I have a feature in the latest issue of Corporate Knights magazine called “Cows, carbon and you” that takes a look at whether carbon labelling of products would have an impact on purchasing behaviour in Canada and the United States. It’s being done to a limited extent in Europe, but would such an approach fly in North America?

It’s an interesting question: Would you, as a consumer, be more likely to purchase a product in a retail store if you knew the energy used to produce it could be guaranteed as zero- or low-carbon?

I know I buy unbleached coffee filters, low-salt cans of tuna and organic veggies because it matters to me, so it follows that some people would be swayed by carbon content. They might not pay more for it, but price being equal, it could give one product a competitive edge over another. On the other hand, is there really any room on product labels to fit this information? How would it be presented in a simple way that doesn’t confuse people? What standards are used to measure the carbon content of energy inputs? Can such a label be exact enough to matter?

BTW: Why the “cows” reference in the headline? That’s because I open the piece with a look inside the operations of Delft Blue, a veal farming company in Ontario that turns cow manure into electricity and heat. So, in a sense, Delft is supplying the market with low-carbon veal. It’s doing so because the capital investment lowers the cost of its farming operation and achieves payback in five or so years. However, its customers — Walmart, Loblaws, etc. — could choose to market the veal as low-carbon if they chose. At the moment, they don’t.

Enerkem, the Montreal-based waste-to-ethanol company, continues to raise money and extend its reach through new partnerships. The company announced today it has secured another $60 million in financing and that Valero Energy has joined existing investors Waste Management, Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures and Cycle Capital in the round. Valero and Enerkem have also agreed to jointly explore future commercial opportunities.

Enerkem is proving to be a Canadian waste-to-energy success story. It has several projects under construction and in the pipeline and it has managed to attract top-tier strategic investors and VCs. Valero is a good catch. It has 10 ethanol refineries across the United States, making it the largest supplier of ethanol in the country. It also has made several investments in next-gen ethanol technology companies, including Mascoma, Zeachem, Terrabon, Solix Biofuels — and now Enerkem. “With Valero joining Waste Management as a strategic investor, Enerkem becomes one of the very few renewable products companies that is aligned with industry leaders from both upstream and downstream parts of the business,” said Vincent Chornet, president and chief executive officer of Enerkem, in a press release.

There’s been a lot of investment and deployment in renewable energy technologies for power generation and for displacing petroleum products, but as far as we’ve come over such a short time, and as much as triple-digit oil prices are helping to accelerate the transition, the disturbing fact is that higher-priced oil is leading to dramatically more investment in dirtier, harder to access and riskier to extract heavy oil. So while we may be experiencing the beginnings of “peak” conventional oil we’re also seeing the word “conventional” being refined to include heavier crude, starting with the oil sands and now moving toward oil shale and heavy oil trapped in aging oil fields of the Middle East. My Clean Break column takes a closer look at this issue and comes to the conclusion that higher fossil fuel prices alone won’t wean us off fossil fuels, it will only make us go for deeper, heavier and more remote resources in an effort to feed our petro addiction. The answer is to put a meaningful price on carbon, impose stricter environmental regulations and eliminate unnecessary incentives for the oil industry. Sadly, we’re heading in the wrong direction and there’s no sign in Canada or the United States of the political will, or public pressure, required to shift course. What we’ve seen so far is window dressing.

George Monbiot raised this issue in one of his recent columns. He cited the fact that Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency, revealed in late April that crude oil production peaked in 2006. Yet the global economy didn’t collapse as predicted. Why not? “The reason, as Birol went on to explain, is that natural gas liquids and tar sands are already filling the gap,” Monbiot wrote. ”Not only does the economy appear to be more resistant to resource shocks than we assumed, but the result of those shocks is an increase, not a decline, in environmental destruction.” The problem, Monbiot continued, isn’t that we have too little fossil fuel but too much. “As oil declines, economies will switch to tar sands, shale gas and coal; as accessible coal declines they’ll switch to ultra-deep reserves (using underground gasification to exploit them) and methane clathrates. The same probably applies to almost all minerals: we will find them, but exploiting them will mean trashing an ever greater proportion of the world’s surface.”

We’re letting it happen. Until we stop letting it happen, things will continue as they are, despite talk of peak oil and despite rising oil and commodity prices.

Thank Thor for kids. They give me hope.

The Canada-Wide Science Fair was recently held and, as usual, there were some terrific projects from some terrific young minds. One in particular was a project by Grade 9 Havergal student Mikaela Preston called “A Population Dynamics Study in Algal Bioreactors.” Preston, working with Dr. Brad Bass at the University of Toronto and representing Ontario (York Region) in the fair, won the platinum award. She had learned that most research on algae as a possible source of biofuel is based on the study of specific strains or monocultures. But would algae growth benefit by mixing strains? That’s what Preston wanted to find out, so she went ahead and grew two different types together and found that, yes, the different algae strains grew better together than apart, suggesting that mixing strains may be a better and ultimately more economic approach to producing biofuels from algae.

Congrats Mikaela, let’s hope 10 years from now you’re leading research in this important area. We need kids like you that are engaged in their energy future.

Team Ontario walked away with the fair’s top prizes, including “Best in Fair,” platinum awards in each of the junior, intermediate and senior levels, and 13 Gold Awards.

There’s so much wind and solar development happening in Ontario as a result of the feed-in-tariff program that it’s easy to forget that FIT prices also exist for generating electricity from biogas and biomass. Indeed, the biogas option has been largely overshadowed even though as a source of electricity it’s arguably the best approach of them all — it’s dispatchable, it reduces methane emissions from manure, it’s a waste management solution, and it’s a way to ensure dangerous pathogens from in-field manure don’t leech into groundwater systems. There have been a dozen or so farm-based anaerobic digester systems deployed throughout Ontario, but there is potential for a whole lot more, not just from dairy farms, but for processing of municipal waste water, chicken/pig/turkey poop, organic matter from industrial food production, etc…

A good sign that more will happen was the announcement yesterday that Anaergia, which operates in Europe under the name UTS Biogas, has chosen Ontario as the location for its $70-million global headquarters, which will include R&D and manufacturing. The company expects to hire 200 people, and it plans to support and drive growth in biogas systems across Ontario and presumably the rest of Canada and northeastern parts of the United States. “The industry, in my view, is still in its infancy,” Andrew Benedek, company CEO, told the Toronto Star. “It has not evolved technologically. I really see an opportunity to become far away the leader of the world.” Benedek, a Canadian citizen, has a track record for running successful cleantech businesses. He was previously founder of Zenon Environmental, the Ontario-based water treatment company that went on to be purchased by General Electric in 2006 for about $700 million.

This is another healthy sign that the Green Energy Act and FIT program, despite their fixable problems and Hudak-spun controversy, are luring future-looking investments and jobs to the province.