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Children and riot police face off in Canadian “Moms” video

The Canadian campaign Moms Against Climate Change just released a provocative video (below) that makes a boldly emotional appeal for action on global warming.

Set in an unnamed city, the 86-second video “Demonstration” features a protest march comprised entirely of children. Riot police block the street, tap their shields and clubs ominously, and hold back barking dogs. Eventually the cops let loose on the children, chasing one boy up a chain link fence while another falls in the street.

It ends with the message, “If our children knew the facts we do, they’d take action. Shouldn’t you?” The violence is presumed, not shown explicitly, but the implication is that we’re all engaged in violence against children by failing to head off the climate changes whose biggest impacts will unfold later this century.

There’s more: Moms Against Climate Change also launched a new website that encourages Canadian mothers to post photos of their children beneath a message to the Prime Minister: “Stephen Harper: Remember who you’re representing in Copenhagen.” Given the reservations many parents have about posting private information about their children on the internet, it’s a strategy likely to cause controversy. The children’s first name and hometown accompany the pictures, and there is a note about private protection in the “Upload” section.

The campaign is a joint effort of two Canadian environmental groups, Environmental Defence and ForestEthics. But it holds importance everywhere, because the Conservative Harper is a world leader that climate negotiators are particularly worried about.

The prominent Australian author and climate activist Tim Flannery recently called on Harper to change his “obstructionist position” on a climate treaty.

"We desperately need Canada to play a much more positive role in the coming months," Flannery said at a recent news conference in Ottawa. "Canada is an important country with important obligations."

With the “Moms” campaign, Harper will hear that message from Canadians too.

The video:

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MaassPhoto courtesy Erinn Hartman/KnopfNew York Times Magazine contributing writer Peter Maass spent eight years following the flow of oil around the world, from fields in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Azerbaijan to corporate boardrooms. His new book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, uses stories from these locales to show why the lucrative resource tends to be very bad for the people who live above it.

We spoke recently about his reporting on this resource curse, and about a strategy he proposes for environmental activists—sourcing gasoline to show buyers the violence their gas money supports.

Q. You call oil “black oxygen.” Unpack that phrase a little.

A.Oil makes our cars move. It makes the planes fly. It’s in our clothes. It’s in our food because it’s in fertilizers. It’s in chemicals. It is just absolutely everywhere in modern existence. It also is everywhere in terms of politics. It’s a major preoccupation of the governments that need it, and it’s the major preoccupation of the governments that have it.

Beyond that, it is a major factor in terms of pollution that occurs in the world today. Even when oil and natural gas are operating the way they are supposed to be, they still cause a lot of damage to the earth. Burning them puts a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. We all know where that’s leading us.

In my book I describe oil not only as black oxygen but also as like gravity, because it’s invisible in a way. From the moment it comes out of the ground until the moment it goes into our gas tank, we do not see it. Yet, like gravity, it influences everything we do.

Q. What makes the oil industry so much more harmful than others?

A.It’s an extractive industry. As with all extractive industries, the word itself tells you quite a lot: you’re gouging into the earth to get something, and that’s never a gentle process.

Second, unlike many other natural resources, oil is really concentrated and really valuable. Whoever owns a certain oilfield--and it usually ends up being a government or a royal family--has an extraordinary amount of concentrated money at their disposal. It’s not a resource like fertile land that is spread over many, many thousands of acres owned by many, many people. It’s not like manufacturing industries where there a lot of workers and a lot of owners and there are products that come out. This is really, really concentrated power. The cliché is that absolute power corrupts and corrupts absolutely. Oil can have a very similar effect because the possessor of oil possesses a country’s destiny.

Q. Does it matter where I buy my gas, or are all oil companies equally harmful? And what about state-owned oil companies like Brazil’s Petrobas?

A.I’ve looked at that question a lot. The more you look at it, there’s something objectionable about pretty much all the oil we consume. If the oil comes from Nigeria, there’s a war being fought over oil in Nigeria. If the oil comes from Ecuador, there’s a tremendous amount of environmental damage that’s coming from that oil. Ironically, most of Ecuador’s oil that goes to the United States goes to California, one of the most environmentally conscious states in the country. If the oil comes from Saudi Arabia, the income from it has gone to feed a lot of Islamic extremism.

Even if the oil is from Canada--which is actually the largest supplier of oil to the United States--a fair amount of Canadian oil comes from tar sands. There you have to cook the earth by using other forms of energy--natural gas, for example--and a lot of water. Canada is a great country politically, and there’s no corruption really associated with the Canadian oil. But there is an environmental toll.

Q. Your book focuses social and human-rights costs of oil extraction. How did climate change play into your reporting with political leaders, executives, and workers?

A.The climate argument has been made really well and continues to be made really well. But I was most interested in writing about the social costs of oil, meaning human rights, violence, and poverty.
So when I went to Nigeria, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela, etc., I focused on how people’s lives been affected by the oil that they export.

And honestly, the environmental issues for them are not the same ones they are for us. When I went to the Niger Delta I had to get permission and an aide from the warlord, because if I didn’t have his protection I’d be kidnapped in an instant. We took a canoe up the creeks and it was a terrible situation with wells dripping oil into the water, with flares all over the place, with fighting going on. I spent the night in one totally destitute village. It has no running water or electricity, it has no healthcare, nothing.

Right across from the creek is a multi-billion dollar Shell natural gas processing facility, with massive flares. In the west, flaring is very tightly regulated. In Nigeria, it’s supposed to be but it’s not. At this particular Soku facility, which is actually shut down at the moment due to fighting, there are massive flares going off 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Huge, huge flares. This is consistent throughout the Niger Delta.

One of the reasons flaring is restricted in the United States and elsewhere is not simply because it emits a lot of greenhouse gases, but because it’s incredibly harmful to human health. The toxins and the chemicals that are emitted in flaring are tremendous. So for these villagers in the Niger Delta, the climate issue for them wasn’t that in 20 or 30 years the world temperatures will have increased by another degree and weather patterns will have changed slightly. The climate issue for them is that they were breathing toxic chemicals as a result of this flare that was 40 yards across the creek.

Q. A few years ago the Chicago Tribune published an impressive piece of reporting (Paul Salopek’s “A tank of gas, a world of trouble”) in which a reporter traced gasoline from a suburban gas station back into all the places it came from. What did you make of that?

A. What he did was fantastic. There’s myth that’s perpetrated by the oil industry, and accepted by pretty much everyone, that it’s impossible to trace the oil that you put into your tank. Shell or Exxon say their oil comes from a lot of different sources, it’s mixed together, and it’s just not tracked down to the local level. They say it’s impossible to do. Paul Salopek said, “Let me check into that.” He found out that it is possible to source gasoline that you put into your tank and find out where it actually comes from. He really blew the lid off this myth.

This knowledge needs to get out. When you don’t know the origin of the product you’re buying, you can’t possibly care about the human-rights abuses or the pollution at the point of origin. That goes for tennis shoes as well as oil. By sourcing it, there is a lever that environmental activist groups can use to make people aware on a very local level of what is in their gas tank and what the price is beyond the $2.50 or $3.00 that they are forking over per gallon. It’s a lever that I don’t think environmental activist groups are fully aware of. Who knows where it will get them, but it could be useful.

Q. Is sourcing gasoline still really difficult to do?

A. Salopek had to get some proprietary data in order to get the information. But he’s just one reporter. If he can do it then an environmental group could too, I would think.

Q. What about solutions to the oil problem—do you have any?

A. I do, but none that are original. There are lots of plans and a lot technology that make a lot of sense. The real problem for us isn’t solutions--the problem is embracing the solutions. The political leadership of this country, perhaps spurred on by the citizenry, needs to actually take the steps of investing in conservation, in efficiency, in renewable energy … the list goes on.

The main problem is motivating people, and motivating political leadership. Not just the White House, which seems quite motivated, but all of the interest groups that it has to deal with. All of the regional interest groups it has to deal with. That’s the problem area.

I don’t have an answer for getting from here to there. In writing the book I hoped to make people understand oil more, and therefore support the kinds of changes necessary to get us to a post-oil future.

The size of each country on this map reflects the relative size of its oil reserves. The colors reflect different level of oil consumption (per country, not per capita).

Click to enlarge.

Courtesy Aaron Pava of CivicActions

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Ontario, on Thursday, launched the province's long-awaited program of feed-in tariffs in response to its ground-breaking Green Energy Act.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, Minister of Energy and Infrastructure George Smitherman, and Minister of the Environment John Gerretsen made the announcement against the iconic backdrop of Toronto's cooperatively-owned wind turbine.

This was the last in a series of announcements on implementation of the Green Energy Act this week by Energy Minister Smitherman.

The announcements began with Minister Smitherman opening the Canadian Wind Energy Association's annual conference in Toronto. At the conference's plenary session on Monday, Sept. 21, Smitherman revealed a $2.3 billion (CAD) plan to build new transmission and distribution lines in the province to rapidly develop Ontario's renewable energy potential.

On Wednesday, Sept. 23, Smitherman announced a special fund to aid development of renewable energy projects by First Nations (Ontario's indigenous people), community groups, and cooperatives.

Thursday's announcement culminates a months-long series of public consultations on the feed-in tariff program. The program now goes live Oct. 1, 2009.

In contrast to several other North American jurisdictions with weak feed-in tariffs, Ontario's policy follows successful practice in Europe. Ontario's system of feed-in tariffs is based on the cost of generation from each different technology, the cornerstone of successful European programs. For example, there are different tariffs for solar photovoltaics (solar PV) and wind energy.

The tariffs are precedent setting in North America not only for the number of different technologies listed, but also for the prices offered. Solar energy advocates will be particularly pleased. Ontario's proposed tariffs, if implemented, will be the highest in North America. For rooftop solar they will be comparable to those offered in Germany and France.

Ontario is expecting a boom in rooftop solar installations as a result of the program. The province will pay $0.80 CAD/kWh ($0.69 USD/kWh) for electricity from small rooftop solar systems less than 10 kilowatts for a period of 20 years.

Through the feed-in tariff program, Ontario will also pay the highest prices for wind energy, and biogas in North America. The tariffs represent the best estimates by engineers and economists of what it costs to develop renewable energy under Ontario's climatic conditions.

Unlike programs in the United States, there are no subsidies from either the federal or local government used in the feed-in tariff program.

In a first for North America, the new program includes feed-in tariffs specifically for offshore wind energy: $0.19 CAD/kWh ($0.16 USD/kWh). Ontario borders all the Great Lakes except Lake Michigan.

In the run up to the G20 in Pittsburgh and the Copenhagen climate conference later this year, Smitherman has stressed the theme that Ontario's new feed-in tariff program is just one part of what is North America's most aggressive climate change policy.

Ontario plans to close all its coal-fired power plants by 2014. It is the only jurisdiction in North America to make such a commitment. As a result, Ontario has embarked on an ambitious plan to become a leader in renewable energy development to make up the difference in lost power generation.

At one time coal made up nearly one-quarter of Ontario's electricity generation. In a previous announcement this past summer, Minister Smitherman accelerated the closing dates for two coal-fired units. This was seen as a sign that the government is making progress on its commitment.

At the press conference, Minister of the Environment Gerretsen introduced new regulations governing the siting of wind turbines and solar power plants. Wind turbines will have to comply with a minimum setback of 1804 feet from a non-participating residence. He also announced that solar power plants may not be built on prime agricultural land, designated Class I and Class II. However, Minister Garretsen said that a number of pre-existing proposals comprising several thousand acres will be allowed to go ahead on Class III lands.

Restricting solar PV development to Class III or greater lands is not expected to have any significant effect on the solar potential of the huge province.

Ontario is the second largest province in Canada. Ontario is also Canada's most populous province.

Toronto, the provincial capital, is Canada's largest city and one of the largest in North America. The Canadian Solar Energy Industries Association (CanSIA) estimates there are several thousand megawatts of potential solar-electric generation on Toronto's rooftops alone.

In early 2009, CanSIA suggested that solar PV alone could make up 10 percent of Ontario's electricity supply by 2025. Such a contribution, about 16 TWh per year, would require the installation of 16,000 MW of solar PV under Ontario's climatic conditions.

In a survey earlier this year, the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) found huge interest in the feed-in tariff program. OPA estimated there was as much as 15,000 MW of potential projects being weighed by project proponents.

To tap that potential, Ontario has embarked on an ambitious program of developing new transmission and distribution lines, including so-called "enabler" lines. The enabler lines will be built in areas where there is more renewable energy potential than the current system can transport. The province will also build enabler lines to areas with a concentration of renewable energy potential that is not currently served by the existing system.

Minister Smitherman revealed in his Sept. 21 announcement the approximate location of 20 new transmission projects.

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Rainforest Action Network hangs a 70-foot banner in front of Niagara Falls, in protest of Canadian tar sands oil.Photo: Rainforest Action NetworkThere's a 70-foot banner and activists dangling over the observation tower at Niagara Falls. Before dawn this morning, a small team of climate advocates with the Rainforest Action Network rappelled hundreds of feet above the ground, to offer special welcome message to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper ahead of his first official visit to the White House to push dirty Tar Sands oil.

Not that he's feeling so welcome anyway. Obama limited the meeting to just one hour. While some have called it a slap in the face, aides say Harper will turn the other cheek. "The economy, and the clean-energy dialogue will dominate the discussions," one aid told the Globe and Mail. Obama needed to dodge controversy over oil imports from Canada's tar sands in the midst of the climate legislation debate. Harper needed a story to go with his photo-op.

During Harper's first official trip to meet Obama in the U.S., the two leaders are expected to discuss climate change and energy policy ahead of the upcoming G-20 Summit. Canada supplies 19 percent of U.S. oil imports, more than half of which now come from the tar sands, making the region the largest single source of U.S. oil imports. The expansion of the tar sands will strip mine an area the size of Florida. Complete with skyrocketing rates of cancer (by 400%!) for First Nations communities living downstream, broken treaties, toxic belching lakes so large you can see them from outer space, churning up ancient boreal forest, destroyed air and water quality, the tar sands have been called the most destructive project on Earth.

Tomorrow’s visit to the U.S. by Prime Minister Harper is the latest attempt by Canadian federal and provincial officials to lock in subsidies for 22 new and expanded refinery projects and oil pipelines crisscrossing 28 states, which would transport and process the dirty tar sands oil. Many are concerned that Prime Minister Harper wants to protect the tar sands oil industry from climate regulation, even though it is one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.

“Climate change, one of the biggest security threats of our time, is something Canada and the United States face together. Extracting tar sands oil, which sends three times more climate-changing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than conventional oil, puts us all at risk,” said Eriel Deranger a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and Rainforest Action Network’s Tar Sands Campaigner in Alberta.

As this oil spills into the U.S., communities living near oil refineries face increased air and water pollution, which contains 11 times more sulfur and nickel and five times more lead than conventional oil.

Opposition to tar sands oil has been rising on both sides of the border. Just last month, four Native American and environmental groups sued Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Deputy Secretary James Steinberg and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over Enbridge Energy’s Alberta Clipper pipeline. If built, the 1,375 mile pipeline would pump 800,000 barrels of tar sands oil per day from Northern Alberta to Midwestern refineries. On the Canadian side, Native activists escalated pressure on the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) for their funding of the tar sands a few weeks ago.

Canada has no regulations to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, and the federal government’s climate change plan would allow total pollution from the tar sands to increase almost 70 percent by 2020. Tar sands oil production is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada and was recently cited as one of the most important reasons Canada will miss its Kyoto targets by over 30 percent.

Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) used to be the centerpiece of Harper's pitch. Global warming pollution from coal and tar sands "can be solved by technology," declared Obama. Not to be outdone, Harper's office announced that "a strengthened U.S.-Canada partnership on carbon sequestration will help accelerate private sector investment in commercial scale, near-zero-carbon coal facilities to promote climate and energy security."

Half a year and billions of wasted tax dollars later, though, CCS is still a pipe dream. FutureGen, North America's supposed proving ground for the unproven technology, can't keep private investors to save it's life. Two of its biggest private backers, Southern Co. and AEP, jumped ship last June. Around the same time, sponsors lowered the goalpost on the project to just 60 percent less carbon. So much for near-zero-carbon facility. Projects promised in the tar sands are fairing even worse.

No matter. Harper is back, hat in hand, looking for legislative giveaways for an industry destined to ruin the climate.

So here's our welcome to you, Prime Minister Harper. Now, please, go home.

And take your dirty tar sands with you.

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Local food, local goods, local everything is in, as you’ve no doubt heard. Local is fresher. Local burns less shipping fuel. Local keeps the wealth nearby.

Naturally, there’s money to be made off local, so big businesses are muscling into the game. The emerging term is localwashing—a variation on greenwashing wherein businesses claim to be local when actually ... you get it.

“The ingenuity of the food manufacturers and marketers never ceases to amaze me,” said author Michael Pollan, who’s done more to articulate the need for local in the food realm than maybe anyone else. “They can turn any critique into a new way to sell food. You’ve got to hand it to them.”

Here’s a look at some prime examples of that ingenuity/absurdity/deception.

Courtesy NEAFP.comCitgo: “Local. Loyal. Like it should be.” The crop of new billboards from the petroleum company owned by Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan government makes sense only if the rather undemocratic president lives around the corner from you. Which he doesn’t.

Maybe you’ve heard of this cute little bookstore around the corner. It’s got a DIY-looking video blog with the tagline, “All bookselling is local.” Except when it isn’t.

“Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, a U.S.-based subsidiary of European processed-food behemoth Unilever, has seen fit to subject Canada (Canada?) to an eat-local campaign,” reports Grist Food Editor Tom Philpott. He’s dumbfounded. Here are those locally sourced ingredients of which Hellmann’s is so proud:

WATER, MODIFIED CORN STARCH, SOYBEAN OIL, VINEGAR, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, EGG WHITES, SALT, SUGAR, XANTHAN GUM, LEMON AND LIME PEEL FIBERS, COLORS ADDED, LACTIC ACID, (SODIUM BENZOATE, CALCIUM DISODIUM EDTA) USED TO PROTECT QUALITY, PHOSPHORIC ACID, NATURAL FLAVORS.

The Hellmann’s campaign also asks Canadians to take a hard look at the food-kilometers of the non-mayonnaise portion of their diet.

Potato farmers pitch chips fresh from the field in a series of ads from Frito-Lay North America, a subsidiary of PepsiCo. The five regional ads reportedly feature farmers who really do grow potatoes in those areas. “By this logic, all of us here in Iowa can begin referring to high fructose corn syrup as a local food as well,” writes Kurt Michael Friese.

Courtesy PSFK.comThese green “local” signs in a New York Whole Foods might point to brands that are local. But the coffee they’re selling wasn’t grown anywhere near Union Square. Blatant deception? No. But one blogger asks for a little clarity please.

In a bit of un-branding that caught the attention of its hometown, Starbucks stripped its name and logo from a Seattle coffee shop and reopened as the “rustic” 15th Ave Coffee and Tea.

Courtesy The Stranger.Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood greeted indie-Starbucks with mockery.

The “We buy local” website of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce includes such mom-and-pop establishments as Wal-Mart. Stacy Mitchell’s superb reporting on localwashing exposes how regional booster groups, through campaigns like this, enable multinational companies to brand themselves as local.

Photo: Whyibuylocal.comIn central California, the Economic Development Corporation of Fresno County launched its Buy Local campaign at the Fashion Fair Mall, with Macy’s in the background. Nearby chains Anthropologie and The Cheesecake Factory added to the confusing message, Mitchell reports.

Banners saying simply “Local” hang above the produce sections at some Wal-Marts. Don’t ask questions. Writes Mitchell: “The chain's local food offerings are usually limited to a few of the main commodity crops of that particular state—peaches in Georgia or potatoes in Maine—and sit amid a sea of industrial food and other goods shipped from the far side of the planet.”

Finally, HSBC calls itself “the world's local bank.” It’s a very large bank--one of the world's largest. This sign is from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

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In February 2009, Canada's Public Safety Minister and the country's Correctional Service announced a planned closure of all six of the prison farms owned by the people of Canada and operated by CORCAN - the branch of the Correctional Service that operates the farm rehabilitation programs which also provide employment training to inmates. The excellent syndicated Canadian radio show Deconstructing Dinner, which covers the local food movement, detailed all of this in its July 2nd show, and it's a fascinating listen.

The proposed closure is a move that's spawned a national grassroots movement to block the action, Save Our Farms.

Why close the farms, Mr. Minister? Because, he explains, they've lost $4 million (doesn't that sound like the cost of a training program, though?) and, worse, prison farms are training people in skills that are 50 years behind the times - growing food by hand, milking cows, and such. This guy apparently has no idea what's on the horizon for food production, and prefers the model with the hydroponic aquabots tending to seas of floating produce or something.

Never mind that Canada's prison farm infrastructures are often relied on by small private farms nearby, that they supply cheap fresh food to large institutions, and the fact that the inmates interviewed in the story told of enjoying the farm work and testified to its great therapeutic effects and a desire to continue this work after release. Add to the picture Canada's farm succession problems and its burgeoning local agriculture revival and one would seem to be mad to close these farms. The one in Kingston, Ontario, is likely the largest urban farm in Canada, a last reservoir of open land in a sprawling city.

Where the prisons plan to get their fresh food from post-CORCAN is my question, and rumors abound that the farms will either be privatized or worse, sold for development at a profit. But what a loss that would be: Canada’s prison farms sit on some of the most desirable agricultural land in their regions and many are close to urban areas.  And there's an ironic twist: Canada's prison farms are an international model and have been recently toured by delegations from Japan, Russia, and New Zealand, the latter hoping to take its own prison farms organic.

In the US, prison farms are also a source of tilth and production. A quick search turns up items like these two:

Nashville prison saves $150K composting all food waste; grows 100 acres of veggies.

And then there's New Jersey, whose largest farmer is its prison system, managed by AgriIndustries - 'a self-supporting operation without appropriated funds. Annual revenues total approximately $11.5 million, with substantial savings to all users. The departments of Corrections, Human Services, and Military and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Juvenile Justice Commission, utilize products from AgriIndustries.'

Their site also says that their operations 'utilize and train about 100 inmates daily in all areas of food production technology,' and that, (surprisingly, to me), 'the food production industry is the largest employer in New Jersey,' and that 'inmates receive training and experience that may qualify them to gain employment when they leave the prison system.'

If that last bit is true, it's another in a long list of reasons why these rehabilitative programs ought to be championed and remain integral to prisons. It's just plain healing to grow and care for things, and we are going to need a lot more people, with criminal records or not, that know how to do that in the near future.

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At a North American summit Monday in Guadalajara, Mexico, U.S. President Barack Obama, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper released a statement on climate change:

North American Leaders’ Declaration on Climate Change and Clean Energy

We, the leaders of North America, reaffirm the urgency and necessity of taking aggressive action on climate change.  We stress that the experience developed during the last 15 years in the North American region on environmental cooperation, sustainable development, and clean energy research, development, and deployment constitutes a valuable platform for climate change action, and we resolve to make use of the opportunities offered by existing bilateral and trilateral institutions.

We recognize the broad scientific view that the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed 2 degrees C, we support a global goal of reducing global emissions by at least 50% compared to 1990 or more recent years by 2050, with developed countries reducing emissions by at least 80% compared to 1990 or more recent years by 2050.

We share a vision for a low-carbon North America, which we believe will strengthen the political momentum behind a successful outcome at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC meeting this December, and support our national and global efforts to combat climate change.  To achieve our low-carbon development goals, and consistent with our respective circumstances and capacities, we agree to the following:

In order to facilitate these actions, we will work cooperatively to develop and follow up on a Trilateral Working Plan and submit a report of results at our next North American Leaders Summit in 2010.

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A tar-sands facility: oil doesn't get any dirtier than this.At ForestEthics, persuading the world's largest corporations to treat the Earth ethically is our bread and butter. And it often starts with a letter.

Last week, we mailed letters to more than 100 Fortune 500 companies, warning that their continued consumption of fuels from Canada’s tar sands—the world’s dirtiest oil—puts their brands at risk.

As ForestEthics Executive Director Todd Paglia documented in a vivid slideshow for Grist last year, the tar sands manage to combine multiple local and global environmental hazards into a single industrial project—in fact, the largest industrial project in the world. In the parlance of addiction, the tar sands are proof that we’re getting pretty close to rock bottom. It’s a giant step backward for a world that is ready to break its addiction to oil.

Tar-sands oil production generates three to five times the greenhouse-gas emissions of conventional oil production. Communities downstream of tar-sands projects are facing elevated levels of cancer. Tar-sands production creates toxic lakes so vast they can be seen from outer space. Production of tar-sands oil destroys fresh drinking water, pollutes the air, and razes North America’s Great Boreal Forests. Tar-sands sludge, extracted primarily in the province of Alberta, Canada, cannot be made clean by technological solutions.

And the tar-sands problem is coming to America.  An increasing percentage of U.S. transportation fuels--consumed in massive quantities to ship American products and power American cars--are derived from Canadian tar-sands oil. This means that despite what you may have heard, a lot of America's favorite products—from cans of soda to bars of soap to books purchased online—have a dirtier carbon footprint than they've ever had before.

The tar-sands industry is proposing new pipelines and refineries that would expand U.S. capacity for converting their tarry sludge into fuel. If these plans move forward, America will have moved Alberta's toxic local impacts to our towns and cities. At the precise moment America has concluded that our economy must be cleaner, tar-sands oil threatens to make it dirtier.

In last week’s letter, we offered a hand in helping companies rely more on cleaner fuels and less on dirty tar-sands fuels, while also notifying them that a public campaign could be launched against any company that does not act ethically in response to the tar sands’ devastating environmental and health impacts. The choice is theirs to make.

Both the sincere offer of help and the legitimate threat of public action are critical, and this "carrot/stick" approach marks a return to the strategies that made ForestEthics’ reputation. As ForestEthics has found over the years, the old adage "the customer is always right" can be a powerful tool for change.

And America’s Fortune 500 companies are some of the most powerful customers in the world.  Many of these companies did not know they were customers of Canada’s tar sands until they received our letter.  Now that they know, they can either burnish their brands by helping to lead us into a clean energy future, or they can 'tar'-nish their brands by passively accepting Big Oil’s latest plan for keeping us addicted to fossil fuels.

A version of this post was originally published at ForestEthics.org.

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Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk won the top prize from the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual reporting awards for his investigation of oil extraction in the tar sands of northern Alberta.

Nikiforuk’s book -- Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent -- examines the high social and environmental costs of the process of converting bitumen to refinable oil, which has drawn $150 billion in investment from the world’s largest oil companies. SEJ awarded Nikiforuk the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, which comes with $10,000.

Grist reviewed the book and interviewed Nikiforuk when it was released; he told us:

He said the economic downturn and drop in oil prices have slowed the pace of tar sands development, though they’re still generating attention. A pair of new studies attempt some tar sands greenwashery, and the activist group Action Factory held an oily demonstration in Washington on Friday to urge Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to nix a pipeline linking tar sands oil to U.S. refineries.

More notable winners from SEJ’s awards:

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Vancouver’s vision for its Olympic village looks dazzling from afar, like the city itself. Up close the details get hairier.Photo: ecstaticistThe city of Vancouver, British Columbia, has a lot to brag about. It's got an enviable location, wedged between the Strait of Georgia and the snow-capped Coast Mountains. It's a perennial winner of "most livable cities" rankings, thanks in part to its parks, arts, and the Canadian social safety net. Its youthful mayor, Gregor Robertson, talks up the city as the greenest in North America and has laid out a plan to make it the most sustainable city in the world.

So you better believe the city will be showing off its environmental credentials when it hosts the 2010 Winter Olympics next February. "Greening" the Olympics has become an expectation, after all (see Turin's recycling programs and Beijing's attempt at air quality improvements). As the largest city ever to host the Winter Games, Vancouver intends to make sustainability central to its Olympic legacy.

The centerpiece of those efforts will be the athletes' village at Southeast False Creek, an 80-acre rehabbed brownfield that lies across a "false creek" from the downtown peninsula. There, a $1 billion city-within-a-city is rising in preparation for next year's Olympic and Paralympic athletes. For years the city eyed the site as a place to try out a new kind of sustainable neighborhood. Winning the Olympic bid in 2003 provided the impetus.

Artist's rendering of the Olympic village. Watch a slide show about the project.The development is distinctively European in its design, an odd influence in a city that can already feel more Asian than North American (See a slide show about the project.) Elsewhere in the city, the "Vancouverist" architectural style highlights slender towers that provide high density while preserving open view corridors (to take in the surrounding water and mountains). But at Southeast False Creek, short, squat buildings push to the edge of narrow streets and courtyards, evoking Amsterdam more than Singapore. Plazas and inner courtyards emphasize shared space, and the streetscape design draws on the Dutch concept of woonerf, a combined sidewalk/street that uses paving and landscaping to encourage walkers, cyclists, slow-moving cars, and children at play to make room for each other.

"You're creating a better community feel because you have more eyes on the street, more people with contact with the street level, and less of that height that keeps people apart from each other," said Robin Petri, the city's project engineering manager.

Southeast False Creek's 16 buildings will include market-rate and affordable housing, a senior housing center, retail shops, a grocery store, a pharmacy, and eventually an elementary school. There are enough clean energy and conservation features to make the head spin—bioswales and wetlands to treat runoff water, rainwater cisterns that irrigate green roofs and flush gray-water toilets, solar-powered trash compactors, heat drawn from sewage pipes, a radiant heating and cooling system.

The development's layout emphasizes communal space, as with this waterfront boardwalk, a nod to one of the site's past uses as a shipyard.Photo: Jonathan HiskesIf it sounds a lot like every other Cool Green Building Project, fair enough. The village is LEED-ey, with expectations that 15 of the buildings will be certified gold and one platinum, under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard. The development is also participating in the pilot LEED neighborhood program. But it's not the highest-rated LEED project—that distinction currently goes to Dockside Green in nearby Victoria, B.C.

Southeast False Creek is notable more for its size—planners predict an eventual population of more than 10,000—and for the international attention it will receive in the Olympic spotlight.

Design manager Roger Bayley summarized the hope that the village's influence in architecture and planning circles will stretch far beyond Vancouver: "I personally believe it could have a very significant influence," he said. "It's being constructed on a scale and in a timeframe that is literally unheard of, except maybe in China. And it's embracing a whole series of innovations that I think many people … will be extraordinarily impressed with."

That's one potential legacy. There's another possibility. Seven months before opening ceremonies, a string of problems nearly as numerous as the clean-tech features threatens to eclipse the project's sustainability goals.

Overshadowing and complicating every other trouble is a financing mess rooted in last fall's credit crisis and mired in the real estate ­­­slump. The project was to be the first Olympic village that was largely funded by private sources and sold as market housing (they are typically built by governments and used afterward as low-income or senior housing). The city, which owns the land, was reportedly glad to avoid the responsibility of supervising construction and financing, while still standing to turn a profit on the project. It ceded much of that work to the developer Millennium Development Corporation. But Millenium's funding mechanism collapsed last October when the New York hedge fund Fortress Investment Group pulled out of the project, leaving the city holding the tab. The city council made arrangements, first in secret and then publicly, to shore up the project with tax money—now figured at $450 million Canadian ($403 million U.S.). City leaders hope they can recover the cost when the units are sold to private buyers for use after the Olympics. Of course, that depends on the real estate market.

A woonerf, or shared-used street, in Matsumoto, Japan. Southeast False Creek will employ similar narrow, winding byways. Photo: Cheryl & RichOther setbacks: Construction lags behind schedule, pressuring workers to meet a Nov. 1 deadline, when the development company hands control of 1,100 units to Olympic organizers. In late June, reports arose of a possible mold problem because of improper pipe installation. A goal that vegetation would cover 50 percent of the project's roof space has been scrapped, reportedly because insurers worried about flooding. [Correction: Petri said the project is on track to meet this target.]

The city also scaled back the amount of low-income and middle-income housing it originally pledged to include. It will now subsidize 252 low-income units, a target that has nearly doubled in cost, from $65 million to $110 million, The Vancouver Sun reports. The city has yet to determine who will qualify and how to select tenants for the subsidized dwellings, Petri said.

British Columbia's anti-Olympic protestors have also focused some of their disapproval on the development, even though Olympic housing will occupy only 50 of Southeast False Creek's 80 acres. Much of the development will be built after the games, and of course the whole village will last far longer than its use for the games. Still, planners have battled the perception that the short-term event influenced the city's long-term plan.

"This isn't really about the Olympics," said Petri. "The Olympics just provided us with a fixed timeline and an opportunity to give it lots of attention. But this was planned way before the Olympics. Whether someone's excited about the Olympics or not is really independent from how they feel about the site."

The project’s blocky buildings achieve the same density as many of the city’s tower housing developments, according to the city's project engineering manager, Robin Petri.Photo: Jonathan HiskesIt will be interesting to see which storylines prevail when the international media trains its eye on Vancouver next winter—the financial mess, the shrinking social-housing target, the clean-energy and water-use technologies, the attempt to build not just green buildings but an entire sustainable neighborhood, or something else altogether. Organizers have begun releasing an elaborate online book on their vision for the site, in monthly segments, to help along those glowing profiles. (To be fair, the publication includes some good information, not just PR.)

Assessing the project's long-term influence will be more difficult. Locally, it may wear down some of the resistance that comes with trying to build things differently. Bayley, the lead designer, spoke this spring about seeking permits to use harvested rainwater to flush toilets.

"You'd think that would be a simple thing to do, but persuading municipal authorities was not as simple as we'd hoped," he said. "We ended up putting signs on the toilet saying 'do not drink this water.' Then they wanted it translated into dog and cat."

Petri added later, "But now they've approved it, and the next attempt at this won't be as new to them." She said the project would help permitters, contractors, engineers, landscape architects, and others who work on it become comfortable with high-efficiency techniques. From there, she hopes, they might spread throughout the building and planning trades. In other words, despite all the attention that comes with being novel, the real goal of Southeast False Creek is to help such projects become normal.

Watch a slide show about Vancouver's Olympic village at Southeast False Creek:

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It all started so well. Almost exactly three years ago, Ontario's government announced the construction of two new nuclear reactors to replace ageing parts of our current power supply. Despite the drawbacks of being announced in the middle of summer vacation season and happening in Ontario, it nonetheless made news around the world. This was probably the furthest that any proposal for nuclear building had gotten in the 21st century, and it was kind of a big deal: The Washington Post said it "put Canada at the leading edge of what the nuclear industry calls a 'renaissance' of support for nuclear power."

The usual suspects touted Ontario's nuclear ambitions as a sign that nuclear power was hip and cool again. See -- even the Canadians are doing it!

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Earlier in the spring, there were persistent rumours that, after getting bids from the major nuclear players, Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman was suffering from "sticker shock". Throw in a major global recession, and a provincial government that his already mired in a scandal for wasting taxpayer's money by the millions, and it was starting to look bleak for the our shiny new reactors. It certainly didn't help that the Federal government decided to throw a monkey wrench into things.

Then, this morning, we get a short press release from George Smitherman's office:

This makes my home and native land the latest jurisdiction to reconsider the much-ballyhooed, little-realized nuclear renaissance.

Of course, this is happening at the same time as Ontario reels out major new subsidies for green energy and remains committed to phasing out coal for good by 2014. No word on whether that will be pushed back for a second time because of the nuclear delays, so it's possible that this is at best a mixed blessing. But given that at the very least we're looking at saving billions of dollars, I call this a win.

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British Columbia held its provincial election yesterday, with the province's carbon tax playing a big role--and coming out a big winner. Aside from the economy, probably no issue was more important than the ruling Liberal Party's climate plan, passed last summer and subsequently the opposition New Democratic Party's (NDP) centerpiece campaign issue.

A carbon tax backlash failed to unseat British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell in the province's May 12 elections.Image courtesy Liberal Party of British ColumbiaThe Liberals won, leading in some 48 district races and giving Premier Gordon Campbell a third consecutive majority government. That should ensure the survival of the carbon tax, called one of the best in the world by our partner in wonkery Alan Durning over at Sightline.

I don't know all the ins and outs of Canadian politics, where the traditionally progressive and environment-minded NDP came out against the tax, which was created by the typically right-of-center Liberals. But the Canadian press reads the election as an affirmation of the climate plan.

Says the Vancouver Sun: "Election victory gives Campbell economic, environmental mandate"

From the Toronto Globe and Mail:

It wasn't an entirely green night, as the Globe and Mail noted the B.C. Green Party won only 8 percent of the vote province-wide, less than it got in the 2005 election.

The carbon tax debate began last summer when oil prices were at a peak, which didn't help its popularity. The NDP tried to harness that frustration, saying the tax was too hard on the economically strapped poor. That strategy earned criticism from prominent green groups like the David Suzuki Foundation.

Vancouver alt-mag the Tyee spoke to David Cubberly, a regional NDP pol who disagreed with his party's strategy:

Says the Carbon Tax Center, an advocacy group:

I can't think of an American statewide (governor or otherwise) election in which a climate plan became the first or second-most important issue. That's not too say it couldn't happen soon.

--

Related: Read Grist contributor Charles Komanoff's take.

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Carbon emissions pricing met its first big electoral test this week, as British Columbia voters rewarded BC premier Gordon Campbell, who last July instituted North America's first major carbon tax, with a third four-year term.

News service AFP reported that with more than 60 percent of the votes counted, Campbell's Liberal Party held a 46-42 lead over the opposition New Democratic Party, whose leader, Carole James, denounced the carbon tax throughout the two-month campaign and promised to replace it with a cap-and-trade scheme.

Elections aren't referenda, as I hastened to note when the Liberals were routed in Canada's national election last fall. But that outcome was tied to the Liberal candidate's hapless campaign style, compounded by his backing away from the carbon tax plank in his party platform. In the BC campaign Campbell stood squarely behind his carbon tax. Indeed, voters appear to have rewarded the Liberals for sticking to principle as much as for the substance of the carbon tax itself.

Here's how AFP put it (emphases added):

The contrast with the U.S. is stark. Not a single governor here publicly backs a carbon tax. Few of the major environmental organizations have anything positive to say about a national carbon tax, and most are still cheerleading for the carbon cap-and-trade alternative no matter how loose the cap or polluter-friendly the trading.

The BC carbon tax that took effect on July 1, 2008 is modest, equating to just $7.50-$8.00 (U.S.) per ton of CO2. However, it is to rise each year through 2012, reaching the U.S. equivalent of around $11.75/ton on July 1 and, in July 2012, around $23.50.

A U.S. carbon tax at that level would raise petrol prices by approximately 23 cents a gallon and national-average electricity prices by around 1.7 cents a kilowatt-hour. (Virtually all power generation in British Columbia is hydro-electric, so their carbon tax effectively exempts electricity.) The BC tax is revenue-neutral, with revenues returned to taxpayers through personal income and business income tax cuts.

In a recent e-mail to the Carbon Tax Center, American climatologist and climate campaigner James Hansen said, "The important thing is to get on the right policy track at the beginning - the policy must attack the fundamental problem, that dirty fossil fuels are the cheapest energy because they are not made to pay their costs to society."

Yes, carbon taxes must reach high levels and go global quickly. But for now let's celebrate that the first major jurisdiction - and party - to choose the right policy track has seen its vision recognized and its courage rewarded.

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If a huge coal power plant goes next door and sets up a cute little boutique collection of five solar panels, have your basic feelings about that giant coal power plant changed? Probably not. After all, you're reading Grist.

But what if said coal company releases advertisements announcing that they've "gone solar," complete with misleading close-up pics of those cute solar panels? Enough people might fall for it to make the ads worthwhile.

Call it the cute little dollhouse effect: a nasty company builds a cute, green dollhouse version of their house, takes misleading pics suggesting that the dollhouse is the real house, and then declares itself a cute little green company.

Ladies and Gentlemen, gargantuan loggovore Kimberly-Clark has built itself a cute little dollhouse!

The world's largest manufacturer of tissue products, Kimberly-Clark continues to clearcut Canada's Boreal forest to make their flagship Kleenex brand tissue. It contains no recycled content. Zero. Donut. Greenpeace has been on the case for a number of years, running a markets campaign highlighting the fact that Kimberly-Clark is wiping away ancient forests to make Kleenex -- which is more useful than most junk mail, but only for a split second.

Natural, or just another faker?scottcommonsense.comThe company's new Naturals line of products -- released under their "Scott" brand name -- is a clear acknowledgement of the impact of Greenpeace's campaign, but also a classic example of the cute little dollhouse effect. It's like a cleaner, greener Mini-Me, which while cute and ostensibly good, does not change the wholly unimpressive state of the parent brand.

The Naturals line amply demonstrates that Kimberly-Clark can make a high-quality tissue with recycled content. That's great to finally see. But Greenpeace's recent tissue guide gave all of the Naturals products an "avoid" rating because their levels of post-consumer recycled content still fall below recommended levels.

Kimberly-Clark has no trouble with innovation -- if they can make an anti-viral tissue product, for god's sake, they can make Kleenex with 100 percent post-consumer recycled content. But Seventh Generation's and Cascades' entire product lines still outdo Kimberly-Clark's best.

And though Kimberly-Clark chooses not to, other companies make the grade. To see how Kimberly-Clark fails to stack up against truly sustainable options, check out the guide. View the kind of destruction that results in a box of Kleenex here.

And while Kimberly-Clark wants you to look at dollhouses and other relatively meaningless playthings, keep your eyes on the real company.

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A strange-bedfellows political coalition, everyone from the CEO of Exxon to climate scientist James Hansen, supports a carbon tax as an alternative to cap-and-trade. Tax proponents allege that cap-and-trade is too complicated; too friendly to financial industry tricks and manipulations; too open to loopholes, cheating, and special pleading; too weak to work.

This is all true. Or rather, could be true, if special interests are given too influential a voice in the process; if there is no organized grassroots movement applying pressure; if the legislators developing the policy allow it to happen.

The thing is, the same flaws could just as easily weaken a carbon tax. Just because it looks elegant sketched on an economist's whiteboard doesn't mean a tax can't be corrupted in the real-world political process. (Have a quick look at the U.S. tax code.)

To boot, taxes of any kind are notoriously unpopular among the U.S. electorate.

It's an article of faith among supporters that returning the revenue to taxpayers via rebates could bring public support around behind a tax, despite the fact that just such a refunded tax was roundly rejected in Canada last year. Despite the fact that a comprehensive new survey out of Yale (PDF) asked a representative sample of over 2,000 people what means they favored to fight climate change and a fully refunded gasoline tax came in dead last. Despite the lack of any real empirical evidence that taxes can be rendered popular with promises of rebates.

Pricing carbon will be a fraught political battle, in danger of being corrupted or dying in Congress. That's true whether it's cap-and-trade or a carbon tax on the table.

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Vancouverite David Suzuki and his namesake foundation surface in the U.S. news from time to time, typically through climate initiatives and ocean conservation initiatives such as its estimate of the carbon impact of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

But for our Northern neighbors, the 73-year-old Suzuki is a household name. He’s become the Canada’s preeminent environmental activist -- David Roberts likened him to the Canadian Al Gore. At this weeks’ World Conference on Sport and the Environment, I asked some youngish Canucks about his first claim to fame. They weren’t sure, they said.  He’s sort of always been around. (The often-helpful interwebs mention he was a genetist and longtime host of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s science TV series, "The Nature of Things.")

When the Vancouver Organizing Committee released a plan yesterday to make the 2010 Winter Games carbon neutral, reporters immediately turned to Suzuki and the policy wonks at his foundation for an assessment. The foundation provided the orginal forecast of the carbon impact of the 2010 Olympics –- 300,000 tons. But it hadn’t seen VANOC’s offset purchasing plan before yesterday, so it couldn’t vouch for it.

“I would plead with VANOC to please set the bar high,” said Suzuki.

He held his own news conference to announce the release of On Thin Ice, a report on the threat climate change poses to winter sports in Canada. It found that global warming could all but wipe out ice skating, cross-country skiing, and low-elevation downhill skiing by 2050 if no action is taken.

Suzuki mentioned two “iconic Canadian images” that are already endangered by climate change – polar bears and backyard skating rinks, like the one on which a young Wayne Gretzky learned to skate.

As he’s done before, Suzuki enlisted Canadian athletes to help make his case. Professional snowboarder Justin Lamoureaux, who trains in Whistler, B.C., said he’s already found his training season and availabe space shrunk by melting glaciers.

"Imagine a Canada with no pond hockey, no snow days, no skiing," he said. "No snowmen, snowballs or snow forts and less maple syrup. As much as some people dislike it, winter is Canada."

Suzuki also offered a harsh critique of the Conservative-led federal government and its lack of climate action, and of the national media’s downplaying of the climate issue in last fall’s election.

“Hundreds of thousands of Canadians are already acting at the individual level, but we need leadership at the federal level,” he said.

The foundation’s report concludes with a call for national carbon regulation.

“Canada is a northern country,” Suzuki said. “We are probably as vulnerable to the effects of greenhouse gases and global warming as any country in the world.”

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The big news of day one at the World Conference on Sport and the Environment in Vancouver, British Columbia, was the unveiling of a carbon neutrality plan for the 2010 Olympics. The rest of the day’s events were a lot like the offset plan: solid at their core and short on details.

During a keynote address, socially responsible investment executive Thomas Van Dyck managed to drop the lines, “The green tide must lift all ships,” “Green is the new green,” and “We must put the eco back in economy,” all within 30 seconds, all without a smile or a trace of irony. That’s got to be worth an award or something.

The crowd -- athletes, sports organizers, corporate sponsors, International Olympics Committee (IOC) officials and suitors from 2016 host city-finalists Chicago, Madrid, Tokyo, Rio -- seemed like they could handle a bit more than inspirational slogans. Not hating, just saying. But there was some good stuff along with the cheerleading.

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson

Introduced as a guy who bicycled to work to work this morning, the boyish, charismatic 43-year-old talked up Vancouver as a cosmopolitan, exercise-loving city, where it’s only natural to unite athletics and care for the earth via a global event such as the Olympics.

Robertson mentioned biking to work, which he said taught him that his city could provide more bike-friendly commuter routes. He offered something of a challenge to his municipal colleagues: “We want to be the greenest city in the world,” he said. “Not that it should always be a competition, because there are things we can learn from each other too. But we figure we’re leading North America, which isn’t all that hard to do in terms of the environment.” Booyah! Take that, Cleveland. Also, he biked to work this morning.

Prince Albert II of Monaco

No newbie to the climate action scene, His Serene Highness Prince Albert II has traveled to both poles to observe the effects of global warming and clamor for carbon regulation. In Vancouver he showed lots of love for the host city, province, and organizing committee, along with the IOC.

"What the IOC has done, what the IOC environmental commission has done and indeed what the Olympic movement has embraced is, for me, a return to the original Olympic spirit," he said. "A philosophy of life with the goal of placing sport at the service of the harmonious development of man."

Overall, it was an everybody-on-board sort of speech: “It is no longer possible to shirk the efforts necessary to save our environment,” he said. “This fight requires absolutely everyone’s attention.”

Premier of British Columbia Gordon Campbell

The province’s leader since 2001 spoke openly and passionately about his love for wood, saying “If you’re concerned about the climate, wood is the best building material there is.

Campbell said wood conserves carbon even in lumber form, is more resilient than steel, and has 400-times better insulation than steel. He said he’s helped rewrite building codes to allow wooden buildings up to six stories high. “It’s cheaper, it’s environmentally sensible, and we’ve got lots of it,” he said.

Mountain pine beetles have killed 80 percent of inland pine forests in B.C. -- the beetle population has exploded because winters are no longer cold enough to kill most of them. The new 350,000 square-foot Olympic speed skating rink in suburban Richmond has a wooden roof, made from beetle-killed B.C. pines. Campbell considers this the sort of lemons-from-lemonade solution B.C. needs to showcase when the Games begin next February.

“We have to be willing to start with ourselves and be an example,” he said. “If no one’s willing to lead, we won’t make any progress.

“I think one of the most important things we can do is tell stories of success. Too often we just hear about what isn’t working.”

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The Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) wants make the 2010 Winter Games carbon neutral, but the plan it released Monday counts on help from the private sector to make it happen.

At the World Conference on Sport and the Environment, VANOC announced a plan to neutralize 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide, mostly through renewable energy and energy efficiency projects in British Columbia. That's the amount of emissions the February 2010 games will create, according to a preliminary carbon forecast by the David Suzuki Foundation. The forecast expects two thirds of that amount will come from air travel by spectators and participants.

Vancouver isn't the first city to attempt a carbon neutral Olympics -- Salt Lake City and Torino made similar promises. But organizers here say theirs is the broadest attempt yet. The 300,000-tons estimate includes carbon dioxide generated by pre-games construction and the 2010 Paralympic Games, to be held in Vancouver later next spring.

VANOC doesn't plan to pay for the offsets itself, CEO John Furlong said. Instead, it's counting on a corporate sponsor to step up just 10 months before the games, long after most sponsorships have been lined up. At current carbon prices of about $15 a ton, meeting the 2010 target would cost about $3.6 million ($4.5 million Canadian), said Linda Coady, vice-president of sustainability for the organizing committee.

Responsibility for executing the offset plan will be placed in the hands of the Pacific Carbon Trust, a newly created corporation that helps oversee the Province of British Columbia's carbon emissions reduction plan. Organizers said they didn't know exactly what projects those offsets would support just yet. Coady said they would likely include retrofitting buildings to run on geothermal or biomass heating instead of natural gas, for one.

Carbon offsets are frequently knocked for not actually reducing emissions (even Grist's Umbra Fisk has weighed in), and Vancouver games organizers conceded there's a big difference between high- and low-quality offsets. They promised to deliver the good kind. "We think the Pacific Carbon Trust standard is going to be one of the highest standards in the world," Coady told a group of reporters.

But the plan would not necessarily meet the internationally recognized gold standard for voluntary offsets, she said, because VANOC wanted to ensure it was weighted toward B.C. projects.

Organizers were asked if offsets are really about easing in the consciences of polluters, and Furlong responded that the offset program really "causes people to change behavior." For example, VANOC officials are traveling less to international meetings and teleconferencing instead, he said.

He promised the 2010 Games would be a shining example of environmental responsibility. "We only get one chance, one opportunity," he said. "Since we're in a part of the world that cares a lot about this, we're doing what we can."

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For the next two days I'll be reporting from Vancouver, British Columbia, where it's hard to walk two blocks without running into a construction project related to the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. Eleven months from the opening ceremonies, Olympics buzz is fairly palpable, with games-related ads on the airwaves, heaps of Olympics gear for sale in souvenir shops, and construction cranes dotting the skyline.

The city gets a chance to highlight its preparations this week at the World Conference on Sport and the Environment (you know it's classy because they say sport and not sports), which will explore the roles athletics can play in addressing climate change and creating livable environments. It brings together Olympic medalists, pro and amateur sports organizers, and reps from the Olympics' heavyweight lineup of corporate sponsors. The Prince of Monaco will drop in to speak, as will leaders from the International Olympic Committee and the UN Environment Programme, the two sponsoring organizations.

There should be a good dose of overblown talk about "How Sports will Save the Earth," and I'll keep a running count of the use of the word "harness," as in "harnessing the power of sport for change." But I'm hopeful about hearing some genuinely innovative ideas too.

The conference also serves as a showcase for the environmental credentials of the Vancouver Organizing Committee, which has made sustainability a prominent part of its bid from the get-go. The 1,100-unit Olympic Village project is touted as a model of sustainable urban design, and new venues like the Richmond speed skating rink feature nifty energy and water-use elements.

Olympic preparations also include a high-impact rebuild of the Sea to Sky Highway connecting Vancouver to the ski resort Whistler, the site of many ski and sled competitions. B.C. has a feisty activist community that has already raised hell--and plans to raise more--about the highway, the loss of affordable housing, and other environmental and social impacts of the games.

I'll be looking into as much of this as I navigate this fair city, try to think metrically, and learn to keep loonies straight from my twoonies. (That's what they call money here, seriously) More to come ...

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