gas – Things Are Good

Ditching Gas Stoves as Good as Using Drugs for Asthmatics

cooking prep

Having asthma is tough as you may too often feel short of breath, and the solution to many asthma symptoms are prescription drugs. The drugs generally help the body open airways and allow the asthmatic person to breathe normally agin.
It’s been proven that air pollutants increase the stress put on asthmatic individuals and lead to increase asthma rates in the population at large. It’s also known that gas stoves produce a ton of indoor pollution. Put those two things together and now you get a good question: if gas stoves are removed from homes with people with asthma then will their condition improve? The answer is yes!

Indeed, if you get rid of gas stoves then you could see improvements as good as, or exceeding, certain drugs used to treat asthma.

Sehgal said: “We were surprised when we analysed the results and found a very large effect size. The improvements in asthma symptoms following stove change were similar to – or even greater than – those reported in clinical trials of commonly used asthma medications.”

Each person was assessed for four weeks before the gas cooking replacement, and for four weeks afterwards, including scoring their asthma using an internationally recognised scale of zero to six.

The average asthma score improved from 2.6 to 1.5, on a scale where a change of 0.5 is considered to be clinically significant. This included fewer hospital visits and fewer days off school or work for asthma flare-ups. They also found less wheezing, less use of reliver inhalers and fewer people saying that their asthma had woken them during the night.

Air pollution was measured in 44 of the homes. On average, nitrogen dioxide dropped 70%.

Canadians Don’t Want Cars

Driving a car is an annoying experience because all one does is sniff the tailpipe coming form the car in front while not moving because there’s too many people stuck in cars. The irony that a car is supposed to be freedom is palpable. Everyone knows that cars are not a good thing, and it’s clear that younger people know that better than the boomers as young Canadians are bemoaning anything to do with cars. Car ownership and the desire to even own a car have decreased dramatically in the last decade, hopefully backwards-looking conservative politicians will start to realize that we need our country to support all sorts of non-car transportation options.

We’re experiencing a generational shift, and attitudes towards car ownership are reflected in that shift. According to the poll, half of Canadians are responding to escalating costs by doing things like driving less (32%), shopping their insurance providers more often (21%) and, more alarmingly, delaying maintenance (18%).
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Something else to keep an eye on: the pandemic work-from-home shift saw many Canadians ditch their second cars. Families weren’t committing to two vehicles because they wanted to, they were doing it because they had to. The return to work orders across the country are facing pushback, with many pointing the finger at politicians desperate to protect their corporate real estate sectors and premiers like Ontario’s just wanting people to buy their lattes again instead of making them in their kitchen.

Canada Starts to Reduce Oil & Gas Subsidies

A country that loves extracting fossil fuels has begun to clean up its tax rebates for the destructive oil and gas industry. Canada spent over $15 BILLION on subsidies for the oil and gas sector in 2021 alone, which isn’t just bad it’s literally funding the destruction of the planet. Thankfully the government has figured out that destroying the land for short term profit isn’t a good idea when the industry profiting kills everything it touches.

Starting this year the Canadian government will begin the long process of cutting tax loopholes and subsidies for oil and gas, which generate billions in profits. Why fund an industry that is insanely profitable that harms people and the planet?

Burning fossil fuels is one of the main drivers of climate change, so ending public spending that supports the industry is crucial. Ending fossil fuel subsidies frees up those funds to support things like renewable energy and electrification. Clean energy is of paramount importance as the world is under pressure to slash greenhouse gas emissions more than 40 per cent by the end of the decade.

“Moving forward, every subsidy that the government would want to grant to the oil and gas sector would have to go through this filter — any department of the federal government, whether it’s finance, international trade, natural resources — to ensure that we do not give federal dollars to support the production of oil and gas or coal,” said Guilbeault. “This is a fundamental shift from what we’ve done in this country for decades.”

Putting Names on the Climate Crisis

The people who make decisions to continue us on a path of climate catastrophe have names and addresses. We need to shame people who are actively engage in profiteering off of killing every living thing on the planet, and that’s exactly what Environmental Defence has started to do. They have created a list of the Canada’s climate villains – those in positions of power that delay climate action and/or encouraging more environmental destruction. The good news about this is that Canadians who care about the climate are upping their game to call out those that are profiting from our demise. The more climate action we take the better – we only have one planet so let’s not burn it down!

Canada’s climate villains:
Brad Corson
Dave McKay
Susannah Pierce
Arthur Irving
Michael Binnion
Alex Pourbaix
Lisa Baiton

Canada’s Oil and Gas industry has long been the biggest barrier to climate action. Despite the harmful impacts that people in Canada and around the world are suffering daily from the warming climate and lack of action, the oil and gas industry continues to spew pollution and rake in record profits and receive billions in government subsidies. We are done taking the blame as individuals. The time to expose the true climate villains is now!

Oil is a Source of Wildfires

Forest

The wildfires burning from coast to coast in Canada have Canadians worried about their livelihood, neighbours, and the planet itself. Finding good news in fires is tough, but in the context of the climate crisis knowledge about to fight fire is good news. The best way to stop wildfires is to prevent them from happening in the first place, and that means eliminating all fossil fuel emissions. Researchers continue to connect the extreme weather events the planet has been experiencing to industry actions.

If we’re to avoid more extreme wildfires then we need to act now, and perhaps we’ll save brave politicians in the future literally make certain companies pay for the damage they wrought.

“Last year, there were a number of studies that directly attributed the increase in emissions and associated climate warming with the massive heat waves that hit Europe,” said Baltzer, the Canada Research Chair in Forests and Global Change.

“I think we’re increasingly seeing scientists make stronger statements, which we need to be doing — stronger statements about the fact that, yes, these changes in climate are human-caused and they are driving these massive catastrophes that we’re seeing around the world.”

Baltzer, who was also not involved in the study, said the findings aren’t surprising, given previous research.

But she said the data helps draw links between previous research and the emissions from the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. “It’s really important to demonstrate those links.”