Environmental Defence Canada

Our blog has moved

2010-10-20T07:42:00.000-07:00

Our blog has a new home, it can be viewed on our new site at: http://environmentaldefence.ca/blog

We will no longer be posting blog entires here, all of our past and future blog entries will be found at: http://environmentaldefence.ca/blog

Foxes, Chickens and Fish

2010-09-30T08:08:00.000-07:00

Good Move, Minister Prentice!

Today, federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice did the right thing by appointing an independent science panel to review industrial pollution in the Athabasca River and surrounding waterways. This comes on the heels of new scientific research showing that pollution from the tar sands is contaminating water far downstream from the development.

So far, the Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program (RAMP) has been responsible for monitoring water pollution in the tar sands region. This industry-dominated body has continually reported that there are no problems. As internationally renowned biologist Dr. David Schindler has pointed out, “there's no way industry can be belching out hundreds of kilograms of toxins every year and this not be detectable in the environment unless the monitoring program is totally incompetent".

This fox-guarding-the-henhouse situation has led to growing concern from downstream communities about the safety of the water they’re drinking and the fish they’re eating. When several seriously deformed fish were recently displayed, Minister Prentice said he was “disgusted”.

We’re glad to see that Minister Prentice is now taking a step to get to the bottom of the pollution problem in the Athabasca River. By appointing a panel of independent scientists to provide recommendations on monitoring and best practices, he’s recognized that the federal government has a responsibility to protect people and the environment from tar sands pollution.

Chair

2010-09-30T06:29:00.001-07:00

Building a chair in nature, constructed from found elements, is a simple idea about accommodating human-kind in the natural world. Just as a primitive hut provides shelter, so too a chair provides a place to rest the body in a landscape that may not necessarily be relied upon to do so.

As a boy I spent my summers canoe-tripping in Northern Ontario. On many occasions we would stop our journey for a little while to rest and play. During such times I often made chairs. Our part of Ontario is located within the pre-Cambrian shield and is formed largely of granite. The chairs where made by stacking loose shards of rock to construct a seat, back and more often than not arms, as they were useful in stabilizing the back. Because the basic building blocks were both large and crude, the chairs tended to have throne-like qualities. Undoubtedly they were situated prominently, with a long view. The purpose of the chairs, to my young imagination, was to provide a place for the ‘hermit’ – the one who had escaped civilization and lived all around us, yet was never seen.

With this in mind, I determined to make a chair in the high Arctic as part of our Cape Farewell journey. Inspired by the hauntingly beautiful constructions made of snow by Peter Clegg and Anthony Gormley during the 2005 Cape Farewell Project, I went shopping in Toronto, prior to my departure, for the tools that I thought I would need; shovel, snow saw and ice saw.

It was a bit of a surprise therefore to arrive at Spitsbergen and discover that the beautiful snow that Peter and Anthony had worked with was available to them because their trip took place in February, whereas we were conducting our expedition at the end of the polar summer, throughout the last three weeks of September. Nature presented us with only a dusting of snow that rarely covered the enormous landscape of solid rock, loose rock, pebbles, and extremely hard glacial ice. So much for the concept of building a throne of carefully cut and assembled slabs of firm polar snow. How naïve I was.

However, after some time it became apparent that I might be able to carve a chair out of icebergs left on the beaches during low tide, adjacent to the glaciers. So, one morning, equipped with ice saw and a borrowed a hatchet from the ship I walked along the beach searching for suitable specimens, Simon was of course close by, rifle in hand, ever vigilant for polar bear.

Unlike the constructions of my childhood, which were made by adding bits of rock to build up a form resembling a chair, ice presented newer and different challenges. The three chairs constructed required cutting into the ice as found in order to create a place to sit. The resulting forms were not therefore instantly recognizable as chairs in the simple sense of the word, but were rather more sculptural. One of the chairs was like a little speed boat while another became a winged chariot, complete with seat, wings, tail and head.

The hat you see in the photos has another meaning. Also when I was a boy, I had a good friend whose father died accidentally when he fell through the ice while Nordic skiing. He was alone and close to shore, where the ice is thinnest, and with skis firmly fixed was unable to get out. With what may have been his final gesture, he threw his hat onto the dock to let his family know where he was.

The hat has become for me a symbol of loss and thin ice. It communicates both the loving selflessness of my old friend’s father’s gesture and the danger to us all of thinning ice; a sign of both love and death.

By late afternoon high tide had rolled in and the chairs carried out to sea, already beginning to melt beyond recognition. The hat is in my luggage awaiting another day.

Ancient Ground

2010-09-29T06:37:00.000-07:00

III

I walk on ancient ground
soft above permafrost
absorbing
what drifts from the south

to the archipelago
cadmium and mercury
bio-diversity

footprints
polar bear, arctic fox, Svalbard reindeer
carbon
remain for years

there are beds of pebbles
on bedrock
- a table top

smoothed by ice
finished
and free under foot

like a filter
exhorbitant
depository of industrial detritus

II

2010-09-27T05:17:00.001-07:00

I witness ice absorbed by the sea
feeding her body
of water

warming
current events
on a bed

she curtsies
with the wind
- swoons

by the moon
she rises and falls
over again

she resists -
giving only
on her own terms

no idle tide

Hoefhalveys I

2010-09-21T07:56:00.000-07:00

I

Who would have thought that such colour
would grace the cliffs at Hoelfhalveys

not white

but of steel left year ‘round in the yard
leaves left to rust
to mulch in March

I could never have imagined rivules of scree
like the veins of a leaf in autumn
of no particular tree

zinc and iron ochre and copper
tracing contours
of isolation

- - -

Follow the Cape Farewell voyage on the 2010 Expedition blog.

First Watch

2010-09-21T07:24:00.000-07:00

David Buckland and I awoke at 3:45 this morning to join first mate, Renske Ritzema, on the morning watch. We hoisted anchor at Sorgfiorden on the island of Friedland to head south through Hinlopenstretet. Our hope was to get through the polar ice that had been drifting northward through the straight, and dogging us for the past several days. The very same ice that nearly trapped us yesterday. To the disappointment of the polar bears, we got away. Full news on other reports.

There was the dimmest light in the sky, as indeed there is all through the night at this time of year. Looking across the horizon, Renske pointed out, one can see where the ice is located, not from seeing the ice itself but by detecting the white reflective band it makes on the skyline.

Within a half an hour I was at the controls of the ship with the entire Cape Farewell team, unawares, slumbering below. It was blissfull; silent and calm. There’s a lot of life on board this boat and it was really wonderful to be in the vastness of the arctic morn with the gang asleep.

She is sweet to control, this vessel. One needs to feel the turnings and compensations of the wheel as she moves about the course, mildly rolling in the morning swell. Finding the way through the broken ice pack adds to the joy, especially when successful.

And successful we were, to a point. The ice pack arrived, first on the horizon, then up close. Soon we were within. Renske took over the controls. Simon, our brilliant and friendly scientist, explains that loose polar ice is moved by a combination of wind and rotation of the earth, the latter causing the pack to drift to the east. The ship’s radar and Renske’s skill guide us through to open water.

But not for long as events turn. Two hours south we encounter the second wave of ice blocking our progress. I learn the patience of polar sailing, as we head back north to the fjord from which we came. Seems we will spend another night at Sorgfiorden with the hope that the disappearing polar ice pack will float past us, thereby allowing our passage tomorrow to future adventures.

- - -

Follow the Cape Farewell voyage on the 2010 Expedition blog.

Something fishy about Alberta's jobs claims

2010-09-20T18:02:00.000-07:00

This week, three Alberta Ministers are in Ontario propping up the potential for Ontarians to get jobs helping out the tar sands. Today Alberta Energy Minister Ron Liepert encouraged workers in Ontario's manufacturing sector to stand up for the tar sands against the environmental campaigns.

But wait a minute...is tar sands development a saviour for Ontario's manufacturing sector?

Because of the tar sands, Ontario is being negatively affected by “Dutch Disease” – a term that describes a hollowing out of the manufacturing sector due to currency inflation driven by resource (oil) exports. A study out of the University of Ottawa that examined the impact of resource exports (oil) on the dollar and manufacturing jobs found that 42 per cent of manufacturing job loss in Canada due to rising currency has been a result of Dutch Disease stemming from rising oil exports.

Ontario is being hit harder by the symptoms of Dutch Disease than the rest of the Canadian economy, losing 183,000 jobs between January 2003 and December 2007.

Yet Ontario is creating new jobs in clean energy - an estimated 20,000 since the Green Energy Act was passed - showing that we can create good jobs by producing our energy here rather than continuing to send billions of dollars elsewhere every year to buy oil.

What's more, leaked cabinet documents reported by the CBC last December show that the federal government is planning on letting tar sands greenhouse gas pollution explode, which would consume an ever growing share of Canada’s carbon budget. This must come at the expense of other sectors – like manufacturers in Ontario – if Canada is to meet its overall carbon targets. This will place a burden on other regions of Canada to do more than their fair share to reduce emissions. The federal government estimates that tar sands emissions will nearly triple by 2020 to 108 million tonnes.

And, this all comes on the heels of Fort Chipewyan fishermen raising concerns about the deformed fish they're pulling out of Lake Athabasca and rising scientific evidence that tar sands pollution is poisoning the water and fish.

The Alberta's government's economic claims are just about as credible as their claims that tar sands development is 'responsible'.

Gillian McEachern
Program Manager, Climate and Energy

Blogging is a Relative Thing

2010-09-16T12:36:00.001-07:00

We’ve been at sea for five days now and the trend has been to have an adventure at shore in the morning and return to the Noorderlicht for lunch by 1:30. The afternoons are spent sailing and ‘blogging.’
It’s a curious sight to see twenty people sitting at their laptop computers while pitching and rolling in the cabin of a 100-year-old schooner at 80N. To a fault, the writers and artists on Mac, the scientists, PC. I suspect there are more words thus generated in the afternoon than are photographs the entire rest of the day, and that’s saying something. To be fair, I should mention that there are also many serious writers on our journey, who I know to be up to a lot more than this writer could ever pretend to be, but that’s still a lot of words.
Many of the blogs are destined for the web sites; primarily Cape Farewell and then on to Huffington Post, Treehugger and Environmental Defence. There’s a flurry of activity after dinner as files are transferred and photos selected to accompany the chosen texts for the day. And that’s no mean feat, for the sheer number of photos submitted for consideration, combined with our exacting editorial standards, makes for a highly competitive and ‘oft political selection process that leaves many images and even more egos left weakened and fallen on the cabin floor.
Words and images are then transferred to Cape Farewell’s Project Co-ordinator, Nina Horstmann who transmits them via Iridium satelitte feed to Marialaura Ghidini at the Cape Farewell headquarters in London. Nina and Marialaura are our Post Master General and work very hard (and often very late) into the night, to make it all happen.
But it wasn’t always this way.
The following excerpt is from a book purchased at the museum at Longyearbyen entitled:
Greetings from Spitsbergen, Tourists at the Eternal Ice 1827 – 1914.
John T. Reilly, published by Tapir Academic Press, Trondheim.

The early visitors were inveterate writers who never passed an opportuntity of informing family and friends of their daily experiences. Indeed postcards were one of the few souvenirs that passengers could obtain during their polar cruise and, as a result, many more than one might expect have survived the ravages of time. Cards could be bought on board ship and in various ports en route. Haffter, a passenger on the “Auguste Victoria” noted that the number of cards posted during the 1899 cruise came to around 20,000 – an average of fifty cards for each passenger. Indeed one tourist on the “Kong Herald” posted a record one hundred and two cards in a single day in 1898. It was not uncommon to run out of postage stamps, as did the small post office in northern Norway when six thousand cards were delivered from the “Blucher” in 1904.
So it begs the question: why all this writing? For one thing, the distance between points in this part of the world is really vast and sail boats, in our case, and steam ships, in the case above, move relatively slowly, so there’s a lot of time to spend between the moments of activity. It’s true there are lively conversations that occur, especially during mealtimes and into the evening, but there are also lengthy periods of silent contemplation, perfect time to write.
I also suspect that, unlike our Victorian ancestors, we are adjusting to the fact that we are no longer permanently connected to familiar and established networks of colleaugues, families and friends. Old habits die hard and home is a long way away.
But most important, we are very serious about the purpose of our journey and are passionate about sharing our thoughts and observations about the impact of climate change, recorded as we sway along the very edge of the polar ice cap, live and in real time - bumping into ice.

Skip the BPA: Food Packaging Update

2010-09-14T13:03:00.001-07:00

For all those devoted bisphenol A (BPA) followers out there, here’s some food packaging news for you to chew on. Early in July, Heinz Australia announced that they were in the process of phasing out BPA in its baby food packaging that used BPA - not all baby food packaging did. This suggests that Heinz’s removal of BPA from their baby food packaging continues to move forward. Seeking Safer Packaging, a report Environmental Defence co-released in 2009, identified Heinz as the only surveyed company currently using an alternative to BPA in some of its can linings, and as phasing out BPA in its baby food can lacquers. A total of 20 companies were surveyed for this report.

Since the time of report release, it has also been announced that Muir Glen, a subsidiary of General Mills, will be switching to metal can packaging that does not contain BPA. To expand, a GreenBiz article suggests that Muir Glen tomato products harvested this summer will be packaged in BPA-free cans. And should you be interested, here are some more companies that BPA-free packaging for some or all of their products: Eden Foods, Edward & Sons, Wild Planet, Eco Fish, and Oregon's Choice.

Cape Farewell: First Night and Second Day

2010-09-14T08:45:00.000-07:00

Comfortably cruising aboard the Noorderlicht through the blue of an Arctic high pressure system. Cold and clear we go between Western Spitsbergen Island and Prins Karls Forland Island due north through the Forland Sundet. We have had our early day adventure followed by a delicious lunch and are now at computers recording our observations. Artists as scientists as artists, searching for meaning, or some such thing.

The morning broke early and bright anchored in Trygghamna Bay (though I doubt the Norse call a bay a bay). Here words fail for the first time but certainly not the last. So make a picture in your mind’s eye, however you will, of a bright sun, a soft mist, clear blue water and two land banks facing one another at a kilometer distance. One rises to a height of 300 metres and the other to 1,000 metres. The bay, really a mini fiord, is 5 km long and ends in a glacier which Simon says has shrunk considerably since he was last here three years ago.

This is an arid landscape and the unusually hot summer of 2010 has left the land drier than usual. To the eye is an infinite nuance of brown. We head to shore aboard a zodiac and beach at the ruin of a 17th c. English whaling settlement, named Alkhornet. Andre, the Russia, and Simon, the Englishman, carry rifles to protect us against the threat of polar bear.

Andre insists, as he guides us to graves with 300 year old human bones, exposed thanks to permafrost, that the settlement was not of the English but rather of Russian ‘Pomors’, a people from the White Sea, and proves it by showing us some old bricks which he claims were made by them alone. Simon makes no retort to the contrary, so with no national affront taken, the guns remain with their latches on safety, at least for the time being.

Follow the Cape Farewell voyage on the 2010 Expedition blog http://www.capefarewell.com/2010expedition/

Cape Farewell: Expectation and Reality

2010-09-13T11:15:00.000-07:00

Left Canada a few days ago to come to this remarkably remote place at 78 degrees north to join Cape Farewell’s global Climate/Culture Expedition. A group of 20 scientists, writers, visual artists and musicians; a delightfully odd collection of souls from around the world, will be boarding a 135 foot sailing schooner, the Noorderlicht, for a 22 day sail around the Svalbard archipeligo, a kind of roiling, boiling think tank on climate change.

Leaving Canada I was feeling excited to be going to a place that I thought would be beyond the reach, or at least just ahead of the curve, of the global eco-tourist trade. Having spent the summer hearing news of the sheer number of tourist boats cruising the Canadian Arctic, including the embarrisingly staged photo-op of Prime Minister Harper balancing on a little piece of polar ice (having personally banished the Russian Air Force) I was feeling pleased to be going to the far reaches of the polar planet, halfway around the world, away from the madding crowd.

Fifteen of us gathered at London and flew north to Oslo where we met our five Russian compatriots and continued further north to Tormo. Changing planes, we left Tormo in the darkness of night and flew ever further north to Longyeaybyen – and into the midnight sun. To bed with light in the sky at 3 am we awoke at 8 am, had breakfast and walked to the wharf, the boat and, as it turns out, a new awakening! Contrary to my expectation, eco-tourism has arrived and is alive and well in Longyearbyen too!

In the past three years, 200 tourist beds have been built in a variety of hotels; mostly to accommodate the cruise-ship trade from the south, but also to provide for climbers, hikers, kayakers and the odd scientific cultural polar expedition to sea. In addition, Longyearbyen hosts a small university, complete with students on bicycles and a very fine local museum to illustrate the history of a once-thriving but small coal mining town and northern outpost.

But never mind, it is still a spectacularly beautiful and very remote place and I have been assured that as we sail further north to the edge of the polar ice cap, we will see no signs of other humans and are guaranteed to see lots of whale, walrus, seal, manitou and of course polar bear. And this I do believe to be true as we will be packing rifles as protection whenever we go ashore. Will keep you posted.

Our Message to Madam Speaker

2010-09-08T06:36:00.000-07:00

Our Message to Madam Speaker

It’s not every day that the third most powerful U.S. politician comes to visit Ottawa. It’s even more rare when a big part of her visit focuses on a key environmental issue – the mismanagement of the tar sands. Her visit coincides with growing U.S. opposition to a massive tar sands pipeline called the Keystone XL, something she is being pressured to investigate by many in her party.

We are encouraged that Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Markey, Chairman of the influential Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, have chosen to reach out to environmental and First Nations actors in addition to politicians and industry representatives.

Our organizations will have an opportunity to meet with her tomorrow to put forward our perspective on how regulators in Ottawa and Edmonton are failing to do their job with regards to the environmental impacts of the tar sands industry, and what U.S. political leaders can do about it.

Our message in a nutshell will be this: the environmental problems with tar sands development will not improve without a signal from its largest customer – the U.S. Indeed, the Canadian government has repeatedly said that it will not lead, but merely follow the U.S. in matters of climate and energy.

Virtually every environmental indicator in the tar sands – greenhouse gas pollution, toxic waste generation, acid rain, habitat destruction and fresh water use – is getting worse because Canada and Alberta are failing to establish or enforce absolute limits on the industry.

What’s worse, both levels of government engage in active denial of the impacts – such as claiming that pollution is “natural,” a claim recently turned on its head by Dr. David Schindler’s independent study on the Athabasca River.

Bigger picture, tar sands development holds hostage Canadian climate policy and diverts resources and attention away from the transition to the clean energy economy.

Canada could be a leader in a clean energy transition. With huge potential in renewable energy, it could also assist the U.S. with more exports of clean electricity. Instead, Canadian taxpayers are footing the bill for politicians to lobby against low carbon legislation in the U.S., in order to protect the tar sands industry.

The U.S. commitment to clean energy will necessarily force them to confront the problems with tar sands oil, which has a significant environmental impact. Right now, the U.S. can take one step by denying the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Otherwise, the U.S. is tacitly saying that it condones the ongoing mismanagement of the tar sands, and of Canada’s role as America’s dirty gas tank.

Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Markey were instrumental in getting a climate and energy bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. While the U.S. has not yet adopted comprehensive climate legislation, her focus on the tar sands could serve in the interim as a step forwards in tackling many of the same issues her legislation sought to address.

Someday our own policy makers will once again show leadership on the climate and energy files. For now, though, we look to others like Speaker Pelosi to help guide us to a better future.

Rick Smith, Executive Director, Environmental Defence Canada
Marlo Raynolds, Executive Director, Pembina Institute

Some Good News about Toxic Flame Retardants: Canada’s Proposing an Expanded Ban

2010-09-03T06:31:00.000-07:00

For all those concerned about the presence of toxic flame retardants known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (or PBDEs for short) in all kinds of products (e.g., furniture, textiles, electronics), know that Canada is committing to banning all of them in everything. Currently only some are.

While not all PBDEs are banned in all products yet and won’t be for a few more years, the commitment of the federal government to do so is certainly noteworthy. Ecojustice, the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Environmental Law Association, and Environmental Defence welcomed this news since we collectively filed a formal Notice of Objection to the original regulations. This was because the original regulations only banned some PBDEs in all products – they did not ban the import and use of the PBDEs that makeup the most widely used mixture. The expanded regulations the government is committing to introducing, however, will.

For more information, check out the recent media release and backgrounder (pdf). Also be sure to visit Health Canada’s webpage about PBDEs.

If you belch out toxins, they must end up somewhere

2010-09-02T13:08:00.000-07:00

New research released this week shows that heavy metal pollution from tar sands development is contaminating rivers in the Athabasca region, despite the claims by government and industry that the pollution is from natural sources.

Dr. David Schindler, one of the authors of the paper, put it this way:

"There's no way industry can be belching out hundreds of kilograms of toxins every year and this not be detectable in the environment unless the monitoring program is totally incompetent,"

The study found 13 metals and metalloids, deemed priority pollutants by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in snow and water. Seven of those were above levels considered safe by the Canadian government, and higher concentrations were found downstream from tar sands development than upstream.

At first, an Alberta government scientist responded with the usual refrain that the pollution comes from natural sources. This is the second peer-reviewed study published by Dr. Schindler that refutes that, yet the government wants us to keep on believing their side without providing any data to back it up. Next Energy Minister Ron Liepert tried to shoot the messenger by questioning Dr. Schindler's credibility. And then yesterday, Premier Ed Stelmach responded to say that his scientists would sit down with the researchers to figure out the discrepancy. The study has, rightfully, struck a nerve.

Meanwhile, federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice stuck to his line that the lead and mercury found in the water is natural.

The Liberal Environment Critic, however, had a different take. David McGuinty said that "the federal government has to exercise its exclusive constitutional responsibility and enforce its existing environmental standards...That means Fisheries Act prosecutions if required, that means exercising the powers they have at their fingertips. Minister Prentice has got to stop bobbing and weaving now and he's got to do his job."

Hopefully, more federal politicians will start to take the type of action Mr. McGuinty is talking about.

Gillian McEachern
Program Manager

Ontario outshines Sunshine State, surging to #3 in North American solar market

2010-08-24T08:35:00.000-07:00

2009 was a breakthrough year for solar power in Ontario. A report by the U.S. Interstate Renewable Energy Council showed remarkable growth in Ontario’s solar market in 2009, pushing Ontario to number three on the list of states/provinces for installed solar power, installing 46 MW of solar panels last year. Only California and New Jersey installed more solar power, 212 and 5 MWs respectively. Ontario even performed better than the so called “Sunshine State,” which installed only 35 MW.

2010 is poised to be an even bigger year for solar power in Ontario. According to the Canadian Solar Industries Association, Ontario will install as much as 200 MW in 2010 (100MW have already been installed), pushing it closer to the top in North America. As a result, several new solar panel manufacturing plants have opened up shop in Ontario.

This massive investment in solar is driven largely by the Green Energy and Green Economy Act and Ontario’s new renewable energy Feed-in Tariff, guaranteeing the price paid to companies and homeowners who generate renewable power.

Thanks to Paul Gipe (www.wind-works.org) for the tip.

BPA: Soon to Be “Toxic”, Currently in Our Bodies

2010-08-20T11:38:00.000-07:00

We have some good news to report regarding the designation of bisphenol A (BPA) as “toxic” under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. The federal government is moving forward on its commitment to designate it as such, having stated that this will occur within the next 8-10 weeks. As mentioned in an earlier blog post, the reason for the 2-year "toxic" designation delay is because a formal notice of objection was filed.

Information reveals that the objection, which asked the federal government to reconsider the “toxic” designation, was filed on July 15, 2009 by the American Chemistry Council. However, now that the government has considered the notice and dismissed it given that no new data was brought forth, we’re going to see BPA’s addition to Canada’s Toxic Substances List relatively soon. For more information, check out this Postmedia article by Sarah Schmidt.

This is particularly good news given that the day before the above story was published, results from the federal government’s Canada-wide biomonitoring project (the Canadian Health Measures Survey (CHMS)) showed that 91% of Canadians aged 6 to 79 had detectable concentrations of BPA in their urine. This is the first time BPA was measured at a national level. Given associated evidence that regulating substances and removing them from our products and environment works - lead concentrations in Canadians’ blood have gone from about 27% to less than 1% at or above the intervention level over 30 years – the move towards designating BPA as “toxic” and opening up the possibility for further action on the substance is most welcome. For more on the CHMS results, check out the full report by Heatlh Canada.

catch up Ontario!

2010-08-20T08:04:00.000-07:00

For a province with so much riding on the future of the automotive industry, you can't shake the feeling that Ontario is starting to fall badly behind in the electric vehicle revolution now unfolding - elsewhere.

Latest is the news that China is pulling together its industrial actors and investing $15 billion to become a leader in electric and hybrid vehicles. One commentator said this of the move:

“The car industry was long ago designated as a pillar industry for China. And the second thing is green technology or high tech; this is where the action is going to be, and China wants to be there.”

One can imagine substituting "Ontario" for "China" in that first sentence, but what about the second?

And, it's not just China that sees the opportunity. Last month, U.S. President Obama was in neighbouring Michigan to break ground on a new battery factory to serve the electric vehicle industry. His administration has allocated $5 billion to electric vehicles, and Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm estimates that 62,000 jobs associated with the industry will be generated in that one state over the next decade.

So, where is Ontario? The McGuinty government seems to "get it" on one level that this is the future, but has so far confined itself to consumer rebates on electric vehicles, and committing to buy electric vehicles for government fleets.

This is all to the good, but amounts to small baby steps while our competitors take giant strides. We are getting left behind.

Fundamentally, this is a matter of infrastructure and industrial policy. Electric vehicle take up by Ontario drivers will only happen in a meaningful way when the infrastructure is in place to support them. And, this involves action on multiple fronts, including standard setting, grid upgrades, and charging stations.

Industrial policy involves working with existing and new companies and workers on creating the conditions where electric vehicle components are developed and manufactured in Ontario rather than elsewhere, and ensuring that these vehicles are powered by clean, renewable energy produced here at home to create even more jobs.

The necessary comprehensive policy for Ontario to catch up and to become a leader in electric vehicles cuts across several Ministries and therefore needs some kind of cross-government Task Force to pull the right decision makers together to make it happen. Such a Task Force should be coupled with an advisory body that brings in experts from municipalities, industry, labour, and environmental organizations.

Oil is a finite resource, and as the Gulf spill and ongoing tar sands destruction have shown, comes at an increasing cost to our life support systems. Ontario needs to catch up to other jurisdictions in pursuing electric vehicles as one core part of getting off oil, and needs to significantly up its game on this front, starting today.

Matt Price
Policy Director

thanks, Scarp

2010-08-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: The report talked about below can now be found online here.

*******

Thanks to MP Francis Scarpaleggia who both spearheaded the push to have the federal House of Commons Environment Committee investigate the issue of tar sands and water issues, and who today released his party's findings based on that investigation.

Unfortunately, the Committee itself could not come to consensus on putting out a report. The members cannot talk about why this is so, since the decision was taken in camera and the rules say they aren't allowed to talk about it. But, to get an indication of what happened, voters would be well advised to check out this story about a guide book on sabotaging Committee work that the Conservatives have deployed.

Mr. Scarpaleggia's recommendations are worth implementing, although unfortunately at this point his report has not been posted online, so we can't cite them in full. They include: conducting a cancer study in Fort Chip, including naphthenic acids in disclosure of pollutants, reviewing the discredited industry-dominated water monitoring program in the tar sands, and having the federal government assert its authority under the Fisheries Act to, in essence, do its job.

Overall, this is a sign that at least some MPs in Ottawa want to take their responsibility regarding tar sands regulation seriously. Indeed, with other party reports expected, this could very well be a majority of MPs - but unfortunately not those of the stripe that currently control the levers of power.

Matt Price
Policy Director

Sun rises again for Ontario’s solar industry

2010-08-13T10:01:00.000-07:00

Good news: Ontario Government hears public concerns on solar price change

A bit of background in case you're not in the renewable energy loop: On July 2nd, the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) posted a change to the microFIT program, the guaranteed price paid to renewable energy generators in Ontario. Much to the chagrin of farmers and solar power investors, the new price for small scale ground-mounted solar projects was 26% lower than previously listed. Like I said in my earlier post, clouds were looming over Ontario solar power, and key stakeholders were not having it.

Leading the charge was the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA), the Canadian Solar Industries Association (CanSIA), Ontario Sustainable Energy Associationand the Green Energy Act Alliance. After several heated webinar battles, carefully crafted submissions and business models comparing installation costs, capacity factors, and debt/equity ratios, inundating the Ontario Power Authority, it was feared that the Ontario solar industry would be taking a big hit.

Today, following the 30-day consultation period, the government has decided to keep the original price for applications in the queue, but set up a new category for small solar power projects installed on the ground.

That sound you hear is a shared sigh of relief from the thousands of people currently waiting to hear back about their contracts or who want to build solar power, and the tens of thousands of people who will be employed in renewable energy industries. Congratulations and thanks for listening Minister Duguid and the OPA.

Wind fills sails of Ontario workers

2010-08-10T12:39:00.000-07:00

Earlier today, Siemens announced it will be opening Ontario’s first wind turbine blade manufacturing facility. The deal with Samsung C&T and Pattern Energy includes 600MW of Siemens turbines for Ontario’s renewable energy market.

Siemens management credit Ontario’s new Feed-in tariff (FIT) with the decision to open the new plant. The FIT guarantees the price paid for different types of renewable power, including wind power.

This announcement is part of the $7 Billion dollar deal with a consortium of Korean companies, including Samsung C&T, that was finalized in January 2010 to anchor Ontario’s renewable energy manufacturing sector and create 1,400 manufacturing jobs while opening at least four manufacturing facilities for wind and solar power.

While it is not yet clear where the facility will be located, all eyes will be focused on Burlington and Hamilton where Siemens owns or has owned plants.

Shhh! This isn't news...

2010-08-10T07:59:00.000-07:00

As Naomi Campbell's diamond flap fills news headlines, what's not news, apparently, is that pesky story that our life support systems are breaking down, just like global warming models predict.

From forest fires and landslides in BC, to forest fires and floods in Russia, to devastating floods around Asia, to a giant iceberg breaking off the Greenland ice sheet, very few journalists care to make the linkage between the trend towards more of these events, and our failure to enact policies to reduce global warming pollution.

Environment Canada, meanwhile, has a couple of interesting maps showing both how the Canadian national average spring temperature this year was 4.1 degrees above average (below), and also a disturbing time trend map showing temperature rise across the country over time.

Our policy makers must awake from their dangerous slumber on this file and instead put in place aggressive policies to transition us to a clean energy economy, as Portugal is doing, for example. But, first we'll have to convince them that the survival of our civilization is somehow more important than the long form census.

Matt Price
Policy Director

You don't need to be dirty to be rich

2010-08-05T12:24:00.000-07:00

Today Premier Ed Stelmach is touting the economic benefits of the tar sands for the rest of Canada at the annual gathering of Premiers in Winnipeg. Apparently, we need to accept the growing pollution problem if we want to prosper.

But the data from the past two decades doesn't support that. Alberta was responsible for more than half of the increase in global warming pollution, and for 18% of Canada's GDP growth. Quebec was also responsible for 18% of our GDP growth, and actually reduced its emissions, while Ontario contributed 40% to GDP and 10% to emissions growth.

We don't need to accept rising global warming pollution as the cost of economic health, particularly with clean energy poised to become one of the largest industrial sectors in the world over the next decade.

What's more, the rapid rise in tar sands exports is actually having a negative impact on jobs in some parts of the country. Manufacturing is suffering in Ontario and Quebec partly due to the rising Canadian dollar. As oil exports have risen, our currency has become increasingly linked to the price of oil. The Petro-Loonie is set to soar if tar sands expansion proceeds as planned, and oil prices continue to rise.

Provinces like Ontario have recognized that the future energy economy will be green, and that jobs can be created by leading in transition from oil to clean energy. As a country, that's the type of economic engine we need, rather than hitching our wagon to dirty energy.

Gillian McEachern
Program Manager, Climate and Energy

BPA Exposure at the Till

2010-07-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

Last October, we posted a blog titled, Beware of BPA When Buying? about the average cash register using BPA-receipt technology (not all cash registers do) having 60 - 100 mg of the substance available and ready for uptake. This may occur through the skin or by being transferred onto food and ingested.

Well now the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has found that 40% of the 36 receipts sampled from major U.S. businesses and services, including McDonald's, CVS, KFC, Whole Foods, Walmart, and Safeway, contained BPA. Testing also determined that the total amounts of BPA on the tested receipts were 250 - 1,000 times greater than other exposure sources.

Receipts from some major chains, including Target, Starbucks, and Bank of America ATMs, were BPA-free or contained only trace amounts, clearly indicating that BPA (pdf) exposure via cash register receipts isn’t the way it has to be.

Click here for more information on the EWG study.

Clouds looming over Ontario solar power

2010-07-21T13:16:00.000-07:00

After receiving an avalanche of applications (over 16,000 in just eight months) for Ontario’s Feed-in Tariff (FIT) program, a new incentive for renewable electricity generation, the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) have proposed reducing the guaranteed price paid for ground-mounted solar power projects.

Frustration is building, and rightly so, with the OPA and the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure over the surprise change in price. Currently, both ground-mounted and rooftop projects under 10kW are eligible for the 80.2 cents/kWh FIT rate. The new proposed category would reduce the FIT price for ground mounted solar projects to 58.8 cents/kWh (a 27% decrease).

As expected, the solar industry is overheating, but they are not the only ones calling foul. The Ontario Federation of Agriculture has voiced its concern demanding the minister restore the original rate as farmers stand to lose a considerable stream of income and have in some cases already made major investments. Today, the Ontario Environment Commissioner has publicly stated that Ontario's solar sector is being harmed by uncertainty around the microFIT. MicroFIT Action, a website dedicated to a petition on the proposed price change, has also popped up and a group called the Ontario Solar Network is hosting a town hall meeting tomorrow night.

The OPA claims that the current FIT price results in a higher than expected rate of return for ground-mounted solar projects. While their price assumptions could be correct, opponents to the price change argue that the process of setting the assumptions is not transparent. They argue that money has already been spent and contracts have been signed with landowners at the original price and developers expected to be rubber stamped by the OPA. They had no reason to believe otherwise. The integrity of the FIT program is itself being challenged as investors question whether or not the program will remain stable enough.

No one disputes that the FIT rates should be adjustable. In fact, FIT programs are designed to decrease over time as the prices of technologies go down. The Netherlands have an annual review. Germany uses predetermined regression in price and a periodic review. Portugal’s FIT price is linked with technology targets. Spain’s system uses a hybrid of these. Ontario was planning a two year review, but is changing the price abruptly at less than 12 months.

Ontario needs to stick to a program, not change the rules mid-game. If we do, people won’t want to play on our home turf.

Ontario workers are doing a sun salutation over new solar jobs in Toronto and London

2010-07-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

In mere days, two big announcements for green manufacturing in Toronto and London. This type of massive shift in Ontario’s economy has been a dream for many environmentalists and workers alike, as Ontario positions itself as a leader in the new green economy.

Canasia Power Corp announced Tuesday that they would establish a solar module manufacturing facility in London, Ontario. The facility would initially have a 50MW annual capacity, employing roughly 100 people, but as capacity grows to 200MW, it will employ over 500 people.

SunEdison and Samco Machinery Ltd, a struggling Scarborough auto parts manufacturer, also announced yesterday that they would be retooling an Ontario factory to produce equipment for solar power projects in Ontario. Steps to retool the plant have already begun and the racking systems it will produce are expected to roll off the line as early as September 2010.

Samco has lost 37 % of their workforce, mainly due to a 63 % decline in automotive sales. The new contract is expected to increase their workforce by 25%, with 100 direct and indirect jobs expected as a result of this investment.

Samco Machinery credits this surge in demand to Ontario’s new feed-in tariff (FIT), guaranteed rate paid for renewable power. The FIT program has a local content requirement that requires renewable energy project developers to use equipment made in Ontario.

SunEdison has already made several announcements as a result of projects to be developed under the FIT program. In April, SunEdison announced it would be build 14 rooftop solar projects totaling 3MW in the Toronto area for the development and property management firm Remington Group. In June, SunEdison announced they would begin construction on eight systems totaling 2.1 MW hosted at facilities owned or operated by LaSalle Investment Management.

Swann Dive

2010-07-14T12:15:00.000-07:00

What's up with Liberals straying from their roots in the faint hope of attracting Conservatives?

Latest up: Alberta Liberal leader David Swann, an honest-to-goodness nice guy who came to prominence by getting fired by the Ralph Klein government for supporting Kyoto.

Now, he's going against federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff for the latter's promise to formalize a tanker ban in BC waters, a move that would effectively end Enbridge's pitch to bring dirty oil from the tar sands to the BC coast.

Last time I checked, BC voters were overwhelmingly against having supertankers plying their coastline - those are of course voters that Mr. Swann by definition cannot court, unlike Mr. Ignatieff.

Which raises the question: exactly which voters is Mr. Swann going after here? His two biggest provincial rivals are trying to out-do one another with their pro-tar sands rhetoric, whereas polls show that Albertans have a more nuanced version of needing to do a better job on that file.

Perhaps Mr. Swann would have better luck returning to his roots, and taking a more progressive position on the issues.

Matt Price
Policy Director

Petro-Determinists

2010-07-13T08:55:00.000-07:00

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman coined the term "petro-determinist" to apply to a person who believes that we will use oil a long time, so there's no point in doing anything about it.

There's a lot of this about in the debate about the future of the tar sands - with proponents trying to shut down debate about the environmental impacts on the grounds that we simply need the oil.

Vancouver Sun columnist Barbara Yaffe seems to be the latest addition to this club, but is not alone. Recently we've seen it creep into the editorial pages of our own New York Times equivalent, the Globe and Mail.

Worse, perhaps, is coupling petro-determinism with political cynicism, which is on display in this piece by Norman Spector. In chronicling Quebec Premier Charest's own mild determinism that we exploit the tar sands because they are there, Spector tut tuts us idealistic environmentalists by telling us that tar sands money drives politics, so presumably we should just stop trying to make things better.

There's two things about petro-determinism, though, that should be pointed out:

1) It's intellectually lazy: just because we now use oil, it doesn't make the tar sands clean. It is possible to point out simultaneously that we are energy users and that Canadian and Albertan regulators are failing miserably at mitigating the worst impacts of the tar sands.

2) It's actually false: there are things we can do right now to dramatically reduce our dependence on oil, and guess what - nobody is making oil anymore, so at some point we have no choice but to embrace these solutions. Petro-determinism is by definition an argument with a limited shelf life.

It's a worrying trend that our media seems to be dominated these days by those who are rationalizing an energy system that is undermining the security of our life support systems. Our children deserve better.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Correction

2010-07-08T10:22:00.000-07:00

A story ran yesterday that dealt in part with a letter I sent to Ministers Aglukkaq and Prentice about naphthenic acid, a key tar sands pollutant.

In that letter I said that the U.S. requires companies to report on releases of over one hundred pounds of this pollutant, whereas in Canada there is no requirement. In fact, the U.S. requires this reporting only at the many so-called "superfund" sites - places of heightened pollution concern.

I apologize for the error.

We still believe, however, that tar sands companies should be required to report on releases of this substance considering that scientists believe it to be one of THE key tar sands pollutants, and also given that tar sands companies themselves admit that their tailings ponds leak into the groundwater (and occasionally into surface water). Now, another company is applying for yet another tailings pond, so the problem is only growing.

Matt Price
Policy Director

Whew!

2010-07-05T10:30:00.001-07:00

As many of us swelter away, a reminder that when it comes to global warming there is a difference between weather and climate.

Nonetheless, 2010 is on track to be the warmest year on record.

Canada's response? Fire up those tar sands!

Matt Price
Policy Director

I Am A Cool Moose

2010-06-30T09:14:00.000-07:00

For a moment at the start of the century, Canada felt like we were in the zone. We were a moose with sunglasses on the cover of the Economist – cool, but also Canadian in that we needed someone outside of our borders to confirm it for us.

We were even feeling good enough about ourselves to shout it out load, even if it had to be through the "I Am Canadian" beer commercial, which in itself seems like an appropriately Canadian vehicle.

What were the ingredients for this feeling good about ourselves? We were breaking new ground on ratifying Kyoto, on legalizing gay marriage, and on decriminalizing marijuana use. At the same time, we were generally standing apart from George W. Bush while he inflicted his narrow-minded America upon the world.

In short, we were expanding tolerance and telling the world that Canada was on the side of a more hopeful future. Things weren’t perfect, but we could be proud.

To show how this can also work in reverse: I have a good friend from the U.S. who was in Ottawa shortly after the fall of Baghdad. He’s the kind of guy who has built up a thick skin through long public service, and has a wonderful sense of humour he uses to smooth the rough edges. Over a drink, though, I was shocked when he teared up while talking about Abu Ghraib, about how for him the event was such a violation of everything that America stood for, that as an American it repeatedly brought him to tears even though he had nothing to do with it.

On this Canada Day in 2010, Canada does not bring me to tears, but it does make me sad. If you watch Joe’s beer commercial rant now, it comes across as dated, as about someone we no longer are. We have replaced vision with making do, tolerance with division, and debate with shouting at each other. Ottawa is a log-jam, with elected officials now consistently failing to move forward measures that inspire and engage us, that advance us as a people.

The worst part of this is our abject failure to provide hope to young Canadians that we will step up to the challenge of letting them live their lives with the stable climate that we took for granted. I constantly look at my four year old son and apologize silently for the conflict and diminished opportunity he will inherit. Many of our elected officials have chosen strip mining of tar sands over a clean energy economy, and as a result have replaced the cool moose we once projected to the world instead with a shameless dealer of dirty fossil fuels to addicts everywhere, defending the dead-end past rather than building a better future.

I refuse to accept that this is who we are, and what makes me passionate about my work is that I believe that most Canadians feel the same way I do. We are better than this and will be better than this. We will not get there, though, without coming together to change the behaviour of our leaders. And, for that to happen we must deepen our investments as citizens, as Canadians.

For now, though, a little break. Like thousands of others, I’ll be camping this Canada Day weekend, trying to figure out a way to watch the World Cup games without electricity or cable, and having some beers with friends and family. I’ll reconnect, recharge, and regroup. And then I’ll reengage. I hope you will too.

Happy Canada Day.

Matt Price
Policy Director

Ontario’s Offshore Wind Undermined by Half-Baked Exclusionary Zone

2010-06-28T13:57:00.000-07:00

Like all types of development, there are some good places and some bad places for wind turbines.

Ontario’s proposed 5km shoreline exclusionary zone attempts to solve this problem with a sledge hammer rather than the scalpel that was called for.

Offshore energy is nothing new. There are many examples in Denmark of wind turbines developments in near shore areas within 5km, including: Vindeby (1.5km offshore), Middelgrunden (3.5km offshore), Samso (3.5km offshore), Ronland (1km offshore), and Frederikshavn (1km offshore).

In 2000, the Danish Energy Authority appointed five international experts to the International Advisory Panel of Experts on Marine Ecology (IAPEME), including marine ecology experts from Universities in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark. The IAPEME goals were to comment on the observed impacts to marine wildlife and environmental monitoring methods of offshore wind turbine developments in Denmark. Their 2006 publication found that “The studies have shown that the Nysted and Horns Rev offshore wind farms have had very little impact on the environment, neither during their construction nor during their operational phases.” Further, “Large offshore wind farms can be constructed and operated without significant damage to the marine environment and vulnerable species.”

There are clearly some places where wind turbines should be pushed further than 5km from shore, if they’re even allowed at all. The proposed SouthPoint Wind project, which would site hundreds of turbines right next to Point Pelee, comes to mind. But what fact-based argument can there be to disallow turbines off the shore of urban Scarborough? None, it seems to us.

Over the next few weeks and months, the Green Energy Act Alliance will be pushing for a setback based on the best science. Five km may be necessary in some cases, but this is one situation where one size doesn't fit all.

A Big BPA Update

2010-06-28T07:33:00.000-07:00

Canada took the international lead on BPA action back in 2008. With last week’s announcement that France has suspended the sale of baby bottles containing BPA (French), and news that New York State is well on its way to doing so, Canada’s early action is being justified by growing global BPA action.

So in addition to Canada’s banning of BPA in baby bottles, here’s an updated list of who’s doing what (at least, as far as we know) regarding BPA laws across the world:

COUNTRIES

France has suspended the sale of baby bottles containing BPA
Denmark has issued a temporary ban on BPA in products for children three and under and it has passed a resolution to ban it in baby bottles
Belgium and the United Kingdom have each introduced bills
Two bills have been introduced in each federal United States (U.S.) house – one of the bills proposes the Food and Drug Administration limits BPA in food and beverage containers, while the other proposes the Consumer Product Safety Commission end the sale of other BPA-containing food-contact products

U.S. STATES

Over 20 state legislatures have introduced bills, including California, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Texas
The Senate of New York legislature passed a BPA bill banning BPA baby bottles, sippy cups, pacifiers, and straws with the companion bill awaiting passage in the Assembly
Both houses of the Vermont legislature have passed a BPA bill restricting BPA in reusable food and beverage containers, infant formula, and baby food containers
Wisconsin, Minnesota, Washington, Maryland, and Connecticut have signed BPA bills into law, with Connecticut going further than Canada by banning BPA from all reusable food and beverage containers, infant formula, and baby food cans and jars

CITY/COUNTY

Suffolk County, New York; Chicago, Illinois; Albany County, New York; and Schenectady County, New York have restricted the sale of products made with bisphenol A.

3rd Time’s the Charm (We Hope): Proposed Consumer Product Safety Act Back Again

2010-06-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

It’s happened – the proposed Canada Consumer Product Safety Act was reintroduced into the House of Commons for the 3rd time on June 9, 2010. It was first known as Bill C-52 (which was dropped when the federal election was called in 2008) and then Bill C-6 (which was dropped when Parliament prorogued in March 2010), but is currently known as Bill C-36.

This proposed Act is an update to the 40 year old Hazardous Products Act and would finally bring Canada in line with Europe and the United States. As per this CBC article, the Bill has support from industry and environmental groups.

Although the House of Commons is currently not in session, we’re hoping for swift passage in the fall when the MPs return.

Learn about the new proposed Act by visiting this Health Canada website.

Keep up-to-date on this law in the fall and other toxics happenings throughout the year by signing up for our monthly Toxic Nation Enews.

Oil's Not Well

2010-06-21T07:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I spent time with Jerome Ringo, a long-time activist and former oil worker from Louisiana. He's witnessing the Gulf oil disaster unfold around his home - the suffocating oil-soaked birds, the protective marsh buffers dying, the fear of hurricane season. He's in Toronto to talk about how this needs to serve as a wake up call for Ontario and others to reduce dependence on dangerous and polluting oil.

It used to be that talking about getting off oil was seen as a fringe view of peak oil theorists and some radical environmentalists. But now, in the wake of the tragedy unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, people are asking: What would it actually take to get off oil?

The oil industry and their proponents in government would have us believe that it just isn't possible. Yet solutions are at hand to transition our transportation system away from oil to clean energy sources, and Ontario can act now to kickstart that transition.

Each year, Ontarians send between $13-22 billion dollars out of province to buy oil. To put that amount into perspective, the price tag for Metrolinx's regional transportation plan is $2 billion per year, and the 2010 Ontario budget for education is $23 billion. We're shipping out vast sums of wealth to create jobs in other places.

Here are some quick numbers we've pulled together on Ontario's oil addiction:

- Global warming pollution from transportation in Ontario in 2008: 61 million tonnes

- Global warming pollution emitted by the entire country of Portugal, population 16,803,952: 60 million tonnes

- Number of passenger vehicles in Ontario in 2008: 7.2 million

- Kilometres driven each year by passenger vehicles: 113 billion

- Electricity needed to power all passenger vehicles for one year: 22.6 million megawhatthours

- Electricity generated in Ontario in 2009: 139 million megawhatthours

- Wind potential in Ontario: 1,711 million megawhatthours

- Number of wind turbines needed to power Ontario’s passenger transportation: 3,767

- Percentage of Ontarians that support laws and policies to accelerate a transition from oil to other energy sources, even if it means changing how people use transportation: 67%

- Percentage of Ontarians support spending by government to transition from oil to electric vehicles, with funding from new fees and taxes on oil and gas pollution: 62%

So what if we invested in building effective public transit and the infrastructure for electric cars instead of sending all that oil money to other places? We could keep jobs here in Ontario - building trains, producing green energy, manufacturing electric vehicles - and reduce smog and the amount of time we spend in traffic.

It's within our reach. Israel and Denmark are already making the game-changing investments needed to get off oil. In Ontario, powering all passenger transportation by electricity would take about 16% of electricity generated in the province. But, because electric vehicles mainly charge over night when electricity demand drops, going electric wouldn't require that much new generation. For example, it has been estimated that 65% of passenger vehicles in the U.S. could be converted to electric without additional generation because they would charge at night.

We as consumers can't do it alone. We need governments to adopt laws and policies to spur the transition away from oil, and to invest in infrastructure needed rather than new highways. Ontario has the potential to lead in building a greener, oil-free transportation system, and the time to start is now.

Gillian McEachern
Program Manager
Environmental Defence

Tone Deaf?

2010-06-17T07:21:00.000-07:00

With the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez worth of oil spilling into the U.S. Gulf every four days, you can't help but wonder about the timing of the Western Premiers in lobbying to reduce regulatory oversight in Canada - in large part for oil and gas projects.

A key part of President Obama's Oval Office address two days ago came when he said the U.S. needs an offshore regulator that "that acts as the oil industry's watchdog not its partner."

Here in Canada we have similar issues of coziness between our regulators and the oil and gas industry. This is evidenced in the fact that they barely ever say "no" to proposals. Another example is from a Canadian landowners group that recently attended a conference where they were surprised at the chummy relationship between regulators and the industry.

Will it take a similar BP-like disaster in Canada before we too get serious about regulatory independence? Meanwhile, will the gung-ho tar sands government in Ottawa go along with Stelmach et al at this time of heightened public anxiety over how industry is run? Let's see.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

McGuinty and Charest to move on cap and trade

2010-06-16T12:17:00.000-07:00

Protecting the environment was a major point of discussion at the joint Ontario-Quebec Cabinet meeting held in Quebec City today. Premiers McGuinty and Charest agreed to develop the regulations needed to implement cap and trade, reaffirming their commitment to transition both provinces to a clean energy economy.

Putting a price on global warming pollution through cap and trade is an important tool for reducing emissions, and we're glad to see Ontario and Quebec agreeing to take the next step.

Manitoba and British Columbia have also committed to implementing a cap and trade system. With the federal government continuing to use the U.S. as an excuse for inaction, provinces are stepping into the void.

As President Obama said yesterday in his Oval Office address:

"We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now. Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash American innovation and seize control of our own destiny."

Now is the time to break our addiction to oil.

Gillian McEachern
Program Manager
Environmental Defence

Obama Spills Into Quebec

2010-06-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

Last night U.S. President Obama gave an Oval Office address about the BP spill, rightly pointing out that the bigger message it sends us is that we need to break our addiction to oil.

At the same time, the Quebec and Ontario Premiers began meeting in Quebec City, and both underlined the need to move ahead on regulating large polluters in the transition to a clean energy economy. They too are taking the lesson of the BP spill to heart.

Unfortunately, this continues to stand in stark contrast to what we are hearing from Ottawa. A British diplomat is the latest to push the boundaries of what is usually said and not said in those overly polite circles (following the Mexican President) by contradicting Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice who has an intentionally overly rosy view of progress on climate change.

The one line from the Oval Office address that stood out as the exact opposite of what the Canadian federal government believes is when Obama said this: "the one approach I will not accept is inaction."

Right now it seems that any hopefulness we have in Canada must come from provincial capitols. Let's see what comes out of the joint Ontario/Quebec cabinet meeting today, and what those governments will do to follow through quickly on ending our addiction to oil.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Gulf doesn't green the tar sands

2010-06-09T07:41:00.000-07:00

Today Jeff Rubin, former chief economist for CIBC World Markets, criticized tar sands promoters for surfing the disaster unfolding in the Gulf to green the image of the tar sands.

We absolutely must avoid the risk of an offshore oil spill in Canada. But, we can't trade one type of risk for another. As Rubin points out, there's nothing clean about producing tar sands oil. It pollutes the water and air, drives up Canada's global warming pollution and threatens the health of people living downstream.

The toxic 'tailings ponds' are leaking over 11 million litres a day, enough to fill the Toronto Skydome two and a half times each year. And by 2012, the planned expansion of the tar sands will mean 25 billion litres of toxic tailings will leak into surrounding waterways each year, enough to fill the Skydome 16 times.

Canada already has its own toxic oil spill.

And, despite the recent PR push by the oil industry, the environment impacts are getting worse not better. Heck, it took them twenty years to figure out how to plant trees. That hardly garners confidence.

The Gulf oil spill should instead spur government action to transition away from oil to clean energy. Canada is getting left behind as other countries invest in electric cars, high speed trains and renewable energy. We can't afford to wait to catch up.

Gillian McEachern
Program Manager
Environmental Defence

The Revolution is Here!

2010-05-31T12:35:00.000-07:00

I'm sure Garrett Brown is a well-meaning guy, but his full page ad out today, appearing in dailies at the cost of a pretty penny, is a bit, well, underwhelming.

Garrett works with the tar sands industry on restoration, and is trumpeting the fact that due to breakthrough research, they are now planting trees as part of their restoration efforts, after they strip mine an area.

But, er, planting trees as a breakthrough?

We clearly have a long, long way to go. The newspapers can only rub their hands at the prospect of all that ad revenue they will get with every little thing the tar sands industry tries out.

Meanwhile, the planet burns.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Hold Your Breath!

2010-05-27T08:11:00.000-07:00

In response to a new report on air pollution in the tar sands released by Environmental Defence today, an Alberta government spokesman claimed of a spike in hydrogen sulphide:

"It's a nuisance issue, it's an odour issue, it's not a health issue," he said. "If you look at our overall air quality numbers, they're showing that 95 per cent of the time the air quality is good."

We found that air pollution in the tar sands region was at levels above what the Alberta government considers safe, known as "exceedances", 1,556 times in the 2009. High hydrogen sulphide levels were the main culprit.

Yet the World Health Organization says that exposure has respiratory, neurological and cardiovascular effects in humans, and that seniors and children are most at risk. Because of the serious toxic effects of exposure to high concentrations for very short time periods, it recommends that all exposure should be avoided. That hardly sounds like a mere nuisance issue, and residents in nearby Fort McKay have been raising concerns about the health impacts of that rotten egg smell wafting into their community on a routine basis.

The growing air pollution problem of the tar sands is another example of the federal government dropping the ball on its responsibility to protect the environment and human health. Three years ago, Prime Minister Harper promised to put mandatory caps on particularly harmful air pollution from industry. But with still nothing in place to clamp down on pollution, tar sands companies are pumping more and more dangerous pollutants into the air.

The spike in hydrogen sulphide is part of a larger trend. We found that the tar sands industry released almost double the amount of volatile organic compounds (which includes highly carcinogenic pollutants like benzene) in 2008 than it did in 2002, and nitrogen oxides rose by 50%.

If air quality is good 95% of the time as the Alberta government claims, will residents be asked to just hold their breath for the 5% of the time it's bad? It's time for the federal government to live up to its promise and put a cap on air pollution from the tar sands.

Gillian McEachern
Program Manager, Climate and Energy

Dragon's Den: View from Down Under

2010-05-25T08:11:00.000-07:00

Hello from Down Under, where I’m speaking about my book at the Sydney Writers’ Festival and jet-laggedly watching the sun rise over Sydney Harbour.

There’s a great assortment of environmental thinkers at this year’s Festival. My co-author Bruce Lourie and I are doing a panel later today with Bill McKibben who is here to talk about his new book “Eaarth” (an unusual title that he suggested to the crowd last night should be pronounced with an Arnold Schwarzenegger-style Austrian drawl). I had dinner with Tim Flannery last night, who chaired a great session on climate change politics post-Copenhagen. Raj Patel is also here, whose book “The Value of Nothing” is a trenchant critique of the unsustainability of our current economic model.

What’s really struck me being here in Australia – and I knew this already but it’s different seeing it close up – is the eery similarity between the environmental debate in Canada and Australia. As in Canada, the Australian federal government is paralyzed by the issue at the moment and whatever progress is occurring is happening at a State (or in Canada’s case, provincial) and municipal level.

As in Canada, where the companies running Alberta’s tar sands get whatever they want from the federal government, the coal lobby in Australia remains retrograde and extremely powerful.

And in the morning newspaper’s, there are even striking similarities between the kneejerk backlash to wind energy in both countries. In Ontario, the province’s Medical Officer of Health’s definitive ruling that there are no demonstrated links between wind turbines and health concerns has failed to satisfy the more strident wind energy opponents. And near Melbourne, a particular case study illustrates the danger of an ad hoc approach to siting new wind developments (which, thankfully, we’ve moved beyond in favour of a single, objective, provincial regulation in Ontario).

What does all this underline? That the environmental challenges we face, and the solutions we need, are truly global in nature. What’s true in the Great White North, is true Down Under. We have to find our way together.

Top Doc gives turbines a clean bill of health

2010-05-21T06:39:00.000-07:00

A definitive ruling has come from the Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health on the impacts of wind turbines on human health. In a report released earlier today, Dr. Arlene King, Ontario's Chief Medical Officer announced that “The scientific evidence does not demonstrate any direct causal link between wind turbine noise and adverse health effects according to a new report from of Health.”

The report (available here), was prepared with technical support from the Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion, the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care and the Council of Ontario Medical Officers of Health. The study reviewed existing literature (from 1970 to present) on wind turbines and health from scientific journals, documented case studies and other sources.

The report came after concerns have been expressed by members of the public and municipalities about possible effects of wind turbines on public health. While the report said there were reports of perceived adverse health impacts, these reports were not documented in scientific literature and the studies had severe methodological limitations due to bias and lack of exposure data, to name a few.

Given this important new evidence we need to move forward in developing Ontario’s wind resources, while ensuring that certain guidelines are strictly upheld. All types of development, noisy or not, need to be planned appropriately. As with gas power plants, 400-series highways and skyscrapers, there are places where wind turbines, hydro dams and biogas plants might not be appropriate, but decisions need to be based on scientific and measurable standards.

Shooting the Messenger

2010-05-21T05:01:00.000-07:00

Why tackle the problem when you can tackle those talking about it instead? Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice is going after the very cautious National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy for daring to suggest that Canada ranks near the bottom of the G8 countries when it comes to low carbon performance.

The problem Mr. Prentice has, though, is that it doesn't matter how many messengers you shoot if your record sucks. So far, all he has done in the positive column is to copy the U.S. on auto standards, because he had to.

Otherwise, he has successfully stalled any action on large polluters and cut programs that were helping renewable energy and housing retrofits. Our report shows that he is costing Canadians tens of thousands of jobs by failing to keep up with other countries in the transition to a clean energy economy.

Canadians can only be jealous looking across the pond at those other Conservatives who just took power in the UK. They just released their "programme for government" which in stark contrast to the Canadian Conservative government embraces a wide range of action on climate change. Do we shoot those Conservative messengers too?

Meanwhile, the Harper government remains stuck in its ideological bunker, keeping climate change off the G8/G20 agenda by saying that anything other than the economy is a "sideshow."

Yet, as David McLaughlin, president and CEO of the Round Table said: "...in a low-carbon world, the environment is the economy."

Until Harper and Prentice grasp that truth, Canada will continue to fall behind the rest of the world.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Dragon's Den: Climate Optimism

2010-05-14T07:02:00.000-07:00

The time has come.

Time for me to come out of the closet. To come clean. Time to tell the world!

I’m a climate optimist.

Yup, the secret’s out.

What I mean by this is that I’m a “glass half full” kind of environmentalist. Yes, the problems that the planet faces are daunting. Yes, the implications of global warming are scary as hell. But I’m firmly convinced that we frail and frequently irrational humans have what it takes to save our collective bacon. I’m optimistic that we are going to solve the climate problem, and it isn’t going to be as wrenching as some seem to think.

Sure, you’re saying. Smith is feeling rosy because he’s upped his daily dosage of Vitamin D. Though that may be true, my current chuffed mood is mostly due to three events this past week which, though unrelated, foreshadow betters days to come.

1. The UK election results: The new Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government in the UK has promised a very ambitious green energy and green jobs agenda. Small aside: if ambitious green-ness is de rigueur for UK Tories, why aren’t Canadian Tories getting with the programme? But more on this in a future blog.) Most interesting is the fact that the environmental platforms of all parties in the UK election were amazingly similar, and amazingly green.

Simply put, concern for the environment in Europe, including in the UK, has now officially transcended political ideologies. Like the current 100% coast to coast to coast Canadian excitement regarding the Habs’ Stanley Cup playoff chances, there is unanimity on the issue.

2. Meanwhile, back on this side of the pond, an historic climate change bill was finally introduced in the US Senate yesterday. Though many naysayers are already writing its obituary, I would humbly point out that the leading edge of the still-gushing BP oil spill haven’t even begun to hit the US coast yet. When that happens CNN will ensure that the images of oiled wildlife and destroyed fishing and tourism livelihoods are broadcast 24/7. This spill is going to get much worse before it gets better. And the best way to stop future catastrophic oil spills is to build more reliable renewable energy sources fast. You read it here on the Dragon’s Den first: this US climate bill is gonna pass.

3. The last thing making me cheery this week is much closer to home, though no less significant. Every time I go to my Facebook page now, multiple ads pop up urging me to install solar panels on my home, ‘cause the new Ontario Green Energy Act makes it financially worthwhile for people to do so. Thousands of people all across the province are now lining up to become solar (and wind and biogas and geothermal) entrepreneurs.

The common theme in all of this? The green new world has arrived. The changes we need to accomplish to both put our economy on a more sustainable footing, and to reduce planet-damaging pollution, are happening. The wind is at our back (pun fully intended!).

Today's Shooter in Foot - CME

2010-05-13T08:28:00.000-07:00

The interesting and disturbing phenomenon of people voting against their own interests - particularly in the U.S. - has been fairly well explored, but aren't Canadian business people supposed to be rational actors when it comes to their economic interests?

Not entirely, it turns out. The Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters (CME) have joined tar sands interests in a big lobby push on Parliament Hill this week, pushing the one sided argument that tar sands means all economic upside. But, in doing so, is CME actually acting against the interests of its own members? Well, could be, if "manufacturing" and "exporting" are what it's all supposed to be about.

As we've explored before, because of expanded tar sands production, Canada is succumbing to "Dutch Disease," a term coined in the 1970's to describe the hollowing out of the Netherlands' manufacturing base when a major natural gas find pushed up the currency rate and priced its products out of international markets. The Canadian dollar now tracks closely with the price of oil, and with increasing scarcity, will go ever higher over time, thereby making the products of Canadian manufacturers more expensive vis-a-vis their international competitors.

One study found that 42 per cent of recent Canadian manufacturing job loss was due to our petro-dollar. The Government of Ontario estimates that a sustained 5 cent change in the dollar affects about $6 billion in Ontario's GDP. The Government of Quebec recently flagged the petro-dollar issue in its budget.

So, the question is whether CME lobbies on behalf of all of its members, or only those involved in the tar sands. If we are to have healthy manufacturing and exporting in Canada, we need to cure our Dutch Disease.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Bad Math

2010-05-12T10:39:00.000-07:00

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon today pleaded with Canada to both put climate change on the G8/G20 agenda and to live up to its greenhouse gas targets.

But, if the Canadian government does what it says it will do and follows lockstep with U.S. climate legislation, the chances of meeting even its weak national target are slim.

The reason is that, as expected, the draft Senate climate and energy Bill out today waits until 2016 before adding industry into its carbon cap, tackling electricity first. Yesterday, we pointed out the difference in the two countries, with electricity emissions being proportionally more than double the share of emissions in the U.S., while our main problem in Canada is exploding tar sands emissions.

Here is some bad math to illustrate the problem with Canada mimicking this approach - the math is bad both because it is very crude on our part, but also because it adds up to big problems for our kids.

Where could Canada end up, emissions-wise by 2016?

Our current (weak) target is to cut our emissions by 17% from 2005 levels by 2020. Canada's emissions in 2005 were 731 million tonnes, and 17% below that is 607 million tonnes. Our latest emissions numbers in 2008 were 734 million tonnes, so by 2020 we have a 127 million tonne cut to make.
In following the U.S. on tackling electricity first, the Canadian government is vastly helped by the fact that the Ontario government has already pledged to shut down it's coal fired power plants by 2014, which account for about 23 million tonnes of emissions.
Ottawa estimates that by following the U.S. vehicle efficiency regulations, it will cut 28 million tonnes of emissions by 2016 - although it's unclear whether this figure is an absolute reduction or a reduction from "business as usual." Let's be charitable for purposes of illustration here and call it an absolute reduction.
But, Ottawa also estimates that tar sands emissions will grow by about 70 million tonnes by 2020, so if we say that 2016 is about half way there, we could be adding about 35 million tonnes by that point.

So, adding up the crude numbers by 2016, we get:

- 23 (Ontario coal shut down, assuming replaced with zero emission options)
- 28 (vehicle efficiency, being charitable)
+ 35 (tar sands growth)
- 16 (Net)
111 (Distance from the 127 million tonne cut needed by 2020 - about 87% away)

This math assumes nothing else will happen, policy-wise, which we hope is untrue. Provincial policies are rolling out, albeit slowly, and Environment Minister Jim Prentice seems to be cooking up something behind closed doors with the utility industry.

Yet, the math illustrates just how big a gap such policies would have to fill, if by 2016 if Canada follows the U.S. in allowing industrial emissions a pass until then. It's doubtful the math would work.

We have a circumstance with the tar sands that the U.S. doesn't have, and if we wait to tackle those emissions, there's no way we'll hit Ottawa's weak target and keep pace with the Americans.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Eagle vs. Beaver pollution

2010-05-11T06:13:00.000-07:00

If you ever needed evidence that our government in Ottawa is simply stalling on climate change when it says "we will wait and copy the U.S.," just watch the release of the U.S. Senate draft energy and climate legislation tomorrow.

The painfulness of the U.S. legislative process is notorious, and full credit should be given to the Canadian government for finding a climate dodge that the Canadian media has largely bought by saying it must do nothing on climate since we'll have to harmonize with the U.S. later.

The spill in the Gulf will play short term havoc with the draft Senate Bill, since it had been written with a mind to get moderate Republicans (if that isn't an oxymoron) onside by also promoting offshore drilling. Now, Democrats whose constituents are horrified by the BP spill are likely to harden their stance against offshore drilling, thereby taking away votes that the Bill cannot afford to lose.

This chaos in the Senate is exactly the kind of thing the Canadian government has been counting on - and in addition it can't seem to help itself by taking advantage of the spill to talk up the tar sands.

Yet, while the offshore provisions may change, the draft Senate Bill may still set the tone for other aspects of climate and energy policy in the U.S., aspects that our federal government keeps pledging to copy.

One aspect in particular bears some exploration, since it gets at a big difference between how the U.S. and Canada pollute differently with regards to global warming, and means that if we simply copy U.S. efforts, there's no way we will even meet the weak national emissions reduction target that Ottawa is now promoting.

The draft Senate Bill takes the approach of clamping down on the U.S. electricity sector sooner and harder than on other U.S. industry. Without commenting on the merit of this approach, if Canada were to follow this lead, we'd be doing less than the U.S. since our electricity sector accounts for less than half of what the U.S. electricity sector does on a proportional basis.

See the following pie charts for the difference between the countries (all numbers sourced from EPA and Environment Canada):

Also, consider these trends:

· In 1990, the electricity sector accounted for 30% of US emissions and by 2008 it had grown to 35% of US emissions.

· In 1990, industry accounted for 25% of US emissions, and by 2008 it had shrunk to 19% of US emissions.

· In 1990, the electricity sector accounted for 16% of Canadian emissions, and by 2008 it had shrunk to 15%.

· In 1990, industry accounted for 26% of Canadian emissions, and by 2008 it had grown to 28%. The mining, oil and gas industries in particular grew from 17% of total emissions in 1990 to 21% by 2008.

The fact of the matter is that the U.S. simply doesn't have a sector like the tar sands that is poised for explosive pollution growth over the coming years. This alone warrants an approach tailored to the Canadian context if we are to have any chance of meeting emissions reductions targets.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Dragon's Den: The True Impact of the Oil Spill

2010-05-07T14:00:00.000-07:00

Another in a continuing series of blogs for CBC's Dragon's Den:

The environmental event of the week, the year, and potentially the decade, is the ongoing BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. If you haven’t properly absorbed the scale of this thing, check out this, and this and this. The “world’s whitest beaches turn black” is a particularly poignant headline.

What is clear is that this is a mammoth environmental and, likely, economic disaster.

What is less clear is how this oil spill will impact the complicated US debate regarding global warming.

For months now, the US Senate has been awaiting the unveiling of a historic new global warming law. Recent reports indicate it may be finally introduced next week.

In the fractious Senate, where even the Democrats are riven by regional differences, passing this bill at the best of times would be difficult. But in the midst of the slow-motion disaster unfolding around the BP spill, all of a sudden the terrain looks even more volatile than usual.

Does the oil spill make the passage of the Senate bill less likely by shattering the fragile coalition necessary to move it forward?

Or does the spill so thoroughly highlight the desperate need to move towards a post-oil economy that it makes adoption more likely?

Only time will tell.

But it may well be that the more lasting impact of the oil spill is measured in votes won or lost on the floor of the US Senate as opposed to dead turtles and grimy seabirds.

Clean energy jobs success stories

2010-05-06T04:39:00.000-07:00

The Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference wrapped up today in Washington.

Senator John Kerry kicked off the day by declaring "I don't want America to be Number Two (in clean energy). I want America to be Number One". We can't drill and burn our way out of the climate crisis, he said, so we need a clean energy revolution that reduces oil, creates jobs and protects the environment.

Senator Kerry's rallying cry was not empty political rhetoric. The rest of the day was filled with stories of how the U.S. is retooling its economy now to transition to clean energy.

For example, we heard from Chandra Brown, the president of United Streetcar in Oregon. Chandra was working for Oregon Iron Works (United Streetcar's parent company) in 2005 when she was shocked to learn that the U.S. was not manufacturing a single streetcar. She and others set out to change that, and last July, the first American-made streetcar in 58 years rolled out the door. The workers who had built it were so proud they all signed their names to it.

Portland, Oregon is now upgrading its streetcar system, supplied by United Streetcar. And, business owners along the streetcar routes are seeing economic gains from the increased public transit and are helping to fund it.

We also heard about the small town of Newton, Iowa. A long-time manufacturing centre for Maytag, the town was devastated when 1,800 people lost their job when the facility closed in 2006. Now, two wind manufacturers have moved into town, creating roughly 700 jobs. Iowa's renewable fuel standard is credited with helping to make that happen.

And, we heard about Trenton, Nova Scotia. In 2007, the TrentonWorks steel facility was closed, putting 330 people out of work. In March of this year, the province announced a joint venture with Daiwoo, a South Korean firm, to build wind turbine towers and blades on the site of the closed steel mill. It will employ 400 people when completed, putting steelworkers back on the job.

The Trenton example shows that Canada can create good, clean energy jobs, and provinces like Nova Scotia and Ontario are leading the way in the absence of federal leadership.

However, without federal leadership to spur the transition to a clean energy economy and ensure we harness new jobs in the fast growing sector, Canada will continue to fall behind. If the U.S. is gunning to be Number One in the clean energy race, I'd say our federal government is aiming for a solid last place finish.

Gillian McEachern
Program Manager, Climate and Energy
Environmental Defence

Green is Gold: US Clean Energy Agenda

2010-05-04T16:01:00.000-07:00

I'm writing from the Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference in Washington, D.C. The conference centre is packed with labour representatives, people working in green jobs, politicians, business leaders, environmental activists, municipal and state civil servants and more. And they're all here to share stories and strategies for creating new, good jobs retooling to a clean energy economy.

Some highlights from today include:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi kicked off the conference this morning, highlighting the importance the Obama administration is placing on clean energy and climate. "Green is gold," she said, and that she thinks clean energy and climate legislation can soon land on the President's desk. This is encouraging coming from the same woman who wrestled health care through the House.
The Mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, talked about building America's Solar City.
A presentation showing the possibility for the U.S. to dramatically reduce the amount of oil used in transportation, and that twice as many jobs were created per dollar spent on public transit compared to highway construction through the stimulus spending. The majority of tar sands oil feed the U.S. thirst for oil for transportation.

I presented on a panel on U.S. and Canadian climate and energy policy this afternoon and highlighted our new report on Canada's 66,000 lost clean energy jobs. The audience, mainly Americans, followed up with several questions about the tar sands. A few years ago, most Americans knew little or nothing about the tar sands. That's changing now as concerns mount over the environmental impacts of tar sands pipelines and refineries coursing through the U.S.

The devastating oil spill unfolding now in the Gulf has been a big topic of discussion at the conference. It adds a renewed urgency to the transition from polluting fossil fuels to clean energy as the risks and consequences of increasingly dangerous and dirty sources of oil - tar sands, oil shale, offshore - are being felt.

Gillian McEachern
Program Manager, Climate and Energy
Environmental Defence

Canada’s 66,000 Lost Clean Energy Jobs

2010-05-04T06:38:00.000-07:00

Today we released the first assessment of the jobs toll of our federal government’s failure to invest in clean energy. You can download the report and read the summary here.

We keep hearing from Minister Prentice that Canada will follow in America’s footsteps on climate and energy policy. We decided to test that claim by comparing the level of investment in clean energy of the two countries since President Obama came to power last January.

As it turns out, we’re nowhere close. The U.S. has invested heavily in clean energy – energy efficiency, greener transportation and renewable energy – over the past 18 months, while Canada has gone in the opposite direction and cut key programs. If Canada were matching the U.S. on a per person basis, an extra $11.5 billion would have been earmarked for clean energy. We're falling far behind the U.S.

This skewed level of support is now taking its toll on Canadian jobs. We used the ‘investment gap’, the difference between Canadian and U.S. spending on renewable energy, to estimate the number of new jobs that could have been created if we had actually matched our southern neighbour. So far, it has cost Canadians an estimated 66,000 jobs in renewable energy alone. We did not estimate the lost energy efficiency and transportation jobs, so the actual number of lost jobs is much higher.

Over the next two days, I’ll be at the Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference in Washington DC, listening to labour, business, politicians and environmentalists discuss how to make the U.S. a leader in the clean energy boom. As a sign of just how seriously they’re taking this issue, the conference draws thousands of people from across North America and will be addressed by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, U.S. House of Representatives majority leader Nancy Pelosi, and U.S. Senator John Kerry, among others.

And where’s Canada?

Gillian McEachern
Program Manager, Climate and Energy
Environmental Defence

Canada's Oil Spill

2010-05-03T08:39:00.000-07:00

We're putting out a report tomorrow that we put together not knowing that the BP oil spill would be happening when we released it.

Major catastrophes like the one now unfolding in the U.S. Gulf have a way of crystallizing the thinking of the day. The Exxon Valdez spill had both the legacy of polluting Prince William Sound but also of reinforcing for the wider public the fragility of wilderness in the face of reckless humans.

The context of the spill now unfolding in the Gulf is different. We now know we must end our use of fossil fuels or endanger our children by cooking the planet, yet we still resist changing due to inertia. We now realize that the easy-to-get fossil fuels are almost gone and so seem prepared to take ever bigger risks to get the hard stuff. Finally, we know there's a new economic race out there to be the company or the country best positioned to profit in the clean energy economy when fossil fuels are gone.

So, I suspect that this time out the longer term legacy of the BP spill will be to move the U.S. public to a new place on the urgency and benefits of transitioning to a clean energy economy.

Whether this new understanding reaches Canada is harder to say. Our government in Ottawa seems to have hardened itself against any challenges to its strategy of doubling down on tar sands promotion. Likewise, Canadian industry seems tone deaf - with Enbridge CEO Pat Daniel pitching his new tar sands pipeline to the fragile BC coast (just below where the Valdez spill happened) right at the time of the BP spill.

Tomorrow we'll release a report that quantifies for the first time how many jobs Canada is missing out on in the clean energy economy due to Ottawa's love affair with dirty oil. It's hard to see whether it will take a Canadian oil spill to change our politics too - let's hope not.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Dragon's Den: The Answer Is Blowing In The Wind

2010-04-29T11:26:00.000-07:00

One in a continuing series of blogs for CBC's Dragon's Den:

Yesterday, the United States government made a very significant, and welcome, announcement: The first offshore wind project in US waters is going ahead. The 468 mW, US$1 billion project, which was opposed by the late Senator Edward Kennedy, will see 130 wind turbines erected about 5 miles off Cape Cod. When completed it will generate enough electricity to power 200,000 homes. To give you some perspective, northern Europe already has 2,000 mW of offshore turbines with a goal of reaching 40,000 mW by 2020.

Any North American plans are still penny ante in comparison.

Why is this a significant decision? The answer is this: Wind energy, and other non-polluting sources of electricity, are the cornerstone of the new green economy. Given the devastating global warming implications of carbon dioxide pollution, we need to move to non-polluting green energy as soon as possible. And wind is a big part of that equation. A recent article in Scientific American estimated that providing ALL of the world’s energy needs from wind, water and solar by 2030 is totally feasible.

The Ontario government has started to lay plans for this transition. The new and innovative Green Energy Act here in Ontario will both result in a reduction in global warming pollution, and a resuscitation of the province’s manufacturing economy. The government estimates the first batch of contracts announced under the Green Energy Act alone will create 20,000 direct and indirect green jobs and attract about $9 billion in private sector investment. Somebody in the world is going to make the wind turbine towers, blades and complicated internal mechanisms. If we want those jobs, we’d better make sure that manufacturing happens right here in Ontario.

Oh ya. And wind energy, as opposed to coal plants – North America’s most common source of energy at present -- doesn’t kill people.

If you haven’t picked up on it yet, I’m downright excited about wind energy. Which brings me to another of yesterday’s events, the small rally held at Queen’s Park in opposition to wind turbines. As someone who slugs it out every day in defence of the environment, I’ll be the first to admit there are some bone-headed wind energy proposals out there. Top of that list is the large project proposed just offshore of the world-renowned bird area of Point Pelee. But there’s a big difference between some badly sited individual projects, and the nonsensical claims being leveled at wind power with respect to phantom “health effects”.

By and large, Bob Dylan was right (as usual): the answer is blowing in the wind.

Hundred Pound Weakling

2010-04-27T10:13:00.000-07:00

Today Environmental Defence Canada and NRDC are releasing a comparison of the low carbon fuel standards (LCFS) of California and British Columbia.

The verdict?

BC’s is a hundred pound weakling next to Schwarzenegger’s muscle. This is a shame in light of other good things that BC is doing on climate change – but this one has backfired due to the bad precedent it has set.

Our comparison comes at a time of intense lobbying by the Canadian government and tar sands industry in an attempt to weaken fuels progress in California, Washington, DC, and the European Union.

Unfortunately, the industry is already trotting out the weak BC standard in its attempts to undermine progressive action. The BC approach fails to do what the LCFS is supposed to do – require fuel suppliers to account for differences in global warming for different fuels. It ignores any accounting for high-carbon petroleum fuels. Nor does it separate the good biofuels from the bad ones. As such, unless it is fixed, the BC LCFS will likely do more harm than good in fighting global warming around North America and the world.

A LCFS is supposed to require that the “life cycle” carbon emissions of transportation fuels – the amount of pollution created by producing, transporting and burning the fuel – goes down over time. It is a tool that governments can use to cut global warming pollution and reduce oil dependency in the transportation sector.

California and BC are the first jurisdictions in North America to adopt low carbon fuel standards. They both set the same goal – to reduce the carbon content of fuel by 10% by 2020 – but that’s about the only similarity between the two.

While California requires fuel suppliers to account for carbon-heavy oil they sell, like tar sands oil, BC allows them to lump all fossil fuel together as if all are created equal from a carbon pollution perspective. Yet the life cycle carbon content of tar sands oil is 15-40% higher than conventional oil. This lets suppliers of tar sands oil off the hook for reducing emissions, and puts more burden on everyone else to do more than their fair share.

Already, nearly half of BC’s oil comes from the tar sands, and this is likely to increase as tar sands production ramps up over the next decade. As it stands, BC’s LCFS will do little to prevent the rise in global warming pollution that will result. The accounting loophole could allow a worsening petroleum mix to completely offset the benefits from any additional low carbon fuels used.

On biofuels, another glaring difference between the BC and California standards is in their treatment of the land use impacts of various biofuels. When land is used to grow biomass for fuel instead of food, new areas of forest or wetlands will inevitably be turned into farmland. This can have a big impact on the carbon stored in the ground, and when it is taken into account, some biofuels can lead to higher life cycle carbon emissions than fossil fuels. California, the U.S. EPA, and the European Union have all conducted significant analysis and modeling to account for this significant impact while BC has arbitrarily given a zero value without justification.

Low carbon fuel standards should encourage a transition to alternative fuel sources that produce less emission. The California standard achieves this by taking the land use impacts of biofuels into account, and can help drive innovation and research on new sources of fuel. The BC standard fails to do this, and thus props up some biofuels that may in fact be worse for the climate.

Gillian McEachern, Environmental Defence and Simon Mui, Natural Resources Defense Council

BPA Back-Up: Substance is Banned in Baby Bottles, but Not Yet “Toxic” in Canada

2010-04-27T06:23:00.000-07:00

It's true - bisphenol A (BPA) has not yet been added to the federal government’s Toxic Substances List. Chemicals on the Toxic Substances List must be managed in Canada while those that are not on the list may or may not be managed depending on things such as provincial regulations.

As you may recall, in October 2008, the government said BPA was “toxic" and recommended its addition to the Toxic Substances List given concerns for Canadians’ health and environment. Then, in June 2009, the government formally published the official proposal to add BPA to the list. After an official proposal is published, the public has a specific amount of time to send in comments before everything is finalized. Meanwhile, in March 2010 (as reported in our last Toxic Nation E-news), the government went ahead with making it illegal to advertise, sell, or import baby bottles containing BPA in Canada.

So, the good news is that BPA-polluted baby bottles are not longer allowed in Canada. But, the bad news is that its slow addition to the Toxic Substances List is concerning, particularly given the secrecy around its delay. As per Saturday’s Globe and Mail article, the reason for the delay is that someone/something “filed a formal notice of objection to the listing last summer”, but the government so far refuses to say who/what filed the notice of objection.

No other chemical determined to be “toxic” via risk assessments conducted via the federal Chemicals Management Plan (as BPA was) has yet to be added to the List of Toxic Substances.

Dragon's Den: The Earth Day Blog

2010-04-22T19:18:00.000-07:00

Fourth in a series for CBC's Dragon's Den:

Happy Earth Day!

I’m actually writing this blog while waiting for my flight back to Toronto from the Pittsburgh airport. I’ve been here for a couple of days with Bruce Lourie, my co-author on Slow Death by Rubber Duck, speaking to an amazing conference on Women’s Health & the Environment. One of the keynote speakers yesterday was Lisa Jackson, the new head of the US Environmental Protection Agency. She gave a kickass speech that brought the crowd of 2,000 women to their feet when she committed to totally overhauling the system of chemical regulation in the States: a system so dysfunctional it’s clearly not protecting the environment or human health.

And this brings me to the point of this Earth Day blog. As I outlined last week, yes, it’s important for consumers to be smarter and more demanding. Yes, it’s critical to read labels more carefully and purchase greener products. But ultimately, we can’t shop our way to a cleaner environment. The power of green consumerism has its limits in the absence of effective policies and regulations from governments.

On Earth Day, and every day, it’s important for people to be savvier consumers AND more engaged citizens.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not discounting, in any way, the amazing power of consumers voting with their dollar. I think the New York Times today has it completely wrong. Environmentalists engaging with the corporate sector is not a sell-out. Green consumerism is not a passing fad, or an unwelcome dilution of “real” environmental change. The opposite is true. It is precisely because environmentalism has become a more powerful mainstream concern that many companies want to meaningfully engage with the debate. And the push-pull relationship between consumers demanding greener and less polluting products (better value, in other words), corporations who need to change their polluting ways, and governments who need to set improved ground rules is a terrain that is richer in real possibilities for change than ever before.

The women in the room in Pittsburgh understand this. These are the folks who are simultaneously pushing the Obama administration to fix a ridiculously broken law that has only properly regulated 5 out of 80,000 synthetic chemicals in the past thirty years. But these are also the women who, through the power of their green consumerism, forced -- and I mean forced -- manufacturers of baby bottles to eliminate the hormone-disrupting chemical bisphenol A (BPA) from their products. This shift in consumer preference on BPA, and the resulting pressure on manufacturers, is making government action to ban BPA in the US much more likely. Green consumerism is paving the way for proper regulation.

The recent announcement of Ontario’s first renewable energy contracts under the new Green Energy Act is another interesting example of this interplay between consumer demand and government action. For a while now, a growing consumer hunger for greener electricity has been building businesses like the fantastic Bullfrog Power. Solar panels have been slowly popping up in the most unlikely places. http://www.bslvideo.com/ The McGuinty government took note of this change and introduced the innovative Green Energy Act – the first North American application of a European-style renewable energy system – and a policy that Al Gore has dubbed “the single best green energy program on the North American continent”. As a result, Ontario’s energy system is becoming much greener. And Ontario has a real shot at becoming a global leader in the manufacture of renewable energy equipment.

So this Earth Day, let’s celebrate the progress we’ve made. And let’s recommit ourselves as consumers and as citizens to buy smarter and demand better from our elected representatives.

We’ve come a long way from the days when dealing with corporations was considered high treason within the environmental movement. The infamous incident of the Loblaws green diapers springs to mind. These days, in fact, and much to my frequent surprise, environmentalists sometimes find themselves making common cause for the Earth with corporate actors over the loud objections of other, allegedly environmental, voices. I promise some tantalizing tidbits from this raging debate next week.

Love the Piano Scene

2010-04-21T09:41:00.000-07:00

Just as James Cameron, director of Avatar, says that the tar sands are giving Canada a "black eye," comes a mock 'Avatarsands' video.

I love the piano scene:

Prentice’s American Dreaming

2010-04-19T05:42:00.000-07:00

Recently, Reuters published leaked information on the contents of the climate and energy bill expected to be introduced in the U.S. Senate within the next couple of weeks. The U.S. House already passed its version, and the two bills will get reconciled before going to the President.

Given that our federal government has adopted a “Made in the U.S.A.” approach to its own climate and energy policy, it’s important to understand the implications for Canada of copying the Americans, whether it’s the Senate bill or otherwise.

Based on the Reuters story and other reports, it seems probable that the Senate bill will include a cap on global warming pollution from the electricity sector, with other sectors being phased in later, some type of fee on transportation fuel, a renewable energy standard and energy efficiency measures.

While this is far less ambitious than the comprehensive climate bill passed by the U.S. House last year, American legislators are actively grappling with global warming and clean energy and have committed billions of dollars to help transition to a clean energy economy and harness the jobs that come with it.

In contrast, Canada’s federal government is cutting clean energy funding and has no proposal on the table to reach its national target to reduce global warming pollution. The U.S. is investing 18 times more per person in renewable energy than we are. For all the rhetoric coming out of Ottawa, we are in fact not matching U.S. federal efforts.

If we take the Reuters story as one possible model for the Harper government to copy, what would this mean for Canada? Several things:

1. A hard cap on the electricity sector: Within Canada, Ontario is doing the heavy lifting on electricity sector emissions by shutting its coal plants, meaning a federal cap on the sector wouldn’t require much beyond what Ontario is already doing. Canada copying America on this could be largely meaningless, and also let other provinces off the hook.

2. Postponing action on other sectors: If we copy this, it means a free pass for the tar sands, Canada’s fastest growing source of emissions, a corollary for which doesn’t exist in the U.S. in relative terms. It will be hard, if not impossible, to meet our target – or match the U.S. on a percentage basis – without reigning in those sectors that are actually growing.

3. Other federal policies: To match Washington, DC, our federal government would need to step up to the plate to work with provinces to regulate the faster adoption of renewable energy and higher energy efficiency standards.

4. Bad federal policies: The Senate bill may also contain incentives for nuclear and new oil drilling, and allow the use of offsets. Canada wouldn’t need to change much to mimic this part – we’re already subsidizing nuclear and tar sands, and are happy to dodge real reductions at home by allowing carbon offsets (and in Canada, unlike the U.S., our government clings tightly to that other loophole – payments into a tech fund in place of reductions).

5. Provincial jurisdiction: The Senate bill may prevent states from implementing their own cap and trade programs. This comes with risks given what is on the table these days in the U.S. is far from an economy-wide system. In Canada, the federal government has been keen to sit back and let the provinces lead. Matching the US on this aspect would be a big change and mean that the federal government would have to be willing to step in and regulate Alberta so that it is making actual reductions like the other provinces.

Copying exactly the likely approach of the Senate could both be unfair to some provinces and result in failing to meet even the weak target that Ottawa has set for itself. Hitching our climate and energy to policy blindly to the U.S. is risky. Our government needs to start charting a Canadian approach to tackling global warming.

Rick Smith
Executive Director

Is the Tide Turning on Triclosan?

2010-04-15T13:31:00.000-07:00

Triclosan – a man-made antibacterial found in many soaps and sanitizers – has, perhaps, seen more encouraging days. While its use in all kinds of antibacterial consumer products continues to grow (think toothpastes, cutting boards, socks), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) questioning of the substance also seems to be expanding. That is to say that according to an article in last week’s Washington Post , the FDA responded to an inquiry about the chemical from U.S. Congressman Edward J. Markey by saying that recent research raises "valid concerns" about triclosan’s health effects (hormone-system disruption, bacterial resistance) and that the chemical is getting a renewed look.

On the day the above article was published, the FDA also posted a new Consumer Update titled “Triclosan: What Consumers Should Know”. Within this, it was noted that the “FDA does not have evidence that triclosan added to antibacterial soaps and body washes provides extra health benefits over soap and water”. The FDA’s review is slated to become public next spring.

Did you know? Triclosan has been found in 76% of liquid soaps and 29% of bar soaps in the U.S. according to this American Journal of Infection Control article by Perencevich, Wong, and Harris.

Did you also know? Triclosan has been found in almost 75% of the 2,517 Americans tested by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) between 2003-2004 according to this CDC webpage.

Dragon's Den: Made to Measure

2010-04-15T07:39:00.000-07:00

Blog #3 in a series for CBC's Dragon's Den

Last week I talked about how the first, and most important, ingredient of any claim to “green-ness” for a product is sincerity on the part of the manufacturer.
The next most important criterion is measurability. The product needs to objectively and quantifiably contribute to making the planet a better place. There are, obviously, as many different ways of doing this as there are products themselves.

A product can be clearly less polluting. Or less toxic. Perhaps it is more forest-friendly. Or more easily compostable. Green products can be very large and complicated. Or smaller in scale. They can be sexy. Or not so much. Some of them are familiar. And many of them most Canadians won’t have heard of.

What all of these things have in common is that they’re measurably better for the environment (and therefore human health) than their alternatives. Though these products may be the green real deal, the challenge in today’s market of cluttered, competing, green claims is to ensure that consumers believe this to be the case.

One way of achieving this is for manufacturers or retailers to submit to independently verified “green labels”. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), for example, certifies that paper products are environmentally-friendly. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is trying to do the same in the realm of seafood (though not without some hiccups). Before too long, I’m convinced, most things we buy will be covered by some third-party “green” certification scheme.

For the moment, most manufacturers don’t have the luxury of accessing such a process and need to fend for themselves. The only path forward is for them to do the homework and give consumers access to the detailed information that validates the green claim. In some cases, this involves contracting independent labs to do some serious in-depth research.

The result of all this? A heckuva lot of information for consumers to sift through, that’s what. It can be overwhelming. It can be maddening. Trying to analyze competing product claims can be difficult even for the most green-minded. And can we really shop our way to a greener planet, anyways? More on this next week.

Cooperation for a planet in need

2010-04-14T13:38:00.000-07:00

Today we applaud an example of the opposition parties coming together in Ottawa in a clear demonstration that the vast majority of MPs support federal action on global warming.

In one sitting, the Liberals, NDP and Bloc voted in favour of a motion put forward by Liberal Environment critic David McGuinty on a suite of key climate change measures, and of proceeding to a third reading of Bill C-311, the Climate Change Accountability Act.

The contents of the Bill and motion are a strong indication that these three parties support tough federal action – setting targets for reducing global warming pollution, reporting and transparency requirements around efforts to address climate change, and greater investment in clean energy and energy efficiency.

Most importantly, it has demonstrated that the opposition parties can cooperate on an ambitious agenda on clean energy and global warming. Canadians want to see our country lead in the clean energy economy. Currently, we are falling badly behind.

The U.S. is investing 18 times more per person in renewable energy than Canada, and is already reaping new clean energy jobs as a result. The U.S., South Korea, Australia, Mexico and Saudi Arabia all made larger investments in clean energy than Canada in their stimulus packages.

Canada needs to catch up or we’ll miss out on the clean energy boom, and we look forward to more of this kind of cooperation in Ottawa to get us there.

Rick Smith
Executive Director

McGuinty's gift to the Greenbelt: quarry rejected

2010-04-13T12:52:00.000-07:00

The Ontario Greenbelt Alliance, a coalition of more than 80 organizations dedicated to protecting the Greenbelt and furthering its objectives, applauded today’s decision by the provincial government to stop the development of the Flamborough quarry.

“Today's decision is important for both the protection of the environment and human health," said Dr. Rick Smith, Executive Director of Environmental Defence, an Ontario Greenbelt Alliance member. “This is a great gift to the Greenbelt in its fifth anniversary year."

Today's decision is a huge victory for Alliance member Friends of Rural Communities and the Environment who have worked tirelessly to defend their community’s drinking water, air quality and natural features.

This quarry would have been the first new industrial development of its kind in the natural heritage system of the Greenbelt. The proposed site and service roads would have cut through working agricultural lands, Provincially Significant Wetlands, significant woodlands and significant wildlife habitat that is home to a number of species at risk. In addition, the quarry was proposed to go below the water table threatening the safety of water quality for the thousands of residents who live in the area and rely on a ground-water based municipal drinking system.

While the introduction of Greenbelt legislation five years ago has done much to protect agricultural land and maintain natural habitats, proposals for aggregate mining continue to undermine this protection.

Heather Harding
Greenbelt Coordinator
Environmental Defence

Tories axe home retrofit support

2010-04-08T09:48:00.000-07:00

Last week, the Conservative government axed the ecoEnergy Retrofit – Homes program, which helped homeowners improve the energy efficiency of their houses.

Apparently, the program was too successful for its own good. Initially launched in 2007, the government topped up funding for it in the 2009 Economic Action Plan and then again in this year’s budget. In total, about $720 million was earmarked for home retrofits over the span of four years .

That may sound like a lot, but the much-touted Home Renovation Tax Credit (also part of the Economic Action Plan) cost the government $3 billion in a single year, more than four times the energy retrofit program .

That money could have been used to make another 2 million Canadian homes more energy efficient – saving families money, decreasing global warming pollution and creating new jobs. The federal government estimates that for every dollar spent on home energy retrofits, homeowners invest $10 in the local renovation industry.

The success of the program speaks to the fact that Canadians want to do their bit to cut energy use. Yet the government has canned it, along with funding for renewable energy and climate research. One more sign that this government is out of step with Canadians.

Click here to send Prime Minister Harper a letter urging him to restore the program.

Gillian McEachern
Program Manager
Environmental Defence

Dragon's Den: The Importance of Being Earnest

2010-04-08T06:59:00.000-07:00

Blog #2 in a series for CBC's Dragon's Den:

When selling anything, it’s important that consumers trust your product. Witness the recent Toyota mishap for a lesson in what happens when consumer confidence in a product, or in this instance an entire brand, goes south.

In a confusing market crowded with competing claims of “green-ness”, it’s doubly important that your customers believe your claim of “green” to be accurate. If this isn’t the case, at best your product won’t derive any measurable benefit from the “green” claim, at worst consumers will hold your perceived lack of transparency against you. Big time.

Take the example of Sigg bottles as a case in point.

For much of the last three years, the hormone-disrupting toxic chemical bisphenol A (BPA) has been in the news. My organization, Environmental Defence, has made it a signature campaign. Linked to breast and prostate cancer and a host of other human diseases, mounting scientific evidence convinced Canada in 2008 to become the first jurisdiction in the world to ban the chemical from baby bottles.

Since then, a variety of other jurisdictions have also moved. Some of these bans include restrictions on the chemical’s use in food can linings (likely the most significant source of exposure for people). As concerns about BPA gathered momentum starting in about 2006, Sigg, the Swiss-based maker of funky aluminum bottles, positioned their product as a “green” alternative to then-common, BPA-containing, plastic sports bottles. The company enjoyed substantial increases in sales in the process. At the time, Sigg categorically stated that their products were BPA-free. But then, lo and behold, late last year the company had to issue an embarrassing public apology admitting that right up until August 2008 their bottle linings did indeed contain the chemical.

To say the least, this really caused the BPA to hit the fan. If you plug “sigg” and “bpa” into Google, you get over 85,000 hits.

After the company admitted misleading its consumers the Web lit up like a Christmas tree with angry people denouncing their former-favourite metal bottle. In summing up the Sigg episode, Advertising Age wrote that the company had moved from a ”badge of consumer eco-consciousness and all-around cool” to being “in danger of becoming a poster child for brand deception and corporate dishonesty.”

The lesson of Sigg is that, first and foremost, claims that a product is “green” have to be sincere. Before making such claims a company better be darn sure that they are true. In this age of email, Twitter and by-the-minute Facebook updates, the moment a customer sniffs out a corporate untruth it will be broadcast far and wide before the hour is out. Sincerity isn’t the only important consideration in evaluating the relative “green-ness” of a product, but more about that next week.

Dragon's Den: Green Comes of Age

2010-03-31T13:40:00.000-07:00

The first in a weekly series of blogs I'm doing for CBC's Dragon's Den:

Green Notes : Green Comes of Age
Posted on March 31, 2010 3:18 PM

There was a time, not that long ago, when "concern for the environment" was a marginal activity. It was about protecting faraway, inaccessible, forests and obscure endangered rabbits. It involved eating unpalatable, cardboard-like, veggie burgers and organic spelt. It was of interest only to the most hardcore devotees of unflattering sandals.

But times have changed.

It's hard to date exactly when things flipped and the environmental movement's decades-long effort emerged fully into the mainstream. The release of Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" in 2006 had a huge impact. Here in Ontario, the environmental debate was fundamentally transformed by the advent of Dalton McGuinty's ambitious green platform in 2003. What is certain is that Barack Obama's election last year sealed the deal. It's difficult to see any daylight between Obama's economic plans and his environmental ones. The President has convincingly made the case that there is green to be made in green, and that the road to America's 21st Century prosperity and jobs creation lies through a "green economy."

"Environment" ain't just for granola-munchers anymore. All of a sudden, the whole world is green. It's become politically de rigueur to at least be seen to be green. The US military is going green. Even the largest, most sluggish, corporations are scrambling to put their sustainability strategies in place. And in the depths of a recession, the new green consciousness has proven it's here to stay.

The realization that there's good money to be made in ideas and ventures and businesses that also protect the environment has permanently transformed the environmental discussion. Now, we see the Clean Energy Economy being hailed as the "new Internet." A recent report estimated that the clean energy technology sector will grow into a US $2.4 trillion industry by 2020, surpassed only by automobiles and electronics. That ain't no chump change. The new Green Energy Act, adopted a few months ago by Ontario, is as much about resuscitating the manufacturing economy as it is about reducing carbon pollution. Provinces are now competing against each other for green investment. And the "green economy" isn't just about energy. It's about making things in less toxic ways. It's about new approaches to waste management (though the relative merits of waste incineration remain an open question), and it's about creating new jobs by conserving water.

Which brings us to Dragon's Den (a show that my wife Jen and I have loved for a while) and Greenvention. With "green business" poised to be such a huge investment opportunity, what could be more appropriate than television's most fun and most watched investment program focusing on this area for Earth Day. May the best Greenvention win! More next week with some tips on the good vs. the bad when it comes to green products.

It’s Official: BPA Banned in Canadian Baby Bottles!

2010-03-31T11:48:00.000-07:00

Riding on yesterday's post about bisphenol A (BPA) movement in the U.S. and Denmark, today, Canada published a notice that polycarbonate baby bottles containing BPA have been legally banned from advertisement, sale, and importation into Canada since March 11, 2010. So following on its earlier global lead in proposing such action, Canada has just become the first country to fully enforce BPA restrictions!

US and Denmark Move Forward on BPA

2010-03-30T11:57:00.000-07:00

This past week has been a bad one for BPA, but another affirmative one for Canada. To expand, action initiated by Canada against the hormone-mimicking chemical is becoming more globalized with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announcing that it is going to intensify its study of BPA’s effects and consider designating it as a “chemical of concern”, and with the Danish government introducing a temporary national ban on BPA-containing products in contact with children’s food.

In the US, yesterday’s news is particularly welcome for those pushing for federal action on BPA as the chemical failed to be added to the EPA’s “chemicals of concern” list last December. It also follows an earlier US Food and Drug Administration announcement that BPA poses “some concern” for the health of fetuses, infants, and young children.

The Danish ban is undergoing a three-month transitional period, with a full prohibition on certain BPA-containing products used by 0 – 3 year old children beginning on July 1, 2010. It is a precautionary response to a recent assessment by the National Food Institute at the Technical University of Denmark which raised uncertainty about BPA’s low-dose effect on learning capacity.

BPA is a massively produced chemical used to make polycarbonate plastic (recycling # 7) food and beverage containers, the linings of metal food cans, and various other products from which it can leach. Canada was the first country to take action on BPA, proposing that it be designated as “toxic” in Canada and that it be banned from baby bottles.

Enbridge Green or Brown?

2010-03-23T16:24:00.000-07:00

Enbridge has a red and orange-y logo, but reaches for that bit of green. On its website, it even lays claim to going "Towards a Neutral Footprint." So, how, exactly, does ramming a tar sands pipeline down the throats of British Columbians fit into that vision?

That should be the question that Enbridge employees are asking themselves today after a large and diverse coalition of BC voices joined together to reject its Gateway pipeline proposal.

If Enbridge is listening, even just a little bit, it would pull the plug and instead try to live up to its green rhetoric. You can't traffic in dirty oil and expect the world to believe you are trying to do the right thing.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Not outside enjoying the weather and looking for something to do?

2010-03-18T11:31:00.001-07:00

Well, then perhaps consider doing a survey on people's daily exposures to chemicals! This survey being conducted by the National Network on Environments and Women's Health (NNEWH), in collaboration with the Canadian Women's Health Network, is trying to gather information from as broad a range of people in Canada as possible, with a particular interest in responses from women. Please fill it in by March 24th and encourage others to do so as well. The results will be published on NNEWH’s website sometime this spring, and made known to Health Canada. Click here for the English version and here for the French version of the survey.

Dollar parity? You ain't seen nothing yet...

2010-03-16T13:05:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: The Globe and Mail today has two interesting things on this. First, a blog by Jeff Rubin on the petro-dollar (which we think is better than his attack on low carbon fuel standards). And second, a story that essentially says that manufacturing is doing fine despite the rising dollar - although we'll apparently have to get used to fewer jobs...)

The Canadian dollar is once again on the cusp of parity with the U.S. dollar. On one level, this inspires a sense of national pride, of muscular loonies beating up on American eagles, until, that is, you look a little deeper.

The pin stripes on Bay Street make all that exchange rate stuff sound very complicated, and far be it for this environmentalist to want a cage match with a bunch of economists. But, then you look at a graph charting the price of oil and the Canadian dollar over the past year and you can't help but notice the similarity:

Turns out that because of rampant tar sands production we now have our very own petro-dollar, or "petro-loonie" that rises and falls with the price of oil.

This might not be so bad - cheaper vacations in Florida and all that - other than the fact that we can expect very soon lots of painful noises coming from our manufacturing sector about how they are being priced out of international markets and need to lay people off. This just in time for a fragile economic recovery. And, with ever more tar sands production being promised by our government and with the prospect of oil prices going even higher, how high will the loonie go?

For a fact sheet on the petro-loonie, visit here.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Eating Seal Meat While the Planet Burns

2010-03-09T12:46:00.000-08:00

Just how much more messed up can Canadian politicians appear to the rest of the world? Plenty, it turns out.

Canada lost whatever was left of its international boy scout image during the Copenhagen UN climate negotiations last December. Turns out our government cares much more about strip mining for oil than it does about passing along a stable atmosphere to our children.

So, what are we doing to clean the tarnished maple leaf? Well, after a prorogation to Own the Podium, we come back with a budget that cements our last place showing in the race to get a piece of the emerging two and a half trillion dollar clean energy market, and then key up a seal meat buffet in the Parliamentary restaurant so that our politicians can all poke their fingers in the eyes of those nasty Europeans.

In your face, world! We own the dirty oil podium too and will beat all challengers away with seal picks!

Oh Canada. All thy sons command quite a mess.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence Canada

Avatar(sands) has our vote

2010-03-04T14:44:00.000-08:00

Watching the scenes in the movie Avatar depicting ‘unobtainium’ mining felt eerily like reliving my trip to the tar sands – the pristine forests being torn away to create ugly strip mines, the giant trucks, the obsessive drive for a dwindling resource. The only thing missing from the theatre were the toxic fumes so prevalent when flying over the tar sands.

Today, 55 environmental groups and First Nations from eight countries ran a full-page ad in Variety, the most influential Hollywood magazine, praising Canadian-born James Cameron for bringing to light in his movie the reality of Canada’s tar sands.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Produces shot back by claiming that the ad is blurring the line between fact and fiction, then went on to craft its own fantasy story about the ‘responsible oil’ flowing from the tar sands.

CAPP claimed that “oil sands development does not go ahead without direct and meaningful Aboriginal consultation about both environmental impacts and economic benefits.” Yet George Poitras from Mikisiew Cree First Nation downstream from the tar sands said in response:

“I would question CAPP's take on characterizing us as "their" neighbours. I am a member and former Chief of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, the largest First Nation in the Athabasca tarsands and today our First Nation has no "formal" relationship with Syncrude or Suncor, that after 40 years is not something I would characterize as good corporate responsibility. They actually have both recently been applying pressure to the First Nations in our community of Fort Chipewyan for speaking out publicly about environmental, health and other issues that we have observed with the unrelenting pace of tarsands development in the past few years.”

CAPP also claimed that “all lands disturbed by oil sands development must be fully reclaimed” yet after 40 years in operation, only 0.2% of the land has been reclaimed. And according to them, Canada “currently has GHG regulation in place.” Um, sorry, but last time we checked Canada was still hiding behind the US on that one. Canada has no regulations to reduce global warming pollution from big polluters like the tar sands.

So who’s really blurring the line between fact and fiction?

Throne Speech - Canada Falling Behind

2010-03-03T12:04:00.000-08:00

It's pretty amazing in this day and age that you can have a section of a speech titled "Building the Jobs and Industries of the Future" and then in that section fail to recognize that the world's next industrial revolution will centre on getting carbon out of our economy.

Yet, this is exactly what today's Throne Speech by the Harper government does. Worse, in service of becoming a "clean energy superpower" the government promises to soften rules on energy exploitation. Many would say that the tar sands industry, for example, is already out of control, in part due to the failure of the federal government to enforce laws now on the books.

The speech does promise to invest in clean energy technologies, but fails to say whether this involves recapitalizing the successful ecoEnergy program that has now run out of money, or whether this will instead be more money for unproven carbon capture and storage programs.

The Speech closes by lauding the incredibly weak Copenhagen accord, and consistent with that, fails to articulate how - or even whether - it will reduce greenhouse gas pollution in Canada.

In all, a disappointing but not surprising speech by a government that seems frozen in the past while our competitors jump ahead in creating the new energy economy of tomorrow.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence Canada

It's Not About the Ducks

2010-03-02T06:05:00.000-08:00

Exxon is widely known for its hardball legal tactics. From the high profile Exxon Valdez case that the company dragged out over 20 years, to small scale battles, the company is known for choosing to fight rather than settle.

Imperial Oil, Exxon's Canadian subsidiary, is 25% owner of Syncrude, with an ex-Exxon man now the President and CEO. The news that Syncrude is arguing against being charged for the oily death of ducks in one of its tar sands tailings pond is therefore no surprise.

And this despite running full page ads at the time apologizing for the incident.

Part of this is about the tar sands industry not wanting the federal government to finally enforce its laws after getting away with the province of Alberta giving it free reign to destroy Northern Alberta. Syncrude's lawyer in the duck case stated that the federal migratory bird act, being used by prosecutors:

"was not ever designed to be used to regulate Alberta's natural resources. This is the toe of the federal government coming into the regulation of Alberta natural resources."

In other words, provincially mandated natural resource exploitation should be exempt from federal environmental laws. But, Canadian law students learn in first year constitutional law that in cases of shared jurisdiction, like environment, when push comes to shove, federal jurisdiction trumps provincial jurisdiction.

Yet, ever since the NEP, there has been a reluctance on the part of Ottawa to enforce its laws in Alberta, and a constant war waged by successive Alberta politicians to push the feds out of their way. The result is failure to enforce a range of federal laws in the tar sands, from the Fisheries Act to the Species At Risk Act.

But another part of Exxon's aggressive legal strategy is that it doesn't just want the feds out of its way, but it wants everyone out of its way. It will challenge enforcement by any level of government anytime. At its core this is about accountability and not wanting any. It's a perfect metaphor for the tar sands in general.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence Canada

Bernier tip of the iceberg?

2010-02-24T10:23:00.000-08:00

Now, Maxime Bernier isn't exactly known as one of the more disciplined members of the Harper caucus, so one wonders whether his climate denial letter to la Presse was sanctioned by the PMO.

The Harper Conservatives have done a relatively good job pivoting from their denialist tendencies in opposition - with Harper himself questioning the science - to adopting different do-nothing arguments in government while staying away from denialism.

But, cracks have started to appear of late (here and here) that go beyond Bernier. The danger to Harper is that his troops believe the hype surrounding the leaked email incident and use this as an excuse to break their message discipline.

If they do, there will be many more slap-downs from scientists, such as the one in la Presse on the Bernier letter who said of him:

"When you're claiming to be talking science, you have to do it using existing scientific standards. These comments show this MP hasn't done his homework. Based on his ill-informed comments, he fails this test."

And, as our recent poll in Quebec showed, that can't be good when you are trying to recruit those voters standing in between you and a majority government - or possibly the opposition bench.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Quebecers see through oily smokescreen

2010-02-17T06:45:00.000-08:00

Recently, Quebecers have been told to suck up rising global warming pollution from the oil sands because of the money oil companies contribute to equalization. But new polling released today by Environmental Defence and Equiterre show Quebec residents aren’t buying that line.

56% of people surveyed disagreed that they should accept increased global warming pollution due to money received from the oil sands in Alberta. The appointment of Christian Paradis, a Quebec M.P., to oversee the tar sands file hasn’t helped to win over public opinion either, the poll showed. And 52% of people said they are LESS likely to vote for Prime Minister Harper’s government because of his climate change policies.

The poll comes on the heels of the firestorm kicked off when Environment Minister Jim Prentice chided Quebec for being too ambitious with its new vehicle efficiency regulations.

Time to wake up Ottawa – Quebecers are seeing through all this spin and want action on global warming, not just threats and rhetoric.

Gillian McEachern
Program Manager, Climate and Energy

Will Bill Gates save us?

2010-02-13T05:07:00.000-08:00

So Windows may still have some glitches, but he can save the planet, right?

Bill Gates is doing amazing work on developing vaccines, and now it appears he may also turn his attention - and possibly some of his fortune - to developing energy solutions.

He raised eyebrows last year with his visit to the tar sands, one of the very worst energy sources if we are at all serious about stopping our atmosphere from deteriorating (and turning Northern Alberta into a toxic theme park).

So, it would be very helpful is someone as iconic as Bill Gates joined the fight against global warming in earnest.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Don't SLAPP me

2010-02-12T12:44:00.000-08:00

Today over 60 groups in Ontario released a letter calling on the McGuinty government to follow Quebec and dozens of U.S. states in banning so-called SLAPPs - strategic lawsuits against public participation.

Some citizens who speak out in the democratic process find themselves at risk of losing everything when big money interests take them to court. Even if those lawsuits end up being thrown out, it has a chilling affect, since many can't afford the legal fees to fight in court.

So, if we want a well functioning democracy, citizens should not be afraid to speak out. The McGuinty government should pass legislation prohibiting SLAPPs.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Use the Force, Gary!

2010-02-11T10:11:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if the situation is redeemable, or whether Gary Doer has been lost to the dark side forever. See here for a piece today in the Winnipeg Free Press.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Get well, Jack

2010-02-05T13:19:00.000-08:00

Regardless of political stripe, elected officials deserve our support when cancer strikes. So, today we'd like to send our very best wishes to Jack Layton as he battles prostate cancer. We know he's the kind of person who can beat it.

Cancer will hit one in three of us, and has already hit staff at Environmental Defence, including myself. This is one of the reasons we work so hard to address the environmental causes of cancer, including toxic contamination.

Jack as well as elected officials in other parties have been supportive of this work in the past, having their blood tested for contaminants, and we look forward to working with him and others further when he makes a full and healthy recovery.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Talk Tough, But Bluff

2010-02-02T06:32:00.000-08:00

Yesterday federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice told a Calgary audience that "we need to up our game, in terms of both environmental vigilance and in terms of our communication efforts" on the tar sands. Well, those communications efforts are clearly underway, but how about that environmental vigilance?

Not only is the federal government failing to enforce existing federal laws (like the Fisheries Act) to reduce the environmental impacts of the tar sands, but is relying on other provinces to make deeper cuts in global warming pollution to allow tar sands to grow. The government recently weakened its national target for reducing emissions. Yesterday’s official submission to the UN as follow up to the Copenhagen climate summit announced our new target as "17% (below 2005), to be aligned with the final economy-wide emissions target of the United States in enacted legislation." In other words, that may be our target, but we won't really decide or start to act until the US has passed climate legislation.

The new weak federal target, when combined with stronger provincial targets, means that leading provinces like Quebec, Ontario and BC will be cutting emissions by 20% more than the rest of the country. They're taking the burden while tar sands emissions grow.

This new target also makes Canada unique among developed countries: we are the only one to date that has signed up with the UN for an increase over 1990 levels by 2020, putting us out of step with the U.S., Japan, Australia and the European Union.

Gillian Mceachern
Program Manager
Environmental Defence

Wall St. Journal Takes On The Duck

2010-02-01T10:54:00.000-08:00

The Wall St. Journal attacked parents' concerns over toxic chemicals in consumer products in a Saturday, January 30, lead editorial. Dismissing studies about the dangers of the hormone-disrupting chemical bisphenol A (BPA) in products such as baby bottles, the Journal editors said "In their book ‘Slow Death by Rubber Duck,’ Canadian activists Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie chronicle how they used the media to terrify soccer moms who then petitioned the government to ban BPA."

Bruce and I issued the following response late yesterday:

"The Wall St. Journal insults the intelligence of concerned parents and scientists who know it is dangerous for children's health to use products such as baby bottles and sippy cups made from plastic containing BPA. Hundreds of recent studies have linked BPA to human ailments as varied as prostate and breast cancer and heart disease. In our tests, documented in the book, our BPA levels rose 7.5 times over 48 hours after eating and drinking from microwaveable BPA plastic containers. The chemical reached levels in our urine that many recent studies have found to have a biological effect. And infants, who are often exposed to BPA leaching from both the plastic in their baby bottles and the lining of infant formula cans, have far greater exposure to chemicals relative to their body weight and nutritional intake.

The Wall St. Journal is putting powerful vested interests above children's safety on toxic chemical issues. Its editorial rejects the basic purpose of scientific research saying 'Environmentalists hope that if researchers run more tests, they'll come up with more links...Thus, they ask for tests unto eternity.' In fact, it was the lack of studies that prompted us to use ourselves as lab rats. Our families would have certainly preferred it if studies had been conducted in modern laboratories, instead of us pioneering them in our homes.

We welcome the opportunity for dialogue and invite the Wall St. Journal editors and any of their friends in the chemical industry to have an honest on-air discussion about the safety of these chemicals for our children. We will even offer them a chair on stage throughout our book tour.

We agree, however, with the Wall St. Journal's comment that 'BPA is everywhere in our lives'. It was this frightening fact which inspired us to write the book."

Harper Prorogues the Planet

2010-01-31T05:01:00.001-08:00

Fearing embarrassing questions about why there's no winter at the winter Olympics, Stephen Harper prorogued the planet today. The Canadian public reacted with predictable outrage, with several thousand people unfriending the Prime Minister on Facebook, wiping out all the gains he made by singing the Beatles.

"We needed the time to recalibrate," said the Prime Minister, "And by that I mean approving a bunch more tar sands projects while I distract everyone by saying our emissions targets are just like the Americans."

The opposition parties reacted by promising to show up on the planet anyway so that they could keep fighting with each other about the best way to save it. "We refuse to accept that Harper can unilaterally suspend his divide and conquer campaign against us," said an opposition spokesperson, "So we'll show up at work as usual, at each other's throats until the planet is cooked permanently."

As imagined by:
Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

More Make-Up Clean-Up Coming?

2010-01-28T14:11:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow afternoon, it is anticipated that the federal government will publish their draft decision on whether or not another concerning chemical used in personal care products will be proposed as "toxic" in Canada. If it is, the government can propose actions intended to reduce our exposures.

A quick search in the U.S.-based Cosmetics Database revealed that the concerning chemical commonly known as BHA/scientifically known as phenol, (1,1-dimethylethyl)-4-methoxy- can be found in lipstick, eye shadow, moisturizer, mascara, and other personal care products. We found a few of the BHA-containing products in the Cosmetics Database on Canadian store shelves. However, that's not all BHA might be in. Information suggests that it may also be found in food packaging and food (e.g., butter, meats, glazed fruits, cereals, baked goods, snack foods, nuts).

So why are we concerned? Well, BHA has been classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" by the International Agency for Research on Cancer and is “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen" according to the U.S. National Toxicology Program. It is also a carcinogen on California's Prop 65 list of substances "known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity".

BHA, or butylated hydroxyanisole, has the CAS No. 25013-16-5. It is being evaluated through the federal government's Chemicals Management Plan.

Satellite images of tailings ponds

2010-01-25T05:35:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of information wanting to be free, and with a credit to Global Forest Watch Canada, below are the satellite images of toxic tailings "ponds" (lakes, really) from the tar sands we first published in our report about talings ponds leakage - in short, all of the ponds leak massive amounts of toxic materials into the groundwater every day. The series shows the growth of the earthen structures (no liners) from 1974 through to the present, including the last one showing the future - the ponds now approved to happen.

The latest on this issue is that both the Alberta and federal governments continue to deny that the toxic leakage reaches surface waters, despite documented cases of it doing so (Suncor's infamous tar island dyke, and Syncrude's Beaver Creek incident), plus industry acknowledgement in their environmental assessment filings that it will take place. Furthermore, neither level of government can show that the 'deep' leakage into the groundwater won't get into surface waters over time, and some of the dangerous substances like napthenic acids break down only over many decades.

The federal government, however, says it is investigating the matter, but so far there has been no enforcement of the Fisheries Act. Stay tuned.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence

Talings ponds have been coloured yellow

1974

1992

2002

2008

Future - Approved Ponds

Rubin-esque

2010-01-20T08:54:00.001-08:00

I have a lot of sympathy for one of Jeff Rubin's core arguments - that high oil prices have been ignored when compared to the sub-prime mortgage mess when talking about the cause of the recent recession.

I even bought and read his best-selling book on this, and recommend it.

But, today Rubin misrepresents California's efforts to reduce the carbon content of fuels sold in that state, and by extension the whole rationale behind so-called 'low carbon fuel standards' everywhere. He characterizes California's push as a "ban" on tar sands oil in particular, when it is no such thing - it requires fuel sellers in California to reduce the overall carbon content of fuel sold there, and lets them do this by blending higher carbon options - like tar sands oil - with lower carbon options, or indeed by buying credits from lower carbon electricity sources feeding electric vehicles.

By doing this, California helps call the question of whether the tar sands industry and their Alberta and federal government boosters are actually serious about reducing the carbon content of tar sands oil, as they claim to be by directing billions of dollars of taxpayer money into carbon capture and storage, or whether this is ultimately a very expensive green washing exercise.

Indeed, documents we recently obtained under Access to Information indicate that the federal government knows the carbon content of tar sands oil is likely to go higher rather than lower, due to factors such as the shift to the more carbon intensive steam injection method, through having mined out the easiest to reach deposits, and through the likelihood that the Alberta government will allow the industry to burn much dirtier feed stocks than natural gas to generate its energy for production.

Those same documents also show our federal government lobbying the California government on low carbon fuel standard using tar sands industry-funded numbers that it knew to be "not transparent" and "out of date." These are our civil servants doing the industry's bidding using misleading information.

Ultimately, a low carbon fuel standard is akin to the consuming jurisdiction enacting a carbon tax if the producing jurisdiction doesn't do it - and do it at a level that actually reduces emisisons. This is exactly what is now unfolding between California and other jurisdictions interested in a robust response on the one hand, and the lame response we have so far seen from Alberta and the Canadian government on the other.

Matt Price
Policy Director
Environmental Defence