VANCOUVER — This year, Michael Uehara will cut deeply into his company's bottom line as he starts a five-year project aimed at reducing by half the carbon footprint of King Pacific Lodge.
The wilderness resort sits in splendid isolation in the middle of British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest, a place where tourists go to embrace nature -- but where generators provide dirty power, outboard engines propel the small vessels used for whale watching and float planes are the main transportation link with the outside world.
In the big scheme of things, King Pacific Lodge has a relatively small carbon footprint, and reducing it will do little to help B.C. in its quest to cut the province's overall greenhouse-gas emissions to 10 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.
But Mr. Uehara makes the point that if an operation like his can't do its bit to find solutions, why should anybody?
Michael Uehara, president of King Pacific Lodge, fly fishes in the Great Bear Rain Forest in B.C.
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"I think it's fairly clear we all have to do something about the carbon we are putting into the atmosphere," said Mr. Uehara, whose lodge, owned by Rosewood Resorts, will spend $250,000 on solar-energy panels and installing a micro hydro plant on a nearby river.
King Pacific Lodge is also going to start offsetting guests' air travel to and from the resort and will strive for greater efficiency in the way it moves people by boat during their visits. Mr. Uehara acknowledges having a greener operation will help with marketing for the eco-resort, but besides that, reducing carbon emissions "is just the right thing to do."
Dermot Foley, vice-president of Strategic Analysis for Inhance Investment Management Inc., a Vancouver-based mutual-fund company that considers environmental and social issues as well as economic factors in investing, isn't surprised to hear that another company is making a voluntary shift toward carbon neutrality. He's seeing a lot of that these days -- after years of waiting.
"Sometimes it seems like I've spent half my life talking about climate change without seeing much action," said Mr. Foley, who was an analyst with the Suzuki Foundation before moving to Inhance Investment. "But I have to admit I've been more optimistic in the past six months than I ever have been before. We are finally starting to see the game plan shape up to meet Kyoto targets. I'm glad to see it's on the political agenda here, and in California and Ottawa. And there has been a real paradigm shift in business. It's not everyone. Some businesses still have their heads in the sand. But many do get it and are taking action to reduce carbon emissions."
"They are doing it mostly for economic reasons, because it's good for business, but there is nothing wrong with that."
There was a time, not so long ago, when Mr. Foley might have felt some despair about the situation. Climate change just wasn't a problem that business, or government, wanted to acknowledge. In 2001, he edited an important report for the Suzuki Foundation, Climate Crisis: Energy Solutions for BC, that was widely ignored.
"We had a few meetings with government, but nothing really resulted from it," said Mr. Foley, who since 1993 has watched a series of governments present climate-change action plans that went nowhere.
"Every year they'd repeat the same old things and nothing ever seemed to change," Mr. Foley said.
Actually, something did happen in those years: B.C.'s carbon emissions soared.
This year, the government vowed in the Throne Speech to seriously address the problem -- but critics say that, although some broad goals have been established, a concrete set of solutions has yet to be put forward.
While voluntary compliance by operations like King Pacific Lodge will help, Mr. Foley said it's urgent that government provide leadership now and establish key targets sector by sector.
The solutions set out in his six-year-old report are a good place to start, he said.
"All that stuff should still be done," he said.
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