Canada’s 66,000 Lost Clean Energy Jobs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: