Newfoundland and Labrador’s ‘Clean Oil’ in a Global Context
The relative cleanliness of NL’s offshore oil is the key selling-point for the industry’s future in a low-carbon world. But does this argument hold up?
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Ecological Ethics and Oil in Newfoundland and Labrador
Ecological ethics confronts petroculture because it does not view the world through markets, and does not privilege our own well-being ahead of others’.
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Keeping It In the Ground
Is directly targeting offshore oil production the most effective way to fight climate change in NL? Or should we focus more energy on reducing local demand?
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100 Debates for the Environment in Newfoundland & Labrador
What do NL candidates in the 2019 election think about the pressing environmental issues facing Canada? We asked eight questions. Here are their answers.
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Climate Strike Newfoundland & Labrador: What Next?
Government has been saying the same thing for decades: we accept climate change is happening, but we’re not going to do anything to stop oil production.
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Cod and the Fishery: Down, but Not Out
Compared to pre-moratorium times, today there are fewer fish, fishers, processors, vessels, and plants. But the value of our fishery remains high.
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The Future (of Fishing) is Female
Women have been the backbone of the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery for centuries. Earning that recognition is reshaping the maritime world.
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Oil is On the Way Out, but NL is Going All-In
Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swede, has jolted the world awake by simply telling a hard truth: adults have stolen her generation’s future because we have not confronted the climate crisis. “I don’t want you to be hopeful,” she tells us, “I want you to panic. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.” Her words have inspired millions of children globally to demand real action from their political leaders. This message is an essential one for Newfoundland and Labrador’s upcoming election. Greta and her generation know all too well that to have any chance of a liveable climate for most of us, global temperature increases must be kept below two degrees of warming. To do this, emissions have to drop steeply, reaching zero—no emissions at all—by 2050. It would have been a…
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Newfoundland and Labrador’s “Climate Action Plan” is All Bark and No Bite
You could almost mistake its 55 glossy pages of picturesque coastal landscapes for a tourism brochure, save a strange word map of climate policy-related buzzwords. In reality, it is Newfoundland and Labrador’s brand new climate change action plan; or, to stay on brand, The Way Forward: On Climate Change in Newfoundland and Labrador. A five-year plan to guide provincial action and support implementation of the federal government’s Pan Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change. Does this beautiful PDF detail how to decarbonize the provincial economy and to help avoid the catastrophic impacts of global climate change? It has some strengths, and many weaknesses. Let’s start with the good news. First and foremost: kudos to the provincial government for recognizing the urgency of climate change. Annual average temperatures in Newfoundland and Labrador have already increased 0.8 degrees Celsius above historical norms, and the report does not shy away from…
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Global warming and corporate greed combine to destroy forests with fire and felling
The razing of millions of acres of forests by wildfires has been increasing in scale and intensity for the past few decades. This year has set new records for the number of trees and shrubs destroyed by fire—not just in the United States and Canada, but also in many other countries, including England, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Sweden, Latvia, and North Korea. Wildfires, of course, have been a yearly occurrence in the summer months for centuries. Triggered mainly by lightning, they were Mother Nature’s way of disposing of dead timber and providing fertile ground for new plant growth. That is still an important natural process, although many conflagrations today are unnaturally caused by human carelessness, such as poorly tended campfires and flipped-away cigarette butts. Far more devastating for the world’s forests today, however, are the effects of global warming, mostly caused by the greenhouse gas emissions that emanate from the burning…
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Why is Canada far behind other countries in switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources?
It is depressingly ironic that, while many other countries are steadily switching from fossil fuels to clean and renewable sources of energy, Canada’s federal and provincial governments squabble over building yet another pipeline to British Columbia—one that, with the existing Trans-Mountain pipeline, would nearly triple the delivery capacity from 300,000 barrels of oil a day to 890,000. And the planned new Kinder Morgan pipeline would carry the thickest and dirtiest oil of all: bitumen. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blithely claims that this massive increase in the extraction of oil from the tar sands is not incompatible with saving the environment from global warming. He proudly points to his government’s carbon pricing policy as evidence of a commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He projects emissions will fall by 90 megatonnes by 2022, conveniently not mentioning that this reduction, even if achieved, will still be inadequate. It will fall far below…
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Oil, gas, and cognitive dissonance
We remember the last oil boom, right? Couple years ago? And the bust that followed? Wealthy people got considerably wealthier while the rest of us strained to see the benefits promised us. What weren’t hard to see were the deep cuts to the public sector after all those revenues (on which the government decided to be fully dependent) suddenly vanished. And the public continues to pay the price. It’s 2018. We’ve known for many years that the future of human beings depends on cutting dependence on fossil fuels. Scientists the world over have insisted this is the case. In a 2012 report, the World Bank stated that “we’re on track for a 4 degree Celsius warmer world by century’s end marked by extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.” The Tyndall Centre for Climate Research says this rise in 4…
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Going vegan at 91
Conversion to a plant-based diet is the key to better health — for people and the planet.
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Climate Change: reclaiming the conversation
“One doesn’t change an economy overnight, but one does need a vision of the future that ensures today’s policies will create the kind of future we want.”
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Rome is burning
What are we going to tell future generations who ask us what we did to solve global warming?
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World’s super-rich are wrecking the planet
But they plan to survive civilization’s collapse.
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We can fight neoliberalism and mitigate its impacts at the same time
Whether or not global plutocracy can be toppled, its billions of victims need immediate help.
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‘The future’s not ours to see’ — but it is ours to shape
What we need to know about neoliberalism. (Part 3 of 3)
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Protests against U.S. pipeline reach Newfoundland
Small group in St. John’s protests RBC’s involvement in the Dakota Access Pipeline.
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Newfoundland and Labrador is rising up for a new economy
The province “has become an epicentre of mobilization to demand an economy that prioritizes people and the planet over corporate profit.”
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