In efforts to be carbon neutral as much as possible my family and I have recently made the switch to a hybrid vehicle. It gets 34 kilometres when running on electricity which is just enough to get me to school and back everyday. Since we’ve had our hybrid we’ve only had to fill up with gas once at the “treaty gas” where we I use my treaty card at the reserve gas station to save a bit of money.
It is important for my family and I to do our part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and trading in my car for a more fuel-efficient mode of transportation was one way of doing that, besides it was either that or take the bus.
I have yet to see my power bill though and am afraid of the cost. So far it takes about 12 hours to bring the battery charge back up to 100 per cent and we’ve been changing it overnight in the garage. Lately I am obsessed with what the percentage of the electricity is while driving. I’m thinking about driving it up to Yellowknife this summer and am hoping that by then there will be more EV stations around town. Here in Victoria there are EV stations everywhere that charge vehicles at a fast rate.
Living a green lifestyle is important. In many aspects of everyday life, I try to encompass a green lifestyle through recycling, composting and buying local as much as possible to reduce pollution from international trade shipping. Since we are still renters, we are not able to install our own wood pellet stove to use biomass and instead we rely on hydroelectricity which is not the greatest renewable technology as it still releases methane (not to mention it damns up and disrupts the natural flow of rivers, which is something only beavers should do).
Living green and off the grid using nothing but the natural elements of wind, solar, biomass and tidal, to power homes is not only good for the environment, it’s also good for socioeconomics because it is hugely cost effective. Imagine not having to pay an outrageous heating bill every month? Or better yet, imagine not having your power turned off because you can’t pay your heating bill. If that has never happened to you then I am happy for you but there are people in the north that have had that happen to them for being late on paying their power bill, myself included.
Green energy can help people save money and live without worry whether that is living off the grid completely in a little shack with compostable toilets, paired with a wind turbine and a solar panel; or whether that means living collectively off the grid in a community that owns the rights to use green technology to eliminate the cost of diesel. It all is for the betterment of the individual and the community as a whole and something that should already be established in the north but there are still regulatory barriers in place making it hard to reduce the reliance on greenhouse gas and it is difficult to untangle the political red taped bureaucracy behind the growing business of green energy. We need to look to our neighbors in the Yukon where the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation have begun generating revenue off their solar farm in the hundreds of thousands and are now looking at incorporating biomass and wind into that system to power their small community of only 250 people for the entire year, not just in the summer months.
In researching the types of green technologies that are on the market, I wondered about the possibility of generating power from snow. Since the North has so much of it why not put it to good use right? And you wouldn’t believe it, but snow is actually energy efficient. I mean why wouldn’t it be right. It already acts as a thermal barrier for igloos. Ironically enough, a scientist all the way out in California (go figure) has found a way to power up his boots and warm them with every step he takes in the snow because snow has a positive charge and when in a static state it produces electrons.
We need our leaders in the North to look at some of the wilder ideas like snow power to see if there is a possibility for creating new technologies that can help the environment by using the natural resources that are found all around us. After all, it’s not the boring-afraid-to-take-risks-of-looking-foolish people who make a difference, it’s the out of the box thinkers who don’t care what people think that make history. Look at Einstein or Tesla, everyone thought they were mad but now they are revered as the most brilliant thinkers of our time and we are still learning from them long after they are gone.
While we wait for the green light on regulatory changes in the north for ease of green energy usage, we can start doing our small part to help protect the environment and live in a way that is both conducive to the past where our ancestors took good care of the land and the future where we ditch fossil fuels altogether.