Hi all, I’m delighted to report that the first review of my upcoming book, Mad Like Tesla: Underdog Inventors and Their Relentless Pursuit of Clean Energy, is in and it’s, well, pretty encouraging. Here’s what Library Journal, an important industry trade magazine used as a purchasing guide by library buyer and book wholesalers, had to say:

Hamilton, energy and technology writer for the Toronto Star, examines some of the latest, most far-out green energy innovations and the people behind them. How far-out? Take, for example, a retired engineer’s idea to produce electricity via an artificial tornado, or a plan for a space-based power station that would harvest the sun’s energy, using microwaves to beam it down to earth. Other gizmos and processes seem more amenable to commercial success and social acceptance: Hamilton tells of a secretive company called EEStor that claims to have made a breakthrough in energy storage, and of a team building a low-cost nuclear fusion reactor. He strikes a fine balance between hope and hard realism when considering barriers to energy transition. As the “tornado guy” says, upon considering financial and regulatory obstacles: “Holy crap, that’s a lot to get through.” VERDICT: Mad Like Tesla is easy to get through, even for readers with only a basic knowledge of energy issues. Hamilton makes complex technologies comprehensible, and he clearly enjoys the remarkable human stories behind the science. Many of the risk takers and visionaries portrayed are Canadian (rocker Neil Young makes a cameo appearance!), but this book’s strong appeal should transcend all borders.

Can’t complain with that. The book is scheduled for public release on Sept. 1 and is already available for pre-order on a number of sites, including Amazon.com/Amazon.ca and Indigo.ca. The book won’t break the bank, either. We decided to do paperback release on first run to make the book more accessible to a larger audience. You can likely pick it up for $13 or so. I built a Web site I’m not entirely happy with, so plan to have a newly designed site finished by the end of August. Stay tuned!

My Clean Break column today reveals some good news for air quality in Ontario, and points out that 2014 is shaping up to be an important milestone for the province — in more than one way. Of course, we all know that the plan in Ontario is to stop burning coal for electricity generation by 2014, and we’re well on our way to achieving that target. We’ll get there through a combination of measures: putting more renewables on the grid, shifting some generation to natural gas, importing more hydro from Quebec, and raising the bar on energy conservation. On that last note, we could see some major reductions from industry if a new program being run by the Ontario Power Authority delivers the goods. Under the Industrial Accelerator program, the province will pay an industrial energy users (the big ones, connected directly to the transmission system) up to 70 per cent of the cost of retrofits that achieve big energy efficiency gains, up to a cap of $10 million per project. So far the agency has received 40 applications to participate in the program, and 200 projects in total have been identified. The goal is to eliminate the equivalent of 300 megawatts of electricity demand (and generating capacity) from the grid by the end of 2014 and, in the process, make Ontario industry more competitive.

Now, this bodes well for air quality in Ontario, but keeping in mind that on average 55 per cent of air pollution comes into southern Ontario from the United States, we heard more good news earlier this month when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized its Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, which goes into effect in 2014. That, in combination with other EPA initiatives, is expected to reduce sulphur dioxide emissions by 73 per cent and nitrogen oxide emissions by 54 per cent compared to 2005 levels. The rule, according to the EPA, “requires 27 states to significantly improve air quality by reducing power plant emissions that cross state lines and contribute to ozone and fine particle pollution in other states.” As EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said, “No community should have to bear the burden of another community’s polluters, or be powerless to prevent air pollution that leads to asthma, heart attacks and other harmful illnesses.”

Now, this wasn’t designed to protect Canadian provinces from smog-causing pollutants — it is meant to protect high-polluting states from less-polluting states — but the fact that Ontario is surrounded on its southern border by some of America’s biggest coal-using power plants, we can expect to benefit tremendously from this rule — assuming it doesn’t get derailed by legal challenges and continuing GOP insanity. I’m surprised, in fact, this didn’t get more coverage by mainstream Canadian media.

Two of Canada’s top environmental NGOs — the Pembina Institute and the David Suzuki Foundation — issued a jointly prepared study today slamming our rising dependence on natural gas, warning that the fossil fuel, while generally cleaner than coal, could seriously slow down efforts to combat climate change if our increased reliance on it begins to bump renewables such as wind, solar and biomass from the future energy mix.

Natural gas is often called a “transition” fuel because it emits fewer greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants than coal and is a good dance partner with renewables — that is, when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow a natural gas-fired power plant can kick in quickly to fill the gap. But beyond serving that purpose, the two organizations argue natural gas shouldn’t become the default option, especially if a rising portion of that gas is coming from shale deposits where drilling and extraction processes can affect local drinking water and lead to higher emissions compared to conventional natural gas development.

“Shale gas requires up to 100 times the number of well pads to extract the same amount of gas as conventional sources, and recent shale gas development in the U.S. has had major environmental impacts,” said Dale Marshall, climate change policy analyst for the David Suzuki Foundation. “Expanded natural gas production in Canada would bring a host of problems — as well as making it harder to fight climate change.”

I’ve written extensively about the environmental risks of shale-gas development, how low natural gas prices resulting from shale development are contributing to increased oil sands development, and how the physical footprint of shale gas developments should give wind NIMBYs pause for thought. I’ve also been sounding the alarm for a couple of years now on the dangers of becoming over-dependent on natural gas and how this “cleaner” fossil fuel would, with the rise of shale gas, eventually become a lightning rod in the climate-change (and water quality) debate. In my view, and to reuse one analogy I’ve used in the past, natural gas might be the “light” fossil fuel, just as you can purchase “light” cigarettes. But in the case of cigarettes, whether light or normal, they still cause cancer and heart disease, and certainly smoking twice as many light cigarettes to wean yourself off regular cigarettes will make matters worse. The point is you have to wean off all cigarettes, period. We need to treat natural gas like we treat nicotine patches and gums — something that’s used temporarily and in moderation to beat an addiction to something we know, from a health and environmental perspective, is bad for us over the long term.

Stephen Colbert gets it. (link only works for Canadians — Americans can see clip here).

Unfortunately, when Canada’s energy ministers meet next week in Alberta, I’m sure any talk of a national energy strategy will put the economy first. After all, we know asbestos causes cancer yet Quebec is permitted to continue selling the dangerous stuff to third-world countries. So will the Pembina-Suzuki report have any impact on outcomes? I doubt it. There will be welcome talk on the need to develop shale gas resources more responsibly, but the focus will be simple: let’s develop as much as possible as quickly as possible, sell it to the world, create jobs, and make a few hundred people really rich. There will be no talk of moderation, either for natural gas development or the oil sands.

That seems, these days, to be the Canadian way. Drill baby drill. Extract baby extract. Sell baby sell.

My Clean Break column this week takes a closer look at Air Miles for Social Change, a new division within LoyaltyOne, which runs the popular billion-dollar Air Miles rewards program. This new business division has spent the past 18 months partnering with government agencies, utilities and environmental groups on programs that get consumers to buy greener products, take transit, consume less energy, reduce their waste and embrace healthier diets and lifestyles. Normally I’m skeptical of anything having to do with loyalty programs, but here’s the thing: it seems to work, and work really well.

For some reason, a large percentage of the population really dig getting Air Miles. There’s trophy value to them, and while they’re worth much less than cash itself, members of the Air Miles program seem to treasure these rewards more than cash. An odd phenomenon, but a good one. That’s because for government agencies and utilities and transit authorities, handing out Air Miles in exchange for good behaviour is much cheaper than handing out cash in the form of discounts and rebates. And because they’re partnered up with LoyaltyGroup, which has direct access to and detailed information on nearly three-quarters of Canadian households (i.e. about 10 million), it gives them a less expensive yet highly more targeted way to reach out to consumers — at least when compared to that relatively ineffective and expensive medium called advertising. The Ontario Power Authority, the first agency to work with Air Miles on such a program to encourage energy conservation, found that it spent two-thirds less but got seven times the results compared to its advertising- and rebates-based approach a year earlier. You’ll get more details on that if you read the column.

Since working with the OPA, Air Miles for Social Change has run with the concept and now has about 25 similar programs on the go across Canada. It’s catching on.

It’s not that issuing rewards for good behaviour is an entirely new thing. It’s what Toronto’s Lowfoot.com is doing, as well as New York City-based Efficiency 2.0 — both focused on energy management for consumers. But what Air Miles brings to the equation, at least in Canada, is unmatched reach into households. And with that comes the power to influence positive change with carrots instead of sticks — not that we don’t need both.

My Clean Break column today revisits the importance of producing biofuels from algae, especially in the case of producing renewable fuels for the airline industry, which can’t electrify its fleet like we can with cars and trucks. But I also zoom in on some research conducted at the University of Western Ontario, led by biochemistry professor Wankei Wan.

Wan and his team created a tabletop algae pond in their lab — in this case, a raceway pond design — and monitored the growth of a type of algae called Chlorella kessleri under certain light and temperature conditions. They then replicated the setup, only this time they circulated the algae in the pond through an area that was exposed to low-level static magnetic fields. An electromagnet was used in this experiment, though Wan says they could have also used a permanent magnet no stronger than a typical fridge magnet.

So what did they observe? Seems algae thrive under a certain level and length of exposure to magnetic fields. Wan’s team, in fact, found a level of optimum exposure that led to a quadrupling of growth of the biomass, the oil inside the algae and in-cell antioxidants, such as Astaxanthin. Wan believes the approach could be used to help boost algae production for both biofuel production and the production of food supplements based on the antioxidant nutrients found in algae.

Actually, while this is a potential benefit for biofuels, Wan sees a much larger opportunity to use magnetism to boost growth for the production of high-value products — i.e. chemicals and nutrients (such as Astaxanthin) that can fetch much more in the market than biofuels. His research is expected to appear later this year in the peer-reviewed journal Bioelectromagnetics.

Wan isn’t the first to observe this phenomenon. Researchers have been exploring the effects of both magnetism and low-level frequencies on simple-cell organisms such as algae and bacteria for a few years now, and in most cases they have observed growth stimulation. This study provides a good overview of that earlier research.