https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanuts

I'm on a mailing list and got an email that read

We’re super excited to announce that They’re Trying To Kill Us is now on Apple TV for download or rental, and streaming for FREE on Roku, Tubi and Youtube’s official movie channel

I watched it a year or two ago. It's more about anti-Black food and environmental racism in the US than it is about veganism per se, but I found it a highly edifying vegan-ish video.

https://www.theyretryingtokillus.com/

They’re Trying to Kill Us is a new groundbreaking documentary from Executive Producers seven-time NBA All-Star, Chris Paul and 7X Grammy winner, Billie Eilish.

The film features notable influencers from the fields of Hip Hop, medicine, sports, entertainment, policy, and politics weighing in on the singular most deadly threat to American society that mainstream media doesn't want to talk about.

https://mastodon.world/@exocomics/113087039277391570

The Canadian government is spending money to attack rigorous journalists who partially dissent with Canadian foreign policy (e.g., Israel and Co's genocide) and to call them Chinese state-affiliated news outlets.

I already had strong suspicions the Canadian government was employing associations with China as pretext to disparage and censor dissenting ideas, people, and platforms. This is strong evidence.

I wish our government focused more on governing based on public wants and needs and less on covering up governance that goes against or that is morally bankrupt or corrupt

Several million spread across a handful of projects may seem like small potatoes compared to other federal financing worth hundreds of millions, but Alex Cool-Fergus, Climate Action Network Canada’s national policy manager, is frustrated to see the federal government pump any money into the hydrogen sector. In an interview with Canada’s National Observer she called hydrogen an improbable “techno-fix” that has been effectively marketed by the fossil fuel industry.

The possible end uses for hydrogen are dwindling, which is eroding its forecasted demand. To put in perspective just how significant this is, four years ago Natural Resources Canada expected the global market could be worth up to $11.7 trillion, but now says it could be worth up to $1.9 trillion — an 84 per cent drop.

“It's disappointing to see that the federal government continues to invest in this false solution, and that disappointment is amplified by the fact that some of this money is going to massive companies that don't need any more money,” she said, calling it a “slap in the face.”

“If [fossil fuel companies are] going to be investing in this at all, they should be using their own profits.” Last year, Enbridge posted $5.8 billion in profit and greenlit $10 billion worth of new projects.

Export Development Canada (EDC) and other national crown corporations have provided $7.6 to $13.5 billion a year between 2020 and 2022 to support the domestic fossil fuel industry, as compared with just $147 million for in-country renewable energy production, number-crunching by the IISD revealed in June.

Canada was criticized in the new report for a “lack of transparency in reporting” that made it hard to ascertain whether finance was going to domestic or international markets. EDC data shows it has provided $88 billion to the oil and gas sector since 2016.

This is an aspect of the carbon capture greenwashing initiative I wasn't aware of. It will need another pipeline network that can be very costly to human and environmental health (and operated by an industry that our government is willfully blind to).

Carbon capture is becoming a linchpin of Canada’s plan to reduce emissions from its oil and gas sector, but to pull this plan off would require massive investments in necessary infrastructure: pipelines, pressurization stations, equipping carbon capture to bitumen upgraders and more, all of which could fail. In a carbon management strategy, released in 2023, the federal government says to support the country’s emission reduction efforts, carbon capture capacity must grow 270 per cent from current levels by 2030, with “significant further scaling required” to reach net-zero by 2050.

when carbon dioxide pipelines fail, they can fail catastrophically.

According to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, there have been at least 76 reported safety incidents related to CO2 pipelines since 2010 in the United States. Some incidents are minor and others are disastrous, but all point to the risks of transporting and storing carbon dioxide as a way to manage greenhouse gas emissions.

Dodging a full assessment

By far the largest project would be the Pathways Alliance’s $16.5-billion flagship carbon capture project, which would include a carbon dioxide pipeline stretching 400 kilometres from the oilsands in northern Alberta to a storage hub about 300 kilometres east of Edmonton.

The Pathways Alliance is splitting its megaproject into 126 smaller segments, with multiple applications for various licences with the AER. As previously reported by Canada’s National Observer, that means the project won’t be subject to a full environmental assessment that examines what the impact of the project in its entirety would be. “The impacts are never being articulated to the public, and that includes impacts on the environment, the climate and Indigenous rights,” said Matt Hulse, a lawyer with Ecojustice collaborating with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation to call for an impact assessment.

So why, years after the Premier promised legal reforms that would deliver “more homes faster” and 1.5 million net new homes by 2030, is the housing shortage even worse? Why are housing starts actually down, year over year? It’s because rather than ending restrictions on midrise housing and slamming the brakes on sprawl and highway schemes that squander construction, Ontario’s changes to land use planning, environmental and transportation laws and policies have done the opposite.

Soon after Premier Doug Ford took office, his government began to dismantle even the modest measures the previous government had taken to promote more efficient housing construction.

Despite calls from housing and environmental experts across the political spectrum — and its own housing task force — to scrap outdated rules such as minimum parking requirements and to permit mid-rise housing on major streets throughout existing residential neighbourhoods, Ford intervened. He personally blocked efforts to legalize even 4-storey “4-plex” apartment buildings.

In recent months, as his government’s failure on housing has become more obvious, Ford has tried to pass the buck by blaming everyone from immigrants to the Bank of Canada. What he glosses over is that the housing market could easily have adapted to population and rate changes, but has instead turned the challenge of high interest rates and the opportunity of a growing population into a housing crisis by willfully sabotaging the solutions.

It’s generally fair to wait for a policy to unfold, to leave some time to judge its effects, before we decide whether it will succeed or fail. The Ford government has done its critics a favour this week, however, with its announced changes to drug policy in Ontario, shutting more than half of the province’s safe consumption sites. The logic adopted by the government and its defenders is that because the province’s overall high rate of opioid deaths has continued, these safe consumption sites are a failure. This is despite the fact that no patient has died of an overdose at these sites precisely because they’ve been monitored and treated.

The bad news for the government, and the good news for its critics, is that if the benchmark for success is "reducing the rate of opioid overdose deaths in Ontario” then nothing announced this week will succeed. That’s not because an emphasis on treatment over harm reduction is itself indefensible. It’s because the scale of the problem that Ontario faces is so far beyond the resources that have so far been committed, and because addiction itself is such a wicked problem for health policy.

For nearly a century, the Beer Store has, in one form or another, operated arguably the best-performing recycling program in the province of Ontario. Its deposit-return system — which sees consumers get refunds of 10 or 20 cents per container returned to the stores — boasts a return rate of nearly 80 per cent overall, and for some specific types of containers, the number is higher still: 89 per cent of glass bottles were returned in 2022, according to the most recent environmental-stewardship report on the Beer Store’s website.

The success of the deposit-return scheme, which has been expanded to include wine bottles and other alcohol-beverage containers, stands in stark contrast to the middling diversion rates achieved by the blue-box program operated by many municipalities. The city of Toronto, for example, achieved an overall diversion rate of just 53.6 per cent in residential collection, and even single-family homes (which perform better than the city’s older apartment buildings) rate only 63.9 per cent. The numbers provincewide aren’t any better overall, and a report from the province’s Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority suggests Ontario’s diversion rates have actually fallen over the past decade.

So the closure of Beer Store locations in small northern communities poses a problem that, at least in some cases, is going to fall on the property-tax bill of local homeowners.

“As a municipality, we now are going to be stuck having to pick up everyone’s empties, and it’s going to impact our landfill space. It’s going to end up in the pile at the front of everyone’s driveway on garbage day,” McPherson says. “We are in the process right now of applying for an environmental assessment for new waste management because the Geraldton landfill is full. This is absolutely the wrong time for us to have excess material going into the landfill.”

Greenstone isn’t alone: Beer Store locations in Nipigon and Cochrane are also reportedly closing in September. In at least some cases, the Beer Store’s former customers will still be able to get beer at an LCBO or a new outlet such as a corner store or gas station — but locals will have nowhere to return empties.

New research finds that access to the surgery has increased since an Ontario government funding change — “but only for one group”

A new study adds weight to such suspicions. Analyzing six years of patient data, it has found that a disproportionate number of surgeries performed by private clinics since the province’s new funding allocation have gone to the wealthiest Ontarians.

“You can’t actually charge patients for cataract surgery, because of OHIP,” says Campbell. “But [these clinics] would have OHIP pay for the cataract surgeries and charge patients for other services in a way that would cover their costs and left a profit.”

“What we did is divide people into five different strata by socioeconomic status and compare their rates of surgery before and after this policy change,” Campbell says. “To put it bluntly, access did go up, but only for one group — and that was the group that could afford to pay extra.” In fact, the team found that surgeries for those in the highest socioeconomic strata went up by nearly 25 per cent in private clinics. For those in the lowest, however, they fell by 8.5 per cent.

While it is difficult to say what precisely is driving this change, Campbell says it likely comes down to two major factors. “The first is the continued request for payment from patients who are seeking care in private centres … The second is these clinics keeping separate wait-lists for people who are willing to pay extra versus those who aren’t,” he says. “That allows them to sell, essentially, the ability to jump the line. Extra lenses and whatnot might have some value to them, but the real value is in jumping what is perceived as a really long queue.”

“The whole thing was equal parts unnerving and a miracle,” he says. “The most terrifying thing was seeing them interacting with 80-year-olds who were confused, worried, and just wanted their vision back so they could see their grandkids. These people were accepting those fees left and right.”