The following post comes from Tom Rand (PEng, PhD), director of VCi Green Funds and author of Kick the Fossil Fuel Habit.

Have we built an economy that’s running rapidly toward ecological collapse? Yep. Has any major party wholeheartedly embraced the sorts of carbon reductions required to avoid that collapse? Um, nope. Does the economy require a wholesale reconfiguration in order to be able to embrace long-term sustainability? You betcha! Does the Green Party have at its core the sort of restructuring that might work? Yep.

But I’m not voting Green in the Ontario election. Why?  Because there is too much at stake in the potential loss of the nascent Green Energy and Economy Act (GEA). The GEA is the single most progressive, forward-thinking piece of environmental legislation in North America. At this point in history, it just doesn’t get any better. It’s the real deal. If we lose it, Ontario will lose our first, real concrete step toward competing in the emerging low-carbon global economy.

But even worse, if Ontario blinks at this juncture, many American States that are closely watching will back off their budding legislative efforts to build their part of the low-carbon economy. The large financial institutions, which have finally emerged as participating players on the project-finance side (it’s banks that drive all large infrastructure projects, including renewables) will back away. It will take a decade to get the momentum back.

If Ontario loses the GEA, there will be heard all over corporate North America a collective “I told you so!”. The political risk associated with any really progressive climate legislation, whether it’s Green, Blue, Orange or Red in origin, will become the main hurdle to engaging the corporate partners that we need on side to move our infrastructure forward. The little bit of momentum the economically engaged environmental movement has in Canada –  the stuff that’s way past the feel-good stage — will subside. Worse, the GEA will become a lesson in what NOT to try.

Greens, your time will come, but this is not it.

For Ontario voters, pick your battles, and use your arrows wisely. It’s hard to compromise, believe me I know. Idealism is always easier, because you can always tell yourself you’re right and the world is wrong. But that’s just not good enough right now.

Results matter. Support the party that built the GEA, as they’re the only ones in a position to protect it. For Greens, the party-building can continue after the Oct. 6 election, and I’ll be there to help.

The following post comes from Tom Rand (PEng, PhD), director of VCi Green Funds and author of Kick the Fossil Fuel Habit.

Fast forward to the year 2030: Canada and the U.S., driven by energy and climate security, have invested hundreds of billions in a continent-wide low-carbon Energy Internet. Vast wind and solar farms, biogas and geothermal power plants, spread across the continent feed that grid. So do countless smart buildings, energy storage facilities and electric vehicles. Will Ontario be a net seller, or buyer, of that technology? The answer depends largely on how, and if, the Green Energy Act (GEA) rolls out. It’s the Liberals, and not the NDP or Conservatives, who are promoting the policies that will ensure Ontario is positioned to become a major manufacturer and producer of clean technology.

The Conservatives would kill the GEA. This is the economic mistake of a lifetime. Clean energy technology is a bigger opportunity today than the microchip was in 1960, or the automobile in the 1940s. Those two sectors took off with strategic government support. The Interstate Highway System and subsequent Autopact grew the automotive sector, and initial demand from the academic and military communities seeded what became Silicon Valley. Entire industries do not emerge from nowhere, and clean energy is no different. The GEA places Ontario firmly at the forefront of the single largest global market of the 21^st century. Killing the GEA, as Hudak as promised, is very short-sighted.

The GEA is big business, and a good deal for taxpayers. Currently 7,400 MW of power are contracted which could power 1.9 million homes. This represents $26 billion in investment. What’s the cost to the taxpayer? The equivalent of a coffee and doughnut added to your bill every month.

To deliver on the promise of jobs, the GEA must do three things. It must engage and motivate the private sector, remove as many hurdles to clean energy projects as possible, and most importantly – provide a long-term, steady hand on the tiller. The NDP’s proposed policy does none of these.

The NDP would have Ontario Power Generation (OPG) own and operate all clean energy projects over 20 MW.  That represents about 70% of all contracted projects. It’s out with the private sector, and in with the public. This brings back the days when large central government agencies had a virtual monopoly on power production. That’s not the way to build a globally competitive industry. Large, private sector players – whether it’s TransAlta or Samsung – must be at the table if we are to create an industry that can grow to compete on the global stage.

When Samsung comes to Ontario, they will not only build and operate large clean energy projects. They will establish manufacturing facilities, and – just like the Ford plants in Ontario – this will create the capacity, and the jobs that come with it – to sell across North America. Samsung, like Ford, will outsource most of the components, spurring the growth of a large supporting ecosystem of companies right across the province. That’s what the big players bring to the table, and we cut them out of the picture at our peril.

To placate wind energy opponents, the NDP have also indicated they would give back a municipal veto on energy projects. The health concerns cited by many opponents of wind energy are nonsense, as any review of the medical literature reveals. Pandering to a small, but vocal minority, would kill many projects before the shovel is in the ground.

Most importantly, what the private sector needs to see is continuity. The veto and the change to public ownership of large projects introduce the worst sort of political risk. Whether it’s entrepreneurs or the big banks, the private sector will only step up if they can be assured the rules will stay the same. By broadcasting that they will change the fundamental dynamics of the policy, the NDP’s policy will have the renewable energy industry heading for the hills.

Ontario has established a lead in ensuring that we will be a seller into the emerging, global clean energy economy.  When Michael Prue, NDP MPP for Beaches and East York says “You can get [clean energy] for half if you buy it from Quebec as opposed to putting up the wind farm” he shows the NDP just don’t get how to create the New Economy jobs of the future. It’s not about the cheapest electrons today. It’s about who gets to make the clean electrons tomorrow.

My friend Tom Rand has a short but no less interesting video filmed during a presentation he gave recently in Toronto. Rand helped build a “green hotel” that emits a quarter of the emissions of a comparable hotel. The workhouse behind this approach is geothermal, and Rand said it can be done in a way where energy savings exceed the monthly payments on a long-term low-interest loan. Now, the key is to get that cheap loan. Rand said it’s up to the federal and provincial governments to backstop such loans and mandate the banks to lend the money. It would help, he added, if use of this technology was mandated where it was appropriate. This, as Rand says, is low-hanging fruit that we’re simply not picking. Instead, with each new building or home we build we’re letting this ripe-for-picking fruit fall on the ground. Rand, it should be pointed out, is behind another move to have the government sell green bonds that would help fund these kinds of projects, or backstop the low-interest loans required to do them. It’s all perfectly logical, but I guess politics is never as logical as it could be.

Click here to watch the short video.

Is green, renewable energy a sexy enough topic to be the centrepiece of a coffee table book? Tom Rand, who leads cleantech development at Toronto’s MaRS Centre, believes so. In fact, he figures that it’s just such a book that will expose a broader section of the population to the issues, technologies and opportunities around renewable energy. Rand has written a soon-to-be-released book called Kick The Fossil Fuel Habit: 10 Clean Technologies To Save Their World. The “their” being our children and their children and so on. The technologies or subjects under the spotlight are solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels, hydropower, ocean (tidal and wave), smart buildings, conservation, transportation and the energy Internet.

Now, there’s no shortage of books out there about green energy, but there’s little that explains it so simply and with the graphics and beautiful pictures that show how it’s done and how it can help change our world for the better. This is an accessible package, cleverly assembled and pleasant to look at, while at the same time making it enjoyable to learn about the technologies that, while seemingly “alternative” or “new” today, are destined to become a dominant and permanent way of energizing future generations and the economies that support them.

I’ve written about Rand before. He’s one of a handful of ambitious business leaders who is trying to convince our federal and provincial governments to create “green bonds” that can be sold to the public and used to finance renewable-energy projects across the country. Sadly, our political leaders have been slow to embrace the idea. Rand describes his upcoming book as “advocacy, pure and simple.” The plan is to distribute it through mainstream outlets such as Starbucks to coincide with the big climate-change conference coming up in December in Copenhagen. It will be released in October.

I’m not usually a fan of these kinds of book, but when the format embraces a serious subject — as opposed to movie stars and dogshow pooches — the larger mainstream awareness that can result is too rare in a society overloaded with information. For this reason, Rand’s book should be on every coffee table, out in open view for family and guests to see.