Some less-than-encouraging news today: Nearly 6 in 10 Canadians call lack of new pipeline capacity a ‘crisis,’ poll suggests Trump replacement for Obama climate plan worse than doing nothing – study The first story about the poll has some room for interpretation. Seeing pipelines as a “crisis” doesn’t necessarily mean supporting them, though the article […]
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In British Columbia, the Unist’ot’en Camp has been operating for years to try to keep fossil fuel pipelines out of the traditional territory of the Wet’suwet’en Nation. Anticipating RCMP enforcement of a court order to allow access for the construction of the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline to Kitimat, the Gidimt’en checkpoint was more recently […]
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Blair King (whose blog bio says he has an “Interdisciplinary PhD in Chemistry and Environmental Studies”) is one of the people who had sent a tweet arguing that only people who use few or no fossil fuels can call for decarbonization and who I linked to this rebuttal post. He subsequently wrote his own response […]
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This Canadian news article about political opposition to carbon taxes does a good job of summarizing the barriers to stronger greenhouse gas mitigation policy that people like Doug McAdam and Stephen Gardiner have articulated: “Certainly there are abundant grounds to doubt the political wisdom of the Liberal plan. A tax, or anything that resembles it, […]
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As reported in The Guardian, no major countries actually have commitments compatible with the 1.5 – 2.0 ˚C maximum target in the Paris Agreement: “When taken as benchmark by other countries, the NDCs of India, the EU, the USA and China lead to 2.6 °C, 3.2 °C, 4 °C and over 5.1 °C warmings, respectively.” Canada is among the […]
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As reported in The Guardian, the International Energy Agency is warning the world that there is no place for new fossil fuel power stations, vehicles, and industrial facilities if the world is going to stay below the 2 ˚C upper limit in the Paris Agreement: In total, the IEA calculated that existing infrastructure would “lock […]
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This happened yesterday: 50,000 people march in Montreal to demand more climate action I hadn’t heard about it in advance and I don’t know the people behind it or what will result of it. Still, the level of media attention and my experience of the March for Jobs, Justice, and the Climate in Toronto make […]
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In an ideal world, politicians would rely on high quality sources of information to determine what they should consider to be true factually about the world. They could then apply their political philosophies and ideologies to the question of what public policy ought to exist. It’s not only conservatives who invert or pervert this process, […]
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Tanya Whyte, one of my classmates at U of T, has been integrally involved in setting up Lipad: a searchable online database of everything said in Canada’s Parliament since 1901. It’s sure to be valuable to everyone from elementary school students researching projects to academic researchers, journalists, and politicians. There was a segment about it […]
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Tzeporah Berman’s comments to the Alberta Teachers Association are well worth reading. She highlights how Canada keeps operating with an outdated notion of how usable and competitive the bitumen sands are, and that the case for new pipelines collapses when you consider what the world as a whole needs to do to address climate change. […]
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