With 150 wildfires burning on the country’s east and west coasts and 85 raging across New South Wales, 46 of them out of control and 14 at an “emergency level”, the premier of Australia’s most populous state declared a seven-day state of emergency Monday and officials issued an unprecedented “catastrophic” fire warning for Sydney, where bushfires were breaking out in suburbs just a few kilometres from the city centre.

TC Energy is restarting the Keystone pipeline while it works to understand why the line spilled more than 1.4 million litres (9,120 barrels) of tar sands/oil sands diluted bitumen along a quarter-mile/0.4-kilometre stretch of northeastern North Dakota late last month. The incident has only strengthened the resolve of Nebraska landowners fighting the company’s efforts to expropriate their land to build the fiercely-contested Keystone XL pipeline.

The United States faces the most destructive hurricanes more than three times as often as it did a century ago, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that blames the shift “unequivocally” on climate change.

Canada shows up as one of the world’s biggest climate laggards in the Climate Transparency consortium’s annual Brown to Green report, with energy-inefficient buildings and fossil-intensive Alberta and Saskatchewan accounting for much of the country’s failure to curb its greenhouse gas emissions, National Observer reports.

The two biggest pension funds in California missed out on US$17 billion in income by holding onto their fossil fuel investments for a decade too long, Fossil Free California reports in a study released last week.

Arm-twisting automakers into an assault on tailpipe emission standards, and taking regulatory action against companies that won’t go along, has emerged as one of the latest strategies in the Trump administration’s continuing push to roll back Obama-era pollution controls while punishing California for trying to defend them.

Far lower CO2 emissions, cleaner air and water, less meat on the dinner table, and less spending on consumer goods are key features of a near future in which humanity brings climate change under control, Danish Member of Parliament Ida Auken writes in a recent post for the World Economic Forum.

From enabling the rise of climate deniers like Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, to boosting the powers of the surveillance state to crack down on climate activism, to luring people off bikes and buses with Internet-dependent services like Uber, Silicon Valley is “fueling the climate crisis,” activist intellectual Rebecca Solnit contends in a post for Resilience.org.

Two-thirds of Canadians want the country’s response to the climate crisis to continue or accelerate under Justin Trudeau’s minority Liberal government, and nearly 60% were dissatisfied with the Conservative Party’s climate platform in the recent federal election, according to polling results released last week by Clean Energy Canada.

Alberta is on the hook for as many as 1,400 more abandoned oil and gas wells and associated infrastructure after the officers and directors of Calgary-based Houston Oil & Gas Ltd. laid off their staff and contractors, shut down the company, and walked away from their responsibility to clean up after themselves.

Countries are still increasing their greenhouse gas emissions and scaling back their investments in GHG reductions, making 2020 a crucial year to turn the tide on the climate crisis.

Next year’s federal budget must acknowledge the hundreds of millions of dollars Canadians are already paying due to climate change and its impacts, the 22-member Green Budget Coalition says in a set of recommendations released last week.

When a major rain and wind storm knocked out power supplies for 115,000 Vermont households on Hallowe’en, the 1,100 Green Mountain Power customers participating in a home battery pilot project did just fine.

Virginia is on track to accelerate its drive for carbon-free energy and join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) in the northeastern United States, after Democrats took control of the state legislature in off-year elections last week.

Vancity Community Investment Bank has announced plans to acquire CoPower Inc., a Toronto-based green financing platform that offers green bonds to investors with as little as C$5,000 to spend.

Donald Trump filed formal notice this week that the United States will withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement. But the decision doesn’t take effect until the day after next year’s presidential election, Trump’s successor will be able to rejoin the agreement on 30 days’ notice—and analysis shows the former reality TV star has failed to completely derail his country’s progress on greenhouse gas reductions.

Award-winning investigative reporter Paul McKay looks into how mainstream media tilts coverage by assigning climate science missing-in-action status.

A booming solar+storage sector is catching the attention of a major U.S. investment news service, with 85 projects totalling 8,921 megawatts of storage and 4,175 MW of storage either under construction or set to begin.

North Carolina-based Duke Energy is insisting that natural gas plants built today are critical lynchpins in its strategy to become 100% carbon-free by 2050, dismissing some stakeholders’ predictions that they will be stranded assets long before that date, with future generations left to pick up the tab.

India’s capital, New Delhi, declared a public health emergency Monday and banned some cars from its roads in an effort to reduce alarming levels of dangerous air pollution.

German engineers have developed a process that turns algae into a carbon-sequestering replacement for steel and concrete that is as climate friendly as it is strong.

The United Kingdom has issued a temporary moratorium on shale gas fracking, citing the industry’s inability to “reliably predict and control tremors”.

Calgary-based Pengrowth Energy closed out a worrying week for the Alberta oilpatch Friday with the announcement that it was being acquired at a bargain basement price of 5¢ per share, down from the $13 per share its stock commanded in 2011.
“Essentially, a piece of leftover Halloween candy is worth more than a share in Pengrowth,” CBC reports.

Alberta has reclaimed the dubious distinction of being the only North American jurisdiction with virtually no government support for energy efficiency programs, after mostly cancelling the rebate and incentive programs that had delivered C$692 million in energy savings, $850 million in economic impact, and 5.7 million tonnes of potential greenhouse gas emission reductions in their first two years of operation.

The four federal parties that went out to voters this fall with strong climate policies had better get started on implementing those policies right now, a coalition of Canadian climate organizations asserted Friday.

As the tide begins to turn against natural gas, with insurers thinking twice about underwriting projects and the industry’s social licence starting to evaporate, the industry is scrambling to salvage its reputation as a relatively low-carbon alternative to coal.

Faced with a fusillade of expert opinion that cutting back on meat consumption is a climate imperative, America’s meat and dairy industry is on the defensive, interfering in efforts to promote climate-friendly school lunches and stymying state efforts to promote green purchasing.

The overwrought grief that greeted Encana Corporation’s decision to move its Calgary head office to the United States shows Canada and Alberta at a crossroads, facing an increasingly obvious choice between yesterday’s energy options and tomorrow’s.

Repairs and clean-up could take anywhere from 10 days to two or three months after the Keystone pipeline spilled more than 1.4 million litres (9,119 barrels) of tar sands/oil sands diluted bitumen along a quarter-mile/0.4-kilometre stretch of northeastern North Dakota Tuesday.

Pressure is mounting on Justin Trudeau’s minority Liberal government to deliver on its promise of climate action, with 27 youth protesters briefly occupying the lobby of the House of Commons earlier this week and a public interest law firm campaigning for a new climate accountability law.

Deploying a far more accurate method than has been used to date to predict future sea level rise, researchers say three times more people than previously thought will face inundation by 2050, with some of the world’s greatest cities at risk of going under the waves.

Manitobans will have to wait another two years for the return of rooftop solar rebates the province’s public utility withdrew in 2018. At least one installer says that’s too long a lag.

Gearing up to host the World Cup of soccer in 2022, fabulously wealthy Qatar is using its revenues from liquefied natural gas (LNG) extraction to air condition city streets, markets, and stadiums that would otherwise be death traps as temperatures soar to levels that are lethal to life.

Alberta has introduced a new C$30-per-tonne carbon cap-and-trade system that covers most of its biggest industrial greenhouse gas emitters, but will cost them $330 million less next year because of looser compliance requirements.

Murray Energy, the U.S. coal mining company whose CEO was an early Donald Trump supporter and later begged his successful candidate for an industry bailout, has become the latest in a series of nearly four dozen mining firms to declare bankruptcy over the last decade.

While progressive U.S. policy-makers increasingly promote electric vehicles as the magic bullet to decarbonize transportation, what Americans really need is encouragement to “drive less, right now” through strategic tweaks to existing infrastructure, more pedestrian- and cycling=friendly roads, and EV car-sharing, says CityLab.

A destabilized climate could lead to a precipitous decline in property values, cutting communities off from the tax base they need to fund climate adaptation while banks stop lending in areas that experience repeated floods, according to an analysis released earlier this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Tesla Inc. has been making waves over the last week with the latest in a series of announcements for its long-promised, long-awaited solar roof. But one industry publication is declaring itself unconvinced.

New Brunswick is earning praise from conservation groups after promising to more than double its protected lands and freshwater, from 4.6 to 10% of the province, by the end of next year.

An estimated 15,000 supporters crowded through downtown Vancouver for the city’s first weekly climate strike since the federal election, with #FridaysforFuture founder Greta Thunberg on hand to lend her support to a youth lawsuit against federal climate inaction that was launched the same day.

Failed power line equipment is showing up once again as a possible root cause of a massive wildfire that has forced 180,000 people to evacuate in California wine country, prompted Governor Gavin Newsom to declare a state-wide emergency, and led the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, to cut off power for 940,000 accounts, totalling more than 2.3 million users.

A week after the climate crisis emerged as the big winner in Canada’s federal election, politicians and opinion writers are beginning to probe the prospects for climate action in a period of minority government—and the extent to which the Liberals’ choices over the next several months will determine Justin Trudeau’s legacy as prime minister.

In the wake of last week’s federal election results, two different clean transition organizations are pointing to the climate policy problem now facing Conservative politicians in Canada, and the opportunity for governments to invest in the shift off carbon.

With more oil and gas wells abandoned than drilled in Alberta this year, decommissioning dead rigs is the only business showing any kind of growth in Western Canada’s struggling oilpatch.

Massachusetts has filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil, in what Climate Liability News says is the first case to accuse the colossal fossil of fraud against both consumers and investors over climate risks.

Fed up with the aggressive self-interest of oil and gas companies, alert to a growing bottleneck at local EV charging stations, and encouraged by his teenaged daughter to make the switch, a Maryland gas station owner has converted his business to 100% EV charging, a first for the United States.

An international communicators’ conference opening in Banff today has dropped pro-fossil provocateur Vivian Krause as one of its keynote speakers.

Heat Pumps show up as #42 in Drawdown’s list of climate solutions, with experts predicting a 5.2-gigaton drop in carbon dioxide emissions through 2050 if the solution is adopted by 45% of the market. Replacing air conditioners and gas furnaces with high-efficiency heat pumps has a net implementation cost of roughly US$119 billion, but would produce estimated savings of nearly $1.55 trillion.

Nova Scotia has unveiled plans to bring its greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050, and is holding the door open to set additional climate targets over the next year.

The Canadian climate community is taking a victory lap and getting ready for the hard work ahead, after this week’s federal election largely delivered on the hope that the climate crisis would emerge as a key issue setting the composition of the country’s new government.

A vile, misogynistic slur spray-painted on the campaign office of Ottawa Centre MP Catherine McKenna has led to an outbreak of multi-partisan decency, with everyone from federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh to Ontario Premier Doug Ford condemning the vandalism.

The world’s renewable energy capacity is on track to grow 50% over the next five years, the traditionally-cautious International Energy Agency reported earlier this week, with solar installations, onshore wind, and hydropower leading the charge.

An automobile fleet that included even 10% electric vehicles would be enough to shift the daily electricity generation peak in California from daytime to nighttime hours if utility Southern California Edison used the cars to store renewable energy while they’re parked and draw it down when it’s needed most, according to a study released last week.

The six communities of the Tŝilhqot’in Nation in British Columbia are looking ahead to better electricity access and C$175,000 in annual revenue after completing construction of a solar farm west of Williams Lake that is expected to generate 1.5 gigawatt-hours per year for the BC Hydro grid.

Visits to the Wood Buffalo Food Bank in Fort McMurray are up 300% from 10 years ago, as the area’s fossil fuel workers and their families suffer the bitter consequences of trusting in the boom-and-bust economics of international oil and gas production.

As election results rolled in last night in downtown Ottawa, climate hawks assessed the results of the first campaign in Canadian history where climate change was at the top of the political agenda. Now, they say the next step is to hold a reconfigured parliament accountable for the domestic action and international commitments that will make the country a world leader in responding to the climate crisis.

After months of open advocacy, thousands if not millions of dollars in campaign spending, and direct collaboration with the federal Conservative Party that prompted a complaint to Elections Canada, the fossil industry is confronting the election outcome it feared most: a Liberal minority government.

As the rhetoric began to fly in the dying days of #elxn43, with some voices hinting at a new push toward western Canadian separation, one of Canada’s leading environmental thinkers warned that “Albertans can kiss their economic future goodbye” if extreme oil development became national policy.

While Canada has just concluded the first election in its history that focused in large part on climate change, the campaign still failed to produce a conversation about a future free of fossil fuels, reflecting the extent to which “oil is part and parcel of our political, economic, and cultural framework,” Corporate Mapping Project researcher Angela Carter told National Observer in a recent interview.

Both veteran legislators and newly-elected Members of Parliament would have stood to learn a great deal from the recent C40 World Mayors Summit in Copenhagen, where participants shared best practices for fighting global warming while ensuring that workers whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels aren’t left out in the cold, former Toronto mayor David Miller writes for the Globe and Mail.

Thousands of Albertans swarmed the grounds of the provincial legislature in Edmonton Friday morning to attend a climate strike rally headlined by Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish #FridaysforFuture founder who’s become a catalyst for millions of youth—and climate protesters of all ages—around the world.

Canadian corporations are just beginning to catch on to a wider global trend and speed up their renewable energy purchases, and Alberta has the right mix of solar and wind resources and skilled work force to meet its share of the demand, CBC reports.

Climate change won’t be on the official agenda when the United States takes its turn next June to chair the annual G-7 meeting, though there’s already speculation that representatives of the world’s biggest economies won’t be willing to skip the topic.

Market analysts at Fitch Solutions Macro Research are looking to the Midwestern United States to supply a large share of the 100 gigawatts of new solar capacity it sees the country adding over the next decade.

An upcoming public consultation will focus at least in part on the greenhouse gas impact of Chevron Corporation’s Kitimat LNG project, after the British Columbia Environmental Assessment Office (EAO) prevailed on the California-based colossal fossil to assess the project’s climate footprint from a regional and global perspective.

The tourist town of Banff, Alberta is aiming for a rapid shift to renewable energy, as one part of the effort to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 30% from 2005 levels by 2030 and 80% by 2050.

The Union of Concerned Scientists is calling out the American Petroleum Institute (API) as one of the entities that exerted inappropriate influence in a recent decision by Massachusetts regulators to reject National Grid’s Phase II electric vehicle proposal.

As the Arctic continues to warm three times faster than the rest of the planet, researchers are working hard to find ways to materially strengthen the melting snow and ice roads that for many Northern communities are the only practical way to receive heavy necessities like fuel and construction materials.

After six weeks of campaigning, months of preparations, and years of advance political positioning, Canada is just three days away from a national vote in which climate change and climate action will be one of the top issues on many electors’ minds.

Two new wind farm developments are making headlines this week, with the Henvey Inlet First Nation announcing completion of the country’s biggest wind installation on Indigenous land and a company linked to U.S. mega-investor Warren Buffett putting C$200 million into a 117.6-megawatt project in Alberta.

#FridaysforFuture founder Greta Thunberg is scheduled to join a climate strike at the Alberta legislature today at 11:00 AM local time, in an event organized by Climate Justice Edmonton, Indigenous Climate Action, Edmonton Youth for Climate, Beaver Hills Warriors, and other grassroot groups.

Colossal fossil ExxonMobil will stand accused of misleading investors by masking tens of billions of dollars in climate-related costs when proceedings get under way next week in a civil case brought by New York State attorney general Letitia James.

Solar, wind, battery storage, energy efficiency, and demand flexibility can reliably replace coal in Alberta at less cost than new gas plants, according to “game-changing” new analysis released last week by the Calgary-based Pembina Institute.

More than half of Canadians support a permanent ban on Arctic oil and gas drilling, and nearly two-thirds of northerners want the current ban extended to 2026, according to an Environics Research poll released last week by WWF-Canada.

The 70 unionized workers and dozen administrative staff who are about to lose their jobs at Alberta’s Highvale coal mine face “a lot of uncertainty” as the province’s latest budget approaches, with a change in government throwing their job transition plans into doubt.

Saskatchewan is out with a new call for proposals for 300 megawatts of wind energy capacity.

Waste-to-Energy ranks #68 in Drawdown’s list of climate solutions, with the potential to cut carbon emissions by 1.1. gigatons over a 30-year period.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) released a new environmental justice plan this week as she continued her quest for her party’s 2020 presidential nomination.

Protecting the Arctic from rapid warming is one of the essential steps in averting runaway climate change for the entire planet, Inuit leader Sheila Watt-Cloutier states in an opinion piece for the Globe and Mail.

California is getting a close-up look at the challenge of trying to prevent severe climate emergencies, and the costs of relying on a “feeble” power utility to adapt on the fly, after Pacific Gas & Electric took 800,000 to a million electricity accounts offline Wednesday in a bid to avert another season of devastating wildfires.

The United Kingdom stands to lose billions of pounds per year in gas tax revenues as drivers increasingly shift from internal combustion to electric vehicles.

The New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) is looking to carbon pricing as an option to reduce the otherwise “astounding” cost of bringing the state’s electricity system to zero emissions by 2040, though it says it won’t take action without a go-ahead from Governor Andrew Cuomo and state stakeholders.

U.S. utility Xcel Energy has announced a landmark, US$250-million deal to replace coal-fired electricity with a 240-megawatt solar power plant to power a steel mill in Colorado.

Net Zero Buildings place #79 on Drawdown’s list of climate solutions, capable of sequestering 7.1 gigatons of carbon by 2050 if only 9.7% of new buildings hit the standard. Net zero designs, which enable a structure to generate as much energy as it consumes over the course of a year, integrate multiple energy solutions, so Drawdown calculates their impact as a single system.

Ontario’s electricity supply is about to get dirtier and more carbon-intensive, as the province begins burning more natural gas to replace electricity from nuclear power plants going offline for expensive overhauls.

Big U.S. utility PacifiCorp is laying out a strategy that relies heavily on solar, energy storage, and wind and speeds up the phaseout of its economically fragile coal plants in a new integrated resource plan (IRP) covering investments through 2038.

Pennsylvania is moving to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), making it the biggest carbon emitter in what would now become a nine-state market aimed at reducing carbon emissions from electricity generation across much of the northeastern United States.

The City of Toronto unanimously adopted a climate emergency resolution Wednesday morning and reaffirmed its plan to bring its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero before 2050.

The 23-kilometre land link that connects Nova Scotia to the rest of Canada is at risk as climate change drives up sea levels and makes severe storms more frequent.

Massachusetts, California, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New York took top billing, while Maryland won honours as the most-improved U.S. state, when the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy released its 2019 50-state scorecard to coincide with Energy Efficiency Day October 2.

Canadians who commute longer distances are more likely to vote Conservative in this month’s federal election, according to a new Ipsos poll released this week.

The world’s oceans will rise nearly one metre (three feet) by 2100, 100-year coastal storms and flooding will happen annually, fish stocks will see serious declines, snow and ice cover will diminish, and killer storms will get wetter and more powerful without fast action to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, concludes the latest science report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), issued last week after a contentious negotiating session in Monaco.

Angry. Joyous. Creative. Determined. Loud. Ottawa isn’t a town that usually comes out in large numbers for public marches. For #ClimateStrike September 27, 20,000 people had other ideas.

Week three of Canada’s federal election saw a flurry of climate, energy, and environment promises from the four national party leaders, coinciding with a major United Nations climate summit in New York, dozens of successful #ClimateStrike marches across the country, and the latest IPCC report laying out the devastating impacts the climate crisis is wreaking on the world’s oceans and ice cover.

The tepid results of last week’s United Nations Climate Summit pointed to the need for political will to match the urgency of the climate crisis, the opportunities in climate solutions, and rising public demand that governments take action, E3G co-founder and CEO Nick Mabey writes for Climate Home News.

With 77 smaller countries pledging to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, but the world’s biggest emitters largely failing to step up, UN Secretary General António Guterres’ much-anticipated Climate Action Summit is being cast as a missed opportunity to gain ground in the fight to get the climate crisis under control.

A Montreal-based company is proposing to build a C$23-billion pipeline from Alberta to New Brunswick that it says can succeed where the controversial Energy East megaproject failed.

With delegates and protesters from around the world gathered to push toward faster, deeper greenhouse gas reductions, the president of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce was at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York earlier this week to lobby for the Canadian fossil sector.

The University of California system has decided to drop all fossil fuel investments from its US$13.4-billion endowment and its $70-billion pension fund.

High-speed rail places #66 on Drawdown’s list of climate solutions. A global network of trains that travel at speeds of at least 220 kilometres per hour would cost close to US$1.3 trillion to install, but that budget would be almost entirely recouped over the lifetime of the infrastructure.

As Canada’s federal election campaign entered its third week, a new international opinion poll identified climate change as Canadians’ leading concern, Green Party leader Elizabeth May promised to replace East Coast oil imports with domestic crude, and Conservative leader Andrew Scheer pledged to fast-track new pipeline proposals directly to the Supreme Court.

At least five people are dead in southeast Texas after Tropical Depression Imelda dropped up to 43 inches (1.1 metres) of rain on the region, becoming the seventh-wettest tropical cyclone in U.S. history.

Low global gas prices have prompted Medicine Hat, the southern Albertan community known as “The Gas City”, to permanently shut down 2,000 active gas wells and 100 jobs.

High school and post-secondary students, employees, businesses, scientists, and city governments are all stepping up to take part in a global strike for climate action that could mark a turning point in the mounting campaign for faster, deeper reductions in the greenhouse gas emissions that are feeding the climate crisis.

Ecojustice is giving Alberta 30 days to respond to concerns about its C$2.5-million inquiry into supposed foreign interference in the province’s fossil sector, asserting the probe is “unlawful and potentially unconstitutional” in its current form.

Supplying 90% of Nova Scotia’s electricity from renewable sources, cutting energy consumption in social housing 60%, tripling energy efficiency in the electricity sector, electrifying personal and public transportation, cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half, and creating 15,000 green jobs are the key 2030 targets in a plan for the renewal of the province’s Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act, released this week by the Halifax-based Ecology Action Centre.

The former chief monitoring officer of Alberta’s Environmental Monitoring and Science Division (EMSD) is raising the alarm about the province’s decision last week to shutter the office and fold it into a new administrative structure, at the same curtailing its stand-alone climate change office, warning that the province’s monitoring of fossil-driven industrial pollution will continue to decline as a result.

The City of Mississauga is going out for public comment on its draft of a 10-year, C$450-million climate plan aimed at cutting its greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050.

The Squamish Nation celebrated a limited victory yesterday in its fight against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, after the provincial Court of Appeal ruled the B.C. government must reassess its previous approval of the project based on changes to a federal regulatory review.

A 65% greenhouse gas emissions cut by 2030, job transition programs for fossil workers, a ban on new pipelines, coal mining, and oil and gas drilling or mining, and an end to fossil fuel subsidies within a year are at the centre of the election platform released this week by the federal Green Party.

The Trump administration plans to follow through with an attempt to strip California of its hard-fought right to set tougher pollution control standards for cars and light trucks, the Washington Post reports, citing two senior government sources.

Canada’s biggest oil refinery came in for some unwanted scrutiny and Alberta put itself forward as a more stable source of supply in the wake of the devastating drone strike on a Saudi oil production facility over the weekend. But within days of the attack, analysts were already talking down the impact the attack by Houthi rebels would have on global oil supplies or prices.

The federal government has issued a call for consulting proposals to study how widespread electrification can “reduce or eliminate” fossil fuel use across the economy.

While federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer may have hopes of turning the Liberal government’s carbon tax into an election issue, it’ll be hard to make the argument stick if actual gasoline prices aren’t cooperating, columnist Kelly McParland argues in the National Post.

A steady stream of hurricane-force storms has Atlantic Canada rethinking its approach to electricity grids, shoreline defences, and even tree planting, while insurance companies brace themselves for damage claims that are set to double every five to seven years.

A Swiss-Swedish automation company, a Japanese automaker, and an e-bus manufacturer in China are all reporting new developments in the race develop rapid recharging technologies for vehicles.

Construction challenges, steadfast opposition from landowners along the route, shocking safety and health risks at two tank farms, and the looming risk of construction “man camps” near B.C. Indigenous communities all call into question the federal government’s stated belief that the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion will open on schedule in 2022, Vancouver-based Stand.earth concludes in a blockbuster report released Wednesday.
The resulting delays could boost the project’s completion costs, undercutting its financial viability and turning the now publicly-owned pipeline megaproject into a “white elephant”, Stand says.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is under fire from all sides, after unveiling details of a taxpayer-funded investigation of supposed foreign-funded pipeline opposition that includes an email “snitch line” for Albertans to report allegedly “un-Albertan” activities by their neighbours.

The British Columbia and federal governments are being accused of greenwashing the climate-busting methane emissions behind the province’s widely-touted liquefied natural gas expansion, with B.C. Green leader Andrew Weaver—whose three-member legislative caucus is keeping Premier John Horgan’s New Democrats in power—comparing efforts to electrify LNG production to “putting lipstick on a pig”.

A Michigan power utility is turning to its customers for reductions in energy demand that will help it keep its promise not to build any more natural gas plants.

Countries must invest US$1.8 trillion in climate adaptation funding by 2030 to prevent a world of “climate apartheid”, in which the wealthiest pay to protect themselves from sea level rise and mounting food shortages while everyone else suffers.

In what one major business-environment coalition is calling an “unforced error”, the Trump administration is moving to weaken a George W. Bush-era light bulb efficiency standard that dates back to 2007, was due to take effect in the new year, and would save enough electricity to power every home in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

One of Canada’s biggest commercial real estate companies, Oxford Properties, is planning to install a million square feet (92,900 square metres) of rooftop solar panels on its retail and industrial properties across North America by 2022.

rge methane digesters rank #30 on Drawdown’s list of climate solutions, with potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 8.4 gigatons by 2050. They operate at less cost than the conventional coal and natural gas power plants they replace, and would produce an estimated US$148.83 billion in savings over 30 years.

Trans Mountain Corporation won’t be able to respond fast enough if one of the bitumen storage tanks in its massive Burnaby Mountain tank farm boils over and spills, according to an audit completed in May by the National Energy Board, before it was replaced by the new Canada Energy Regulator.

In what a New York Times editorial calls a “cruel parody of anti-trust enforcement”, the U.S. Justice Department has launched an investigation after four major automakers embarrassed Donald Trump by striking a deal with California to boost their vehicles’ fuel efficiency and reduce their tailpipe emissions.

The Ontario government is violating free speech provisions in the Canadian Constitution by forcing gas stations to display its propaganda stickers opposing the federal carbon tax, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association contends in a lawsuit filed this week.

The Scottish government has outlined plans to make its 2045 zero emissions target a “centrepiece” of its program and “lay the foundations for a new Scottish Green Deal”. But at least one major environmental group is pointing to the “obvious contradiction” in the country’s continuing embrace of its offshore oil and gas industry, Global Citizen reports.

A vision of a “five-minute city”, restrictions on polluting cars, an awesomely effective transit system, and a shift to renewable energy are centrepieces of the effort to make bicycle-friendly Copenhagen a carbon-neutral city, a couple of decades ahead of most other leading municipalities and just a dozen years after it first set its 2025 target.

The state government in Queensland, Australia has gone to the extraordinary length of extinguishing Aboriginal title over 1,385 hectares of land to permit construction of the mammoth Adani coal mine, even as financial analysis concludes the project would be “unbankable and unviable” without billions of dollars in subsidies.

More than one-third of high school students in Fort McMurray are showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), three years after the wildfire known as The Beast tore through their home town and forced many of them to escape by road through a wall of surrounding flames.

Donald Trump and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue are planning to roll back Bill Clinton-era logging restrictions in Alaska’s 16.7-million-acre/6.75-million-hectare Tongass National Forest, exposing more than half of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest to logging, fossil, and mining projects.

After stalling for 36 hours over parts of the Bahamas and leaving mind-boggling destruction and devastation in its wake, Hurricane Dorian is on the move as a Category 2 storm and began hitting Florida’s east coast with 110-mile/177-kilometre-per-hour winds Tuesday evening, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center.

Southern Alberta is drawing international attention after the province approved Canada’s biggest-ever solar-electric installation, the 600-megawatt, privately-financed Travers Solar project in Vulcan County.

The federal and British Columbia governments are getting mixed reviews for their plan to partly decarbonize the province’s emerging liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry by electrifying upstream fracking operations.

A new non-partisan volunteer group in Ontario is handing out free pro-carbon-tax stickers to counter the mandatory propaganda campaign mounted earlier this year by the province, just as the Ford government announced it would appeal a court ruling that the federal carbon tax is permitted under the Canadian Constitution.

Less than two months after a landmark Ontario Court of Appeals ruling upheld the federal carbon tax, Premier Doug Ford may be preparing the ground to abandon his much-publicized court challenge against the program.

Major automakers are siding with California against the Trump administration’s push to roll back Obama-era vehicle efficiency standards, as they scramble to dodge years of court battles and regulatory uncertainty and bolster their public credibility in the face of a mounting climate crisis.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced plans to reboot his company’s lagging solar division by offering rooftop panels for rent in six U.S. states, just days before Walmart filed a lawsuit over seven fires it linked to Tesla rooftop installations between 2012 and 2018.

If Canada wants transit agencies to buy more electric buses, it should introduce the kind of simple, predictable, easily accessible funding that is jump-starting adoption of electric vehicles, Fernando Melo of Clean Energy Canada and Robert Parsons of the University of Manitoba argue in a post for Policy Options.

A first-of-its-kind approach to geothermal energy that uses no fracking or water and produces no greenhouse gas emissions is turning heads in central Alberta, where Calgary-based Eavor Technologies is building a C$10-million pilot plant.

Microgrids come in at #78 on Drawdown’s list of climate solutions. Defined as locally-managed electricity generation systems, microgrids can be powered by renewable resources like micro-wind, solar power, in-stream hydro, and biomass energy—whatever resources are available. Drawdown doesn’t quantify the carbon reduction value of microgrids independently, but includes their positive impact in its calculations for each energy source.

Hot on the heels of the Trump administration’s decision to aggressively weaken the nation’s highly effective Endangered Species Act, eight environmental organizations have launched a legal challenge, citing multiple violations of due process as well as a fundamental breach in the enshrined federal duty to protect America’s wildlife.

Bold Nebraska, Nebraska landowners, and tribal nations are vowing to carry on their fight against the Keystone XL pipeline, after the state Supreme Court upheld a November, 2017 route approval by the Nebraska Public Service Commission (PSC).

The latest in a series of offshore oil spills has roused the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board (CNLOPB) to express some displeasure at fossils’ ability to meet their obligations for environmental protection.

Equipped with neither a carbon price nor meaningful regulation, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer’s proposed climate plan would ultimately find Canada’s emissions 100 megatonnes higher by 2030 than they would be under the Liberal Party’s existing strategy, writes climate and sustainability expert Mark Jaccard.

California is cutting its greenhouse gas emissions even faster than state regulations require, and produced more electricity from renewable energy than from fossil fuels for the first time in 2017, according to data released earlier this month.

The desire to lead “climate-friendlier lives”—an impulse driven by a mixture of shame and anxiety—is one of the reasons more and more young Europeans are choosing trains over planes as their mode of travel around the continent. (The ever-escalating hassle of flying coach is another.)

Undaunted by 28% unemployment, and the fact that Marie Le Pen’s xenophobic National Rally party continues to appeal to a majority of his constituents, the Green Party mayor of an impoverished coastal town near Calais is determined to prove that strong environmental policy means a better life for working people.

Just two weeks after Canada’s National Energy Board rejected calls for it to review the contested Coastal GasLink shale gas pipeline, a First Nation in northeast British Columbia revealed the company behind the project tried to pressure it to squelch community opposition to the project.

There were sighs of relief in California earlier this month, after utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric confirmed it will honour all its contracts with renewable energy providers as it goes through bankruptcy reorganization.

National Observer and Global News are out with a blockbuster investigative report that alleges potentially deadly health and safety problems in the western Canadian oilpatch, driven by a pervasive “culture of silence” in which accident reports are falsified, would-be whistleblowers are at risk of being fired and ostracized, and not a single fossil in Alberta or Saskatchewan has ever been charged or penalized for filing deliberately misleading paperwork.

The rail line that runs through Lac-Mégantic, the Québec community whose downtown was incinerated by a runaway oil train that killed 47 people in 2013, faces “several urgent” issues, according to a May, 2019 inspection report issued by Transport Canada and obtained by CBC.

Climate change is a “deciding factor” in this summer’s record high water levels on the Great Lakes, CTV News reported earlier this month, citing climate adaptation specialist Blair Feltmate of the University of Waterloo.

Faced with a shortfall between his city’s carbon reduction target and its climate programming, Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson is vowing to do better.

Corporate renewable energy purchases are on track to set another all-time record in 2019, with the United States still driving a strong growth trend and China moving toward a more prominent role.

Campaign groups and constitutional lawyers are raising concerns about free speech and a fossil lobbyist is bragging about his success, after nine U.S. states adopted laws at the behest of the fossil and chemical industries that make it a felony to engage in peaceful anti-pipeline protests.

Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage is declaring herself “disappointed” that her province lost 14,300 jobs last month, bringing the unemployment rate up to 7%, in spite of healthy second-quarter fossil profits driven up by a 1% corporate tax cut introduced by Savage’s boss, Premier Jason Kenney.

Twenty-two U.S. states and seven cities went to court last week, trying to block the Trump administration from rolling back Obama-era restrictions on coal-fired electricity under the Clean Power Plan.

A new campaign against the fossil fuel subsidies on which projects like the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion depend is just the latest front in a fight against the pipeline that is far from over, writes Robert Hackett, professor emeritus of communications at Simon Fraser University and co-director of NewsWatch Canada, in an opinion piece for National Observer.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) issued its first emergency alert since January 2014, after record demand driven by a summer heat wave last week pushed electricity prices above $9,000 per megawatt-hour and reduced the sprawling state’s electricity reserves from at least 3,000 to less than 2,300 MW.

Living buildings is one of the 20 carbon reduction options that Drawdown lists as Coming Attractions—strategies that weren’t ready for prime time when the book was published, but looked like promising approaches through mid-century.

British Columbia is taking heat from two different news outlets for its avid support of natural gas fracking to feed its liquefied natural gas (LNG) boom, just as a new study reasserts the connection between fracking and a continuing increase in climate-busting methane emissions.

ExxonMobil faced accusations last week that it pressured possible witnesses in a climate fraud case brought by New York State Attorney General Letitia James, just as analysts pointed to continuing business challenges in the colossal fossil’s earnings report for the second three months of 2019.

From India to Iran to Botswana, the New York Times is out with text and graphics that illustrate the 17 countries, home to one-quarter of the world’s population, that are at increasingly urgent risk of running out of water, according to new data from the World Resources Institute (WRI).

Subsidy-free solar is now less expensive than grid electricity in virtually every city across China, according to a paper published this week in the journal Nature Energy.

Drawdown lists the Hyperloop as a Coming Attraction—a climate solution in development that is not yet ready for prime time, but might be by mid-century.

Two-thirds to 84% of Canadians would accept bold measures to address climate change, more than four-fifths see the climate crisis as a serious problem, 47% consider it extremely serious, and one in four “report thinking about climate change often and are getting really anxious about it,” according to a new Abacus Data poll commissioned by Seth Klein, an adjunct professor of urban studies at British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University.

With the federal election campaign about to hit high gear, Green Party leader Elizabeth May was in Vancouver last week to unveil a plan to extend the federal government’s existing job transition plan for coal workers to oil and gas.

Energy Efficiency Alberta is earning praise at the national level, even as it faces an uncertain future in its home province, after reporting C$692 million in energy savings, $850 million in economic impact, and 5.7 million tonnes of potential greenhouse gas emission reductions over its first two years of operation.

Mothers living near active oil and gas sites in Colorado are 40 to 70% are more likely to give birth to babies with congenital heart defects (CHDs) compared to their counterparts in areas with less intensive fossil development, researchers at the Colorado School of Public Health conclude in a study published last week in the journal Environment International.

Human-scale water conservation methods, both ancient and modern, not big-budget, Delhi-directed megaprojects, will be critical to helping India survive and gain resilience as monsoon rains fail and temperatures rise, says journalist and environmental activist Meera Subramanian.

In an exclusive interview with The Energy Mix, Tamara Vrooman, President and CEO of Vancity Credit Union, talked about the next steps the federal government could take down the road toward decarbonization, after getting at the short-term wins that she and Steven Guilbeault of Montreal looked into as co-chairs of the federal Advisory Council on Climate Action.

Alert to the steadily improving economics of wind and solar—and growing ever more wary of natural gas investments becoming stranded on the fossil slag heap—U.S. state regulators are increasingly pushing utilities towards renewables, with Republican states leading the transition.

In Britain’s first-ever citizens’ assembly on climate change, participants convened by Camden council in north London came up with rooftop solar, cutting fossil fuels out of local government developments, and 15 other steps their community could take to cut emissions and boost sustainability.

Alberta bird populations have declined dramatically over the last 50 years, and a Calgary naturalist and citizen scientist is blaming a combination of human activity and climate change.

Federal Green Party Leader Elizabeth May would work with any other party in a minority Parliament with a serious climate plan—and even thinks she could influence Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives to drop their crusade against carbon pricing “if it means the difference for them between governing or spending more time in opposition,” The Canadian Press is reporting today.

India is on track to overshoot a key Paris Agreement target by nearly 60% by obtaining close to two-thirds of its installed electricity capacity from renewable sources by 2030, according to a new report from the country’s Central Electricity Authority (CEA).

With the federal election less than 100 days away, news reports last week focused on the financial action around the upcoming campaign, provinces’ mixed reaction to programs the Trudeau government wants to fund out of carbon tax revenue, the possibility of extreme fossil ideology uniting Canadians behind a more moderate alternative, and the prospects for a Liberal-Green-NDP coalition that would truly be those ideologues’ worst nightmare.

Canada is violating the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and sidestepping international environmental law in its handling of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and a proposed three-berth marine container terminal south of Vancouver, contends the Lummi Nation in northwest Washington state, in a letter this week to Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland.

With a national think tank positioning energy efficiency as a kind of “all-of-the-above” strategy to deliver lower home energy bills, boost business productivity, and cut pollution, the industry’s newly-minted trade association is embarking on an initial campaign to help energy efficiency companies and professionals see their own place in the sector.

Minnesota is the latest U.S. state to consider grid-scale storage as a possible alternative to natural gas peaker plants, under a new state law that requires power companies to include storage in their long-range plans.

Offshore wind developers Ørsted and Equinor and industrial workers along the eastern United States coast were the biggest winners last week as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced contracts for 1.7 gigawatts of offshore wind while signing his state’s Green New Deal into law.

Household recycling ranks #55 on Drawdown’s list of climate solutions. It could eliminate 2.77 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions at a net cost of US$366.9 billion, while producing net savings of $71.1 billion.

The Trump administration is abandoning its accelerated timeline for rolling back the tougher fuel efficiency standards adopted under President Barack Obama, making it virtually certain the inevitable court challenges to the deregulatory push will be heard after 2020 presidential elections in the United States.

Virtually 100% of all global cities will experience profound shifts in climate by 2050 if average global warming reaches 2.0°C, with 77% on track to experience the temperature and rainfall patterns now associated with equatorial regions and 22% projected to suffer conditions never before seen in any city on Earth, says a new study.

Only about half of the 4.5 million people living in the Zimbabwe capital of Harare and four satellite towns have access to municipal water supplies, with some suburbs going weeks without water and reported cases of typhoid beginning to emerge, Climate Home News reports.

Even in the country that is the developed world’s most decentralized federation, and in spite of the tendency in some regions to trust provinces rather than the federal government to set energy policy, a comprehensive survey of Canadians’ attitudes to federalism has detected strong support in almost every province for a single, national climate policy.

More than four in five Canadians support or somewhat support a ban on single-use plastics, and most would be willing to pay a little bit extra for more environmentally sustainable products, according to a new survey released this week by Nanos Research.

With utilities in two southern U.S. states resorting to planned outages to stop their equipment from sparking wildfires during dry, windy conditions, power users are looking for more reliable electricity—and solar and storage battery providers are stepping up to respond.

A year after California became the first state to mandate rooftop solar on all new homes, a nationally representative survey by CITE Research has found that 70% of Americans would like to see the same policy in place across the country.

Two months and 800,000 gallons (three million litres) of crude oil-contaminated water later, Chevron Corporation has been ordered by California officials “to take all measures” to shut down an oil spill into a dry creek bed in Kern County and prevent any and all future disasters.

Off-grid energy systems already employ as many people as centralized utilities in India, Kenya, and Nigeria, and that total is expected to more than double by 2022-23, Power for All reports in its first-ever census of employment in rural electrification.

Calgary-based Pieridae Energy Inc., the company behind the C$10-billion Goldboro liquefied natural gas (LNG) development in Guysborough County, Nova Scotia, has postponed the go/no-go decision on its investment by a year.

With a new CEO set to take over August 6, Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) is about to double down on its effort to brand the tar sands/oil sands industry as a clean technology leader.

Substantially replacing cotton with industrial hemp is one of the 20 carbon reduction options that Drawdown lists as Coming Attractions—strategies that weren’t ready for prime time when the book was published, but looked like promising approaches through mid-century.

New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and other Louisiana communities caught a break over the weekend as Barry, the first named storm of the 2019 season, briefly came ashore as a hurricane before being downgraded to a tropical storm, then a tropical depression.

Reversing the climate crisis will cost less and deliver more positive impacts than most estimates usually assume, and that gap in analysis is shaping up as a barrier to climate action, CBC reported last week, as part of its In Your Backyard climate series.

Governors from 22 U.S. states plus Puerto Rico, including at least three Republicans, are urging the White House to adopt tougher fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks, contending that consumers, automakers, and the environment will all suffer from Donald Trump’s determined effort to roll those standards back.

The southeastern U.S. state of Georgia has emerged as the country’s hottest new market for solar, driven largely by data centre demand from tech giant Facebook and regional reaction to the punishing, 30% tariff the Trump administration imposed on solar components from China in 2018.

With prefabricated housing gradually gaining ground in North America, Canada is beginning to see a small surge in the number of companies producing prefab, high-performance wall panels for passive solar homes.

Building with wood is making a comeback, and is included in Drawdown’s list of “coming attractions” as a decarbonization option that hasn’t yet hit the mainstream, but could be a part of a wider set of post-carbon solutions by 2050.

Canadian Conservative leader Andrew Scheer is vowing to scrap a key element of the Trudeau Liberals’ climate agenda, its yet-to-be-finalized clean fuel standard, if he forms a government after the federal election this fall.

The frequency of major climate disasters has reached one per week around the world, a top United Nations official warns, in a new report that calls for developing countries to prepare now for the “profound impact” they will continue to face.

Buildings, coastlines, and Northern communities in Canada face the most serious risks from climate change, according to a new report produced for the federal Treasury Board by the Council of Canadian Academies.

Propaganda by automated text message appears to be the favoured modus operandi of a newly-minted lobby group pushing opposition to the federal carbon tax—possibly because Elections Canada guidelines do not currently require the third parties behind such communications to disclose their finances.

The mammoth Tennessee Valley Authority is planning to add up to 14 gigawatts (14 billion watts) of new solar capacity and five GW of storage by 2038, in a bid to draw business investors and data centres to the southeastern United States.

Forest companies using herbicides and mechanical removal methods to eradicate aspen from the spruce and pine crops they want to harvest are depriving moose of a winter food source and making wildfires more likely in Alberta forests, the Edmonton Journal reports.

wo months after a diverse collection of Indigenous, civil society, environmental, and labour groups launched the Pact for a Green New Deal in Canada, organizers have issued a report summarizing key recommendations submitted to date by thousands of interested citizens.

Albertans will shell out C$2.5 million in hard-earned tax dollars over the next year for Jason Kenney’s provincial inquiry into the supposed “foreign-funded special interests” undermining the province’s tar sands/oil sands industry.

Eastern Canada’s two biggest cities have unveiled contrasting approaches as the summer heat wave season looms: while Montreal is making a renewed effort to protect vulnerable populations, Toronto is raising concerns that it is cutting back access to life-saving cooling centres.

Made physically and psychologically ill by choking smoke from wildfires that grow ever more commonplace as the climate crisis escalates, more and more western Canadians are grimly choosing the painful social and economic costs of relocating over the toxic toll of remaining.

When a near century-old alpine hut high in the Rockies was precipitously threatened by thawing permafrost last August, Parks Canada struggled with just how much to publicly link the event to climate change—a poor decision, say those urging straight talk on the growing crisis.

Undaunted by a premier avowedly hostile to renewable energy, communities across Alberta are embracing solar electricity as good business, with the small southern town of Raymond determined to be the first in Canada to power itself entirely by the sun.

Two years after a family of Ottawa Valley sheep farmers partnered with French-owned EDF Renewables on a “vegetation abatement” pilot, their herd has grown, they have a significant secondary source of income, and EDF has secured a herbicide-free way to keep over-enthusiastic weeds from overtaking its solar arrays.

While the Trudeau government disappointed its climate allies with its much-anticipated decision to re-approve the controversial Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, it has also crafted a more complicated record on energy and carbon by committing to C$70 billion in low-carbon investment over a 12-year span, reporter Sandy Garossino writes in a provocative post last week for National Observer.

The Doug Ford government will be looking for a hearing before the Supreme Court of Canada after the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled 4-1 last Friday that the federal government had the constitutional authority to introduce its national carbon pricing plan.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed a lawsuit last Thursday against Calgary-based Enbridge Inc., demanding the company shut down the 66-year-old Line 5 pipeline through the Straits of Mackinac.

Canada is aligning its automobile tailpipe emissions standard with California and will work with the most populous U.S. state to promote cleaner-running vehicles, under a new agreement that puts the country onside against the Trump administration’s attempt to roll back fuel efficiency targets introduced by President Barack Obama in 2012.

General Electric plans to close and demolish a 750-megawatt natural gas power plant in California 20 years ahead of schedule, after concluding it can’t compete with inexpensive solar- and wind-generated electricity.

Having done their very best to boost an oil and gas fracking industry that leaves behind massive quantities of contaminated water, U.S. pipeline companies are looking to their next big business opportunity in hauling that water.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau was in Kitimat, British Columbia Monday to announce the latest federal subsidy to the C$40-billion LNG Canada megaproject—a $220-million cash infusion to help project developers buy energy-efficient gas turbines, plus another $55 million to replace the city’s Haisla Bridge to accommodate an expected increase in traffic.

An Oregon senator promised violence against state police, threats from right wing militia shut down the state legislature, and a website using the “blue lives matter” slogan touted a crowdfunding campaign supporting the renegade legislators over the local constabulary, after Democrats tried to pass a carbon cap-and-trade bill introduced by Governor Kate Brown.

The reaction was mixed when the former climate activist nicknamed the “green Jesus of Montreal” announced he would run for Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in the federal election this fall. But in an interview last week, Équiterre co-founder Steven Guilbeault was clear about why he had jumped into the electoral fray.

An ever-growing chorus of American scientists, health professionals, politicians, and media is calling for a country-wide moratorium on fracking, as evidence accumulates that the industry and the known carcinogens it relies on are causing profound harm to public and ecosystem health.

Nine years after federal civil servants first urged Ottawa to “plan an orderly and effective response” to help resettle at least some of the tens of millions of people forecast to be displaced by climate impacts by 2050, Canada has no comprehensive plan to do so, and international law isn’t helping.