How to Win Friends and Influence People in Washington

When a candidate is running for political office, whether it’s for a seat in the House of Representatives, the Senate or the White House itself, the winner isn’t dictated by their campaign or their policies; technically it’s not even the amount of money they raise. The overwhelming factor these days seems to be the price tag that is attached to their soul. Politics in Washington has become so corrupt and immoral that it is now more important to be bought by the most corporations and special interests as possible…

Ethical Oil: Part 3, NAFTA

If you’ve already read Ethical Oil: parts one and two, you’ve suffered through the realities of our energy market in this country. You’ve read the back-and-forth about the very existential quandary that seems to be occupying ivory-tower environmental thinkers.

Trying to make sense of Canadian energy policy is not for the faint of the heart, so I called Gordon Laxer. The University of Alberta professor has spent the past 29 years in Alberta, having followed Canadian energy policy through…

Ethical Oil, Part Two: The Trade

In part one, I introduced everyone to Alykhan Velshi and Zoe; two ideological zealots engaged in a war of words over the nature of Canadian oil production.

Velshi is the captain of the good ship Ethical Oil and Zoe is, of course, Ezra Levant’s fictitious and quintessential environmentalist.

So, not happy with having such an important debate boiled down to a never-ending back-and-forth of pontificating and self-righteousness, I wanted to know where our oil actually comes from.

Our underlying issue is one of supply and demand: Canadians are demanding oil, and we’re supplying it to…

Closing the window on Irene

As the remnants of Tropical Storm Irene pounded Montreal this past Sunday, I hunkered down in my apartment. Listening to the winds blow and the rain fall, I thought to myself: “I should really close the living room window, my roommate’s XBox is getting wet.” If you were expecting my rainy day thoughts to be something more profound or at the very least profound-ish sounding and dealing with the nature of nature and its relationship to our very unnatural culture, well, that’s not the case here. And why should it be? Yeah, I had been outside earlier in the day. I had felt slightly stronger-than-usual winds press up against me as I ran some errands. I witnessed the closest thing my neighbourhood got to destruction…

Parc Oxygène: The Small Cause & The Cost of Community

Have you ever seen a really small rally or demonstration? The kind where you instinctively ask yourself whether those gathered may require the services of a new communications director? Or feel compelled to determine exactly which crackpot idea would lead to this small congregation? “What’s so ‘special’ about your special-interest group,” you may ask yourself, for shits and giggles…

Wasteful Thinking (online doc premiere)

With the world’s population projected to hit seven billion later this year, a stable supply of food has never been more important.

Recent spikes in food prices have set off riots around the world and have been linked to revolutions in the Middle East and the famine devastating the horn of Africa. Even here at home, rising food prices are making people think more about what they eat and where it comes from…

Shale gas industry shoots for social media revamp, critics not convinced

Canada’s shale gas industry is turning to social media for a cure to its tattered public image in Quebec, according to the Canadian Press. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) has contracted the services of social media company Parta Dialogue to create forumschiste.com, a website billed as a place to discuss issues and share information about shale gas. With the official launch of the website set for Tuesday, one of the industry’s most vocal critics, the Association Québecoise de Lutte Contre la Pollution Atmosphérique (AQLPA) is already calling into question the motives of the effort. “Is this looking at environmental questions or is this damage control?” said Kim Cornelissen of the AQLPA in a phone interview…

Toronto the Green

Before moving to Toronto for the rest of the summer I was warned about the dangers of biking on its streets. I’d need a helmet and some luck, I was told. And I’d heard plenty about newly elected Mayor Rob Ford’s lack of appetite for cyclists and their paths. In fact, the week I arrived, bike paths were making headlines as city council decided to remove bike lanes on Jarvis street they had set up one year earlier. The irony of the decision is that it will cost much more to remove the lanes than it did to install them…

Grain drain: Corn ethanol and a visual tour of Canada’s biofuel industry

With the effects of climate change becoming more pronounced and more dangerous each year, the push for greener fuels is growing around the world. Developers of plant-based fuels called biofuels are doing their best to be the ones to replace gasoline, but not all biofuels are as green as they seem. Some can take nearly as much fossil fuel to produce as they are supposed to replace. Corn ethanol is what is called a first generation biofuel because it is produced from a food grain. This fact has placed it at the centre of the food vs. fuel debate that pits the nutritional needs of people around the world…

Wave of protest: month-long anti-shale gas march crests in Montreal rally

If anyone thought the battle over shale gas in Quebec was finished, a wave of protest that has swept through the province washed those thoughts away in Montreal on Saturday. Organizers and supporters of the “Moratorium for a Generation” marched on the city, bringing to a crescendo a month-long trek from Rimouski in eastern Quebec and along the St-Lawrence River to downtown Montreal outside of…

Malaria in Montreal…it can happen again

When the Montreal General Hospital first opened in 1823, three percent of the first 3665 medical cases treated were for malaria. Yep, malaria…in Montreal.

Our lovely grey city used to be surrounded by a lot more swamp and marshland than it is now. Cases of malaria stretched from here all the way out to the prairies. And we can still get malaria in Montreal; the host of the malaria parasite is the Anopheles mosquito, who lives here, too.

The decrease in Montreal malaria cases happened because…

Monsanto: The King of Corporate Evil

According to a new report released last Tuesday, industry regulators have known for years that Roundup, the world’s best-selling herbicide produced by the U.S. based Monsanto Corporation, causes birth defects. The report, “Roundup and birth defects: Is the public being kept in the dark?”, says that industry regulators have known since as early as 1980 that glyphosate, the chemical on which Roundup and other herbicides are based, can cause birth defects in laboratory animals. Why am I not surprised…

Flipping off: Germany to abandon nuclear by 2022, activists not satisfied

Despite the fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster and renewed fears about the safety of nuclear power, almost no country has taken a position against the controversial energy source, except one. Europe’s economic engine and most populace country, Germany, has bucked the global trend and announced it will shut down all of its nuclear power plants by 2022, at the latest. But ask Jana Wiechmann, Greenpeace coordinator for the northern German city of Bremen, if the battle over nuclear in Germany is won and the answer is simple: no.

When You’ve Got to Go

It wasn’t all that long ago that we needed to use an outhouse to do our business. Even my mom remembers using newspaper instead of toilet paper in the 50s because it wasn’t a common household item at the time. Living in rural Ghana during the summer of 2007 brought me back in time to Montreal’s pre-indoor toilet era. My compound had one communal latrine (a tiny closet of a room with a hole in the ground and…

Achtung! Germany getting greener beyond doors of Klimahaus museum

When Bob Geldof opened the world’s first climate change museum in northern Germany two years ago, he was surprised by two guests, a man from Niger and a man from Samoa whose countries feature prominently in The Journey, the main exhibit at the Klimahaus. Geldof, a well-known human rights activist and music producer, spoke about water, from rising sea levels to desertification, and how these global warming problems will lead to climate migration. People like Foua from Samoa and Ibrahim from Niger would be forced to abandon their homes and homelands because their island is being flooded or there simply isn’t enough water available to survive where their people have lived for centuries…

Crazy Cameroon

Unbiased reporting is very difficult when it comes to the environment. How can one deliver a balanced report when ultra-rich investment corporation ‘X’ forgoes the environmental impact assessment, and goes ahead with project destroy-precious-habitat-for-profit-again? Unfortunately, this is a tale of that exact old story. The happy ending will come from a simple click to share your voice. It’s easy to feel heroic these days.