Researchers say above average temperatures over Antarctica are driving new records, as heat waves grip the northern hemisphere and wildfires rage across western Canada and the United States The post 'Truly uncharted territory' as world breaks heat record one day after setting it appeared first on Corporate Knights ..read more

An $800-million home retrofit program for lower-income households and a pledge to replace oil heating with heat pumps in new buildings are key elements of the federal government’s long-awaited Green Buildings Strategy, released Tuesday by Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson. The strategy brings together a smorgasbord of funding programs for buildings and energy efficiency, most of which the government has already announced, including measures from the 2024 budget that included $15 billion in apartment construction loans, $6 billion for infrastructure to support ne ..read more

After weeks of intense media speculation and sustained pressure from Democratic lawmakers, major donors, and senior advisors, President Joe Biden has announced that he is bowing out of the presidential race. He is the first sitting president to step aside so close to Election Day. “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus entirely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term,” Biden said in a letter on Sunday. He endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to take his place. “Today I want to offer my ful ..read more

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe recently announced new oil and gas courses that will be offered to grade 11 and 12 students in the province to prepare students to work in those industries. The Saskatchewan Distance Learning Centre, which provides Kindergarten to Grade 12 online education to Saskatchewan students, partnered with Teine Energy, an Alberta-based company to develop the courses. They will include 50 hours of online theory and 50 hours of work placement. This training will directly benefit oil and gas companies and prepare students for careers in industries t ..read more

More than 200 kilometers off Norway’s coast in the North Sea sits the world’s first offshore carbon-capture-and-storage project. Built in 1996, the Sleipner project strips carbon dioxide from natural gas — largely made up of methane — to make it marketable. But instead of releasing the CO2 into the atmosphere, the greenhouse gas is buried. The effort stores around 1 million metric tons of CO2 per year — and is praised by many as a pioneering success in global attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, total global CO2 emissions hit an all-time high of around 35.8 billion tons, or gig ..read more

While around 2,400 GOP delegates will meet at an arena in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention this week, a small group of conservatives will be convening almost five kilometres away to talk about a topic not expected to gain much traction at the main event: climate change. Eco-right organizations such as the Conservative Climate Foundation and Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions were set to hold a reception on Tuesday at a horticultural conservancy where members of the Conservative Climate Caucus will speak. But their concerns about a warming planet will likely go largely un ..read more

Farmers around the world all need to deal with weeds. The most widely used chemical product they use to kill those unwanted plants is glyphosate, often sold under commercial names like Roundup. In 2015, the World Health Organization declared glyphosate a “Probable Human Carcinogen.” This link to cancer was reinforced in January 2024 when a jury in the United States concluded Roundup caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and ordered chemical company Bayer — which purchased Roundup producer Monsanto in 2018 — to pay US$2.5 billion in damages. Bayer has announced it intends to ap ..read more

Just a few months before the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the Biden administration appears to be accelerating its timeline to finalize a regulation that could protect 36 million workers from the harmful effects of exposure to extreme heat. On Tuesday, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, released the draft text of a proposed rule on preventing heat injury and illness amongst the U.S. workers. If finalized, the proposed rule would become the nation’s first-ever federal regulation on heat stress in the workplace. The development comes at the start of a s ..read more

Last week, the federal government approved a US$7-billion takeover by Swiss-based Glencore of the steelmaking coal mines of Teck Resources, in a deal it hailed as a long term measure providing “generational assurance of sound environmental stewardship.” But conservation and financial experts say that conditions of the approval are inadequate to protect the Elk Valley in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, where the company’s mining operations have for decades released high levels of the mineral selenium from waste rock into local waterways, harming fish populations and raising human healt ..read more

North American meat and dairy companies have been hard at work in recent years, attempting to clean up their eco-image. While environmental groups zero in on animal agriculture as a top driver of climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss and ocean degradation, a growing number of consumers and governments have been demanding more from the sector to cut its carbon footprint. However, most of the industry’s efforts so far appear to be focused on shifting messaging and undercutting climate policies rather than shifting practices. Recent analysis by UK-based think tank InfluenceMap shows th ..read more