EACH WEEK, A\J staffers share our favourite facts & findings from whatever books, articles, documentaries, podcasts and other media we’ve been consuming. Here’s what we’ve learned this week – from videos!
Non-Renewables
What’s Up with Energy East
TRANSCANaDA ABANDONED plans for an Energy East oil port in Cacouna, Quebec, earlier this month, pushing the projected finish date of the pipeline back two years, to 2020.
Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth is Plundering the Planet
A few centuries ago humans ignited a fossil fire, liberating stocks of carbon long-buried in the Earth’s crust. Since then this fire has powered civilization, enabling the extraction of all other minerals. But it is now flickering, its fuel almost exhausted, even as the waste it produced threatens the biosphere. […]
Industry Made Quakes
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.
Inside Ijen’s Volcanic Sulphur Mine
See a gallery of Kevin McElvaney’s photos from his visit below It took me three flights, one train ride, two motorcycle trips and a long trek up the volcano before I saw the mine for the first time. I met Imam, a former sulphur miner, at the train station in […]
Managing Shared Resources
Aristotle nailed it when he said, “What is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care.” He elaborated that people “pay most attention to what is their own; they care less for what is common.”1 One wonders whether the ancient teacher could have foreseen the day when […]
Mending Mining
IN 1906, the New York City Police Department dispatched mounted officers onto Wall Street to break up mobs of investors trying to buy Cobalt, Ontario silver mine stocks. Simultaneously, thousands across North America descended upon the burgeoning camp cut into the remote northern Ontario wilderness to stake additional claims or […]
Transforming Energy
Imagine a morning when the lights and coffee machine don’t work, your home has no heat and your car doesn’t start. We generally don’t give much thought to where our energy comes from – we just flip the switch. But energy is an integral part of our economy, society and […]
Breaking Up With Fossil Fuels
It’s Global Divestment Day on February 13th, 2015, a day of worldwide climate action and recognition of the growth and reach of the fossil fuel divestment movement, created by the Go Fossil Free campaign.
Huffing & Puffing
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 […]
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