Electric mail delivery fleet lowers energy costs, gases (Whse Star. Oct. 27, 2016)

Electric mail delivery fleet lowers energy costs, gases (Whse Star. Oct. 27, 2016)

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A long overdue initiative for electric road transportation is here, and its perspectives pack punch for meeting Vancouver declaration and Paris agreement requirements.

The first part of this two-part commentary, published Tuesday, summarized the back story of energy economics.

A Yukon Party media release of Oct. 17: “This investment of $160,000 will allow the purchase of four electric vehicles and the installation of eight charging stations throughout Whitehorse (some open to public use).”

It is the first concrete climate/energy deliverable of the election campaign.

Coming from the Yukon Party, this may surprise some.

However, it is not so much on the strength of their overall platform that the initiative shines, but it’s helped by the feebleness of the carbon price talk from the opposition parties.

Electric vehicle batteries hold a key for storing energy on the grid through the use of eventually bi-directional chargers as well as for lowering the energy cost of doing business in the community.

Highway fast charge points are the logical follow-up that people will demand.

Helping soon is the close, hands-on visibility of these electric trucks or vans and cars that run on 15 per cent energy and 20 per cent of fuel costs and 10 per cent of maintenance cost of equivalent combustion-powered vehicles.

The carbon tax claim to add a price signal of five or 50 per cent on top of the better than 500 per cent renewable fuel advantage is as false as it sounds.

The carbon pricing myth of viable fossil fuel into the long future is being busted wide open.

Coincidentally, carbon price advocating organizations like the Yukon Conservation Society and the Yukon NDP have often marginalized discussing EV policy options.

They might not realize how much their ecological aspirations have been and especially will be shackled to carbon pricing agendas of the fossil resource industry, locally and beyond.

Unfortunately, widely reported fracking slushfund operations under the cover of B.C. carbon tax refunds have never been denounced by these carbon price advocates who in fact praise the B.C. carbon tax as model.

A disturbing backdrop to the five priorities of the 2011 NDP election platform, which never even mentioned the word energy, creating an invitation, a vacuum that was filled by the Yukon Party with fracking and LNG proposals.

“Putting a price on carbon,” as if there was none, taunts the cord woodcutter who is trying to make it with an old pickup truck and the single mom with an empty gas tank.

Intentionally or not, the annual carbon tax refund, if it was for real, which it isn’t, laughs at the many families who live from paycheque to paycheque.

First Nations from northern B.C. to Treaty 3 lands in Ontario say no to carbon pricing, as it is an ideological bulldozer for pipelines they don’t want.

The Indigenous Environmental Network, likewise to the G-77 developing Nations in Paris, rejected this renewed and racialized finance colonialism.

Developing and First Nations are working toward renewable energy leapfrogging because it is economically and environmentally more realistic than the status quo nickle-and-diming by the carbon price to subsidize unconventional oil and gas expansion.

The tricky carbon tax title automatically locks in the expansion of emitter rights and free emission permits for carbon off-set traders, wherever there is a carbon tax from B.C. to Alberta (by 2017) to Australia (until 2014), Sweden and the U.K., for the purpose of capping emission reductions.

The energy policy study tour NDP Leader Liz Hanson participated in and reported on was offered by the German diplomatic service to Paris conference participants.

It centred around the effects of the EEG from 1999, the successful renewable energy source legislation she never mentioned and which had to fight its way against carbon tax lobbyists who tried and still try to stop it. She should know better than technocratic same old.

J. R. Saul observes in his book The Comeback (of aboriginal peoples) in the chapter History Is Upon Us:

“But the key to dealing with a real crisis, one that goes beyond our personal realities, lies in our ability to move outside what we think of as normal.

“If the crisis is big enough, we have to reconsider the narrative or we can be destroyed by it.”

The electric vehicle initiative is striking as the carbon price lobby of the oil cartel fights hardest to defend a 95 per cent control of the transportation sector.

Premier Darrell Pasloski’s statement that carbon pricing does not work in the North does not go far enough because it does not work – period.

Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.

By Peter Becker