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Global Warming - My Growing Sense of Unease

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

In my life, I have many people who sit on either side of the Global Warming fence. On the one side are my friends and colleagues who say that “global warming is a political animal, not a scientific fact”. On the other side, I have a core group of friends who are confident that Global [...]

Goods News and Bad News: BC’s New Carbon Tax

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

On Tuesday, February 19, the Government of British Columbia announced that it would introduce a new carbon tax in July, 2008 that would be applied to gasoline and other fuels.
The carbon tax will be phased in to give individuals, businesses, and industry time to adapt, innovate, and reduce the impact of the tax. The carbon [...]

Five Ways to Reduce The Environmental Cost of Your Digital Life

Monday, February 18th, 2008

As I’ve said in previous postings, I’m all about comprehensive cost accounting when looking at greenhouse gas emissions. Put another way, I don’t believe that you can measure the emissions of something without measuring the missions that were created when that something was created. Smelting metal, electricity used to run the machines that build something, [...]

Damned if you Do, Damned if you Don’t

Monday, February 11th, 2008

This post is not of my usual calibre. I have worked 75 hours in the last week and I’m bone-tired. Instead of going off on a crazy rant about how bleak the future looks to me at the moment (which I just wrote and subsequently deleted) - I’m going to post an article from the [...]

Does Dot Bomb Continue to Burn BC?

Monday, February 4th, 2008

During the peak of Dot Com fever, I was living in Ottawa and Vancouver - both homes (at the time) to some of the most over-hyper software and IT companies in North America. I lived through my friend dropping out of their undergrad Computer Science degrees to take six figure jobs with Nortel or starting [...]

Canada would need 96,000 wind turbines to satisfy Kyoto

Monday, January 28th, 2008

A recent article in the UK publication The Independent caught my attention because it said that the UK would need to build 12,500 wind farms to meet EU emissions targets. I wondered how many wind farms Canada would need to build to meet its emission reduction commitments. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, [...]

Remembering Our Humanity - Science Ethics in the 21st Century

Monday, January 21st, 2008

I recently read Next by Michael Crichton - a thought-provoking read that postulates what life in America might be like when genetic manipulation enters the consumer goods market. Like most Crichton books, it’s not particularly well written but it poses some interesting ethical questions and interestingly, makes actual policy recommendations about genetic research to the [...]

Does BC Have a Future in Fuel Production?

Monday, January 14th, 2008

In the past decade, pundits and scientists have teased us with the concept that British Columbia might be able to get into the fuel production business. We’ve heard about offshore oil and gas, we’ve heard some hints that hydrogen might have a future in BC but neither of these have seemed to pan out. However, [...]

Is Geothermal Energy Ready for Prime Time in Canada?

Monday, December 31st, 2007

A recent Canadian Press article announced that Yellowknife, NWT is getting ready to pilot a geothermal power system by repurposing an abandoned gold mine. The mine, which goes as far as 2.5 km into the Earth’s crust can heat water to a balmy 50 degrees celcius. Some geothermal specialists are planning on running a pilot [...]

A Green, Green Christmas

Monday, December 24th, 2007

This Christmas Eve, two environmental policy issues related to the holidays haunt my thoughts. First, the looming policy shift around plastic carrier bags. Second, the lack of attention paid to the Christmas tree industry. I believe that many Canadian jurisdictions, like Leaf Rapids, Manitoba are preparing to institute a plastic carrier bag ban. At the [...]

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