Climate change & energy policy

Towards a managed wind-down: the conversation we need to have

Nov 26, 2020
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An enduring lesson from COVID-19 is that where there’s a will there’s a way. Faced with a pandemic, governments have risen to the challenge and made profound changes that would have seemed impossible mere months before. We now need to shift this out-of-the-box thinking to the existential threat posed by climate change. The need to… View Article

Time to mobilize like we mean it

Nov 17, 2020
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Lessons from the Second World War for the climate emergency Even before the arrival of COVID-19, the history of the Second World War was making a remarkable comeback. Our movie theatres (remember those?), Netflix offerings and bookstore shelves were full of modern reboots of our mid-century wartime experience. Then the global pandemic struck, and suddenly,… View Article

TMX: What’s at stake?

Oct 29, 2020
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New research from veteran earth scientist David Hughes concludes that the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project (TMX) makes no financial sense. In fact, Alberta heavy oil producers can expect to lose money on every barrel of oil they produce and move through TMX. Contrary to claims that bringing heavy oil to tidewater for export to… View Article

Losing sight at Site C

Oct 8, 2020
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Court documents and FOI materials show BC Hydro knew shale would move at troubled construction project, yet Hydro proceeded with river diversion BC Hydro approved the pouring of massive amounts of concrete to build a buttress at its problem-plagued Site C dam project months before a critical drainage tunnel was completed to draw water away… View Article

Site C’s radical makeover: What the ‘L’ is going on at problem-plagued dam construction project where costs keep piling up and completion remains years away?

Sep 11, 2020
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BC Hydro knew 30 years before it started building the Site C dam that its chosen location for the most expensive publicly funded infrastructure project in British Columbia’s history had big problems.  In fact, by the 1980s, BC Hydro had done tests showing that the ground at Site C had serious flaws “due to the… View Article

State of Play: COVID-19, carbon and energy

Jun 23, 2020
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2020 has been a year like no other in the political economy of energy and climate change. As the new year broke, wildfires spiked by higher temperatures scorched Australia. In Canada, a different fire took hold as a BC gas pipeline sparked a cross-country Indigenous-led uprising. By mid-March, economies around the world were shutting down… View Article

Why has UBC divested from fossil fuels but UVic has not? The high cost of industry influence

Jun 16, 2020
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The death and disruption wrought by COVID-19 is calamitous. The bad news is that climate change will be worse. It is easy to forget that 2020 began with Australia burning in a brutal wildfire season. Like the current pandemic, Australia’s disaster was predicted years in advance by ecological science. As we slowly emerge from the… View Article