Year: 2015

Ontario Slaps SLAPPs

- Adam Clare

A strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) is a lawsuit that has the goal of shutting down opponents. They tend to be used as a strategy to shut down poor NGOs or poor people who can’t afford to defend themselves in a lengthy legal battle. SLAPPs tie up the courts while shutting down debate – bad for democracy and bad for all of society.

Ontario has joined many other parts of the world in passing legislation to stop SLAPPs.

The new act, which will become law in Ontario upon Royal Assent, contains a number of elements that will reduce the risk of citizens being threatened with legal action when speaking out on matters of public interest, including:

  • A new fast-track review process that will allow the courts to quickly identify and deal with strategic lawsuits
  • New protections for individuals from defamation lawsuits when their concerns are reported to the public through a third party, such as a blogger or a reporter
  • Faster and less expensive procedures at boards and tribunals that will allow parties to make written submissions about legal costs instead of making submissions in person.

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Thanks to Delaney!

Vertical Kelp Farming

- Adam Clare

Farming the Sea: why eating kelp is good for you and good for the environment from Patrick Mustain on Vimeo.

GreenWave is a new non-profit that wants to improve our food sources while cleaning the seas. Kelp usually grows on the ground or sides of anything inorganic underwater, what GreenWave has done is to build an efficient way to harvest kelp from these sources. A benefit of this is that kelp naturally cleans the water around it so now we can get kelp in a faster way while cleaning the water.

As a result of their approach, GreenWave has won the Buckminster Fuller 2015 challenge.

This new approach moves us from growing vulnerable monocultures to creating vibrant ecosystems, which work to rebuild biodiversity and produce higher yields. The infrastructure is simple: seaweed, scallops and mussels grow on floating ropes, stacked above oyster and clam cages below. From these crops ocean farmers can produce food, fertilizers, animal feeds, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, biofuels and much more. The farms are designed to restore, rather than deplete our ecosystems. A single acre filters millions of gallons of ocean water every day, creates homes for hundreds of wild marine and bird species and absorbs the overabundance of nitrogen and carbon (with kelp sequestering 5x more carbon than land based-plants) that are killing billions of organisms. The design requires zero-inputs—there is no need for fresh water.

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Grow Diamonds Instead of Buying Blood Diamonds

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

Blood diamonds are a problem for a multitude of reasons and they really shouldn’t be since we can create diamonds from scratch. A company called Pure Grown Diamonds sell diamonds that are grown in a a lab for all your diamond needs. The market for diamonds is largely a social construct based off of good marketing, so you may as well play it safe and go for lab-grown diamonds instead of buying diamonds from sketchy sources.

How are Pure Grown Diamonds made?

Pure Grown Diamonds are produced by utilizing two gem-quality diamond creation processes: High Pressure-High Temperature (HPHT) and Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD). In both processes, a small diamond seed is placed in an environment that contains carbon. Under suitably controlled conditions, the diamond grows, atom-by-atom, layer-by-layer, recreating nature’s process.

Grown Diamonds—Eco Advantages

In a recent environmental impact analysis, Frost & Sullivan (F&S) concludes the impact of the Pure Grown Process is seven times lower than Diamond Mining.

Mined diamonds disturb more land, produce more mineral waste, use more water, create more air emissions (carbon, NOx and SOx), use more energy, have more environmental incidents, result in more lost time injury (both in terms of frequency and severity) and have a higher occupational disease rate. Based on their calculations, F&S further concludes that mined diamonds represent more than 7 times the level of impact as compared to grown diamonds.

Check it out

Keystone XL is Done, COP 21 Set to Start

- Adam Clare

You probably already heard the good news about the end of Keystone XL with Obama killing the proposal. This is a good symbolic step in ending the exploitation of the tar sands in Alberta, plus this comes just a few weeks before COP21.

COP21 is the upcoming United Nations climate change conference which is set to run from Nov. 30 to Dec.11. In the light of Keystone being killed it gives people hope that Obama will actually do something about climate change.

On the Canadian side of the border Prime Minster Trudeau (who loves pipelines, sigh) has cast Catherine McKenna as Canada’s minister of environment and climate change. A new title acknowledging that climate change is real and has to be dealt with – a step forward from the idiotic climate approach from the Conservatives previously in power.

Keystone XL being nixed may be just the thing North America needs to show up at COP21. With the pipeline project over, other countries may actually start respecting North America on environmental matters.

TransCanada first applied for Keystone permits in September 2008 — shortly before Obama was elected. As envisioned, Keystone would snake from Canada’s oilsands through Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska, then connect with existing pipelines to carry more than 800,000 barrels of crude oil a day to specialized refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast.

Democrats and environmental groups latched onto Keystone as emblematic of the type of dirty fossil fuels that must be phased out. Opponents chained themselves to construction equipment and the White House fence in protest, arguing that building the pipeline would be antithetical to Obama’s call for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

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Cuba Shows Off Its Biotech Industry

- Adam Clare

Cuba has an amazing farming system which is impressive from farm to fork. The way they grow crops to how they ensure that food distribution is effective is impressive to say the least. The island nation was hit hard with the collapse of the USSR and the embargo from the USA, as a result they have a robust and advanced farming system in the nation.

At one of the largest farming conferences Cuba is showcasing its advanced biotech. Cuba has had to use natural (and locally produced) ways to increase farming production instead of relying on imports.

Among them was, “Gavac,” an immunogen that provides for better control over ticks and tick-related infections in cattle, according to Doctor Hector Machado of Cuba’s Heber Biotec company.

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Cuba has been attracting attention in recent years for its model of agriculture, as it has been able to develop cheap and eco-friendly technologies that have helped the country to reach a certain level of food security without damaging the environment. With the environmental and financial challenges the world is now facing, the Cuban model – built in a time of crisis, after the USSR collapsed – is seen as offering potential solutions to many countries in the world.

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