The 470,000 sq. ft. Microsoft data center in San Antonio, Texas. Microsoft has signed a 20 year deal to buy electricity from a 55 wind turbine wind project being built just outside of Fort Worth, Texas. The wind power will be about 430,000 megawatt hours – enough to power about 45,000 homes. The energy is
Photo: John Crux/Getty With the wildfire season upon them, Aussie Prime Minister Tony Abbott has called climate change science “crap” and has denied a link between man-made climate change and an unusually high number of Australian wildfires. Abbott had recently (September, 2013) been elected running a campaign against a previously imposed carbon tax. The irony
In the worldwide struggle to cut the use of fossil fuels to power our cars and heat our homes, China and India along with a couple other “developing” countries are often seen by the west (including Canada) as a major obstacle to any serious attempt to cut back emissions. That’s because as “developing” nations they
No one familiar with the Enbridge pipeline proposal should be surprised that First Nations groups affected by the proposal have banded together to oppose it. The proposed pipeline would carry unrefined bitument from the Alberta oil sands across the Rocky Mountains to the town of Kitimat on the Pacific Ocean. Alternative route to move oil
This video was recently produced by Pacific Wild and posted on the website Pipe Up Against Engridge. Oil in Eden: The Battle to Protect Canada’s Pacific Coast from Pacific Wild on Vimeo.
Here is an interesting article by Fen Montaigne on the warming of Antarctica and the melting of Antarctic ice. One would expect that signs of global warming would be most evident at the points with the harshest climates – the hottest areas on earth and the coldest. Especially the coldest. I have read elsewhere that
After 13 years of fighting an application for the creation of a quarry in Caledon (near Mississauga) the OMB has turned down the application. The OMB ruled that the proposed Rockfort Quarry could possibly have a “catastrophic impact” on the surrounding environment if measures to guard against potential problems did not work. The Coalition of
In this article from the Globe and Mail called Does Ontario’s Green Energy Act pass the ‘net benefit’ test? the author, Jatin Nathwani from the University of Waterloo argues that there are serious problems with the Green Energy Act of Ontario. These problems put our entire electrical supply system in jeopardy and make its sustainability questionable. The most
In his book Ethical Oil author and activist Ezra Levant argues that attempts to replace carbon based energy – in this case, oil from the Alberta oil sands – with renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar have been an “unmitigated disaster” [p207] in Spain, and by extension, other countries such as Germany. This
Bitumen has been flowing naturally into the Athabasca River for thousands of years. This is the way most of us think of the Alberta oil sands: humungous equipment and open pit mining. Surmont project north of Fort Macmurray – Newer projects in the oil sands do not use open pit mining. Most Canadians are blissfully
