Climate
Viewing Alberta’s Tar Sands: A Canadian Catastrophe
by Andrew Loewen on March 4, 2013
Business Insider commissioned photo journalist Robert Johnson to fly over the largest industrial mega-project on earth, Alberta’s Tar Sands, and document the process: from untrammeled boreal forest to strip mines, refineries, and tailing ponds. The results are spectacular and richly informative. A bird’s eye view of a made-in-Canada project. The scale of destruction and irrationality is staggering. Here’s part of a statement from Chief Adam (Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation) in …
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Climate Change As Viewed From a Pothole
by Nick Glossop on January 29, 2013
While spelunking the Intertubes the other day I stumbled across a particularly rich vein, the prodigious video offerings of one Potholer54. His clips debunking various crackpots and charlatans are thoroughly entertaining, and I intend to watch the Golden Crocoduck Awards closely in the future, but it is for his lengthy series on climate change that he deserves to be particularly commended. If you are interested in the subject and …
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Hurricane OMG!
by Andrew Loewen on October 30, 2012
So millions without power, blocks of homes burnt to the ground (in Queens), Long Island crushed, much of New York’s monumental 108-year-old subway system flooded with brine, vehicles bobbing like corks in the Lower East Side, and doubtless a YouTube bananza to come thanks to the largest storm to ever wallop the Big Apple. Funny, how climate change just wasn’t a campaign issue. Just remember to vote Democrat every couple …
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Honey Badger creator makes Save the Arctic video
by Michelle Lovegrove Thomson on October 15, 2012
Lending his particular brand of snark to the good cause of saving the “precious, furry, polies” of the Arctic:
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The Recipe For Extreme Weather
by Nick Glossop on September 5, 2012
Arctic ice and the unknown unknown
In a paper in Geophysical Letters last March entitled Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes, Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University and Stephen Vavrus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered a hypothesis that may explain why world grain prices have risen 30 per cent in the past four months (and are still going up).
First, a warmer Arctic reduces the temperature gradient
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What is Slow Violence (at Five-Minutes-to-Midnight)?
by Andrew Loewen on August 29, 2012
Violence is sudden; violence is fast. Violence is bullet, fist, crashing glass. So what can it mean to speak of “slow violence”? At the interpersonal level, slow violence might conjure something like the steady incremental pain of abuse, a relentless emergency rendered as normal, everyday life. Rob Nixon has coined the term as a way of thinking about pollution, toxicity, and anthropogenic climate change, the human effects of which are …
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Enbridge oil erases 1000km of island landmass to demonstrate safety route!
by Michelle Lovegrove Thomson on August 16, 2012
Enbridge has unveiled a PR video in a bid to sway public opinion on their possibly disastrous plan to stretch the Northern Gateway Pipeline across land we’d rather not bathe in heavy crude. Apparently the only way they could make it look like a safe and viable plan is to erase islands from the Douglas channel.
According to an recent article on the David Suzuki Foundation website by Lori Waters, a specialist …
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Dept Of Climate Change Klezmer
by Nick Glossop on August 11, 2012
Down at the music festival I’m spending this weekend at, Geoff Berner just laid down a truly weird cover of 88 Lines About 44 Women (or maybe it was a different song entirely. It was a little early in the day for both of us). He also pointed out something that seems perfectly obvious to me now, but I’d never thought of before, that the Pinocchio story has its origins …
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Hot as Hell
by Andrew Loewen on July 10, 2012
According to the US National Climatic Data Center, the odds of all this record-breaking heat being a random event unrelated to climate change are 1 in 1.6 million. At this rate the Midwest is going to have a Mad Max lookin quality for the grandchildren of This American Life listeners, all cracked earth, thirst, and road rage. Sort of hellish (but how cute would Ira Glass be in bondage …
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A Dyer Post-Mortem Of Rio+20
by Nick Glossop on June 25, 2012
When they make ecocide illegal it will be too late
They are already dying from the effects of environmental destruction in poor countries, but that makes no difference because they are powerless. By the time it starts to hurt large numbers of people in powerful countries, 20 or 30 years from now, most of the politicians who conspired to smother any substantial progress at the Rio+20 Earth Summit will be
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Overcoming Doom with Dr. David Suzuki
by Andrew Loewen on June 25, 2012
Canadians love David Suzuki, and rightly so.
The span of Suzuki’s lifework — from biologist to public broadcaster and environmentalist — testifies to a pivotal paradox of our time. Namely, that the emergence of modern environmentalism and expanding environmental consciousness has coincided exactly with the latticework expansion and penetration of industrial capitalism (and the hollowing of democratic mechanisms). So it is that 20 years after his daughter Severn, then age …
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ExxonMobil ~ Private Empire
by Nick Glossop on May 4, 2012
Author of Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, Steve Coll has been doing the interview rounds. Here he is on Democracy Now, and, after the break, with Rachel Maddow. One interesting point he makes, in the second interview, is that it was the end of the Cold War that enabled the, already very large, major oil companies to dramatically expand into the global behemoths they are today; it opened …
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