Category: Uncategorized

Vancouver Magazine: She Saw You

A man carrying a blue Nalgene water bottle with a “No Pipelines” sticker strikes up a conversation with a woman in a health-food store on the Drive. It’s mid-December, 2014, and they chat about kombucha and Hornby Island before parting ways. Later, the man regrets letting her go without even an email address. He submits a heartfelt letter to the Georgia Straight’s I Saw You section and hopes for the best.

No one ever replies.

This is because neither the man, nor the woman, nor even the Nalgene bottle ever existed. Trying to contact the man from the shop—or the woman folding her delicates in Rainbow Coin-op Laundry, or the man in the black sweater in La Taqueria on Hastings—will only lead to Lisa Icarus (not her real name). She’s the elusive author of at least a dozen anonymous I Saw You letters. And, therefore, possibly the most prolific inventor of supposedly genuine romantic encounters in Vancouver.

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Desmog Canada: Should Taxpayers Be On The Hook For Cleaning Up Saskatchewan’s Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells?

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall announced Monday he asked the federal government for $156 million to help fund oil and gas well cleanup efforts. In a press release he said the program “will stimulate economic activity and job creation while at the same time delivering environmental benefits.”

But Saskatchewan already has a fund in place for dealing with so-called “orphan wells,” or wells that have been left behind by companies or individuals who are no longer financially able to pay or legally responsible. Since 2009 the province has collected payments from wells in operation, and if the well doesn’t meet a particular threshold for financial stability the province may demand a refundable deposit as a guarantee. As of last fall that fund held $11.4 million in payments, up a million dollars from the previous year, plus another $45 million in refundable deposits.

The Alberta NDP government said in a statement on Tuesday that the province — despite having about seven times as many orphan wells as Saskatchewan — will not seek federal money because “industry should continue covering costs related to remediating abandoned wells.”

So why does Saskatchewan need $156 million now?

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Desmog: Low Expectations for Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall’s High Emissions

The summer of 2010 was a bad year for Saskatchewan. Record floods, winds, and hailstorms led to 175 communities declaring states of emergency, and costing the province over $100 million. “The Summer of Storms” also made it the worst year ever for insurers, with $100 million in crop insurance payouts.

Premier Brad Wall, a man once described by Maclean’s as “standing athwart history yelling ‘I’m not sure about this!’ ” responded to the string of natural disasters with a telling quote: “The one thing the province cannot control is the weather,” he said.

Unfortunately for Saskatchewan, the type of extreme weather that cost it so dearly in 2010 is symptomatic of what models predict for the province under a changing climate.

Sure enough, extreme weather was yet again making headlines and shutting down entire cities in 2014.

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The Tyee: Six ways climate change is getting personal in B.C.

Climate change is getting personal in British Columbia. Shifts in weather patterns in recent years are already changing the way we live in this province, whether you ranch, ski, love eating shellfish, or happen to notice the forest on the edge of town isn’t the same as it was when you wandered through it as a child.

Here are six ways global warming is coming home for British Columbians.

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BCBusiness Magazine: Why an economist picked Kamloops over Vancouver. Hint: it has to do with the commute

An average morning for Joel Wood used to begin with a 20-minute drive from his Langley home. He would arrive at a park-and-ride in South Surrey, board a bus to a Canada Line station, then take a train into Vancouver. From there, it was just one more bus ride to his job as assistant director of the Centre for Environmental Studies at the Fraser Institute in Kitsilano. At the end of the day, he would do it all again in reverse—a total commute time of 75 minutes each way, or about two and a half hours per day. He would spend 50 hours each month in his car, buses and trains—the equivalent of working more than three extra months per year. “It was pretty taxing,” says the 34-year-old father of one (soon to be two). “You’re away from family, away from small children, away from your partner.”

After three years of slogging from Langley to Kitsilano and back, Wood started to look for work in smaller cities; his wife is from a small town and they both pined for a slower pace of living.

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Toronto Star: Russians blamed for attack on Syrian hospital

Russia is being blamed for an airstrike on a hospital in the northeastern Syrian city of Hama, continuing a pattern of attacks begun by the regime of Bashar Assad.

While Russia maintains it is striking Islamic State (IS) targets in the country, the hospital that was hit Friday was more than 70 kilometres from the nearest IS-supporting region.

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Hakai Magazine: The Blob in the Northeast Pacific Ocean

For the past couple of years, researchers from California to Alaska have witnessed a warm-water phenomenon mess with the coastline’s marine food web. It’s like watching a horror B-flick unfold: suddenly, a strange miasma emerges, things get weird, and everyone starts behaving differently. Appropriately, a scientist nicknamed this tepid ocean broth The Blob.

“It’s the type of thing you might expect to happen once in a millennium,” says Richard Dewey.

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Toronto Star: Russians blamed for attack on Syrian hospital

Russia is being blamed for an airstrike on a hospital in the northeastern Syrian city of Hama, continuing a pattern of attacks begun by the regime of Bashar Assad.

While Russia maintains it is striking Islamic State (IS) targets in the country, the hospital that was hit Friday was more than 70 kilometres from the nearest IS-supporting region.

Video posted on YouTube, apparently shot in the aftermath of the attack, shows doctors and nurses sprawled out on a floor littered with debris and medical supplies.

Read more here.

BCBusiness: Startup Pilots a Social Network for Condos

Looking to connect with your condo-dwelling neighbours? There’s an app for that.

“We think that neighbours should be neighbours,” says Joseph Nakhla, founder of Bazinga Technologies Inc. Compared to his grandmother’s native Egypt, where her relatives regularly used their neighbour’s landline—the only at the building—at all hours, living in Vancouver can be an isolating experience. A 2012 Vancouver Foundation report found that more than half of us have never so much as picked up the mail for our neighbours.

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