Privatizing public dollars
The high-priced help at BC Hydro and the provincial government decided benefits of low-costs should never be wasted on consumers. To ensure it was not, the utility signed decades-long deals…
Norman Farrell
BC’s GHG emissions worse than we’ve been told
Governments of Canada and three western provinces are committed to increasing fossil fuel production, despite science that says we must begin to reduce GHG emissions immediately. Canada’s Industrial and political…
BC Warming Exceeds 1.5 C
The IPCC Report issued this week warns of dire conditions due to global warming. These conditions are already present in BC…
Production up; public revenue down
BC fights climate change by reducing the public share of natural gas revenues to almost nothing, while production soars. Meanwhile, unprecedented portions of the world are on fire
Hypocrisy reaching new heights
A day after the UN panel of climate experts reported global warming is dangerously close to spiralling out of control, British Columbia Premier Horgan repeated a bullshit claim that his…
Laws of Karma
We have seen a steady stream of news reports about science deniers resisting measures to prevent the spread of a deadly virus. That disease is reported to have killed 4.3…
Numbers speak
Climate science is not accepted by the British Columbia government. BC NDP promises “environmentally responsible development of BC’s energy resources” and while that sounds reasonable, BC’s Public Accounts reveals the…
Regulators who oppose regulation
A Boston Globe report ought to interest Canadians because the Massachusetts experience improves understanding of how regulators who do not believe in regulation work hand-in-hand with industry…
Resolving EV inhibitions
For personal use in urban areas, electric vehicles are clearly in our immediate future. But not everyone lives in a place where battery charging is a simple affair. Fast charging…
Explanations for BC Gov’t wasting billions of dollars
Kurzweil and others have argued that people find this pace of change almost impossible to grasp, because it is human nature to perceive rates of progress as linear, not exponential……
An old problem, not a new problem
This week, the Globe and Mail published a short article and podcast about a hospital staffing problem they believe has grown more acute during the pandemic. In fact, key staff…
Survival of the unfittest… megaprojects
UC Berkeley scholar Karen Trapenberg Frick wrote of the 25 years it took for Californians to build a Bay bridge replacement. Dr. Frick said the project was “a cautionary tale…
Priorities
A tweet written by Jeffrey Levin made sense to me. So, I produced a Canadian version.
Bring out the dead…
Ignoring climate change in the short term has benefits both to individuals and to organizations. Individuals do not have to make changes in the cars they drive, the products they…
Hypocrisy
on at the centre of national policy making chooses to leave government to work on the climate crisis. She is silent about her government dedication to expanding fossil fuel production,…
COVID-19 mortality burden may be 2x times higher than reported
Analysis suggests that COVID-19 was associated with many deaths in Canada that were not classified as such…
Maintaining infinite growth on a finite planet
Choose your activities carefully and do your part to maintain infinite growth on a finite planet. Put away your bicycle. P.S. Walking is even worse. Pedestrians don’t even buy bicycles.
Taxpayers pay for Earth’s destruction
When an industry is on a path to extinction, private investors exit and governments often step in, spending huge dollars that merely delay the inevitable. We should not allow that…
321 years into a 246 year cycle
Canada’s federal government gave $4.5 billion to Kinder Morgan for Trans Mountain after the owners had difficulty financing expansion of the pipeline. By 2020, the new construction budget had soared…
BC NDP, guardians of the environment… the corporate environment
The origin story of Stand.earth—previously ForestEthics, successor to Clayoquot Rainforest Coalition—illustrates how little has changed in recent decades. NGOs and concerned citizens are ever the underdogs when competing with governments…