Beat Global Heat Saturday, July 26th is going to be hot! The first ever Beat Global Heat Backyard Festival will see a series of small scale concerts independently organized by people like you across Canada.
Earth Hour Earth Hour 2009 aims to reach more than one billion people in 1000 cities around the world, inviting communities, business and governments to switch off lights for one hour at 8:30pm on Saturday March 28 and sending a powerful global message that we care
Earth Run: Run for your planet Earth Run helps raise awareness and funds for environmental organizations and initiatives.
United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009 The sessions (COP 15) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is open to Parties of the Convention and Observer States (Governments), the United Nations System and observer organizations duly admitted by the Conference of the Parties.
World Car Fee Day Every September 22, people from around the world get together in the streets, intersections, and neighbourhood blocks to remind the world that we don't have to accept our car-dominated society.
Ethanol Clean Air Facts
In 2004, ethanol use in the U.S. reduced CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 7 million tons, equal to removing the emissions of more than 1 million cars from the road.
Greenhouse Gases Emissions per Km
Full-size SUVs, minivans, pickup trucks and the like emit about 40 per cent more greenhouse gases per kilometre travelled than do passenger cars.
How to Pick a Better Bulb
If every household replaced just three 60-watt incandescent bulbs with CF bulbs, the pollution savings would be like taking 3.5 million cars off the road!
Last exit for the Holocene era
The Holocene epoch is that blessed time of stable, warm climate (but not too hot) and unchanging sea levels in which human civilization was born and grew to its present size.
Urban Sprawl
Sprawling land development is gobbling up the American countryside at an alarming rate -- around 365 acres per hour according to government figures.
Greetings from twenty-first-century Europe, where new ideas, new technologies, and better ways of living are flourishing
It’s a real pity, Gesine Bänfer wanted us to know, that we couldn’t have visited her daughter’s kindergarten at the end of last week. This scene was fine and all, she conceded: The building a low-slung, primary-coloured series of attached, self-contained classroom units, each with its own patio and garden, like a row of holiday condos. Vines hanging from trellises for shade. The sloped roof tiled in solar panels. A communal cob oven out here in the rear courtyard where the kids learn to bake. Gleeful German five-year-olds streaming out the main entrance — there was Gesine’s daughter Stevie now — and onto automobile-free streets, strolling toward their ultra-efficient, mostly solar-heated homes, there to munch on exquisite Brötchen from the neighbourhood bakery and continue the process, evidently already under way, of evolution onto a higher plane of existence.
LS » As a Canadian I know that our drunk-on-oil conservative prime minister from Alberta is going to be totally useless at guiding us towards a future of sustainable energy but perhaps the guy to the south of us can help in that regard. It won’t be easy for him, there is a huge drunk-on-oil contingent in the US but perhaps the BP oil leak (um, geyser) disaster will give Obama the impetus to make the quest for sustainable energy the focus of the American people (biz and gov) until the job is complete. Sort of like the Manhattan Project during WWII.
How urban planners are turning industrial eyesores into popular public spaces
The High Line serves as a prime example of a new kind of park taking shape in countries such as the United States, Germany, Mexico, and Canada — one that uses the abandoned infrastructure and artifacts of industry to create distinctive public green spaces. Where we once understood parks to be the manicured places of respite envisioned by legendary landscape architects like Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of Manhattan’s Central Park, they increasingly reflect recent urban history, seeking to create a positive legacy for what were once polluting structures.
One of the reasons for this change is economic: it’s typically less expensive to reinvent industrial ruins than to remove them. Another is that cities are simply running out of green space. “With Central Park, the land was acquired when Manhattan’s growth was still very much on the tip of the island; same pattern with Golden Gate Park in San Francisco,” says Julia Czerniak, director of the Upstate design centre at the Syracuse University School of Architecture, and co-editor of the book Large Parks. “Now we’re going back into cities and finding military bases or old factories, and cobbling together vacant land, typically brownfields,” she notes, referring to contaminated sites. It’s not that landscape architects enjoy cleaning up degraded sites, says Czerniak — “That’s just what we get.”
LS » I happened to take a stroll on the High Line in NYC this past summer. Totally awesome rejuvenation of an old industrial space. All cities should make an effort to do this kind of thing with the detritus of our industrial era’s. Recycle and reuse on a large scale.
Start with big oil companies, and the money and connections flow.
Here’s how it fits together. Sallie Baliunas is a Harvard-Smithsonian Institution astrophysicist who has been providing scientific cover for global-warming deniers since the mid-nineties. She is a senior scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute (received $310,000 from ExxonMobil), where Marshall CEO William O’Keefe was a former ExxonMobil lobbyist, senior official of the American Petroleum Institute and chairman of the Global Climate Coalition. Baliunas co-wrote (with colleague Willie Soon) the Fraser Institute pamphlet Global warming: A guide to the science (receives $60,000 a year from ExxonMobil). Baliunas is “enviro-sci host” of TechCentralStation.com (received $95,000 from ExxonMobil) and is on science advisory boards for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ($252,000) and the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy ($427,500). She has given speeches before the American Enterprise Institute ($960,000) and the Heritage Foundation ($340,000). The Heartland Institute ($312,000) publishes her op-ed pieces. She is not lying when she says she receives no direct funding from ExxonMobil, but the money surrounds her.
LS » I wish I had read this article before Xmas dinner when my over-sized SUV-driving uncle started blustering on about the global-warming hoax perpetrated by scientists looking for funding. Talk about hypocritical, but he was right about always following the money.
More Info:
Responding to the skeptics: Science takes on four common arguments against global warming www.theglobeandmail.com/…
The Copenhagen talks on climate change are going badly, which doubtless pleases the federal government. It thinks a weak agreement or none at all will serve Canada’s economic interests better. It is wrong.
There are only two likely scenarios, really. One is the “business as usual” scenario, in which the developed countries do not reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions fast enough and the developing countries just let it rip. In the other, the rich countries make big emissions cuts in the next 10 or 15 years, and the developing countries at least cap their emissions. That better future is still ugly in many places—but not in Canada.
Nobody gets away unscathed in the “business as usual” scenario. When British foreign secretary David Miliband revealed the latest numbers from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre (the U.K.’s national weather service) last October, predicting that a world in which emissions go unchecked may see a 4-degree-Celsius rise in average global temperature by 2060, he simply said: “We cannot cope with a 4-degree world.”
LS » So basically the choices are to do nothing and hope that this global warming stuff is really just some big lefty-liberal conspiracy BS or to do something about it and suffer short term economic consequences as we change our civilization from a destructive one to a sustainable one.
If we do nothing and the lefty-liberals are correct then we are fucked and will be known historically as the idiots who let our planet be destroyed. Our kids will really appreciate that, if they are around to even care about it.
If we do something about global warming and the lefty-liberals are correct then we are saviours and it will of course be worth the short term costs. If we do something and the lefty-liberals are wrong then the short term costs will be unfortunate but at least we will have improved our civilization in the mean time. Sustainability and industry don’t have to be anathema concepts.
Seems to me then that there is only one option. Time to buck up and do something about this lefty-liberal global warming conspiracy BS.
The tar barons have held the nation to ransom. This thuggish petro-state is today the greatest obstacle to a deal in Copenhagen
When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world’s peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country’s government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee’s tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I’ve broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.
So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.
Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.
LS » Sorry folks of the rest of the world. I nor anyone I know under the age of 44 voted for Stephen Harper and the Conservatives who have allowed this travesty to propagate for the past few years. It is embarrassing to have that Albertan tar sand licker as our leader. The problem is he has no competition, we had no Obama for the last election. It is rather hard to oust a democratically elected government. If you have any suggestions, by all means feel free to help us out.
Google PowerMeter is a free electricity usage monitoring tool that provides you with information on how much energy your home is consuming. Google PowerMeter receives information from utility smart meters and in-home energy management devices and visualizes this information for you on iGoogle (your personalized Google homepage). And, Google PowerMeter is free.
Studies show that being able to see your electricity usage in near real time, throughout the day, makes it easier to reduce it and save money.
LS » This should be standard technology in every house, it would really help in getting my kids to turn the lights off once in a while, my wife to put a sweater on and my neighbour to ease up on the damn leaf-blower. Of course can you not just see some less than altruistic people abusing it by seeing how much energy they can consume.
Canada needs to lead in urban eco-design, urges former Vancouver mayor.
He was Vancouver’s mayor before becoming premier of British Columbia, so no one could mistake Mike Harcourt for a city-hating, back-to-the-land kind of guy.
But his message lately paints a dark picture of city life in the future — unless Canada shows the way in designing and building green urban systems.
Harcourt and other experts say a massive global population shift towards city life is undermining efforts to combat climate change and achieve sustainable communities.
LS » The thing that struck me about this article was this quote referring to our human population growth:
“The global population increase has gone from one billion in 1800, to two billion by 1930, to six billion by the year 2000, to eight and a half billion by 2025, to nine to ten billion by 2050. . . that’s the problem; it’s population growth.”
Okay, so we are experiencing exponential population growth, but what happens after 2050? Are we going to continue on this upward trajectory or all of a sudden are people going to become smart and altruistic and only have enough children to replace themselves or will something more dire, apocalyptic even, happen to cause a population reduction?
The tides in the Bay of Fundy pummel the shores of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick with the force of 8,000 locomotives, a twice daily demonstration of nature’s unyielding power.
More than 100 billion tonnes of water - more than all of the world’s rivers combined - rush in and out, raising 12 metres between high and low tide.
And this unique phenomena could soon power 800,000 homes on Canada’s East Coast - enough energy to keep the lights on in all of Nova Scotia, with enough spare power to cover parts of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island - without emitting a single molecule of greenhouse gas.
The Nova Scotia government has approved a “tidal power demonstration project” that would put three turbines in the middle of the Minas Basin at the northeastern end of the Bay of Fundy.
LS » As long as it can be done without killing all the sea life around it, then bring it on. Unfortunately you can only test it so much in the lab, the real testing has to be done in a real situation. But once it works properly it will be great to say good-bye to coal power and hello to tidal power. And given the power of the Bay of Fundy you have to try and take advantage of that natural and sustainable power source.
Dave Hughes’s guide to the end of the fossil fuel age
Dave Hughes is driving north on Highway 2. Headed out of Calgary, where he worked for thirty-two years at the Geological Survey of Canada, mapping the nation’s coal reserves. Bound for Edmonton, where he grew up and earned two degrees in geology. It’s not yet dawn, the sky deep black and the windows of his pickup truck like mirrors, the southbound lanes a line of smeared headlights as long-haul commuters make the trek the other way into the capital of the oil patch. Hughes sips coffee from a reusable mug, fighting back sleepiness. Just another commuter trailing a cloud of burnt dinosaur bones on his way to work.
Dave had to start out fifteen minutes earlier than the requisite ungodly hour so he could pick you up at your house. So you wouldn’t drive yourself. Save a few hydrocarbons, he’d joked. He’s a coal man, a geologist, and he always refers to the holy trinity of fossil fuels whose flames have stoked the past 200 years of industrial growth — coal, natural gas, and especially oil — in that same semi-technical way: hydrocarbons. Dave Hughes has a lot to say about hydrocarbons, mainly how there’s no possible way to keep running the engine of a modern global economy for much longer at the pace we’re burning them. Which is why you felt compelled to join him in the black chill of this late-autumn morning. Because that seems like a pretty big deal.
LS » What if the oil era really did end in 10 years before we have time to make a significant change from hydrocarbon powered energy to alternative and sustainable energy? Given how reliant we are on hydrocarbons this is basically an apocalyptic thought.
Memo to Obama: To hell with health care and that ridiculously partisan quagmire, you have bigger fish to fry, time to start a massive deployment for R&D on alternative energy options.
Will bluefin tuna survive our insatiable appetite for status and taste?
This environmental crisis has everything: world-renowned chefs and Hollywood celebrities in an intercontinental food fight over the fate of one of the world’s great predators, the bluefin tuna.
Pound-for-pound, bluefin is the most valuable fish in the world, prized as a delicacy at the finest sushi bars. But after decades of overfishing, this magnificent fish, which can grow to weigh three-quarters of a ton, has been so severely depleted that it swims on the brink of oblivion. Yet its prized buttery flesh is still on the menu at Nobu, the celebrated high-end sushi chain, which is co-owned by Robert De Niro, and has 24 restaurants in 13 countries.
With demand for the rare tuna showing no signs of abating, the market for it has grown more feverish. At the highest level of bluefin mania, a single fish that weighed 444 pounds was sold at auction for $174,000 in 2001. Since the tuna jackpot can be so huge, it’s no surprise that the weak regulations that exist to curb overfishing have been flouted by greedy constituents of the fishing industry, which put short-term profits over long-term sustainability.
But now conservationists, with help from Hollywood, are trying to transform bluefin from a status symbol to an environmental mark of Cain. In June, inspired by the muckraking documentary “The End of the Line,” Sting, Elle Macpherson, Alicia Silverstone, Sienna Miller and Charlize Theron signed a letter, pleading with chef Nobu Matsuhisa to stop serving the fish.
LS » When it comes to making money versus sustainability the money is always going to win so we can’t rely on the fishing industry and their regulatory associations to stop the fishing of bluefin tuna until the last bluefin has been caught, gutted and served. The only thing that can be done is to educate the public so that they stop buying and eating bluefin tuna and to make those that do eat a bluefin feel like a selfish asshole. Ultimately only peer pressure can trump the money.
LS » This documentary video will make you think twice the next time you go and grab a glass of water. Luckily the solutions are there, it is just a matter of accepting liability and forking over the cash, albeit a lot of cash, but what choice do we have.
[Editor’s note: Political science professor Byers delivered this speech to graduating students at UBC’s “Great Arts Send-Off”.]
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In retrospect, I learned many useful things during my studies. I learned about passion and politics from William Shakespeare, evil from Joseph Conrad, cynicism from Niccolò Machiavelli and hope from Immanuel Kant. I learned that differences of culture, religion, ethnicity and sexuality make the human species more interesting. I learned that history matters; that asking questions is a mark of intellect, not ignorance; and that words, wielded well, have the power to change the world.
LS » This speech is worthwhile for more than just a few Bachelor of Arts graduates if you require a little inspiration for the hurdles humanity will be facing during this century of climate breakdown.
Earth Day Network was founded on the premise that all people, regardless of race, gender, income, or geography, have a moral right to a healthy, sustainable environment. Our mission is to broaden and diversify the environmental movement worldwide, and to mobilize it as the most effective vehicle for promoting a healthy, sustainable environment. We pursue our mission through a combination of education, public policy, and consumer activism campaigns. Our campaign and programs are predicated on the belief that an educated, energized population will take action to secure a healthy future for itself and its children. Earth Day Network has a global reach with a network of more than 17,000 partners and organizations in 174 countries. More than 1 billion people participate in Earth Day activities, making it the largest secular civic event in the world.
Erecting new transmission lines for solar and wind power is a boon to coal-burning utilities and a drain on our wallets. What’s an environmentalist to do?
With a boost of billions in the economic stimulus plan, the White House plans to double the nation’s supply of renewable energy in the next three years. There’s big talk in Congress of creating a national renewable-energy standard, which would mandate that utilities get a chunk of their power from green sources like solar, wind and geothermal. So long dirty energy, hello green future.
Yet as renewable energy finally takes its place as a national priority, a tripwire lurks in the rosy scenario: transmission lines. No less an authority than President Obama is promoting the goal of building thousands of miles of new transmission lines to move power from the Great Plains and Mojave Desert to the nation’s energy-hungry cities and ‘burbs. And he’s got plenty of political might behind him.
The power companies lobbying for new lines compare the notion of a national grid to the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has brought legislation to help create what he calls a “electric superhighway.” Large environmental groups, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, have joined the wind and solar industries in championing the expansion of the transmission grid.
Not all environmentalists, though, are buzzing about the expansion. …
LS » Nothing is seems to be easy, you’d think setting up a bunch of solar panels in a barren desert and then transmitting the energy back to the urban areas would be a good renewable energy option, but of course transmission lines suck and despite the beauty of the above picture, transmission lines are an eyesore at best and a public health hazard at worst. This article brings a new phrase to the sustainability lexicon, “distributed generation” which means that the generation of energy needs to be distrubuted around the country and thus close to the users of the energy.
Greetings from twenty-first-century Europe, where new ideas, new technologies, and better ways of living are flourishing
