“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.

Proponents of electric vehicles struggle with the same chicken-and-egg dilemma that has held back many promising technologies over the years.

It’s easy enough selling the virtues of vehicles that plug into a wall socket and run on low-emission electricity. They’re generally clean, quiet, cheap to maintain, inexpensive fuel-wise and quick off the mark when it comes to performance.

But range anxiety continues to be a deal breaker for many. Battery technologies are getting better, charging times are getting faster, but the fact is there aren’t many places to charge an electric vehicle when it’s not parked in your own driveway.

In other words, we need more charging stations — namely, the 240-volt “Level 2” variety, which can cut charging times in half — but there are too few electric vehicles driving the roads to justify the very investment that will boost confidence in and sales of electric vehicles.

This conundrum explains why the Ontario government announced this week the creation of a rebate program for homeowners and businesses looking to purchase Level 2 charging equipment, on top of the $5,000 to $8,500 rebate already offered on electric vehicle purchases.

Starting Jan. 1, a buyer of a charging station can get a rebate of up to 50 per cent of the total purchase and installation cost, capped at $1,000. It could help spur installation of the equipment at gas stations, shopping malls and in company parking lots.

Shopping malls alone are a tremendous opportunity, as most people who go to them stick around for two or three hours — enough time to recharge a good portion of an electric vehicle’s battery system. And landlords of major shopping malls, I’m told, are keen to go “green” while offering an enhanced experience to visitors.

Still, they have a legitimate concern: What if they build it and nobody comes? What if spots dedicated to EV charging are left empty much of the time, while drivers of gas-powered vehicles — the vast majority of shoppers — have to cruise around for an open spot elsewhere?

One innovative answer has been proposed by Toronto-based CleanPark Investments, a minority-owned spin-off of solar project developer Carbonfree Technology. Joel Donen, chief executive of CleanPark, told me that one compromise is to create a premium parking area for EV charging that can also be used for drivers of gas-fuelled cars.

CleanPark’s idea is to build parking canopies near the main entrances of major retail shopping malls, with each canopy housing six parking spaces that would double as solar-assisted charging stations for electric vehicles.

Plug-in vehicles could park and charge there for a modest fee of, say, $2 every hour. Part of this fee would cover the cost of the solar panels and grid-sourced electricity, likely from a green energy retailer like Bullfrog Power, which would supplement the system when the sun isn’t shining.

A bonus is that the spots, based on where they’re located, offer greater convenience for the shopper. The nine kilowatts of solar panels that create the canopy would also keep snow and rain off the cars.

But here’s the kicker: gas-powered cars would also be permitted to use the spots, as long as drivers still paid the per-hour fee. Donen said a part of that fee would go toward either a carbon offset or an environmental charity.

“The challenge is shifting the model away from reserving parking spaces just for EVs,” explained Donen. “By allowing all cars to park in the spaces, we can likely generate sufficient revenue to make the economics work. And an ‘all cars welcome’ policy avoids problems such as empty parking spaces due to a (current) lack of EVs on the road.”

CleanPark is designing this to be economical without relying on incentives such as Ontario’s feed-in-tariff program, which pays a premium to generators of solar power. Revenues would instead come from a portion of the hourly parking fees, third-party advertising on the car ports, and net-metering that would offset the mall’s own electricity use when the sun is shining but no vehicles are plugged in.

With those three sources, “we can likely achieve returns that will satisfy investors without the need for government subsidies,” said Donen. “This would allow us to roll out the program across the country.”

Major shopping mall landlords — those who each have more than 100 malls in their national portfolio — so far appear to be cautiously keen on the idea. CleanPark is eyeing Ontario and B.C. properties initially, but after proving the concept through a few pilot sites, it envisions a network of these car-charging ports emerging across Canada and into the United States.

The mall landlords themselves don’t stand to make much money, if any, by going this route. For them it’s more about better customer experience and service, and that means providing more choice and anticipating the future needs of consumers.

For Donen, it’s about addressing the range anxiety that keeps some car buyers away from plug-in models. “If we’re going to get adoption of more plug-in vehicles, we need that chicken and egg dilemma to start unwinding itself.”

And that’s not going to happen with technological innovation alone. Creative business models, such as this one, are more often needed to turn promising technologies into commercial successes.

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.