2:35 NSP President Rob Bennett has wrapped up the session with a brief thank you to the consumer participants and expert panelists. The session ended about an hour early to give participants time to get home before Hurricane Bill hits. Before leaving Truro,  the consumer participants will fill out a questionnaire touching on various energy issues. They filled out an a second survey before coming to the session. Comparing the two will give NSP policy planners some insight into whether and how an informed discussion can move public opinion on energy issues. 2:25 One of the consumer breakout groups expressed alarm about the...

22 August, 2009

9:15 [caption id="attachment_1952" align="alignleft" width="303" caption="Roberta Bondar poses with charmed NSP flacks."][/caption] My old Daily News chum David Rodenhiser, now laboring in NSP communications, asked Bondar if she had any startling revelations in space. Many of them. One is that Buck Rogers was a myth. We romanticize space. It's a very difficult environment. It's very hard. It's hard on the body. But you can't beat the view. 8:40 p.m.: A surprisingly witty keynote speech by Roberta Bondar began with several slides of Hurricane Bill. These days Bondar makes her living as a professional speaker, but this isn't shaping up to be a canned speech. Moneyquote: The...

21 August, 2009

On February 12, 1891, the latest of many interruptions in his household's supply of coal gas moved Samuel Langhorne Clemens, AKA Mark Twain, to write the Hartford Gas and Electric Company. "Dear Sirs," he began. "Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed Goddamned fashion of shutting your Goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your Goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds and blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it...

20 August, 2009

Explore, Canada's outdoor magazine, has added a feature on Pollett's Cove in northern Cape Breton to its website. Moneyquote: When you research and read about Pollett's Cove on Cape Breton Island, NS, you realize it's one of those special places that consistently puts it at the top of favourite lists among the hikers and backpackers who have conquered it, regardless of where they've been in the world...

19 August, 2009

Atlantic Magazine writer James Fallows, drawing on this New York Times op-ed piece, bemoaned the lack of headway in replacing the GDP (gross domestic product) with a GPI (genuine progress indicator) in the years since the Atlantic published this seminal 1995 cover story on the concept. In fact, that Atlantic cover story helped inspire Nova Scotia's Ron Colman to found GPI Atlantic, which has done important work developing measures of real progress in this region. Colman wrote Fallows to point this out, and today Fallows blogs about GPI Atlantic.  [Disclosure: contrarian once worked for GPI Atlantic.]...

12 August, 2009

On trial in 1971: [caption id="attachment_1797" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="(Canadian Press Photo)"][/caption] Upon his release in 1982 : [caption id="attachment_1798" align="alignwrap" width="600" caption="(Canadian Press Photo by Halifax photographer Albert Lee.)"][/caption] With his mother, Caroline Marshall, following double-lung transplant in 2003: [caption id="attachment_1799" align="alignwrap" width="600" caption="(Canadian Press photo)"][/caption]...

06 August, 2009
At the risk of sounding like a Green Party blog, today's news has to be disheartening for those adherents who have tried to get the party back on track. After the break, an email from Elections Nova Scotia Communications Director Dana Philip Doiron describes the outcome of a meeting this morning in which Chief Electoral Office Christine McCulloch gave outgoing party leader Ryan Watson and official agent Kathryn Herbert one last chance to demonstrate that the party can meet its legal obligations.
05 August, 2009
[caption id="attachment_1671" align="alignwrap" width="500" caption="The late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (left) and modern day acolyte Ryan Watson, outgoing leader of Nova Scotia's Green Party"]rinpoche-watson[/caption]
Coast News Editor Tim Bousquet has stirred things up with his report of a festering schism within Halifax's Shambhala Buddhist community, and Green Party gadfly Mike Marshall claims the same breach underlies bizarre behaviour by outgoing party leader Ryan Watson and his executive. Bousquet reports that dissidents, including Mark Szpakowski, Ed Michalik, and Andrew Safer, have set up RadioFreeShambhala, a website to foster discussion they say mainstream Shambhala leadership discourages.
01 August, 2009

In a post yesterday Monday, contrarian observed that a little noticed NDP campaign promise would advance Nova Scotia Power's renewable energy targets by five years. Today Tuesday, the new government made that promise official government policy. NSP must generate one quarter of its energy from renewable sources (hydro, wind, tidal, wave, solar, biomass, biofuel, or landfill gas) by 2015. It's certainly a laudable step, but how big a step is it? The answer to that is incredibly complicated. It's complicated because various stages of the renewable energy requirements imposed on NSP define renewable energy three different ways: as overall generation from renewable sources; as...

28 July, 2009
Show more
Loading...