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.
We are living through an unprecedented crisis, in a world beset by massive social problems – the obscene poverty and inequality that neoliberal capitalist globalization has wreaked on at least two-thirds of humanity, the immobility of the political elite almost everywhere, and cultures of violence that poison our lives from the most intimate relations to the mass murder of the world’s wars.
Oil at the first phase of separation from the sand is seen at the Suncor tar sands processing plant near Fort McMurray, Alberta, in this Sept. 17, 2014 file photo.
(Todd Korol/Reuters)
Oil sands producers may have collectively breathed a sigh of relief on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent failure to get the premiers signing on to a national price for carbon emissions. However, domestic measures to reduce carbon emissions are the least of oil sands producers’ concerns when it comes to how actions to mitigate climate change will challenge their industry’s survival.
An artistic rendering of Pacific NorthWest LNG’s proposed LNG export terminal on Lelu Island.
“The project would result in 5.28 million tonnes of CO2 per year … a marked increase of greenhouse gas emissions both at the provincial (8.5 per cent increase) and national (0.75 per cent increase) level,”
When Premier Christy Clark dismissed opponents of resource developments in B.C. as the “forces of no,” she singled out for specific criticism those aligned against the proposed LNG facility at Lelu Island, near Prince Rupert.
CALGARY – Imperial Oil Ltd. has revealed plans for a new $2-billion oilsands plant at a time its competitors have cancelled or deferred new projects to survive the oil price collapse.
Imperial, one of the largest oil and gas companies in Canada, announced Friday it had filed an application with the Alberta Energy Regulator to build a 50,000 barrel per day oilsands facility, which would extract oil using a new technique the company says would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent compared with existing projects.
