Lori Kufner and Kevin Brachen, fun guys and the brains behind Newmindspace.
Candida Paltiel, Director of the Planet in Focus environmental film festival.
Ryan Wiseman joins us with a guest segment on “ghost loads.”
The headlines in brief:
Opposition parties have pledged to defeat the federal Clean Air Bill, which has been strongly criticized by environmentalists for setting no short-term goals on climate change, and the conservatives say they will not consider a failure of the bill a non-confidence vote.
David Miller has announced his public transit platform, which will emphasize busses and streetcars and play down the role of subways;
Ontario has received royal assent on its Clean Water Act;
Porter airlines has begun its flights from the Toronto Island Airport amid protests;
The world is in for more climate extremes according to a new study based on several of the world’s most advanced climate models
Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets’ worth of natural resources every year by 2050 on current trends according to the World Wildlife Fund’s 2006 Living Planet Report
UN experts said the number of oxygen-starved “dead zones” in the world’s seas and oceans has risen more than a third in the past two years because of fertilizer, sewage, animal waste and fossil-fuel burning
Iceland has announced it will be resuming commercial whaling in the face of a worldwide ban;
A Haze polluting the Arctic has thickened in the past decade despite lower emissions by Russian factories, perhaps because of more forest fires or pollution from Asia;
Environmentalist David Suzuki at age 70 has announced will be retiring shortly after publishing the second installment to his autobiography.
Mary Pattenden, Director of the Climate Change program at Pollution Probe
Karen Buck, member of Citizens for a Safe Environment and the drafting committee for the preparation of an environmental assessment on Toronto’s waste issue.
The headlines in brief:
The federal government has released its Clean Air Act, which has been strongly criticized by environmentalists for setting no short-term goals on climate change;
The Canada Youth Climate Coalition staged funerals across the country to protest the federal government’s inaction in climate change;
Conservative Environment Minister Rona has raised eyebrows by citing a reduction of automobiles with no known source;
The bikechain vote failed to reach quorum on University of Toronto campus;
A study on women with breast cancer in Women has linked the onset of the disease to working in the agricultural and automotive industries;
A Memorandum of Understanding has been established to begin work on an 8.3 million acre national park in the NW territories;
Canada has assumed the controversial position of trying scuttle an international ban on deep-sea trawlers;
Machine gun target practice by the US Coast Guard has been temporarily suspended among Canadian concerns about safety and lead pollution;
The US population hit 300 million on Tuesday morning.
Michael Louis Johnson from Streets are for People. Dr. Frank Hartman on the federal conservative announcement about the Clean Air Bill.
The headlines in brief:
- The federal government announced its Clean Air Bill this week, which has come under criticism for setting intensity-based, rather than absolute limits;
- Environmental Defense has released a report on reported greenhouse gas emissions across Canada;
- The government of Ontario has signed a letter of intent with the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management to reduce transboundary emissions;
- Environment Minister Rona Ambrose is under fire for making several apparently inaccurate statements to a parliamentary committee last week;
- The insurance industry has indicated that they will be raising insurance costs in areas susceptible to hurricanes because of the impact of global climate change;
- Representatives from 20 of the world’s most polluting nations met behind closed doors in northern Mexico to discuss ways to combat global warming;
- A new facility for wind energy development, the Wind Energy Institute of Canada, was officially opened this week in North Cape;
- Today is the final day for voting on the proposed bikechain levy for University of Toronto undergraduate students (click here for ballot locations).
