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[PHOTO] Revealed wall, Yonge and Eglinton
Feb. 7th, 2016 03:05 pm
The construction on the northeast corner of Yonge and Eglinton has torn a gap in the city. Walls once hidden are now revealed.
Feb. 7th, 2016
The construction on the northeast corner of Yonge and Eglinton has torn a gap in the city. Walls once hidden are now revealed.
Writing for The Guardian, Ryan Schuessler examines how the Caribbean island of Montserrat is trying to capitalize on its excessive volcanism.
It’s still a grim sight, but 20 years after the first eruption, Montserratians are beginning to reconsider Soufrière Hills. The nation’s government, elected at the end of 2014, is now betting the country’s future, in part, on the very volcano that almost destroyed it. The eruption is the past, they argue; geothermal energy, sand mining and tourism are the future.
“We have learned to live with the volcano,” said the island’s premier, Donaldson Romeo. The “long, hopeless period” that began with the eruptions is over. “Ash to cash,” he said with a grin.
“Before the volcano, we were standing on our own two feet,” Romeo added. “Here we are 20 years later, with lots of money spent, but we don’t have the programs that will assist us in achieving [self-sufficiency].”
The majority of Montserrat’s annual budget comes from the United Kingdom: since the crisis, British taxpayers have invested more than £400m in aid to the island. A new airport and housing for displaced residents are among the improvements made possible through those funds.
But “ash to cash” has been slow to materialize. Talk of geothermal development, like many projects on the island, has been going on for more than a decade amid concerns, both in Montserrat and the UK, of local mismanagement of aid money.
Yet Romeo says the island is poised to finally spring forward with a refreshed relationship with London.
“British taxpayers’ money will now be spent in the way where the people of Montserrat will be developed, and the infrastructure will be developed,” he said. “We are actually in a place to fix several hundred years of history.”
In The New Yorker, Jacques Leslie examines how the Kariba Dam on the Zambia-Zimbabwe border is one predictable disaster away from collapse.
The new year has not been kind to the hydroelectric-dam industry. On January 11th, the New York Times reported that Mosul Dam, the largest such structure in Iraq, urgently requires maintenance to prevent its collapse, a disaster that could drown as many as five hundred thousand people downstream and leave a million homeless. Four days earlier, the energy minister of Zambia declared that Kariba Dam, which straddles the border between his country and Zimbabwe, holding back the world’s largest reservoir, was in “dire” condition. An unprecedented drought threatens to shut down the dam’s power production, which supplies nearly half the nation’s electricity.
The news comes as more and more of the biggest hydroelectric-dam projects around the world are being cancelled or postponed. In 2014, researchers at Oxford University reviewed the financial performance of two hundred and forty-five dams and concluded that the “construction costs of large dams are too high to yield a positive return.” Other forms of energy generation—wind, solar, and miniature hydropower units that can be installed inside irrigation canals—are becoming competitive, and they cause far less social and environmental damage. And dams are particularly ill-suited to climate change, which simultaneously requires that they be larger (to accommodate the anticipated floods) and smaller (to be cost-effective during the anticipated droughts).
[ . . . Kariba] has been nearly incapacitated by ongoing drought, which has lowered the reservoir’s volume to twelve per cent of its usual capacity. But if the reservoir is refilled, the dam faces the possibility of collapse. It was built in the late nineteen-fifties, and in the years since water flowing through the dam’s six floodgates has carved a three-hundred-foot-deep pit, or plunge pool, at its base. The plunge pool extends to within a hundred and thirty feet of the dam’s foundation; if it reaches the foundation, the dam will collapse. That seems hard to imagine now, with the reservoir at a record-low level. But the Zambezi River Basin, on which the dam sits, is the most susceptible of Africa’s thirteen basins to exceptional droughts and floods, and climate change is intensifying both.
Kariba’s collapse, like Mosul’s, would constitute an epochal event in the history of energy development—the dam industry’s Chernobyl. The ensuing torrent would be four times bigger than the Zambezi’s biggest recorded flood, in 1958, and would release enough water to knock over another major dam three hundred miles downstream, in Mozambique. At least three million people live in the flood’s path; most would die or lose their crops or possessions. About forty per cent of the electricity-generating capacity of twelve southern African nations would be eliminated.
The dam, four hundred and twenty feet tall and nearly two thousand feet wide, was built with financing from the World Bank to provide power for the copper mines of what was then Northern Rhodesia. The designers intended to make the dam impervious to a one-in-ten-thousand-year flood, but their calculations were based on only three decades of Zambezi flow data—a period too short to permit credible forecasting. This flaw became apparent in 1957, when the site, still under construction, was hit with a flood bigger than the designers’ worst-case projection. The planners hurriedly enlarged the spillway, but in 1958 the project was hit by another flood, twice as big as the previous one, so the spillway was expanded again. More recent projections, cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicate that the Zambezi River Basin will experience still drier and more prolonged droughts and even bigger floods in years to come.
Bloomberg's William Davison notes how Chinese investment and government spending are driving Ethiopia's booming economy.
Ethiopia is the new flavor of the month for Africa watchers.
The East African nation led the pack of fastest-growing economies — not just in Africa, but in the world — in 2015. While many African nations are struggling to cope with plunging currencies and falling revenue from commodities, Ethiopia’s economy grew 8.7 percent last year and is set to expand 8.1 percent in 2016, according to International Monetary Fund estimates. Globally, only Papua New Guinea grew faster last year, at 12.3 percent.
Much of Ethiopia’s success is due to the dominance of the state in the economy. The nation exports very little compared to its African peers and capital controls mean the currency, the birr, has retained its value despite the global downturn.
"The fact that much of the spending is on capital projects, especially infrastructure, means that government spending has been the key driver of the boom," said Getachew Teklemariam, an independent economist based in the capital, Addis Ababa. "It is unimaginable to think of Ethiopia as one of the fast-growing countries in the world without government spending."
It’s that spending by state-owned companies such as the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, Ethio Telecom and Ethiopia Electric Power that’s led to a 70 percent boost in capital investment in the past three fiscal years to 155.2 billion birr ($7.3 billion). The government is building everything from industrial parks to sugar factories and power lines.
Adnan R. Khan of MacLean's notes the precarity of the Saudi monarchy.
The execution of Sheik Nimr al-Nimr and 46 other people in Saudi Arabia’s capital of Riyadh last month was a curious bit of cruelty, even by Saudi standards. Nimr, a political activist and leading figure in the Shia reformist community, opposed the Iranian regime and considered the Assads in Syria “oppressors,” sentiments shared by the Saudi government.
His killing seemed to serve no purpose at a time when regional rivals Saudi Arabia, a Sunni power, and Shia Iran are locked in one of their worst cold-war flare-ups. The fallout was predictable, too: Iranian protesters took to the streets, storming the Saudi embassy and other consulates throughout Iran. Diplomatic relations, already on a knife’s-edge, all but collapsed.
“With the recent execution of Sheik Nimr, it looks like the door to a more cordial diplomatic resolution may have been all but closed by Saudi Arabia,” says Payam Mohseni, Iran project director and a fellow for Iran studies at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. “The risk is now that tit-for-tat retaliations between the two countries may further raise the stakes and escalate conflict.”
So why did Saudi Arabia invite this trouble? The answer can partly be found in the fast-falling price of oil. With oil prices down 70 per cent in the past year and a half, and Iran on the verge of breaking out on the international stage after a nuclear limitation deal that led to a lifting of international sanctions, Saudi Arabia suddenly finds itself on the losing end of Middle Eastern petro-politics.
With some experts predicting oil prices could remain low for the foreseeable future—prices are currently around $30 a barrel (all prices in US$) and falling this week—Saudi Arabia faces the challenge of maintaining an expensive economic system based on patronage and almost entirely reliant on oil revenues.
Bloomberg's Christine Jenkins has a brief article about a push for development in Amazonian Colombia that has obvious potential environmental repercussions.
Remote, sparsely-populated regions of Colombia will see “spectacular growth” when they become open for development following a peace deal with Marxist rebels, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said.
“Half of our country is unconquered, unoccupied; there’s nothing there,” Santos said Friday in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “These are productive lands. There’s a lot of interest from private companies and we are establishing private-public initiatives to develop this half of the country.”
A peace deal would boost economic growth by 1.5-to-2 percentage points per year, with remote regions growing as fast as 9 percent, he said. Santos has set a March deadline for talks with the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to wrap up.
Most of Colombia’s 49 million inhabitants live in the Andes mountains and on the Caribbean and Pacific coasts. The vast plains and rain forests east of the Andes, which make up about half of the national territory, are very thinly inhabited. Vichada province, a territory about the size of Kentucky that borders Venezuela, has a population of 72,000.
CBC notes the continued decline of BlackBerry.
BlackBerry has confirmed it is laying off 200 employees, in Waterloo, Ont., where the company is headquartered, and at a manufacturing facility in Sunrise, Fla.
The company filed a worker adjustment and retraining notification with the state of Florida on Thursday to lay off 75 manufacturing workers between Feb. 4 and Feb. 26. The other 125 jobs, part of the 200 overall, would be cut from Waterloo.
BlackBerry denied reports in the tech blog Mobile Syrup, which suggested the number of layoffs at BlackBerry's Waterloo headquarters could be as high as 1,000 people, or 35 per cent of the company's estimated workforce.
[. . .]
The company has also parted ways with Gary Klassen, creator of BlackBerry Messenger.
"We can confirm that Gary Klassen has left BlackBerry. The company is grateful for his many contributions during his tenure and we wish him the best in his future endeavours," said BlackBerry in a statement.
Torontoist's Kevin Plummer looks at the legacy of William Peyton Hubbard, Toronto's first black elected official, and how he is remembered.
In 2008, a local resident discovered that the historical plaque near 660 Broadview Avenue—erected 30 years ago by the Toronto Historical Board to honour William Peyton Hubbard, the city’s first municipal politician of African descent—was damaged. They returned the pieces to Heritage Toronto, which unveiled a replacement marker in February 2009 with a ceremony for students at Montcrest School. Over the years, Hubbard has been commemorated in public ceremony, newspaper retrospectives, a biography, and now a second historical plaque. And his story offers insight into the ways the lives of prominent citizens can become entangled with the politics of commemoration.
There is a common narrative shared between them all. The Toronto-born son of a Virginian freed slave, Hubbard worked for 16 years as a cake baker before becoming a cab driver. As he was driving one wintry night, he saved another cab from nearly plummeting into the Don River. A friendship blossomed between Hubbard and the grateful occupant of that cab, newspaperman George Brown, who later encouraged him to seek elected office at the age of 51. He was narrowly defeated in the municipal election of 1893, but made a strong impression with the public and the press. In 1894, Hubbard was elected alderman, the first of 14 consecutive (and 15 total) terms in office. Over the course of his career, he also served on the Board of Control from 1898 and served as acting mayor on a number of occasions.
The present day is always exerting pressure in public commemoration. As Thomas Symons, then-chair of the Canadian Historic Sites and Monuments Board, said in the introduction to his The Place of History (1997): “Heritage is…the aspirations of the people who made it, and one might add, the aspirations of the people who have chosen to preserve it.” Often it’s an act that celebrates more than it engages critiques or controversies surrounding historical questions. Looking at a few instances of public commemoration of Hubbard—each of which highlight different points of emphasis—we can see how each reveals or obscures different aspects of character and gain a fuller picture of Hubbard.
James Bow considers the question of what is to be done with the Union Pearson Express.
Metrolinx, the provincial agency charged with upgrading public transit across the Greater Toronto Area and Hamilton, has a problem, and its letters are U.P.
The Union Pearson Express is a seriously odd-duck — a major transit improvement that neither the City of Toronto nor the province of Ontario initially asked for, but one which Ontario ended up building. It was launched as a legacy project by the federal transport minister in the dying months of Jean Chretien’s government, but it somehow survived the election of Stephen Harper. It’s a line that actually got built among a sea of transit expansion proposals that went exactly nowhere. It’s supposed to make back all its costs from the farebox. And it’s carrying fewer passengers per day than the 192 AIPORT ROCKET TTC bus to Kipling station.
This is a problem, because while Metrolinx is labouring mightily on a number of important and worthy transit projects, including the Eglinton-Crosstown LRT, this is the first really noticeable piece of new transit infrastructure to bear Metrolinx’s name. And as the media reports on every story of low ridership and warms up a “white elephant” narrative on the line, the project risks tarnishing the credibility of Metrolinx.
I don’t think it’s entirely fair to Metrolinx, although the Union-Perason project is an indictment of the entire transit planning process within the Greater Toronto Area and politicians from every level of government (municipal, provincial and especially federal) that allowed this to happen. I wrote about the whole bizarre history of the Union Pearson Express in Transit Toronto, and the process does deserve a thorough post-mortem to ensure that similar mistakes don’t happen again. However, we are still left with the question of what to do with what we’ve done.
Steve Munro describes an upsetting future for me, and many other transit users. I need to make long commutes to get to my job: making me pay more is infuriating. I feel like I am being shut out of the city, and Metrolinx's dishonesty is upsetting.
One of the great mysteries surrounding the roll out of Presto on the TTC has been the whole debate about “Regional Fare Integration”. Now and then, discussion papers surface at Metrolinx, but folks at the TTC, especially the politicians, are strangely silent on the subject. “Wait and see” is the order of the day.
Well, folks, we have waited and now we are beginning to see the direction Metrolinx is heading in for a consolidated GTHA-wide fare structure. The results will not please folks in suburban Toronto or the inner 905 for whom long subway trips are a routine part of their commutes.
The Metrolinx Board will consider an update on this subject at its meeting on February 10.
The presentation is in a sadly familiar Metrolinx format: lots of wonderful talk about consultation and fairness, and philosophical musings about what a fare system should look like. One big omission is any evaluation of the relative numbers of riders who would be affected by various schemes, and even worse of any sense of calibration of the fares to produce different results.
This comes at a time when we know from SmartTrack demand studies the importance of fare levels in attracting ridership. It is important here to remember that we are not talking the relatively small differences between types of TTC fares, or year-by-year increments, but the much larger deltas between TTC fares and those on GO Transit.