Given all the ways in which humans are otherwise smarter and better educated than plants, you’d think we would have established a bit more of an advantage in our capacity to harvest the sun’s energy.
Renewables
The Untapped Heat Beneath Our Feet
In 1904, Prince Piero Ginori Conti of Larderello, Italy found himself in charge of a boric acid extraction company. One can only assume his life’s greatest ambition was not boric acid extraction, because he quickly repurposed the firm’s resources to begin producing electricity via a reciprocating steam engine.
Redirecting Anti-Wind Energy
During the last 10 years in Canada, as well as elsewhere in North America and other parts of the world, proposed wind energy projects have spawned fierce opposition and intense controversy. It’s not headline news when members of the public react against possible changes to their neighbourhoods.
Why I Want a Wind Farm in My Backyard
GE’s new Space Frame wind tower is lighter, taller and easier to transport than previous turbines. It also represents the wind industry’s latest effort to remove itself from human view. One wonders if something won’t be lost in moving renewable power further away from our communities.
Ontario’s Wind Problem: Accepting the Blame
Last month in Goderich, Ontario, hundreds of protestors demonstrated outside the local courthouse during injunction deliberations for the proposed K2 Wind Power Project.
Renewables Aren’t Perfect, and That’s Okay
Sometime during the next 100 years or so, the world is going to run out of platinum. If we haven’t found a replacement, production of new jewelry, electrodes, anticancer drugs and turbine engines will all grind to a halt. Also coming to a screeching stop will be production of solar […]
People of a Feather
In People of a Feather, filmmaker and ecologist Joel Health takes viewers on an Arctic adventure with time-lapse video footage, underwater photography, and raw scenes of Inuit life to show how environmental changes are impacting the people and wildlife of the Belcher Islands in Canada’s Hudson Bay. The film was […]
Seeking the Current
Arguments over resource extraction have become a cornerstone in energy expansion debates, and debates over projects such as the Northern Gateway and Keystone XL pipelines define how many such projects are stalled and sometimes thwarted. Unlike the famous pipelines, a publicized debate has never come to the defense of the […]
Green Neighbours Collide over Wind Power Project
It’s dispiriting when newly rival factions of the environmental movement clash over what has become a touchy subject in green circles. Worse when disagreements end up in the justice system. Yet that’s exactly what played out this week in a Toronto appeals court.
Aboriginal Power: Clean Energy & The Future of Canada’s First Peoples
When breaking new ground, it’s quite common to find oneself in muddy water. Aboriginal Power is all about how Indigenous Peoples in Canada have broken new ground by entering the renewable energy foray, sometimes in a big way.
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