Canada's Environmental Voice
The relationship between Canada and First Nations plays out like a marriage on the rocks. Once upon a time, separate Nations came together: some brought a love of land, and others had more of a lust for it. They made a solemn covenant, sealed the deal in ceremony, and then: […]
What’s’ Mine is Not Yours The effects of climate change are beginning to emerge through constant changing temperatures, water supply fluctuations, and increased average global temperatures. It can be felt all around the world in little ways. In Toretsk, Ukraine, a local coal mine supplying 67 000 workers is on […]
Over recent decades, forests have been cut down at alarming rates to create space for housing and agricultural lands. While necessary to accommodate our rapidly growing world population, a balance must be kept between forest coverage and human development, particularly in the context of climate change. Now more than ever, […]
Over the last two years, the government of British Columbia, along with Ottawa, has become an aggressive promoter of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to Asia. The get-rich scheme would require puncturing much of the province’s northern forests and farmlands with thousands of unconventional wells.
A private member’s bill from Toronto-area NDP MPP Peter Tabuns to ban fracking in the province passed second reading Thursday by a 29-18 vote with support from the governing Liberals. “Water or gas — that’s our choice,” Tabuns explained to the House. “We can’t have both.”
If recent crises in Ukraine and Gaza are any indication of how our global thirst for energy is destabilizing the world order, then Ezra Levant – author of Groundswell: The Case for Fracking – has got it right. Levant astutely allocates an entire chapter to Russia’s Gazprom in “How the Shale Gas Revolution Weakens […]
FOR YEARS NOW the oil and gas industry has argued that “seismic activity caused by hydraulic fracturing is not a hazard or a nuisance.” The powerful industry, which bills the brute-force technology as “safe and proven,” repeatedly downplayed the earthquake risks the same way it belittled the threat of climate change.
YOU’VE HEARD the ads. Beyond the ugly open pit mines lies a different sort of oil sands, intones a friendly Cenovus voice. The difference, goes the ad, consists of some 100 gleaming steam plants in Alberta’s boreal forest where industry can safely recover oil from 450 metres beneath the ground […]
The oil and gas industry has a pernicious engineering problem: leaky wells. When industry cements or seals a wellbore, stray gas from shallow or intermediate zones can migrate along the casing to the surface or into aquifers. So too can brine and other hydrocarbons. And with the advent of hydraulic […]
