by John McGrath

Posted 4 months, 4 weeks ago Almost exactly three years ago, Ontario's government announced the construction of two new nuclear reactors to replace aging parts of our current power supply. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Read More

Posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago Canada's public broadcaster, CBC, has just finished airing the three-part series Climate Wars, based on the Gwynne Dyer book of the same name. I haven't yet finished reading the book, but the thesis is easily summarized: If you thought that the effects of climate change only included withering droughts, torrential storms, and general freaky-deakiness, you've missed one of the big ones: anthropogenic mass death, or as the political scientists call it, "war."

Yup, on top of all the other things we'll have to worry about in a melting world, there's the sad fact that we'll have more and more… Read More

Posted 9 months, 4 weeks ago I heard about this on the radio this morning, and couldn't believe the uncritical reporting on it:

The City of Calgary's entire fleet of trucks and buses may soon be partly fueled by biodiesel produced from Alberta beef tallow.

Tallow is all that's left over after an animal has been processed. The city has been experimenting with tallow from the meat-packing plant in High River, Alta., as part efforts to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

...

Not only is the tallow in ready supply locally, turning it into biofuel recycles a product that would normally be thrown away, he said.

Tallow-waste biofuel is… Read More

Posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago The situation in Ottawa has passed, for now. The Governor-General (representing Her Majesty Elizabeth II) has granted Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's request to prorogue (or suspend) Parliament, meaning that the confidence vote that had been scheduled for Monday will not happen for now. This is a day of firsts, as this is the shortest session of Parliament in this country ever and the first time a PM has suspended Parliament with a confidence vote on the docket. Harper has bought himself about two months as Parliament will return late January and almost immediately present a budget at that… Read More

Posted 11 months, 4 weeks ago It looks like Stéphane Dion might just make it to the Prime Minister's office after all, at least for a little while. According to frenzied reporting out of Ottawa, opposition parties in Canada's Parliament (who, while not forming the government, hold the majority of seats between them) are preparing to topple the Conservative government of Stephen Harper.

According to initial reports, Dion would become Prime Minister until the spring, when his party chooses a new leader.

It will go down on Dec. 8, when opposition parties will table a motion of no confidence in the House of Commons; the… Read More

Posted 1 year, 1 month ago Well, it was a short, boring campaign, and, uh, nothing really happened. I'm writing this before the polls have all reported in, but the Conservatives have almost certainly gained a couple dozen seats, putting them just -- just -- short of a majority government. The Liberals have run on a campaign of trying to be mildly less abusive of the planet, and will be even weaker in the 40th Parliament than they were in the 39th. This likely means a few things:

• Stéphane Dion, Liberal leader and Kyoto champion, will lose his job next spring if not sooner. I've got… Read More

Posted 1 year, 1 month ago Robert Farley has a point I would like all environmentalists to have seared to the insides of our eyelids:

Simply because something must happen does not mean that it will happen ... It's not that people are stupid (although many are) or dishonest (although many are); its that the institutions make certain outcomes difficult to achieve.

Farley thinks that America isn't in as bad straights as pre-Imperial Rome, but of course the bailout isn't America's only crisis at the moment. There is this whole "oh God oh God the planet is burning" thing we've got going on which… Read More

Posted 1 year, 2 months ago Not too long after my earlier post was published, even Canada's biggest carbon-tax booster inched away from the central plank of his election platform.

To understand how disingenuous this is, Dion spent months preparing the ground for his carbon tax announcement, which was conducted with huge fanfare and hoopla. Now he's saying the media are the ones who claimed it was a "major" part of his platform.

Don't get me wrong, I like the green shift, and I've been a fan of Dion for some time (which I put in writing here), but he sees the writing… Read More

Posted 1 year, 2 months ago Canada is two weeks in to its third election in four years, and environmental issues have been ... well, not quite front-and-center, but definitely somewhere in the foreground. And that could be a very bad thing for the chances for a carbon tax in the U.S.

The election has been pretty dull, even by Canadian standards. Aside from an argument over whether the televised debates should have four or five party leaders on stage (take that, America!) there have been very few sparks. The governing Conservatives have a campaign message centered around making Stephen Harper look less like an… Read More

Posted 1 year, 6 months ago Ali Velshi on CNN, Wednesday morning: "What if you could take a lump of coal and turn that in to your gasoline?"

What if, indeed? A brief (very brief) stroll through the archives... Read More