I've moved!!
I'm now blogging most every day over at my work site...
10 April 2008
The numbers behind higher bridge tolls
In today's Coast I call for increasing the tolls on the two bridges across the Halifax Harbour, and using the additional revenue to fund increased transit services. This is, I argue, the only way for Nova Scotia to meet its legally mandated greenhouse gas reduction targets.
I've discussed the dimensions of the problems we face many times before (see here, here, here and here), but let's look more closely at only the transportation numbers.
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Increase the bridge tolls
[Also in today's Coast ]
My job over the next few years, I fear, is to document exactly how Nova Scotia refuses to take global warming seriously.
It's true that last year the legislature passed the Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act, which mandates, as law, that we meet a greenhouse gas emission reduction target of 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 (we are presently about 20 percent *above* 1990 levels). And if the stars align just perfectly---if politically powerful industrial giants don't derail the provincial energy efficiency program, if the requirements for the use of renewable energy are ramped up considerably and if (sadly, but true) the economy stumbles into recession---it may yet be possible for us to just barely meet the GHG reduction target in the electrical generation sector of the economy.
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03 April 2008
Coast blogging
I'll start using this spaceon a more regular basis to comment on Halifax issues. I have to shift around some software on my work and home computers so today's post, on City Council secrecy, will be posted on the Coast website blog, here. Today's post will be up in the early afternoon, and then if all goes well, I'll post more often on this site.
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29 March 2008
Beer class, week eleven: student presentations
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This was the best beer class yet!
We're winding down the semester now. [I'll be catching up on intervening weeks ASAP, but want to get this post out while it's fresh on my mind.] Mcouat is through with his lectures--- we have a final guest lecture next week--- and now it's time for the students to show off their work.
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12 March 2008
Beer class, week five: the birth of the pub
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When we last left off, we were discussing the Industrial Revolution and its effect on brewing (see Week Four). In a nutshell, for better or worse, the old craft knowledge of brewing had given way to the industrial manufacturing of beer on a colossal scale.
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06 February 2008
Beer class, week four: the Industrial Revolution
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Okay, I've been giving Mcouat a hard time the last couple of weeks, but I take it all back. His lecture this week was a stellar performance, demonstrating just how much he knows about this subject, and more, how to relate it all to a room for of college students. Or, at least, to some random guy off the street who's gonna hit him up for a beer after class.
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31 January 2008
Beer class, week three: the Modern
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Okay, I've been giving Mcouat a hard time the last couple of weeks, but I take it all back. His lecture this week was a stellar performance, demonstrating just how much he knows about this subject, and more, how to relate it all to a room for of college students. Or, at least, to some random guy off the street who's gonna hit him up for a beer after class.
Read more.
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30 January 2008
Beer class, week two: Alchemy and alcohol
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This week, Dr. Kyle Fraser gave a guest lecture to the class (what does Mcouat actually do over at Kings?). Fraser teaches the history of alchemy at King's, which is a fascinating subject all its own, but it certainly didn't hurt that Fraser's enthusiasm is infectious.
Regardless, it turns out that this "techne" business the Greeks were on about (see Week One) is pretty important. I won't pretend to understand it, but Fraser's point was that craft technology---and brewing and distilling in particular---was central to the development of modern science, and alchemy was the vehicle for this knowledge.
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24 January 2008
Beer class!
This semester, Kings College is offering a course titled "Brewing Science: The History, Culture and Science of Beer," taught by professor Gordon Mcouat, an instructor in King's History of Science and Technology program.
I managed to get myself enrolled in the class, and so will be posting regular (or irregular, as this first late post attests) updates on its progress.
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12 December 2007
Disaster porn
Terrorists are coming! A suicide bomber is going to blow up your bus! Meteors will fall on downtown Halifax! Tidal waves! Anthrax! Pandemics!
BOO!
Are you scared yet? Well, you should be! How else is "Canada's New Government" (now pushing two years "new") going to hand bloated contracts to well-connected corporations?
Here's how it works: the feds make a few hundred million dollars in "security" money available as "matching funds" for city governments to dream up new projects that are absolutely—absolutely!—necessary to protect against terrorists/ prepare for the tsunami/ stop the Ebola virus in its tracks, even though no one ever mentioned the absolutely—absolutely!—necessary gadgets and techo fixes even existed, never mind that they were absolutely—absolutely!—necessary, before the feds agreed to pony up the dough for them.
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Ship Harbour- Long Lake
Let's give credit where credit is due: in one very important aspect, the provincial government is coming through with its promises.
You'll recall that this spring the legislature unanimously approved the Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act, which established a series of environmental targets that the province is legally committed to reaching in coming years, including for reductions in pollutant levels, improved water quality, increases in renewable energy generation and so fourth.
I'll leave aside for the moment that many of the targets were laughably low and the province is seemingly doing everything in its power to make sure that arguably the most important target—for greenhouse gas emission reductions—won't be met.
I'll leave those issues aside for the moment because whatever other problems there are with the Act (and with implementation of the Act), the province did lay out one very meaningful goal and, more importantly, is actually following through with action to meet the goal.
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05 December 2007
Easy Travel
I'm continually amazed at the off-handed travel that accompanies academia and the business and non-profit worlds. For example, my partner was recently asked to fly across the continent-- to sign a bank form. Using the mails would've taken a few extra days, which in the calculus of the age is an unacceptable delay.
People think literally nothing of jumping in a plane to fly wherever, for insanely minor purposes. While this is sold as great convenience, and "bringing the world together" so that we "can learn from each other" and such, the actual result of this off-handed travel is the exact opposite: travel is no longer valued as anything more than a convenience. When travelling thousands of miles consists merely of stepping into a tube, reading a newspaper for a couple of hours, and then stepping out of the tube, travellers lose all sense of distance-- both geographical distance and social distance.
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29 November 2007
Twinning Highways
Yesterday, the Ecology Action Centre held a press conference to announce its portion of the Climate Change Action Report Card, the collective effort that rates governments on their performance towards meeting the greenhouse gas emission reduction goals they established for themselves in 2001.
The Nova Scotian government received an overall grade of C, but the report was broken into eight sub-categories, with grades ranging from A to F. At the press conference, the grades were plastered on a large board posted to the wall above the speakers' heads.
A telling moment came when Scott Gillard, the EAC's transportation coordinator, stood up, crossed out the C- grade in the "transportation" category and wrote in a big fat F. "We had to change it after last week's crown speech," he said.
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Environmental train wreck
Nowadays, working as an environmental reporter can be like watching a train wreck in slow motion: you see the catastrophe laid out before you, you know how the catastrophe will unfold and, sure enough, there it happens, exactly as expected. All that’s left to do is document the details.
This, at any event, is how I feel about climate change. Of course I hope I’m wrong, but watching the doublespeak, disingenuousness, ass-covering and straight-out lying coming from our politicians, I can’t help but be more than a wee bit cynical.
I’ve been over this many times before, but I’ll use the release of this year’s Climate Change Action Report Card to once again document the duplicity, failures, and lack of leadership from our business and political betters. They evidently don’t give a damn about this stuff, but maybe the citizenry will get engaged and enraged enough to throw the whole lot out and bring in people who might actually avert the looming catastrophe. Failing that, maybe some random grad student 50 years from now will take a passing interest in the ugly details that led to her ruined planet. So here goes, again, for what it’s worth:
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14 November 2007
The problem with trees..
I've been researching the concept (and use) of carbon offsets, and have been meaning to write something about it for some time. A recent exchange with the good folks at The Nation magazine gives the excuse.
When I started thinking about carbon offsets, I was very skeptical. For starters, whatever the offset, it doesn't do away with the fact of the initial greenhouse gas emissions. And then there are issues concerning the companies that sell carbon offsets, and others, like a Portland, Oregon Land Rover dealership, that use carbon offsets to "greenwash" their products. These are important issues, and I'll return to them soon.
But for now, I want to concentrate on the use of tree planting as a carbon offset. Like Joe Romm and (as we'll see momentarily) the David Suzuki Foundation, I'm against it..
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05 November 2007
You're too stupid to have an opinion
I don’t have the answer to Halifax’s problem with street violence, and neither do you. Certainly the mayor doesn’t have the answer, nor the chief of police, nor a random city councillor.
That’s because there’s not likely to be some magic pill that will solve this thing—no single configuration of police deployment, parental supervision, lecturing school marms, throw-away-the-key judges or super tough guy vigilantism will make this thing disappear.
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23 October 2007
Mining challenge
I was recently at an environmental meeting where a spontanious discussion broke out about the provincial government's rubber-stamping of mine proposals. The collective sense of this group of people-- people from around the province, who had not met each other before-- was that Nova Scotia has a pretty much "anything goes" approach to mines, and no one could remember even one instance of a mining permit being turned down.
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23 October 2007
More faulty logic from Atlantica hacks
At this point, there's no surprise that those paid handsomely to pimp the pro-big business (read: anti-labour and anti-environment) Atlantica concept will use any inane argument in an attempt to pretty up their whoredom. What is surprising is that the inanity is repeated verbatim as the picture of logical purity.
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11 October 2007
An alarming report
Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide may already be above levels not expected for another decade or so, according to Tim Flannery:
Tim Flannery told Australian Broadcasting Corp. that an upcoming report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will contain new data showing that the level of climate-changing gases in the atmosphere has already reached critical levels.read more
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08 October 2007
Sidewalk Cafes
Halifax has pretty miserable winters-- cold, rainy and windy. But, no matter:
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06 October 2007
Apples
Yes, it's apple harvest season in Nova Scotia! So, where are the apples at SuperStore from?
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More port silliness
Halifax's two international shipping terminals were built in the 1960s, and they've had their ups and downs through the years.
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05 October 2007
I agree with the right-wing nut
Charles Cirtwill, of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS):
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Global
Terrible news for the Halifax media market:
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04 October 2007
Commonwealth Games
This is what I've been up to for the last couple of months:
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Panuke
Much is being made about the Deep Panuke gas field.
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18 September 2007
Gloria Flora
One conference speaker was Gloria Flora, who became something of an environmentalist hero when, as an employee of the U.S. Forest Service she stood up to higher ups and refused to rubber stamp proposals to allow gas wells into the Bob Marshall Wilderness, a protected area along the Rocky Mountain front range in Montana. She's been on the lecture circuit for some time-- I remember she came to my college, in the late 1980s.
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Worthwhile
Lest I be criticized as always being down on everything, let me just say up front that this Power of Green conference is worthwhile, on several fronts.
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Green Fleet
Q. When is "green" not green? A. When you're driving a car instead of taking a bus, no matter how fuel efficient that car is. Which brings us to Rodney MacDonald's announcement yesterday that the province will implement a "green fleet" policy.
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15 September 2007
GHG Numbers
Partly in answer to Marcel in the previous post's comment section, here are some hard numbers, illustrating exactly how the provincial government has first, passed a law requiring a ten percent below-1990 target for greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and second, is adopting a regulatory framework for Nova Scotia Power that will make it impossible to meet that target.
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13 September 2007
Since you're here...
Welcome to all the locals directed here by this week's column! Documentation mentioned in that column can be found in the next post down. But since you're here, I'd really like to hear from you. What are the issues, environmental and otherwise, that you'd like to see discussed? What can this blog do to help bring discussion of those issues to a broader audience? Toss whatever commnents move you my way, and I'll see what I can do.
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Nova Scotia and greenhouse gases: documentation
I've mentioned quite a bit in this week's Sustainable City column, all of which needs expanding on. That's a tall order, and it's a big reason for this blog's existence: I'd like to get more fully into these issues over time.
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11 September 2007
The disappearing Arctic ice
On the heals of yesterday's post about the disappearing Greenland ice cap, there's this news article about the disappearing Arctic ice:
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10 September 2007
Is the Greenland ice sheet collapsing?
The Greenland ice cap appears to be melting faster than previously thought. At least, that the gist of the round of recent news articles.
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09 September 2007
Pathways
The Ecology Action Centre document I reference in this week's Sustainable City column, Pathways to Sustainable Energy Prosperity in Nova Scotia, is here.
This is a publication of the Ecology Action Centre. Please consider joining the organization, or dropping them $10 to offset research and publication costs. Reach EAC here.
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08 September 2007
Whales
Canadian shipping lane change idea would do right by whales
By ALISON AULD The Canadian Press
An area off the East Coast that teems with endangered North Atlantic right whales will be given special protections against container traffic if a unique Canadian initiative is adopted by an international marine agency.Transport Canada, Environment Canada and scientists who study the rare animals have submitted a proposal to the International Maritime Organization recommending that container ships divert around the Roseway Basin southwest of Nova Scotia.
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05 September 2007
Community College
This morning CBC radio broadcast from the new Community College in Dartmouth. Much was made of the new building's eco-friendly design and operation which, according to a press release from the college, includes:
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23 August 2007
Naming the rape victim
A woman working alone at an all-night Ultramar gas station in Dartmouth was assaulted early Tuesday morning. The event rightly made the news, as the attack was particularly ugly -- the woman was reportedly raped, had her throat slit "from ear to ear" and was left for dead -- and raised important issues of protection for late-night workers. It's the legitimate-- essential, in my view-- role of the media to report on and discuss these issues.
But while many news outlets did good work ferreting out the issues, something else made the news: the rape victim's name.
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22 August 2007
Coal posts coming soon
I'm falling behind, but those promised coal posts will be up soon. Please come back!
14 August 2007
Nova Scotia's Power Plants
My column this week (to be published Thursday) will look at how the Nova Scotia government deals with, or rather, doesn't deal with our coal problem. Anticipating that, I'll give some background material here over the next few days to round out the discussion. First up, the dimensions of the problem:
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13 August 2007 Welcome
Welcome to Tim Bousquet's blog!
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