The Toronto Star
Councillor Shelley Carroll’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped.
“Oh my God, it’s a plastic bag,” she blurted in mock panic.
Not just any plastic bag: an official City of Toronto plastic bag, with the city logo emblazoned on each side.
The bags were delivered to each councillor’s office this week, filled with the City of Toronto lapel pins councillors give out each year.
Continue to the full story...The Toronto Star
Water, particularly fresh water, is an incredibly precious resource. It’s been dubbed the “oil of the 21st century.” Yet our use of water has largely been overshadowed by measurements of our carbon footprint.
The Globe and Mail
New energy-efficiency standards are set to kick in for new homes in Ontario.
Effective Thursday, the province’s building code will require near full-height insulation on foundation walls in all new-home construction.
The province estimates that such homes will be typically about 28 per cent more energy efficient than a decade ago.
The new requirement is the second step in a three-phase approach to energy efficiency brought in with the introduction of the 2006 Building Code.
The Toronto Star
Is there a changing of the guard on climate change? Or no guard at all?
I was in Germany last week, on a tour organized by a non-profit company called Inwent and funded by the German government.
It let a small group from Canada and the United States meet with government and business people involved in the country’s booming renewable-energy industry.
Telegraph
Mr Obama selected Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Chu as energy secretary and Carol Browner, a confidante of former Vice President Al Gore, to lead a White House council on energy and climate.
Dr Chu, 60, is director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, and is a leading advocate of reducing greenhouse gases by developing new energy sources .
The Globe and Mail
More than two trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.
More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA’s GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.
The Toronto Star
Pumping compressed air underground so it can be extracted later to generate electricity could prove one of the most effective ways in the short term for Ontario to add vast amounts of renewable energy to the power system, industry experts say.
The Toronto Star
Federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice addressed the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan yesterday, calling for a reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions while at the same time ensuring economic growth and sustainable development.
“Canada like the rest of the world worries about the health of our planet, and we already living with the impacts of climate change,” Prentice told the crowded room of international delegates last night.
The Toronto Star
Diplomats say European leaders have agreed on how they will carry out an ambitious plan to fight global warming.
The plan lays out how the 27 member countries will cut carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 and is meant to set an example for world efforts to tackle climate change.
The Globe and Mail
We may be champions when it comes to hauling our blue boxes to the curb, but Canadians are less aware of the impact their consumer habits have on greenhouse-gas emissions, according to two new studies from Statistics Canada.
Canadian households shoulder nearly half of the responsibility for greenhouse gasses emitted into the atmosphere by the nation, most of which come from the gas our vehicles guzzle, the electricity we use and the products we buy, the study on household greenhouse-gas emissions suggests.
