When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced last November that his government was approving Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, it was bound to be a bombshell. The pipe would send hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil sands bitumen from Edmonton to the port of Vancouver each day – this at a moment when oil sands production and the pipelines that move it have become the proxy for a debate about climate change and the fossil fuel industries not just across Canada but worldwide.

LONDON – The city of Bogota, Colombia’s sprawling high-altitude capital, has a problem most metropolises would envy: an abundance of inexpensive electricity.

The vast mountain range that surrounds the city abounds with fast-moving water, and hydropower is far cheaper in Colombia than any other fuel source. So it just makes sense that the municipal government would want to swap expensive, polluting oil for streams of electrons in its transportation system.

In March, an Ottawa Citizen reporter named Tom Spears sent a routine request to the National Research Council (NRC). Spears had noticed a joint research project in which the NRC and NASA were studying that quintessential Canadian topic of snow – specifically, what causes it to fall in the quantities and densities it does – and he was hoping to interview a scientist working on the project to gather some more detail. It was a straightforward scientific slice of life story, revealing a little of the trench work carried out mostly without fanfare by the 23,000 scientists on the federal government’s payroll; the NRC’s own media officials characterized it as a “positive/informative” story.