Green Party leader Elizabeth May likes to deride clean coal technology as "George Bush's favorite techno-fix" for climate change. But a new documentary from the Australian Broadcasting Company says the Bush administration actually undermined clean coal, even as it pretended to support the technology. Coal is our most abundant conventional energy resource, also our dirtiest. It contributes about half of greenhouse gas production in Nova Scotia, about 30 percent worldwide. So a technology that let us use this resource without producing greenhouse gas emissions would be a huge breakthrough in efforts to slow climate change. In 2007, MIT produced a study called,...

20 September, 2009

The Times of London reports that the World Bank is pumping billions into the construction of coal-fired power plants in India, Botswana, and South Africa, despite a recent bank report citing the disproportionate impact of climate change on third world countries. The bank’s World Development Report says: “Developing countries are disproportionately affected by climate change — a crisis that is not of their making and for which they are the least prepared. Increasing access to energy and other services using high-carbon technologies will produce more greenhouse gases, hence more climate change.” The report says that between 75 and 80 per cent of...

19 September, 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
Seminal environmentalist (and sometime Cape Breton summer resident) Stewart Brand promotes a series of environmental heresies in this surprising talk. In 1968, Brand created the Whole Earth Catalog, which Apple founder Steve Jobs described as the conceptual forerunner of the World Wide Web. A counter-cultural touchstone, the Catalog helped inspire and galvanize the environmental movement. Today, Brand calls himself an ecopragmatist. This talk previews Whole Earth Discipline, a book he will publish this Fall challenging contemporary environmentalists to reconsider objections to nuclear power and genetically modified foods. Brand is pro-city, pro-genetic engineering, pro-nuclear, and so profoundly worried about climate change, he believes geoengineering will probably be necessary. After the jump, some excerpts from the talk.
14 July, 2009
[caption id="attachment_777" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Dr. Chris Milburn"]Dr. Chris Milburn[/caption] What's disquieting about our New Democratic Party government-in-waiting is the same thing that's been disturbing about Nova Scotia for decades: a lack of compelling leadership. It's not simply that our once-upon-a-time socialists have moved to the dead center of the road. Contrarian is OK with that. It's Darrell Dexter's meticulous avoidance of anything that might challenge voters in any way. The NDP knew that to get elected, they would have to win seats in rural Nova Scotia. They took polls and conducted focus groups, and discovered that rural Nova Scotians are upset about emergency room closures. So the NDP promised to end those closures, even though every thoughtful observer knows that doing so would be a wasteful diversion of scarce health care dollars. Among other things, it will make recruitment of physicians to rural areas more difficult, not easier. Why would a fully trained physician want to sit in an emergency room all night to treat one or two patients?
07 June, 2009