Magna Marque, a subsidiary of Canadian autoparts giant Magna International, has announced a four-week bikeshare trial in California that will sees its BionX electric bikes used on the Sacremento campus of the California Energy Environmental Protection Agency. The project is in partnership with Ecotron Systems, which is making the bikeshare stations. I’m a big fan of BionX, which I had the chance to test out for a month in 2008. The BionX system is not a bike, but an e-bike retrofit kit that includes a battery, electric motor and handlebar control panel, all tied together with sophisticated energy-management software. You can put the system on your existing bike or purchase a new bike complete with the system (Trek and Diamant are among the big-name devotees). I wrote about the company back in August 2008 and it continues to forge ahead, preferring to downplay the Magna connection and focus instead of building the BionX brand. At the time, they told me they were working on a bikeshare model for e-bikes, so apparently they’re ready to start showing it off. This pilot in California will be, I’m sure, the first of many to come.

Funny, when I first met Magna Marque CEO Fred Gingl, he told me one of the bikes was sent to California Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, a fellow Austrian along with Magna International founder Frank Stronach. Guess Arnie liked them. It will be interesting to see how electric bikes, a much more delicate and expensive product than a typical barebones bike, will be introduced to the bikeshare model. I expect campus environments will be the first market, as these bikes go through tremendous abuse in citywide bikeshare programs.

My latest Clean Break column, which appears in Friday’s Toronto Star but has already been published online, looks at the next election Torontonians and the rest of Ontario’s citizens have to worry about, this one in California on Nov. 2. That’s assuming, of course, that you believe climate change is happening, believe human activity is the cause of it, and feel we have a moral obligation to take action. Toronto’s new mayor, Rob Ford, doesn’t seem to fall into that category, which itself is alarming. But consider that the outcome of California’s election next Tuesday could pull the rug out from one of Ontario’s most important greenhouse-gas reduction strategies — cap-and-trade.

I’ll let you read my column for the full details, which echo concerns recently raised by Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner, Gord Miller, on his commission blog and subsequently republished here. In a nutshell, Californians vote for a new governor, but they also vote to accept or reject Proposition 23, which aims to kill existing climate-change legislation that enables California’s participation in the Western Climate Initiative (WCI), a regional carbon-trading market that Ontario is heavily involved in.

WCI has 11 members but California, New Mexico, Ontario, Quebec and B.C. are its anchors. These five jurisdictions all have enabling legislation in place and all were expected to launch the market in 2012. California on its own represents half the GHGs in the market. If California is forced to pull out — that is, if the “yes” vote for Prop 23 wins — then the WCI dominoes begin to fall. Ontario has not said it won’t move forward if California doesn’t, but it hasn’t said it will, and we know New Mexico will certainly bail if California bails.

If WCI collapses, I expect at least a couple more years of delay before Ontario participates in a carbon market. At best, Ontario, Quebec and B.C. could decide to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Intiative (RGGI), a much smaller regional market that includes 10 northeastern and mid-Atlantic states. It has been in effect for two years. Problem is RGGI has weaker emission-reduction goals and is much narrower in focus — that is, its market only applies to power producers, while WCI also applies to large industrial emitters. (Again, read the column for more details). Better to keep WCI alive.

So, that’s why the California vote on Nov. 2 is so important. If the oil lobbyists and the Tea Party/Republican climate deniers manage to convince California voters to accept Prop 23, it won’t just derail Ontario’s efforts, it will kill what would have become the second-largest carbon trading market in the world and it will set back efforts in Washington and Ottawa to establish national cap-and-trade systems that are harmonized with each other.

Keep your fingers cross. The encouraging news is that, if you believe the polls, Proposition 23 is likely to be rejected. But polls have been wrong before, so this will remain a nailbiter until it’s over. Those who read this blog regularly will know that I’m a bigger fan of carbon taxes than I am of cap-and-trade. I worry about the complexity of a carbon market, all the bureaucracy and all the potential to manipulate it. But without alternatives waiting in the wings cap-and-trade is the best we’ve got. We need it. We need something to happen.

There’s a tendency during times of economic trouble to cast eco-friendly policies as risky, expensive, dangerous and reckless, and this is exactly what Prime Minister Stephen Harper did in the lead-up to last week’s Canadian federal election. Thanks to the effectiveness of the media soundbite, it worked. The public got scared, embraced the “steady as she goes” line, and pretty much derailed any hope of serious federal action on climate change and clean-technology development (beyond carbon capture for use in enhanced oil recovery). Fortunately, Canadian provinces are picking up a lot of the slack.

Still, it would be good for provincial officials to read a new study out of the University of California, Berkeley, which found that aggressive energy-efficiency policies embraced by California between 1977 and 2007 created nearly 1.5 million jobs, far outstripping the 25,000 jobs such policies eliminated (hat tip to Joe Romm for the tip at Climate Progress, where he provides his own take on the study). (more…)