Clean Air Canada

BLOG EXPORTED

2010-08-20T09:01:00.001-07:00

This blog has been exported and is now part of Lilith News: Environment News.

Please also check out The Environmental eZine.

How to Host a Geothermal Party

2010-03-28T15:32:00.000-07:00

ENVIRONMENT - Sounds strange doesn't it? Think of it like a Tupper-Ware Party, but for something that will actually save your friends money.

Here's what you do... compile a list of websites, diagrams, photos, price estimates, companies all about geothermal technology and installation.

You could also research Climate Change and have material available on other topics, but that's not really the point here. Your primary goal is to help people SAVE MONEY on the heating and AC, the environmental benefits are just a bonus.

Then you set a date for when you want to host your party. Try to pick a day most people don't work, they're not on holiday or vacation and they should be able to make the effort to come to your party.

Next you start calling all your friends, co-workers and colleagues at home or at work on the business phones. Basically you want to invite everyone you know, including your local Toronto dentist (or wherever you happen to live). Don't bother inviting anyone who doesn't own a house or land. Apartment and condo-ites have no need for geothermal because they can't install it anyway.

Follow up with emails, Facebook and whatever other means you have available. Don't forget to remind people of the event a day or two before the actual event. (Some people need reminding otherwise they might forget and spend the day indoors watching reruns.)

Next if your party is outside remember to do some grass cutting before the big day , prune the hedges, clean up the flower beds, fix or replace lawn furniture, clean the pool, etc. If you're planning a BBQ feast remember to clean the BBQ itself. You want to make a good impression on your friends and co-workers so they won't be distracted by your dying rose bushes and the lawn which is so long they're getting an allergic reaction.

You could also hire someone to help plan the party for you. Toronto party rentals/events are pretty cheap/easy to organize, especially if you outsource some of the planning required. Most large cities have party planning companies with the experience and know-how to get the job done properly.

You can also get guest speakers, make a speech yourself, hire musicians and make a huge effort of it. If you invite representatives from local geothermal installation companies they can probably do a lot of the work for you.

Samsung to build 600 MW of Renewables

2009-10-06T11:56:00.000-07:00

CANADA/ENVIRONMENT - South Korean industrial giant Samsung Group has announced plans to build 600 megawatts of renewable wind and solar power projects in Ontario.

The Energy and Infrastructure Ministry is now asking the province's power authority to "hold in reserve" enough transmission capacity to support "renewable energy generating facilities whose proponents have signed a province-wide framework agreement with the province".

500 megawatts will be set aside and 100 MW will be developed on Class 3 agricultural lands in western Ontario

Samsung seeks to become a major developer of renewable-energy projects and a manufacturer of support machinery/products for maintenance.

If the deal goes through Samsung will be investing several billions of dollars in Ontario and create hundreds of jobs, most of them in manufacturing. All indications are the deal is a go.

The deal has sparked some controversy from competitors as to whether Samsung is receiving special treatment, but the truth is the province has to make assurances in an effort to make Samsung feel comfortable investing billions in Ontario.

When dealing with such large numbers its sometimes necessary to give some special treatment to make both parties feel their needs are being met.

Ontario has a goal of dramatically increasing their solar and wind capacity by 2011 and it will require some large reliable manufacturing companies to do it.

Climate Change Quotes

2009-09-16T10:40:00.000-07:00

"Soon will come a day when climate change escapes all control. We are on the verge of the irreversible. Faced with this emergency, the time is not for half measures. The time is for a revolution: a revolution of our awareness, a revolution of the economy, a revolution of political actions." - Jacques Chirac, former French President.

"The new report gives us a stark warning that the potential impact will be more dramatic, faster and more drastic in terms of consequences than previously thought. This will change in some parts of the world the fundamental way in which we live." - Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environmental programme (UNEP).

"This report is a comprehensive and accurate reflection of the current state of climate change science." - Sharon Hays, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, US.

"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from
observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures,
widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level3." - IPCC, Synthesis report

"If the last IPCC report was a wake-up call, this one is a screaming siren." - Stephanie Tunmore, Greenpeace International.

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." - George Orwell.

For more information about climate change and how it will effect tourism, check out the following PDF:
The Climate Change Challenge: Implications for the Tourism Industry

Clinton pushing climate change initiatives in Canada

2009-09-01T08:39:00.000-07:00

ENVIRONMENT - Bill Clinton was in Canada last Saturday promoting climate change initiatives and free health care.

Of course, Canada already has free health care, but the point is still made. The United States is just starting on the road to free health care, for every uninsured child, senior and adult in the United States.

Clinton tried to pass free health care during his 8 years in the White House and only managed a few meager initiatives, health care programs for uninsured children. His goal of free health care for Americans was shouted down by Republican bigots in Congress worried about the overall cost and "Communist-style health care" (which is nonsense, because the USA up until 2009 was the only western country that didn't have free health care).

When George W. Bush got into power America's public health care system took one step forward and two steps backward. Bush signed into law a Medicare drug benefit program (something even Canada doesn't have), but later vetoed State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) legislation which would have expanded free health care to ten million American children (and would have been funded by a modest increase to cigarette taxes).

Since getting into power President Obama has quickly managed to do what Clinton couldn't do because he didn't have support from Congress, and what Bush refused to do because he doesn't give a damn about poor people. Less than a month in power and riding on overwhelming support and a Democratic majority in Congress, Obama signed the United States into a new era of free health care.

The issue is still being discussed in Congress, but its essentially a done deal. Better yet Obama already found a way to pay for it by decreasing the amount wealthy people get back from the IRS when they make charitable donations. Wealthy Americans used to get back 35% of their donation, but now they only get back 28%.

And poof! Free health care in America finally became a reality. Done and paid for.

Now if only we could do the same thing for the environment?

Clinton is effectively an unofficial ambassador for the Obama administration. So whenever he visits Canada or other nations overseas to give speeches, he's not just acting as a former president who cares about the USA, he's acting as a global ambassador for the USA to the rest of the world. That is how a former American president should act... help the USA and the world by being a spokesperson. (You will note Bush in comparison avoids the spotlight as much as possible.)

The problem is that selling the environment is a much tougher sell than health care (and we can see how long it took Americans to join the rest of the civilized world).

Think of it like a car... when you buy a new car from the Ford Motor Co. you expect it to work properly. But lo and behold they bought cheap brakes from China and the next thing you know you are upside down in a ditch, the car is on fire and in order to rescue you the firemen have to amputee your leg.

Afterwards you sue the Ford Motor Co. for damages (because they imported faulty brakes from China) and are awarded millions. Ford then promises to only buy quality brakes built in North America and has to recall thousands of cars to replace the brakes on each one.

But what about the tailpipe? Try and make the argument that cars pollute, produce greenhouse gases, which locks in heat, which causes global warming, which causes climate change, which causes a host of other environmental problems like polar ice caps melting and rising sea levels.

You can't sue Ford for damages. You'd have to sue the entire automotive industry, the coal industry and any other industry producing excess amounts of greenhouses gases... and it wouldn't just be the United States. It would be a global lawsuit. Its so ridiculously huge it would just plain never happen.

Thus trying to sell green initiatives to Americans can be very tricky. We can't even do it in Canada because we currently have a corrupt Conservative government under the "do nothing" bogus Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Harper has no intention of setting caps on greenhouse gases. He's been bought and paid off by the Alberta oil industry and the Atlantic coal industry.

Name one thing Harper has done to help the environment since getting into the PM's chair in February 2006? He announced some new national parks. That is it. The man epitomizes the "do nothing" approach to politics.

There has been no new "climate change initiatives" in Canada since Paul Martin left power in 2006.

And thus we come full circle. Now we understand why Bill Clinton is pushing such initiatives in Canada. Its because our own government is too lazy and corrupt to do it themselves.

83% of Canadians support initiatives to combat global warming and climate change. So why can't we elect a government that will actually make good on its promises?

Its because Canada has three separate left-wing parties: The Liberals, the NDP and the Greens. The NDP and the Greens will NEVER get elected and win a majority government, but the vote splitting between the three has resulted in the Liberal party being held back from winning majority governments. Its the reason we keep getting minority Conservative governments.

Remember Stephane Dion's idea to put a tax on carbon emissions? He bet an election on it and failed, despite the fact that it was originally a Conservative idea. What happened was the Reform Party (which has since changed its name to the Canadian Alliance Party, and changed it again to the Conservative Party) held a discussion back when Jean Chretien was still in power. Chretien wanted to put a cap on carbon emissions, but the Reform Party under Stockwell Day thought it was a better idea to just tax carbon emissions instead.

Stephen Harper later replaced Stockwell Day as leader, but because Harper is a puppet of the oil industry (whereas Stockwell Day is a puppet of right wing Christians) they had to abandon the carbon tax idea... which left it to be picked up by the Liberals and touted.

The problem is there really is no other ways to combat climate change. We have to cut carbon emissions somehow, and the only ways to do that is:

Cap Carbon Emissions.
Tax Carbon Emissions (and hope companies reduce the amount they release).
Make cars more efficient (which we've already done).
Increase sales of more fuel efficient cars like hybrids, electrics, hydrogen, etc. (which we are currently doing).
Phase out coal powered plants by building lots of solar/wind alternatives (which we are doing already).

Which implies we will eventually start taxing/capping greenhouse gases anyway. Its just a matter of who will do it first, Canada or the United States?

Judging by the fact Obama has a majority of Democrats in Congress the USA might beat Canada to it.

India to build Wind Turbines in Ontario

2009-04-19T10:13:00.000-07:00

ENVIRONMENT - Asia's largest maker of wind turbines is thinking of setting up in Ontario for a new manufacturing plant, believing Ontario has the right combination of policies, infrastructure and local desire for more wind power.

Tulsi Tanti, founder and chair of Suzlon Energy Ltd., says that the Ontario government's proposed Green Energy Act is a "very strong" initiative that helps set the province apart from other jurisdictions in North America. The decision to come to Canada could come soon. "Based on our analysis, 2010 is the right time for us to start business operations in the Canadian market."

Tanti, also called the "wind man of India," was ranked by Forbes magazine in 2008 as the 33rd richest man in India, with a family wealth of $1.1 billion. That is billion with a B... and he sells wind turbines...?

15 years ago Tanti was a thirty-something engineer trying to grow his textile company with a new line of polyester yarns, but the problem was India's unreliable electricity system and the high cost of power... so he decided to purchase two wind turbines in 1995. By 2000 he was so impressed he decided to sell off his textile business and start manufacturing wind turbines.

Today his company Suzlon is the fifth-largest wind turbine supplier in the world with $3.34 billion in revenues in 2008, 13,000 employees and sells wind mill and wind turbine products in 21 countries. Tanti also owns a majority stake in German wind-turbine maker Repower AG, which has already secured contracts for developing wind-power projects in Canada.

Because of high transportation costs of shipping wind towers and rotor blades, its cheaper to set up manufacturing close to project locations. To build them they need to determine the availability of skilled manpower, the logistical costs and local government support.

In countries such as India, Brazil and Australia, Suzlon doesn't just sell wind turbines, it also designs, engineers and constructs the wind farms. In India Suzlon also builds the transmission lines that connect them to the country's power grid. In countries where they just build turbines, they build everything from scratch: the gearbox, rotor blades, generator, control systems, towers, etc. Everything is built locally by the company to save on shipping costs.

Despite the American recession Suzlon is expecting 20 to 30% growth by 2010.

New Incinerator in Ontario

2009-04-19T09:20:00.000-07:00

ENVIRONMENT - Ontario is contemplating building a garbage incinerator and has contacted North America's largest incinerator company to build and operate an incinerator in Clarington Ontario that will burn 140,000 tonnes of garbage every year from Durham and York regions.

Covanta Energy Corp., based in Fairfield, New Jersey, operates 35 facilities in the United States, is waiting to be approved to construct the $236-million plant. It will be capable of generating 20 megawatts of power by burning unusable garbage (material that currently can't be recycled or turned into compost) once the facility begins operating in 2013.

(If this feels like a step backwards, you're right. What they should be doing is building a recycling plant that can recycle ANYTHING.)

The Durham council will receive the proposal on April 22 – Earth Day – and a final vote is expected June 24.

The new incinerator will be the first to be built in Ontario in nearly 20 years, and if approved, Covanta would design, get the necessary permits, build and operate the new incinerator under a 20-year contract. They would also get two options for five-year extensions. The plant will also be built with the option to expand to 400,000 tonnes per year... suggesting they may decide to take in more garbage from the Greater Toronto Area.

Covanta will also be paid $14.7 million a year to run the facility and would be paid using federal gas tax revenues.

Covanta has guaranteed that the facility will be able to produce 767 kilowatt-hours of electricity for every tonne of waste processed, the equivalent of how much a small household uses every month. At full operation, that's enough to power nearly 12,000 households for a year. Or 34,000 homes if its expanded to 400,000-tonnes-per-year.

In December 2008, Ontario's Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman directed the Ontario Power Authority to purchase electricity from Durham-York's proposed incinerator for 8 cents per kilowatt-hour. Sounds silly? The OPA is selling that electricity for less than 6.5 cents/kWh and taking a loss.

In other words the OPA will spend $8.59 million a year... but they will save more than $15 million a year in landfill fees and the millions in transporting residual waste to a landfill.

A future source of revenue could also come from capturing heat from the facility and selling it to surrounding businesses, industry and households as part of a district heating system.

Critics warn the excessive emissions will cause environmental damage and the likelihood it will stifle expansion of recycling programs.

Last year, Pennsylvania's environmental protection department fined Covanta in October for exceeding emission limits, while Michigan residents are pushing for the closing of a controversial Covanta plant in Detroit.

Covanta says plant emissions will be well below provincial standards and the electricity it produces will offset coal-burning generation in Ontario.

So... burning garbage is better than burning coal. So they say. That doesn't make it better overall however. What we really need is better recycling facilities that can recycle EVERYTHING.

And as for offsetting coal-burners... whats the point of all those windmills and solar farms we're building right now unless its to eliminate the use of coal?

White House calls for polar protection

2009-04-06T15:28:00.001-07:00

ENVIRONMENT - The Obama administration today called for enhanced protection of the Earth's polar regions, proposing mandatory limits on Antarctic tourism and urging increased environmental research there and in the Canadian Arctic.

Opening a two-week conference of parties to the 50-year-old Antarctic Treaty, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the recent collapse of an Antarctic ice bridge was a stark reminder that the poles are gravely threatened by climate change and human activity.

"With the collapse of an ice bridge that holds in place the Wilkins Ice Shelf, we are reminded that global warming has already had enormous effects on our planet, and we have no time to lose in tackling this crisis," she told the first-ever joint meeting of Antarctic Treaty parties and the Arctic Council at the State Department.

The bridge linking the Wilkins shelf to Antarctica's Charcot and Latady Islands shattered over the weekend after two large chunks of it fell away last year. The shelf, formed by thousands of years of accumulated and compacted snow, had been stable for most of the last century before it began retreating in the 1990s.

Originally the size of Jamaica, the shelf on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula lost 14% of its mass last year alone, according to scientists who are looking at whether global warming is the cause of its breakup.

Average temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula have risen by 3.8 degrees Farenheit over the past half century, the statement said – higher than the average global rise.

Clinton said the Antarctic Treaty – which also bars military use of the continent – could be a model for improved cooperation and coordination in the Arctic, which is not governed by a similar pact.

"The treaty is a blueprint for the kind of international cooperation that will be needed more and more to address the challenges of the 21st century," she said.

Clinton also formally announced that the United States would be proposing mandatory limits on the size of Antarctic cruise ships and the number of passengers they bring ashore at the treaty conference, which begins later Monday in Baltimore and runs through April 17.

If the Arctic and Antarctic melts its predicted the world's sea level would rise 21+ meters and would flood many major cities.

The Antarctic has 4 remaining ice shelfs. As they disappear mainland ice glaciers will slide into the ocean faster and will speed up rising sea levels.

See Also:
Arctic Ice to vanish by 2013
Flooded Cities by 2013?
Greenland ice melting faster than expected
Ancient Ice Shelf snaps free in Canada

37% of Droughts caused by Global Warming

2009-03-28T17:10:00.000-07:00

ENVIRONMENT - Global warming is more than a third to blame for a major drop in rainfall that includes a decade-long drought in Australia and a lengthy dry spell in the United States, a scientist said Wednesday.

Peter Baines of Melbourne University in Australia analyzed global rainfall observations, sea surface temperature data as well as a reconstruction of how the atmosphere has behaved over the past 50 years to reveal rainfall winners and losers.

What he found was an underlying trend where rainfall over the past 15 years or so has been steadily decreasing, with global warming 37% responsible for the drop.

"The 37 per cent is probably going to increase if global warming continues," Baines said as he presented his findings at a major climate change conference in Perth Australia.

Four major regions has seen a large decline in rainfall. The affected areas are the continental United States, southeastern Australia, a large region of equatorial Africa and the Altiplano in South America.

At the same time there is two areas in the tropics where rainfall has been increasing – northwestern Australia and the Amazon Basin.

"This is all part of a global pattern where the rainfall is generally increasing in the equatorial tropics and decreasing in the sub-tropics in mid-latitudes," Baines said.

"This is a little bit like the pattern that the (computer) models predict for global warming but this is coming out of the rainfall observations of the past 30 years," added Baines.

The rainfall trend was also accompanied by a trend in global sea surface temperatures (SST), he said, adding he used temperature data going back to 1910.

Sea surface temperatures have also been rising as the atmosphere warms.

"If you take the SST data and analyse that over a long period you can break that up into a variety of components, such a global warming component," he said.

He also looked at the influence on rainfall of major ocean circulation patterns that have a major impact on the world's weather such as the Atlantic conveyor belt that brings warm temperatures to northern Europe.

Two Pacific circulation patterns, including the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, were also studied for their influence on rainfall.

The key in the analysis was to strip out the influence of the El Niño ocean-climate pattern which routinely causes drought in Southeast Asia and Australia and floods in Chile and Peru.

Baines says the Atlantic conveyor belt was 27% to blame for the decreased rainfall, while the two Pacific ocean circulation patterns were 30% responsible.

See Also:
Global Warming in Russia & the North Atlantic
Global Warming: Hurricanes in Europe?
Australian Drought

China joins Earth Hour

2009-03-28T12:45:00.000-07:00

ENVIRONMENT - This year will be the first time China has joined in on Earth Hour. For environmentalists, it will be one of the most powerful images to see many of China's architectural landmarks suddenly going dark.

The whole point of Earth Hour is to promote environmental awareness and reaching China's 1.3 billion people is certainly a boost to the global environmental movement.

Securing the participation of China's cities in a country that is home to a fifth of the globe's population – and the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world – is a good start.

Organizers of Earth Hour believe China's participation will send a powerful message around the world.

"That two of China's most iconic landmarks – the Shanghai skyline and the Olympic Green – will be part of this year's effort will send a message to the rest of the world that the people of China are committed to taking action on climate change," says Dermot O'Gorman, country director of the World Wildlife Federation, the organization that inspired the movement.

"Ordinary people, too, in many cities have now signed up to switch off," he says.

Beijing and Shanghai aren't just any two cities. Their combined populations total more than 36 million – more than the entire population of Canada. They represent a huge boost to Earth Hour's global effort.

During a briefing in Beijing last week, Angel Gurria, the head of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, said: "No global issue can be addressed properly without China in its midst."

Other major Chinese cities also participating include Hong Kong, Macau, Baoding, Dalian, Nanjing – where a valley of 80 skyscrapers will switch off – and countless smaller cities and towns.

They'll join hundreds of millions others – organizers hope the global total will exceed 1 billion – throughout 84 countries - for the first time.

In Beijing – in restaurants, on campuses and in private homes – there's a nascent enthusiasm about joining a global movement. The city's popular Bookworm, a bookshop and eatery, sent out an email to customers this week inviting them all for a candlelit dinner.

A New Era of Solar Energy in Ontario

2009-03-21T11:26:00.000-07:00

CANADA/ENVIRONMENT - A new green-energy law is coming to Ontario, combined with long-term incentives for solar energy producers.

The new law (the Green Energy Act) + incentives has solar corporations clambering over each other. Tempe, Arizona-based First Solar Inc., one of the world's leading suppliers of next-generation solar modules, and solar power supplier Recurrent Energy Inc. of San Francisco are both planning to develop multi-megawatt solar projects in Ontario.

California-based Nanosolar Inc. says it is seriously considering Ontario as the location of a regional assembly plant for its thin-film solar modules. Nanosolar is also working with French energy giant EDF Energies Nouvelles to map out future solar projects in Ontario.

Why? The new laws + new prices the province is willing to pay for solar power will tip the balance in favour of investment in Ontario.

Two other firms are also planning to build solar-cell manufacturing operations in Ontario.

The recent Green Energy Act and a new renewable-power purchase program that offers a generous premium for green power is just a start. The Ontario Power Authority has proposed an European-style "feed-in tariffs" that would see it pay, as part of a 20-year contract, 80.2 cents for every kilowatt-hour of power that comes from a residential rooftop solar photovoltaic system.

(NOTE: Critics will point out that people in Ontario currently pay approx. 7 cents per kWh, so this seems like a ploy by the Ontario Power Authority to jack up electricity prices.)

Long-term contracts under a feed-in tariff model is superior to approaches in the United States that tend to be based on upfront tax incentives that create short-term sales spurts.

In theory as systems grow larger the feed-in tariff would decline. The power authority would pay 71.3 cents for rooftop systems up to 100 kilowatts, dropping to 63.5 cents for systems up to 500 kilowatts and 53.9 cents for anything above that. The largest systems would likely be found on the rooftops of schools, commercial buildings and big-box stores.

The lowest tariff, 44.3 cents, applies to "ground mount" systems that don't exceed 10 megawatts. This would apply to the massive solar farms that sprawl across acres of empty fields.

All prices replace a fixed 42-cent tariff that applied to all system categories that existed under a previous program, which itself was a continental first when introduced two years ago.

So already Ontario is paying extra for green energy, and some customers are willing to pay more for green electricity... but are they willing to pay even more?

These new prices are great news for people wanting to produce electricity in their backyard, and maybe even good for people willing to pay the extra for green energy, but what about regular electricity consumers? They care more about price than whether it is green or not.

Arno Harris, CEO of Recurrent Energy, said the new tariffs makes Ontario an attractive market for his company, which yesterday purchased a project pipeline totalling 350 megawatts from Chicago-based UPC Solar.

Harris said Recurrent and other large developers are taking advantage of the economic downtown to consolidate the market. The "vast majority" of projects acquired from UPC, he says, are based in Ontario.

"Our goal is to develop over 100 megawatts and get it into commercial operation by 2012," says Harris, explaining that economies of scale allow the company to lower costs by placing bulk orders for solar modules.

In early March, First Solar purchased a pipeline of more than 2,000 megawatts of solar projects from Hayward, Calif.-based OptiSolar Inc. in a stock deal valued at $400 million (U.S.). About 10% of those projects are based in Ontario.

Solar developers are pushing for 50 cent tariffs for large land-based solar fields in an effort to lure investment and green-collar jobs. They claim the current prices don't make it profitable enough to get investments to build.

The power authority says the tariffs have only been proposed and could change after eight weeks of consultation with industry players. "Anyone having concerns with the proposed pricing should provide their feedback to the agency," said energy ministry spokeswoman Amy Tang.

But who's going to pay for higher prices? Consumers?

Right now the cheapest alternative isn't to buy green electricity, its to buy your own solar/wind power and make it yourself.

Solar module prices are expected to fall dramatically this year and 2010 as new cheaper/more efficient solar panels come into the market.

Ozone tied to respiratory death rate

2009-03-12T14:39:00.000-07:00

Residents of big cities face greater threat to breathing hazards and death due to pollution, a new study finds.

CANADA/ENVIRONMENT - According to the study long-term exposure to ozone in Toronto may be responsible for approx. 20% of all lung-related deaths in the city. The massive new American study on health risks of the common air pollutant compares smog levels in major North American cities and deaths caused by smog.

People who live in cities with smoggy ozone pollution are 25% to 30% more likely to die from lung disease than those living in areas with the cleanest air, researchers reported.

The study, which looked at data tracking 450,000 people over 18 years, suggests the current emphasis on peak ozone days (also known as smog days) as the smog component's major health danger ignores the serious, cumulative perils that breathing it over a lifetime impose.

"It's not just the peaks you should worry about, it's the cumulative, entire ozone season that's important, too," says George Thurston, a professor of environmental medicine at New York University.

"So we can't just sort of hide in our homes on the peak days and avoid the adverse effects of ozone," says Thurston, who directed the air pollution portion of the study.

The report, released today in the New England Journal of Medicine, does not look at Canadian cities, but York University air pollution expert Geoff Harris says Toronto's ozone levels are almost identical with those found in many large cities in the northeast United States.

About 20% of respiratory deaths in these cities can be directly attributable to long-term exposure to the pollutant. Ozone and fine airborne particles are two of the major components of smog. In New York and Washington ozone smog increased the risk of dying of any respiratory ailment, from cancers to a severe asthma attack, by approx. 25%.

In very smoggy Los Angeles ozone increased the risk of dying of any respiratory ailment by about 50%.

Ozone in the upper reaches of the atmosphere helps protect the Earth from the sun's punishing ultraviolet rays. But at ground level, ozone is corrosive is a key player in respiratory fatalities.

Ground level ozone is created by sunlight reacting with nitrogen dioxide and fine particle pollutants emitted by cars, factories and coal-fired generating plants. The resulting triple oxygen molecule (O3) is volatile, and can react with the vulnerable surface of the lung, breaking down the tissue and causing a host of pulmonary conditions.

Doctors have long known that ozone is hazardous. Short-term exposure aggravates asthma symptoms and causes breathing problems. It is especially dangerous for those people who suffer from pre-existing pulmonary conditions such as emphysema.

The study is the first to tease out the relative percentage that ozone exposure contributes to deaths due to smog. The study will give more ammunition to groups like his to argue for tougher pollution standards.

Toronto Public Health says air pollution in general accounts for about 1,700 premature deaths in the GTA and 6,000 hospital admissions each year.

See Also: Pollution in Canada getting worse, statistics show

Sea levels rising faster than predicted

2009-03-10T17:23:00.000-07:00

ENVIRONMENT - Top climate scientists warned today that rising sea levels could rise twice as much as previously projected in 2007.

Right: NASA Photo of what the Earth would look like if the sea level rose 2 meters.

A 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted a sea level rise of 18 to 59 centimeters by 2100. But scientists meeting today in Copenhagen dismissed those estimates as too conservative, saying new data suggest that sea level rise will exceed 1 meter and happen a lot sooner than previously suggested.

"This means that if the emissions of greenhouse gases is not reduced quickly and substantially, even the best-case scenario will hit low-lying coastal areas housing one-tenth of humans on the planet hard," organizers said in a statement at the three-day congress hosted by the University of Copenhagen.

The melting of polar ice sheets and of glaciers are two big factors that will affect sea levels, they added.

"Unless we undertake urgent and significant mitigation actions, the climate could cross a threshold during the 21st century committing the world to a sea level rise of metres," said John Church of the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research.

The conclusions of the conference will be presented to politicians meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009 to discuss a new global agreement on greenhouse gas emissions to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Some 1,600 reports from nearly 80 countries have been submitted to the conference, many of them pointing to evidence of melting sea ice, melting ice in Greenland, Canada and Antarctica.

Last week a group of scientists at Laval University in Quebec announced arctic ice might melt completely in the Summer of 2013, which combined with melting ice in Greenland would raise sea levels by approx. 7 meters. The same scientists also said it was too late to stop the melting.

See Also:
Arctic Ice to vanish by 2013
Flooded Cities by 2013?
Toronto breaks temperature record, again
Vancouver and Montreal could become flooded
Greenland ice melting faster than expected

Ground temperatures rising in Canada

2009-03-10T17:03:00.000-07:00

CANADA/ENVIRONMENT - According to a new Canadian study, global warming has caused ground temperatures across the country to rise over the past few decades, in some cases by as much as a few degrees. The study is the first comprehensive assessment of Canada's shallow geothermal resources.

The study shows that thermal energy can be harvested with geo-exchange technologies and used for heating homes and buildings during the winter. This is good news for homeowners using Geothermal Heating Systems.

"There was this realization that we had a heat pulse going into the ground and it was a function of climate warming. It's really one of the best records of climate warming there is in Canada," said study co-author Stephen Grasby, a research scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada. "Depending on where you are ground temperature has increased by a few degrees."

"We actually have this opportunity to retrieve that heat energy trapped by global warming, to use that heat that's gone into the ground to offset future use of non-renewable energy sources," says Grasby.

The study, published in the journal Natural Resource Research, assessed ground temperatures across Canada down to 250 meters to get a sense of the potential resource. The researchers found that the heat energy in the first 50 meters alone was roughly equivalent to the commercially recoverable energy in the oil sands. Thats a lot actually, suggesting that if Canadians wanted to invest in Geothermal technology it would be more profitable than the Alberta Oil Sands.

Low-temperature geothermal technologies, often called geo-exchange systems, are capable of efficiently extracting warmth from the ground at shallow depths to heat homes and building. High-temperature geothermal systems tap heat kilometers below the Earth's surface to produce steam that is used to turn turbines and generate electricity.

"It equates to more than 190 million barrels of oil equivalent," said Grasby. He emphasized that the resource is spread out across the entire country, making it impractical to harvest more than a fraction of the total energy potential.

"But even if a small percentage of it is recoverable it's still going to potentially make a marked impact on renewable-energy supply," said Grasby. "Even if you end up with one or two per cent of it, you've still got one or two million barrels equivalent (of oil). It's a big number."

Temperatures typically increase at lower depth, but the researchers found that the temperature differences at 50 meters, 100 meters and 200 meters are getting smaller because shallower depths are heating up.

"The shallow rock mass of Canada has been shown to store a large component of heat due to recent climatic warming," according to the study.

"This suggests that we may have similar heat energy from the upper 50 meters compared to deeper levels depending on the location and relevant recent history (of) surface temperature changes."

The geological survey is working on another study that will attempt to estimate the portion of shallow geothermal resource that's easily recoverable, such as with heat-pump systems. Another study to be published later this year that will estimate the country's potential for generating electricity from geothermal resources at a temperature of 150 degree Celsius and higher.

Alison Thompson, executive director of the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association, said the geological survey studies are welcome and long overdue, but the analysis is based on ground temperature data collected prior to 1985, which is when funding for the federal geothermal energy program was pulled.

Thompson said new data must be collected to get an accurate estimate and to raise the profile of geothermal energy, which despite its massive potential is largely overlooked in Canada as a renewable source of electricity generation.

The geothermal association, which has set the goal of developing 5,000 megawatts of geothermal power projects in Canada by 2015, has identified 33 areas that need to be studied but has found it challenging to raise the required funding to carry out such studies.

"We feel the rest of the country doesn't understand how big this resource is," said Thompson. "For $1 million we could be off and running and really answer all the questions that politicians have. This would be a game-changer for the industry."

Grasby said interest in the area is growing, particularly in Alberta, where the oil and gas industry's drilling and ground-fracturing expertise can be easily applied to geothermal projects. "You just need a regulatory framework to support it," he says.

Canada is the only country located on the Pacific "Ring of Fire" that has NOT developed its high-temperature geothermal resources on a commercial scale. The United States, Japan, China, Russia all have developed their geothermal resources. Many industry experts argue that geothermal could play an important role in reducing natural gas consumption in the oil sands, making it cheaper to get oil out of the tar sands.

The Pembina Institute, a Calgary think tank, released a report in January that estimated there were 21 billion gigawatt-hours of energy released every year below the surface of Alberta at depths of less than 5 kilometres.

"Even with the conservative assumption that only 0.5 per cent of this potential is recoverable, it represents the equivalent of roughly 14 million megawatts of generating capacity," or 1,100 times the current generating capacity of all existing power plants in Alberta, according to the report.

The report cited lack of public awareness as the key barrier to developing the resource.

The geothermal association hopes to raise that awareness level on April 22nd in Vancouver, where it will hold the industry's first major geothermal energy conference in decades. More than 250 people are expected to attend the event, which is timed to coincide with Earth Day.

Arctic Ice to vanish by 2013

2009-03-05T13:16:00.000-08:00

ENVIRONMENT - The Arctic is warming up so quickly that the region's sea ice cover could vanish as early as summer 2013, decades earlier than previously predicted, says scientist Warwick Vincent.

Vincent, director of the Centre for Northern Studies at Laval University in Quebec, said recent data on the ice cover "appear to be tracking the most pessimistic of the models", which indicate an ice free summer in 2013.

"2013 is starting to look as though it is a lot more reasonable as a prediction. But each year we've been wrong – each year we're finding that it's a little bit faster than expected," says Vincent. "We're losing, irreversibly, major features of the Canadian ice scape and that suggests that these more pessimistic models are really much closer to reality."

The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and the sea ice cover shrank to a record low in 2007 before growing slightly in 2008. But at the same time 2008 also record warm weather in parts of the arctic, with temperatures rising to 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to the usual 5 degrees. In 2008 five ice shelves along Ellesmere Island in Canada's Far North, ice which is more than 4,000 years old, shrunk by 23% according to satellite analysis.

In 2004 a major international panel forecast the ice could vanish by 2100. In December 2008 some experts said the summer ice could last until 2020 or 2030.

When the ice disappears shipping companies will be able to make short cuts through the Canadian and Russian Arctic, which also contains enormous reserves of oil and natural gas.

"I was astounded as to how fast the changes are taking place. The extent of open water is something that we haven't experienced in the 10 years that I've been working up there," Vincent said after making a presentation in the Canadian Parliament.

Its now not a question of whether the ice will melt, it a question of when.

Its also a question of what should we do about it? Ice melting in Greenland and the Antarctic could raise sea levels dramatically by 7 meters (22 feet) or more and flood many of the world's port cities.

See Also:
Rising Sea Levels
Climate Change will effect Economy
Ancient ice shelf snaps free from Canada
Global Warming in Russia & the North Atlantic
7 Environmental Problems That Are Worse Than We Thought
The Theory of Rapid Climate Change

Alternative Energy

2009-02-28T23:20:00.000-08:00

Geothermal Heating Systems

Is Biofuel the Fuel of the Future?

The Eco-Car Battleground

The Hydrogen Equinox

Hydrogen Power

Building a Wind Turbine Factory in Ontario

Solar Power becoming Profitable

The Solar Powered Myth

Looking for Geothermal Installation price estimates? Try GeothermalInstallers.ca

Ontario to fast-track wind turbine projects

2009-02-22T18:26:00.000-08:00

CANADA/ENVIRONMENT - Ontario municipalities will lose the power to decide how close wind turbines can be to residential properties and environmentally sensitive areas under proposed green-energy legislation being tabled Monday.

The new rules, a blow to NIMBYism (NIMBY = Not In My Back Yard), will also ensure that developers of wind and other renewable-energy projects get construction permits within six months.

It's all part of Ontario's plan to streamline approvals for such projects, create certainty for developers and attract more investments that will create green-collar jobs in the province – more than 50,000 jobs over three years.

Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman, speaking yesterday at the Toronto Board of Trade, said the patchwork of municipal guidelines that has evolved over the years has created a cumbersome process for energy developers. He compared it to the patchwork of municipal rules regarding public smoking before the province created an Ontario-wide standard. Similarly, the proposed Green Energy Act will create a provincial standard for wind turbine sites and a "one-window, one-permit" approach to approvals.

"I see municipalities grappling, struggling, with how to balance the desire of local wind proponents against the desire of some local residents," Smitherman said in an interview. "A patchwork quilt is not the best way forward."

The setback distance for turbines – how far they must be from a home – will be determined through consultation with the public and the environment ministry. Possible distances will be discussed next week.

Other items expected to be in the proposed legislation:

The province's Standard Offer Program, which sets standard pricing for electricity from small renewable energy projects, has been scrapped. It will be replaced by a more ambitious program that accommodates wind, biomass, hydroelectric and solar projects.

Homeowners will soon have access to direct grants and low-interest loans to help pay for technology and appliances that make their homes more energy efficient.

New policies will support co-operatives of farmers, homeowners and businesses that want to invest in renewable-energy projects.

The province will also stimulate development of offshore wind farms on the Ontario side of the Great Lakes with the aim of pursuing power-purchase contracts with developers.

Recycling Humour

2009-01-21T18:46:00.000-08:00

The following is recycling humour by The Order of the Stick:

Green Energy Act in Ontario

2008-12-08T15:23:00.000-08:00

CANADA - A coalition of environmental, farming, community and native groups are urging the Ontario government to create a green energy act for the province.

Such legislation is urgently needed, they argue, if Ontario has any hope of stimulating the economy, tackling climate change, shutting down its coal plants and staying competitive with its neighbours in the United States under a decidedly pro-green Obama-led administration.

The coalition envisions legislation that would make renewable energy and conservation a priority in electricity-system planning, streamline regulation and the way power is purchased, push enabling "smart-grid" technologies, establish low-cost project financing and protect low-income consumers.

All of this would be with an eye to growing a green economy in Ontario that supports local jobs and technologies.

Indeed, officials are working on some kind of green energy act in the background and there's high-level interest in making it happen within the next few months. A free showing last Tuesday of David Suzuki's, The Suzuki Diaries, was used to promote the idea of a green energy act and several people of influence were there including Ontario Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman, Environment Minister John Gerretsen, and Colin Andersen the chief executive of the Ontario Power Authority.

"Ontario stands at a critical point now and we have to take advantage of the opportunity," said David Suzuki during the event.

However the transmission system, as it is, can't support a rapid transition to so many sources of energy. Nuclear power employs thousands of people in the province and is the economic engine for several communities, so it will be decades before those jobs are phased out.

The nuclear issue is a particular hot button for Suzuki, who as we know from his popular PowerWise TV commercials is a huge proponent of energy conservation. Suzuki, angered by Smitherman's seemingly unwavering commitment to build new nuclear plants in Ontario, recently quit the PowerWise campaign in protest.

Despite his frustration, Suzuki did recognize the government for its commitment to phasing out coal and being more progressive than other jurisdictions on the green-energy file.

Ontario gets about 20% of its electricity from hydroelectric generation alone, thanks to our great grandparents who had the foresight to invest in power dams, and the target is to reach about 45% by 2025 through the addition of wind turbine farms, solar parks, biogas generation from farms/landfills and new hydropower.

Germany may be an economic powerhouse when it comes to renewable energy and a poster child of the industry, but it only gets 15 per cent of its electricity from renewables – most of it added in the past two decades. Germany currently produces enough clean energy to run one third of Canada.

"It makes no sense to set renewable energy standards and then import all the equipment from overseas," said Andy King of the United Steelworkers Union, which has 80,000 members who are being hit hard by the American recession. The union sees a new era of manufacturing that supports development of green infrastructure and, ideally, a healthy export market.

It will cost money to get there, but it will cost us even more if we delay. Besides, all governments have embraced the need for economic stimulus. The trick now is to target the right areas.

Even the wind industry realizes putting green power on the grid isn't enough on its own. "In the long-term, continued political support of the wind industry will hinge on the ability to create jobs," said Robert Hornung, president of the Canadian Wind Energy Association. There are approx. 8,000 components that go into a wind turbine and they should be built here in Canada, he says.

Canadians for a Progressive Coalition

2008-12-01T20:16:00.001-08:00

Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World

2008-11-30T12:10:00.000-08:00

ENVIRONMENTAL - The U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC) has published its new report "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World." The report predicts a gloomy future for the United States.

The NIC comes up with these reports every four years. This report is the fourth since 1997, and the most dismal, at least for the United States.

According to the report, by 2025 the European Union will not be able to diversify its energy imports and will still depend on Russian energy sources. By 2025, Europe's energy consumption will go up by 60%, and 57% of all gas reserves will be amassed in Russia, Iraq, and Qatar. Many of the current oil producers will lose their positions, and almost 40% of the world's oil will come from six countries: Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq. For aggregate oil and gas reserves, there will be two great energy powers, Russia and Iran.

Global warming will bring trouble, like floods and draughts, to some countries.

The report predicts that the United States will continue losing its influence. It will remain a powerful state in 2025, but will be less dominant. The same fate will befall the weak US dollar. The void left from America's decline will be filled by Brazil, India, China, and the Korean Peninsular (the report optimistically predicts by that time the two Koreas will merge). The latter three are likely to form a free trade association.

The world will become multipolar, and Western models of economic liberalism and democracy will lose their appeal (which is already happening). The EU will lose its influence and become a "hobbled giant." Wars may break out because of limited resources such as food, freshwater, oil and gas... This sounds horrible.

It would sound even worse if these reports were flawless. In the previous reports for 2010, 2015, and 2020, intelligence analysts made forecasts which contradict what they are writing now. They predicted the growth of the EU's role and influence, and the steady advance of Western economies by about 2% a year through 2010.

These reports are not accurate forecasts but rather a reminder for U.S. leaders what will happen if they do not pursue this or that policy. They offer food for thought and encourage certain ideas. They're not considered accurate.

To see whether the NIC is objective in its reports, we should recall what it is. This is the number one think tank headed by the director of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, Michael McConnell, and conducts medium- and long-term strategic analysis. Its current chairman Thomas Fingar is his direct subordinate. The NIC was set up in 1979.

The NIC submits its reports to all U.S. leaders. National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) is its main commodity. Most of them are classified, but there are always inspired leaks to the press. The council makes what it calls over-the-horizon analysis. Sometimes, it goes far beyond that for political reasons. The NIC, as is often the case with intelligence organizations set up for administrations, always deviates moderately from the party line. With time it dawns on them that they are expected to say what is required of them rather than make predictions.

This makes the NIC's role is supposed to coordinate the analytical reports of all U.S. intelligence centers - the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the political intelligence of the Department of State, intelligence services of the army, air force, and navy, as well as of the border patrol, the departments of the Treasury and Energy, and finally the FBI counterintelligence.

But here is the problem. All these services and departments are trying to take advantage of the NIC, trying to push presidents, departments, or Congress to make the "right" decisions. The NIE and analysis of intelligence information always lead to heated debates for this reason.

So what this tells you is that the different security departments are suddenly worried about global warming, food and water supplies and of course the scarcity of oil. The dire gloom and doom report isn't accurate, but it shows the different US departments are becoming increasingly concerned about these issues.

Making a Greener Christmas

2008-11-30T11:14:00.000-08:00

Dreaming of a green Christmas?

ENVIRONMENTAL - Then why not go for the recyclable real tree this holiday season instead of the faux Tannenbaum, made of metal and PVC derivatives, that eats up boatloads of oil on its way from China to your living room?

Better yet, what about a small potted version that grows – not just glows – as you cart it in from the garden each year? Maybe even a bonsai Christmas tree?

How about sending e-cards or email updates to friends and family, instead of the tree-felling greeting-card kind that only just get tossed with the non-biodegradable tinsel, anyway?

It may seem like too much work to be eco-responsible when your to-do list is already as long as Santa's. But you could aim for "the 20 per-cent rule" – a reasonable cut in conspicuous consumption – and stuff a few stockings with a pocket-sized book that spells out pretty clearly why The Most Wonderful Time of the Year isn't all that wonderful for the environment.

There's all this extra stuff – the packing that comes in the boxes, the wrapping paper, the ribbon, not to mention the toys and everything that comes with them. Any parent knows all the garbage you have to move out of your living room on Christmas Day. Do we really need all this packaging?

Household waste increases 25 per cent at Christmastime, and since the Twelve Days of Christmas stretch into a month in the U.S.A. – where Thanksgiving signals the official start of a month of eating, drinking and splurging – that piles up into 2 billion pounds of garbage per week.

Enough holiday cards are sold in the U.S. to fill a 10-storey football stadium and kill 300,000 trees. That's on top of all those glossy catalogues that consume 8 million trees a year and produce a truly global footprint as many are delivered around the world.

Creating a Christmas to remember can translate into a lot we'd sooner forget, such as the brutal drain on electricity and even risks to your health, including the petroleum-based paraffin candles that may set the mood, but can also emit toxic chemicals from toluene to benzene and formaldehyde.

Then there are all those toys from China.

Even if they aren't tainted with lead, they are made of plastic that tends to break – often Christmas Day – but never biodegrade. Not to mention the less-than-good cheer they spread on their oil-guzzling journey from Beijing to North America.

In the midst of this recession some consumers are opting to buy less, but spend more, for locally made toys or handicrafts. Or they're clicking on websites such as buycanadianfirst.ca which has a selection of products made in Canada.

You can start out with something as simple as buying a real tree. In most cases they are locally grown, rather than crafted by distant conglomerates, and more than 90 per cent are collected curbside and turned into garden mulch by Springtime.

Instead of fake garland and mistletoe, buy the real stuff, which looks and smells authentic and can also be converted to garden cover.

But don't shut down completely. Everybody still needs a holiday.

More greenhouses turn to coal for heat

2008-11-11T10:39:00.000-08:00

ENVIRONMENT/CANADA - It will be a difficult winter for greenhouses. Growing vegetables in a glasshouse is much more expensive when the outdoor temperature slides below zero. Tomatoes, peppers and eggplants need heat to thrive, and the cost of supplying that energy will impose a heavy toll this winter on Ontario's world-class greenhouse sector.

"Our fuel is up probably 40 per cent versus last year," says Rob Mastronardi, who for four years has operated Cedar Beach Acres in Kingsville, Ont. For him, growing greenhouse vegetables goes back four generations. It's in his blood.

But the high cost of fuel, combined with the impact a volatile Canadian dollar is having on exports, has his blood boiling. "It's just a hellish economy out there right now. We're suffering just like the auto sector is suffering, but we're not getting any attention at all," he says.

Not that it's a lightweight sector. The province's greenhouse industry is the largest in North America for vegetable production.

Including floriculture, it employs 17,300 full- and part-time workers across 1,200 operations. Sales in 2007 reached about $1.25 billion, with a 40-60 split between vegetables and flowers respectively, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

"The Ontario greenhouse sector is a major contributor to the provincial economy and is worthy of support and promotion," according to a 2006 economic impact study commissioned by the Ontario Greenhouse Alliance.

But that support is lacking, says Mastronardi, who is glum about his industry's prospects. "In these market conditions, our days are definitely numbered."

Left to their own devices, he says, many operators are being forced into survival mode. For some, that means burning the cheapest and dirtiest fuel available: Coal.

Mastronardi says his greenhouse uses about 110,000 gigajoules of heat energy a year. Based on mid-summer fuel prices, he figures he would save between $500,000 to $700,000 annually in energy costs by switching from natural gas to coal. He began burning coal earlier this year but has so far resisted making it his primary fuel.

No. 6 "Bunker C" oil, a heavier fuel oil that's often used instead of natural gas, is also falling out of favour. The price of crude oil has been highly volatile and, though it has fallen over the past four months, is still well above its 10-year average. The International Energy Agency predicted last week that oil prices will average more than hundred dollars/barrel between now and 2015.

"It's just outrageously priced," Mastronardi says. "I probably won't burn Bunker C at all this winter."

Again, that leaves coal.

Dozens of other greenhouse operators in Ontario – clustered around the flower-dominant Niagara region and vegetable-dominant Essex County – have switched or are considering a transition to coal as a way to save on fuel costs.

The impact so far appears small, but the trend is gaining momentum. As it does, it could undermine the environmental benefits of an Ontario government plan to wean the province off coal-fired power generation by 2014.

"Coal is expanding in the province, despite a policy to phase out coal," says Roger Samson, executive director of REAP-Canada, an independent group that encourages sustainable farming practices. "The Ontario government has no plan on how to mitigate this."

How much coal, potentially, are we talking about? The energy demands of a typical greenhouse are enormous. Shalin Khosla, a greenhouse specialist with the agriculture ministry, says anywhere between 35 per cent to 50 per cent of the costs of operating a modern vegetable greenhouse goes toward energy consumption. The figure is closer to 20 per cent for flower growers.

It's estimated that greenhouses in Ontario cover 2,823 acres, and that the average greenhouse requires 9,500 gigajoules of energy per acre every year. This works out to 26.8 million gigajoules annually.

Convert that energy into electricity potential and it works out to 7.44 terawatt-hours a year – more than three times the 2004 electricity output of the Lakeview coal-fired generating station in Mississauga (which has since been closed down and demolished).

That's equivalent to more than one million tonnes of coal being burned annually.

It's a mathematical exercise that raises a serious public policy question: What's preventing the entire greenhouse industry from moving to coal, and in doing so, undermining the spirit of the McGuinty government's coal phase-out strategy?

Not much, it appears. Unlike power plants and other major industrial facilities, greenhouses can burn whatever fuel they want without much scrutiny.

Cement plants and fossil-fuel power stations require a certificate of approval from the environment ministry to burn coal.

But that's not so for greenhouses.

"Greenhouses are exempt because they're considered to be agricultural operations," says John Steele, a spokesman for Ontario's Ministry of the Environment. "Under the EPA (Environmental Protection Act), those operations are exempt from the certificate of approval process."

And because they have an exemption, he adds, "we don't know what they're doing."

Keith Stewart, an energy expert with WWF-Canada and author of a book on Ontario's electricity system, calls the situation "perverse" and a reflection of inconsistent government policy.

"Outdated energy policy is giving us coal-fired tomatoes," he says.

The issue has also caused concern in British Columbia's Fraser Valley Regional District, which has a greenhouse industry ranked second in Canada behind Ontario.

Barry Penner, B.C.'s environment minister, acknowledged the problem in a March 27 letter to district chair Clint Hames. But Penner said a new carbon tax in the 2008 B.C. budget "will send a signal that less greenhouse-gas-intense fuels should be considered."

No such tax exists or has been proposed in Ontario. If it did exist, it might help Don Nott, a switchgrass grower in Clinton, about 100 kilometres west of Kitchener.

Nott decided a few years ago to start growing fast-growing switchgrass on 300 acres of land. He figured he could make a better business out of harvesting the grasses, grinding them up, and packing them into carbon-neutral "biopellets" – a renewable fuel. Burning such pellets for fuel wouldn't be penalized by a carbon tax.

Back in 2006 about 14,000 tonnes of the pellets were burned for fuel, much of it in greenhouses that were experimenting with alternatives. "We had 30 different individuals burning our product at one time, of various sizes from small up to 30 acres," says Nott.

But when oil and natural gas prices began to rise, the greenhouses couldn't afford to experiment any longer. "It's gone down to nothing. There's just one guy left who's willing to burn it. Most of those guys have switched over to burning coal."

With 400 tonnes of switchgrass sitting in storage waiting for a market, Nott has pretty much folded the business.

"When they said they were going to burn coal, I said I'm out."

Most greenhouse operators that have turned to or are considering burning more coal aren't proud of it. They know it pollutes more, but escalating costs have left those in the industry with few choices.

"In my eyes the government is moving at an absolute snail's pace regarding this energy crisis in our industry," Mastronardi says.

"If they want us to survive, we're going to need help."

Pollution: Where have all the boys gone?

2008-11-06T19:01:00.000-08:00

Every year, thousands of babies who should be boys are born girls. The answer to this mystery could lie in a small town in Canada.

CANADA - Something very strange is happening in a small but highly polluted Canadian community. And it may explain why every year thousands of British babies who should be boys are born as girls instead.

Young boys are becoming hard to find on the Chippewa Indian reservation in the gritty town of Sarnia, in Ontario's "Chemical Valley". It boasts four children's softball teams, but three of them are made up entirely of girls.

Research shows that the number of boys being born to the community has been dropping precipitously for the past 13 years, while the proportion of baby girls has risen. Now there are twice as many female births as male ones, though nature normally keeps the sexes in balance.

Scientists increasingly believe that pollution is to blame and that what has happened here - and among some other highly contaminated groups of people in other countries - may solve an enduring mystery of "missing boys" in maternity units throughout the industrialized world.

Normally, and with remarkable consistency around the globe, 106 boys are born for every 100 girls; the excess is thought to be nature's way of compensating for the fact that males were more likely to be killed through hunting and conflicts.

But this figure has been slowly declining in rich countries over the past quarter of a century. In Britain it has fallen to about 105 since 1977 -which suggests that every year more than 3,000 babies are born as girls instead boys. Studies have revealed much the same story in the US, Canada, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries.

Worldwide approx. 1 million less baby boys are being born every year.

Suggested explanations have included increasing stress and rising numbers of single mothers; women in difficulties, it has been found, produce more girls than boys. But what is happening in Sarnia, on the US Canadian border, is increasingly turning the spotlight on pollution.

The Chippewa Indians of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation Community have long lived in the area, on the southern tip of Lake Huron, not far from Detroit. Their right to the land was confirmed in 1827, but much of it was taken over by industry in the 1960s.

Now their woods and homes are entirely surrounded by one of the world's most extensive petrochemical complexes, producing 40 per cent of Canada's entire output of plastics, synthetic rubber and other chemical compounds. The air stinks, and the ground is contaminated with high levels of dangerous pollutants.

It was those softball teams that first got the 870 people of the community thinking that many more girls than boys were being born. Among them was Ada Lockridge, a 42-year-old home help aide, who sits on the community's council. She and her sister had eight daughters between them, and only one son.

She started counting all the babies born to the community since 1984, Until 1993 girls and boys were in normal balance, but then the number of male births started plummeting. "I felt like I wanted to throw up," she says. "I did a lot of crying. And then I got angry."

She joined up with researchers from the University of Ottawa and together they published an article in a leading scientific journal. It reported "a significant ongoing decrease in the number of male births beginning in the early 1990s".

Only 35 per cent of babies now are boys, and there is no sign of the decline levelling off. The study could not prove a cause, but pointed the finger at "multiple chemical exposures over the years".

Other non-native communities downwind of the complex also have had dramatic reductions in male birth rates. Studies have shown sex changes in fish and wildlife in the lake nearby.

Ada Lockridge points to a fire and chemical release at one of the chemical plants in 1993 as a possible culprit.

The findings tally with other research around the world. People exposed to high levels of dioxin in the 1976 accident in Seveso, Italy, also have twice as many girl as boy children. The same is true for Russian men exposed to pesticides containing the chemical.

And Brazilian scientists have reported that the proportion of boy babies fell in the most polluted parts of the city of São Paulo.

Professor Shanna Swan of the University of Ro chester, New York - not far from Sarnia - says that levels of contamination on the reservation are "incredible" and that the "first assumption" must be that they are to blame. She believes that changing sex ratios may often provide an indication of dangerous pollution, and that low levels of exposure to such ubiquitous chemicals as dioxins and PCBs may explain the decline in boys in industrialized countries.

See also: The Disappearing Male and Petrochemicals

Congratulations President Obama

2008-11-04T22:33:00.000-08:00

Congratulations Barack Obama! You have won an important battle for democracy, for the environment, for America, for Canada and for the world!

Canadian cities not getting the truth on their air quality

2008-10-22T16:55:00.000-07:00

Cities not getting true air quality story

Right: Smoggy Montreal

CANADA - The federal and provincial governments are lulling Ontario residents into a false sense of security about the level of pollution they're breathing in on city streets, the province's environment watchdog warned today.

The air quality city dwellers actually endure can differ ``significantly" from the readings provided by the province and Environment Canada because they don't factor in street-level pollution, Environmental Commissioner Gord Miller said in his annual report.

Ontario's monitoring stations, which are used by the federal government to provide its Air Quality Health Index, are located well away from traffic and other sources of pollution, he said.

Many residents rely on those readings – called the Air Quality Index, or AQI, in Ontario – on a daily basis to determine whether its safe to go outside, he said.

In effect, the current system may be "inadvertently enticing" people to expose themselves to inferior air quality because they're under the false impression that the air in city streets is safe to breathe, his report said.

"I have data to show that the AQI will say that the air quality is clean in Toronto today, and down there on Bay Street, it's very poor," Miller said.

"It's ironic because Ontario actually was ahead of the game 20 years ago when we brought in AQI, on a world basis. Now we're far behind."

Cities like Paris and London have a regional warning system and a street-level system, which provides a better picture of the air quality in key problem areas, Miller said.

Environment Canada provides air quality reports for the provinces and territories, and an Air Quality Health Index – which combines the quality of air with known health effects – for Saint John and dozens of cities in Ontario and British Columbia, according to the agency's website.

Some Ontario municipalities like Halton have plans to put in their own street-level monitoring stations, Miller added.

Ontario environment officials appear to be "well aware" of this weakness, but lack the resources to correct it, Miller said.

Air pollution is linked to an estimated 9,500 deaths each year and its effects on health and the environment costs the province millions of dollars each year, his report said.

But there were no promises to fix the system from Ontario's environment minister.

"If there are some suggestions that he's making with respect as to where these monitoring stations should be set up, we are certainly going to take a look at that, because I think the reporting that we do should be as accurate as possible," John Gerretsen said Tuesday, ahead of the report's official release.

But air quality reporting isn't the only provincial program that's not doing its job to protect people's health and the environment, Miller said.

His report also slammed Ontario's environmental assessment process, which he says isn't screening new projects as carefully as the public has been led to expect.

The province has gradually "whittled away" at the legislation for 30 years, leaving it "in shambles," Miller said.

"Increasingly, in many kinds of environment assessment process, it's a pre-determined 'yes' and there's no way to stop it," he said.

Right: Smoggy Toronto

Mining projects in Ontario are currently exempt from the process, said Justin Duncan of Ecojustice, a non-profit environmental group.

"The Victor diamond mine, for instance. It's going to be a massive pit in the ground, and no one assessed it," he said.

Miller's report also recommends that the government take steps to protect biodiversity in the province and its fresh water.

Ontario has an increasingly limited water supply and has experienced some of the driest conditions on record over the last decade, Miller said.

The government should raise the low fees it charges to companies who take Ontario water, which would encourage conservation and offset the cost of its water management programs, he said.

The report also concludes that the decline in biodiversity has reached a crisis state, but the government hasn't been studying the problem in a comprehensive way.

Detailed studies are instead being done by not-for-profit groups, many of which have spent years documenting species' decline, it said.

Climate right for green bonds

2008-10-07T09:23:00.000-07:00

CANADA - The International Energy Agency warned last week that 50 per cent of global electricity supply will need to come from renewable energy sources by 2050 if we hope to "minimize significant and irreversible climate change impacts."

"Governments need to take urgent action," said Nobuo Tanak, executive director of the agency. "Governments need to do more. Setting a carbon price is not enough."

What's interesting about this particular warning is that comes from an agency that, in the past, has been accused of paying only lip service to renewables as part of its broader energy mandate, which has traditionally been dominated by fossil fuels.

Indeed, the organization was founded during the early 1970s directly in response to the 1973 Arab oil embargo.

Here in Canada, Tanak's "do more" message likely fell on deaf ears. The federal Conservative government is more focused on ways to clean up the image of the western oil sands so that development there can continue unabated. Provinces such as Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia have taken leadership, but at a federal level there's no green vision for Canada — just a laundry list of half-measures aimed at creating a perception of action.

Given the Conservative lead in the polls, Canadians must be buying it. The only other explanation is that four in 10 voters don't care about the environment, climate change or how we leave the world for future generations. Not enough, anyway, to sway them toward the Liberals, NDP or Green Party.

It gets worse.

The collapse of Wall Street has severely tightened lending markets. There's a global credit crunch, and those looking to spend big bucks on wind, hydroelectric, solar and biomass projects will find it much more difficult — and expensive — to obtain debt financing.

The bottom line: the knee-jerk reaction to the financial crisis will lead to less, or slower action on the climate crisis.

"These are capital-intensive projects," says Tom Rand, director of Toronto-based VCi Green Funds Inc., a private-equity fund that invests in technologies that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. "And we need renewable-energy production to step up tomorrow."

Rand has spent the past year promoting the creation of a government "green bond" that, during the current credit crunch, makes more sense than ever.

The idea is that Canadians could purchase tax-free green bonds in the same way they can purchase Canada Savings Bonds, earning about 4 per cent a year. But the money, potentially billions of dollars, raised from the bond issue would be devoted to infrastructure projects that promote deployment of renewable energy.

"Renewables have to get built, that's a priority, and our plan steps in to provide that liquidity, that cheap debt capital," explains Rand, adding that the bond money could also be used to backstop low-interest bank loans so homeowners have an affordable way to pay for energy retrofits.

"Canadians get a safe investment vehicle, and companies get guaranteed access to low-cost capital over a long period of time. They don't have to worry about that credit crunch biting them in the ass. It's the best of both worlds."

Jobs get created. Clean energy capacity gets built. And Canadians who purchased the bonds get a safe return on their investment and a chance to boost — for themselves, and for their children — development of a green economy.

Liberal leader Stéphane Dion is a strong advocate of the green bond concept.

Last month, Dion said if elected he would create a federal infrastructure bank that would use money raised from green bonds to provide low-cost financing for major clean-energy projects.

A week earlier, NDP leader Jack Layton announced similar plans for a climate-change bond.

The Conservatives, initially receptive to the idea, ended up backing away.

"Mainly because I don't think they want to engage Canadians on climate-change issues," Rand says. "Because once Canadians are engaged and they have something at stake, their psychology changes and suddenly people want real action."

Europe introduced green bonds last year and within three months about $1.5 billion was raised.

The public appetite is enormous for this kind of investment vehicle, says Rand, who plans to shift gears if the Conservatives get re-elected and start pitching the idea to the provinces.

Why wait? Ontario should be looking into the green bond approach today. If Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman is serious about increasing the province's targets for renewables, then reaching those targets in an environment of tight credit will require some creative financing.

A green bond could fit that bill.

Vancouver and Montreal could become flooded

2008-09-30T21:19:00.000-07:00

CANADA - If Greenland's ice sheet melts (which a group of UK scientists predict will happen by 2014) the rising sea levels would flood Canadian coastal cities Vancouver and Montreal.

The data is relatively simple. If the Greenland ice sheet melts it will raise sea levels by 7 meters (23 feet). Melting ice in the antarctic could raise sea levels even more or faster. Due to the low proximity of much of Vancouver and Montreal they would experience excessive flooding. Approx 70% if Vancouver would be under water and approx. half of Montreal would be flooded too.

Canadian province Prince Edward Island would also be hard hit, with 30% of the island being lost to the sea and erosion (indeed the island would become two islands).

The United States would also be hard hit, with New Orleans, all of southern Louisiana and a large chunk of Florida would all be underwater.

Sarah Palin hates Polar Bears?

2008-09-30T16:44:00.000-07:00

Palin fought safeguards for polar bears with studies by climate change skeptics

United States - The Republican Sarah Palin and her officials in the Alaskan state government drew on the work of at least six scientists known to be skeptical about the dangers and causes of global warming, to back efforts to stop polar bears being protected as an endangered species, the Guardian can disclose. Some of the scientists were funded by the oil industry.

In official submissions to the US government's consultation on the status of the polar bear, Palin and her team referred to at least six scientists who have questioned either the existence of warming as a largely man-made phenomenon or its severity. One paper was partly funded by the US oil company ExxonMobil.

The status of the polar bear has become a battleground in the debate on global warming. In May the US department of the interior rejected Palin's objections and listed the bear as a threatened species, saying that two-thirds of the world's polar bears were likely to be extinct by 2050 due to the rapid melting of the sea ice. Palin, governor of Alaska and the Republican nominee for US vice-president, responded last month by suing the federal government, to try to overturn the ruling. The case will be heard in January.

Though the state of Alaska has no polar bear specialists on its staff, the governor's stance has pitted it against the combined scientific fire-power of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Geological Survey, and world experts on the mammal.

In its lawsuit, Alaska said it opposed the endangered label partly because the listing would "deter activities such as … oil and gas exploration and development". Oil companies recently bid $2.7bn (£1.5bn) for rights to explore the Chuckchi sea, an established polar bear habitat.

The threatened species status might also impede the building of an Alaskan natural gas pipeline, which Palin has called the "will of God". In a letter last year to the US interior secretary, Dirk Kempthorne, she said she believed the polar bear population was "abundant, stable and unthreatened by direct human activity". She opposed the call for the listing because it "did not use the best available scientific and commercial information".

Her own Alaskan review of the science drew on a joint paper by seven authors, four of whom were well-known climate-change deniers. Her paper argued that it was "certainly premature, if not impossible" to link temperature rise in Alaska with human CO2 emissions.

The paper, entitled Polar Bears of Western Hudson Bay and Climate Change, has been criticized for relying on old research and ignoring evidence that Arctic sea-ice is melting at a quickening pace. Walt Meier, a world authority on sea ice, based at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, said: "The paper doesn't measure up scientifically."

One co-author of the paper, Willie Soon, completed the study with funding from ExxonMobil — which has oil operations in Alaska's North Slope — as well as from the American Petroleum Institute. Soon was a former senior scientist with the George C Marshall Institute, which acts as an incubator for climate-change scepticism. The institute has received $715,000 in funding from ExxonMobil since 1998.

In May, ExxonMobil announced that it was no longer funding Marshall and other groups linked with climate-change denier views. It said this was to avoid "distraction from the need to provide energy while reducing greenhouse gas emissions" and stressed that the company did not "control the research itself".

Another co-author of the document was Sallie Baliunas. In 2003 she and Soon were criticized when it was revealed that a joint paper had been partially funded by the American Petroleum Institute. Thirteen scientists whom they cited issued a rebuttal and several editors of the journal Climate Research resigned because of the "flawed peer review". A third co-author of the polar bear study, David Legates, a professor at Delaware University, is also associated with the Marshall Institute.

The citation by Palin and her officials prompted complaints from Congress. One member, Brad Miller, dubbed the polar bear study phony science.
Palin told Miller: "Attempts to discredit scientists...simply because their analyses do not agree with your views, would be a disservice to this country." Miller now says that Palin's use of the paper shows she differs greatly from John McCain, the Republican presidential contender, who has pressed for scientific integrity. "Turning to the cottage industry of scientists who are funded because they spread doubt about global warming is not integrity," Miller said.

Palin's submission consulted J Scott Armstrong, a specialist in forecasting, who regards the global warming issue as "public hysteria".

Two other climate change deniers were cited. One was Syun-Ichi Akasofu, formerly director of the International Arctic Research Centre, in Alaska, who argues that climate change could be a hangover from the "little ice age". He is a founding director of the Heartland Institute, a thinktank that has received $676,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

Timothy Ball, a retired professor from Winnipeg, is cited for his climate and polar bear research. He has called human-made global warming "the greatest deception in the history of science". He has worked with both Friends of Science, and the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, which each had funding from energy firms.

Kert Davies, research director at Greenpeace US, said the state of Alaska under Palin's leadership had relied on scholars who argue the opposite view to that of the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community. "It shows that she is completely out of touch with the urgency of the climate crisis."

Last month Palin agreed that the Alaskan climate was changing but added: "I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made." She later tried to retract the statement.

University of Calgary working on CO2 Scrubber

2008-09-30T16:37:00.001-07:00

University of Calgary climate change researchers say they are close to figuring out how to commercialize the capture of carbon dioxide directly from the air with a simple system that could be set up anywhere in the world.

If they can make it work, it would allow greenhouse gas to be removed from ambient air and reduce the effect of emissions from transportation sources such as cars and airplanes.

"That's the excitement about it. It's a tool for dealing with diffuse CO2 emissions from transportation that account for roughly half of emissions," physicist and climate change scientist David Keith said Tuesday in a phone interview from his Calgary office.

That's important given how conventional systems for capturing CO2 work. Most involve installing "scrubbing" equipment at, for example, a coal-fired power plant to capture carbon dioxide produced during the burning of coal. But a system that can take CO2 out of ambient air is attractive because cars and airplanes aren't equipped with such scrubbers.

"You could do it wherever labour or capital costs are the cheapest and wherever you can best put the CO2," said Keith.

Over the summer, Keith and his team conducted an outdoor test of its seven-metre CO2 capture tower at the University of Calgary sports stadium.

The tower acts as a scrubber, with sodium hydroxide, also known as caustic soda, reacting with air blown into its base. A metal honeycomb system inside the tower slows down the flow of caustic soda, allowing it to efficiently scrub CO2.

While Keith said the technology isn't new — it's been used since the 1950s in industrial processes that call for carbon dioxide-free air — he believes his team has surmounted one of the two biggest obstacles to CO2 capture.

For the system to be effective, it must remove more carbon dioxide from the air than it emits as a byproduct of the energy used to run the scrubber. This summer's experiment showed that can be done, said Keith.

He estimates that if the electricity used to run the ambient air scrubber were to come from a coal-fired power plant — a heavy emitter of CO2 — he could capture 10 times more CO2 than the coal plant emitted.

The second catch, of course, is finding somewhere to store the CO2.

While some scientists have suggested storing it deep underground or at the bottom of the ocean, it's not yet clear how effective or affordable that would be on a large scale.

Marlo Raynolds, executive director of the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based environmental think tank, said Keith's system merits the research effort.

"But while we advance technology like this, we need to deploy current technology that we know works now — conservation, hybrid vehicles. And we have to have the right policies in place to promote that, such as a price on carbon," Raynolds said.

"I think David Keith would be the first to admit it will be a long time before we see these things on street corners."

Indeed, Keith stresses that point, saying, "The steps between this and building an engineering company that gets a lot of smart people working on this project are pretty big."

Other researchers — most notably at Columbia University in New York City and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California — are also working on ambient air scrubbing technology, and Keith said he'd like to investigate potential commercial partnerships with them.

Certainly there is incentive beyond doing the environment a good turn.

Richard Branson, head of Virgin Group, has made a standing offer of $25 million US for anyone who can come up with a system to remove the equivalent of one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide or more every year from the atmosphere for at least a decade.

The University of Calgary's scrubber tower experiment will be featured in January on an episode of Discovery Channel's new Project Earth series.

Carbon taxes originally a Conservative idea

2008-09-17T00:04:00.001-07:00

Canada is in the midst of a new federal election and the biggest thing on the agenda is a proposed new carbon tax and income tax cut the Liberal Party is pushing for.

But here's the rub: Its not originally a Liberal idea. Its a Conservative one. Stephen Harper's Conservative Party commissioned a Conservative think tank to make a study into what ways the government could cut carbon emissions in Canada and NOT harm the economy. They spent several million dollars on the study and the conclusion was: Tax carbon omissions and there will be no detrimental effect to the Canadian economy.

But the oil industry in Alberta didn't like the report's conclusions, so they have since pressured Stephen Harper to ignore the findings and to simply do nothing about greenhouse gases.

However the Liberal Party saw the report and said "Hey, tax carbon omissions... not a bad idea. Why aren't we doing this?" And it has since become party policy and no doubt will some day pass in parliament.

So if carbon taxes was originally a Conservative idea, why not just run with it? Well the answer is simple. The Alberta oil industry is funding the new Conservative Party and they're not about to bite the hand that feeds them.

The NDP, the Green Party and the BLOC also support the carbon tax. Indeed according to a poll conducted last march 72% of Canadians support taxing greenhouse gases.

Heck, if we held a Referendum on the topic of carbon taxes (and lowering income taxes simultaneously), its pretty much guaranteed to pass.

Lets pretend for a moment that the Conservatives win a minority government, which could happen. The opposition parties could join together and vote in a referendum on the topic and then let Canadians decide what they want.

At which point Stephen Harper would be wise to flip-flop on this issue again and suddenly remember "Oh yeah, carbon taxes was originally our idea!" just so he can get the credit for it.

Environmental Blabble

2008-09-10T11:48:00.000-07:00

If you're a fan of Facebook you'll probably like this new Facebook application called Blabble. Loads of fun for you and your friends.

European Union calculating the cost of fighting climate change

2008-09-06T12:48:00.000-07:00

How much will it cost the European Union to fight global climate change? Clearly the answer depends on what your target is, how you propose to get there and the size of the EU's contribution compared with those of the US, China and so on. But a new report from the Centre for European Policy Studies offers some useful estimates.

It assesses six recent studies, from the UK's Stern review of the economic impact of climate change and a World Bank analysis to research prepared by Vattenfall, the Swedish energy company. In these reports, the average annual global costs for mitigating and adapting to climate change are put at anything from €230bn to €614bn, based on 2006 data.

The EU is not, these days, one of the world's great polluters. In 2004, the global economy emitted about 49bn tons of greenhouse gases (measured in carbon dioxide equivalent). The share of the 27-nation bloc was only 5.2bn tons, or 10.6 per cent.

However, as western Europe is one of the world's richest areas, and as Europe has historical responsibility for the CO 2 emissions of its industrial heyday, the EU will surely have to pay more than 10.6 per cent of the global costs of fighting climate change.

According to the CEPS study, the smallest bill the EU could expect to pick up is €24.4bn a year, while the biggest is €194.3bn. The think-tank's own estimate, based on what it calls "the limited likelihood of a global burden-sharing according to current emissions", is that the EU will face annual costs of at least €60bn.

This figure is close to the forecast provided by the European Commission last January, when it published its all-encompassing proposals on energy and climate change policy. At the time, the Commission said €60bn - or about 0.5 per cent of the EU's annual gross domestic product - might seem a lot of money, but the cost of doing nothing would be even higher.

Has the message got through to Germany's car manufacturers and their friends in the European Parliament?

This week, the legislature's industry committee tried to weaken a Commission proposal for capping CO2 emissions from new cars. Rather than imposing a target of 130 grammes per kilometre on all new cars by 2012, the committee voted to apply it to only 60 per cent of new cars and to delay full introduction of the target until 2015. The vote was unmistakably aimed at helping German carmakers, whose models are bigger and less green than those of France and Italy.

This is, of course, hardly the last word on the subject. The parliamentary committee's vote isn't binding. But when it comes to converting the EU's high-sounding principles on climate change into concrete legislation, the devil is always in the detail.

Learn more about Eco-Friendly Cars.

McCain ignores environment and climate change

2008-09-06T12:44:00.000-07:00

In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention Thursday night, presidential candidate John McCain mentioned climate change and global warming exactly zero times. He never even uttered the "E" word (environment).

It used to be that McCain's bipartisan work combating global warming was a point of pride for the GOP senator. That was before he selected VP candidate Sarah Palin, who is a global warming denier and is passionate about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The closest McCain got to the climate was in talking about energy:

We'll produce more energy at home. We will drill new wells off-shore, and we'll drill them now. We'll drill them now.

We'll -- we'll -- my friends, we'll build more nuclear power plants. We'll develop clean-coal technology. We'll increase the use of wind, tide, solar, and natural gas. We'll encourage the development and use of flex-fuel, hybrid and electric automobiles.

Senator Obama thinks we can achieve energy independence without more drilling and without more nuclear power. But Americans know better than that.

We must use all resources and develop all technologies necessary to rescue our economy from the damage caused by rising oil prices and restore the health of our planet.

Asian pollution may cause American climate shift

2008-09-06T12:38:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON - Pollution from Asian coal power plants could create summer hot spots in the central United States and southern Europe by mid-century, US climate scientists reported on Thursday. The full report is available online at www.climatescience.gov and was released by the US Climate Change Science Program.

Unlike the long-lived greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the particle and gas pollution cited in this report only stays in the air for a few days or weeks but its warming effect stays over the long term.

"We found that these short-lived pollutants have a greater influence on the Earth's climate throughout the 21st century than previously thought," said Hiram Levy of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"By 2050, two of the three climate models we use found that changes in short-lived pollutants will contribute 20 percent of the predicted global warming. By 2100, that figure goes up to 25 percent."

The short-lived pollution that can cause long-term warming comes from soot, also known as the black carbon particles that result from fires, and sulfate particles, which are emitted by power plants. Soot particles are dark and absorb heat; sulfates are light and reflect heat, actually cooling things down.

Asian soot and sulfate pollution is likely to make for hotter, drier summers in the American Midwest and the Mediterranean region of southern Europe, Levy said, adding that heating and drying effects are not expected to hit Asia.

The reason for the expected pollution-related warming trend is that sulfate pollution, which has been linked to respiratory problems, is expected to decrease dramatically while soot pollution is forecast to continue increasing in Asia.

Ground-level ozone emitted by US transport vehicles is also a factor, the scientists said.

These pollutants have usually been dealt with as threats to air quality, but should also be considered for their impact on climate change, said Drew Shindell, a climate expert at NASA.

Carbon dioxide, which spurs global warming and is emitted from natural and human-made sources, still is going to dominate the climate change picture in the coming century, but because modern societies are built to emit lots of this substance, change is likely to be slow, Shindell said.

Targeting these air pollutants now makes sense, because of their role in the quality of the air people breathe as well as their impact on global warming, he said.

"It's no substitute for targeting CO2 (carbon dioxide), which in the long run is the main contributor to global warming and has to be tackled, but ... the shorter-term pollutants can have a very large impact," Shindell said.

Climate change could dramatically hurt the US economy.

Conservatives fail in climate change report

2008-09-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

OTTAWA - A new report card by the Sierra Club of Canada gives the Liberal Party high marks for its green shift plan, while failing the Conservatives for their lack of effort and commitment on climate change.

In its report card released today, the Sierra Club of Canada took the Conservative government to task, giving it an “F+” for setting emission reduction targets that amount to nothing more than “regulating the status quo.” Meanwhile the Liberal Party was lauded for having “a credible plan to achieve significant reductions in greenhouse gases and received a “B+,” second only to the Green Party.

The report is an eye opener for Canadians who think that the Conservative government is actually concerned about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Economists, scientists and environmentalists alike have repeatedly stated that allowing Stephen Harper to implement his ‘Turning the Corner’ plan is a recipe for failure.

While more than a dozen independent analysts have determined that the Harper plan will not meet its already meager targets, the Sierra Club noted that “the way forward really is to have a carbon tax regime such as the Liberal green shift plan.”

Canadians have a choice in the coming election: Elect Harper who will maintain the status quo, or they can choose a party that understands the scope of the problem and has a credible plan to address it.

Global droughts resulting in Wheat Shortage

2008-09-06T12:03:00.000-07:00

Droughts caused by global climate change have led to a drop in wheat production, a worldwide shortage and high food prices around the world.

The global wheat supply is at its lowest point in 50 years, with wheat reserves so low that some countries will simply run out of wheat and flour. This has been one factor pushing the prices of bread, beer and other wheat-containing foods steadily higher. In Canada alone the price of flour has more than doubled over the past eight months.

Usually prices are more seasonal, going up or down 10%. But due to the worldwide drought its created a huge shortage of wheat, resulting in prices to double in countries that export wheat, and to be significant worse in countries that don't.

Also to blame for the global wheat shortage is rising population, coupled with increasing meat consumption worldwide. This has led to the increasing diversion of grain to animal feed.

Analysts anticipate that the shortage may be resolved within 12 months, when more farmers are expected to cash into wheat production. But even when the shortage resolves, food prices are only expected to keep climbing above the norm due to other factors, such as high energy and shipping costs.

Public health experts have expressed concern about the effect that rising food prices have on the poor. The United Nations recently reported that in 2007, the cost of food imports in the world's neediest countries increased 24 percent, to a total of $107 billion. Large populations will simply go without...

At which point some idiot in Washington will likely say "Let them eat cake."

Greenland ice melting faster than expected

2008-09-06T11:06:00.000-07:00

When scientists make a prediction they usually make several: A conservative estimate and a seemingly wilder number which is frequently more accurate. The conservative estimate is really more the press and the naysayers, and the more other number is either scary or delightfully good news, depending on the situation.

So when a group of scientists comes forward and says that Greenland's ice sheet is melting faster than expected, you have to ask... were they comparing it to the conservative estimate or the supposedly-more-accurate one? As you will see below scientists don't agree all the time.

A group of NASA and university scientists are warning the steady loss of the Greenland ice sheet could raise sea levels three times higher than estimated. In a report in the journal Nature Geoscience, the study challenges current predictions about the rate at which the massive ice sheet is predicted to melt over the next century as greenhouse gases rise and temperatures warm.

The report's authors say the loss of the ice mass could raise global sea levels by up to five millimetres a year – almost three times the current estimates set by an international authority on the issue. (Basically its one group of scientists saying the other group was using a really conservative estimate.)

"We're showing that the geologic record shows that in the past, ice sheets have melted much faster than we're predicting at the end of this century," Anders Carlson, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The team of researchers, including scientists from NASA and the University of British Columbia, used geologic data to study the Laurentide ice sheet, the last massive ice dome to cover much of the northern hemisphere.

Faron Anslow, a glaciologist at UBC in Vancouver, said they studied marine and terrestrial records to determine how fast the Laurentide sheet melted and if it might predict the fate of the Greenland sheet.

The team discovered that the ancient ice cap, which spanned 1.7 million square kilometres, went through two periods of rapid melting. The first occurred about 9,000 years ago and again about 7,600 years ago, when there was increased solar radiation.

"The ice sheet was existing in a pretty warm climate and what we show is that that sunlight was enough to melt the ice sheet away very rapidly," he said.

They also found that the melt led to a speedy rise in sea levels of almost two centimetres a year.

Anslow said the temperatures at the time of the Laurentide melt are similar to what's expected for Greenland by the end of this century, suggesting it could undergo an equally rapid melt.

The Laurentide sheet, which was almost twice the size of its Greenland cousin, was at its largest about 22,000 years ago when it began its slow decline due to warming temperatures.

It virtually disappeared about 6,000 years ago.

Carlson says that if the Greenland sheet completely disappeared, it would raise sea levels by seven metres, adding that even the slightest increases could threaten hundreds of millions of people in coastal communities.

"The word 'glacial' used to imply that something was very slow," co-author Allegra LeGrande of the New York-based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies wrote in the report. "This new evidence ... indicates that 'glacial' is anything but slow.

"This finding shows the potential for ice to disappear quickly, given the right push."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a maximum sea level rise over the next 100 years of up to 10 centimetres, based mainly on the expansion of the oceans through warming.

Anders said it doesn't take into account contributions from ice sheet melt.

"They now predict a half-metre sea level rise with most of that coming from the expansion of the ocean due to warming and very little of that coming from ice sheet melting," he said.

"Ice sheet melting could be a much bigger component, so these values should be seen as low estimates."

Anders said science hasn't been able to get an accurate picture of how fast ice sheets melt as a result of climate change until now. The scientific team used sophisticated computer modelling and terrestrial records to track the sheet's disappearance, linking it in time to warming temperatures.

In 2006 a huge iceshelf snapped in northern Canada, surprising scientists at the sheer speed it disappeared. In 2007 the Greenland ice sheet retreated by a record amount and that record will likely be broken again in the future.

Bill C-61 blocking green initiatives

2008-07-21T22:33:00.000-07:00

As our environmental policies move beyond establishing emissions standards or cleanup requirements, law and regulation is increasingly focused on creating incentives for business to reduce polluting activities and for consumers to adopt environmentally-friendly habits. Given the desire to reorient long-standing practices, laws not traditionally considered part of the environmental file should also be examined to determine whether they are consistent with promoting "greener" behaviour.

The notion of "green copyright" sounds odd, yet the policy choices found in Bill C-61, Industry Minister Jim Prentice's controversial copyright bill, disappointingly run directly counter to the current emphasis on the environment.

For example, Canadians trash an estimated 184,000 tonnes of old computers, cellphones, and printer cartridges each year, with many of containing potentially hazardous materials such as mercury and lead. In response, the Ontario government recently proposed a new electronic waste fee to encourage recycling of older devices.

Despite attempts to reduce e-waste, Bill C-61 establishes new barriers to the reuse of electronics. If enacted into law, it would prohibit the unlocking of cellphones, forcing many consumers to junk their phones when they switch carriers (there are an estimated 500 million unused cellphones in the United States alone).

Similarly, the U.S. version of Bill C-61 has resulted in lawsuits over the legality of companies that offer to recycle printer ink cartridges. In one lawsuit, Lexmark sued a company that offered recycled cartridge and though it ultimately lost the case, the lawsuit created a strong chill for companies set to enter that marketplace.

Bill C-61 also creates new barriers in the race toward network-based computing, which forms part of the ICT industry's response to the fact that it accounts for more carbon emissions than the airline industry.

Network-based computing – often referred to as "cloud computing" – benefits from the efficiencies provided by large computer server farms that are often situated in proximity to clean energy sources. Network experts argue that Canada could parlay its high-speed optical networks and environmental advantages in the north to become a global cloud computing leader with zero carbon emissions, yet the new copyright bill now stands in the way.

The bill prohibits companies from taking advantage of cloud computing to offer network-based video recording services (as are offered by some U.S. based providers). It also stops consumers from shifting their music, videos, and other content to network-based computers, limiting these new rights to devices physically owned by the consumer. In fact, the bill even blocks consumers from using network-based computer backup since multiple copies of purchased songs or videos is forbidden.

Canadian politicians entered the summer recess expecting to get an earful about the environment from their constituents. To the surprise of many, the digital environment has joined the physical environment as one of the hot-button issues of the summer.

Sources indicate Prentice received more than 20,000 letters criticizing Bill C-61 within weeks of its introduction. Local members of Parliament such as Conservative Bruce Stanton (Simcoe North) and Liberal Sukh Dhaliwal (Newton-North Delta) have scheduled town hall meetings on copyright in response to constituent concerns, while author and broadcaster Tom King, an NDP candidate in the forthcoming Guelph by-election, has emphasized copyright as a key campaign issue.

As Canadians express concern over both their physical and digital environments, many may begin to link the issues by advocating for a greener copyright bill.

Ontario joins Western Climate Initiative

2008-07-18T08:53:00.000-07:00

Ontario is joining an initiative which aims to compel companies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. (Ontario is the 2nd largest polluter in Canada, behind Alberta.)

The province is now part of the Western Climate Initiative (WCI), which includes British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec and seven U.S. states.

A key to the initiative is a so-called cap-and-trade system, which allows polluters to buy credits from greener companies.

Premier Dalton McGuinty says Ontario is "proud to be welcomed into this important organization of climate-change leaders."

Environment Minister John Gerretsen calls the cap-and-trade system "fair and effective (and) economically and environmentally sound."

Ontario and Quebec had earlier signed their own cap-and-trade deal on June 2 during a joint cabinet session.

The cap-and-trade system is scheduled to be in place by 2010.

Ontario rethinking ethanol and biofuels

2008-07-09T11:23:00.000-07:00

Gasoline sold in Ontario may not be required to contain 10 per cent ethanol fuel within two years, Premier Dalton McGuinty said today.

McGuinty said he’s rethinking his long-standing promise to boost the ethanol content in gasoline by 2010 due to complaints that the biofuel yields little to no environmental benefits and is driving up the cost of food.

“The issue for us is whether it would be in the public’s interest to stretch it to 10 per cent,” he said.

“I think we’ve got to pay attention to some of the other developments, including food costs.”

McGuinty made the pledge prior to the 2003 election that saw the Liberals seize power, saying the move to ethanol would boost Ontario’s rural communities and add thousands of new jobs.

Currently, gasoline sold in Ontario must contain an average of five per cent ethanol, which is derived from corn, wheat and straw.

But environmentalists and other groups have grown disenchanted with biofuels, which a United Nations report linked to the increase in world food prices.

McGuinty wouldn’t say whether he’s also rethinking the government’s policy of purchasing cars that can accept 85 per cent ethanol fuel.

Offshore Wind Power in Ontario?

2008-06-30T08:39:00.000-07:00

KINGSTON – The sun was shining, the wind was gentle, and the water calm as a boatload of visitors to Kingston, guests of budding offshore wind developer Trillium Power, embarked last week on a three-hour tour of Lake Ontario.

The cruise was timed to coincide with a global wind power conference at St. Lawrence College.

Trillium's goal was simple: Show people, rather than just tell, how much stronger and consistent the wind is when venturing offshore.

About 30 minutes into the ride the mission was accomplished. What was a relatively smooth cruise became a stomach-churning experience as the wind-battered Catamaran, big enough to hold 180 people, began shifting back and forth in the water. Staff ran to keep bottles of wine from smashing on to the floor, while guests were urged to stay seated.

"The wind here is three times more powerful," said John Kourtoff, chief executive of Trillium, as he compared the potential wind energy from his project to existing onshore wind farms scattered around southern Ontario.

Kourtoff wants to build a 750-megawatt offshore wind farm in these waters, about 15 kilometres off the shore of Prince Edward County. That works out to about 150 wind turbines, seen as specks from the shoreline. And there's potential to double that.

Earlier this month, he announced the creation of Tai Wind, a consortium of North American offshore wind developers who hope, by combining their collective needs, to attract a turbine manufacturer to Ontario.

Already, Germany's Multibrid is seriously considering the invitation and, sources say, has begun high-level discussions between its executives and Ontario government officials.

Multibrid's interest is understandable. A recent report from energy consultancy Helimax concluded there were 64 sites on the Ontario side of the Great Lakes representing up to 34,500 megawatts of offshore wind capacity. This means the Trillium project is just scratching the surface.

Last week, for example, Toronto Hydro said it was renewing its efforts to establish an 80-turbine offshore wind farm near the Scarborough Bluffs.

"Offshore wind will be a driver of growth for the wind industry in the years to come," concluded investment firm Kyoto Planet Asset Management in a research report issued last week.

Also understandable is the government's interest. Embracing offshore wind is more than just adding more renewable energy to the grid, it could form the basis of a new "green" industrial strategy aimed at creating green-collar jobs. Multibrid is potentially the seed for that strategy, as it would need to develop a supply chain to support its Ontario growth plan. More than that, it sees Ontario as a manufacturing hub as it seeks to expand sales across North America and beyond.

It's welcome news at a time when production lines and plants are being shut down at Ontario automotive manufacturers. The idea makes so much sense that some unlikely alliances are being formed. When Trillium announced the Tai Wind consortium earlier this month, representatives from environmental groups WWF Canada and the David Suzuki Foundation shared the stage with the Canadian Auto Workers union, which fully backs the consortium's goals.

Natural Resources Minister Donna Cansfield said that Ontario is "open for business" when it comes to offshore wind. George Smitherman, now minister of energy and infrastructure, wanted so much to express his support for wind-industry growth in Ontario that just days after his appointment he made an unscheduled speech at the Kingston wind conference.

There's a sense of urgency, and a recognition that if Ontario doesn't act on the opportunity, other jurisdictions will.

But a big question remains: How much does offshore wind cost?

The Ontario Power Authority, the government agency that effectively determines which large power projects live or die, says offshore wind costs too much to be considered in its 20-year power system plan. It acknowledges that the technology provides more power than onshore projects, but not enough to justify the higher cost of building offshore wind farms.

"It should be borne in mind that there is currently no experience in Ontario with offshore wind resources, and it may be that additional information may become available over time that would justify further review of this issue," the power authority concluded in a recent amendment to its 20-year plan.

Herein lies a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma. How can the province get a true sense of development costs without forging ahead on at least one project?

We can point to ocean-based offshore projects in Europe and make comparisons, but there are major differences to consider that may work in Ontario's favour. For one, planting a big wind turbine in relatively shallow and calm lake waters would seem to be an advantage in terms of costs. And since we're talking fresh water, there's no risk of salt degrading the mechanical performance of turbines. Also important to consider is the degree to which local manufacturing could reduce turbine and component costs.

It's unclear whether the power authority has taken this into account. Nor has the agency considered larger economic considerations, such as job creation. Technically, it doesn't have that mandate. It exists to get what it perceives to be the cheapest, most reliable power it can for consumers and industry. Power authority executives, mostly former Ontario Hydro engineers who are smart and well intentioned, aren't naturally inclined to include wind, solar and other intermittent sources of renewable energy in their big-picture plans. They reluctantly do so under direction from the government.

The power authority, said one cruise guest, "has its hands full with nuclear".

Clearly, the government has some strategic decisions to make. Sooner, it would appear, than later.

Coal power provides 35% of Ontario's energy needs but produces approx. 30% of Canada's greenhouse gases.

COMPARING WIND AND NUCLEAR ENERGY

2008-06-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

So how does offshore wind stack up to nuclear?

Moody's Investors Service, commenting in May about the rising cost of atomic power, said the potential cost of a new plant being proposed today is more than $7,000 per kilowatt of capacity. This equates to about $5.3 billion for every 750 megawatts of nuclear capacity added to the grid.

Helimax estimates that the average cost of offshore wind development in Ontario is about $3,800 per kilowatt, or $2.9 billion for 750 megawatts of offshore wind capacity – that is, a project the size of what Trillium has proposed.

Such a comparison, however, is misleading. The lifetime "capacity factor" of Candu nuclear reactors around the world is about 80 per cent, a figure some would call generous in the Ontario context. This means the reactors have produced energy on average that amounts to 80 per cent of potential capacity. Helimax said offshore wind turbines have a capacity factor ranging from 35 to 40 per cent.

So to get the same energy over the course of a year from an offshore wind farm you'd have to build twice as much. This makes offshore wind slightly more expensive than what Moody's is predicting for the cost of nuclear. But is it really? Offshore proponents are quick to point out that with wind power you don't need a lifetime supply of uranium fuel, don't produce toxic waste products, don't have to pay for long-term storage of those waste products, and have lower ongoing staffing and maintenance costs.

They acknowledge offshore wind isn't baseload power like nuclear. Then again, there's no risk of a 1,500-megawatt reactor shutting down for a month or two in the summer because of unscheduled maintenance, like we saw last summer at Pickering generating station.

Timing is also an important consideration. Ontario's first lake-based wind farms, should the province choose to go down the offshore path, could be built and operating by 2013 – a year before the last coal plant is scheduled for shutdown in Ontario. The new nuclear plant at Darlington, as much as the province may need it for baseload power, won't go live until 2018.

Building a wind turbine factory in Ontario

2008-06-19T09:14:00.001-07:00

First North American Wind Turbine Factory

A German maker of offshore wind turbines is targeting southern Ontario as the location for its first North American manufacturing plant, a venture that would create thousands of local jobs and inject hundreds of millions of dollars into the province's struggling economy.

Read More...

Carbon tariffs in China

2008-03-27T11:49:00.000-07:00

Countries such as Canada and the United States may start imposing a "carbon tariff" on goods from China and other developing countries which have become the biggest contributors to global greenhouse-gas emissions, CIBC World Markets said Thursday.

The investment bank's report says China, India and other developing economies have expanded so massively they have surpassed the established industrialized world in belching out carbon dioxide pollution blamed for climate change.

"And once surpassed, the gap is growing rapidly," wrote economists Jeff Rubin and Benjamin Tal.

"Already, non-OECD emissions are a massive 2,500 million metric tonnes more than the OECD – a gap that is now equal to almost 20 per cent of the latter's total emissions."

With advanced countries enacting carbon taxes, carbon trading systems and other measures to lower emissions, Rubin and Tal believe the growing pollution from poor countries will provoke penalties against their exports.

Many in the West assumed that since industrialized nations were primarily responsible for the historical build-up of greenhouse gases in the world, they should bear the brunt of efforts to cut back, a view that underpinned the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which exempted developing countries.

But the CIBCWM economists see a shift in sentiment.

"As the OECD countries begin to impose greater economic sacrifices on their own economies as part of decarbonization efforts, tolerance for the carbon practices of its trading partners, or more precisely the lack thereof, will diminish dramatically," they write.

"Already Europe, which is well ahead of North America in terms of domestic carbon pricing, is talking about a carbon tariff that it can apply to imports from countries that don't play by the same carbon rules."

They add that the concept is likely to gain currency in the U.S. and Canada.

The report fingers China as the world's top greenhouse-gas polluter, surpassing the U.S. and pulling away.

Since the beginning of the decade, it says, China's emissions have increased about 120 per cent and are greater than Canada, India, Spain and Japan combined.

A key reason is China's reliance on heavily polluting coal. As a result, Chinese emissions per unit of energy are double those of Canada, the report says.

Ice shelf in the Arctic collapses

2008-03-25T17:40:00.000-07:00

A chunk of Antarctic ice about the size of Manhattan suddenly collapsed, putting an even greater portion of glacial ice at risk, scientists said today.

Satellite images show the runaway disintegration of a 414-square-kilometre chunk in western Antarctica, which started Feb. 28. It was the edge of the Wilkins ice shelf and has been there for hundreds, maybe 1,500 years.

This is the result of global warming, said British Antarctic Survey scientist David Vaughan.

Because scientists noticed satellite images within hours, they diverted satellite cameras and even flew an airplane over the ongoing collapse for rare pictures and video.

"It's an event we don't get to see very often," said Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. "The cracks fill with water and slice off and topple... That gets to be a runaway situation."

While icebergs naturally break away from the mainland, collapses like this are unusual but are happening more frequently in recent decades, Vaughan said. The collapse is similar to what happens to hardened glass when it is smashed with a hammer, he said.

The rest of the Wilkins ice shelf, which is about twice the size of Prince Edward Island, is holding on by a narrow beam of thin ice. Scientists worry that it too may collapse. Larger, more dramatic ice collapses occurred in 2002 and 1995.

Vaughan had predicted the Wilkins shelf would collapse about 15 years from now. The part that recently gave way makes up about four per cent of the overall shelf, but it is an important part that can trigger further collapse.

There is still a chance the rest of the ice shelf will survive until next year because this is the end of the Antarctic summer and colder weather is setting in, Vaughan said.

Scientists said they are not concerned about a rise in sea level from the latest event, but say it is a sign of worsening global warming.

Such occurrences are "more indicative of a tipping point or trigger in the climate system," said Sarah Das, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

"These are things that are not re-forming," Das said. "So once they're gone, they're gone."

Climate in Antarctica is complicated and more isolated from the rest of the world.

Much of the continent is not warming and some parts are even cooling, Vaughan said. However, the western peninsula, which includes the Wilkins ice shelf, juts out into the ocean and is warming. This is the part of the continent where scientists are most concern about ice-melt triggering sea level rise.

Wal-Mart opens energy efficient store

2008-03-18T13:32:00.000-07:00

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will open its latest generation of energy-efficient test stores this week with a Las Vegas Supercenter that uses new cooling technology to cut overall energy use by up to 45 per cent.

The Las Vegas store opening Wednesday builds on advances in earlier pilot stores that reduced energy use in areas including lighting, refrigeration and water flow.

The previous pilot stores in the Midwest cut energy use up to 25 per cent compared to a typical Supercenter built in 2005, the year Wal-Mart launched a broad environmental program to reduce energy use and packaging waste and to sell more sustainable products.

Wal-Mart said the new Las Vegas store adds to those savings with a new cooling system based on water evaporation for total energy savings of between 35 per cent and 45 per cent.

Wal-Mart has said it is the biggest private user of electricity in the world and has huge potential to cut back on greenhouse gases from fossil fuels burned to create electricity. It aims to use technologies proven in the pilot stores to develop a prototype in 2009 for all new Supercenters that will be between 25 per cent and 30 per cent more energy efficient.

An outside engineering and efficiency expert said Wal-Mart's advances in saving energy, including the new Las Vegas store, are leading the field for big-box retailers.

"This is not just a baby step. This is a big step," said Terry Townsend, past president of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.

Townsend said Wal-Mart's pilot stores are important because they show other retailers how to use available technology to improve energy efficiency. Wal-Mart says it is sharing its lessons with retail industry groups.

The latest store is built specifically for the arid climate of Western states, where water evaporates faster than in the more-humid East.

It uses rooftop cooling towers to chill water that then runs in conduits under the floor of the store. The radiant cooling from the floor replaces traditional electricity-powered air conditioning.

The store also incorporates innovations from the previous pilot stores that include recycling heat from refrigerators and combining low-power LED lights in freezer cases with sensors that turn off those lights when no customers are around.

The future looks worse according to environmental study

2008-03-07T19:16:00.000-08:00

Fed up with unpredictable winter storms cancelling air flights, closing highways and dumping enormous amounts of precipitation, like Saturday?

Too bad. 100 of Canada's top scientists say get used to it.

In a major forthcoming report on Canada's changing climate, scientists warn of everything from increased severe storm activity in Atlantic Canada to hotter summers and poorer air quality in urban Ontario.

British Columbia may face retreating glaciers and snow loss on its mountains, causing potential water shortages. The Prairie provinces will continue to struggle with drought, impacting agriculture rurally and potentially causing water rationing in urban areas.

The 500-page report is the work of 145 leading Canadian scientists. They've examined the current and future risks climate change presents coast to coast and what they have to say isn't comforting.

But it's not necessary to wait for the future to experience intense storms. A taste of that can be had this weekend as yet another major system moves in from the Gulf of Mexico.

This one will dump up to 50 centimetres of snow over Ontario and Quebec and bring winds of up to 70 kilometres an hour, as it churns over Central Canada through Saturday and into Sunday. The same system will drop 40 to 70 millimetres of precipitation along the Nova Scotia side of the Bay of Fundy and send rain and freezing rain into New Brunswick.

And, yes, as travellers head to the airports for March break, it's very likely some flights will be cancelled and traffic will be snarled once again.

Perhaps one of the people least surprised by the wicked weekend weather, is Norm Catto, a geographer at Memorial University in Newfoundland and one of the climate report's lead authors.

On Friday, he said the intensity of weather events is increasing.

When hurricane Juan swept through Atlantic Canada in 2003 the storm surge didn't coincide with high tide. But next time it could and the level of the water could be 40 to 50 centimetres higher.

"Are we ready for that?" Catto asked. "That's the sort of question we're trying to ask here and get people to consider."

Quentin Chiotti, a senior scientist with Pollution Probe in Toronto and another study author, echoed Catto's concern. In Ontario, for example, intense dumps of precipitation could lead to floods of the sort Toronto and Peterborough endured in 2005.

Chiotti said such floods illustrated that much of the region's critical infrastructure was based on standards developed following hurricane Hazel in 1954 and is in need of updating.

Like many of the scientists, Chiotti warned that the weather will become increasingly unpredictable. "When you put more heat into the atmosphere, you're going to start getting more wacky weather, and that's going to be more variable from season to season and year to year."

Catto said Northern Canada faces permafrost erosion, retreating coastlines and problems with maintaining the ice roads that provide vital transportation links in winter.

On the Prairies, drought could potentially affect the power supply. Problems with water reservoirs could leave utilities without sufficiently high levels of water to generate the amount of power required

"Each of the regions does have its own challenges," Catto said.

Suren Kulshreshtha, a professor in the University of Saskatchewan's bioresource policy department and another report author, agrees. "I think the only things these models are telling us is there will be a likely increase in the events of extremes."

People in Ontario and much of Quebec know all about "extremes" as they cope with the sixth major snow storm of the season Saturday.

The storm, which originated in the U.S. South and gathered power as it moved north, was expected to dump between 30 and 50 centimetres of snow on parts of each province.

As much as 30 cm of snow was expected in Toronto, up to 40 cm in Ottawa and maybe even more -mixed with ice pellets -was anticipated to cover the streets of Montreal.

A little more than 171 cm of snow already has been recorded this winter at Toronto's Pearson International Airport.

The highest recorded snowfall for a Toronto winter was the 207 cm, which fell in 1938. 220 cm are expected in Toronto this year, a new record.

The worst winter recorded in the nation's capital of Ottawa was that of 1970-71, when 444.1 cm of snow fell, only about 83 cm more than already has fallen so far this winter.

Environment Canada says usually at this time of the year, temperatures begin to rise to an average in the 1 C to 4 C range in Ontario, but the forecast for mid-March likely would be filled with temperatures in the -3 C range for many parts of the region.

In Montreal, the city was drifting depressingly close to matching or even breaking the record of 383 centimetres of snowfall set in 1971. So far this season, the city has recorded 316 centimetres as of Thursday.

Ontario's Climate change czar

2008-03-07T10:52:00.000-08:00

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has appointed a climate change czar to lead Ontario's fight against global warming.

Hugh MacLeod's job will be to make sure the government's numerous environmental plans – from banning conventional light bulbs to phasing out coal-fired power plants – are actually carried out.

MacLeod has already quietly started setting up Ontario's Climate Change Secretariat but the provincial government had been planning to announce it on March 29 – when people around the world turn off lights for Earth Hour to symbolize their commitment to protecting the environment.

MacLeod, 60, isn't a hemp-wearing environmentalist, but a man of business with a track record in the health-care field for bringing diverse groups together with government to work for change.

The government's action plan on climate change, released last summer, is about pushing Ontario to do what it can to mitigate the environmental crisis.

Environmental groups have criticized the government for talking a lot, but not delivering much on climate change.

"The secretariat is the premier's recognition that you can have the loftiest climate change goals but if you want to get anything done you have to have a strong focus and strong leadership," a government source said.

MacLeod will hold "climate change results" meetings every five weeks with the premier, senior politicians and bureaucrats to outline what has been done to date and what has to happen next, the source said.

It's a strategy that has worked elsewhere. British Columbia, which has a Climate Action Secretariat, came out with a green provincial budget two weeks ago that included North America's first full-fledged carbon tax.

"(The B.C. secretariat) was central to giving climate change the priority it had in the budget," said Julia Langer, global threats director at the World Wildlife Federation Canada.

It can be a "crack the whip" sort of role if a particular ministry isn't moving on something, but more often than not, climate change issues cut across many ministries and a person managing, from above it all, can make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction.

This is just what Ontario needs, Langer said.

"We had a climate plan announced in the summer and, from a tangible perspective, what's emerged from that? It's bits and pieces and what we need is a massive scale up," she said referring to a series of government announcements in June, July and August about various initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"(A secretariat) has the ability to knock some heads together and make things happen because often they're all off on their own little planets and orbits and they don't necessarily work toward the same goal," Langer said.

While the idea of a climate change secretariat is welcome, Langer said she'll wait to see Ontario's results before cheering too loudly.

"The clock is tick, tick, ticking. We have a climate change crisis on our hands," she said.

By end of April, the secretariat is expected to be up and running.

It's not about setting up a big bureaucracy though. It will be "a small guerrilla outfit with strong vision that can drive through ministries," a source said.

MacLeod reports directly to McGuinty and, as such, has the clout of being the premier's man. As head of the climate change secretariat, MacLeod's top priorities will be making sure Ontario's coal-fired power plants close by 2014, which is already well after the original Liberal promise to close them by 2007; protect large-scale areas for caribou habitat in the Boreal Forest; and build more rapid transit, the source said.

These are key planks in the Liberal plan to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change by 6 per cent below 1990 levels by 2014, 15 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050.

Ontario's coal-fired power plants are the largest producers of greenhouse gases and closing them by 2014 will reduce the province's annual emissions by 30 megatonnes, according to the government.

Ontario's northern Boreal Forest stores vast amounts of carbon and provides a buffer for species to adapt to changing climate, but it is under threat from industry.

Each year, millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide are released through logging.

The province's transit plan, MoveOntario 2020, includes 902 kilometres of new or improved rapid transit.

It will take 300 million annual car trips off GTA roads, cut smog and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 10 megatonnes by 2020, according to the government.

The Earth's Axis in Danger

2008-03-06T09:02:00.000-08:00

The axis that controls the earth's seasons could shift in the coming decades.

If enough ice in the Earth's polar regions it could knock the earth's axis off center and the new found tilt could dramatically alter the intensity and the duration of the seasons.

The amount of ice in both the arctic and antarctic creates significant weight and pressure on the earth's core. If we remove all that weight it may cause the earth's axis to tilt more than usual, and for longer periods of time.

In theory if it tilted just 10% more southward than the northern hemisphere would endure record heats and the southern hemisphere would suffer exceptionally longer winters.

If it tilted 10% northward, the reverse would happen. Longer winters in the northern hemisphere and longer summers in the southern hemisphere.

It could also have dramatic effects on the magnetic poles, perhaps moving them as has happened previously in the earth's history, which could cause huge climate shifts if, for example, the new south pole found itself in Australia, and the new north pole in central Canada.

The point is we don't have a clue what would happen if the axis or the magnetic poles were shifted. We have no idea where they would shift to or whether they would even stay constant as they do right now.

It is usually best not to mess with such gravitational forces and tempt the chances of something going awry.

Climate change warning issued

2008-03-06T08:56:00.000-08:00

World must act now or face consequences.

OSLO, Norway – The world must deal with climate change now or pay a much higher price later, says the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In two decades, unchecked environmental damage will leave half the world's population without adequate drinking water, the OECD's secretary general, Angel Gurria, said Wednesday.

An OECD report on the environmental outlook to 2030, part of a series of reports compiled every five years, concentrates on climate change, water shortages, energy needs, biodiversity loss, transportation, agriculture and fisheries.

"Without more ambitious policies, increasing pressures on the environment will cause irreversible damage within the next few decades," the report said. "The cost of inaction is high, while ambitious actions to protect the environment are affordable and can go hand in hand with economic growth.''

The report also stressed the need for a global response. Gurria urged the United States and developing countries with booming economies such as China and India to accept a binding international commitment to reduce global-warming gases.

"It involves that everyone participates. This is very important. We can't have anybody do a 'free ride,'" he said.

By 2030, the world's population – currently about 6.5 billion people – is expected to hit 8.2 billion, and the global economy could double in size, largely due to growth in countries such as Brazil, Russia, China and India, the report said.

Unchecked, growth in energy consumption in those countries could be 72 per cent by 2030, compared to 29 per cent for all 30 of the OECD's nations.

That would lead to a 38 per cent increase in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. However, if Brazil, Russia, China and India take the same step in 2020, and are followed by the rest of the world in 2030, emissions could be held at 2000 levels, it said.

If no steps are taken, world gross domestic product will grow 99 per cent between 2005 and 2030, with severe environmental consequences, the report said. With measures, growth would be nearly the same, 97 per cent, but with a much healthier environment.

The report said governments must create such policies as "green taxes" to encourage sound technologies and practices, and that the rich world must help poor countries develop without spewing pollution by providing technology and expertise.

It also said ecological advances bring multiple benefits. For example, cutting motor vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions would improve air quality in cities or better insulated homes that cut power bills for consumers while reducing power plant emissions.

"OECD's report identifies critical environmental issues facing our country and countries around the world," Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), chairman of the House of Representatives' science and technology committee, said in a statement from Washington. "The OECD report provides a good roadmap for evaluating environmental challenges and the economic impacts we face if no action is taken.''

The OECD (www.oecd.org), made up of 30 nations, focuses on economic and social policies.

Meanwhile oil prices set a new record today of $106 US per barrel.

Niagara's land is key to the ecotourism industry

2008-03-05T07:52:00.000-08:00

If Niagara wants to maintain its image as the lush, fruit-laden provence (think France) of Ontario, it needs to protect the look of the land, says John Middleton, Brock University tourism and environment professor.

That means preserving the more than 3,000 acres of tender-fruit land at risk following the demise of the juice-grape industry last year and the possible blow to 150 peach and pear growers if the CanGro plant in St. Davids closes, possibly by the end of the month.

If a massive amount of vacant, weed-filled land is left behind in the wake of recent economic setbacks, expect it to hurt Niagara's tourism industry, Middleton said.

"The future of the Niagara brand, as it were, is in danger over the medium term if anything were to get in the way of our beautiful landscape, which is the basis for how we bring out tourists here," Middleton said.

People come to Niagara expecting the fruit belt, and that includes peaches, pears, cherries and wine, said Magdalena Kaiser-Smit, director of marketing and communication for the Niagara Culinary Trail.

Kaiser-Smit, whose organization creates a map of businesses that sell local goods, said losing any local crop is a blow to the industry and tourism.

Consumers need to be constantly reminded about the importance of buying local, she said. Several Niagara organizations, such as the Culinary Trail and the Niagara Agri-Tourism Centre in Welland, encourage people to buy local. As well, there is an ongoing Good Things Grow in Ontario campaign, run by the province.

"People in the region, and perhaps visitors, are not realizing what we produce, or it hasn't been marketed as well over the last number of years," Kaiser-Smit said.

"With that, it's kind of created a lack of demand. It's why farmers are struggling and why people aren't investing as much anymore into developing new (agricultural) products."

The land at risk, which wraps around the Golden Horseshoe, is protected against urban development by the provincially mandated Greenbelt Act.

That makes keeping the land viable for ecotourism and agritourism all the more important, said Patrick Gedge, chief executive officer of the Niagara Economic Development Corp.

Arctic needs cash, not eco-tourism

2008-03-05T07:51:00.000-08:00

There’s a distressing perversity in the latest boom in eco-tourism. People are flocking to see the world’s great natural areas “before they are gone,” including Australia’s the Great Barrier Reef, Antarctica’s penguins and Canada’s Arctic to see the iconic polar bear, which appears bound to join the list of species to die out in the next few decades.

The sentiment is certainly understandable, but it comes after years of indifference to warnings from scientists about the impending loss of great natural treasures.
How unfortunate people’s curiosity can be piqued by “doomsday tourism” while it’s much harder to rustle up concern for serious conservation effort to save some of these species.

With a touch of irony, it’s notable that those rushing to these mostly remote locations for a last viewing are also adding to the environmental problem as flights and cruises increase the burden of greenhouse gases causing the permanent damage.
Canada is especially guilty of that indifference when it comes to the Arctic, as Journal reporter Ed Struzik so thoroughly mapped out in his excellent series on Climate Change in the Arctic, researched during several months’ leave on an Atkinson fellowship.

For years, federal governments have inadequately funded research in the Arctic and disregarded warnings about the “sorry state of Arctic science,” as Struzik writes.
Other Arctic countries like Norway and Russia take their polar regions seriously, and have permanent well-funded research stations.

Even tiny Belgium is building a $9.3-million polar research station that will recycle its own waste and run on renewable energy. Meanwhile, in the Yukon, the Kluane research station is still equipped with outhouses for the brigade of international scientists who come there.

Stephen Harper's government has generously, if lately, funded the Polar Continental Shelf Project with $10 million.

That’s a start. But Canada’s premier scientific support facility in the high arctic is open for only half the year, has no labs, and has just eight people working for it.
By contrast, Norway’s Polar Institute employs 110, operates an ice-breaker ship and supports research from almost a dozen other countries.

“In terms of infrastructure and funding support, Canada is 50 years behind Norway,” says Andrew Derocher, now a University of Alberta professor who worked previously for the Norwegian Polar Institute.

This summer, the government suddenly cut back funding to the Canadian Wildlife Services, cancelling dozens of projects. The federal government several years ago promised 24 research chairs in polar science but only six were established due to lack of funding.

The result is that Canada has been left at a disadvantage in these crucial years. As global warming takes its toll in the Arctic, policy makers are looking for direction from scientists on how to adapt.

“But they can’t give them the answers unless they have the support they need to get them up here,” adds Derocher.

Canada is also ill-equipped to counter those Russian claims to sovereignty in parts of the Arctic. This country has yet to complete the task begun in the 1950s of mapping the continental shelf.

In the October throne speech, the Harper government promised a world-class research centre and eight patrol boats.

All that is welcome to assert our sovereignty.

But what’s also needed is funding to study climate change, adaptation measures for wildlife, and Inuit culture and economic activity, and above all to involve the Inuit in these efforts.

This is not a short-term issue. The effects of climate change will go on for years; new mining and oil and gas activities will last for decades. A long-term strategy is needed.

If Canadian scientists can find a way to conserve some remote population of polar bears, beluga whales and narwhal whales threatened by the loss of Arctic ice, that will be a major accomplishment.

Solar Power comes to Osoyoos Desert

2008-03-05T07:40:00.000-08:00

OSOYOOS, B.C. – The federal government is putting money towards solar power for Osoyoos in the Okanagan Valley. Ron Cannan, Kelowna-Lake Country MP, made the announcement on the weekend for $20,000 to the Osoyoos Desert Society.

The money will be used to buy and install solar equipment to provide the Desert Centre a source of year-round power.

Cannan says the investment will allow the society to take commitments to conservation and environmental education to the next level.

Society executive director Joanne Muirhead says the project will serve as a positive example of the use of renewable energy sources in ecotourism.

Known as ‘Canada’s Only Desert,’ the area hosts one of the largest concentrations of rare and at-risk species in Canada.

Wind Power Monopoly?

2008-02-29T07:36:00.000-08:00

Poor Cameron Lewis figured he was in for bad news when he learned the people at the head of the line had been there for five days.

He had come to Peterborough to apply for wind power sites on Ontario Crown land and had arrived 11 hours before the provincial Ministry of Natural Resources would begin accepting applications – at 8 a.m., Wednesday, Feb. 20.

Lewis found himself fifth in line, and under previous ministry rules he would have had an excellent chance to get the sites where his two-year-old Environmental Electric Co. Inc. planned to erect wind turbines to generate electricity.

But the ministry changed the rules in January. It created a winner-take-all process that could allow the first in line – Toronto-based SkyPower Corp. – to virtually control all the remaining locations in Ontario where wind power would be most effective and the most profitable.

The stakes are high. Control of these sites potentially means millions in profits as Ontario switches its power sources from traditional to renewable.

Just before the ministry office opened, SkyPower's plan became clear to those shivering in the line when a car pulled up and handed over five file boxes to the company's line-sitters. Lewis estimated they contained at least 200 application forms, enough for sites totalling nearly one million hectares. In one chunk, the area would be bigger than Algonquin Provincial Park.

"We thought, 'uh oh, (the ministry) made a big mistake here,'" Lewis says. "They opened it up to a land rush. ... It allows one company to monopolize all the Crown land."

Officials are now assessing applications, which cost $1,000 each.

About 87 per cent of Ontario – or roughly 94 million hectares, mainly in the North – is Crown land, but only a small fraction of that is suitable for wind power. Last week's opening also included applications for offshore sites in Lakes Ontario, Erie and Huron.

With most of the likely sites on private land already taken, this opening of the provincially owned Crown land was "probably one of the last opportunities to get the better sites" that are left, says Gary Pundsack, senior business development manager with Invenergy, which sat sixth in line and had been seeking 13 sites for development.

Lewis fears a monopoly will stifle innovation and lead to higher prices.

The effort to get sites, though, also signals that wind energy has moved from the fringe of electricity generation on to the main stage. In fact, it's attracting billions of dollars in investment across Canada, says the Canadian Wind Energy Association, based in Calgary.

No one is suggesting SkyPower did anything illegal or unethical. Criticism centres on the government policy and a result that few appear to have foreseen.

"I don't think anyone anticipated someone would submit a large number of applications," says Pundsack.

SkyPower president Kerry Adler says with evident pride that his company did, indeed, grab the front of the line and "made a large number of applications ... We took advantage of a great opportunity, as everyone had an opportunity to do." Neither he nor the ministry would reveal how many applications SkyPower filed or how much land they cover.

A team of 12 company staff spent a long time scouting sites, Adler says. Before the opening, "several members of our management team spent the night in parkas and sleeping bags. Whether we secured the windiest areas, that's competition at its finest."

Back in 2004, the province announced it would, from time to time, accept applications for wind power sites on its unoccupied Crown land. Applicants would be allowed to bid on blocks covering about 4,400 hectares – with a limit of three applications per company.

Trouble was, some applicants set up new companies, lots of them, to get around the restriction, says David Bauer, spokesperson for Natural Resources Minister Donna Cansfield.

The solution, quietly unveiled in January, was to remove the limit and assess applications on a first-come, first-served basis. The earliest application for any piece of land would take precedence: Competitors would get a crack at the property only if the ministry rejected the original bid – a decision based on whether the applicant has the technical and financial strength to go through the approvals and construction process.

Industry observers say that isn't much of a hurdle for SkyPower, which Adler calls, "one of the leading renewable energy companies in Canada."

Applicants need deep pockets and a lot of expertise because approval simply allows them to begin a process of testing wind potential and securing environmental and other approvals that can take up to six years before construction begins.

The ministry has no policy on whether the sites should go to one or several companies, Bauer says.

No More Rebates for Green Cars

2008-02-27T07:44:00.000-08:00

The Conservative government is eliminating a rebate program for fuel-efficient cars after less than two years. So if you want to get a fuel-efficient car for less you had better do so before the end of 2008.

The federal government announced yesterday that it will no longer offer rebates ranging from $1,000 to $2,000 on eligible 2006, 2007 and 2008 models under the ecoAuto program after the end of 2008. It was first announced in March 2007.

"The program will not be available beyond the 2008 model year," said a one-line statement in the government's budget papers.

However, the government added it will keep its gas-guzzler tax or "Green Levy" of up to $4,000 on a few big sport-utility vehicles.

Part of the problem was that consumers had to wait several months before the program started sending cheques to motorists who qualified. Automakers also had to wait months before knowing which vehicles would qualify.

The Conservatives are now favouring a gas tax idea, but this idea will not effect wealthy SUV drivers who can easily afford higher gas prices. Instead such a gas tax would harm poor drivers the most and drive up inflation on food.

Some industry analysts and several manufacturers opposed the rebate program because they said it also gave a few automakers an unfair competitive advantage.

Honda Canada responded by offering $1,000 incentives on two of its popular fuel-efficient models that didn't qualify for the rebate last year. Honda argued that the program penalized fuel-efficient vehicles that don't compromise on safety.

Another solution would be to up the levy on gas guzzlers by an extra $1000 for ever year, or to immediately double the levy. The money would go towards developing more hydrogen fuel cell technology and build a distribution network across Canada.

End to hydro rate subsidy

2008-02-19T09:08:00.000-08:00

Clean Air Alliance recommends $5 billion better spent on consumer rebates.

An environmental research group called Clean Air Alliance says the $5 billion that goes toward subsidizing Ontario electricity rates annually should be completely eliminated over the next 10 years and instead given back to citizens in the form of an annual hydro rebate.

Such a move would cause electricity rates to rise 35 per cent over that time, but the Ontario Clean Air Alliance argues that higher power costs would encourage more homeowners and businesses to conserve energy and force industry to operate more efficiently.

"If you want to promote energy efficiency you don't subsidize the price of electricity, you've got to raise it," said Jack Gibbons, lead author of the study, called "Tax Shift: Eliminating Subsidies and Moving to Full Cost Electricity Pricing."

He said more people are likely to ease off on their air conditioners, turn out the lights, and purchase EnergyStar products if they see a 35 per cent hike on the power bill.

At the same time, the province should take the billions of dollars it would save by eliminating the subsidies and give it back to citizens in the form of an annual hydro rebate amounting to $386 for each person in the province, the group proposes.

Such a rebate would more than offset higher power bills in the typical household. A family of four, for example, would get back $1,544 under the plan compared to the $503 increase the average home would see on its electricity bill – excluding any savings through personal conservation efforts.

"It's true that one could use the (annual) tax reduction to pay for one's status quo level of electricity consumption, but that is not likely to happen," Gibbons said. "For example, when you get a $1,500 pay increase, you don't typically spend one-third of that on increased electricity consumption."

The study, funded by a number of philanthropic organizations – including the EJLB Foundation and the Laidlaw Foundation – identified a number of subsidies that keep electricity rates in the province artificially low (around 5.9 cents per kWh, when in reality it costs the government 9 to 10 cents per kWh).

Specifically, it determined the province pays nearly $2 billion so that Ontario Power Generation and other owners of hydroelectric power stations can pay royalties for water that are well below market rates. Ontario Power Generation also gets a below-market return on its generating assets that amounts to $850 million annually.

Another $2 billion goes toward a provincial sales tax exemption on grid-supplied electricity and interest payments on the former Ontario Hydro's $19.3 billion in stranded nuclear debt.

The study argues that eliminating these subsidies will encourage a "culture of conservation" and make Ontario's industries more efficient and competitive, though industry and businesses would not get rebates. Instead, the group is recommending that the government offer low-interest loans to companies wanting to do efficiency upgrades on their operations.

"In essence, a full-cost pricing strategy represents a tax shift from subsidizing wasteful consumption to rewarding efficiency, which in turn is a much more economically efficient and beneficial use of government revenues," according to the study.

Frank De Jong, leader of the Ontario Green Party, which has long advocated the use of revenue-neutral tax shifting, said he supports the plan in principle.

"This is absolutely the right way to go," he said. "But it's a question of the right mechanism for doing it."

De Jong said a simpler approach would be to use the $5 billion that goes toward subsidies and instead directly lower business and consumer taxes, freeing up more money to pay the higher cost of electricity or invest in energy efficiency.

He said the government's $3 billion health-care levy should also be turned into a carbon tax.

"Yes, we want the health care, but we should be paying for it on our electricity and gas bill rather than our health-care bill."

Biofuels harm Environment

2008-02-08T04:40:00.000-08:00

February 8th 2008.

Biofuels – gasoline substitutes made from plants – can't make much of a dent in climate change and will actually make it worse, say two reports released yesterday.

One study concludes that the current race, propelled by massive government subsidies, to grow biofuel crops on existing agricultural land increases global greenhouse gas emissions because it causes farmers to clear vast tracts of forest and grassland elsewhere, releasing the carbon they store.

The second says the only option that might make sense – planting biofuel crops on land now considered degraded – could replace just a small fraction of the fossil fuels consumed by vehicles.

"Many people imagine that with all the talk about biofuels, they're going to give us all our energy," David Tilman, of the University of Minnesota in St. Paul and co-author of the report on using degraded land, said in an interview. "They're not. ... It's not the miracle" many people believe.

The studies were published in Science magazine on the same day the Helmut Kaiser Consultancy, based in Germany, reported that thanks to government subsidies and targets in Canada and many other places, global biofuel production hit 61 billion litres, at 2,000 refining plants, in 2007 and is forecast to grow by 15 per cent a year until 2025.

But the two scientific studies suggest such supports are bad policy.

"I no longer feel corn ethanol is a wise path," Tilman said.

Biofuels' main advantage is that they store carbon while they grow: That, in theory, offsets the greenhouse gas emissions generated when they're burned. Previous research has shown the gain is greatly reduced by the amount of energy required to grow the crops and convert them to fuel.

Most North American ethanol is produced from corn and wheat. It produces just 20 per cent more energy than it takes to grow and process the crop. That makes the savings in greenhouse gas emissions also about 20 per cent.

Producing fuel from grasses and other non-food crops is more efficient – although still technically difficult – and creates roughly a 50 per cent emissions saving.

But those benefits are wiped out by a consequence of biofuel production, says the first of the new reports by scientists at Princeton and two other U.S. universities and by the Woods Hole Research Centre.

Demand for food continues unabated after agricultural land is turned over to biofuel crops. As well, prices for the crops rise. The result: Farmers expand on to previously undeveloped land, and the carbon stored in the trees, grasses and soil is released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, a primary greenhouse gas.

The U.S. would need 43 per cent of its present food-corn land to meet its ethanol projection for 2016.

"Corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20 per cent savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years," the study says. The results for non-food crops aren't much better: "Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50 per cent."

The second study, by Tilman and other Minnesota scientists and funded by the Nature Conservancy, offers equally disheartening figures: "Converting rainforests, peat lands, savannahs, or grasslands to produce food-based biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a `biofuel carbon debt' by releasing 17 to 420 times more carbon dioxide than the annual greenhouse gas reductions these biofuels provide by displacing fossil fuels."

It says planting grasses for biofuel on the half-billion hectares of degraded land around the world would, for many years, have a double climate-change benefit. The crop could be harvested to make "green" fuel and its roots and the gradually improving soil would store more carbon.

But even if all that land were converted to biofuel crops – an unlikely event – they'd still meet, at best, only 20 per cent of the global demand for transportation fuels, Tilman said.

Michael Bryan, who heads the industry group BBI Biofuels Canada, said ethanol from corn, and even the "better" version from non-food plants and waste matter, isn't perfect, but is helping in the move away from a fossil fuel economy.

What the world needs is a clean alternative to burning ethanol. Whether we are burning oil-based ethanol or biofuel, it still amounts to the burning of carbon.

Great Lakes Wind Power

2008-01-15T15:27:00.000-08:00

The Ontario Liberal government is preparing to lift a controversial moratorium on the development of offshore wind projects in the Great Lakes that has been in place for nearly 14 months. An official leaked the info and industry sources also confirmed the moratorium's end is imminent.

Offshore wind energy, while typically associated with ocean projects, offers significant opportunities in the Great Lakes. According to one study by Helimax Energy Inc., the strong and consistent winds typically over the lakes could generate up to 47,000 megawatts of clean electricity – nearly double Ontario's existing power capacity.

The ministry put a halt to all offshore development in November 2006 to give the government more time to study the potential environmental impact of such projects on bats, butterflies, aquatic species and bird migration routes.

But the moratorium caught some wind developers off guard, particularly those trying to raise money for their proposed projects.

The wisdom of halting development was also called into question when it was discovered that some U.S. states, such as Ohio, were actively moving forward with offshore projects in Lake Erie despite the Ontario policy.

The moratorium followed a protest against an offshore wind project near Leamington, Ont., in September 2006. Nearly 300 residents showed up to a council meeting to protest a 119-turbine project planned by developer Southpoint Wind Power. Council unanimously rejected Southpoint's proposal and urged the ministry to come up with guidelines that would help small communities evaluate offshore projects.

"There were a number of serious concerns," said deputy mayor Robert Schmidt, explaining that many residents saw negative impacts on lake navigation, bird and butterfly migration, recreational boating and fishing.

"The biggest issue to most residents was how it affected their view of the lake, which is really only the last natural view we have in our area."

Schmidt said a number of offshore proposals still wait in the wings.

"The majority of people aren't against the idea, as long as it's located in an area where it doesn't cause problems."

Energy consultant Paul Bradley, manager of PJB Energy Solutions and former vice-president of generation at the Ontario Power Authority, said offshore projects hold great potential but are also a huge technical challenge.

"They're all-or-nothing projects," he said. "You've got to collect all that power from each turbine, aggregate it, and then bring it in efficiently through an underwater cable."

The best wind resources tend to be far from where power is consumed.

One of the biggest challenges is to bring wind-generated energy to communities in southern Ontario without breaking the bank on building high voltage transmission lines, which cost about $3 million a kilometre to construct.

Toronto Hydro Corp. has considered an offshore wind project in Lake Ontario near the Scarborough Bluffs. That wind farm would have a capacity of up to 200 megawatts.

"In the general context of developing wind power in the province, (lifting the moratorium) would be a great step forward," said Joyce McLean, chair of the Canadian Wind Energy Association and Toronto Hydro's manager of green energy services.

A more ambitious project by Trillium Power Energy Corp. would involve 140 turbines erected along a shallow stretch of Lake Ontario, about 15 kilometres offshore from Prince Edward County. The wind farm would have a capacity of 710 megawatts, the largest in Ontario.

Wind energy is a major part of the McGuinty government's plan to double by 2025 the amount of electricity that comes from renewable resources.

The Ministry of Energy announced last August it had directed the Ontario Power Authority to procure another 2,000 megawatts of renewable power, a large portion of which is expected to be generated from wind.

Banks should encourage Green Practices

2008-01-10T09:08:00.000-08:00

Banks around the world are uniquely positioned to push private-sector companies to adopt environmentally conscious practices, say the authors of a report released on Thursday.

It is important that banks start to consider the long-term financial ramifications of lending money to companies that produce high levels of greenhouse gases, says Ceres, a coalition of investors and environmental groups.

"As one of the world's largest economic sectors, and as one that reaches virtually every consumer and business, the financial services industry must be involved in mitigating climate change and its impacts," said Ceres president Mindy Lubber.

The report ranks 40 of the world's biggest banks on how they are addressing climate change.

The Bank of America is the only bank committed to reducing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions associated with its loan book. None of the banks have adopted policies to discourage investment heavy polluting projects like coal-fired plants.

Three Canadian banks are included in the survey, with Royal Bank of Canada ranked highest at 16. The Bank of Nova Scotia and Toronto-Dominion Bank slotted in at 26 and 29, respectively.

The Ceres report evaluates how banks are dealing with climate change through board oversight and management practices. It looks at 15 European, five Asian, one Brazilian and three Canadian financial institutions.

California's auto standards would save Canadians $37 billion

2007-11-11T09:49:00.000-08:00

OTTAWA - $37 billion dollars: That is the amount Canadian motorists could save over the next decade if car manufacturers were forced to meet California's fuel consumption standards for new cars, suggests a new report released by an environmental consultant.

The study, produced for ClimateforChange.ca, said consumers might face additional costs to purchase cars with better technology, but that those expenses would be offset by significant savings in reduced fuel costs, economic spinoffs and a decrease in the greenhouse gas emissions that are linked to global warming.

"The gas savings translate directly into consumer savings at the gas pump, allowing consumers to use that money to save, invest or spend those dollars on other goods and services, building Canada's economy," reads the report that was written by Dan Becker, a former policy expert at the Sierra Club in the U.S. "The technologies that automakers use to save gas, such as more efficient engines, advanced transmissions and sleeker aerodynamics, cost less than the energy saved over the life of the vehicle."

The savings are based on gas prices remaining at $1.00 per litre, but consumers would benefit more from the tougher standards if the price at the pumps increased, Becker explained.

"It is also important to stress that the more stringent the auto emissions standard, the more energy saving technology will be added to the vehicles," said the report. "It takes more workers to manufacturer and install this technology, which creates new autoworker jobs. It will also help make Canadian auto plants more competitive with those in Europe and Asia currently producing better technology vehicles that are very popular with consumers."

In a new ad campaign, the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers' Association says that "a provincial patchwork of standards" could hurt consumers and auto jobs in Canada because it would disrupt an existing North American system that offers lower costs and speeds up the development of newer vehicles. The industry association is urging provinces to co-operate with them, along with the federal government and consumers to develop a single North American standard.

Nearly 20 American States are planning to adopt or are in the process of adopting the California standards which call for a 30 per cent improvement in the emissions of new cars sold between 2009 and 2016. At least four provinces, representing nearly half of the Canadian market have also indicated they plan to adopt the tougher standards, but the federal government in Canada is still in the midst of consultations.

Becker said that car manufacturers are going to be forced to improve their product since provinces and states are already moving forward on their own, without waiting for their respective federal governments.

"If you add up the combined population of those 19 states, it's the majority of the U.S. car-buying public," said Becker in an interview. "You have a similar situation in Canada looming, where the provinces are about to make the federal government irrelevant on this issue.

California sues U.S. over auto pollution

2007-11-08T16:27:00.000-08:00

California is suing the United States government to force a decision over whether the state can impose America's first greenhouse gas emission standards for cars and light trucks.

More than a dozen other states are poised to follow California's lead if it is granted the waiver from federal law.

New standards would present a challenge to automakers, who would have to adapt to a patchwork of regulations from States.

California's lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., was expected after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vowed last spring to take legal action.

At issue is California's nearly two-year-old request for a waiver under the federal Clean Air Act allowing it to implement a 2002 state anti-pollution law regulating greenhouse gases.

Eleven other states have adopted California's standard as a way to combat global warming and five others are considering it.

"Our position is that it's time for EPA to either act or get out of the way," said Lee Moore, a spokesman for New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram.

The 16-page complaint filed by California's attorney general says that "the longer delay in reducing these emissions, the more costly and harmful will be the impact on California."

Schwarzenegger and other state officials say implementing the law is crucial for California's ability to meet the provisions of a separate global warming law that passed last year, garnering worldwide attention. That law seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 25 per cent by 2020.

Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington plan to join California's lawsuit against the federal government, said Gareth Lacy, spokesman for California Attorney General Jerry Brown.

California asked the EPA to grant its waiver in December 2005. EPA administrator Stephen Johnson said last summer that he would make a decision by the end of this year.

Schwarzenegger sought quicker action and vowed to sue. The state's lawsuit was expected to be filed in late October but was delayed after state officials became preoccupied with the Southern California wildfires.

The EPA criticized the state's actions today.

"The administrator has stated numerous times that he plans to make a decision by the end of the year," EPA spokeswoman Jennifer Wood said.

Yet state officials say they need the matter resolved soon because the auto-emissions law applies to vehicles in the 2009 model year, which can be marketed by companies as early as this coming January.

Cars, pickups and sport utility vehicles sold in California would be required to produce fewer greenhouse gases, with the goal of reducing auto emissions 25 per cent by 2030.

Further delay by the EPA would interfere with the state's ability to enforce the law on time, according to the complaint.

"Congress generally intended that the U.S. EPA make determinations of this type in a matter of weeks or months, not years," the complaint says.

While the federal government sets national air pollution rules, California has unique status under the Clean Air Act to enact its own regulations if it gets approval to do so by the EPA.

Other states can follow federal rules or California's standards if they are tougher. The EPA has granted about 50 such waivers over the past 40 years for the use of catalytic converters, leaded gasoline regulations and other measures.

In addition to the states that plan to join California's lawsuit, the governors of Colorado, Florida and Utah have said their states plan to adopt the standard.

The EPA initially refused to act on California's application, saying the agency did not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant. That changed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in April that the EPA did indeed have that right.

As a result, the EPA is now developing greenhouse gas regulations that are scheduled to be released by the end of the year. Environmental groups say those regulations are unlikely to be stronger than California standards.

Automakers continue to challenge the California standards in court.

They are appealing a ruling last month by a federal judge in Vermont who upheld the California rules in that state. They also are trying to persuade a federal judge in Fresno to toss out the emission standards mandated under California's 2002 law.

Associations for both domestic and foreign car companies say California's standards would raise the cost of vehicles and could force manufacturers to pull some sport utility vehicles and pickup truck models from showrooms.

Ship pollution kills!

2007-11-08T16:23:00.000-08:00

Pollution from smokestacks of ocean ships kills up to 60,000 people a year around the world, says a study released today.

The estimated toll of premature deaths in North America, most on the West Coast, is 9,000, says the study, published in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Without a clean up, the global total is expected to hit 84,000 within five years, the study says.

The damage comes from the sulphur-laden Bunker C fuel that powers the growing number of ships conducting global trade.

The sludgy fuel is “basically the dregs of the oil refining process,” and contains nearly 2,000 times as much sulphur as the diesel fuel burned in trucks in North America and Europe, says David Marshall, of the Clean Air Task Force, one of the groups that commissioned the study.

The study’s authors - researchers from four universities in the United States and Germany - conclude the emissions cause deadly heart and respiratory ailments, including lung cancer, mainly in people who live along coasts near busy shipping lanes. Hardest hit are Europe and Asia.

The main culprits are the sulphur, along with nitrates and particles.

“The study is the first to estimate the impacts of ship emissions on a global scale in human health terms,” said one of the researchers, James Corbett, at the University of Delaware.

The annual number of premature deaths from all outdoor air pollution is estimated to be about 800,000, the study notes.

The researchers estimated the marine pollution toll by first measuring the emissions from the more than 55,000 ships that ply the oceans, then, figuring out how much they add to the total pollution in the atmosphere. Finally, they calculate the expected number of deaths from that increase in pollution.

The technique is similar to the one employed by Toronto Public Health to estimate that air pollution and smog lead to 1,700 premature deaths in the city each year.

Ship engines are massive - equivalent to a municipal power plant, or thousands of cars and trucks, Marshall said in an interview. But while power plants face restrictions on the types of fuel they can use, and many must install scrubbers or other polluting-reducing devices, “international shipping is completely unregulated.

“It has gotten away Scot-free to this point, partly due to the feeling that since the emissions are out of sight they can’t harm anyone.”

The pollution is not that far from view, the study notes: 70 per cent of emissions occur within 400 kilometres of land.

The solution is simple, although expensive, Marshall said: Ships, too, should be required to burn low-sulphur fuel and install scrubbing devices. Emissions of sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxide from new and existing ships must be cut by as much as 90 per cent, no later than 2015, the study states.

The American Petroleum Institute estimates it would cost $126 billion (U.S.) between now and 2020 to convert refineries around the world to produce cleaner fuels for marine engines. But the cost of health care and lost income and productivity from pollution damage is much higher, Marshall said.

At the International Marine Organization, seagoing nations have been negotiating for the past 15 years on new air pollution standards, Marshall said. To date, the talks have only produced regulations that amount to business as usual.

Tougher regulations are imposed in a few places, including Scandinavia and California, which now requires clean fuel in ships that enter its waters.

Improvements can’t wait, because ocean shipping is increasing by four per cent a year globally and, thanks to rapidly growing trade with Asia, by six per cent on the West Coast, Marshall said.

A bright energy future without coal

2007-11-04T12:10:00.000-08:00

This week, our dirty coal-fired power plants were back in the news with electoral candidates arguing the ifs and whens of their necessary shutdown. Shutting down coal plants, our guiltiest climate-change-causing beasts, seems like a no-brainer, but heels keep dragging.

We're told that spending $1.3 billion on scrubbers is the answer. Let's be clear: Scrubbers remove some particulates – pollution that causes smog – but they will do nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. In fact, scrubbers are energy intensive and could lead to more of these emissions, leaving us further unable to meet Kyoto targets.

We're told a nuclear-based energy plan is the answer. The 20-year electricity plan unveiled by the Ontario Power Authority last month calls for half of Ontario's electricity supply to come from refurbished and new nuclear reactors. Because these reactors take many years to construct, coal plants will need to stay online to fill in the gap. It doesn't have to be this way.

The billions earmarked to build and replace an aging fleet of nuclear reactors or to put scrubbers on outdated coal plants would be better invested in new clean renewable technology of the future. Energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies are fast to deploy and, if done right, can eliminate the need for coal or nuclear to keep the lights on.

Unfortunately, Ontario's energy planners have chosen to lowball the potential for green options in favour of a nuclear-centred future. For example, the OPA plan calls for 200 megawatts of solar energy by 2025. Germany installed five times that much in 2006 alone. Ontario could be harnessing three times the amount of wind power the OPA plan calls for, 10 times the amount of solar the OPA plan calls for, and thousands of megawatts from bio-energy sources, cogeneration and waste heat recycling.

The OPA plan also underestimates energy efficiency and conservation. The plan puts an arbitrary cap on energy savings through conservation and energy efficiency at only 60 per cent of the cost-effective potential identified and recommended by the OPA's own studies. This will cost Ontarians millions of dollars in missed opportunities, higher production costs and higher electricity rates. The Pembina Institute and WWF-Canada's "Renewable is Doable" study shows Ontario could be saving nearly double the amount of energy through energy efficiency and conservation than the OPA plan claims.

More than two-thirds of the renewable energy in the OPA plan is installed and planned large hydro. Hydro is an important energy source and should be in the mix – but in addition to maximizing wind and other renewable sources first, not instead of.

Probably of greatest significance, the OPA plan totally ignores the use of power storage technologies for wind, solar and other renewable sources that would allow renewable energy to be Ontario's primary power source, not subordinate to a nuclear plan.

The OPA marginalizes renewable energy, arguing that large, centralized nuclear megaprojects are needed to supply our "base load" needs. But Ontario's base load power can be met through the right technical, regulatory and policy tools. Ontario could learn from California, one of the leaders in North America in integration of renewable energy into the grid. It has set up a task force to look at what's needed in the way of grid management, transmission optimization and regulatory and policy reform to meet California's lofty renewable energy targets.

For Ontario, a decision to invest billions of dollars in nuclear megaprojects or coal scrubbers is a decision not to invest in clean renewable technology. Every dollar sunk into huge transmission systems to support centralized megaprojects is a dollar not invested in "smart grids" that accommodate local production of renewable energy.

A bright energy future without the need for coal or nuclear is doable. With renewable energy, energy efficiency and co-generation, we can cut our greenhouse gas emissions by half of what's called for in the OPA plan. Ontarians could actually be saving money on their electricity bill rather than deepening our nuclear debt with at least another 40 years of expensive and unreliable power, not to mention generating more long-lived, unsolvable radioactive waste.

Biofuels are not green fuels...

2007-11-04T12:06:00.000-08:00

"Biofuels worsens global warming because they are like setting fire to fields of crops in the long run."

Most crops grown in North America and Europe to make a "green" alternative transport fuel actually speed up global warming because of industrial farming methods, says a report by Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel prize in 1995 for his work on the hole in the Earth's ozone layer.

The findings could spell special worries for alternative fuels derived from rapeseed, used in Europe, which the study concluded could produce up to 70 per cent more planet-warming greenhouse gases than conventional diesel.

The report suggested scientists and farmers focus on crops needing little fertilizer and harvesting methods that were not energy intensive in order to produce benefits for the environment.

Biofuels are derived from plants that absorb the planet-warming greenhouse gas carbon dioxide as they grow, and so are meant as a climate-friendly substitute for fossil fuels.

But the new study shows that some biofuels actually release more greenhouse gases than they save, because of the fertilizer used in modern farming practices.

The problem greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, is more famous as the dentists' anaesthetic "laughing gas," and is about 300 times more insulating than the most common man-made greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

"The nitrous oxide emission on its own can cancel out the overall benefit," co-author professor Keith Smith said in a telephone interview from Edinburgh in Scotland.

The study casts further doubts on the credibility of biofuels as a climate cure after the revelation of other unintended side effects, such as rain-forest clearance and higher food prices, from competing with forests and food for land. Brazil and the United States produce most of the world's bioethanol, as a substitute for gasoline, while the European Union is the main supplier of biodiesel.

Using biodiesel derived from rapeseed would produce between 1 and 1.7 times more greenhouse gas than using conventional diesel, the study estimated.

Biofuels derived from sugar cane, as in Brazil, fared better, producing between 0.5 and 0.9 times as much greenhouse gases as gasoline.

Corn, also known as maize, is the main biofuels feedstock used in North America, and produced between 0.9 and 1.5 times the global warming effect of conventional gasoline, it said.

"As it's used at the moment, bioethanol from maize seems to be a pretty futile exercise," Smith said.

The study did not account for the extra global warming effect of burning fossil fuels in biofuel manufacture, or for the planet-cooling effect of using biofuel by-products as a substitute for coal in electricity generation.

"Even if somebody decides that our numbers are too big ... if you add together the undoubted amount of nitrous oxide that is formed, plus the fossil-fuel usage, with most of the biofuels of today you are not going to get any benefit," Smith said.

The study did not condemn all biofuels, however, suggesting that scientists and farmers should focus on crops needing little fertilizer, and harvesting methods that were not energy intensive.

"In future, if you use low nitrogen demanding crops, and low impact agriculture, then we could get a benefit," Smith said.

The study singled out grasses and woody coppice species – such as willows and poplars – as crops with potentially more favourable impacts on the climate.

Nitrogen makes up a large portion of the atmosphere, and is a vital component for the growth of plants. Massive production of synthetic fertilizer in a 20th century "green revolution" has almost doubled the amount of nitrogen in the global system, adding nearly 100 million tonnes, Smith said.

"That has increased the production of nitrous oxide."

Energy Opportunities in Ontario

2007-11-04T11:55:00.000-08:00

The province of Ontario is looking for new "transformative energy innovations" that carry a "wow factor" and can make Ontario shine on the world stage.

So says a memo hastily distributed several months ago by the government-created Ontario Centres of Excellence, which recently received $15 million in public funds earmarked for "low-carbon technologies."

There's a certain irony to this, because as hungry start-ups across the province were busy putting together a five-page project proposal in hopes of getting a slice of that funding, the Ontario Power Authority was putting out a 20-year electricity plan for the province that decided to exclude how alternative approaches to power generation – such as fuel cells, gasification and pumped storage – could make meaningful contributions to the grid over the next two decades.

It's fair to ask why the government, so willing to throw $15 million at "transformative" energy technologies, is being guided by a planning authority that's giving short shrift to innovations, many of them Canadian, that can transform our electricity system today.

Yes, the power authority has implemented a standard offer program meant to encourage development of small-scale renewables such as solar, wind, and biomass. Yes, it has awarded long-term contracts to purchase wind power and plans to significantly expand that investment. All very good.

But as Energy Minister Dwight Duncan said last month, "We have to look at every available opportunity." This simply isn't happening.

In the final plan submitted on Aug. 29 to the Ontario Energy Board, the power authority reduced its earlier projection for wind development by 800 megawatts and shifted it over to hydroelectric dams in the north.

It also made clear that it has no plans to go beyond the minimum requirements laid out in a directive from the energy minister, who wants at least 15,700 megawatts of renewable energy supply in place by 2025.

The plan, according to the power authority, "does not seek to exceed the directive's goals for renewable resources. This is because the incremental renewable resource would be large wind projects. These projects would not be cost-effective when compared to the supply resources included in the plan that would be displaced."

This is troubling.

First, the large-scale deployment of clean power isn't the exclusive domain of wind, which is but one of many options available.

Second, the power authority ignores that the cost of renewable technologies is expected to drop considerably over 20 years, and likely much sooner. Much can happen over two decades, if you consider that most of us never heard of the Internet back in 1987.

Third, the plan makes clear that cost (i.e. investment in nuclear power) trumps the environment after the minister's directive has been met, though it doesn't factor in the true environmental costs in its assessment of nuclear.

The power authority says it will review its 20-year plan in three years and is open to considering new approaches at that time. And in talking with officials there, a sincere attempt is being made to be flexible. But is this realistic?

We all know that the further you go down a path of big-build nuclear, the harder it is to change course. And once you've accepted your course, the search for alternatives, more often than not, loses momentum.

For this reason, it's prudent to factor in the alternatives today and plan accordingly.

Feasible power-generation options do exist, and all of them could have been given more weight in the power authority's current plan:

Pumped storage: The power authority in the past has recognized the potential of pumped storage as a way to store wind power so we can dispatch it as needed. It allows us to get higher value out of otherwise undependable renewables, and can replace the use of coal and natural gas on the grid.

The power authority's preliminary 20-year plan cites 1,500 megawatts of pumped storage that could be developed at three sites – one located near Peterborough, another in northern Ottawa Valley and another near Atikokan. Sources tell me another massive site north of Thunder Bay could alone economically provide more than 1,000 megawatts of power storage over a period of more than 24 hours.

Again, this isn't electricity generation per se, but we don't really need new generation in this province as much as ways to better use the electricity we can produce.

Energy-from-waste: Most environmentalists don't like this technology, largely because they don't believe the claims. But a pilot project that's about to enter full operation in the Ottawa area is poised to prove that energy-from-waste can be done in an environmentally responsible way.

Rod Bryden, chief executive of Plasco Energy and overseer of the Ottawa project, is prepared to let his company's facility speak for itself. He says preliminary results have attracted the attention of several municipalities, and he figures it's a matter of time before Toronto – highly reluctant under Mayor David Miller's watch – gives the technology serious consideration.

"If Ontario was to process the 10 million tonnes of waste, which it currently puts into landfill, through a system with the kind of efficiency that Plasco's technology offers, it would produce nearly half of the output of Ontario's largest coal plant," says Bryden. "You'd get about 1,600 megawatts out of the waste you're putting into the ground right now."

The technology gets 2.5 times more energy out of a tonne of garbage than traditional incineration technology and emissions are well below regulatory limits – certainly outperforming Ontario's cleanest coal plants. Bryden envisions dozens of these facilities scattered in Ontario communities that process local waste with local facilities.

Solar power: The problem with solar photovoltaic technology is that it's expensive, and there are certain folks who are understandably outraged that the province is willing to pay a 600-per-cent premium for solar power projects being developed in Ontario. Under the power authority's plan, solar capacity in the province will not exceed 88 megawatts over the next two decades – about the same amount that's already been contracted out to companies such as Skypower and OptiSolar, who are planning massive multi-megawatts solar farms in various locations throughout Ontario.

The power authority's reasoning for sticking with this number is simple: while there may be more projects announced, it doesn't expect all of them will get built. A prudent assumption, maybe, but many believe the 20-year plan seriously low-balls the potential of solar, which can supply power when we need it most – during the afternoon when the sun is at its hottest and air conditioners are blasting.

Paul Gipe from the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association believes it's easily possible within 10 years to have 1,000 megawatts of solar deployed across the province – and that's just for rooftop systems, not the massive farms that have been proposed. He estimates it would cost $7 billion to $10 billion, about double the cost of building a new nuclear reactor of similar capacity, and would only add half a cent to the per-kilowatt cost of electricity on consumers' bills.

Offshore wind: We typically associate offshore wind with massive turbines located in turbulent ocean waters, but there's great potential to install turbines in the Great Lakes where waters are more shallow, manageable and accessible, and wind is more constant compared to land-based wind farms.

Toronto Hydro Corp. has seriously considered an offshore wind project in Lake Ontario near the Scarborough Bluffs that would have a capacity of up to 200 megawatts. Trillium Power Energy Corp., wants to build a 710-megawatt offshore farm east of Toronto. It would consist of 140 turbines about 15 kilometres offshore of Prince Edward County, hardly detectable from land and outside all migratory routes for birds and butterflies.

The financial backers are there, says Trillium chief executive John Kourtoff. But offshore projects were put on hold last November after the Ministry of Natural Resources issued a moratorium on development until more studies could be done. In the meantime, while Canadian developers twiddle their thumbs, U.S. states such as Ohio are positioning themselves to develop offshore projects in Lake Erie.

Offshore wind is considered the next major growth area in the wind-power sector, and experts say it would be easier and less expensive to do projects in a lake than in the ocean. The ministry is expected to lift the moratorium, likely by year's end, but the power authority excluded such projects from its roadmap without explanation.

Co-generation: Also referred to as "combined heat and power." Algoma Steel Inc. in Sault Ste. Marie plans to use waste gases from its blast furnaces to generate about 70 megawatts worth of power. Northland Power Inc. is building a 236-watt natural gas plant that will sell both steam and electricity to Abitibi-Consolidated Inc.'s newsprint-recycling mill in Thorold. The leftover electricity not used by Abitibi will be sold into the grid.

If you think of all the buildings and facilities out there where excess heat and flu gases can be captured and put to good use, the enormous potential becomes obvious. Groups like WWF-Canada and the Pembina Institute argue that 3,000 megawatts of cost-competitive co-generation could be put in place by 2012, and a total of 5,000 megawatts by 2017. They consider these numbers a conservative estimate.

Thomas Casten of Recycled Energy Development LLC, who is chair of a new Ontario group called the Alliance for Clean Technology, estimates that waste heat and gases from the province's 77 biggest industrial exhaust stacks could alone produce about 600 megawatts – enough to replace two coal stations up north. Casten considers this low-hanging fruit that could be implemented quickly. "It would not require any additional fossil fuel and would produce no incremental CO{-2} emissions," says Casten.

The power authority has only accounted for 584 megawatts of co-generation between now and 2027, though a new standard offer program for small-scale co-generation could add a bit to that figure. It's just a slice of what's doable, says Keith Stewart of WWF-Canada.

The problem, as folks like Casten and Stewart see it, is that the standard offer only accommodates deployments under 10 megawatts, meaning the lion's share of projects out there can't participate.

Forest and agricultural bioenergy: This type of bioenergy would also achieve two other public policy objectives: helping farmers and boosting northern economies.

The power authority estimates in its plan that 300 megawatts of power could be produced from animal manure, 450 megawatts from crop waste and 300 megawatts from forest biofibre – the bark, branches and tops of trees removed and unused after harvesting.

Those numbers are a heavy discount on the potential of what's out there. For example, it's assumed that 90 per cent of forest biofibre can't be retrieved economically. "10 per cent is really low," says Melissa Felder, an environmental consultant in Toronto and bioenergy expert. For manure it's 75 per cent and for crop residue it's 80 per cent. "The lack of serious consideration to bioenergy potential is disturbing and short-sighted," she adds.

But the power authority trims those targets even further under second analysis. Under its final plan, it brings the 750 megawatts it identified for manure and crop residue down to 150 megawatts and the 300 megawatts it calculated for forest biofibre down to 150 megawatts.

"The planning assumptions ... are less than the total theoretical potential identified because there is significant uncertainty with respect to the amount of biomass resource that will be developed to produce electricity," the power authority explains.

There's uncertainty because there's no plan from which supportive policy can sprout. Certainly, without a commitment to build nuclear from the government, there would be uncertainty around new nuclear plants as well. The same goes with the ethanol market in Ontario without a government mandate. Seems in this instance the power authority is part of the problem.

The final tally: A feasible target of at least 10,100 megawatts versus the OPA's commitment to 1,488 megawatts in its 20-year plan.

If just a third of this potential was adopted it would eliminate the need for 1,000 megawatts of new nuclear capacity. What can be done, with some hard work and political will, would give the government more flexibility as it phases out the use of coal, and might even reduce our need to refurbish old nukes.

The question is whether the next premier of Ontario, whoever he may be, has the will to go that extra low-carbon mile, and whether the bureaucratic engine he commands agrees to get behind the cause.

So far, and I'd be happy to be proven wrong, the answer is "no" – on both accounts.

Schwarzenegger's Green is Golden

2007-11-04T11:53:00.000-08:00

VANCOUVER - California's determination to slash greenhouse gas emissions is touching off a "new gold rush" worth tens of billions of dollars for companies taking a stake in the booming green energy sector, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Thursday at an economic summit in Vancouver.

Schwarzenegger said his state, which has a larger economy than all but six of the world's national governments, is eager to strike relationships with businesses that can help California meet tough new emission standards adopted last year.

The former action movie superstar and body builder was joined on stage by B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell.

The duo capped their appearance by signing a memorandum of understanding committing the state and the province to work together to cap greenhouse gas emissions, collaborate on development and implementation of green technologies and join other U.S. and Canadian jurisdictions in building a hydrogen highway between B.C. and California.

Campbell lauded Schwarzenegger's leadership on issues such as improved emission standards for automobiles. Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger cited a Vancouver manufacturer of low-emission truck engines as an example of the market opportunities and business relationships opening up in California for companies based in B.C.

"The ports of Los Angeles for instance and Long Beach are buying right now trucks with natural gas engines that are made by a British Columbia company," said Schwarzenegger.

"These engines are helping us meet our emission standards, and a California company has seized this opportunity to build stations to fuel those trucks. That's how we are working together."

Schwarzenegger noted that 150 years ago, the territories of what are now California and British Columbia were the site of gold rushes that "shaped our history and led to unprecedented growth."

"Ladies and gentlemen we have the opportunity once again. The Wall Street Journal has just said that our new fuel standard has companies eager to supply low carbon products to California's $50-billion annual transportation fuel market. They call it California's new gold rush.

"With your willingness to be innovative in clean technology, you are poised to start British Columbia's new gold rush."

As an indication of the size and scope of the opportunities, Schwarzenegger noted a decision by General Electric to concentrate its research and development investments in products that help lower emissions.

"GE sales of green clean technology products is $12 billion annually," Schwarzenegger said. "They are now just investing in green clean technology because that's where the profits and the growth is. Their goal is by 2010 to sell $20 billion worth of goods and they are already backlogged by $50 billion. So that is the kind of growth you see in that area."

Poll: Majority of Canadians support Kyoto

2007-11-04T11:51:00.000-08:00

67 per cent of Canadians surveyed support ratification of the Kyoto accord on fighting global warming, according to a new poll.

Only 19 per cent of those asked oppose the treaty, which would compel more than 150 countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Ekos Research Associates conducted the poll for CBC, Radio Canada and various newspapers.

The polling firm talked to 1,217 randomly chosen Canadians by phone from May 27-29.

Alberta's Premier Ralph Klein is spearheading a plan that would employ new technologies to cut air pollution, but would set back the emission targets and Kyoto timetable.

Klein managed to get the support of western premiers last week to have Alberta's Kyoto alternative put forward at public consultations.

Klein has warned that a ratified Kyoto accord will hurt both Alberta's economy and that of the entire country.

Still, among Albertans surveyed, 54 per cent said they support ratification.

When Ekos asked Canadians what impact Kyoto would have on the Canadian economy, it found 61 per cent agreed with Ottawa's prediction of a modest impact.

Twenty-one per cent agreed with Alberta's prediction of a disastrous impact.

When asked about holding more consultations about lowering greenhouse gases, 56 per cent of respondents agreed that Canada should quit wasting time debating the economic consequences of Kyoto. Nineteen per cent disagreed.

When asked if they would agree to a tax increase to reduce greenhouse gases, support slipped to 46 per cent, and opposition climbed to 40 per cent.

Pollster Frank Graves says most Canadians know little or nothing about Kyoto, but support it anyway.

"There may be a growing sense of impatience and frustration coming out in the public, that 'look, we don't want to wake up and find P.E.I. under water someday.'"

The results of the poll are considered valid plus or minus 2.8 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

How Greens altered the Canadian political landscape

2007-11-04T11:46:00.000-08:00

Carol Kidd may be a card-carrying Conservative, but last Wednesday she, who lives along the largely rural plains of Caledon, northwest of Toronto, voted Green.

It was a first for her. But along with thousands of others, she's offering a glimpse of an altered political landscape in rural Ontario, where the Green party is becoming a viable choice.

But why in the province's rural areas and not the cities, where the environmental movement is at its most intense? Not even Green party leader Frank de Jong, knows the answer. But there are hypotheses.

The Greens, who ran candidates in all 107 ridings, came in third or better in 18 of them in last week's election. In one, Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, Green candidate Shane Jolley came in second behind the incumbent, Tory Bill Murdoch. In the 2003 election, when they ran in 102 of 103 ridings, Greens placed third in just two ridings.

Although there were a handful of urban third-place finishes – such as Toronto constituencies Don Valley West and Davenport, where leader Frank de Jong ran, and Barrie – most of the success came in rural ridings, in the 519 area code.

"I think sometimes, and now particularly, people in the rural communities see the farmland being eaten up with development, and issues like Walkerton with the water and the Greenbelt," says Kidd, 64, executive director of the Caledon Meals On Wheels program. "I think we're more concerned about the land."

Experts say the spreading rural Green tide may have as much to do with history and demographics as environmental awareness.

The Green Party in Ontario began in the large cities, Toronto, Kingston and Ottawa, among the downtowners. "It was the usual-suspects kind of thing, we were treehuggers, myself included," says de Jong, who recounts how he was arrested for mischief in 1996 along with others protesting logging of old-growth forest at Owain Lake in Temagami in northern Ontario. (The charges were later dropped.)

Highly decentralized and grassroots, it started transforming into a more solid, traditional party with a clear structure and leader in the 1990s. Each election it would field more candidates. And its share of the popular vote would increase, tripling to 8 per cent last week.

But a trend emerged that no one expected. By the mid-1990s, the party was gaining traction in the rural, agricultural regions faster than in the cities from which it began.

The conundrum no one has quite figured out is exactly who in the rural areas is apt to vote Green.

The farmers are the prime example. There are those who might look at the Green Party and its desire to protect farmland from development and to make farms more viable for producing food for local markets, and find that attractive.

"We have fewer farmers every year, that's no surprise," says Geri Kamenz, president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture. "But if you look at my new members, a lot of them are third-career people who have taken early retirement, moved into rural Ontario and are farming to some degree ... Is profitability their number one goal? I'm not sure it is. Is reconnecting with their roots or getting closer to that which really sustains and feeds humanity part of their motivation? I think so.

"If you look at that, and you look at what the Green party offers in terms of environmental sustainability, (rural Ontario) would seem an obvious place to field candidates."

Organic farmers, too, were early supporters – and candidates – for the Green party, which champions organic and local foods.

Larger-scale commercial farmers, who raise crops like corn and soy beans to sell on international markets, might also look to the Green party, since the other parties, Kamenz says, rarely talked about agriculture during the campaign.

"A small part of the commercial farming community may exercise a protest vote, not to elect the Green party, but to yank the chains of the other parties to say, `You better pay attention to us.'"

On the other hand, many farmers oppose the province's Greenbelt, which protects a wide swath of land from further development. In some cases, it has erased their future ability to sell the land for development profit. It also creates hurdles to making any changes to the land.

The Green party, as it happens, would like to expand the Greenbelt in the interest of curbing sprawl.

Farmers have also historically viewed environmentalists as an "enemy rather than an ally" and see the Greens as closely connected to environmentalists, says Peter Andrée, a specialist in environmental politics at Carleton University.

"I don't think that's necessarily well thought through, but I see there's a gut reaction in that direction."

The Green party must be aware of the fact that even in these rural regions, farmers don't make up the majority of voters, Andrée notes. So their message has to work for a broader audience.

Some say the reason the Greens came in ahead of the NDP in many of these ridings is because the New Democrats, tied to the labour movement, have historically been weak in these areas, which tend to be Conservative bastions.

"The NDP isn't seen as the alternative in those rural ridings," Andrée says.

"In the 705, the 519, they're not connecting with the voters, whereas the Greens have come up on the radar as a new option that doesn't have the negative connotations yet like the NDP."

De Jong, a Toronto teacher, agrees with that assessment. When someone came to ecological consciousness in Toronto over last 20 years, they'd go to a multiplicity of environmental non-governmental organizations, like Friends of the Earth, or to the NDP, he explains. "But in Owen Sound there are no ecological groups, and the NDP is not a force. So you have to go to the Green party."

Some pundits predict that Green support will plateau as other parties adopt environmental agendas. And Andrée sees the danger of a "ceiling" of voters who turn out strictly on environmental issues.

Still, he expects the Greens to do even better next time. First, however, they'll have to convince people that they're not a one-issue party.

Voters in rural Ontario, it appears, are already starting to believe.

Report: Pollution deadlier than car crashes

2007-11-04T11:39:00.000-08:00

BELGRADE, Serbia – Poor water and air quality, and environmental changes blamed largely on industrialized nations have cut Europeans' life expectancy by nearly a year, Europe's environmental agency warned Wednesday.

More must be done – fast – to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to improve air and water quality, the European Environment Agency said in a 400-page report presented at a ministerial conference held in Serbia.

Hundreds of thousands of people across Europe are dying prematurely because of air pollution, it said. "The estimated annual loss of life is significantly greater than that due to car accidents," the report said.

At this rate, life expectancy in western and central Europe will be shorter by nearly a year, it said. The current average age expectancy in western and central Europe is 70 for men and 74 for women.

The report also warned of the risks to the development of children.

Pollution is "similarly bleak" across eastern Europe, mostly from vehicle gas emissions and the expansion of industry in ex-Soviet nations, the report said.

Also, more than 100 million people in the region still do not have access to safe drinking water, it said.

The emission of greenhouse gases – on the rise across Europe – has contributed to global warming, the report said, citing overfishing and damage to crops as key risks facing the continent as climate change upsets Europe's ecosystems.

"Climate change is likely to affect seas and coasts, including marine organisms," the report said.

Emissions must be reduced by up to 50 percent by 2050 to limit rises in the earth's temperature – the target proposed by the EU as necessary to avert major climate changes in the future, the report noted.

"We need to further strengthen the will to act on environmental issues across the pan-European region," the agency's director, Jacqueline McGlade, said at the opening of the conference attended by environment officials from 53 countries.

"This requires a better understanding of the problems we face, their nature, and distribution across societies and generations,'' McGlade said. "Analysis, assessment, communication and education will help overcome this 'information gap' and will better equip those who need to act.''

Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize

2007-11-04T11:34:00.000-08:00

Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change jointly won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize today for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for fighting it.

Gorewon an Academy Award earlier this year for his film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth" and had been widely tipped to win the Nobel peace prize.

He said that global warming was not a political issue but a worldwide crisis: “We face a true planetary emergency. ... It is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity,” he said. “It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.”

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN agency, said Gore phoned him soon after learning that they are to share the prize.

“We congratulated each other,” Pachauri told a news conference in Geneva, by telephone link from New Delhi.

He said Gore told him, “We must work together. We should meet as soon as possible.”

Canadian climate-change campaigner Sheila Watt-Cloutier, who was nominated jointly with Gore for the prize, said she was pleased that Gore and the IPCC had won the honour.

“For me, the issue has won, and in fact our own planet Earth is a winner in all of this,” the Inuit activist told CBC-TV from Iqaluit.

“I was a little bit surprised, to be honest, because we have jointly been nominated by two Norwegian parliamentarians,” she added.

“It was more of a surprise than a great disappointment, because I don’t try to put too much expectation on things that are external to my own life. But it certainly would have helped, and in that sense, I think, to continue to put the issue on the map in terms of the Arctic issues and the human dimensions to it — in that respect I have to admit I was a little bit disappointed.”

Gore’s win will likely add further fuel to a burgeoning movement in the United States for him to run for president in 2008, which he has so far said he does not plan to do.

Kenneth Sherrill, a political scientist at Hunter College in New York said Gore probably enjoys being a public person more than an elected official.

“He seems happier and liberated in the years since his loss in 2000. Perhaps winning the Nobel and being viewed as a prophet in his own time will be sufficient,” says Sherrill.

Two Gore advisers, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to share his thinking, said the award will not make it more likely that he will seek the presidency.

One of the advisers said that while Gore is unlikely to rule out a bid in the coming days, the prospects of the former vice-president entering the fray in 2008 are “extremely remote.”

In its citation, the committed lauded Gore’s “strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change. He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.”

Ole Danbolt Mjoes, chairman of the prize committee, said the award should not be seen as singling out the administration of President George W. Bush for criticism.

“A peace prize is never a criticism of anything. A peace prize is a positive message and support to all those champions of peace in the world.”

Bush abandoned the Kyoto Protocol because he said it would harm the U.S. economy. The treaty aimed to put the biggest burden on the richest nations that contributed the most carbon emissions.

Gore called the award meaningful because of his co-winner, calling the IPCC the “world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis.”

The committee cited the IPCC for its two decades of scientific reports that have “created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming. Thousands of scientists and officials from over 100 countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming.”

It went on to say that because of the panel’s efforts, global warming has been increasingly recognized. In the 1980s it “seemed to be merely an interesting hypothesis, the 1990s produced firmer evidence in its support. In the last few years, the connections have become even clearer and the consequences still more apparent.”

Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, said the prize would help to continue the globally growing awareness of climate change.

“Their contributions to the prevention of climate change have raised awareness all over the world. Their work has been an inspiration for politicians and citizens alike,” he said in a statement.

The Nobel Prizes each bestow a gold medal, a diploma and a $1.5 million cash prize on the winner.

Wasted energy from nuclear power could spark Hydrogen Renaissance

2007-11-04T11:27:00.000-08:00

Fast forward to the Present: November 4th 2007.

The key to establishing a hydrogen-powered rail corridor in Toronto is Nuclear energy, says Greg Naterer, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.

The big issue with hydrogen is that 96 per cent of what's produced in the world comes from fossil fuels, particularly natural gas, through a process called steam reforming. This results in greenhouse gases and other emissions.

The rest largely comes from a more expensive process called electrolysis, which is the use of electricity to separate water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen.

Electrolysis has the potential to produce emission-free hydrogen, but only if the source electricity is itself emission-free – that is, it must come from wind, solar or hydroelectric generation. Nuclear power, if you ignore the radioactive waste, also fits the bill, and this has turned the nuclear industry into a big hydrogen-economy supporter as a way of boosting its own self-proclaimed renaissance.

"A hydrogen economy doesn't make sense if we're using fossil fuels to generate the hydrogen, so we need a method that doesn't use fossil fuels," says Naterer. "And right now hydrogen from electrolysis is too costly because it has to compete against other fuels."

As research chair in advanced energy systems at UOIT, Naterer is leading a 24-member team that's exploring a method of producing lower-cost hydrogen from the waste heat of nuclear plants. Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago and universities across Ontario are also participating in the research effort.

Some have argued that surplus electricity from the overnight operation of nuclear reactors could be used to produce hydrogen, but UOIT and its research partners have their eye on a more economical approach. Instead of using nuclear power directly for electrolysis, they plan to use the waste heat from a nearby nuclear plant to extract hydrogen from steam.

What happens is the steam reacts with copper and chlorine compounds through a five-step process that splits water. It's a closed cycle, meaning the copper and chlorine is recycled and no waste is produced.

"All you have going in is water and all that comes out is hydrogen and oxygen," says Naterer, adding that the process is more than 33 per cent more efficient than electrolysis and makes hydrogen production cost-competitive with the fossil-fuel approach, once carbon taxes and the future cost of carbon capture and storage are factored in.

"We think the economics are attractive," he adds. "This thermo-chemical approach can produce hydrogen below $1.40 per kilogram, compared to steam reforming at above $2 per kilogram. And this doesn't include savings from the waste heat recovery, rising natural gas prices, higher demand and declining natural gas reserves."

The process doesn't rely exclusively on nuclear – waste heat from any industrial operation will do, assuming there's enough. But given the proximity of Ontario nuclear plants to the GO train corridor, and the massive amounts of waste heat that could be tapped, researchers see huge potential in McGuinty's proposal.

"There's enough waste heat from a nuclear reactor plant for several commercial hydrogen plants," explains Naterer.

He says an initial pilot plant would produce enough of the gas to fuel a couple of trains travelling between Oshawa and Toronto. Once the technique is proven, it could be scaled up 1,000 times – enough hydrogen for GO's entire train fleet and hundreds of thousands of vehicles.

Canada's forest industry to turn over a new leaf

2007-10-31T19:10:00.000-07:00

October 30th 2007.

Canada's forest industry says it will be carbon neutral by 2015.

In what is likely the first such pledge by any major industry sector in the world, the forest companies say their logging, paper and pulp operations, and the products they produce, will, in effect, no longer be a source of greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

And they'll do it, they say, without resorting to offsets – the controversial practice in which polluters continue to spew emissions, but contribute to projects elsewhere that claim to reduce them.

The effort must extend beyond forests and mills to wood and paper consumers, such as construction sites, homes and offices, Avrim Lazar, president of the Forest Products Association of Canada, said.

The aim is to protect both the environment and the industry's bottom line, said Lazar, who was to announce the pledge this morning at a conference in Ottawa.

Global demand for wood products is soaring, he said. "If people continue to do it the old way ... it won't be very good for the planet."

The devastating spread of pine beetles in British Columbia – partly because winters are no longer cold enough to kill the insects – is a wake-up call, he said.

"We got a lesson in the impact of climate change before most of the rest of Canada."

As well, global buyers increasingly demand products from "sustainable" operations. That can be an edge for Canadian firms, which face fierce competition from China, Brazil and other places where trees grow faster, costs are lower, and environment rules can be lax.

The Canadian industry has reduced its greenhouse emissions 44 per cent since 1990, when its output increased by 20 per cent.

That puts it far ahead of Canada's Kyoto Protocol target – a 6 per cent cut.

Most of the industry's reductions have been at pulp and paper mills, which have become more efficient and, in many cases, converted from oil and gas to renewable fuels. But much of the effort will involve keeping wood and paper out of landfills where, as it decomposes, it releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

About half the paper used in Canada is recycled, Lazar said. To improve that figure, the industry will use publicity to target consumers in offices and apartment buildings, where recycling rates are low.

Another focus will be recycling wood waste at construction sites. The aim is to have it recycled into plywood, particleboard or paper; or sent to high-tech plants that burn wood for heat and electricity.

"We hope other industries will rise to the challenge" of doing the same, or better, said Lorne Johnson of World Wildlife Fund Canada, which is working with the association. Other green groups are on an advisory panel.

Johnson added the odds are good the industry will meet the target. "They're already doing a good job."

Shifting into neutral

How the Canadian forestry industry plans to meet its 2015 target:

Become energy self-sufficient – switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Adopt energy-efficient technologies.

Increase diversion of used forest products from landfills.

Cap more landfills to prevent methane leaks.

Increase cogeneration – using waste heat to generate electricity.

Increase potential of forests and wood products to store carbon.

Maximize recycling of paper and wood products.

Scientists 'stunned' by Arctic ice behaviour

2007-10-18T15:46:00.000-07:00

The giant Ayles Ice Island south of the North Pole has broken in two, one of several "remarkable" occurrences in a year that has seen a record-shattering retreat of the Arctic ice.

"We have people here in the ice service with over 40 years experience and they're all stunned," says Doug Bancroft, director of the Canadian Ice Service, of the extraordinary behaviour of Arctic ice this summer.

"They've never seen anything like this."

The break-up of the ice island last month was just one of several highlights of a summer season that also saw the Northwest Passage open up for the second year in a row.

There has been the occasional summer in the past where the passage was almost ice-free in late summer, making it possible to navigate the fabled passage in a small vessel, says Bancroft.

But to see it happen two years in a row is unprecedented in four decades of record-keeping, he says.

Just two per cent of the 2,300-kilometre-long passage had sea ice at the peak of the ice retreat in mid-September this year, compared to the normal 14 per cent, Bancroft says.

"Normally you'd encounter ice for 400 kilometres of that, this year there was only 20 kilometres," he said.

The Ayles Ice Island, a Manhattan-sized chunk of ice that cracked off an ancient ice shelf at the north end of Ellesmere Island in 2005, also had an incredible summer. After spending more than a year struck in the pack ice at the north end of Ellesmere, the giant slab started moving and sailed into a channel that is normally blocked by ice year-round. The island, which hit a top speed of 10 nautical miles a day, cracked in half in early September and the two pieces are now on opposite sides of a small island in the Arctic archipelago. They are now about 360 nautical miles from where they originated, says Bancroft.

The ice service uses satellites and a beacon to follow the islands, which have now headed into a "graveyard" of multi-year ice far from shipping lanes and oil, gas and mining operations. Bancroft is, however, reluctant to say they won't break loose and become a potential menace in future.

"2007 was such an usual summer in so many respects that people aren't making forecasts about the fate and evolution of very large chunks of ice such as this," says Bancroft, noting how the Arctic ice is changing - and melting - much faster than climate models predicted.

"If you look at what happened in the last three years, it closely resembles the absolutely worst-case scenario, but about 20, 25 years ahead of schedule," he says, referring to models created by international teams of scientists to predict the impact of global warming on the north. They had forecast the Arctic could be free of summer ice as early as 2050.

On Monday the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center issued a seasonal wrap-up that said the Arctic sea ice hit the lowest level in 2007 since satellite measurements began in 1979. The average sea ice extent for the month of September was 4.28 million square kilometres, the lowest September on record, shattering the previous record for the month, set in 2005, by 23 per cent. At the end of the melt season, September 2007 sea ice was 39 per cent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000.

"The sea ice cover is in a downward spiral and may have passed the point of no return," Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the U.S. centre said in the statement that warned the Arctic could be ice-free in summer by 2030.

Bancroft agrees that the ice "may" have passed the point of no return, stressing that no one really knows for sure.

But he says there is no question the ice has supported the Arctic ecosystem for millennia is "rapidly" changing.

"There is a sense of urgency here," says Bancroft, noting that research teams from around the world are focused on the Arctic as part of the International Polar Year and working to get a better read on the ice and its ecosystem.

Experts fear greenhouse gas cuts may be too little, too late

2007-10-18T15:42:00.000-07:00

Greenhouse gas reduction targets, set by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other world leaders are not nearly tough enough to prevent a planetary meltdown, a leading Canadian climate research team reports.

It says global emissions need to be slashed by 90 per by 2050 to avoid a two-degree Celsius rise in the global temperature - a threshold that scientists fear could trigger melting of the Greenland ice sheet and a seven-metre rise in sea level.

Even with such a huge cut in emissions, future generations will still have to extract carbon monoxide out of the air because the gas persists in the atmosphere for so long, the team reports in the Geophysical Research Letters this week.

"Our results suggest that if a 2.0-degree C warming is to be avoided, direct CO2 capture from the air, together with subsequent sequestration would eventually have to be introduced in addition to sustained 90 per cent global carbon emissions reductions by 2050," the University of Victoria team concludes.

The group's experiments indicate many emission reduction targets - which vary widely depending on the government proposing them - are "inconsistent" with the stated aims of the politicians, says lead author Andrew Weaver.

"They're saying: 'We don't want to have two-degree warming, so let's aim for a 40 to 50 per cent cut in emissions'," says Weaver. "What's we're saying is: 'If you want to avoid two-degree warming, then you need to get to 90 per cent cuts by 2050.' "

California and Germany aim to slash their emissions by 80 per cent from 1990 levels by 2050; leaders of several G8 countries have proposed cutting global emissions to 50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050; and the Harper government wants to cut Canada's current emissions by 60 to 70 per cent by 2050.

"In Canada, we have a history of just making numbers up," says Weaver, who sees little scientific rationale for the targets set by either the former Liberal government or the current Conservative one.

"Maybe they have a Ouija board or something, and they all sit around in a seance," Weaver said in an interview. "There is no rhyme or reason to it. "

The current target set by the Conservatives is "nowhere near enough," says Weaver, stressing the need for the Canada and other countries to wean themselves off fossil fuels to curb carbon emissions from cars, factories and power plants that continue to soar globally.

While two-degree warming globally does not sound like much, many experts believe it will be enough to trigger mass species extinctions and accelerated melting of polar ice sheets. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN climate panel, said recently that some scientists are now questioning if the two-degree benchmark is safe enough.

"People are actually questioning if the two-degrees centigrade benchmark that has been set is safe enough," Pachauri, head of the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told a Reuters environment summit in London.

There are also indications the climate is changing faster than expected. The remarkable loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer, which scientists and government officials have described as "stunning," has prompted leading ice researchers to say the Arctic may have already passed the tipping point and the summer ice could be gone by 2030.

Weaver's team is one of the few in the world that has computer models with the power and sophistication to assess the long-term impact of different emission reductions.

In a series of nine experiments, Weaver's team found less than 60 per cent global emissions reduction by 2050 breaks the two-degree threshold warming this century. And even when total global emissions are stabilized at 90 per cent below present levels by 2050, the two-degree threshold is broken in centuries ahead because of the way carbon lingers in the atmosphere. While two degrees could trigger melting of the massive Greenland ice sheet, scientists say it would actually take centuries to melt all the ice and raise sea levels seven metres.

In a related study, which was presented an a conference earlier this year and is published this week, Weaver and his colleagues found burning all known reserves of fossil fuels, from Alberta's oil sands to China's vast stores of coal, would have grave long-term consequences.

It says that the carbon released, if it continued to waft into the atmosphere as it does today, would drive up global temperatures between six and eight degrees and persist in the atmosphere for more than 1,800 years.

Climate models are not perfect and are less reliable the farther into the future they extend, but scientists say they are the only available means of exploring different scenarios.

Pollution in Canada getting worse, statistics show

2007-10-18T15:41:00.000-07:00

OTTAWA - Canada's air and water quality is getting worse, Statistics Canada reported Monday.

Reviewing key indicators from 1990 to 2005, the statistical agency found a 12 per cent increase in ground-level ozone, a major component of smog, over the 15-year period. The increases were particularly noteworthy in southern Ontario and southern Quebec.

Smog is created from ozone and fine particulate matter that come from transportation, electricity generation, wood burning and the use of some chemical products.

The Statistics Canada report also found that water quality was "poor" or "marginal" in 23 per cent of sites tested.

Overall, it concluded that Canada was falling short of accepted quality standards required for protecting fish, plants and other aquatic life. The main source of pollution appeared to be phosphorus from sewage, agriculture runoff and industrial waste, according to the report.

Meantime, the study confirmed other recent studies about Canada's greenhouse gas emissions that revealed that levels of heat-trapping gases were stable between 2004 and 2005, but more than 30 per cent above Canada's legally binding targets under the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

Greenhouse gas emissions hit point of no return

2007-10-09T15:17:00.000-07:00

SYDNEY (Reuters) - The global economic boom has accelerated greenhouse gas emissions to a dangerous threshold not expected for a decade and could potentially cause irreversible climate change, said one of Australia's leading scientists.

Tim Flannery, a world recognized climate change scientist and Australian of the Year in 2007, said a U.N. international climate change report due in November will show that greenhouse gases have already reached a dangerous level.

Flannery said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will show that greenhouse gas in the atmosphere in mid-2005 had reached about 455 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent -- a level not expected for another 10 years.

"We thought we'd be at that threshold within about a decade," Flannery told Australian television late on Monday.

"We thought we had that much time. But the new data indicates that in about mid-2005 we crossed that threshold," he said.

"What the report establishes is that the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is already above the threshold that could potentially cause dangerous climate change."

Flannery, from Macquarie University and author of the climate change book "The Weather Makers," said he had seen the raw data which will be in the IPCC Synthesis Report.

He said the measurement of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere included not just carbon dioxide, but also nitrous oxide, methane and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). All these gases were measured and then equated into potentially one gas to reach a general level.

"They're all having an impact. Probably 75 percent is carbon dioxide but the rest is that mixed bag of other gases," he said.

COLLISION COURSE

Flannery said global economic expansion, particularly in China and India, was a major factor behind the unexpected acceleration in greenhouse gas levels.

"We're still basing that economic activity on fossil fuels. You know, the metabolism of that economy is now on a collision course, clearly, with the metabolism of our planet," he said.

The report adds an urgency to international climate change talks on the Indonesian island of Bali in December, as reducing greenhouse gas emissions may no longer be enough to prevent dangerous climate change, he said.

U.N. environment ministers meet in December in Bali to start talks on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol on curbing climate change that expires in 2012.

"We can reduce emissions as strongly as we like -- unless we can draw some of the standing stock of pollutant out of the air and into the tropical forests, we'll still face unacceptable levels of risk in 40 years time," he said.

Flannery suggested the developed world could buy "climate security" by paying villages in countries like Papua New Guinea not to log forests and to regrow forests.

"That 200 gigatonnes of carbon pollutant, the standing stock that's in the atmosphere, is there courtesy of the industrial revolution, and we're the beneficiaries of that and most of the world missed out," he said.

"So I see that as a historic debt that we owe the world. And I can't imagine a better way of paying it back than trying to help the poorest people on the planet."

Homeowners riding the green wave

2007-10-09T15:14:00.000-07:00

For Andrea Kantelberg, "green" isn't just another one of those warm, fuzzy buy words exploited by slick marketers eager to cash in on the latest craze. The same might be said for Mitch Abrahams, Martin Blake and others like them in Greater Toronto's development industry – people for whom green is a way of work and a way of life.

And increasingly, they have allies among homebuyers who – despite being skeptical about products being labelled green – are making it known they want residences that are safe, cheap to operate and enviro-friendly.

So while the trees may be changing colour, the great push of 2007 toward greening our homes and lifestyles will only gain momentum through fall and winter, Kantelberg, Abrahams, Blake and other industry leaders say.

"(Green priorities) will absolutely soon be the norm because we can't carry on as a world without making some serious changes," says Kantelberg, who has won awards for her numerous eco-friendly projects, including a Smart Environments award from the International Interior Design Association. "That's not preachy, that's reality."

Kantelberg, who lived in Holland between the ages of 8 and 14, says she grew up recycling and eating healthy, organic foods. "So designing green interiors was just a natural segue."

Owner of Kantelberg Design, a five-person boutique shop, she has worked on projects for Tridel, including the 1,900-square-foot Eco-Suite in Tridel's Element project.

That showcase unit features eco-friendly wallpaper and water-based, low VOC (volatile organic compound) paint. Her projects use recycled steel and drywall and local materials such as quartz or porcelain countertops instead of granite.

But building on the green trend and doing right by the environment all requires attention to economics.

Blake, vice-president of project implementation for Daniels Corp., fully agrees that the greening of the condo and new home construction industry is a good thing. "But the challenge is to make sure it is affordable as well," he says.

One way Daniels has been able to make costs work for clients is by building its subdivisions before the homes are sold, he says. Most GTA builders do it the other way round.

The strategy allows the builder to purchase materials in bulk and pass on savings to buyers, he says, adding that Daniels also scraps many costly cosmetic upgrades in favour of energy-saving materials and appliances.

The extra initial costs of quality windows or beefed-up insulation can easily be recouped within a few years of lower operating costs, Blake says. "But it's not just the energy and cost savings that count, it's also a tangible benefit to the environment."

And as these messages gradually permeate the public consciousness, the green trend only solidifies itself.

Alas, there's still a long way to go. A recent Ipsos Reid survey of Canadian homeowners indicates many are still not convinced that going green will save them money, and almost two-thirds think that when a company calls a product green it is usually just a marketing ploy.

"There is a lot of skepticism about green products out there and men are even more skeptical than women," says home improvement expert Jon Eakes, a spokesperson for insulation manufacturer Icynene, which commissioned the poll.

So how can homebuyers cut through all the noise to ensure a product billed as environmentally friendly is just that and not simply more greenwash?

Abrahams, president of the Benvenuto Group, a residential condo developer, admits it isn't always easy. "Sometimes there is more marketing than substance," he says.

Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence, says consumers must look carefully at products and homes being peddled as eco-friendly, saying many don't live up to their billing.

"Some of their green stuff reminds me of the developers who name their subdivisions after the very natural features they have just obliterated – you know, Wildflower Lane," Smith says. "We're living in an era where every manufacturer claims to be green and buyers are vulnerable to unsubstantiated builders' claims."

It doesn't help that the construction industry itself is still grappling to define what it really means to build green, he adds. "We're at the very beginnings of this debate," he says. "I think buyers have to proceed with caution and carefully examine these claims."

That means homebuyers should look for recognized eco-brands such as LEED, Energy-Star and Green Globe when it comes to assessing whether a home – or any other product – can live up to an eco-friendly billing, Smith says.

Buyers should also look for homes with built-in features such as smart thermostats, solar water heaters, extra insulation and energy-efficient windows.

Most of the ratings systems such as LEED and Energy-Star focus on energy efficiency, but Smith predicts that over the next few years, a system to create eco-standards for building materials will also evolve.

This will rate materials according to their levels of toxicity or whether they are organically produced. Currently, there is a rating system for lumber called FSC – the Forest Stewardship Council – the "gold standard" for enviro-wood, Smith says.

Then there are the consumers who say they would purchase environmentally safe products, but only if there is no price difference and they can still get the upscale products they want.

"It's great to say in a focus group that you care about the environment," Blake says. "But are you willing to give up your granite countertops (which have often been transported from Europe)?"

Blake agrees with Kantelberg about the importance of buying and building local. "No more imported Kentucky limestone; why don't we just go with what the local environment has," he says. "There has to be a recognition of the cost and the impact," he adds.

So is using granite for your countertops eco-friendly? "Forget about it," Kantelberg says. "People may perceive it as a natural product, but it is not a renewable product."

The granite is often mined in Italy, and the weight and the long-distance shipping mean huge costs for the environment in carbon emissions, she says.

"For all those reasons, it is a poor choice," Kantelberg says. "There are so many products, such as recycled bottles, that are good alternatives."

Smith agrees, calling stone countertops "an environmental disaster. The energy alone used to power the water-cooled saws needed to cut marble is gigantic," Smith says.

Abrahams of Benvenuto Group says buildings also have to be constructed with an eye to how they will "perform" down the road.

What kind of eco-friendly homes will hit the market in 15 years? And how will communities build to save energy?

Smith, Abrahams and Blake all foresee more localized solar and wind power for our homes and more use of geothermal systems for heating and cooling.

And most new homes will be net-zero homes, meaning they consume less power than they generate through renewable sources.

Abrahams also says that making more efficient use of land and cutting the need for carbon-based transportation is crucial, using Benvenuto Group as an example for taking an "eyesore" sunken parking lot near Eglinton Ave. E. and Yonge St. and turning it into energy-efficient condos.

"I think intensifying is key to the whole green movement," he says.

Harper's budget cuts exasperate, infuriate environmental scientists

2007-10-08T10:05:00.000-07:00

EDMONTON -- Environment Canada scientists are virtually at war with the federal department over funding shortfalls for conservation and climate change initiatives.

The situation has become so intense that Environment Canada has put out a contract worth up to $100,000 to get an outside agency to help ease tensions and get employees used to the idea of coming changes.

Battle lines began to be drawn this summer when the Conservative government froze the budget of the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS), the 60-year-old institution that is responsible for migratory birds, national bird and wildlife sanctuaries, endangered species and the famous Hinterland's Who's Who television commercials and web sites.

Budgets were also slashed for the Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Network, the Migratory Bird Program and the National Wildlife Areas before Environment Minister John Baird rescinded those cuts last week.

Baird declined to be interviewed about the troubles at Environment Canada.

But in a statement, Garry Keller, his director of communications, blamed the former Liberal government for the freeze and the cuts. Keller said a $17.1-million budget cut agreed to by Liberal Leader Stephane Dion, when Dion was environment minister, is responsible.

He said the Tory government has increased Environment Canada's main budget by $38 million. Keller said there will be no layoffs, which was never an issue, but did not say if a budget freeze were still part of the plan.

He added that Baird has instructed his department to be "financially flexible" so that critical programs are maintained.

More than a dozen scientists and managers interviewed by The Edmonton Journal over the past week aren't optimistic anything is going to get better.

The scientists said CWS has been so cash-starved for so long that there are virtually no recovery programs in place for the majority of plant and wildlife species that are considered to be at risk.

The problems, they said, have been made known to the government through various channels and audits. Last year, for example, an audit done for the government showed that the former Liberal government diverted funds away from the endangered species program.

The audit by Stratos, a management consulting firm, noted that Environment Canada lagged far behind Parks Canada and Fisheries and Oceans in taking action on the endangered species for which they are responsible.

Seven weeks ago, the Environment Law Centre of Alberta sent Baird a letter saying that, to date, critical habitat for the recovery of species at risk has been identified for only three of the 235 plants and animals that should have recovery plans in place.

The freeze, however, isn't the only thing that has the scientists at CWS hopping mad. The budget issues have also escalated into what one senior research scientist described as a "bizarre round of spending initiatives" that is being used to justify the so-called re-organization of CWS and changing its name to the Conservation and Biodiversity Protection Directorate.

Earlier this year, Ipsos-Reid was hired to give the government insight into what the scientists said was a senseless re-organization of the service under a new name.

Regional Environment Canada managers interviewed by Ipsos-Reid saw no need for it, scientists and other employees saw it as an excuse for cutting jobs and conservation programs and creating another layer in what they called an already top-loaded bureaucracy.

The report, however, has apparently not changed the minds of the senior officials within the department who have put out another contract, one that calls for "organizational intervention" for the CWS's entire work force.

The focus this time is on "team building, change management, employee engagement, and values and ethics policies and legislation."

The value of the contract is estimated to be between $50,000 and $100,000.

Keller defended the contract, saying it was for "ethics training, something that Canadians said was very important after years of Liberal mismanagement." Scientists and a number of managers see it as a waste of money that could be used for more meaningful conservation programs.

CWS is not the only unhappy organization within Environment Canada.

At the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC), many of the roughly 300 researchers, scientists and forecasters also say they are angry, depressed and frustrated by budget constraints that stop them from providing the services Canadians are paying for. MSC operates on an annual budget of about $200 million, which most scientists think is not nearly enough to address the climate change and air quality challenges that Canada faces.

MSC has never recovered from the years 1994 through to 1998, when government cutbacks shrank funding by 30 per cent. A little over two years ago, many of MSC's top scientists joined university colleagues in making a detailed public statement warning the government that the research essential to climate change and smog-reducing initiatives was near a state of collapse.

Arctic torn to pieces as heat triggers landslides

2007-10-07T16:16:00.000-07:00

Queen's University researchers watched in awe and dismay this summer as landslides blamed on climate change mangled wide swaths of a remote Arctic valley in mere hours.

"When a week was up the landscape had been torn to pieces in dozens of places. We were surprised by both the speed and the scale of the changes," said geography professor Scott Lamoureux.

He warned that such large-scale environmental upheaval could throw fragile Arctic ecosystems off-kilter by interfering with the flow of vital organic material and nutrients carried by water during the brief summer months.

"We expected this would happen in the future to some extent but to see it taking place already is a bit of a shock," Lamoureux said.

Lamoureux leads a Queen's University research team probing the impact of climate change on water quality in a 20-square-kilometre region at the southern end of Melville Island in the western Arctic.

The study began in 2003 and this spring expanded to include scientists from the University of Toronto.

The findings sound a warning for other areas of the Arctic, some warmer than the Melville Island locale.

Federal government surveys have concluded permafrost lies beneath about half the land mass of Canada, extending as much as 700 metres deep in the Arctic archipelago.

Lamoureux said the landslides were triggered in the last week of July after unprecedented high summer temperatures caused the permafrost on Melville to melt down as far as a metre, 20 times deeper than normal.

This excess water acted like a layer of ball bearings, letting the soil on top slide down the valley slopes.

"It was like a rug coming down and then piling up in the river channel in folds.

"Along one 200-metre stretch, it shifted the entire river bed to the other side," Lamoureux said.

Records going back to the 1950s show daytime highs averaging about 5C in July, but this past summer, temperatures regularly reached 15C and sometimes 20C, Lamoureux said.

"There were dozens of these slow-motion landslides. You couldn't see them move over a period of minutes, but they covered 50 or 60 metres in a day.

"One flowed down a good two kilometres from a ridge to the valley floor," he said.

The ecological upheaval most probably continued after the Queen's researchers left on Aug. 1, Lamoureux said, but he has been unsuccessful in obtaining satellite images to check on the final extent of the damage.

The geography professor said having before and after measurements of water flow and quality from the site is "scientific serendipity."

"From an experimental standpoint, we couldn't ask for a better situation," he said.

Also excited by the development is U of T professor Myrna Simpson, a specialist in environmental chemistry who joined the Melville Island project this year when the federal government provided nearly $700,000 as part of International Polar Year funding.

In her lab on the university's Scarborough campus, Simpson analyzes how carbon-based organic material ages differently in the Arctic compared to temperate zones.

"We're learning a lot of really new things," she said.

Mulroney urges more action on climate change

2007-10-01T19:58:00.001-07:00

Former prime minister Brian Mulroney said Sunday night the world's countries should mark the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Protocol with a new agreement that will slash greenhouse gases.

Mulroney was in Montreal to deliver the keynote speech of this week's United Nations conference marking marking the 20th anniversary of the protocol, in which 191 countries agreed to ban ozone-depleting substances.

"It doesn't really matter whether the process is called Kyoto or something else, as long as we are addressing the urgency of global warming," Mulroney said.

The Montreal Protocol, signed 20 years ago Sunday, aims to cut down on emissions of chemicals that deplete the ozone layer, which shields Earth from ultraviolet solar radiation that can cause skin cancer and other ailments.

To mark the anniversary, the countries that signed it will be taking part in a conference that starts today and runs until Friday. It's hoped that the conference will result in a commitment to further reduce ozone-depleting substances.

Mulroney pointed out the Montreal Protocol has been called the most successful international agreement by former United Nations secretary general Kofi Anan.

The treaty is considered a raging success because it mapped a way to cut production of ozone-depleting substances. So far, 191 countries have signed this pact, and have phased out more than 95 per cent of ozone-depleting substances. One of the gases banned as a result of the agreement was chlorofluorocarbons, which were present in aerosol sprays.

Mulroney said as a result of the protocol, a large hole in the ozone over Antarctica is now on the mend.

"It was the first concerted action on climate change," said Mulroney, who last year was named by leading environmentalists as Canada's greenest prime minister. "At the end of the last century, it foretold the great global issue of this century."

There is much optimism among the participants that this year's conference will result in an agreement to ban gases called hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), which are detrimental to the ozone and contribute to climate change. Those gases are present in refrigerators and air conditioners.

The United States is pushing for all signatories of the Montreal Protocol to ratify an agreement to phase out HCFCs over a period of 10 years.

It's believed such an agreement would have a greater impact on global warming than the Kyoto Protocol on climate change because the U.S. has not signed on to that pact. Developing countries such as China and India are also exempt from Kyoto's pact to cut on greenhouse gas emissions.

Canada's Emission Remain at Record High

2007-10-01T19:53:00.000-07:00

OTTAWA -- Canada's greenhouse gas emissions have stayed at a record high for another year, according to federal statistics showing that even a warm winter and more nuclear power can't stop our up-and-up emissions trend.

The newest national summary shows our greenhouse gas production in 2005 stayed at the peak first reached in 2004, slightly above 2003, and significantly higher than all previous years.

Our emissions are now 32.7 per cent above the target in Canada's Kyoto Protocol commitment - which takes binding effect in three months.

While we at least managed not to increase our emissions in 2005, Environment Canada says that's partly because we got lucky with a warm winter. We also reduced emissions in some areas by bringing nuclear plants back online in Ontario, which allowed the province's power plants to burn less coal.

Environment Canada adds: "Long term growth, nevertheless, remains large. Between 1990 and 2005 significant increases in oil and gas production, much of which have been provided to the United States, have resulted in a significant increase in the emissions associated with the production and transportation of fuel for export."

The Kyoto Protocol obliges Canada to keep greenhouse gas emissions six percentage points below 1990 levels, on average, from the beginning of 2008 through 2012.

Yet the latest figures illustrate the gap between the public's stated goals - telling pollsters we demand cuts in emissions - and the nation's real demand for cars, heated homes and manufactured products.

The upward emissions trend doesn't surprise Jim Bruce, a former senior official of Environment Canada now in private practice.

That's "because we haven't made any really big, determined efforts," he said. "We've taken a number of baby steps but not really big concerted effort to reduce emissions."

We can't cut fuel unless we re-engineer existing buildings to conserve more heat, and make smaller cars and trucks, he said.

"The Europeans are doing this, especially Britain and Norway and Germany." Some of these countries also have substantial wind power, and this week Britain announced it will dam the Severn River estuary to run rising and falling tidewaters through turbines that produce electricity.

"California is doing things. There are a number of developed countries and regions that have taken the bit in the teeth and are moving to reductions.

"What the Swedes did is a really a key thing. They rejigged their whole tax structure to reduce significantly income takes and other taxes and increase energy taxes."

Canadian figures comparing 2005 to previous years show that:

- People still aren't conserving electricity. Demand actually increased from 2003 to 2005, but greenhouse emissions fell when Ontario refurbished nuclear plants that had been idle, and shut down coal-burning plans. There was also some increase nationally in hydroelectric power, which doesn't produce carbon dioxide.

- Since 1990, Canadians have increased their emissions from transportation by 33 per cent. (The Kyoto deal measures everything since 1990.)

But within that category, emissions from light trucks and SUVs are up by 109 per cent, reflecting how sales of these popular brands have risen sharply despite our national commitment to use less fuel.

Most of the rest of the increase from transportation came from heavy diesel trucks.

- The growth of factory farms for pigs, chickens and beef cattle boosted emissions in the agriculture sector. As well, the conversion of forest and natural grasslands to cropland is a continuing source of gas emissions.

- Alberta is the biggest greenhouse gas producer (more than 230 million tonnes in 2005, or about 30 per cent of Canada's total.) Ontario comes second (200 million tonnes), followed by Quebec (about 90 million), Saskatchewan (about 70 million, much of it from fertilizer), British Columbia (about 65 million) and the rest all less than 25 million.

- Leaks from natural gas pipelines continue to be a major source of greenhouse gases. Leakage grew by 54 per cent between 1990 and 2005.

- Exploitation of tarsands is expected to increase greenhouse gases from energy production.

2005 (also 2004) 747 million tonnes

2000 - 721 million tonnes

1995 - 646 million tonnes

1990 - 596 million tonnes

Turning sun's rays into gold

2007-10-01T18:49:00.000-07:00

DAVID MILLS - He's determined to get countries such as the United States and China off their nasty habit of burning coal. He's got the financial backing of two of the world's highest-profile venture capitalists, and the attention of former U.S. president Bill Clinton.

If David Mills gets his way, America's sun-bathed states and the deserts of Asia and Africa will become hubs of clean-power generation for their respective continents.

It's an ambitious mission for a mild-mannered Canadian – a former CBC camera technician from south Etobicoke and physics graduate from McMaster University.

But Mills, who left Canada in the early 1970s and spent the next 30 years of his career in Australia, moved back to North America in March to turn his lifelong dream – generating gigawatts of affordable, emission-free electricity from the heat of the sun – into a commercial reality.

"This is the most exciting time in my career," Mills, who turns 61 in November, told the Star during a telephone interview from his new office in Silicon Valley. "Better late than never."

Mills is founder, chairman and chief scientific officer of Ausra Inc., a Palo Alto, Calif.-based developer of solar-thermal power plants that, in his view, are poised in certain geographies to challenge the supremacy of fossil-fuel electricity generation.

Solar thermal power systems capture heat from the sun and create steam for generating electricity. The approach has existed for decades and, while cheaper than using solar panels to produce electricity directly, widespread deployment has been held back by high costs compared to conventional electricity sources and a number of technical hurdles.

Mills, inspired in the late 1970s by a scientific study out of the University of Chicago, has spent 30 years trying to refine the technology to the point where it can be scaled up to the size of a major power plant and compete on price with coal-fired generation.

This meant inventing a novel alternative to expensive parabolic mirrors and designing a simple system that uses commodity materials and has a way to store heat and supply electricity 24 hours a day. It's been a long haul, but Ausra says it has overcome the technical and economic problems and is ready to make history.

"We're considering many projects in many states at the moment, and all of them are feasible," explains Mills, estimating that California and Texas alone have the potential to supply 96 per cent of all electricity in the United States. "The amount of area we require to generate all of the United States' electricity is 145 kilometres by 145 kilometres."

It sounds large, but put into perspective, it's less area than the amount of U.S. land that's mined for coal. "It's also very small compared to the area of desert that's available," he says.

On a worldwide basis, the potential is huge. Greenpeace and the European Solar Thermal Industry Association concluded in a 2005 report that "there are no technical, economic or resource barriers to supplying 5 per cent of the world's electricity needs from solar thermal power by 2040" – equivalent to about 600 nuclear reactors or 1,200 medium-sized coal plants.

The numbers are probably higher today, given the advancements made over the past two years.

At the moment it's big talk, but some major players in the U.S. electricity sector are taking serious notice. Florida Power & Light, a subsidiary of FPL Group Inc., plans to use Ausra's technology to construct a 300-megawatt solar thermal power plant – starting with a smaller 10-megawatt project and expanding from there.

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton announced FPL's commitment last Wednesday at the 2007 Clinton Global Initiative in New York City. Ausra has other projects in the works, including a 175-megawatt plant in California that could end up feeding power to utility Pacific Gas & Electric Co.

A job notice on Ausra's website says the company wants to scale up its solar thermal deployment to 2,000 megawatts over the next three years, a fraction of the time it would take to get a similarly sized nuclear plant built.

"The whole picture is changing very, very rapidly," says Mills, adding that his technology is fast-approaching the cost thresholds for coal and natural gas, which in the United States are a cent or two below 10 cents per kilowatt-hour – and that excludes the strong possibility of future carbon taxes or caps.

"You'll be seeing 10 cents per kilowatt-hour bandied around Ausra, but that will drop very rapidly over the next few years."

The company is confident it can eventually push costs below 7 cents per kilowatt-hour at a time when fossil-fuel generation is getting more expensive, politically risky, and is encountering resistance in Kyoto-friendly communities.

"In the last six months interest has started to explode, and this coincides exactly with the cancellation of coal plants in the United States," adds Mills.

The competition will be intense, and there are many regulatory battles to win. Utilities are also a notoriously conservative, risk-averse bunch, and the strong lobby of the coal and nuclear industry is a force that can't be ignored. There's also the question of whether the transmission exists, or can be affordably built, to carry electricity from remote desert-like locations to major power-consuming centres.

Still, a supportive political climate, public anxiety over climate change, and the expectation that carbon emissions will eventually face some kind of cap or tax all work in Ausra's favour.

It was at the University of New South Wales in Sydney that he conceived of the "compact linear fresnel reflector," or CLFR. It's a design for a solar thermal plant that uses nearly flat rotating mirrors that focus the sun's light on a fixed overhead pipe filled with water. The sun boils the water, producing steam that spins a turbine to generate power.

Mills formed a company called Solar Heat and Power Pty. Ltd. to commercialize the technology, and while he did manage to build a small demonstration facility in a parking lot in Sydney, the business never gained traction Down Under and last summer the transplanted Canadian – at this point more Aussie than Canuck – began losing steam.

"I was very serious about retiring," recalls Mills.

Then came that call, that opportunity, which usually signals a turning point in Hollywood movies. Venture capitalists Vinod Khosla and Ray Lane, both partners with venture capital titan Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (the firm that made early and successful bets on Google, Amazon.com and AOL), were alerted to what Mills was doing and wanted to learn more. They asked him to visit California for a meeting.

"In October we went over," says Mills. "We clicked really well."

Shortly after Khosla, through his own company Khosla Ventures, and Lane, representing Kleiner Perkins, agreed to invest $40 million (U.S.) for a 50-per-cent stake in Mills' company, which changed its name to Ausra. Both men also became directors on Ausra's board.

The money started to flow in February, Ausra relocated its headquarters to California in March, and since then Mills has expanded his workforce from six to 70.

"It's odd. You walk in each day and there's somebody new. But it's exciting, too. The quality of people is such that it's a great pleasure to solve problems."

Alan Mills is proud of what his brother has accomplished, not just as an entrepreneur, but also as an individual who has developed a practical approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and slowing down climate change. "He spent his career bringing the idea to fruition and now the technology is ready at a time when it is needed more obviously than ever," he says.

David's other younger brother, Brian, keeps an eye out for news on Ausra from the sidelines in Etobicoke. The whole Mills family is eagerly watching the Ausra story unfold, knowing full well that how America generates power over the coming decades will have a direct impact on the air quality and lives of Canadians.

"This could be a great Canadian success story," says Brian Mills. "A Canadian-born entrepreneur, scientist and innovator with a major solution for climate change."

He describes his ex-pat sibling as an "interesting" character. "Even," he adds, "if he is my older brother."

CEOs call for climate action

2007-10-01T18:46:00.000-07:00

OTTAWA–Canada's top business leaders have endorsed a plan to combat global climate change that calls for government intervention and says businesses, as well as the public, will have to pay a stiff price.

In a report released today, a task force of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, which represents a wide cross-section of business interests, including oil producers, called for a national strategy that produces real reductions in greenhouse gases.

The document will likely face criticism from environmentalists for not going far enough because it does not embrace a carbon tax – although it does not reject one – and calls for intensity-based targets rather than absolute reductions.

The proposals most resemble the Conservative government's green plan, which was roundly criticized by opposition parties and environmental groups.

Council president Tom d'Aquino, a task force co-chair, said such criticism would miss the point that business leaders from every sector of the economy have accepted the responsibility of making greenhouse-gas reductions.

And he noted that while the report calls for the controversial intensity targets – which would allow industries to increase emissions if they produce more products – the chief executives also say that the intensity targets must result in absolute, economy-wide reductions.

"There isn't another country in the world that has brought together such a coalition of CEOs and business interests to pursue an environmental agenda," d'Aquino said.

"What we're saying is, if we harness the opportunities that the climate change offers us, ultimately Canada will emerge not only an energy superpower but also an environmental superpower."

The task force, formed in March, includes CEOs from Alcan, Suncor, Imperial Oil, Royal Bank, Manulife Financial and Power Corp.

The most encompassing recommendation is that the federal government, provinces, industry and consumer groups join forces on an agreed-upon national action plan on climate change.

The report is most critical about the failure of provinces and Ottawa to agree on a common strategy.

It also calls on governments to establish "price signals" – which could include a carbon tax – but leans more to an emissions trading system to influence behaviour. It urges governments to establish long-term technology funds to drive innovation.