In 1964, Flai Kalenga Mbwenga went looking for some good grazing land. Mbwenga was a small-scale farmer who lives in northern Namibia, close to the Kavango River that forms part of the border between his country and neighbouring Angola. Like nearly all the rural people in his country, Mbwenga’s family’s livelihood came from small-scale and mixed […]
Wastewater from Northern Pulp’s hibernating paper mill is being discharged into the Bay of Fundy
Wastewater from Northern Pulp’s mill is being discharged into the Bay of Fundy. Since July 2020 Northern Pulp has been shipping run-off and “landfill leachate” from its hibernating pulp mill site on Abercrombie Point in Pictou County to Colchester County’s municipal sewage treatment facility in Lower Truro, which discharges into the Bay of Fundy. Invoices […]
Pieridae’s pipe dream
Pieridae Energy’s plans for a liquified natural gas plant in Nova Scotia sit in the sweet spot of an elaborate Rube Goldberg financing machine that requires Shell Oil offloading some aging gas wells in Alberta to a cash-strapped energy company living on the hope of sky-high gas costs in Germany years from now.
If the Halifax Examiner inbox is anything to go by, there is no shortage of critics of Pieridae Energy and its plans to pipe natural gas into Nova Scotia, build a $10-billion liquefied natural gas plant in Goldboro on the province’s Eastern Shore, and then ship the LNG to Germany, a project the Halifax Examiner […]
Fracking is back on the agenda in Nova Scotia
After years during which nobody seemed to be asking the F-question in the province, suddenly it is being asked again all over the place: To frack or not to frack? Who’s asking and why?
To frack, or not to frack Nova Scotia? That seems to be the question. Again. There’s been a de facto moratorium on fracking — more specifically on “high-volume hydraulic fracturing in shale” — in the province since 2014, and oil and gas companies haven’t exactly been beating down our doors to get it lifted, demanding […]
PCs put fracking back on the agenda
Five years since Stephen McNeil’s Liberal government placed a moratorium on fracking in Nova Scotia, the Progressive Conservative party seems intent on putting it back on the agenda. In February this year, the two PC members of the Standing Committee on Natural Resources and Economic Development — MLAs Pat Dunn and Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin — proposed […]
“Pig in a poke”: die-hard proponents want to open Nova Scotia to fracking
About 200 people gathered last evening in Pugwash, filling the Northumberland Community Curling Club for a debate framed around the resolution “fracking will be beneficial to Cumberland County.” The audience was, not surprisingly, clearly divided between those in favour and those against. For many, including several members of the Nova Scotia Fracking Resource and Action […]
The corporate kleptocracy takes aim at Nova Scotia
Morning File, Friday, August 31, 2018
Hi, I’m Joan Baxter, a Nova Scotian journalist and author. Some of my books are actually quite upbeat, proving that I’m not always a bearer of bad news. News 1. Abandoned tidal turbine Jennifer Henderson updates the situation of the abandoned tidal turbine in the Minas Basin in this article for the Examiner. After a […]
We’re Cooked: The Case for Ignoring Nova Scotia’s Fracking Potential
On the same day that Nova Scotia’s governing Liberals introduced legislation to ban high volume hydraulic fracturing in the province, I happened to be on a “fracking tour” in the U.S. with a bus load of other environmental journalists in a place that had instead embraced it. We were headed from New Orleans to the […]
Fracking ain’t what it’s cracked up to be: Morning File, Monday, January 15, 2018
News 1. Immigration Writes Stephen Kimber: Reading news accounts of last week’s meeting of the legislature’s committee on economic development, you could be forgiven for assuming the much fooforahed Ivany Report’s call to action on immigration had already become a neatly gift-wrapped fait accompli, topped with a pretty government-tied bow. Not so fast… Click here […]
New map reopens the fracking debate: Morning File, Wednesday, January 10, 2018
News 1. Trudeau and Abdi “A 23-year-old former refugee from Somalia waited in a segregated cell in New Brunswick Tuesday night as about two dozen of his supporters called attention to his case at the prime minister’s town hall in Lower Sackville, N.S,” reports Emma Smith for the CBC. I detailed Abdi’s plight in yesterday’s Morning File. I don’t see any news […]