In Germany, the sale of heat pumps have surpassed those of gas boilers for the first time. Like Germany, Ontario gets most of our gas from outside the country (in our case, most of the gas coming into Ontario comes from the U.S.) Yet Ontario has no credible decarbonization plan.

Energy is one of the most abundant things in the universe. The only reason it costs so much money is because corporations want to sell us fuel. Instead of letting us just gather and store it locally, they created an energy system where power would stop if we didn’t buy fuel to power it.

Australia has so much solar power that they're offering free electricity during peak hours because solar power is so cheap. Here in Ontario, Doug Ford is doubling down on nuclear, which is the most expensive form of electricity. And subsidizing it with our tax dollars. electrek.co/2025/11/04/a...

Many Ontarians don't know that our electricity rates are very significantly subsidized to the tune of billions of dollars. But instead of building our grid using renewables — the cheapest source of electricity known to humankind — Doug Ford is doubling down on nuclear — the most expensive.

This is the kind of thing we need in Toronto. It will make roads safer for everyone, including drivers. The only people it will annoy are drivers who like to illegally zip around turns at high speeds without stopping.

My giant 72-inch LED television uses as much power as a single 100W light bulb common in homes fifteen years ago.

That’s some incredible baseball playing.

TIL that the ability for cars to turn right on a red light was an attempt to ‘save fuel’ during the 70s oil crisis—which it doesn’t actually do. The result: There are people who are dead today who would otherwise be alive and healthy. And many of those people were drivers turning right on a red.

Fun fact: The LA Dodgers used to be the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, because of all the streetcars that ran through New York in the late 1800s. They moved to LA in the 1950s. Toronto never got rid of our streetcars.

Streetcars are supposed to come every ten minutes or better. But arrival is highly erratic. How do we change this? By getting private cars out of the way. The average car has just one person in it. And is almost never full. The average streetcar will hold over 100 people several times a day.

Where you put the line break matters.

New polling from Toronto Environmental Alliance fielded by the polling firm Abacus shows that Torontonians overwhelmingly support green building standards. City Hall should listen to Torontonians, not bot-filled comment sections. #topoli

New polling by fielded by Abacus Data for @toenviro.bsky.social shows that Torontonians, including those in the suburbs, overwhelming support for green building requirements. Actions to protect our climate are very popular. But there’s a very loud and angry minority saying the opposite.

The oil and gas industry is responsible not just for our heating climate, but also for selling us cheap, single use, throwaway garbage that is poisoning our environmental and literally seeping into our brains and bloodstreams.

Great piece by @thekeenanwire.bsky.social, which I'll paraphrase here: New York achieved the aim of speeding up the flow of car traffic by *refusing to see the aim as being solely to speed up the flow of car traffic.*

A reminder that social media likes is not the same thing as the real world.

There are more people on bikes than there are people in cars in this photo. We could move more people if we gave cyclists more space. Most of the energy spent moving a bike is moving the weight of the rider. Most of the energy expended by a car is moving the weight of the car.

Tropical storms should not be hitting Alaska. We need to get off of oil, gas, and other fossil fuels now. And every community needs take its responsibility to cut fossil fuels and to protect people very, very seriously.

Sometimes being an activist can feel defeating. But then I remember that humpback whales were considered so endangered that an entire Star Trek movie was made about them in the 80s. Now, because of the work of thousands, humpbacks are now a classified as a ‘species of least concern’.

Montreal Urbanism Superthread. About 25 years ago, I lived in Montreal as a student. I’ve always found Montreal to be more walkable and bikeable than Toronto. But over the past 25 years, the city’s urbanism has only gotten better. Here’s just a few places where I’ve noticed impressive changes. 🧵

Bike sharing — specifically the particular system of bike sharing infrastructure found in Toronto, Montreal, New York, London, and dozens of others, is a real Canadian success story. A thread 🧵

The main reason city streets are dangerous for children isn’t because of crime. It’s because of cars.

In addition to the report below, a new report shows that a vehicle belonging to a Ford government cabinet minister was caught driving 50km/h over the limit *twelve times* over the past three years.

As the provincial government looks at banning automated speed cameras, a new report shows that vehicles belonging to cabinet ministers have been regularly caught by automated speed cameras, in some cases going 30kph over the speed limit.

This Friday evening, I will be on stage with David Miller, former Mayor of Toronto and currently the Managing Director of the C40 Centre. The event is pay-as-you-can. Space is limited. Sign up for the event here. www.tickettailor.com/events/urban...

A reminder that by the end of the day today, there will have been over 130 car collisions in Toronto alone. And that’s just the reported number. Collisions with less than $5000 in damage do not legally have to be reported.

Great article the Toronto Star today on going car free. The first new car I ever bought was in my 40s, and mostly because the number of family needs in the suburbs and out of the city went up. By waiting 20 years before owning a car, I’ve saved well over a hundred thousand dollars.

This sign could say ‘pedestrian area’. But because we still prioritize cars, the only sign we have is ‘road closed’…meant for construction sites. This tells people that pedestrians are only temporarily allowed to be on streets, even though pedestrian streets predate cars by thousands of years.

The City of Toronto has just launched a program to provide low-interest loans to homeowners to install heat pumps! #topoli

Eliminating speed cameras in Ontario will literally get people killed.

Investopedia looked at the lifetime costs to reach "The American Dream" and found that owning a new car is more costly than raising kids and nearly as costly as owning a home. Source: www.investopedia.com/2025-america...

The problem is this: Everyone wants traffic to be slow and safe in their own neighbourhood… … but they also want to be able to drive as fast as they can through everyone else’s neighbourhood. www.thestar.com/news/gta/dou...

It’s a massive problem how much of social media is just bots. Here’s screenshot of a conversation on x/Twitter where someone purports to be a Democrat switching sides to become Republican, and then someone asks the account to post a recipe… and then again in Korean.

We need operating funding for public transportation. It’s what countries around the world already do, including the US. While we’re at it, we also need more interurban transportation funding, including rail and busses.

Someone took the chip from their Presto Card and put it into a magic wand.

"The very thing that’s exciting about solar energy — its abundance and low cost — also makes it of little interest to investors. Sun (and wind) are so freely available all around us that it’s hard to hoard them and make big profits from them." Amazing, @lindamcquaig.bsky.social! #canpoli

These two lanes for bikes take up less than one half a lane for cars.

We are entering an era where home systems and appliances will themselves be batteries, building resilience from blackouts and giving buildings options to capture more energy than they need.

A list of very sensible solutions to speeding up and increasing reliability of the Spadina streetcar. www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

I just had a smoothie that had a chunk of plastic accidentally blended into it and I can’t wait until we eliminate single use plastics forever.

Fare-capping is a fantastic policy that we need in Toronto.

1) We used to transport things like this before cars 2) Via Rail has a program where trains drop people off in the wilderness between stations and you can ask them to pick you up elsewhere along the rail line: www.viarail.ca/en/plan/faq/...

As the climate continues to warm, cities like Toronto need to have serious discussions about the importance of shade.

Infant is dead and 6 more injured because we keep building our communities to prioritize 1-tonne vehicles that go 180km/h, are parked 95% of the time, are mostly empty even when moving, costs thousands a year just to run, kills over a million people each year, and are burning up our planet. #topoli

Reposting because far too many people don’t yet understand this.

If we had a single design for all of our street furniture across the city, then we could more easily store spare parts and repair them when they break down.

Behind me, 70-80 people are being held up by about 7 people in cars turning left. AND I counted another 5-6 cars that cut into the left lane in front of the streetcar because they also wanted to turn left. This could be solved by banning left turning cars from the streetcar lane.

On September 20th, people from across Toronto will be meeting at Yonge and Dundas to call for climate action. I’ll be there and I hope you will too. (if you’re not in Toronto, the site might be an event close to you as well!) #topoli drawtheline.world/canada?r=CA&...

Tens of thousands of people have to scramble every day because Toronto isn’t moving fast enough to separate surface transit from cars even though transit a) moves more people than cars do on major corridors and b) moves more people using less road space than cars do everywhere. #topoli

Countries like South Africa, Pakistan, and Vietnam are going solar at just astounding rates. Solar is cheap because you don’t need to extract, transport, or buy fuel — fuel that’s been controlled by a handful of corporations for decades. We can have energy without fossil fuels.