The Mingan Archipelago National Park lies on a lonely stretch of coast in the northeast corner of North America. Nearly five centuries have passed since Jacques Cartier first laid anchor nearby, when the Atlantic coast teemed with wildlife. The landscape remains unmarred by the signatures of modern life, though the raucous chorus of seabirds that used to nest in unimaginable numbers is gone, as are the lumpy congregations of walrus along the shores. The fishing vessels have all but vanished, as has the Aboriginal presence – the plumes of smoke rising from summer camps, Innu hunters putting in their nets from birch bark canoes.

From the mainland I could see the islands, but not the park’s signature limestone monoliths – fantastical creatures carved out over millions of years by the motion of waves and ice. I also couldn’t see the lichen-draped trees, the tide pools bejeweled with sea stars and anemones, or the plant life found nowhere else on Earth. A ribbon of fast-moving whitewater marked the estuary where the Romaine River empties into the Gulf of St. Lawrence after coursing through 500 kilometres of canyons, forested valleys and wetlands from its headwaters on the Labrador plateau.

It was early June 2012 when I visited Mingan and the salmon were running, returning to their spawning beds on the Romaine. Almost every river on the Atlantic coast of North America once supported salmon, all distinct breeds adapted to unique conditions over millennia. Today, only a few of the rivers in the northeastern corner of the continent, in Québec and Labrador, have not been dammed or silted by deforestation and other industrial activity. It turns out that the almighty Salmo salar – aka Atlantic salmon, which the Romans called the “jumper” because it could muscle its way against powerful currents with little food or rest – cannot tolerate the subtlest chemical contamination of its waters. It will not suffer the indignity of being herded on barges and through culverts, or being raised in hatcheries. Only forested riverbanks and clear, cascading streams will do.

Soon salmon will be making their ancient journey up the Romaine for the last time.
One of Québec’s longest and wildest rivers, the Romaine is also the site of the second largest construction project in Canada. Hydro- Québec’s $8-billion Romaine Complex – part of the provincial government’s Plan Nord, a 25-year development strategy for northern Québec – will ultimately involve four large hydroelectric dam stations, a series of dikes, canals and spillways, and hundreds of kilometres of reservoir, roads and transmission lines. The Romaine-2 hydroelectric station was well underway by 2011; by the summer of 2012, Hydro-Québec was proceeding to dam the Grandes Chutes, a magnificent 27-metre cataract that formed a barrier falls for the salmon and served as an icon of Quebec’s unspoiled wilderness.

To get to the Romaine, I travelled almost 1,300 kilometres from Burlington, Vermont, most of the way along Route 138, a mountainous two-lane highway that follows the St. Lawrence River from Québec City almost to the Labrador border. The state of Vermont relies on Hydro-Québec for a third of its electricity, and yet few Vermonters have ever made the journey to the source of those electrons in the big, raging rivers of the north. I had come to meet with members of the communities that have been displaced by dams throughout the region, and to see the Grandes Chutes before they were gone forever.

About 250 km northwest of Québec City, Route 138 crosses the Saguenay fjord, beyond which is the land that the Innu people call Nitassinan. Not to be confused with their Inuit neighbors to the north, the Innu people live in 13 different communities that are politically divided by the Québec-Labrador boundary, most of them at the mouths of the rivers flowing into the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic. The Innu once crisscrossed the coastal mountains into the boreal forest and taiga as far west as James and Hudson bays, and as far north as Ungava. They are a forest-dwelling people who once lived primarily by the caribou, roaming freely by foot and canoe in the company of the animals and their spirits.

Nitassinan is now the land of Big Hydro. Large rivers like the Manicouagan, Outardes, Betsiamites and Sainte-Marguerite once tumbled over countless rapids as they descended from the lakes, streams and bogs of the Labrador tablelands toward the Gulf. The dams installed on those four rivers and their tributaries during the second half of the 20th century represent almost half of the hydroelectricity produced in Québec. When the Romaine complex is complete in 2020, Hydro-Québec’s reservoirs throughout the province will cover an area almost the size of the state of Vermont. That power goes to the aluminum smelters on the north shore, and to southern Québec, Ontario and the northeastern US, contributing to what is far and away the largest electricity grid in North America.

Hydro-Québec’s development of the Romaine was able to proceed through the planning and permitting process with little public opposition from the Innu communities, which had signed three separate compensation agreements in 2008 and 2009. Only Uashat and Mani-Utenam – two communities located 200 kilometres from the Romaine and represented by a single band council – obstructed the project by filing a court injunction in 2009. The band argued that the transmission lines would cut through the heart of their ancestral lands.

In the spring of 2012, while the transmission corridor construction proceeded without consent from the community, some two hundred Innu blockaded Route 138 in protest. All of the trucks carrying supplies to the dam construction site use this road. After four days, a phalanx of riot police wielding helmets, shields and batons moved in to break up the barricade. Women, children and elders cried and embraced one another. Some were carried off to jail.

The turnoff from Route 138 to Mani-Utenam is normally easy to miss, but I knew I’d arrived when I stumbled upon a large roadside encampment. A collection of canvas and spruce-pole tents, patched with pieces of blue tarp, were clustered around a larger, saddle-shaped tent called a shaputuan, which an Innu man explained was traditionally used for celebrations and “for making decisions.” Hand-scrawled placards (in French) lined the road, reading “Stop the Romaine Project!” and “We demand a recognition of our rights!” The encampment had been established by a group of Innu women after they returned from a protest march covering more than 700 km from Mani-Utenam to Montreal for Earth Day festivities in April 2012.

One of those women was Elyse Vollant, a mother of eight and a grandmother. Vollant greeted us as we approached the camp and led us inside the shaputuan, which was carpeted with fresh spruce boughs and smelled like a pine forest in winter. “We are doing this for our children,” she explained.

There is no consensus about the Romaine project among the Innu. Hydro-Québec’s piecemeal approach of negotiating separate agreements with each of the affected communities has caused a great deal of discord between and within these communities. Innu on the reserves up and down the north shore have voted in referendums on the compensation packages offered for their consent to the Romaine project and its associated transmission lines. Three communities signed agreements in 2008 and 2009, two of them before public hearings had been held, accepting packages ranging from $14.5-million to $75-million. (Meanwhile, the six Québécois communities collectively represented by the Municipal Regional Council of Minganie will receive compensation and benefits totalling more than $700-million.)

Only the communities of Uashat and Mani-Utenam rejected – narrowly – $125-million in compensation for Romaine complex transmissions lines in two separate referendums held in 2011.

Feelings about the Romaine project in all of these communities are mixed. Some Innu welcome their integration into the wage economy; others decry the desecration of their ancestral lands. In public hearings, elders spoke of their traditional relationship with the land and the animals, of the continuing importance of fishing and hunting to their way of life. As one Innu elder put it, “A large part of our history, of our culture, will be flooded and lost forever” by the creation of the Romaine reservoirs.

A younger generation of dissidents has questioned the legitimacy of a system created in the 19th century by the Indian Act to assimilate First Nations. They have challenged agreements made by band council chiefs without the consent of the community – such as in the summer of 2012, when the Uashat and Mani-Utenam council attempted to go ahead with an agreement with Hydro-Québec, but later backed down in response to protests.

“They are not thinking about future generations,” said Vollant. “What will happen when the money runs out? I fear for my children. Will there be a tree left standing? Will future generations have to breathe through a gas mask?”

At the other end of the spectrum, supporters of the Romaine project see their inclusion in development – historically, the Innu were simply ignored – as a means of addressing the chronic poverty and unemployment on the reserves. At the formal inauguration of the project in May 2009, FranÁois Bellefleur, band council chief of Nutashkuan, publicly championed the development: “Premier Charest, you have given us a wonderful opportunity to prove to ourselves that the Innu Nation is capable of great things … we will respond to your invitation with energy, intelligence and determination.”

Many are neither for nor against the project, but they’ve accepted with heavy hearts that development is the price they must pay for modern life. One Innu man who works for a mining company told me, “It breaks my heart to see what they are doing to the land. But I have to support my family.”

For millennia, the Innu fished char, eel, brook trout and whitefish in the upper Romaine, and in summer they caught salmon from the pools below the Grandes Chutes. They collected medicinal plants from shorelines and tidal marshes. Archeological studies have turned up evidence of 4,000 years of continuous Innu occupancy along the Romaine, whose name is derived from the Innu words for red, olamane or oromane, which refers to the unusual pigmentation in the river’s rocks.

Whitewater paddlers who have descended the Romaine describe furious four-metre waves, menacing whirlpools and treacherous portages over shorelines strewn with moss-covered boulders and fallen trees. They recall floating in the current beneath glacial monoliths and resting in the shadows of rock walls adorned with hanging gardens. They gorged on blueberries and cooked brook trout over open fires, and camped at night beneath meteor showers and luminous curtains of aurora, listening to the rumble of the river and the baying of wolves.

What makes a wild river an adventure and a challenge for a paddler is also what makes it ecologically alive and abundant. The logjams that impede the river traveller also create rearing and spawning habitats (and winter refuges) for juvenile fish. A river that teems with fish in its shallows attracts herons, otters, kingfishers, ducks and wading birds, as well as large predators like bears, wolves and lynx. The eagles, peregrines and osprey that nest in the cliffs and in the crowns of trees along the shore will fertilize inland forests from the sky.

To turn a wild river into a series of reservoirs is to kill it. “Nothing alters a river as totally as a dam,” writes Patrick McCully, executive director of the US-based International Rivers organization, in his 1996 book, Silenced Rivers. “A reservoir is the antithesis of a river – the essence of a river is that it flows, the essence of a reservoir that it is still.”

After dams were built on the St. Marguerite, Manicouagan, Betsiamites, Outardes and Churchill rivers, the Innu stopped using them. The rivers could no longer be travelled; the animals and fish were gone. As spur roads sprouted from the main access roads, the forests disappeared. To some Innu, the water was no longer fit for drinking.
 

Chris Scott, a Canadian activist working with a Québécois environmental group called the Romaine Alliance, leapt at the chance to show me the river. It would be yet another opportunity to see the Romaine’s iconic waterfall – the Grandes Chutes – in the weeks before it would be gone forever. Scott, in his mid-thirties, was living and working for the summer out of an auberge in Sept-Îles and conducting the Romaine Alliance campaign as an unpaid volunteer using an old, slow computer. He has no cellphone or driver’s license, and would visit the scattered Innu communities using his thumb.

We first approached the river from the coast, where it empties into the estuary. Scott pointed to the band of whitewater, falling down from the coastal forests like a bridal train and trailing out toward the horizon. “Look,” he said, “that is the Romaine. If you return here next year, or the next, you will not see that sight. All that freshwater, bubbling with oxygen, carrying nutrients out to sea to create the unique ecology of the Mingan Archipelago, will no longer flow.”

We could see two Innu fishing boats riding in the current of the Romaine. “Hydro-Québec says there are other wild rivers in Québec, but none of the wild rivers left in Québec are big rivers like the Romaine,” he continued. “None have a volume of freshwater discharging into the Atlantic as large as the Romaine. There were once 16 big wild rivers in Québec, now there are only three. Once the Romaine project is complete, there will be only two.”

To get to the Grandes Chutes, we had to pass through a Hydro-Québec checkpoint and take the newly constructed gravel road to a wooden bridge just above the falls. The forests had been leveled for as far as the eye could see. Piles of logs stacked in pyramids lined the roadside. Godzilla-like feller bunchers and bulldozers crawled across the denuded hillsides. We hiked over piles of slash until we reached the portage trail. We could hear the thunderous chute before we could see it through the tops of the trees. Climbing over rocks, we followed the river as it made its tumultuous descent before crashing over the precipice. Sheets of mist billowed in the air like sails.

We reached the top of the precipice and stood over a mass of white water, the river basin obscured by clouds of vapour and foam. Scott climbed down a steep rock face and stood perilously at the river’s edge, his tiny silhouette dwarfed by the great cataract. While I experienced that almost ecstatic feeling of being before an incomparable natural spectacle, at the same time I carried the certain knowledge that the river was doomed. Scott and his group continued to fight to save the falls – but the machinery was already nosing its way through the curtains of mist where we stood.

I asked Scott if it was too late to save the Romaine. “Our hope is that in the future it will be politically impossible to dam one of the last wild rivers,” he said. “I’m trying to hold back the oncoming army until reinforcements arrive. We need to get out there and say, we don’t need to take this lying down.”

A year or two from now, I thought, when the salmon return after two or three years and they head upriver toward their gravelly spawning beds in the pools beneath the Grandes Chutes, there will be no more pools.

When it was time to go, it was hard to tear Scott away. “Just give me a moment,” he said.

Afterwards, I went to sit by the last set of rapids on the river before it somersaults over a jumble of rocks into the estuary.

I could see the Innu in their boats and their bright orange jackets, and the islands in the distance. These islands all have Innu names, meaning that they are a part of their history. Iskuekuniskuain. Katshinahkuaht. Ahkan Hukanainh. Names tell the stories of those places – where someone was born, where the fish or caribou were plentiful, where someone was caught in a snowstorm, where a sign was given.

To preserve this history, Innu elders share stories with young people from their communities who want to learn about the old travel routes into the interior, over rivers and lakes by canoe, snowshoe and toboggan. They explain where to look for the mounds of stones under which they cached their meat; where to find the piles of fishing poles that were left at the place on the river when they were no longer needed; where to find depressions in the rocks made by the passage of feet over the millennia. Their place names tell their histories. Memory is geography. Who, then, will the Innu be without their land?

By the summer of 2013, crews had cleared yet more forest for the creation of a third reservoir and hydroelectric complex at kilometre 99. They were asphalting the first stretch of the access road, punching it further inland. At Romaine-2, on target to begin operating in late 2014, the installation of two massive turbines inside a deep underground gallery was underway. Blasting and crushing continued at Romaine-1, the site of the Grandes Chutes, while a spillway, underground powerhouse, tunnels for the penstocks and the temporary river diversion were under construction. Where a living forest so recently stood, photos on Hydro-Québec’s website now show a moonscape of quarries, tunnels, piles of rock and heavy machinery. As you read this, the tempestuous pools where the salmon come to spawn will likely have become a graveyard of rock and sand. All that remains untouched is the site of Romaine-4, the largest of the four reservoirs by far, accounting for more than half of the 279 km2 area that will be flooded by the complex.

The Liberal Party that created Québec’s Plan Nord was replaced by the Parti Québécois in 2012, and the scheme to open up the northlands to industrial development is proceeding under a new name: Le Nord Pour Tous. Dubbed a “carbon copy” of the old by the Liberals, the revised plan emphasizes the “development” objective of its “sustainable development” model by backing out of a commitment to protect 20 per cent of the project area – a landscape twice the size of France.

On May 27, 2013, a Québec Superior Court rejected the Uashat and Mani-Utenam band’s motion to halt work on the power lines, which were under construction even while the court’s decision was pending. Band Council Chief Mike MacKenzie stated that his community would continue to press for justice. “Is this what we can expect,” he asked, “from the new Plan Pour Nous?”
 

On the last morning of our visit, Vollant and a dozen others began another march. This time they were marching north, towards the Romaine. Before setting out, a large group gathered inside the shaputuan to see them off. They danced and prayed together, then filtered out onto Route 138 and dispersed. Only a few remained who would march with Vollant, dressed in fluorescent vests. They planned to stop at the Innu communities along the way, gathering signatures for a petition stating their opposition to the Plan Nord.

After walking for six days, the marchers arrived at the Romaine construction site and were joined by Innu from nearby communities as well as by Québécois supporters from the region. Some 50 protesters formed a human chain before the entrance to the site where they held their ground for 11 hours.

Vollant was full of hope on that summer day in 2012. She felt that while the Romaine may be ruined, there is still much work to do to protect what remains of Nitassinan from Plan Nord, which calls for adding another 3,500 megawatts of hydroelectric energy to the 47,000 already produced by the province. Next will be the Petit-Mecatina River – currently under study, with construction scheduled to begin in 2015 – and after that the Magpie and a half-dozen other, smaller rivers, opening up the boreal forests for mining and forestry projects, and an influx of newcomers throughout the region. “The Innu people are coming together,” Vollant said. “The young people are rising up. People from outside – like yourself – will come to join us in solidarity.”

After walking with them for two hours, I had to turn around to begin the journey home. I watched Vollant and her group walking at a good clip into the distance, until they disappeared beyond the 50th parallel, into the unspoiled boreal.  

 Dip your paddle into the conservation effort by taking CPAWS’ thebigwildchallenge.org. Sign a petition at savethemagpie.org. Read a review of the 2011 film, Seeking the Current.

The post Rage On, Sweet Romaine appeared first on A\J.

A\J: Does Ontario have a long-term comprehensive energy plan?

Read “The Story of Solar” from A\J’s latest issue and see how solar cells and photovoltaic systems work.

A\J: Does Ontario have a long-term comprehensive energy plan?

Shawn Cronkwright: Last year the Government of Ontario published its 2013 Long-Term Energy Plan. The goal is to have 20,000 MW of renewables on-line by 2025; 10,700 MW to be sourced from non-hydro renewable energy and the other 9,300 MW from hydro.

In the Ontario Power Authority’s (OPA) experience, what is the most difficult part of incorporating PV into the existing grid?

The OPA’s role is in the planning and procuring section of the plan. The Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) actually operates and integrates the PV into the grid, so OPA don’t concern themselves with that aspect. They like that PV generation lines up nicely with peak demand.  The greatest difficulty is that the supply can change very rapidly. They can be generating a large number of MW, and that can quickly diminish due to clouds.

What is the OPA’s renewable energy of choice?

The OPA encourages all renewable energy developments, as they all have their own benefits and challenges. Wind is the lowest cost, but you only get power when it’s windy. Bioenergy helps take care of agricultural waste. Biomass is huge in Northern Ontario with the forest industry. Hydro [is] great where there is [an] appropriate water resource.

The Feed-in Tariff (FiT) in Ontario is perceived as very difficult to comply with. Is this deliberate to slow down or control the rate of uptake?

The OPA is not trying to make it difficult, but they are trying to accomplish a lot of things through the program at the same time. 2009 saw lots of FiT uptake. The cost of PV equipment has dropped drastically, helping uptake as well. Even though the pay-out for PV generation has been decreasing, every time there is an offer they are way over-prescribed for the FiT program.

The FiT is not just about energy, about getting as much as you can get. They are also trying to encourage aboriginal communities and co-ops to get involved. So it’s also a social improvement project.

How will all this work with smart grids?

Well, the grid is slowly getting “smarter.”

A few years ago, the electricity was for the most part centrally produced. Now, electricity flows both ways inherently, right down to the house level. Smart meters have been installed and they can monitor electricity entering and being pulled from the grid. Now that managers can see the usage and generation patterns more clearly, they can also charge much closer to what the real cost for electricity generation and use is. This ability also promotes energy conservation.

Another benefit of the two-way meters is that outages can be seen and responded to much quicker. With one-way supply of electricity, it was very difficult to detect where outages were occurring and when. With two-way meters, they see any disruptions much faster.

The IESO is adding some storage capacity to the grid to take care of short-term response in demand changes – 50 MW in total. 35 MW came on this summer, and another 15 MW are in the works.

The OPA is working on adding longer-term response and storage options.

The post Ontario’s Solar Plan appeared first on A\J.

Our planet is supported on the wings of bees, butterflies, skippers (flies that hover over flowers) and hummingbirds. These pollinators are threatened primarily by habitat loss, land degradation and both urban and agricultural pesticide use. Any time a natural area is converted to a subdivision, or a sterile lawn is managed with pesticides, these pollinators are heavily compromised, and often times killed.

Enter beekeeper Jeri Parrent. Parrent has a PhD in ecology and owns a farm on the Bruce Peninsula. Parrent is studying pollinators native to her region – such as the monarch butterfly, ruby-throated hummingbird, bumblebee and squash bee – with the help of
her community.

A\J: What is “citizen science” and where did you get the support to do the research?

Jeri Parrent: The ultimate goal of our pollinator observation and monitoring project is to partner with farmers, students and community members to document the important native plant pollinators in our regions, and to better understand their distribution and abundance in both natural and agricultural areas. We received a grant from the TD Friends of the Environment Fund in the spring to launch our pilot project this summer.

Citizen science projects generally involve scientists reaching out to the public to collaborate; usually that means collecting data that greatly extends the amount of information for scientists to study. In this case, we specifically solicited participation from ecological farmers because we are interested in comparing pollinator data from natural areas to that on farmland managed in an ecologically sensitive manner.

Why did you decide to undertake this project?

Dr. Thorsten Arnold and I are part of the Grey Bruce Centre for Agroecology, which is a small cooperative of rural farmers and research professionals aiming to combine practical farming, ecological research and educational outreach. We realized that although there has been a great deal of attention recently given to the rapid decline in honeybee populations due to neonicotinoid insecticide use on Ontario’s cash crops, very little attention was being given to the potential consequences for other native pollinators. In fact, we know very little about the diversity and abundance of pollinators that are native to our region.

Why are pollinators dying?

As with so many other species suffering severe population declines, there is not one single cause for the recent population crashes of many pollinator species such as the honeybee or the monarch butterfly. Instead, it is a combination of factors, including loss of habitat, both for nesting and for feeding. Many of the plant species that serve as critical food sources for pollinators, such as milkweed and goldenrod, are often eradicated as weeds. Also, through the movement of pollinators around the world by humans, we have introduced a variety of exotic pests and diseases. One example is the escape of diseased bumblebees from commercial greenhouse operations, where they are used to pollinate plants such as tomatoes, which has spread illness to native bumblebees. Lastly, there is the increased use of insecticides. These chemicals do not discriminate between the insect pests that they are intended to control and the beneficial insects that serve as plant pollinators. As a result we are seeing drastic declines and huge die-offs of honeybee populations.

Without pollinators the world would be a much less tasty place.

Why should we be worried about the health of pollinators?

Pollinators are critical for the success of so many of our food crops. They supply untold millions of dollars in free services to our farmers, and without them the world would be a much less tasty place. Furthermore, insects are the food source for many other species: insect-eating birds such as swallows and phoebes, as well as bats and small mammals.

What was the outcome of your pilot project?

We were able to partner with a number of ecological farmers from the CRAFT network (Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training), members from the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario, and a number of other rural landowners and organic gardeners. We have also interacted with students at area schools and hope to expand and continue to work with teachers to integrate pollinator education into the classroom. As a pilot project, the data from the first year will likely be somewhat limited, but the project has been a real success in terms of developing a network of participants. We can now evaluate and refine our current protocols for next season. We hope to obtain additional funding so we can continue to provide the necessary training and support to our citizen scientists and to launch our observation and monitoring projects at a larger scale in 2015.  

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After an extensive development period, the British Columbia provincial government introduced Bill 18—Water Sustainability Act (WSA) into legislature this spring and it received Royal Assent in May. While it is now officially law, the WSA will not come into force until next year, after certain details have been finalized and particular regulations developed. The new WSA represents the culmination of six years of consultation to modernize the previous Water Act, which was over 100 years old and sorely out of date. The WSA is ushering in a potentially new and exciting era of water stewardship in BC based more on the concept of protection than rules for resource extraction.

The former Water Act was a relic from a bygone era when the Province was largely focused on the needs of settlers, miners, and loggers. Creating certainty for investment to kick-start a resource-based economy was top priority. Fast forward 105 years and BC is a different place. Now, water is acknowledged as critical to our future by almost all sectors, and across the full political spectrum.

Intensifying water issues – like droughts and flooding; mounting concerns around urbanization; water needs for fish and fish habitat; water needs for energy, such as shale gas fracking in the northeast of the province and hydro damming projects – all conspire to challenge BC’s current management and governance regime. Critical legal developments around Aboriginal rights and title have further unsettled the status quo of the Province’s largely unsustainable approach to freshwater management to date.

The WSA is the critical first step to ensuring better, and regionally appropriate, protection for environmental flows, water planning, groundwater licensing, and incentives for improving efficiency and promoting conservation.

The full implementation of the new act will hinge on passing a suite of foundational regulations to bring the act into effect. The first batch of regulations is expected by April 2015. These will focus on administrative aspects, as well as the Province’s new groundwater licensing regime, which will bring the legislation into force.

Moving Toward Watershed Governance

The WSA also includes a clear provision for watershed governance, which will allow the provincial government to share or delegate certain decision-making responsibilities to local authorities at the regional or watershed scale who might better understand specific local needs and priorities, particularly in areas with water conflicts or ecosystem risks.

At this stage, the legislation only provides an enabling framework for the sharing and delegation of decision-making powers. However, this provision (s.126) lays the foundation for a broader move toward watershed governance in the province.

Much work remains to fully embed watershed governance—which is neither a quick nor an easy process. A new policy report from the University of Victoria’s POLIS Project on Ecological Governance, A Blueprint for Watershed Governance in British Columbia, addresses the complex details of who makes decisions about water, and how decision-makers can be held to account for the overall benefit of BC’s fresh water. It offers a strategic 10-year plan to address this challenge and ultimately make the Water Sustainability Act really work.

The Blueprint proposes that aligning water-management decision-making with the ecological boundaries of watersheds—instead of political lines on a map—is an important aspect and the best way to achieve positive, long-term ecological, social, and economic outcomes. For watershed governance to effectively function, nine winning conditions are outlined in the Blueprint. When implemented together, these fundamentally improve governance and increase the likelihood of achieving the goal of protecting, and in some cases restoring, watersheds:

1. Enabling powers in legislation
2. Co-governance with first nations
3. Support from and partnership with local government
4. Sustainable long-term funding
5. A functioning legal framework for sustainable water and watershed management
6. Availability of data, information, and monitoring
7. Independent oversight and public reporting
8. Assessing cumulative impacts
9. Continuous peer-to-peer learning and capacity building

BC’s new legislation combined with these identified priorities could create a real opportunity for positive change, particularly when it comes to engaging local communities in important watershed decisions. The critical conclusion from this work is that the starting point will require collaboration between key stakeholders, rights holders and governments at all levels, including First Nations in their traditional territories. Whatever form these new governing bodies might take, they must be designed to be accountable and financially sustainable, and also “nimble” in their ability to respond to the emerging challenges and shifting priorities that they will inevitably face.

The Price of Water

In addition to the ongoing development of regulations to support the WSA, the provincial government has begun a water licence pricing review. This review, aptly called Pricing BC’s Water, is aimed at ensuring the new groundwater licensing regime is in line with surface water licence pricing. And, even more importantly, it seeks to address the increasingly apparent government revenue shortfalls and ensure sufficient funds for full implementation of the WSA.

As laid out in the POLIS Project’s March 2014 submission to government regarding water pricing options for BC, an appropriate full-cost pricing of water allocations through licensing must be set to ensure:

• an effective provincial enforcement regime can be maintained (polluter pays); comprehensive monitoring and reporting of water use and impacts on watersheds and aquifers (transparency);
• detailed understanding of local environmental flow needs and aquifer health and dynamics to  inform all allocation and water planning decisions (water for nature);
• financial resources and expertise for development of enforceable plans and application of area-based regulations in priority areas, including capacity to implement and ensure compliance (financial sustainability);
• a conflict-resolution processes that assures citizens the right and ability to participate in key  aspects of the allocation decision process, including citizen access to appeal decisions (public participation);
• independent oversight (accountability);
• basic administrative support for designated authorities (watershed governance); and increased efficiency and conservation (volume-based pricing).

Before Bill 18 was passed, BC was the only jurisdiction in Canada that didn’t regulate groundwater use. This outdated oversight led to significant controversy last summer when Nestlé became the “poster corporation” for industry’s ability to legally pump tons of water at no cost and sell it back to British Columbians in bottles. These events not only helped push the passing of the legislation, but initiated a deeper discussion and review of how to resource a more sophisticated program for water management and governance in BC.

Missed Opportunities

The WSA is a big and complicated piece of legislation and many of the details have yet to be worked out. However, while it is certainly on the right track, there are some clear missed opportunities. One significant example was not using the WSA as a chance to update BC’s archaic “first-in-time, first-in-right” (FITFIR) system of water allocation. The Province could have entrenched the public trust doctrine as a guiding principle and, in so doing, ensured that water remains available for the environment and communities now and into the future. This should remain a priority in future updates of the act or in efforts to define the scope of “beneficial use” in the supporting regulations.

Addressing Aboriginal water rights is another area of grave concern. The new legislation continues to vest water in the Crown and remains silent on acknowledging the fundamental rights and title of First Nations. Many First Nations are not satisfied with the level of engagement and consultation to date and require a more committed approach to genuine government-to-government engagement and co-governance going forward, especially regarding the groundwater licencing process and the regulation development phase.

Looking Ahead

Despite its shortcomings, the WSA does offer a real opportunity to begin moving toward a more sustainable and resilient freshwater future. Without abundant clean and flowing water—and functioning watersheds—there is no life, no economy, and no future. British Columbians really do care about water: according to recent public opinion data, 93 per cent agree that fresh water is our most precious resource. The challenge lies in not being afraid to embark on reforms of policies and decision-making structures that ensure critical attention to ecological health and function. It is becoming increasingly clear that fresh water will be what defines prosperity for the coming generation and BC’s new Water Sustainability Act offers opportunities to address some urgent priorities.

The post BC Floats New Water Law appeared first on A\J.

There are many excellent arguments to be made in favour of solar power and against nuclear. Unfortunately, Jim Harris [“The UnAtomic Age,” A\J 40:4] has made none of them. Moreover, there are gaps in the author’s logic large enough to hide a lifetime of nuclear waste.

No Favour

There are many excellent arguments to be made in favour of solar power and against nuclear. Unfortunately, Jim Harris [“The UnAtomic Age,” A\J 40:4] has made none of them. Moreover, there are gaps in the author’s logic large enough to hide a lifetime of nuclear waste.

Harris seems to conflate electricity and energy (an important distinction) when talking about solar vs. nuclear. The ësolar vs. nuclear’ thrust of the article is also puzzling, since there’s no particular reason to think – nor does the author present any arguments – that one would come at the expense of the other.

And not to belabour the point, but the comparison of solar power and cell phones is, frankly, a little bizarre. Cell phone use may have grown exponentially, but it’s a major leap from pointing out that technologies can make exponential gains to arguing that a particular technology will make such gains.

A well-researched piece may well reach the same conclusions, vis-à-vis solar’s rise and nuclear’s decline, but I don’t think Harris is doing either the anti-nuclear or pro-solar crowds any favours with this article. An environmental magazine is always at risk of becoming an echo-chamber in which authors wrap popular conclusions in loose arguments, adding nothing to the conversation.

Stu Campana
Ecology Ottawa

Harris responds

If Ontario’s government proceeds with nuclear refurbishment – it will lock Ontario taxpayers into the most expensive form of power for decades.

Deutsche Bank predicts that solar power will be at grid parity in all 50 US states by 2016. This means solar will be cheaper than nuclear refurbishment by 2016. Energy efficiency is already dramatically cheaper – and so is wind power.

Spending billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to refurbish aging nuclear plants will inhibit Ontario’s ability to invest in cheaper solar, wind and energy efficiency – given Ontario’s deficit.

Solar is growing exponentially. Google “Swanson Effect” to see a 100-fold fall in the price of solar power from 1977 to today. With such dramatic costs declines we’re experiencing explosive growth of solar power installations globally. Facts are facts.

Campana can take his argument up with Deutsche Bank, Bloomberg and the International Energy Agency. All predict the explosive growth of solar. 

The post Letter to the Editor appeared first on A\J.

Canada is rich in natural capital, notably water. In this issue, we travel from coast to coast to coast to examine fresh- and salt-water-related initiatives that are making waves and inspiring change in our resource-blessed country and beyond.

On the East Coast, Susan Holtz explores the latest efforts to harness the Bay of Fundy’s magnum tidal power, while on the North Coast, Alex Speers-Roesch outlines the global push to create an Arctic Sanctuary similar to the ocean sanctuary now in place around Antarctica. And in “Secrets of the Salt Marsh,” Lisa Szabo-Jones shows us the hidden beauty in these unique, salt-tolerant ecosystems at the edge of land and sea. Dig into her photo essay here.

In our cover feature, Andrew Reeves’ exploration of the Asian carp invasion catalogues the imperfect options being considered by the US Army Corps to contain the invasive species that have taken over the Mississippi watershed. In “Carpocalypse Now,” Reeves – who is working on a book about the North American Asian carp assault – spins a cautionary tale about the fish that threaten to forever change the Great Lakes, and the dedicated individuals and communities who are working to protect this vulnerable and valuable watershed.

In the US West, the hedonistic desert playground known as Sin City has gambled with nature and is about to lose. Mother Nature is walking away from the table. The Colorado River and Lake Mead are drying up, and Las Vegas is finally forced to curb water consumption, hoping they can make a modern miracle out of a mirage. Read all about this city’s innovative efforts in “Aqua Viva Las Vegas.”

Also in this issue, we applaud British Columbia’s new Water Sustainability Act and celebrate this year’s Earth Day Canada Hometown Heroes—Junction Creek Stewardship, Calstone and Wayne Salewski—all of whom have worked to conserve water in their communities and businesses.

When Leonardo da Vinci said that water is the driver of nature, he recognized that people depend on it. Globally, more than a billion people now live in countries and regions with water scarcity, and by 2030, almost half of the world will live under conditions of high water stress.

In these times of climate change with unexpected floods and drought, this issue of A\J shows how important it is to take care of our freshwater and marine resources. Rising sea levels threaten coastal sources of freshwater as well as coastal communities, economies and ecologies.

In this context it is worth mentioning the recent and hopeful development to fight climate change: The US and China have agreed to set targets to curb carbon emissions, leaving the Canadian government with fewer excuses for inaction.

Even if the newly set targets for emissions reductions by the US and China aren’t as ambitious as we might hope, a commitment from the world’s two largest carbon emitters should help convince more countries to sign on for a solid global climate deal next year in Paris. It will be a good opportunity for Canada to take up its responsibilities to combat climate change and to be a more active guardian of its increasingly imperiled freshwater and coastal zones. 

The post Editorial: Going Coastal appeared first on A\J.

The oil and gas industry has a pernicious engineering problem: leaky wells. When industry cements or seals a wellbore, stray gas from shallow or intermediate zones can migrate along the casing to the surface or into aquifers. So too can brine and other hydrocarbons. And with the advent of hydraulic fracturing, the scale of this largely unacknowledged liability to groundwater and climate change is growing dramatically.

In fact, a new University of Waterloo study warns that the leaky wellbore crisis in both active and abandoned energy wells has already contributed “to the erosion of the social license that permits the functioning of the upstream hydrocarbon industry.” Maurice Dusseault, one of the nation’s top petroleum geologists, contributed to the big study.

The subterranean problem, which effectively dogs the oil patch from Texas to British Columbia, has been simmering for a long time. Each and every well drilled into the ground can potentially become a superhighway for methane and other gases such as radon, which might otherwise take millions of years to migrate to the surface.

Methane, a gas lighter than air, can also migrate as far as 14 kilometres from its source. It can travel along a wellbore and then connect to pre-existing faults or natural fractures and then pop up into basements or groundwater sources. It can even exit rural kitchen taps in a milky, flammable, bubbling brew.

The scale of the largely invisible problem remains unsettling. In Norway, 24 per cent of offshore wells leak, and in the Gulf of Mexico more than half of aging oil wells have sprung leaks. Ten per cent of all active and suspended gas wells in British Columbia spew methane. In addition, some hydraulically fractured shale gas wells in the province have become “super emitters” that spew as much as 3,000 cubic metres of methane a year.

About 20 per cent of Saskatchewan’s more than 87,000 wells leak. Alberta regulators report that some 27,000 out of about 315,000 wells are chronic seepers. But that’s a mammoth underestimate. Heavy oil fields in Lloydminster, for example, have reported leakage rates as high as 45 per cent.

Hydraulic fracturing has magnified the problem. Unlike conventional drilling, the brute force of the technology exerts high pressures on wellbores. Horizontal wells that are greater in length than depth also tend to leak more. During oil and gas booms the quality of cement jobs deteriorates as companies cut corners to drill more wells. 

Abandoned wells present another conundrum. Alberta has abandoned 150,000 oil and gas wells, but neither government nor industry monitors these wellbores for cracked cement seals or methane leaks.

A 2014 PhD thesis tells the bad news story. For the first time ever, Mary Kang, a civil engineer grad student at Princeton, directly measured leaks at 19 abandoned wells in a northern area of Pennsylvania. (The state pioneered US oil production in the 1850s and has between 280,000 and 970,000 abandoned wells.) All 19 seeped like hell. Moreover, the best-plugged wells leaked as badly as the unplugged ones. The methane emissions ebbed and flowed with the weather and seasons too.

But the startling finding was this: three of the wells were methane super emitters. That meant leaky abandoned wellbores – infrastructure that is ignored in climate change assessments – accounted for anywhere between 4 and 7 per cent of the state’s total man-made methane pollution.

If that sort of uncomfortable math were done in Alberta, or Texas, then shale gas might be outlawed. Whenever methane leaks account for more than 3.2 per cent of industry production, natural gas has a bigger climate footprint than coal-fired electricity, according to collaborative research by US scientists.

Fixing a leaky wellbore is not easy or cheap. Costs can range from $150,000 to $600,000 per well. More importantly, repair jobs have a poor track record, characterized by what the Waterloo study called “persistent underreporting of negative results.” (Dig deeper into the study here.)

So, Houston, we have an ugly methane problem. Every oil and gas well drilled in the ground will leak and become a methane pathway for eternity. To date, neither industry nor government has a cleanup plan. 

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The Arctic is melting as a result of global warming, with sea ice shrinking at an alarming rate. Within 30 years, the Arctic Ocean is projected to be virtually free of summer sea ice. This has led to a significant increase in marine traffic and the expectation of even larger increases in the future. In October 2014, Canada’s environment commissioner, Julie Gelfand, released an annual audit, which this year included an assessment of the federal government’s ability to support safe marine transportation in the Canadian Arctic – and the results weren’t pretty. More marine traffic means increased risk of spills, accidents and other harmful impacts. Poorly managed Arctic transportation poses a significant threat to the region.

The audit found nautical charts and surveys of Canadian Arctic waters to be sorely inadequate, including those of higher-risk areas and many of the main traffic corridors. In fact, less than one per cent of Canadian Arctic waters have been surveyed to modern standards. Navigational aid systems, icebreaking services and pollution-monitoring tools all fell short. What’s more, the audit found “no long-term national vision or coordinated departmental strategies to support safe marine transportation in the Arctic.” The take-away message was that when it comes to marine transport, Canada is not ready for the changes underway in the Arctic, and if we don’t get our act together, it will put the region at risk.

The conclusion is dead-on and applies to more than just marine traffic. Canada’s current inability to support Arctic shipping is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the failures of Canadian Arctic policy.

Although the problems identified in the commissioner’s audit are certainly serious, perhaps Canada’s biggest failure in the Arctic is its refusal to seriously address the chief threat facing the region: climate change. The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the planet as a whole, causing rapid ice melt and putting people and wildlife at risk. Iconic species such as the narwhal, polar bear and walrus depend on sea ice for their habitat and hunting grounds, and as it disappears, their futures become increasingly uncertain. Arctic Indigenous peoples too depend on the ice and the wildlife it supports for their food, livelihood and culture. Whole villages in Alaska are being washed away as permafrost melts and coasts erode into the sea.

The melting Arctic threatens people outside the region as well. Arctic ice helps cool the planet, reflecting more incoming sunlight than the darker land and ocean uncovered when the ice disappears. Arctic permafrost sequesters massive quantities of carbon, but as permafrost melts, carbon is released into the atmosphere, resulting in further warming of the planet. As the ice melts, these critical climate-stabilizing services are degraded, the planet gets hotter, and the climate crisis spirals out of control.

The Arctic is on the front line of climate change, and what happens in the Arctic affects everyone on Earth. In the words of Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a prominent Inuit climate advocate and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, “Climate change is amplified in the Arctic. What is happening to us now will happen soon in the rest of the world. Our region is the globe’s climate change barometer. If you want to protect the planet, look to the Arctic and listen to what Inuit are saying.”

The Harper government hasn’t listened. From its 2011 withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, to early 2014, when Gelfand slammed the government for failing to produce climate regulations for the oil and gas sector, Canada has obstructed serious action on climate change. In 2012, when Arctic summer sea ice reached its lowest extent since satellite records began in 1979, the Harper government actually blocked federally employed scientists from reporting this fact to the media.

Drilling and spilling

If inaction on climate change is the biggest failure of Canada’s Arctic policy, promotion of far-offshore oil drilling is the most invidious. The Arctic Ocean is believed to have large quantities of oil and gas beneath it, and as with the tar sands, the Canadian government is keen to see these resources exploited. In the western Canadian Arctic, licenses have been granted by Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada for exploratory drilling in the Beaufort Sea. To the east, the National Energy Board has approved seismic testing around Baffin Island. In the remote and harsh Arctic environment, getting at the oil is both difficult and expensive. But this region is now being prospected because conventional oil resources are dwindling and the melting ice is making the region more accessible to industry.

From a climate perspective, the idea is madness. Instead of recognizing the melting Arctic as an alarm call for the climate crisis, government and industry see it as an opportunity to dig up and burn more of the fossil fuels that are causing the crisis in the first place. According to the latest science, the majority of existing fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground if we’re to have a good chance of keeping global warming below 2∞ Celsius. If we can’t safely burn the fossil fuels we already have, why on earth are we going out exploring for more? If the world finally gets serious about climate change and takes appropriate action to cut emissions, oil demand is expected to drop to the point that most offshore Arctic oil will become unneeded and unprofitable. Responding to the climate threat and drilling for Arctic oil are simply not compatible objectives. If we pursue one, we must be prepared to give up on the other. Sadly, the Canadian government has decided to go after the oil.

Arctic oil drilling is hugely controversial for another reason: because of the remote and harsh Arctic environment, effective clean-up of a major spill is practically impossible. Given the fragile nature of the Arctic ecosystem, which is foundational to the mixed economies of northern Indigenous peoples, a major oil spill in the Arctic would be catastrophic. Even the oil industry itself has occasionally acknowledged some of the risks. Peter Slaiby, vice president of Shell in Alaska, said quite plainly in a 2012 BBC interview, “There will be spills.” In 2012, French oil giant Total announced that it would not participate in Arctic drilling because the risk of an oil spill was too great, and “a leak would do too much damage to the image of the company.”

We fear that what the Conservative government is doing is a cultural genocide and will end the Inuit way of life as we know it.
– Niore Iqalukjuak, Clyde River resident

The government’s plans have not gone unchallenged. In June 2014, the National Energy Board approved a proposal to conduct a five-year seismic testing survey off the coast of Baffin Island despite strong opposition from local Inuit communities. One of those communities, Clyde River, has launched a legal challenge to have the decision reversed. Seismic testing involves firing extremely powerful air guns underwater, and analyzing the pattern of sounds reflected off geological structures beneath the seafloor to identify potential petroleum reservoirs. The air guns are so loud that they can cause significant harm to marine life, including disruption of migration patterns, physical damage and death.

Clyde River and other Inuit communities are concerned that seismic testing and the drilling activity that would follow threaten their food security and cultural survival. Clyde River resident Niore Iqalukjuak has articulated the community’s concerns powerfully:

“It completely scares us – it’s the food of our people. That’s why Inuit are so adamant about trying to stop this…. We depend on these waters for food and the very existence of Inuit life depends on them. We fear that what the Conservative government is doing is a cultural genocide and will end the Inuit way of life as we know it.”

The sanctuary idea has received support from the more than six million people who’ve signed Greenpeace’s petition at savethearctic.org. A list of prominent individuals and organizations calling for the creation of an Arctic sanctuary can be found at arcticdeclaration.org.

The Sanctuary Solution

Canada can work to stop Arctic melting by taking strong action to fight climate change. This means the government must work toward cutting emissions by putting a price on carbon; investing in large-scale energy efficiency projects, renewable energy and mass public transportation; and supporting a fair, ambitious and binding global deal on climate change. This also means leaving Arctic oil in the ground, where the risk of spills is nil.

Furthermore, Canada should take action to protect all Arctic fish stocks from new commercial fisheries, uphold the highest safety standards in marine shipping, encourage economic development that supports rather than threatens subsistence activities and culture, and work internationally to ensure that similar efforts are pursued throughout the Arctic.

A wide range of individuals and civil-society organizations around the globe are calling for the creation of a sanctuary in the central Arctic Ocean to serve as the cornerstone of a new regional governance framework for Arctic protection. This Arctic Sanctuary would be a marine reserve covering the uninhabited region of the Arctic Ocean beyond the 200 nautical mile limit of Arctic coastal states’ Exclusive Economic Zones – which under international law is the usual limit of states’ rights over marine resources. The Arctic Sanctuary would be off-limits for extractive and destructive uses. There would be no fishing, no military activity, and no exploration for and extraction of hydrocarbon and mineral resources.

It’s an ambitious goal, but the legal route to creating such a sanctuary is actually quite straightforward. At any time, the Arctic states (Canada, US, Russia, Iceland, Denmark/Greenland, Norway, Sweden and Finland), in collaboration with the international community, could create a binding multilateral agreement to control activities in the high seas of the Arctic Ocean and bring the sanctuary into being. This was the approach taken in creating the protected area covering Antarctica, and it could be applied again to create a sanctuary in the Arctic.

Sadly, most governments are more intent on exploiting the Arctic than protecting it. All five Arctic coastal states have made claims to portions of the would-be sanctuary, with Canada, Russia and Denmark all seeking to claim the North Pole. These efforts are driven by the quest for resources, oil and gas in particular, and the political points that could be scored with domestic audiences by the government that can say it won the North Pole.

The main barrier to the creation of the sanctuary, as for Arctic protection generally, is states’ pursuit of narrowly construed national self-interest, lack of political will and vested corporate interests. Though these forces are not easily beaten, we have it in our power to work together to overcome them. We have a vision and a path forward for how to protect the Arctic, we simply need to take action to make it a reality. So it falls to all of us to educate, organize and act to ensure this uniquely important region is protected, for the good of all life on Earth. 

See pictures of this fall’s chilly bike ride to save the Arctic and find out how you can throw your support behind a sanctuary.

Subscribe or order the Water issue now for this and more great stories on fresh- and salt-water initiatives that are making waves and inspiring change in our resource-blessed country and beyond.

The post Cold Rush appeared first on A\J.

Since the 2011 Fukushima catastrophe, the global decline in nuclear power has steepened. More than 20 countries are phasing out nuclear plants, have stopped the construction of new reactors, or passed laws prohibiting nuclear power. The number of reactors and nuclear electricity output is falling worldwide.

Illustration by nik harron.

Since the 2011 Fukushima catastrophe, the global decline in nuclear power has steepened. More than 20 countries are phasing out nuclear plants, have stopped the construction of new reactors, or passed laws prohibiting nuclear power. The number of reactors and nuclear electricity output is falling worldwide.

Japanese citizens are still feeling the horror of Fukushima. Some 400,000 people were evacuated – and a staggering 100,000 people are still displaced three years later. In all, 800 square kilometers of land is too radioactive for human habitation. More than 225,000 tonnes of radioactive soil sits in plastic bags about the area, and 272 tonnes of radioactive water still flow into the Pacific Ocean every day.

The cost of the damage caused by the Fukushima Daiichi power plant meltdown is estimated at US$250-billion and could end up doubling. And guess who is going to bear that cost? Japanese taxpayers.

The fact that no company will insure nuclear power suggests that it is a financial catastrophe in waiting. In Canada, the Harper government has passed legislation that will limit the nuclear industry’s liability to $1-billion. So if a Fukushima-scale catastrophe happened in Canada, the nuclear industry would be responsible for less than 0.4 per cent of the cost. Taxpayers would be on the hook for the other $249-billion. Certainly the financial burden of catastrophic fallout would be unaffordable.

The real message is that we just cannot afford nuclear energy.

While the federal government obviously doesn’t have a grip on adequate liability, the nuclear industry also consistently and dramatically underestimates the costs of construction, operation and decommissioning of nuclear plants. In the United Kingdom, the decommissioning costs of Sellafield nuclear site have hit £70-billion (CAD$128-billion). If, for instance, the cost of decommissioning the Darlington nuclear reactors in southeastern Ontario were the same, every Ontario resident would have to bear $10,000 in additional taxes. The real message is that we just cannot afford nuclear energy.

Nuclear power has never been profitable when all costs are included. No private corporation will agree to construct and operate nuclear reactors without government guarantees of paying for construction cost overruns, covering or capping accident liability, and paying for the long-term disposal of nuclear waste.

The Darlington reactors went 4.5 times over budget, costing provincial taxpayers $14.3-billion. Every Ontario electricity user pays a global adjustment charge on her or his hydro bill, as well as a debt retirement charge. Much of both charges are associated with nuclear power. A study by Navigant showed that 42 per cent of the global adjustment charge is due to nuclear. When Ontario Hydro was broken up in 1998, its $19.4-billion nuclear debt was called “stranded debt” and has been paid for by Ontario taxpayers. As of 2010, Ontarians had paid $19.6-billion to retire this debt – and $14.8-billion was still owing. In other words, the total debt payments have already exceeded the original value of the debt!

Energy efficiency is the cheapest form of power generation because it creates more usable energy within the grid – someone somewhere can use every kWh of power that I don’t. Ontario can secure energy efficiency in homes and buildings for 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). Homeowners that insulate their attics and walls, install weather stripping or energy efficient lights, or swap out an old 150-litre hot water tank for an on-demand system to lower their home energy use. A staggering 24 per cent of electricity in North America is used simply for lighting, and LEDs reduce usage by 80 per cent compared to incandescent bulbs.

Alternatively, Ontario could source cheap hydroelectric power from Québec for three cents per kWh, or install combined heat and power (CHP – also known as cogen or cogeneration) for 6 cents per kWh.

Ontario’s residential utility customers currently pay 8.6 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for the first 750 kWh per month, then 10.1 cents a kWh thereafter. Homes that use electricity on “time-of-use rates” pay 7.5 cents per kWh during off-peak hours (7pm to 7am); 11.2 cents per kWh for mid-peak (7am to 11am and 5pm to 7pm); and 13.5 cents per kWh from 11am to 5pm.

By contrast, Moody’s Credit Rating puts the cost of electricity generated by new nuclear power plants at 15 cents per kWh. According to Jack Gibbons of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance (OCAA), refurbishing Darlington’s four nuclear reactors will cost 19 to 37 cents per kWh. The Ontario Power Generation (OPG) lowballs the cost at eight to 14 cents per kWh.

But it’s notable that Ontario’s past nuclear decisions have followed a predictable pattern: lowball costs are used to secure project approval, and then overruns are simply passed on to taxpayers. Nuclear projects in Ontario, on average, have gone 2.5 times over budget – so it’s reasonable to multiply OPG’s 8 cents per kWh by 2.5 and 4.5 (Darlington’s overruns) and get a more realistic range of 20 to 36 cents per kWh, in line with Jack Gibbon’s more accurate and trustworthy estimate.

A wise saying applies here: Never ask a barber if you need a haircut. Given that 50 per cent of Ontario’s electricity comes from nuclear reactors, perhaps we shouldn’t ask the OPG or Ontario Power Authority (OPA) about the province’s energy future. It is particularly telling that no company anywhere in the world will build a nuclear reactor unless it is shielded from liability and can pass cost overruns on to taxpayers.

Why then are both the Ontario Liberals and Conservatives advocating spending billions of dollars refurbishing old nuclear reactors? The NDP supports it too because of unionized power workers, but its party leaders are cagey about categorical statements. Only the Green Party of Ontario remains steadfastly opposed to nuclear refurbishment.

OPG admitted in June 2014 that the Darlington refurbishment project is already $300-million over budget – before any actual construction work has begun. Will Ontario’s new Liberal majority government continue to pursue nuclear refurbishment or stop throwing good money after bad?

McKinsey & Company, one of the world’s preeminent management consulting firms, has identified $2-trillion worth of energy efficiency initiatives not currently being pursued worldwide, which have an internal rate of return of 17 per cent or better. Government and business leaders should be aggressively pursuing these highly profitable opportunities rather than embarking on nuclear refurbishment.

But even smart people have problems predicting the future. In the 1980s, AT&T commissioned a study by McKinsey & Company that predicted the market for cell phones by the year 2000 would be 100,000 users. That year, 107 million phones were sold.

How could the leading phone company and management consulting firm have been so off? For the same five reasons that we should be investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency projects instead of refurbishing nuclear reactors.

Faster, Better, Smaller, Cheaper

In 1965, computer tech pioneer Gordon Moore predicted that a CPU (central processing unit – the ‘brains’ of a computer) would double in power every two years while the price point to produce it stayed the same. Practically, this means that transistor-based technologies – computers, tablets, cell phones, etc – get faster, better, smaller and cheaper. The same is true of solar photovoltaics (PV), the cost of which has fallen 100-fold since 1977, and 80 per cent since 2008 (see the chart below).

More solar energy can fall on Earth in a single hour than all the energy used globally in a year. 

Nobel Laureate and former US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu predicted in 2011 that solar power will be at grid parity by 2020 – meaning solar power will be dramatically cheaper than nuclear power. Renewable energy (excluding hydro) currently represents only 8.5 per cent of the world’s generating capacity – causing some critics to dismiss it. But in 2013, renewables created a staggering 44 per cent of new global energy capacity.

Here’s another stunning fact: more solar energy can fall on Earth in a single hour than all the energy used globally in a year. On June 9, 2014, Germany produced a record 50.6 per cent of its electricity in the middle of the day from solar power! Germany is not noted for a sunny climate, and 90 per cent of the world’s population lives in countries with substantially more sunlight – so the potential of solar power in the future is fantastic. The annual solar energy that Earth receives dwarfs all remaining fossil fuels.

 By 2030 renewable energy – primarily wind and solar power – will make up 66 per cent of the power supply according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. But I believe the timeline for renewable dominance is actually closer at hand than that. In 2013, 29 per cent of the electricity capacity added in the US was solar. In fact, more solar was installed in the US in 18 months from June 2012 to December 2013 than in the prior 30 years combined.

But according to Ontario’s Long Term Energy Plan, the Darlington nuclear reactor refurbishment won’t be completed until 2025. If it proceeds, Ontario taxpayers will be locked into the most expensive form of electricity for the next 40 years. So while other provinces, states and countries will be basking in the endless supply of low-cost solar power, Ontario businesses, manufacturers and homeowners will be burdened with billions in high costs to pay for nuclear power.

As the famous energy consultant Wayne Gretzky said, “I never go where the puck is, I go to where it’s going to be.” The critical question seems to be: Where is the world’s energy future going?

A Crowdsourced Power Grid

Back when AT&T commissioned McKinsey to study cell phones, the technology was horrifically expensive and therefore ownership was very exclusive – only a small group of wealthy individuals or corporations could afford them. But as the technology plummeted in price – driven by Moore’s Law – millions of individuals became buyers. This completely revolutionized the industry.

The same thing is happening in the renewable energy sector. Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) programs around the world are driving the adoption of wind and solar power. FIT programs ensure that homeowners, farmers, private investors, community and Aboriginal groups are paid a fixed price for the electricity they generate and feed into the grid. Rather than the governments or electric utilities laying out billions of dollars of capital for big, expensive centralized power plants (as with coal, nuclear or gas operations), individuals, communities and local groups are investing in small-scale renewable energy.

As of 2010, more than 50 countries have FIT programs, which also have some ancillary benefits. They increase consumers’ consciousness about energy and as a result those people become more efficient at using and conserving it. Homeowners who are being paid a premium for electricity generation become conscious of the value of electricity and use less.

The resulting energy consciousness thereby lowers demand. FIT programs also reduce transmission line loss, which can reach as high as 22.5 per cent at peak demand because locally produced electricity does not have to be transported hundreds or thousands of miles from a centralized facility. Likewise, the FIT approach increases grid reliability because generation is distributed over a wider geographic area and is therefore more fault-tolerant.

Developing Economies of Scale

Nokia rose to dominance in the cell phone industry by producing inexpensive phones. In fact, Western nations have developing nations to thank for cheap cell phones. China, India and other developing nations in Latin America and Africa couldn’t afford the wire line infrastructure required to provide billions of landline phones to emerging middle-class and poor consumers. So these heavily populated areas leapfrogged the West and moved directly to cellular mobile technology. Their massive economies of scale dramatically reduced the price of mobile technology.

China has announced it will triple its current installed solar capacity to 70 GW by 2017. China already has the second-largest installed capacity of solar – by 2017 it will be the leading country globally.

And solar’s potential is already huge: A PV farm in the Sahara covering just 0.3 per cent of the desert could power all of Europe.

An Explosion of Exponential Growth

Imagine a pond that starts with one lily pad, and the number of lilies doubles every day. At the end of day two there are two lilies, then four lilies after three days, eight after four days, 16 after five days, and so on. However, on day 14, one day before the entire pond is covered, 50 per cent of the water will still be open. On day 13, 75 per cent of the pond will be uncovered, and on day 11 nearly 95 per cent is visible.

If you began warning people on day 11 that the pond was about to be covered over with lilies, they’d look at you like you’re crazy. The key lesson is that most people – most strategic planners, most OPA and OPG energy planners – cannot see exponential growth until it overwhelms their plans.

Solar power might only be a small percentage of the global energy mix at the moment. But global solar capacity has been growing by 40 per cent a year, compounded annually for the last 20 years!

People really don’t understand the power of exponential growth. The amount of computational power in a wristwatch is greater than all the computer power on the first lunar landing module. The average computer notebook today has more raw computing power than IBM’s largest mainframe 15 years ago.

Exponential growth is a game-changer. Whole industries are blindsided by it. The exponential growth in bandwidth resulted in Netflix blindsiding Blockbuster into bankruptcy. More than 33 per cent of all international long-distance calls are now facilitated by Skype, which blindsided the telecom industry’s traditional profit. The exponential growth of social media has vaulted the valuation of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn into the billions. The exponential growth of digital music compression transformed music consumption.

In industry after industry, exponential growth of a new technology or trend has dramatically changed the playing field.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

In 2013, 1,350,000 Canadians were out of work and another 914,000 were underemployed. At a time where we need to create two million jobs for Canadians, government policy should be focused on job creation as a first priority.

In 2011, EnergySavvy.com produced a study about the value proposition of expanding US nuclear capacity versus household-scale energy efficiency, summed up by the infographic below. If Canada’s political leaders cared about jobs, they’d get busy promoting energy efficiency, building retrofits and mass transit.

Green Party of Ontario leader Mike Schreiner points out that energy efficiency could create 14 times more jobs than building new nuclear plants. You’d think all political parties would favour an overriding focus on energy efficiency, because it creates jobs in every community and insulates homeowners and businesses from inevitable rises in energy prices.

By pursuing the lower-cost options of energy efficiency and buying power from Québec, Ontario can assure taxpayers better electricity rates going forward without the threat of debt, provide better environmental choices and less risk, and create more jobs. To defeat nuclear refurbishment in Ontario, we need to delay the decision to proceed, and leave it to market forces and the falling price of solar power to eliminate this unneccesary and overly expensive option.    

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Leilani Münter is a “vegan hippie chick with a racecar.” She’s been a successful professional driver for more than a decade and an unlikely champion of environmental awareness in her sport since 2007, when she began racing carbon neutral by buying offsets. Münter has spoken at a White House briefing about sustainability in sports, trumpeted environmental messages into racing stadiums, collaborated with the Ocean Preservation Society, promoted environmental documentaries on TV and online, and won many accolades – including Discovery’s #1 Eco Athlete 2010 and ELLE Magazine’s Genius Award 2012. 

A\J: Why combine racing and activism?

Leilani Münter: One of the reasons was watching An Inconvenient Truth and understanding the urgency of what we’re facing. That’s when I started integrating my racing website with environmental news. Marketing people said, as a driver you need to shut up, drive and plug your sponsors. I made the decision that I didn’t care if it ended my career; I felt like it was important and I wanted to do whatever I could.

How have racing fans reacted?

There were fans that took offence. I found a thread on a NASCAR forum; somebody trashing me for promoting An Inconvenient Truth. Then the argument shifted to global warming. By the end there were people posting graphs of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. This is on a NASCAR forum! The discussion evolved from being negative talk about me to this really positive discussion about climate change. That really made me realize why I’m doing this.

What issue is most important currently?

Climate change is the biggest issue humans will ever face. Our generation has been called to answer the most noble of duties, to ensure the future survival of generations to come. Just by being that example, every time you interact with somebody you’re planting that seed – there’s another way, a different system that’s not the system you’ve known. I really feel honoured – it didn’t make sense when I graduated with my biology degree and started racing. But now it makes perfect sense, that as a racecar driver I could carry messages places I never could if I didn’t race.

To change something you have to be willing to have that more difficult conversation with people who don’t agree.

Do you have any advice for environmentalists?

I go to environmental events where people agree with me; they pat me on the back and say good job. But you’re not doing any good by talking with people who agree. To change something you have to be willing to have that more difficult conversation with people who don’t agree.

It seems ironic, using a racecar to send environmental messages. But the racecar is my greatest advantage; it’s what gives me a voice to talk to people that normally wouldn’t hear my message. One cannot exist without the other.   

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