climate change policy, science, and activism; photography; cartography and mapmaking
The Pembina Institute has released a new interactive tool that lets anybody test out alternative approaches to setting energy policy for Alberta, in sectors including transport, buildings, electricity generation, and agriculture. It doesn’t allow a huge amount of ambition. For instance, the only bitumen sands policy option is the 100 megatonne cap which the Alberta … Continue reading “Alberta’s Energy Policy Simulator”
The CBC is reporting today that the oil production cuts enacted by the NDP provincial government to try to raise fossil fuel prices have made oil transport by rail less viable. The possibility of exporting the bitumen sands by rail when pipeline capacity is exceeded has highlighted how fossil fuel advocates take climate change inaction … Continue reading “Open thread: oil by rail”
A bit of good news: Supreme Court rules energy companies cannot walk away from old wells. The fossil fuel industry has huge future cleanup costs, including the UK’s North Sea platforms, and of course Canada’s bitumen sands. The CBC story notes: Alberta has been dealing with a tsunami of orphaned oil and gas wells in … Continue reading “Redwater Energy Supreme Court decision”
An increasingly frequent media line from supporters of the bitumen sands and the fossil fuels industry generally is that if oil isn’t produced in Canada it will be produced in Saudi Arabia instead, and that is undesirable because the conduct of people in Saudi Arabia is unethical while Canadians behave ethically. As more morally worthy … Continue reading “Saudi Arabia as an argument for Canadian oil”
Lots on the go — I’ve had a sudden flurry of late year photo bookings, including a three day Canada-UK artificial intelligence conference at the Munk School. I’m still working on the dissertation of course, continuing with interviews and the literature review while working with my committee to structure the final document. I’ll be doing … Continue reading “Working through and thinking beyond the PhD”
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 She highlights how Canada keeps operating with an outdated notion of how usable and competitive the bitumen sands are, and that the case for new pipelines collapses when you consider what the world as a whole needs to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. … Continue reading “Berman on the oil sands and decarbonization”
One frequent talking point from people who see no problem with continuing to enlarge the bitumen sands is that action by countries like Canada is pointless as long as larger places like India and China continue to build large amounts of coal capacity. The Economist recently reported (in an issue with a cover story about … Continue reading “India and coal”
Canada’s continued enthusiasm for new fossil fuel production not only helps undermine the world’s chances of dealing with climate change, but it also threatens Canada’s future economic prosperity as one of the dirtiest and highest-cost producers of a commodity that may see sharply declining demand. A recent special report in The Economist said: Yet the … Continue reading “Canada and losers in a global transition to climate-safe energy”
Yesterday I photographed two rallies outside Toronto-area offices of Members of Parliament and Ministers of Finance and Foreign Affairs Bill Morneau and Chrystia Freeland. With Freeland we asked if Canada was now going to withdraw our signature from the Paris Agreement. The sentiment was crafted to be possible to express in one photograph, but the … Continue reading “Canada’s message to the world”
Writing in The Globe and Mail Thomas Homer-Dixon and Yonatan Strauch have a solid explanation for the incompatibility between the Trans Mountain pipeline and the climate commitments Canada has chosen for itself: For these [pipeline] opponents, further massive investment in the extraction and export of some of the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel on Earth is … Continue reading “The climate case against Trans Mountain”