This is a scrapbook of ideas. One can hardly call it a blog, but I maintain it to file away thoughts I find interesting, like shiny pebbles.

Almost Extinct

Every day, hundreds of endangered species get closer to extinction. By working together, we can help save them.

June 2011

Selling greenhouse emissions for billions

Alberta tar sands

Photo by Peter Essick.

Wake up, Canada:

Oilsands emissions data left out of UN report

Federal government admits deliberately leaving numbers out that indicate pollution from oilsands production outstrips auto emissions… The data also indicated that emissions per barrel of oil produced by the sector is increasing, despite claims made by the industry in an advertising campaign.

Overall, Environment Canada said that the oilsands industry was responsible for about 6.5 per cent of Canada’s annual greenhouse gas emissions in 2009, up from five per cent in 2008. This also indicates a growth in emissions that is close to about 300 per cent since 1990, which cancel out many reductions in pollution from other economic sectors.

Via Vancouver Sun

China targeting tens of billions in Alberta oilsands investment

Alberta government and business leaders who sat down with Chinese energy executives this week were told tens of billions of dollars in new oilpatch investment will flow in the coming years — if export capacity issues in Canada are improved.

In the past 18 months alone, Chinese oil companies have pumped more than $13 billion into developing crude oil and natural gas prospects in Western Canada.

However, future spending is contingent upon Canada building new pipeline capacity to transport oilsands — such as the $5.5-billion Northern Gateway project planned by Enbridge Inc. — and natural gas to the West Coast, where liquefied gas could be shipped by tanker into the Chinese market, he said.

Via Calgary Herald

May 2011

Sperm Whale encounter

January 2011

Ross Allen Reptile Institute

June 2010

How much CO2 does this article produce?

(CNN) — Twenty milligrams; that’s the average amount of carbon emissions generated from the time it took you to read the first two words of this article.
How green is your website? Calculating all the factors involved in a website can be tricky.

Now, depending on how quickly you read, around 80, perhaps even 100 milligrams of C02 have been released. And in the several minutes it will take you to get to the end of this story, the number of milligrams of greenhouse gas emitted could be several thousand, if not more.

This may not seem like a lot: “But in aggregate, if you consider all the people visiting a web site and then all the seconds that each of them spends on it, it turns out to be a large number,” says Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University who studies the environmental impact of computing.

Read the rest on CNN

July 2009