Latest Posts

  • The Top Salesman for our Tar Sands!

    Stephen Harper visited New York where he spoke at a meeting of the Council of Foreign Relations, a group of influential businessmen and financiers, on the need for the U.S. to approve the Keystone XL pipeline to transport tar sands bitumen to U.S. refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

    In its study the US State Department concluded that tar sands oil will get to markets whether Keystone goes ahead or not.   Some of the output from the tar sands is now being transported by rail to the U.S for refining.    Still Keystone XL is necessary as it has the capacity to handle the future output of the tar sands in a way that railway transport cannot.

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  • An election about a pipeline!

    The British Columbia Liberal Government overcame the NDP’s large lead in popular opinion to win Monday’s election.  Public opinion polls continued to confirm an NDP lead right up to election day.  Not since the victory of Harry Truman over Governor Dewey in the U.S. 1948 Presidential election have pollsters been so wrong.  So wrong that they actually apologized for their failure to track the swing in support to the Liberals during the election campaign.

    The Liberals got out their vote, which, in a low voter turnout election, would make a difference. Premier Clark projected a warm confident image, which also helped.  There is talk about the success of the Liberal attack ads, which may have assisted the swing but were unlikely in themselves to be the reason for the result.

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  • Green Innovation on Our Street

    When collecting signatures for our petition on renewable energy, we made an interesting discovery.  One of our neighbours is associated with a company that specializes in renewable energy technology.  Green Syndications, working with George Brown College in Toronto, has developed a line of Vertical Axis Wind Turbines, with models designed to generate a maximum output of electricity from 2.5 to 10 KW.  The structure is also fitted with small solar panels that supplement output in calm wind conditions.

    These small wind turbines have many advantages: they can be easily transported and set up; they are silent; they can operate in turbulent air flows; they are a good size for roof-top installation.  As they are less costly to manufacture, they will be priced less than other roof installations.

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  • The road to COP 19 (Warsaw)

    The negotiations for a world climate change treaty continue during the months between the annual COP conferences, the last of which (Conference of the Parties 18) was held at Qatar last November-December and the next to be held in Warsaw in November of this year.  The difference is that these interim negotiations are attended by civil servants of the Kyoto countries, UN representatives, observers and NGO’s.  These interim negotiations concentrate on the details necessary to flesh out any agreement on fundamental commitments. National leaders do not participate in these interim negotiations.

    The bureaucrats did manage to produce some interesting concepts.  The 2015 agreement on climate change that is to replace Kyoto cannot be cast in stone, or “frozen in time” but must be “dynamic”.  Nobody outside of the participants has explained what such an agreement would look like.

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  • Get Statoil out of the Tar Sands!

    Open letter to The Norwegian Government, attention of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg

    The government must instruct the Board of Statoil to withdraw the company from Canadian tar sands

    The Norwegian oil company Statoil’s engagement in extraction of oil from tar sand in the traditional homeland of some of Canada’s First Nations has been controversial from the start in 2007. Warnings of negative impact on local communities, the environment and the climate from the oil industries’ devastating extractions, have proved well founded. Documentation of damages is mounting, as also confirmed in a recently published paper in the highly reputable scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

    Both scientists and the affected First Nations have long opposed the environmentally destructive extraction of tar sands, due to increased occurrence of cancer and other serious health issues.

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  • A Cash Shower

    On May 3 last,  the Canadian Government (described in its Press Releases as the Harper Government) showered cash on certain Canadian businesses and research institutions. Coordinated press conferences to announce these grants took place across Canada: in the Maritimes,  Quebec City (Harper was there), the Canada Cement Lafarge cement plant in Ontario, Toronto and the Yukon.  These grants approved in the 2011 budget under the Federal ecoENERGY Innovation Initiative total 85 million.

    Grants for $17 million were awarded for research into Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), larger  than amounts granted to any other research category.  Still the amount is relatively small in comparison with the Alberta Government committment to advance $1.3 billion to support the development of CCS as a solution to Alberta’s GHG emissions.

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