BIG Exclusives

Late 2024 saw several reports from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and news media detailing observations that childhood vaccination rates are dropping.The studies being quoted consider very short time periods. One CDC report compares two-year-old child vaccination rates between the 2018-2019 period and 2020-2021, and two other articles consider CDC data on kindergartner vaccination rates in the 2023-2024 school year against the previous school year and 2019-2020. These issues beg the...

Since the introduction of Barack Obama’s Pivot to Asia policy framework in 2011, U.S. foreign policy has focused on strengthening diplomatic, economic, and military ties with countries in the Asia-Pacific in response to a bipartisan recognition in Washington that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is preparing to displace the United States from its dominance over the Indo-Pacific region (The U.S. Pivot to Asia and American Grand Strategy). The historical basis of this geopolitical shift...

Trust in news media in the United States has dropped to a new low, at only 31% of those polled by Gallup attributing a fair or great deal of trust in the fairness, fullness, and accuracy of media reports.Worse, another recent Gallup poll suggests that half of respondents in the United States believe that the news media is deliberately misleading them.The gulf between inaccuracy and intentional deception is material. Canadian trust in the news has...

What did I learn this year, in the context of researching and producing articles for news platform BIG Media? I learned that principles are crucial in creating good policy, easing societal divides, and making a better world. These are complex problems; we are always in some danger of enacting poor policy that inflames discord, but our chances of such error are vastly reduced with a thoughtful, fundamental approach. Unfortunately, I have noted several instances in...

Almost all human beings wonder, at one time or another, whether they will be prejudicially misjudged based on some readily observable aspect of themselves – based on a group identity. The identity could be predicated on skin colour, ethnicity, gender, nationality, sexual preference, religion, height, weight – and we could be looked upon with disfavour based on a stereotype. This concern can create anxiety and stress, and may lead to heightened feelings of persecution, failure...

I have studied, written, and talked a lot about energy over the past few years – articles in BIG Media and elsewhere, countless presentations in classrooms, on webinars, to conference delegates, plus podcasts and radio interviews. Together with a great expert team and support from the University of Alberta and Canadian Society for Evolving Energy, I have created a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) called “21st Century Energy Transition – How do we Make it...

Social justice aims to make the world a better place and bring about a fairer set of outcomes. However, we argue from principle that some of the ideas of social justice are destructive to these ends. Trying to make a better world and lifting people up is to be celebrated, but in this article we examine two concepts in social justice that are more likely to bring people down, distract, and increase social division...

Some people are convinced we live in a time of unprecedented and existential crises. Many of their feelings are magnified in today’s social and mainstream media, where activists urge political leaders and society to take drastic and immediate action to address the perceived problems. To them, we (society/government) know what to do, so we just have to “get on with it”. And often, if we don’t just get on with it, they accuse industry and...

Headlining this week’s climate change and emissions reduction news is the Canadian government’s next step in its crusade against big emitting industries, especially the fossil fuel sector – a “hard cap” on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Of course, this will be interpreted as a cap on production by most in a hydrocarbon resource industry that provides more than 80% of the world's energy. A hard cap on emissions and therefore on the sector that drives a...

As we enter the mid-2020s, public discourse and government policy in rich nations focus intensively on climate. The idea that we live in a time of “climate crisis” garners more and more attention, fueled by publicity around every bad weather event and dire pronouncements of ever-more intense and frequent storms, floods, droughts, and other calamities to come. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human activities – primarily carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) – are blamed...