Welcome to the St. George’s Green Team’s Green Scene’s first blog posting! Normally, we will be posting Green Tips for home, work and school, but as our inaugural posting, I would like to share what I learned at a recent conference titled “Pour un Québec libéré du pétrole d’ici 2030.” (For a Quebec free of petroleum in 2030) With such an ambitious title, you can imagine that there was a lot to be learned from speaker Hugo Séguin, senior advisor for Équiterre and president of the board of directors of Climate Action Network Canada. I would like to talk numbers, because what spoke to me most were the surprising statistics that Mr. Séguin provided with us as motivation for ending our dependence on fossil fuels.
The conference in numbers....
The conference in numbers....
- "Le plan de développement durable de la collectivité montréalaise 2010-2015" has set a goal of reducing by 30% our emissions of Green House Gases by 2020.
- The world's population consumes 30 billion barrels of oil each year, which is 85 million barrels a day.
- With countries like China, Brazil and India developing at breakneck speed, by 2030 we will need 20 million more barrels per day, which is 6 times the annual production of Saudi Arabia.
- One barrel of oil is the same as 5000 hours of manual labour on a farm.
- Our agricultural industry is 67% dependent on petroleum.
- Our transportation industry is 98% dependent.
- Most of our petroleum comes from Algeria, 38.7%.
- Petroleum and its byproducts are responsible for 82% of the world's energy systems.
- In Canada's economic stimulus plan following the recent recession, we invested 2.6 billion dollars in "green" technology, or 8% of the total package.
- South Korea invested 30.7 billion, or 90% of their entire stimulus package.
- In Quebec in 2007, our Green House Gas emissions came mostly from transportation (40.7%), and industry (32.4%).
Thanks for tuning in,
Green Team's Green Queen
Ms. Gallimore
ps Don't forget to check out the hyperlinks within the article for more information!