Climate activists in London's Trafalgar Square, which they occupied throughout the UN conference in Denmark.

There is no longer any reason to make films explaining the science behind climate change. An Inconvenient Truth has done its job.

What we need to know now is what can we do about it and, more importantly, what are we actually going to do about it?

This December saw what is fairly described as humanity’s best attempt at a solution: COP15, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was a gathering of tens of thousands of delegates, lobbyists, NGOs and activists from 192 nations — and filmmakers, who came to document the circus.

The high stakes meeting was just that: a circus — colourful and dramatic, but politically futile. And with delegates slashing their hands, demonstrators costumed as clowns, marches a hundred thousand strong, and activists beaten by police, fodder for good filmmaking.

The final accord is, in practical terms, meaningless. It is not legally binding; it sets no targets and is shady on the financial details. It simply acknowledges the need to limit the temperature rise to 2°C.

Though Copenhagen was full of sound and fury but accomplished nothing, it did at least signify something: the political process isn’t working, and local and individual efforts are not just important solutions but — for now — the only solutions.

This isn’t to say that the Un process is always inept. The Montréal protocol, signed in 1987 to ban chemicals that destroy the ozone layer, “proves that no matter how insurmountable the environmental crisis seems to be we can handle any challenge,” says Toronto filmmaker Mark Terry, director of the 2009 documentary Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning.

Terry believes that his film “is one of the few climate change documentaries that is actually hopeful — most of them are a bit preachy and say ‘look at what you’ve done, we’re all going to die.’” Still optimistic, he feels that “if we all work together we can probably fix this.” His film presents new science from Antarctica. The ice caps are melting much faster than expected, and sea levels could rise much more quickly than was thought. Terry was one of the only filmmakers who presented inside the actual Un conference, as part of the Canadian delegation.

Antarctica Challenge, says Terry, influenced, “certain delegations to create resolutions for building flood defenses.” Though these resolutions were removed from the final draft, “it was encouraging to see a film take part in the process.” And though the deal was insufficient, “I think the accord was positive overall.”

Most political leaders share his view, and described the meeting as flawed but praiseworthy for acknowledging the need for action.

But many experts believe the UN talks are incapable of forging a real solution based both on science and on historical precedent.

The last accord, Kyoto, stipulated a six per cent cut in emissions. And atmospheric levels have risen steadily ever since. Canada increased its output by almost 30 per cent, and publicly stated that it would do so in breach of our legal commitment — confirming the impotence of the Accord.

Part of the problem is climate change is far more complex than ozone depletion, which was caused by a handful of chemicals. Climate change is impacted by and impacts upon every facet of our lives. What we eat, how we grow it, what we buy, how we make it, why we value it — all the threads of culture, society, politics and, above all, economics.

“Those who are opposed to addressing climate change have been very good at using that complexity as a way of sowing confusion and apathy,” says Sven Huseby, star and producer of A Sea Change, a 2009 doc directed by Barbara Ettinger about oceanic acidification due to climate change.

Huseby screened his film at the Klimaforum09 alternative conference — open to everyone. “I still feel the excitement and delight from the Q&A.” He also marched with 100,000 people on December 12. “It was diverse, creative, peaceful, a thrill beyond belief to be in a sea of people there to bear witness,” says the 66 year-old. “It was a real throwback to the 1960s and the anti-war effort.”

The march demonstrated, if anything, that climate change is ultimately a social justice issue, and not an abstract “environmental” concept. it is about the simple staples of our lives — food, water and energy — who gets it, who doesn’t get it, and why. People marched not just for polar bears but for human rights.

“But,” he adds, “there were so many people with so many different messages, ranging from ‘down with capitalism’ to ‘seal the deal.’ They didn’t have a central focus like a war.”

And when a march five days later turned ugly, with riot police beating demonstrators, that message became even harder for observers thousands of miles away to understand through the prism of their television sets or from the footage posted online from “citizen journalists.”

For me, the violence was not just disturbing to witness first-hand, but also worrying in terms of the effect on the message. It becomes easier to see cops beating activists rather than the points they were trying to make. An observer could think the demonstrators were mere idealistic youths venting knee-jerk anti-capitalist rage without valid arguments. On the one hand they see thousands of delegates with suits, science, and tomes of policy couched in the complex language of legalese and the magical mathematics of finance. And on the other hand, angry anarchists with loud chants and puppets.

But the fact is that the demonstrators did have valid and informed criticisms shared with many academics and experts, such as James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and perhaps the world’s most famous climate change scientist. They are not simply criticising the UN process for being slow and inefficient. They believe it could actually make the problem worse.

The main reason being that it is “a corporate strategy designed to be the least disruptive to economic growth and development,” says the narrator in Brenda Longfellow’s 2009 NFB co-production Weather Report. A key mechanism espoused by the UN is the “cap and trade” system, which allows permits to pollute to be bought and sold like a commodity. “This is wholly inadequate — it is a false hope,” says James Cameron, Vice President of Climate Change Capital, in the film, which goes on to explain why we should be distrustful of “the market to correct the excesses that the market has created in the first place.”

“The elephant in the room here is that they won’t talk about the model — globalisation, deregulation, privatisation, and unlimited economic growth,” Maude Barlow said to me at Klimaforum09. She is the former senior Adviser on Water to the 63rd President of the United Nations General Assembly — and the co-author of Blue Gold, which was made into a 2007 documentary. “This is never going to work.”

Economics aside, one scientific conclusion is clear. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already above risky levels, and therefore the Un process hasn’t worked. This may be due to the constraints of our economic system, or to an inescapable “tragedy of the commons” outcome. Either way, the process has not worked.

So was Voltaire right: is an enlightened dictator the only solution? I am tempted to think so.

In the meantime, in lieu of political leadership, what are we to do?

“Why do I have to wait for congress to do something?” asks Colin Beavan, a New York writer. Documented in the 2009 film No Impact Man, he and his wife (and toddler) cut down on every extraneous item, including meat, electricity, packaging and power, “to see if it is possible to have a good life without wasting so much,” he explains.

It isn’t easy: no food from beyond 250 miles (so no coffee or sugar), no packaging (so no take out), and no new unnecessary purchases. The day they run out of toilet paper is memorable.

But there are also unexpected gains. His wife learns to cook. He becomes fitter. They give up their television, spend more time outdoors, and “become better parents.” The experiment is more than an attention-grabbing gimmick. “A big question is whether one person can make a difference,” he comments. “But the thing about individual action is that it causes people to be engaged.”

The point is not trivial. The first step towards action is to engage with the issues, and to become aware that our acts of consumption contribute to climate change. That, in itself, is difficult. Comprehending how a cup of coffee with a plastic lid directly contributes to drought in Africa defies the imaginative capacities of the human mind.

But action can take more concrete forms. A Time Comes, nick Broomfield’s 2009 Greenpeace short available free online, documents the experience of six activists who scaled a 200-metre smoke-stack of a coal-fired plant in England. They shut down the furnace temporarily but far more significant was the legal precedent set. They argued in court that the damage they caused was justified because it prevented greater damage to private property worldwide. And they won.

“Throughout history people, have taken direct action and were lambasted but when you look back you realise they were right to do what they did,” says Ben Stewart, one of the six activists.

“But after a few years of activism you become exhausted,” says Mikael Rioux, a young man from Québec who sat suspended over the Trois-Pistoles River in protest of dams. He mellowed after the birth of his son and decided to search for real solutions. His story is documented in Sylvie Van Brabant’s NFB doc Earth Keepers, winner of the 2009 Planet in Focus environmental film festival and screened in Copenhagen.

His journey takes him to see India’s recycling programmes employing slum youths, to meet Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan Nobel prize winner who champions reforestation as economic development, and other progressive economists, and designers and thinkers.

The message is clear: the tools are there. We already have the right ideas and technology, and passionate and smart people ready to deploy them. And all it would take is two per cent of our global GDP.

America spends more than four per cent of its GDP on its military budget. We have the means but we lack the political will.

“We should empower people to have faith in their own means…citizens must reappropriate power,” concludes Rioux. “But people see that the problem is so big. How can we switch from fear to action?”

In this fight, “one moment is optimism, the next is apocalyptic despair,” says Jonathon Porritt of the Sustainable Development Commission in London, England, speaking in Earth Keepers. “We need to reach out to the young people who are both very passionate and very angry.”

But, Rioux wonders, “How can we remain optimistic and find the heart to keep on fighting?” Especially in Copenhagen in the midst of a bewilderingly complex meeting that came to almost nothing.

One evening in the Danish city I met an unusual Canadian filmmaker. Slater Jewell-Kemker is 17 years old and making An Inconvenient Youth about “the people who really are experiencing climate change and working towards solutions,” she said. “Our leaders are not going to be around for the effects of their decisions, and the youth movement has something they don’t: enormous positive energy and creativity that prevents us from becoming depressed.”

She’s not the only Canadian teenaged climate change documentarian. Colin Carter, the director of 2009’s Fight For The Planet is in grade 12.

“It is important for older activists like myself to pass the baton,” says Huseby. “We met a lot of terrific young people in Copenhagen who understood where to find the leverage points for change. The more I see of that, the better I feel for the sake of my grandchildren.”

Social struggles can succeed without violence. Gandhi was victorious in India and thanks to Martin Luther King, segregation came to an end in the Us. I am grateful to be a woman today rather than a century ago. As No Impact Man — without toilet paper, electricity or heating — puts it:

“The most radical political act is to be an optimist.”

The first Public Eye Award for Greenwash handed out in Davos last week was unprecedented. Not only was it the first such award handed out in the Swiss city for false environmental claims, but it was also the first ever Public Eye Award for the recipient: the United Nations.

The UN CEO Water Mandate, a public-private partnership meant to facilitate water conservation, was singled out for falsely claiming to address the global water crisis. The real aim, the Public Eye committee alleges, is not to conserve water but to “facilitate greater control over water sources by for-profit corporations.” For example Nestlé, is a signatory. One of the largest purveyors of bottled water, a product widely reviled by ecologists, it is in their best interests to obtain as large a volume of water as possible, rather than to ease its distribution in regions suffering from water scarcity.

This marks the tenth year for the Public Eye Awards, trophies meant to mirror the high-profile World Economic Forum meetings by fingering “the nastiest corporate players of the year,” such as Novartis in 2007 for blocking the distribution of cheap generic drugs to leukemia patients in India. Last week saw the first award for greenwash: attempts to increase profits masquerading as attempts to improve ecological performance, usually by co-opting the symbols of environmental groups. Classic example: British Petroleum re-branding itself as “Beyond Petroleum” with a green floral logo while decreasing investments in renewable energies and making inroads into the tar sands.

The problem runs deeper than an innocent fib: by allowing ecologically detrimental practises to continue unchecked, greenwashing undermines the credibility of organisations which genuinely improve their environmental performance. In the long run the widespread practice could fuel a backlash against green-branded products by tainting all as disingenuous.

The inception of a greenwash award this year was not surprising, as false claims of ecological credentials have risen in parallel with social awareness of climate change and other issues. But the selection of the UN CEO Water Mandate seems curious. Why criticize above others an organisation whose primary mandate is world peace and universal human rights? For many this strikes the same strange chord as the demonstrations against the UN talks on climate change in Copenhagen in December. The talks may not have been as effective as hoped, but at least the gathering acknowledged the need to address climate change. Was it deserving of the same fury as the World Trade Organisation in Seattle?

“Some of the worst corporate water barons have been blue-washing their bad practices through the CEO Mandate process – it is wonderful that the award has gone to the UN CEO Mandate and I congratulate the committee for having the courage to do this” says Maude Barlow, Senior Adviser on Water to the 63rd President of the United Nations General Assembly. ”There is a struggle for the soul of the UN taking place. Will it represent the peoples of the world through their governments or will it become a mouthpiece for the interests of private capital?”

The UN has changed over the past two decades, says Richard Girard of the Polaris Institute in Canada, who submitted the nomination.

“It is important to call out the increasing corporate infiltration of the UN on all levels – it has shifted from regulating corporations to partnering with them,” he says. “The problem is that the program has no third party verification. Coca Cola [a signatory of the mandate] may publish a sustainability report – but if you check the fine print the auditor only checked four out of hundreds of bottling facilities.”

Gavin Powers, Deputy Director of the United Nations Global Compact, declined requests for commentary and instead referred to the official UN response to the nomination.

The Mandate “is based on the conviction that the private sector can play a positive role,” it reads. “The Secretariat appreciates that there are differences of opinion with respect to the role of the private sector … [but a] fundamental belief in the key role businesses can and should play in advancing sustainable water management is the basis of the Mandate.”

Assisting both corporate businesses and governments is the academic Water Footprint Network, based out of the Netherlands. They aim to refine the scientific tools required to measure the precise amount of water needed to produce a consumer product, such as a glass of beer (140 litres) or a cotton t-shirt (2,700 litres). “We are non-partisan – we aim to make the data and methodology available to anyone who needs it in support of sustainable and equitable water use,” explains Derk Kuiper, executive director of the Water Footprint Network

So what does he make of the Public Eye Award?

“As an African saying goes, ‘when elephants fight, the grass suffers,’ and there is a real truth to that in Davos,” says Kuiper. “The million dollar question is if this really helps those that are in need of water, or just triggers more communications activity.”

“There is political polarisation of this issue – and as always there are two sides to the coin,” adds Professor Arjen Hoekstra, scientific director of the Water Footprint Network and originator of the concept. ”There is a lot of greenwashing, but at the same time many businesses are serious about water conservation. It’s not easy to say if the UN Mandate is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. The reality is much more nuanced.”

Politics and profits aside, the question is this: Do companies that sign up to the UN CEO Water Mandate actually reduce their water footprints?

“It is simply impossible to say yes or no definitely because there is no monitoring mechanism,” says Hoekstra.

The research, published in the scientific journal PlosOne on January 12, found that American men over 60 with the highest levels of BPA in their urine on average had a 45 per cent greater chance of developing cardiovascular disease than men with lower levels of the chemical.

This does not conclusively prove that BPA causes cardiovascular disease, says study author Dr. Tamara Galloway, Professor of Ecotoxicology at the University of Exeter, UK. The association could be influenced by other factors, such as a poor diet featuring large amounts of canned food, she said.

But the finding does add to more than 200 scientific studies that have linked the chemical to human health concerns, including diabetes, breast cancer, obesity, hyperactivity and behavioural problems, and early puberty. Of particular concern is the chemical’s potential to affect the development of infants and babies in the womb (it is also found in umbilical cord blood).

BPA is able to mimic the hormone estrogen (dubbed an “endocrine disruptor”) and numerous studies in lab animals have demonstrated effects at extremely low doses, such as changes to the development of mammary glands in mouse embryos exposed to levels equivalent to just 25 parts per trillion. The average level of BPA in the urine of people sampled in the newest study was 3.3 parts per billion.

Used to manufacture clear, polycarbonate plastic and the epoxy resins used in the lining of tin cans, BPA is found in many plastics that are labeled with the number seven (found in the triangular recycling symbol). It is used to make a wide variety of products including CDs, circuit boards, coffee makers, water cooler jugs, auto parts, sports equipment, cell phones, cameras, eyeglass lenses and medical equipment.

In 2008 Canada designated BPA “toxic” and became the first country to ban the sale and import of baby bottles containing it. The states of Connecticut and Massachussets have placed restrictions on the chemical, and several US senators are forwarding legislation to ban it from baby products. Many large brands and retailers such as Wal-Mart, Toys “R” Us, Playtex and Nalgene have pledged to phase out the chemical.

The newest study is particularly significant because “it is the first major epidemiological study to replicate an earlier finding – this brings a much higher level of confidence in the study’s validity,” says Professor Frederick vom Saal of the University of Missouri-Columbia. His own research has shown multiple effects on laboratory mice exposed to BPA, including developmental changes in the prostate glands, which he says suggest men exposed to the chemical before birth could be predisposed to develop prostate cancer later in life.

“It’s important to note that nobody claims any of the diseases BPA is related to are caused solely by this chemical, but that it could be an important contributing factor,” he says. Based on what we know, it is “lunacy” to allow BPA to be used in products that come into contact with food, he says.

The chemical poses more than just a risk to human health. “BPA is a huge environmental problem – it is estimated to contribute the highest level of estrogenicity released from landfills,” says Dr. Galloway.

Many other chemicals, such as phthalates (found in cosmetics, shampoos, soft plastics and clear plastic food wraps), flame retardants (used in many electronics), and other petrochemicals found in consumer products are also able to mimic hormones and can affect wildlife. BPA has been found to affect the development of snails, for example, at extremely low levels.

But the science isn’t all scary, says Dr. Galloway. BPA is rapidly broken down in the environment, unlike “persistent pollutants” like DDT, flame retardants and “non-stick” chemicals like Teflon, which will remain in the environment for decades. Children born today still carry PCBs in their blood, despite the fact that the chemical was broadly banned in the 1970s. On the other hand, BPA is broken down in the environment quickly.

Moreover, BPA is metabolised rapidly by the body compared to other chemicals, so people can quickly lower their blood levels. The newest study, based on a sample of the US population, shows a 30 per cent decline in average levels of the chemical in the US population since the last survey in 2003. “That’s really good news, and it happened without any legislation,” she comments, noting that public concern over the chemical could have led people to avoid canned food and drink and plastics known to contain BPA.

But many supposedly safe plastic products still contain the chemical. An analysis carried out by the government agency Health Canada in 2009 found that a number of baby bottle brands labeled “BPA-free” still contained trace amounts of the chemical. And a study commissioned by the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel in 2008 found that BPA leaches into food from plastics not typically thought to contain BPA, including Nos 1, 2 and 5.

And even switching entirely to glass containers from plastic still leaves other routes for exposure, as Rick Smith, executive director of the Canadian advocacy group Environmental Defence discovered. For his book Slow Death by Rubber Duck, Smith experimented on himself by eating food microwaved in plastic containers, drinking canned pop and doing everything he could to elevate his own levels, which instantly shot up.

He then stripped everything suspect out of his diet and saw his BPA levels quickly drop – though not entirely. Clearly, he says, BPA was still able to suffuse his body through other known sources such as newspaper inks, grocery store receipts, recycled paper products and trace amounts in drinking water.

But BPA is something we can feel positive about, he says. ”If we ceased production of this chemicals tomorrow it would literally disappear from our bodies and from virtually every part of the environment – it would fizzle out.” Already chemists are finding new ways to make hard plastics with less (or no) BPA.

“There is absolutely no question in my mind that we will see this chemical disappear,” he says, adding that he is certain the Canadian government will bring in a broader ban in the next decade reaching beyond baby products. ”You would be hard pressed to think of any other single action that should be taken to protect human health than to ban this product from items that come into contact with food and drink.”

Smith believes the US will soon follow Canada’s example, but Professor Patricia Hunt of Washington State University, who has been studying BPA and its effects on lab animals for the past 15 years, isn’t so convinced. “I think it will be a lot more difficult here than in Canada – for one because there aren’t any manufacturers of the chemical on Canadian soil,” she says.

But the shift in public awareness of the chemical over the past 10 years has been “just amazing,” says Prof Hunt. “It’s parents in particular who have been demanding BPA-free products. That’s where change will come from: not from legislation, but from industry bowing to consumer demands.”

On Friday the FDA in the US announced its new position on the chemical, stating that “on the basis of results from recent studies using novel approaches to test for subtle effects [the FDA has] some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and young children, [and will be conducting] in-depth studies to answer key questions and clarify uncertainties about the risks of BPA.” The agency has also ear marked $30 million to study the chemical for the next two years.

This is the first time the FDA has expressed concern over the safety of BPA. “This is huge,” says Prof vom Saal. “We finally have science overcoming politics in the US. Previously, under President Bush, the FDA behaved essentially like a public relations wing for the chemical industry.”

The American Chemistry Council, which represents companies that manufacture BPA, states that “consumer products made with BPA are safe for their intended uses and pose no known risks to human health.”

This position is unlikely to change soon, says consumer advocate Smith. “They are manning the barricades, and their game plan is clear: deny, deny, deny,” he says. “They are still fighting any increased regulation of BPA in any form. And based on the leaked minutes of their planning session last year, we know exactly how low they will stoop to maintain sales.”

While the chemical continues to cause controversy in America and Canada, where baby products are colourfully labeled “BPA-FREE”, it is considerably less visible in the UK and many other European countries.

“More attention is given by the media to our research on the other side of the Atlantic,” says Dr Galloway, who works in England. “There seems to be more of a public debate there.”

But what if you just don’t like the bloody thing?

Because not every woman does. “Publicists are always trying to get women’s magazine editors to jump on the diva cup bandwagon – but I’m so not there with it,” says Cathy Garrard, an editor and writer who has staffed at numerous publications including environmental magazine Plenty.

Many women won’t want to convert – try telling a woman with vulvodynia they should give it a whirl. Or a 13-year-old already suffering from the physical and psychological traumas of puberty.

The fact that the cup is not always a comfortable choice – despite the claims made by its manufacturers – could undermine ecologically-friendly products as a whole, which continue to be widely perceived as invariably “ugly” or “impractical.”

Full disclosure: I don’t like the cup. I tried. It wasn’t comfortable. Trying to get it out was far less easy than I was told it would be. A few days was enough before I quit – and it can take up to three months to grow comfortable with it. No thanks.

But less well-known are the equally ecologically and economically sound alternatives: re-usable cotton liners and lined underwear, such as Lunapads and Lunapanties.

Full disclosure: Lunapanties are my weapon of choice. They fit just as comfortably as normal undies, and are genuinely much more comfortable than synthetic maxi-pads, which bunch up and can be clammy (or damned cold in Canadian winters). Best of all: I haven’t had to buy anything in three years.

To be fair, most women who try the cup become devotees. My female friends are eager to endorse its virtues. Zuzia: “Love it.” Amy: “I’ve never had any problems with it – I often forget it’s even there.” Sarah: “I worry less than I did about pads leaking all over my clothes.” Rochelle: “They’re way more convenient.” Bethan: “It gives you freedom.” (Especially, as travelers will tell you, in remote locations.)

Jessie however shared my view: “Sounds good in theory, but I had a rather painful encounter with one of those things. The memory is still too vivid to try it again.”

Regardless what women choose the financial gains are indisputable and the ecological impact is considerable: each year in America alone an estimated 14 billion pads and seven billion tampons end up in sewers and landfills – or wash out to sea. Volunteers with the NGO Ocean Conservancy kindly gathered 17,239 tampons and applicators from beaches in the 2007 International Coastal Cleanup, just a tiny fraction of what remains out there.

But then – far more belittlingly – by our own Government when Prime Minister Stephen Harper single-handedly shut down Parliament on 30 December through a process known as proroguing. Ministers were to resume parliamentary proceedings on 25 January – now they will have to wait until 3 March.

The almost indisputable reason (certainly as speculated by every single newspaper in the country): because the Government wishes to evade allegations by Canadian diplomats of a cover-up of collusion in the torture of Afghan detainees. A topic the Government has been avoiding since November – and certainly not one they want tainting Canada’s international brand image while Vancouver plays host to the Olympics in February.

Proroguing, a constitutional measure that suspends proceedings in the House of Commons (and scuttles all bills under consideration), can be done at the whim of the Prime Minister without being put to a vote by the House (or even his own party). All that is required is that he kindly ask the Governor General for permission – and in this case, he did not even do so in person, phoning in the request instead.

And all this when the Conservative Party of Canada holds a minority government, and by a man elected by only 34 per cent of Canadians voters.

This strange artifact of the Canadian constitutional system has been wielded many times in the past, usually when all pending legislation has been dealt with and the Government has little to do. Harper claims to have prorogued Parliament in order to “focus on the economy” and thus described his motion as a “fairly standard procedure”. But absolutely nobody is convinced, from all the opposition political parties, to academic theorists across the country, to every single news outlet (including the right-wing press that has traditionally supported him).

The fact that the prorogue was announced the day before New Years Eve, while even the most media-attentive Canadians were taking a rest, and on the same day as the men’s Olympic hockey team squad was announced, has not gone unnoticed. Green Party leader Elizabeth May described it as a “mastery in political calculation”. The Globe and Mail has labelled this “an insult to Parliament”. The Economist calls it “little more than naked self interest”. Even the Calgary Herald – traditionally Harper’s most staunch supporter (and the site of his own riding) – calls it a “cynical political play”.

To add insult to injury, this is the second time PM Harper has prorogued parliament in just over a year – the last time was in October 2008, when opposition parties were set to hold a vote of no confidence, likely forcing a new election and possibly the defeat of the Conservatives.

Liberal Party of Canada leader Michael Ignatieff criticizes “the arrogance of a regime that thinks it can get away with just about anything”. The Conservatives, curiously, make no mention of the prorogue on their own website – but do “highlight Canada’s upcoming leadership of major international events in 2010, including the Olympic and Paralympic Games as well as the G-8 and G-20 Summits … we plan to use these two summits to continue playing a leadership role on issues of importance to Canadians”.

In Harper’s view, clearly, the Olympics are important to Canadians. And torture is not.

“This is a slimy, dishonest way to avoid criticism on such an important issue – it’s also a waste of our taxpayer money and our legislative time,” says Justin Arjoon, a Toronto university student who is co-organizing a rally to be held on the 23 January to demand that MPs return to work on 25 January. Other demonstrations will be held across the country, largely orchestrated through a Facebook group – now with more than 150,000 members.

“This makes me embarrassed – almost slightly ashamed to be Canadian,” says Arlene Decker, a Canadian living in London, England, who is trying to organize a rally on the same day for Canadian ex-pats in Britain.

Especially embarrassing, she says, after Canada was labelled the “Colossal Fossil” and cleverly pranked by the Yes Men in Copenhagen last month for coming to the negotiations with the weakest emission reduction plan of any nation.

“By any measure the performance of our federal government compared with other governments was miserable,”says Rick Smith, Executive Director of the Environmental Defence in Canada, who “felt schizophrenic” in Copenhagen.

Despite the failings of the Harper Government, he says, “I was really proud of many of our provinces and cities,”such as the Province of Ontario for the Green Energy Act and the City of Montreal for its public transport plans, which the Environmental Defence recognized with a gala event on 16 December in the Danish city. “Our point was to highlight the tremendous progress being made at the municipal level in Canada – progress that is being undermined by a federal government that is intent on doing as little as possible.”

“There were over 300 protests in Canada during Copenhagen and leading up to it, including the high-profile sit-ins at Ministerial offices – this was the most impressive display I’ve seen in my 30 years as an activist,” adds John Bennet, executive director of the Sierra Club, who was also in Copenhagen and was also “disappointed in a federal government that is not expending one iota of political pressure on this issue”.

But despite that show of activism, Canadians are still led by a Prime Minister (remember, elected by barely a third of the population) who can represent them at international negotiations with globally denounced proposals – and then shut down Parliament at whim whenever challenged.

“The media says that Canadians don’t care about climate change, or about our democratic process, that we suffer from an ingrained apathy – but I don’t think that’s actually true,” says Arjoon, one of the organizers of the Toronto rally. “It’s time we really started shaking down that assumption.”

At the vast Bella centre where the talks were held, sleep-deprived, jargon-fatigued, confused, and frequently demoralized politicians and reporters slogged late into the morning hours to forge a piece of paper that from the start had been labelled both as humanity’s last chance to save itself and a political sham. Working so hard on something potentially so meaningless must have been a strange experience.

For me the most surreal, unforgettable moment came not when the accord was signed, but when it wasn’t. I didn’t learn something eye-opening about climate change or about global politics, but about the most powerful news organization in the world and their endorsement of the political equivalent of a napkin to the entire world.

Sitting at the internet-equipped press table at the alternate Klimaforum09, I was thrashing out a piece on the tar sands while a gypsy folk band played in the main hall and people danced and drank the last night of the fortnight away.

Grumpy, tired, and focusing on an issue that can easily leave you feeling overwhelmed and depressed, I tried to shut out the sounds of the party. Its very existence utterly baffled me: what is there to celebrate? The deal hasn’t been signed, and even if it had, it is highly unlikely to satisfy anyone serious about tackling climate change in a socially just way. The juxtaposition between the gloomy news threads reporting continual deadlock at the Bella, the devastating images of the tar sands on my computer screen, and the uproarious music and cheers from downstairs was truly surreal.

My gloom was broken suddenly by shouting and cheers from a group of American members of NGOs sitting next to me: “There it is, there it is!”

“There’s what?”

“The deal – they signed the deal. This is fantastic, just fantastic Check out the New York Times.”

There it was, a New York Times piece: “President Obama announced here on Friday night that five major nations, including the United States, had together forged a climate deal.”

It seemed utterly improbable. How could something have been signed this early? Sceptical, I checked the news sites of several other main news organizations. Nothing. No pieces criticizing the “deal”, examining it – or even reporting its existence.

“It’s not perfect, but he did it, Obama broke the deadlock,” said one of the Americans, smiling broadly, and cheerfully scrolling through the piece. “We did it! This is so much better than I had hoped for. Just shows what perseverance can come to.” Two others high-fived.

As the deal was not the concern of the article I needed to finish, I decided to focus on my own work; I skimmed the piece, but kept several other mainstream news sites open and waited for their coverage. Curiously, nothing appeared on any of the websites I trust – most notably The Guardian’s – by the time I shut off my computer several hours later.

Published the next day, The Guardian’s first piece on the accord makes for an interesting comparison: “Low targets, goals dropped: Copenhagen ends in failure” reads the headline.

Describing the “deal” that prompted such elation in my American neighbours the previous evening, The Guardian notes that the “weak outline of a global agreement” was only signed by five countries, would continue to be scrutinized and debated through the night, and “it was unclear whether it would be adopted by all 192 countries in the full plenary session.”

The final piece describing the accord in The Guardian – published a day later after more details (meagre as they were) had been worked out and more countries (few as there were) had signed – is headlined: “Copenhagen closes with weak deal that poor threaten to reject.”

The first sentence – the most important sentence in any piece, and the only one that very many readers will bother to read – from the main article in the Times of London, is markedly unoptimistic in comparison to the New York Times: “The United Nations climate change summit ended last night without setting any emission reduction targets.”

So what had happened? Why the publication in the New York Times so many hours before any other major news outlet – and why the optimism?

In short: negotiations were deadlocked. Obama came to the conference on the last day and selected four key countries – China, India, Brazil, and South Africa – for a conference. They agreed to a preliminary accord that featured no emission reduction targets, no specific details on finance, but merely a simple recognition of the fact that global temperature rise needs to be kept to 2C.

This “deal” was the political equivalent of a napkin. The napkin would then need to be debated, negotiated and signed by 190 other nations, and could change throughout.

Obama’s media team then held a press conference about this napkin, which the New York Times quickly noted would still be subject to scrutiny by the rest of the UN, but “might not need ratification by the entire conference.”

Analyses of the final “Copenhagen Accord” in The Guardian, the New York Times, and elsewhere all note that the treaty is non-legally binding, sets no specific emission reduction targets or timelines, is shady at best on financial details of transfer of technology and funds to developing countries, and dropped many of the most important clauses necessary to avoid “runaway” climate change, such as an 80 per cent overall drop in emissions by 2050. There is little reason to describe the conference and its conclusions as a success, and a thorough diary and analysis of COP15 in this publication as “appalling – not worth the paper it was hastily photocopied on.”

What I found fascinating from my last night in Copenhagen was not the length of the talks, nor the “weak” and “unfair” nature of the “accord.” It was that the most powerful and influential news organization in the world, in the race to be the first past the gate to publish (an unfortunate by-product of the transition to online publishing), reported on a napkin deemed by others to be too premature to be worth reporting.

And that they did so based first and foremost on a press conference held by the White House, rather than waiting to see how the rest of the world would respond.

And that this article – by the most powerful news organization in the world – conveyed an overriding sense of achievement, optimism, and American leadership. A typical reader, without the time or desire to read through an entire piece, could easily come away with the general impression that the deal was signed, that America had brokered it, and that it had been a success.

Granted, those sitting near me – and around the world, reading the most powerful news organization in the world – who were most excited by the initial accord may have waned in their enthusiasm over the coming days as the analyses showed the weakness of this document. But only those interested in taking the time to read through the sticky, mathematical and legal details.

But the fast and Whitehouse-friendly publication is interesting indeed. And it reminds me of other fast and Whitehouse-friendly publications: the premature assertion of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

I’m definitely not an a fan or advocate of conspiracy theories – I’m definitely not implying deliberate collusion or an attempt at confusion.

But I do find this interesting.

Aerial view of Syncrude upgrader and tailings pond in the Boreal forest north of Fort McMurray, northern Alberta, Canada, July 2009. Photo Credit: Jiri Rezac, Courtesy of Greenpeace

But even those who are aware of the size and scope of what is considered the largest industrial project in the world are still profoundly unable to grasp that they too contribute to it, in one way or another. It’s incredibly difficult to wrap one’s mind around.

In other words, one of the ultimate barriers is neither political, nor social, nor economic: it is psychological.

I am sitting in the Kilmaforum09 alternative climate conference in Copenhagen on Friday evening. I have just surveyed a dozen people sitting near me – activists, journalists, students, and representatives from NGOs. I questioned only Americans.

“Who do you think is America’s largest source of foreign oil? Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venequela, Mexico, or Canada?”

Not a single one got the answer right: Canada.

I was prompted to make the survey after an interesting conversation with the head of an American NGO. He had just returned from the Bella centre – the official UN conference that I had been unable to attend (like the overwhelming vast majority of journalists worldwide). Curious to know more about the atmosphere inside, I asked him about his day – and about Canada’s obstructions at the talks. He was aware of the tar sands, and their role in Canada’s economic and political policy.

“But as I understand it, they’re still a small portion of Canada’s emissions and energetic output, though, because it’s still such an expensive process,” he said.

But Canada is the largest supplier of foreign oil to the US, I pointed out.

“No, it’s not. It’s Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, but definitely not Canada,” he placidly said.

Certain I knew my facts – that Canada has been the largest supplier since 2007 – I looked it up. Here they are, the US Government’s own figures.

I then quizzed everyone with an American accent around me – people who, having come to Copenhagen, would be reasonably well-informed regarding climate and energy issues. But each was unaware, and each was surprised at the truth.

“But that’s because of the country’s proximity to the US – it’s just crude being pumped down from the Arctic, like we have in Alaska,” one volunteered.

No, I gently corrected, it’s largely because of the tar sands, and showed them a handful of photos from the world’s largest industrial project.

Suncor Millennium tailings pond and tarsands mining operations north of Fort McMurray, northern Alberta, Canada, July 2009. Photo Credit: Jiri Rezac, Courtesy of Greenpeace.

Photo Credit: Jiri Rezac, Courtesy of Greenpeace

Then I rattled off the basic statistics: Alberta boasts the world’s second largest reserve of oil – not liquid crude, but a mixture of bitumen and sand. This is difficult to extract, and uses four barrels of fresh water to produce one barrel of oil. This water is left irreparably contaminated with heavy metals and petrochemicals and collected in giant tailing ‘ponds’ – considered by some to be the largest man-made objects ever created.

Syncrude upgrader and tailings pond in the Boreal forest north of Fort McMurray, northern Alberta, Canada. Photo Credit: Jiri Rezac, Courtesy of Greenpeace.

The production of this oil releases up to five times more greenhouse gases per unit than conventional extraction, and is one of the main reasons that Canada sits almost 30 per cent above its 1990 emission levels (when Kyoto meant we should have at least achieved a six per cent reduction). And official government estimates of the emissions don’t include the fact that the boreal forest – a carbon sink – has to be removed to get at the sands.

Before - and after. Photo Credit: Jiri Rezac, Courtesy of Greenpeace.

Covering an area the size of England the tar sands, if fully developed, could be the factor that becomes ‘the tipping point’ for ‘runaway’ climate change.

“When I first heard about the tar sands in April, to be honest, I was sincerely embarrassed that I hadn’t heard about them,” says Jess Worth, founder of the UK Tar Sands Campaign.

But she needn’t have been embarrassed – this strange lack of awareness is a global norm. But that is slowly starting to change in the UK, where the UK Tar Sands Campaign is now staging protests against the Canadian High Commission and British financial institutions invested in the sands.

On December 15, during COP15 in Copenhagen, activists in London, England scaled the Canadian High Commission, dunked the Canadian flag in oil, and strung up a banner of their own. Photo Credit: Nick Cobbing

At a panel held at Klimaforum last week, Worth, Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, the Freedom from Oil Campaigner for the Rainforest Action Network (and from Fort Chipewyan, a community downstream of the sands), Clayton Thomas Muller of the Indigenous Environmental Network and Maude Barlow, Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, spoke about the scale of the tar sands, how political opposition can be leveraged in Canada, and how public campaigns in Britain could be replicated in other countries.

During the question and answer period a Canadian audience member asked why awareness of the tar sands seemed so much greater in Britain than in Canada.

I raised my hand – I felt this was the one point I could speak to best out of anyone in the room, being a Canadian environmental journalist and a resident of the UK for the past four years. I felt obliged to correct her.

I have spoken about the sands and their impacts at great length for the entire time I have lived in the UK, and no matter how many times I rattle off the statistics they almost always fail to have a lasting impact.

I am convinced that this is due to the way that Canada is perceived: we carry a reputation for being green, liberal, polite and peaceful. Liberalizers of marijuana rights, legalizers of gay marriage, founders of Greenpeace, stewards of the environment.

Canada in fact has an environmental track record far from boast-worthy. But our falsely ‘green’ reputation precedes us, allowing us to carry out destructive environmental practices – from uranium mining to over-fishing to the deployment of intensive mining operations worldwide.

For this reason it has been incredibly difficult for British people to appreciate the reality and scale of the tar sands project: a psychological set-point exists thanks to a false mythology that paints Canada as a clean, green nation of eco-minded liberals – a land of rivers, forests, wolves and hippies. Canada may have been awarded the Colossal Fossil award yet again this year, but China and its famous construction of two coal-fired plants a week still has a more predominant place in people’s minds.

This mythology of ecological enlightenment still persists among Canadians themselves. But self-identity and patriotism aside, most Canadians are certainly aware of the scale of the tar sand operations because it plays such a predominant role in the country’s economy and has such a highly visible presence in the mainstream media.

But even for those concerned about the impacts of the project – even for those saddened and angered by it – the sheer size of the operations is almost impossible to comprehend. Nothing like it has ever existed. It is without any historical precedent. It is, simply put, overwhelming.

Photo Credit: Jiri Rezac, Courtesy of Greenpeace

One could watch documentaries such as H2Oil and Petropolis over and over or scroll through aerial shots for hours on end (which I have), and still feel like one has no appreciation of the true scale of the operation – not simply its size, but also the causes, the effects, and its future.

Confronted with the unprecedented scope of the tar sands, most people’s minds simply switch off. It’s too big, too overwhelming, and – frankly – too depressing for most Canadians to think about.

And without psychological inspiration, nobody is motivated to take action.

There are political and legal means to challenge the tar sand operations – most of all, the treaty rights of the First Nations communities, as Thomas-Muller argues. “Not a single environmental victory in Canada in 30 years took place without the enforcement of the treaty rights of First Nations,” he said. But the psychological barriers continue to prevent most Canadians from being inspired to act.

However, as Deranger pointed out, the responsibility for the existence of the sands – and the ability to oppose them – lies not just with Canadians. Financial institutions and petrochemical companies the world over are invested in the sands. British tax payers, no matter whom they bank with, fuel the sands through nationalized banks such as the Royal Bank of Scotland.

But moreover, purchasing the petroleum-derived products – which include polymer plastics, food grown with chemical fertilizers and pharmaceuticals as well as gasoline – manufactured by companies such as Shell, BP and other energy giants directly fuels projects in the sands.

“We are all contributing to this project because we are addicted to oil – because we don’t know how to move forward to renewable energies,” she pointed out.

Understanding that we each and everyone of us the world over play a small indirect part in the tar sands and the destruction of Alberta’s forests – and communities – through the complex carbon chains in our economy is even more staggeringly difficult to comprehend than merely the size of the project.

But until we are capable of appreciating this we will not move to oppose expansions in the tar sands – nor of making changes to our lifestyles and economy that underpin all of this.

It will prove noteworthy in an unprecedented fashion: it demonstrates unequivocally that climate change is an issue of social justice and human rights, and not merely a “scientific” or “environmental” concern.

The attempted disruption of the talks at the Bella Centre in Copenhagen today by thousands of protestors demanding “climate justice,” the indisputable brutality of the police, and the resignation of the Danish environment minister (presumed due to fury of developing nations over leaked drafts perceived to hand power to rich countries) demonstrated three key points:

1. Civil disobedience and grassroots uprisings can have an impact, even if only symbolic rather than constitutional. It is incredibly easy to believe that public demonstrations are utterly ineffective – especially after seeing the Iraq war marches come to nothing. But days like today remind us that they can be an effective tool to change public perception and to push issues onto the political agenda.

2. The UN climate negotiations are not going to work. They are stagnant in a political stalemate and absolutely nobody with a solid understanding of climate change science – such as James Hansen – believes the political process is capable of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to an effective degree.

3. Perhaps most importantly, that climate change – and all “environmental” matters – is an issue of human rights.

Ten years ago climate change was barely a concern for subversive activists, who from Seattle to Quebec City to Genoa campaigned primarily on issues of trade, finance, and social inequality. Certainly they were not unaware of climate change, but it was not perceived as a pressing concern nor as central to their humanistic agenda.

Now, when Copenhagen saw one of the largest gatherings of public demonstrators in recent history, climate change has become not just an issue, but the issue.

It encapsulates everything. It concerns not just topics that can be perceived as distant, abstract, or personally irrelevant, such as melting polar caps, changing weather patterns, and biodiversity loss. Ideas issues that can be misconstrued as “external” to our own lives or unimportant in practical terms.

Climate change – how we have caused it and how we propose to deal with it – is ultimately about resources, rights, and health.

It is about water. It is about food. It is about energy. It is about minerals, timber, and other natural goods and services.

It is ultimately about who has access to those things, who doesn’t, and why.

In other words: climate change is about humanity. It is about human rights, social egalitarianism, and – simply put – people.

This shift in psychology for the entire world will prove historic: for decades “environmental” issues have been perceived as secondary to “human” issues. Forests and whales and polar bears and bees are pretty, interesting and sometimes moving, but not as important as people, society, or “the economy.”

Now our collective thinking is finally shifting in a sense that cannot be underestimated in its importance: environmental and economic issues are one and the same.

It isn’t on the bargaining table in Copenhagen this week, but the world is facing a crisis of a different sort that affects (and is affected by) climate change and greenhouse gas emissions: water scarcity.

“I think on water, we are maybe four years behind where we are on climate change – it has not yet seeped down into the consciousness of the majority of people or our political leaders,” says Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and Senior Adviser on Water to the 63rd President of the United Nations General Assembly, who spoke at the Kilmaforum09 alternate climate conference in Copenhagen yesterday.

Barlow, joined by eight scientists and water activists, spoke for three hours to demonstrate an incredibly unappreciated point: water is not simply affected by climate change, but the way we misuse it is in fact a major cause of climate change.

“We will not find a solution without including water in the solutions,” said Riccardo Petrella, founder of the International Committee for the Global Water Contract.

“This is not appreciated by the people in the negotiations, or even by most climate change scientists,” said Barlow. ”If we don’t include water in a climate change framework, we will never be able to prevent runaway climate change.”

Politicians, scientists, NGOs and policymakers widely appreciate that water is affected by climate change: higher temperatures and changing precipitation patterns (along with population growth, deforestation and diversion of water for dams, urbanization and industry) will mean that by 2025 more than two thirds of the world’s population will have to deal with chronic water shortages, according to the UN World Water Assessment Program. And – like climate change – water issues could worsen quicker than we think: already a third of the world’s population suffers from water scarcity, when less than a decade ago it was thought we wouldn’t reach that point until 2025.

But the way we use (and waste) water has a profound impact on climate change – so much so, the panel argued, that even if we take every measure to reduce our carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 (the level most scientists advocate), we could still see ourselves pushed into ‘runaway’ climate change by its effects.

“This is due to the fact that we move water around in the same way as we do oil and gas, but people are just not as aware of this,” says Barlow.

Simple example: Australia is suffering from chronic drought, which is typically attributed to climate change, but it could just as easily be attributed to water allocation. Shifting water from the river Darling to fields to grow cotton, wheat and wine (which is then exported, removing water from the continent) means there is less water in the river to evapo-transpirate and fall back to the continent as rain.

Drained marshes, overdrawn groundwater and depleted riversheds the world over reduce the ability of natural ‘carbon sinks’ – like forests, wetlands, and peat – to absorb carbon from the atmosphere as they grow. In fact, these carbon sinks can themselves turn into carbon sources if they become too dry – forest fires are an increasingly major contributor to the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and ultimately to climate change.

Moreover, many of the solutions being put forward to abate climate change themselves exacerbate water shortages: biofuels consume enormous quantities of fresh water to produce (and do not actually mitigate climate change – and by their profligate consumption of water, exacerbate climate change even more.

Products labelled with their carbon footprints are slowly making their way into the marketplace – for example, Timberland Co., a U.S. footwear maker, has identified the environmental impact of many of its shoe lines.

But imagine buying an apple with this label: It took 68 litres of water to produce this fruit.

Water footprints may soon be coming to a store near you.

As global leaders scramble to reach a deal on climate change this week in Copenhagen, environmentalists are hoping a topic that isn’t on the agenda – water scarcity – will be the next big issue to capture the world’s attention. For the consumer, that means pointing out just how much water is needed to produce items we use every day.

“I think personally that water footprints are much more tangible for people than the concept of a carbon footprint – it’s amazing to see people’s reactions when they see that 25,000 litres of water go into making a pair of shoes,” says Karen Kun, co-founder of Waterlution, a Toronto-based non-profit organization for water education.

“People would respond very well to products being clearly labelled with their water footprint – consumers are crying out for mainstream products to have the right information so they can make their own choices.”

The movement to label water footprints saw its first victory this year when Finnish food conglomerate Raisio launched the first voluntary example – 101 litres of water for each 100 grams of its oat flakes breakfast cereal.

And over the past few years, about 60 large companies have signed on to the United Nations’ CEO Water Mandate, an informal pledge to lower their water footprints. They include Coca-Cola, Bayer, Cadbury, Dow Chemical, Heineken, Unilever and Siemens.

“All over the world, we consume products that don’t include the cost of the water, and this needs to be changed,” says Arjen Hoekstra, creator of the water footprint concept. Dr. Hoekstra is a professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and scientific director of the Water Footprint Network.

“This is why the concept of a water footprint is useful, to try and show the link between consumption and the creation of those products, and show the consumer’s responsibility for the waste.”

Some surprising statistics: A cup of coffee typically needs more than 140 litres of water to produce. For one kilogram of beef, it’s about 15,150 litres.

Food usually accounts for about 70 per cent of each person’s total footprint, but consumer products, such as jeans, cellphones and eyeshadow, require far more water per purchase. A cotton T-shirt soaks up 2,700 litres of water, a microchip needs 30 litres and a car requires more than 150,000 litres.

Of course, footprints can vary from product to product. Beef from cattle raised on soy will carry a different water footprint than meat from cattle fed on grain, and leather jackets made by different designers will vary from one another, which is why many environmentalists are calling for the development of a standardized label.

Dr. Hoekstra is wary of all the corporate interest in the water footprint: “They are all embracing the concept of the water footprint for the same reason they embraced the carbon footprint – because there is a lot of money to be made, not because they are serious about water conservation,” he says. “There has been a great deal of hype made over carbon footprints, and you will see the same thing happen with the water footprint as it moves up the political agenda.”

In fact, experts say climate change and water scarcity are inextricably linked: Higher temperatures and changing precipitation patterns – along with population growth, deforestation and diversion of water for dams, urbanization and industry – will mean that by 2025, more than two-thirds of the world’s population will have to deal with chronic water shortages, according to the UN World Water Assessment Program.

According to the UN, one-third of the world’s population currently suffers from water scarcity, when less than a decade ago it was thought the world would not reach that point until 2025.

Dr. Hoekstra says he hopes a labelling standard for the water footprint will avoid the mistakes made with carbon footprints, which use language that makes it easy “to confuse people and for vested interests to appear as though they are doing something substantial when it is the least effort they could make.”

For instance, carbon offsets have been fraught with problems: Any individual, company or country can claim to be “carbon-neutral” by purchasing offsets rather than implementing carbon-reducing strategies first. And not all offsets are created equal. They vary widely in quality and impact – investment in renewable-energy projects in developing nations are considered superior to tree-planting schemes, for example.

“Already we are hearing people talk about water offsets – because it’s cheaper to spend the money on some nice project somewhere than on reducing the operation’s actual water footprint,” Dr. Hoekstra says.

Even so, helpful and clear water-footprint labels won’t tell the whole story. Listing the volume of water used to grow an orange doesn’t tell a consumer anything about the agricultural or water systems in the place where it was grown. For example, would an apple grown in rainy British Columbia carry as high an ecological price as one in an irrigated grove in California that piped water in and depleted groundwater sources hundreds of kilometres away?

And water footprints combined with carbon footprints could become even more confusing for harried shoppers: Which is more important?

“You cannot convey all information in a label about water and its complexities in an easy way,” Dr. Hoekstra concedes. So even the creator of the water footprint acknowledges that for consumers, it won’t be easy being blue.

Published in the prestigious journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the new analysis by Professor David Schindler of the University of Alberta concludes that pollution from the tar sands is up to five times higher than industry figures state.

That is not surprising. But in the unostentatious language of science, other poignant messages can be easy to miss. Reading between the lines of the final sentences in the abstract leads to a crucial conclusion: ‘These results indicate that major changes are needed to the way that environmental impacts of oil sands development are monitored and managed.’ If you have the time – and the expertise – to read through to the conclusion, you will come to a more detailed explanation:

‘Our study confirms the serious defects of the [the government watershed monitoring system]. More than 10 years of inconsistent sampling design, inadequate statistical power, and monitoring-insensitive responses have missed major sources of [petrochemical pollution] to the watershed … The existing [programme] must be redesigned with more scientific and technical oversight.’

In other words: the money, resources and political will required to adequately monitor the Athabasca river basin is desperately needed, and simply isn’t there.

‘Though it may seem obvious that this pollution is linked to skyrocketing cancer rates in the indigenous community, we need more information – we need that scientific evidence to have the political and legal case to stop the damage,’ says Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and Senior Adviser on Water to the 63rd President of the United Nations General Assembly.

But being able to leverage a legal case is even more difficult in Canada because laws concerning water quality are left up to the provinces, and not the national government, which has led to a ‘mishmash of policies,’ she says.

‘Water protection laws are virtually non-existent in the province of Alberta,’ says Clayton Thomas-Muller, of the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation in nearby Manitoba and a member of the Indigenous Environmental Network.

Clayton Thomas-Muller, campaigning in London, England against BP's involvement in the Alberta tar sands in London this September. Photo Credit: Zoe Cormier

‘Provincial regulators have effectively handed over monitoring and enforcement to industry. The strongest case for water protection in Canada’s Tar Sands is the recognition and implementation of treaty rights via Aboriginal Law.’

But without enough information to show what the river contains, where it comes from and who is responsible, making that legal case will continue to prove difficult.

Schindler is not the only scientist who thinks we need to gather that information. Garnering far less media attention was a study released earlier this year by Professor Monique Dubé, Canada Research Chair in Aquatic Ecosystem Health Diagnosis, published in the journal Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management.

She pulled together more than 4 million data point from nine sampling bases, a difficult and novel approach, and wrote that ‘methods that can assess these multiple types of effects over a broad spatial and time scale must be developed’. There are many different refineries operating throughout the basin that are releasing pollution into the river basin, and being able to see who is releasing what, and how this is affecting the region, is currently impossible.

It may at first blush sound like another obvious and mild conclusion, but she was making an important point.

‘We are only just beginning to evaluate the Athabasca system on a whole watershed scale – I find that alarming,’ she says. ‘We are talking about “death by a thousand cuts”. We really need to focus on the development of integrated assessment and science – a complete rethinking of how we train scientists to work together – because our water resources are under a lot more pressure than people realize, and it’s only going to get worse.’

‘Professor Dubé’s work is extremely important for the world as a whole, as is that of anyone working on how to measure watershed protection and the cumulative effects of multi-source pollution into any watershed,’ says Barlow. ‘We really need to give more credit to those scientists who work on watershed protection.’

Because those scientists are still too few and far between – not just in Canada, but around the world.

It’s not that research into ‘cumulative and multi-source’ pollution is neglected because it requires technological sophistication – to put it bluntly, it’s not rocket science. Establishing a network of water monitoring systems throughout the Athabasca is without a doubt feasible.

‘We have the science to do this,’ says Dubé. ‘Compared to the economic returns from the tar sands, this is not a financial issue.’

Dubé is certainly not the first scientist to state such an opinion.

‘All of these questions urgently require the precise answers that only extensive research can provide, yet funds for such purposes are pitifully small… If we would divert to constructive research even a small fraction of the money spent each year on the development of ever more toxic sprays, we could find ways to use less dangerous materials and to keep poisons out of our waterways.’

But it wasn’t Barlow, or Dubé, or Schindler, or even Thomas-Muller who wrote that. It was biologist Rachel Carson in the seminal book Silent Spring, writing about the links between the use of pesticides and the death of songbirds – which, as it happens, are also declining in the tar sands. Carson’s book was published almost half a century ago, and still relevant. The times change, but the songs – or lack thereof – stay the same.

Given that she has spent almost no time in the past two years making films and almost every waking moment campaigning on climate change, it’s hard to disbelieve her.

A year ago The Age of Stupid was a new documentary about climate change to add to the pile. Now it’s the driving force behind a global campaign to get everybody to reduce their personal carbon emissions by 10 per cent (and has the support of all the British political leaders) in 2010, the title-holder of a world-record and the all-consuming focus of Armstrong’s entire life. She’s even said that on her days off she feels like she’s just “wasting time.”

With a recipe of four parts documentary footage and one part dystopic vision of the world in 2055, the film is explicitly designed to shock us all into preventing runaway climate change by showing as plainly as possible just how truly stupid our epoch is. By 2055, according to the film’s sci-fi premise, the world has been ravaged by climate change, civilization has fallen and all that’s left are melted ice caps, drowned cities, war, starvation and looming annihilation. What few humans remain on earth live in shanty towns of corrugated steel, a world away from the ruins of the crumbling taj Mahal, the partially submerged London eye, and the casinos of Las Vegas slowly being swallowed by the desert.

The Age of Stupid centres on Pete Postlethwaite, the only actor in the film, who plays the keeper of the global archive, a huge storage facility built 800 km north of norway in what is now permanently ice-free stormy northern seas. Housing every art work from every museum, every book ever written, every study ever produced and two pickled specimens of every species stacked two by two, the macabre Noah’s Ark serves as the last great work humanity will ever produce.

To understand how we got there, he looks back at old newsreels and footage of the early 21st century, and in particular at six real-life stories: a French mountaineer who has watched the Alpine glaciers vanish; a British family trying to build wind farms but constantly thwarted by NIMBY protestors; an Indian businessman starting a low-cost airline to fulfil his dream of launching India’s poor masses into the skies; two children, a brother and sister, refugees from the oil-motivated war in Iraq, trying to make ends meet by repairing discarded American shoes and selling them on the streets; a Nigerian woman trying to make a living in an area afflicted by “the resource curse,” the paradox that leads to one of the most oil-rich parts of Africa remaining one of the poorest; and a “hero” of Hurricane Katrina, a middle-aged man who personally saved the lives of 100 people from their flooded homes with his motor boat in new Orleans in 2005. All six tell different sides to the story of our age: our intensive use of fossil fuels and the repercussions we reap.

* * *

“We could have saved ourselves, but we didn’t,” laments Postlethwaite. “It’s amazing, what state of mind we were in, to face extinction and simply shrug it off.”

We’ve known about climate change for more than 60 years now, and the science has been indisputable since the 1980s, and yet greenhouse gas emissions have risen steadily and the world has been glacially slow to act. “the situation we are in is desperate,” says Armstrong. “One of the problems is that scientists and politicians have never emphasized the worst case scenario at all. People need to know how urgent the situation is.” Which is where filmmakers, and the capacity to tell the human story and jolt us into action by inspiring our imaginations, come in. “If you want to change the world, make a documentary,” she says.

Armstrong has a singular mission: to screen the film to as many people as possible (with profit as the very last concern) and to get them to sign on to her “10:10” campaign, pledging to cut personal carbon emissions by 10 per cent in 2010. Her campaign concludes in December, when the UN will meet in Poland to decide what may be ‘our last chance’ at avoiding catastrophic climate change.

Armstrong and her team have made a good start. with more than a million people in 63 countries viewing the film at once, the global premiere in September — centred in new York — set a Guinness world record for the largest simultaneous film screening in world history. Embarrassingly, Canada did not take part in the global premiere while Zimbabwe, Papua new Guinea and Sierra Leone all managed it — Honduras too was set to stage one before the coup forced its cancellation. The largest screening, 5,000 strong, was in the tiny nation of Kiribati — a low-lying Pacific island that is one of the most at-risk places on earth due to rising sea levels.

The stars in attendance included UN Secretary Kofi Annan and NASA climate scientist James Hansen (best known as the whistleblower who revealed white House tampering of scientific reports on climate change). The carpet — green, not red — was made of recycled glass bottles.

Even before the global premiere in September, the film was breaking new ground. in May, Armstrong and colleagues launched a program for independent screenings in the UK with an automated system that allowed anybody to purchase the license to screen the film and use the money they made however they wished — charitable or profitable.

More than 700 screenings saw the Stupid team earn £61,000. “That’s more money than Drowned Out [Armstrong’s last documentary, released in 2002] ever made, even though it was screened internationally, was on TV and then DVD. With the old system, the filmmaker makes a fraction of the profits, but with indie screenings 100 per cent of it comes back to us — it’s a bit of a revolution,” she says.

And even before the indie screenings, even before a frame was ever shot, she took an unorthodox path with funding. The film was financed by crowd-sourcing (initially a necessity after legal headaches following Armstrong’s previous documentary, McLibel), which saw the producers raise £450,000 from 228 investors, from small community organisations to high-flying financiers.

* * *

The Age of Stupid started seven years ago with no money and an idea: to do for oil and climate change what Traffic did for the drug trade and to show as many sides of the story as possible and lay bare the links between producers and consumers, profiteers and victims. But unlike the drug trade, not a single person on the planet is unaffected by these issues. The most important line in the film could in fact be the very first, the disclaimer put in stark white print on a bare black screen: “The future climate events portrayed in this film are based on mainstream scientific projections.”

As grim as the future they paint is, it is not beyond the bounds of plausibility. “This is science fact, not science fiction,” Armstrong bristles, when the sci-fi label is brought up.

At the time that they made the film, Armstrong and her producer Lizzie Gillett chose to portray the worst-case scenario — an average global temperature rise of 4C by 2055 — based on peer-reviewed scientific climate models and with the help of a scientific advisor. “But now that worst-case scenario has become the medium-case scenario,” says Armstrong, because each subsequent report from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which synthesizes scientific findings into a moderate consensus) has predicted ever higher rises in carbon dioxide and global temperature and even quicker rates of climate change.

Al Gore was widely attacked for daring to suggest in 2005’s An Inconvenient Truth that sea levels could rise by up to seven metres within a century as IPCC reports had set the plausible boundary at 18cm to 55cm, but now more and more scientific reports, including NASA’s James Hansen’s (perhaps the world’s most famous climate change scientist), are finding that a sea level rise of several metres is perfectly within the bounds of scientific plausibility.

By stressing the worst-case scenario, The Age of Stupid is likely to face even more criticism than the Academy Award-winning film but Armstrong “couldn’t care less.” By having Postlethwaite’s archivist remark that “the conditions we are experiencing now were actually caused by our behaviour in the period leading up to 2015,” the main point of the film becomes obvious: not just to educate (the main drive behind An Inconvenient Truth), nor to infuriate (such as Who Killed The Electric Car), and not even to terrify, but to motivate: the responsibility to avert global catastrophe lies squarely on our own shoulders. We have never before been so certain of the consequences of our actions, and yet so capable of averting them. For good reason, the opening credits list “and you” among the actors.

Two teenagers in the year 2055 were the film’s initial narrators. That structure bombed at initial screenings, “because people didn’t want to hear two brats from the future lecture us about using up all the world’s resources,” she says.

So Armstrong and her producer went back to the drawing board. They decided the story should be narrated by somebody from their own generation (who would therefore be born right about now) — middle-aged, regretful and sad.

Enter Postlethwaite: Shakespearean, regal, classy and sombre, he was a perfect fit. Though it took considerable effort to track him down and ask him to take part in the film, the actor has now taken his part in the film far beyond mere stardom. At the film’s big London premiere in March 2009, he threatened to give back his Order of the British Empire if the government went ahead with plans for a new coal-fired plant. And in October the government agreed not to construct it after years of campaigning by British climate change activists — proving that victories can be scored.

The film’s future projections with Postlethwaite distinguish The Age of Stupid from all other documentaries that have dealt with peak oil, resource wars, clean technology and climate change over the past ten years. Another key defining element is the handful of animated sequences created to illustrate concepts they couldn’t portray with personal stories, such as how our economic system inherently leads to resource depletion and climate change. “we certainly weren’t paying a big animation studio thousands of pounds; these were all boys working in their bedrooms,” she says.

There are moments that verge on cliché: the film could have done without children’s voices narrating an animated sequence explaining how capitalism and our economic system encourages constant growth and thus inevitably leads to climate change. It comes across at best as simplistic and guilt-tripping, and at worst patronizing and manipulative. the use of “I Just Can’t Get Enough” to background a montage on consumer culture feels a bit predictable. The animated sequences in general run the risk of sounding preachy to some.

But most of the time, the film is undeniably balanced. Jeh Wadia, the founder of the new airline in india (and a tyrant over his employees) still comes across as a sympathetic character. “Everyone is here for a purpose and you need to realise what your higher purpose is and how to fulfil it — mine is to eradicate poverty,” he proclaims. The road, as we know, is always paved.

And there are also moments that are deeply profound. the title of the film comes from Alvin DuVernay, a Southern white American employee of the oil industry who worked for thirty years looking for oil reserves beneath the waves of the Gulf of Mexico and analysing sediment samples for traces of fossils and the oil that may lie underneath. Introduced as the hero of Hurricane Katrina, who saved 100 lives, the revelation that Alvin does in fact work for “the bad guys,” — flying out to work on an oil rig in a chugging chopper with a hardhat branded with the Shell logo — comes as a surprise. He considers his profession to be noble; oil is after all the stuff of everything that made the last and this century what they are: vinyl records, blood bags, semiconductor chips, solar panels, and the very film that Armstrong’s crew used to shoot The Age of Stupid.

“In my opinion, maybe arrogantly so, it’s a pretty high calling to do that — to take apart time itself,” he says. “But our use and misuse of resources in the last 100 years, I would rename that something like the age of ignorance — the age of stupid.” And he is completely justified in saying that as well. Rather than saving polymer plastics for medical equipment, scientific instruments and immortalising music and art, we waste 40 per cent of it on disposable packaging. Rather than using what remains of the world’s oil to fuel a global conversion to renewable (and presumably permanent) means of harvesting energy that could keep us going when all the oil runs out, we waste it on two-hour commutes in gas-guzzling cars and short haul flights we could easily manage by train.

His most profound statement, however, wasn’t even a comment on climate change, but on the experience of living through the hurricane. “You stare mother nature in the eye. Usually she’s fairly benign, then she comes along, methodically, ruthlessly, then she stands toe to toe with you and dares you, dares you, go ahead, get your best equipment out, let’s dance.” He was speaking about Katrina — but he could just as easily be speaking about our effects on the climate over the past century.

**

There are of course always bits that have to be left out. One thing Armstrong wanted to explore in the film but was unable to capture was the inside story of a politician working on climate change (for obvious reasons). If she makes another film in the future, she says, it might be a fictitious one that would focus on the inside dealings of politicians brokering deals on climate change. She may, she adds, write the book about the experience of making the film, an ordeal she describes as “inspiring.”

But in reality, she says, Armstrong and the entire Stupid team have no plans beyond the UN conference at Copenhagen in December: they want to have the film seen by 250 million people by then, and at the conference itself they will stake out a place in the city for 12 days to have their voice heard as much as possible. Regarding The Age of Stupid, “I’ve done what I set out to do. it’s profoundly fulfilling — the film says everything I wanted to say. I no longer have that burning desire I used to have to say all these things — I’ve said them,” she says. The only thing left is to embody the message she broadcast: to do everything she can to spread the word and help us before we all destroy ourselves.

So would she ever consider taking the next logical step — moving into politics and actually working on the decision-making process herself?

“No,” she says emphatically, “I’m rubbish at committees. I just want to make decisions on my own. I think I have the character of a filmmaker — the last benign dictatorship on earth.”

So perhaps one question remains: is the human species suicidal, as she postulated in her undergraduate zoology thesis (which was, to put it mildly, not warmly welcomed by her professors). Will we avert a global catastrophe or will we destroy ourselves? “Are we suicidal?” she ponders. “We’ve got the noose around our necks — and we’re going to find out over the next few months whether or not we jump.”

“This is your money that is being used to bankroll the tar sands,” said Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, a member of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, speaking to a roomful of members of parliament, politicians, aides, lawyers, journalists, and representatives from NGOs at the House of Commons in London, England today.

Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Heather Milton Lightening and Eriel Tchekwie Deranger by the House of Commons, London.

Tchekwie Deranger, the Freedom from Oil Campaigner for the Rainforest Action Network, was in the British capital to discuss the involvement of British financial institutions in the Alberta oil sands, joined by Heather Milton Lightening of the Pasqua First Nation in Saskatchewan and the Indigenous Environmental Network, and Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a member of the Lubicon Cree in Alberta and a campaigner with Greenpeace Canada. This is the second trip to the UK for Milton Lightening, who attended the Climate Camp in September to raise awareness among English activists about the involvement of British institutions in the sands and subsequently staged a protest in front of BP headquarters.

The tar sands, or oil sands, cover a large portion of Canada’s western province of Alberta estimated to be roughly the size of England. Considered to be one of the world’s second largest oil reserves (second only to Saudi Arabia), the region – a mixture of bitumen, sand and rock, mined to the tune of 1.3 million barrels a day.

Aerial view of Syncrude upgrader and tailings pond in the Boreal forest north of Fort McMurray, northern Alberta, Canada. Photo Credit: Jiri Rezac, Courtesy of Greenpeace

“This is the most destructive industrial project on the face of the planet,” said Laboucan-Massimo, listing a number of statistics: up to four barrels of fresh water are used to extract one barrel of oil from the sands; after use, the water contains levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), heavy metals and other chemicals of concern considered too high to be released and is collected in large tailing ponds, visible from space, and which are considered by some to be the largest man-made structures ever created; and extraction produces four times more greenhouse gases per unit than conventional oil extraction.

“We urge you to use your majority shareholder position with the banks to challenge investments in the tar sands,” said the Freedom from Oil Campaigner for the Rainforest Action Network, referring to the financial “bail outs” and nationalisations of the past year. The British government now holds more than 70 per cent of the Royal Bank of Scotland’s shares. In early November RBS announced it had raised $2.3bn) in finance for Britain’s onshore wind industry as part of a consortium.

Since 2007 RBS has invested an estimated $13.7 bn (US) in loan guarantees or debt and equity underwriting to energy companies with projects in the tar sands. An estimated 18 per cent of the stocks on the London Stock Exchange are invested in either Shell or British Petroleum, both of which are invested in the tar sands.

Tchekwie Deranger had been invited to Parliament by Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, spokesman for Energy and Climate Change. A month previous she was ejected from the House of Commons in Ottawa, Canada during question period, an incident that was widely broadcast on television that evening, and subsequently saw her banned from Canada’s Parliament for a full year. She was subsequently invited to the British Parliament by MP Hughes.

“I can’t help but find that funny,” she said.

“I find it interesting that we sit here staring out at the Shell building across the river – and there’s British Petroleum over there,” said Hughes, gesturing out the window across the Thames. “I will try to broker talks between industry and environmental groups here in the UK, and to try and raise the issue in the national and local press,” he offered at the meeting’s conclusion.

Campaigners allege there are legal grounds with which to challenge RBS, which in 2003 was a signatory of Equator Principles, a set of standards for environmentally and socially responsible lending practices.

RBS headquarters in London. Photo Credit: Zoe Cormier

“Additionally, I find it alarming that the UK is a signatory of the declaration of indigenous rights and yet prior consent has not been given,” said Tchekwie Deranger. “This project is therefore a direct violation of international conventions.”

Milton Lightening stressed that the environmental impacts of the tar sands are not limited to Canadians; the greenhouse gas emissions from the region are so large, she contested, that they alone could precipitate ‘runaway’ climate change beyond two degrees Celsius, the minimum level considered manageable. “We will be the tipping point for the entire planet.”

Following their parliamentary meeting, the three women were granted their request for a formal meeting by RBS. “This is huge – the Royal Bank of Canada has turned us down a hundred times,” said Tchekwie Deranger.

Photo Credit: Zoe Cormier

After staging a pre-arranged “die-in” protest outside the headquarters of RBS with English student activists, who labelled the tar sand products “bloody oil,” the three attended a meeting with the head of sustainability for RBS, a position Tchekwie Deranger describes as “quasi-relevant – his ability to make any changes in RBS is extremely limited.”

“But he said he would look into it.”

The tar sands, little known in England until September, are increasingly better known to the British public, in addition to politicians and investors. This autumn People & Planet, the UK’s largest student campaigning network, designated the tar sands a key campaigning issue. It is anticipated that international efforts – particularly from the UK – could pressure the Canadian government to scale the operation down, as they did following European boycotts on virgin timber in the 1990s.

Says Milton Lightening: “Canada really cares what the UK thinks of it.”

Photo Credit: Zoe Cormier

Reaching Higher

The NFB’s sustainability targets range from the typical to the lofty. Standard measures include encouraging car pooling, using air conditioning and heating less, cutting total energy use by 25,688 hours, reducing paper waste by moving to one mail delivery a day (instead of two) and reducing the size of its catalogue from 110 pages last year to 24 this year. The organization has also eliminated many flights by installing an online video conferencing system.

Like most green measures, these steps will save them (and us, the tax payers) money in the long run: New energy reducing measures coming in this and next year should save the NFB even more than the $200,000 they pocketed in savings in 2008, a 12.6 percent cut over 2007. They’re proving that simple things can make a real difference: Just by installing a sink in the cafeteria, which allows staff to bring in their own reusable lunch containers and cutlery, has reduced the use (and cost) of disposable plates and cutlery by 50 percent.

But the NFB also has more ambitious aims that a decade ago would have been rare to see in the film industry, such as hoping to attain zero net waste, switching to packaging DVDs in 100 percent post-consumer cardboard and printed with plant-based inks, and introducing a permanent recycling service for VHS cassettes, CDs, DVDs, cell phones and batteries (items that are notoriously difficult to recycle). Already they even query prospective employees on “how they have included environmentally responsible practices in previous productions,” says Lainesse.

Going Digital

Another huge green step is their plans to launch a brand new project this autumn that will be exclusively digital; involving 12 different directors across Canada, using only online ftp servers and avoiding the use of paper and film entirely.

They are also archiving of hundreds of films from the past 70 years into a digital format for free online viewing by anyone, anywhere (here are some of the top eco films in their library). So far, they have put more than 1,000 films online, out of a total of more than 13,000 productions. And a good chunk of these concern ecological issues: the Footprints portion of nfb.ca is devoted to films about environmental topics and features more than 124 films and 185 clips, “which gives us more potential for sharing and getting those ideas out there and to get more people to think green and work along those lines,” says Lainesse.

Not only is the online database a goldmine of scary, enlightening and inspiring flicks, it also acts as an invaluable cultural and historical record of how Canadians regarded and acted toward the environment in the past. Films from the 1960s onward include ones about the industrial pollution in the Great Lakes, uranium mining and the nuclear waste near First Nations reserves in Saskatchewan and even the beginnings of the deforestation in Canada’s west. These films provide critical perspectives on how much has changed—and more importantly, how much hasn’t.

And while they are constantly updating this vast cinematic record, they are also changing the way they create it, bit by bit. “Our films on the environment have brought important issues to the surface for decades,” says Lainesse, “so we finally decided do what these films talk about, denounce and explain.”

To learn more about efforts to green Canada’s film industry, see “Greening the Silver Screen” and for more green news, tips, innovations and debate, served with a strong Canadian point of view, visit greenlivingonline.com

You’d think that given the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is already happening and that humans are to blame, she wouldn’t need to remind (or scold) journalists to not give climate change ’sceptics’ a voice in the media – but unfortunately, she does.

Not just because of the considerable damage that they did in the past to public awareness of the reality of climate change (and thus the political will to deal with it). But because deniers and sceptics are still – amazingly – alive and well, and even seem to be on the increase.

And with the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen just over a month away, they are likely to show up on the media radar more than ever. Expect to see notorious deniers like Christopher Monckton and Steve Milloy, more and more, and especially expect to see media-friendly ‘moderate voices’ like Bjorn Lomborg, who claim that climate change, though real, is simply too difficult or expensive or unimportant to prioritize (and those crazy environmentalists are being hyperbolic and alarmist anyways).

In an unfortunate coincidence of fate, at the precise time when we most crucially need media outlets to responsibly and accurately report on the science of climate change, they are far less likely to do so. According to a feature in The Nation, as mainstream media outlets across the US have made cutbacks, dedicated and experienced science reporters – the very people who could capably report on climate change – are among the first in the firing line. From 1989 to 2005, they report, the number of newspapers in the US that featured weekly science sections dropped to 34 from 95.

‘Here an obvious question arises: if the Internet is most directly responsible for the decline of newspapers, then can science blogs and science-infused websites fill the gap?’ the authors ask. ‘Undoubtedly, one can find excellent science information on the web, but the question is whether most people will find it… Accurate science and the most stunning misinformation thrive side by side… global warming deniers all have highly popular websites and blogs, and there is no reason to think good scientific information is somehow beating them back.’

There is in fact little reason to think good scientific reporting is winning. At the 2008 Weblogs, wattsupwiththat.com – which consistently questions and undermines mainstream climate change science, won by popular vote for Best Science Blog. And according to a Gallup poll conducted this year, 41 per cent of Americans think mainstream reporting of the threat of climate change is exaggerated – a record high, even higher than 10 years ago.

Journalists and major media outlets, not the public, are to blame: for decades they gave climate change deniers and genuine climate change scientists equal air time, leaving the voting public with the impression that the two positions had equal merit. Well-intentioned but scientifically untrained reporters did so in the name of ‘balance’, despite the fact that well over 99 per cent of scientists who actually research the topic asserted that climate change was real – and ‘experts’ who disagreed seldom conducted atmospheric research themselves (and were almost invariably funded by oil and manufacturing interests).

We may never understand the true scope of the damage: scientists have known about the effect of our greenhouse gas emissions since the 1950s, and since the 1980s the scientific consensus has been impossible to deny, but political action has stagnated, our emissions continued to rise, and the pace of climate change has accelerated: every subsequent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has predicted higher temperature increases and higher sea level rises. Armstrong’s documentary paints a dark vision of the future based on the worst-case projections of the IPCC as they stood in 2005 – those worst-case scenarios are now considered medium-case scenarios.

Now the mainstream media (or what’s left of it) is doing a much better job of covering the science accurately, but we have a much more severe situation on our hands to deal with than we would have if they had reported on the science accurately two decades ago.

And with the disappearance of dedicated science beat reporters (and with the economic crisis obscuring the climate crisis in the headlines), there is a serious risk that climate science will again be underrepresented and misreported. In the run-up to the UN conference in Copenhagen, ‘there will be prominent deniers out there undermining the science,’ predicts Jim Hoggan, founder of desmogblog, to ‘clear the PR pollution that clouds climate science’.

‘They will chip away at the science, create doubt over how reliable the science is and the seriousness of the problem, undermining any traction and momentum that would drive public policy.’

Copenhagen is considered to be our last chance to sign a deal that could avert ‘runaway climate change’. How does the momentum to drive public policy look?

Already there are clear signs that whatever is agreed at Copenhagen will not feature ambitious (read: effective) targets – from the UN itself.

“Making music is one of the weirdest things we do – and the more you think about it, the weirder music becomes. How can some compositions sound “happy”, while others “sad”? Why in the world should ordered collections of notes give us goose-bumps, or stir our hearts just like the feeling of love? How you can you explain the fact that we are undeniably drawn to gathering in dark nightclubs with complete strangers just to experience noises – or that we collectively spend more money on music than on pornography or prescription drugs every year?

And yet every human culture makes music – not all have writing, or agriculture, but all make music. Why? Could it be something that we evolved to do for a reason? Could it predate language, and might other hominids have been musical too? And could music even hold the key to what makes us human in the first place? Change the way you think about music – and science – with Guerilla Scientist Zoe Cormier”

He’s not shocked by how climate change deniers managed to stall global awareness and action on global warming—though many people are. He’s shocked that the people who deny the very existence of climate change are actually still around, and amazed that there is even the need for his book, which outlines their lies and the PR machine that drives them.

If anybody is in a position to understand how the art of public relations has furthered the cause of global warming denialists, he should: As president of the PR firm Hoggan & Associates in Vancouver, he has worked in the field for decades. “Public relations is about fostering relationships and helping people communicate—not about spreading misinformation,” he says.

Offended and incensed by the way oil and coal companies hired PR firms from the 1980s onwards to manufacture doubt about the reality of global warming (just as they did to spread uncertainty about the hazards of second-hand smoke and a litany of other scientifically solid issues), he founded an online resource, DeSmogBlog.com, five years ago.

“When we started it, a small blog run out of a closet in Vancouver, I never thought we would have 1.3 million visitors by now,” he says—nor did he think the blog would still be in existence.

Denialist boom

In fact, Hoggan says, not only are the deniers still around, “they seem to be on the increase.” As the public grows more aware of the unshakeable strength of the scientific consensus and the urgency of the problem, so does the desperation and the stubbornness of those determined to deny its importance for the sake of big money. “This isn’t a conspiracy—it’s an industry,” he says.

In the late 1980s, Hoggan writes in the Climate Cover-Up, the recognition of climate change and of man-made greenhouse gases as the primary cause was so accepted that even George Bush Sr., said “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forget about the ‘White House effect’: as president I intend to do something about it.”

But 20 years of oil companies (plus their hired PR guns) manufacturing doubt with “phony scientists, phony scientific reports, phony grassroots organizations and phony think tanks putting out press releases and press kits with the objective of undermining any effort by political bodies to put legislation in place to reduce greenhouse gases” means that we really, haven’t done anything about the problem.

Greenhouse gases continue to rise (Canada is now roughly 30 percent above its 1990 levels, when it should have made cuts), public awareness continues to stagnate (a recent Gallup poll estimated that 48 percent of Americans think the threat of global warming is exaggerated), political movements are slowed (the B.C. carbon tax was notoriously rejected, “when people should have been crying out for a carbon tax,” Hoggan says; it has since been implemented) and the media continues to quote global warming skeptics in the same space as bona fide climate change scientists. Most notoriously, he writes, The Calgary Herald.

Changing tactics

With the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (along with Al Gore) winning the Nobel Prize and the upcoming UN meeting in Copenhagen on everybody’s radar, outright denial of the existence of climate change is becoming less and less commonplace. But in that place, he says, we are now seeing more and more “energy” and “environmental” experts saying that it is indeed a problem and it is indeed our fault, but that it would be too costly to prevent. Other problems, such as AIDS or poverty, rank higher on our priority list, and we can’t possibly deal with climate change at the same time, they argue.

“They give people the sense that it’s not something they can do anything about—it’s a very clever strategy,” Hoggan says.

Media-friendly figures like Britain’s Christopher Monckton (featured on CBC’s The Hour) and Bjorn Lomborg (graced with a TED talk) continue to find megaphones for their views that climate change is just too big a problem for us to fix, “without ever being asked where they get their money from,” he says.

Reason to hope

But, he adds, “The number of people who understand the problem and who are concerned grows by the day.”

“I really feel my job is to help improve the way that we talk about [climate change] to people so that they can understand it better—to help shed light on those people who are just trying to confuse the public,” says Hoggan. “I think that is something that I will spend the rest of my life on.”

We live in a sea of toxic chemicals. Every single person on earth carries in their bodies minute quantities of hundreds to thousands of hazardous chemicals: polyaromatic hydrocarbons from smokestack and vehicle exhaust; pesticides, fungicides and herbicides from industrialized agriculture; methyl mercury from coal-fired plants; dioxins and furans from garbage incineration; hormone-mimicking plasticizers and plastic softeners from polycarbonate bottles, the lining of tin cans, soaps and cosmetics; perfluorochemicals from stain-resistant coatings and non-stick cookware; flame retardants from electronics and furniture. The list goes on.

This chemical contamination is part and parcel of our wasteful use of resources and energy. At its core it’s a sustainability issue, but it is never addressed as such – and this is the problem.

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‘Biomonitoring’ tests measuring chemicals in the US population are carried out by the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and the results are freely available online. The latest results, released in 2005, cover 148 chemicals.¹Canada is doing similar population-wide testing; those figures will be available in 2010.

Tests consistently flag the same chemical contaminants in the atmosphere, water, soil, animals and people the world over.

Here are a few choice selections:

Lead – known for thousands of years to be toxic to the brain and nervous system and which we now know lowers IQ and causes learning difficulties.

Dioxins – some of the most carcinogenic chemicals known, released by waste incineration.

Phthalates – used to soften plastics, found in thousands of products from shampoo to blood bags. Interfere with testosterone, have been linked to reproductive defects and cancers and are thus banned from baby toys in Europe and may soon be restricted in Canada.

Bisphenol-A (BPA) – used to make hard, clear polycarbonate plastics such as water bottles as well as epoxy resins found in the lining of tin cans. Known to mimic oestrogen, causes cancer and reproductive problems in lab animals. Banned in plastic baby bottles in Canada.

Even chemicals that we have known for decades to be dangerous and which haven’t been used since the 1970s still show up in our blood today. These include organochlorine pesticides like DDT and industrial insulators like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

Some of our cleverest chemicals are the most problematic – chemicals used to stop electronics from catching fire and compounds found in grease-proof food wrap and non-stick cookware persist in the environment for decades, maybe even centuries, by virtue of the fact that they are doing what they were designed to do in the first place: never break down.

No surprise then that the fruits of our industry persist in the environment, travel around the world, linger in the soil and find their way into us before we are even born. The Environmental Working Group,² an independent US monitoring organization, found more than 287 chemicals in the umbilical cord blood of 10 American babies – 217 are known to be toxic to the nervous system, 208 can cause birth defects and 180 are proven carcinogens in humans and/or lab animals. Had they the resources to check for all 100,000 chemicals ever approved for use in the US, they would no doubt have found thousands more. What’s worse, the concentrations of chemicals are often higher in newborns than in their mothers. Research by Environmental Defence in Canada³ found some chemicals at levels three times higher in children than in their mothers.

Over and over the story is the same: we design the chemical, we use it and it turns up in the environment and in ourselves

We can each of us avoid canned food, bottled soft drinks and lipstick – but total avoidance to exposure is truly impossible. In fact, the highest concentration of PCBs ever detected was in the breast milk of Inuit women, decades and thousands of miles away from their production. All the money, knowledge and seclusion in the world won’t help – it doesn’t matter if you’re living in a wooden cottage on a mountain top, subsisting on twigs and berries; or in a high-tech eco-condo with a diet dictated by a nutritional specialist in Malibu.

Over and over the story is the same: we design a chemical, we use it and it turns up in the environment and in ourselves. Eventually, with enough research, it may be restricted or banned – the whole process can take decades. But even if chemicals are restricted, they persist – all the ‘Dirty Dozen’ pollutants restricted under the Stockholm Convention, including DDT and PCBs, are still a problem.

Moreover, new ones are introduced all the time. Environmental chemists are constantly playing catch-up. The companies don’t tell them what compounds they ought to be looking for. They have to guess, devise tests and hunt. They find new ones all the time, even chemicals that have already been in use for decades.

We still know very little about how these chemicals may be affecting our health, but even the most cursory survey of peer-reviewed scientific studies into the effects on lab animals and in people – even at astonishingly low doses – gives pause for thought. It is difficult to say with confidence that the chemical soup we are all exposed to plays some role in the prevalence of cancers, learning difficulties, reproductive defects and other health problems – but there is certainly good reason to suspect so.

Especially given the problem of ‘mixtures’. Diligent lab studies on mice test each chemical one at a time – even though nobody is ever exposed to just one chemical at a time. So what happens when you are exposed to dozens or hundreds of chemicals that mimic oestrogen? The question is not only scary to contemplate, it also defies statistical scrutiny. Teasing apart the combined (and often synergistic) effects of thousands of chemicals and how they interact is just too complex for our scientific tools to unravel.

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So what are we supposed to do? Consumer advocates applaud the adoption of safe alternatives devised with new chemistry. But in many cases the supposedly safe alternatives turn out to be themselves dangerous. Brominated flame retardants pose the same hazards as chlorinated flame retardants – persistent in the environment, toxic to the nervous system, amplified through the food chain. Other times, solutions come with new hazards – such as fluorescent lightbulbs which have a lower energy footprint but contain toxic mercury.

Technological innovations and ‘green’ chemistry are indispensable and provide many solutions, but ultimately can only go so far. In many cases, it may simply be impossible to create bona fide benign chemicals that can accomplish all the same feats that we desire.

The obvious solution would be to stop using all chemicals that are remotely hazardous – but even if that were possible, would we want to? Would we want to stop producing the hard plastics used for semiconductor chips and sterile medical equipment?

The only solution is this: use these chemicals only when absolutely necessary. This would mean being very careful and calculated about how we use them. But it would also mean creating less. Produce less, make less, buy less, use less. In other words: consume less.

Peruse the pages of any women’s magazine, and you’ll find anxiety-inducing articles about chemicals in lipstick, the hazards of cling film-wrapped broccoli, the perils of certain brands of diet cola, along with advice on where to find them and how to avoid them – without ever suggesting that we could opt to stop using those products altogether. News stories list suspect chemicals, where to find them and what consumer products you could buy instead.⁴ But seldom will you read the unspeakable: buy less.

The onus is put on government to screen, test and regulate chemicals better; on industry to be more compliant in phasing out chemical hazards; and on providing adequate advice to consumers. But none of these solutions will solve the problem.

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No matter which angle you come from, the undeniable conclusion is the same: we need to produce, consume and discard less. The more consumer products we produce, the more energy we use, the more fossil fuels we burn, the more air pollution we create and the more chemicals come back to us in the long run.

Even if we diligently recycle, those chemicals still find their way into the environment – some of the biggest producers of heavy metals are, in fact, recycling companies. Dumping your paper and plastic into the recycling bin does not make heavy metals and petrochemicals vanish into thin air, much as we’d like to believe it.

Our spending habits can have a chain reaction impact over thousands of miles. Take mercury. Coal-fired power plants are the main source of this toxic metal. But the British Government – despite claims to be committed to genuine action on climate change – still plans to build new coal plants. Even if British campaigners are successful in halting the new coal plants, China famously builds one new coal plant every week! And no small portion of what we buy is manufactured in Chinese factories using coal-fired electricity. Buying a cheap plastic hairband in Brooklyn directly fuels the release of mercury into Asian skies – which eventually winds its way into the oceans, up through the foodchain, and back to us in a maki roll.

This is not a matter of ideals, of political theory or of principle: this is a matter of common sense, based on scientific evidence. Just as climate change science tells us unambiguously that we are living beyond our means, so does research into toxic chemicals.

Buying a cheap plastic hairband in Brooklyn directly fuels the release of mercury into Asian skies – which eventually winds its way into the oceans, up through the foodchain, and back to us in a maki roll

The affluent or the indifferent may not care about changing weather patterns, crop failures or desertification in far-flung Southern nations. But they can’t escape the ubiquitous chemicals in their homes, shopping malls, drinking water, atmosphere and food.

It is equally indisputable that fossil fuels and petroleum products – though problematic – are incredible, almost magical resources. Without oil we would never have thrown satellites into space, mapped the heavens and visited the moon. Without polymer plastics we would not have recorded music, photographs and movies, semiconductor chips and computers. The 20th century and all its marvels would never have happened without plastic. But instead of preserving this incredible, finite resource for sterile medical equipment, photovoltaic solar panels and laptop computers we waste 40 per cent of it on packaging. Used once and thrown away to leach its cargo from landfills into the environment and back into us.

Every shred of science gleaned from climate monitoring, from estimates of remaining fossil fuel reserves and from ecotoxicological studies points towards the same basic conclusion: we need to consume less. ‘Buy Nothing Day’ is a nice idea, but doesn’t go far enough. This argument has been made for decades and consistently dismissed as naïve, as unfeasible and idealistic, as ignorant of the ‘realities’ of the market economy – as uninformed hippy hyperbole. But it is nothing but unbiased scientific inquiry and the logical conclusions that can be drawn from the physical realities we have measured that prove the fallacies of our economic system. We need to erase the phrase ‘retail therapy’ from our vernacular. Only when we reframe the toxics issue as one of resource depletion and economic sustainability will we start to tackle the root causes of pollution.

Zoe Cormier is a freelance science writer based in London. She also features regularly as our NI ‘alternative science’ blogger.