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'More opinion than fact' on Kyoto

Nathan VanderKlippe
Northern News Services


Yellowknife (Dec 11/02) - The hints are subtle, but persistent: the climate in the North is changing. Permafrost is melting, and threatening to take with it municipal infrastructure which depends on a solid base.

"We have problems with our roads ... but other than that, it doesn't really affect our infrastructure too much in terms of water and sewer," said Yellowknife public works manager Dennis Kefalas.

However, the city is trying to cut down on emissions. It is burning less fuel to heat water in the winter, and it just adopted a no idling policy on its vehicles. In addition, the city is installing variable-frequency drives in its pumphouses. The drives cost $150,000 to buy and install, but save between $30,000-$60,000 in electricity every year.

But, said Kefalas, the prime culprit in Yellowknife emissions is the amount of diesel-fuelled electricity the city consumes.

"If our politicians want, they can maybe try and force the power corporation to reduce our need for that diesel generator," he said.

In Tuktoyaktuk, Arctic storms are literally beating away the shoreline where people live. In a few decades, an island which protects the harbour of the high Northern community could disappear.

In other communities, public works employees worry that berms in sewage lagoons could fall apart if their permafrost base melts. The city of Iqaluit has been forced to replace its underground sewage pipes with much stronger new models that can withstand the pressures of a shifting, and melting, earth.

Conversely, some Baffin communities worry that temperatures might actually be getting colder. If that happens, the sand that filters the waste in their sewage lagoons may no longer be effective -- and lagoons could be backed up.

In other places, warming waters could cause algae blooms, with potential effects on human health.

Gather a bunch of waste and water workers in a room and the stories you hear are interesting, especially when discussion is about climate change. These are the people who see the ground changing the way they work with underground pipes and earthen berms.

And this past weekend, they were the ones talking about it at the annual conference of the Northern Territories Water and Waste Association. The conference brought together everyone from frontline workers to policymakers to discuss a number of issues facing municipalities.

One of them was the Kyoto Protocol, which Canada intends to sign this week and which will oblige the country to drop its greenhouse gas emissions to about six per cent below 1990 levels by 2012.

In the North, where development has proceeded at a furious pace since 1990, that could have significant consequences. In 2002, the NWT produced 1,502 kilotons of greenhouse gases. By 2008, conservative estimates predict that will rise to 1,622.

To meet Kyoto requirements here, the territory will have to drop its emissions by a full 40 per cent.

Reduction challenge

Is that even possible?

"I don't want to say it's impossible," said Nick Lawson, an engineer with Jacques Whitford who spoke about practical steps to cut emissions. "But it's a huge challenge."

Lawson recommended a number of practical steps, including less vehicle idling, more clustering of buildings, community energy planning and better vehicle maintenance.

"It's the things we talked about in the oil crisis of the '70s -- the same kinds of things we talked about then. And we managed to get over that," he said.

The problem is, no one yet knows how Kyoto will be implemented -- or even what sort of climate change is even happening.

Information about climate change is still "nebulous," said Ken Johnson, an engineer with EBA Engineering, who also presented at the conference.

The same is true for Kyoto, said Lawson.

"There's more opinion than fact out there on Kyoto," he said.

Even so, Iqaluit works engineer Matthew Hough said climate change is a fundamentally important issue.

"Right now we fully rely on the climate conditions for our infrastructure," he said.