Food & Energy
The fake meat industry claims to be environmentally friendly, but researchers from UC Davis have warned that lab-grown meat produces up to 25 times more CO2 than traditional animal husbandry. While the fake meat industry is being touted as an environmentally friendly and sustainable way to feed the world, the true intent is to recreate the kind of global control that Monsanto and others achieved through patented GMO seed development. In the end, lab-created meats are worse for the environment than livestock and will undoubtedly deteriorate human health to boot, just like GMO grains have.
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Read MoreA Maru Public Opinion survey undertaken for the Breakfast Club of Canada finds a vast majority of Canadians believe the federal Liberal government should make good on its 2021 election campaign promise to provide a national school nutritious meal program.
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Read MoreThe actor and comedian behind the popular Mr. Bean character has called on drivers to hold off buying an electric vehicle (EV), saying the environmental benefits do not stack up.
Rowan Atkinson, a long-time motor enthusiast with a degree and master’s in electrical engineering, said current EV technology was more harmful to the environment than it was worth.
“Increasingly, I’m feeling that our honeymoon with electric cars is coming to an end, and that’s no bad thing: we’re realising that a wider range of options need to be explored if we’re going to properly address the very serious environmental problems that our use of the motor car has created,” Atkinson wrote in The Guardian newspaper.
He pointed to figures released by automotive giant Volvo revealing that greenhouse gas emissions during the EV production process were 70 percent higher than building a petrol car.
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Read MoreProfit margins for landlords in Canada average eight percent, the Commons human resources committee was told yesterday. Witnesses disagreed over means to increase the national housing supply.
“Some people picture all or most of the rent money going into the landlord’s pocket,” testified John Dickie, president of the Canadian Federation of Apartment Associations. “The truth is far from that.”
Dickie said an average 19 percent of rental revenue covered operating costs, 14 percent paid property tax and 12 percent paid utilities. “That makes up 45 cents out of every dollar of rent leaving 55 cents as net operating income but we’re not done with the expenses,” said Dickie.
“On average another 36 cents goes to pay the mortgage and 11 cents goes to pay for major repairs and building modernization,” said Dickie. “That leaves just eight cents out of every dollar of rent as the pre-tax return on each dollar of revenue.”
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Read MoreThe Bank of Canada increased its target for the overnight rate to 4.75 per cent, with the Bank rate at 5 per cent and the deposit rate at 4.75 per cent.
The Bank is continuing with its quantitative tightening. Since the last announcement in April, the Bank’s Government of Canada bond holdings have declined from around $340 billion to around $323 billion in May.
CPI inflation in April reached 4.4 per cent. The Bank continues to expect that CPI inflation will ease to about 3 per cent within the summer. The Bank, however, is concerned that CPI inflation could become stuck above 2 per cent given excess demand persisting and three-month measures of core inflation between 3.5 and 4 per cent for several months.
GDP growth for the first quarter of 2023 was stronger than the Bank expected, coming in at 3.1 per cent. The Governing Council says it will continue to assess core inflation and CPI inflation outlooks while evaluating the evolution of excess demand, inflation expectations, wage growth and corporate pricing behaviour to ensure they remain in line with the Bank’s inflation goals.
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Read MoreThe latest data from the non-profit Angus Reid Institute tracking approval of provincial premiers shows while most garner a positive assessment from at least 40% of their provincial populations, Ontario’s Doug Ford, New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs and Manitoba’s Heather Stefanson are struggling.
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Read MoreStory at a glance:
Pairwise, an agricultural biotechnology company, created Conscious Greens Purple Power Baby Greens Blend, the first CRISPR-edited food available to U.S. consumers.
The company used CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat, to edit mustard greens’ DNA, removing a gene that gives them their pungent flavor.
The greens are first being rolled out in restaurants in St. Louis, Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, before heading to U.S. grocery stores — beginning in the Pacific Northwest.
In 2022, researchers with Boston Children’s Hospital revealed that using CRISPR in human cell lines increased the risk of large rearrangements of DNA, which could increase cancer risk.
Because regulators don’t consider gene-edited foods to be genetically modified organisms (GMOs), they don’t have to be labeled.
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Read MoreWind power generation dwindled to a near standstill across Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and even deep into the central United States on Wednesday morning.
According to the outlet Pipeline Online, major wind farms ranging across Alberta to Saskatchewan and down south to New Mexico and Texas fell to near-zero levels.
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Read MoreVaccines against African swine fever being tested in Vietnam are close to approval, global and U.S. veterinary officials said, in what would be a major breakthrough to tackle the deadly animal disease that regularly ravages pig farms worldwide.
African swine fever has for years disrupted the $250 billion global pork market. In the worst outbreak in 2018-19, about half the domestic pig population died in China, the world’s biggest producer, causing losses estimated at over $100 billion.
After decades of failed attempts due to the complexity of the virus, two vaccines co-developed by U.S. scientists being tested in large pilot schemes by Vietnamese companies are showing “very promising” results, Gregorio Torres, head of the science department at the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), told Reuters in a telephone interview.
“We have never been so close to get a vaccine that may work,” Torres said, noting the two shots had “probably the highest chances to succeed” and be authorised for sale worldwide.
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Read MoreThe day after the city’s housing and affordability task force recommendations were voted down, Calgary city council had a change of heart and voted in favour of them, with some changes.
Late Tuesday, councillors Dan McLean, Andre Chabot, Richard Pootmans, Jennifer Wyness, Terry Wong, Sonya Sharp, Peter Demong and Sean Chu voted against the recommendations, citing concerns about items like making a base residential land use district common across the city, and how the decision-making process on the recommendations would play out.
“The process was not clear yesterday,” Mayor Jyoti Gondek said.
Pootmans said he did some reflecting on the vote that evening and then reached out to his colleagues.
“It occurred to me after I went home, I was ashamed. The city has an affordable housing issue and there’s a housing problem as well. None of this was effectively addressed by what we did yesterday,” he told reporters. “In fact, it was not at all addressed.”
The year-old task force’s recommendations focused on three outcomes: increasing and diversifying the housing supply in Calgary, strengthening the ties within the housing sector and improving living conditions for people in rental housing.
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