streetfestival

It wasn’t all dark. Just mostly.

Fox News: J.R.R. Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, Ursula Le Guin — these fantasy masters are revered for their ability to create entire new worlds. None of them hold a candle to Fox News. Dressing up like a Klingon at Comic-Con? Piss-ant stuff. The Rupert Murdoch-owned broadcast channel has managed to create an alternate universe superimposed upon our own, a world with its own facts and reality in which its viewers actually dwell. Fox News is Disneyland for chumps.

Gas prices: The single economic factor that lays bare the futility of all political action. To wit: a carbon tax combined with a rebate should leave most Canadian families no worse off, yet discourage fossil fuel use. Too complicated! “Axe the tax” is three simple words. Carbon tax aside, gas prices are for the most part outside government control. Never mind — they make motorists angry, and angry people vote. The opposition candidate is openly authoritarian and has no realistic plan to reduce gas prices anyway? Too bad. We’re pissed, so we’re voting for the apple-munching martinet, or the Project 2025 guy. Fossil fuels hold not only our climate hostage but our politics too.

Genocide: This month, Amnesty International declared that sufficient evidence has been gathered to confirm Israeli actions in Gaza amount to genocide, saying “Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity.” The Israeli foreign ministry replied that Amnesty International was “deplorable and fanatical.” The same day, the Israeli military announced that air strikes on a Palestinian tent camp that killed 21 people had been aimed at Hamas.

TORONTO — As we enter 2025, Dr. Theresa Tam has her eye on H5N1 bird flu, an emerging virus that had its first human case in Canada this year.

At the same time, Canada's chief public health officer is closely monitoring measles — a virus that was eliminated in this country more than two decades ago, but is making an accelerated resurgence.

But on the same day as The Canadian Press interview with Tam, health officials announced the first case of severe [human] illness in the U.S. — a person over 65 in Louisiana who had been in contact with sick birds in a backyard flock.

Tam said there have been close to 170 measles cases in Canada in 2024, compared to 59 cases last year. Many cases are related to a large outbreak that started in the fall in New Brunswick and has since spread through travel to people in Ontario, she said. The majority of people affected had not been vaccinated.

Measles was declared eliminated in Canada in 1998. Cases since then can generally be traced back to someone who travelled and brought in the virus from another country — then it spreads to those who aren't immunized.

Tam said one of the factors likely driving the resurgence of measles and whooping cough is the disruption to children's routine immunizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite "catch-up" programs, "we're still not back at the pre-pandemic levels of vaccine coverage.”

Northwest Naturals in Portland, Oregon, says in a statement that it is recalling one batch of its two-pound Feline Turkey Recipe raw frozen pet food after it tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza virus.

The company says the same product was sold in several states including California, Colorado, Washington and B.C. in Canada.

The Oregon Department of Agriculture says in a warning issued on Thursday that tests confirm that a house cat in Washington County was infected with H5N1 and died after consuming the raw frozen pet food sold by Northwest Naturals.

The test results have triggered a nationwide voluntary recall with the company alerting consumers to check their products.

The recall applies to products packaged in two-pound plastic bags with "Best if used by" dates between May 21, 2026, and June 23, 2026.

Northwest Naturals says customers who have purchased the recalled product should immediately throw away the product.

The most recent projections from poll aggregator Canada338.com show that if an election were held today, the Conservatives led by Pierre Poilievre would win a crushing majority of 232 seats. The site suggests the Bloc is running a distant second with 45 seats — but ahead of the Liberals with 39, the NDP with 25, and the Greens with two.

The Bloc Québécois has formed the Official Opposition only once before, in 1993, after Lucien Bouchard left Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives to found the party.

As a growing number of zoos report animal deaths, scientists are concerned that infected wild birds landing in enclosures could be spreading it among captive animals. In the US, a cheetah, mountain lion, Indian goose, and kookaburra were among the animals that died in Wildlife World Zoo near Phoenix, according to local media reports last week. San Francisco Zoo temporarily closed its aviaries after a wild red-shouldered hawk was found dead on its grounds, and later tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAIV). A rare red-breasted goose died at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, causing aviaries to close and penguin feeding for visitors to be suspended in November. These cases follow the deaths of 47 tigers, three lions, and a panther in zoos across South Vietnam over the summer.

Bird flu viruses can be passed among a wide variety of animals. In 2020, a variant spread across the world, finally reaching the Antarctic in late 2023, causing millions of wild animals to die across Eurasia, Africa, North America, and South America on its route. In the US, it fully adapted to cattle, increasing the risk of human infections.

The spread continues in dairy farms, especially in California – the US’s top-producing dairy state – where nearly half of the state’s 1,300 farms have now been affected, and two farm workers tested positive this month. Two indoor cats are suspected to have died in Los Angeles after drinking infected raw milk.

In some regions, such as the UK and the EU, licensed bird flu vaccines can be used on captive zoo animals. In the US this is not allowed.

CCS involves siphoning off carbon dioxide (CO2) from its source, then rendering it liquid, moving it by underground pipeline, and finally injecting it deep underground in perpetuity. Pathways Alliance, representing six of Canada’s largest oil companies, proposes to pipe CO2 from up to 20 oil and gas facilities across 400 km to a geological reservoir under Alberta’s Lakeland district. This district is home to numerous communities (St. Paul, Cold Lake, Bonnyville), many farms, and eight First Nation reserves.

Despite the risks, the Alberta government and the Alberta Energy Regulator have denied the request for an environmental impact assessment made by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and by environmental groups.

The greatest CO2 emission disaster occurred in Cameroon in 1986, as a result of a massive natural release from a volcanic lake; it killed about 1,700 people and thousands of animals.

In the USA alone, at least 75 other CO2 pipeline incidents have been reported since 2010.

However, the practice of injecting fluids deep underground is an established source of induced earthquakes which can cause structural and environmental damage. CO2 in aquifers may leach heavy metals into drinking water; this past May, a CCS project in Australia was nixed due to this risk.

Injected CO2 can and has seeped to the surface, either through natural faults, or through inadequately capped wells, common in storage areas. A high school in Wyoming had to be closed for most of the school year due to such a leak.

The Pathways Alliance CCS plan envisions its pipeline routes and storage on both private and public land. Storage sites would require close monitoring — forever. The technology for CCS storage and monitoring, especially for the long term, is immature, and research on risks to human health and safety is limited.

The industrial process of CCS requires energy, producing more emissions and thus contributes to climate change. Although CCS is presented as a technological solution to mitigate climate change, it risks becoming a distraction from the urgent need to reduce emissions at their source.

CCS gives permission to polluters to continue operating as usual, perpetuating reliance on fossil fuels rather than transitioning to cleaner alternatives and improving energy efficiency.

Next year, Ontarians are set to spend roughly one out of every five days in an election. The federal writs are due by the fall, and Ontario premier Doug Ford is expected to call an early election to get ahead of a police investigation into the Greenbelt scandal and to campaign against the federal Liberals, instead of the Conservatives, who are expected to soon replace them.

There are certain affinities between Ford and Trudeau, however – or perhaps unintended flattery by way of imitation. Both favour sending pre-election bribe cheques to voters. In October, the Ontario government announced it would send cash to residents in the new year, with $200 “rebates” going out “to support families facing high interest rates and the federal carbon tax.” In November, Trudeau announced he’d do the same – $250 cheques, in this case – alongside a GST holiday on a number of consumer goods from Dec. 14 to Feb 15. But while the GST break is on, the cheques are being held up in the House of Commons.

“I was really disappointed by Canada's position,” said David Boyd, an associate professor with the University of British Columbia and former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment. “I mean Canada lined up with Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United States — basically these major emitters are making the argument that the only legal obligations they have are the obligations set forth in [those agreements].”

“By saying that the only things that apply are the Paris Agreement and the 1992 framework convention, Canada went on to reject the principles of prevention, international generational equity, reject the principle of polluter pays, [and] reject the right to a healthy environment,” he said. “[It’s] saying none of these principles are part of customary international law, so they just don't apply.”

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In an interview with Canada’s National Observer last year at the UN climate summit in Dubai, Regenvanu said increasingly petrostates, like Canada, are viewed as “rogue states.”

“The message from the Pacific small island developing states … is that Canada has to immediately stop any further expansion of fossil fuel production,” he said at the time. “It has to do that now if it's going to be faithful to the science. We all know that.”

A study from Oil Change International published last year found Canada is on track to be the second-largest fossil fuel expander, behind only the U.S., by 2050. On its own, Canada’s planned fossil fuel expansion represents 10 per cent of the world’s expansion plans, creating the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of 117 coal plants run for decades.

A reminder of a year you’d like to forget.

AOC. The first person to gain a million followers on social media channel Bluesky. Can we just hurry up and give Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the keys to the Democratic party already?

As if Dem leadership will let their party be so progressive.

BC Conservatives They’re new! They’re hot! And they are already at each other’s throats.

Fresh from the party’s election success that gave them a caucus of 44, 13 BC Conservative MLAs recently sent a letter to party leader John Rustad demanding that he discipline fellow Conservative MLA Elenore Sturko.

Sturko’s alleged crime? In a CBC interview, she agreed that Comfort Sakoma-Fadugba was right to resign as vice-chair of the Vancouver Police Board. Sakoma-Fadugba had posted online comments that, among other things, attacked Diwali celebrations as a means of “erasing Christian values from the lives of our children.”

The Gang of 13 says Sturko is a cancel culture cop. The 13 signees include Brent Chapman, the Surrey South MLA who once suggested mass shootings might be a hoax and called Palestinians “inbred.”

The BC Conservatives appear to be following the path forged by the Republican caucus in the U.S. Congress, with an extremist faction emerging to attack the faction that would qualify as extreme, if not for the existence of the more extreme faction.

Trade deals can allow international corporations to trample over the rights of governments in the Global South. That is the message from the Colombian government, which describes the effect of such deals as a “bloodbath” for their national sovereignty. And now, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro has said he wants to renegotiate the deals his country has with the United States, European Union and the United Kingdom.

He has a strong case because, in the last couple of years, the US and European countries have also been renegotiating similar trade and investment deals, as they try to prevent themselves from being sued in the secretive “corporate courts” that these deals create.

Only this year, the British government withdrew from a toxic investment deal, called the Energy Charter Treaty, after a slew of cases in which European governments were sued by fossil fuel corporations for taking climate action which supposedly damaged the profits of said businesses.

So the question now is whether European countries are going to accept that southern countries need the same policy space to deal with climate change and numerous other problems they face. Or whether they will demand these countries continue to abide by these awful, one-sided deals.