The hottest 3 months ever recorded. 2014 is on track to break a lot of records, in a bad way. * * Earth Just Finished Its Warmest Quarter-Year Ever
Continue readingTag: climate change
Politics and its Discontents: A Mound Of Sound Guest Post: Climate Change By The Numbers
One of the great malignancies of the 20th century was the spread of neo-classical economics. the macro- and micro-stuff that you probably had to learn in university. I did a good bit of fraud work in my legal career. One of the key ways to unravel a well-crafted fraud was
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Ralph Surette highlights the dangers of a pollution-based economy which fails to account for the damage we’re doing to our planet and its ability to provide food for people: This is something to behold. A more-or-less hurricane in early July. Has anyone ever
Continue reading350 or bust: Building Momentum For A Price On Carbon
Citizens’ Climate Lobby held its 5th Annual Conference in Washington DC June 22 – 24th. It was my second international CCL conference; at last year’s meeting there were 365 CCLers from across the United States, with a few Canadians thrown in for good measure. This year the number of climate-concerned
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Alberta’s Climate Change Strategy Goes Up in Smoke
Alberta’s Auditor General blew a gasket. He called the government’s performance on climate change strategy “troubling” and “disturbing”. Hey, he’s a mild mannered accountant; this is as in-your-face as he gets. Our feisty Auditor General Mr Saher kicked off the July 2014 audit report with a lesson on the role
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Lego Pimps Your Kids’ Brains For Shell Oil
This is just too much. Lego has teamed up with Shell Oil to pimp your kids’ brains for Shell. We need to be helping our children understand that our future lies in the post-carbon energy infrastructure and things like solar roadways. Here’s one way to do that, at Lego Block
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: The Lethal Dysfunction Of The Far Right: A Mound of Sound Guest Post
Problem: you’re already getting hammered by early-onset climate change. Solution: deny it’s happening, look the other way, think happy thoughts. It sounds ridiculously dysfunctional and it is but that is the approach being taken by governments, state and municipal, in parts of the American south. Take North Carolina, for example,
Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: World Council of Churches Endorses Fossil Fuel Divestment
The fellowship of over 300 churches representing some 590 million people in 150 countries, this week endorsed fossil fuel divestment. The post World Council of Churches Endorses Fossil Fuel Divestment appeared first on The Canadian Progressive.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on the importance of coming together and putting people first in a time of crisis – contrasted against Stephen Harper and Brad Wall’s apparent view that the real tragedy is that the oil sector might find it tougher to extract profits when it’s causing humanitarian disasters. For further reading…–
Continue readingEnvironmental Law Alert Blog: Field Notes From the Fifth (and Final) Tar Sands Healing Walk
Wednesday, July 9, 2014 June 28, 2014 marked the 5th and final Tar Sands Healing Walk, a grassroots event organized by local Indigenous communities in the heart of the tar sands development. This was not a protest or a march, nor was it about disrupting the work of the energy
Continue readingreeves report: ECO urges province to create new climate action plan
SO MUCH OF THE THINKING around climate change has evolved since 2007 that Ontario’s seven-year-old climate action plan is now “irrelevant” according to Environmental Commissioner Gord Miller. In releasing Looking for Leadership: The Costs of Climate Inaction this morning, Miller said the province has been a leader in the climate file but has
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: How Translink Impedes Transit Use
Translink is “being evasive on exactly how much money is being spent on this.” via Compass Card program delayed again by TransLink – British Columbia – CBC News. How’s that for not surprising. Translink is notorious for its taxation without representation: taking municipalities’ money without providing democratic representation to municipalities.
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: Has Harper Betrayed The West? A Mound Of Sound Guest Post
Recent summer flooding across southern Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba seems to be bringing the reality of climate change home to the people of the prairies and it’s drawing some unwelcome attention to prime minister Harper. Look, it was bound to happen. You can’t have once-a-century weather disasters arriving every two
Continue readingEnvironmental Law Alert Blog: Foresters, biologists, planners take on the “fundamental impacts” of Climate Change
Tuesday, July 8, 2014 Governments and businesses rely heavily on the advice of professionals on a wide range of environmental, resource management and land use planning decisions. That’s why it’s critical that the professionals who are making key decisions about our ecosystems and the evolution of our communities know about
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: The Occupy Movement Has Changed the Narrative, But We’re Not Done
Recently, with the WEF spending the last few years acknowledging global income inequality is a problem, I’ve declared a kind of victory for the Occupy Movement: getting the lexicon on the 1% and inequality on the tongues of the sly gazillionaires who rule the world, and into mass consumption. Now
Continue readingPolitics and its Discontents: UPDATED: From The Mound Of Sound: A Basis For Optimism
The Mound writes: Hi Lorne. I spotted this article in the ‘comments’ section of The Guardian. It’s been a while since I heard anything this encouraging on the climate change front: It’s something akin to an epidemic. In the Australian state of Queensland, solar power has become cheaper than coal-generated
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian: The Economist calculates the enormous cost of ignoring climate change
Rendering of New York City from “World Under Water”, an app designed by Carbon Story Read this June 28 story from The Economist on the cost of doing nothing to curb climate change – and interesting corollary to the World Bank’s recent determination that tackling global warming could significantly grow the global economy. It has been
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: The outsize (un)importance of the tarsands
It’s easy to overestimate the importance of the tar sands to the Canadian economy. Tar sands and their pipelines are after all hailed by the ruling Conservatives, sections of the business press and the ever-present oil lobby as this young century’s “nation-building” project. Yet, a survey recently making the rounds
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