Somewhere in the United States on August 20, 2013, a technician flicked a switch and Al Jazeera America joined the other networks that bring television news to Americans. At that moment, Al Jazeera became the first new source of American TV news in two decades and the first not owned
Continue readingAuthor: Ray Grigg
The Common Sense Canadian: Al Jazeera comes to America
Somewhere in the United States on August 20, 2013, a technician flicked a switch and Al Jazeera America joined the other networks that bring television news to Americans. At that moment, Al Jazeera became the first new source of American TV news in two decades and the first not owned
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: The Ecology of Wealth
What is a man to do with a “main palace” of 420 rooms, a customized Boeing 747 jumbo jet for his exclusive use, a private zoo and amusement park, and a stash of $700 million in jewels? This is the dilemma facing Prince Alwaleed, whose $20 billion in assets gets
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian: The ecology of wealth
Saudi Prince Alwaleed with his wife, Princess Amira al-Taweel (AFP/Getty) What is a man to do with a “main palace” of 420 rooms, a customized Boeing 747 jumbo jet for his exclusive use, a private zoo and amusement park, and a stash of $700 million in jewels? This is the
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: The Thorium reactor energy option
For half a century, the electrical power industry has been trying to make success of failure, safety of danger, and efficiency of wastefulness because it chose the wrong nuclear fuel to produce electricity from reactors. Instead of using thorium, it used uranium, and the economic, political and environmental costs of
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: The Carbon Dilemma
The carbon dilemma first received public attention in 2012 when Bill McKibben, an American environmentalist and founder of 350.org, publicized the growing conflict between the known carbon that is stored in fossil fuel reserves — the equivalent of 2,795 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide — and the amount we can afford
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: The Rite of Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring
This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The event in Paris on May 29, 1913, was a watershed moment for classical music, an evening of seemingly cacophonous noise that redefined our human character, presaged the barbarous decades to come, and
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Global Warning
By superimposing a big red “N” over the black “m” in “Global Warming”, the editors of a feature article on greenhouse gas emissions in NewScientist magazine (Nov. 17/12) altered the title to “Global WarNing”. This simple change of a single letter summarizes the sobering prospects of climate change induced by
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: The Evolution of Denial
The shortcoming of denial is that it tends to be indiscriminate — so we deny things we should confront. Denial is also a much better coping strategy for an individual than for a species. The denial mechanism which once affected only local people in local places could potentially affect life
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: The Ministry of Natural Gas: British Columbians will pay high price for LNG
By electing a party whose principal economic platform is the development of British Columbia’s natural gas resources, BC voters have decided to tempt disaster. The province’s premier, apparently oblivious to the portentous warnings of climate science, has created a new ministry specifically tasked with the responsibility of developing at least
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Calgary Flood one in growing list of recent Extreme Weather Events
Calgary’s flood, it seems, is just the latest in a growing frequency of extreme weather events that have been causing havoc nearly everywhere on the planet. While Canadian news was fixated on Alberta’s misfortune, the same weather system was causing unusual flooding in south-eastern BC. While Calgary was drowning, extreme
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Why Story of Climate Change Fails to Capture Public’s Interest
According to the Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman, “the most important issues of our era aren’t particularly interesting. Worse than that, there’s good reason to believe in an inverse relationship between interestingness and importance.” For example, when global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide reached 400 parts per million for an entire day
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: The Importance of Forgetting in the Digital Age
We live in an Information Age so we should be able to adequately inform ourselves, make thoughtful decisions and act on matters of importance. We certainly have enough environmental problems to solve these days. Yet we have been eminently poor at addressing most of them. Why? One of the answers
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Gwynne Dyer’s Future Tense Predicts Conflict from Climate Change
Future Tense is the title of one of Gwynne Dyer’s many best-selling books. His expertise has been war, with detailed analyses of the politics, psychology and circumstances that bring humanity to this most crude and unfortunate behaviour. And this book’s title has a ingenious double entendre, suggesting both the future
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Piscine Reovirus Pt. 2: Evolution of a New Salmon Virus
Strange things can happen when salmon eat chickens. Such a diet is unprecedented and bizarre, a violation of the biological order that has occurred over millions of years of evolutionary history. Nature, it seems, does the unusual when human ingenuity tampers with its traditions. And the consequences can be dire.
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Knowing Whales
The huge body of the dead humpback whale lay silently on the beach at White Rock, BC, as if it had chosen this spacious stretch of sand as a conspicuous and welcoming place to die. Its death on June 12, 2012, seemed important, perhaps because of the great size of
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Anthropology’s Capitalism
The anthropologist’s view of capitalism has more perspective than the economist’s. The economist examines such details as the rhythms of booms and busts, the dynamics of prosperity and poverty, and the merits of deficits and surpluses. But the anthropologist examines capitalism as a passing cultural phenomenon within great sweeps of
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Experimental Lakes: Latest Victim of Harper Govt’s Anti-Science Ideology
The decision by Canada’s federal government to close the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), a unique and world-class research region in Northern Ontario, fits a sobering pattern. Canadian scientists, employed with public funds, have been muzzled and are unable to speak openly to the media without prior approval of the government’s
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Logging BC’s Coastal Treasures
Exasperation is the tone of the full page ad placed in a March edition of Victoria’s Times-Colonist newspaper by the Discovery Islands Marine Tourism Group, a coalition of businesses associated with an ecotourism industry employing over 1,200 people and generating $45 million for the local economy. Their problem is logging,
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian home page: Salmon Confidential
Anyone who has been following the sorry saga of inexplicable diseases and unusual mortality in BC’s wild salmon will not be surprised that the information in Twyla Roscovich’s documentary, Salmon Confidential, links the source of this trouble to the salmon farming industry. The surprise, however, is the impact of such
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