Never one to suffer subtlety gladly, or overpolish the written word, US President Donald J. Trump on January 3 ‘spoke’ to the world by tweet: an American flag, behind which, we soon learned, lay the body of Iranian General Qassam Suleimani (and seven other human beings), assassinated by drone inRead More
I have an update on last week’s district energy study story, with some information gleaned from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM). The full cost of the study was $175,400. The CBRM and Enwave Energy applied to the FCM for funding (with the CBRM as “lead applicant”) and received $74,700Read More
If you were a cash-strapped community of communities looking to cut your greenhouse gas emissions and had $100,000 to spend, how would you spend it? Would you blow the boodle on a preliminary study for a “district heating and cooling system” in Sydney’s downtown core? A system that would serviceRead More
“Doublethink,” a term coined by George Orwell in 1984 (the book, not the year), is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “believing two contradictory ideas at the same time” and I think it describes the CBRM’s approach to waterfront development. This past week, I had reason to have aRead More
I watched most of Monday’s almost four-hour Climate Change Municipal Action Plan Update and will recap some of the highlights for you, but I have to begin. with District 7 Councilor Ivan Doncaster’s contribution to the proceedings which consisted largely — I could not make this up if I triedRead...
Jennifer Henderson at the Halifax Examiner has been following plans for a new provincial art gallery on the Halifax waterfront from a (to me) very reasonable angle — the “when are we going to talk about sea rise?” angle. The Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (TIR) has issued a requestRead...
Last month, I argued that, when we think in Marxist terms about the contradictions of capitalism, perhaps the most striking and important contradiction of all is that to make the goods bought and sold to keep the capitalist machine running we are destroying the very planet we depend upon forRead More
![April 23, 2015: NASA and ESA are celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope's silver anniversary of 25 years in space by unveiling some of nature's own fireworks — a giant cluster of about 3,000 stars called Westerlund 2. The cluster resides inside a vibrant stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina. The comparatively young, 2-million-year-old star cluster contains some of our galaxy's hottest, brightest, and most massive stars. The largest stars are unleashing a torrent of ultraviolet light and hurricane-force winds that etch away the enveloping hydrogen gas cloud. This creates a fantasy celestial landscape of pillars, ridges, and valleys. (NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team [Public domain]](https://capebretonspectator.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Hubble_feature_image-200x150.png)
The law I am signing today provides $738 billion – that’s with a “B”. That’s an all-time record. … That brings our total investment in national defense, since my inauguration, to almost two and a half trillion dollars. And what’s the good of a budget if you don’t have theRead More
Roughly half of Nova Scotians rely on groundwater for their domestic water supply. In the Annapolis Valley, that percentage climbs to 90% — in Kings County alone it is as high as 99%. I’m starting with that fact not because I intend to focus on Kings County but because itRead More
Editor’s Note: I was hoping to begin this third and final part of my water series with a catchy intro, but I can’t think of one, so will simply dive right in. (Dive? Water? Does that count as catchy?) In 2010, the Canadian Council of Ministers of the EnvironmentRead More
