Canada’s Contradiction

Half of Canadians say the recent wave of heat, drought, and wildfires sweeping the country has given them a heightened sense of urgency about the climate crisis, according to an Ipsos poll released Wednesday by Global News.

The completion of the controversial Coastal GasLink pipeline could be delayed if TC Energy can’t resolve an ongoing dispute with LNG Canada over project costs, the Calgary-based company said Thursday.

Trailblazing Northern Quebec Inuit leader Mary Simon emphasized climate change, Arctic environmental protection, and reconciliation as she was installed earlier this week as Canada’s first Inuk governor general.

The Trudeau government has agreed to a tentative, C$5.2-billion bailout for Newfoundland and Labrador’s troubled Muskrat Falls hydropower megaproject, aimed at stopping local electricity rates from almost doubling while taking some of the immediate heat off a province facing serious financial woes.

With massive die-offs predicted for salmon populations across North America’s West Coast, as both home and migratory waters grow too hot for their survival, efforts are intensifying to restore and protect habitats and restrict the annual harvest.

A solar and wind power developer in Fredericton is taking the New Brunswick government to task for letting a “provincially legislated monopoly” keep a lid on renewable energy investment.

The director of Canada’s largest food rescue organization is urging companies to both fight the climate crisis and secure their bottom lines by eliminating food waste, even as the meat industry lays plans to scale up production.

The report of a two-year, $3.5-million report on supposed “anti-Alberta energy campaigns” shows the whole process up as a “farcical attack” on Canadians’ rights with a strong overtone of climate denial, say two campaign organizations that have seen a draft of the still-confidential document.

The federal and British Columbia governments are on the wrong path to counter the climate emergency, a West Coast advocacy group is warning, after Premier John Horgan and Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough announced funding for a new low-carbon innovation centre led by Shell Canada.

A new climate adaptation coalition is bringing together an unusually wide mix of voices—from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce to the Métis National Council—and placing carbon reductions, social equity, and a just transition off fossil fuels at the centre of its strategy for building climate resilience.

The federal government has provided the final piece of the puzzle to allow a controversial reservoir that could protect Calgary from future flooding to move forward.

The Canadian Standards Association (CSA) is facing a citizen complaint before the federal Competition Bureau for certifying old-growth logging as “sustainable”, something it has being doing since 1996 through its Sustainable Forestry Management standards process.

The expansion of a tailings pond at a southeastern B.C. copper mine must not be allowed to go ahead without a thorough environmental assessment, says one of the founding organizers of Earth Day.

Quebec has rejected GNL Québec’s application to build a C$14-billion liquefied natural gas terminal in the Saguenay region, capping years of opposition by Indigenous communities, climate campaigners, scientists, and health professionals.

Farmers are calling for emergency relief after two rural municipalities in Manitoba’s Interlake region declared a state of agriculture disaster earlier this month following drought, extreme heat, and a destructive surge of grasshoppers. 

Extreme weather conditions across the country should be a wake-up call for people resisting taking action against climate change, Environment and Climate Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said Tuesday.

The federal government is adding almost C$1.4 billion to its disaster mitigation and adaptation fund this year to help communities across Canada facing climate change and environmental disasters.

Climate campaigners and analysts were pressing Export Development Canada (EDC) for faster, better results yesterday, after the federal agency released a 10-page net-zero roadmap that pledges to reduce its financial support to a half-dozen high-emitting sectors by 40% from 2018 levels by 2023.

The United Nations special envoy on climate finance, Mark Carney, says he won’t be on the Liberal ticket if there’s a federal election this fall.

The C.D. Howe Institute says 70 to 75% of Canadian passenger auto sales will have to be zero-emission vehicles by 2030 in order to achieve the federal government’s emissions targets.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is under pressure to bring the Canada Energy Regulator (CER)’s energy futures modelling in line with the Paris climate agreement, The Energy Mix has learned, just as an international agency warns that the world’s 1.5°C climate stabilization target is slipping out of reach.

The Nisga’a Nation in British Columbia is teaming up with seven natural gas producers to propose a C$10-billion liquefied natural gas development, claiming the project will bring its emissions to net-zero within three years of starting operations in 2027 or 2028.

The federal government is getting mixed reviews after announcing an engagement process on a just, equitable transition for fossil fuel workers and communities, nearly two years after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised a federal Just Transition Act during the last round of electioneering in 2019.

The federal government must prioritize the protection of “near-urban” nature—spaces rich in biodiversity but increasingly fragmented and fragile—if Canada is to make good on its promise to protect 30% of its land and waters by 2030.

Two Northern Saskatchewan Indigenous communities are engaging younger generations in renewable energy by launching in-school solar power projects.

Environment and climate has re-emerged as a top issue for Canadian voters, while urgency around the COVID-19 pandemic declines, as the country gets ever closer to an expected federal election this summer or fall, according to data released this week by the non-profit Angus Reid Institute.

Teika Newton is Managing Director of Climate Action Network Canada (CAN-Rac) and lives near Kenora, Ontario. In this feature interview conducted last Friday, she talks about the day-to-day realities of a climate emergency, the resilience she’s learned from other generations, and what it’s like to work on climate policy with wildfires nearby…and the winds blowing in her direction.

International oil companies may be on the verge of divesting tar sands/oil sands properties worth C$13.4 billion, according to a new report published earlier this month by Toronto-based Veritas Investment Research.

There won’t be any more negotiations over a proposed natural gas pipeline crossing Indigenous lands in northern Quebec, say Innu leaders who oppose it.

Toronto city councillors carried off a two-fer this week, adopting two new policies Wednesday to accelerate energy-efficient building retrofits before endorsing the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Thursday afternoon on a 22-2 vote.

In 1906, American philosopher William James coined the phrase “the moral equivalent of war” in referring to the problem of sustaining political unity and resolve in the absence of war. U.S. President Jimmy Carter used the phrase in his famous energy crisis speech of 1977 to describe what it was going to take to respond to the security threat posed by the OPEC oil embargo.

Methane emissions from British Columbia oil and gas fields are 1.6 to 2.2 times higher than the federal government is estimating, according to yet another study that contrasts actual measurements from airborne monitoring with the Ottawa’s official calculations.

As much of Canada continues to bake under fierce heat, northwestern Ontario communities are calling out the provincial government’s failure to prepare for wildfire season.

Low-carbon investments continued to hold pride of place in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s pre-election tour this week, with the PM travelling to Quebec’s Gaspé region Wednesday to announce C$25-million for an expanded wind turbine plant.

Wind, solar, and hydrogen energy are gaining ground in the minds of Canadians, with more than half of respondents telling the Angus Reid polling agency they want to see renewables prioritized over fossil fuels.

More than two-thirds of Canadian fossil fuel workers are interested in jobs in a net-zero economy, 58% see themselves thriving in that economy, and nearly nine in 10 want training and upskilling for net-zero employment, according to a groundbreaking survey released this morning by Edmonton-based Iron & Earth.

The federal government is facing reactions ranging from disappointment to mockery after filing its updated carbon reduction target, or Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), with the United Nations climate secretariat this week.

Days after people across the Greater Toronto Area watched a “heat dome” scorch much of western Canada and burn Lytton, British Columbia to the ground, Toronto City Council has a unique opportunity to help turn down the heat.

As two remote First Nation communities in Northern Ontario evacuate in the face of encroaching wildfires, experts are warning that impacts like trauma and respiratory damage from such events will become ever more common as the planet heats up.

Shell Canada Ltd. has announced tentative plans to build a large-scale carbon capture and storage project at its Scotford Complex near Edmonton, part of its strategy to become a net-zero emissions company by 2050.

Two of Canada’s biggest fossil companies say they’ll by looking for about C$50 billion in taxpayer subsidies to bring their net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.

The co-chair of a new expert panel set up to advise Ottawa on how to reach net-zero emissions says expansion of Canada’s tar sands/oil sands industry is “not well aligned” with that goal.

Crews in British Columbia battled nearly 300 wildfires, temperatures in Death Valley, CA hit 130°F/54.5°C, more than 31 million Americans were under heat warnings, and a mega-drought spanned 93% of the western United States, as an entire region of North America faced a second massive heat wave just a bit milder than the last one less than two weeks ago.

With Canada’s banks under heightened scrutiny for the “financed emissions” they drive with their loans and investments, the Vancity Credit Union is out with a public disclosure report that shows where the 35-year-old co-operative is leading other financial institutions—even though management is taking the report as a roadmap for further carbon reductions.

The University of Calgary has decided to suspend new admissions to its bachelor’s program in oil and gas engineering.

Much of the federal subsidy that has helped clean up abandoned oil wells in Alberta may have simply replaced money that fossil companies would have spent anyway, according to a new analysis.

While the corporate embrace of net-zero targets might seem cause for celebration, the allure of the relatively easy to achieve “net” may be distracting—or providing an escape hatch—from the hard work of actually zeroing emissions, analyst Shawn McCarthy warns in a recent opinion piece for Corporate Knights.

Nineteen-year-old Canadian climate campaigner Alyssa Scanga is fed up with adult inaction on the climate crisis and has served notice that she’ll no longer play along with the notion that tinkering around the edges of business-as-usual will make everything okay again

Less than a week after a deadly “heat dome” devastated western Canada and the U.S. Pacific Northwest and burned Lytton, B.C. to the ground, an international science team is reporting that the blistering conditions would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change.

As experts warn that the planet is entering a “runaway fire age,” First Nations in and around Lytton, British Columbia, are expressing anger as response crews prioritize fire-damaged rail infrastructure over people.

Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario will receive up to C$420 million in federal funding to replace its coal-fired production processes with electric arc furnaces, one of a trio of green infrastructure announcements this week that included a high-frequency rail promise for the Quebec City-Toronto corridor and light rail funding for the long-delayed Green Line in Calgary.

Federal and provincial governments have lavished C$23 billion on fossil fuel pipelines, mostly in the form of loan guarantees and other fiscal measures that are heavily distorting Canada’s financial marketplace, according to new research released this week by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

Newfoundland and Labrador’s federally funded subsidies for offshore oil are a “misuse of funds” and another step in the wrong economic direction for the cash-strapped province, says a political scientist who previously taught in the province has studied the province’s oil sector.

The Jason Kenney government’s inquiry into supposed foreign-funded interference with the province’s fossil industry has failed to make its case, but is still an affront to democracy, Greenpeace Canada senior energy strategist Keith Stewart argues this week in an opinion piece for the Edmonton Journal.

As the town of Lytton and the Lytton First Nation mourn all they lost to last week’s British Columbia inferno, climate experts and health professionals warn that further tragedies await in the absence of an “all hands on deck” approach to fighting the climate crisis.

The Blueberry River First Nations will be able to limit development in a key natural gas fracking region in northeastern British Columbia, after the B.C. Supreme Court ruled the province violated Treaty 8 with the amount of industrial development it had permitted in the area.

Calgary-based Pieridae Energy Ltd. has missed its June 30 deadline for a decision on whether to go ahead with its controversial Goldboro liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Nova Scotia, stating in a release Friday that “cost pressures and time constraints due to COVID-19 have made building the current version of the LNG Project impractical.”

Most of Alberta’s energy wells no longer hold enough oil and gas to pay for their cleanup and the public should take them over to ensure their remaining revenue funds remediation, a new report concludes.

Calgary-based pipeliner TC Energy has launched a US$15-billion trade complaint against the United States after President Joe Biden cancelled the presidential permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.

Parliament made history yesterday and overjoyed climate and civil society groups took a victory lap as the Senate passed Canada’s first-ever climate accountability legislation, just hours before adjourning for the summer.

Pavement buckled, light rail power cables melted, all-time high temperature records fell, then fell again, and utilities in British Columbia and Alberta reported record electricity demand as a brutal “heat dome” brought broiling temperatures to western Canada and the U.S. Pacific Northwest this week, prompting scientists to draw an immediate, obvious connection to climate change.

The federal government announced Tuesday it’s speeding up its goal for when it wants to see every new light-duty vehicle sold in Canada to be electric. Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said that by 2035, all new cars and light-duty trucks sold in the country will be zero-emission vehicles, The Canadian Press reports. Until now, the […]

With the discovery of the remains of more than 1,000 Indigenous children in unmarked graves at former residential schools in Kamloops, Brandon, and Cowessess, Saskatchewan, Canada’s national holiday July 1 is an essential moment for those of us in the settler community to absorb and reflect. (Warning: This story contains details of residential schools and the abuse that took place there.)

A new launch video from the Climate Emergency Unit digs into Canada’s past to create a hopeful call to action, illustrating how even a fight that feels overwhelming can be won when a nation comes together.

Canada’s new emission reduction target under the Paris climate agreement is the federal government’s opportunity “to finally do the right thing and address the disconnect between its climate goals and its ongoing support for oil and gas,” writes Eddy Pérez, international climate diplomacy manager at Climate Action Network-Canada, in a post this week for Climate Home News.

British Columbians fighting to save the province’s remaining old-growth forests are cautiously welcoming the provincial government’s decision to assemble an independent Old-Growth Technical Advisory Panel.

As health authorities in British Columbia declare the ongoing heat wave a greater threat than COVID-19, experts are warning that the heat, arriving on the heels of the driest spring on record, is setting the stage for a summer of devastating wildfires.

Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna has decided not to seek re-election. She’s expected to hold a news conference today to announce her decision to stand down in the next election, but an advance copy of her remarks was obtained Sunday by The Canadian Press.

The bottom is falling out of a heavily-hyped boom in liquefied natural gas (LNG) development, as cost overruns, project delays, climate concerns, and security worries for one major megaproject drive down investor confidence that seemed unbeatable as recently as two years ago, according to a new analysis by Global Energy Monitor.

Broken supply chains intersecting with pandemic-weary multitudes desperate to get out on two wheels have meant a stressful year for bike shops—and bike buyers—around the world, with little change expected for months to come.

Taking on an audacious “national retrofit mission” would enable Canada to upgrade every building in the country by 2035, eliminate their fossil fuel consumption by 2050, make energy poverty a thing of the past, and free up 50 terawatt-hours of electricity for other uses—enough to eliminate 60 million tonnes of carbon pollution per year if it were used to power 10 million electric vehicles, according to new analysis released this week by Efficiency Canada.

Environmental groups were celebrating, a climate champion in the Canadian Senate was optimistic, and one of the country’s highest-profile fossil senators appeared to be onboard after the country’s new climate accountability legislation, Bill C-12, cleared the House of Commons earlier this week and looked likely to receive Senate approval before Parliament shuts down for the summer.

Canada is on track to add more than 200,000 clean energy jobs this decade, considerably more than 125,000 that will be lost in a declining fossil fuel industry, Clean Energy Canada concludes in an analysis released last week.

A federal regulator has lifted a stop-work order on tree cutting and grass mowing along the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project route.

Amazon announced Wednesday it will purchase power from a massive new solar farm in Alberta, marking the e-commerce giant’s second renewable energy investment in Canada.

The majority of Canadians believe a national climate plan must nurture strong economies across the country, but there are sharp regional differences on how that plan should be carried out, the latest Confederation of Tomorrow survey shows.

The hydrogen and biofuel industries were both paying close attention this week after the federal government announced a C$1.5-billion Clean Fuels Fund, aimed at boosting the country’s supply of hydrogen, renewable diesel, synthetic fuels, renewable natural gas, and sustainable aviation fuel.

The century-old mindset that framed pedestrians and cyclists who dared to use city streets as trespassers in the kingdom of the car is finally fading—and good riddance, says the Globe and Mail.

A new report from Environmental Defence Canada finds that pledges from automakers to drive an EV revolution are at odds with their continued hard-sell of fossil-driven SUVs in Canada.

Nearly three-quarters of the planet will be facing a significant increase in wildfires by 2100, leading to severe public health impacts, a new report by the Global Climate Health Alliance concludes.

The Newfoundland and Labrador government insists it’s getting a good deal after throwing fossil companies a C$505-million lifeline to help keep the Terra Nova offshore oilfield alive, even if it means it will reap just $35 million in royalties over the next decade.

A joint federal-provincial review has denied an application for an open-pit coal mine in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, saying its impacts on the environment and Indigenous rights aren’t worth the economic benefits it would bring.

After announcing its access to a C$400-million loan earlier this month, The City of Ottawa is now putting its financial pedal to the metal, committing to spend nearly $1 billion by 2027 to start electrifying its bus fleet.

The value of crude oil exports from Canada has increased over 15-fold in the last 30 years, according to a report from Statistics Canada and the Canada Energy Regulator.

Haphazard oversight by the Canadian Energy Regulator (CER) may have enabled a lax safety culture at Crown-owned Trans Mountain Corporation that is now making insurers nervous about backing the company’s existing 68-year-old pipeline and its efforts to complete a C$12.6-billion expansion project, a retired insurance executive says.

The United Kingdom’s biggest asset manager, Legal & General Investment Management, is dropping its shares in U.S. insurance giant American International Group (AIG) and three other companies, after concluding they aren’t moving far enough, fast enough to address the climate risks in their activities.

In what the Reuters news agency is calling a “blockbuster” moment, Royal Dutch Shell is considering selling off the biggest oilfield in the United States, a 260,000-acre expanse in Texas’ Permian Basin, for as much as US$10 billion.

Fossil fuel subsidies have more than doubled in British Columbia since the Premier John Horgan’s NDP government took office in 2017, with oil and gas fracking companies the biggest winners, according to an analysis released this week by Stand.earth and Dogwood.

The putrid smell makes Paula Jongerden sick to her stomach.
It comes from a natural gas well about 300 metres from her home near Delhi, ON, that erupts at least twice a week.

About 100 oil workers gathered outside Newfoundland and Labrador’s legislature Monday, a day before Suncor Energy was expected to announce whether the Terra Nova offshore oilfield will be shut down for good.

Alberta’s finance minister says the province’s C$1.3-billion investment of taxpayers’ money in the now-defunct Keystone XL oil pipeline project was a prudent gamble given the potential payoff in profits and jobs.

G7 leaders have tied up a weekend summit in Cornwall, United Kingdom that produced a still-vague collective promise on international climate finance, pledges to stop funding international coal projects next year and to “strive” to shift vehicles off fossil fuels, a still-nascent sustainable infrastructure investment plan for developing countries, and a disappointing effort on global vaccine equity.

Canada’s five big tar sands/oil sands companies are raising eyebrows with their plan to form an Oil Sands Pathways to Net Zero alliance aimed at cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 without reducing their actual oil production.

An effort backed by a powerful natural gas organization to erode Vancouver’s climate emergency plan has failed, but the thin margin on the final council vote has campaigners and green builders on alert for a protracted battle.

The federal government will no longer approve new thermal coal mines or mine expansions, after Environment and Climate Minister Jonathan Wilkinson released a policy statement pinpointing coal as a source of greenhouse gas emissions and other “unacceptable environmental impacts”.

Alberta’s auditor general is criticizing the government for failing to fix problems pointed out six years ago in a program that’s supposed to guarantee coal and oilsands mines clean up after themselves.

Canadian investors may be in for a rude awakening as they discover that their stocks and bonds in carbon-intensive industries are “mispriced” once the risks of climate change are taken into account, the Bank of Canada warned in its annual Financial System Review released last month.

It took nearly five months, after U.S. President Joe Biden dealt a death blow to the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office. But Calgary-based pipeliner TC Energy finally, formally cancelled the project this week, acknowledging that a decade-long fight has come to an end.

A plan by a Pennsylvania-based industrial gas and chemical company to build a C$1.3-billion “blue” hydrogen plant in Edmonton is raising cautious optimism about a new way to drive the transition from a fossil- to renewable-based fuel, while raising concerns about the methane emissions the project could trigger and its potential to lock in future demand for climate-busting natural gas.

If work begins now to aggressively restore and protect Canada’s forests, grasslands, farmlands, and peatlands, the country could reduce its annual emissions by 78 megatonnes (Mt) by 2030, says a groundbreaking new study.

With climate finance on the agenda at this weekend’s G7 summit in Cornwall, United Kingdom, 70% of Canadian adults and 66% across the world’s seven most industrialized countries say they favour financial and technological support to help poorer countries shift from fossil fuels to renewables, according to a YouGov survey commissioned by the E3G climate consultancy.

The European Union has approved a €17.5-billion Just Transition Fund (JTF) to support communities most affected by the shift off fossil fuels, while Canadians wait for word on federal just transition legislation that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised two years ago, but has not said very much about since.

The Canadian Infrastructure Bank has agreed in principle to lend the City of Ottawa C$400-million to help it buy 450 electric buses and build out the necessary charging infrastructure.

A strong majority of British Columbia residents care a great deal about the health of the province’s old-growth forests, and many believe the Horgan government is doing a poor job of protecting them, a recent survey suggests.

The 21st-century challenges cities face can only be solved by governments, not by profit-driven corporations, say five recent Canadian winners of a prestigious global urban design award.

Federal officials were asking themselves how many pipelines Canada really needs in the days after U.S. President Joe Biden cancelled Keystone XL.

The dispute over the cross-border Line 5 pipeline is entirely for Michigan to deal with, the state’s attorney general argues in a legal brief released Wednesday that flatly rejects Canada’s depiction of a foreign policy matter that Ottawa and the White House must resolve.

Federal departments and agencies have spent the last few days issuing a flurry of new funding announcements for clean technologies, and for nature protection through the Indigenous Guardians program.

Another insurance company is abandoning the controversial Trans Mountain Pipeline.

Alberta’s predictably hostile, defensive reaction to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) landmark Net Zero by 2050 roadmap shows it no longer matters what the Kenney government or its fossil industry allies think about the drive to decarbonize the global economy and hold average global warming to 1.5°C.

Canada spent significantly more of its COVID-19 recovery dollars on renewable energy than on fossil fuels, but has attached few green strings to that funding and is still failing on a crucial commitment to international climate finance, according to new analyses published ahead of next week’s G7 summit in Cornwall, England.

As the British Columbia government moves to overhaul the province’s forestry sector, the Sierra Club of BC is decrying the decision to prioritize access to wood fibre over old-growth forest protections.

The climate crisis is deepening the socioeconomic factors that lead to widespread ill health—and policy-makers must pay attention, say two Canadian public health experts.

Canada and four other big fossil exporters are under the microscope after announcing formation of the Net Zero Producers’ Forum (NZPF), a bid to either “develop pragmatic net-zero emission strategies” for fossil-dependent economies or slow down the push for faster, deeper carbon cuts—depending on how you read the fine print.

A public consultation committee on coal mining in the Rocky Mountains will consider why Albertans’ level of trust in the province’s regulatory bodies is so low, the panel’s head said Monday.

Canadian businesses and non-profits will be able to borrow up to $10 million to install solar panels on their properties under a new commercial solar financing program introduced by the Vancity Community Investment Bank (VCIB).

The University of Waterloo moved yesterday to drop all its fossil fuel exploration and extraction investments by 2025 and decarbonize its C$2.7-billion pension and endowment fund 50% by 2030 and 100% by 2040, capping a six-year campaign by Fossil Free UW and allied groups to push the school to divest.

A new report by veteran earth scientist David Hughes is reinforcing the argument for a “stark change in direction” in Canadian climate and energy policy.

Limited access to insurance is emerging as a big obstacle for Canadian tar sands/oil sands companies aiming to get new projects off the ground, just a year or two after campaigners began setting their sights on getting insurers to abandon fossil fuels, CBC reports.

More damaging earthquakes can be expected more often in northern British Columbia as fracking oil and gas wells increases pressure underground, says newly published research.

Canada’s biggest pension managers saw their investments in the country’s top four tar sands/oil sands producers grow by $2.9 billion in the first three months of this year, a 147% increase from last year, the Reuters news agency revealed last week in a new analysis.

The expected uptake of electric vehicles and stricter measures worldwide to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are the top reasons why a climate-focused research group is calling on governments not to invest any more money in Alberta’s oil sector.

As federally-owned Trans Mountain Corporation begins to tunnel under Burnaby Mountain, and climate and Indigenous activists protest, a coalition of media outlets and press freedom groups is petitioning the B.C. Supreme Court to order the RCMP to stop using injunctions as an excuse to block reporters from protest sites.

Federal New Democrats are ensuring the survival of a key piece of Liberal legislation aimed at keeping Canada accountable to its target of achieving net-zero carbon-related emissions by mid-century, while former Green Party leader Elizabeth May mounts a last-ditch effort to strengthen the bill.

The federal government is receiving a rocky response after unveiling its seven-year, C$2.6-billion plan to help Canadians cover the cost of home energy retrofits.

Canada played an important behind-the-scenes role in prodding the International Energy Agency to develop its landmark Net-Zero by 2050 pathway, while the Trump administration would have been in a position to exert outsized influence on the IEA’s governing board to obstruct progress, The Energy Mix has learned.

A fracking field in Alberta has produced Canada’s biggest methane cloud since satellite tracking began, with the third-highest rate of emissions in North America this year, according to a geospatial analytics firm working with data from the European Space Agency.

In the space of a few days in April, Canada’s 2030 emissions reduction target under the Paris Agreement jumped from 30% to 36% to between 40 and 45%. Going into this latest round of climate ambition poker, the federal government, we were told, had already put everything it could on the table and was tapped out. But along came the White House climate summit, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau upped the ante by another 50%.

The costs of Alberta’s growing stock of abandoned and inactive oil and gas wells are falling unfairly on landowners and taxpayers, says a report from the University of Calgary.

Mere days after Ottawa designated their product as a toxic substance, plastics manufacturers are taking the Canadian government to court—but experts say they are likely to be disappointed.

Alberta’s inquiry into the funding of oil and gas industry critics is getting its fourth deadline extension.

It would be a big mistake for Canada to count on carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) or hydrogen to meet its 2030 climate targets when those technologies will make “zero contribution” to emission reductions over the next decade, renowned Canadian climate scientist Corinne Le Quéré told a webinar audience Monday morning.

The federal government is looking to train 2,000 more people to do energy audits as it tries to get its new green home renovation program off the ground.

The Trudeau government is getting a thumbs-up from the Globe and Mail editorial board after announcing more than C$12 billion for major transit projects in Toronto and Hamilton.

Canadians are only minimally familiar with climate issues, but give the federal government low marks for its plans to reach net-zero emissions and balance environmental and economic concerns, according to recent opinion research conducted for Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) by Environics Research.

Difficult as it was for many people to adjust to working from home when the COVID-19 pandemic hit—and to absorb the searing realities of who got to stay home and who didn’t—the shift back to regular workplaces may be even more complex.

Farmers in parts of the Prairies are worrying about crop failures and water-deprived livestock, and communities are already facing local water restrictions and at least one forest fire, as the region enters a period of near-record dry conditions.

A shipping pilot’s recent decision to guide an oil tanker through British Columbia’s navigationally tricky Active Pass has highlighted a legal gap that may be putting the Salish Sea at risk—along with human lives.

The lack of a predictable, long-term development plan is holding Canada back from emerging as a global leader in renewable energy production, according to a new international market assessment by London, UK-based IHS Markit.

A grassroot group from Ireland is looking for international support to persuade the Irish government to call for a global ban on oil and gas fracking at the United Nations General Assembly in mid-September, just six weeks before this year’s UN climate conference, COP 26, convenes in Glasgow.

A judge has dismissed an attempt to quash the United Conservative government’s inquiry into whether foreign groups have conspired against Alberta’s oil industry.

As extreme seasonal flooding hits riverside communities in Canada’s Northwest Territories, the region’s small towns are stepping up to help each other.

The Spanish parliament has adopted a new climate law that calls for just a 23% emissions reduction from 1990 levels by 2030, but immediately bans new permits for coal, oil, and gas operations, sets a 2040 deadline to phase out fossil fuel vehicle sales, and commits the country to generate 74% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

Seventy-five years ago, Canadian scientists began a reckless romance with nuclear fission. Lessons from a tragic death, and a meltdown that destroyed a reactor, were not learned. Serious design flaws with the Candu nuclear reactor were never fixed. Today, Paul McKay writes, the tradition continues.

Tar sands/oil sands producer Suncor Energy Inc. is partnering with utility ATCO Ltd. on a “multi-billion-dollar” project to produce more than 300,000 tonnes per year of hydrogen—as long as governments are ready to facilitate the deal, and taxpayers are standing by to help clear some of the financial hurdles.

Critical shortages in skilled labour and affordable housing are threatening to derail Canada’s plan to reduce national emissions—and, with it, the promise of sustainable economic growth.

Nearly three dozen households in the Taykwa Tagamou Nation in northern Ontario stand to save hundreds of dollars per month on their power bills with the installation of rooftop or ground-mounted solar panels over the next few months.

The reference to a carbon border adjustment in the latest federal budget was one sign that countries with relatively strong carbon prices are keen to avoid becoming the new “Rust Belt”, CBC business columnist Don Pittis writes in a recent analysis.

Campaigners in Michigan planned two days of “eviction” events today and tomorrow, Governor Gretchen Whitmer threatened to seize Enbridge Inc.’s profits if the Calgary-based pipeliner ignored her closure order, and the Trudeau government filed a legal brief in the company’s defence as today’s deadline loomed to shut down operation of the 68-year-old Line 5 pipeline.

A British Columbia legal research initiative and the UK government might just as well have named tobacco lobbyists to oversee health messaging, after two fossil executives were among 26 “exceptional individuals” identified as Canadian climate champions ahead of this year’s United Nations climate conference, one of the country’s top climate advocates said Monday.

Tar sands/oil sands companies are stepping up protective measures as a spate of COVID-19 cases sweeps through the region at the same time that thousands of workers are being brought in for spring maintenance shutdowns at various plants.

Quebec-based electric school bus and truck manufacturer Lion Electric is citing a friendly operating environment in its decision last week to locate a US$70-million manufacturing plant in Illinois, a move expected to create about 750 jobs over the next three years.

The deciduous trees that are replacing conifers in the northern boreal forest may help slow the dangerous feedback loop that is now fuelling intense Arctic fires.

With Michigan’s deadline to shut down the Line 5 pipeline just two days away, the state and Calgary-based Enbridge Inc. are telling different stories about whether the leaky, 68-year-old line will still be operating Thursday morning.

Last year’s dive in oil prices has caused Alberta to change the way it calculates payments due from tar sands/oil sands mines make to ensure there’s enough money to clean up the mess they leave behind.

The company proposing the Woodfibre liquefied natural gas (LNG) export project near Squamish, British Columbia, says it has struck a second sales contract with BP Gas Marketing Ltd. that allows it to account for more than 70% of future production from the plant.

The Trudeau government is still grappling with whether introduce a national mandate requiring the auto industry to make or sell more zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) as it scrambles to meet its new 2030 target for greenhouse gas reductions.

The town of Old Crow, Yukon will get to shut off its noisy, polluting diesel generators for the first time in 50 years, after the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation’s new solar farm reaches full capacity in July.

While much of the world’s food is produced on large farms, a recent review has found that smaller operations tend to have higher yields and biodiversity while being no less profitable or efficient—making them a fund-worthy lynchpin of sustainable development.

Canada’s climate accountability legislation, Bill C-12, is on its way to detailed review by the Commons environment and sustainable development committee, after passing second reading in the House by a 210-122 vote.

Canadian banks and insurance companies are finding themselves singled out as major players in the effort to get climate change under control, after analysis by the non-profit Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) concluded that financial institutions’ investments, loans, and underwriting activities account for 700 times more climate impact than the direct emissions from their operations.

Angela Carter is a political science professor and Truzaar Dordi is a PhD candidate in climate finance at the University of Waterloo. In this interview, they explain their research showing that the fossil fuels Canada expect to extract until 2050 would soak up a full 16% of the world’s remaining carbon budget, and talk about what climate policy would look like if Ottawa weren’t formulating it with one eye shut.

The proposed “Ring of Fire” mineral development in northern Ontario is equivalent in destructive capacity to Alberta’s tar sands/oil sands, say two researchers from Sierra Club Canada.

Imperial Oil Ltd. investors have voted 86% to defeat a shareholder resolution that it adopt a target to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Export Development Canada (EDC) may face court action in the not-too-distant future, after a legal opinion commissioned by Oil Change International and several other organizations concluded that national export credit agencies have an international legal obligation to scale back their financing for fossil fuel-related activities.

Canada’s 2030 carbon reduction target is still “insufficient”, the 50% cut promised by United States President Joe Biden is enough to trim average global warming by 0.2°C, and the combination of rich nations’ climate promises to date points toward a 2.4°C world, according to the latest batch of analysis released this week by the Climate Action Tracker (CAT).

The Canadian government is facing a lawsuit and accusations of hypocrisy after allowing chemical giant DuPont an extra two years to comply with restrictions on hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), just as the Biden administration in the United States announces swift action to reduce emissions of the climate-busting greenhouse gas.

Environment and Climate Minister Jonathan Wilkinson has announced a federal environmental assessment of the Ford government’s contentious, C$6-billion plan for a new highway through the northwestern part of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), citing “clear areas of federal concern related to this project.”

This past winter, COVID-19 outbreaks at two Coastal GasLink work camps in northern British Columbia spilled over into neighbouring Wet’suwet’en communities, according to media reports. The spread of disease to Indigenous communities through industrial projects is an example of environmental racism—when government policies discriminate against racialized communities by disproportionately exposing them to harms from industrial and other toxic activities.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is less than 10 days away from implementing a momentous decision to shut down a 68-year-old, underwater pipeline that her administration and many of her constituents consider an environmental hazard and an affront to Indigenous rights, but that Canadian Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan has declared a “non-negotiable” irritant in bilateral relations.

A British Columbia First Nation has joined calls for the federal government to step in on the environmental review of a proposed open-pit coal mine in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains.

The new chair of Ontario’s Greenbelt Council is a former Mike Harris-era cabinet minister who voted against the Greenbelt itself when it was established in 2005.

Residents of northern Labrador are having to tackle a new set of miseries as climate change delivers fog, gale-force winds, exploding black fly and mosquito populations, reduced berry crops, and even new sources of camouflage for dangerous bears.

Canada’s environment minister has put forward changes in response to NDP concerns about a bill that would make the federal government more accountable as it strives to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is hitting the Alberta tar sands/oil sands hard, with 12 active outbreaks at man camps and mining sites across the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, 738 active cases, and a total of 2,054 workers who’d tested positive as of Tuesday.

A new study has used millions of satellite images to generate the clearest picture yet of the world’s glaciers and concludes they’re getting smaller, faster.

While the “serious coin” directed to climate action by Canada’s 2021 budget is most welcome, two experts are urging policy-makers at all levels to double down on community-based climate policies that integrate climate change adaptation and mitigation.

The Canada Energy Regulator has decided to grant a request by the operator of the Trans Mountain pipeline to protect the identity of its insurers in its regulatory filings.

The British Columbia Supreme Court has rejected a bid to quash the extension of the environmental assessment certificate for the Coastal GasLink pipeline, the project at the centre of countrywide protests in February last year.

Canada’s biggest private sector union, Unifor, is throwing its support behind calls for a 60% cut in the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, as long as the more ambitious target comes with a realistic just transition plan for the oil and gas industry workers it represents.

The Doug Ford government is turning Ontario into an “innovation wasteland” and setting the province up to increase its dependence on greenhouse gas-intensive natural gas with its latest plan to eliminate renewable energy requirements in provincial legislation—and making its move while communities are preoccupied with a brutal third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, renewable advocates say.

Environment and Climate Change Canada has ordered a halt to construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline through a forest in Burnaby, British Columbia until the end of bird nesting season.

A western Canada think tank is calling on Alberta to lower regulatory barriers that it says discourage businesses from reusing abandoned and unreclaimed oil and gas well sites. Observers say the scheme could allow fossils to hand off many billions of dollars in environmental liabilities.

The Alberta government bowed to public pressure late last week and paused coal exploration in the most sensitive areas of the Rocky Mountains while it continues to gather public feedback about mines.

A team of Canadian scientists is about to embark on a five-year attempt to calculate just how much the country depends on the natural world—in economic terms, and in ways that are far less tangible.

Climate campaigners and green community practitioners in Toronto shared their shock and sadness, and accolades began pouring in, as word spread over the last week that carpenter, passive solar builder, green economy practitioner, peace and climate justice campaigner, and systems change advocate Peter Shepherd had died April 21 at age 63.

Canada will be more than $100 billion poorer by 2050 if the world doesn’t work harder to fight climate change, says one of the world’s largest insurers.

Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan says Canada will join the United States in establishing a platform for oil and gas producing countries to figure out how the sector can support implementing the Paris Agreement on climate change and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.

While last week’s federal budget cemented a significant increase in government support for energy efficiency, the “nitty-gritty details of implementation” have yet to be filled in and more funding will be needed to deliver the scale of building retrofit activity the country needs, Efficiency Canada Policy Director Brendan Haley argues in a follow-up analysis.

In the days since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged a 40% reduction in Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, analysts and news outlets have been weighing in on what it will take for the country to hit a target that many climate advocates consider far too modest, but its proponents see as a very heavy lift.

If Canada’s non-profit sector wants to make a lasting impact, then it’s time to “get political,” says a leading food justice advocate.

Burnside, Nova Scotia-based CarbonCure Technologies is taking home about C$9.4 million as one of two winners of the NRG COSIA XPrize, after developing a technology to capture carbon dioxide in concrete and make an essential building material stronger while reducing its carbon footprint.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau committed Canada to a 40 to 45% reduction in its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 yesterday, in an address to the Leaders’ Summit on Climate convened by U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Biden-Harris Leaders’ Summit on Climate was scheduled to open with statements from leaders of more than two dozen countries, in what the White House signposted as “an opportunity for leaders to highlight the climate-related challenges their countries face and the efforts they are undertaking”.

Nearly four dozen of the world’s biggest banks, insurance companies, and investment fund managers are vowing to mobilize trillions of dollars in financing for net-zero initiatives under the banner of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), a new initiative launched this week with Mark Carney, the UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, at the helm.

The federal government is getting decidedly mixed reviews for a 2021 budget that announces but doesn’t quite spell out C$17.6 billion in green recovery spending over the next five years, while tipping a 2030 emissions reduction goal of 36% that may be superseded within days by a more ambitious government target.

Big industrial emitters are emerging as major winners from the climate-related elements of this week’s federal budget, even though the Alberta and Saskatchewan governments are already fretting that the billions in new funding won’t flow quite the way they’d hoped.

A troubled demonstration project in Saskatchewan may be an example of the challenges the Trudeau government will face if it relies on carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technologies to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, as this week’s federal budget proposes, an analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has told The Energy Mix.

The federal government is hoping a budget provision for C$40,000 interest-free loans will be sufficient incentive to encourage 200,000 Canadian households to undertake deep retrofits on their homes.

Nature-based climate solutions show up at several points in this week’s federal budget, with funds set aside for emission reductions on farms, the forest-based bio-economy, and a continuing, multi-billion-dollar effort to extend Canada’s network of protected areas.

Two veteran public interest researchers have come up with a troubling equation they say is at the heart of the federal government’s climate strategy: Carbon Pricing + Hydrogen + Carbon Capture + Nuclear = Paris 2030 and beyond.

From transit to home energy retrofits, from natural climate solutions to green innovation funding, the federal budget tabled today by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland will put an end to months of lobbying, advocacy, and speculation from climate policy advocates looking for a solid federal commitment to climate action.

With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expected to increase Canada’s 2030 carbon reduction target to more than 40%, and the Conservative Party embracing carbon pricing (however fractiously) as a central plank of their own emerging climate strategy, analysts and major media are pointing to a narrowing of the political polarization that has helped block decisive action on climate change.

Conservatives have moved to quash a government bill that mandates Ottawa set targets to hit net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 over a lack of representation from the oil and gas sector on an outside advisory panel.

Enbridge’s newly-minted enthusiasm for asserting a warm and fuzzy intersection between its activities and the spiritual and cultural practices of Indigenous Peoples is merely acting to highlight the company’s poor commitment to consent.

A committee that is supposed to consult Albertans on coal development in the Rocky Mountains won’t be allowed to hear what people want to say about water and land use.

Two federal ministers have written Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe to protest his plan to bring in a tax on electric vehicles.

With the new U.S. administration taking real action on climate change, both domestically and internationally, Canada will have to show up next week at President Joe Biden’s climate leadership summit with more than just words, former Irish president Mary Robinson said Wednesday.

The inability to accurately measure and regulate methane emissions from natural gas operations is emerging as a gaping, potentially fatal flaw in a Canadian climate strategy that appears to lean increasingly on a continuing presence for the oil and gas industry, with large volumes of hydrogen to be produced from natural gas.

Greenhouse gas emissions from Canada’s oil and gas industry will make up an outsized share of the remaining carbon the world’s atmosphere can take, a new analysis suggests.

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole was facing intense criticism from within his own caucus Thursday evening, just hours after releasing a glossy, 15-page brochure he’d touted as his party’s new climate plan, with backbenchers telling media they’d had no advance warning that he planned to turn his back on long-standing policy and embrace a half-hearted carbon price.

Toronto’s retiring director of environment and energy issued a broadside on his way out the door last week, warning councillors that there’s “no vaccine for climate change”, and an urgent need for the city to pick up the pace on its climate plan.

This summer will mark 150 years since British Columbia joined Canada. While some will celebrate a landmark anniversary, Dogwood’s Kai Nagata and Christina Smethurst say decolonizing the province begins with acknowledging the true history of how it came to be.

Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions rose fractionally in 2019, the first year the country’s national carbon pricing system took effect, but Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson says it’s “really good news” the numbers weren’t considerably worse.

New York State’s US$247.7-billion pension fund is dropping the more than $7 million it’s invested in seven Canadian tar sands/oil sands producers, citing the “significant environmental, legal, and economic risks” the companies face.

The Quebec Environmental Law Centre is coming to the aid of an environmental group targeted by an Alberta oil company threatening legal action.

Environmentalists and loggers are crying foul after revelations that British Columbia’s thriving wood pellet industry is sourcing its feedstock not from wood waste, but from forests—and employing scant few workers in the process.

A Paris-based airship company called Flying Whales has signed an exclusive deal with Canada that could advance plans to use the dirigibles as an Arctic-preserving cargo solution.

A research team at the University of Alberta has received a C$2.89-million grant from Natural Resources Canada to produce jet fuel from waste fats and oils.

Toronto transit users can expect to return to a much-improved subway network once the COVID-19 pandemic begins to subside, after the Toronto Transit Commission took the opportunity to speed up its maintenance and upgrades to tracks, stations, and vehicles.

Fresh from a Liberal Party policy convention over the weekend, the Trudeau government is just days away from an April 19 budget that is widely expected to emphasize a national child care plan alongside a menu of green economic recovery measures.

At least two out of 10 fossil workers around the world involved in drilling, operational support, or maintenance could be replaced by robots over the next decade as the industry sets out to save more than US$7 billion per year in the United States alone, according to the latest analysis by Rystad Energy.

Canada needs to rethink its climate policies to stop excluding Indigenous people from decision-making, respect Indigenous rights to self-determination and free, prior and informed consent, deliver solutions that reflect the realities of both rural and urban Indigenous communities, and address “structural inequalities that are continually being reproduced through colonial relation, processes, and structures in so-called Canada,” Indigenous Climate Action (ICA) concludes in a report issued late last month.

A B.C. man camp operator’s well-intentioned plan to keep waste food out of the nearest landfill is colliding with the permanent food security impact of the hydro dam the camp was built to serve, raising tough questions about how socially responsible a contractor can be when the bigger-picture impact of the project is far beyond their control.

The psychological scars of cabin fever and adaptation fatigue are adding to the immediate physical dangers for Indigenous people in Labrador of pursuing a traditional life on the thinning sea ice.

A fourth request has been made to the federal government to get involved in the environmental review of a coal mine proposed for Alberta’s Rocky Mountains.

Canadian tar sands/oil sands operators are having trouble lining up the skilled work force they need for a busy period of essential scheduled maintenance, with nine facilities fighting COVID-19 outbreaks as the country lurches through a third wave of the pandemic.

As many as 450,000 of the 600,000 people now employed directly or indirectly by the Canadian fossil industry could be looking for new jobs as the transition off oil and gas unfolds, TD Economics concludes in a report released earlier this week.

Five Canadian climate organizations are turning up the heat on all the parties in the House of Commons to advance the Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, Bill C-12, when Parliament resumes Monday.

A “climate emergency alliance” between the New Democratic and Green parties could make as many as 80 more House of Commons seats available to MPs who support faster, deeper carbon cuts, 350 Canada contends in a new campaign aimed at the two federal parties.

Canada’s biggest fossils aren’t considering a sudden pivot to renewable energy, but pipeline companies have no major expansion plans in the offing, judging by their remarks at a virtual symposium this week hosted by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) and Scotiabank.

Nearly two-thirds of the directors of Canada’s five biggest banks have past or present ties to high-carbon industries, making “climate-conflicted” bank directors a far more common phenomenon in Canada than in the United States, Europe, or the United Kingdom, according to a database compiled by DeSmog UK.

A new public opinion snapshot shows job creation, climate action, and income inequalities among Canadians’ top priorities ahead of this month’s federal budget.

A U.S. technology newsletter is touting Canada’s newly-confirmed carbon tax as a likely catalyst for a “start-up explosion” in several branches of cleantech, even as the Globe and Mail reports on the loopholes some provinces have opened up in the federal scheme—with the Trudeau government’s blessing.

U.S. President Joe Biden travelled to Pittsburgh last Wednesday to unveil a US$2-billion jobs and infrastructure plan that includes a 10-year, $650-billion commitment to a U.S. clean energy transition, with big allocations for building energy retrofits, electric vehicle infrastructure, grid modernization, public transit, and union jobs cleaning up abandoned oil and gas wells and mines.

China can hit its stated target of carbon neutrality by 2060 if it expedites the closure of 186 of its most underperforming coal plants, gradually reduces the capacity of those that remain, and ceases to build any new ones, a new study concludes. But a powerful coal lobby is attempting to stand in the way.

The posting for a new high-level Alberta government job supposed to help the province align with environmental concerns from financial markets seems more about talk than action, observers say.

An Ottawa city council committee has stopped short of opposing plans for two new nuclear waste disposal sites less than 200 kilometres upriver, but will ask privately-owned Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) to refrain from accepting waste from outside Ontario and take steps to protect the Ottawa River, on which the community depends for its drinking water.

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Andrew Furey says he rejected an idea last summer from former prime minister Jean Chrétien to store international nuclear waste in Labrador.

April 1, 2021—Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan immediately stepped up with a C$320-million subsidy, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney demanded $30 billion in federal largesse, and oddsmakers had Kenney heavily favoured to take the grand prize for hot air production after federal officials discovered a decades-old fake science monograph that pointed to a foolproof way to make the world’s legislatures energy self-sufficient.

Canada is in line to lose C$11.9 billion on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, as rising project costs collide with falling demand for oil, according to a new analysis by Simon Fraser University’s School of Resource and Environmental Management.

Less than two weeks before U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled a US$2-trillion infrastructure plan with heavy emphasis on electric cars and clean electricity, U.S. Department of Commerce officials were touching base with Canadian mining companies and battery producers to look at amping up production of electric vehicle components.

U.S. President Joe Biden will be in Pittsburgh today to announce a massive new jobs and infrastructure plan worth as much as US$4 trillion over the next eight to 10 years, potentially paid for with tax hikes of up to $3 trillion on corporations and the country’s highest income earners.

The Canadian government’s new carbon offset system could ultimately drive up greenhouse gas emissions while creating the illusion of progress on the climate crisis, three of the country’s leading climate analysts warn in an opinion piece for the CBC.

The Minnesota Court of Appeals heard arguments last week over Enbridge’s Line 3 replacement project in northern Minnesota, which opponents are calling unnecessary due to an eventual decline in the demand for oil.

The director of a children’s movie about Bigfoot wants to thank the Alberta government’s energy centre for starting a “ludicrous” fight over the film.

It’s a “deadly distraction” to think major corporations can replace sweeping government action in response to the climate crisis, according to a former finance professional who now says he helped promote that “fantasy” as chief investment officer for sustainable investing at mammoth investment firm BlackRock Inc.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney says his government didn’t prepare a fallback plan on implementing a consumer carbon tax because they were hoping to win in the country’s top court.

The Alberta public relations shop last known for picking a fight with Netflix over an animated children’s movie has been handed responsibility for promoting the province’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) credentials to would-be investors in its beleaguered fossil industry.

The Doug Ford government in Ontario is now 0 for 2 in its bid to stop a youth-led climate lawsuit from going to a full court hearing.

Teck Coal is facing the largest fine ever imposed under the federal Fisheries Act after pleading guilty to contaminating waterways in southeastern British Columbia.

The sea ice was five weeks late to arrive along the north coast of Labrador this year—and is still 85% shy of its typical thickness. The Inuit communities that rely on that ice are rallying as best they can under conditions that pose both immediate dangers and long-term peril.

British Columbia has become the first province in Canada to set greenhouse gas emission reduction targets for major sectors of the provincial economy, but is being urged to toughen up its standards for oil and gas operations, The Canadian Press reports.

Road-building approvals for coal exploration already exceed legal limits in some parts of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains and foothills, suggest documents from the province’s energy regulator.

The Supreme Court of Canada has brought an end to years of provincial legal challenges to a key cornerstone of federal climate policy, deciding by a 6-3 vote that the Trudeau government’s carbon pricing regime is constitutional.

The Royal Bank of Canada is being singled out for the “dubious honour of punching above its weight” after a new international study identified 60 of the world’s biggest banks that have invested US$3.8 trillion in fossil fuels since the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Quebec’s environmental review board says the risks associated with GNL Québec’s proposed Saguenay gas terminal project far outweigh its benefits.

Alberta relaxed more environmental rules in response to the COVID-19 pandemic than any other government in Canada, says a study from the University of Calgary.

Renewable electricity capacity in Canada will grow over the next few years at less than half the rate it’s seen in recent years, according to federal projections.

Aamjiwnaang First Nation near Sarnia, Ontario, is ringed by some 60 toxin-spewing petrochemical plants, more than any other community in Canada. That kind of environmental racism is the motivation for a private member’s bill currently before the House of Commons that calls for a national program to help communities measure the impacts they face.

Alberta’s oil patch shed more than 35,000 jobs between December 2013 and February 2020. Now, analysts are urging anyone still banking on a strong return of fossil employment to think again.

Canada is missing out on a C$200-billion-per-year opportunity to build an industrial bioeconomy using feedstocks from forestry, agriculture, and municipal solid waste, Passmore Group CEO Jeff Passmore writes in a post this week for Biofuels Digest.

A new federal incentive, modelled on a U.S. tax credit for carbon capture, utilization and storage, would be tailor-made to drive higher greenhouse gas emissions and could produce unexpected surprises for private investors if it’s included in Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s April 19 budget, a veteran U.S. energy consultant and attorney has told The Energy Mix.

A partner in a project designed to allow more tar sands/oil sands bitumen to be shipped by rail from Canada to Texas says the US$25-billion merger of Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. and U.S. rival Kansas City Southern announced Sunday promises to provide new benefits.

Federal Liberals swiftly adopted a new attack strategy Monday to paint the Official Opposition as climate change deniers, after a weekend convention that saw the Conservative party grassroots reject a motion to declare climate change is real.

In announcing its “non-negotiable” opposition to the closure of the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline, the Canadian government has seemingly kicked to the curb a longstanding cross-border commitment to protect the Great Lakes from harm, says an experienced U.S. advisor.

A new study is calling for countries’ greenhouse gas emission inventories to include deep ocean trawling that accounts for a billion tonnes of carbon pollution per year, more than the total produced by Germany and about the same as the global airline industry.

The federal Conservatives will go into the next federal election with a policy book that does not directly acknowledge that “climate change is real” or declare the party “willing to act”, after delegates to the CPC virtual policy convention in Halifax voted down a set of environment-oriented policies by a 54-46 margin.

Imperial Oil Ltd. is advising investors attending its annual meeting in May to vote against a shareholder resolution that it adopt a corporate wide target to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

When she tables a much-anticipated federal budget later this year, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland mustn’t pass up the opportunity to revisit and rethink a bedrock assumption of Canadian economic strategy: that the country’s prosperity stands or falls on the fortunes of its oil and gas industry. It’s time for the federal government to stop trying to do two things at once, and instead pick a lane.

Wealthy countries will never return to their pre-pandemic levels of oil consumption, but rebounding economic activity in the developing world could drive daily demand to new highs within two years without much stronger government leadership toward clean energy, the International Energy Agency warned in its Oil 2021 assessment released last Tuesday.

Two veteran safe energy campaigners are raising the alarm after the federal government announced a C$50.5-million subsidy to a New Brunswick company that wants to build a new 300-megawatt small modular nuclear reactor at the site of the current Point Lepreau nuclear station by the early 2030s.

The decision by Chevron Canada Ltd. to stop funding its proposed Kitimat LNG project on B.C.’s north coast isn’t surprising given its failed attempt to sell its stake over the past 15 months, an analyst says.

More than 60 countries could see their credit ratings downgraded by 2030, while countries and businesses could be in line for as much as US$270 billion per year in higher interest costs by 2100, without tough policies to get climate change under control, according to a study released last week by three United Kingdom universities.

Canada and Germany have signed an agreement to team up on green energy innovation and trade, with an eye to hydrogen as the market for the low-carbon fuel heats up.

With 12 new coal mines now at a pre-construction phase, Canada has vaulted into seventh place among the countries with the highest output of climate-busting methane from new mining projects, according to a new analysis released this morning by Global Energy Monitor (GEM).

Alberta’s energy minister has promised people will be able to say “no” to coal mining in the Rocky Mountains during upcoming consultations.

A recent study in shows that new bike lanes set up during the pandemic made the city more accessible for all, prompting cycling advocates to urge policy-makers to make the lanes permanent.

Courts in the United States would take “many, many years” to resolve the battle between Canada and Michigan over Line 5, the pipeline’s operator told MPs Tuesday as he pleaded for a negotiated solution to the dispute.

Energy efficiency is an essential part of the solution for the 20% of Canadian households now living in energy poverty—but the country’s major news outlets have yet to factor that reality into their coverage, Efficiency Canada argues in a recent blog post.

The federal government could be at risk of squandering its best opportunity at a just, green transition if a rosy February jobs report, the prospect of higher borrowing costs, and the belief that consumers are itching to spend their pandemic year savings pull it away from the job creation and economic recovery investments it promised in the Speech from the Throne last fall.

Electric school bus and truck manufacturer Lion Electric is building a new C$185-million battery pack assembly plant near its headquarters in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, after the federal and provincial governments each invested $50 million in the new venture this week—possibly forestalling a decision to locate the factory in the United States.

The Tsleil-Waututh Nation on Canada’s southern west coast has been warning for years that heavy marine traffic in the Burrard Inlet is producing too much wave action and eroding the shoreline. Now, a new study has confirmed this to be the case—and the situation is set to worsen as the Trans Mountain Pipeline brings in even more ships.

The government of Canada has been quick to hit back against fast-moving emergencies like wildfires—and against actions by Indigenous land defenders—but the country has been bitterly slow to respond to the gradual juggernaut of the climate crisis. Now, two Wet’suwet’en chiefs are calling for an end to those politically-motivated delays.

Canada is about to get its first-ever pool of money dedicated specifically to “active transportation,” Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna announced last week.

Tidewater Midstream and Infrastructure Ltd. says it expects to receive C$100 million in provincial government low-carbon fuel credits if it proceeds with a plan to build renewable diesel and renewable hydrogen facilities at its Prince George Refinery in British Columbia.

The Alberta government’s energy “war room” is going to battle with a Netflix children’s movie saying it inaccurately portrays the oil industry.

The 30th anniversary of one of the most successful environmental treaties ever reached holds lessons for today’s fight against climate change, says the former Conservative prime minister who negotiated the deal.

Congressional Democrats in the United States are considering reversing a long-standing excise tax exemption for tar sands/oil sands crude entering the country, a move that could cost the Alberta industry US$665 million over the next decade.

The federal government will spend more than C$40 million of carbon tax revenue to make Ontario schools more energy efficient, the Environment and Climate Minister Jonathan Wilkinson announced last Wednesday.

Ottawa has committed more than C$40 million to fund the development of geothermal power from a diminishing natural gas field in northern British Columbia.

From the Rocky Mountains to the Amazon to the boreal stretches of Siberia, vast swaths of forest are being lost to drought and wildfire. Now, recent research is showing that these forests may never return, because the climate that nurtured them no longer exists.

The federal Crown corporation responsible for the Trans Mountain pipeline is diverting attention from its own shoddy safety culture by blaming campaigners for its rising insurance premiums, while trying to conceal information on its operations that properly belongs in the public domain, two insurance industry veterans have told The Energy Mix.

The world’s 50 biggest economies devoted just 2.5% of their budgets in 2020 and only 18% of their pandemic spending to green recovery measures, according to a new analysis released this week by the University of Oxford and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Toronto has become the 21st Ontario city, and by definition the largest, urging the Ontario government to phase out fossil gas-fired power generation as soon as possible, after councillors and Mayor John Tory adopted a resolution supporting a provincial ban by a 21-2 margin.

Toronto-based Brookfield Renewable Partners is planning to supply electricity from its Holtwood hydropower plant in Pennsylvania to a U.S. fuel cell company aiming to cash in on the growing green hydrogen boom.

A municipal council in Alberta Environment Minister Jason Nixon’s constituency is the latest in a growing number of communities expressing concern about the province’s plan to expand coal mining in the Rocky Mountains.

The Alberta government is pitching for a 10-year, C$30-billion federal budget commitment to subsidize large-scale carbon capture, storage and utilization (CCUS) projects, even as the federal and provincial governments form a joint working group to develop CCS strategy for the fossil sector.

Canadian Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan is framing Michigan’s intention to shutter Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline as a dire threat to energy security on both sides of the border. Calmer analysis suggests otherwise.

The fierce debate over cross-border pipelines is putting more Canadian oil and gas on trains destined for the United States—a country experts fear is ill-equipped for the potential consequences.

The controversial GNL-Québec liquefied natural gas megaproject will drive up electricity rates across the province by producing a roughly C$310-million revenue shortfall for utility Hydro-Québec, the province’s Union des consommateurs warned in an open letter late last month.

His research in the lab and the field was published in some of the world’s top journals, but that was never enough for David Schindler, who died Thursday at the age of 80.

The Trudeau government has released draft regulations that will set the rules for companies intent on buying and selling credits for projects that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The City of Toronto will have a chance Wednesday to deal with what one leading advocate calls its “embarrassing gas problem” when councillors vote on a motion to support a phaseout of power plants running largely on fracked gas.

The Alberta Energy Regulator says it is suspending licences for thousands of wells and pipelines after an oil and gas producer failed to bring its operations into regulatory compliance.

Senior officials from Canada and Europe are urging the World Bank to end its investments in coal- and oil-related projects and gradually phase out gas, three separate sources told the Reuters news agency late last month.

Neither the pandemic nor the climate crisis came out of a vacuum—both are rooted in systemic racism and the bitter legacy of colonialism, says Indigenous environmental journalist and academic Candis Callison. And recognizing climate change as a “syndemic” event will help humanity rethink its response.

Canadian transit agencies are in line to receive C$2.7 billion in new federal funding over five years to begin converting their diesel fleets to electric buses.

Just days after unveiling its long-awaited Net-Zero Advisory Body, the Canadian government is receiving some pointed advice on how to toughen up its new climate accountability framework, Bill C-12, to deliver on a legally-binding net-zero target by 2050.

Canada is angling for a green energy exemption from Buy American policies likely to be introduced by the Biden administration, chief trade negotiator Steve Verheul told a parliamentary committee earlier this week.

The global Powering Past Coal Alliance is taking sharp criticism from both sides of the Atlantic this week, with delegates gathering for a three-day online summit while the PPCA’s two founders and co-chairs, Canada and the United Kingdom, allow new coal mines to go into operation.

The auto manufacturing town of Windsor, Ontario is angling for a C$2-billion investment in an electric vehicle manufacturing plant, Canada’s first, that would create 2,000 local jobs and be “truly transformative” to the local economy.

Nearly 70% of Canadians looking to buy a new vehicle within the next five years plan on dumping the internal combustion engine and going with an EV, according to a new KPMG survey.

Greenhouse gas emissions rose 7% in Toronto and 5.2% across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) in 2018, with natural gas the major cause, a new report warns this week.

A private member’s bill seeking to address environmental racism in Canada, in part by empowering BIPOC communities to act in their own defence, is due to be debated in the House of Commons later this month—the first step in moving the legislation forward to committee.

Premier John Horgan has given the green light for work on British Columbia’s Site C hydroelectric dam to proceed, citing termination costs of more than C$10 billion and expert opinion that the geotechnical problems that have haunted the project can be fixed. Members of the West Moberly First Nations say they’ll see the province in court.

The Royal Bank of Canada plans to add C$500 billion to its sustainable investment funds by 2025 after hitting an initial target of $100 billion last year, even as it comes under increasing fire as a leading supporter of new fossil fuel projects.

Norway’s US$1.3-trillion sovereign wealth fund is following through on its threat to drop investments in Canadian tar sands/oil sands production, with four Alberta fossils showing up among the 15 companies the fund blacklisted last year, the Globe and Mail reports.

The federal government should build on the work of the 2020 Task Force for a Resilient Recovery by investing at least C$27 billion in resilient, energy-efficient buildings and directing the dollars to help build an effective deep retrofit industry, The Atmospheric Fund recommends in its 2021 pre-budget submission.

A new coalition of agriculture and environmental groups is calling for a two-year, C$600-million federal investment to begin reducing the sector’s greenhouse gas emissions, pave the way for further improvements over time, and dial down concerns about carbon pricing and its potential impact on farm producers.

With its kilometres of rapids and deep blue waters winding through Quebec’s Côte-Nord region, the Magpie river has long been a culturally significant spot for the Innu of Ekuanitshit.

Now the river, a majestic, world-renowned whitewater rafting destination, has been granted legal personhood status in a bid to protect it from future threats, such as hydroelectric development. Its new status means the body of water could theoretically sue the government.

A new report suggests the economic impact of the pandemic led to a massive increase in federal aid to Canada’s oilpatch.

The Canadian government has appointed a 14-member Net-Zero Advisory Body to help it find the best pathways to net-zero emissions by 2050.

The Crown corporation building the controversial Trans Mountain pipeline expansion has asked a federal regulator to conceal the names of its insurance companies to prevent them from being targeted by climate campaigners, just days before the insurance industry’s “leading international think tank” released a new task force report on climate risk assessment.

Colossal fossil ExxonMobil has dropped virtually all its tar sands/oil sands holdings from its list of recoverable assets, and its Canadian subsidiary Imperial Oil followed suit by cutting a billion barrels of bitumen from its inventory, in what Bloomberg News calls a “sweeping revision of worldwide reserves to depths never before seen in the company’s modern history”.

Four of Canada’s Big Five chartered banks have made the Dirty Thirty list of the world’s largest coal financiers, making the country the fourth-largest lender to the global coal industry between 2018 and 2020, according to releases this week by European NGO Urgewald and Toronto-based Shift Action for Pension Wealth & Planet Health.

Nova Scotia Premier Iain Rankin has announced C$19 million in rebates to help people buy electric vehicles and to assist low-income families in making their homes more energy efficient.

Building non-partisan community support for climate action that will endure through municipal election cycles is an absolute imperative to solving the climate crisis. That is the core message being delivered in the West Kootenay EcoSociety’s 2020 Climate Playbook and Toolkit.

Accelerating climate ambition and building back better are two of the six components of a new U.S.-Canada partnership roadmap that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Joe Biden released yesterday, during the first official summit between the two leaders and their senior cabinet officials.

The CEO of TC Energy Corp. is warning that the cost of its Coastal GasLink pipeline to bring natural gas from northeastern British Columbia to Canada’s first LNG export terminal is rising and completion will likely be delayed due to a construction halt to control spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s essential for Canada to deliver on a zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate this year if it wants to stay true to its commitments under the Paris Agreement, Équiterre mobility analyst Andréanne Brazeau writes in a recent post for Policy Options.

Toronto city council decided last week to delay planning activities and reduce funding for its TranformTO climate plan, ignoring warnings that the climate crisis and the community’s own environmental targets will make it tough to make up the lost time.

The exponential growth of unpaid property taxes from Alberta’s struggling oilpatch is threatening small communities and they need new ways to enforce the rules, says the group that represents them.

The investment fund responsible for British Columbia’s public sector pensions is committing to buy C$5 billion in new sustainability bonds and reduce the carbon dioxide exposure of its existing investments 30% from 2019 levels by 2025, at a moment when the broader field of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing is taking financiers by surprise with its “astronomical” rise.

The federal committee responsible for building code development is undercutting Canada’s commitment to a net-zero future by making airtightness testing a voluntary measure, Efficiency Canada warns in a new blog post.

With many Texans still scrambling to recover from a week of freezing cold weather, power blackouts, and water shortages, early analysis in the United States and Canada is pointing to the episode as a wake-up call for grid operators—and electricity users—across the continent.

A new partnership between a rising circular economy juggernaut, a supermarket giant, and some very popular food brands (think Häagen-Dazs and Heinz) is raising hopes for the viability of reusable packaging in Canada. The groundbreaking project is being met with acclaim from business sustainability experts, and cautious praise from Greenpeace.

A business council with representation from virtually all the major fossil companies in Alberta is calling on the Jason Kenney government to introduce a provincial sales tax and reinstate a consumer carbon tax.

The federal government owes Canadian families in three provinces more than C$200 million after underestimating how much it would raise from the carbon tax during the first year of the program.

Construction of the U.S. portion of the Line 3 pipeline will cost $1.1 billion more than expected due to regulatory and court delays in Minnesota, but the CEO of owner Enbridge Inc. says the project is on track to start delivering “lots of free cash flow” by late this year.

The Canadian Bar Association is expected to vote on a climate leadership resolution at its annual meeting later today. In this guest post, an excerpt from a longer analysis for Lawyers for Climate Justice, Canadian environmental law pioneer David Estrin talks about what’s at stake.

Despite its “Super, Natural” branding, British Columbia is by no means a haven for old-growth forests, according to a new mapping project that points to a massive toll from logging and industrial activity.

Community groups and angry citizens from Pickering, Ontario are going up against what one news report calls “a billionaire and a business-friendly government” to try to stop the Lower Duffins Creek Wetland, a provincially significant local green space, wildlife habitat, and buffer against climate impacts, from being bulldozed for a massive warehouse and entertainment complex.

A net-zero home in Edmonton, Alberta stayed toasty warm this week when the polar vortex brought bitterly cold temperatures to town, enabling Darryl Zubot and his family to stay comfortable and safe—without having to turn on the furnace.

With a new administration in Washington, DC setting climate action as one of its four defining priorities, Canadian Environment and Climate Minister Jonathan Wilkinson has opened conversations with his U.S. counterpart on “an array of potential new agreements” for cross-border cooperation, the Globe and Mail reports.

“Roses are red/Money is green/Thanks for the cheque/Glad we’re on the same team.”
That’s the tone of a series of valentines released late last week by Dogwood BC, this one addressed from fossil producer Encana (now Ovintiv) to Premier John Horgan, just days after a four-page analysis by the Wilderness Committee listed the subsidies going to the province’s top 10 fracking companies.

With nearly 200 renewable energy projects in progress, each of them generating more than a megawatt of electricity at full capacity, Indigenous Clean Energy is calling on the federal government to invest C$500 million in a “decolonized energy future” for Indigenous communities.

Its recent mea culpa notwithstanding, the Jason Kenney government in Alberta has by no means closed the barn door on the idea of metallurgical coal mining in the beloved, and ecologically sensitive, eastern slopes of the Rockies.

The Edmonton-based Parkland Institute is out with a detailed fact check of Premier Jason Kenney’s recent pronouncements on the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, while Maclean’s magazine speculates on whether this is the job Kenney was looking for when he sought the Alberta premiership.

The Alberta, British Columbia, and federal governments have unveiled a new round of funding to help clean up inactive oil and gas sites in the province, including C$400 million in Alberta and $120 million for B.C.

Canadian governments stand to lose more than half of their revenue from oil and gas activities through 2040, and nearly nine-tenths of the taxes and royalties the industry says they will collect, as the global economy decarbonizes and shifts away from fossil fuel production, the UK-based Carbon Tracker Initiative concludes in an analysis released this week.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s 2021 budget must include funding for building energy retrofits for low-income households that can’t afford the up-front cost of a home renovation, Efficiency Canada argues in a sign-on published this week.

The federal Liberal government is promising cash-strapped cities billions of dollars in permanent funding for their public transit systems—though most of the money won’t start flowing until later in the decade.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is looking to promote hydropower exports to the United States, as one response to President Joe Biden’s commitment to decarbonize his country’s sprawling electricity grid by 2035. But analysts say Canada’s network of hydro dams might be useful as a place to store renewable power, rather than generating it.

A judge in Calgary was to hear arguments this week over whether Alberta’s public inquiry into the purported foreign funding of environmental charities is a valid defence of the province’s ailing oil industry or an attempt to silence dissent.

Canada has multiple opportunities to thrive along the road to a net-zero economy by 2050 as long as governments make the right decisions now, concludes a study released this week by the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices (CICC).

Nicole Rycroft is founder and executive director of Vancouver-based Canopy, and one of this year’s two recipients of the 2020 Climate Breakthrough award, a US$3-million, unrestricted award that supports “the kind of novel and potentially game-changing strategies we need in order to achieve massive greenhouse gas reductions”. In this feature interview, she talks about how to quickly and fundamentally shift supply chains and scale up next-generation alternative fibres as a key step to protect intact, carbon- and biodiversity-rich forest ecosystems.

As officials in Michigan look to shut down the Line 5 pipeline, business interests in Ontario and Quebec are warning of dire economic effects. But others—like Green Party Leader Annamie Paul—say there are opportunities, too, and that presenting the pipeline as a choice between jobs and the environment is a false, and dangerous, dichotomy.

Doubts are being raised about the Alberta government’s decision to restore a policy that protects the Rocky Mountains from coal mining.

The cancellation of the Keystone XL oil export pipeline has resulted in a second tar sands/oil sands company posting a multi-million-dollar impairment charge in its fourth quarter earnings report.

A large floating platform with six underwater turbines was launched Monday near the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, marking the latest high-tech bid to generate electricity by harnessing the bay’s powerful tides.

Wind energy investment received twin boosts in Quebec and British Columbia last week, with one of the announcements prompting the Globe and Mail to comment that “the era of building big new hydropower dams in Quebec might be over”.

The Alberta government says it plans to restore some aspects of a policy it revoked last spring that protected a wide swath of the province’s foothills and mountains from coal mines.
The move has provoked intense public protest.

Technology companies are delivering a ray of hope to an Alberta economy facing the combined impact of a global health crisis and shaky demand for oil. But the sector’s success could be precarious as the province competes with other jurisdictions for investment and jobs.

Alberta’s government may brandish democracy when it promotes its oil to the world, but its transparent efforts to silence voices of opposition to fossil fuels come direct from the playbook of some of the world’s most oppressive petro-states, says a new report from Toronto-based Environmental Defence.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is getting some unsolicited advice from the co-founder of the United Conservative Party: fire yourself as intergovernmental affairs minister.

Federal environmental agencies are underestimating methane emissions from abandoned oil and gas wells by 20% in the United States and 150% in Canada, according to a McGill University study published late last month in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, one of several in recent weeks that have pointed to a mounting crisis in releases of the climate-busting gas.

Canada is missing a big opportunity to create jobs, cut pollution, and advance a net-zero emissions agenda by failing to prioritize projects that use low-carbon building materials and cleaner construction processes, Blue Green Canada argues in a report issued this week.

A series of socially-distanced demonstrations across Canada last Friday kicked off a national campaign to press the Royal Bank of Canada and other big banks to stop investing in fossil fuel projects and respect Indigenous rights.

After failing to assess elevated risks of drought, wildfire, and flooding resulting from its standard logging practices, British Columbia urgently needs to address impacts of forest clearcutting that were left out of its 2019 Strategic Climate Risk Assessment, according to a report released Monday by Sierra Club BC.

The Alberta government has given an inquiry into the funding of oil and gas industry critics a third deadline extension to complete its report.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney proved to be “all hat but no horse” when it came to roping and tying down the ill-fated Keystone XL pipeline. Now, after risking billions in taxpayer funds on that folly, it appears he may soon be riding out of town on a one-trick pony. A metaphorical analysis by veteran journalist Paul McKay.

A new generation of young professionals is coming back with an eloquent response to the idea that a declining fossil industry is a “slap in the face” to people who’ve set their sights on careers in fields like geology or petroleum engineering.

A Canadian solar company is claiming that no Uyghurs are employed at its 30-MW solar farm in China’s Xinjiang region, nor are any members of the persecuted Muslim community being forced into labour anywhere along its solar supply chain. But human rights observers say that last assertion doesn’t stand up to the evidence.

The parliamentary budget office says a pledge by the Trudeau Liberals to plant two billion trees could cost almost double what the government says.

Alberta fossils Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. and Imperial Oil are on a list of 13 big oil and gas companies that may face rating downgrades within weeks, and Suncor Energy was also assigned a negative outlook, after ratings agency Standard & Poors shifted its risk assessment for the entire fossil industry from “intermediate” to “moderately high”.

The biggest climate survey ever conducted has confirmed that nearly two-thirds of people around the world see climate change as a “global emergency”—a mandate for action that is clear and unquestionable. And with the desire for change even higher among young people, it’s also clear that education has played a big role in the groundswell.

Deep waters in the Gulf of St. Lawrence are hitting record highs that fall far beyond normal variations, part of a decade-long trend emerging from research released earlier this week by the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO).

Two Alberta-based fossil companies are reporting that they’ve reached “net-negative” carbon emissions, thanks to carbon capture technology. But while the news sounds promising for CCS—which experts increasingly believe will be necessary to keep average global warming below 2°C—there are still concerns about how emissions reductions are calculated, and how CCS may reduce the incentive to actually reduce emissions.

In September, Tesla announced that it would be phasing out the use of cobalt in its batteries, in an effort to produce a US$25,000 electric vehicle within three years. If successful, this bold move will be an industry game changer, making electric vehicles competitive with conventional counterparts.

The rural county in Alberta that brought Canada its biggest solar farm to date is at it again, with word this week that it is seeking regulatory approval for a 500-megawatt wind farm.

Provincial utility Hydro-Québec has signed a deal with a division of Essen, Germany-based industrial conglomerate Thyssenkrupp to build one of the world’s biggest green hydrogen plants, an 88-megawatt facility in Varennes that will produce 11,100 tonnes of the product per year.

EDMONTON — Critics are asking why Alberta Environment has been sitting on years’ worth of data about pollution from coal mines while the government considers a dramatic expansion of the industry.

In the wake of U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline, analysts say proponent TC Energy should be able to walk away from the intensely controversial megaproject relatively unscathed. But the same can’t be said for the Jason Kenney government in Alberta, whose eleventh-hour subsidy kept the pipeline alive long enough for Biden to shut it down.

As home grocery delivery ramps up plastic use in cities across North America, a Bay Area start-up is hoping to become the 21st century’s answer to the milk delivery company—but with a much expanded product list.

With U.S. President Joe Biden making climate action a top priority for his new administration, and an analyst warning that the Keystone XL pipeline cancellation will stifle Alberta’s fossil industry for years, Canada’s U.S. ambassador is saying that it’s time to move on and focus on other opportunities in the bilateral relationship.

A European banking executive’s declaration that “to put it mildly, gas is over” is casting a pall over what should have been a moment of triumph for the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP)—the release of a new net-zero emissions plan, just a month after the fund became majority owner of Italy’s second-largest natural gas pipeline network.

EDMONTON — Political analysts say Premier Jason Kenney must rethink his traditional “fight back” approach and start building bridges to reconcile environmental concerns with oil and gas development.

REGINA — Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe is warning Regina city council there could be financial consequences if it restricts energy companies from sponsoring or advertising with the city.

A “humiliated” Alberta Premier Jason Kenney demanded trade sanctions against the United States, TC Energy cut 1,000 construction jobs, Fox Business and the Wall Street Journal falsely claimed 10,000 to 11,000 jobs lost, and the Keystone XL pipeline was at risk of being sold off for scrap after President Joe Biden signed a Day One executive order cancelling the presidential permit for the intensely controversial fossil megaproject.

A division of storied Quebec industrial conglomerate Power Corporation is launching a C$1-billion investment fund focused on solar and wind projects.

More than two-thirds of Albertans support a 2050 target for net-zero emissions, and six in 10 British Columbians back clean energy over liquefied natural gas (LNG) development, according to separate research released last week by the Pembina Institute and Clean Energy Canada.

A Toronto-based government relations specialist is advising clean transition entrepreneurs to tentatively mark October in their calendars for the first signs of federal procurement supporting a Build Back Better agenda.

Those peddling the notion that Canada’s federal government is holding back some portion of the federal carbon tax from its citizens are pushing a false narrative, writes Toronto-based Clean Prosperity, in an analysis that lays out the plain truth: nine out of every ten dollars is returned via taxpayer rebates, with the remainder going to support local emissions reduction projects.

Northeastern British Columbia pipeliner Coastal GasLink has been ordered to abide by provincial laws and start preventing polluted sediments from flowing from its work sites into prime fish habitats. And it won’t be trusted to take these protective measures on its own.

Political infighting, misinformation campaigns, and serial communication failures have dashed any hopes that the Cascadia region would take the lead in the climate fight and significantly reduce its emissions by the end of last year. Now, angry young people are asking the courts to force their leaders to do a better job, and fast.

The Canadian economy has added 42 new jobs for each one it has lost in fossil fuels since 2014, and a 20-year industry phaseout would only reduce fossil employment by about 8,500 positions per year—as many as the country usually creates every 10 days—concludes economist Jim Stanford in an analysis published this week by Environmental Defence.

An aggressive program of executive actions and green investments, a White House staffed with “climate champions”, and a concerted effort to rebuild the U.S. government’s scientific capacity and morale will all begin to take shape today with the inauguration of President Joe Biden, former White House counsellor John Podesta said Tuesday afternoon, during a webinar hosted by Toronto-based GreenPAC.

Calgary-based pipeliner TC Energy touted a “zero-emissions” approach to its fossil fuel transportation business, the federal and Alberta government vowed to continue the fight, and Premier Jason Kenney admitted his province stands to lose a billion-dollar gamble as the reality sank in that U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline after he’s sworn in later today.