Living Off the Grid in a Major City
Most people think living off the grid means living the countryside with your own well, reenable energy, and food source. The truth is that style of off the grid requires…
energy
International Leaders of Geothermal Energy Agree to Work Together
Geothermal energy is very simple in principal: drill a hole into the hot earth and use the naturally occurring heat to get turbines spinning. In practice it can be very…
Improved Air Conditioner Beams Heat Into Space
Air conditioner suck up a lot of energy in hotter months by dumping heat from inside buildings to the outside, ironically heating up neighbouring locations. A Stanford research team developed…
Wind Power: One of the Cheapest Sources of Energy
Sustainable and renewable energy sources continue to get more cost effective when compared to fossil fuel based energy. This is fantastic since the economics of scale are really kicking into…
How One Hawaiian Mayor is Making His Town Better
Hawaii is a beautiful part of the world and like most gorgeous parts pf this planet it’s feeling the pressures of climate change. Despite the American government’s blatant rejection of…
Alberta’s Carbon Tax Brings Cash to Great Programs
The Canadian province of Alberta is best known for the tar sands and the damage extraction of the bitumen has done to the planet. The province is now aware that…
A Solar Solution on Indian Railways
The largest railway system in the world runs in India and it consumes a lot of energy to run it. Back when oil was more expensive they started looking into…
Tonawanda Provides a Template for Transitioning a Town’s Economy from Coal
Globally, coal is on the way out and in America small towns are suffering because coal demand is dropping. The predictable plight of coal-backed small towns in the USA has…
Fiscal situation of Canada’s ‘oil rich’ provinces
I’ve just written a blog post about the fiscal situation of Canada’s ‘oil rich’ provinces (i.e., Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador). It consists of a summary of key points…
Kinder Morgan’s IPO: Risk > Reward
Thursday, June 1, 2017 Kinder Morgan’s risky Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion just got a whole lot riskier, just as the company was taking steps to offload some of that risk…
Ontario’s Electricity Sector III: Legislative & Finance Update
My January and March posts on the Ontario electricity sector described how decisions by different Ontario governments gave rise to excess electricity generation with an inflated cost structure, leading to…
Why the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act is worth celebrating
Wednesday, May 17, 2017 On May 12, 2017, the federal government introduced Bill C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, for first reading in Parliament. You could say that the Act…
United we beat Enbridge: Celebrating the defeat of Northern Gateway with the people of Haida Gwaii
Monday, April 10, 2017 West Coast Environmental Law was happy to accept an invitation to attend a celebration in Gaaw (Old Massett) on March 25, co-hosted by Haida Gwaii CoAST…
Ontario’s Electricity Sector II: Political Economy Update
This is a third guest post by Edgardo Sepulveda, who is a Toronto-based expert in telecommunications and regulatory economics. Twitter: @E_R_Sepulveda By Edgardo Sepulveda In my previous post of January…
Leadership 2017 Links
The latest on the NDP’s leadership campaign. – Karl Nerenberg sees the youth debate in Montreal as having shown more differences in style than substance, while Christo Aivalis identifies some…
Wresting authority from the regulators: The proper role of the National Energy Board in environmental assessments
Friday, March 31, 2017 It is not every day that we have an opportunity to effect transformative legal change. It is natural, then, that when last summer a number of…
Renewables Had a Record Year in 2016
Renewable energy production is growing more every year and 2016 was no exception to that growth. In 2016 capacity of renewables increased by 8.7% and for the first time solar…
What will it take to get Canada’s Arctic off diesel?
The planned Innavik Hydro Electric Project will provide clean energy and propel the indigenous Inukjuak community in Northern Quebec off its dependency on dirty diesel energy. But the project faces…
A Kinder Morgan snapshot
Tuesday, March 14, 2017 It’s been a while since we’ve updated you about Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline and tanker expansion project (KMX). A lot has happened in the past…
More Americans Working in Solar Than in Coal
The coal industry is failing and sustainable alternatives are on the rise. No matter what politicians do to try and “save” coal it’s clear that the dirty source of electricity…