Nov 20 2019 — Democrats in the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday unveiled draft legislation in the latest attempt to extend tax credits for renewable technologies. The Growing Renewable Energy and Efficiency Now, or GREEN, Act would extend the federal Investment Tax Credit for solar and offshore wind for five years and keep a 60 percent […]
Nov 20 2019 — Policy Options — The coastal marine environment constitutes a biological, geochemical and physical milieu without which life would not exist. Phytoplankton and other microbes, the base of food webs, transfer mass and energy to organisms higher up in the food chain, many of which play key roles in marine ecosystems, provide important sources of protein for humans and […]
Nov 19 2019 — Climate and energy policy news is filled with talk of regional tensions over pipelines and carbon taxes. These policy debates become regional ones because certain provinces are rich in particular resources, such as oil and hydroelectricity. While many energy production methods are regionally concentrated, energy waste is everywhere. That means there is an energy efficiency […]
Nov 14 2019 — The Canadian Press — A baby born in Canada today will never know a time in which his or her health isn’t at risk from a warming planet, an annual look at climate change and human health reported Wednesday. The Lancet medical journal’s 2019 countdown on health and climate change has dire warnings about the kind of world we […]
Nov 13 2019 — Wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles are spreading far more quickly around the world than many experts had predicted. But this rapid growth in clean energy isn’t yet fast enough to slash humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and get global warming under control.
Nov 11 2019 — Alex Binkley — National Newswatch — It plans to encourage its suppliers to work to the same goal. Ottawa–Maple Leaf Foods has become the first food company to reach carbon neutrality in its processing operations and wants to encourage its meat, grain and other suppliers to work toward the same goal. Michael McCain, President and CEO, told a Nov. 7 news […]
Nov 7 2019 — Robert P. Murphy — Fraser Institute — Now that the election’s over, the Trudeau government (perhaps now in closer concert with parties across the aisle) will continue its climate policy program. It’s therefore worth noting the recent tragic death of Harvard economist Martin Weitzman has underscored his work on climate risk assessment, which many climate activists use to argue for more aggressive […]
Nov 5 2019 — CBC — Climate emergencies have been declared by countries like Canada, Portugal, Ireland and France, and in individual cities such as Paris, New York, Toronto and Vancouver. Now a collection 11,000 scientists from 153 countries is doing the same. In a declaration published Tuesday in the journal BioScience, the collective put forth six “critical and interrelated steps” that governments and […]
Nov 5 2019 — Associated Press — Germany says the U.S. government’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement is “regrettable” but no surprise. Environment Minister Svenja Schulze said Tuesday that the U.S. had announced its plan to withdraw from the pact two years ago and “luckily it has remained alone in doing so.”
Nov 5 2019 — NY Times — The Trump administration on Monday moved to weaken an Obama-era regulation aimed at limiting the seepage of toxic pollution into water supplies from the ash of coal burning power plants, a change that coal industry leaders say could keep plants open longer and which environmental groups fear will increase the risk of water contamination.
Nov 2 2019 — Dan Kraus — Nature Conservancy of Canada — Parks and protected areas have been established across Canada to conserve many things we value. Banff National Park was originally established in 1885 to protect hot springs and breathtaking scenery for tourists. In 1893, Algonquin Provincial Park was set up to protect forested headwaters from settlement and land clearing. Over the last 134 years, more […]
Oct 31 2019 — Globe and Mail — When federal scientists working in the High Arctic began monitoring a glacier on Meighen Island in the 1960s, they built a wooden hut for shelter. As the years passed and snow accumulated, the hut was gradually buried and then abandoned once it became easier to build a new one atop the one becoming entombed in […]
Oct 29 2019 — The impassioned speech given by teenage activist Greta Thunberg to the United Nations climate change summit, in which she told politicians young people would not forgive them if they failed to act on the climate crisis, caused an excited stir. But while social media was dominated with talk of her personality quirks, the reasons behind […]
Oct 29 2019 — In terms of public health, one of the worst air pollutants is fine particulate matter. From 2009 to 2016, average levels of these particulates in the ambient air in the U.S. plummeted by 24.2 percent. That’s the good news. The bad news is that from 2016 to 2018, average levels jumped by 5.5 percent. You’ve […]
Oct 25 2019 — Fatima Syed — National Observer — For Saskatchewan’s oil and gas industry, the next stop is schools. Public education in Saskatchewan has become a key tool in securing the “hegemony” of the oil and gas industry and “obstructing” the transition to a low-carbon economy, a study has found. The September 2019 report titled “Petro-pedagogy: fossil fuel interests and the obstruction of […]