Posted in Climate change, Conservation, Energy, Green lifestyle on March 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Earth Hour is tonight from 8 to 9 p.m. wherever you live.
Think you’ll be bored in an hour without electricity? Here are some suggestions to keep you busy:
Read
Play board games
Knit
Talk to your significant other. Who know what that could lead to…
Play with your kids
Sing
Play an instrument
Draw
Sleep
Go for a walk
Montreal Canadiens’ fans: listen to the game [...]
Posted in Climate change, Conservation, Energy, Green lifestyle, Greenhouse gases, Reduce on March 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
People around the world are making plans to shut off their electricity for an hour on March 29 (that’s two weeks from tonight) in a global statement against global warming. More than 32,000 Canadians – including our family – have already pledged to turn off their lights between 8 and 9 p.m., local time.
Last year, [...]
Posted in Climate change, Conservation, Driving, Energy, Green lifestyle, Greenhouse gases, Public transit, Smog on February 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
There’s an interesting story in today’s Montreal Gazette about the impact of idling your car. Besides polluting and wasting fuel, it also damages the car engine because newer cars are designed in order not to have to be idled before you start driving, even in the winter.
Idle Threat
Bylaw rarely enforced. Only 106 out of 1.3 [...]
Posted in Climate change, Conservation, Driving, Energy, Green lifestyle, Greenhouse gases, Public transit, Resolutions on February 24, 2008 | 1 Comment »
I’ve been reading a couple of interesting things recently about the oil sands projects in Alberta.
The first is this series, published earlier this year in the Globe and Mail. The eight-day series looks at the development of the oil sands, and the environmental and social cost of the projects, which are estimated to have a [...]
Posted in Conservation, Green lifestyle, Water on February 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Last summer you could hardly go a couple of days in Quebec without hearing about blue-green algae, a toxin affecting the province’s lakes and chasing swimmers out of the water.
While agriculture and sewage from lakefront homes greatly contribute to the spread of blue-green algae, a small part of the problem is phosphates coming from things like dishwasher detergents. [...]
Posted in Climate change, Conservation, Driving, Food, Green lifestyle on February 13, 2008 | 1 Comment »
A few years ago I wrote a story (see below) for the Montreal Gazette about a British Columbia couple who were following what they called a 100-Mile Diet. For a year, they would only eat food that came from a 100-mile radius of their Vancouver home. Their project later became this book.
Writing that story really put [...]
Posted in Climate change, Conservation, Energy, Greenhouse gases, Resolutions on January 31, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Now that we’ve been thinking greener for a while, I thought it would be interesting to find out what kind of an impact our lifestyle has on the planet. Using a carbon footprint calculator, I plugged in all sorts of information about our family from the number of kilowatt hours of electricity we use every year [...]
Posted in Climate change, Conservation, Green lifestyle, Greenhouse gases, Public transit, Television on January 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I caught a couple of very entertaining green shows on HGTV last weekend. Both – Eco House Challenge and No Waste Like Home – are about families trying to live in a more environmentally aware way.
Eco House Challenge pits two Australian families against each other to see who can be the greenest, and the results are hilarious. It kicks off with each [...]
