Spending $130 billion in BC to accelerate oil & gas production
Around $130 billion dollars will be spent in British Columbia to increase consumption of oil and gas. NDP and BCUP politicians make empty promises about dealing with climate change, but…
Norman Farrell
Wildfire warnings ignored by government
I began to distrust the province’s wildfire statistics after noticing the reported size of the Donnie Creek fire, the province’s largest ever, was not altered from mid-July to mid-September. Yet…
Comparing BC Hydro June 2023 to BC Hydro June 2007.
BC Hydro recently released its first quarter results for the fiscal year ending March 2024. The report covered three months in 2023: April, May and June. It is worth looking…
Organized hate groups on our streets
Gonzaga University is often recognized for basketball, but the 135-year-old Spokane institution is also known for academic initiatives. One is the Journal of Hate Studies, an annual peer-reviewed publication by…
Wildfires — deadly for some, unhealthy for hundreds of millions
Stanford research reveals the rapidly growing influence of wildfire smoke on air quality trends across much of North America. Wildfire smoke in recent years has slowed or reversed progress toward…
Western Canada’s plans for fossil fuel expansion are the second largest in the world
2023 is the worst ever year for areas burned by wildfires in British Columbia, Alberta and the entire nation of Canada. For years before 2023, despite huge sums invested by…
Strategic misrepresentation, aka as lying
Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University is the most cited scholar in the world in megaproject management. One of his studies included this: “Underestimation cannot be explained by error and is…
American attitudes toward climate change
A 2022 study1 by investigators from Yale and George Mason universities reported survey results after Americans were questioned about climate change. I suspect ignorance would be lower and expressions of…
Precarious times
If we paid more attention to impacts of climate change, we would demand our governments take immediate and effective action, not offer promises that solutions will somehow be in place…
Police-involved deaths involving force
Data collected by Tracking (In)Justice shows disturbingly high police-involved deaths Canada’s northern region and reports police-involved fatalities in four western provinces (2.69 per 100,000) are much higher the six provinces…
Harperism operates in right-wing shadows
Stephen Harper is today’s éminence grise behind the Conservative Party of Canada. Since leaving the University of Calgary in 1985, Harper has been a resolute right-wing activist. After being turned…
Circumscribed freedom
The emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These “ugly freedoms” legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate…
Protect the unborn, not the already born
Some who favour right wing politics believe in protecting the unborn, but vehemently oppose protection of children already born. This is largely an American problem, where guns overtook car crashes…
Wildfires
Wildfires are clearly a major problem for Canadians in 2023. Primary causes are known but solutions conflict with policies of governments that prefer to eliminate forest diversity and promote fossil…
Canada, land of vanishing wonders
Mike Hanafin, “Brilliant doesn’t do this justice. @thejuicemedia usually skewers Australian (Australien!) govts/politicians for kissing up to Big Oil, Fossil Fuel extractors, & monopolist billionaires. But they noticed it was…
BC Hydro’s credibility gap
When BC Hydro said that growing demand required asset additions worth billions of dollars and contractual commitments of $50+ billion owed to independent power producers, should we have believed what…
Oversight? No! Undersight? Yes!
Lew Edwardson wrote the following as a comment on the post Lack of transparency at BC Hydro may conceal massive fraud. It deserves to be repeated in this separate post.…
BC’s contractual obligations worth tens of billions of dollars
BC’s government seems determined to continue the present model for private power in the intended 2024 call for additional electricity. The difference in 2024 will be that large contracts for…
Efficiency of BC Hydro dams slowly dropping – Site C may produce 1/4 less than promised
Site C was conceived when output per MW of capacity was higher than it has been in recent years. BC Hydro has regularly claimed that 1,100 MW capacity at Site…
Lack of transparency at BC Hydro may conceal massive fraud
Economist Dr. Jetson Leder-Luis of Boston University studies fraud in public spending. He estimates that fraud in large projects may divert five percent of spending. On the Site C power…