We’re doomed. It seems the mainstream media believe that the most pressing issues of our times — climate change, environmental degradation, energy security, etc. – should be left to general assignment reporters or treated as political news covered by political reporters. Copenhagen, for the most part, was covered as a political event, yet the issues underlying this political conference were highly scientific in nature. Covering these issues properly requires a certain expertise, specifically when we’re dealing with a politically charged issue like climate change. Environmental reporters know when they’re being duped by faux experts; political or GA reporters don’t. Environmental reporters are better at explaining complex issues in a way that the average person can better understand; political or GA reporters can often make matters even more confusing to the reader or gloss over important details.

Sadly, the environmental reporter has become an endangered species. I heard yesterday that the Oregonian just disbanded its environmental reporting team and made them all into general assignment reporters. Also yesterday Keith Johnson announced that his Wall Street Journal blog Environmental Capital was “closing its virtual doors.” In October, the prestigious Columbia School of Journalism announced it had stopped accepting applications for its Earth and Environmental Science Journalism program because of “the current weakness in the job market for environmental journalists.” In a letter to its faculty, the school wrote “media organizations across the country are in dire financial straits and thousands of journalists’ jobs have been eliminated. Science and environment beats have been particularly vulnerable.”

Again, this is all happening at a time when we need this kind of experienced coverage most, and when governments and the business community both are giving environmental issues more attention than ever. My own newspaper, the Toronto Star, used to have two environmental reporters a year ago. Through newsroom attrition both positions are vacant, but given plans to downsize the newsroom there appears no desire to fill those spots. It’s discouraging to say the least.

But, hell, we can all take comfort that Sarah Palin is joining Fox News.

Smart meters and time-of-use pricing are always well-read stories because there’s true division within the general public on whether smart meters are consumer-friendly gadgets that encourage conservation or utility-friendly devices that make it easier to gouge consumers. See my story in the Toronto Star from Friday. My take is that electricity prices are going up whether we get smart meters or not, and that smart meters — and the applications they enable — offer households a way to shift and even lower their electricity use to buffer the impact of rising prices. The mistake — and again, just my view — is that smart meters have been improperly marketed to consumers as some kind of sexy wonder tool that will help them lower their bills. Instead, utilities should have downplayed the introduction and simply moved ahead with their installation as part of a less exciting grid modernization play — equivalent to a telecom company upgrading from analog to digital networks so that, down the road, new services can be offered to customers. Customers don’t care about the bandwidth, they just care about the handsets and what they can do.

By positioning smart meters as more of an infrastructure play the cost of deployment can be simply incorporated into annual capital budgets and households are more resigned to the fact that getting the new device is mandatory. Let’s face it, initially smart meters are about helping utilities manage their networks better — i.e. they can pinpoint problems and do more detailed analysis of individual household, neighbourhood, and community power consumption, improving system planning and maintenance operations and preparing utilities for increased distributed generation in their service territories.

By making this seem like some gift to consumers, as has been done, utilities open themselves up to consumers expecting certain results and wanting the option of getting or not getting the smart meter. (more…)

I have a short article about efforts to establish dot-eco as a new top-level domain as ICANN, the regulatory body in charge of the Internet’s addressing system, prepares to accept proposals early next year. Two groups have so far expressed a desire to become the official registry for dot-eco — one group, based in California, is Dot Eco LLC and is backed by former U.S. vice-president Al Gore and a number of U.S.-based environmental organizations; the other group, based in Vancouver, B.C., is called Big Room Inc. and is backed by former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev (through his group Green Cross International), the David Suzuki Foundation, and WWF International.
Both companies have set up Web sites to build support for their bids. The Gore-backed group is more U.S.-centric and seems more focused on climate change, while the Gorbachev-backed group has a more international flavour and wants to embrace environmental issues (including climate change) more generally. Find Dot Eco LLC here and Big Room here.

Creating .eco as an Internet address extension could be beneficial, but it could also enable corporate greenwashing. And major questions are bound to emerge, like: Can you register www.coal.eco or www.climatechangeisahoax.eco? The good news is that both groups want to take a portion of proceeds from the sale of these new addresses and donate them to environmental causes. It will be interesting to see as 2010 approaches whether any other bidders come out of the woodwork.

UPDATE: The folks at Dot Eco LLC were upset that I didn’t include a comment from them in the above story, so I gave them a chance to comment on this blog post. Here’s what Minor Childers, co-founder of Dot Eco LLC, had to say:

If you’re looking for an up-to-date breakdown of the solar industry in Canada and the jobs that are expected to be created in the coming years, check out this labour survey by Kelly Sears Consulting Group, which was commissioned by the Canadian Solar Industries Association and Canada’s Electricity Sector Council.

Key findings:

• Doubling of jobs by 2011.
• Industry shortage of installers right now.
• By 2011 there will also be a shortage of system designers, project managers and engineers.
• Recommendation to increase training and relevant curricula.

My guess is that most of these shortages and job opportunities will be created in Ontario, given the province’s Green Energy Act and progressive feed-in tariff program.

Jimmy Wales wants to build the world’s greatest handbook for going green. Actually, he wants you to build it.  The makers of Wikipedia have launched Wikia Green, a “project to build a community generated online resource that is home to the best information about green topics and issues.” There are many other sites out there trying to be a one-stop shop for all things green, so perhaps this is one — in the spirit of Wikipedia — that will actually work. Can’t hurt, right? It’s worth keeping an eye on this site to see how it evolves over the months.