Alberta Tar Sands Pipelines

A huge Arctic ozone hole opened up over the Northern Hemisphere for the first time this year, an international research team reported Sunday.

The hole covered 2 million square kilometres - about twice the size of Ontario - and allowed high levels of harmful ultraviolet radiation to hit large swaths of northern Canada, Europe and Russia this spring, the 29 scientists say.

The discovery of the "unprecedented" hole comes as the Canadian government is moving to reduce staff in what Environment Minister Peter Kent calls the "streamlining" of its ozone monitoring network.

Environment Canada scientist David Tarasick, whose team played a key role in the report published Sunday in the journal Nature, is not allowed to discuss the discovery with the media.... Read more »

CALGARY - Alberta's energy minister says pipeline companies are being victimized by an increasingly hostile environmental movement.

In an interview with The Canadian Press, Ron Liepert noted it wasn't long ago that the pipeline sector went largely unnoticed, but that has changed with TransCanada's (TSX:TRP) plans for the Keystone XL pipeline to ship oilsands product south through the United States.

"I think back to the good old days this pipeline business used to be sort of a sleepy, boring, unnoticed part of the industry. That's not the case anymore," Liepert said.

"I think pipelines have sort of become the baby seals of the environmental groups these days."

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Luke Copland is an associate professor in the geography department at the University of Ottawa who co-authored the research published on Carleton University’s website. He said the Serson Ice Shelf shrank from 205 square kilometres to two remnant sections five years ago, and was further diminished this past summer.

Prof. Copland said the shelf went from a 42-square-km floating glacier tongue to 25 square km, and the second section from 35 square km to 7 square km, off Ellesmere Island’s northern coastline.

This past summer, Ward Hunt Ice Shelf’s central area disintegrated into drifting ice masses, leaving two separate ice shelves measuring 227 and 74 square km respectively, reduced from 340 square km the previous year.... Read more »

A report by an advisory board to the government of Canada estimates that the effects of global warming will cost the country’s economy 5 billion Canadian dollars a year by 2020 and that those costs will rise substantially afterward.

Unlike earlier studies, the report does not examine the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions; it looked at the economic consequences of global warming.

“The costs we could incur from climate change are the costs of continuously adjusting to changing conditions,” the advisory board, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, said. “Although harder to calculate and less immediately apparent, they are real and significant and bear understanding.”
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