“Let’s cut in half the energy wasted by our homes and businesses over the next 20 years,” said Obama, adding that states that stepped forward with the best ideas would get financial support from the federal government to make it happen.

Obama’s words echoed recommendations that came out just a week earlier by the Alliance Commission on National Energy Efficiency Policy, a coalition of U.S. energy utilities, academics, industry and environmental groups.

It urged an effort to double energy productivity by 2020, a move that would create an estimated 1.3 million jobs, slash $1,000 a year from household energy bills, give a boost to GDP, decrease energy imports by $100 billion a year, and save U.S. industry a whopping $169 billion a year.

Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, called it a “huge and largely untapped opportunity.”

It may seem a daunting task, but whether you’re talking about the United States or Canada, doubling productivity can be done, should be done, and elsewhere around the world, it has been done.

The U.S. and Canada rank 8th and 12th respectively out of G20 countries when measured by energy productivity. You could call that middle-of-the-road, but when compared to leaders like Germany and Japan, we’re closer to the ditch.

America consumed the equivalent of 83,561 kilowatt-hours per capita in 2011. Canada was a bit higher, at 86,101 kilowatt-hours. Both are among the bottom of the global pack.

Germany, at 46,702 kilowatt-hours, and Japan, at 45,477 kilowatt-hours, are among the top. Both seem to be doing just fine but without the kind of waste that Obama is intent on targeting.

Tighter building codes, stricter vehicle emission standards, serious attempts to recycle waste heat at industrial facilities, and better tax breaks for companies that install more energy-efficient equipment are just some of the options that should be on the table.

Screwing in energy-efficient light bulbs, while great, can only take us so far.

Buildings are particularly ripe for the picking, accounting for well more than 40 per cent of all energy consumed in North America.

Yes, “new” construction is getting more efficient, including all the LEED-certified silver, gold and platinum buildings sprouting up across cities like Toronto and Calgary.

But we’re barely scratching the surface, and to a large extent we’re neglecting the big, deep savings that can come from retrofitting or optimizing the operation of our existing building stock.

Part of the problem, explains Dan Seto, founder and president of Toronto-based CircuitMeter, is that there is a lack of information about how buildings function on a day-to-day, even minute-by-minute basis. He calls commercial buildings “black boxes” – difficult to see inside without the use of expensive energy-monitoring technologies.

“Once you get granularity of information, it opens up the door,” says Seto.

CircuitMeter is part of Seto’s attempt to stick a foot in the door, pry it open, and liberate that data – what amounts to the pulse and other vital signs of a “living” building. “We thought there has got to be a better way to do this.”

The company has designed a low-cost and relatively easy-to-install device called WebMeter, which can monitor the electricity flowing through up to 36 individual circuits in a building’s circuit board. Readings from these meters are stored on outside computer servers – “the cloud” – and can be accessed and analysed any time through the Internet.

“It puts a living, breathing building at your fingertips so you can start figuring out how that building is operating per square foot or employee,” says Seto, explaining that the device can detect problems with equipment and lighting and send alerts. “We can tell if a 2-watt LED light bulb has stopped working if we have to.”

Now, to be clear, there is no shortage of energy monitoring devices and gizmos in the marketplace. What CircuitMeter is offering is a way to overcome the cost barrier. Seto says WebMeter costs less than $30 per circuit, versus $200 and up to $700 per circuit for other monitoring technologies. “In general, we’re about one-tenth the cost.”

CircuitMeter also doesn’t make claims that it will reduce a building owner’s energy bills. What WebMeter does it liberate data – lots of it—by getting deep inside the black box. Once that data tsunami is released, a near-infinite numbers of applications can surf on top.

It will also be a useful way to verify savings from big energy retrofit projects, which is increasingly a condition of financing. “We’re only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding the applications,” says Seto, who last week snagged early-stage financing from the MaRS Cleantech Fund and Robert Macintosh, co-founder of the Pembina Institute in Calgary.

Seto is encouraged by Obama’s big commitment to increase energy productivity. Canada, at some point, will be forced to get with the program.

“There’s big momentum out there to get focused on conservation,” he says. “I think the timing for us is very good.”

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies.

Sitting at a café in Washington, D.C., surrounded by local newspapers and watching a news channel on a wall-mounted television, you’d never know there was an international climate conference being held 11,000 kilometres away.

The talk here is fiscal cliff. There could be a 24-hour channel dedicated to it.

The talk in Doha, Qatar, is climate cliff. Try getting a 24-hour news channel to make more than a brief mention of it.

Indeed, much of what coverage there has been is about the irony of holding the 18th United Nations Climate Change Conference in a country with the world’s largest greenhouse-gas footprint, and in an oil-rich region expected to get pummeled severely by climate change.

The Middle East is already one of the hottest spots on the planet, so the added average rise of 2 degrees C expected by 2050 will make the heat that much more oppressive. It doesn’t get much rain to begin with, but it is expected to get even less over the years. Sand storms are likely to become more frequent and destructive.

And fresh water? Qatar is already one of the most water-scarce countries in the world, with underground aquifers expected to be depleted within two or three decades.

People need to drink. Crops need watering. Lacking drinking water and food, folks start to get angry. As if the Middle East wasn’t volatile enough.

“For a region that is already vulnerable to many non-climate stresses, climate change and its potential physical and socioeconomic impacts are likely to exacerbate this vulnerability, leading to large scale instability,” according to a 2010 U.N. report on the Middle East and North Africa.

“Climate change is likely to act as a risk multiplier, aggravating water scarcity. Water scarcity on the other hand threatens food security by reducing agricultural productivity, as well as hindering human health and economic development.”

So what does Qatar and its neighbours see as the short-term solution to the water crisis? They have grand plans to use more solar and nuclear power, but the reality is that they’re burning more fossil fuels – a combination of oil and natural gas – to power the large-scale desalination facilities needed to turn sea water into water for irrigating crops or drinking.

In other words, the rising need for water desalination because of the impacts of climate change is leading to more use of the fossil fuels that spew heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That’s what one could call a positive feedback loop.

Saudi Arabia is arguably the worst offender on this front, as Canadian economist and author Jeff Rubin likes to point out. In his latest book, The End of Growth, he writes that the Saudis currently burn more than three million barrels of oil daily to meet their own energy needs, and nearly half – yes, half—of that oil is used for facilities that take salt out of seawater.

And let’s not forget all that salt has to go somewhere. Right now, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and others are dumping the salt back into the Persian Gulf. It’s estimated that Qatar alone by 2020 could be dumping the equivalent of 4,600 shipping containers full of pure salt back into Gulf waters – daily – increasing brine concentrations in an already stressed body of water.

Of course, the Middle East isn’t the only region that’s challenged. It’s why these annual U.N. climate conferences have increasingly drawn more business interest over the years.

Tackling problems like pollution, greenhouse-gas emissions and water scarcity will require hundreds of billions of dollars in capital, and most governments are tapped out.

The private sector is being looked to both as the source and funder of energy-efficient, low-carbon solutions. It’s why healing the climate is a massive economic opportunity, or as U.K. billionaire Richard Branson likes to say: “Saving the world is good for business.”

And big business should be at the table. According to a report from the Washington, D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute, there are 80,000 transnational corporations worldwide but 40 per cent of their total value is represented by just 147 of them – or one-fifth of 1 per cent.

These same companies want certainty, which is why more than 100 of the world’s largest corporations – including Shell, Swiss Re, Unilever and Statoil – have used the Doha conference to call on all governments to get on with creating a global price on carbon.

These same companies are also increasingly realizing that the natural world around them – what are often called ecological services, from an economic perspective – make their existence possible.

“They are not islands: corporations operate within a vast economic system that includes a multitude of players and variables,” the authors of the Worldwatch report emphasized. “Any vision of a sustainable future must include full recognition of the role that transnational corporations play in shaping the planet’s human and ecological destiny.”

Technology won’t solve all of our problems. It goes hand-in-hand with changes in behaviour. In many cases, whether talking about countries or businesses or consumers, it comes down to simply wasting less and being smarter about how we make and consume “stuff.”

Strangely enough, this all ties directly to the fiscal cliff issue, as wasting less, being smarter, embracing efficiency and improving productivity all help sustain economic prosperity. Failing to do all of this only pushes us that much closer to the edge of both cliffs.

The climate cliff and fiscal cliff ultimately lead us to the same place. One is Butch Cassidy; the other is the Sundance Kid. They both take the plunge together. Ignoring one to focus on the other is pointless, really, whether you’re sitting in Doha, Washington or Ottawa.

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, or maybe it’s clever politicking, but Kathleen Wynne made a smart move last month.

Two weeks before resigning her cabinet post and announcing her intentions to run for leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party, the MPP for Don Valley West signed amendments to two pieces of legislation that could potentially fill a gaping hole in the province’s troubled energy policy.

Exercising her authority as minister of municipal affairs and housing, Wynne approved changes to the Municipal Act and City of Toronto Act that empower all municipalities in Ontario to take the lead on energy and water conservation programs.

Specifically, municipalities such as Toronto can now use a financing tool called a local improvement charge (LIC) to help property owners finance changes to their homes that are aimed at reducing energy or water consumption.

This is important, as the McGuinty government has neglected to follow through on the conservation promises of its own Green Energy Act, despite the fact that improving energy efficiency is the lowest cost and fastest way to save energy and reduce the environmental impacts of electricity generation.

Previously, local improvement charges could only be used to finance neighbourhood infrastructure projects. If a town or city replaced a sewer pipe or repaved a road, it could spread part of the cost among those property owners that stand to benefit. This would be visible as a special charge added to property tax bills.

The amendments, first proposed back in May, now make it possible for municipalities to apply the LIC model to energy or water efficiency projects taken on by individual property owners.

So what’s the big deal? As I wrote back in June, the amendments mean that municipalities can leverage their ability to raise cheap capital through bond issues.

They can then turn around and offer low-interest financing to property owners looking to insulate their homes, add energy-efficient windows, install smart thermostats, and upgrade to high-efficiency furnaces, air conditioners and water heaters.

Property owners could then pay back the loan over 10 or more years through their property taxes, with the idea being that annual payments would be less than annual energy or water savings. Another bonus is that existing municipal billing systems can be leveraged.

There are many names for this kind of program. When focused on energy conservation, programs are often called Property Assessed Payments for Energy Retrofits, or PAPER. When designed to encourage installation of renewable energy, such as rooftop solar, it’s called Property Assessed Clean Energy, or PACE. The legislative changes in Ontario allow for both types of programs to be created.

“I would say that over 50 municipalities are so far interested in this model,” said Sonja Persram, president of Toronto-based Sustainable Alternatives Consulting Inc., who has been a major champion of the proposed legislative changes. “Of those, a fairly large number — both large and small — are keen to move forward.”

Ontario is now the third jurisdiction in Canada — behind Yukon and Nova Scotia — to embrace LICs as a method for stimulating efficiency investments by easing the upfront capital burden that often make such investments unpalatable for property owners.

Brian Kelly, manager of sustainability for the Region of Durham, said what amounts to a minor regulatory change on Wynne’s part opens the door for municipalities to stimulate major residential retrofit activity, create local jobs, and at the same time help consumers do what they need to do to lower energy and water costs.

There’s little, if any, political or financial risk to the province. But the impact is potentially huge, in terms of lowering emissions, reducing pressure on utility infrastructure, and spurring economic activity.

Toronto councillor Mike Layton, who is pushing the city to launch a pilot project as soon as possible, called the approved amendments an “exciting” development. “Staff will be bringing a pilot project in coming months and I hope we can find money to fund it,” said Layton. “It would be great if we can start getting some real pickup on this.”

The Toronto Real Estate Board, the Toronto Board of Trade, as well as several labour organizations, NGOs and business leaders, have so far backed Layton’s efforts.

As far as seeing the model expanded country-wide, Natural Resources Canada considers the approach a complement or alternative to incentive-based programs that overcomes two barriers: Upfront access to capital and a practical way to pay back loans — i.e. through municipal or local utility billing infrastructure.

“These mechanisms are key to market transformation, helping homeowners move away from reliance on government subsidies to a more market-based arrangement,” according to the ministry.

The federal EcoEnergy home retrofit program, underpinned by nearly $200 million in subsidies, only tapped into 6 per cent of Canada’s housing stock.

“This is potentially a huge spur for the Ontario economy,” said Persram, who expects to see plenty of municipal collaboration on program development. “This allows municipalities to take control of their own destiny.”

If the approach is successful, the Liberal government — perhaps one day Wynne — can take credit for the heavy lifting it has essentially offloaded.

All it took was a signature.

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies.

Sixteen years ago actor Woody Harrelson decided to climb the Golden Gate Bridge with a bunch of environmental activists to protest the logging of redwood forests in Northern California.

The two-time Academy Award nominee thought it was pure craziness that, as a society, we’re fine with cutting down trees just so we can make products—namely paper—that are used once and then just tossed away as trash.

Since then, it has been Harrelson’s dream to find an economical, efficient and eco-friendly way to make paper that doesn’t rely on wood pulp.

“Maybe my name should have tipped me off to what my future would be,” the actor joked earlier this month during a phone interview from Atlanta, where he’s currently shooting the sequel to The Hunger Games.

“If you think about it, over half of all paper used is just used temporarily,” he explained, adding that much of it comes from ancient and threatened forests, including Canada’s boreal forest. “I’d like to see that changed.”

Harrelson, in fact, is more than just seeing that change. As co-founder of Canadian cleantech venture Prairie Pulp & Paper, he’s helping to lead it. The Winnipeg-based company has developed a cost-competitive approach to making paper out of wheat straw – the stuff that farmers often burn as left-behind field waste.

To Harrelson’s delight, Prairie P&P is starting to get some serious commercial traction after 14 years of working to perfect its patented recipe and process. In August, for example, the company’s “Step Forward Paper” – a mix of 80 per cent wheat straw and 20 per cent Forest Stewardship Council-certified sustainable wood – hit the shelves in Staples Canada stores as part of a partnership with environmental group Canopy.

Its next challenge was to show the broader marketplace the degree to which its paper is more sustainable. Earlier this year, the company commissioned a lifecycle environmental impact study from carbon management firm Offsetters.

The final report, publicly released today, found that the process of making Prairie P&P’s straw paper consumes on average half the energy as paper made from 100 per cent virgin wood. At the same time, it emits at least 40 per cent less greenhouse-gas emissions.

On most metrics – energy use, wastewater production, and emissions – it also beat paper made of 30 per cent recycled materials by a significant margin. Only 100 per cent recycled paper came close to matching the straw paper’s environmental footprint.

“In and of itself this product sets a new eco-standard for paper,” Jeff Golfman, co-founder and president of Prairie P&P, said in a recent interview.

So how did a famous Hollywood actor with the name Woody end up becoming the co-founder of a Manitoba company trying to reduce our use of wood? The seed of the venture was planted in 1998 when Harrelson began researching the market.

“I had a meeting with this engineer who is very knowledgeable about the making of non-wood pulp and paper mills,” Harrelson recounted. “I asked him who was the closest to making this happen in North America. He turned me on to Jeff.”

The engineer, it turned out, was working for Golfman, who had been travelling the world assembling a team of technical folks capable of making good on his own straw paper vision.

Golfman, an honours graduate in business administration from the Richard Ivey School of Business, is a self-described environmentalist and eco-entrepreneur who 20 years ago developed the Blue Box recycling program for the City of Winnipeg. After that, he started a company that manufactures “sweat shop free” furniture before moving on to tree-free paper.

“Woody heard about what I was up to,” recalled Golfman. “And literally 24 hours later I was on the phone with him chatting about it.” Two weeks later he was on a plane to Boston to meet Harrelson in person, and 48 hours after that they shook on a deal.

Harrelson became one of the company’s main investors. “We’ve been business partners ever since,” said Golfman, adding that funds have also been received through the federal and Manitoba governments, as well as Sustainable Development Technology Canada.

Harrelson, who in 2009 received an honorary degree from York University for his contributions to environmental education, described their first meeting as a “great talk” that convinced him of Golfman’s commitment to the project. “I could just tell with his energy and positivity that he was the guy who could move this paper forward.”

And move it forward he has. The company is working exclusively with a pulp and paper mill in India that has so far produced 40 million sheets of Step Forward Paper, which looks and feels just like any other printer-quality paper on the market.

Golfman’s plan over the next five years is to build a production facility in Manitoba capable of making paper that is 95 per cent wheat straw and 5 per cent flax, both of which would be sourced locally from the Canadian prairies.

At the same time, the company aims to build awareness of the product throughout Canada and the United States over the next two years, eventually moving into Central and South America. The Canadian facility will serve those regions, while the mill in India will continue to supply Asian, African and European customers.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Golfman.

Harrelson is hyped about the prospect of seeing paper come from farmers, not forests. “To me this is a big one,” he said. “This one has been a long-term dream and I’m excited about where it’s at right now.”

And he gives due props to his Canadian partner. “It’s incredible how far Jeff has come with this.”

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies.