Tag Archives: Heat Death

New Westminster aims to protect tenants from extreme heat

Editor’s note: Will any other municipalities or regions follow this example?

By Theresa McManus, Freshet News, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

New Westminster tenants aren’t allowed to freeze to death in their apartments — nor should they be allowed to succumb to heat in their homes.

That’s the motivation behind bylaws that will require New Westminster landlords to maintain safe temperatures in at least one living space in rental units occupied by a tenant. City council unanimously supported three readings to business bylaws at its March 30 meeting. 

“This is a very exciting piece of work that the city is taking on,” said Coun. Nadine Nakagawa. “To the best of my knowledge, we are the first municipality in Canada to take this move to protect renters against extreme heat.”

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The Quadra Project: The Uninhabitable Part 2

David Wallace-Wells divides his book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, into four sections, each dealing with the effects of a warmer planet on human life. The first, “Cascades”, deals with the general notion that every single climate event will trigger a multitude of effects. For human civilization, this will mean a multiplying of stresses all amplifying the seriousness of each other in a “cascade” of complex problems, none of which can be solved without solving all the others. Once problems reach some unspecified level of disruption, they become so interconnected that they overwhelm our ability to address them. This means that we regress rather than progress. And just as progress tends to amplify itself, the same applies to the deconstruction process, until the structure of a civilization is so riddled with dysfunction that it is no longer viable.

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