What a fruitful — and somewhat bizarre — day in the land of green. First it was announced that retail leviathan Wal-Mart had entered a three-year agreement to purchase 39,000 megawatt-hours of green power from Bullfrog Power. It’s being touted as the largest commercial purchase of green power in Ontario’s history. Wal-Mart and SAM’s CLUB stores in Pickering, Collingwood, Cambridge and Toronto (St. Clair and Runnymede) are the locations to benefit from the purchase, which, even as a PR move, is more than welcome if it lends momentum to Bullfrog’s business plan. Still, in the grand scheme of things this purchase is a drop in the bucket. We’ve got a long way to go.

Second, former prime minister Brian Mulroney, of all people, was recognized in Ottawa this evening by environmentalists as the greenest prime minister in Canadian history. Huh? Making this event even less credible was a comment to reporters from Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who summed up Mulroney’s recognition as follows: “I believe the reason he’s regarded that way is that he didn’t pursue grandiose schemes and unworkable arrangements and the kind of problem we got into on Kyoto.”

Grandiose? Unworkable? Other than making a promise, did Canada even try? This, coming from a prime minister who in his infinite wisdom recently cut more than a dozen climate change programs while at the same time calling our Kyoto targets impossible to achieve. Thanks for the inspiration, buddy, but Kyoto isn’t the problem. Canada is the problem. Though I’ll admit the One-Tonne Challenge was a dud.

Given Harper’s boneheaded comment, it was perhaps fitting that 400 or so kilometres away in Toronto federal NDP leader Jack Layton was introducing Tim Flannery, the Australian author of global warming wake-up book The Weather Makers, at a University of Toronto event hosted by science journalist Bob McDonald of CBC’s Quirks & Quarks.

Layton used the opportunity to question Harper’s commitment to tackling climate change. “I’m saying to Mr. Harper it’s very important that you read this book,” Layton told the audience, which thanks to a ticket from Bullfrog included yours truly.

According to Layton, he sent a copy of the book earlier this year to Harper, who agreed to give it a read. More recently, he met Harper in his office. The prime minister acknowledged that he received the book, and pointed to a copy that was sitting on his desk. He confessed to Layton that he hadn’t yet read it. Layton, among other things, said this evening he was going to keep urging Harper to fulfill that promise. He also issued a challenge, calling on Harper to take the $2 billion in subsidies that go each year to the highly profitable oil and gas industry and redirect it to renewable energy and energy efficiency programs and investments.

As for the book itself, which Layton says he read over the Christmas break, “I have never read such a powerful call to action,” he said, which explains why he feels it so important for Harper to read. ”About two-thirds of the way through you need a stiff drink, or something, if you have soul… it’s tough.” He said the final chapters of The Weather Makers, which you can find on Amazon.ca through a link at the bottom-right corner of this blog, do provide some hope if we can start making meaningful change over the next 10 or so years.

I just bought the book tonight, so I can’t offer much commentary, other than to point out a few comments that the jet-lagged Flannery made this evening.

* He basically said that if we don’t take quick and aggressive action within the next decade to reduce greenhouse gases, we’ll be past the point of no return once we hit the mid-point of the century. At that point, global warming will become an unstoppable steam train. “The next 10 years are really critical,” he said.

* He predicted by 2050 there will be no polar ice cap in the summer, and that by 2030 he wouldn’t be surprised if polar bears were extinct. In 6 of the last 15 years the Fraser River has been so warm that salmon have not been able to breed. Sea birds are dying out, and California squid are showing up off the coast of British Columbia because of warmer waters. “These are severe warning signs people should know about, and I’m surprised they’re not making front-page headlines across the country,” Flannery told the audience.

* Pointing to the Alberta oil sands, which I touched on in a column two weeks ago, he said they’re the main reason Canada hasn’t been able to meet its Kyoto obligations. “The rest of Canada is doing just fine,” he said, though I think he’d be safer to say the rest of Canada is doing relatively better.

* He said Canada, which presides over the next Kyoto talks taking place this month in Bonn, Germany, is being counted on internationally to lead the way morally during the talks. Not doing so, he said, would “be a tragedy for the world and Canada.”

* He said clean coal, even if it does eventually prove doable, comes with enormous cost and uncertainty and wouldn’t be able to have any meaningful impact until mid-century, which is far too late. “I used to be quite anti-nuclear,” he said. “I must say now I’m a little less convinced.” Acknowledging that the world and our energy choices are all imperfect, he said nuclear compared to coal is the lesser of two evils, explaining that nuclear safety and waste issues are manageable and that emissions from coal plants are creating a measurable climate and health crisis today.

It’s a conclusion I can support, though I’m personally still grappling with the issue. Flannery’s comment raised a few eyebrows among anti-nuke folks in the crowd, though I’m sure it will please Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, who hinted this week that the province is likely to go with more nuclear as it phases out coal plants. To be fair, Flannery said nuclear is only part of the solution, and that nuclear should only be relied on after renewable alternatives and efficiency strategies have been exhausted. But he’s a realist by appreciating that nuclear has to play some role.

Some role. Not dominant role. For example, Ontario may need to stick with nuclear, but why does nuclear have to remain 50 per cent of the mix? There’s no convincing reason for this figure, and nobody has been able to tell my why we can’t operate the province with a much lower baseload of nuclear.

Anyway, the points above are just a sample of Flannery’s comments. If you want more details, I suggest you read the book, which is already a #1 National Bestseller. Flannery didn’t say much at all about clean technologies as a partial solution to the problem, but as a scientist and professor of evolutionary biology, I wouldn’t expect it from him. That’s for readers of this blog to discuss.

UPDATE: Flannery, speaking at a press conference in Ottawa on Friday morning (a day after his Toronto visit), urged Harper to take political and moral leadership on Kyoto and the climate change issue. He calld on Harper to invest more in renewable energy, increase vehicle fuel efficiency standards, improve energy efficiency across the country, and better regulate emissions from large industry.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 21st, 2006 at 12:11 am and is filed under Main Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.