Climate Extremes

As the global push for a hydrogen economy accelerates, researchers are urging policy-makers to address new knowledge and fill in some profound data gaps, with recent studies revealing the considerable global warming potential of a fuel that many fossils see as their industry’s best hope for a second life.

Campaigners and local residents are using photos, video, and drone footage to document a Trans Mountain pipeline work site they say is impeding an early salmon run and leaving dead fish along the Coquihalla River in British Columbia.

As the burning of fossil fuels presents us with yet another summer of catastrophic impacts, the pressure is growing for pension funds to either phase out their oil, gas, coal, and pipeline assets or explain how they’re aligned with a safe retirement future for their beneficiaries. And Canada’s seventh-largest fund, the C$121-billion Ontario Municipal Employees’ Retirement System (OMERS), may be getting the memo, three of its members write for Corporate Knights.

The reopening of a Newfoundland highway that had been closed for days because of raging wildfires provided hope Tuesday that much-needed supplies would finally arrive in stranded communities along the island’s south coast.

In the wake of last week’s shelling of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine, the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and now G7 foreign ministers are urging Moscow to abandon the “suicidal” gambit of using the plant as a nuclear shield, and return it to Ukrainian control.

Water levels on the Rhine River could reach a critically low point in the coming days, German officials said Wednesday, making it increasingly difficult to transport goods—including coal and gasoline—as drought and an energy crisis grip Europe.

Baby boomers are often derided for not taking the climate crisis seriously enough, but many do feel responsible for the climate crisis, Nexus Media News reports. Some of them say they plan to dedicate the next stage of their lives to the climate movement.

After a marathon series of votes that began just before midnight Saturday, the United States Senate adopted a US$369-billion climate and clean energy plan Sunday afternoon, the country’s biggest-ever investment in climate action.

Heat waves and drought in France are adding to Europe’s energy crisis which began when Russian invaded Ukraine—but the decline in the French electricity production is not just a temporary blip. France’s nuclear industry is in serious trouble.

British Columbia and Alberta residents who endured last summer’s lethal heat dome say they feel fear, anger, and guilt in its aftermath, testifying to the urgent need for Canadians to take personal and political responsibility for climate change as extreme weather threatens the vulnerable.

Australia’s new government announced Thursday it plans to prevent development of a coal mine due to the potential impact on the nearby Great Barrier Reef.

Climate science has left the most severe outcomes of the climate crisis “dangerously unexplored,” says a team of experts who are calling for a new research agenda to prepare for worst-case scenarios.

Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity turned up the heat on swing-vote senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, a wider network of business groups stepped up to defend the deal, and environmental justice campaigners decried concessions to oil and gas as advocates absorbed the details of the $369.75-billion climate and clean energy package announced last week by Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer.

As scientists confirm that climate change made the United Kingdom’s most recent devastating heat wave “at least 10 times more likely,” a frontrunner to replace Prime Minister Boris Johnson has invoked a notorious climate denier to defend her tax-cutting plan.

Solar power is keeping the Texas grid from crashing—despite a sharp increase in energy demand due to record-breaking high temperatures, says an energy expert.

Offshore oil and gas activities in Atlantic Canada are a genuine threat to the ocean ecosystem and exacerbate climate change, but the federal government is falling short in its plans to regulate that activity, writes Mark Brooks, senior specialist, oil and gas at WWF-Canada, in a recent post on the WWF blog.

Fifty years in the making, the United Nations’ recent overwhelming approval of a resolution recognizing the right to a “clean, healthy, and sustainable environment” is being heralded as a “victory for people and planet,” and a potential foundation for future legal action.

A scant eight months after Congo President Félix Tshisekedi joined other world leaders in a 10-year pledge to protect the world’s second-largest rainforest, the country is setting out to become “the new destination for oil investments” by auctioning off vast swaths of territory for drilling—including carbon-heavy peatlands and parts of Virunga National Park, the world’s most important gorilla sanctuary.

A campaign of misinformation is working to undermine a 30% fertilizer emissions reduction target in Canada’s next Agriculture Policy Framework (APF), says a national farmers’ coalition, contending that recently announced emissions policies actually don’t go far enough.

Even with La Niña’s cooling effect on the tropical Pacific, 2022 is set to be the fifth warmest year on record after a “scorcher” summer brought record-breaking heat across the northern hemisphere, especially in continental Europe, the United Kingdom, China, and parts of the United States.

As brutal, extended heat waves bring record temperatures across the United States and put millions of residents at risk of heat stroke and death, the government has launched a website aiming to support heat resilience amid a climate crisis.

Unusually warm weather has led to a spike in the steadily rising melt rate of Greenland’s ice sheet, leaving scientists alarmed by temperatures that ran 5°C higher than normal for July.

A new study finds that a full transition to electric vehicles in the United States could rein in future cropland expansion by cutting down the area needed to grow biofuel feedstocks.

Forecaster Warren Dean recalls feeling helpless as a deadly heat dome hovered over British Columbia last summer.

The global slowdown in human activity that occurred during the pandemic left some species healing and others hurting badly—a pattern offering complex and nuanced lessons about humanity’s impact on wildlife, say ecologists.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Nova Scotia last Thursday to promise green energy funds for the province, but he also said the idea of upgraded facilities to help ship liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe in the “very short term” is back on the table.

Offshore wind proponents are exploring “turbine reefs”—coral habitats planted on wind turbine bases—as a solution to the intersecting crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Two days of negotiations in Berlin last week yielded decent progress on how the world’s richest countries can compensate the poorest for the impacts of climate change. But there’s a lot more ground to cover to deliver a fair, effective result at this year’s UN climate summit in November, Bloomberg Green reports.

When Dutch lawmakers proposed measures to reduce climate-busting nitrogen emissions in agriculture, nearly 40,000 livestock farmers took to the streets. But multiple news reports got the story wrong in ways that amplify myths and delay climate action, and the same problem has been playing out in Canada.

If you’ve been hesitating to talk with your neighbours about climate change, a number of recent studies suggest they’d likely be up for the conversation—as long as you’re ready to really listen, not lecture, and keep the focus local.

U.S. President Joe Biden visited a former coal plant in Massachusetts yesterday to announce new areas for offshore wind farms, funding for home energy subsidies, and support for communities facing heat emergencies and other climate impacts. But he fell short of declaring a full-scale climate emergency, keeping a door open instead for an accommodation with renegade Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV).

Britain’s High Court has declared the country’s net-zero emissions strategy “unlawful”, capping a successful court challenge by Friends of the Earth UK, environmental law charity ClientEarth, and the Good Law Project.

A heat emergency earlier this week in the U.S. Great Plains region forced the operator of the Keystone pipeline, Calgary-based TC Energy, to cut back its flow of what Bloomberg Markets calls a “crucial grade of oil” to refineries.

A Canadian Red Cross official in Manitoba estimates close to 2,000 people have been evacuated from a First Nation threatened by a wildfire over the last several days using planes, helicopters, and trains.

A massive surf swell sent waves crashing into a wedding reception in Hawaii last week, reminding residents of the profound threat that sea level rise poses to the Aloha State.

Hundreds are dead from heat-related causes, tens of thousands are displaced by raging wildfires, and global food security is yet further threatened as vast swathes of western Europe, North Africa, and China continue to suffer in the grip of lethal heat.

Firefighting crews lost ground Sunday after successfully holding back a blaze threatening the village of Lytton in southern British Columbia—barely one year after it was burned to the ground by a raging wildfire that took two lives and displaced hundreds of residents.

A detailed carbon reduction roadmap for agriculture will have to compete with a menu of other farm sector priorities at a high-level meeting in Saskatoon this week, as federal, provincial, and territorial ministers hash out the details of Canada’s next Agriculture Policy Framework (APF).

An environmental assessment for a one-gigawatt, 164-turbine wind farm/green hydrogen and ammonia park in rural Newfoundland is generating local concern about potential habitat impacts, while picking up some high-powered support for the community benefits the project would bring.

From building low-cost, easily accessible meteorological stations that help citizen scientists fill data gaps, to securing the grants necessary to purchase vital computer modelling equipment, the Kathmandu Institute of Applied Science is helping Nepal deepen its understanding of how climate change, and drought in particular, affect the country.

The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) is urging its member states to support the Escazú Agreement following the release of its final report last month, though some say there’s a lack of political will to implement the world’s first legally binding instrument to include provisions on environmental human rights defenders.

A leading advocate for Africa’s renewable energy transition is condemning Germany and Italy for pushing to “saddle” African countries with new fossil fuel infrastructure that will drag down their economies.

Most of the world can switch to renewable energy without destabilizing power grids, at low cost, and relying almost entirely on existing technologies, according to a new Stanford University study.

The European Union’s executive warned last week that the continent is facing one of its toughest years when it comes to natural disasters like droughts and wildfires because of increasing climate change.

Lake Michigan’s shoreline communities face “toxic risks,” says a new report, as extreme weather threatens to damage waste storage sites, nuclear power plants, and industrial facilities in the area.

Controversy over shipping routes in the Arctic Ocean is intensifying in light of recent climate science projections of sea ice melt.

Boris Johnson’s imminent departure as British Prime Minister is raising concern that the country will soon begin backsliding on its climate and nature commitments—even if those commitments consisted primarily of grand gestures, with relatively little practical action to back them up.

A Michigan regulatory panel said Thursday it needs more information about safety risks before it can rule on Calgary-based Enbridge Energy’s plan to extend the Line 5 pipeline through a tunnel beneath the Straits of Mackinac. The state Public Service Commission voted 3-0 to seek further details about the potential for explosions and fires involving […]

With extreme heat continuing to feed an increasing number of wildfires in northern Canada, Yukon authorities say some residents must prepare to evacuate within two hours of notification, while in the Northwest Territories a government with stretched resources has asked locals to do their part to prevent unnecessary fires.

With billions of people depending on wild flora and fauna for food, medicine, and energy, a million species are at risk of extinction due to the combined impacts of climate change, other forms of pollution, overexploitation, and deforestation, warns a new report backed by the United Nations.

The Solar and Energy Storage Association of Puerto Rico is claiming a victory for grid resilience after the Caribbean island installed thousands of solar batteries in the wake of a devastating hurricane in 2017. But liquefied natural gas is still very much on the agenda for the local utility.

From food production to local bike couriers, degrowth strategies are saving land, work time, and money while meeting basic needs and re-localizing economies, 360info reports.

With a disabled oil supertanker in the Red Sea likely just weeks or months away from breaking up or exploding, triggering a $20-billion ecological and humanitarian disaster, countries that could help pay for an emergency salvage plan are saying they can’t find the right budget codes to free up the funds.

Two of Canada’s most influential cities stepped up this week with serious action on the climate emergency, with Calgary adopting a new emissions reduction strategy that includes a 2050 net-zero target and Ottawa endorsing the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The European Parliament looks likely to face legal challenges after voting yesterday to temporarily include natural gas and nuclear energy in its “taxonomy” of green energy technologies, potentially triggering billions of Euros in green investment for the two technologies.

Restoring degraded environments, such as by planting trees, is an important climate solution but no substitute for preventing fossil fuel emissions to limit global warming, University of Melbourne researchers Kate Dooley and Zebedee Nicholls write in a post for The Conversation.

(Part 2 of a series) In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court decision limiting government regulation of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, climate analysts and campaigners are now turning to other legislative options, state and city governments, market forces, and ultimately the ballot box for solutions.

Undisciplined private operators in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico, and “old, leaky equipment” in fossil-producing nations like Algeria that have accelerated production in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, are being blamed for a “worrisome” rise in methane emissions in the first quarter of 2022.

As search and rescue teams continue to discover body parts and hiking equipment in the wake of an avalanche in northeastern Italy that left seven people confirmed dead and five missing, glaciologists are confirming a “direct link” between the devastating ice collapse and climate change.

With near record-setting wildfire activity early in Alaska’s fire season and a looming heat wave, the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center moved to wildland fire Planning Level 5, the highest level, on Thursday, June 30.

Looking to avoid power blackouts, California may turn to the one energy source it’s otherwise desperate to get rid of: fossil fuels.

As utilities and municipalities rush to conserve water so that no one is left thirsty, the Chicago-based Alliance of Water Efficiency is reminding policy-makers and the public that saving water also means saving energy and reducing carbon emissions.

Brazil’s Amazon rainforest suffered record levels of deforestation in the first six months of 2022, as well as a record level of fires in June, says the country’s Space Research Institute (INPE).

There will be no federal financing for two companies vying to export Canadian liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe from terminals on the East Coast, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said in a recent interview with the Globe and Mail.

A deeply radical ruling Thursday by the United States Supreme Court has set back but not ended efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from the country’s fossil-fuelled power plants.

The 53 migrants who died from heat exhaustion in Texas after being abandoned in a sweltering tractor-trailer in 100°F heat were victims of vicious smugglers, inhumane laws, dire conditions at home, and a climate crisis that continues to pick off the world’s most vulnerable first.

The first of our EcoA Tips, a new monthly series in The Energy Mix,highlights a surprising bit of data from a major survey by EcoAnalytics, a non-profit market research initiative that uses data and analysis to strengthen Canada’s environmental movement.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has confirmed Montreal as the headquarters for its new Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence, just weeks after a retired Australian military officer published an analysis of the “hyperthreat” humanity faces due to the global climate emergency.

Scorching track temperatures pushed significantly above standard operating levels by an extreme heat wave are being blamed for the recent derailment of a San Francisco rapid transit train.

The European Court of Human Rights said Thursday that a complaint against 33 countries filed by six young Portuguese climate activists will be examined by the tribunal’s top panel of judges, a move reflecting the case’s legal significance.

Last November, the Biden administration in the United States released a Methane Emissions Reduction Plan that included detailed steps to reduce emissions of the potent planet-warming gas from the oil and gas industries and from landfills. Under the authority of the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would expand regulations on fossil energy companies and require landfills to significantly reduce their emissions.

Indoor farming could be a powerful solution for producing food in a volatile climate, but the benefits for the food system will come at the cost of a large carbon footprint as long as those new systems depend on natural gas for heat and power.

As early spring heat, increasingly dry summers, and high demand for water drain rivers and aquifers, municipalities across southern Quebec are sounding the alarm on what they know will be a long-term problem they currently have neither the data nor the tax base to resolve.

Marine stewardship, better methane management, and increased recycling figure prominently in Project Drawdown’s latest update on its already vast array of available, scalable, and financially viable climate solutions.

A group of 15 trainees will be heading out into the field to begin converting two Alberta oilfield sites into solar farms, after graduating from a rapid upskilling program for fossil industry and Indigenous workers hosted by Iron & Earth and Medicine Hat College.

G7 leaders meeting in Bavaria this week affirmed their rhetorical commitment to climate action but walked back a month-old promise to swiftly end public investment in overseas fossil fuel projects as they sought to grapple with the energy crisis brought on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Food, fossil fuel, and pharmaceutical companies that have enjoyed bumper profits in the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath should be hit with a substantial windfall tax on their excess income, the global head of Oxfam has said.

Less than a year after Petaluma, California, became the first city in the world to ban new gas stations, four others have passed similar policies, and at least six more are working on it, including the infamously car-centric Los Angeles—and the British Columbia town of Comox.

Citing the Ontario government’s poor track record on endangered species protection, as well as the need to address First Nations’ concerns and respond to the imperatives of the climate crisis, Environmental Defence Canada is urging Ottawa to conduct a full environmental impact assessment of Highway 413.

Just when France, and the rest of Europe, needed the country’s 56 nuclear reactors to be pumping out electricity at maximum power to counter the shortfall of energy supplies caused by the war in Ukraine, half of them have had to shut down.

While global spending on agriculture has increased, critical support to help the sector build resilience and reduce emissions has decreased, an international agency concludes, even though effective policies are vital to avert a global disaster as food supplies are threatened by climate disasters and the war in Ukraine.

Public vigilance will be vital to preserving the well-being of the world’s greenbelts, which are needed more than ever but increasingly under threat, says a new report produced by the Ontario-based Greenbelt Foundation.

Carbon storage in the world’s forests is only at 88% of its full potential, finds a new study that aims to inform global climate strategies by pinpointing opportunities for more sequestration.

Hydroponic farms in shipping containers and software poised to turn electric vehicle (EV) owners into well-paid electricity providers are among the ingenious innovations that are signs of a better world to come—despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Toronto Star reports.

Canada has inched closer to passing its first-ever on environmental racism, after a private member’s bill passed second reading in the House of Commons last week.

The sudden rise in fertilizer prices since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could have implications for global emissions by reducing how much of it farmers use in their fields. But experts say there’s more to the picture, with non-monetary variables like human capital making a big impact on farming decisions.

British researchers have produced a new twist to the great pandemic debate, arguing that intensive livestock farming—the crowding of animals into feedlots and factory farms in ways widely blamed for spreading new disease—might actually help reduce the risks of introducing new and potentially devastating global pandemics from the wild.

Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first elected leftist president, will take office in August with ambitious proposals to halt the record-high rates of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.

The Joe Biden administration in the United States should be pushing for a transit fare holiday—and a windfall profit tax on fossil revenues—not a gas tax holiday, a measure critics are panning as anti-climate action that will do nothing to help consumers cope with inflation.

As spiking inflation converges with an unequal post-pandemic recovery and an ever-escalating climate crisis, economists warn of widespread public pessimism about the future that is rapidly curdling into violent despair, especially among young men in many of the world’s poorer countries.

In a shifting landscape of climate policies in Vietnam—as indicated by the recent arrest of anti-coal activist Nguy Thi Khanh—Japanese and Korean lobbyists are seizing the moment to push gas infrastructure into the country’s energy planning.

A scathing budget analysis and a new lawsuit alleging police harassment produced a day of bad news Wednesday for the Trans Mountain and Coastal GasLink pipelines in British Columbia.

Yellowstone National Park partly reopened yesterday after devastating floods forced the shutdown of one of the United States’ most beloved natural sites. But park staff were still adding up the damage and projecting a recovery that could take several years and cost more than US$1 billion.

Canadian steel giant Dofasco and United States aluminium titan Alcoa are trying to “green” their notoriously polluting industries, as climate and public health concerns escalate. But with technology and energy gaps are complicating the effort.

With ministers meeting in one month to negotiate Canada’s next Agricultural Policy Framework (APF)—an agreement that will govern agriculture spending for the next five years—a farmer-led coalition has released a roadmap to boost adoption of climate-friendly farming practices from coast to coast.

Nearly 750,000 people around the world are facing a food security “catastrophe,” and a further 49 million risk famine conditions in the coming months, as Russia’s war on Ukraine disrupts grain exports, compounding extreme food shortages caused by the climate-driven devastation of harvests in India.

Montreal will host a long-delayed United Nations nature summit December 5-17 that has been described as the Paris Conference for biodiversity, after Canada and China agreed to relocate the high-stakes negotiating session that was originally meant to take place in Kunming, China in October 2020.

When it comes to sustainable cities, Scandinavia is knocking it out of the park, according to the world’s first-ever crowdsourced urban sustainability index, with Stockholm scoring highest and Oslo, Copenhagen, and Lahti, Finland close behind on a list of 50 high- and middle-income cities.

Countries accounting for about 80% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and economic output made new promises on methane controls, clean energy technology demonstrations, zero-emission vehicles, food security and agriculture emissions, and green shipping at a Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate convened by U.S. President Joe Biden June 17.

With the Ford government situated firmly in office for a second term after an election that saw the lowest voter turnout in Ontario’s history, it’s likely that any future climate action will need to be led by the federal government, says Mark Winfield, a professor of environmental and urban change at York University, in a recent op ed.

Determined to provide residents and visitors with “an experience of summer comfort in the city,” Montreal has closed two and a half kilometers of a major urban street to vehicle traffic for the summer, opening it up to pedestrians and filling it with art, entertainment, food, and lots of plant-filled spaces to sit.

Once again, climate science has helped light up ancient history. Researchers have found evidence of prolonged and devastating drought in the south Arabian Peninsula that enfeebled an ancient kingdom and created conditions ripe for the arrival of a new faith: Islam.

Delivering “a message of hope and action,” a 93-member coalition of environmental groups, aquariums, and outdoor recreation companies is urging the Biden administration in the United States to recognize that restoring and protecting the world’s oceans can help limit global heating to 1.5°C.

An environmental law non-profit in Vancouver is inviting British Columbia municipalities to join a class action lawsuit to hold some of the world’s biggest fossil companies responsible for their share of the climate damages local communities are experiencing.

Journalists, Indigenous and human rights campaigners, and climate and land defenders are mourning a monumental loss and demanding answers after authorities confirmed that Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips were murdered in the Javari region of the Amazon earlier this month. “For environmental journalists and environmentalists in Brazil, Dom’s loss and […]

The first major assessment of the costs of climate change to infrastructure across Northern Canada calls for action from all levels of government to bring about “transformative adaptation” and address the dual crises of climate hazards and infrastructure gaps.

The British Columbia coroner’s report on last year’s 619 extreme-heat-related deaths in the province recommends building codes be updated to require cooling systems, but experts call that measure a “necessary but insufficient action” as Canadian summers grow dangerously hotter.

The small glaciers of Greenland are shrinking faster than ever. In the first years of this century, they were measured as losing ice at the rate of 27 billion tonnes a year. Between October 2018 to December 2021, that rate grew to more than 42 billion tonnes a year, a 55% increase.

The world’s richest countries stood accused of hypocrisy and international negotiators were left with a long list of issues to tie up after the UN climate secretariat hosted two weeks of talks leading up to the COP 27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt later this year.

Bankrolled by fossil revenues, Vladimir Putin’s war machine will take a serious hit once the European Union’s ban on Russian oil imports arriving by sea kicks in at the end of 2022, predicts a new report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

New legislation in Florida gives local governments added support to build resilience against rising sea levels, but stops short of taking direct action to slash state emissions.

Giving birth in 50°C heat, and forced by their circumstances to work very shortly afterwards, young mothers of southern Pakistan and their pregnant peers suffer cruelly from global heating, confirming the gendered nature of the climate crisis, say public health experts.

The United Nations has launched a crowdfunding campaign to help close a $20-million gap on the US$80 million needed for the “emergency phase” of removing the FSO Safer oil tanker currently rusting off Yemen’s Red Sea coast.

The countries of the world missed an “historic chance for a clean energy recovery” from the COVID-19 pandemic and saw renewable energy stagnate due to a surge of fossil fuel subsidies last year, the REN 21 Secretariat reports this morning in its Renewables 2022 Global Status Report.

Three major oil companies have cancelled plans to drill in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a sign that fossil fuel exploration is losing ground against United States environmental policy priorities.

Extreme heat and humidity is inhibiting learning and leaving teachers in the United States anxious for the well-being of their students, as researchers estimate that by 2025, one in four public schools in the country will need to install air conditioning or upgrade their existing ventilation systems.

BlocPower’s Civilian Climate Corps provides paid, on-the-job training to New Yorkers who live in neighbourhoods with high rates of gun violence, aiming to start them on their way to a career in the city’s fast-growing green construction and clean energy trades.

As gasoline prices skyrocket in the Sunshine State, so does reluctance to obey hurricane evacuation orders, with a survey finding more than 40% of Florida respondents likely to put their pocketbooks ahead of their personal safety.

Ukrainian state oil and gas company Naftogaz has announced a deal to buy liquefied natural gas (LNG) and green hydrogen from Quebec, beginning in just five years.

As the search continues for missing British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Araújo Pereira—both recipients of regular death threats for their work to protect the Amazon’s Indigenous peoples—their loved ones have lost hope of finding them alive.

Public health doctor, pipeline protester, and renowned tree-sitter Tim Takaro doesn’t deserve four weeks in prison for violating a court injunction against blocking construction of the controversial Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, climate communicator James Boothroyd writes in an op ed for the Toronto Star.

Europe’s decades-old renewable energy communities (RECs)—where a group of residents produce their own energy instead of buying it from a third-party—can offer policy-makers valuable lessons on how to match renewable energy targets with the goal of energy equity.

Despite the conventional wisdom that Russia stands to benefit from the climate crisis as warming temperatures open frozen lands for agriculture and natural resources, a new book paints a grimmer picture of the country’s future.

As a devastating drought threatens to dry up Utah’s Great Salt Lake, scientists warn of environmental apocalypses to ensue: millions of migratory birds will go hungry after losing their feeding grounds, and nearby residents will be exposed to dust clouds filled with arsenic.

An explosion Wednesday at the Freeport gas liquefaction plant south of Houston, Texas has shut down the facility for at least three weeks, bringing new uncertainties and higher costs to global gas markets while plant operators search for the cause of the blast.

A consulting report for Enbridge Inc. estimates the closure of the Line 5 pipeline would lead to an increase of one to two cents per litre in gasoline prices for Ontarians and Quebecers, a revelation that has reignited debate on the true economic impacts of shuttering an aging pipeline with very clear environmental risks.

Canada’s first federal carbon offset market kicked off Wednesday as the final piece of the puzzle in the carbon price for big industry takes shape. Climate activists say it simply makes it cheaper for big industry to keep polluting.

Canada and California are kindred progressive spirits on climate change, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday, as he and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled a new blueprint for working together to stave off the worst consequences of a warming planet.

A new study maps out several pathways for the United States to fulfill its pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2030, but authors say success depends on making big commitments—now.

The European Union’s plan to build new natural gas infrastructure is illegal under its own climate laws and won’t solve the fossil energy crunch triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine, climate lawyers with London, UK-based Client Earth are arguing.

Environmental groups are warning that the 1,200-kilometre Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic Sea could become an environmental hazard and a source of atmospheric methane if it is left to decay after stopping routine service and maintenance.

British Columbia has more ground to cover to protect people and communities from heat emergencies, even though the province would be better prepared now to withstand the heat dome that resulted in more than 600 deaths last summer, says the chief medical officer at BC’s Coroners Service.

Canada’s shift to local renewables is in full swing from coast to coast, with Indigenous-owned hydroelectric and heat pump projects afoot in British Columbia, a 21-megawatt solar and storage project under way in Prince Edward Island, and new wind turbines coming to New Brunswick.

Better climate-related research and early warning systems are needed as extreme weather—from cyclones to drought—continues to afflict the African continent, said Sudanese billionaire and philanthropist Mo Ibrahim, who heads up his own foundation.

Communities near fracking operations and liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities in the United States are worried that industrial expansion prompted by Russia’s war in Ukraine will bring them increasing and longer-term exposure to health-threatening pollutants. 

Worried about food security and determined to boost resilience while cutting energy costs, traditionally oil-dependent Alaska is looking to develop new microgrids and upgrade existing fossil-fueled ones—with renewables and storage.

Tinkering with the planet’s air to cool Earth’s ever-warming climate is inching close enough to reality that two different high-powered groups—one consisting of scientists, the other involving former world leaders including former Canadian prime minister Kim Campbell—are trying to come up with ethics and governing guidelines.

The increasing, intentional use of microplastics in pesticides and fertilizers has driven up their concentrations in soil to between four and 23 times the levels in marine environment, a group of U.S. environmental law experts warns.

Two years into its worst drought in four decades, distress in the Horn of Africa is deepening, with more than 16 million people now at risk of profound water and food insecurity, and the women and children of the region’s pastoralist communities suffering most.

A transit agency in California is drastically reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, saving money, and creating hundreds of jobs after shifting its entire 87-bus fleet from diesel to electric, 18 years ahead of the state mandate that would have required the new vehicles.

California’s unrelenting drought is straining the state’s resources and inflaming tensions in the legislature, as crucial drought relief policies and action are delayed by competing priorities like the pandemic, homelessness, and wildfires.

A recent study showing that levels of lung-damaging black carbon pollution at the Trudeau International Airport are 400% higher than in downtown Montreal has left those who live nearby anxious about their health, and at least one academic urging a rethink on the airport’s planned expansion.

Tesla has launched a demonstration project in Texas to show that its Powerwall battery owners can create a virtual power plant that would be able to feed energy back to the state grid.

Responding to the creep of ecofascist rhetoric into mainstream discourse, as well as to the demonstrably vicious ecofascist “creeps” themselves, a group of American academics have created a webzine that uses Marvel comic characters to educate the public about the dangerous fallacies driving far-right thinking on environmental crises like climate change.

With the Trudeau government continuing to tout liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to help Europe free itself from dependence on Russian supplies, a new report says the continent is poised to boost renewable energy and reduce fossil fuels to just 18% of its electricity production by 2030, with the biggest importers of Russian oil and gas leading the way.

The British Columbia Prosecution Service said 15 people are being charged with criminal contempt of court following protests last fall over a natural gas pipeline being built near Houston in northern B.C. Those charged are alleged to have breached a B.C. Supreme Court injunction granted to the controversial Coastal GasLink pipeline in 2019 that prohibited […]

As the European Union rushes to wean itself off fossil fuels from Russia, it is exploring a “you collect/we buy” scheme to import more liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Algeria, while simultaneously addressing massive methane leaks in the North African nation’s facilities.

Small modular reactors, (SMRs), seen by the beleaguered nuclear industry as a shining hope for a global revival, may have hit a serious snag. A new study finds that mini-nuclear power stations produce higher volumes of radioactive waste per unit of generation than larger-scale traditional ones.

With long-term care workers and nursing assistants increasingly taking on the role of first responders during climate-driven disasters like wildfires and heat waves, California has launched a pilot project to train them for the new responsibility, while their union pushes for better wages and benefits to match the added work load.

A trial of sheep grazing under solar panels in New South Wales could lead to further research, after local graziers claimed that panel-bedecked pastures better sustained feed supplies through drought and improved the wool quality of their flocks.

Batten down the hatches for another nasty hurricane season, U.S. forecasters advise. The season that starts today looks like another note in a record-breaking refrain.

A groundbreaking climate lawsuit—filed by a Peruvian farmer who alleges high-emitting German utility RWE knowingly contributed to climate change and the flood threat he faces—entered a decisive phase last week as German court officials travelled to Huarez, Peru, to examine melting glaciers.

The tiny south Pacific nation Vanuatu has declared a climate emergency, hoping to garner global support for its bid to have the International Court of Justice (ICJ) affirm that vulnerable nations must be protected from climate change.

With Ontario voters going to the polls tomorrow, the battle is still on to protect the province’s rural communities from urban sprawl, amped up by Ministerial Zoning Orders (MZOs) that have enabled the Ford government to rezone land without a municipal council’s permission.

Nearly 20 years after a summer heat wave took 70,000 lives across Europe, even cities focused on climate action aren’t paying sufficient attention to the deepening peril of urban heat stress, finds a recent study, while cities in the developing world urgently need to develop long-term cooling strategies for their most vulnerable. 

The Group of Seven western industrialized countries set a 2035 deadline to decarbonize electricity generation, promised to end international public financing of fossil fuels this year, cited Russia’s war in Ukraine as a catalyst for a faster fossil phaseout, but left themselves a long list of agenda items on climate finance as they tied up a marathon series of ministerial meetings in Germany last week.

Business-as-usual inaction on climate change could cost the world’s economy US$178 trillion by 2070, while a concerted and collaborative global push for net-zero could see $43 trillion in economic growth over the same period, says a new report from the Deloitte Center for Sustainable Progress.

A lethal combination of energy shortages and searing heat is poised to generate enormous suffering in many parts of the world this summer, especially for the poor, the elderly, and those living in Asia, southern Africa, eastern Europe, and the American Midwest.

Forty years of largely unregulated growth have left 1.4 trillion litres of toxic tar sands/oil sands tailings sloshing around in “ponds” on the shores of the Athabasca River, devastating ecosystems and First Nations communities with neither plan nor budget for reclamation, says a new report from Environmental Defence.

The senior safety consultant whose high-profile resignation from Shell spotlighted the company’s “extreme harms” to the environment is drawing a sharp contrast between the colossal fossil’s enduring interest in safer work processes and its failure to deliver on its highly-touted emissions reduction plan.

Ontario opposition politicians sharpened their focus on climate policy in the dying days of the provincial election campaign after Conservative leader Doug Ford mistakenly called the massive storm that hit Ottawa and parts of Ontario and Quebec on Saturday a “once in a lifetime” event.

The climate crisis brought death and devastation to India and Bangladesh this spring, with at least 60 people killed so far by flooding, landslides, or lightning strikes, at least another 90 lost to extreme heat, and millions displaced from their homes.

Environmental degradation and rising insecurity are twin crises that, together, threaten to turn back decades of economic and social progress while governments look away instead of taking action, a new report warns.

An extensive study of thousands of COVID-19 patients in Ontario hospitals found links between the severity of their infections and the levels of common air pollutants they experience.

Hundreds of thousands of people remain without power after Saturday’s powerful storm that left at least nine dead and caused extensive damage throughout southern Ontario and Quebec.

An ESG investors’ network is urging the animal agriculture industry, which is facing a cascade of climate-related risks, to align itself with climate goals and diversify into sustainable protein production to help avoid an exodus of financing and the most dire consequences of climate change.

New research has uncovered a surprising link between reduced air pollution in North America and Europe and increased tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic basin.

The Bahamas is planning to offer “blue carbon” credits for companies aiming to offset their greenhouse gas emissions, promising to restore and protect seagrass beds and mangrove trees while raising funds to pay for badly-needed climate resilience projects.

Across the globe, peatlands are under threat and their destruction is contributing to climate change. In Canada, Europe, and the tropics, peatlands are being drained for urban, suburban, and infrastructure expansion, converted to dryland agriculture, and mined for fuel and the horticulture industry, researchers Rafael Ziegler, Magali Simard, Rahma Eldeeb write for The Conversation.

With many of the world’s cities, and especially their poorest citizens, facing increasing risks of drought and water shortages, faster emissions cuts and the long overdue establishment of an international fund for loss and damage are needed, says a new report.

Though residents remain traumatized six years after the wildfire known as “The Beast” tore through Fort McMurray, Alberta, their fierce loyalty to Alberta’s fossil energy industry leaves many unwilling to connect the dots between greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and the increasing ferocity of wildfires.

The war in Ukraine is increasing gasoline prices in America despite the country’s status as the world’s largest oil producer, demonstrating why the United States “cannot drill its way to energy security” and should instead invest in renewables, writes Princeton University energy specialist Jesse Jenkins.

Conservative leader Doug Ford’s promise to build Highway 413, a proposed suburban superhighway ring road to the west and north of Toronto, would lock in a massive increase in climate-changing emissions and other damaging impacts for decades to come, critics say.

Researchers are developing mental health resources for farmers facing more unpredictable farming seasons, as climate change increases the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events.

A collection of power sector suppliers from around the world has introduced a Powering Net Zero Pact to “promote a fair and just transition” to reduce emissions.

Nine years after Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippines, a human rights board has determined that the world’s largest fossil fuel companies “engaged in willful obfuscation and obstruction to prevent meaningful climate action,” concluding that corporations have obligations under human rights law and can be held liable if they neglect them.

The glaciers of the Canadian Rockies are “past their tipping point” for meltdown, says a climate and water expert, describing a reality that bodes ill for Prairie freshwater supplies.

Police in the United Kingdom arrested 15 Greenpeace activists on Monday after they blocked a Russian tanker from docking in Essex. The campaigners said the tanker contained diesel fuel worth US$36.5 million that would fund Russia’s war in Ukraine.

By pushing forward Ring of Fire mining and smelting development projects in northern Ontario, experts say federal and provincial governments are failing to recognize the right to free, informed, and prior consent enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), ratified by the Canadian government.

Ontario voters concerned about global heating and other environmental problems will find no champion in Doug Ford, given his track record of catering to developers and heavy industry at the expense of the public good, warns a recent op ed in the Toronto Star.

A floating tidal energy project in the Bay of Fundy has been successfully connected to Nova Scotia’s grid, an undertaking that marks a milestone for Canada’s marine energy ambitions, say proponents, as the bay’s tidal resources could be harnessed for thousands of megawatts of clean energy in the future.

The extreme rainfall that triggered deadly flooding on the eastern coast of South Africa in April was made twice as likely and 4 to 8% more intense by climate change, concludes a new study by the World Weather Attribution Service.

Public schools were closed and evacuation bags packed late last week as a stubborn wildfire crept within a few miles of the city of Los Alamos and its companion U.S. national security lab—where assessing apocalyptic threats is a specialty and wildland fire is a beguiling equation.

The Trudeau government is talking up prospects for a new gas export deal to Germany involving a project that has already been proposed and withdrawn, a gas field in the Alberta foothills that has drawn scrutiny from provincial regulators, a financing scheme that will likely need federal backing to succeed, a route that may need U.S. regulatory approval, and a timeline that will likely be cut short by Europe’s rapid decarbonization plans, The Energy Mix has learned.

As they struggle with the immediate impacts of the flooding that has inundated HayRiver, Northwest Territories, anxious locals are questioning their municipality’s ability to respond in a climate-changed world where such disasters are growing more common and severe.

The international community is gearing for global market shocks after India, the world’s second-largest wheat producer, halted most wheat exports to protect its national food security, while advocates call for greater attention to the entire Southeast Asian region gripped by the same deadly heat wave.

The current narrative linking international human migration with increased security risks should not be accepted at face value, say experts, and policy-makers must focus on building cohesive strategies and support systems for migration within borders in anticipation of large influxes of climate refugees, a conference audience heard last week.

Canadian Solar Inc. has announced an investigation to determine whether any workers at its photovoltaic plant in China’s Xinjiang region were hired against their will, though the company claimed in the past it would be impossible to determine if its supply chain used forced labour.

The recent collapse of two oceanfront homes on the North Carolina coast in the immediate wake of a slow-moving storm is being received as yet another reminder that climate change is a real and present danger.

Canada’s collective failure to protect endangered boreal caribou herds and the forests on which they depend owes to a longstanding determination to put jobs and profits above the health and well-being of wildlife—a determination on particularly short-sighted display in Quebec, a new analysis concludes.

If the world goes on burning fossil fuels at the present rate, then the numbers of people in South Asia at risk from devastating super-cyclones and catastrophic storm-surge flooding could more than double, according to a new study.

As global heating brings dire ecological challenges and new resource opportunities to the Arctic, international security experts agree that stakeholder nations must work together to navigate the changing security dynamics—with the exclusion of Russia, whose war in Ukraine is threatening international order.

Climate change and social equity were both on the curriculum for the designers and builders of two new purpose-built schools in Washington, DC.

A recent state court ruling in India that Nature has the same legal status as a human being is being celebrated for breaking with environmental law as usual, but also criticized as a missed opportunity to invoke the less legally vexing but still evolving principle of “legal naturehood”.

Alberta’s top court said Tuesday the federal government’s environmental impact law is unconstitutional, and Ottawa almost immediately announced its plan to appeal.

Annual average global warming has a 50-50 chance of blowing past the crucial 1.5°C threshold in at least one of the next five years, and at least one year between 2022 to 2026 has 93% odds of being the warmest on record, according to analysis produced by the UK Met Office and released this week by the World Meteorological Organization.

Utilities across several states are warning of rolling blackouts caused by electricity shortages, as the United States braces itself for a summer of record-breaking heat waves that will drive up energy demand.

A heavy industry town in British Columbia with an ingrained suspicion of government has decided to say yes to a 100% renewable energy transition by 2050, after a local climate group spent time meeting people where they’re at with curiosity and compassion—a hallmark of the “deep canvassing” technique.

Canada’s territorial premiers are calling on the federal government to increase funding for clean energy projects and climate change adaptation.

The changing agricultural landscape of Canada’s Northwest Territories is showing how rising global temperatures could affect food production, as growing conditions in the North become increasingly favourable, while heat waves and drought desiccate farmland in other regions.

The 2017 floods in Australia’s New South Wales has left the state facing a potential epidemic of mental health problems, say researchers. They’re urging the government to support long-term mental health and community services for flood-affected residents.

Substituting meat from cattle and other ruminants with microbial protein grown in bioreactors could greatly reduce deforestation and emissions from global meat consumption by mid-century, according to a study in the journal Nature.

Major geopolitical tensions could be resolved by electrifying transportation, a change that would dilute the concentration of power held by oil producers and redistribute it across producers of solar, wind, and other clean energies, analysts say.

Europe will have 142 GW of electrolyzer projects operational by 2030, according to one estimate.

A Texas state program to allocate federal aid for rebuilding after Hurricane Harvey unfairly overlooks Houston’s Black and Hispanic neighborhoods after it designed a competition-based application process that favoured smaller, predominantly white counties, community advocates say.

E-bikes were the big hit at the recent New York International Auto Show, with the arrival of a plethora of start-ups offering more accessible, safer, and child- and cargo-friendly rides.

A Wisconsin Indigenous band is seeking a permit to immediately evict the Line 5 pipeline from its land, creating a second shutdown risk for a piece of fossil infrastructure that has already faced closure threats from the Michigan government, as well as other Indigenous and environmental groups.

Carbon dioxide pipelines supporting a fast uptick in carbon capture and storage (CCS) could threaten the safety of countless communities across the United States, say experts, due to federal pipeline safety regulations that are woefully inadequate to cover the “flurry of multibillion-dollar CO2 pipeline proposals” now eligible for tax credits.

“Collective complacency” in the face of the climate crisis and other human-caused catastrophes is setting the world up for 560 disasters a year by 2030, according to a new UN report that says humans are overly optimistic and have made short-sighted decisions so far.

Mining of lithium in South America’s Atacama Plateau creates “severe” impacts for local communities and the environment that need to be addressed as production surges to meet growing demand for electric vehicle batteries and other power storage.

A new photovoltaic (PV) system designed by French company Ecovégétal increases energy yields by up to 10% by combining solar power generation with urban agriculture.

With the worst of the thick wildfire smoke having blown out of town, residents of this small northern New Mexico city of Las Vegas tried to recapture a sense of normalcy Saturday as their rural neighbours hunkered down amid predictions of extreme fire conditions.

The murderous heat and wildfires that claimed lives and destroyed property in British Columbia and other parts of North America in June, 2021 has hit the global record books. According to a new statistical study, only five other heat waves worldwide since 1960 have been more extreme.

As statistics show an acute upswing in the number of global conflicts involving water, urban planning experts and alarmed policy-makers are devising ways to protect citizens from the harms of too little water—as well as too much.

Determined to protect their residents from the increasing reality of extreme weather events like wildfire, two towns in Western Canada are starting to build permanent evacuation centres, but need government help to make that happen.

Climate change has already created thousands more opportunities for viruses to jump to new hosts, as mammal species are driven to new geographic ranges and mingle in new combinations, say scientists in a study that finds bats responsible for the majority of novel virus sharing—along pathways that facilitate emergence in humans.

Four new studies—each quite separate—appear to confirm that heat, drought, and hunger on massive scales can only get worse with rising global temperatures. One of the most ominous is a prediction that ferocious summer temperatures and extended droughts are increasingly likely to happen simultaneously.

India’s continuing, brutal heat wave is drawing new attention to the country’s heavy dependence on coal-fired electricity, with the majority of the country’s coal power plants running low on fuel and a handful of them having to shut down.

Even after last year’s 13% decline in global coal capacity to a record low, steeper cuts are needed to keep global heating below 1.5°C, finds a new report by Global Energy Monitor. But the effort to cut coal consumption is being hampered by spiking electricity demand after the pandemic, coupled with supply shocks from Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Scientists are worried that wildfires might burn out of control in Siberia while the Russian military units that normally keep them in check are dispatched to Ukraine.

A massive drought-starved reservoir on the Colorado River has become so depleted that Las Vegas now is pumping water from deeper within Lake Mead where other states downstream don’t have access.

When several of Canada’s top hockey players came to play at a pond hockey tournament in Hay River, Northwest Territories earlier this spring, they also came to talk climate, and locals were ready for the conversation.

A wholesale switch to electric vehicles in the United States could save more than 100,000 lives and more than US$1.2 trillion in public health costs by 2050, says a new report by the American Lung Association.

BC Hydro is falling short of its obligations to fund habitat conservation under the Fish & Wildlife Compensation Program, according to a brief from the B.C. Wildlife Federation and the University of Victoria Environmental Law Centre that asks the provincial auditor general to look into the matter.

Canada’s economy will lose C$2.8 trillion in climate costs by 2100 if global temperatures rise by 2°C, a figure that doubles to $5.5 trillion should warming increase by the 5°C forecast in “business as usual” scenarios, says a new report.

A growing body of research published over the past two decades has found that most reservoirs, including those used for hydropower, aren’t emissions-free. Despite the green reputation of hydropower among policy-makers, some reservoirs emit significant amounts of methane, along with much smaller amounts of nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide.

Germany is “very, very close” to declaring independence from Russian oil, vice-chancellor and economy and climate minister Robert Habeck declared last week, after Russian state fossil Gazprom cut off gas deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria over their “failure” to pay for the product in rubles.

 One of the latest efforts to understand how global heating is changing the Atlantic Ocean’s surface and deep currents has concluded that natural variability—not forcing due to human influence—may have dominated the complex current system since 1900.

The world can’t afford to rely on natural gas beyond the next decade unless its greenhouse gas emissions are fully captured, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry warned late last month.

After persuading his colleagues to support free transit for under-19s and low-income seniors, Victoria city councillor Ben Isitt is working hard to push his city to join the 100 or so municipalities around the world that already make public transit free for all riders.

Researchers are citing health risks as a reason to switch to electric stoves, after their measurements of indoor air pollutants linked to gas cooking motivated them to change their own appliance choices.

A private email shows a Conservative MP from Alberta calling an NDP-initiated study into the relationship between resource development and increased violence against Indigenous women and girls “disgraceful.”

Russia’s dominant position in the global fuel economy is paying off, after soaring prices doubled the country’s fossil fuel revenues in the last two months—even though volumes are reduced.

Texas is ground zero for the climate emergency, and 65% of its people are worried. But voter suppression on a broad scale makes it harder for them to have their say and demand action.

South Melbourne, Australia-based Montem Resources has announced plans to pursue a renewable energy project at its Tent Mountain site in Alberta’s Crowsnest Pass instead of its planned coal mine, but some environmental advocates remain suspicious of the company’s plans.

Roughly one-third of all ocean animals could disappear in the next 300 years if humanity doesn’t get its greenhouse gas emissions under control, concludes a new study published yesterday in the journal Science.

Humans weren’t the only ones affected by last summer’s record heat wave in Western Canada. The high temperatures also put honeybees and other pollinators at risk, Dr. Alison McAfee of the University of British Columbia writes for The Conversation.

Global per capita meat consumption must drop at least 75% to rescue ravaged ecosystems, address ever-worsening food insecurity, and keep Paris climate targets alive, says a new study from the University of Bonn.

A group of conservation groups in Wisconsin are asking the state natural resources department to stop work on a US$492-million transmission line and revoke its wetlands and waterway permits until a “lawful” environmental review can be conducted.

Disheartened Winnipeg residents wringing out their homes in the wake of last week’s deluge of rain are turning to neighbours and community groups for support as the municipality’s response fall short.

The month of March brought India its highest maximum temperatures in 122 years, April has been scorching, and May is forecast to be even worse for more than a billion people facing ferocious heat waves that have been hammering the subcontinent since early spring.

Binding, science-based climate targets, respect for Indigenous sovereignty, and investment in a “thriving, regenerative, zero-emissions economy” are the top demands from more than 125 organizations that were scheduled to launch the Ontario Climate Emergency Campaign at the provincial legislature later today.

Scientific evidence “unequivocally” indicates a need for decisive action to protect Canadians from the adverse health effects of traffic-related air pollution, says a new report prepared by doctors calling for a shift to electric vehicles and greener, more walkable cities.

Alanna Cowan has watched the Nicola River in British Columbia’s Interior turn the colour of chocolate milk and rise every spring, as warm weather melts snow from the surrounding mountains. It is part of an annual cycle that can cause minor flooding, but Cowan said this year feels more uncertain.

Researchers have found that growing a particular perennial grass in the American Midwest could scale back warming by as much as 1°C in parts of the region.

United States laws that make plastic manufacturers bear some responsibility for recycling their ocean-clogging products are actually inhibiting progress, say experts, and bear the fingerprints of plastic lobbying groups that are determined to prevent effective restrictions.

“You’re going to die of old age. We’re going to die of climate change,” chanted a group of Whitehorse, Yukon, high school students who gathered on Earth Day to protest the failure of way too many adults to take the climate crisis seriously.

The vacant strips of land along major highways could unlock a cleaner power grid and promote the uptake of electric vehicles, according to an 81-page feasibility study done for the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

A decision just a decade ago to invest heavily in the Alberta tar sands/oil sands has turned out to be a big liability for the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC)—and now the company is looking to sell off its Long Lake and Hangingstone operations before being hit by sanctions related to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Economic security through a basic income must be at the centre of the just transition off fossil fuels, and Canadians need the wherewithal to build resilience in their own communities, the Green Resilience Project concluded earlier this month, based on a series of 33 local conversations involving more than 900 participants across the country.

The fertilizer price crunch now plaguing farmers is reminiscent of the 1970s oil shock that led to greater energy efficiency in several industries, and could produce a similar shift in today’s agriculture sector—but that transition will have to be managed carefully to avoid further disrupting the global food supply.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank wrapped up their annual spring meeting in Washington, DC, last week without answering a request for an additional US$500 billion per year in climate finance to the Global South for the next 20 years.

The largest private land conservation project in Canadian history is unfolding in northern Ontario.

South African fuel and chemicals giant Sasol Ltd. is stepping away from plans to invest in a new pipeline from northern Mozambique, for fear that it will end up saddled a stranded asset in a decarbonizing world.

Countries must accelerate their transition off fossil fuels, not abandon urgent climate action, as they scramble to replace oil and gas supplies from Russia in response to the war in Ukraine, the steering group of the Net-Zero Asset Owners Alliance declared earlier this month.

After South Africa’s deadliest storm on record killed 448 people and left another 63 missing, the country is vowing to get serious about climate adaptation—a pledge that must address the tragic nexus between climate casualties, dangerously inadequate housing, and a sky-high unemployment rate.

A survivor of British Columbia’s catastrophic floods last year is warning others to check their insurance policies after she said she was offered a payout of only $30,000 when her home, assessed at $414,000, was destroyed.

Replacing fossil-powered peaker plants with virtual power plants will mean a cleaner, cheaper, more reliable power supply, according to a recent white paper commissioned by California-based energy application developer Autogrid.

Thousands of Canada’s most vulnerable citizens risk suffering and death by extreme heat in the next few decades without collectively action to protect them and combat heat, says a new report from the University of Waterloo’s Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation.

In the early hours of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, two American non-profits devised a plan to send solar microgrids to a Ukrainian hospital and emergency power equipment to a refugee camp, sparking an energy transition as the devastation of war caused power outages across the country.

In what campaigners are calling a world first, Quebec’s National Assembly voted Tuesday afternoon to ban new oil and gas exploration and shut down existing drill sites within three years, even as the promoters behind the failed Énergie Saguenay liquefied natural gas (LNG) project try to revive it as a response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

British Columbia mayors whose communities were devastated by last year’s flooding and wildfires want the federal government to deliver billions of dollars in promised funding as soon as possible.

Rising sea surface temperatures driven by anthropogenic global heating have doubled the odds of an “extremely active”—and therefore intensely destructive—cyclone season in the tropical Atlantic, says a new study from Climate Analytics.

As we learn more about the negligence of Russian generals who ignored warnings that the radioactive forest surrounding Chornobyl was a hazardous staging ground for their assault on Kyiv, environmental historian Kate Brown flags an ill-recognized reality: humanity is ill prepared for what happens when nuclear facilities are held hostage during war.

Germany’s energy security and climate policies leapt forward in a recently-announced Easter Package that outlines ambitious transition targets as the country struggles to unyoke itself from Russian oil.

Two days after the latest, alarming science report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate scientist Peter Kalmus and three colleagues were arrested for locking themselves to the entrance to the JPMorgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles. In a post for The Guardian, Kalmus traces how the slow pace of climate action got him out of the lab and into the streets, and why he feels morally compelled to raise the alarm.

There’s no need for new export terminals in the United States to help Europe end its dependence on natural gas from Russia—the U.S. fossil industry’s spin notwithstanding, according to a new analysis by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

The European Union’s fuel supply options carry different implications for the climate, according to a life cycle assessment released while the continent is rethinking energy policy from between the rock of Russia’s war on Ukraine and the hard place of a looming energy supply crisis.

Keeping the community onboard and elected councillors informed and involved were two of the most important steps in making Halton Hills, Ontario the first Canadian community to adopt a 2030 net-zero strategy, according to two of the program’s lead developers.

The Alberta government has released recovery plans for two herds of threatened caribou in the province’s north that it says will bring the amount of usable habitat on their ranges up to the level required by a deal signed with Ottawa, The Canadian Press reports.

Major new dollars for affordable and energy-efficient housing, a C$15-billion fund to accelerate clean investment, and a controversial tax credit for carbon capture and storage (CCUS) technology are among the big-ticket items in the federal budget tabled in the House of Commons yesterday by Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland.

Plans to build a up to eight giant new nuclear reactors plus a raft of small modular reactors as part of the new energy strategy announced yesterday by the British government were met with outrage by environmentalists and scientists.

As oil and gas prices continue to skyrocket in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Canadian fossil companies’ hopes for a lucrative 2022 are being undercut by labour shortages.

Fossil fuel companies are using stock buybacks to profit from Russia’s war on Ukraine—at the expense of consumers, workers, and just about everyone else, says a new report released by advocacy groups just as the United States holds hearings to scrutinize oil and gas profits.

The European Union must shift its farming policies to prioritize regenerative agriculture and expand the practice to a landscape scale, says a new report by the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (EASAC).

A University of Calgary study says there may be a link between the density of shale oil and gas operations and increased health risks for nearby pregnant women and their babies.

With the options for holding global warming to 1.5°C quickly closing, countries must immediately phase down fossil fuel production, embrace low-carbon technologies that are already practical and affordable, mobilize citizens around the benefits of decarbonization, and increase low-carbon financing three- to six-fold, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes in a 2,913-page report released yesterday.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s latest report on climate change mitigation warns of an “enormous, growing emissions gap,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said yesterday, adding up to a “file of shame” the puts humanity on track toward an unliveable world.

The IPCC’s message on mitigation offers encouragement but leaves no room for any possible complacency: the evidence shows that humanity could contain global warming to no more than 1.5°C above the long-term average for most of human history, but only with rapid, deep reductions in the greenhouse gas emissions driving the climate emergency.

For the first time in the UN agency’s 34-year history, yesterday’s massive report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) introduces the language of “demand-side” action to the field of climate mitigation, with potential to reduce emissions by 40 to 70% in the places where people live, work, learn, and play.

Land management for forestry and agriculture can support global climate targets if it is backed by strong domestic and international policies, but will need to consider a “wide range of landowners” and “billions of consumers in diverse contexts,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes in yesterday’s report on climate change mitigation.

International cooperation on climate action has grown since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to yield modest progress, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but stronger collaborations are needed to overcome barriers in countries with limited capacity.

Lands held by Indigenous peoples and other local communities (IPLCs) sequester emissions equivalent to about 30% of the 2030 carbon reduction targets in four countries that are the focus of a new study by the Forest Declaration Platform.

Easy to manoeuvre and far less expensive than cars, e-bikes are making urban transportation more inclusive around the world—especially for women, older adults, and the differently abled.

Deepening its efforts to become an “ark for seeds,” Canada’s National Tree Seed Centre is asking First Nations to identify tree species of concern, so that the species may be conserved and nurtured to make a comeback.

Responding to pressure from its students, Emory Medical School in Atlanta has formally integrated learning about the human health impacts of the climate crisis into its curriculum.

The federal government’s new emissions reduction plan continues to undercount emissions from forestry, an environmental group says, throwing doubt on Canada’s ability to reach its goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.

With midterm elections looming, the success of U.S. President Joe Biden’s push for Congress to approve $45 billion in climate funding in the White House budget is expected to set the tone for future domestic and international climate policy.

U.S. President Joe Biden brandished one of the biggest weapons in his economic arsenal Thursday in hopes of turning the United States into a leading producer of electric-vehicle batteries and the minerals used to make them.

The fossil and transportation sectors get a relatively free ride and electricity producers do the most to decarbonize in the much-anticipated 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan released yesterday by Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault.

Canadians of all political stripes and from all regions support greater protection for the country’s forests but are concerned about what that could mean for the economy, according to a new survey.

A bankruptcy hearing that could determine whether more than C$200 million in oilpatch environmental liabilities wind up on the public dime will have to go back to court.

The death of an Ottawa cyclist struck by a snow grader turning right at a busy and dangerous four-way intersection has renewed calls for the city to invest in infrastructure that keeps pedestrians and cyclists safe.

Experts say renewables will be a critical component of India’s climate plan—which rightfully sets its net-zero deadline two decades later than wealthier high-emitters like the United States and Europe—as the country balances urgent climate adaptation alongside pressing support for food security.

An agreement by a Michigan public utility to expand its low-income efficiency programs and study how the energy burden of vulnerable households can be reduced is being hailed by environmental justice advocates as a crucial move towards fighting energy inequality.

A wind-powered re-icing machine may be on location in Nunavut next winter, pending the success of a $1.2-million crowdfunding campaign that kicks off next month.

New-York-City-sized ice shelf has collapsed in East Antarctica, much to the alarm of scientists who thought the region was substantially protected from the impacts of climate change, unlike the more vulnerable western reaches of the continent.

Weeks away from Canada’s first federal budget announcement following a natural disaster-ridden year, governments and private investors will need to collaborate to fund climate adaptation and prevention at the municipal level, a Globe and Mail op ed asserts.

Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is good reason to “crank with wartime urgency” the mass insulation of buildings and deployment of renewables, energy conservation pioneer Amory Lovins declares in an interview with the Guardian.

The United States Department of Energy has chosen 14 host communities for technical assistance, in a bid to discover how energy storage can increase resilience and reduce costs in underserved communities.

A local resilience project in Tuktoyaktuk that has spent the past four years helping to prepare the NWT hamlet to cope with the climate crisis has won $500,000 as a recipient of the Arctic Inspiration Prize.

Climate science has done more than just warn humankind about the future: it has also systematically enriched our understanding of the planet we call home.

Using a combination of solar panels and a hydrogel that sucks water vapour out of the air, a test project run by environmental engineers in Saudi Arabia successfully grew a crop of water spinach last summer using only the water generated by a novel green energy system, known as WEC2P.

Although many of the world’s biggest financial institutions have been vocal about their climate commitments, fewer than half of them have introduced policies to restrict new oil and gas investments or phase out existing ones, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis released earlier this week by Reclaim Finance and more than a dozen advocacy groups.

The controversial Bay du Nord exploration project off the coast of Newfoundland is running into new headwinds in Ottawa, with Environment and Climate Minister Steven Guilbeault busting the myth that new oil and gas wells can help Europe free itself from Russian supplies and the NDP questioning how any new fossil project can align with the government’s climate promises.

Canada’s oil and gas producers can hike output by the equivalent of 300,000 barrels a day by the end of the year to help displace Russian fossil fuels, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said Thursday.