The blueprint for winning big on climate also came out last night. No more technocratic, policy wonk approaches. People showed they care about utility bills, free buses, affordable housing, etc. These are all climate issues. Talk about climate in terms people understand and experience.

New-to-me news from the only country taking indoor air quality seriously: www.brusselstimes.com/1622783/air-...

Toronto connections with Australian Science Prize winner for advances in air quality science, combating COVID and wildfire smoke hazards... www.abc.net.au/news/science...

In Ontario, Public-Private Partnerships for the Loss. 🏴 Let's build real capacity, not the shareholder value of engineering multinationals (or similar.)

It is very clear the gutting of Teen Vogue is about silencing their excellent political coverage. Corporations want you uninformed and shut off from meaningful journalism. And they’re staggeringly successful at it so far.

NEW POST: No, the Supreme Court is not an obstacle to tougher laws against child porn emmettmacfarlane.substack.com/p/no-the-sup...

🆄🅽🆂🅰🅵🅴 🅸🅽 🆃🅷🅴 🆆🅾🆁🅺🅿🅻🅰🅲🅴 how the CBC forced me to resign over COVID and why we’re all worse off for it—especially our kids a 🧵 (on the occasion of my son’s [5th] and the CBC’s [89th] shared birthday, nov. 2) 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼 [links to referenced articles in ALT text]

It's district heat in Boston! WOOHOO!

Fact check says **Yes**.

PSA: Ontario is opening COVID and flu shots to the general public starting tomorrow

“Ontario’s [actually Doug Ford’s] plan to ban bike lanes is ripped from the business lobby’s wish list. Buried in a new omnibus bill, the latest salvo in Doug Ford’s war on bikes is more than a vendetta—it’s a gift to corporate lobbyists.” Via @breachmedia.ca Money over lives and better mobility.

What would it take to drive ground-source heating and cooling into the mainstream in big commercial property developments? There's some hope in this Toronto Star story about a new business model that sees the geothermal company selling flat-rate heating/cooling to renters and property owners.

Now we're *all* on the Shining Path.

9. When faced with a choice between betraying their transgender students or defying Trump’s demands, these locally elected leaders at school boards are sending a clear message: the rights and dignity of queer and trans people are not bargaining chips in a hostage negotiation.

A new pipeline paired with carbon capture may sound promising, but the numbers tell a different story. Our analysis finds the so-called “grand bargain” would result in oilsands emissions going up, even with the Pathways carbon capture project.

In remembrance of Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered on 7 October 2006. The 7th of October is also Vladimir Putin's birthday - it is not a coincidence.

Good on the mayors. Also, I'd love to be a fly on the wall now with the comms consultants & Ford's comms ppl. “A total ban on (automated speed enforcement) would reverse years of progress on safety,” said a letter that went out to Ford and Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria" #OnPoli

The richest man on earth owns X. The second richest man on earth is about to be a major owner of TikTok. The third richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fourth richest man owns The Washington Post. See the problem here?

It would be good if this was matched with a call for embedding critical thinking skills in primary and secondary education across Europe.

On Automated Speed Enforcement Cameras in Ontario: “The speed traps do not slow people down. They may slow them within the community, but there are so many other people coming throughout the community.

@mark-carney.bsky.social @juliedabrusin.bsky.social

NEW: NIH leadership has denied the existence of a list of banned words for grantmaking purposes, but I have seen such a list circulating among staff. It has lots of words relating to gender and diversity, of course. Also things like "climate change," "vaccine hesitancy," "ethnic origin," and others.

Glad to have had a heat pump installed earlier this year. Meanwhile, in Finland, Norway, and Sweden, "Cumulatively, the heat pumps sold over the past 30 years contributed to a -72% drop in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from heating in Finland, -83% in Norway and -95% in Sweden." #ClimateAction

"The Conservatives rewrote the self-defence provisions in 2012. Poilievre voted for them. Now he’s out pretending that the law he championed is some sinister Liberal plot against homeowners."

My lab's been attacked by an anti-wind group and their lawyers. They threatened the science funding of my whole university, to shut me and my undergraduate research assistants up. NYT just covered it. 1/n www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...

York Region Public Health warning of measles outbreak linked to Thornhill convenience store

There's no treatment or cure for Long COVID, which vaccines can help prevent. The official position of the FDA, according to Vinay Prasad, is that millions of Americans are merely "lying fake disease grifters."

There's a problem with Alberta's COVID-19 vaccination policy. OK, there are a lot of problems, but let me point out one that most have missed. Tomorrow (Monday the 18) should be the *end* of the fall vaccine season. It takes 2 weeks for the immune system to build up full defences after vaccination.

Hello, smoke-affected continent of North America. Anyone suggesting that Canada could do manual fuel control at scale across the Boreal Forest is quite innumerate and has no intuition about space and scale.

The last three decades of efforts to build bridges, deradicalize, and address the root causes of gun violence will not prevent another CDC shooting. It will continue to happen until RFK Jr. is removed from power. It will never be safe to practice public health in RFK Jr.'s America.

This op-ed from NIH director Jay Bhattacharya is *infuriating*. He says we have to stop funding mRNA vaccine research because it hasn't "earned public trust." Motherfucker, WHO DID THAT.

🧵 Dear Republican lawmakers, Canada has the largest intact boreal forest on the planet. An increasingly hotter world due to #ClimateChange makes longer dry seasons, far larger wildfires & yes, more smoke. No amount of "raking" fixes it. The scientists warned of exactly this for a very long time /1

I hope some people in Toronto Water's stormwater team are modeling this for us. I seem to recall a ~100 mm (4 inch) rainfall a few summers ago that caused some serious problems, many of them unforeseen, and almost killed some people. So, twice as much would not be very good news.

Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.

From a design perspective, Autopilot takes human out of "the driving task" and into what is called a "vigilance task": where you sit and wait for something to go wrong, then recover from it. Humans are known to be worse at vigilance tasks than driving, and inevitably become inattentive over time.

This is not a good way to save money. Not at all! But it is an opportunity to give rich people one more advantage over poor people.

Bloomberg's ‪‪@byjustinfox.bsky.social‬ has done it again: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

NEW: A former Microsoft AI engineer says the company's "AI for sustainability" claims are BS, a distraction from their hyper-polluting AI contracts with oil companies. “From what I saw," he said, "I believe that finding and extracting more oil is one of the biggest use cases of AI today."

Now, years later, the case is clear. On 17 November 2022, after a trial in absentia in the Netherlands, two Russians and a Ukrainian separatist were found guilty of murdering all 298 people on board MH17. The Dutch court also ruled that Russia was in control of the separatist forces 4

Maybe you've heard Ontario is dealing with some bad air quality, mostly thanks to wildfires. That's bad, but there are several problems layered on top. Here's yesterday's:

This is Tommy Douglas, 1904-1986. He is the grandfather of Kiefer Sutherland and leader of the NDP from 1961-71. His government introduced the continent’s first single payer, universal health care program. #Canada

Liberals have been very concerned about mis- and disinformation in recent years, so when Mark Carney says carbon capture will allow for “decarbonized” oil, we should be clear that he’s engaging in active disinformation about climate change to please Danielle Smith and the Alberta oil industry.

This is not a fight about soyabeans and transistors. Trump is the front face of a right wing insurgency that has undermined the international rule of law. Canada is the front line standing up to his increasingly dangerous rhetoric. Here is my latest piece. charlieangus.substack.com/p/trumps-tar...

People are dying because the news & Government didn’t tell the story of ever increasing climate risk. Pass it on.

Anyway, it's been deeply depressing to cover extremism for nearly a decade, only now for sitting members of congress to tweet out the same sort of thing you'd have once seen on the daily stormer

Anyone have recs for heat pump installers in the Philly area? A friend of mine just had her HVAC system go kaput. She had wanted to switch to heat pumps but now she's stressed and might just end up doing a replacement.