Assorted content to start your week. – Jonathan Watts reports on new research showing that even existing worst-case scenarios may underestimate the severity of the climate crisis. Anna Kanduth and Justin Leroux write about the need to start developing policy based on carbon stocks or budgets, rather than single-year flows
Continue readingTag: Tar Sands
Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Martin Birt writes that we can never again ignore the importance and value of the people performing essential work. And Jennifer Keesmat argues that the patterns of life made necessary by the coronavirus point the way toward a far greater focus on building
Continue readingViews from the Beltline: Oil Capitals Hunker Down
To Calgarians, the city is starting to feel like a punching bag. Its primary industry suffers one body blow after another. Oil prices crashed at the end of 2014 as surprising growth in U.S. shale production boosted supply while OPEC refused to cut its output. Major investment firms, finally recognizing
Continue readingViews from the Beltline: The Cartel Still Rules … Sort of
It isn’t easy to convince nominally free-market Albertans that monopoly and government interference in the market made us rich, but of course they did. Nothing has contributed more to the province’s coffers than OPEC, the oil-producing countries’ cartel. OPEC’s control of supply has kept oil prices well above what a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Saeed Kamali Dehghan reports on a new World Health Organization study showing the utter lack of progress toward sustainable development, particularly due to the harms caused by our climate breakdown. Mahita Gajanan focuses on the reality that every child’s future is threatened
Continue readingThings Are Good: Teck Halts Work on Tarsands Proposal
Canada is waking up to the reality of the climate crisis, those ringing the alarms includes a diverse group from the Wet’suwet’en Nation to Greenpeace. Now a large fossil fuel company, Teck Resources Ltd., has decided to not move ahead with an environment-destroying tarsands project partly due to the fact
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Benjamin Israel, Jan Gorski, Nina Lothian, Chris Severson-Baker and Nikki Way highlight the reality that increased extraction from the tar sands is fundamentally incompatible with any attempt to meet reasonable greenhouse gas emission targets. And Jonathan Watts reports on new research from the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Andrew Leach and Martin Olszynski go into detail about the calculations around the Teck Frontier mine – and particularly how any pricing assumptions which could make development viable are far out of date. – Kate Yoder points out how the fossil fuel industry
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Fiona Harvey writes about the perfect storm of environmental crises leaving us at risk of societal collapse. And Tim Flannery calls out the deception and denial from Australia’s government after it has contributed to setting its own country ablaze. – Mark Olalde
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on how the costs of approving the Teck Frontier tar sands mine likely include locking Canada into another cycle of public subsidies for a dying oil sector – making it clear that it isn’t in the public interest. For further reading…– Tzeporah Berman has previously questioned how any approval
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – The Canadian Press reports on the Libs’ desire to approve massive tar sands expansions no matter how the resulting production – to say nothing of the consumption left uncounted – would affect Canada’s role in exacerbating a climate breakdown. And Janyce McGregor
Continue readingViews from the Beltline: Is This the Line in the Sand?
Crunch time. How far will Trudeau go to placate Alberta? Premier Kenney may just have drawn the line in the sand. He has said that the federal government faces a stark choice. It can either approve Teck Resources’ Frontier Mine or risk leaving the country’s oil industry “with no way
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Evening Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Stephen Mihm writes that among other positive outcomes, wealth taxes and other progressive tax options reliably produce a boost in life satisfaction for a large number of people (while having little impact on the positional interests of the ultra-rich against each other). And
Continue readingViews from the Beltline: "We need a carbon tax"—oil company CEO
MEG Energy Corp. is a Canadian oil company focused on in situ tar sands production. Its CEO, Derek Evans, claims the company intends to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. The plan is to capture emissions from the production process and inject them into an underground reservoir, i.e. carbon capture and
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: From small creeks do mighty rivers flow.
From the Manchester Guardian to the Toronto Globe and Mail, there have been reports of our federal government scientists testing spills of diluted bitumen from Alberta’s tar sands. As one source pointed out to me, this was the government laboratory that former prime minister Stephen Harper forgot to shut down.
Continue readingViews from the Beltline: The surreallity of life in Alberta
Living in Alberta, I sometimes get the feeling I live in a place shifted a few degrees off centre from reality. For example, in the real world we are faced with the overarching threat of global warming, a crisis we have brought down upon ourselves. But, despite near unanimous agreement
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning LInks
This and that for your Sunday reading. – James Cairns discusses why socialism is seeing a resurgence in popularity, particularly among younger citizens who see little reason for hope in politics as usual: Occupy Wall Street popularized the language of the 99 per cent and the 1 per cent as
Continue readingViews from the Beltline: A tar sands story
Canadian Natural Resources, Canada’s largest oil and gas producer, has set an ambitious goal regarding greenhouse gas emissions. It has announced that by applying advanced technology, including carbon capture and storage, it will attempt to reduce the emissions from its tar sands operations to effectively zero. A laudable goal. This
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Susan Bradley reports on Dave Phillips’ observations as to how Atlantic Canada is already facing the effects of a climate breakdown. Cameron Brick discusses the importance of seeing ourselves as more than consumers in developing a response to our climate crisis. And David
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Tom Parkin writes about the need for workers to be at the centre of a Green New Deal for Canada: Those determined to reverse austerity, inequality and environmental damage need to help Canadians be clear that there’s a huge difference between a Green
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