This summer, Fisheries and Oceans Canada released a beautiful-looking report “State of Canadian Pacific Salmon: Responses to Changing Climate and Habitats” which your intrepid editor, asked me to “process into layman terms” for TAKE 5. She didn’t actually say, “Your mission, should you choose to accept it,” but … you remember that music?
For more than eight years, independent economist Robyn Allan has amassed information about the economics and politics of pipeline expansion. She’s appeared both as an expert witness at the Northern Gateway pipeline review and expert intervenor at the Trans Mountain expansion project review. Disappointed by the outcomes, she decided to do something completely different.
A major academic review of the impact climate change has on human health has found that more than half of the nearly 450,000 Canadians evacuated from their homes due to wildfires since 1980 were displaced in the past decade, and says that more than 1,000 Canadians were killed by air pollution related to the transportation industry in 2015.
Yesterday I presented the first of two “Am I wrong?” queries regarding the climate crisis. If you accept my facts, I said, you will see the massive challenge we face in transforming human assumptions and ways of living on Earth.
To see our fate clearly, we must face these hard facts about energy, growth and governance. Part one of two.
No one wants to be the downer at the party, and some would say that I am an unreformed pessimist. But consider this — pessimism and optimism are mere states of mind that may or may not be anchored in reality. I would prefer to be labeled a realist, someone who sees things as they are, who has a healthy respect for good data and solid analysis (or at least credible theory).
Shiri Pasternak suspected corporations likely won more injunctions than First Nations did in land disputes.
But she was shocked after she and her fellow researchers began crunching numbers.
The team at Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous-led think tank, reviewed nearly 100 injunction cases. They found corporations succeeded in 76 per cent of injunctions filed against First Nations, while First Nations were denied in 81 per cent of injunctions against corporations.
Countries across the world need to make their 2030 emission targets much more ambitious if the world is to stand a chance of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a major research report says.
And Canada is one of the biggest laggards, far from reaching its own targets which are themselves far from enough to keep warming to that level.
