Canada's Environmental Voice
In the Russian province of Chelyabinsk, close to the northern border of Kazakhstan, is a quiet village called Muslyumovo. The crisp, powdery snow dances across its empty streets, over the ruins of brick buildings and the Techa River. A haunting wind blows through, hinting at a forgotten tragedy.
Isaac Newton was pondering how to test the hypothesis that colour is created through pressure on the optical nerves when, suddenly, he had an epiphany. With startling confidence – or perhaps simply unnerving indifference – he stuck a needle into the back of his eye. Newton calmly noted the effect […]
The world’s first algae-powered building has just been completed in Hamburg, Germany. The outside of the apartment complex is covered in green slime, generating heat and biomass.
Around the time of the financially disastrous OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s, Shell decided to see how far they could look into the future. What other shocks might be in store and what might they mean for oil? They fleshed out a series of plausible futures, exploring potential consequences […]
It would take more than 200 days to walk across Canada. More if you stopped at New Brunswick’s illustrious Potato World Museum. It’s understandable then, that the quintessential trans-Canadian roadtrip involves a beat up old Honda Civic, rather than a sturdy pair of walking shoes.
Let’s say you want to install a solar panel on your roof but there’s a tree in the way. Trees are great and all, but for the sake of green energy you’d want to cut it down, right? Actually, maybe not. In fact, if you own a tree (just one […]
We complain all the time about the global treatment of renewable energies as we move from fossil fuels to renewables. It’s taking too long. We need a better energy mix. The subsidies are unfair. But we don’t really question the inevitability that the future belongs to renewable energy. After […]
In 2008, the esteemed Al Gore told Obama he should demand that the US move to 100 per cent renewables within ten years. We’re five years on now, but let’s pretend that Obama is just getting around to this memo on his list of things to do. “Oh darn,” he says to […]
The Canada of 2035 will be a very different place. We’ll be a nation of 43 million people; the GTA alone will balloon to more than nine million residents. It is hard to fathom the changes society will undergo in the next 22 years. Just think back to 1991 (if […]
As greenhouse gases go, hexafluoroethane (C2F6), nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) are about as obscure as a high school band at the Rolling Stones concert of atmospheric warming. Nobody’s suggesting they deserve top billing, but Ozzie Zehner of the University of California thinks these three GHGs are worthy […]
