Climate Change

This and That

This and That

August 9, 2023 at 9:40 am

The Third Way I’ve had to print a correction with regard to a June item I wrote about The Third, a new weekly listings paper I had somehow understood to be a production of the CBRM. The Third, it turns out, is a free, local, 16-page print weekly, published andRead More

From Sydney to Saudi: EllisDon Gets Around

From Sydney to Saudi: EllisDon Gets Around

May 17, 2023 at 1:36 pm

I have seen the name EllisDon on signs attached to the fencing around the under-construction NSCC Sydney Waterfront Campus but I didn’t actually know anything about the company until this week, when I got interested in it as part of an entity called SHIP.ED which submitted a proposal to developRead More

TV, Then and Now

TV, Then and Now

May 3, 2023 at 10:02 am

I was thinking back to the 1950s when television arrived in Cape Breton and how many of us made our way up to Charlotte Street to stand looking into the window of a store that displayed a small set, itself displaying what we came to know as a test pattern.Read More

Letter to the Premier: About That Golf Course…

Letter to the Premier: About That Golf Course…

February 8, 2023 at 10:47 am

Dear Premier Houston: We would like to bring your attention to the West Mabou Beach Provincial Park controversy and our concerns in that regard. West Mabou Beach is an ecologically sensitive area that forms part of the mere 5% of Nova Scotian coastline that is legally protected. We are adamantlyRead More

Flooded farmland after Tropical Storm Lee, Campbell Hall, NY (Photo by Daniel Case [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Bean There: Weathering Climate Change

November 2, 2022 at 12:11 pm

Editor’s Note: We’re reaching into Michelle’s Smith’s archives for posts as useful now as when they were first published and this week, we’re revisiting one of her lovely long-form essays, last published in November 2020.   The cat and I huddled under the blankets in the dark as the windRead More

Green Hydrogen Revisited

Green Hydrogen Revisited

August 24, 2022 at 12:14 pm

There have been big developments on the green hydrogen file since last we spoke—and by big developments, I don’t mean actual, physical, developments.  I mean big plans (and incentives) announced by big, important people. I’ve dealt with the Nova Scotian aspect of these developments in a separate article, but IRead More

Feeling the Heat

Feeling the Heat

August 10, 2022 at 12:25 pm

As the temperature hit 41° C (with the humidex) on Sunday, I found myself thinking of CBU poli-sci Prof Tom Urbaniak’s recent Post opinion piece about our municipality’s woefully inadequate preparations for extreme heat: Severe, extended heat waves were previously rare around here. But our changing climate is changing ourRead More

Nova Scotia’s Road to Nowhere?

Nova Scotia’s Road to Nowhere?

July 27, 2022 at 11:49 am

I just read “Sustainable Prosperity,” the provincial government’s recently dropped 2022 Progress Report on the Environmental Goals and Climate Change Reduction Act (EGCCRA) that, frankly,  lost me at the title. We need a new definition of “prosperity” before we can start talking about it in terms of “sustainability” because ourRead More

How to Heat a Hospital

How to Heat a Hospital

April 6, 2022 at 10:55 am

The headline on a 2021 article  from the Nova Scotia Health (NSH) website declares: Cape Breton Regional Hospital’s new energy centre will be cleaner, greener and more efficient What struck me when I first read this was that it didn’t simply say the new energy center will be “clean, greenRead More

Public domain photos of F35A (US Air Force, 2021) and the Bluenose (Wallace R. MacAskill, 1921)

Who Will Know the F-35 in the Sun?

April 6, 2022 at 10:53 am

More than 100 years after shipyard workers in Lunenburg, N.S., shaped wood and metal to build the Bluenose schooner, the tradition of local, hand-built excellence lives on. But now, instead of fishing boats, it’s fighter jets — Brett Ruskin, CBC, 6 April 2022   It’s such an apt comparison. LikeRead More