350 or bust: The Harper Government: Making The North Pole Safe, For Oil Companies & You

The Alberta tar sands aren’t only environmentally friendly, they’re good for the ozone layer, they will stop illiteracy and alleviate erectile dysfunction; and that’s just the tip of the melting iceberg! Don’t believe me? The Canadian federal government can’t stop gushing over them, so they must be out-of-this-world amazing! * * StopGreenWash.ca Great Plains Tar […]

350 or bust: First Nations & Tar Sands: “Our Backs Are To The Wall”

From the Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance: * More links: Indigenous Environmental Network Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance NoKXL Tar Sands Action

350 or bust: Keystone XL: Nightmare In The Making

* Think it can’t happen? Remember Mayflower Arkansas, where residents of a residential suburb woke up to a sea of dirty oil around their homes. More links: Alberta Oil Spill: Up To 3,000 Barrels Spill Near Red Deer River Reports Plains Midstream Canada Alberta Oil Spill Will Take Months To Clean Up (Photos)

350 or bust: The Obama Tar Sands Pipeline

Is the Keystone XL pipeline really what President Obama wants to leave as his legacy, for future generations to remember him by – and curse him for? * Meanwhile climate destabilization continues as unabated as our carbon dioxide emissions: Czech PM Declares Emergency As Floods Threaten Prague: Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas declared a state of […]

350 or bust: No More “Nice Guy”: Canada’s Democracy & Reputation Tarred

It turns out Canada’s reputation is getting as toxic as the Alberta tar sands tailings ponds: * Some more facts: Canadian federal taxpayers subsidize the oil industry $1.38 billion a year. And that’s not counting your Province’s subsidies to the oil industry. The International Energy Agency says up to two thirds of known fossil reserves […]

350 or bust: Canadian Oil Waste Blackens Detroit

* The Koch brothers are about their usual dirty business, this time in Detroit: WINDSOR, Ontario — Assumption Park gives residents of this city lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. Lately they’ve been treated to another sight: a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other […]

350 or bust: Goodbye Fossil Fuels: Rejecting Scarcity & Embracing Abundance

It’s TED Talk Tuesday on 350orbust, and today’s talk, like last week’s, is from TEDx Sydney. Danny Kennedy,Founder and President of Sungevity. Before starting Sungevity Kennedy spent decades campaigning with Greenpeace; in this talk he discusses how profit can save the planet rather than destroying it. * Sungevity: The Life & Times Of Solar People

350 or bust: Harper’s House of Cards Disintegrating Under Weight of Conservative Senators

* We are living in interesting times, as the saying goes. Here in Canada, the house of cards that is the federal Conservative government of Stephen Harper is starting to self-destruct; the only surprising thing to me is that it took this long to happen. The Harper government is throwing bodies overboard as fast as […]

350 or bust: B.C. Votes Against Its Future

I don’t live in Canada’s most westerly province, but I know that British Columbians pride themselves in their slogan, “Beautiful British Columbia”. It is a province of vast wilderness, ancient mountains, and pristine waters, although its beauty has been marred in recent years by the pine-beetle-destroyed pine trees covering vast regions of the Rocky Mountains. […]

350 or bust: Scientists To Harper Government: It’s Time For Grown Up Conversation on Climate Change

This week twelve climate scientists and energy experts penned a letter to Canada’s Natural Resources (aka “Oil”) Minister, Joe Oliver, to express their concern about his ongoing support for building new pipelines and expanding fossil fuel production in face of the threat of climate change. Mr. Oliver was an international banker before he was elected […]

350 or bust: Betting The Farm On Hazardous Pipelines With Poor Track Records

* Ready or not, painful or not, we are in the middle of a huge shift from an oil dependent economy to one that is run on renewables, the Great Transition. Our governments and the corporations that control them – the people and structures that have become out-of-this-world wealthy from the way we do things […]

350 or bust: Carbon Polluters Have Pushed True Cost of Their Pollution Onto The Rest Of Us For Too Long

* Posted on March 12, 2013 on Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s Facebook page: We pay for carbon pollution in far too many ways. Today, Rep. Henry Waxman, Rep. Blumenauer, Senator Schatz, and I introduced a carbon fee discussion draft. Our goal is to begin a collaborative process that results in legislation that not only reduces carbon [...]

350 or bust: Warning: Use Of This Fuel Product Contributes To Climate Change & Species Extinction

Canadian lawyer, Robert Shirkey, is Executive Director of a new nonprofit organization, Our Horizon, that has launched an ambitious and well-coordinated campaign to have warning labels placed on every gasoline pump in this country This can be done, the campaign asserts, by having the 4,000 municipalities in Canada pass bylaws instituting this rule. The group’s [...]

350 or bust: This Earth Day, Let’s Focus On Saving Humans

It’s a snowy and cold Earth Day morning in northwestern Ontario. On this Earth Day, Joe Romm over at Think Progress muses about renaming Earth Day – after all, it’s really humans and our civilization that is in peril at this point by our feckless, reckless and cavalier treatment of the ecosystem that gives us [...]

350 or bust: Next, Kansas Republicans Plan To Outlaw Sunshine

* No matter how hard the fossil fools try to stuff the renewable energy genie back into the bottle (click here to read more about Kansas’s latest back-the-past bill), the green energy economy is growing. For example, in March 2013 the number of Australian homes with solar power systems passed the one million mark, according [...]

350 or bust: Internalizing the Externalities of Fossil Fuels

It’s time to internalize the externalities of the fossil fuel industry. For far too long, the extremely high price we all pay in the pollution of our “commons” – air, water, and climate, which also affects the health of far too many of us, has been ignored by governments and the fossil fuel industry. Putting [...]

350 or bust: Let’s Stop Being Fossil Fools, And Just Say No To Bankrolling Climate Change

Via Fossil Free Canada: What do you call an industry that is planning to cook the planet? An industry responsible for destroying land, polluting the air and water, and violating the rights of people around the world? An industry who’s business model means burning over three times the amount of carbon our planetary carbon budget [...]

350 or bust: Ending Fossil Fuel’s War On Us And The Planet

I’m on a (low-carbon) holiday for the next while, with little access to a computer, so please accept my apologies for delayed responses or posting of comments. All should be back to normal the last week of March. In the meantime, I scoured my files for some photos and graphics to post while I’m away. [...]

350 or bust: Greedy Lying Bastards: Exposing The Fossil Fools Who Put Profit Before Human Lives

* One of the few-and-far-between perks of being a climate blogger is that occasionally I get access to books and movies before the general public does. This past weekend I got to watch “Greedy Lying Bastards” before it hit movie screens across the U.S. on Monday. Sunday night I, along with some fellow Citizens Climate [...]

350 or bust: Canadian First Nations Leader Takes Tar Sands Fight To Europe Ahead Of Key Council Vote

via Friends of the Earth Europe & Bill Erasmus, Dene National Chief A leader of Canada’s Indigenous peoples gave a dramatic eyewitness account of the environmental and social devastation associated with mining tar sands at the world’s biggest tourism fair on Friday March 8, ahead of key vote by the European Council later this year [...]

350 or bust: Ecosystem Collapse: A Clarion Call For A New Way of Being Human

* It’s been three and a half years since I began talking about, blogging about, and working for action on, climate change. It took me a while to call myself a “climate activist” but it’s a label that I now wear proudly, although I am starting to prefer the term “fossil fuel abolitionist”. Like the [...]

350 or bust: We Could Have Stopped Climate Chaos But We Were Too Damned Cheap

What a beautiful Friday morning in my part of the world. The sky is blue and clear on a minus 16 degree C March 1st day. I’m watching two pileated woodpeckers enjoy the suet in the bird feeder just outside the window. They certainly are impressive birds, especially close up! I took this picture earlier [...]

350 or bust: Arctic Sea Ice Death Spiral Visible From Space

Holy sh*t – if this video doesn’t alarm the heck out of you, you don’t have a pulse! New findings on the state of the Arctic sea ice, resulting from a collaboration between many international agencies, confirm new data collected from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite spanning 2010 to 2012, and data from NASA’s [...]

350 or bust: A Fork In the Road

“Transition to a post-fossil fuel world of clean energies will not occur as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy. Fossil fuels are cheap only because they are subsidized and do not pay their costs to society. Air and water pollution from fossil fuel extraction and use have high costs in human health, food [...]

350 or bust: Take Time To Renew Your Spirit

We act not because it’s easy, but because it’s right. Thousands of people are gathering in Washington DC today to send a message to President Obama that clean air, clean water, and a stable climate are not negotiable – the Keystone XL Pipeline must not be approved. *