Tag: Emissions

Trudeau government’s Climate Accountability Act passes to the sound of one hand clapping

Trudeau government’s Climate Accountability Act passes to the sound of one hand clapping

Posted by | Jun 29, 2021 | , |

Accompanied by much damning with faint praise, the Trudeau government’s climate change legislation passed third reading in the House of Commons last week. A few minutes after midnight on June 23 – just ahead of the first record-breaking heat wave of the summer – the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act was approved by a vote of 204 to 114. Then it was off to the Senate where the committee assigned to conduct a pre-study had already concluded that the incoming Bill C-12 is “weak and will not lead to actual reductions of GHGs.” Flaccid as the act is, the...

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Starr’s Point Index #5

Starr’s Point Index #5

Posted by | Nov 12, 2020 | |

Country with largest increase in COVID-19 cases in October: Czechia (formerly Czech Republic) 379% Country with second largest increase: Poland 296% Canada’s October increase: 49% Country with highest rate of COVID positive tests to Oct. 31: Czechia 14.6% U.S test positivity rate to Oct. 31: 6.5% Canada test positivity rate to Oct. 31: 2.4% Nova Scotia rate to date: 0.94% [1]   COVID-USA Number of states with COVID-19 case increases greater than 50% in October: 15 Number of those 15 states won by Donald Trump in 2020 Presidential election: 11 Number of those 11 states that have not supported a...

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Frontier Mine should have been headed off before the impasse

Frontier Mine should have been headed off before the impasse

Posted by | Feb 6, 2020 | , |

The Frontier oil sands mine has jumped to the political front burner lately. Whether the federal government will approve the northern Alberta project was the second question the Conservatives asked when parliament resumed last week. Naturally the Conservatives wanted it done, right away. But the Bloc, feeling its oats in the minority parliament had a different idea, calling approval “the end of us meeting our greenhouse gas reduction targets and the end of the Paris agreement.” And this week there is word that the Liberal caucus is split on the issue, one that has been framed as a litmus...

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Obsession with larger vehicles has gone into overdrive

Obsession with larger vehicles has gone into overdrive

Posted by | Jan 22, 2020 | |

Disconnect between concern about climate change and the vehicles people drive keeps growing. In 2018 I noted a couple of troubling Canadian transportation trends – the number of registered road vehicles is increasing faster than the population and SUVs and their ilk are increasingly taking over the roads. The drift continues. Between 2017 and 2018, Canada’s human population increase of 1.41 per cent was outpaced by a 2.01 per cent increase in registered road vehicles. In Nova Scotia, where population growth has become a fixation, the number of humans grew by only 0.96 per cent, while cars on the...

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Decade look backs miss climate mess

Decade look backs miss climate mess

Posted by | Jan 6, 2020 | |

At the risk of being repetitive, it’s hard not to address the dearth of discussion about climate change in the media’s reflections on the ten-year period that ended last week. Even as drought stricken Australia burned amidst heat waves and fierce winds, the media presented a menu more concerned with reflections on populism, pop culture and political positioning than climate change. Then, forcing everyone to move on, Trump changed the channel with his reckless adventurism in Iraq. One notable exception to the trend bemoaned above was a piece in the National Observer, part of a collaboration with HuffPost. It...

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Richard Starr, The man behind the Point

About Richard

RICHARD STARR has had careers as a journalist, public servant, broadcaster, political staffer and freelance policy adviser. He is author of numerous newspaper and magazine articles, a former radio and TV producer and weekly newspaper editor, and the author of three non-fiction books. Starr has lived in Dartmouth for more than 30 years.

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