OTTAWA - The chairman of Canada's Ecofiscal Commission has a message for Brad Wall as the Saskatchewan premier and high-profile carbon-tax opponent embarks on his third straight majority mandate.
"If you have a stated goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — and Saskatchewan does — the most cost-effective way to do it is carbon pricing. Period," says Chris Ragan, the McGill University economist who acts as the non-partisan commission's chief spokesman.
Any just transition to a green economy must take place on labor’s terms — not capital’s.
Climate change must be stopped. But who will do the stopping? Who, in other words, could be the political subject of an anticapitalist climate revolution?
Arctic sea ice reached a record winter low this year — the latest mark in a season that has left scientists gape-mouthed in amazement.
"I’ve never seen such a warm, crazy winter in the Arctic,” said an email from Mark Serreze, director of the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center. "The heat was relentless."
Serreze's group declared Monday that the maximum extent of sea ice before it begins its spring melt was 20,000 square kilometres less this winter than it has ever been since satellite monitoring began. The record had been set only last year.
[Webpage editor's note: This scientific paper has great significance for the plans in BC to create a large fracking/LNG industry. The implication that the increase in methane emissions in the US may be partly due to oil and gas development is another reason to reject claims that BC LNG would reduce world-wide emissions by replacing coal in Asia.]
Our leaders thought fracking would save our climate. They were wrong.
Global warming is, in the end, not about the noisy political battles here on the planet’s surface. It actually happens in constant, silent interactions in the atmosphere, where the molecular structure of certain gases traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. If you get the chemistry wrong, it doesn’t matter how many landmark climate agreements you sign or how many speeches you give. And it appears the United States may have gotten the chemistry wrong. Really wrong.
The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and the “intended nationally determined contributions”submitted to the UNFCCC enshrines carbon markets and emissions trading schemes (ETSs) as a key mechanism for reducing emissions. But are carbon markets effective?
Nearly 60 protesters blocked the driveway of a storage plant for natural gas on March 7. Its owners want to expand the facility, which the opponents say would endanger nearby Seneca Lake. But their concerns were global, as well.
“There’s a climate emergency happening,” one of the protesters, Coby Schultz, said. “It’s a life-or-death struggle.”
Many large Canadian companies are financing legal action and lobbying against President Barack Obama’s climate change plan, putting the public and their investors at risk, said a new report released on Monday by an investment services organization.
