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Will regular power cuts soon be part of Canadian summer?
"We won't have any protection … imagine trying to live without being able to stay cool, even inside a house, it's like an oven in there," he says, gesturing to his small rancher that sits in a semi-rural neighbourhood, with very little tree coverage.
Reader Feedback
Last week, we wrote about some common misconceptions surrounding electric vehicles (EVs) and whether they really are better for the environment than fossil fuel-powered internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. We focused on carbon emissions.
But some readers were also interested in the environmental impact of mining the critical minerals for the batteries that power EVs.
Barbara Bond wrote: "At this point in time we are destroying entire ecosystems to recover the cobalt and other minerals that are necessary."
Rachel Doran, the executive director of Clean Energy Canada, says: "I don't want to be painting a picture that everything is rosy and that [in] every place that things are mined in the world today, there's appropriate human rights practices or that environmental impacts are perfect."
But, in regards to the environment, she says we have to consider how much resource extraction is already happening to power ICE vehicles — and a fossil-fuel driven global economy.
Climate change is making heat waves worse. A new study shows how specific companies are fuelling the problem
The increasing role of carbon emissions in causing heat waves, floods, droughts and other extreme weather is becoming clearer, thanks to the growing field of climate attribution studies.This research shows how much more likely — and severe — a particular weather disaster was because of climate change.A new study by climate researchers in Europe and the U.S. and published in the journal Nature has taken this analysis further, by linking the deadliest type of disaster — heat waves — directly to major fossil fuel companies and their products.
A woman uses a misting station in Vancouver during a heat wave in June 2021. (Ben Nelms/CBC)
