streetfestival

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanuts

https://mastodon.world/@exocomics/113087039277391570

https://mstdn.social/@DemocracyMattersALot/113063952703333947

BREAKING: Following Donald Trump’s debacle at Arlington National Cemetery, Vote Vets released this devastating ad calling out Donald Trump for his BS. Retweet to make sure all Americans see this.

Click link for video (1 min, 33 secs) hosted on a Mastodon instance

The Canadian government is spending money to attack rigorous journalists who partially dissent with Canadian foreign policy (e.g., Israel and Co's genocide) and to call them Chinese state-affiliated news outlets.

I already had strong suspicions the Canadian government was employing associations with China as pretext to disparage and censor dissenting ideas, people, and platforms. This is strong evidence.

I wish our government focused more on governing based on public wants and needs and less on covering up governance that goes against or that is morally bankrupt or corrupt

The BC Conservative party’s official “climate policy” explicitly rejects the idea that climate change is a “crisis.”

In August 2022, Rustad retweeted a tweet from prominent climate science denier Patrick Moore casting doubt on climate science.: “The case for CO2 being the control knob of global temperature gets weaker every day,” said the tweet amplified by Rustad, adding that people should “celebrate C02.”

Several million spread across a handful of projects may seem like small potatoes compared to other federal financing worth hundreds of millions, but Alex Cool-Fergus, Climate Action Network Canada’s national policy manager, is frustrated to see the federal government pump any money into the hydrogen sector. In an interview with Canada’s National Observer she called hydrogen an improbable “techno-fix” that has been effectively marketed by the fossil fuel industry.

The possible end uses for hydrogen are dwindling, which is eroding its forecasted demand. To put in perspective just how significant this is, four years ago Natural Resources Canada expected the global market could be worth up to $11.7 trillion, but now says it could be worth up to $1.9 trillion — an 84 per cent drop.

“It's disappointing to see that the federal government continues to invest in this false solution, and that disappointment is amplified by the fact that some of this money is going to massive companies that don't need any more money,” she said, calling it a “slap in the face.”

“If [fossil fuel companies are] going to be investing in this at all, they should be using their own profits.” Last year, Enbridge posted $5.8 billion in profit and greenlit $10 billion worth of new projects.

Export Development Canada (EDC) and other national crown corporations have provided $7.6 to $13.5 billion a year between 2020 and 2022 to support the domestic fossil fuel industry, as compared with just $147 million for in-country renewable energy production, number-crunching by the IISD revealed in June.

Canada was criticized in the new report for a “lack of transparency in reporting” that made it hard to ascertain whether finance was going to domestic or international markets. EDC data shows it has provided $88 billion to the oil and gas sector since 2016.

Today, the NDP sits in the shadow of the Liberal government, caught between criticizing those in power while also attempting to claim agency over bills being passed. Most peculiar of all has been Singh’s retreat from online spaces. In 2023, he deactivated his TikTok account citing privacy concerns, but the shift in the tone of his content went beyond that.

His once fresh, relatable, curtain-tearing content had been replaced by generic campaign videos of Singh reading scripts word-for-word that feel like they were copied directly from the platform section of the NDP website. It became boring, uninspired and — most importantly — ineffective. Polls now project a loss of seats for the NDP in the next election.

One thing is for certain: we are closer to a Singh exit than we are from his arrival. Come October, he will have been party leader for seven years — he will certainly not be leader in seven years. So, has his choice to abandon his online roots damaged the future of his party?

Whatever the future of the NDP holds and whoever its next leader will be, it is clear that it remains a party in desperate need of reimagination — the exact same issue that Singh was brought in to solve.

This is an aspect of the carbon capture greenwashing initiative I wasn't aware of. It will need another pipeline network that can be very costly to human and environmental health (and operated by an industry that our government is willfully blind to).

Carbon capture is becoming a linchpin of Canada’s plan to reduce emissions from its oil and gas sector, but to pull this plan off would require massive investments in necessary infrastructure: pipelines, pressurization stations, equipping carbon capture to bitumen upgraders and more, all of which could fail. In a carbon management strategy, released in 2023, the federal government says to support the country’s emission reduction efforts, carbon capture capacity must grow 270 per cent from current levels by 2030, with “significant further scaling required” to reach net-zero by 2050.

when carbon dioxide pipelines fail, they can fail catastrophically.

According to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, there have been at least 76 reported safety incidents related to CO2 pipelines since 2010 in the United States. Some incidents are minor and others are disastrous, but all point to the risks of transporting and storing carbon dioxide as a way to manage greenhouse gas emissions.

Dodging a full assessment

By far the largest project would be the Pathways Alliance’s $16.5-billion flagship carbon capture project, which would include a carbon dioxide pipeline stretching 400 kilometres from the oilsands in northern Alberta to a storage hub about 300 kilometres east of Edmonton.

The Pathways Alliance is splitting its megaproject into 126 smaller segments, with multiple applications for various licences with the AER. As previously reported by Canada’s National Observer, that means the project won’t be subject to a full environmental assessment that examines what the impact of the project in its entirety would be. “The impacts are never being articulated to the public, and that includes impacts on the environment, the climate and Indigenous rights,” said Matt Hulse, a lawyer with Ecojustice collaborating with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation to call for an impact assessment.

So why, years after the Premier promised legal reforms that would deliver “more homes faster” and 1.5 million net new homes by 2030, is the housing shortage even worse? Why are housing starts actually down, year over year? It’s because rather than ending restrictions on midrise housing and slamming the brakes on sprawl and highway schemes that squander construction, Ontario’s changes to land use planning, environmental and transportation laws and policies have done the opposite.

Soon after Premier Doug Ford took office, his government began to dismantle even the modest measures the previous government had taken to promote more efficient housing construction.

Despite calls from housing and environmental experts across the political spectrum — and its own housing task force — to scrap outdated rules such as minimum parking requirements and to permit mid-rise housing on major streets throughout existing residential neighbourhoods, Ford intervened. He personally blocked efforts to legalize even 4-storey “4-plex” apartment buildings.

In recent months, as his government’s failure on housing has become more obvious, Ford has tried to pass the buck by blaming everyone from immigrants to the Bank of Canada. What he glosses over is that the housing market could easily have adapted to population and rate changes, but has instead turned the challenge of high interest rates and the opportunity of a growing population into a housing crisis by willfully sabotaging the solutions.

It’s generally fair to wait for a policy to unfold, to leave some time to judge its effects, before we decide whether it will succeed or fail. The Ford government has done its critics a favour this week, however, with its announced changes to drug policy in Ontario, shutting more than half of the province’s safe consumption sites. The logic adopted by the government and its defenders is that because the province’s overall high rate of opioid deaths has continued, these safe consumption sites are a failure. This is despite the fact that no patient has died of an overdose at these sites precisely because they’ve been monitored and treated.

The bad news for the government, and the good news for its critics, is that if the benchmark for success is "reducing the rate of opioid overdose deaths in Ontario” then nothing announced this week will succeed. That’s not because an emphasis on treatment over harm reduction is itself indefensible. It’s because the scale of the problem that Ontario faces is so far beyond the resources that have so far been committed, and because addiction itself is such a wicked problem for health policy.