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Tyler Hamilton

For years the nuclear power lobby has muscled its way into international climate negotiations and asserted itself as a critical part of any serious effort to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions.

Not so much during climate talks in Durban, South Africa, these past two weeks. There were some media mentions and the occasional sound bite from industry officials, but the nuclear lobby — still suffering from a Fukushima hangover — stayed relatively quiet this time around.

Even Patrick Moore, Greenpeace [alleged?] co-founder turned nuclear booster, seems to have moved on. His gig these days is defending the oilsands, part of a recent advertising campaign from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

The Fukushima disaster in Japan certainly served a blow to the nuclear power industry. The low price of natural gas and the global economic downturn — and reduced demand for electricity — hasn’t helped matters.

The economics of building new nuclear plants also remain in question. A report just released by the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association points out that even before the Fukushima accident, the decades-long trend of reactor projects being delayed and coming in dramatically over budget was still a reality, as recent experiences in Finland and France clearly show.

The Worldwatch Institute reported last week that generating capacity of the world’s nuclear power fleet dropped 2.4 per cent in 2011, causing nuclear’s share of the world energy mix to fall slightly.

The first 10 months of this year saw the closing of 13 reactors, contributing to a reduction in the total number in operation around the world to 433 from 441. Growth is happening in developing countries such as China, India and Pakistan, but these are far outweighed by reactor shutdowns in France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom.

So much for the much-heralded nuclear renaissance. “These numbers can hardly encourage the (nuclear) industry,” said Worldwatch president Robert Engelman.

As much as the anti-nuclear lobby must be cheering, these numbers also beg the question: if not nuclear, then what?

Some environmentalists, while not particularly fans of nuclear power, do worry about the pullback and how it will impact what are already pitiful efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

If, for example, a decline in nuclear capacity means more countries — particularly China — burning more coal and natural gas instead of embracing more renewable energy, then we’re merely trading one risk for another (out-of-control climate change) with a more certain, broad-reaching outcome.

As U.K. Guardian columnist and environmentalist George Monbiot has said, “The choice between renewables and nuclear is a false one. We appear to need both” – as painful a reality as that might be.

If we accept this, then the question shouldn’t be about how to get rid of nuclear power, but about how to make it better and safer.

“For nuclear to gain significant share, it must change,” writes U.K. journalist Mark Halper in a recent report on emerging nuclear innovations, penned for Canadian cleantech consultancy Kachan & Co.

Fukushima gave the world cause for pause, according to the report, but it also created an opportunity to move the nuclear industry in a new direction. “There has never been a better time for mavericks to come forward with safer, better and less costly ways to split atoms or, in the case of the elusive but reachable notion of fusion, to meld them together.”

In Halper’s view, part of the problem is that the nuclear technology we have today was a poor choice from the start, given that it produces weapons-grade plutonium as its waste, is vulnerable to meltdowns, and can potentially release dangerous amounts of radioactive material if something goes horribly wrong.

There were many alternatives to choose from half a century ago, but the fission reactor design most in use today was the result of Cold War decision-making.

“As undesirable as plutonium waste is today, it was in demand during the atomic weapons build up of the Cold War, helping the water-cooled uranium reactor win the day in the 1960s,” Halper writes. “It was a VHS victory over several superior Betamax alternatives.”

Some Betamax alternatives, however, are trying to make a comeback. The Kachan report outlines a number of technology alternatives currently in play, some of them based on designs or ideas that have been around for several decades.

Included in this list are reactors that use thorium as fuel instead of uranium, or which are cooled using gas. Molten salt, pebble bed and fast-neutron reactors are also being seriously considered. And yes, even fusion technology, including a mechanical reactor from Vancouver-based General Fusion, is grabbing attention.

Some designs deal with the toxic waste and nuclear proliferation issues. Others improve significantly on safety, such as eliminating the potential for meltdown. This is all exciting news for those outside the old boys nuclear club.

Unfortunately, they don’t offer a quick fix. Our nuclear regulators, underfunded as they are, haven’t the resources and time to understand, let alone establish rules for, new nuclear reactor designs. It will take many years, perhaps decades, for competing technologies to take hold.

But time is something severely lacking when it comes to avoiding the worst effects of climate change. This, even with “old” nuclear technology in decline and better alternatives on the rise, is the conundrum we face.

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

In my book Mad Like Tesla I have a chapter on a company called General Fusion, which is making what is in essence a mechanical fusion reactor — a thermonuclear diesel engine, if you will — using $50 million or so in government grants and venture capital, some of which has come from Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. General Fusion says it can do with tens of millions and within a few years what large, bureaucratic international consortia, such as ITER, aim to do with many billions over at least a couple of decades.

But enough about GF. You can read the book for that.

I mention this because as part of the chapter I go into a bit of history around nuclear fusion, and specifically some of the past scandals related to cold-fusion claims — e.g. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann’s public claim in 1989 that they had achieved a cold fusion reaction in their university lab. If you can’t remember the day of that event, just go on YouTube to view the original news conference. The media was abuzz, and the world thought we finally had the solution to the world’s growing energy crisis. Yay! Except, wait, nobody else could replicate it and after a few months government scientists put out a comprehensive report that said Pons and Fleischmann’s claim lacked “convincing evidence.”

The two scientists, tails under their legs, walked out of the limelight and the quest for “cold fusion” was, as far as the mainstream media were concerned, a dead end.

Except is wasn’t a dead end. Since then there have been many serious and not-so-serious scientists quietly labouring away on cold fusion. One of the most prominent is Peter Hagelstein, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The group, generally, is shunned by the mainstream scientific community, and yes, spurned by a media still stinging more than two decades after Pons and Fleischmann.

But it will be interesting to see how long they will stay out of this story, considering the progress Italian scientists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi are apparently making.

Back in January 2011 the two men demonstrated their own cold fusion apparatus, which they claim fuses nuclei of nickel and hydrogen to produce copper and huge amounts of excess energy. The device is being called the E-Cat, which stands for “energy catalyzer.” According to the site E-Cat World, which was created to follow the work of Rossi and Focardi, “The E-Cat is a device in which hydrogen gas, powdered nickel metal, and an undisclosed catalyst are combined to produce a large amount of heat through a little understood low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR) process inside a specially designed chamber… In this process, when an external heat source is applied (electric or fossil) it is claimed that the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, a proton, penetrates a nickel nucleus and in doing so a nickel atom becomes a copper atom, and releases a large amount of thermal energy” — much more than the energy that goes into the process. That heat, of course, is used just like any heat source to drive a steam generator that produces electricity.

Furthermore, no radioactive waste is created from the process and no CO2 is released, it is claimed.

Honestly, I don’t know what Rossi and Focardi have, but they have attracted much attention in the blogosphere — no surprise there — and have conducted a number of demonstrations in front of scientists, such as two Swedish physicists who — while still skeptical — have admitted that the reaction is real and not based on chemical reactions.

I write all of this now because, as he promised earlier this year, Rossi has plans to demonstrate a 1-megawatt version of his technology later in October, and possibly as early as Oct. 6 will test a single E-Cat unit in Uppsala, Sweden. Apparently a number of scientists from around the world — and some select journalists — have been invited to attend. The demonstration of the 1 -megawatt plant will be interesting, as this is being positioned as a pre-commercial demonstration. Something to watch for, certainly, and the outcome of this larger 1-megawatt demonstration could either reinforce the skepticism toward the cold fusion concept or, after 20 years, finally attract the attention of the mainstream media.

Stay tuned. In the meantime, it’s worth watching this 60 Minutes show from spring 2009 — one of the rare detailed looks by a mainstream media outlet at the state of cold-fusion research. It cited research from the U.S. Pentagon, specifically the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which found after a thorough analysis of the research that “there no doubt that anomolous excess heat is produced from these experiments.”

Also in the show, Robert Duncan, vice-chancellor of research at the University of Missouri and an expert in energy measurement, said he was a cold-fusion skeptic until he took a closer look at the data. He’s now convinced that we should be taking seriously some of the research in the field. “To say we don’t fundamentally understand the process, and that’s why we’re not going to study it, it’s like saying we’re too sick to go to the doctor,” he says, encouraging the mainstream scientific community to do their homework before making knee-jerk dismissals. “Read the published results, talk to the scientists, and never let anybody else do your thinking for you.”

I’ll report back later in October with an update on the Rossi and Focardi demonstration.

Just one more note: the term cold fusion is thrown around loosely now to encompass any kind of non-chemical reaction in a relatively ambient-temperature environment that can’t be easily explained. Defined narrowly, what Rossi and Focardi are attempting to do may not even be cold fusion — or even just fusion. But it’s something that may be producing much more energy than goes in. The same can be said for BlackLight Power, which claims it has a catalyst-driven process that turns hydrogen atoms into what the company calls hydrinos. The process of turning hydrogen to hydrinos releases an enormous amount of energy, according to the company — another venture to watch.

Calling each of these innovations a form of “cold fusion” is the equivalent of calling the research crackpot science, and this does a disservice to those individuals who are devoting their life and labours to exploring these energy unknowns. Perhaps one day we can move beyond the cold fusion label and the memories of Pons and Fleischmann and give this broad area of research a more committed, objective look. We need more of this kind of exploration and experimentation, not less. We should cautiously praise it; not ridicule and ignore.

General Fusion, of course, is far from a cold fusion play — though anything considered unconventional fusion is often wrongly tossed into the cold fusion bucket. What General Fusion is attempting is a lower-cost mechanical approach to fusion that takes the best of magnetic fusion (ITER) and intertial confinement fusion (U.S. National Ignition Facility) — i.e. a hybrid approach known as magnetized target fusion.

Keep your eyes on General Fusion as well, and on the fusion field in general. Often written off as that forever-emerging but never-emerging technology, there are significant advancements coming down the pipeline — sooner than many people think.

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.

You see, Hydro One and its union are complaining they can’t keep up with the demands of homeowners and farmers who want to connect their solar rooftop systems to the grid. Industry, in response, is wondering what gives? If Hydro One can’t do it — and many justifiably accuse the utility of intentionally dragging its feet — then let’s let other players come into the market that can do it. Of course, Hydro One doesn’t want that because it threatens its hegemony over the Ontario grid. Hydro One has had two years or more to prepare for the increased connection requests that were expected to come through the feed-in tariff program, yet it is acting now as a deer in the headlights that couldn’t possibly accommodate the influx without sacrificing grid reliability. It leads one to believe whether top officials and union leaders at this utility — which earns generous incomes through Ontario ratepayers (they seem to forget about this) — are intentionally delaying action in hopes that a Progressive Conservative government will be elected, after which they can continue with the status quo: nuclear and fossil fuel generation.

What gets me is the misinformation they’re prepared to spread through these full-page advertisements. Here’s one: “So far, the tens of billions Ontario has spent on intermittent wind and solar energy is not delivering the promised benefits to the environment or the economy.” Wha? Would be nice to see something backing up that claim. I mean, Ontario ratepayers only pay for the renewable energy they receive, and two, any capital costs have come from the private sector, not ratepayers, and these investments have created thousands of jobs — non-unionized jobs, which is what is ruffling the PWO’s feathers.

PWO is pro-nuclear, pro-centralized generation, and pro-big transmission at a time when the global electricity market is moving to become more decentralized and less carbon-intensive. It is a throwback to an earlier era, and it’s struggling to protect what it has and it won’t let the truth get in the way.

That’s the real threat to the future of Ontario’s electricity system, not green energy.

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!

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!

There are many reasons to oppose nuclear: high cost, toxic waste, risk of disaster, uranium mining, etc… What I haven’t seen raised so far is the ability of a province like Ontario to carry out an aggressive nuclear refurbishment and new-build strategy. In other words, do we have the skilled labour at our disposal to take on such an initiative?

It doesn’t appear that way.

Recent data from the industry-led Construction Sector Council has raised a red flag, warning that Ontario will face an extremely tight labour market between the period 2014 and 2019. During this time about 85,000 new construction workers will be needed. Problem is, 73,000 existing workers are expected to exit the labour force because of retirement (or mortality), and only 60,000 new entrants are expected. “This leaves a gap of almost 100,000 workers that need to be recruited from either other industries or outside the province,” according to the Council.

Don’t let the recent recession fool you. Ontario is only a year or two away from reaching pre-recession construction employment levels, largely because of new mining and processing facilities planned for Northern Ontario, the need for new facilities in time for the 2015 Pan American games, the deployment of renewable-energy projects that have been enabled by the Green Energy and Green Economy Act (and FIT program), and plans for the refurishment of several nuclear reactors over the period. The Council estimates this will carry construction employment “to new record levels,” with non-residential construction activity more than double that enjoyed in pre-recession years.

The Greater Toronto Area will be hit particularly hard, and the Council pegs much of that to nuclear refurbishment and new-build plans. This is supported by comments from Mark Arnone, vice-president of nuclear refurbishment execution at Ontario Power Generation. “For those working on the nuclear plants, supply will be particularly tight,” Arnone is quoted as saying in the Council press statement.

How tight will it be? The Council’s report ranks a number of different construction trades in each region of Ontario, including the GTA. It ranks them on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 representing no problems with the labour pool and 5 representing severe shortages. Specifically, a ranking of 5 means “Needed workers meeting employer qualifications are not available in local or adjacent markets to meet current demand so that projects or production may be delayed or deferred. There is excess demand, competition is intense and recruiting reaches to remote markets.”

In the GTA, four key trades carry a 5 ranking between 2012 and 2019: boilermakers, construction managers, construction millwrights and industrial mechanics, and industrial instrument technicians and mechanics. In all cases, blame is placed on major industrial and utility projects, with particular troubles occurring between 2015 and 2018 as planned nuclear projects enter high gear. Electricians, gasfitters, pipefitters and welders will also be in short supply.

So what does this all mean? First, the Ontario government and its opposition are underestimating the impact of baby boomer retirements during a period of what is expected to be high construction activity. Big projects, such as nuclear refurbs and new reactor builds, will suffer and will be at serious risk of delay. Getting the necessary skilled trades will mean bringing in workers from distant locations. In this environment of tight labour supply wages will surely skyrocket, causing project costs to rise. Ontario will be competing with other jurisdictions, such as Alberta, and this will cause both labour markets to overheat.

Simply put, Ontario will have a very difficult time refurbishing its fleet of reactors AND building a new plant at Darlington. It will be difficult enough trying to refurbish the existing fleet and keep it on schedule. Adding a new build into the mix could spell major trouble for an industry already struggling to keep up with the backfilling of its retiring workforce. Sure, skilled workers can be imported — at a premium. It makes one wonder: Do we need these jobs? How can job creation be a justification for these large projects, which create jobs but not necessarily ones that Ontarians can/will fill?

You might be thinking that this applies equally to other power-sector projects, such as the building of wind farms and big solar plants. To a certain extent it will, but there will be less of an impact because of the small scale and distributed nature of renewable-energy projects. Labour tightness might delay a few small projects, but that will have much less impact than the delays and cost-overruns associated with massive centralized projects that currently lie at the beating  heart of our electricity system.

So when Tim Hudak, leader of the Progressive Conservatives, says he wants to go full steam ahead with nuclear power, one must wonder if he’s setting up the market for failure and promising something he won’t be capable of delivering. He has said that “a PC government will stop dithering and delays and invest in nuclear power,” but a PC government will be powerless in that regard. Perhaps he’ll address some of the dithering, but the delays will be imposed by the market.

All of this isn’t to suggest Ontario shouldn’t go forward with some nuclear refurbishment projects. What it does suggest is that building new reactors at Darlington, while at the same time tackling a logistically difficult refurbishment program, will cause delays, cost-overruns and market stresses that could have been avoided. Sound familiar?

Ontario, in other words, must be careful that it doesn’t bite off more than it can chew. Sure, it means many jobs won’t be created. But those jobs will be more expensive to fill, and there’s a good chance it wouldn’t be Ontarians filling them. In my humble opinion, the province would be far better off ditching its plans to build a new nuclear plant at Darlington and re-evaluating its existing fleet refurbishment plans. More thought should be put into industrial efficiency, conservation, hydroelectric imports from Quebec (or Newfoundland and Labrador), combined heat and power plants, offshore wind and community power projects based on renewables.

Beyond the propoganda of the nuclear industry, I haven’t seen a single credible study that calculates the cost of (new) nuclear to ratepayers below 13 cents per kilowatt-hour. Indeed, there are many reports that suggest nuke power is above 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, particularly when you choose to not hide the hidden costs and subsidies. This makes wind power, landfill gas systems, waterpower and even some large biogas systems competitive with nuclear on a kilowatt-hour basis. And, of course, under the FIT we’re not held hostage to delays or cost overruns like we have been in the past with nuclear. You pay for what you get under the FIT. No risk, no large single points of failure, no risk of meltdown, no worries about handling future radioactive waste, and very high price transparency.

Now, Hudak would have Ontario voters believe that the rate we pay today is what we should expect to pay for future generation. I don’t believe this is a naive belief on Hudak’s part; I believe it’s to intentionally mislead. Fact is, there isn’t a single form of clean (or dirty) generation that can be built new today that isn’t more expensive than the 6 or 7 cents per kilowatt-hour that Hudak (and most media, for that matter) recklessly bandies about. Now, could we get wind generation cheaper through a competitive process? Yeah, we could maybe carve a couple of cents off the FIT rate. But the FIT was intentionally designed to lower barriers to market access — to open up the market beyond the big, deep-pocketed corporate giants who can afford the upfront millions required to respond to a request for proposals (RFP) and, after participating in such a process, can afford to walk away empty handed. The province created the FIT to encourage community participation, and to stimulate the kind of growth that would attract manufacturing and jobs — and it has, despite a few spineless moments and missteps from the Liberal government.

 Now, on to solar. Hudak and his legion of backers, including National Post columnist Parker Gallant (who has somehow managed to turn his column into an official soap box for the Ontario PCs — hell, he even hands over fresh quotes for Hudak’s press releases now), always point to solar prices when talking about the FIT. After all, it’s easier to anger voters by saying generally that we’re paying 80.2 cents per kilowatt-hour under the FIT and that this is 10 times more than the wholesale market rate for electricity. Wow — 10 times more! Crazy. But the comparison shouldn’t be to the wholesale market rate, and the rate itself is far from representative of the FIT program pricing. That scary 80.2 cents, which will soon be lowered, is for less than 1 per cent of FIT contracts when measured on a megawatt-hour contribution basis. Also, that money doesn’t go to big corporate conglomerates intent on vacuuming money out of Ontario. It goes to farmers and homeowners who are taking risks to become participants in the electricity system. The thousands of people taking part are literally changing the energy landscape in Ontario and they’re creating local jobs. You can see it just driving around this province. Put into perspective, the premium being paid to them is more than worth what the province is getting back. Hudak, however, would prefer to demonize them to score votes.

Now, let’s talk about the elephant in the room — big solar. Big, multimegawatt solar projects are getting 44.3 cents per kilowatt-hour. But unlike the small solar rooftop systems, these larger systems will collectively have an impact on electricty rates over the coming years. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that it is because of these large systems that a lot of manufacturing has shifted to Ontario. Still, it’s a lot of solar and a lot to pay, and this is in my view the Achilles heal of Ontario’s FIT program. If there are going to be changes to the program, the most dramatic changes have to come here, but it has to be done in a way that balances the need to nurture an emerging industry and the interests of ratepayers. The answer, in my view, is to embrace a competitive bidding process for these large-scale projects and set caps (targets?) on the amount of big solar we want in Ontario by 2015, 2020 and 2025.

But Hudak isn’t thinking or talking that way. He wants to throw the baby out with the bath water, and in doing so kill investor confidence in the Ontario market, kill green jobs and build new nuclear plants that we’ll have to start paying for 10 years before the first kilowatt-hour is generated. His approach is reckless at a time when Ontario needs surgical, not blunt force, solutions. He’s being destructive at a time when Ontarians want our politicians to be constructive.

On a final note, let’s keep in mind that we don’t have to choose nuclear over renewables or vice versa. While building new nuclear plants may be an unwise decision economically, there is plenty of job creation to come from reburishing or extending the life of Ontario’s existing nuclear fleet — even if we retire a couple of plants, such as Pickering. Indeed, OPG and Bruce Power have expressed concerns about doing these refurbishments and building new because of the limited labour pool and the logistical nightmare of taking so much on in such a tight window. So, the message here is you can continue to aggressively build green energy and capture the associated jobs while keeping folks in our nuclear industry gainfully employed for the next 10 years, simply following through on an existing refurbishment schedule. Talk of building new nukes is a distraction — there will be opportunities in both sectors, and plenty of jobs to go around. We don’t have to choose one over the other.

Another new investor in the round is Canadian oil company Cenovus Energy, through its Environmental Opportunity Fund. Bezos and Cenovus join returning investors Chrysalix Energy, GrowthWorks, Braemar Energy Ventures, Entrepreneurs Fund, Business Development Bank of Canada, and SET Venture Partners.

“We have a lot of work ahead of us, but the support of Cenovus Energy and Jeff Bezos, and the continued participation of every one of our venture capital investors, reflects the strength of our team, our plan, and the progress we have made.”

I have a chapter in my upcoming book, Mad Like Tesla, about General Fusion, its technology and its struggle to be taken seriously. It’s a great company taking the kinds of risks we need to see in this world. Check out this article I wrote on General Fusion two years ago for the Toronto Star, and here for MIT Technology Review.

That’s why in my Clean Break column this week I argue clean technology, and specifically the efforts of SDTC, need to be part of the country’s election dialogue. We need to build on the progress SDTC has achieved to date, not abandon the momentum at a time when major world economies — Germany, China, India, Brazil, the United States – are racing to establish a dominant position in the emerging global green economy.

The leaders of the political parties looking to run the next government need to be asked: How are they prepared to support clean technology innovation and green economic development in Canada?