanted to speak out about their government’s actions in the wake of COP17.
Speaking to local news outlet News 1130 one participant Alice Paul said: “Basically with what happened in Durban in South Africa at the recent climate talks, youth are really disappointed with the decision made by Canada and other countries to delay action to stop climate change. We felt we needed to do as much as we can. Youth do care.”
Changing political climate
Following the elections in May 2011, the Conservative government – which had already been leading a minority government since 2006 – took the majority with 40% of the vote.
Canada’s previous Liberal administration signed the Kyoto Protocol, but current Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative government have never embraced it.
The latest announcement may not have come a surprise for many, as the government had already announced four years ago that it would not be meeting its commitments – and Canada’s emissions have risen by about a third since 1990.
But scratch the surface and a complex picture starts to emerge.
 
Peter Kent was called a 'piece of sh*t' by a fellow MP on his return from COP17
Former Canadian Green Party Campaign manager David Lewis told RTCC that federal policy masked progress on renewable energy and mitigation efforts at provincial level.
“While the federal Conservatives oppose key climate change legislation, largely due to their desire to protect Alberta’s tar sands production, there is significant progress to be found at the provincial level,” he said.
“This is important because the provinces wield considerable power to enact their own mitigation and adaptation measures.
“Quebec and British Columbia have had carbon taxes in place for several years, Ontario is eliminating its coal-fired plants and provides feed-in tariffs for renewable energy, and Nova Scotia is capping emissions from its power plants.
“Four provinces are active in the Western Climate Initiative, which along with several American states, seeks to create a carbon market.
“So while on the surface things look bleak, a closer inspection reveals that political will exists to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the great white north.”
Warm words
Anger at government policy came to a head a week after COP17, during in a heated exchange between Peter Kent and Liberal MP Justin Trudeau, who called the Environment Minister a “piece of sh*t” in Parliament.
Kent had suggested MPs questioning him over Canada’s position in Durban should have come to the conference – despite the government having banned opposition MPs from joining the delegation to South Africa.
Some found a way around these restrictions: Green Party MP Elizabeth May paid her own way to the conference and became a delegate of Papua New Guinea.
The Harper government has accused their predecessors of never making real attempts to comply with the commitments laid down by the Kyoto Protocol, and has criticised the agreement for only including developed nations – leaving  countries like China and India without any emission restrictions.
The Canadian government did, however, add their support for the Durban Platform, that would see a new legally binding agreement come into force by 2020.
Grassroots leadership
Across Canada young people are stepping up to the challenge of living a greener more environmentally friendly lifestyle.
For grade 8 student Harnoor Gill, from Georgetown, Ontario, this means volunteering on local environmental projects.
He was recently voted one of Canada’s Top Fifteen under Fifteen by national magazine Canadian Family. He told RTCC that he believes youth can make changes for the better in the environment, despite their young age.
“I have been involved in volunteering with the community at a very young age,” he said.
“This is important to me because I tell youth that age is not a barrier to volunteering. We can speak up for ourselves, for what we believe is right and what we believe is wrong.”
“We can make changes in the world by stopping the footprint of pollution on the Earth. We should go green in every aspect of our lives; this is how I believe youth can make a change in the world. ”
Harnoor worked on environmental causes from being in the Kindergarten and has now worked on his schools green team, volunteered for two environmental organisations in his local area.
He has also written for multiple publications across the country spreading his story and encouraging other youth to get involved.
And he was joined in the top fifteen by others working on similar projects – including a 12-year-old girl who makes films about the environment and a 14-year-old boy who runs his school’s environmental team and helped clean up his local beach.
Proof perhaps that while the government in Ottawa is more concerned about the billions of dollars that lie in the Alberta Tar Sands, below the surface Canada’s green streak remains alive, if hidden from view.
We’ll be sending copies of the UN’s Exclusive Rio Conventions Calendar to Harnoor Gill and members of Canada’s Youth Climate Committee in recognition of their outstanding work in 2011.
RTCC VIDEO: The Sierra Club’s Heather Hatzenbuhler and Toby Davine from Canada’s Youth Climate Committee explain how they are  attempting to change their governments’ climate policy.

http://www.rtcc.org/living/stars-of-2011-canadas-youth-climate-delegates/

NEW JOBS FOR A NEW AGE

It’s 2031. A young job seeker is sifting through help-wanted ads on a mobile device.
Many of the jobs didn’t exist two decades ago: Genetic counsellor, nanosurgeon, cyber soldier, seafloor miner.
The workforce is also flooded with green-collar workers and caregivers for the elderly, a result of climate change and retiring baby boomers.
Booming new careers, coupled with an influx of skilled immigrants, have buffered the country’s workforce against a greying population and shrinking participation rate.
Canada’s labour force now stands at 22.5 million, an increase of four million since 2011. One in four workers is over 55 years old, while one in three is foreign-born.
Rewinding to 2011, futurist Jim Carroll says the biggest trend is "massive exponential knowledge growth in every single field of knowledge."
Even jobs that are around today are poised to change dramatically, he says.
"We’ve got a faster velocity of change in every single industry than ever before," says Carroll, a Halifax native who delivers keynote speeches on future trends and innovations to a blue-chip client list around the world.
"Science is evolving faster, there is more knowledge and things are speeding up," he says. "In every sector, everybody is becoming a specialist, which sparks the emergence of new niche-oriented jobs."
The biggest trend in medicine is DNA-based medicine, Carroll says.
DNA interpreters will work alongside medical professionals, spelling out for doctors and nurses the implications of a patient’s DNA sequence.
Genetic counsellors will help patients understand what genetic diseases, disorders and conditions their children may inherit.
For treating patients, doctors and research scientists are looking increasingly toward nanotechnology — the manipulation of matter on an atomic scale — for solutions.
"Nanotechnology is just a natural progression of science and engineering to go to the next scale of possibility," says Felipe Chibante, the Richard J. Currie chair in nanotechnology in the faculty of engineering at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton.
Chibante says "nano-enabled" scientists and engineers will lead the way in nearly every field in the future.
In the medical profession, nano-scale robotic devices could alter how internal organs are operated on.
In the oil and gas sector, Chibante says, nanotechnology is being explored as a means of getting more hydrocarbons out of the ground in a more efficient way. Nanotechnology will play a vital role as unconventional sources of oil and gas start to play a bigger role in the industry.
"We already have our hands on the easy-to-get resources," says Doug Wallace, Canada excellence research chair in ocean science and technology at Dalhousie University.
"We’re now going into ever-deeper, unexplored parts of ocean, including the Arctic Ocean, in search of oil reserves."
A job boom will likely be tied to increasing attention on the ocean and subsea minerals.
"The potential is there for minerals and metals and precious metals to be exploited from the ocean environment, maybe even phosphates," Wallace says. "The list goes on and on as our demand for resources increases.
"The demand for technologies that are able to deal with high pressures, low temperatures and the darkness of the deep ocean environment will grow."
While the search for more hydrocarbons is bound to continue for decades, climate change will increasingly spur renewable energy research and development.
A new tidal energy institute at Acadia University hopes to be at the forefront of this renewable wave by learning to better harness tidal power for our energy needs.
Tidal power, along with wind, solar and geothermal sources of electricity, will spur a bevy of new green-collar jobs.
Information technology, regardless of collar colour, will be at the heart of nearly every profession. Not only will all workers require a high level of computer literacy, the demand for computer experts is expected to soar.
While enrolment in computer science dipped after the tech bubble burst in 2000, that has now changed, says the dean of the computer science faculty at Dalhousie.
"We’re expecting a huge new wave to come into computer science in the coming years," Michael Shepherd says.
While many computer science graduates will get jobs as programmers or in IT departments, many of the top jobs have likely not been invented yet, he says.
"In the last five years, a whole industry has sprung up around building mobile apps. Now everybody is running around screaming for app developers."
Pointing to a research lab at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., that is experimenting with wireless interfaces on contact lenses, Shepherd says computing will become ubiquitous in everything we do.
"There is really a revolution going, and the IT sector is driving things to the point things are changing so rapidly that it’s very hard to predict what the jobs of the future will be."
If history has taught us anything, however, it seems war will be a part of life, at least for the foreseeable future.
If Irving Shipbuilding Inc.’s $25-billion contract to build the country’s next fleet of warships is any indication, jobs will continue to flow in the area of defence.
JoAnne Seviour, executive director of the Aerospace and Defence Industries Association of Nova Scotia, says there is a battery of other contracts to service and replace aging equipment.
Despite the continuing need for traditional trades such as metal fabricators and welders, the nature of conflicts is changing, Seviour says.
"Information technology is changing the rules on warfare," she says. "We expect to see a rise in the use of unmanned vehicles and systems for surveillance.
"A huge market has exploded in the last decade and we expect this will continue to grow."
Cyber warfare will likely increase in the coming years, and therefore the need for tech-savvy soldiers will also rise.
"There has been an explosion of IT on the military side," Seviour says. "With the threat of cyber network attacks increasing, the necessity of protecting networks has grown."
As the needs of the workforce change, community colleges pride themselves on adapting quickly.
Don Bureaux, president of the Nova Scotia Community College, says the post-secondary institution was "created on a foundation of being nimble, flexible and responsive to industry and community needs in the province."
"We can’t guess the jobs of the future, some of which aren’t known yet," he says. "But we need to be proactive, working with industry, government and communities to be predictive of what is before us."
The community college offers students trades that will likely never become obsolete: plumbing, electrical work, welding and cooking.
But it also offers training in high-demand fields such as practical nursing, health information management, and funeral and allied health services — all likely to increase in demand, given demographics.
"It would be great to have a crystal ball to say in five years’ time we will need a thousand more ‘blank’ in Nova Scotia," Bureaux says. "But we don’t, so we want to encourage students to become lifelong learners who understand at the core what they value."
 

http://thechronicleherald.ca/business/46586-new-jobs-new-age

Farmers Learn About Converting Grass Into Fuel

September, 2011--Farmers from across Atlantic Canada gathered in Truro, N.S., on Tuesday to learn about converting grass into fuel.
The technology is based on converting marginal grassland and unwanted hay into pellets that can be burned in wood or pellet stoves or furnaces.
Gus Swanson, a Pictou County farmer and inventor, created a furnace to burn hay pellets.
He said he came up with the idea several years ago when the price of oil went up.
"I had a farm with 400 acres of hay on it. We knew we could burn it if it's made into pellets so I thought I had it made back then but oil dropped down over the years," Swanson said, laughing.
"It's cheaper and it's on the farm in your own backyard. For farmers it would be ideal. My interest in it is, get the farmers' fields back into production and get jobs for the rural areas."
Swanson now heats a three-bedroom apartment, a two-bedroom apartment and a two-bedroom house with hay pellets for about $300 a month. He was previously spending $900 a month when he used oil to heat the properties.
Swanson is working on the project with a furnace maker in Pictou, a company that makes pellet machines in Cape Breton and government scientists at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College.
Kenny Corscadden, one of the scientists at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College, said while the province doesn't have the best land for food growth, grass has the potential to make money.
"It certainly grows in abundance. We have a lot of marginal lands in Nova Scotia and there's great potential for grass to be grown here. It's a crop that grows every year," said Corscadden.
CBC"One good application is to use hay that isn't suitable for a food stock and turn it into an energy crop."
Corscadden estimates it will take about 8,100 square metres of grass to heat a home for a year.
"One of the key benefits would either be to keep land from going into disuse or to bring it back into use," he said.
"That's another nice benefit of grass, it doesn't have to compete with a food crop. We don't use grass for any other source, really, in the food chain so it won't compete with that land that's been used for food production."
Scientists estimate up to 100,000 homes could be heated with locally-grown grass if farmers show enough interest in using their fields to produce biomass fuels.
"Farmers need a market for their crops so they're not going to start growing crops until there's an outlet for that so it's getting everyone together at the same time … to try and get everyone talking and on the same page," said Corscadden.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/story/2011/09/13/ns-grass-pellets-heat.html