I will be moderating the panel discussion Green Energy Perspectives – What Does the Future Hold at the upcoming annual conference of the Municipal Waste Integration Network (MWIN).

Date: June 23
Panel Time: 3:30 – 4:30 pm
Location: Ajax Convention Centre (550 Beck Crescent Ajax, ON L7L 5S3)

Accommodation is available at the Hilton Garden Inn located next to the convention centre. Please mention mwin or the Municipal Waste Integration Network to be eligible for the special conference room rate.

I’d be pleased if readers would consider attending the conference. The conference begins with breakfast at 7:30 am at the convention centre, followed by the mwin annual general meeting of members and then the actual conference at 8:30 am. The day prior there’s a golf and networking event.

In case you need more information, you can visit www.mwin.org or contact the association as follows:

Maryanne Hill
Executive Director
mwin
Box 1116, 704 Glen Morris Rd. W.
Ayr, ON N0B 1E0

Tel: 519-620-9654
Fax: 519-620-9678
Cell: 519-651-9838

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 05:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I think this article by John Ibbitson of The Globe & Mail does a very good job summarizing the forthcoming US policy on GhG reduction, and the implications for Canadian policymakers.

As the U.S. goes (green), so too goes Canada

Because we can't do it on our own, Congress is legislating a cap-and-trade system for us

John Ibbitson

The Globe & Mail -- Thursday, Apr. 02, 2009 01:40PM EDT

Ten Congressional committees are working on Canada's plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to fight global warming.

They're not actually thinking about Canada at all. But the chances are getting steadily better that Congress will pass legislation to cap carbon dioxide and other emissions, allowing polluters to trade credits depending on whether they are above or below their cap.

“There is the strongest prospect ever” that the United States will embrace cap-and-trade, believes Elliot Diringer, vice-president for international strategies at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

That likelihood represents a profound surrender of sovereignty by Canada on environmental policy.

For a dozen years, since signing the Kyoto Protocol to fight global warming, the federal government has struggled to craft a cap-and-trade policy of its own.

But repeated Liberal and Conservative governments have retreated in the face of entrenched opposition from energy and manufacturing interests, and from provincial premiers who fear the economic consequences.

Now Canada can only watch as the United States, moving from laggard to leader in the fight against global warming, crafts a cap-and-trade policy, one that Canada will have no choice but to emulate.

“It's almost certain that Canada will mirror U.S. cap-and-trade legislation,” said Gerald Butts, president of World Wildlife Fund Canada.

“The government's delay in implementing caps shows the danger in outsourcing such a fundamental piece of national policy.”

To do nothing while the United States joins Europe and Japan in the fight to cool the planet's air would leave Canada virtually alone among major developed nations in refusing to act, something that neither Canadians nor Canada's international partners would tolerate.

In essence, the Americans are legislating for us because we can't do it on our own.

How did this come to pass? Simply put, while Canada dithered, Barack Obama became President of the United States.

The 44th President is determined to implement a cap-and-trade system, because he sees it as the linchpin of not only his environmental but also his economic policies.

Mr. Obama is determined to retool America's energy sector by reducing its reliance on fossil fuels, while establishing dominance in a new economy founded on researching and manufacturing alternative energy sources.

Capping and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by manufacturers and energy producers is fundamental to that industrial strategy. And with a strong Democratic majority in the House, and a majority as well – though less robust – in the Senate, the President has an excellent chance of pulling it off.

The House is expected to pass cap-and-trade legislation this year. And “if the President continues to push the way he has, there will be strong pressure on the Senate to move a bill next year,” Mr. Diringer believes.

The U.S. could have cap-and-trade legislation in place within months, with Canada's Parliament scrambling to catch up.

So, what will Canada's new cap-and-trade system look like, once we emulate whatever the Americans adopt? To find out, it's best to look to the House of Representatives. And here, Canadian opponents of cap-and-trade can find at least partial reasons for solace.

The House Energy and Commerce committee recently passed an amended version of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, commonly known as Waxman-Markey in honour of its authors, congressmen Henry Waxman and Ed Markey.

Although eight other committees in the House are looking at the bill, the real fight was in the energy and commerce committee. Liberal Democrats from outside the industrial Midwest championed the toughest possible legislation; those from the states with coal or heavy manufacturing wanted the weakest possible rules. The conservatives won.

While scientists and environmental groups argue that the United States must cut emissions to 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 if global warming is to slow, the revised bill has a target of 4 per cent below 1990 levels, or 17 per cent below current levels.

Initially, emitters such as coal plants or heavy industry were to buy at auction credits allowing them to continue polluting, creating a carbon market that would provide the federal government with tens of billions of dollars in revenues as it auctioned off the credits.

But the revised bill gives away 85 per cent of the initial credits, to give coal-powered plants, steel factories and the like more time to reduce emissions.

Requirements for utilities to greatly expand the percentage of renewable energy they draw from were also watered down.

“The revised bill is a triumph for coal-patch Dems and big business and a punch in the gut for greens,” analyst David Roberts lamented on Grist, an environmental website.

Some environmental leaders, such as former vice-president Al Gore, continue to support Waxman-Markey, despite the weakened provisions, arguing that it remains more than half a loaf, and is in any case better than no loaf at all. But Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and other environmental groups have swung against it.

“I don't know that the perfect being the enemy of the good is an apt analogy,” said Nick Berning, in the Washington office of Friends of the Earth.

“It's more of question of: Is the United States going to stand up and be a leader in doing what's necessary to avert a catastrophe? And that bill doesn't get us there.”

Nonetheless, the Republicans staunchly oppose cap-and-trade in its entirety, calling it a “cap and tax.”

“It will have a devastating effect on the economy, on families and individuals in the United States,” warned Pennsylvania Congressman Glenn Thompson in an interview.

The Republicans calculate that the increased energy costs resulting from cap-and-trade will equate to $3,100 (U.S.) per family.

“All energy will be taxed,” Mr. Thompson observed. While analysts offer a range of estimates, there is no question that cap-and-trade will make it more expensive to heat homes and purchase manufactured goods. That will apply to Canadians as well, once the equivalent bill is passed.

Despite Republican opposition, most observers believe House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be able to assemble a comfortable majority for passage by the House. Meanwhile, the Senate has two committees working on similar legislation, which could be put to a vote in the first half of 2010.

Pressure on Congress from the White House to keep moving on cap and trade has been relentless. Apart from domestic economic considerations, the President believes that he will be unable to convince emerging-market polluters, such as China and India, to clean up their act unless he can show them that the United States is prepared to do its part. And if the legislation isn't in place by the time the campaign for the 2010 midterm elections begins next summer, it might never pass at all.

“There will be changes to the bill,” predicts Mr. Berning. But “there's a very real chance that he could have legislation passed” either this year or next.

The U.S. bill mandates that if any other country wants to integrate its emission-reduction measures with the United States, it must meet the American standards. This is just another reason for Canada to duplicate the American bill: It would be foolishly inefficient to operate separate carbon markets in both Canada and the U.S.

And though its language has been watered down and the date deferred, Waxman-Markey also envisions the possibility of penalizing countries in the future who try to export goods or energy to the United States but who lack emission-reduction regimes of their own.

Add it all up, and the case for Canada's federal government simply photocopying the U.S. program and submitting it to Parliament is overwhelming.

Canada will join the fight against global warming whether its politicians want it to or not. The Americans will leave us no choice.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 01:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I will be at the Spring conference of the Association of Municipal Recycling Coordinators this week (May 27-28) at Hockley Valley Resort, for anyone interested in looking me up at that event.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Readers should enjoy this article that offers some straight talk about the new US Administration and climate change.

COMMENTARY

May 2009

US Democrats backing away from cap and trade

By Dr. Stephen Murgatroyd, Columnist

Troy Media Corporation

US President Barack Obama's cap and trade proposal is in trouble with Democrats in Congress.

The most recent Democratic deserter is the Chairman of the powerful Agriculture Committee, Colin Peterson (D: Minn). Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), who called cap-and-trade "the most significant revenue-generating proposal of our time."

Even scientists like James Hansen and John Lovelock – the leading climate alarmists in the world – oppose the cap and trade legislation. In their view, the cap-and-trade approach is both “ineffectual” and “verging on a gigantic scam.”

Several technical analysis of the potential impact of the cap and trade legislation in the US suggest that a full implementation and adherence to the emissions restrictions provisions described in the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill would only result in setting back the projected rise in global temperatures by a few years -- a scientifically meaningless prospect. But even this insignificant result assumes a reduction of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions of greater than 80 per cent, as envisioned in the Waxman-Markey bill. If implemented, cap and trade would produce a global temperature “savings,” during the next 50 years, of about 0.05ºC, assuming India and China also started to cut emissions.

Senator Jim Inhofe -- the Senate's resident climate change skeptic, believes that the cap and trade will raise $400 billion for the US treasury, but also increase energy costs for each family by approximately. $3,000 a year and lead to some 800,000 job losses. Pointing out that the vote on this part of the Obama's budget secured just 39 votes in the Senate -- 60 are needed for the legislation to become law -- Inhofe makes clear that he thinks that the cap and trade scheme is “dead in the water.”

The European Union's experience suggests that cap and trade, unless carefully enacted and enforced, leads to some people becoming quite wealthy, most people becoming poorer, with almost no impact of CO2 emissions. A pharmaceutical company in France, for example, has switched its core business from producing health products to selling carbon credits because it's more profitable. It continues to emit exactly what it emitted before the scheme began.

In place of cap and trade, some law makers in the US are beginning to tout the idea of a carbon tax -- along the lines of that implemented in British Columbia. This too is dead in the water. Almost all law makers are opposed to a carbon tax, arguing that it would have substantial negative impacts on the economy in general and “ordinary” families in particular. While the promise is that other taxes would be reduced, the reality of the US debt-ridden economy cannot afford it: the US government needs all of the tax revenue it can get.

Obama has committed to reducing CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 -- a 14 per cent cut from current levels -- then cut a further 80 per cent of the 1990 C02 emissions by 2050. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has already said that the 2020 target is far too low and should be nearer 25 per cent. The target is important because it is a reflection of Obama's commitment: unfortunately, it is the lowest target set by any G7 nation. It also represents what Obama thinks is realistic -- something other countries do not seem to take into account when setting targets (almost none of which are ever met).

What happens if the cap and trade legislation does indeed fail? Well, Obama's secret weapon is the Environment Protection Agency (EPA), which has ruled that CO2 is a pollutant and falls within their sphere of responsibility to regulate.

The EPA is a blunt instrument which will enact regulations within existing legislative frameworks, which do not require Congressional permission. With the death of cap and trade, look for the EPA to begin to develop regulations focusing on major polluters first, most likely targeting the coal industry and coal fired energy plants. In fact, it has already placed a hold on several coal fired powered plants which were about to be approved. Look to see buildings and emissions from the transportation sector to also come under their guns.

Because of its failure to pass cap and trade and its very modest emissions target, it is unlikely that the US will be the lead country in negotiations during the December Copenhagen Climate Change global summit.

Instead, it will be the EU that will lead. According to several diplomatic sources, however, preliminary work on the summit is not going well. The faltering US legislation and low targets, coupled with the continued challenge by China and India over their role in climate change and the implications of establishing global targets, are challenging diplomats to find a meaningful compromise. Another challenge is the demands of developing nations for an annual payment of $600 billion to compensate them for the impacts of climate change, largely driven by the developed economies. Copenhagen will be a battle, and largely symbolic.

The good news is that it is getting cooler, the global climate is well within its normal range, the arctic ice is getting thicker and there is growing recognition that climate alarmists, who base most of their arguments on climate change models rather than actual observations, are being revealed as exaggerators and polemicists. It will be an interesting period between now and the end of the year.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 02:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought readers would be interested in this unseen but disastrous environmental concern.

Ghost nets hurting marine environment

Abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing gear is impacting fish stocks and poses a hazard to boats

Washington and Rome, 6 May 2009 - Large amounts of fishing gear lost at sea or abandoned by fishers are hurting the marine environment, impacting fish stocks through "ghost fishing" and posing a hazard to ships, according to a new report jointly produced by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

According to the study, the problem of abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing gear (ALDFG) is getting worse due to the increased scale of global fishing operations and the introduction of highly durable fishing gear made of long-lasting synthetic materials.

The report estimates that abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear in the oceans makes up around 10 percent (640 000 metric tons) of all marine litter.* Merchant shipping is the primary source on the open sea, land-based sources are the predominate cause of marine debris in coastal areas.

Most fishing gear is not deliberately discarded but is lost in storms or strong currents or results from "gear conflicts," for example, fishing with nets in areas where bottom-traps that can entangle them are already deployed.

The main impacts of abandoned or lost fishing gear are:

continued catches of fish -- known as "ghost fishing" -- and other animals such as turtles, seabirds, and marine mammals, who are trapped and die;

alterations of the sea-floor environment; and

the creation of navigation hazards that can cause accidents at sea and damage boats.

Gill nets, fishing pots and traps are most likely to "ghost fish," while longlines, are more likely to ensnare other marine organisms and trawls most likely to damage sub-sea habitats.

Ghost fishing

In the past, poorly operated drift nets were the prime culprits, but a 1992 ban on their use in many areas has reduced their contribution to ghost fishing.

Today, bottom set gill nets are more often-cited as a problem. The bottom edge of these nets is anchored to the sea floor and floats are attached to their top, so that they form a vertical undersea wall of netting that can run anywhere from 0.4 to 6 miles in length. If a gillnet is abandoned or lost, it can continue to fish on its own for months - and sometimes years - indiscriminately killing fish and other animals.

Traps and pots are another major ghost fisher. In the Chesapeake Bay of the United States, an estimated 150 000 crab traps are lost each year out of an estimated 500 000 total deployed. On just the single Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, about 20 000 of all traps set each year are lost each hurricane season - a loss rate of 50 percent. Like gill nets, these traps can continue to fish on their own for long periods of time.

Solutions

"The amount of fishing gear remaining in the marine environment will continue to accumulate and the impacts on marine ecosystems will continue to get worse if the international community doesn't take effective steps to deal with the problem of marine debris as a whole. Strategies for addressing the problem must occur on multiple fronts, including prevention, mitigation, and curative measures," said Ichiro Nomura, FAO Assistant Director-General for Fisheries and Aquaculture. He also noted that FAO is working closely with the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in its ongoing review of Annex V of the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) as regards fishing gear and shore side reception facilities.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, said:" There are many ‘ghosts in the marine environment machine' from overfishing and acidification linked with greenhouse gases to the rise in de-oxygenated ‘dead zones' as a result of run off and land-based source of pollution. Abandoned and lost fishing is part of this suite of challenges that must be urgently addressed collectively if the productivity of our oceans and seas is to be maintained for this and future generations, not least for achievement of the UN Millennium Development Goals".

The FAO/UNEP report makes a number of recommendations for tackling the problem of ghost nets:

Financial incentives. Economic incentives could encourage fishers to report lost gear or bring to port old and damaged gear, as well as any ghost nets they might recover accidentally while fishing.

Marking gear. Not all trash gear is deliberately dumped, so marking should not be used to "identify offenders" but rather better understand the reasons for gear loss and identify appropriate, fishery-specific preventative measures.

New technologies. New technologies offer new possibilities for reducing the probability of ghost fishing. Sea-bed imaging can be used to avoid undersea snags and obstacles. Fishing equipment can be expensive, and many fishers often go to great lengths to retrieve lost gear. Technology that makes doing so easier can help. Using GPS, vessels can mark locations where gear has been lost, facilitating retrieval, and transponders can be fitted to gear in order to do the same. Similarly, improvements in weather monitoring technology can be used to help skippers avoid deploying nets when very bad weather is imminent.

Just as new synthetic and other materials used in fishing gears have contributed to the ADLFG problem, they can also help solve it. Work is underway to speed up the commercial adoption of durable gear components that incorporate bio-degradable elements. For example, in some countries fish traps and pots are constructed with a biodegradable "escape hatch" that disintegrates when left under water too long, rendering the trap harmless. As this would not necessarily reduce the levels of debris, a reporting and retrieval system should also be adopted.

Improving collection, disposal and recycling schemes. It is necessary to facilitate proper disposal of all old, damaged and retrieved fishing gears, according to the report. Most ports do not have facilities on site that allow for this. Putting disposal bins on docks and providing boats with oversized, high-strength disposal bags for old fishing gear or parts thereof can help remedy this.

Better reporting of lost gear. A key recommendation of the report is that vessels should be required to log gear losses as a matter of course. However a "no-blame" approach should be followed with respect to liability for losses, their impacts, and any recovery efforts, it says. The goal should be to improve awareness of potential hazards and increase the opportunity for gear recovery.

The report discusses a number of other measures that could help, as well.

"Clearly solutions to this problem do exist, and our hope is that this report will prompt industry and governments to take action to significantly reduce the amount of lost or abandoned fishing gear in the marine environment," said Nomura.

The new report comes as nations are set to gather in for the World Oceans Conference in Manado, Indonesia (11-15 May 2009), where the issue of realizing healthy marine environments will figure high on the agenda.

Note to editors:

*The total input of marine litter into the oceans per year has been estimated at approximately 6.4 million metric tons annually, of which nearly 5.6 million metric tons (88 percent) comes from merchant shipping.

Some 8 million items of marine litter are thought to enter the oceans and seas every day, about 5 million (63 percent) of which are solid waste thrown overboard or lost from ships.

It has been estimated that currently over 13 000 pieces of plastic litter are floating on every square mile of ocean. In 2002, 4 miles of plastic was found for every mile of plankton near the surface of a gyre point in the central Pacific, where debris collects.

Mass concentrations of marine debris in high seas accumulation areas, such as the equatorial convergence zone, are of particular concern. In some such areas, rafts of assorted debris, including various plastics; ropes; fishing nets; and cargo-associated wastes such as dunnage, pallets, wires and plastic covers, drums and shipping containers, along with accumulated slicks of various oils, often extend for many miles.

For more information on the work of FAO: www.fao.org

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 02:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a fascinating article about the technology to gasify coal underground (not above ground) and avoid pollution, including GHG emissions.

Clean coal? Go underground, Alberta

BY THOMAS HOMER-DIXON AND JULIO FRIEDMANN

From the Globe and Mail, May 4, 2009 at 12:00 AM EDT

Alberta appears to be in a box - an energy box - that constrains policy options in every direction. The province's wealth is critically tied to exploitation of its vast hydrocarbon resources. But faced with declining reserves of conventional oil and natural gas, it has been forced to turn increasingly to the tar sands, which pack a huge carbon punch. And in a warming world, carbon is seen as a menace. The strategy could severely crimp Alberta's ability to sell energy at home and abroad, even make it a pariah.

There is an alternative: coal.

What? Impossible, you say - measured in carbon emitted per unit of usable energy generated, coal is as dirty as the tar sands, or even dirtier.

Coal's many problems are well known. They start with the damage caused by mining. Mountaintops are sliced off in coal-rich zones in the United States. And burning it creates pollution from sulphur, ash and heavy metals. Although we can sequester coal's greenhouse-gas emissions underground with a technology called carbon capture and storage, it sharply boosts costs.

•Deflation's big game •Unbounded uncertainty •Everything is not peachy •We must green the market •Global capitalism teeters on the brink But can we get coal's energy without the carbon, ash and ruined landscapes? Yes - if we don't mine it.

Engineers have long known how to gasify coal above ground - turn it into syngas, a mixture of hydrogen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. The same is accomplished with underground coal gasification, but without the mining or the gasifier machinery.

Air or oxygen is injected into wells that penetrate a deep coal seam, where controlled partial combustion drives gasification. The gases are brought to the surface, leaving behind many of the objectionable components, including roughly half the coal's sulphur, ash, tar, mercury and arsenic. On the surface, this operation looks like nothing more than a network of wellheads and pipes. But the huge quantities of gas produced can either be burned to generate electricity on site or piped off to make hydrogen, heat or synthetic fuels.

UCG uses an inaccessible, dirty resource for largely clean energy. It allows us to reach coal seams that are too deep for conventional mining, effectively tripling or even quadrupling Canada's reserves. It's also relatively cheap - under ideal conditions, UCG syngas costs as little as $1 per million BTU. More realistically, the technology can produce raw syngas deliverable to most markets at less than $3 per million BTU. By contrast, Alberta and U.S. natural gas traded between $7 and $11 per million BTU in 2008 and early 2009.

Because the price is low, it becomes cost-effective to couple UCG with sequestration technology. The carbon content of UCG syngas is similar to that of burned coal. If Canada's deep seams were developed without sequestration, their emissions could exceed those of the tar sands. But UCG's carbon footprint could easily be less than that of a single natural gas plant if combined with partial or complete sequestration programs. All commercial projects proposed for the U.S. and Canada will capture and sequester most or all of the carbon dioxide they produce. The decarbonized syngas, in turn, could be used to produce power or low-carbon fuels.

Several countries have already deployed and even commercialized UCG. Most such projects were built in the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s and in the U.S. after the oil shocks of the 1970s and early 1980s. But the later flood of low-cost natural gas undermined these projects' economic viability. Nonetheless, one plant in Uzbekistan has burned UCG syngas continuously since 1959. Today, three commercial projects are ramping up in Australia and two in China.

Canada is a UCG leader. Ergo Exergy, based in Montreal, has operated a pilot project at industrial scale in Australia and is running the largest current pilot at the Majuba coalfield in South Africa. The company is also developing a project near Edmonton that will provide low-carbon electricity, steam and hydrogen to tar-sands upgraders, as well as carbon dioxide for sequestration and enhanced recovery from exhausted oil fields. So is Calgary's Swan Hills Synfuels, which is exploiting the deep Manville coal seam near Edmonton in partnership with the Alberta Energy Research Institute.

The big prizes in Alberta are the province's deep, thick and continuous seams of coal. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California estimate that just five to eight square kilometres of such a resource could support a 200-MW gas plant for 50 to 70 years. Only eight such developments would meet Calgary's entire energy needs.

Compared to coal-bed methane technology, which extracts gas that is naturally resident in deep seams, UCG generates 300 to 400 times more energy per tonne of coal. Through UCG, Alberta has an energy resource comparable to the tar sands in scale and accessibility. And unlike the sands, which produce a great deal of carbon that is difficult or expensive to capture, UCG energy can be almost carbon neutral. Indeed, decarbonized UCG could even help reduce the footprint of tar-sands production and upgrading by supplying these facilities with carbon-neutral heat, hydrogen and steam.

Like any promising technology, UCG has problems. Although coal isn't mined, some coal mass is still extracted from underground. Poorly managed, this process can lead to harmful subsidence. Also, poor choice of site and project operation can contaminate groundwater, as has happened in one U.S. pilot project. Government has a key role in developing the technology and conducting the studies needed to regulate this emerging industry.

If UCG is to play an important role in Canada's energy future, it will need investment, oversight and commitment to the highest technical standards. But the benefits could be huge. UCG offers Alberta a real path to a carbon-free future and a new technology for export.

Thomas Homer-Dixon holds the CIGI Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo. S. Julio Friedmann is the head of the Carbon Management Program at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 02:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought readers might enjoy this article about the first waste-to-energy (WTE) plant to receive an air permit in more than a decade:

Developer of Proposed Energy from Waste Facility in Mahoning County, Ohio Receives Air Permit from Ohio EPA

Green Field Air Permit Represents First Such Approval in U.S. in Over a Decade

Warwick, RI…… Jefferson Renewable Energy, an alternative energy company developing a $317 million energy-from-waste plant in Smith Township, Ohio, announced today that Ohio EPA has issued a final air permit for the project, the first air permit issued in the United States for a new energy from waste plant in over a decade.

The air permit demonstrates Jefferson Renewable Energy’s leadership in the industry and moves it a step closer to building its proposed Mahoning Renewable Energy plant. The facility will produce 66 megawatts of power, enough to power 50,000 homes, and will use construction & demolition debris and pre-processed municipal solid waste, otherwise referred to as “Refuse-Derived Fuel” as its fuel source.

“The Air Permit approval we received from the Ohio EPA is a major milestone for our project,” said company President Gregory Benik. “Our approval puts us that much closer to a ground breaking and reflects our commitment to developing advanced, state-of-the-art plants that meet or exceed environmental safeguards. It also puts Ohio at the forefront in recognizing the need for alternative energy sources.”

Benik said the Mahoning County energy-from-waste plant will set the standard for future plants in the country based on his company’s commitment to employ the most advanced and efficient combustion and control technology available. The Mahoning Renewable Energy plant will rely on Advanced Stoker Boiler System and Control Technology developed by Babcock Power Environmental, Inc.

The company’s Senior Vice President and CFO, Richard Nicholson, said that Mahoning Renewable Energy has received soft commitments for debt financing from senior U.S. lenders and that the project is one of several being developed by Jefferson Renewable Energy using a wide range of best available demonstrated technologies for the conversion of biomass and waste materials for energy generation or biofuels production. The company is based in Warwick, Rhode Island.

For more information on the company visit www.JRERI.com

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 02:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At a recent recycling industry meeting a colleague of mine said that he continues to enjoy Solid Waste & Recycling magazine but was worried that recent coverage about Zero Waste issues was drawing our attention away from the kind of practical “shop floor” information that we usually make prominent.

I recognized that there was some truth to that, although I’d felt obliged to give somewhat saturation coverage to the Zero Waste topic as it was front and centre in the news this past fall.

Anyway, I thought he (and other readers) might be interested in the next (April/May) article lineup, which I think contains lots of practical information.

Here are the highlights of the April/May edition, that should be printed and mailed at the end of April.

Cover Story: Landfill mining project in Barrie looks at the recovery of valuable landfill space and water protection. by Sandy Coulter, Barrie & Paul Dewaele, Golder Assoc.

Editorial: A look at new information from Dan Lantz comparing single stream versus dual stream recycling. by Guy Crittenden

Up Front and Masthead: Contains details about the new federal initiative on extended producer Responsibility (EPR)

Waste-to-Energy: Pelletization. by Salman Zafar, Renewable Energy Advisor, GOI

Waste-to-Energy Sidebar: Tour with photos of the Dongara pelletization plant in York Region. by Guy Crittenden

Recycling: Report from the MWIN recycling markets seminar. by Guy Crittenden

MRF Operation: Dealing with the media after an incident. by Paul Lima, freelancer

Landfill Technology: Landfill gas project. by Darren Fry, Integrated Gas Recovery Services Inc. & Mike Watt, P. Eng., Walker Industries

Composting Matters: Perfecting the brand. by Paul van der Werf, 2cg Inc.

Waste Business: The Continuous Improvement Fund. by John Nicholson, EBC Canada

Equipment: Shredders, sorters and conveyors. by Guy Crittenden

Regulation Roundup: Waste regulations across Canada. by Rosalind Cooper, Fasken

Blog: OWMA’s Waste Diversion Act proposal. by Usman Valiante, Corporate Policy Group

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 06:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Readers might be interested in this contrarian article that questions the assumption that a large-scale investment in wind energy benefits the environment or reduces CO2. I'm suspicious of the author's claim that there are serious negative health effects from the turbines (noise), and I think that nuclear power would cancel the rise in CO2 from building fossil fuel power plants (for more reserve power). But the inefficiency of wind is worth thinking about.

Ontario, don't be seduced by wind's breezy glamour
Province should seek an objective appraisal of wind turbines' generating potential

Toronto Star
March 24, 2009
Michael Trebilcock
Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law

I am not anti-green.

We do need to invest in technologies that reduce our reliance on fossil fuels that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

But I believe we must do so with intelligence and not be seduced by vague or reckless promises that clearly do not stand up to scrutiny. Nor should we proceed with enormous public expenditures without appropriate due diligence and reasonable care, especially when it comes to the health and welfare of our fellow citizens and the future of our children.

I chose to live in a rural area that was once one of the scenic treasures of Ontario and that is now being populated by wind turbines. According to the premier of our province, I am a NIMBY. But NIMBY talk comes cheap from those who will never live anywhere near these incessantly noisy, 35-story behemoths that cause documented health and environmental risks as well as dramatically lowering property values and impacting one's quality of life. And all for what purpose when we have alternative approaches that are proven to be less costly and vastly more effective?

While the intent is understandable, the Green Energy Act is seriously flawed – particularly in those aspects pertaining to wind energy and lack of due process.

If the provincial government of the day is so certain that the risks are negligible, then why does the act not contain protections such as indemnifying property owners for losses incurred or those who will suffer severe negative health consequences?

Wouldn't a prudent government undertake independent epidemiological and environmental studies prior to giving developers huge financial incentives to go down a path that is largely irreversible? Proceeding without such knowledge, while other pressing social priorities take a back seat, is a classic example of "Fire. Ready. Aim."

Let's examine some of the facts.

Is wind power really a viable economical alternative to other renewable energy options? The European experience is instructive. Denmark, the world's most wind-intensive nation with more than 6,000 turbines generating 19 per cent of its electricity, has yet to close a single fossil-fuel power plant. It requires 50 per cent more coal-generated electricity to cover wind's failings; pollution and carbon dioxide emissions have risen (by 36 per cent in 2006 alone); and its electricity generation costs are the highest in Europe (15 cents per kilowatt-hour compared to Ontario's current rate of about 6 cents).

The Danish Federation of Industries says: "Windmills are a mistake and economically make no sense." The head of Denmark's largest energy utility tells us that "wind turbines do not reduce carbon dioxide emissions." The chair of energy policy in the Danish parliament calls it "a terribly expensive disaster."

The German experience is no different. Der Spiegel reports that "Germany's CO2 emissions haven't been reduced by even a single gram" and additional coal- and gas-fired plants have been constructed to ensure reliable delivery. These people do not seem like NIMBYs nor does this sound like a green Utopia.

Given these circumstances, The Wall Street Journal advises that "wind is more a nuisance than a source of power" and that "wind generation is the prime example of what can go wrong when the government decides to pick winners. The idea that it can replace coal or natural gas in electrical generation is a fantasy." Worldwide, wind energy contributes less than 1 per cent to the reduction of greenhouse gasses.

I am disappointed that our government seems so willing to accept the advice of the wind industry, as many of its claims parrot their views. The Advertising Standards Authority in the U.K. recently forced the industry to cut by half its false claim regarding the amount of harmful carbon dioxide emissions that would be eliminated by using wind turbines.

Isn't it time we insisted on an objective, scientific examination of all the facts rather than simply accepting the industry lobbyists' assertions at face value?

The government advises that wind power will cost us 13.5 cents per kilowatt-hour (more than twice current electricity costs) but has yet to publicly identify all the additional costs. Its enthusiasm for green is countered by its silence on how this flawed policy – one that relies so heavily on unpredictable, heavily subsidized, premium-priced wind energy – will require backup from even more publicly funded, standby generation facilities.

As the European experience confirms, this will inevitably lead to a staggering increase in energy costs with consequent detrimental effects on business and employment. From this perspective, the promise of 55,000 new jobs from green energy is a cruel delusion.

The people most negatively affected by this act are rural residents. By taking planning responsibilities away from local municipalities and leaving key decisions to subsequent ministerial regulations, the new decision-making regime gives them no say in matters that will dramatically affect their lives. Rural residents are not major contributors to Ontario's carbon footprint but are being conscripted as a major part of its solution.

There is a simple solution to the impact on rural residents. Ensure that setbacks from residences conform to international standards as endorsed by renowned medical and scientific bodies that have closely examined the health and environmental risks. The French Academy of Medicine recommends 1.5 kilometres, pending further research on health effects of persistent exposure to low intensity noise.

Alternatively, the government could concentrate wind farms in more remote areas, as has been done in Quebec and much of Europe. But that would likely cost more and this government seems bent on sacrificing the welfare of rural residents rather than incurring more expense.

I have spent my professional life committed to the principle that reasoned and informed debate best serves the public interest. It may cost us all dearly that the present government evinces so little commitment to the same principle.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For anyone who missed this the first time, I found this article on BPA in soft drink cans interesting.

MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT

From Thursday's Globe and Mail, March 4, 2009

The estrogen-mimicking chemical BPA, already banished from baby bottles and frowned upon in water jugs, has now shown up in significant levels in soft drinks.

Tests by Health Canada scientists revealed the highest levels were in energy drinks, the often caffeine-loaded beverages that have become popular with teenagers seeking a buzz and athletes chasing a quick pick-me-up. But the study also found the controversial compound in a wide variety of ginger ales, diet colas, root beers and citrus-flavoured sodas.

Bisphenol A was detected in 96 per cent of soft drinks tested, in quantities below regulatory limits. But a growing body of science suggests the chemical may have harmful effects at levels far below those limits.

Health Canada did not disclose the brand names of the beverages it evaluated, but estimated that the survey covered at least 84 per cent of canned soft drinks sold in Canada.

Testing by Health Canada highlighted BPA's presence in pop and energy drinks packaged in cans

The testing is considered the most sophisticated conducted anywhere in the world on BPA in pop, a subject about which little has been known up to now. The report outlining the results appeared last month in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a relatively obscure scientific publication, and Health Canada also posted its data on its website, with little publicity.

Soft-drink cans are treated with a BPA-containing liner to prevent drinks from coming into contact with metal.

Although independent scientists and environmentalists warn that all exposures to the artificial sex hormone should be avoided, both Health Canada and the soft-drink industry played down the study's findings, saying the amounts detected were well below regulatory limits.

"It really confirms the safety of the packaging," said Justin Sherwood, president of Refreshments Canada, an industry trade group. He said the higher levels in several energy drinks may be statistical flukes.

Since prior testing hasn't usually detected residues, the soft-drink industry has long told consumers that its canned product doesn't expose drinkers to BPA. Pop companies have consequently avoided some of the controversy surrounding polycarbonate plastic water bottles, baby bottles and canned foods, where testing has often found the compound.

Health Canada contends there is no risk because a single serving of pop with the highest amount detected — 4.5 parts per billion — would give drinkers a dose well below its safety limit.

The levels are "extremely low," said Samuel Godefroy, director of the health agency's Bureau of Chemical Safety. He said children would not be at risk from consuming pop, and an adult would have to drink 900 cans a day to exceed the government's safety level.

Still, many scientists are worried about ingestion of the minute amounts of BPA found leaching from food and beverage packaging. The chemical is a synthetic compound able to fool cells into viewing it as estrogen, providing what amounts to an extra dollop of the female hormone.

"We are constantly getting exposed to this chemical," said Frederick vom Saal, a biologist at the University of Missouri and an authority on BPA. "People drink a lot of soda and this needs to be looked at as one of a very large number of sources of exposure to this chemical." BPA is also used in dental sealants, plastic water pipes and even carbonless cash-register receipts.

Although levels vary, natural estrogen circulates in people at extremely minute concentrations, around a part per trillion. The test results indicated that an average soft drink has concentrations of BPA around half a part per billion, or 500 times more than the level of the female hormone in people.

Dr. vom Saal says there is also a growing body of scientific literature, based on animal experiments, that has found harmful effects due to BPA at concentrations up to 1,000 times below Health Canada's safety limit. These conditions include such hormonally linked illnesses as breast cancer, and Dr. vom Saal called the government's assurances of no harm "simple-minded."

The Health Canada testing found BPA in 69 of the 72 cans evaluated. It didn't detect the chemical in two cans of tonic water, but the researchers said a bittering agent in them may have gummed up the tests; they could not explain why one can of energy drink didn't show any bisphenol A.

Nor is it clear why, overall, the highest BPA levels were found in energy drinks, but the results might be a surprise to some of the consumers of these products. "It would be interesting to do a survey in the weight rooms to see how many tough guys are aware of the estrogen levels in their drinks," said Aaron Freeman, a spokesman for Environmental Defence, a group that is lobbying Health Canada to eliminate BPA from food and beverage packaging.

RESPONSES TO BPA

The safety of bisphenol A levels in several products has been questioned.

Polycarbonate baby bottles: Health Canada is drafting rules to ban their import, sale and advertising. Retailers have pulled them from shelves in advance of the ban.

Polycarbonate water bottles: Most retailers have removed them, and bottle makers are switching to BPA-free alternatives.

Canned formula: Health Canada is working to develop a code of practice to reduce BPA leaching from infant formula cans to the lowest possible levels.

Canned foods: BPA is found in most canned foods, but Health Canada says the amounts pose no risk to adults, pregnant women or children older than 18 months.

Toxic substances list: Canada is adding BPA to the dangerous chemical list, based on worries that infants could be overexposed and that it is a possible hazard to wildlife.

Pop cans: A new Health Canada survey has found BPA in nearly all cans, but it says residues are too low to be a risk.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 08:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought readers might enjoy these two recent articles from the Toronto Star that suggest there's a big shortage of composting and organics processing capacity in Ontario, at the same time as organics collection is increasing. The overall theme is correct, although I warn there are a few inaccuracies, including the reporter's wrong explanation of a "typical" composting process, which describes the very a-typical in-vessel digestion process used at Toronto's Dufferin plant. I think if someone were to build a new composting plant near the GTA that works and doesn't stink, they'd make a ton of money. Anway, here are the two articles.

Not so green bins

March 03, 2009

Green bin programs are supposed to move organic waste "from curb to compost," but some inefficient Ontario municipalities have opted for another route: curb to combustion.

Thousands of tonnes of organic material, including bones, meat and other kitchen scraps, household plants, paper towels and soiled paper food packaging, have been sent to the United States to be burned rather than being composted here in Ontario.

In a weekend report, the Star's Moira Welsh found that York Region sent almost 12,000 tonnes of green bin waste to a Niagara Falls, N.Y., incinerator between March and August last year. The City of Guelph has been trucking about 10,000 tonnes to the same facility each year. In addition, in 2007, Peel Region sent about 50 truckloads of partly composted kitchen waste to a Barrie topsoil company that did not have environment ministry approval to accept such material.

Obviously, some municipalities have fumbled the recycling ball. There is a market for green bin compost, mainly in gardening rather than in large-scale agriculture. But cities must balance the volume of material they collect with the capacity of facilities to process it. It is no easy task, especially if a processor unexpectedly shuts down, or if residents opposed to a composting plant succeed in derailing a project.

Still, some municipalities have successfully managed to expand their green bin program, increase processing and find good markets for finished compost. Toronto, for example, handles about 40,000 tonnes of green bin material at a city-owned plant and ships another 70,000 tonnes to public and private processing facilities around Ontario.

"We have been able to juggle things and make sure all our material does move to composting markets," Geoff Rathbone, general manager of solid waste, said in an interview yesterday. To ensure that Toronto stays ahead, it is building two more publicly owned processing plants.

There's a lesson here for other municipalities.

Green bin waste trucked to N.Y.

Ontario municipalities 'scrambling' to cope with surge in kitchen refuse and plant closings

March 01, 2009

MOIRA WELSH
ENVIRONMENT REPORTER

Ontario facilities that compost kitchen waste are in such short supply that thousands of tonnes have been sent to the United States for incineration and at least one municipality has improperly dumped truckloads within the province.

Severe odour problems are the main reason for the closing of facilities, including Peel Region's compost-curing location in Caledon and two plants in Quebec that took thousands of tonnes from Toronto and York region.

At the same time, new facilities in Ontario can barely meet the surging demand from municipal green bin programs that recycle food waste into high-grade compost.

"If somebody goes out of business then we've got a real problem – there is no extra capacity in the system," said Durham Region's Cliff Curtis, chair of Regional Public Works Commissioners of Ontario.

"In many ways, we are victims of our own success. There have been more (organics) collected than expected, and we are scrambling."

Pushed by the Ontario government to recycle organics, municipalities collected 251,368 tonnes of kitchen scraps in green bins in 2007 – a jump of nearly 30 per cent over 2006. Those numbers will only go higher. Toronto is expanding its green bin program into apartments, increasing organic collections from about 115,000 tonnes a year to 170,000 tonnes within the next 16 months.

The green bin program has grown so fast that it has outstripped the ability of municipalities to process the organics locally, creating a new carbon footprint since the material is trucked to facilities hundreds of kilometres away.

The program collects mountains of leftover steak, hamburgers, vegetables and (depending on the municipality) diapers and pet waste, diverting them from the landfills into compost. It is the meat products that tend to cause the odours.

The vast popularity of organic recycling has placed cities in a vulnerable position. When a facility shuts down, city managers need backup plans because excess rotting food cannot be stored in warehouses.

Despite pressuring municipalities to recycle organics, the Ontario government has not created a comprehensive plan to help them do so, although ministry sources say the current review of the Waste Diversion Act will bring change. Some cities, like Toronto, have decided to get into the processing business, with long-term plans to own facilities that will provide two-thirds of the processing capacity.

"We've been shuffling since our program started in 2002," said Toronto's Geoff Rathbone, general manager of solid waste. "It has been a challenge every day to find sufficient capacity for organics ... they have to flow every day."

Among recent contingency plans:

• York Region trucked 11,864 tonnes of kitchen waste to Covanta Energy, an incinerator in Niagara Falls, N.Y., between March and August 2008 when its Quebec processor was shut down.
•
• The City of Guelph ships 10,000 tonnes of kitchen waste every year to Covanta Energy. During the mid-1990s, the city was considered a composting pioneer but closed its facility in 2006 due to odours and structural weakness caused by ammonia.
•
• Peel Region shipped 50 truckloads of partially composted kitchen waste to Barrie topsoil company Cornerstone Landscaping in 2007. The company did not have environment ministry approval to accept "unfinished" compost, which contains inorganic material, an environment ministry spokesperson said. Mounds of the compost – including tattered plastic bags – remain on the site.
•
Ministry of environment spokesperson Kate Jordan said investigators responded to an odour complaint about Cornerstone in late 2007 but did not issue an order against the company because it co-operated in the cleanup. Jordan said plastic bags included in the compost defined it as "unfinished." Cornerstone and Peel are now working under the oversight of the province to remove thousands of tattered plastic bags that held the organics, Jordan said.

Cornerstone's owner, Rick Sova, said his company did not need ministry approvals to take the organics, saying the compost was already finished when it arrived on site.

"We took the material, we screened it, we processed it into a good organic medium for growing results, the Region of Peel is taking back the plastic and they're processing it," Sova said.

Larry Conrad is the acting director of waste management for Peel Region. He said Peel sent the material to Cornerstone because odour problems forced the region to close its outdoor curing facility in Caledon. He said they also believed it was a finished product. The region is seeking approvals to build a new composting facility in Caledon.

"Composting is a tough industry," Conrad said. "It is an industry that has a lot of odour problems. We operated our composting plant in Caledon for many years with no odour issues, but obviously we weren't immune to it."

Every municipality collects different items and uses a slightly different composting process, but the system generally works like this:

Bags of kitchen waste are picked up from neighbourhood curbs and taken to processing facilities, where the food is dumped into enormous vats and separated from the plastic bags and errant shampoo bottles.

It continues through the system, sometimes taking weeks, until the organics have turned into a thick, dark material with a heavy ammonia-like odour. It is then trucked to a composting facility, which turns it into the compost that is given to residents or sold in stores to be spread on gardens and lawns.

The juggling act to keep composting – and diverting from overflowing landfills – has forced cities to look further afield for their processors. Toronto, for example, had shipped roughly 1,000 truckloads of organic waste a year to Quebec. That arrangement ended last November when the Quebec environment ministry limited the company's intake due to odour problems.

In that case, Toronto quickly ramped up their contracts with two new Ontario facilities, Orgaworld, a Dutch-owned company that opened a facility near London, and Universal Resource in Welland.

The city also has plans to build two processing facilities, at the Disco Transfer Station in north Etobicoke and the Dufferin Waste Management Facility in North York.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An interesting and thought provoking article on the risks of carbon capture, popular now with the leaders of the United States and Canada. I don't know if the described risks are true, but they are worth debating.

Urban Renaissance Institute
Urban Renaissance Institute in the News: Monday, February 23, 2009
Our web site is www.urban-renaissance.org

The dirty truth

Barack Obama and Stephen Harper are all for carbon capture technology. Too bad it's not as green as it seems.
by Lawrence Solomon, National Post, February 20, 2009

During President Barack Obama's visit to Canada this week, he and Prime Minister Stephen Harper pledged to spend billions developing technologies that would capture carbon and then store it underground.

Carbon capture and storage, as these schemes are known, is misguided environmentally, economically, and in the long term, politically too. Carbon capture has only one virtue: It solves short-term political problems for both leaders.

Harper has an overarching aim in funding carbon capture - the continuing development of the Alberta tar sands. Environmentalists castigate oil from tar sands as "dirty oil" for one reason above all: Tar sands oil generates more carbon dioxide than does oil from conventional sources. With carbon capture technology promising to counter much of the greenhouse gas associated with tar sands development, Harper can neutralize the main opposition to more tar sands projects.As a bonus, he will be fulfilling a campaign promise to address global warming.

Obama has two aims in funding carbon capture. For one thing, he needs oil from Canada's tar sands to fulfill his campaign promise of weaning the U.S. off Middle-Eastern oil; for another, as this week's U.S.-Canada Clean Energy Dialogue makes clear, he wants to exploit America's vast coal reserves, both for their economic benefits and to promote U.S. energy independence, another campaign promise.

Carbon capture and storage, however, is not as green as it seems - underground burial of carbon dioxide presents immense new risks to society. If the carbon dioxide is stored in deep ocean masses, as sometimes proposed, environmentalists fear that ocean acidification could devastate marine eco-systems. If the carbon dioxide is stored in geologic formations near fossil fuel plants, as is more commonly proposed, the harmful effects would directly affect human life: Research at Columbia University by one of the world's leading geohazard scientists ranks carbon storage as one of the five top coming causes of man-induced earthquakes, a prediction all the more scary because the earthquakes would tend to occur near the fossil fuel plants, and population centres. In another potential danger, some fret about the consequences of an accidental release of carbon dioxide from underground storage facilities. In Cameroon in 1986, 1,800 people died after an unexplained release of carbon dioxide from beneath Lake Nyos, which has deep stores of carbon dioxide beneath its bottom.

Apart from these unknown future risks of stuffing carbon dioxide underground, carbon capture technologies are chock-a-block with known problems, all stemming from the fact that these technologies are, in the parlance of environmentalists, energy pigs. As one example, a typical coal plant employing carbon capture technology requires between 24% and 50% more energy for every kilowatt-hour produced.

At this level of resource gluttony, the world's store of non-renewable fossil fuels would be consumed at a fast clip wherever carbon capture technology was applied. Worse, other pollutants that environmentalists have long fought would also increase. The "clean coal" plants that President Obama touts would produce one-third more in nitrous oxides, a major contributor to smog. Likewise, carbon capture technology applied to tar sands plants would mean that additional tar sands plants would need to be developed just to run the tar sands carbon capture facilities.

Ironically, carbon capture technology would not only worsen air quality and more rapidly scar the tar sands landscape, it may also harm the global environment if it is successful in its goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide stimulates plant growth and leads to a greening of the planet. In fact, satellite measurements now show the planet to be the greenest in decades. Little wonder that, in surveys of scientists, the great majority view carbon dioxide as a beneficial gas that's indispensable to plant growth, and insignificant to any deleterious global warming.

To add to the irony, even if carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that plays a significant role in warming the planet, there may be good reason to encourage its release into the atmosphere. A decade ago, the planet stopped warming and a year ago, global temperatures began to decline markedly. If, as many scientists now speculate, Earth could be entering a new Little Ice Age, carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases could mitigate the hardship that would come with a cooling planet.

The environmental drawbacks in carbon capture also spell economic trouble. The complexity of the technology, and its energy inefficiency, translate into high prices. Estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show customers should be prepared to pay as much as 50% to 70% more for their power. With cost penalties on that scale, industries will leave carbon capture jurisdictions for less punitive climes, and captive consumers will rebel.

At heart, what politicians and the public most want is clean energy and a clean environment. Rather than sinking billions into carbon capture schemes likely to do nothing but damage the environment and the economy, Obama and Harper should target true environmental hazards such as the mercury, NOX and SOX in coal, the air and water emissions associated with tar sands. And they should come clean with the public over carbon dioxide, and admit that too little worrisome is known about its risks to start burying it, and too much worrisome is known about the risks of burying it.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute, and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 12:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This short article from the Toronto Star speaks to the problem that material from single-stream MRFs (recycling plants) may end up in China where sortation labor is cheap. Fine idea as long as you ignore the carbon footprint.

Recycling efforts create 'contentious' carbon footprint

Toronto Star -- February 09, 2009
MOIRA WELSH
ENVIRONMENT REPORTER

Ontario's recycling scraps – dirty peanut butter jars, plastic toys, and unsorted paper – are being shipped to Asia at a rate of thousands of tonnes a month.

The blue-box castoffs are sorted by low-paid workers in huge factories, and recycled into inexpensive toys, shoes and colourful cardboard packages, before being sold back to Ontarians, where they fill the blue boxes once again.

Garbage experts say this revolving door is a necessary evil that will continue until the province has better recycling facilities so cities can process their own garbage.

"The question is, how much do we want to transport materials around?" said Glenda Gies, executive director of Waste Diversion Ontario, which oversees the provincial blue-box program. "We really do want to support the Ontario economy, we want to process these materials here."

Most residents recycle with the belief they are helping the environment and are unaware that their municipalities are shipping materials to China and South Korea, creating a huge new carbon footprint.

"It is a contentious issue here," said Jo-Anne St. Godard, executive director of the Recycling Council of Ontario. "We took advantage of (China's) cheaper labour force to have them clean, or re-clean, our recyclables, to sort out the more valuable items from the less valuable."

With the downturn in the recycling commodities market, China's demand for low-end mixed paper and plastic "residue" from blue boxes dropped considerably. But, Toronto, which sent up to 20,000 tonnes of mixed paper to China's massive Nine Dragons mill in both 2007 and last year, reports that in January, the mill began requesting more of the city's paper.

Toronto gets paid roughly $30 to $40 per tonne of mixed paper sent to China. According to Geoff Rathbone, general manager of Toronto's solid waste department, that worked out to be about $600,000 to $800,000 in 2007 and 2008.

In addition to shipping to China, Rathbone said the city sends about 10,000 tonnes a year of its "polycoat" milk and juice cartons to South Korea. If Toronto moves ahead with plans to recycle disposable coffee cups, it will send them to the same South Korean facility, as long as the owners can handle the influx, he said.

Still, Rathbone believes local paper mills and recycling facilities are the best option. "In the long term, I don't think (shipping to Asia) is a sustainable way to go," he said.

It is not clear how many tonnes of Ontario's recycled goods are sent to Asia each year. A study published by Waste Diversion Ontario looked at shipping data – voluntarily supplied by municipalities and private recyclers. Based on their information, the authors of the report concluded that four per cent of the 937,979 tonnes of blue-box materials sold in 2006 went to China, and a lesser number to South Korea. WDO's Gies said more ongoing studies are needed before the full picture is known.

St. Godard said North American mills generally require materials be properly sorted and clean. But some municipalities, like Toronto, allow all recycled goods to be mixed into the same blue bin, because it is cheaper and easier for residents.

"You end up co-mingling materials that have to be sorted and re-sorted and re-sorted and by the time they actually reach the end market they are still so contaminated that the mills here cannot take them. But China has an extra layer of labour that can sift through them," she said.

To get to China from Toronto, the mixed paper is stacked in bales, placed in shipping containers and sent across country to the port of Vancouver by train, said Jake Westerhof, of Canada Fibres, which sells Toronto's paper to Nine Dragons.

From Vancouver, it is placed on a large freighter ship and spends several weeks at sea before arriving in one of China's southern ports. It is moved into a truck a driven several hours before arriving at the massive Nine Dragons paper mill in the province of Guangdong.

Rathbone believes the increase in orders from China means the market will slowly rebound.
He says Toronto will continue shipping its paper to Nine Dragons, and pointed out the city's contract requires that the mill adhere to environmental standards, along with health and safety rules for its workers.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 09:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It looks like Micahel Mann of the discredited climate change "hockey stick" is up to his old tricks, this time manipulating data with computer models to show a non-existent warming in Antarctica. I offer this interesting article reproduced from the Financial Post section of the National Post newspaper.

Climate change's Antarctic ruffle

by Lawrence Solomon, FP Comment, January 31, 2009

How does a new Nature study conclude that Antarctica is warming when actual temperature readings show it is not?

For two decades now, those predicting climate-change catastrophe have been frustrated by skeptics who ask, “If carbon dioxide is warming the planet, why does the data show Antarctica to be cooling?” Until last week, the doomsayers had all manner of complicated explanations but no slam dunk answer. Now, thanks to a new study published last week in Nature magazine, the doomsayers obtained the answer they sought — proof that any fool can understand. The bottom line: Antarctica is in fact warming, just like the rest of the planet. “Contrarians have sometime grabbed on to this idea that the entire continent of Antarctica is cooling, so how could we be talking about global warming,” elaborated Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University and a co-author of the Nature study. “Now we can say: No, it’s not true ... It is not bucking the trend.”

The press seized on the findings. “Antarctica is warming, not cooling: study,” announced a Reuters headline. “Global warming hits Antarctica,” stated CNN. “Antarctica joins rest of the globe in warming,” said the Associated Press. But this study in Nature leaves many unimpressed, including top scientists from the doomsayer camp. One week after the study’s release, it is clear this study does nothing to explain the enigma of a cooling Antarctica.

The Nature authors had a daunting challenge. For one thing, the U.S. government has maintained a scientific base at the South Pole since 1957 at which temperatures have been continuously measured. The temperature readings show a cooler climate over the past half century. For another, various weather stations in Antarctica record cooler temperatures. Moreover, satellite readings of temperatures above Antarctica show a cooling trend. Little wonder that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself rejects the warming hypothesis. In its 2007 report, the IPCC accepts that Antarctica shows a “lack of warming reflected in atmospheric temperatures averaged across the region.” To reconcile Antarctica with the rest of the globe, global warming advocates have taken the simple, if unsatisfying, view that the lack of warming in Antarctica is consistent with the presence of warming everywhere else.

How do Mann and the other scientists involved in the Nature study now conclude that Antarctica is warming when actual temperature readings show it is not? Antarctica’s weather stations cover a small fraction of the continent. Where data doesn’t exist, Mann makes various assumptions, then deduces Antarctic temperatures over the last 50 years with the help of computer models. The official explanation: “The researchers devised a statistical technique that uses data from satellites and from Antarctic weather stations to make a new estimate of temperature trends.”

Are these statistical techniques reliable?

“I have to say I remain somewhat skeptical,” states Kevin Trenberth, a lead author for the IPCC and director of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It is hard to make data where none exist.”

Such results “have no real way to be validated,” states John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. “We will never know what the temperature was over the very large missing areas that this technique attempts to fill in.”

“How do the authors reconcile the conclusions in their paper with the cooler than average long-term sea-surface temperature anomalies off of the coast of Antarctica?” asked Roger Pielke, senior scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, in noting one of several failings in the study.

Michael Mann and Nature are not new to political controversy, or dubious science. The two collaborated before — in publishing what became known as the hockey-stick graph. This graph — which showed the 1990s to be the hottest decade of the hottest century of the last thousand years — became one of the most publicized facts of the year when it was published. Then the hockey stick became slapstick as it became an object of ridicule: Mann’s statistical techniques were shown to be entirely invalid and Mann was shown to have lacked the statistical knowledge demanded by the study. Mann and Nature refused to make public the data used to produce the graph, Nature refused to publish a response rebutting the hockey stick graph and Nature’s peer review process was shown to be a sham.

It took years, and a U.S. Congressional committee, to finally resolve the dispute, to Mann’s and Nature’s shame. Mercifully, the verdict over the latest offering from these two is seeing a speedier resolution.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Often I receive news releases that aren't a great fit for the magazine or website, but are interesting, and environmentally related. The release below should be of interest to anyone who wishes to follow the issue of mountaintop removal for coal extraction -- certainly one of the most controversial and questionable activities in the United States today.

NEW COAL SLUDGE DANGER? CITIZENS WARN OF DANGER OF BLASTING NEAR SLUDGE DAM 10 TIMES BIGGER THAN TVA'S KINGSPORT SITE

Protest Takes Place as Massey Energy Prepares to Blast Coal River Mountain; TheCLEAN.org Joins Local Groups in Calling for More Study of Risks at CRM, Other Sites Posing Kingsport-Like Dangers.

PETTUS, W.Va.//February 3, 2009//Plans to start blasting as part of the mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining operation on West Virginia's Coal River Mountain could compromise an eight-billion-gallon coal sludge dam that is roughly 10 times bigger than the coal ash dam that was breached in late December 2008, in Kingsport, Tenn.

Local citizens gathered today at the Marfork Coal Company gate, in Pettus, W.Va., approximately one hour from Charleston, W.Va., to protest the blasting of Coal River Mountain by Massey Energy. Instead of mountaintop removal, the citizens would prefer a wind farm, which studies show would provide more tax revenue and more jobs over time than mountaintop removal. Top climate scientist James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has endorsed the residents' call for the wind farm.

"I fear for my friends and all the people living below this coal sludge dam," said Gary Anderson, who lives on the mountain near the site. "Blasting beside the dam, over underground mines, could decimate the valley for miles. The 'experts' said that the Buffalo Creek sludge dam was safe, but it failed. They said that the TVA sludge dam was safe, but it failed. Massey is setting up an even greater catastrophe here."

Today's action was organized by pan-Appalachian Mountain Justice (http://www.mountainjustice.org) and Climate Ground Zero (http://www.ClimateGroundZero.org). The citizens were joined by the nonprofit and nonpartisan Civil Society Institute (CSI) and TheCLEAN.org (http://www.TheClean.org), a collaborative movement of grassroots organizations and individuals with the common goal of implementing a new energy future through safe and clean renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Vivian Stockman, of the West Virginia-based Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, one of the co-conveners of the TheCLEAN.org, said: "The attack on Coal River Mountain has emerged as a national symbol of the foolishness of permanently sacrificing mountains, forests, streams and nearby communities. This mountain instead could support a wind farm, creating safer long-term jobs, more taxes and clean energy. The fact that Coal River Mountain blasting would jeopardize an eight-billion-gallon toxic coal sludge dam underscores why this nation needs to transition as quickly as possible to its clean energy future."

Vernon Haltom, a resident of the Coal River Valley and Mountain Justice volunteer, said: "The myth of 'clean coal' ignores the tragedy of mountaintop removal, the poisoning of our drinking water, and severe health consequences from coal mining and burning. People are no longer going to stand by silently and let coal companies destroy our communities while the government does nothing."

Haltom added: "We've worked within the West Virginia system, but now we need the support of President Obama and federal lawmakers to make sure that the risk of mountaintop removal operations is fully analyzed, disclosed and then dealt with. In practical terms, that means no mountaintop removal."

How big is the potential risk of a coal sludge spill at Coal River Mountain?

The coal sludge dam site is located over underground mines and also poses a direct risk to a nearby school, town and scores of local residents.

Massey is already clearing trees to begin work on the proposed mountaintop removal operation, the same site where residents are advocating for a wind farm as a safe alternative for cleaner energy and long-term jobs (http://www.coalriverwind.org).

Local citizens are calling on the W.V. Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) to suspend Massey's permit due to the recent coal disasters in Tennessee and revelations that the DEP has failed to properly regulate sludge dams.

Residents worry that blasting next to a sludge lake above underground mines may create a catastrophe that could kill thousands in the communities downstream.

"President Obama, please look at Coal River Mountain. Your strongest supporters are counting on you to stop this madness, " Hansen, the climate scientist, said.

A 2008 report by the federal Office of Surface Mining revealed serious deficiencies in the WV DEP's regulation of coal waste dams (http://www.wvgazette.com/News/200901110512?page=1&build=cache).

Massey also operated the Martin County, Ky., sludge dam that released approximately 300 million gallons of coal waste through underground mines in 2000. The EPA called that the worst environmental disaster in the Southeast.

Then, in December 2008, a coal ash sludge impoundment operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) failed near Harriman, Tenn. That disaster released one billion gallons that destroyed three homes, damaged twelve more and covered 300 acres.

CONTACT: Ailis Aaron Wolf, for CSI/TheCLEAN.org, (703) 276-3265 or aaaron@hastingsgroup.com.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 06:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Popular opinion (and some expert opinion) is beginning to shift again in respect to the subject of anthropogenic climate change. I think the article sequence below from the Urban Renaissance Institute is very interesting and readers should give it some attention. By way of introduction, let me mention that a colleague of mine recently recounted the events at an environmental confererence. He was telling me about someone who spoke on a topic (not relevant here) and began his presentation by saying he was something of a climate change skeptic. My friend then said, "Of course, from that moment on the speaker had zero credibility with the audience." Oh really? I thought. It's come to the point where if someone freely expresses doubt, which may be backed up with considerable research and insight I might add, then they automatically have "zero credibility." Hmm. I think this is some kind of neo-Mediaevalism. Anyway, read the article below and enjoy. And one last comment: please be aware that Fred Singer has been attacked by forces with an agenda, including slanderous and false information placed on Wikipedia by unqualified commentators. Just thought I'd throw that in.

Urban Renaissance Institute in the News:
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Our web site is www.urban-renaissance.org

Obama's America – a denier nation

Americans will have two messages for Barack Obama at his inauguration today: We love you but don't blame us for climate change.

by Lawrence Solomon, National Post, January 20

In a national survey released on the eve of Obama's inauguration by Rasmussen Reports, the U.S. polling company, a majority of Americans – 51% – now believe that humans are not the predominant cause of climate change. Only 41% blame humans and 9% aren't sure. Just one month ago, the same pollster found that just 43% of Americans let us humans off the hook while 46% blamed humans and 11% were not sure. Last July, fully 50% blamed humans.

Of those who see natural causes at work in our ever-changing climate, the great majority see the Sun and other long-term planetary trends as the cause while a minority blame other natural factors, such as volcanic activity.

To make matters worse for the global warming [Global warming is the increase in the average measured temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans since the mid-20th century, and its projected continuation.] doomsayers, the majority don't view the global warming we have seen – whether its cause is natural or man-made – with great alarm, despite media depictions of rising oceans, melting polar caps, dying polar bears and accelerating hurricanes. One third dismiss global warming concerns altogether, saying they are not too serious or not at all serious, and another quarter find climate change only "somewhat serious." Only four in 10 Americans do find climate change to be a "very serious" issue.

The Rasmussen Poll found Democrats to be isolated in their attitudes toward climate change. A decisive majority of both Republicans and independents absolve humans. Even among Democrats, however, only 59% still blame humans. Likewise, only 18% of Republicans and 33% of independents view global warming as a very serious problem while a majority of Democrats do.

The Rasmussen poll also provides guidance as to how a politically savvy President Obama will deal with climate change, given that he has put the current economic crisis at the top of his political agenda. In response to the question, "Is there a conflict between economic growth and environmental protection?," 46% responded "yes" compared to only 32% who thought not. If President Obama is to get the broad-based support that he desires for the economic reforms that he will be proposing, he'll need to respect the views of the large minority of Democrats, and the majority of Independents and Republicans that he now represents. His climate change agenda may need to wait, until the planets align themselves for him in a propitious manner.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute, and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

What the global warming fear-mongers won't tell you

by Ron Smith, Baltimore Sun, January 7, 2009

Despite what this newspaper's editorialists aver ("A New Year's resolution," Jan. 2, 2009), there is no scientific proof that "time is running out for mankind to take the needed actions to thwart the most disastrous effects of climate change." Nor is it anything more than an unproven assertion to argue that "the relevant scientific community has reached a clear consensus: Many decades of unchecked fossil fuel consumption has pushed the planet far beyond the natural cycle, and the impact of this enhanced warming, especially the forecast rise in sea level this century, could ultimately lead to human suffering on an epic scale."

The Baltimore Sun confidently urges the next president to avoid the temptation of postponing drastic action on this matter because of other pressing problems, such as the worldwide economic slowdown, our wars in Eurasia, etc. - the most important thing in the long term is to "reduce global warming [Global warming is the increase in the average measured temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans since the mid-20th century, and its projected continuation.] ." To this I say: "Nonsense." Oops, that makes me a "flat-earth type," and an all-around bad person, perhaps allied with "certain deep-pocketed traditional energy interests such as coal producers." As you probably know, proponents of global warming are very well funded as well, but space is limited, so let us move on to the idea of scientific consensus, which is oxymoronic.

Michael Crichton put it this way in a 2003 speech: "Let's be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."

The talismanic word consensus is hauled out and used to beat skeptics about the head and shoulders only in cases where the science is far from convincing. Besides, the consensus is not actually there. Search for the book The Deniers: The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution and Fraud and you'll find a list of some of the scientists who depart from the supposed consensus.

The idea that we can predict anything at all about what the next century has in store for us and further generations is patently ludicrous. We don't know what the weather will be like over the next two weeks, yet the global warming crowd insists that computer modeling shows imminent disaster and actions must be taken immediately, no matter the cost, to avert it.

S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery wrote a book, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, a New York Times best-seller, providing details on scientific studies that disprove the arguments put forth by Al Gore (and The Baltimore Sun) about human activity causing climate change. The 1,500-year cycle of climate change is not based on unproven, theoretical computer modeling, but on actual ice core sampling and satellite measurement of the sun's varying rays. The evidence from the actual measurements is that variation in solar activity - sun spots - is what causes global warming and cooling.

The fact is that the latest global warming began about 18,000 years ago, long before man started spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. At that time, thick layers of ice covered much of the Earth. The even bigger picture to keep in mind shows that for several million years, the dominant climate on this planet has been that of ice ages, which last approximately 100,000 years and which are interrupted by far briefer periods of warming, called interglacial periods, lasting for about 15,000 to 20,000 years. The current one in which we humans and other species developed and thrived should last a while longer before the extreme, life-unfriendly deep freeze returns. Warming is what enables and enhances life and is therefore something to be welcomed, not something to be feared.

Ron Smith can be heard weekdays, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., on 1090 WBAL-AM and WBAL.com. His column appears Wednesdays in The Baltimore Sun.

Book review: The Deniers
by B.P. Terpstra, tcsdaily.com (Technology/Commerce/Society), January 8, 2008

There appears to be a great spiritual thirst for predicting great catastrophes. I call it Armageddon chic. In Lawrence Solomon's 2008 book, The Deniers, however, we hear from a good many moderate voices. There are no sensational prophecies, but there are many reasons to take a deep yoga breath.

Here are four:

Notably, the former chairman of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Sciences, Dr. Edward Wegman, for example, exposed the "hockey stick" rot behind the catastrophic global warming narrative, in spite of attacks from all directions.

The president of the International Commission on Polar Meteorology, Dr. David Bromwich openly believes that "it's hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now."

The chief of Insects and Infectious Diseases, Prof. Paul Reiter from the influential Pasteur Institute acknowledges that Al Gore's stated view that "global" warming catastrophes and "mosquito-borne diseases" are partners is not taken seriously in specialist circles.

And, not surprisingly, the director of research, from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, Prof. Hendrik Tennekes, maintains that "there exists no sound theoretical framework for climate predictability studies" to justify catastrophic warming forecasts.

The Deniers also calls readers to think outside the so-called consensus box. Is there really a consensus on the consensus? And, if so, how wise is it to present science as a show of hands? In it, Solomon, a Canadian columnist raises the issue of politics in all of this. Page 183: "Headline horrors make great scapegoats. There's no more egregious or vicious example than governments using global warming to cover up their own failures to prevent the resurgence of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases."

The dynamics of the global warming issue are changing, too. From Jimmy Carter's campaign against "global cooling" and his faith in the National Climate Program Act to Hollywood's An Inconvenient Truth, Solomon's text is also a cautionary tale about embracing extreme theories. But rather than deleting historical records, and simply inserting ourselves in a catastrophic motion picture, The Deniers also attempts to draw our attention to the big-picture arguments.

Page 171: "For millions of years, the geologic record shows, Earth has experienced an ongoing cycle of ice ages, each typically lasting about 100,000 years, and punctured by brief, warmer periods called interglacials, such as we are now in," Solomon argues. "The current period of global warming actually constitutes additional indication of the ice age to come." Thus, there is no reason to blame the "evil" robber barons. Or live like Hobbits.

With so much talk about the role of politics in business (an important argument, no doubt), it's no wonder so many of us forget just how political the "independent" United Nations and other public intuitions are. And, where, pray tell is the infamous hockey stick today? Page 21: "The IPCC has dropped it from the Summary for Policymakers for its 2007 Report," notes Solomon. "But the hockey stick did its main work years ago and is still very widely cited by advocates of the science-is-settled position."

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 08:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought readers would enjoy reading a news release from the Environment and Plastics Industry Council (EPIC) that's critical of the move by Loblaw's supermarkets to charge a nickel to customers for each plastic non-reusable bag they request for their groceries. I have inserted some comments in bold just to add my two cents (pun intended). -- Guy Crittenden

CONSUMERS TO PAY MILLIONS WITH LAUNCH OF FIVE-CENT BAG FEE BY LOBLAW

Toronto (January 12, 2009) – Consumers are the losers with the implementation today of a five-cent charge on plastic shopping bags by Loblaw which has moved quickly to benefit from the City of Toronto proposal to charge for bags. The five-cent bag fee is an unnecessary $44 million hit to consumers on their food bills and retailers are the big winners.

The bags cost 1-cent and the Loblaw charge is 5-cents; a 500 per cent profit. Retailers are turning a cost item into a highly profitable source of revenue at the expense of consumers. For Loblaw, with its dominant share of the market, this is a major windfall profit of millions during a recession, particularly since the retailer is rushing to introduce the fee in Toronto six months ahead of the city mandated deadline so it can add as much as $15 million to their bottomline.

GUY ADDS: This is an interesting characterization of the issue. Plastic bags are a cost centre for stores. It seems odd to criticize retailers for reducing this kind of cost. If they make a profit of the kind EPIC claims, it will only be because consumers keep using and buying the same number of plastic bags, which is unlikely. The point of the fee is to encourage greater use of reusable bags -- which no one disputes is a good thing to do -- yet still give people the option of a plastic bag if they want the convenience, or to use a few each week in their below-the-sink kitchen catchers (as I do).

“With the Loblaw launch, the first shoe has dropped on the $44 million bag tax on consumers in Toronto. It is very hard to see this fee as anything other than a revenue grab during a recession”, said Cathy Cirko, Vice President, Environment and Plastics Industry Council.

“There is no question that this will add costs to consumers’ food bills. Consumers will now have to buy plastic bags if they want to participate in the city’s organics collection program and to get their household garbage to curbside. We doubt very much that Loblaw plans to lower the cost of their food to consumers,” said Cirko.

Currently, seven out of ten traditional plastic shopping bags are reused by residents for many purposes including household garbage and the city organics program. A fee could become a disincentive to participation in the organics program. Consumers lose even if they opt for a reusable bag.

As Cirko points out consumers are not going to use a reusable for their household garbage or to participate in the city organics program. They will now have to pay for bags; either five-cents for the traditional bag or 15-cents for a kitchen catcher or they can shop at stores that are not charging for bags.

GUY ADDS: This seems inflammatory to me. I like and respect Cathy Cirko, so this is not personal and I know she's got a job to do, and I'm sure she believes what she's saying. But you don't absolutely have to use a bag for the organics program, and a new generation of compostable bags is on the market. Having to pay five cents or more for a kitchen catcher bag is actually an incentive to recycle and divert more (I know I do) so you save money by putting out less garbage. Isn't this the whole point? So one can equally argue that the Loblaws levy not only encourages the use of reusable bags when shopping, but also greater waste diversion at home. I'm down to just two or three grocery bags per week for what I throw out, and I have two boys, plus no organics collection program in the condo where I live.

“If consumers opt for kitchen catchers, it will cost three times as much adding even more to the retailer bottomline; a win-win for retailers”, adds Cirko.

The industry is most concerned that the Loblaw focus and publicity around bag fees is a red herring sending the wrong message to consumers. And it could end up undermining and killing Toronto’s new blue bin recycling program for plastic shopping bags.

The addition of plastic shopping bags to the Toronto blue bin was seen as the first step to recycle a wide range of other plastic bags and film in packaged products sold by retailers like Loblaw – bread bags, toilet paper wrap, dry cleaning bags, produce bags, milk bags, vegetable bags, newspaper bags, etc. Toronto’s bags are being recycled by EFS Plastics Inc. in Elmira, Ont. and remanufactured right here in Ontario into new bags, drainage pipes, lawn edging, and a host of other made-in-Ontario products.

GUY ADDS: Missing from this argument is the cost of collecting and processing the plastic shopping bags and other film plastic. These are the most expensive items to collect and recycle, especially from an activity-based costing perspective. In today's market I'd expect these to cost $1500/tonne or more. Whatever the number is, the fact is that these plastics are also being collected in only tiny amounts, perhaps because of the cost. I think an argument can be made that we should reduce our reliance on these plastics in all but the most essential cases (e.g., food safety, meat wrap, etc.) and recycle the rest 100 per cent paid for by industry, which should also pay for anything sent to disposal. EPIC is criticizing teh visible Loblaw fee, but not mentioning the huge hidden cost of collecting and recycling or disposing of film plastic. Let's get all the numbers out there and have an honest debate.

“Consumers want to recycle, not pay unnecessary fees for bags,” contends Cirko. “The best thing Loblaw could do for the environment is promote recycling and educate consumers on the 3 R’s. We should not be continually exporting jobs to Asia. Retailers need to work with industry on solutions that grow jobs locally and help the environment,” said Cirko. According to the plastics industry, 10,900 Ontarians are employed in the manufacture of plastic bags and film.

International experience shows that bag fees actually hurt the environment. Plastic bags represent only 1 per cent of landfill and less than .5 per cent of litter. Everywhere bag fees have been implemented, they have failed. Consumers have responded by purchasing the heavier kitchen catcher type bags which contain 82 per cent more plastic and by using more paper bags. This has resulted in more resource consumption, more material going to landfill and the generation of even more greenhouse gases.

GUY SAYS: I direct readers to Maria Kelleher's excellent recent article on the experience in Ireland, that they can access by searching on her name on the home page of www.solidwastemag.com She offers a different perspective.

“The best thing we can all do for the environment is buy locally-made products, reuse and recycle locally,” continues Cirko. “We don’t need to load these kinds of costs on consumers, but need to continue with public education, building recycling infrastructure and drive recycling. There are 44 million reasons why this is a better approach.”

GUYS SAYS: Once again, industry is pushing the recycling solution and not respecting the 3Rs hierarchy. I think the five cent fee is a reasonable compromise compared to, say, an outright ban on plastic bags. Let's face it, a lot of people will keep using and buying these bags, but lots will also use their reusable bags, too. If the plastics industry had to participate in full Extended Producer Responsibility for plastic shopping bags, and pay for all net collection, recycling and disposal costs, would the industry feel the same way? it'll be interested to see what the five cent fee actually accomplishes. Readers are invited to email their opinions to the magazine.

The Environment and Plastics Industry Council (EPIC), a council, is part of the Canadian Plastics Industry Association (CPIA), is dedicated to sustainable plastics recycling and to minimizing plastic waste sent to landfill.

For more information, contact:

Aydan Raghavan/Jaclyn Clare
416-777-0368

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 07:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chester Waxman has died at the age of 82, after fighting asbestos-related lung cancer for just under three years. I wouldn't wish mesothelioma on anyone, yet it's somehow not surprising that someone who worked in the scrap recycling industry might succumb to it. Asbestos was a common material back in the day when Waxman was part of the hands-on side of his family's recycling operation. You can read the detailed obituary at www.solidwastemag.com (December 15, 2008) website news.

I thought it'd be interesting to reprint two items. The first is an article from today's Hamilton Spectator; and the second is an editorial I wrote back in the August/September 2002 edition of Solid Waste & Recycling magazine after judgement was rendered in Waxman v. Waxman -- the longest running civil lawsuit in Ontario history. See below.

Tough, honest business grew from junk buyer to scrap empire

STEVE ARNOLD -- The Hamilton Spectator

(Dec 15, 2008)

It takes guts to build a business from almost nothing.

That was one of the things Chester and Morris Waxman had going for them over the 40 years they worked together to turn their father's horse-and-wagon junk trade into one of Canada's largest scrap metal companies.

"Chester had a lot of street savvy," recalled Ron Foxcroft, whose trucking company was next door to the Waxman scrapyard for almost 25 years. "Chester was a salesman, a promoter, a leader. In scrap, and trucking, you have to be tough. You have to make tough decisions, and Chester did that.

"He was tough guy, a passionate guy, a never-give-up kind of guy."

The Waxman business roots go back to 1911 when Isaac, a Jewish shoemaker from Poland, arrived in the city. After losing his job because he refused to work on the Sabbath, he got a horse and wagon and took to gathering rags, bottles and other scrap to earn a living. After 11 years, he'd earned enough to bring his wife and five children from Poland. Eventually, four more children were added to the brood, including Morris in 1925 and Chester in 1926.

Chester Waxman left high school at age 15 to help support the family, working as a jeweller's apprentice and then at Hamilton Bridge and National Steel Car during the Second World War. After the war, the brothers joined their father in the junk business, trading the horse for a truck and focusing on scrap metal, which they sold to the city's booming steel mills.

They quickly won contracts with Stelco, Butler Manufacturing, Firestone and other companies that soon had the scrapyard behind the family home on Harriet Street humming with constant activity. Early on, the brothers divided up the workload to play to their strengths -- Morris ran the yard and the trucks while Chester handled sales and the legal-financial side.

When the scrapyard needed a new piece of equipment Morris laid out the specification and Chester made the deal.

That tag-team approach worked well -- without a well-run yard the company wouldn't have been able to handle the volume of business Chester brought in.

"They were successful because they started young, they kept up with the times and they worked damn hard," recalled former Ontario lieutenant governor Lincoln Alexander. "To succeed in business you have to believe in yourself, and the Waxmans did that very well.

"Chester was especially tough," he recalled. "He didn't back down from anybody, he was a real fighter."

Success brought rewards -- the brothers often treated themselves to matching Cadillacs and expensive gifts for their wives. There was also money to indulge Chester's interest in horse racing, allowing him to buy a part interest in the Fort Erie race track.

Over those decades, I. Waxman and Sons had a sterling reputation in the city and a tough industry.

"My grandfather, who's 94, remembers selling scrap to the Waxmans on nothing but a handshake," said former regional chairman Terry Cooke. "There was never anything but a handshake and my grandfather was never disappointed."

The fact they started from such modest beginnings coloured the way the brothers approached business, Cooke added.

"Because they started with nothing they knew they had to hustle and find a way to survive," he said.

Former mayor Jack MacDonald had a similar memory of Waxman.

"Chester Waxman was one of my very favourite people," he said. "He was one of the most interesting and honest people I've ever known."

As Chester's sons matured they also joined the business, following a short road from sales to the executive offices. A spot was also found for Chester's brother-in-law Sheldon Kumer.

The Chester-Morris partnership dissolved in the mid-1980s into a bitter legal dispute that eventually ended with a multimillion-dollar judgment in favour of Morris. In March 2007, the family business was ordered into liquidation. The assets were eventually sold to Montreal scrap king Herb Black and the shell of the company was petitioned into bankruptcy.

sarnold@thespec.com

Editorial

Solid Waste & Recycling, August/September 2002

The Waxman Decision

On June 27, 2002, the Ontario Superior Court's Madame Justice Mary Anne Sanderson rendered her decision in Waxman vs. Waxman. Her ruling, which runs 440 pages, culminates 14 years of civil litigation capped by a 200-day trial between warring factions of the country's most prominent scrap-recycling family. (See "Family Scrap" in the October/November 2000 edition.)

Judge Sanderson's decision struck like an avenging sword. The judge ruled that Chester Waxman duped his older brother Morris out of his 50 per cent share of the multi-million-dollar family business I. Waxman & Sons Ltd. in December 1983. The ruling reinstates the plaintiff Morris (now 77) as half-owner of the company and orders Chester and his family to return his share in tens of millions of dollars in profit and bonuses pocketed since 1984.

Stating they were "fabricated," the judge rejected Chester's defense and most of his counter suit as well as the testimony of his three sons, company accountant Steve Wiseman, and lawyer Paul Ennis (whom she also found liable). Moreover, she assigned unusual punitive damages against Chester totaling $350,000, saying, "He abused the trust of a loving brother and faithful partner."

"On the facts before me," she writes, "I find Chester's conduct meets, indeed, surpasses, the bar set...for malicious, oppressive and high-handed conduct deserving of public censure by the court."

The judge accepted Morris's testimony that in 1983, shortly before he was to undergo open-heart surgery, Chester -- his brother and business partner of 40 years and someone he trusted implicitly -- got him to sign over half of the business for just $3-million and ignored his pleas to tear up the deal after he realized what had happened.

The judge cites the issue of succession as the trigger for the terrible feud. The accountant had proposed an "estate freeze" (for tax purposes) in which Chester's three sons (Robert, Gary and Warren) and Morris's two sons (Michael and Douglas) would each inherit an equal 20 per cent of the company. Morris rejected this proposal as it gave control to Chester's sons (three could out-vote two).

The judge determined that Chester, angered by Morris's rejection of the estate freeze, sought to gain control of the company and operate it from then on for the benefit of himself and his sons. Morris and his family, for example, were not made aware of multi-million-dollar bonuses that Chester paid himself and his boys, or of property leases that were highly unfavorable to Morris.

The judge concluded that Chester and his sons formed a number of side businesses that provided various services to the company (e.g., Greycliffe trucking) the real purpose of which was to divert equity from the company through such things as inflated charges. Her ruling provides tracing orders to allow the plaintiff to recover profits that may have been invested in such things as fine art and Bobby Waxman's notorious racehorses.

The judge also found that Chester and his sons induced Philip Environmental to breach contracts it held with a business operated by Morris and his son Michael, Solid Waste Reclamation Inc. (SWRI). Philip was then just a young start-up company that provided contract services to SWRI. Chester and Bobby told Philip's owners Allen and Philip Fracassi they would only drop a lawsuit against them if they stopped doing business with Morris.

The judge writes, "I find that Robert tampered with the documents, then presented them to Fracassi...in order to induce Philip to terminate its contract with SWRI."

The Fracassi's took most of SWRI's customers with them to the benefit of Philip and later bought Chester's business for $30-million. Morris and his family, already shut out of I. Waxman & Sons, were left devastated.

During the trial the judge was absolutely inscrutable. But in her written decision she makes it clear -- in terms that are at times scathing and quite personal -- that she found Chester and his sons not to be credible witnesses. She mentions that Morris's family medical benefits were cut off shortly after his wife was diagnosed with cancer.

Meanwhile, she cites testimony that as a child Morris defended his younger brother from schoolyard bullies. She praises Morris as a "reluctant warrior" who was slow to sue his brother Chester for fear of shaming the family. She praises son Michael as a young businessman with whom she was greatly impressed. She quotes transcripts that recount how the extended Waxman family in Hamilton has sided with Chester -- who controls the purse strings -- and shunned Morris and his family, though the judge decided that he was the real victim.

The story isn't quite over yet. Chester's lawyers say they will file an appeal, stating that a man is responsible for his signature and has a duty to read documents before signing them. And Philip Environmental's lawsuit against Chester's son Bobby for $150-million is still before the courts. Philip's lawyers will find Judge Sanderson's conclusions about Bobby Waxman's and Allen Fracassi's testimony in Waxman vs. Waxman excellent bedtime reading.

But there's one outcome that needn't wait for further court decisions: The extended Waxman family that sided with Chester should read the judge's decision line by line, word for word.

Readers can access the complete 440-page decision in Waxman vs. Waxman and the related lawsuits by looking under the "Posted Documents" section at our Web site: www.solidwastemag.com

Guy Crittenden is editor-in-chief of this magazine. Send your letters to:

gcrittenden@solidwastemag.com

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 12:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We’re in full production with the December/January edition of Solid Waste & Recycling magazine and the Winter edition of HazMat Management magazine. The article lineups for both are really strong. In addition to a robust Brownfields Marketplace supplement in HazMat Management, the cover story for Solid Waste & Recycling is about the Ontario environment minister’s new discussion paper “Toward A Zero Waste Future” and this ties in well with related sidebars on product stewardship and EPR from BC, a new electronics program from Sony/GEEP and Alberta’s recent changes to its deposit-refund program (including placing milk containers on deposit). We’ve got a terrific article by the City of Guelph’s Phil Zigby on the collapsed market prices for recycled commodities and a related sidebar adapted from his AMRC presentation in Niagara-on-the-Lake this fall about materials that create problems for recycling plants (MRFs).

In addition to getting all that off to press, I’m going to attend two (count ‘em!) consultation meetings on Toward a Zero Waste Future and the five-year review of the Waste Diversion Act. The first is being conducted by Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment at the direct Energy Centre in Toronto – I will have to attend the Wednesday session (with municipalities and NGOs) rather than the Tuesday session (industry) due to some pretty bad snow and sleet expected in my area (Collingwood) and all points south. The second meeting is being held Friday by the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy (CIELAP) and I look forward to meeting old friends at that session and making new acquaintances.

I’ll report back on this Blog early next week about some of what I learn and will likely be in a position to post (for downloading) some documents that I’ve been asked not to circulate until after the meetings.

I respectfully suggest to readers outside Ontario that this stuff is interesting to everyone, as the ideas being developed could apply anywhere and everywhere. Stay tuned!

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 01:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This blog entry contains a short essay on “Toward a Zero Waste Future: Review of Ontario’s Waste Diversion Act, 2002” the discussion paper released in November 2008 by Ontario Environment Minister John Gerretsen. The essay summarizes and responds to issues raised in the paper, and describes some solutions that advocates of the Zero Waste approach might recommend. This essay will be updated after suggestions are received.

Readers are invited to read this short essay and the suggestions at the end, then forward their own additional suggestions to the editor at:

gcrit@solidwastemag.com

The End of Garbage?

Commentary on “Toward a Zero Waste Future: Review of Ontario’s Waste Diversion Act, 2002”

By Guy Crittenden

In November 2008, Ontario Environment Minister John Gerretsen released a discussion paper, “Toward a Zero Waste Future: Review of Ontario’s Waste Diversion Act, 2002.” Release of the paper triggered a 90-day comment period ending on January 15, 2009. This brief essay summarizes and responds to issues raised in the paper, and describes some solutions that advocates of the Zero Waste approach might recommend.

Overview & Background

The ideas put forward in Toward a Zero Waste Future represent a significant change in direction in Ontario with respect to waste management and related policy issues. The document recognizes significant shortcomings in the current waste recycling and disposal system and offers to overcome these not simply by making minor modifications to the existing system but by overhauling it in major ways. The level of insight and the degree of change proposed in the paper will no doubt excite environmental advocates and waste minimization proponents, as well as generate concern from affected industries, including product and packaging producers (whose costs may rise and industry position may change) and waste management companies whose traditional role as carters and disposers of waste will require modification.

Simply put, the discussion paper proposes to move Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) from a conceptual idea to a reality in the province; this will not only change how wastes are managed but also impact how goods are produced, packaged and distributed. The paper envisions an EPR economy in Ontario similar in many respects to those in place in certain European countries, most notably Germany.

If the ideas in the paper are implemented in the real world, Ontario will become a North American leader not only in waste minimization but also environmental stewardship, because much of the impacts will occur “upstream” during the production/manufacturing and distribution stage of products, not just the end-of-life management stage. Staff inside the environment ministry appear to have recognized that efficient waste diversion and disposal represent only a small fraction of the energy and environmental impact of products over their entire lifecycle, from natural resource extraction through manufacturing, distribution, sale and actual use of the product. Making industry responsible for its product and packaging wastes is a powerful way to cause change up and down the design and production ladder.

Moving Ontario toward becoming a European-style EPR economy will most certainly trigger a backlash, especially from the industries with a vested interest in the status quo. These include industries whose materials are managed via blue box recycling, but also industries whose materials never make it into that system and are sent directly for disposal. A province-wide EPR system would capture most if not all these materials, and assign management costs to producers that are currently borne by municipal ratepayers and only a few blue box “stewards.” If, as is described, industrial, commercial and institutional (IC&I) wastes are caught in the EPR net, owners of discards from this sector (which represents two-thirds of the waste stream) will no longer be able simply make use of the cheapest available landfill for disposal, and will instead have to reduce, reuse or recycle the materials.

The discussion paper was triggered by a stipulation of the 2002 Waste Diversion Act that the act be reviewed every five years. The minister is concurrently asking Waste Diversion Ontario (WDO) to review the existing Blue Box Program Plan (BBPP) and report back to the minister by March 20, 2009. WDO is the arms-length agency that meets with various “stewards” to arrange for program design and funding of waste diversion activities. Chief among these (so far) is Stewardship Ontario (SO) that represents the industries whose packaging is managed via the province’s curbside recycling program.

Currently, Stewardship Ontario’s members pay 50 per cent of the net cost of curbside recycling in the province, following a funding formula that attempts to assign costs proportionately among the different members (e.g., paper and paperboard packaging industry, beverage container producers, and so on). These stewards often argue fiercely between one another over the apportioning of costs (e.g., plastic versus paper) but have a common interest in paying only half, and not the full, net cost of recycling.

Municipalities have complained that SO’s members have never paid anything like 50 per cent of the blue box costs; industry has required from the outset that municipal systems must operate efficiently (a not unreasonable requirement). Industry has withheld full funding from communities that it rates as “poor performers” and has set aside funds for municipal projects to demonstrate innovative or “best practices.” Some municipalities, meanwhile, complain that they are in fact operating efficiently and that funds are being withheld by industry acting in its own self interest. These complaints are not easy to prove one way or the other, but it’s a widely held perception among municipalities that industry is not paying its fair share, and among industry that municipalities operate inefficiently. This holds significance in terms of the minister’s discussion paper, because many municipalities (tired of criticism and lack of funds) are now fed up to the point of being willing to hand over management of product and packaging waste to industry, and some industries are so fed up with the perceived inefficiency of the municipalities that they’d consider managing their wastes themselves. (Consider the example of paper mills rejecting loads of “contaminated” fibre, especially from single-stream recycling programs, as anecdotal evidence suggests is being done.)

In addition to presiding over the funding of the blue box, the WDO has facilitated discussions among industry stakeholders to develop product stewardship programs for the wastes from a number of industries, namely: scrap tires, household hazardous wastes (HHW), and waste electronics and electronic equipment (WEEE). These material streams appear to have been given priority due to various factors such as the hazardous components they contain, the volume they take up in landfill, or simply the fact that stewardship programs already exist in other provinces or states that could easily be copied. In the vision outlined in the new discussion paper, it’s possible that almost every waste material could be managed in a product stewardship program of some kind, with industry funding 100 per cent of the cost, and managing the materials in various unique take-back programs or “manufacturer’s networks,” or simply contracting with municipalities to collect and process them.

Thus far, a program for scrap tires has not been achieved; the first program put forward by WDO ran afoul of the “nexus” test – meaning (to simplify) that the program’s fee structure was too similar to a “tax.” A new scrap tire management program is currently being discussed.

An HHW program was approved and is being rolled out. At first, municipalities were to collect the materials and industry would “share” the cost of processing and safely disposing of the materials. The minister later decided that industry will pay the full cost of the program.

A WEEE program has been approved that will see WEEE collected and recycled by designated transporters and processors. The program has two phases, collecting a list of approved waste electronics in Phase One, and an additional (more complete) list in Phase Two.

As an aside, the governance and board membership of the WDO has been criticized in the past as being overly subject to influence by regulated industry. However, the makeup of the WDO board has recently been changed to better balance the interests of industry, municipalities and the public (i.e., the minister can appoint some impartial representatives). Good governance of the WDO is seen as crucial, since a contest is unfolding across the continent between proponents of stronger and weaker forms of product stewardship and EPR.

Product Stewardship (PS): In a weak PS program, industry negotiates and agrees to a program that requires only minimal involvement on its part, and “business as usual” for its members. The industry forms a collective or “industry funding organization” (IFO) that assigns an advance recycling fee (ARF) to its products and approves a list of designated collection sites, haulers and processors for the materials. The ARF pays for end-of-life management costs of the product. Industry and elected officials may then claim to have “solved the problem,” which is defined simply in terms of keeping the waste materials out of landfill. In some cases, disposal of the materials at a cement kiln or waste incinerator is counted as “waste diversion.”

While this kind of entry-level PS may indeed keep waste materials out of landfill, critics say that it continues the separation (via the IFO) of manufacturers from downstream responsibility for their products. They have no incentive to redesign the products or packaging for “cradle to cradle” management and true sustainability. PS is the right answer to the wrong question, they say, i.e., “How can we divert more waste from landfill?” instead of the more meaningful “How would a truly sustainable economic system function?” Defenders of certain PS programs counter that full EPR for such things as used oil and tires is not appropriate, since there’s little opportunity for product redesign, unlike (say) computers and other electronic equipment.

Another criticism is that the IFO can act like an industry cartel – prohibited in other contexts – and engage in practices such as price fixing and the use of market clout to push competitors out of the market. This criticism has been leveled at certain used oil stewardship programs, for instance, in which IFOs populated by representatives of the petroleum industry were accused of designing systems that economically favor virgin oil producers and punish oil re-refiners, despite the fact that the latter are themselves models of product stewardship who (ironically) improve the overall eco-efficiency of the production cycle started by the virgin oil producers. Such unintended anti-market (and anti-environment) consequences must be carefully guarded against in policy and program development.

Environmentalists fear that jurisdictions across North America will approve various PS programs for all kinds of materials, allowing industry reps and elected officials to hold press conferences and declare the problem “solved” for each material even as the very same quantity and type of environmentally unfriendly products and packaging are manufactured in a status quo system. PS programs could in theory be put in place for every kind of material (e.g., plastic water bottles, shopping bags, aluminum beer cans, etc.) and allow those products and packaging to continue forever, with no one ever bothering to ask, “Should we really be using this material/package in the first place?”

Individual Producer Responsibility (IPR): Minister Gerretsen’s discussion paper suggests that he and his staff are well aware of the limitations of entry-level PS; they refer not only to EPR but also to Individual Producer Responsibility (IPR). This term was coined by policymakers who recognize the danger that stakeholders may design PS programs that look like EPR but are in fact just diversion schemes managed by collectives and ARFs. IPR promotes the idea that individual companies should be made to pay for (i.e., internalize the cost of) their products and packaging. Only when they cannot externalize the costs onto the environment or ratepayers (or consumers via a visible fee, which can then be falsely called a “tax”) will companies make decisions that are truly eco-efficient. The more that the specific costs of an industry’s wastes (and better yet, an individual company) can be assigned to that industry/company, the greater the incentive will be for the producer to choose the most eco-efficient or clean-production system, and packaging. Modern bar code and evolving RFID technologies may make it possible for companies in various industries to be precisely billed for the true end-of-life management costs of their products. In the meantime, waste composition studies can somewhat fairly apportion costs between different brand owners in certain industries (e.g., among electronics companies such as Sony, Sanyo, Toshiba, etc.). An eco fee may be applied to the sale of new products to pay for “orphan” or historical wastes in such sectors.

A good example of an industry for which asking a different question could yield more sustainable strategies is the soft drink industry. The industry currently uses a mix of plastic containers and metal cans (usually aluminum, to provide a subsidy to municipal recycling programs). After all the time and money spent promoting recycling, roughly half of these energy-intensive containers end up being sent for disposal. Those that are captured in municipal recycling programs are subject to wild market price fluctuations and pose various processing challenges. If the soft drink industry was made wholly responsible for the management of its containers and other packaging at end-of-life, including payment for the landfilling of those that are not recycled, it might contemplate different options, including the adoption of the very deposit-refund systems that its fought for years in so-called “bottle bill” states. It might even switch to refillable bottle collection and sterilization systems (as it did up until the 1970s) if they are the most eco-efficient. But it will only do this when it’s made directly responsible for these containers. Interestingly, the soft drink companies operate just such systems in Europe; in Germany, refillable PET bottles are as ubiquitous for beverages like Coca-Cola as single-use “recyclable” ones are in North America.

Discussion paper details

The WDA discussion paper discusses producer versus shared responsibility, the economic implications of individual producer responsibility versus collective producer action on waste diversion, the issue of stewardship costs manifesting themselves as "visible fees" applied over and above the price of products, and the impact of stewardship program design on competition in waste service markets.

In this context the discussion paper then proposes the following:

1. A clear framework built upon the foundation of EPR. The paper identifies key elements of this framework:

-- The concept that, "…waste diversion programs should shift more financial responsibility onto producers", while allowing, "…producers to discharge responsibility for their products and packaging in the way that best suits their needs, has the fairest impact on existing markets and meets the public's demand for successful diversion activities that strive for zero waste and foster a green economy."

-- The concept of differentiating between producers' products based on the environmental profile of those products (including waste and non-waste factors such as energy efficiency, toxics reduction, greenhouse gas emissions profile, etc.);

-- A prohibition on "visible fees";

-- Application of stewardship fees to materials that are not currently recyclable;

-- A more flexible approach to allowing producers to discharge their existing or future stewardship obligations through individually crafted approaches such as pre-existing schemes, or individual producer-run programs.

2. A greater focus on the first and second of the 3Rs: waste reduction and reuse.

3. Increasing reduction and diversion of waste from the industrial, commercial & institutional sectors. Alternatives proposed include revising existing 3Rs regulations, extending responsibility for IC&I wastes to producers or designating IC&I wastes on a material-by-material basis.

4. Governance and administration of EPR programs -- i.e., greater clarity around roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities, to ensure that all players are contributing to a common goal.

The Ministry has posted Toward a Zero Waste Future on the Environmental Bill of Rights registry at:

http://www.ebr.gov.on.ca/ERS-WEB-External/displaynoticecontent.do?noticeId=MTA0NjEy&statusId=MTU2Njg2&language=en

A copy of the discussion paper itself can be downloaded from inside that link. The discussion paper embeds some set questions in the body of its text, with a caution that the ministry offers these only as examples and welcomes any kind of comment or recommendation.

Solutions & Recommendations

It can be argued that companies, industry groups and their representatives generally behave in a rational, self-interested and somewhat predictable way in any given set of circumstances. Although corporate interests and those of the public are often aligned, it would be naive to expect an industry to harm its own profit potential to fulfill some abstract public or environmental good. History has shown that, given the opportunity, an industry will externalize its costs onto the environment or ratepayers if given the chance. With all due respect to the success and benefits of curbside recycling programs thus far, as an appropriate strategy for some materials, the blue box program represented from the very beginning a form of cost externalization by industry. The story is well documented that the soft drink industry, acting in concert with grocers, saw the blue box as a convenient way to get out of refillable beverage containers and rebrand their single-use containers as “recyclable” and therefore environmentally friendly.

The concept was embraced by environmentalists, elected officials and (of course) industry because it appeared to have all the elements of a winning policy. Anecdotal evidence suggests that municipalities initially had very high expectations of making money from the programs, especially when the soft drink industry switched from steel to valuable aluminum cans. In subsequent decades, the drawbacks of focusing on recycling (the third “R”) have manifested themselves in ways that no one can ignore. The “shared cost” and “basket of goods” system has cost ratepayers literally hundreds of millions of dollars in net costs, with no end in sight. When commodity prices have been high, the programs appeared to be at least self-financing (if not profitable). With today’s commodity markets collapsing, and municipalities once again stockpiling or even set to landfill bales of recycled materials, the downside is once again evident. It’s not that the blue box should be terminated; rather, curbside collection and recycling must be seen as but one tool in the solutions toolbox, and not as a “one size fits all” solution.

Gerretsen’s EPR discussion paper challenges the province to move to the next level (beyond the blue box) and may be thought of as a call for various industries to internalize costs that they’ve externalized onto the environment and ratepayers for a long time. Zero Waste advocates can expect resistance from those industries, and no end of arguments against EPR waged in the pages of newspapers and on the radio and television airways. But these protestations should not be taken at face value; many industry reps and lobbyists recognize that EPR and Zero Waste are almost inevitable and, being citizens and parents themselves, may be more open to change than would at first appear. Significant change creates winners and losers. The losers will no doubt quickly see themselves as such and adapt quickly to the new set of circumstances, if and when the initial “lobby wars” prove futile. (It’s worth noting that Coca-Cola captured major market share in Germany by switching to a refillable bottling system faster than its rivals, once it realized that the government was serious.)

In the end, the German and some other European governments realized that making companies directly responsible for the management of their products and packaging at end of life would cause them to innovate toward the most eco-efficient system. As Ontario shifts toward a Zero Waste or EPR economy, some ideas and solutions that will help it succeed include the following:

• Make industry fully responsible: As the discussion paper suggests, make industry fully responsible for the end-of-life management of its products and packaging. Not all outcomes of doing this are predictable, and a certain “let the chips fall where they may” attitude will be necessary. (In other words, let the market sort it out. Offering protection for certain industries may turn out to be counter-productive.) The Ontario government might be wise to spend time carefully assessing European success stories (and failures) and include learnings from there into new legislation here.

• Implement disposal bans: Although landfill and other bans may be unpopular with some waste and industry groups, the Zero Waste/EPR approach will not work if industry is made solely responsible for end-of-life management of its products and wastes, and simultaneously has the option to simply place it cheaply in a landfill or waste incinerator (as is currently the fate for a great deal of otherwise recyclable IC&I waste materials). Anything that can be reused or recycled should be banned from disposal. This might have to be phased in for certain materials.

• Require recycled content: As a correlative of disposal bans, it should be required that recycled materials be incorporated wherever possible in new products and packaging. This will drive markets for the materials banned from disposal, which should not sit in stockpiles.

• Ban problem materials: By now the kinds of materials that are easy versus difficult (or even impossible) to sort and recycle at recycling plants are well known. Certain plastics and other materials that cannot be recycled must be banned from the marketplace, including plastics (for example) that are not recyclable but look identical to plastics that are recyclable. Again, making industry responsible to pay for the end-of-life management of its products and packaging should, on its own, provide an incentive for the selection of environmentally-friendlier materials.

• Use economic instruments: It’s important to support environmentally preferred behavior with positive price signals. For instance, in order to encourage the use of reusable shopping bags, “recyclable” ones should only be provided by merchants to customers who ask for them with the charge of a refundable deposit (e.g., set at a meaningful level of, say, 25 cents per bag). That way, customers can still enjoy the convenience of whatever bag they prefer, but have an economic incentive to use reusable bags or at least return bags for recycling; if they do not, at least “the polluter pays.” Non-refunded deposits can be used to support recycling and waste diversion systems. This concept could be extended to a wide variety of products and materials (e.g., non-rechargeable batteries, oil filters, various containers, etc.).

• Set meaningful targets and timetables: It’s reasonable to demand of various industries that their packaging achieve certain diversion rates by a certain time. When Alberta’s milk industry recently failed to achieve prescribed diversion targets in a voluntary program, the government placed milk beverage containers on deposit. The soft drink industry, for instance, could be required to attain an 80 per cent or greater recovery rate for its containers within a set number of years. It should be charged for all containers that are sent for disposal. This will almost certainly cause the industry to adopt a deposit-refund system. Such a system could be prescribed. The industry could be required to sell its products in refillable containers in a system similar to that of Germany.

• Implement green procurement policies: The government should lead by example and adopt meaningful Zero Waste practices throughout its own operations. A good example is the program recently implemented by the Town of Markham – a waste diversion leader.

• Issue a clear policy statement: The government should issue a broad policy statement in support of EPR and Zero Waste. This could be a re-written draft of its recent discussion paper, after comments have been received. Zero Waste principles should be incorporated into all waste and environmental legislation wherever possible. The government needs to outline its vision for where the EPR economy is headed so that various economic actors can determine their appropriate roles and responsibilities in the new system. For instance, the government could state that its long-term goal is to see local municipalities primarily managing source-separated organics via collection and composting programs, and to see them only handling other materials under contractual arrangements with industry. As much as possible, the policy statement should harmonize Ontario’s EPR goals with so-called “framework legislation” being adopted in certain other jurisdictions (e.g., British Columbia, California) to promote EPR and Zero Waste as a continent-wide movement.

• Regulate materials by application: Ontario should establish a formal policy task force to link with British Columbia and emulate the approach taken there, which regulates waste diversion by application rather than simply by material. For example, BC is establishing a product stewardship program for used detergent containers. This has the advantage that the government can work with one industry group led by a small number of companies whose packaging constitutes the vast majority of waste materials in that sector. The packages generally use the same kind of plastic resin. In this instance, having the detergent companies design and implement a product stewardship program for their containers makes more sense than, say, implementing product stewardship broadly for a particular kind of plastic. Ontario and BC (and other provinces such as Nova Scotia and Quebec) could cooperate in rolling out a series of programs to deal with various materials/applications, and this would benefit brand owners who sell their products nationally. It’s difficult to imagine “laggard” provinces not following suit once such programs are established. Another example of an industry sector whose discards need to be managed more sustainably and whose way of delivering products to customers must change is the fast food industry, including chains like Time Hortons and McDonalds, and also the in-store food counters of supermarkets. The City of Toronto has recently demanded change from this sector, which begs the question: Wouldn’t a province-wide system be better than a balkanized local one, now that municipal governments have raised the issue?

• Establish a Duales-type authority in the province: At the recent fall conference of the Association of Municipal Recycling Coordinators (AMRC, now known as the Municipal Waste Association, MWA) in Niagara-on-the-Lake, consultant Usman Valiante outlined a scheme in which Stewardship Ontario would be tasked with responsibility for the materials managed in the blue box. He described SO as becoming the Duales-type manager of industry wastes in the province (i.e., similar to the German entity). Something like this makes sense, given the “bench strength” within SO in understanding waste and recycling issues. SO would no doubt have to be reorganized a bit and various safeguards would have to be put in place to make sure that anti-competitive “combines”-type activities do not occur or become institutionalized.

• Hold a Zero Waste Summit: The province should hold a summit at which reps from key organizations would have an opportunity to present their ideas for how the new system could be made to work. The agenda would have to reflect presentations and discussion about “how it can be done” and not “why it cannot be done.” Reps from BC and other jurisdictions with “product stewardship councils” could share information about what’s happening in their jurisdictions, including the writing of “framework legislation” for EPR/Zero Waste. Presentations from Europe could explain how EPR and Zero Waste systems work there, and how various challenges have been overcome.

• Implement a provincial communications strategy: At some point the new system will have to be described to the public, which will have to recognize that some “convenience” products and packaging items may be sacrificed along the way as it truly embraces sustainability. Province-wide TV, radio and print campaigns could explain Zero Waste and how the province is now moving beyond the blue box to the next level.

• Provide assistance to displaced facilities and personnel: There will be some displacement of people and facilities as Ontario moves toward full EPR. The government needs to resist the temptation to “pick winners” in new technologies, or otherwise interfere as the market sorts itself out. Nevertheless, since full EPR and Zero Waste will initially be disruptive and the government is instigating change for a greater public good, it’s reasonable for the government to provide some kind of transitional support to certain facilities and workers in the environment industry. This could include retraining and transition programs, and financial support to municipalities that may, for instance, have to close, shutter or re-tool recycling plants that no longer have a place in the new system. Funding for this could come directly or indirectly from such things as the environment levy collected from the sale of all non-refillable alcohol beverage containers in the province, which amounts to tens of millions of dollars annually. The transition help could also be extended to people displaced by changes in the production of certain products and packaging.

• Reuse wine and liquor bottles: Now that The Beer Store is collecting LCBO wine and liquor bottles under deposit, the opportunity exists to separate a portion of these not merely for recycling as broken glass cullet, but for sanitization and reuse as wine bottles made available at a low price to domestic Ontario wine producers. Large amounts of intact wine bottles, for instance, are being returned (in standard shapes and sizes) by restaurants in cardboard cartons. If these are reused instead of recycled, they should be entitled to money from the 10 cent environment levy currently imposed on all non-refillable alcohol beverage containers sold in the province. Working in partnership with wine entrepreneurs, a beneficial program could be set up with the government to preserve the embodied energy in intact wine bottles, and lower container costs for local producers.

• Revisit waste to energy policy: The discussion paper puts the ministry in a conflicted position in respect to policy statements that recognized waste as a renewable energy resource. In other words, the government – anxious to find new “calories” for the provincial energy grid (as it closes coal-fired generating plants) – was quick to embrace the idea that burning waste for energy (in modern waste-to-energy [WTE] plants) is a clean and “green” activity. This idea is not embraced uniformly by Zero Waste proponents for a number of reasons. They argue against the idea that such plants are truly non-polluting, but that even if a safe and non-polluting WTE plant can be built, burning of wastes supports “business as usual” for the consumer society, i.e., we can keep consuming materials and make the discards somehow “go away.” Indeed, WTE plants compete for the very same BTU-dense materials made from byproducts of non-renewable petroleum (e.g., plastic containers) that Zero Waste proponents would prefer not be used in the first place (at least, not at the high volumes we see today). The environment ministry must clarify its commitment to the waste management hierarchy and treat disposal (burying and burning) as a “last resort.” In the case of WTE, perhaps only niche applications should be allowed (e.g., autoclave for medical wastes) until society has moved much further toward reduction and reuse, and overall sustainable practices.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 02:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The current buzz in the Canadian waste and recycling industry is all about Ontario Environment Minister John Gerretsen's discussion paper Toward a Zero Waste Future (see extended entry below that reproduces our news announcement) which proposes to move the province away from the current blue box recycling model (in which industry "stewards" pay 50 per cent of net municipal curbside recycling costs) toward Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) -- the Holy Grail of environmentalists who feel that society has emphasized the wrong "R" (recycling) in the waste management hierarchy, the first two being Reuse and Reduction (and even "redesign" in some savvy circles).

If Gerretsen does anything like what's proposed in the discussion paper, he will earn himself a rightful place as one of the most important environment ministers in Ontario history, taking the lifetime work of his predecessor Jim Bradley to the next logical level. (Hint: When the industry lobbying gets fierce, as it no doubt will when producers learn they are to pay for all the costs of managing their wastes, Gerretsen might want to steel himself for battle by having a drink or two with Bradley and listen to some of his old war stories.)

Waste reduction expert Usman Valiante waste no time coming up with a practical scheme to turn the EPR vision hinted at in the minister's discussion paper into reality. In a presentation (that you can download below) at the recent Fall conference of the Association of Municipal Recycling Coordinators (AMRC, whose name has just been changed to the Municipal Waste Association [MWA]), Valiante painted a picture of a new system that builds on the blue box history in Ontario and envisions Stewardship Ontario (the blue box funding organization) becoming a sort of equivalent body to that which operates the Dualles EPR system in Germany.

I thought readers might enjoy seeing Valiante's Power Point presentation directly for themselves, and have uploaded an Acrobate PDF version for you to download here:

Download file

Please note that this topic will be the subject of my Cover Story in December/January edition of Solid Waste & Recycling magazine, where I will again summarize some of Valiante's ideas, in addition to quoting other experts.

And here's the news item:

Continue reading "A proposal for Ontario's new EPR direction" »

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought readers might enjoy reading this letter that PPEC Executive Director John Mullinder sent to the Toronto Star about incorrect statements from Toronto Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker.

October 14, 2008

Toronto Star VIA EMAIL

RE: Toronto’s loose cannon misfires again

Dear Editor:

Toronto Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker would have more credibility if he got his facts right before opening his mouth (Rethinking the idea of packaging, Toronto Star October 11, 2008).
To claim that paper grocery bags and telephone books are the result of “ripping down thousand-year-old trees in British Columbia to use once …and then throwing (them) in the garbage” is just plain ignorant and irresponsible.

Most paper grocery bags used in Canada come from US plantation forests that have been third-party certified as being sustainably managed. The minority that come from Canadian managed forests (again certified) are made from wood chips, shavings and sawdust that are left over after harvesting trees for lumber (to make hospitals, universities and Councillor De Baeremaeker’s house).

As for telephone books, most are made from 100% recycled paper materials (old newspapers and egg cartons).

And while he’s checking his facts, maybe Councillor De Baeremaeker could find time to investigate the latest Blue Box recovery rates for Ontario: 72% for paper overall and 88% for telephone books.

Yours sincerely,

PAPER & PAPERBOARD PACKAGING
ENVIRONMENTAL COUNCIL (PPEC)

John Mullinder
Executive Director

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 09:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought readers would enjoy this exchange from Alternatives Journal, an excellent Canadian publication to which I encourage readers subscribe. In the article, Richard Gilbert and Mark Winfield offer arguments for and against waste incineration. I have heard these arguments before, but I found it useful to have all the pros and cons presented this way. It's kind of a nice summary to have on file as a reference, and to send to folks who are just getting up to speed on these matters. With incineration proposals and projects at various stages in Durham, Vancouver, Ottawa and eslewhere, this is worth reading.

"Reprinted from Alternatives Journal, 33:2/3 (2007). Annual subscriptions $35.00 (plus GST) Visit http://www.alternativesjournal.ca

The article is also on their website at:

http://www.alternativesjournal.ca/index.php?

Alternatives Journal 33:2/3 (2007)

Point-Counterpoint: To Incinerate or Not to Incinerate

Richard Gilbert and Mark Winfield debate the burning issue.

There are more than two sides to the story. Read this article and then add your thoughts to our blog.

Richard Gilbert opens: WASTE IS WHAT we have used and have no further use for. Incinerating waste, I believe, is a better environmental solution than landfilling.

Only a limited amount of waste occurs in nature. Animals produce waste in the form of faeces, which, in turn, provide nutrients for other parts of the ecosystem. In contrast, we humans appropriate and discard major material flows beyond what is required for our metabolism and beyond what our local ecosystems can handle. The first objective of a waste management system should be to reduce material flows and thus potential waste. This reduction, in turn, can lower the likelihood of risks to human health and environmental problems.When the cost of managing waste is high, which is often the case with incineration, it encourages a reduction in the flow of material.

The second objective should be material reuse, which includes recycling. Because it is more costly, incineration can facilitate recycling. It also results in reuse when ferrous materials are readily extracted from ash.

Data back up the compatibility of incineration and recycling. If you look at the wealth of information in “The State of Garbage in America,” an article published in the January 2004 issue of Biocycle, you can readily figure out that the median recycling rate in US states where there was some incineration was much higher than in states with no incineration (29 versus 10 per cent).

In many places, combustion of materials with energy recovery is regarded as reuse, leaving what is sent to landfill as the only true waste. European Union directives require the avoidance of landfill for all but non-combustible waste. Denmark is closest to this ideal. In 2003, according to the European Environment Agency, Danes incinerated 60 per cent of their household waste, reused or recycled 31 per cent and landfilled six per cent.

Reasons to avoid landfilling include its high environmental cost and impact on human health. A 1999 Ontario government study suggested that the cancer risk from living near a landfill was about 100 times that of living near an incinerator. Differences for other health risks were less dramatic, but were still higher for landfill than for incineration. A 2005 study in New York City had similar findings, noting that the longer trucking distances associated with landfill present additional health
risks.

Landfills also produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas. As a result, a landfill’s contribution to global warming is between 45 and 115 times greater than incineration on a per-tonne-of-waste basis, depending on the extent of methane collection in the landfill.

But the strongest criticisms levelled against incineration arise from its history of releasing dioxins and furans. In 1987, incinerators produced 63 per cent of dioxin/furan releases in the US, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. In 2002, they produced one per cent, a decline from 8877 grams to 12 grams. Technological improvements to waste incineration with regard to the release of dioxins, furans and a number of other pollutants are so advanced that concentrations of these compounds sometimes fall below levels found in ambient air. In this case, incinerators actually clean air rather than pollute it.

Flaring or other combustion of landfill gases can also result in dioxin emissions. However, trucking is the main source of dioxins.My calculations suggest that dioxin emissions from the trucks carrying Toronto’s waste to a Michigan landfill site are several times that of incinerating the same waste.

The politics of incineration are unusual. Opinion polls in Toronto consistently show that support for incineration exceeds 75 per cent. A 2006 survey suggested that “nine in 10 residents believe burning waste to produce electricity could be a viable solution [to the garbage crisis].” Of these, 60 per cent said they would support having an incinerator in their own neighbourhood. Nevertheless, Toronto City Council has consistently opposed incineration.

Toronto Mayor David Miller characterizes incineration as “expensive, polluting and damaging to recycling efforts” in comparison with landfill. That incineration pollutes and damages recycling efforts is not consistent with available data. Furthermore, there is even doubt about its expense.We know that in 2004, the tipping fee at the 850-tonne-per-day incinerator in Syracuse, NY, was $62.50 per tonne, when Toronto was paying $55 per tonne to landfill its waste in Michigan ($35 for trucking and $20 for landfilling). The Syracuse fee would likely have been lower if the plant were larger and its bottom ash could be sold as aggregate, as permitted in Europe and some US states, perhaps even lower than what Toronto was paying.

I would argue, however, that high costs for incineration and landfill can be a good thing if they reduce material flows, and encourage or even subsidize recycling.

Mark Winfield replies: Richard, your argument for incineration over landfill as a waste disposal option seems premised on two propositions: that incineration has less environmental impact than landfilling and that the high cost of incineration will drive waste reduction.

At the same time, you assume that the primary argument against incineration is its air pollution impacts. Most opponents of incineration as a waste disposal option, including me, concede that the hazardous and criteria air pollutant emission performance of newer incinerator designs may be better than those of the past. Nonetheless, these emissions continue to be a serious concern, as do greenhouse gas emissions.

Rather, the core critique of incineration as a waste disposal practice is that it competes directly with diversion options for high embedded-energy components of the waste stream such as paper and paperboard, wood, organics and certain plastics. Incinerators need the energy contained in these materials to be economically viable. The lower the portion of these materials in their feedstock, the more incinerators require expensive and high-value supplemental fuels such as natural gas.

This situation has resulted in incinerator operators requiring municipalities to enter into “put-or-pay” contracts. These provide for financial penalties when minimum waste levels (often with specified energy content) are not provided. Such arrangements effectively cap the expansion of diversion programs as they would undermine the ability of municipalities to meet their waste-flow obligations.

Even more serious from a sustainability perspective, the waste supply arrangements necessary to make incineration viable encourage continued waste generation and the underlying patterns of materials-use and consumption. In a global context, developed societies such as Canada need to reduce the intensity of their use of primary materials by a factor that ranges between four and ten to bring them in line with what the global biosphere can sustain.

The critical impacts from a global perspective are not those of waste disposal, be it landfill or incineration. Rather, it is the upstream impacts of mining, intensive forestry and petrochemical production that feed the current material throughput of our economy. Incineration perpetuates the resource-input and waste-output flow.

Furthermore, presenting the debate as one of incineration versus landfill is misleading. Widespread incineration would not eliminate the need for landfill.At best, incineration reduces the volume of material requiring disposal, but the resulting ash may well contain combustion products that are far more toxic than anything in the original waste.What really counts in environmental terms is what you are landfilling, not how much.

Your argument on the relative environmental merits of incineration and landfill is premised on the assumption of continued reliance on conventional mixed-waste landfills. Research completed for Friends of the Earth in the UK indicates that the combination of stabilized landfill and intensive up-front sorting to remove recyclables, and hazardous and other problematic wastes, for example, could lower greenhouse gas emissions and reduce other impacts. Furthermore, this combination doesn’t compete with diversion.

Moreover, extended producer responsibility programs that require manufacturers and distributors to assume responsibility for diverting post-consumer products from disposal could drive changes in product design to reduce waste and facilitate the reuse and recycling of product components and materials.

Richard, you also assume that communities are more likely to accept incinerators in their midst than landfills. The public opinion poll that you cite shows potential acceptance of incineration – as long as the incinerator is to be in someone else’s (very distant) backyard. In the meantime, the public is voting with its green bins. As Torontonians and others prove, when given the opportunity, people will alter their behaviour in significant ways to reduce the flow of waste requiring disposal.

I agree with your view that increasing the cost of waste disposal will improve the economic viability of diversion. However, there are many ways of achieving this outcome without committing to incineration. Your proposal is a little like suggesting we build expensive nuclear power plants to promote energy efficiency. Many jurisdictions around the world apply curbside disposal charges or landfilling taxes to improve the economic viability of waste reduction, reuse and recycling. More broadly, disposal costs alone, applied at the back-end of the materials cycle, are unlikely to reduce material use and consumption. A sustainable economy requires that we stop subsidizing the extraction and production of primary materials.

Gilbert responds: Mark, You write as though I had not provided compelling evidence of the following:
• There is much more recycling in communities where residual waste is incinerated than where it is not;
• Incineration has lower net greenhouse gas emissions than landfill; and
• Communities appear to be accepting of incineration. You add a few canards:
• “Incinerators require expensive and high-value supplemental fuels,” when no incinerator used for municipal waste requires supplemental fuel except for a few minutes during start-up after annual maintenance; and
• “At best, incineration reduces the volume of material requiring disposal,” when most incinerator ash is suitable for reuse, usually as aggregate, and is reused where permitted. The small percentage of ash containing toxic compounds captured from incinerator gases can be readily made inert. In Denmark, useful materials are extracted from fly ash.Without incineration, toxic materials end up in landfills, where they remain hazardous.

The “put-and-pay” requirement is a red herring. Landfill operators seek put-and-pay provisions too, which is why Toronto will continue sending its waste to Michigan even though it has purchased a landfill that is closer.

We don’t disagree about the need to reduce material flows. Indeed, I’ve been critical of some recycling in the past because
it may sustain flows.Nor do we disagree about the need to recycle what cannot be reduced.

However, I find the idea of shipping waste a long distance and putting it into a hole in the ground – however carefully engineered the trucks and the hole may be – so abhorrent I’ll support incineration of residual waste, at possible political cost, if it is shown to be environmentally superior to trucking and landfilling. Either you don’t consider trucking and landfilling to be abhorrent, or you find incineration to be less environmentally sound.

Mark, I’m curious to know what it is you like about trucking and landfilling, and whether there are any circumstances under which you would support incineration over trucking and landfilling.

Winfield closes: Richard, The issue isn’t one of abhorring the transport and landfilling of waste. Rather, it is a question of what precisely would be left to burn after we have reduced, reused and recycled as much of the waste stream as possible, as you agree we should. If the paper and paperboard, wood, organics and recyclable plastics are removed, all that remain are materials such as construction and demolition wastes that make very poor fuel, and non-recyclable plastics that release unacceptable by-products when burned.

The choice is not between incineration and landfill, but between incineration and diversion. Incinerators need the best components of the waste stream for diversion as fuel. What counts is what happens at the individual municipal level. We know that municipalities that have committed to incineration view their diversion efforts as capped. The same certainly cannot be said of the City of Toronto, which, notwithstanding the landfill arrangements you reference, is well on its way to a 70 per cent residential diversion target. Landfills do not need a continuous flow of high-energy-content waste to operate. Incinerators do.

What I do find abhorrent is the notion of squandering the embedded energy and materials by reducing them to ash that, at best, can only be used in low-grade applications. Indeed, the normal destination of incinerator fly ash is a hazardous waste landfill. I note that you wisely don’t raise the idea of obtaining “energy from waste.” Even with energy recovery, recent lifecycle inventories completed for Environment Canada and Natural Resources Canada make it clear that incineration is an absolute loser relative to reuse and recycling in terms of energy retention and greenhouse gas emissions.

Your argument is premised on an assumption that incineration is the only alternative to long-distance transport to a conventional mixed-waste landfill when, in fact, we have more sustainable options for the management of used materials. The problem with incineration is that it can’t co-exist with those paths.

Mark Winfield is director of the Pembina Institute’s Environmental Governance Program and is associate faculty with the University of Toronto’s Centre for the Environment. He will join York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies in July.

Richard Gilbert is a Toronto-based consultant.With Anthony Perl, he is the author of the forthcoming Transport Revolutions: Making the Movement of People and Freight work for the 21st Century (Earthscan/James & James, 2008).

"Reprinted from Alternatives Journal, 33:2/3 (2007). Annual subscriptions $35.00 (plus GST) Visit http://www.alternativesjournal.ca

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Posted by Guy Crittenden at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's an interesting entry from Lawrence Solomon from his The Next City colum in the Financial Post (a section in the National Post newspaper). Another fact to consider in thinking about "global warming" is that precisely the same (small) amount of warming has been measured on other planets in our solar system (e.g., Mars) which supports the idea that fluctuations in the Sun's output are responsible.

Global cooling sign: Solar winds at 50-year-low

by Lawrence Solomon

FP Comment, September 28, 2008

In yet another sign that the Earth could be heading in to a period of global cooling, NASA reports that the solar wind is now at a 50-year low, the lowest that NASA has seen. This change in solar activity, which began to occur about a decade ago, coincides with the end of the climb in global temperatures that had been underway for decades.

"What we're seeing is a long term trend, a steady decrease in pressure that began sometime in the mid-1990s," explains Arik Posner, NASA's Ulysses Program Scientist in Washington DC.

"How unusual is this event?

"It's hard to say. We've only been monitoring solar wind since the early years of the Space Age – from the early 60s to the present. Over that period of time, it's unique. How the event stands out over centuries or millennia, however, is anybody's guess. We don't have data going back that far."

As a result of the diminished solar wind, cosmic rays are entering the Earth's atmosphere in greater number. Research at the Danish National Space Institute shows that cosmic rays increase cloud cover on Earth, and that this cloud cover can have a cooling effect. Does this help explain why global temperatures plateaued a decade ago, and why they are now decreasing? Stay tuned!

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 08:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought readers would enjoy the following exchange between writer David Menzies and the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). The initial article (and replies) appeared in the Financial Post and exposes the LCBO's sham environmental programs. The LCBO replies and this provides Menzies with another opportunity to gore them. Interesting stuff.

Fake ‘green’ campaign kills real jobs

July 30, 2008

The LCBO’s anti-glass crusade is all about optics, not facts

By David Menzies

More than 400 employees of the Owens-Illinois glass plant in Toronto received a shock on Tuesday when they discovered their factory is being tossed upon the scrap heap of obsolescence come September.

What killed the plant? A robust loonie? Skyrocketing energy costs? Nope. The silent assassin is none other than the Ontario government’s liquor monopoly and its disingenuous pursuit of a bogus “green” strategy.

In a nutshell, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) now deems glass bottles to be environmentally-unfriendly. Waste is measured by weight in Ontario, and glass is heavy, so out with glass. As a result, the LCBO is actively strong-arming suppliers to opt for other forms of packaging. As Owen-Illinois CEO and chairman Albert Stroucken notes in a July 2, 2008 letter to Premier Dalton McGuinty, the LCBO has been “aggressively encouraging — and in some cases effectively forcing — our customers in Ontario and in other jurisdictions to switch from using glass packaging to so-called ‘alternative’ materials such as plastic and aseptic cartons.”

Unfortunately for Owens-Illinois workers, the LCBO’s anti-glass campaign is all about optics, not facts. The LCBO’s recent self-congratulatory marketing push hailed its campaign as “Enviro Chic: The Evolution of Packaging.” The liquor monopoly crowned itself a green champion thanks to a policy of “challenging” its suppliers to reduce packaging. When a government monopoly “challenges” a supplier, this is akin to issuing an edict, as Mr. Stroucken suggested.

The LCBO’s green master plan boils down to a weight reduction scheme by coercing suppliers to drop glass bottles in favour of light-weight aluminum, Tetra Pak and plastic. “Look, Ma. No waste by weight.” But putting containers on a diet creates another problem, which is massive waste that can’t be recycled and must be land-filled.

Consider the LCBO’s push for wineries to eschew glass bottles in favour of Tetra Paks. Undeniably, a Tetra Pak carton is lighter than a glass bottle; however, the recycling rate for Tetra Paks is downright abysmal. According to Waste Diversion Ontario, a minuscule 12.7% of Tetra Pak packaging was recovered in 2005, meaning 87.3% ended up in landfill. And Tetra Paks, like Toronto’s garbage, must be shipped out of the province for processing since there aren’t any facilities to recycle the stuff in Ontario.

Also of note, Tetra Paks are derived from virgin pulp and aluminum. As such, the manufacture of Tetra Pak containers requires excessive energy consumption and needlessly depletes natural resources. By comparison, almost 100% of all refillable glass bottles are recovered. “The LCBO has not produced any credible, validated third-party assessment of the environmental claims it is making regarding alternative packaging,” notes Stroucken. Owens-Illinois’s Toronto and Brampton plants are situated within 100 kilometres of every major beverage alcohol producer in the province, making it a localized packaging solution.

Unfortunately, given its monopoly position, the LCBO’s strong-arm tactics have paid off. “We were recently advised that as a result of commercial pressure by the LCBO, a major beverage alcohol producer in Ontario is switching from competitively-priced glass packaging to plastic bottles,” notes Mr. Stroucken. The LCBO, it seems, is taking greenmail to a new level.

Tetra Paks, moreover, typically contain foreign-made alcoholic beverages, such as French Rabbit wine (which isn’t even sold in France). The reason: the LCBO prefers foreign wine over the domestic product as it perceives Ontario vintners as a competitive threat due to their on-site wine stores. This is why Ontario wines are treated as second-class citizens at LCBO stores. According to the Wine Council of Ontario, Ontario wines can account for up to 30% of total LCBO wine sales. Yet, many LCBO stores give Ontario wines as little as 14% shelf space.

As a fake green corporation, the LCBO has managed to dodge bottle recycling. All bottles sold through the monopoly must now be returned by consumers to another company in Ontario’s bizarre alcohol market, The Beer Store, a retail monopoly owned and operated by Ontario brewers. Having dodged the recycling bullet, the LCBO is now looking for an environmental win and thinks it has found it in Tetra Paks and schemes that reduce its output of waste by weight. Hundreds of local manufacturing jobs are jettisoned along the way.

The premier, apparently, does not care about the Owens-Illinois Toronto plant nor the abusive business practices of a crown corporation. Meantime, the LCBO publicly congratulates itself for false green triumphs.

Financial Post

David Menzies is a Toronto writer.

For LCBO, the glass is half empty

Re: Fake 'green' campaign kills real jobs, David Menzies, July 31.

David Menzies' July 31st opinion piece, "Fake 'green' campaign kills real jobs" is another blatant attempt to discredit the LCBO by distorting the truth to support his bias.

He pins the sole blame for the Toronto plant closure of American glass manufacturer Owens Illinois (OI) on the LCBO, even though the company itself cites surging energy costs, a strong Canadian dollar and the U. S. economic downturn as the prime reasons. He also doesn't mention that OI previously announced plant closures in New Brunswick, France and Germany. According to OI, this contraction is a result of an ongoing review of its "global manufacturing footprint." No reference to LCBO.

Despite these challenges, OI announced on July 31 that its second quarter profit had climbed 60% and 2008 is shaping up to be a record year.

Far from being anti-glass, in fiscal 2007-08 the LCBO sold almost 287 million litres of products in glass containers, or the equivalent of 382.2 million standard 750-mL bottles -- an increase of 4.7 million 750-mL glass bottles over the previous year. Since 2005, the LCBO has made available fewer than 230 products in new or repackaged formats (PET, aluminium and aseptic containers).

The reality is suppliers make their own business decisions as to packaging. The LCBO has worked with a handful of suppliers to offer selected products in lighter-weight packages, but these products account for less than 4.6% of all LCBO volume sales. Most of these are imports, packaged outside of Ontario, not products that would impact a glass manufacturer in Toronto.

Mr. Menzies also uses selective, outdated data to try to discredit Tetra Paks. Some 30% of beverage alcohol Tetra Paks are now being recycled through the Ontario deposit return program. The 12.7% figure he cites represents all types of Tetra Pak containers including fruit drink boxes and pre-dates deposit-return. This government recycling program has also benefitted OI by significantly increasing the amount of glass available in Ontario for reuse.

The LCBO would be pleased to discuss with OI and other glass producers ways to help us in our efforts to shift to lighter-weight glass bottles.

Fanciful conspiracy theories aside, the fact is the glass bottle will be the dominant format in LCBO stores for years to come.

Chris Layton, LCBO Media Relations Co-ordinator, Toronto.

David Menzies responds: Alas, once again the control freaks at the Liquor Control Board are stretching the truth some more. Let me count the ways:

Firstly, the LCBO notes non-glass packages "… account for less than 4.6% of all LCBO volume sales." This is misleading at best. While the statistic may be true on a dollar sales basis (dollars of booze sold) on a unit sales basis (the number of containers sold) here are the facts: - Unit sales in non-glass containers exceed 22%, with 7.8% of that in aseptic cartons (Tetra Pak containers) and PET plastic; - 90% of sales growth between 2006 and 2007 was in non-glass containers (aluminum, PET and Tetra Paks) while the remaining 10% was in glass.

Secondly, suppliers are indeed coerced into so-called "alternative packaging" using LCBO listing polices as inducements. Just consider the January 31, 2006 letter penned by Lyle Clarke, the LCBO's project lead for "environmental strategy." In the letter sent to Linda Franklin, the then-president of the Wine Council of Ontario, Mr. Clarke notes the following:

"Assuming the WCO were to indicate a desire for the LCBO to lift the moratorium for Ontario wine, the LCBO would be pleased to discuss a comprehensive strategy for the expansion of the LCBO's offering of Ontario wines in this format [alternative packaging] … As I noted, it is very important for the LCBO to maintain a premium image for wines in alternative packaging, and therefore, the Wines Category will not purchase any new products, including extensions of existing brands, that are not priced in the premium segment. However, Wines [Category] will replace any existing SKU if the supplier is proposing to completely convert from glass to non-glass formats such as Tetra Pak for that SKU, regardless of its price positioning in the market."

When the only distribution channel in the province dangles increased shelf space to its suppliers on the proviso that they switch to non-glass packaging, surely this cannot be considered anything but coercion.

Thirdly, the LCBO cites a 30% recycling rate for Tetra Paks in the deposit-refund system. Actually the recovery rate is 30% but there is no dedicated Tetra Pak recycling available in Canada. Tetra Paks are therefore being blended into other cardboard collected by The Beer Store. Of every kilogram of Tetra Paks recovered, only 50% can be recycled with the plastic and aluminum going to landfill. It gets worse: the Michigan plant that was recycling Ontario's Tetra Paks no longer accepts such trash. As such, those Tetra Pak containers are now shipped half-way around the world to Korea and China for processing. The carbon footprint for that initiative is surely Sasquatch in size.

Bottom line: The LCBO clearly strong-arms its suppliers and floats misleading data so as to make it seem like it is doing something progressive for the environment, all at the expense of local jobs. And as long as the LCBO can continue to delude its ministerial masters that its environmental policies make sense, one shouldn't be hopeful that tangible change is in the cards. All of which is perversely ironic given that the ostensible policy reason for the very existence of the LCBO is "social responsibility."

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 01:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I found this article interesting and wish to share it with readers. For me, the authors make too much of the climate change threat -- but that's just me. Substitute your own sustainability concern wherever needed, and the overall argument is cogent and important.

We must green the market
Everywhere we look, the prices of goods don't reflect the true environmental costs of their production
THOMAS HOMER-DIXON AND STEWART ELGIE

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail (August 6, 2008 at 8:13 AM EDT)

Modern capitalist markets are among the most amazing institutions humankind has ever created. They are mighty engines of innovation and wealth. They allow societies to quickly adapt to a world full of disruptions and surprises. And by linking billions of producers and consumers every day, they generate price signals that help people around the world decide what to make and what to buy.

But when it comes to conserving Earth's natural environment, our markets are badly broken. For our planet's future -- and for our future prosperity -- we must fix them.

The underlying problem is that we don't pay the true environmental costs of making, using and getting rid of the products we buy. Take the gasoline we use in our cars. Every time we push down on the accelerator pedal, we emit a blast of carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming. Our children and grandchildren will pay for this warming - in the form of higher food prices from drought, heat waves and floods, greater health expenses from diseases that thrive in warmth, more property damage from storms and rising seas. Those huge future costs aren't reflected in today's gasoline's price. In effect, our children and grandchildren are subsidizing our current mania for driving.

The same problem arises with electricity from coal-fired power plants. This electricity may seem relatively cheap, but air pollution from these plants is a major cause of thousands of premature deaths in Canada each year - costing our society billions of dollars. And the plants' enormous carbon emissions also contribute to climate change. Because neither power companies nor their customers pay the full costs of coal electricity, cleaner sources of electricity (like wind or solar) are relatively more expensive in the marketplace, even though their overall cost to society is often less.

Indeed, everywhere we look, we see products whose prices don't reflect the true environmental costs of their production. Local food often costs more than imported food, because we don't pay for the climate change caused by getting it to our tables or the damage to soil and water from poor farming practices. Recycled paper usually costs more, too, because we don't pay for the loss of virgin forests or for the water and air pollution from making non-recycled paper.

So, while most of us want to protect the environment, we operate in an economic system that encourages us to harm it. Our moral and economic motivations point in opposite directions. It's time we got them pointing in the same direction.

Economists say we can do this in two ways: We can apply green fees or taxes to reflect a product's environmental harm, or we can create a market for nature's environmental services that we now treat as free.

In Canada right now, both approaches are on the table to combat climate change. The federal Liberals have proposed a carbon tax (joining B.C. and Quebec), while the Conservatives and several provinces are proposing carbon trading -- creating a market in rights to emit carbon dioxide.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach, but most economists say taxes and fees are more economically efficient, because they involve less bureaucracy and provide clearer signals to companies and consumers. Either way, though, both approaches require government intervention - not to distort markets, but to make them work the way they're supposed to work, by counting real costs.

Yet putting a price on carbon is just a first step. If we want to build an economy that can prosper without ruining our natural environment, we'll have to price other types of environmental harm as well, such as water depletion, smog, toxic pollution and the destruction of wildlife habitats.

Such policies would be good not only for our environment, but also for our economy. In fact, they offer a way out of the narrow environment-versus-economy logic that dominates public discussion of environmental protection. The revenues from green fees or taxes, or from auctioning emission permits, can be used to reduce inefficient taxes on income, employment or investment. We can tax things we want to discourage, such as pollution and resource waste, not things we want to encourage, like income, employment and investment. Also, putting a price on environmental harm spurs green innovation, because companies will pursue the huge potential profits from developing technologies and practices that reduce environmental damage.

The economy of the future will reward energy efficiency, clean production and wise use of natural capital. That's why England, Germany, Denmark, Australia and more recently California and British Columbia have been moving ahead with strong policies to integrate environmental costs into market prices. If Canada as a whole doesn't make this shift, it risks being left behind in the transition to a new global economy.

On the other hand, we can leave to our grandchildren a greener, more prosperous Canada -- and set a global example of a sustainable society -- if we start making markets tell the environmental truth.

Thomas Homer-Dixon holds the CIGI Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ont. Stewart Elgie is a professor at the University of Ottawa, specializing in environmental law and economics.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 09:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some recent correspondence with members of the new Ontario Zero Waste Coalition caused me to write up an explanation of Zero Waste, as I understand the term. My motivation was both to clarify the term and further differentiate it from other concepts that, while they may work in concert with Zero Waste (at present), are quite different. The main one is “waste diversion” -- a catchall phrase for activities like municipal recycling and composting that may be worthwhile for some applications, but that are not the same as Zero Waste and might, in some instances, work against the goals of the Zero Waste movement.

I offer an edited version below for the benefit of interested parties. The items are not listed in order of importance.

1. The Zero Waste movement is concerned with moving beyond “waste disposal” and even “waste diversion” toward a society that views waste as poor design. The idea is to design waste out of products and packaging completely.

2. Ideally, municipalities could eventually only collect and process organic materials (kitchen scraps and yard trimmings); “product waste” (all the byproducts of the consumer society) will be managed in manufacturer networks, reverse distribution systems and, in some cases, municipalities collecting material under contract from private businesses. Industry will pay for the reuse and recycling of its byproducts, as well as anything that needs final disposal, which should be as close to zero as possible.

3. “Waste diversion” (recycling, etc.) is only an interim step along the path to true Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) wherein businesses will assume “cradle to cradle” responsibility for their products, and not externalize certain lifecycle costs onto the environment or taxpayers (which provide a kind of subsidy by absorbing industry’s effluvia or carting it off). When they have to pay for the end-of-life management of their products, businesses have a financial incentive to become “eco-efficient.”

4. The Zero Waste movement opposes “product stewardship” programs that look superficially like EPR but are in fact nothing of the kind. In some product stewardship programs an industry funding organization (IFO) is established that charges an advance recycling fee to collect and manage waste materials. Even if this offers the positive aspect of keeping the materials out of landfill, there’s often no incentive for producers to change “business as usual” (i.e., redesign products for reuse and recycling). For consumers, the “eco fee” becomes analogous to a green tax that they have no choice but to pay, with only a vague idea that some good will come from the program. In the worst instances, the advance recycling fee rewards “free riders” that foist poorly designed products (from an ecological standpoint) on the market, yet get to wear the same green “fig leaf” as companies that are more eco-efficient. The eco-fee may even discourage companies from doing more to improve their environmental performance at each stage, because the stewardship program has simply made the environmental image problem “go away.” Consumers feel the problem has been dealt with and consume in the usual way, “guilt free.” Instead, true Extended Producer Responsibility is what is sought.

5. Nothing in the Zero Waste philosophy is meant to question the good intentions, sincerity and professionalism of municipal waste managers. They generally perform an excellent job doing what society asks of them. Instead, what Zero Waste proponents are doing is changing what is being asked of these professionals. Where society and its elected representatives used to ask, “How can we safely dispose of this waste?” or (more recently) “How can we divert more of this material from disposal (e.g., landfill, incineration)?” the new questions are along the lines of, “What would a truly sustainable society look like?” The answer to that question may include municipalities not handling many waste materials at all. Local governments have, in a sense, become “enablers” of the throwaway society.

6. Even if we could design the perfect landfill that never leaks or the perfect emissions-free waste-to-energy incinerator, Zero Waste advocates would still view that negatively because the very last thing they want is make it even easier to consume and dispose of goods (“guilt free”). Something that’s often lost in the simplistic public conversation over waste diversion versus disposal is that the biggest part of the environmental footprint occurs not at a product’s disposal or recycling stage, but “upstream” during the stages of natural resource extraction, manufacturing, transportation and distrubution, and during the useful life of the product. We’re facing a broader sustainability challenge, not a mere “disposal problem,” the Zero Waste advocates might say.

7. Everyone agrees that waste management infrastructure -- if it’s to be built at all -- should be constructed and operated to a high standard and comply with environmental regulations. Waste management professionals constantly try to deflect public skepticism about new waste transfer, processing or disposal systems with promises that everything will be done properly, and that there won’t be toxic emissions or odors or leaks. However, in place of better disposal infrastructure, Zero Waste promotes what some people call “industrial ecology” -- a materials and energy flow system that is harmonious with, and reflective of, natural systems, where waste is either not produced at all, or is the raw material for another product. Nothing goes to waste in nature. While government has a role as regulator and overseer, this outcome is just too important to entrust to government alone. The power of a subsidy-free marketplace can be harnessed to achieve sustainability faster and for the very long term. A Zero Waste system would include changes in the way products are made, used and delivered to the marketplace. Eco parks would spring up to efficiently share resources, including raw or recycled materials and electricity or steam.

8. Any list of preferred Zero Waste materials and systems quickly points up the (ironic) point that often the environmentally superior solution is also the cheapest. Examples include: reusable cloth shopping bags instead of disposable (or even recyclable) plastic or paper bags; refillable coffee mugs instead of paper or polystyrene cups; water consumed from the tap or via refillable containers, rather than single-serve plastic containers (often transported great distances); soft drinks and beer, etc. sold in refillable containers rather than throwaway “recyclable” containers; computers and other electronics equipment designed for easy dismantling for reuse or recycling at end-of-life; packaging made from recyclable and renewable fibres rather than plastics derived from fossil fuels (e.g., foam, film plastic, bubble wrap, etc.). The savviest Zero Waste proponents prefer not to play the game of trying to specify which materials are the best or worst; instead, they say that if we force industry to internalize its costs (and not externalize them onto the environment of ratepayers) the most eco-efficient solutions will emerge.

9. Zero Waste advocates decry the situation in which public policy often focuses only on residential waste which, while visible to voters, is only about one-third of the waste stream. The other two-thirds of commercial and industrial waste is made up primarily of recyclable materials such as metal, paper, cardboard, wood, etc. that should not be sent to landfill. It’s time, they say, for policies that consider all “three-thirds” of the waste stream.

10. The Zero Waste movement is not advocating a return to some kind of pre-industrial Stone Age. It’s not attempting to turn the clock back very far. Our grandparents who survived the Great Depression knew a thing or two about thrift and the value of reusing glass bottles and getting all the possible use out of a product. In their day, durability was prized over mere “convenience.” The throwaway society was invented in the 1950s in the era when “cheap” energy from oil and electricity seemed limitless, and the modern chemical industry was born. In an era of peak oil and greater awareness of the dangers from some synthetic chemicals, it’s time to rethink the throwaway society and replace its values with those of just two or three generations ago.

Conclusion

When we complain about the “inconvenience” of having to bring a reusable cloth shopping bag into the grocery store, or ride a bike to work (where possible), or put our kitchen scraps into a green bin for composting, what we’re really complaining about is having to change from a “waste full” way of being in the world to a “waste less” way of life. We’re like modern equivalents of degenerate aristocrats who, having fallen on difficult times, have to learn to live without servants, empty their own bed pans, wash their own soiled linens and cook their own food.

The modern throwaway society gave us a lot of convenience over the past half-century, and it also spoiled us rotten and made us careless individuals who cry crocodile tears over bleached coral reefs or disappearing rain forest even as we move into larger and larger climate-controlled homes filled with designer furniture and appliances that magazines have convinced us we must have. Indeed, we have a fetish now for these things.

Marshall McLuhan once said, “There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.” He made this statement in 1965, in reference to Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963) by Buckminster Fuller.

That statement is something I think about every day, both the McLuhan quote and the title of Buckminster Fuller’s book. Whether you’re an environmental engineer, a waste recycling coordinator, a person working in industry, a consumer or just (!) an interested citizen, you are engaged, as a crew member, in the ad hoc writing of that operating manual. The Zero Waste movement is currently writing a section -- perhaps a whole chapter -- in that manual, because waste is the rough, cut-your-fingers edge where the consumer society and Earth’s natural systems collide. It’s where we can measure the size and depth of our ecological footprint.

Far from being just about “the household trash,” Zero Waste is really about… everything.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 08:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought readers would enjoy this recent interesting article by policy analyst and environmental commentator Lawrence Solomon, taken from the National Post newspaper, FP Comment page. It's an update on the topic of Sun cycles and their implications for climate.

I agree with this article, for the most part, and it repeats or picks up some info I've written over the years about the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age and so on. The one thing I disagree on is the idea that a cooler world might be a bad thing. While it's true that agricultural production would fall in certain northern climes (that aren't all that productive to start with), cooler periods tend to spur an abundance of life, especially in the tropics. When we think of past ice ages, we tend to think of glaciers and snow covering the northern part of North America and Europe, with little if anything surviving. While that may be accurate for those areas, "artist renderings" and film depictions get us thinking about this the wrong way. Just south of these cold areas life practically exploded.

So, let the Ice Man Cometh, I say! Anyway, here is the article:

Our spotless sun

With the debate focused on a warming Earth, the icy consequences of a cooler future have not been considered

by Lawrence Solomon

You probably haven't heard much of Solar Cycle 24, the current cycle that our sun has entered, and I hope you don't. If Solar Cycle 24 becomes a household term, your lifestyle could be taking a dramatic turn for the worse. That of your children and their children could fare worse still, say some scientists, because Solar Cycle 24 could mark a time of profound long-term change in the climate. As put by geophysicist Philip Chapman, a former NASA astronaut-scientist and former president of the National Space Society, "It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age."

The sun, of late, is remarkably free of eruptions: It has lost its spots. By this point in the solar cycle, sunspots would ordinarily have been present in goodly numbers. Today's spotlessness-- what alarms Dr. Chapman and others -- may be an anomaly of some kind, and the sun may soon revert to form. But if it doesn't - and with each passing day, the speculation in the scientific community grows that it will not - we could be entering a new epoch that few would welcome.

Sunspots have been well documented throughout human history, starting in the fourth century BC, with written descriptions by Gan De, a Chinese astronomer. In 1128, an English monk, John of Worcester, was the first person known to have drawn sunspots, and after the telescope's arrival in the early 1600s, observations and drawings became commonplace, including by such luminaries as Galileo Galilei. Then, to the astonishment of astronomers, they saw the sunspots diminish and die out altogether.

This was the case during the Little Ice Age, a period starting in the 15th or 16th century and lasting centuries, says NASA's Goddard Space Centre, which links the absence of sunspots to the cold that then descended on Earth. During the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, a time known as the Maunder Minimum (named after English astronomer Edward Maunder), astronomers saw only about 50 sunspots over a 30-year period, less than one half of 1% of the sunspots that would normally have been expected. Other Minimums -- times of low sunspot activity -- also corresponded to times of unusual cold.

The consequences of the Little Ice Age, because they occurred in relatively recent times, have come down to us through literature and the arts as well as from historians and scientists, government and business records. When Shakespeare wrote of "lawn as white as driven snow," he had first-hand experience - Europe was bitterly cold in his day, a sharp contrast to the very warm weather that preceded his birth. During the Little Ice Age, the River Thames froze over, the Dutch developed the ice skate and the great artists of the day learned to love a new genre: the winter landscape.

In what had been a warm Europe , adaptations were not all happy: Growing seasons in England and Continental Europe generally became short and unreliable, which led to shortages and famine. These hardships were nothing compared to the more northerly countries: Glaciers advanced rapidly in Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia and North America, making vast tracts of land uninhabitable. The Arctic pack ice extended so far south that several reports describe Eskimos landing their kayaks in Scotland. Finland's population fell by one-third, Iceland's by half, the Viking colonies in Greenland were abandoned altogether, as were many Inuit communities. The cold in North America spread so far south that, in the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, enabling people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island.

In the same way that the Earth shivered when sunspots disappeared, the Earth warmed when sunspot activity became pronounced. The warm period about 1000 years ago known as the Medieval Warm Period--a time of bounty in which grapes grew in England and Greenland was colonized -- also was a time of high sunspot activity, called the Medieval Maximum. Since 1900, Earth has experienced what astronomers call "the Modern Maximum" -- the 20th century has again been a time of high sunspot activity.

But the 1900s are gone, along with the high temperatures that accompanied them. The last 10 years have seen no increase in temperatures -- they reached a plateau and then remained there -- and the last year saw a precipitous decline. How much lower and for how long the temperatures will fall, if at all, no one yet knows -- the science is far from settled on what drives climate.

But many are watching the sun for answers, and for good reason. Several renowned scientists have been predicting for some time that the world could enter a period of cooling right around now, with consequences that could be dire. "The next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do," believes, Dr. Chapman. "There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the U. S. and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it."

We are now at the beginning of Solar Cycle 24, so named because it is the 24th consecutive cycle that astronomers have listed, starting with the first cycle that began in March, 1755, and ended in June, 1766. Each cycle lasts an average of approximately 11 years; each is marked by sunspots that first erupt in the mid latitudes of the sun, and then, over the course of the 11 years, erupt progressively toward the sun's equator; each is marked by a change in the polarity of the sun's hemispheres; each changes the temperature on Earth in ways that humans don't fully understand, but cannot in all honesty deny.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers. Contact Lawrence at LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 06:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I thought I'd mention to readers that I'm in possession of a book by Lawrence Solomon (of Energy Probe and the Urban Renaissance Institute) entitled The Deniers. It's based on a collection of his articles in the National Post about the many very credible scientists who offer a wide range of opinions about the science of climate change. The book skewers the common cant that there is a "consensus of opinion" on the topic.

I've posted the full title of the book below and will offer a review once I've finished reading it. (If it's anything like the article series, my review will be highly positive.) In the meantime, you should read the article I pasted below on how the minions at Wikipedia manipulate entries in that information resource to defame people they disagree with over climate change, and put forward their own viewpoint (and in this case, self aggrandize). It's very interesting and quite frightening.

Here's the full title of the book, that you can look up on Amazon:

The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud *And those who are too fearful to do so (Hardcover)
by Lawrence Solomon

And here's the article:

The opinionator

by Lawrence Solomon

Next to Al Gore, William Connolley may be the world's most influential person in the global warming debate. He has a PhD in mathematics and worked as a climate modeller, but those accomplishments don't explain his influence – PhDs are not uncommon and, in any case, he comes from the mid-level ranks in the British Antarctic Survey, the agency for which he worked until recently.

He was the Parish Councillor for the village of Coton in the U.K., his Web site tells us, and a school governor there, too, but neither of those accomplishments are a claim to fame in the wider world. Neither are his five failed attempts to attain public office as a local candidate for South Cambridgeshire District Council and Cambridgeshire County Council as a representative for the Green Party.

But Connolley is a big shot on Wikipedia, which honours him with an extensive biography, an honour Wikipedia did not see fit to bestow on his boss at the British Antarctic Survey. Or on his boss's's boss, or on his boss's boss's boss, or on his boss's boss's boss's boss, none of whose opinions seemingly count for much, despite their impressive accomplishments. William Connolley's opinions, in contrast, count for a great deal at Wikipedia, even though some might not think them particularly worthy of note. "It is his view that there is a consensus in the scientific community about climate change topics such as global warming, and that the various reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarize this consensus," states his Wikipedia page, in the section called "Biography."

Connolley is not only a big shot on Wikipedia, he's a big shot at Wikipedia – an administrator with unusual editorial clout. Using that clout, this 40-something scientist of minor relevance gets to tear down scientists of great accomplishment. Because Wikipedia has become the single biggest reference source in the world, and global warming is one of the most sought-after subjects, the ability to control information on Wikipedia by taking down authoritative scientists is no trifling matter.

One such scientist is Fred Singer, the First Director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service, the recipient of a White House commendation for his early design of space satellites; the recipient of a NASA commendation for research on particle clouds – in short, a scientist with dazzling achievements who is everything Connolley is not. Under Connolley's supervision, Singer is relentlessly smeared, and has been for years, as a kook who believes in Martians and a hack in the pay of the oil industry. When a smear is inadequate, or when a fair-minded Wikipedian tries to correct a smear, Connolley and his cohorts are there to widen the smear or remove the correction, often rebuking the Wikipedian in the process.

Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, as well as a code of civility. Those rules and codes don't apply to Connolley, or to those he favours.

"Peiser's crap shouldn't be in here," Connolley wrote several weeks ago, in berating a Wikipedian colleague during an "edit war," as they're called. In such a war, rival sides change the content of a Wikipedia page from one competing version to another, often with bewildering speed. (Two people, landing on the same page seconds apart, might obtain entirely different information.) In the Peiser case, a Wikipedian stopped a prolonged war by freezing a continually changing page, to prevent more alterations until the dispute was settled. As occurs on such occasions, readers are alerted that Wikipedians are warring over the page, and that Wikipedia was not endorsing the version of the page that had been frozen. To Connolley's chagrin, however, the version that was frozen cast doubt on claims of a consensus on climate change. Although this was done within Wikipedia rules, Connolley intervened to revert the page and ensure Wikipedia readers saw only what he wanted them to see.

Peiser is Benny Peiser, a distinguished U.K. scientist who had convincingly refuted a study by Naomi Oreskes that claimed to have found no scientific papers at odds with the conventional wisdom on climate change. The Oreskes study – cited by Al Gore in his film, An Inconvenient Truth – is an article of faith to many global warming doomsayers and guarded from criticism by Connolley et al. Peiser and other critics of Oreskes's study, meanwhile, get demeaned.

Connolley and his cohorts don't just edit pages of scientists actively involved in the global warming debate. Scientists who work in unrelated fields, but who have findings that indirectly bolster a critique of climate change orthodoxy, will also get smeared. So will non-scientists and organizations that he disagrees with. Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia's 2.5-million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley's bidding.

Connolley no longer works as a climate modeller – he now works as a software engineer for a company called Cambridge Silicon Radio. And as an engineer of opinion at Wikipedia.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Energy Probe, and author of The Deniers.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought readers might enjoy this short article by Patrick Hebert of Thriftopia -- an Ontario organization that recycles e-waste. His point about economic incentives would apply to programs in jursidictions other than Ontario.

Ontario’s E-Waste Program - What’s In It For You?

Posted by Patrick Hebert under: thriftopia.com

The Ontario Electronic Stewardship plan is a lengthy document which details a system to assist the province in diverting up to 60% of e-waste from landfills for proper recycling and disposal.

Great notion – but one question remains unanswered – what’s in it for the public? In a time of ever rising fuel costs, the authors of the plan assume that the public will flock to depots to drop off their obsolete technology.

For those who are forward thinking & green minded, this assumption may prove to be correct – however as with other statistics, these people are only a portion of the bell curve of society. For those who care greatly about Earth-friendly initiatives, there are equal numbers of those who don’t. And then, there is the average person who given a convenient option may or may not choose to participate in ecological efforts.

What’s lacking in the OES plan – and all other provincial e-waste diversion initiatives – is consideration of “What’s In It For Me” from the consumer’s perspective. Nowhere in the plan is there consideration for the consumer’s gasoline, time, or labour in moving heavy and awkward items to places for proper disposal.

Also missing from the plan are details about who will police solid waste sent to transfer stations, who will intercept and separate e-waste from other forms of trash, and what such labour would cost.

Of course, one should not criticize if they are unwilling or unable to suggest an alternative. Finding a better program is well within reach though – a trip to The Beer Store reveals how passionate consumers are about participating in recycling programs – when there’s something to be gained.

By collecting a $0.10 bottle deposit, Brewer’s Retail has been able to collect and reuse 99% of industry standard beer bottles 12 to 15 times each. And they’ve been able to collect and transport 100,000 tonnes of beer packaging each year from over 17,500 establishments. Surely, if Ontario beer consumers will make the trip to The Beer Store to get $2.40 back per case of beer, there is something to be learned and applied to the e-waste crisis.

While e-waste is certainly more sophisticated and concerning than simple beer bottles, the principle of deposit and refund is not something that should be ignored.

Proposed “Advance Disposal Fees” charged on the sale of new technology vary from $2 to $13 depending on the component but there is still no incentive for consumers to comply with the program once the fee is paid. Without convenient collection or adequate incentives, this may just be another “Sin Tax.”

By increasing the proposed fees to encompass a deposit & refund program, the 60% target could not only be achieved but likely surpassed.

The notion is not entirely new – Sims Metals California operations now pay $0.05 per pound to California residents who recycle TVs and computer monitors.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's the link to a recent episode of CBC's The Current radio talk show.

If you listen to Part Two, there's an excellent segment in which host Anna Maria Tremonti interviews conservative MP Bob Mills (Red Deer, AB) -- a gasification proponent -- and then waste reduction consultant (and a contributing editor to our magazine) Clarissa Morawski who puts forward the waste diversion and Zero Waste point of view, very effectively I would say. I consider this is a "must" listen to anyone interesting in hearing cogent arguments for and against waste-to-energy and Zero Waste.

Here is the link, and Clarissa's contact info is below (for your records).

http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2008/200804/20080402.html

Clarissa Morawski
CM Consulting
315 Pearl Ave.
Peterborough, Ontario
K9J 5G4

office (digital voice): (416) 682-8984
mobile: (705) 760-5332
fax: (705) 745-5810

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I highly recommend that anyone interested in waste diversion and information/discussion about leading-edge product stewardship or extended producer responsibility (EPR) issues visit and bookmark the website of an organization called the Product Policy Institute. The website is here:

http://www.productpolicy.org/

You'll want to visit the "resources" area and download some of the interesting documents posted there.

The Product Policy Institute (PPI) is led by Bill Sheehan -- formerly of the GrassRoots Recycling Network (www.grrn.org) -- a consumer-focused organization. While it still speaks to the "grassroots," the PPI is a bit more professionalized and its content has more academic bench strength. The website is poised to become a "must visit" resource for anyone interested in environmental protection, waste reduction and sustainable development (i.e., the link between consumer culture, waste generation and the related ecological footprint). The PPI is now, effectively, "Ground Zero" for the Zero Waste movement.

On its home page, the PPI states that it is "addressing the challenge of sustainable production and consumption by seeking out innovative thinkers and experts from business, government, academic and NGO communities to chart a new relationship between government and business in the service of achieving sustainable life styles."

An interesting mission statement!

It goes on: "The dialogue builds on a core of shared values: that government has a duty to protect public assets (variously called the 'commons' and 'public trust'); that government is needed to define and enforce performance standards in the public interest; but then government should give industry the freedom to do what industry does best -- innovate to achieve the desired outcomes."

I really like this, and find the PPI's stated goals refreshing and inspiring. The PPI then outlines its Mission, Vision and Strategy:

"Our Mission is to develop and communicate a strong framework for product-focused environmental policies that advance sustainable production and consumption and good governance. Our Vision is a vibrant, sustainable consumer economy in which government takes a leadership role in protecting human and environmental health through policies that reward green businesses providing 'cradle to cradle' management of their products.

"Our Strategy is to connect innovative thinkers and diverse stakeholders to develop a big-picture framework for sustainable production and consumption for a North American audience; to provide problem-centered input and solutions to high impact problems in the arena of product production, consumption and disposal; and to communicate policy solutions effectively."

Having pointed readers in the PPI's direction, I trust they'll realize its importance for themselves and get involved.

To that, I'd like to add a few sentiments of my own.

A few years ago -- when he was dying from cancer -- I asked my friend, environmentalist Gary Gallon, out for lunch. He and I both knew, without stating it, that this might be the last time we saw one another (which it was). The premise of the lunch was an interview for a profile article I would write that eventually appeared as a cover story for HazMat Management magazine. It was unusual for the trade magazine to profile an environmentalist on its cover, but in addition to being my tribute to Gary, it was an excuse to celebrate the evolution of environmentalism and sustainable development into a phenomenon that's gradually becoming part of corporate culture, not an exterior enemy. In that regard, Gary (who was taken from us at the young age of 54) was a transitional figure, having made the shift from hippy-ish ecologist to environment industry professional. (I got to know Gary well when he rented office space from us in our old magazine digs in downtown Toronto. He was executive director of what is now ONEIA -- the Ontario Environment Industry Association.)

At the lunch I asked Gary what advise he had for young people who want to protect the environment. Should they become environmentalists and join groups like GreenPeace (of which Gary was a co-founder)? I asked.

"No," Gary replied. "In my time we were on the outside throwing stones. Then some of us joined government so we could directly access power and make regulatory changes. [Gary was a policy advisor to former Ontario environment minister Jim Bradley, who introduced far-reaching environmental legislation during his term of office.] But now what's needed is young people to go into the corporate world and change companies from within."

Since then I've noted that, while there are still GreenPeace-style activists on the outside "throwing stones" (and I believe we need them) there's another breed of environmentalist that I think represents a more mature phase of the movement -- a phase that's crucial for where we're headed (or need to head) in any journey to toward sustainability. These environmentalists may not even think of nor describe themselves as such. They're a sophisticated group of deep thinkers and organizers who are tackling updated challenges, and they include people like Amory Lovins (the Rocky Mountain Institute), Toronto-based Lawrence Solomon of the Urban Renaissance Institute and Zero Waste advocate Helen Spiegelman (of Vancouver, also on the Product Policy Institute board), and Orangeville, Ontario-based Usman Valiante, among others.

People like these offer a refreshing perspective because they're independent thinkers and have gone beyond traditional adversarial activism that reduces the world into "good" environmentalists and "bad" corporations motiivated by greed. Let's face it, back in Gary Gallon's youth (and mine), factory and chemical plant smokestacks and pipes directly spewed untreated toxic wastes directly into the air and waterways. It was the era of leaded gasoline, worry-free smoking, and "living better through electricity." Although much work remains to be done, the "low hanging fruit" has been picked, in terms of the installation of primary and sometimes secondary treatment equipment at these plants. We're now at the "industrial ecology" stage, where the energy use, natural resource consumption and environmental impacts of a product over the course of its entire lifecycle have to be examined, and changes made. (These include not producing certain items in the first place.)

Among the many interesting observations and ideas from the "new environmentalists" is that the problem is not the "market" or "capitalism." They recognize that everything is a "market" and that to oppose markets is like opposing gravity or ocean tides. Instead, they recognize that market forces are neither virtuous or evil, and can be harnessed for all kinds of public and private good. But markets can also have problems that need correction. One of these (maybe the biggest) is subsidies.

The subsidies are, in fact, non-market (or even anti-market) government gifts to companies and sometimes whole industries that may include money (grants, forgiveable loans, etc.) and also what Valiante calls "useful regulatory instruments." The latter can take many different forms. One example is regulations that on the surface appear to be prohibitions against pollution, but are in fact licenses to pollute within a prescribed limit. Another is exemption from certain regulations, or certificates of approval to build, expand and/or operate a facility granted by politicians against the wishes of local opponents who are dismissed as "NIMBYs."

A great example of a useful regulatory instrument "purchased" by a powerful industry lobby was the exemption of the soft drink industry in the United States from the anti-trust and combines legislation there, that allowed the major soft drink companies to dismantle the established bottle refilling and deposit-refund system and replace it with a system of one-way "throwaway" beverage containers. The companies at the time even managed to convince most U.S. lawmakers (though not all) that their special exemption was for the greater cause of environmental protection (to protect their bottle refilling system) when it was in fact the very opposite. Insidiously, the companies managed to corrupt and control the agenda -- by partially funding the startup of curbside collection programs -- and re-branding their throwaway packaging "recyclable" to the extent that policymakers are now reduced to negotiating whether used beverage containers should be collected for recycling on deposit, or not, which neatly sidesteps the larger and more important debate of whether the recyclabe/throwaway containers should be allowed in the first place. The companies avoid mention of the high-speed super-efficient refilling systems in places like Germany where most soft drinks are sold (by the very same companies) in refillable containers. In other words, the 3Rs hierarchy has been overturned, and not by accident.

Corporate representatives nowadays sit on the boards of various Industry Funding Organizations (IFOs) that formulate strategies and oversee the development of various emerging product stewardship programs. It's not their fault at all that they participate in the IFOs -- in most cases they're legally required to do so. And there's nothing nefarious in the fact that they (rationally and predictably) pursue policies that reflect their commercial interests.

The problem is that, time and again, governments allow and even encourage the development of programs that give the appearance of being environmentally progressive when, in fact, they are simplistic programs that stick an advance disposal fee onto a consumer item and allow "business as usual" for producers and consumers. True, the product stewardship programs (if properly designed and independently audited) may succeed in diverting certain wastes from landfill disposal. That may be desireable but is really the "right answer to the wrong question." Zero Waste proponents like the folks at the Product Policy Institute would likely say that the better question is "what is the most eco-efficient product and packaging, over a product's entire lifecycle." Ask that question and you start generating EPR answers that include design for environment (DfE), and not simply waste diversion solutions.

From this perspective, the entire Blue Box curbside recycling system is the right answer to the wrong question. In fact, it represents a mostly "business as usual" scenario for producers, who continue to externalize their costs onto the environment, and ratepayers. One of the PPI's central ideas is that municipalities have been duped in the past half century into becoming "enablers" to co-dependent industry, carting off an ever-increasing tide of "product waste" at no cost to industry. These days, more and more of the items (which increasingly include short lifespan electronic products like computers, MP3 players and cellphones that are obsolete almost from the moment they're sold) contribute to a growing amount of waste. there's no "feedback loop" connecting upstream manufacturers to the upstream and downstream environmental impacts of their products and wastes. End the subsidies (at each stage of production, and the carting away of wastes), the Zero Waste proponents will argue, and much of that feedback loop will come into effect.

Let's assume that in the next few years the stated goal of governments across North America will be reached. Let's imagine that something like 60 per cent (or higher) of our "garbage" is "diverted from landfill." Let's imagine that about a third of the total waste stream is recycled through Blue Box-style programs, and another third is composted through various organics "Green Bin" programs. Let's also imagine that a considerable amount of products are kept out of the waste stream entirely via various product stewardship programs. One day, there will be a program for scrap tires, used oil, household hazardous waste (batteries, pesticides, etc.), fluorescent bulbs, used electronics ("e-waste"), and so on. Oh happy day! But, what will we have acheived?

Only a small part of what the Zero Waste proponents argue we need. While it's true that recycling offsets the upstream energy inputs and environmental externalities of natural resource extraction, this is only a small part of what's required for sustainability -- the business of getting us to the place where everyone on this planet can live a reasonably comfortable life without the five planets that would be required if everyone lived as Americans (and Canadians) do. With the growth of consumerism and markets in China and India, we need to worry about this, urgently.

Curbside recycling and product stewardship programs are desirable for certain materials, to be sure, and they are important tools in our sustainability toolbox. But using them while ignoring the 3Rs hierarchy (reduction, reuse) is like a carpenter attempting to build a house with only the screw driver and rasp, and not also using the hammer, saw and pliers (etc.). So, even as the municipal-industrial dream of a content covered in recyclng and composting plants comes to fruition in the next decade or so, we will still need more landfills and waste-to-energy plants (and probably another two or three Earths!) unless the producer responsibility and true product stewardship issues are addressed, and that will require nothing less than fundamental changes in the consumer society.

A few years ago I would have doubted this kind of change was possible. My suspicion now, however, is that a "sleeping giant" is wakening, and a grassroots movement of people concerned about climate change, peak oil, and ecosystems under stress from numerous factors, will gather momentum. It will not be led by corporations, although some progressive companies will get onside (and see some commercial benefits from doing so). It will not be led by municipalities, that will continue to struggle with the tide of waste coming at them, and continue to be preoccupied with building their recycling and composting mini-empires.

It will be led (I think) by a collection of different groups bound by a common interest. Chief among these will be aging Baby Boomers -- a "grey power" army of modern "village elders" who will increasingly have both the time and the interest in bringing social change, now that the most consumerist phase of their lives is over (families, larger houses, cars, etc.). They will join with the new generation of idealistic and concerned young people growing up with entrenched environmental values and, let's face it, $100 (and higher) per barrel gasoline. The catalyst will be the intellectuals and organizers of the updated environmental movement, personafied by the board of the Product Policy Institute and similar organizations, who will develop new models and fresh insights into how to change the system and harness market forces for various public and environmental goods. Their ideas wille eventually overtake the simply "waste diversion" philosophy and its technologies. The companies that position themselves at the forefront of this emerging trend will prosper; those that ignore it will slowly fade. Things are changing, and the Zero Waste proponents time has come.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 02:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My work has got me very involved in understanding the Zero Waste movement lately -- and the zero carbon footprint dimension -- and I've begun to feel that -- with certain qualifications -- it offers the philosophical underpinning to solve many of society's (and the world's) problems. We are the ones who will have to change our ways, and our value system. I'm beginning to understand that certain forms of pollution, poverty, war and demagoguery are not accidental, but the inevitable consequence of our consumer culture and the imperial projection of our power around the world extracting and exploiting human and natural resources on terms that are favorable to us, backed up by military force.

To break the cycle, we first have to understand the system upon which we stand, which is largely out of sight and therefore out of mind, and we then need solutions -- because it quickly becomes depressing and people will simply "tune out" if the bad news isn't delivered almost hand-in-hand with information about what we can do to make positive change.

To that end, if you click on the two links below, you'll find a very thought provoking presentation of the issue of externalities and the environmental and human impacts of the hyper-consumer culture and economy, and also a talk by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute about how we can "win the oil end game." Watch them when you have about 15 minutes to view each.

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/51

(If the second link doesn't work for you, visit TED.com and search "Lovins." This is Amory Lovins on "We must win the oil end game.")

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This may count as my most frivolous Blog entry ever, but I imagine that quite a few of our readers are engineers or at least people with enthusiasm for various kinds of technology. And what I'm about to write may be useful to more than a few of you at some point as I know of at least one company that has advertised with us that sells hand-held gas detection devices that look quite a bit like the gizmos featured in the Star Trek TV series, and I learned in talking to their designers that this was no coincidence and that, in fact, they were serious Trekkies who modelled their equipment on "phaser" guns and so on from that program.

Anyway, there's a new term floating around called "steampunk" that refers to a new trend in which people take modern electronic devices (laptops, computer monitors, electric guitars) and decorate them -- or even rebuild them -- to look like weird 19th Century-type inventions (i.e., with brass fittings and decorative hinges and so on) reminiscent of the steam locomotive era; hence the term "steampunk."

I have pasted some URLs below of some websites that celebrate this interesting trend. Take a peek and you'll instantly see what I mean. I really like this stuff, especially the first website with the "brass" computer monitor. I also think the ladies' laptop is amazing.

Steampunk is a take-off on "cyberpunk" -- the techno-dystopian genre with cybernetics and so forth epitomized in the Matrix film trilogy. Steampunk is characterized by the Wellsian aesthetic of 19th-century technology deployed in crazy, modern ways. There are novels and so forth written like this, and even a game puckishly called Space: 1889.

If you want to see this concept taken to the ultimate level, go see the excellent new movie, The Golden Compass. The whole film is populated with this kind of retro-futuristic equipment, from the compass itself -- called an "alethiometer" to fanciful dirigibles and so on. Even if you don't see the movie, check out the official website and you'll get a sense of how it all looks.

http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/

I have a very modern condo and yet I also have various 19th-century-style brass instruments like an astrolabe or sextant and so on that I got at the Bombay Company store. Makes me think I should keep them and display after all.

I think steampunk speaks to our contemporary relationship with technology and the desire for a human connection with the machines with which we interact. Just think of how many hours in a day each of us interacts with machines: computers, cars, kitchen appliances, Blackberry or iPod-type devices.

In the 19th century you could physically see and even touch the various gears and components of a machine, or open it up and see its inner workings, even if you didn't completely understand them. Think of a watch or a steam locomotive.

The gasoline engine made things more complicated but technology was still accessible to ordinary people. From the Model T to a 1980s Camero, a mecahnically inclined person could still work "under the hood" of their car, change the oil, or even rebuild and supercharge the engine. Nowadays you need special instruments to read the computerized monitoring equipment in a car. Topping up or changing fluids is still realtively easy, but most of a car's inner workings are impenetrable and it's going to get more complicated as more and more parts of a car become computerized and electronic (including soon-to-be electric motors that will be emissions free and silent).

The next electronic revolution, followed almost right away by the digital computer age, moved technology further and further away from intuitive comprehension. Devices, as everyone knows, have become smaller and thinner, running on microchips whose inner workings are only visible under a microscope. The iPod and the new iPhone best embody the latest developments -- thin, wireless and, for all intents and purposes -- completely magical in terms of how they work. A DVD or thumb drive mysteriously holds all the contents of an encyclopedia, or all the color and sound and drama of a feature movie.

At the same time as all this nano-wirelessness made new devices "cool" (to the extent that they're now wearable fashion objects, and even fetish objects of a kind) it was quite predictable that people would feel nostalgia for the days when they could relate to machines and tools -- a time when the craftsmanship that went into building a device was evident.

It may be that this is the genesis of steampunk, which could become a major trend. Just as electronic and computerized devices are becoming wrist-watch-sized and credit-card thin, a sizable market could erupt to take these same items -- or at least their essential components and flat monitors, etc. -- and integrate them inside deliberately large, heavy, ornate and seemingly hand-crafted housings.

My guess is that if someone opened up a storefront on a fashionable street selling hand-crafted, one of a kind computer accessories they'd make a fortune! Another business might be to supply easy-to-install retrofit kits for people to customize their laptops, Blackberries, iPhones, etc.

Watch for it. (And if you work for a company that designs or builds special equipment, mayube it's time to dump the sleek plastic look of an iPod Nano and replace it with an aesthetic that might find a place in, say, a Jules Verne novel.)

Now here are those URLs:

http://steampunkworkshop.com/lcd.shtml

http://jakeofalltrades.wordpress.com/2007/01/23/test/

http://jakeofalltrades.wordpress.com/2007/01/25/tick-tock-a-steampunk-clock/

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/lady-steampunk/mod-your-laptop-into-a-portable-typewriter-and-adding-machine-275541.php

http://steampunkworkshop.com/steampunk-strat.shtml

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just a note to let everyone know I will be at the Canadian Waste & Recycling Expo in Vancouver this week. Come see me and Publisher Brad O'Brien at our booth. If I'm out walking the show floor, leave a note at the booth with your cell phone number and I'll track you down!

Here are the details about the Canadian Waste & Recycling Expo

Dates: November 28-29 2007
City: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Location: Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre
Contact Name: Arnie Gess
Local Phone: 403-638.4410
Toll-free Phone: 877-534-7285
Fax: 403-638-4413
Email: arnie.gess@cwre.ca
Website: www.cwre.ca

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Our contributing editor Usman Valiante -- along with contributing editor Clarissa Morawski -- recently had the opportunity to appear on TV Ontario’s program "The Agenda with Steve Paikin" to discuss “The Calculus of Going Green.” The show focused on the complexities of environmental decision-making (the topics of discussion focused on assessing the relative environmental merits of eating locally produced food, using compact fluorescent bulbs and driving hybrid gasoline-electric cars).

The show opened with an interview with Mr. Bjorn Lomborg – “The Skeptical Environmentalist” as he calls himself. Whatever your thoughts regarding the merits of Mr. Lomborg’s arguments there is no denying that his delivery is highly effective in questioning our priorities in addressing climate change and the flaws in the Kyoto Protocol approach.

Here is the link to the episode page so you can view the interview with Bjorn Lomborg:

http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/theagenda/index.cfm?page_id=7&bpn=779042&ts=2007-10-16%2020:00:15.0

(If it does not open when you click on the link please copy and paste it into the address line on your web browser). You can watch the episode by choosing video on the right menu on the episode page.

After that interview our contributing editors appeared with other panelists in a moderated discussion. You can watch that segment here:

http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/tvoutils/globalfiles/VideoPop.cfm?spot_id=3203&sitefolder=theagenda

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 06:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's another recent entry from Lawrence Solomon in the FP Comment section of the Financial Post section of Canada's National Post newspaper. I have to say that I just can't get enough of this stuff -- Larry is doing such a great job on this article series, and I hope I puts it together as a book, with each article a page or chapter. Even if you are true believer in the received wisdom of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- in fact, especially if you are such a person -- you have a duty to read these articles and challenge yourself. This is an especially interesting article on Antarctica; it turns out that, contrary to media reports about the Larson B ice shelf collapsing, etc. -- there is no fingerprint of human-induced cliamte change to be discerned in Antarctica, no temperature increase and so on, which flies in the face of the computer models.

Enjoy.

You still need your parka in Antarctica

LAWRENCE SOLOMON
Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

Antarctica — a vast territory whose sea-ice growth in winter effectively doubles its size to envelop an area three times that of Canada — is the world’s coldest continent by far, its permanent ice sheet regulating the Antarctic atmosphere. It is also the world’s windiest and driest continent by far, and its highest by far, with a mean elevation of 2,300 metres.

It is also the world’s most remote continent, its least explored and least understood.

Not until 1998, with the advent of new technologies and improved scientific understanding, did human knowledge “allow the question of the global relevance of Antarctica to be explored in detail for the first time,” stated David Bromwich of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University. A decade ago, Dr. Bromwich was embarking on a major research project for the National Science Foundation to begin to understand this frozen continent, which is the primary heat sink in the global climate system, and “plays a central role in global climate variability and change.”

His mission, in part, dealt with the science of global warming, which could not be settled until Antarctica gave up its mysteries. “The validity of global change scenarios remains controversial,” he said at the time.

A decade later, despite accumulating research, the validity of climate change scenarios continues to be controversial, and the unknowns surrounding the role of Antarctica continue to overwhelm the little that’s known. As Dr. Bromwich reported earlier this year at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at San Francisco, “It’s hard to see a global-warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now.”

Dr. Bromwich presented his findings shortly after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with new findings in February that pointed to catastrophic consequences if mankind didn’t change its ways. The science is settled, the IPCC indicated, its global models reliable.

Yet Dr. Bromwich found that the global models that the IPCC relies on are at odds with his own findings. Antarctica’s temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as global climate models predicted.

“The best we can say right now is that the climate models are somewhat inconsistent with the evidence that we have for the last 50 years from continental Antarctica,” he stated, adding that “We’re looking for a small signal that represents the impact of human activity and it is hard to find it at the moment.”

A 2006 study by Dr. Bromwich and others, published in the journal Science, again found the accepted climate-change models to be wrong. According to those models, snowfall in Antarctica should have been increasing. Instead, the study found, there has been no statistically significant increase in the snowfall trend over the past 50 years. Instead, snowfall patterns in Antarctica varied widely from year to year and decade to decade. Dr. Bromwich’s findings — considered to be the most precise record of Antarctic snowfall yet — also point to the need for decades of more data from satellites to determine Antarctica’s patterns.

Complex computer modelling is notoriously unreliable, yet there are exceptions. One is the model that helped save the life of Ronald Shemenski, a physician stationed at the U.S. South Pole Station in April, 2001. Dr. Shemenski, who had developed a life-threatening pancreatic infection, needed to be airlifted in a season of high winds, extreme cold and near 24-hour darkness, when plane travel doesn’t normally occur. The unprecedented rescue effort succeeded, thanks to the aircrew of Canada’s Kenn Borek Air Ltd., who flew a Twin Otter in and out of the South Pole, and Dr. Bromwich’s model, which helped predict the best time for the perilous rescue effort.

“The forecast model used to predict aircraft-landing conditions at the South Pole for the rescue was optimized specifically for Antarctic conditions,” Dr. Bromwich explains. “The model was only run for short periods, about two days at a time,” to approximate the time required for the rescue mission.

The optimization for Antarctic conditions also succeeds where global models fail. “Global climate models that are having some trouble at predicting the long-term behaviour [over decades] of Antarctic near-surface temperatures are not optimized for the unique atmospheric conditions over Antarctica, probably the most pristine place on Earth,” he elaborates. “The primary reason is connected with cloud formation. The global models treat the clouds like those in mid-latitudes, whereas they are very different in reality.”

That global models fare poorly in remote parts of the world doesn’t surprise him. “These are global models and shouldn’t be expected to be equally exact for all locations,” he explains, adding that “until the global models get the polar regions right, they won’t get the global climate right either.”

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the Urban Renaissance Institute.
www.urban-renaissance.org

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I thought I'd just make a quick entry to explain to readers how subscriptions work at our magazine. I've spoken to a few people recently who seemed confused by the fact that they currently receive the magazine for free, but are sometimes asked to buy a paid-for subscription.

Here's how it works:

We are primarily a "controlled circulation" magazine, meaning our magazine is sent out free of charge to qualified professionals (e.g., municipal waste managers, property managers, commercial waste generators, key people at recycling companies, etc.). When we launched the magazine years ago, most of our readership was gleaned from directories and lists (such as those offered by our affliate Scotts' Directories).

Over the years, more and more people read our magazine and found out about it at conferences and trade shows, etc. Eventually, we enticed almost all our readers to fill in and sign a special card requesting the magazine (for free). This is important as our circulation list is audited independently each year by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). We send the ABC audit statement to our advertisers to prove to them that our claims are true about who is reading our magazine (their prospective customers in different industry sectors and various provinces).

So, you should at least fill in the reader qualification card each year in order to remain on our mailing list. We like to have virtually all our readers "first year written request" and we routinely delete old names and records.

That being said, you might ask, "Why should I pay for a subscription?" The answer is that being a qualified reader doesn't guarantee that you will keep receiving the magazine. We frequently add and delete unpaid subscribers in order to improve the quality of our distribution. (For instance, we might decide one month that we're a bit light on property managers and too heavy on construction and demolition sector readers, and simply drop a couple of hundred names here and add a couple of hundred there.)

Having a paid subscription prevents you from getting deleted and guarantees that you will receive the magazine. And, since our magazine only comes out six times per year, you might not notice for many months that you've stopped receiving the magazine, and you could miss some useful stories and information.

Also, paid subscribers receive other benefits, including email-based topic alerts and our electronic weekly newsletter (if you want to receive that). And only paid subscribers can access the archived articles from past editions on the website (under the Print Edition button). That's a very useful, searchable database of information that is great for research or brushing up on any topic related to waste disposal, recycling, composting and so on.

So there you have it -- a short description of why you should purchase a paid subscription to our magazine. To learn more and to get one, just click on Subscriber Services at the upper left side of our website's home page. And if you need to contact our circulation manager directly, her name is Mary Garufi, and she can be reached at 416-442-5600, ext. 3545 or via email at mgarufi@bizinfogroup.ca

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 06:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just last week I passed the minimum $2,000 level in my fundraising effort that will allow me to walk in The Weekend to End Breast Cancer (September 8-9). Thanks to all of you who have contributed -- the vast majority of donors are people I know from the waste management and environmental services industry. I'm now walking between five and 15 kilometres daily as preparation for the weekend walk, in which I have to walk a marathon on each day back to back Saturday and Sunday.

The topic of breast cancer became very relevant when my mother-in-law developed breast cancer and underwent a masectomy this year. The wife of one of our regular magazine columnists -- who is much younger than my mother-in-law -- has also undergone treatment. Cancer has taken away several friends and acquaintances of mine in recent years, too. Sometimes the outcomes are good -- the spouse of one of my industry friends beat lung cancer, which is quite unusual. Other times the news is more grim: I just found out last week that the sister of my stepfather has colon cancer. She's in her seventies but very fit and active, playing tennis all the time and involved in various causes. I hope her outcome is good also, but one never knows.

I have no doubt that every reader knows someone with cancer or who has passed away from it. For some time I've read "Alicia's Story" in the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle. The past diary-like entries are still posted there, but Alicia is taking a break from the column to fight the disease, which appears to be taking over now. A very sad story about cancer interrupting the life of a lovely woman who is only in her early twenties.

Anyway, all of this leads me to want to share an interesting piece of information. I'll tell you an interesting story in a moment, but first let me provide some context.

There's a debate among experts as to whether cancer is caused by innate factors or the external environment (i.e., pollution).

On the one hand, I've read some interesting articles and viewed TV programs in recent years that suggest that cancer is to a large extent natural -- a disease of aging. Simply put, we are seeing more cancers (according to some doctors and researchers) because people are living longer. In previous generations, people died of other causes before they had a chance to get cancer.

Along this line of thought, the system via which the body regenerates itself (wherein all our cells are replaced every eight years) has the consequence that sometimes cells grow out of control. We're all getting cancer all the time, but our immune system kills off these out-of-control cells before they get a foothold. The thinking is that if we become immuno-suppressed, the cancer takes root. In this school of thought, we need to keep ourselves fit, minimize stress and eat vitamins -- all to boost immunity and keep cancer at bay.

Also along this line of thought, as we age the cancer eventually gets us (if we don't succumb to somthing else like heart disease), but progresses slowly in older people, since the metabolic rate has slowed down also. One of the proofs for this theory is that, in mice at least, when researchers turn off the genes of aging, the mice quickly develop tumors. Like a dark Darwinian joke, somehow the genes that allow us to age also suppress cancer, so you can't have eternal youth without also getting sick.

On the other hand, there's a school of thought that cancer is caused by environmental factors, such as various pollutants that we inhale and also imbibe in our water and (especially) our food. This concept is supported by growing rates of certain cancer among young people, especially breast cancer among women in their thirties and so on. We wouldn't expect this if cancer was only a disease of aging. I also wonder if two other factors apply. First, the fact that there are more women in the workforce, such that the stress impacts them by a certain age. And second, by increasing fat and obesity. Women have more body fat than men, and people are getting fatter, and maybe a stressed out overweight population is more susceptible to cancer.

Or maybe that's not the reason at all, and environmental factors really are the cause. At this point in time, I believe that both interpretations are true: i.e., that cancer is indeed a disease of aging, and also that environmental pollutants are causing additional cancers among younger people. I haven't even mentioned smoking, which accounts for something like 30 per cent of all cancers.

Now to the tidbit of information that's most interesting. My apologies for the long build-up, but I think this story needs the context above.

I was talking about this topic with a professional colleague the other day, and he referred to a book he read recently, a diary written by a surgeon from the American Civil War. One day the surgeon performed an autopsy on the body of a young soldier and discovered that the young man had died of cancer (not battlefield injuries). He had the body packed in ice and shipped back to his hometown university because it might be the only opportunity his medical students would ever have to witness cancer.

In other words, cancer was so rare in the 19th Century that a doctor shipped a soldier's body home to his students for a perhaps once-in-a-lifetime view of it. Maybe this anecdote points up that doctor's simply didn't detect cancer very often back then, and that surely accounts for some of it. But the story is arresting, and suggests that perhaps modern pollution really does play a significant role in cancer generation.

If so, we'll have to redouble our efforts not just to "find a cure" but to prevent cancer in the first place, by removing the cause: pollution in our environment, our air, water and food. Something I'll be thinking about as I walk in the fundraising marathon in September.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I remind readers of the interesting article series by Lawrence Solomon that appears regularly on the FP Comment page of the National Post newspaper. I've taken the liberty of reproducing the most recent (30th) installment below. Remember, you can access the whole series at Larry's website here:

www.urban-renaissance.org

THE DENIERS — PAR T XXX

What global warming, Australian skeptic asks

LAWRENCE SOLOMON
Financial Post

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

Bob Carter, a professor at James Cook University (Queensland) and the University of Adelaide (South Australia), is a paleontologist, a stratigrapher, and a marine geologist.

He has been chair of the National Marine Science and Technologies Committee, director of the Australian Office of the Ocean Drilling Program, and chair of the Earth Sciences Discipline Panel of the Australian Research Council. He is Cambridge educated. And he is an outspoken global-warming skeptic.

Most global-warming skeptics criticize the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on limited grounds — they might view the science put forth by the IPCC to be at odds with science in their particular discipline, for example, or they might object to the IPCC’s secrecy, or they might object to the IPCC’s failure to observe standard peerreview practices. Moreover, when they object they generally do so quietly, often without naming names and only in private.

Prof. Carter objects on multiple grounds and in multiple arenas; he names names and he will set the record straight, even when those he believes to be in the wrong are fellow skeptics.

NASA chief Michael Griffin, for example, is a skeptic because he thinks that global warming may be beneficial, that it is not worth worrying about, and that, in any case, we wouldn’t be able to stop it, even if we wanted to. But Dr. Griffin also thinks that a global-warming trend is certainly underway, and to this Prof. Carter takes objection.

Dr. Griffin’s “opinion is unsupported by the evidence,” Prof. Carter wrote in rebuttal. “The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4%) in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

“Second, lower-atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17%).”

Moreover, Prof. Carter adds, credible scientists predict global cooling. How then can Dr. Griffin boldly assert that humans are causing global warming?

One of the most contentious areas of climate-change science involves computer General Circulation Models (GCMs), the predictive tool that generate most of the scary scenarios that arouse public alarm. Prof. Carter has long been a critic of these models, which claim to project for us what the climate will be in the year 2100.

In the past, Prof. Carter has drawn the ire of global-warming proponents with his GCM critiques. Now, to his satisfaction, he has support in his critique from an unlikely source — Kevin Trenberth, whom he thinks of as “one of the advisory high priests of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

As Dr. Trenberth recently acknowledged to Nature journal’s Climate Feedback blog, IPCC models cannot predict future climate because they don’t reflect reality: “None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate,” he stated.

“Moreover, the starting climate state in several of the models may depart significantly from the real climate owing to model errors. I postulate that regional climate change is impossible to deal with properly unless the models are initialized.”

While these statements warrant Prof. Carter’s approval , others do not, such as Dr. Trenberth’s claim that people have mistakenly believed that the IPCC makes predictions: “In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been,” claims Dr. Trenberth.

To which Prof. Carter notes an audit at the 27th International Symposium on Forecasting presented earlier this month. It found that “in apparent contradiction to claims by some climate experts that the IPCC provides ‘projections’ and not ‘forecasts’, the word ‘forecast’ and its derivatives occurred 37 times, and ‘predict’ and its derivatives occur 90 times” in a chapter from the IPCC’s latest report.

“There is no predictive value in the current generation of computer GCMs and therefore the alarmist IPCC statements about human-caused global warming are unjustified,” he concludes. Until others conclude so too, expect Prof. Carter to continue his critiques without fear or favour.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 03:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I thought readers would appreciate this sobering evaluation of the peer review process, which (like so many other things) isn't quite the model process some think. This interesting article is from the Financial Post, FP Comment section, Friday, June 22, 2007.

Lessons of figure skating

Peer review is a crucial part of science funding, but scientists could learn from the skating world that more than two opinions are needed for a good judgment

REINHOLD VIETH

Financial Post

Scientific peer reviewers are the best specialists that editors can find to read the manuscripts they receive. Peer reviewers usually serve as unpaid, hardworking experts. In essence, journal peer reviewers stand on guard for society as a whole, to ensure that only scientifically credible articles get published.

But long before any journal peer review, the research needs to be financed, so a different kind of peer review takes place. To apply to publicly supported granting agencies, researchers need to describe why an idea needs investigation and how they would conduct their experiments. Instead of a worldwide pool of experts, funding agencies usually must rely on committees, or groups of scientists from various fields. Those who serve as peer reviewers for funding agencies are also volunteers, giving of their time in the often thankless task of reading many applications for funding. The goal of their peer review is to provide a score that agencies will use to rank who gets funding. In theory, peer reviews applicable to grant applications ensure that limited research dollars support the best science.

The peer review of research-grant applications is a huge problem for all concerned. Not counting the thinking and the groundwork, a typical medical researcher spends an absolute minimum of a month of full-time work writing a grant application. After that, according to the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), our federal government’s largest medical and health funding agency, the odds of funding success are about one out of six. If the grant application aims to fund brand-new research, the odds of success are even worse. Peer review should ensure that good research stands a better chance of success than a roll of the dice.

Almost five years ago, Warren Thorngate, a statistician from Carleton University, examined the statistics about the peer-review process at CIHR. His “Thorngate report” paints a very sad picture. He shows that the scoring of scientific grant applications is no different from other situations in which humans need to “score” something, whether it is judging figure skaters, or choosing a paint colour. Any two people can agree or disagree, just by the luck of the draw of which two people are selected to judge. I have long wondered how many people who apply for research funding have read the Thorngate report with care.

Basically, every grant application is given to two members of a committee to read, each assigning a score out of five. That score is a judgment based on quality guidelines about the possible importance of the research to the health of Canadians, the quality of the experiment proposed, etc. The result, according to Thorngate, is that “perceived differences in the quality of the applications accounted for less than 25% of the variance of internal reviewers’ ratings. Individual differences among the internal reviewers seemed to account for the rest.”

This means that 75% of what compares your score with everybody else’s is just plain randomness. Everyone who has applied repeatedly for research grant money knows this, and it applies to just about any peer-review system, not just CIHR. For example, I sent exactly the same grant proposal to two funding agencies at the same time. Agency A scored the proposal so badly it was not even worth discussing. Agency B scored the proposal as the best of the 20 it considered. When I complained to Agency A about this discrepancy, it replied that its low score simply reflected a difference of opinion.

For researchers who need support, the random gamble of the way applications are scored and ranked is a huge problem. Researchers now accept that peer review is junk science, because it is not science at all. Applicants for grants know that, despite the sincere efforts of peer reviewers (all of whom have also been applicants), the opinion-based judgments of peer reviews do end up functioning like a lottery. And just like any lottery, the only way to be sure of winning is to keep on buying a ticket.

For funding agencies, the randomness of peer review has created an ever-growing problem. As applicants keep recycling grant applications into the lottery, the number of applications climbs and the success rate drops. New research ideas entering the pool are quickly watered down into a sea of applications. The burden of dealing with applications that need reviewing increases. With that, the mental capacity of peer reviewers becomes ever more strained. It becomes difficult for them to do justice to every application, they are overworked, and they become quick to toss proposals out of competition.

To outsiders, peer review is a mysterious scientific system that serves as our ultimate way to determine research quality. Warren Thorngate tells us with evidence that the quality of judgment in peer review is no more reliable than for any other kind of judgment call.

In the field of figure skating, performances are scored and averaged from several judges, with the highest and lowest scores tossed out. The scoring system for figure skating is more scientific, because ranking for a given performance is designed to be reproducible. Figure skating has minimized the lottery effect. The problem for those of us who apply for medical research funding is that, with only two reviewers to score applications, the scoring system that compares each applicant with the competition is just too noisy. I am by no means criticizing peer review of research grants because there really is no better alternative. But we need to make the system less of a crapshoot for applicants.

In science, the usual way to make things less random is to average more inputs. This means to average scores from more than the usual two peer reviewers who sit on committees. However, according to Thorngate, even though our CIHR sends proposals to outside experts for peer review, their opinions “matter little in the adjudication process” and “the usefulness of external reviews remains a mystery.” In other words, to a statistician, it looks like the extra peer reviews available are wasted because there is no evidence that they count toward the ranking for funding. This is not good science.

Counting the input from a greater number of judges in the average score works for figure skating. Those responsible for designing the way research grant applications are ranked need to borrow a page from the world of sports and make the system as reliable as it would be if an audience were watching.

Reinhold Vieth is Professor, Department of Nutritional Sciences and Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto, and Director, Bone and Mineral Laboratory Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 08:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At the beginning of May I moved into a condo along the waterfront in Collingwood, in a 20-year-old development known as Rupert's Landing.

I have sworn in the past that I would never live in a gated community, but once again my life fulfills Satre's comment that "we become what we resist." However, the gate appears to be broken and therefore left open most of the time, so that may not be important.

One of the most wonderful and somewhat unexpected benefits of living here is my new proximity to nature. My condo is on two storeys, facing south (so I get the sunlight all day) with a partial view of the bay toward the east. I have birch trees and red maples and a very green lawn (at the moment) to look out upon. The water level has dropped in Georgian Bay about six feet in recent years, so what was once a wave-lapped beach outside my doorstep now touches upon a reedy marsh. I would prefer proper lake water, but there's an "enviro" dimension to having this wetland nearby, and it is the presence of all kinds of birds and animals, especially migratory birds and frogs. I wake up every morning to a cacaphony from the former and go to sleep to the calls of the latter.

I have finally found a dwelling that is the perfect synthesis of home and cottage. When I barbeque on my lower balcony (which is allowed here, and yes, there is an upper balcony replete with Adirondack chairs for morning coffee or late night scotch) I'm drinking in the full-on Georgian Bay cottage lifestyle. Well, up to a point. There's still a bit more "home" feel than "away."

Actually, my new digs are very similar to the timeshare resorts to which I've been taking my kids for about a decade. The three-storey condo buildings, with their patios and balconies, are very similar to those favored in timeshare resorts. Rupert's Landing has tennis courts, a shuffle board deck and basketball hoop, an indoor pool and hot tub, a sauna, games room (with ping pong table), a squash court, a weight room with walking and cycling machines, etc., and a large adults-only rec room with big-screen TV and pool table, where drinks are served on late Saturday afternoons and where movies are screened regularly for residents. So it's more like a resort than a cottage.

I mention all this mostly because of the bird song and the proximity to nature. I can see storms developing from my large picture windows and, because I neither have nor desire air conditioning, I'm often opening windows to create a cross-breeze through the apartment. When I lived in the city I used to complain that I spent a lot of time writing and editing articles to protect nature, but I didn't spend much time experiencing it. Now I'm surrounded by it, and that inspires me when writing and editing topics on pollution prevention, waste minimization and all aspects of municipal and industrial ecology.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 02:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I enjoyed Peter Foster's editorial "The madness of eco-crowds" on the Comment page of the Financial Post section of the National Post today (May 23, 2007). I have excerpted it below. Personally, I support people taking steps to protect the environment, including the relatively "easy" climate mitigation stuff (as a precaurionary measure, and besides, some of it makes sense from an energy efficiency standpoint). But I share Foster's loathing of the self-righteous busybodies keeping an eye on one another in the English town described below. Very amusing.

Here's the excerpt:

One of my favourite books has always been Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Written more than 150 years ago by a gentleman named Charles Mackay, it provides a necessary reminder of mankind’s periodic tendency to go collectively off its rocker.

I was reminded of the book while listening to a CBC report that featured some earnest soul suggesting that the recent plummeting of a piece of marble from Toronto’s First Canadian Place might be due to climate change. Such a belief would surely fit into Mackay’s category of “the most remarkable instances of … moral epidemics [that] show … how imitative and gregarious men are.”

That is, we tend to think in herds, and the herd frequently launches itself off a cliff. “In reading the history of nations,” writes Mackay, “We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly.”

Extraordinary Delusions is filled with accounts of great public manias, from the South Sea Bubble and Tulipomania to widespread belief in witches and apocalyptic prophesies. Which brings us to current apocalyptic environmental forecasts and the almost universal call for centrally directed global mobilization to “do something.” Now.

It is not that climate change is not a fact of life, or that humans may not be having a marginal impact upon it. It is not even that the science is far more uncertain than radicals claim. It is that these beliefs have come to be considered an all-consuming “truth.” Everything is suddenly seen through a climate change prism. This perspective warps the view from the highest levels of government to the smallest of local communities.

With regards the latter, another report on the CBC last week focused on a small rural English village, Ashton Hayes, which is attempting to become “carbon neutral” to fight climate change. When I heard the report, my mind went to another British reference, this time the recent British comedy Hot Fuzz. In the movie, a hotshot policeman — who is so good at his job that he makes his colleagues look bad — is dispatched for that reason to an allegedly sleepy, crime-free village that does, however, have an extraordinary number of “accidents.”

It emerges that a cabal of influential villagers — obsessed with winning the award for prettiest village in England — are not above murdering anybody who might threaten their village’s picturesque status!

Similarly, Ashton Hayes — which has become a point of pilgrimage for eco-warriers/worriers (and described by the Financial Times of London as being like a “green-tinged Lourdes”) — doesn’t sound admirable so much as creepy, with roaming teams of eco-auditors, and the application of social pressures to stop such wasteful practices as sending individual Christmas cards.

Again according to the Financial Times: “Refuse recycling rates have replaced village cricket as the jealously fought competitive sport between rival villages.” When it comes to real sport, meanwhile, the village has a carbonneutral soccer team.

Sounds like a nightmare to me, although organizers claim that there is no “finger pointing” at anybody who refuses to sign on to the eco-moralization of virtually every form of activity, from leaving on the coffee machine to taking holiday flights.

Apparently, more than 30 other British communities have joined Ashton Hayes on the Via Dolorosa to carbon neutrality. One would love to hear what the half of the village that hasn’t signed on to this mania thinks of it, and what kind of pressures they feel from their puritan neighbours.

There have been myriad examples of manias and delusions since Mackay’s book. Marxism-Leninism was perhaps the bloodiest delusion in history. It came strapped to the recurring belief that capitalism was always about to self-destruct (which makes it, not coincidentally, analogous to current apocalyptic environmental theories).

Similarly, Malthusian delusions of resource depletion and widespread starvation have raised their head with astonishing regularity in the past century and a half. Not long after Mackay wrote, there was concern that the Industrial Revolution might grind to a halt for want of coal. Petroleum has been confidently predicted to be on the point of exhaustion virtually since its first discovery. Meanwhile there have always been seers and charlatans around to point the way to salvation. Significantly, however, some of the most truly apocalyptic events of the past 150 years have been linked to following their advice.

Although believing that climate change is causing pieces of marble to fall off buildings is perhaps at the outer limits of mania, global warming is widely believed to be behind every extreme weather event, from Parisian heat waves to Hurricane Katrina.

“Men, it has been well said,” wrote Mackay, “think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

We have been here before.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 09:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've previously pointed readers toward the excellent article series by Lawrence Solomon entitled "The Deniers" and I've taken the liberty of copying and pasting the latest column below. You really should take a few minutes and read it.

The article is the 23rd in the series, each of which profiles a top highly-credentialed scientist who has doubts about the conventional wisdom about global warming and the role of human-related greenhouse gases. The title of the series is deliberately ironic, an off-hand reference to the tendency of "true believers" to dismiss skeptics as "deniers" (along the lines of Holocaust deniers).

One of the things that makes these articles so damaging to propagandists for extreme climate change scenarios is the credibility of the author. I've known Larry for quite some time, and wrote several articles for his now-defunct The Next City magazine, where I found him to be a demanding editor and a very rigorous thinker. Larry is that rare creature -- an environmentalist who also believes in free markets and recognizes the downside of many well-intentioned government programs. He's what I think of as a "next generation" environmentalist (i.e., Al Gore is the past generation, and his approach is out of date). The brilliance of these columns is that the author is not just a skeptical crank (like me!) adding to the litany of "for and against" diatribes. Instead, he's carefully reporting the facts from eminent scientists to defend the notion that the science isn't "settled" on climate change, despite what the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would have you believe.

As an aside, Larry does his work under the auspices of a philanthropic entity entitled the Urban Renaissance Institute, which describes itself as "dedicated to helping cities and their regions flourish by removing the many impediments to their proper functioning." It's a division of Energy Probe, and you can read all of Solomon's writings at its website here:

http://www.urban-renaissance.org/urbanren/index.cfm

Sometimes I wish I could clone myself in order to create the time to research and write about different things that interest or move me. From time to time I encounter writers for whom I'm thankful in that regard, in that they sort of "cover off" an area that I think deserves attention, in a similar way to which I would do it, if I had the time. "The Deniers" fits that category very nicely and I've now taken to simply directing folks to these articles rather than debate them on some of the fine details of climate change.

This article takes on Sir Nicholas Stern, who's report calls for dramatic action now to prevent economic disruption from climate change. The article below presents a highly lucid refutation of this idea, and mentions that Stern relied on improbable and inflated worst-case scenarios to concoct the need for his drastic solutions. I agree completely with the last paragraph of this article. Enjoy.

THE DENIERS — PA R T XXIII

Discounting logic

LAWRENCE SOLOMON
Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

If you’re the type of person who sets aside money today for the university education of your great-great-great grandchildren, even if it means that you may not be able to afford university tuition for your own children, you may think it sensible for society to invest now in major measures to stop global warming.

If you’re not this type — and who in his right mind is — you should forget about Kyoto-like greenhouse-gas reduction targets and the crash programs that would be required to meet them. Doing so would not only be economically prudent, it would be — by almost any measure — the ethical thing to do.

So argues celebrated economist William Nordhaus, author of pathbreaking books and studies on global warming, and generally considered the most authoritative economist in the climate change field. His verdict on global warming alarmism, as exemplified by the UK’s Stern review, which demanded drastic measures now to avert climate change calamity later: “Completely absurd.”

The Stern review, released last year to banner headlines, argues that the cost of inaction greatly exceeds the cost of action. It has been much criticized for its selective use of data — Sir Nicholas Stern piles one worst-case scenario upon another to arrive at his fantastical costs, and Dr. Nordhaus is among those who note this failing. In fact, Sir Nicholas uses Nordhaus as a source for global-warming costs that could present themselves well after the year 2100, although Nordhaus characterized that data as particularly unreliable.

But a series of unreliable, worst-case scenarios centuries off, by themselves, still would not warrant the extreme greenhousegas prevention investments that the Stern review recommends. To make an economic case for immediate action, Sir Nicholas adjusted his model to have us paying now for potential damage that could be happening hundreds of years from now.

Sir Nicholas estimates the potential costs of climate change to be so great as to force on us a “20% cut in per-capita consumption, now and forever.” Yet his data showed low damages from climate change in the next two centuries. To overcome his data, he applied to his model what economists call a “near-zero social discount rate.” Doing so brings forward future expenses — in the Stern review’s case, expenses that might occur in the 23rd and 24th centuries. The Stern review then presents us with a tab that includes these far-out costs, and the invoice is eye-popping indeed.

But the Stern review approach defies logic, as Dr. Nordhaus illustrates by demonstrating just where zero social-discount-rate thinking leads. “Suppose that scientists discover that a wrinkle in the climatic system will cause damages equal to 0.01% of output starting in 2200 and continuing at that rate thereafter,” he explains. “How large a onetime investment would be justified today to remove the wrinkle starting after two centuries? The answer is that a payment of 15% of world consumption today (approximately US$7-trillion) would pass the review’s costbenefit test. This seems completely absurd. The bizarre result arises because the value of the future consumption stream is so high with near-zero discounting that we would trade off a large fraction of today’s income to increase a far-future income stream by a very tiny fraction.”

Moreover, who should be asked to forgo that consumption? It hardly seems fair to keep back poor countries, yet, if paid by the rich countries alone, the decline would far exceed that of the Great Depression.

Some climate-change alarmists argue that we should invest in combating climate change now as an insurance policy against the risk of future damage. Sounds prudent, until you consider the premium to be paid.

“Suppose that we suddenly learn that there is a 10% probability of the wrinkle in the climatic system that reduces the post2200 income stream by 0.01%,” Dr. Nordhaus explains, again to illustrate the Stern review’s logic. “What insurance premium would be justified today to reduce that probability to zero? With conventional discount rates, we would probably ignore any tiny wrinkle two or three centuries ahead. If we did a careful calculation using conventional discount rates, we would calculate a break-even 0.0002% insurance premium to remove the year 2200 contingency, and a 0.0000003% premium for the year-2400 contingency. Moreover, these dollar premiums are small whether the probability is large or small.

“With the review’s near-zero discount rate, offsetting the low-probability wrinkle would be worth an insurance premium today of almost 2% of current income, or $1-trillion. We would pay almost the same amount if that threshold were to be crossed in 2400 rather than in 2200.”

Dr. Nordhaus’s conclusion about such scares: “We are in effect forced to make current decisions about highly uncertain events in the distant future, even though these estimates are highly speculative and are almost sure to be refined over the coming decades.”

Dr. Nordhaus discounts climate-change alarmism, but not climate change itself. He advocates research to better understand its consequences and to develop more efficient technologies. He advocates the elimination of subsidies that artificially increase greenhouse-gas emissions, and other “no-regrets” measures that would benefit the environment without harming the economy. The costs of climate change are real, he believes, and society should act. But not overreact.

SIDEBAR: CV OF A DENIER

William Nordhaus is the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University. He is the co-author with Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson of Economics, the classic textbook, now in its 18th edition. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 1977 to 1979, he served Jimmy Carter as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He serves on the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Experts and is chairman of the advisory committee for the Bureau of Economic Analysis. He received his PhD in economics in 1967 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I tend not to write in this space about internal matters regarding how our magzine is produced, on the assumption that readers prefer that I focus on industry issues.

However, I'm going to break that rule here because of a new development and in the event that some of you might be interested in how a magazine is physcially put together. Actually, I started out wanting to just mention a small but important change in how our magazine is produced, that will greatly enhance our efficiency and profitability -- one that speaks to how the digital revolution is changing how business is done.

When my partners and I launched our first magazine (HazMat Management) 17 years ago, we wrote or edited articles on early-version PCs. I recall orange glowing letters on a black background, and we had to navigate around in DOS code. It seems like a thousand years ago now, with today's "point and click" technology. (If you can remember ever typing "C:ENTER" you're showing your age.)

My partner Todd Latham and I used to take turns at deadline time sitting at the computer formatting the magazine in Ventura -- the state-of-the art layout software on PCs at the time. (Layout people have always preferred the Mac, and Ventura was a poor cousin to Apple layout software, but it did get the job done.) In those days, it could sometimes take us three or four days working all day and all night to finish the magazine and generate files on floppy disks, which we then took to a pre-press establishment in downtown Toronto, which would convert them to another format (Mac-oriented, I imagine) so they could be printed out as lineotype sheets, each containing a positive image of each page of our magazine.

We would then take these sheets back to the office and carefully cut out photos (that were printed as screen art) with an Exacto-brand surgical knife and, using a wax glue gun and roller, paste them carefully inside the keylines for each image. Since this was all black and white, any color ads and color photos had to be pasted into this set up as a black and white image, and then we'd write "POS" ("For Position Only") in thick black marker across the image. (At the film house -- the next stage -- the technicans would match the four-color film art with these "POS" images and assemble the film manually, using red [i.e., invisible] semi-transparent tape. Black pages were one sheet of film, and four-color pages were, naturally, four pages of film, one for each print color: magenta, cyan, yellow and black.)

Todd and I would have "iron man" contests to see who could work the longest getting the magazine to the film stage. (The things you're prepared to do when you own your own business!) I forget the record, and I forget who established it. I recall that it was me, and that it was a 36-hour shift at the computer, getting up only for pee breaks and coffee. But it might have been Todd. At that time we had an office in a house in the Portuguese part of Toronto, on Salem Avenue off Bloor Street West. I remember several times when I'd been awake for two or more days working and I'd go over to one of the local coffee shops and order a milkshake-size espresso, wait for it to cool down, then chug the whole thing in one go. If bennies had been available, I would have taken them. One time I listened to exotic Portuguese accordion music late at night in one of these shops for about an hour before going back to my desk.

After the hell of typesetting every word, image and comma, and pasting the whole thing up manually, and sending it all off to the film house, we'd go home and sleep for about 16 hours. The sales staff (led by our other partner, Arnie Gess) would get on the phone and call the various advertisers to get their artwork (film or lineotype) sent over, so that it, too, could be forwarded to the film house, and added to the layout. All this manual assembly of paper and film (and wax guns!) is impossible to imagine in the era of digital production, although to some extent ads still have to be rounded up and put in position in the final art.

I recall one time getting very annoyed with Todd about something that seems trivial now, but was a big deal at the time. After generating the film files for lineotype, the only thing you wanted to do was go home and sleep. But I always had to wait around at this file-conversion place downtown for hours and hours while they converted the PC files to the necessary format. It would sometimes take 8, 12, 14 or more hours! I later learned that this was because the establishment used Macs, so the process was terribly slow. We could have taken them to another pre-press house with PCs that could have ripped the files quickly, but this would have cost a couple of dollars extra per page, and Todd was intent on saving money. When I learned how small the savings were, and when I thought of all the timjes I'd waited from, say, midnight until 6:00 am for these files to be converted, I wanted to strangle Todd!

Another off-beat memory I have from those days was the earliest glimmerings of the digital film process. Remember, we initially generated computer files that were then converted to another format, all with the goal of printing off black and white pages to which we added cut outs of the ads and photos, and this was then shipped to the film house to be, literally, photographed. The photographic images were used to generate film, which was then used in a photo-chemical process to produced metal plates which were directly mounted on the printing presses.

The digital glimmering was this: One day I walked into a new pre-press house (one of several that we changed to, in part because we were rather slow paying our bills to suppliers in the early days!). They had an enormous new machine, with the words "HELL SCANNER" on the side. This thing was truly gigantic -- more than the height of a normal room -- and was exotic and European. It must have weighed several tons and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think the name of the machine would make a good title for a sci-fi book, but anyway, that gigantic machine performed, in those days, the same function as your little $79 scanner from Costco today! It performed the amazing new (magical!) function of scanning artwork and making everything digital. (We never made use of it, because we couldn't afford the rates at that time, so we stuck with conventional pre-press production, wax guns and all.)

By the time my partners and I sold our business in 2000 to a division of what was then Hollinger (which had just bought the old Southam Magazine and Information Group), we had already long since stopped with the old lineotype system, and actually had an internal production person who did everything via computer. (There were still a lot of glitches, though, and many late nights spent with him or her figuring our what part of our computer array was screwing up and preventing the correct output of film files. On more than one occasion we lost the entire typeset magazine to computer error -- the production person hadn't backed up the files as they went along, and so lost days and days of work!)

But even in the new Hollinger (now Business Information Group, a division of Glacier Ventures in B.C.) our assigned "art director" has had, all this while, to produce the magazine as computer files that are then sent to a film house where they're coverted (digitally) to film, which is then couriered to our printer (in Winnipeg).

So, my my mind was flooded with all these memories the other day when our publisher Brad O'Brien informed me that we're shifting to a new system for the next magazine edition -- one that uses NO FILM HOUSE! Simply put, our art director Sheila Wilson will place all ads and other artwork in the digital files on her computer, and send the whole job (via email, I imagine, or ftp site,but I don't really know) as a monster-size digital file to the printer. The printer will produce a final color mock-up and courier it to me and Brad so we can take one final look and sign off on the job before the magazine goes on press, Going this route gives us more control over the job (e.g., one less middleman in the process) and will save thousands of dollars per edition in film costs. That's tens of thousands of dollars annually that will go directly to the bottom line, and these reduced costs will boost our profitability (which, these days, is the only form of job security for us non-union folk).

I realize that I am already a dinosaur for the next generation of magazine and media grads from universities and polytechnical colleges. People starting out nowadays will completely take for granted the bleeding edge computer technology that puts everything together in virtual reality. There will be no wax guns or whiteout under the fingernails for them!

One final thought -- all of this reminds me of my own childhood and just how much things have changed in the print media world. I grew up in a newspaper family. My father and stepfather and mother and stepmother were (and some still are) newspaper writers and editors. (They were all on staff at the same time and recently remarried to one another when the old Toronto Telegram folded in 1970. My stepfather was one of the founders of the Toronto Sun, which launched its first edition on the Monday after the Tely folded on a Saturday. I still recall the "wake" my dad held at his apartment for the Tely, and some of the people there getting angry when they learned that Paul Rimstead burned the last edition at a bonfire in a park!)

In those days, the newsroom was a busy and very loud place, unlike today's quiet computer and cuble-land environment. Articles were written on ink and ribbon typewriters, and corrections were made with pencil on paper (remember those thick yellow pencils?). Articles were then (I am not kidding!) rolled into containers and sent Dr.Seuss-like by vaccum tube from the editorial department to other departments, and ultimately down to the "composing room" where technicians would read it and copy it onto printing plates ONE LETTER AT A TIME from little block letters made of lead.

This was an astonishing skill that I witnessed as a child. The fingers of these older fellows would fly as they "composed" each newspaper page in hot lead type. And remember the most amazing thing of all -- because these were print forms, every word and sentence had to be composed in lead type that read BACKWARDS!

I recall that my father Max (since deceased) was the editor of the Telegram and was famous for being able to compose "directly on the stone." Remember that the broadsheet papers in those days would have three, sometimes even four, editions per day. There would be a morning, afternoon and evening edition, and maybe one more if there was a huge news story. The Tely, the Star and the Globe and Mail fought almost to the death to get "the scoop" and I recall that it was against the rules to be a delivery boy for more than one newspaper. You were either a "Tely" kid or a "Star" kid. I never did meet a "Globe" kid!) This meant that the newspaper, and especially the front page, was constantly being updated. So, under deadline pressure and not wanting to bother sketching out a new front page layout, my dad would go down to the composing room and give direction to the print technicians, telling them to start an article here or end an column there, with the whole front page layout in his head, he'd direct them to compose the page in hot lead type on the "stone" (an actual stone tablet onto which the lead type was arranged). What an amazing accomplishment!

(I guess I come by my magazine layout trade honestly!)

Of course, as technology evolved, those old typesetters were eventually out of a job, much as I imagine a lot of the older film house staff will have to find new work or retire early these days, unless they can covert their skills with red tape and Exacto knives into skills using a keyboard and computer monitor.

Closing comment: I'm writing this Blog entry on my laptop from a coffee shop with a wireless internet connection that allows me to connect to my company's server in Toronto. The software will automatically format this entry and post it to our magazine's website. Who would have thought this possible just a few decades ago, in the era of vaccum tubes and typewriters and yellow pencils?

So, good-bye film house! You will be missed!

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

A few days ago I posted a Blog entry and also a website news item here about a documentary from the UK entitled The Great Global Warming Swindle, which takes apart the conventional wisdom about man-made climate change.

Not surprisingly, I received emails from various folks who feel the documentary is itself a "swindle" -- a piece of propaganda for the "other side", i.e., the climate change "deniers."

I thought readers would be interested in reading a couple of the more thoughtful of these replies. I have removed the author's names not because they asked me to, but because I haven't made the time to seek their permission. One is a lawyer and one is a consultant and they are both quite well read on the climate change topic and debate. There is an excellent web link among these to a website where people who disliked the Swindle documentary list their objections.

When you're done reading these two letters, I invite you to click at the bottom of this entry to read the extended post, where I've copied and pasted Lawrence Solomon's latest article in his "The Deniers" series (from the FP Comment page in the "Financial Post" section of the National Post newspaper.) Once again, Larry has done an excellent job publicizing science that's highly problematic for the UN International Panel on Climatge Change (IPCC). It turns out that this ice core data is not as reliable as the IPCC has suggested, and other data sets may offer a better history of CO2 in the atmosphere (and paint a picture that is at odds with the IPCC version of things). The "chilling" point of this article (pun intended) is how the scientist got fired for publishing information that runs contrary to received wisdom on climate change, because it created funding problems for his employer. This whole issue of how scientists are shunned or outright fired for publishing contrarian information is (for me) the most telling thing.

Anyway, here are the letters.

Dear Guy,

I watched it. The premise of the 'documentary' seems to be that the
'theory' of man-made global warming is wrong, and that it is perpetuated
because "thousands of jobs depend on it" and "funding for scientific
research depends on it".

Some observations:

Billions of dollars in corporate profits are dependent on continuing to
emit large quantities of toxic pollutants and CO2.

The majority of mainstream media in the developed world is controlled by
conservative interests that are financially locked with large corporations.

A number of the 'authorities' in this film are highly suspect (i.e. look
at where they get their money). For example, Patrick Moore has been
completely discredited and exposed as a corporate mouthpiece for the
nuclear and the GMO food industry.

I could go on.

That having been said, there are a number of things in the film that are
clearly true. Science IS very political. There are some credible,
independent scientists who are genuinely skeptical about the link
between human activity and global warming. The majority of the people
who are up in arms about global warming have at best a superficial
understanding of the subject (people crave simple, easy to understand
answers to complex problems, even if these answers are wrong).

However, I believe that the only sane way to approach issues like this
is with an open but skeptical mind, and a consistent application of the
precautionary principle.

Net: This is a propaganda film for sure. I wonder who financed it?
Following the money is always interesting and enlightening.

In closing, the possibilities are:

1. The skeptics are right, and either global warming doesn't exist or it
is not influenced in any significant way by human activity;
2. Global warming is real and human activity is a significant
contributor to it.

If we cut back on our greenhouse gas emissions it will cost us a LOT of
money that we would otherwise spend on _________. You fill in the blank,
but I guarantee that it will not be combating poverty or some other
noble cause. In this case, if the skeptics are right, the money could
have been spent on _________. If global warming is real, our species
(and most of the others that share the planet with us) will be better
off (i.e. we may survive).

If we do not cut back on our greenhouse gas emissions, and the skeptics
are right, we will have spent all that money on ___________ and reaped
the benefits. If global warming is real, not to be too dramatic about
it, but we are screwed as a species.

To me, given the trade off, the sane course of action is clear. However,
if we don't care a fig about future generations, our generation can
probably enjoy more material comforts by plowing ahead on our current
course. And as Fred Reed once said, "Inability has always been more of a
check on human activity than wisdom."

Other commentary:

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/07/0313pure_propaganda_the.php

Dear Guy,

The fact that I am writing this from my office while I should be practicing law (I know its almost midnight) gives you some idea that I think the attention to the "Swindle" may be a swindle.

A couple suggestions. Weigh the "Swindle" against other sources - do not accept its information as gospel (and perhaps not even as considered) - I do not think it really challenges much except the urge not to think critically.

One web site that you may find interesting is the link below that I found by "googling" climate change swindle and "debunking". I am not suggesting that it is the greatest source (I have not double checked its facts) but it does provide some counterarguments and I am not so sure that the "Swindle" producers double checked all their sources.

http://portal.campaigncc.org/node/1820

Consider:

A review of the journal articles noted in The Weather Makers adds to ones breadth of knowledge. For instance, the Science article that explains that (contrary to the, until recently, conventional wisdom) the glaciers in Patagonia are indeed shrinking.

Another thought….where are the follow ups on the swindle and is the worlds scientific community really so easily duped (consider the IPCC which included scientists from the US and Australia - those bastions of critical political thought on climate change).

I note with interest the recent American studies regarding the shrinking polar sea ice cap. It was considered obvious to all in my undergrad climatology class (20 years ago) that if there is less ice at the poles the albedo will decrease and the absorption of energy by the oceans at the poles increases. No scientific disagreement that if the polar caps melt the place will get fairly warm.

The current issue of NewsScientist reports that the near surface ocean temperature decline over the last couple years is explained away. Apparently, they changed the type of ocean based temperature sensors a couple of years ago but did not properly calibrate the new equipment to the old. So at first it looked as though the temperatures in the near surface levels of the oceans had decreased which is now known not to have been the case.

I really could go on but I have to get back to the salt mines….I probably wouldn't spend this much time but you have a good soapbox and I want to share these thoughts with you. I am not so sure that the "Swindle" will turn out to be good journalism with the benefit of hindsight.

I would bet a Guinness that in 30 years climate change and the cause is even more obvious. That said, I really do not want to collect on the bet….we can go Dutch but I will say "I told you so".

Continue reading "Problems with the Ice Core data" »

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Please find below the link to the video documentary you may have heard about from the UK entitled "The Great Global Warming Swindle." Be prepared to have your assumptions about global warming seriously rocked by this documentary. I was told it was just some piece of reactionary propaganda, but guess what? It's a very serious and convincing piece of journalism and a welcome antidote to Al Gore and his film An Inconvenient Truth. This should be mandatory viewing for anyone who cares to voice an opinion on the global warming topic as it debunks a lot of myths and offers a compelling explanation of the role of solar wind, cosmic rays and water vapor in the atmosphere. I was especially struck by the detailed evidence that a rise in CO2 follows (not leads) natural warming trends going back millenia. I was also struck by the "case closed" science that a slightly warmer earth will see fewer, less violent storms, not the opposite claimed by proponents of the anthropgenic warming theory.

I really enjoyed it and hope you do, too. Watch it and make up your own mind!

Here's the link:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4499562022478442170

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, it’s pretty big news, isn’t it? Canada’s Conservative federal government has announced a plan to fight climate change. In case you missed our news item about this, I’ve reproduced it at the end of this post (scroll down).

The gist is that, via a number of measures, Canada’s overall greenhouse gas emissions (i.e., consumers and industry) must be reduced by 20 per cent by 2020; the government expects industry alone to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 18 per cent by 2010 and 26 per cent by 2015.

It’s interesting that yet again (ironically) a Conservative government is introducing big environmental programs (remember Brian Mulroney’s Green Plan?), whereas people normally think of the Liberals and NDP as the “greens” (not to mention the national Green Party led by Elizabeth May).

I expect I’ll comment on this in more detail in the next edition of the printed magazine, but I thought I’d share at least one thought right away.

Almost in tandem with this announcement, Ontario has announced phase-out of incandescent light bulbs. To quote from the news item:

“The Ontario government has already announced a phase-out of incandescent light bulbs, to be replaced by compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) by 2012. The government believes replacing all 87 million incandescent bulbs in Ontario households with CFLs will save six million megawatt hours annually -- enough to power 600,000 homes.”

When this was announced, Terence Corcoran (with whom I often agree) wrote an editorial that appeared on the front page of the National Post, panning the whole thing and describing it as yet another example of the nanny state meddling in the economy, no doubt to trigger perverse consequences. (For instance, he stated that people would likely hoard their incandescent bulbs because of the more please amber light, and this would affect prices, and the whole thing is really a subsidy to the Home Depot-style box stores, etc.)

On a certain level I agree with Corcoran on this – there will no doubt be some hoarding and CFLs are more expensive (initially) and so on. But even though I remain skeptical that human activity is directly warming the climate (I think increased energy from the Sun has a lot to do with it), I feel that at some point government has to set the pace for broad societal change. The juggernaut of consumer society and its enormous ecological footprint needs to chart a new course, and ocean liners take a long time to turn around, even when you suddenly turn the wheel hard about.

It’s not that I think we need to live like monks. I’m just powerfully aware of how wasteful we are in terms of energy and consumption of non-renewable fuels. I don’t even need the argument that the Earth is heating up to agree that some bold changes must occur.

The reason Ontario’s fluorescent bulb initiative resonated with me, and is in fact emblematic for me of the whole issue, is due to a couple of trips I’ve made to Europe in recent years. Visits to France, England and Finland made a profound impression on me.

The trips included visits to major cities (e.g., London, Helsinki, Paris) but also smaller cities, towns and villages. I was struck by the consistency between both the cities and villages in regard to energy efficiency and, in general, a more enlightened way of doing things.

Coming from me, this is no small statement. I am not one of those people who automatically thinks everything the Europeans do is automatically better than our way. I know people like that and their comments often make me cringe. But there was just no escaping the fact that the Europeans are already where Canada aims to be in 2020. High fuel prices and dollops of common sense caused Europeans to move ahead with energy conservation and environmental preservation dramatically in the past several decades., and the results are impressive, not just on the macro level, but in many small ways you notice traveling around.

I don’t want to write an epic novel here, so here is a short list of things I noticed in my travels, all of which could be implemented in North America with terrific results. In other words, these are changes we could make that would improve our lives, not cause us to live in some kind of impoverishment.

1. Trains: The train systems in Europe are simply incredible. Both in terms of the train systems connecting major centres, and also the trains that connect smaller rural areas to one another, and the larger centres. You could argue that the population density in Europe makes this kind of thing more viable, but the lack of numerous train routes in Canada is a very sad comment. For instance, I live in Collingwood, Ontario and there’s no train connecting my town to anything. If I want to get to Toronto, I can drive to Barrie and get on the Go Transit system, but guess what? There’s no train there, either. I have to catch a Go bus and then switch to a train down in Bradford. It’s just such a joke. And I really notice this when I want to send one of my young kids to visit their grandparents in the city. They’d have to change so many buses and trains that the lack of security and complexity of it all makes it unthinkable – I end up just driving them to and fro. But if you go to London and visit ANY of the MANY large train stations, you’ll get a glimpse into the (preferable) future and see what a travesty the absence of such infrastructure is in Canada (and the United States).

2. Public transit: As with trains, the quality of public transit is far superior in Europe than here. I was especially struck in Lyon, France, where the ancient city and its beautiful old buildings coexist with a network of uber-modern sleek streetcars and subway trains. These things look very futuristic, yet its not the future to them – it has already arrived. These are not the rattling, noisy buses and streetcars of most Canadian cities. They’re quiet (almost silent) crafts that weave their way between sidewalk and street like enormous strange insects.

3. Bicycles: The fact that most European cities are pedestrian friendly and have bicycle lanes (esp. places like Amsterdam) is not news. But I noticed that some cities have a really innovative concept that I think would work here. When you get off the train, there are public bikes locked to special poles. The bikes are painted a distinctive color. You put a coin or token in a slot in the special pole and unlock the bike, then ride it to your destination. These special bike poles are all over the place, so you just lock it up when you arrive at your destination. It’s incredible that entrepreneurs haven’t established this kind of system in every Canadian city.

4. Density: There’s less urban sprawl in Europe, and it’s no accident. Sprawl is not subsidized there as it is here. Many people live in apartments above shops. They live, work and play in the same areas, whereas in North America many people live in one low-density area, drive to work in another area (downtown in a high-rise or to some non-descript commercial area) and shop in another part of town (often a “shopping centre” that is, in fact, not at the “centre” of anything, but on the edge of town). The saddest example is the so-called “community centre” which is usually an ugly concrete building that’s not in the centre of town, which houses swimming pools and sports halls, but isn’t really a lively centre of urban life. These stand in stark contrast to the lovely open plazas in European cities (think: Italy) with statues and fountains in the middle, and coffee shops and bistros all around the perimeter. What impoverished lives we live here! Here’s a suggestion: if you’re an urban planner, jump on a plane and go to Lyon with a camera and a notebook. Observe everything they’ve done there and copy it over here, please! A practice you’ll notice in European cities is that a lot of dense apartment complexes (with shops on the main floor) are built directly above subway stations. This encourages a close integration of living, shopping and use of public transit – what a contrast to the pathetic empty buses that cruise around suburban neighborhoods here.

5. Hot water: Because many of the homes in Europe were built before the era of hot water heaters and central plumbing, often conveniences like hot water had to be retrofitted. This has led to the practice of installing small electric heaters inside walls that serve individual shower heads and bath faucets. The beauty of this is that rather than pay to keep a huge tank filled with super-hot water (99 per cent of the time sitting unused) the water is heated at the point of use. Doesn’t that make a lot more sense? I think a combination of this kind of system with “smart metering” would boost energy efficiency in most homes.

6. Light bulbs: The thing that struck me most in my trip to Finland was the ubiquity of compact fluorescent bulbs. My host took me all over the country and I walked through many different kinds of buildings. I stayed at a spa resort. I visited commercial buildings, municipal buildings, private homes and apartments, even a golf course. I don’t think I saw an incandescent bulb even once! I never, and I do mean NEVER, walked into an empty room that had lights on. Even in the golf club, when you went downstairs to the change room the lights in the hallway were off, as well as the lights in the change room and washroom. These rooms were equipped with luminous wall switches, and/or motion detectors that turned on the lights when you entered the room. Most appeared to be on timers, so when you left, the lights went out after a little while. It just made so much sense. After a few days of this it was difficult to return to our energy wasting country where lights are on all the time and people are so sloppy in their habits. I kept thinking, “We are just pigs, we really are.” I still think that, at least on the energy waste front.

7. Cars: Not only are automobiles smaller in Europe (for the most part) but they are energy efficient. What you encounter all over the place is diesel. Not smoke-belching diesel, like you see with transport trucks here, but clean diesel. You see a lot of diesel Volkswagens, but also other brands. My host in Finland drove a diesel Jaguar. I don’t recall him ever filling up the tank the entire time I was there. I recall him saying that on a tank of diesel he can drive about 1,000 kilometres on the highway, and 700 to 800 kms in the city. Now here’s the thing that kills me: the same companies that produce these cars in Europe are cross-owned by the Big Three car companies in North America. In other words, they do one thing over there, and another here. I have absolutely ZERO sympathy for the Chryslers and Fords of the world, and their bleeding red ink. Though I would feel for the workers, I wouldn’t care one bit if they went bankrupt tomorrow. Why? Because they should have introduced energy efficient cars to the market decades ago, like the diesel cars you see all over Europe. (It’s difficult to find any at all here.) These companies deserve to be replaced by the smart imports that are eating their lunch. Do yourself a favor and go see (or rent) the movie “Who Killed the Electric Car?” It’s one of the best things I’ve seen in years – really great!

8. Nuclear power: One of things I like about France is that they understand the benefit of nuclear power and have never succumbed to the fear-mongering about Three Mile Island and so on. In his book “The Revenge of Gaia,” environmentalist James Lovelock makes the most convincing and passionate argument on behalf of nuclear power imaginable. I won’t try to do the same here – just buy the book and read it. I swear you won’t be able to put it down, and you’ll think differently about nuclear power. No, I don’t think we should build them along the economic subsidy-ridden model of Ontario Hydro, but I think a competitive market with private sector involvement to build and operate nukes should be a big part of our energy strategy. I am more and more convinced that we should be building nukes in Alberta to generate power to melt the tar sands, and using the perfectly suited geologic structures underground in Saskatchewan to sequester carbon – but that’s a story for another day.

I could go on and on with this list, but I think I’ve made the point. I don’t think you have to be a global warming proponent to embrace the new direction toward which the federal government’s climate change plan is pointing us. There are many many significant changes our society should be making that will boost our environmental performance and sustainability, and also create more of a sense of community. This is perhaps the greatest benefit; we need to move away from being a society of lonely people driving one person to a car between far-flung low-density locations, and embrace more of a high-density society with people walking, cycling, taking the train and, in general, interacting with one another.

Canada initiates climate change plan

Sensing that Canadians are deeply concerned about a potential global warming threat, and that inaction will cost them at the polls, Canada’s Conservative Stephen Harper government has announced a blueprint to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020.

The government plans to force industry to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 18 per cent by 2010 and 26 per cent by 2015.

The price of cars, home appliances, electricity and fuel are expected to rise, but may be offset by technological innovation and the adoption of energy-efficient systems. (The Ontario government has already announced a phase-out of incandescent light bulbs, to be replaced by compact fluorescent bulbs [CFLs] by 2012. The government believes replacing all 87 million incandescent bulbs in Ontario households with CFLs will save six million megawatt hours annually -- enough to power 600,000 homes.)

Environment Minister John Baird concedes the economy will take a hit of up to $8 billion annually in the “worst year” under the plan until 2020. But he claims that cleaner air will result in health-care savings of more than $6 billion annually, by 2015, courtesy of reduced risk of death and respiratory illness.

Industry’s 26 per cent reduction target by 2015 is expected to be met through reduced emissions, contributions to a technology fund, domestic emissions trading and a one-time credit for emissions reduction action between 1992 and 2006.

Highlights of the government plan include:

-- Short-term emission reduction target of 18 per cent for existing industry by 2010, based on 2006 emission levels.

-- A 26 per cent reduction target rate for industry by 2015.

-- Canada’s total emissions, including industry and other sources, reduced by 20 per cent by 2020.

-- Industry can meet targets through reducing emissions, contributing to a technology fund, through domestic emissions trading and one-time credit for emission reduction action between 1992 and 2006.

-- Plan predicts real but “manageable” price increases for cars, home appliances, electricity and fuel.

-- National emission caps by 2012 for air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides, volatile organic compounds and particulate matter.

-- Plan predicts $6.4 billion in annual health benefits by 2015 from reduced risk of death and illness.

-- Mandatory fuel-efficiency standard for the auto industry (yet to be determined) to take effect beginning with 2011 model year.

-- Economy expected to a hit of $8 billion in “worst” year of plan.

For further commentary, see Editor's Blog at left side of the home page at www.hazmatmag.com or www.solidwastemag.com

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last year I attended an industry event and chatted with a fellow who works for the federal government in Ottawa. He was very pleased to tell me how he enjoys reading the Toronto Star, tolerates the Globe & Mail and simply can't bring himself to read the National Post. This amused me, because I react to the papers in the opposite order (love the National Post and can't stand the Toronto Star).

I put this person's bias down to his being surrounded by think-alikes in government, who tend to be left-leaning. But I often remind myself that it's important to read things about which you assume you might disagree. This is intellectually rigorous and, besides, you often learn things you would never have discovered, reading material that already fits with your assumptions.

I assume a great many readers who are concerned about environmental issues might have a certain loathing not only for the National Post, but especially for the Financial Post section's editorial page ("Comment") edited by Terence Corcoran and Peter Foster. If you're one of those people, do yourself a huge favor and start reading that page every day -- even if you don't agree with the libertarian philisophy of the editors, because it contains what I consider the most vibrant journalism in Canada.

As a good example, consider the article that I just copied from today's paper about ethanol. Making ethanol from biomass derived from the leftovers of other agriculture (as occurs in Brazil) makes sense, but it makes no sense to grow corn in order to produce it. Fossil fuels are consumed in corn production, negating much of its benefit as "biofuel." As bad, the climate would benefit from many agricultural fields being returned to forest. But the article below goes further and neatly explains the perverse effect of rising corn prices (from ethanol production) not only raising the price of corn as a food, but other crops as well.

This is the sort of article you're missing if you don't read the Comment section of the Financial Post regularly. Enjoy.

Ethanol craze may starve the poor

C. FORD RUNGE AND BENJAMIN SENAUER
Foreign Affairs

Biofuels have tied oil and food prices together in ways that could profoundly upset the relationships between food producers, consumers and nations in the years ahead, with potentially devastating implications for bothglobal poverty and food security.

Filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires more than 450 pounds of corn — which contains enoughcalories to feed one person for a year. By putting pressure on global supplies of edible crops, the surge in ethanol production will translate into higher prices for bothprocessed and staple foods around the world.

The enormous volume of corn required by the ethanol industry is sending shock waves through the food system. In March, 2007, corn futures rose to the highest level in 10 years. Wheat and rice prices have also surged to decade highs, because even as those grains are increasingly being used as substitutes for corn, farmers are planting more acres with corn and fewer acres with other crops.

With the price of raw materials at such highs, the biofuel craze would place significant stress on other parts of the agricultural sector. In fact, it already does. In the United States, the growth of the biofuel industry has triggered increases not only in the prices of corn, oilseeds and other grains, but also in the prices of seemingly unrelated crops and products. The use of land to grow corn to feed the ethanol maw is reducing the acreage devoted to other crops. Food processors who use crops suchas peas and sweet corn have been forced to pay higher prices to keep their supplies secure — costs that will eventually be passed on to consumers. Rising feed prices are also hitting the livestock and poultry industries. According to Vernon Eidman, a professor emeritus of agribusiness management at the University of Minnesota, higher feed costs have caused returns to fall sharply, especially in the poultry and swine sectors. If returns continue to drop, production will decline, and the prices for chicken, turkey, pork, milk and eggs will rise. A number of Iowa’s pork producers could go out of business in the next few years as they are forced to compete with ethanol plants for corn supplies.

The International Food Policy Research Institute, in Washington, D.C., has produced sobering estimates of the potential global impact of the rising demand for biofuels. Given continued high oil prices, the rapid increase in global biofuel production will pushglobal corn prices up by 20% by 2010 and 41% by 2020. Wheat prices may rise 11% by 2010 and 30% by 2020.

The production of cassava-based ethanol may pose an especially grave threat to the food security of the world’s poor. Cassava, a tropical potato-like tuber also known as manioc, provides one-third of the caloric needs of the population in sub-Saharan Africa and is the primary staple for over 200 million of Africa’s poorest people. In many tropical countries, it is the food people turn to when they cannot afford anything else. It also serves as an important reserve when other crops fail because it can grow in poor soils and dry conditions and can be left in the ground to be harvested as needed.

Thanks to its high-starch content, cassava is also an excellent source of ethanol. As the technology for converting it to fuel improves, many countries — including China, Nigeria, and Thailand — are considering using more of the crop to that end. If peasant farmers in developing countries could become suppliers for the emerging industry, they would benefit from the increased income. But the history of industrial demand for agricultural crops in these countries suggests that large producers will be the main beneficiaries. The likely result of a boom in cassava-based ethanol production is that an increasing number of poor people will struggle even more to feed themselves.

Several studies by economists at the World Bank and elsewhere suggest that caloric consumption among the world’s poor declines by about half of 1% whenever the average prices of all major food staples increase by 1%. When one staple becomes more expensive, people try to replace it with a cheaper one, but if the prices of nearly all staples go up, they are left withno alternative.

The world’s poorest people already spend 50% to 80% of their total household income on food. For the many among them who are landless labourers or rural subsistence farmers, large increases in the prices of staple foods will mean malnutrition and hunger. Some of them will tumble over the edge of subsistence into outright starvation, and many more will die from a multitude of hunger-related diseases.

Excerpted from “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor” by C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer, in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I posted a news item on our magazine website this week in advance of Earth Day (April 22) in which the Oceana group calls upon people to remember the world's oceans on Earth Day. You can read about the group's campaign at www.Oceana.org

We have an informal rule among the editors in the EcoLog Group, and that is since we are in the business-to-business (B2B) press, we avoid anything to do with the three Fs (fur, fins and feathers). It's not that we don't care about saving whales or baby seals or polar bears, it's just that there are other information venues and groups that focus on that. In my case, I indirectly help out the three Fs by promoting sustainability within modern industrial society, what I call "industrial ecology" (a term I sometimes expand to "municipal/industrial ecology").

But, seeing as this is an Earth Day item, I decided to break my own three Fs rule. If you read my earlier post about Lawrence Solomon's excellent article series The Deniers (about global warming skeptics) you'll gain some insight into why I posted the Oceana item instead of some of the others that always arrive in abundance just before Earth Day.

I'm very happy that concern about climate change has renewed interest in environmental issues, which are now top-of-mind for people, according to recent surveys and even a cursory review of newspaper headlines. You'd have to live in a cave not to notice that people are interested in this subject, and want to know what they can do to help. (Watch for Al Gore to jump into the U.S. presidential race -- he's in third place according to polls, and he isn't even running!)

The trouble not just that I'm concerned that much of the small amount of warming that appears to be underway may be from natural causes, such as increased output from the Sun, which goes through cycles. Rather, the point is we're so busy worrying about a possible warming of the atmosphere that our attention as a society is being drawn away from some hard core conservation issues about which there's far less scientific uncertainty. For me, the top conservation crisis of our time is the degradation of the marine environment, from pollution and especially over-fishing. I have read several articles and seen several TV and film documentaries recently that have raised my awareness about this and it causes me to lose sleep like no other issue.

Unless something drastic is done, within my lifetime I fully expect to witness the wholesale collapse of the earth's aquatic ecosystems (let's call them that, and not just "fisheries" which is so anthropocentric). It's well known that the coral reefs are bleaching. My guess is that it's in part from global warming but also a deadly combination of fishing, pollution and soil runoff from the islands and other terrain that has been deforested in many tropical areas. The reefs are being choked already and then along come fishermen with dynamite! Goodbye reef!

In the deep oceans we have a true "tragedy of the commons" underway. The tragedy of the commons is a term that describes what happens in any area that is a shared resource for which no one has a duty of care, or a property right. With no one really policing the oceans beyond the aribitrary offshore boundaries governments claim (and there's not much in the way of sustainable fishing closer to shore, either), it's actually in the short-term interest of fishermen to catch as many fish as quickly as possible, and thereby beat their competitors. Large factory ships catch and process/freeze the fish out in the ocean, out of sight and out of mind for everyone, including governments. The tragedy of the oceanic commons is illustrated by the terribly destructive techniques employed.

Do you know that an area of the ocean floor roughly the size of the United States is scraped bare every year by the most popular fishing technique, which involves dragging special nets on the bottom? This is a part of the world about which we know practically nothing. We know more about the surface of Mars than we know about our own ocean bottoms. Then there are the huge drift nets, which are often abandoned and simply float in the water for years, even decades, as huge pointless killing machines, entangling and strangling or suffocating hundreds of different species. Then there is long-lining, via which trawlers hook hundreds of marine animals on enormous lines equipped with hooks and shorter lines positioned at regular intervals. These are death machines that kill many many animals of no commercial value to fishermen. The techniqie is popular simply because it's convenient for the fishermen. It reminds me of that popular military T-shirt slogan: "Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out!"

Taken together, all these destructive practices amount to nothing less than marine genocide. Observers in an alien spacecraft hovering over the ocean would assume human beings are on a program to destroy all life in the oceans, rather than harvest food in any kind of sustainable manner.

Campaigns to save the whales are well known (and now under threat of being dismantled, also). But no one is protecting the sharks -- the most important "alpha predators" in the seas. Removing the world's sharks (as we are doing rapidly) is akin to removing all the spiders; how long would it be before we'd be knee deep in flies? Killing off the sharks will have the perverse effect of allowing subspecies populations to bloom and then collapse as they decimate their own food supplies. We are well on our way to creating a marine desert, it appears.

Do yourself a favor and go see the new documentary Sharkwater. It's the best film ever made on this topic, I believe. We need to make sure all the policymakers in all the world's countries (especially in Asia) see this movie and take action. Personally, I would like to see Al Gore promote that film and not just his own An Inconvenient Truth. We run the risk of reducing our greenhouse gases, only to one day find our seas are empty.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Readers would be well served to read the excellent article series by Lawrence Solomon in the National Post newspaper on the topic of global warming and climate change. I've taken the liberty of copying the most recent one below. It’s his latest in a series championing the scientists who question the orthodoxy about man-made global warming. It’s an excellent article and discusses the thesis that most of the warming comes from changed output from the Sun.

The other articles in this series (14 so far) can be read here:

http://www.urban-renaissance.org/urbanren/index.cfm?DSP=larry&SubID=163

One of the things that sets these articles apart from others that question orthodoxies about anthropogenic global warming is the author, who is a credible environmentalist who has spent a lifetime promoting wise energy use at Pollution Probe and his more recent Urban Renaissance Institute. I am a big fan of Larry's non-ideological common sense solutions to a wide variety of social and environmental problems, including harnessing the power of markets and individual choice to solve problems, rather than just the government command-and-control programs with which some left-leaning environmentalists are sometimes enamored. A central planner he ain't.

Below, I offer ten points of my own for you to think about, that reflect my own recent thoughts and also some ideas about positive things we should do for the environment, whether or not humans are the cause. Under that I list some facts sent to me from a friend that are worht including in informed discussion about the climate change topic. Below that is the Lawrence Solomon article. Enjoy.

Ten thoughts about climate change:

1. The theory that human generation of greenhouse gases from the consumption of fossil fuels is responsible for most or all of recent warming of the Earth‘s climate is not a “settled science.” Human beings are no doubt having some impact on the climate but it may be much less than is claimed by some groups, including the UN IPCC, which has recently revised its warming projections downwards. There is significant evidence that the bureaucrats at the UN IPCC have manipulated and "spun" scientific findings, especially in the Summary for Policymakers chapter that accompanies their reports. Dissenting reports and statements have been issued by scientists who feel the IPCC has misconstrued their findings, and this is a terrible shame considering the importance of the climate change topic.

2. There is evidence that the Earth’s climate is warming a small amount, but that this is largely from natural causes. The small recent increase in the Earth’s temperature perfectly correlates with warming measured on other planets such as Mars, where probes have measured the same increase on Earth, though of course human beings cannot be responsible for warming on that planet. This lends support to the body of science that believes increased output from the Sun is responsible for most of the warming trend which, in fact, predates the industrial revolution. This is an area where further research is crucial. If society is going to make a massive effort to reduce its CO2 emissions, it had better be based on convincing science and not the sort of selective propaganda one finds in such things as Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth which really dumbed down the science. The danger exists that attention and funds could be diverted from other serious environmental issues, such as the severe degradation of various ecosystems, including those in the ocean. (As just one excellent example, please go see the new documentary Sharkwater which shows the worldwide destruction of sharks which has occurred almost without notice. The consequences of removing these alpha predators from the seas is extremely dire and deserves to be on the front page of every newspaper as much as climate change issues. Turns out that sharks, which predate the dinosaurs, have shaped most life on earth.)

3. This does not, however, mean that human beings should continue to pollute the atmosphere or use non-renewable energy resources wastefully. Just as the environmental activists tell us, there are many opportunities for us to increase energy efficiency and save money in our own households and, as a society, avoid the need to build more power plants (to meet peak energy demand). These steps are worth taking whether or not human fossil fuel burning is heating the planet. We should also preserve oil and gas reserves for future generations – these reserves took hundreds of millions of years to accumulate via the decay of ancient plants and complex geological forces; it’s almost immoral to burn up the easily-accessible stock in only a few generations. Our descendants a few hundred years from now will rightly regard us as wanton and reckless creatures.

4. The issue of climate change is important enough, even for a skeptical person, to be treated seriously. While further research is conducted, we should at least do the relatively easy things, as an insurance policy against an ongoing warming that is already under way. Even if it’s from natural causes, we don’t need to add to the problem by recklessly emitting significantly more carbon into the environment than we need to, and apart from warming there are other legitimate concerns we must consider from the release of carbon into the environment, which includes the potential to increase the acidity of oceans and other effects from interfering with the carbon cycle.

5. The easy things are, naturally, “easy” to think of. For example, consider the retail stores that seek to entice customers inside by leaving their front doors open in the summer, so that cold air-conditioned air flows out to the street. This is an expensive and inexcusable waste. On an individual scale, people can adjust thermostats in the summer and winter so that houses aren’t overly hot in the cold months, nor overly cool in the warm months. People can put on a sweater in the winter or open up their windows in the summer, and save money on their energy bills. A good investment is a thermostat that can be set to adjust vary the output of furnaces and air conditioners at different times of day and night. These are the easy things, and they really add up.

6. Along those lines, people need to use their appliances (dishwashers, clothes washers, dryers, etc.) during non-peak times. Public agencies could do a much better job at educating people as to what the best times are, and should consider hiring summer students to go door to door educating people about such things as how to better insulate their homes, and how to use timers on dishwashers. As an aside, old beer fridges in people’s basements and cottages are enormously energy wasters and should be replaced immediately.

7. But no amount of proselytizing will do as good a job as changing behavior as a price signal. The next step is to equip homes and appliances with so-called “smart meters” which measure the energy consumption of different machines in real time, so that consumers can see immediately what their energy consumption costs them. A nation-wide investment in smart meters could potentially do more to reduce energy consumption than most other ideas. It would best if the private sector is encouraged to do this with government backing, rather than a government led, government implemented progam.

8. As Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently announced in Montreal, Canada is in an excellent position to commercialize energy-efficient technology and then sell it around the world. As countries invest in more varied assets in their energy portfolios, nuclear power will no doubt become popular once again, and Canada is a world leader in this technology as well as rich in rare uranium resources. Canada has great strengths in fuel cell technology and hydrogen. In developing the Alberta oil sands, we are also in a terrific position to develop and demonstrate “carbon sequestration.” The fact is, if we melt all the readily available oil in the oil sands (and use natural gas to do so) we will vastly exceed our Kyoto commitments. This seems likely to occur as the United States turns to Canada to reduce its reliance on Middle East oil (read: unstable and hostile governments). Yet it’s proven that Saskatchewan’s geology is made up of precisely the right kind of fractured rock into which we could safely pump and sequester all of the CO2 that will be generated by oil sands development. In fact, Saskatchewan is said to have enough room underground to store all the CO2 produced from burning the world’s entire fossil fuel reserves. Though this would be impractical, we can certainly take care of our own emissions and teach other countries to do the same, where the right geology exists. (Some have argued that the best way for Canada to develop the oil sands is to use nuclear power to melt the tar and then pump the CO2 to Saskatchewan. Something worth evaluating.)

9. Real market pricing and the removal of subsidies would go a long way toward improving our environmental performance. This includes the removal of any subsidies to natural resource extraction and to oil and gas development, and especially subsidies to the agricultural sector that seeks to grow corn, etc. for ethanol production (“renewable fuel”). This has the perverse effect of raising the price of corn and hence many foods (which disproportionately affects the poor) and is also an environmental shell game; it takes about the same amount of fossil fuel to produce a unit of ethanol, thus negating any benefit. Ethanol production makes sense in some circumstances but purpose-grown cron crops are non-economic and environmentally regressive. Also, the climate would benefit more if we planted trees on this land or even just let such lands lie fallow. Trees are an excellent carbon sequestration mechanism, and their cutting down in the past to create vast farm lands has harmed natural systems and, in fact, allowed more and more energy from the sun to penetrate and heat the soil. This leads to excess evaporation and eventual “desertification” of large areas. Canada’s Prairies are in real danger of reverting to the drier state that existed up until the anomaly of the 20th Century.

10. Canada is in an excellent position to promote sound science and common-sense solutions to overcome environmental impacts that are the byproduct of natural resource exploitation and manufacturing. Many technical advancements are ready, or almost ready, for commercialization. Market discipline could remove many of the perverse side-effects of subsidies. There are enough practical actions available to ordinary people and companies to satisfy environmental activists, concerned citizens, and business entrepreneurs alike.

Some interesting facts related to climate change:

1. The famous "hockey stick" diagram that purports to show global temperatures rising has been discredited. Although some people still trot it out at conferences and other gatherings, there was a raging debate on this now infamous curve and it was shown to be the product of manipulation of data toward a preconceived goal. Think what you want about climate change, but don't make use of this icon without doing some research.

This is not a small matter. The "hockey stick" was the centre piece of the 3rd IPCC report. It occupies almost half a page in the Summary for Policymakers, more than half a page in the Technical Summary, and a full page in the main text of the 3rd IPPC Report. In the Synthesis Report it appears three times. Not surprisingly it was reproduced all around the world in media reports, governmental briefings and other official reports.

Countless books have covered this issue, some devoting entire chapters to it. If you do a web search you will find any number of pages citing it. Wikipedia covers it well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy

Another good composite source will be found at

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2005/03/03/hockey-stick-1998-2005-rip/

It provides a lengthy account and is fully referenced. Toward the end that article sums up the position thus:

But, the “hockey stick” was remarkable. And as such, it will be remembered as a remarkable lesson in how fanaticism can temporarily blind a large part of the scientific community and allow unproven results to become mainstream thought overnight. The embarrassment that it caused to many scientists working in the field of climatology will not be soon forgotten. Hopefully, new findings to come, as remarkable and enticing as they may first appear, will be greeted with a bit more caution and thorough investigation before they are widely accepted as representing the scientific consensus.

2. Carbon dioxide.

It is sometimes claimed that man-made emissions of about 7 Gigatonnes of carbon are so massive as to disrupt the global carbon balance. However, for proportion, consider this:

There are about 750 GtC of CO2 in the atmosphere

In the oceans it is about 40,000 GtC

The stock of CO2 as carbon in land plants, animals and soils is about 2,000 GtC

Fossil fuel reserves are about 5-10,000 GtC

Plant respiration and decomposition releases and withdraws about 60 GtC annually into the atmosphere

The oceans release and withdraw about 90 GtC

Minor variations in natural release and withdrawal can swamp anything mankind may have contributed

Source: Essex & McKitrick, ‘Taken by Storm: the troubled science, policy and politics of global warming’ at page 210 in the chapter entitled ‘Uncertainty and Nescience’

Now, here's the Lawrence Solomon article I mentioned at the start of this mini-essay:

THE DENIERS — PART XIX

Science, not politics

LAWRENCE SOLOMON

Financial Post (National Post, FP Comment section, FP15, Friday, April 13)

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

Of all the scientists who are labelled “deniers” because they don’t support the orthodoxy of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, none comes in for more vilification than Eigil Friis-Christensen. For understandable reasons. Dr. Friis-Christensen questions the very premise that man-made activities explain most of the global warming that we see, and through his work he has convinced much of an entire scientific discipline to explore his line of inquiry. With his 1991 paper in Science, showing a startling correlation between global warming and the activities of the sun, Dr. Friis-Christensen unleashed a wave of related research by solar scientists seeking to learn the mechanisms through which solar activity may influence climate on Earth. Thanks largely to his early efforts, and ongoing efforts, too, a growing proportion of the world’s solar scientists no longer place man at the centre of the climate-change universe.

Dr. Friis-Christensen’s interest in climate change predates the Kyoto Treaty of 1995, it predates the Rio Conference in 1992 that led to Kyoto, it even predates the first report in 1990 of the IPCC, the body spearheading the vast majority of the climate-change research now underway.

“My interest dates back to an extreme solar storm that occurred in August, 1972,” he explains. “I was in Greenland, on my first assignment in my new job as geophysicist at the Danish Meteorological Institute, setting up a chain of magnetometer stations on the west coast.”

Dr. Friis-Christensen remembers lying in his tent and “watching the ink pens of my recorder going so wild that they nearly tore the paper chart apart — we had no digital recording at that time — and I wondered whether such big events could also have an influence in the lower atmosphere, on weather and climate.

“That storm cut off my contact to the outside world for nine days — all radio communication was blacked out — so I had lots of time to reflect on the enormity of the forces at play.”

Dr. Friis-Christensen would soon discover he had a soulmate in his reflections, his mentor and a division head at the institute, Knud Lassen, a pioneer in research into the aurora borealis. They followed developments in the field, even gave lectures on the subject, which was then topical, although not for the reasons we’re familiar with today — in the mid-1970s, climate scientists feared global cooling.

Yet for both scientists, the interest was more a hobby than a formal area of study — until 1989, when Dr. Lassen, 68 years old and nearing retirement, decided to cap his career by pursuing the hunch they had long held. Dr. FriisChristensen needed no persuading to join him on his quest. Two years later, their pathbreaking study was published, though without fanfare. Global cooling had receded from public memory and global warming was not yet a hot topic.

That soon changed, with the growing role of the newly created IPCC.

Upon the IPCC’s creation, with its mandate to investigate the causes of climate change, Dr. Friis-Christensen was hopeful of advances in solving one of the scientific passions of his life. To participate in the IPCC’s quest for answers, he travelled to its January, 1992, meeting in Guangzhou, China, as part of the Danish delegation. By then, he had succeeded Dr. Lassen to become head of the institute’s geophysics division.

But to his astonishment, and despite the recent publication of his Science article, the IPCC refused to consider the sun’s influence on Earth’s climate as a topic worthy of investigation. The scientists at the IPCC had decided that man-made causes and man-made causes alone deserved their attention. But ignoring the potential role of the sun didn’t make it go away, especially since Dr. Friis-Christensen and other solar scientists refused to abandon their research.

Then the attacks on Dr. Friis-Christensen’s credibility began.

His 1991 study had errors, his detractors stated. His 1995 study only made it worse, others chimed in. He fabricated data, people whispered. A recent article in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper by IPCC partisan George Monbiot well represents the tenor of the attacks:

“A paper published in the journal Eos in 2004 reveals that the ‘agreement’ [between temperatures and solar activity that Friis-Christensen’s 1991 study found] was the result of ‘incorrect handling of the physical data.’ The real data for recent years show the opposite: that the length of the sunspot cycle has declined, while temperatures have risen. When this error was exposed, FriisChristensen and his co-author published a new paper, purporting to produce similar results.

“But this too turned out to be an artefact of mistakes — in this case, in their arithmetic.

“So Friis-Christensen and another author developed yet another means of demonstrating that the sun is responsible, claiming to have discovered a remarkable agreement between cosmic radiation influenced by the sun and global cloud cover ... . But, yet again, the method was exposed as faulty. They had been using satellite data which did not in fact measure global cloud cover.

“A paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics shows that, when the right data are used, a correlation is not found.”

How much of this litany in the Guardian demonstrates actual errors by Dr. Friis-Christensen? In truth, none of it. Virtually all of the criticisms of Dr. FriisChristensen, published and republished willy-nilly, stem from a lone advisor to the Danish government’s Ministry of the Energy with scant research credentials — he even admits that the government hired him largely for his communications skill.

There is no arithmetic error in Dr. Friis-Christensen’s studies. Remarkably, his critics attributed someone else’s error to him, and then kept doggedly repeating their assertion. Neither are there errors in methodology, although this charge likewise gets repeated without foundation. Neither should it be surprising that different studies of different aspects of solar behaviour would yield anomalies. It is through such exceptions that science proves the rule.

Do the epithets work? With the uninformed, they work a great deal. With the vast majority of his peers, the attacks more represent irritants, noise that obfuscates the political debate but not what counts — the science. Because of his scientific rigour, Dr. Friis-Christensen has won a citation from the Journal of Geophysical Research of the American Geophysical Union for “Excellence in refereeing” and he is sought after by the world’s leading agencies, who have elevated him to the top ranks of his profession.

He now chairs the Danish Space Consortium, heads a European Space Agency mission advisory group, and is vice-president of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy. Many of the world’s most prestigious space-related research institutions — the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, and the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia among them — are now building on the work that Dr. Friis-Christensen set in train.
Bit by bit, they are putting the pieces of the climate puzzle together, slowly learning more and more about the amazingly complex relationships among solar and cosmic forces, on the one hand, and the array of forces on Earth.

Where this slow, methodical brand of solar science will ultimately lead, no one can yet say. Such uncertainty does not characterize the brand of climate science practiced by the IPCC.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I thought readers might be interested in notes I made at Americana 2007, where I was the "waste analyst" for the conference sessions pertaining to waste management. Despite spending quite a bit of time on the trade show floor, I managed to attend many of the conference sessions, and certainly all the sessions that struck me as the most interesting. The event generated what may be a year's worth of article leads! So watch for some interesting material in upcoming editions of our magazines.

At the request of the conference organizers, I gathered my notes into the form of a short article that will be edited into a forthcoming edition of a Quebec-based environmental services magazine -- Vecteur environnement. Thanks to my hosts, also, at RÉSEAU environnement, the environmental trade association that organized the conference and trade show, and especially Raphael Bruneau who introduced me around and invited me to the final luncheon where I appeared on a wrap-up panel with "analysts" from other conference streams.

Reflections on the Waste Management sessions of Americana 2007

By Guy Crittenden, waste analyst

The conference sessions at Americana 2007 that concerned solid waste management, taken as a whole, suggested that the industry is in a period of quite dramatic transition -- from a previous system in which the only value of garbage was the collection, transportation and disposal fees charged by waste haulers, to a new system in which waste is regarded as a valuable resource. The new market for waste is dynamic and is being influenced by new technologies such as those that better sort recyclable or compostable materials from the waste stream, and thereby divert them from landfill disposal, and those that capture the energy embodied in waste, such as thermal treatment systems for garbage residuals, and systems to capture methane gas at landfills to generate power.

Simply put, an industry that used to be merely a low-tech municipal service is now going high-tech and is increasingly attracting investment from the private sector.

Opinions differ, however, as to what the value of waste really is, and from the different presentations one could detect some important and conflicting trends that will play themselves out in the decade to come.

For example, the audience was treated to an excellent presentation from a technology company, Plasco, which has built a demonstration facility in Ottawa that uses plasma arc torches to destroy waste. The company is currently in the testing and ramp-up stage to full operation, and results will be interesting to monitor in the summer of 2007. The value proposition of the technology is that it uses computer systems to control the blended feedstock of raw garbage and plastic to create just the right gaseous fuel to drive special combustion engines. This control of the fuel – waste that needs minimal preparation – may allow Plasco to succeed where other plasma-based systems have failed, for technical and/or economic reasons. In any case, the technology was one of several presented at the conference that illustrate the leading edge of innovation in waste disposal.

Plasco also illustrates another important trend, and that is the recognition of the BTU value – the embodied energy – in waste. This has already been recognized by the engineers of conventional mass-burn incinerators, who regularly refer to their systems as “waste-to-energy” and, in the best and most efficient examples (e.g., Sweden) generate both electricity and steam. The trick, though, has been to use technology to clean the emissions from such systems so that they represent a reduced threat to human health and the environment, and to use technology to garner public acceptance of such facilities by the public in their jurisdictions.

In that regard, the presentation from David Merriman of MacViro Consultants was interesting. Merriman led the audience on a compelling journey through the history of waste disposal in the Greater Toronto Area, where several important projects are under development. It was a convoluted tale, but the gist was that Toronto and the surrounding regions are diverting as much waste as possible through recycling and composting, and at least one area (York Region) plans to build a large waste-to-energy plant. (There was some discussion at the conference that perhaps conventional mass burn may be just as effective as gasification and other higher-tech systems, at a lower cost.)

However, another set of values also informed the discussion, as was evident from certain presentations and especially in questions from the audience. There’s an entirely different sense of “value” that many people see in waste that doesn’t view as beneficial the capture of a relatively small amount of energy via thermal treatment. In fact, there’s a school of thought that even the most successful waste-to-energy schemes are a poor idea, because they encourage the notion that we can continue consuming the earth’s resources and then just make our waste byproducts “go away.”

Proponents of this alternative view regard any material sent for disposal as a poorly-allocated resource. In their opinion, change needs to occur upstream at the manufacturing and natural resource extraction stage. Anything that can’t be recycled or composted or reused, they would argue, shouldn’t be produced in the first place. An efficient and effective municipal waste disposal system, in their view, is really a subsidy to companies that foist their packaging and built-for-obsolescence products on the taxpayer.

This philosophy, sometimes called the “zero waste” movement, looks at the entire lifecycle of products and places emphasis on packaging redesign and such things as renewable energy. A zero waste proponent would never regard a plastic soft drink bottle burned in a waste-to-energy plant as the appropriate consumption of “renewable” energy. Primarily due to climate change concerns, the link between consumption and environmental impacts is increasingly being understood by the public and policymakers, and producer responsibility systems (rather than efficient waste disposal) are the solution advocated by zero waste proponents.

Proper markets are needed for materials diverted from landfill (e.g., metal, plastic and fibre, and also compostable organics). For this reason the last panel discussion was especially interesting. Representatives from five different municipalities across Canada presented on the different technologies and approaches they are implementing to manage waste, and especially to divert it from landfill. One had the sense of Canada as a vast laboratory in which different experiments are being conducted on waste, analogous to different steam engines being developed in England during the industrial revolution. (Edmonton’s co-composting facility and new gasifier are a good example.)

Most importantly, each jurisdiction is struggling with the new economic equation for waste and, to be honest, not yet fully making the connection between the value of what is diverted from disposal and proper markets. Some could not find markets for their source-separated organics (e.g., kitchen scraps). Indeed, not one of them charged a user fee (“bag tag”) for waste placed at the curb, and most often the cost of garbage disposal was hidden in municipal tax bills, among charges for other services.

It was clear that waste reduction and greater recycling and composting will occur when cities and towns charge a visible fee – i.e., a price signal – to waste, that rewards people for doing the “right thing” (diversion) and tolls them for the “wrong thing” (waste).

Realistically one can conclude that the era of zero waste will only come as the second part of a two-step process. We are half-way through the first step – poised to soon divert as much as 60 to 70 per cent of waste from disposal via both high-tech and low-tech recycling and composting, and then dispose of the residuals in thermal treatment plants, anaerobic digesters or stabilized landfills. The days of the old low-tech dump are almost over. When that step is complete (and perhaps a bit sooner), society will be ready to drive change up the production line to the point of the manufacturer or brand owner, and this will prevent many materials from entering the waste stream in the first place. Only then will we be able to say we have moved from consumerism to sustainability.

Guy Crittenden is editor of Solid Waste & Recycling magazine and HazMat Management magazine. He can be reached at gcrit@bizinfogroup.ca or 705-445-0361.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A news item caught my attention today (posted at the end of this entry). Toronto Mayor David Miller has stated he would consider tolling city roads -- as London England did, with great success -- in order to reduce commuting, downtown congestion and smog.

The London mayor who introduced tolling in that city was actually a left-wing mayor (like Miller) and the concept, which is market-oriented, was anathema to his political followers, who decried it as a tax on the poor and said it wouldn't work. Well, it did work. I have been to London twice in recent years and, while there is traffic, there is very little congestion, even during rush hour. The tolls place a "price" on driving downtown from outside the city. If people want to do it, they can, but they pay. Because it's not considered "free" people who have other options (public transit, not going downtown, taking taxis) use them, and the roads are less congested.

Tollling makes sense, if properly implemented, because it solves the "tragedy of the commons" where cars are concerned. When taxes pay for the construction of roads, people perceive their use of those roads as a right, and that their actions are without cost. But when too many cars clog the streets, there is in fact a cost -- loss to the economy from all those thousands of people sitting idle in traffic, wear and tear to the roadways themselves, and (most important) the cost in health care and environmental degradation from smog. It's excellent public policy to recognize this "cost" and to put a "price" on it. The price (market) signal turns the roadways into a market, rather than a commons.

Over time, people adjust their behavior according to the market signals. When the roadways are perceived as free, people behave perfectly rationally -- competing to squeeze out as much of their share of the free public good as they can (by using the roads during peak hours, commuting, etc.). It's utterly predictable that "free" roads encourage suburban sprawl. If you can buy a house in exurbia for, say, two-thirds the price of that same house downtown, and your only penalty is to have to drive a bit more every day and not have access to public transit for your work commute, you will logically move to the cheaper suburban house because you can pay off your mortgage much faster and, besides, enjoy a more "bucolic" existence away from the "trafficy" downtown. (Okay, many people will not make this choice, but a glance at any map of the GTA and it's enormous low-density suburbs shows that millions of people will.

But if you turn the commons into a market, if the roads are suddenly not "free" (at least, the downtown roads) then the equation changes. People don't so readily assume that it makes sense to live far apart from where they work. ?The cost of the impact of their behavior is no longer externalized onto taxpayers (in the form of road repairs, road construction, hospital care, etc.) or the general economy (the drag of millions of person-hours wasted in traffic). The cost is internalized directly back to the consumer of the service (the driver on the road).

There's a further benefit. Not only are costs being appropriately assigned to users of the system, but the system itself changes -- it self-corrects. The very traffic congestion that inspired the tolls begins to melt away as people re-order their affairs. In the short-term, they drive less often to the city. They start to car-pool (i.e., share costs). More than any amount of proslytizing from government (nanny state nagging) could accomplish about the value of car pooling, people do it because it saves them money. Aha! The same force that inspires them to turn down their thermostat or turn off lights in empty rooms, or comparison shop for cheaper shoes, gets them to do the "right thing for the environment." They discover the "Kiss-N-Ride" and jump on the commuter train. They take cabs, trains, buses, street cars, bicycles and (gosh!) they even walk!

Over the long term, the appeal of living in the suburbs and working downtown diminishes. Or, more correctly, people make decisions to follow such a pattern with the correct pricing in their heads. One can imagine that real estate values in urban cores -- even the cores of suburban areas -- will more perfectly reflect the value that one can work/shop/play in close proximity, and the values of outlying properties will be diminished. Butthis doesn't mean that the suburbds will become wastelands, ghettos. The opposite should occur: As municipal politicians see the new pattern, they will introduce planning rules to encourage density, thereby turning each suburban node into a small dense city unto itself, rather than a mere add-on to The Big Smoke. This is precisely what is happening now in the Town of Markham (where i once lived), which is a sad example of low-density sprawl that is reinventing itself and literally dropping a high-density core into its new "city centre." Light rapid transit and other public infrastructure will reinforce the idea over time that you can live in Markham, work there, and play, and only go downtown once in a while of other big city pleasures.

If this same mechanism is applied to other "free" services, a virtuous cycle should ensue. Markham, for instance, is introducing a user-pay system for garbage (bag tags), in combination with free (tag-less) collection of recyclable materials and organic waste. Unsurprisingly, the town is closing in on its goal of diverting 60 per cent of solid waste from landfill. The town already meters water consumption, which appears as a (not buried) line item on bills. Gas and electricity consumption is already metered by suppliers (including discounters with long-term contractual plans that lock in prices). Imagine the further advances that will be achieved in Markham and every other town and city when each appliance in each household is equipped with "smart meters" telling the owner/user exactly how much it's costing them -- in real time -- to use power for a given period. Again, pricing behavior appropriately will lead people to behave rationally, if they're provided a rational context.

If I know, for instance, that it will cost me half as much in electricty pricing to run my dishwasher during the night, while I'm asleep, I will take the time to figure out the slightly complicated digital setting on the front of the machine to make this happen. I will even dig out the owner's manual, or search for it online (by keying in the product name or description). Whereas such a task once sat idle on the endless "to do" task list (along with trimming the hedge in the front yard, or replacing the burnt-out back porch light), it now moves onto my priority "action list" for today, because of pricing. Smart metering will cause me to operate my clothes washer and dryer during non-peak hours for the same reason.

But again, there are other benefits and changes that will occur, that movefrom the individual to the systemic. For example, I will likely take a keen interest in the energy efficiency of every appliance that I own or purchase. I'll start to pay attention to the stickers on these machines, and the issue will become part of my research into what I will buy, beyond bottom-line price and styling. I might decide to retire the inefficient beer fridge in the basement when I learn that it's the single greatest power consumer in my home, sucking up power senselessly day and night. And that's just the "low-hanging fruit." I will eventually replace my standard incandescent light bulbs with fluorescents. I will buy rechargeable batteries instead of throwaways. I will install water-saving shower heads. And I may in fact do away with certain appliances altogether, or use them less. (I have recently discovered that it takes only slighly more time to wash dishes than load and empty the dishwasher. And since it makes for a good "chore" for my kids, it costs me nothing personally.)

Now let's switch to the view from ten thousand feet. If I'm doing this, millions of other people will be as well. Our combined rational behavior in the new system takes many many megawatts of consumption off the grid. But more importantly, market forces smooth out the peaks and valleys of power consumption. And, since electricty production and consumption is virtually instantaneous, new power plants are not required. The existing system can meet demand and even be in surplus, because infrastructure adequately serves the robust "middle" of consumption, rather than strain to meet peak demand (e.g., everyone cranking up their air conditioners on a hot summer's day, and running their dishwashers at the same time, etc., etc.).

And then the planners and the suppliers of power are under less pressure to build mega-projects based on worst-case demand scenarios, and can invest in a more diverse -- dare I say "green" -- array of options. Many people in Ontario, for example, are already buying their power from Bull Frog -- an alternative energy supplier that emphasizes hydroelectricty and wind, etc.

So I've extrapolated quite an arc of opportunities from the initial example of road tolls. Beyond municipal services like roads, drinking water and wastewater treatment, power supply, garbage collection and so on, many further opportunities exist in the realm of such things as extended producer responsibility for packaging, electronics and other products. I haven't even touched on trading/credit systems for emissions, that bring market discipline to another perceived "free" commons -- the atmosphere. But an interesting tie-in, in that regard, is that Toronto Mayor Miller's motivation to introduce road tolls is not directly about relieving traffic congestion, but rather to help get the city into compliance with its own four-year goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change impact.

The the very macro climate change issue is triggering very micro level policy instruments. A perfect example of "think globally, act locally." I believe that over time, more and more environmental activists will embrace market solutions to environmental problems, as command and control regulation proves to be an approach with certain limitations -- namely that it punishes bad behavior rather than reward correct (or, I should say, rational) behavior.

Continue reading "Road tolls, market forces and climate change" »

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 09:36 PM | Permalink

Just a note to readers who may be attending the Americana trade show and conference in Montreal (March 20-22). I have been designated as the official "waste management" media person for the event whcih, among other things, will involve me particpating in an end-of-conference wrap-up session with other journalists discussing topics raised at the conference. If you're at the event, please drop by our trade show booth and speak with me or Publisher Brad O'Brien.

Two more things. I've copied beow a list of articles/topics that will appear in the upcoming Spring edition of HazMat Management magazine. Watch for that edition, which I feel will be quite a good one (and will be the Show Issue for Americana). I have also re-posted (further below) a Blog entry that I made late last year updating readers about the coming changes and re-focus of our magazine. Since they get "archived" quite fast (by month) I thought some of you might like to read that, if you missed it the first time.

Article Lineup:

• HazMat audits (cover story) -- dangerous goods auditing for industrial facilities. by Chris Houschild (Vicinia Corporation)

• Toxic chemicals: Canada's new plan to regulate toxic chemicals puts the onus on industry to prove that target compounds are safe. by Connie Vitello.

• Sidebar article on the science behind the new federal toxic chemical plan. by GlobalTox.

• The new PCB regulations. by Martin Hassenbach (Contech).

• Environmental technology issues. by John Nicholson.

• New product stewardship plan for fluorescent lights. by Joanne St. Godard.

• HazMat ER training exercise at Camp Borden. by Peter Knaack.

• New proposed brownfield remediation rules in Ontario. by Dianne Saxe.

Continue reading "Americana and update" »

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 06:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought I'd take a minute or two and update readers about a few things, more on a personal note, as the 2006 year ends and we begin 2007.

Some of you may have noticed that I have not blogged in this space much in recent months. The reason has to do with changes in my personal life related to marital separation and all the chaos that engenders, including negotiated settlements, parenting plans, moving, and so on. It's been a busy and stressful time -- the sort of situation that sometimes leads a person to ask for a leave of absence from work. But I commiitted myself to focus on the magazines this fall (I edit both Solid Waste & Recycling magazine and HazMat Management magazine) and make sure those products didn't suffer because of my personal situation. Plus, my job isn't easy to contract out to someone else.

Anyway, things worked out fine and we got through the most recent editions of the magazines on time and with what I think is some of our best content ever. And I'm excited about our plans for 2007 and the many cross-over opportunities between the two publications that have some common themes in the areas of industrial and commercial waste, product stewardship, and so on.

I'll be in Florida on holiday with the kids for the first two weeks of January and might manage a post or two from there, but watch this space starting mid-January for more regular entries from me about the dynamic environmental service and waste management industries.

And Happy New Year!

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 02:36 PM | Permalink

Hello Everyone!

It's great to be back!

After a hiatus of several years, I am now editing HazMat Management magazine again -- a publication I got involved with at the start-up stage 16 years ago. Oh my god! Can it be 16 years already? I admit, it must be.

There have been changes recently within our company. Former editor Connie Vitello has moved on to freelance work, and our new publisher Brad O'Brien is handling advertising and business development. Connie has agreed to contribute to the magazine and will in fact write the cover story for the upcoming winter edtion. She's writing a piece for us about that explosion and fire and evacuation of the EQ facility in the United States a few months back, and we welcome her continued voice in the magazine. Connie is also a new mother and is spending time with her family, and we want to encourage her in that endeavor as well as her ongoing journalism career.

I mentioned "winter edition." Did you catch that? Yes, HazMat Management is going to be a quarterly magazine from now on. Fact is, we spoke to our customers and they told us that is basically where the market is. The Canadian market can support a four times per year product serving the HazMat topic, so we're throttling back from the six times per year formula that worked well in the 1990s but doesn't suit the new environment.

In addition to becoming a quartertly magazine, HazMat Management is going back to its roots. There was a time when we could cover all manner of issues -- from drinking water quality to air monitoring and Kyoto compliance to energy efficiency. But, let's face it, the business of environmental protection is very niche-oriented nowadays. We can't be "all things to all people" and our business and government readership demands a focused magazine that specifically addresses targeted topics.

You'll have to watch this space to learn more about what we have in store, but I'd like to at least to convey this much: In each edition of HazMat Management, readers can expect to see a sort of "shop floor" focus on the practical "how to" matters associated with the following subjects:

1) Emergency preparedness and response

2) Contaminated site cleanup and "brownfield" restoration

3) In-plant spills and cleanup, sorbents, etc.

4) Storage and Transportation of Dangerous Goods (TDG) issues (placards, manifests, containers, etc.)

5) Above ground storage taks and USTs

6) Personal protective equipment (encapsulated suits, special gloves, boots, etc.)

7) Crisis communications

8) Confined space entry

9) Chemical waste treatment and disposal (sludges, still bottoms, liquid waste)

10) Pollution prevention and control

I think you get the basic picture of where we're headed. You can expect to encounter some of the familiar voices you've come to know over the years, like legal expert Dianne Saxe and also the regulatory experts from Torys. John Nicholson will write about new techologies and strategies, and Dr. Ron Brecher will update you on toxics and risk assessment.

We're going to stick with our knitting, and I dare say we may be the only "HazMat" publicaiton in North America now, with many "out of focus" enviro magazines having gone under in recent years.

So stay with us, embrace the changes, and enjoy the renewed "shop floor" magazine we're abot to roll out at the end of December (our Annual Buyer's Guide edition). And (by the way) if you're in the business and would like to participate in the Buyer's Guide or another edition, call Publisher Brad O'Brien at 1-888-702-1111, ext. 1.

Posted by Guy Crittenden at 02:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)