Canada's Environmental Voice
November was an up-and-down month for Ontario’s renewable energy industry. The Minister of Energy released a directive on November 23 to resume accepting applications for the province’s Feed-In Tariff (FIT) program. It’s good news for a program that has been on hold for review for several months, leaving solar manufacturers […]
Right now, we live in a world that is an average of 0.8 degrees (Celcius) warmer than it was one hundred years ago. This is a profoundly changed planet: one of superstorms, species loss, rising ocean levels, and innumerable other environmental catastrophes.
A RECENT headline in The Globe and Mail reads, “Canadians won’t quit on the environment.” Indeed, in a February poll conducted by Ipsos Reid, over half of the people surveyed (57 per cent) indicated that Canada should take immediate action on climate change, even if it means larger deficits. Results […]
On November 15th the mayors of Canada’s 22 largest municipalities convened in Ottawa to ask the federal government to increase funding for infrastructure. Cities face crumbling infrastructure and a massive backlog of repairs and investment at a time when population in growth in many urban centres is booming.
I like birds, on the whole. I can’t identify more than one or two (maybe just chickens and ducks), but I’m happy to listen to some cheerful chirping in the morning. Certainly I would prefer to listen to a singing bird than to watch it fly, squawking, into the churning […]
How does the enduring master-slave metaphor relate to our high-energy culture? Andrew Nikiforuk talks about cheap energy issues and The Energy of Slaves in an interview with Kyrke Gaudreau. Watch the highlights above or check out the full interview: You can read Nikiforuk’s regular column in every issue of A\J.
A British startup has figured out how to produce gasoline from air and water.
Like many Canadians, I stood outside this past Sunday, November 11th, at a local cenotaph to commemorate Remembrance Day. I couldn’t help but notice the weather: it was almost 20°C in Toronto and record-breaking weather for Southern Ontario.
Canada largely owes its economic development to natural resources, the vast and (theoretically) sustainable resources like lumber, fish, minerals, agriculture and energy in the form of oil and natural gas. Borrowing liberally from Harold Innis’s iconic The Fur Trade in Canada, hewers of wood and drawers of water we were, […]
The “Not in My Backyard” (NIMBY) problem can put a real lid on wind energy uptake if a sufficient number of backyards are marked as off-limits. And we need those yards. A windmill can’t exactly function to peak capacity when tucked furtively away in one’s garage. But what creates the […]
