Assorted content to end your week. – Guy Quenneville reports on Dr. Saqib Shahab’s warning that Saskatchewan needs to improve its vaccination rates and minimize social mixing to avoid a fifth COVID wave this winter. And Kelly Skjerven reports on modelling showing that delays in testing and seeking treatment are
Continue readingTag: environment
Things Are Good: They mapped the thousand places in America where you’re breathing poison
The Trump administration in the USA cut funding for their Environmental Protection Agency which led to an increase in pollution that harms people and nature. The pollution problem isn’t all thanks to Trump though, it comes from years of negligence around policies and procedures to protect communities from dangerous industrial
Continue readingThings Are Good: Change Your Bank to Slow Climate Change
money Is your money being used by your bank to make your life worse? Hopefully not! A bank I used to do business with was literally funding the tar sands with my money, so I withdrew my money and took it to another institution. Wondering if your bank is trying
Continue readingThings Are Good: Not Using Fossil Fuels is Better Than Technopostivism
The COP26 news coverage has focussed on pledges from counties to cut their emissions (which is good) and on funding for new technologies to suck carbon out of the air (which isn’t so good). Increasingly scientists, ecologists, and activists have been calling out that technical solutions are a distraction from
Continue readingCanadian Dimension: How to save the world (from a climate armageddon)
Smoke billows from chimneys at a coal-fired power plant in eastern China’s Jiangsu province on December 12, 2018. Photo by Xu Congjun/Imaginechina. This summer we witnessed, with brutal clarity, the Beginning of the End: the end of Earth as we know it—a world of lush forests, bountiful croplands, livable cities,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – PressProgress offers a timeline of Saskatchewan’s fourth wave of COVID-19 (and the choices by Scott Moe which precipitated it), while Arthur White-Crummey reports that approval of the Sask Party’s pandemic response is half what it was four months ago. And Justin Ling highlights
Continue readingThings Are Good: COP26 Starts Soon, We Need to Capture Carbon Now
A company in Iceland captures carbon right out of the air and injects into the earth, the operation is a working proof that we can take carbon out of thin air. The carbon capture and storage (ccs) process is one of many options we have as a species to advert
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Yasmine Ghania interviews Nazeem Muhajarine about the Saskatchewan Party’s choice to produce misleadingly low COVID-19 case numbers by stifling testing. And Kelly Provost reports on one of the families facing potentially dangerous delays in necessary medical care due to Scott Moe’s fourth wave, as
Continue readingThings Are Good: Greenland Bans Oil Extraction
Greenland will no longer allow exploration for new oil fields in their territorial waters and newly exposed land. Climate change obviously impacts the country greatly with their ice fields melting at increasing rates. They’ve been experiencing the effects of burning too much oil first hand and refuse to participate it
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Ed Yong discusses how the field of public health has been marginalized by the false assumption that the task of keeping people healthy shouldn’t play a role in our political choices. – Nadeem Badshah reports on Greta Thunberg’s message to countries participating
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Carol Off interviews Andre Picard about the cultural factors and policy choices that have led to an avoidable fourth wave of COVID-19 in Saskatchewan and Alberta. And Yasmine Ghania talks to Alex Wong about the need for immediate gathering size restrictions to prevent
Continue readingThings Are Good: Historians and Farmers Working Together will Help Crops Grow
Food price volatility and production due to climate change is upon us already, and you’ve probably noticed it at your local grocer through increase costs. Farmers are grappling with climate change’s impact on predictable weather, meaning crops are have a harder time growing and farmers have a hard time planning.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Adam Hunter points out the stark gap between public health officials emphasizing the need for protections against community transmission of COVID-19, and Scott Moe’s stubborn refusal to apply them. Alexander Quon writes about the hundreds of Saskatchewan patients missing out on surgeries every
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Thomas Saunders discusses how COVID-19 transmission through schools is resulting in effectively a separate epidemic among children and parents. Kathy Eagar offers a reminder of the dangers of recklessly discarding public health measures rather than taking care to make sure that reopening is
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Carrie Tait reports on the spate of readmissions of COVID-19 patients to Alberta hospitals, while Zak Vescera points out the large number of Saskatchewan diagnoses happening only in hospital as infected people fail to get tested until their symptoms are severe. And Arthur
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – The Institut economique Molinari studies how COVID Zero strategies have not only kept populations healthier, but helped to preserve higher levels of freedom than plans which instead allow for avoidable community transmission. And Andrew Conway-Harris et al. find (PDF) that air filtration is extremely
Continue readingIn-Sights: Taking care of business…
Husband, dad and small business owner Sean Wood posted an item on Facebook that is worth our attention. With permission, it is repeated…
Continue readingIn-Sights: Unnecessary risk to people and property in BC
The NDP government is blundering on with construction of the Site C hydro dam on unstable ground, despite availability of much lower-cost energy sources. It is the same government that BC’s Auditor General found has not effectively overseen the safety of dams in BC and did not adequately verify or
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: #Elxn44 Roundup
News and notes from Canada’s federal election campaign. – Alex Hemingway writes about the need to tax the rich far beyond even the “unlimited zeal” reflected in the NDP’s modest plans to secure additional revenue. And David Moscrop makes the case for far more discussion of systemic change in who owns and makes decisions
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Affordable electricity Decarbonization in OECD countries? Part I
After eight extensive posts about the Ontario electricity sector, I am expanding my geographic coverage to look at the electricity sectors in selected OECD countries. My focus will be on the historical and relative performance of each country’s sector with respect to decarbonization and prices. As in the case of
Continue reading