Posts Tagged ‘Climate change’

Climate in election 2015: The time for action is now

August 27th, 2015 by Brian Iler

In 1990, Greenpeace published Global Warming: The Greenpeace Report. It’s a serious work, some 480 pages written by a host of highly qualified scientists and policy analysts.

Perusing the book now is a chilling experience: even then, the scientific evidence it sets out in detail was more than clear, and the book’s call for urgent and drastic cuts to our greenhouse gas emissions has essentially been ignored for the past 25 years.

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Moving away from the transport of dangerous goods toward safer, low-carbon solutions

December 4th, 2013 by Paula Boutis

The Lac‑Mégantic derailment in Quebec last July involved the transportation of 72 tank cars of crude oil. This derailment caused the confirmed deaths of 42 people, with five more missing and presumed dead. Approximately half the downtown core was destroyed. It is one of the most significant train disasters in Canadian history.

This event and other train derailments that have since followed have proponents of pipelines using these occasions to expound the view that pipelines are the safest way to move fossil fuels. As the argument goes, we should be allowing new pipelines and the hold‑up of their approvals will only force the transportation of dangerous goods onto a more dangerous form of transportation, rail.

On Tuesday, the Auditor General’s 2013 Fall Report looked in part at rail safety. But it did not specifically look at the Lac‑Mégantic accident or any other rail accidents. For that, we must go back to a December 2011 report by the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development.

Read more on rabble.ca

The Politics of enforcing laws protecting Polar Bears in Canada

January 11th, 2012 by Laura Bowman

The U.S. Center for Biological Diversity recently filed a petition at the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, that Canada is not effectively enforcing the Species At Risk Act (SARA) by failing to list and protect the Polar Bear as an endangered or threatened species.  Currently, the Polar Bear is listed as a species of special concern.  SARA sets up a process for listing that is intended to be based on objective science (the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada or COSEWIC).  Although COSEWIC’s last evaluation raised alarm bells about the future of Polar Bears, the Minister has not listed them.  There are continued controversies over which population units of the Bears should be protected and how.

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