Ecology and Environment

Vancouver and its North Shores are considered among the worst congested areas in Canada if not North America. A recent column in the North Shore News by Jonathan Wilkinson, Member of Parliament for North Vancouver (“A Promising Step Forward on Congestion”, Friday, January 19th… »

The French electricity generation and distribution company, EDF, today proposed the closure of several nuclear power plants from 2029 onwards as part of a new long-term energy strategy. Speaking to journalists, Philippe Sasseigne, head of the company’s nuclear division, defended the relevance of shutting down several reactors by that date,… »

Michael Grubb, UCL for The Conversation Science is slow. It rests on painstaking research with accumulating evidence. This makes for an inherently uneasy relationship with the modern media age, especially once issues are politicised. The interaction between politics and media can be toxic for science, and climate change… »

By Sarah Aziza Announcing his presidency in 2016, Donald Trump promised the nation that he’d become “the greatest job president God ever created.” His plan to accomplish this rested on a retrograde economic vision that would “make America great again,” by restoring waning coal and manufacturing jobs, as well as… »

By Gunnar Rundgren It is possible to feed more than 9 billion people with organic production methods with a small increase in the required crop acreage and with decreased greenhouse gas emission. But this assumes considerable reduction in food wastage and in the quantities of feed grown to animals. That… »

The upward trend in global temperatures marked by record-shattering warmth in 2015 and 2016 kept pace last year, with the United Nations weather agency on 18 January 2018 warning that continued pressure on the Arctic in 2017 will have “profound and long-lasting repercussions on sea levels, and on weather patterns… »

“These cost declines across technologies are unprecendented and representative of the degree to which renewable energy is disrupting the global energy system.” by Andrea Germanos, staff writer for Common Dreams A new report showing that renewable prices may soon out-compete fossil fuels offers just the latest evidence to bolster… »

By William Bowle, Before I began this essay I read through some of my past forays that mentioned climate change and capitalism, the first I think, being in 2006 where I opined in a piece on the ‘War on Terror’: Perhaps the impending climate catastrophe as well as the genocidal… »

By Eric Holthaus Last week, at a New Orleans conference center that once doubled as a storm shelter for thousands during Hurricane Katrina, a group of polar scientists made a startling declaration: The Arctic as we once knew it is no more. The region is now definitively trending toward an… »

By Guy Lane Bitcoin mining – the mechanism of creating Bitcoins and approving transactions on the blockchain – consumes prodigious amounts of electricity due to the use of a ‘Proof of Work’ cryptographic algorithm. While some Bitcoin is mined using clean energy (hydropower and geothermal energy, mainly) most Bitcoin is… »