So the federal government just announced that they are half way to reaching their Copenhagen emissions goal this week. (You can read the CBC article here ). Not bad.... not bad at all. But unfortunately not good enough. The energy and environment engineers here at uOttawa also just finished crunching some numbers this week. The result, our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are the lowest we have ever recorded - basically since 1974. DATA So let's deconstruct some of the numbers. In 1974, our direct GHG emissions were 27,223 tonnes. (*direct emissions mean everything that we burn here on campus like natural gas, oil, fuel in our cars, etc.) In 2011, our direct GHG emissinos were 15,556 tonnes, a 43% reduction. KYOTO Under Canada's Kyoto obligations, uOttawa would have had to reduced its total emissions by 6% of 1990 levels by 2012. (*total emissions include everything you burn and all the emissions associated with the electricity you use). In the 1990's our t...

Photo Credit: itatour.net The last leg of an epic journey took my family and me through Italy – Milano, to be specific, and then over a crazy alpine pass to Zurich, Switzerland. The small alpine towns we passed through seemed to function similarly to the sustainable glory that was St. Anton in Austria, though to a slightly lesser degree. Milano didn’t really give off the impression of being environmentally concerned; I didn’t see any recycling bins anywhere in the downtown core and surrounding streets, but to be fair, I didn’t cover much ground in my wanderings due to time restrictions. Given the sheer amount of tourist traffic, the quantity of waste that would be produced in that city would be gigantic; for the Earth’s sake, I just hope that they had some hidden recycling programs in place (however that would work). As far as Switzerland is concerned, I saw quite a few recycling stations in Zurich that broke down recyclables very specifically – namely, there were separate bins for br...