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.

The New York Times had a great piece today called “Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush,” which quotes from among hundreds of industry e-mails and insider documents suggesting that shale gas isn’t as easy or inexpensive to extract from the ground as claimed. Some of the e-mails compare the current shale-gas lovefest to a dot-com bubble destined to burst, or to a giant Ponzi scheme because the economics don’t work. I’m sure the economics do work on a certain percentage of wells, but when companies talk generally about the productivity of shale-gas wells or the size of their reserves are they exaggerating reality? Are they pumping up their stocks and duping investors? And if so, are we grossly overestimating the true contribution — environmental problems aside — shale gas can make to our energy future?

This reminds me of some comments Jeff Rubin made during a chat we had in December. Rubin, former chief economist at CIBC World Markets and author of Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, compared the current path of the shale-gas industry to what we saw with the sub-prime mortgage market. Here’s what he had to say, taken from a Q&A that ran in the Toronto Star:

The debate is about the real cost. If you exclude the natural gas liquids that come with most shale projects, is the real cost $4 per Mcf (1,000 cubic feet) or is it $8? If the real cost is $8 then a lot of people, like Chesapeake Energy, the biggest gas producer in the U.S., have a big problem. Is shale gas the sub-prime mortgage market of the natural gas market? Is this one giant con and investors are being conned into thinking there’s a huge supply of gas at $4 when it really costs $7 or $8 to bring it to market? In the fullness of time economics will assert itself, just as it did in the sub-prime mortgage market.

The question is, when will that time come?

I have a feature in the latest issue of Corporate Knights magazine called “Cows, carbon and you” that takes a look at whether carbon labelling of products would have an impact on purchasing behaviour in Canada and the United States. It’s being done to a limited extent in Europe, but would such an approach fly in North America?

It’s an interesting question: Would you, as a consumer, be more likely to purchase a product in a retail store if you knew the energy used to produce it could be guaranteed as zero- or low-carbon?

I know I buy unbleached coffee filters, low-salt cans of tuna and organic veggies because it matters to me, so it follows that some people would be swayed by carbon content. They might not pay more for it, but price being equal, it could give one product a competitive edge over another. On the other hand, is there really any room on product labels to fit this information? How would it be presented in a simple way that doesn’t confuse people? What standards are used to measure the carbon content of energy inputs? Can such a label be exact enough to matter?

BTW: Why the “cows” reference in the headline? That’s because I open the piece with a look inside the operations of Delft Blue, a veal farming company in Ontario that turns cow manure into electricity and heat. So, in a sense, Delft is supplying the market with low-carbon veal. It’s doing so because the capital investment lowers the cost of its farming operation and achieves payback in five or so years. However, its customers — Walmart, Loblaws, etc. — could choose to market the veal as low-carbon if they chose. At the moment, they don’t.