Welcome to our weekly newsletter where we highlight environmental trends and solutions that are moving us to a more sustainable world.
Emily here wishing you a happy Earth Week! I was at the EV and Charging Expo earlier this month and heard and saw a lot of interesting stuff, including this.
This week:
- Want 5-minute EV charging? Canada is getting a megawatt charger, too
- The Big Picture: Get ready for sargassum
- Meet 3 unsung heroes of conservation
Want 5-minute EV charging? Canada is getting a megawatt charger, too
A year ago, Chinese automaker BYD announced it was launching “flash” chargers that add 400 kilometres of range to an EV in the same five minutes it takes to fill a tank of gas.
Recently, the company said its flash charging was now even faster and that it would begin a global rollout in Europe. It also released its first compatible European model, the Denza Z9 GT, a few weeks ago.
Flash chargers have a megawatt of charging power, allowing them to reach peak speeds that add two kilometres of range every second.
I also learned recently that Canada’s first megawatt charger is set to open this summer in Quebec — specifically for freight trucks.
When BYD unveiled its first flash chargers in the spring of 2025, Wang Chaunfu, chairman and president of BYD, noted that “charge anxiety” is still a major concern for drivers and “the ultimate solution is to make charging as quick as refuelling a gasoline car.”
At the time, BYD said it planned to build more than 4,000 flash charging stations in China.
Recently, at EV and Charging Expo in Toronto, Daniel Breton, CEO of the EV advocacy group Electric Mobility Canada, gave a talk about his recent trip to Shanghai, where he saw a live demonstration of BYD’s even more powerful new 2.1-megawatt flash charger.
“With a charger like that, it takes five minutes to go from 10 per cent to 70 per cent EV charging,” he said.
He added that some people might think that’s overkill, but there’s a good reason for it: more vehicles can be charged in the same amount of time, which means fewer chargers are needed. That makes sense in big cities where land is scarce and expensive, including Vancouver, he suggested.
Breton’s talk was followed by a panel about Canada’s first megawatt charger. It’s under construction at the service area de La Porte du Nord along Highway 15 outside the town of Saint-Jérôme, Que., in the Laurentians. And it will be for trucks, not cars.
Improving truck charging is a big deal because emissions from heavy-duty freight trucks nearly doubled between 1990 and 2024.
Martin Archambeault, business development manager for fleet electrification at Hydro-Québec, which is leading the project through its Electric Circuit subsidiary, said the charger is a pilot project. He added that the site is ideal because of the large amount of space available, the number of trucks that use it and the fact that it is near the Institut du véhicule innovant, a research centre in Saint-Jérôme focused on electric, autonomous and connected vehicles, making surveillance and analysis of the project easier.
A study released by Propulsion Québec in February looked at creating a corridor of such megawatt truck chargers from Toronto to Quebec City. It recommended seven sites spaced 60 to 150 kilometres apart along Highway 401 in Ontario and Highway 20 in Quebec, and concluded that this should be feasible with existing technology.
So far, just 2.62 per cent of 2023-model freight trucks in Canada were zero-emissions.
Archambault said he works with trucking companies that find today’s charging speeds a barrier to electrification: “They cannot pay a driver to wait for an hour ’til the truck is full.”
On a megawatt charging corridor, he added, a truck could be topped up enough in five or 10 minutes to continue its route: “It’s going to be a big game changer and the adoption of electric trucks will go a lot faster.”
Another big plus is the same one that applies to cars. Archambault said, “If a truck stopped for 15 minutes instead of an hour, you can charge four trucks with the same charger.”
What about cars? Will we be seeing flash charging in Canada soon?
In an interview Wednesday with CBC’s Laura Lynch, Breton said, “It’s coming our way. That’s for sure.”
He thinks it will happen in five to 10 years, once Canada has cars with the technology to take advantage of that kind of charging. And while he doesn’t think people will need those chargers all the time, they’ll be available: “I do think it will become the norm.”
– Emily Chung
Old issues of What on Earth? are here. The CBC News climate page is here.
Check out our podcast and radio show. In our latest episode: Coral reefs support marine life — and livelihoods. But bleaching caused by warming oceans is putting both under threat. Fishing communities in Mauritius and Seychelles are feeling it more than almost anywhere else. But there are ambitious efforts underway in these island nations to restore some of what’s been lost, to protect the health of the ecosystems and the local economies.
What On Earth23:40Can baby coral nurseries rescue reefs from climate change?
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Check the CBC News Climate Dashboard for live updates on record-breaking weather and current conditions across the country. Set your location to find out how today’s temperatures compare to historical trends.
Reader feedback
Last week, Inayat Singh wrote about the use of artificial intelligence in conservation research. The story highlighted how scientists are turning to AI models to process massive amounts of data that can help inform decisions about, for example, where parks should be established and how fisheries should be managed.
Mike Chandler wrote that the article did not mention AI’s huge environmental cost. “Personally, I am against any use of AI unless it can be made more environmentally friendly,” he said. The concerns around excessive water and energy use from AI data centres are growing, driven by newer generative AI technologies — tools such as ChatGPT that can dream up essays and hold conversations, or video generators that are turning our social media feeds into weird slop.
But the AI models that nature scientists mostly use are predictive ones that automate tasks too time-consuming and monotonous for humans. For example, computers can learn to recognize trees in aerial images so they can count the total number of trees over Canada’s landscape. This is far less resource-intensive than, say, training a generative AI model on millions of images — still a concern, but one that may be balanced against the potential benefits of speeding up research.
Do you ride an ebike, either your own or through a bike share or other rental program? Write us at [email protected] (and send photos there too!)
The Big Picture: Get ready for sargassum
On a trip to Cape Canaveral to cover the Artemis II launch of Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen and NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch around the moon, I stayed near the ocean in Cocoa Beach. There was an unmistakable stench in the air: sargassum.
Saragassum is a type of brown seaweed (and algae) made up of leafy pieces, as well as oxygen-filled, round berry-like bladders that help it float on the surface. It doesn’t contain any roots or seeds. It can clump together and create large rafts. It also follows a seasonal cycle, beginning in the spring, peaking in summer and dying out in the fall.
While sargassum is an important part of the ocean ecosystem, providing habitat, food and protection for many aquatic species, it can become a problem when it drifts from the open ocean to shore. Not only does it disrupt tourist resorts and beaches, but, more importantly, it can threaten delicate shoreline ecosystems and make coral reefs more vulnerable to wave damage and hurricanes.
The University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science has released its March 2026 outlook.
“The year of 2026 is set to be another major sargassum year (i.e., Sargassum amount exceeds 75 per cent of the historical values), and likely to be a record year by summer 2026,” they said.
Beachgoers might want to pack some nose plugs.
— Nicole Mortillaro
Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web
- Police in France have been asked to investigate a possible case of temperature tampering after a sensor at Charles de Gaulle airport registered an unusual spike on April 15. The site is used to settle daily temperature bets on Polymarket, the platform where users bet on the outcomes of real-world events.
Meet 3 unsung heroes of conservation this Earth Week
Throughout history, human activity has often damaged the environment, pushing forests and wildlife closer to extinction.
But alongside these challenges are quieter, sometimes overlooked stories — of people who have devoted their lives to protecting the natural world for those who come after us.
Here are three such stories from India, the United States and Canada.
The woman who died to save the trees
In 1730, in the village of Khejarli in the Jodhpur district of Rajasthan, India, the region’s king, Maharaja Abhay Singh, set out to build a new royal palace.
To supply the construction, Singh ordered the cutting of the area’s khejri trees, which were essential to the desert landscape because they provided food, shade, shelter and fodder for livestock, according to Amir Sohel, a doctoral candidate at the Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur, who researches carbon forestry and environmental history.
Despite the importance of these trees, royal soldiers and woodcutters moved in to carry out the order.
A woman in the village, Amrita Devi, noticed what was happening and bravely ran out to confront the soldiers with the help of her two daughters, hoping to save the trees.
Ignored, the women embraced the trees, declaring: “Sar santey rukh rahe to bhi sasto jan” — a tree saved at the cost of a head is still worth it.
The soldiers killed the three women, an act that ignited wider resistance across nearby villages.
“This is the first recorded environmental movement in India,” Sohel said. “And, in fact, the world’s earliest women-led environment movement.”
An estimated 363 people died defending the trees before the king halted the operation and issued a ban on tree-cutting.
America’s first Black national parks superintendent
Marginalized groups have historically been overlooked for their contributions to the history of environmental conservation in North America.
Among those rarely told stories is that of Charles Young, who became the first Black superintendent of the U.S. national parks system, despite the racism he faced in his career, according to Alyssa Johnson, an outreach and programs co-ordinator at Community Science Institute, a New York-based non-profit organization that empowers communities to protect their local water resources.
Young was born into slavery in 1864 in Kentucky but escaped with his family as an infant to Ohio, where he excelled academically and became one of the first Black students at his high school.
After graduating with honours, he entered West Point, the U.S. military academy, in 1884 and then served in a cavalry unit in Nebraska, where he endured isolation and racial discrimination.
Despite this, he rose through the ranks and in 1903 was assigned to lead troops protecting what are now Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in California.
“He marched his men out into this vast wilderness of redwoods and these ginormous trees to protect the land,” said Johnson.
Young and his troops protected the parks by keeping area livestock, such as sheep, from grazing within the parks’ boundaries, preventing illegal logging and safeguarding wildlife from poachers.
At the time, the parks were just 13 years old and still largely undeveloped, so his troops began building some of the first roads into the region, cutting routes through dense forest and rugged terrain.
Many of those early pathways still exist today, incorporated into modern trail systems, and helping shape access to the parks for generations to come.
The judge who listened
In the 1970s, interest in oil and gas development across the Canadian Arctic intensified, driven by the March 1968 discovery of one of North America’s largest oil fields at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, and by a global oil crisis that underscored the risks of relying on foreign energy sources.
That momentum had taken concrete form in a proposed pipeline that would cut through the environmentally sensitive Mackenzie River Delta, which stretches through the Yukon and Northwest Territories to Alberta.
As plans advanced, opposition grew, led by Indigenous peoples in the North — including the Dene, Métis and Inuvialuit — as well as non-Indigenous environmental groups warning of threats to a fragile and little-understood ecosystem.
In response, the federal government launched a public inquiry in March 1974, appointing Thomas Berger, then a B.C. Supreme Court justice, to lead the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry.
Though initially focused on technical details, Berger expanded its scope significantly, according to Tina Loo, a professor of environmental history at the University of British Columbia.
“He took that mandate where no mandate had gone before,” she said.
He travelled to all 35 northern communities, holding long-form hearings and allowing testimony in local languages.
In 1977, he recommended against any pipeline across Alaska and the northern Yukon because of ecological sensitivity, especially caribou calving grounds vital to Indigenous livelihoods.
He said a Mackenzie Valley route could proceed only after a 10-year moratorium to settle land claims and develop a parallel renewable-resource economy.
The project was ultimately cancelled in 2017 after Imperial Oil withdrew amid falling prices and cheaper alternatives.
“What’s so striking about that inquiry is just the time [he put in],” Loo said. “He would stay in a community for as long as they wanted to talk.”
— Catherine Zhu
Thanks for reading. If you have questions, criticisms or story tips, please send them to [email protected].
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Editors: Emily Chung and Hannah Hoag | Logo design: Sködt McNalty
