From a greenhouse-gas perspective, the emission reductions aren’t massive — up to 25 per cent reduction — but the real gains here are in the reduction of smog-causing pollutants. Nitrogen oxides and diesel particulate matter are reduced by 90 per cent. Over time, it leaves open the possibility of using renewable natural gas, sourced from landfill gas and municipal wastewater biogas, to displace its fossil fuel cousin. The city of Surrey, B.C., is already heading in this direction. It now requires that natural gas-powered trucks be used for its municipal waste collection, a service being performed by BFI Canada, which has purchased 75 trucks that run on CNG. At the same time, it is launching an organics collection program for Surrey’s 470,000 residents and businesses that will see the household waste converted into biogas that will be cleaned, conditioned and used in BFI trucks. Surrey hopes the new biogas facility will begin operation in 2014.

Toronto was supposed to head in this direction as well, but from what I understand the plan has unraveled under the administration of Mayor Rob Ford.

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Tyler Hamilton

My family flew to North Carolina during the holiday to visit relatives and, being aware of new baggage fees, we made every effort to pack lightly.

Of two adults and two children we had only one item to check in. Not bad. But it still meant paying $25 to get the bag to Charlotte and another $25 to get it back home. Had we each checked just one bag for our one-week trip, it would have cost the family $200.

I point this out because I’m perplexed by Air Canada’s strong opposition to the European Union’s new aviation carbon tax, which went into effect Jan. 1.

The airline — as well as other members of the National Airlines Council of Canada — has no problem arbitrarily adding $50 to the price of a 2,500-kilometre round trip to the United States.

But it won’t tolerate the European Union slapping on a carbon tax that would only add $1.45 to a $500 round-trip ticket between Toronto and Frankfurt, Germany, a journey that covers five times the distance.

How did I come to $1.45? Anyone can calculate the impact on any trip to Europe. Just go to the website of the International Civil Aviation Organization at and click on the carbon calculator link at the bottom-left of the screen. Or click here.

A round trip between Toronto and Frankfurt generates 922 kilograms of carbon emissions per person. Per tonne, the price of carbon emissions on the European market is about $10.50, so the price for 922 kilograms would be $9.68.

But that’s not what airlines would initially have to pay per passenger. Under the new European aviation tax scheme, airlines still get a free pass for 85 per cent of their emissions. With the tax only applying to the remaining 15 per cent, that works out to $1.45 that will surely be passed along to consumers.

As industry observer Bill Hemmings said, “Commercially it’s a non-event.” Airlines arbitrarily change online flight prices on a minute-by-minute basis by much larger amounts.

Yet Air Canada and its fellow airlines in Canada, the United States, China, India, Russia and Japan insist on demonizing the fee and amplifying talk of trade wars and unproven claims of job destruction. It doesn’t matter that the European Union Court of Justice ruled recently that the new tax does not contravene international law.

“This ruling by no means settles this matter,” George Petsikas, president of Canada’s airline council, said defiantly after the European court ruling.

Those opposed to the EU’s actions argue that the matter of emissions reductions in the global aviation industry is best addressed through a “coherent, multilateral framework” via the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

The solution, they feel, is to create yet another international initiative that likely will lead to more delay and inaction on pressing climate matters.

Been there, done that. What’s admirable about the EU approach is that it’s about more action and less talk. Understandably, it’s tired of waiting for the rest of the world to get its act together.

The aviation sector accounts for 3 per cent of global emissions, but both its share of global emissions and its absolute contribution are expected to grow under a do-nothing scenario that isn’t sustainable.

To be fair, the industry hasn’t been idle. Fuel efficiency has improved by 16 per cent between 2001 and 2008, according to the International Air Transport Association. Since 1990, major Canadian airlines have improved fuel efficiency by 31 per cent.

But it’s not enough, and there’s a whole lot more that can be done. A sector-specific carbon tax that grows gradually and includes more countries over time will accelerate innovation and give the most fuel-efficient airlines an edge over competitors.

As airline fleets are renewed there will be greater incentive to embrace more efficient engine technology and light-weight materials, such as carbon fibre, in the design of new aircraft.

The air transport association estimates the industry will spend $1.5 trillion on new aircraft by 2020, resulting in more than a quarter of the global fleet being replaced. It’s important to make sure new aircraft are built and purchased with fuel-efficiency top of mind.

Airlines will also be more motivated to use renewable jet fuel products in old and new aircraft to offset their carbon footprints. There’s tremendous promise with respect to carbon-neutral jet fuels derived from algae, wood waste, inedible plants such as camelina, and even industrial waste gases.

One advantage is that aviation is a relatively easy market to target. There are fewer than 2,000 airports around the world that serve as major fuelling hubs for airplanes, so the required infrastructure changes to accommodate renewable jet fuel are quite manageable. Contrast this with the hundreds of thousands of fuelling stations that service cars worldwide.

Jet fuel also represents less than 8 per cent of global demand for oil products, so it’s not as daunting as tackling the market for consumer vehicles, which consume more than 40 per cent of oil supply.

The industry says it is already going down this innovation path. That only makes the EU carbon tax even more benign. The EU, meanwhile, has said that any airline headquartered in a country with similar emission-reduction policies would be exempt from the EU tax.

So what, exactly, is the fuss all about? It’s about the rest of the world not liking Europe taking the lead and telling it what to do, and even though it’s clear that we need to do it.

It certainly isn’t about the financial interests of travellers, who have been and will continue to be penalized much more by arbitrary fees designed to pad the bottom line.

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

Fact is, Layton and Dion supported a price on carbon — that should have been more important than the details on how that price was created. By making it an election issue, Layton helped sabotage any momentum to price carbon in Canada, making it a toxic issue that to this day no federal politician without suicidal tendencies will touch.

My argument is that we need to get over this fear of a carbon tax (or carbon pricing in general), create a discussion about it — both nationally and in Ontario — and recognize how putting a price on carbon can help get our fiscal house in order and strengthen an otherwise weak climate strategy.

See column below:

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Tyler Hamilton

It’s hard to hold a grudge against Jack Layton.

Passionate. Likeable. Well-intentioned. Caring. These are all words to describe the former federal NDP leader.

He had a lot of things right, but many still don’t forgive Layton for helping to sabotage a proposal in 2008 that called for the creation of a national tax on carbon emissions.

The idea came from then Liberal leader Stéphane Dion, who called his plan “the Green Shift.” Money collected from a carbon tax would be used to lower personal income taxes and invest in social and environmental programs, ultimately reducing Canada’s dependency on fossil fuels and assisting the shift to a low-carbon economy.

Layton aggressively attacked the plan, contributing to a Liberal implosion at the polls and a Conservative re-election that gave us our current do-little climate strategy.

It’s not that Layton opposed putting a price on carbon; he just favoured a different approach — a complex cap-and-trade system that would let the market set the price and let the government set and adjust the emissions cap.

And it’s not like Dion did himself any favours. He had a decent policy in his hands but he did a horrible job of selling it to the public and failed miserably in defending it against Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s campaign of smear and fear.

The bitter pill is that Dion and Layton both had the goal of putting a price on carbon. Both saw it as necessary for making our industries more resource-productive while achieving meaningful emissions reductions and fulfilling international climate obligations.

But many blame Layton for playing the spoiler, and as a result, for taking talk of a serious carbon-pricing plan off the table, where it rests toxic to this day.

“You basically can’t speak of it in political company,” says Alex Wood, senior director of policy and markets at Sustainable Prosperity, a green economy think tank in Ottawa. “There’s no political home for it.”

Not federally, at least. British Columbia took the big step in 2008 with the same kind of revenue-neutral carbon tax proposed by Dion. As controversial as it was and continues to be in many circles, it hasn’t plunged the B.C. economy into an abyss.

Quite the opposite. The province now has the lowest per-capita consumption of gasoline in the country and the lowest income tax rates. Its GDP has grown over the past three years at a time when the global economy is struggling, and the expectation is that B.C. will outperform the Canadian provincial average in 2012.

Carbon emissions, meanwhile, appear to be heading in the right direction. Next year the tax will rise to $30 per tonne of CO2 equivalent emissions, pulling in nearly $1 billion for the province, which will redistribute that revenue mostly through income tax cuts.

Each year that passes makes it harder to kill the B.C. carbon tax, says Wood. “No government will be able to come in and say we’re cutting this but we’ve got to raise your taxes. Politically it’s achieved an almost untouchable status.”

So when Harper insisted Dion’s plan would “screw everybody,” as The Economist magazine recently reminded us, it’s instructive to look at B.C. as we head into climate talks next week in Durban, South Africa, and ask: are we collectively getting screwed by not having a national carbon-pricing scheme?

We have a sense of the economic costs of not acting. The independent National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy estimated in September that climate impact costs for Canada would reach $5 billion annually by 2020 and as high as $43 billion a year by 2050.

Australia, a kindred spirit to Canada with similar resource-dependent industries, has seen that writing on the wall. It decided after years of Canadian-style foot-dragging that a carbon price is good for the country’s long-term economic health.

It is now poised to introduce a national carbon tax in July 2012 that will morph into a cap-and-trade system after a few years. The policy is part of a larger economic reform initiative aimed at making the transition to a clean energy economy.

An optimist might hope that Australia’s move will rub off on Canada, which could use the revenues from a carbon tax (or cap-and-trade system) to help get its fiscal house in order. It could generate tens of billions of dollars annually by 2020 that could go toward lowering income taxes, reducing the deficit, or boosting investment in climate-friendly public infrastructure projects.

If not federally, maybe it will rub off on Ontario. Saddled with what’s expected to be a $16-billion deficit this year, the province could benefit by slapping a price on carbon.

That was the plan in 2008 when Ontario joined the Western Climate Initiative, a group of Canadian provinces and U.S. states (including California) trying to set up a regional carbon cap-and-trade system. But six U.S. states recently pulled out and Ontario, which was supposed to launch on Jan. 1, is now waffling.

Maybe former TD Bank economist Don Drummond can talk some sense into Premier Dalton McGuinty. Drummond is expected to issue a report in January that will advise the McGuinty government on how to proceed with economic reforms.

Drummond is a fan of carbon pricing, particularly the idea of a carbon tax, having endorsed Dion’s Green Shift plan for the benefits it could bring to the Canadian economy.

It’s not entirely impossible that Drummond might try to stimulate talk of an Ontario carbon tax for Ontario, as toxic as the two words might be.

No thanks to Jack.

But seriously, isn’t it time we had an honest and adult discussion about it?

Tyler Hamilton, author of Mad Like Tesla, writes weekly about green energy and clean technologies. Contact him at tyler@cleanbreak.ca.

“Our research shows that during the past eight years alone, (commodity prices) have undone the decline of the previous century, rising to levels not seen since the early 1900s,” according to McKinsey. “In addition, volatility is now greater than at any time since the oil-shocked 1970s because commodity prices increasingly move in lockstep. Our analysis suggests that they will remain high and volatile for at least the next 20 years if current trends hold—barring a major macroeconomic shock—as global resource markets oscillate in response to surging global demand and inelastic supplies.”

The report talks of the surging demand for energy, food, metals and water as 3 billion new middle-class citizens emerge over the next two decades. In India calorie intake will rise 20 per cent per person, while in China per-capita meat consumption is expected to rise 60 per cent. While such dramatic growth of consumption isn’t unusual historically, and while we have managed to accommodate that growth in the past, McKinsey says things are very different this time around:

There are three differences today. First, we are now aware of the potential climatic impact of carbon emissions associated with surging resource use. Without major changes, global carbon emissions will remain significantly above the level required to keep increases in the global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius—the threshold identified as potentially catastrophic.

Second, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to expand the supply of commodities, especially in the short run. While there may not be absolute resource shortages—the perceived risk of one has historically spurred efficiency-enhancing innovations—we are at a point where supply is increasingly inelastic. Long-term marginal costs are increasing for many resources as depletion rates accelerate and new investments are made in more complex, less productive locations.

Third, the linkages among resources are becoming increasingly important. Consider, for example, the potential ripple effects of water shortfalls at a time when roughly 70 percent of all water is consumed by agriculture and 12 percent by energy production. In Uganda, water shortages have led to escalating energy prices, which led to the use of more wood fuels, which led to deforestation and soil degradation that threatened the food supply.

So where do we go from here? McKinsey, citing forthcoming research, says better resource productivity can maybe meet more than 20 per cent of the forecast 2030 demand for energy, steel, water and land. Higher prices over the long-term will also create incentives for “breakthrough” innovations that could reduce carbon emissions. But even then, a heck of a lot more needs to be done, the consultancy argues — and it won’t be easy. “Major policy, behavioral, and institutional barriers must be addressed,” it argues. “Yet as we enter a new era for commodities, there’s little choice but to act.”

Action. Now isn’t that a novel concept. Sure beats denial.

The bad news: Emissions from the United States, China, India and other developing countries took a giant leap in 2010, bringing total global emissions 6 per cent higher than the previous year, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Energy.

So, sadly, it seems that global emissions are higher than the worst-case projections that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published in its 2007 report. Under its worst-case scenario predictions, global temperatures will rise by between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are currently 389 parts per million and rising fast.

Something’s gotta give, folks.

And all of this when we’re supposedly teetering on the brink of recession. Hell, imagine what things would be like if the economy was running on all cylinders. Scary.

Mad Like Tesla: Underdog Inventors and Their Relentless Pursuit of Clean Energy was launched this month and has been well-received. The reviews so far have been positive, and awareness of the book is slowly building. But not fast enough. I want to take this moment to ask my readers, many of whom have already purchased the book (thank you!), to help spread the word. Share this link or the Mad Like Tesla website (www.madliketesla.com) on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Refer to it when commenting on the various blogs you might follow. And for my media friends out there — whether in the mainstream press or the blogosphere — please consider a review, or alternatively, I’m happy to chat about the many odd and inspiring stories in this book. Please see press release here.

Thank you all for your ongoing interest and support. BTW: Many have asked, so I’m happy to report that the e-book version of Mad Like Tesla is now available at Amazon.com.

BTW: Here’s my response to her last major assault on green energy back in April 2010.

Here’s my response to Wente’s most recent anti-green column, starting with the Globe’s headline: “Message to McGuinty: Most green-job schemes have been miserable failures.”

I can’t believe the headline writer and overseeing editor would allow the word “most” to make it into that headline. Wente doesn’t back up the “most” claim with any statistics, let alone credible ones. And the few examples she cites are small, based on someone else’s reporting (such as one problematic report in the New York Times) and/or come without any context.

Now, here’s Wente’s opening two paragraphs:

Dalton McGuinty has hit the campaign trail, and he’s paving it green. Earlier this month he announced that Ontario will pump $80-million into building charging stations for electric cars. “They are peppy, they are quiet, and the thing that I like best as a father, and ultimately a grandfather, I would hope, is that they’re clean,” he said. By 2020, he hopes, one out of 20 cars in Ontario will be electrically powered.

Meantime, Costco, the giant retailer, has pulled the plug on its electric car-charging stations, which it had installed in its California parking lots. The reason is that nobody uses them. Even China – which promised it would leapfrog the world in electric-car development – is backing off.

First, Costco is removing chargers that were installed back when GM introduced its EV1 electric vehicle to the market in the 1990s, before the cars were crushed and shredded. Costco says the chargers aren’t used, but that’s largely because electric vehicles only began hitting the market this year and the chargers that are in place are outdated (i.e. based on old standards) or simply stopped working, as you’ll read further down in this Daily Mail story.  Second, Costco is just one company seemingly going against the grain at a time when dozens of others, including Best Buy, IKEA, Walgreens and Lowe’s, are adding them. Personally, I don’t think retail stores are ideal places for EV charging systems, but the fact that so many big brand operations are beginning to test them and deploy them is a good sign. For Wente to cite the Costco decision as proof that EV charging systems, and thus electric vehicles, are being abandoned is quite the stretch. Also completely wrong is her unsupported comment that the Chinese are “backing off.” How she came to this conclusion is beyond me, but perhaps she didn’t read China’s 12th five-year plan. By 2015 China plans to have 4,000 charging stations and growth is expected to increase rapidly from there with plans to invest nearly $5 billion in charging infrastructure by 2020, at which point the country will have at least 10,000 public state-run charging locations, not including the tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of private home and business charging stations that are expected to emerge. That doesn’t sound like backing off.

Indeed, research firm Pike Research projected last week that there will be 7.7 million charging stations for EVs located in homes, workplaces and public spaces worldwide by 2017, with about 1.5 million of them located in the United States. So much for backing off. I’ll admit that’s an ambitious prediction, but the trend is clear — yet Wente cites a decision by Costco to remove obsolete charging systems as proof that the market for EVs and their associated charging infrastructure is fading.

The rest of the world has begun to discover that the green dream is a mirage. Across the U.S., federal, state and city governments have poured zillions into green schemes. Most have been miserable failures.

The city of Seattle, for example, got $20-million from the U.S. Department of Energy to retrofit houses and make them more energy efficient. The money was supposed to create 2,000 jobs and retrofit at least 2,000 homes. But by this month, only three homes had been retrofitted and only 14 jobs created. Even the greens admit the program is a total flop.

There’s that “most” word again, as in “most have been miserable failures.” She’s referring both generally to green energy initiatives spearheaded by government and specifically to a small $20-million household retrofit program in Seattle that didn’t deliver promised results. Forget that maybe, just maybe this specific program was mismanaged. So what? I mean, programs — private or public — get mismanaged and don’t produce results all the time. Hey, the market even screws up, too. You know, like how mismanagement by U.S. and European banks led to a worldwide financial crisis? No mention of that, of course. Also no mention of how successful the Canadian federal government’s EcoEnergy home retrofit program was before it was cancelled in 2010. In all, Ottawa committed $750 million to a program that encouraged Canadians to spend $4 billion of their own money. In doing so, those Canadians will save an average of $340 million a year every year on their energy bills — all of it money that will be reinvested in the Canadian economy each year. Also, the $4 billion spent by homeowners generated $250 million in GST revenue for the government. All of this also created thousands of jobs, contributing even more tax revenue to Ottawa. How can that be categorized as a miserable failure? It can’t, which is why Wente didn’t mention it — it didn’t fit with her message or her goal, which is to poke holes in the McGuinty government’s green energy and electric vehicle strategy and give momentum to the opposition PC party as a provincial election approaches.

Green projects, it turns out, don’t create many jobs, and those jobs are costly. Barack Obama recently visited a plant in Michigan to tout its investment in new battery technology. The plant got grants of $300-million, and expects to create 150 new jobs. That works out to $2-million a job. Then there’s SolFocus, a company in San Jose, Calif., that produces solar panels. The mayor called it an “enormously important” development for the city’s economy,” The New York Times reported. But the company assembles its solar panels in China, and its new headquarters employs just 90 people.

During his 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama promised to create five million green jobs over the next decade. But as The New York Times reported last week, “federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed.”

At this point Wente hasn’t established that green projects don’t create jobs, but she goes ahead and makes this statement anyway, giving only a tiny snapshop of job creation by mentioning two more ventures — one an electric vehicle battery maker and the other a maker of solar panels. She talks about how one government investment in a battery maker worked out to $2-million a job, though she doesn’t talk about future job growth at that company that was seeded by this government money — she only talks about the situation as it stands today so early in the birth of this new market. And this is where Wente goes off tracks, referring to a recent New York Times report that was clearly the inspiration for her column in the first place. That is, she waited for a juicy story in a more left-leaning U.S. newspaper like the Times and used it as a way to legitimize her own biases on the green energy topic. After all, it’s juicy to quote the Times saying “federal and state efforts to stimulate creation of green jobs have largely failed.”

But the Times article was also a failure of journalism. As Joe Romm points out at Climate Progress, isn’t it kind of strange to declare a program a failure about two or three years into a 10-year mandate? As Romm writes, “Imagine if, in 1963, two years after JFK’s famous speech to Congress, the New York Times had run a story, ‘Space program fails to live up to promise.’” Let’s keep in mind as well that the space program wouldn’t have gone far either if, during that time, a U.S. Congress filled with anti-science, anti-government Tea Partiers prevented the flow of money into Kennedy’s vision. Obama’s goal is achievable but not when such programs are consistently under attack by state and federal legislators who have only one objective: to defeat and humiliate the U.S. president. This is Wente’s objective with respect to McGuinty, who is also facing resistance but has actually delivered so much more: 20,000-plus green jobs, and counting. Is that a failure? Wente mentions that job count, but she doesn’t directly call it a failure, preferring instead to breeze over results in Ontario and focus on negative outcomes in the U.S. market.

Maybe he should take a look at Spain, which also set out to become the solar-power capital of the world. Everything went fine, so long as the subsidies kept flowing. But when the world economy went south, the Spanish government couldn’t afford them any more and pulled the plug. Bye, bye solar, and bye, bye jobs. By one reckoning, Spain spent half a million euros for each green job it created.

The moral of the story is as clear as a row of giant wind turbines on the horizon. Governments that invest in risky, expensive and unproven technologies will probably lose big. The only way they are able to lure private investment is with generous subsidies and long-term contracts. And even then, the failure rate is high. Ontario has already attracted its share of “suitcase” companies that are here so long as the money flows, and not a moment longer. And when they go belly-up, guess who’s stuck with the bills?

It’s predictable that Wente again trots out the Spanish example, which she also used in her wind-bashing column a year earlier. It’s the only example she can really offer up, largely because Spain’s solar market did in fact go through troubles and it is one cautionary tale that’s worth learning from. However, Spain is not representative of the market and its health. Wente neglects to mention countries that are thriving, how quickly solar costs are falling, how worldwide investment in solar continues to grow at a healthy pace, and how Ontario solar manufacturers are saying they can deal with a 30 per cent reduction in the feed-in-tariff rate as part of a plan to eventually eliminate incentives. No question Ontario could have done a better job executing its green-energy programs, and while there may be the occasional dud along the way, what this province is doing is investing in a future that Wente apparently can’t see or appreciate, or maybe doesn’t want.

By the way, to call solar and wind and electric vehicles “unproven” technology is, well, wrong. This stuff works, and it works well. It’s no less proven than the iPhone or BlackBerry Wente carries on her hip. Is it risky? Yes, because the deck is stacked against it and folks like Wente don’t make it any easier. But risk is also a matter of perception. I mean, drilling deep in the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea is risky, and so is investing in the oil sands, and so is sending people deep underground to mine for coal.

Anyway, none of this is going to change Wente’s mind. But I do expect better journalism from her, at least on this issue. And I do expect the editors of the Globe and Mail to challenge unsubstantiated claims, even if they come from columnists.

Some other interesting comments:

“As things stand, the world simply doesn’t have the luxury of turning its back on nuclear power, despite the recent disaster in Japan”

Oil demand and overall energy demand is expected to double between now and 2050 as developing countries grow and add more cars to the roads.

If we do nothing, “a doubling in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, more than three and a half times the amount recommended to keep temperatures at a safe level.”

“We have become terribly complacent in the way in which we use energy… The lowest hanging fruit is in the transport sector. Smaller, more efficient cars will get you from A to B, just not as quickly. Similarly, buildings can be powered much more efficiently, with the cost of alterations coming down quickly as technology evolves.”

“The lead times we highlight on the measures in ‘the solution’ are often long. Therefore the squeeze on fossil fuels in the interim could be both persistent and painful as oil prices are so sensitive to minor imbalances between energy demand and supply.”

It’s an interesting read, and while those who follow these issues closely won’t find anything new, it’s good to have another major institution issuing a warning and call for much-needed change in the way the world operates.

Why Mad Like Tesla? That’s explained in the introduction, but in a nutshell Serbian-American engineer Nikola Tesla invented many important technologies in his lifetime. yet he faced constant struggle against naysayers and skeptics who couldn’t, at first, grasp the significance of what he was sharing with the world. Many dismissed Tesla as a mad scientist, and yet his inventions shaped the world largely for the better. So, in my view, if someone today is mad like Tesla, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s quite a good thing, actually — we need more of these people, for the changes necessary in our world will not come from the kind of cautious, incremental steps being taken today.

I have a website for the book in the works, but it won’t be ready until end of August.

Thanks for your support!