*Toronto, Ontario/Canada - July 16, 2018: A firefighter gives instructions to her team. Photo by Colin Dewar, Shutterstock.*Dear friends, Every lasting movement depends on people who are willing to learn together, speak together, and act together.  Today, that has...

The war that began when the United States and Israel attacked Iran quickly morphed into a regional conflict. For over 100 days it choked off the export of up to a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG), until the MOU between the US and Iran was...

Photo: SCAN! member Jamie Swift at Kingston’s weekly Fridays for the Future noon rally. He hadn’t even heard by then that Cenovus CEO Jon McKenzie is pulling down $10,391,189 a year. It is difficult to ignore the hard-faced arrogance Canadians witnessed last month....

Carney won the last election with an “elbows up” rallying cry promising to protect us from Trump, tariffs, and threats to Canadian sovereignty.  Before he became a politician he repeatedly called for fossil fuels to be left in the ground.   His election platform...

Last October, Ontario’s Auditor-General issued a Report on Progress to Reduce Gas Emissions. With respect to action on climate breakdown, the A-G concluded that not since 2021 has the provincial government “reported on progress.” That’s because there has been zero...

 The Ford government, through its electricity producer, Ontario Power Generation, has recently announced plans to build the largest and most expensive nuclear reactor complex in the world. The project is called New Nuclear at Wesleyville (NNW). It is currently at the...

Photo: Jody Berland   “If cattle and dairy cows were a country” ...   Prime Minister Carney’s eloquent speech at the recent conference in Davos made headlines around the world. He spoke articulately about the rise of hegemonic countries with unhindered...

*Photo credit: Wolfgang Weiser/Unsplash   In Davos, on January 25, 2026, Prime Minister Carney declared there had been a rupture, not a transition, in the world order. In response to this breach, he stated the government of Canada has pursued a strategy of...

* This article was originally published in  The Kingston Crow on January 2, 2026. *     In voting for the Liberals, Canadians rejected the politics of climate change denialism, austerity, and the assault on minority rights and refugees represented by Pierre Poilievre....

We in Kawartha Lakes may be happy to say ‘so long’ to 2025, our year of extreme weather. The record-shattering snowfall. Then the Ice Storm (yes, with capitals), with massive destruction, lengthy power outages, and flooding. Then one heat wave after another, often...

  In the dead of winter, 2025, the Ford government called a snap election 15 months early under the pretence of needing a mandate to address Trump’s tariff threat.  Soon after being re-elected with a third majority government on February 27th (with 43% of the...

*Residents flee 2016 wildfire in FortMcMurray. Photo licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.   Driven by human-caused climate heating, temperatures are rising globally. In Canada, temperatures are warming twice as...

"If fascism scares you the way it does me, figuring out how to break the centralized power of the fossil fuel industry is a key form of resistance."     The most recent Ontario Auditor-General’s report should shock  the most hard-bitten cynic. It certainly made me...

SCAN! stands for Seniors for Climate Action Now!. Effective action taken now requires both clear goals and planning for the future. The world is telling us that we must change how we live. We should talk about what kind of approaches would be sustainable. One of our...

September 20th was International Draw the Line Day. Here's a line that needs to be drawn in Ontario and all across Canada. It is generally accepted in the scientific community that the world is undergoing a significant change in its climate, and we need to do...

I think this piece has the right instincts – “global heating” is sharper than “warming,” and the reminder about feedback loops is useful – but it too quickly slides into misdirection. The whole “we are the enemy” line flattens responsibility in ways that are both...

When you are in a fight, as we are for the health of our planet, you had better study your enemy. But for us that is simultaneously easy and hard. We are the enemy. For all sorts of reasons, we do not like the hard truth. We soften bad news. We puff up the positive....

*Photo: R. D. Darren, Wikimedia Commons       As I write this post, Toronto is enveloped by haze from wildfires burning in northern Ontario and the Prairie provinces. The air quality is poor, and it is hot—so hot that dogs are finding shade and refusing to continue to...

  If we look deep into the eyes of animals we will see wisdom behind them.  However, if we look deep into the eyes of some politicians and industry leaders we will see nothing but the status quo and a shortsighted view of the future behind them.  By looking to the...

Early last November I was asleep in a narrow bunk on VIA Rail’s Canadian on the way to Vancouver. It was a bucket list trip. Outside Winnipeg I was awakened by my phone’s irritating ping. And here I’d told myself to use airplane mode on the train. But that wasn’t the...

Seniors for Climate Action Now! (SCAN!) is a climate action group that emphasizes “Now” in its name - because the future is not something we wait for; it's something we create today.  The word “Now” is not just a moment in time. It refers to the present moment,...

Kim – thank you for this thoughtful reflection. Still, I find myself deeply unsettled by the persistence of the personal responsibility frame in discussions of climate and environmental collapse. While it often comes across as a moral appeal – even a call to agency –...

For me, CBC News Network is the most comprehensive, reliable and accessible news station in Canada. So, whenever I have a craving for news, I connect with CBC’s 24-hour news station. If you have ever watched it, you will note that besides the time-specific...

As the world transitions from fossil fuels to renewable energy, attention has focused on the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But we have largely ignored the related harm of air pollution on our health, caused by burning fossil fuels. Given the...

A recent meeting in Saskatoon brought the Canada’s newly elected Prime Minister together with all the Premiers. They sat down just after Saskatchewan declared a State of Emergency as wildfires ravaged the northern part of the province. The Premiers and Prime Minister...

The Industrial Revolution came about solely because fossil fuels are not only literally powerful, they are also the most conveniently stored and versatile source of energy ever discovered. They seemed the perfect commodity until it became apparent that their emissions...

Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) the Italian astronomer and physicist was correct when he said, “The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.” He believed that the universe is governed by mathematical principles and that understanding these principles is...

Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, London/New York: Verso, 2024. As the title suggests, this will not be a comforting read. Malm, known for his earlier book, How to Blow up a Pipeline, tackles our current,...

 The IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services1 2024, compiled by 145 expert authors from 50 countries over the past three years, finds that around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades,...

  Stop Press: The following was written before the Green Party was banished from the televised party leaders’ debates.   Election day is coming up.  This time we vote just after Earth Day and Earth Week. Yet you wouldn’t even suspect from the campaign that...

Ontario is projected to require 75% more electricity by 2050. To meet this demand, the Ontario government has proposed transforming the province into an energy superpower by aggressively expanding nuclear energy and natural gas while cutting support for wind and solar...

Last October 1, 2024, the world and Seniors for Climate Action Now (SCAN!) celebrated International Climate Change Seniors Day with thousands of projects and events to mark the occasion. SCAN!, with its many regional political and eco-activist events, along with other...

Yup, the ABF election (that no one wanted) is staring us in the face. If you are just waking up from a nap and are caught off guard wondering what ABF is, well it means “anyone but Ford”. I don’t know about you, but I have never liked anything the “FORD NATION” has...

Ontario homeowners are experiencing major inflation in home insurance premiums -- and it is unlikely to end anytime soon. The insurance industry blames the skyrocketing damages from “severe weather events” like flooding and wildfires that are becoming more intense and...

Let’s go beyond facts, figures, and frightening forecasts.  Let’s tell a story about a better future. In late October, I had a phone conversation with a long-time friend who now lives in a retirement community in a town 20 miles from Ashville, N.C.  Ashville has the...

The Ford government has rushed through another Omnibus Bill. Much public debate after the bill was introduced was around the whole issue of tearing up bike lanes.  An important issue for sure but just a small piece of the bill. This one (Bill 212) is popularly known...

This is about hot stuff and cold stuff, where heat goes, some devices that create cold, some devices that create heat, and what a heat pump does. What We Learned by Grade 6 Put your fingers around a cold can of pop and feel the heat in your fingers leave and go to the...

The history of wind turbines in Ontario is a saga with as many twists, turns and revolutions as a wind turbine.  A brief chronology is set out below which shows where we have ended up in Ontario and why all SCAN! Ontario members should check with their own...

In March of 2018, Amazon software developer Tim Bray was blocking the gates of pipeline colossus Kinder Morgan at its Burnaby, B.C. fossil-fuel trans-shipment complex. He and fellow activists sang and stood their ground until the police hauled them off. Some 250...

Nuclear is Not the Solution : The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change by M.V. Ramana Professor M.V. Ramana’s new book goes much further than a conventional accounting of the well-documented problems that plague the nuclear power industry. The huge cost...

It has been a busy time for the Ford government and its costly nuclear expansion program.  Back in June former Energy Minister Todd Smith left the government. After spending billions on the nuclear industry and promising billions more, Todd Smith landed a job as a VP...

Book Review: The Environmentalist’s Dilemma: Promise and Peril in and Age of Climate Crisis, by Arno Kopecky, ECW Press, 2021Arno Kopecky* has collected a highly readable, and often humorous, series of essays related to the climate crisis. Published in 2021, some of...

As the world grapples with the escalating threat of climate change it's shocking to note that our governments seem to be getting their priorities backwards. Instead of focusing on the future and the well-being of the planet, they're mired in short-term thinking and...

I watched the late-night news on July 24 with dread and dismay. The news showed the Maligne Lodge in Jasper fully engulfed in flames. My family had stayed in that lodge, the Jasper Park Lodge, and other places during our visits to Jasper. We once stayed in the upper...

As the world grapples with climate change, it's clear that our planet's future depends on transforming infrastructure and transportation systems. Wales, a small country with a big vision, is leading the way. By prioritizing sustainable transportation infrastructure...

*This post was revised on July 18, 2026   Until our son, Kyle, died at the age of 36 in February of 2019, no one in our family had heard of or given a moment’s consideration to “green” or “natural” burial. To the extent that we had given any thought to what would...