Yasuo Yoshikuni and his colleagues at the Bio Architecture Lab in Berkeley, California, engineered the bacterium Escherichia coli so that it could digest brown seaweed and produce ethanol. Their work is published in Science today¹.

Yoshikuni says that his group chose brown seaweed because it was both sustainable and scalable. “Seaweed is already produced in huge quantities around the world without taking up any fresh water or arable land.” Brown seaweed also grows faster than red or green seaweed, with varieties such as the giant kelp, found off the coast of California, growing by up to a metre a day.

Many researchers are exploring ways to produce ethanol without using food crops such as sugar cane or maize (corn), and have turned to different feedstocks including switchgrass, the succulent plant jatropha, cyanobacteria and green algae. However, producing biofuels from sugar cane or maize not only detracts from food supplies, but also takes up huge areas of arable land. In the case of maize, more energy is required for growing and harvesting the crop than can be gained from the ethanol produced.

But producing biofuels from seaweed has so far proved difficult for bioengineers. Seaweed produces four kinds of sugars — laminarin, mannitol, alginate and cellulose. The biggest fraction in brown seaweed is alginate, which is a complex polysaccharide and tricky for microbes to digest.

“The carbohydrates are rather exotic compared to traditional terrestrial sources like corn or sugar cane,” says Yoshikuni. “Alginate is the key to unlocking the potential of brown seaweed.”

Seaweed solution

So using Vibrio splendidus, a marine microbe that can digest brown seaweed, Yoshikuni and his team isolated a biochemical pathway that breaks down alginate. They inserted the genes responsible into a strain of E. coli, which could then digest the alginate into simple sugars. The team also engineered the strain so that it could convert those sugars into ethanol, enabling the direct production of ethanol from brown seaweed. This strain of E. coli could, in theory, be engineered to produce a variety of other useful chemicals and fuels.

“This is very impressive work — it really is a groundbreaking achievement,” says Yong-Su Jin of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, who also studies biofuel production from seaweed. Jin works with red seaweed, which is less abundant in the world’s oceans than brown seaweed, but “relatively easy to ferment using yeast”, he says, because of its lower alginate content².

Stephen Mayfield, director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology at the University of California San Diego, calls the work “a very sophisticated engineering feat”, but adds “so far this has almost nothing to do with bioenergy production”. The main challenge in biofuels is not the ability to degrade complex carbohydrates and turn them into simple sugars, he explains: “It’s the rest of the steps involved in the lifecycle of growing and transporting the biomass.”

Scalability remains the big problem: people have farmed seaweed for hundreds of years, but only produce several thousand tonnes a year for food. Biofuel production would require billions of tonnes. “We still face a huge technical gap for large-scale cultivation,” says Jin.

That’s the next step, says Yoshikuni: this year his team will demonstrate the feasibility of their ethanol-production process at a pilot plant being built in Chile.

It is not exactly your average venue. The concrete cobblestones were cold, spare couch cushions served as chairs, winter winds wafted into the room. Police sirens blared. There were tents everywhere. And, every hour, loud bells would gong in the cathedral towering overhead.

But the small cinema at the Occupy London Stock Exchange, at the foot of St Paul’s Cathedral, has been screening films since the inception of the sit-in over a month ago.

“There is a lot of talk about the financial crisis, but we have to ask: how were we so uncritical about what was going on? Finance has been able to dominate our lives in part because we have stopped imagining that other worlds are possible. Tent City University, and Occupy in general, is about creating an open, participatory space where these possibilities can be explored,” says Christopher Fraser, who runs the cinema at the camp.

But the British début of the new US documentary Growthbusters at the camp might seem puzzling, counterintuitive and even offensive to anti-poverty campaigners at the camp and the millions of people worldwide who have lost their homes and jobs, hard-hit by the fallout from the global recession.

When the economy is in free fall, who would be against growth? Intuitively, growth symbolizes health and prosperity – the London camp is itself growing, spread now to Finsbury Square and an abandoned UBS building – surely a sign of its resilience, and potential longevity.

Supporting growth seems like a universal point of agreement: British Prime Minister David Cameron’s pledge to kickstart the economy by building 450,000 new affordable homes for first-time buyers, announced this weekend, seems hard to argue with.

Affordable homes for new families, jobs for labourers, more income in their pockets to spill in the rest of the economy – what could be more sensible?

A generation of ecologists, demographers, and a few unorthodox economists, however, have together built the case that growth is not the solution – it is part of the problem, and a core component of an economic model that needs to be changed.

“We need to learn to embrace the end of growth, or go down fighting,” says Dave Gardner, the film’s director.

His words might seem hyperbolic, coming from the mouth of a filmmaker from Colorado who unsuccessfully runs for local government in his community on a platform opposed to more growth (he exposes the whole amusing saga, including uncomfortable and cantankerous moments at City Hall, in the film). But to those familiar with the subject, it is notable that Gardner bagged interviews with all the heavyweight thinkers in this field, whose arguments are woven into the film to support his case.

The hitlist: Canadian scientist Professor William Rees, the very founder of the concept of the ‘ecological footprint’ who made popular the notion of the earth’s “carrying capacity” (which, by the way, we are already overshooting by 30 per cent); retired economist Paul Ehrlich, author of the Population Bomb, who first raised the alarm over human expansion back in 1968; Herman Daly, a former economist with the World Bank; Bill McKibben of 350.org; Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved; the list continues.

Essentially, they all argue that we need to de-link the connection in our economic and financial system between prosperity and the GDP growth, and achieve a sustainable economy (also called a ‘steady state’ system). But though the idea has been bandied about for decades, the system remains unchanged.

“There are individuals and companies who profit from growth – it is in their interest to keep us hooked on growth,” says Gardner. “These ‘growth-pushers’ [financial institutions, energy companies, and so on] profit, while society and future generations pay. They make easy short-term profits, dependent on us encouraging and even subsidizing them to plunder our communities.”

The term “subsidize” might jump out at most readers, having watched the banks deemed ‘too big to fail’ propped up with public funds.

“Documentaries can be an important source of evidence in challenging conventions, and Growthbusters is a fantastic example of this,” says Fraser. “The ‘growth-pushers’ it talks of help perpetuate the idea that growth will deliver prosperity. But perhaps the core myth of our time is that deliberation of these matters is pointless – or best left to experts. Neither is true.”

A year on from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP’s Annual General Meeting struck a far different tone compared to the 2010 congregation, held just a week before the explosion in the gulf, which released over five million barrels of oil and destroyed the fisheries, coastal estuaries and fishing economies of the Gulf of Mexico.

Last year’s AGM: quiet and uneventful, save for a formal resolution supported by Fair Pensions and campaigners from Canada regarding the risks of potential tar sands extractions, which seemed to go largely unnoticed by most of the shareholders.

This year: the board unsurprisingly found itself at the receiving end of impassioned criticism. “This AGM is the last chance to hold the company accountable,” said Kuhns.

She and other representatives from gulf coast communities staged a protest at the entrance of the meeting – Diane Wilson, a shrimp farmer from Texas, was arrested by police after covering herself in black goo, “the only thing they understand,” she told the television cameras. Though they were entitled to enter as proxy shareholders, BP security barred them from the conference on the grounds that they could cause a disturbance in the proceedings.

Activists from Climate Rush, the UK Tar Sands Network and Rising Tide were dragged out of the building, after attempting to create a human banner spelling “No Tar Sands”.

Members of the Ethecon foundation entreated the board to let the barred Gulf representatives into the building, and attempted to present the board with the “Black Planet” award – a planet-coloured beach ball covered in black ink.

Risky investment

Anti-tar sands campaigners from First Nations communities in Canada – Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Jasmine Thomas and Clayton Thomas-Muller – spoke to the board about the impacts of tar sands extraction projects in Alberta, and questioned the board’s decision to enter into the region, the world’s largest industrial project and a “risky investment”, as Thomas-Muller described it.

Many long-term shareholders of a more conventional stripe asked difficult questions regarding the spill, as well as the company’s future plans: “You assert to us that you can plan for climate change by asserting that you are good at drilling in deep waters,” one white-haired shareholder asked. “I would caution you to watch that hubris does not overtake you,” said another.

And, more to the sentiment shared by all shareholders who hold stake in the company, which lost £40 billion due to the spill, “Quite frankly, you have cost me money.”

With so many dissenting voices, the tone was markedly different from the previous year’s unexceptional meeting. Though some shareholders present denounced the “harassment” and “intolerable treatment” of former CEO Tony Hayward by “the Americans” last year, the overall sentiment in the room this year appeared undoubtedly to be one of anger regarding the accident and a degree of sympathy for the Gulf residents, including those who had travelled from the US for the AGM and had been barred entry.

When chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg tried to interrupt author Antonia Juhasz (who like many dissenters had bought a BP share for the opportunity to question the board at their meeting), the crowd came to her defence, the crowd came to her defence – in this video on Sky News you can hear cries supporting her to read the statement (about 1:40 in) from Keith Jones, father of Gordon Jones, one of the 11 men who died in the explosion:

“You had to make more money faster, and if that put those who were on the rig at risk, well sometimes one has to take a few chances, right? Well none of you were on that rig, and none of you were rolling the dice with the lives of your sons or daughters – but you were rolling the dice with my son’s life, and you lost.”

Though the explosion is largely regarded by the public as an accident, and perhaps one that could have happened in any industry, Juhasz explained two days previous to a gathering of dissenting BP shareholders, activists and campaigners that the catastrophe was not “a fluke”.

“This was an expected outcome of an industry that has extended beyond its technological capacity,” said Juhasz, author of Black Tide: the Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill. ‘They were using shallow water technology, the same used back in 1989. And yet their documentation said they could handle a spill of 300,000 barrels per day – the Deepwater Horizon only leaked 80,000 barrels per day.”

Winners and losers

There are 148 other deep wells around the world, she said, and Juhasz is not alone in thinking the Deepwater Horizon spill could just be the first of many such environmental disasters as oil and gas exploration heads into more extreme environments, from the deep ocean to polar waters to oil shale and tar sands.

Questions regarding the tar sands in fact garnered a huge amount of attention – a stark change from the previous year, when few shareholders seemed to be aware of any controversy. The Financial Times blog even declared tar sands campaigners to be among the few “winners” of the AGM, for “attracting maximum attention to their cause”.

But one is left wondering how many shareholders would give the green light to operations in Alberta, in particular because the board sold them the idea of a “lower impact” form of tar sands extraction, steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD). Also known as ‘in situ mining’, this process injects steam into deep fissures underground, melting the oil and piping it to the surface. Svanberg proudly proclaimed that the process, which will be utilized at the Sunrise project (operated by BP with Husky Energy in Canada), due to its subterranean nature, leaves no tailings ponds and only affects “five per cent” of the surface area.

But these figures are extremely misleading, says Greenpeace’s Laboucan-Massimo, who published a report last week showing that the energy and water needs of SAGD operations are in most cases just as bad as open pit tar sands mining operations – and in many cases worse.

But like the spill in the gulf of Mexico, these effects will not be readily seen by board members in London or energy consumers around the world – only those on the front lines will be able to see the true impacts, unaffected by the glossy PR campaigns. BP may claim that the cleanup operation in the Gulf is complete, but coastal communities and local scientists know that the oil is still there, just lingering on the bottom of the ocean. Oysters, shrimp and fish have not returned, dolphins continue to wash up dead on the shores, and the rivers continue to stink. “We still have oil coating the bottom of the ocean, we still have dispersant coating the bottom of the ocean, what we don’t have is the life that is supposed to be there,” says Juhasz.

The impacts of SAGD too could be as intense and expansive – yet remain out of sight and out of mind for BP’s board, shareholders, and everyone worldwide who consumes their oil. Svanberg soothingly claimed that BP had become “a wiser company”, yet history may be committed to repeat itself.

The Syncrude upgrader and tailings pond in the Boreal forest north of Fort McMurray. Photo Credit: Jiri Rezac, courtesy of Greenpeace.

But director niobe Thompson’s documentary Tipping Point: The End of Oil has taken on more than the standard hand-wringing anti-big-business stance of other non-fiction features about the Alberta tar sands. in environmental contexts, the phrase “tipping point” usually refers to ecological thresholds beyond which there is no return — such as the potential for “runaway climate change.” But the film’s title goes further: it refers instead to a turning point for civilization.

“We want the audience to understand: we are at the end of the age of oil, and this is what it looks like,” says Thompson. “The subtitle ‘The End of Oil’ may make one think our film is about solar panels and electric cars, but really this is about what our oil-driven society is doing.”

“Oil invades every part of our lives. We go to enormous lengths to extract it, and we will go to war to get it,” writes David suzuki, the film’s narrator, in an e-mail interview. “Then when people say we have to shift our energy sources, the immediate response is to say that is crazy. Of course, it’s easy to say it’s crazy when you look at the world through the perceptual lenses of our vested interests.”

But through the lens of a camera, the sheer scale of the tar sands project never fails to impress. It’s a “provincial sacrifice zone,” as Thompson puts it, created through “a Faustian pact” Canada has made in the pursuit of economic growth. Deep toxic tailing ponds, larger than any man-made structure on earth. Vast scourges in the earth, forged by what Stephen Harper once aptly described as “Brobdingnagian technology.” And rare, fatal liver, blood and brain tumours afflicting the people who live downstream in the community of Fort Chipewyan.

The saga is not necessarily easy to tell, for the very same reasons that make it so gripping: so unprecedented in scope, it is difficult to truly capture. And so dramatic, the story has already been told many times before.

The sands and Fort Chipewyan have already featured in half a dozen documentaries: Crude Sacrifice, an independent 2009 film by Vancouver filmmaker Lawrence Carota; H2Oil, a feature-length 2009 doc by Montreal director Shannon Walsh; Greenpeace’s Petropolis, more a work of art by Toronto’s Peter Mettler, 45 minutes of spanning aerial shots of the operations; and Downstream, a 30-minute film by U.S. filmmaker Leslie Iwerks shortlisted for a 2008 Oscar, expanded into the feature film Dirty Oil in 2010.

“With the exception of Petropolis, these are all essentially David and Goliath stories — people facing down a massive project run by the world’s richest oil companies,” says Thompson. “We wanted to do something different to give the audience an idea of what is really at stake by combining a conventional survey of the issues with a narrative built on strong story lines.”

What is at stake? not only the lives of the people downstream, the forests and rivers in Canada, or even the global climate. The fate of all human civilization hangs in the balance.

“The tar sands are telling us that everything about fossil fuel–based economies has changed. This is the tipping point,” says Andrew Nikiforuk, journalist and author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, interviewed for the film. “If we can get off of fossil fuels in 30 years in response to this wake-up call that would be great, but if we don’t, then as a society we will collapse because you cannot sustain a civilization on a resource as dirty as bitumen.”

The End Of Oil

Most of the other tar sands documentaries hardly travel outside of Fort Chipewyan. The Oscar-nominated Downstream, for example, focuses on Dr. John O’Connor, the family physician put under investigation by Alberta Health, Health Canada and the Alberta College of physicians and surgeons for causing “undue alarm” when he raised concerns about cancers in Fort Chipewyan. His tale also features largely in Crude Sacrifice and H2Oil.

By now most Canadians are very familiar with this story, says Thompson, so he does not dwell on it. Instead, Tipping Point tells the story of how the people with the most at stake — the community of Fort

Chip — brought their story to the world stage. “This is about people with no voice who reached out beyond Canada to find their voice,” says Thompson.

Of central importance are Francois Paulette, a former chief of the Fort Smith Chipewyan who fought for native land claims in the 1960s with the Canadian government and is now fighting again on the world stage in Copenhagen, New York and Norway; David Schindler, an ecologist at the University of Alberta whose research brought the truth about the toxic impacts of the industry to the global press; and James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of the film Avatar (widely seen as an allegory for northern Alberta).

Added to this, a who’s-who of climate and oil-sands experts: Andrew Nikiforuk; Andrew Weaver, Canada’s pre-eminent climate change scientist; Tim Flannery, Australian scientist and author of The Weather Makers; Bill McKibben, journalist and founder of 350.org; George Monbiot, Guardian columnist and author of Heat; Ronald Wright, author, academic and civilization theorist; and rob renner, Alberta’s minister of environment.

Even the interviews lying on the cutting-room floor could have produced a documentary; they include the head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Rajendra Pachuri, and Jim Hansen, a NASA physicist and unquestionably the world’s most famous climate change expert (best known as the scientist who revealed that the American government tried to squash evidence of climate change in the 1980s, as immortalised in An Inconvenient Truth).

“There is always the frustration when you work on a film for this long that you will never have enough space,” says Thompson. The film touches on the contribution of the oil sands to climate change — epitomized in Canada’s notorious obstruction at negotiations in Copenhagen last year — but lacked the scope to explore the issue to its fullest. For his part, Suzuki would have liked to have said more.

“My message, I’m afraid, is drearily repetitive, and has been for decades: human beings have very suddenly become a geological force, but people just don’t realize it,” he says. “We have reached the moment when humanity is altering the chemical, physical and biological makeup of the planet on a geological scale.

“If I were to put a concluding message to the film, it would be to remind people that we are animals, and our most fundamental needs are not dictated by economics, but biology. It is completely mystifying to me how we continue to place the economy, a human construct, above the very fundamental things we need to survive: clean air, water, energy and soil.”

A Global Warning

Filming took Thompson and the crew out to Copenhagen for the 2009 UN climate conference, to new York and Norway following paulette on his diplomatic missions, and many other locations that did not make it to the final cut. I myself signed a release form in London, England, in November 2009, when Thompson followed First Nations activists to parliament to argue their treaty rights.

And of course, filming took the team out to the sands and Fort McMurray a total of  29 times. “It’s impossible to get a sense of the sheer scale of the operations without aerial shots,” says Thompson. “In a sense, they really are a character themselves in the film.”

They brought the Cineflex helicopter-bound high-definition camera from Los Angeles, the same machine used in the BBC Planet Earth series. “You can zoom up the nose of somebody driving a truck with this thing — it costs a lot of money, so it requires a project of this magnitude,” says Thompson.

Greenpeace used the same camera for Petropolis. They, however, were only able to use the Cineflex for two hours in total — Thompson and his team had it for a full week. They now have a library of footage, which they hope to make available to other projects.

The sands have an added meaning for Thompson — he grew up in Wabasca, Alberta. “I had no conception as a child that this land was part of the oil sands,” he says. Nor did he know during the eight summers he spent as a forest fire fighter. “I put out a lot of fires on land that is now a pit — it is absolutely bizarre to think about it.”

Photo by Jiri Rezac, courtesy of Greenpeace.

After all these years, and having flown over them more than 20 times, has the sight of the tar sands ceased to impress?

“Yes, they do stop being shocking after your 20th flight — and that really was a challenge. Any filmmaker is always battling the loss of distance,” he says. “You always need to be conscious of the process of estrangement. You constantly need to distance yourself from the subject matter so you can look at it with fresh eyes — the eyes of the audience. But this becomes hard when you live the subject for years.”

Sound & Fury

Another challenge for any filmmaker covering the sands—and for anyone trying to come to an informed opinion — is the public clash of rhetoric.

On the one hand we see the oil companies and the government, who have always maintained that the environmental impact is minimized.

“We have large industrial projects that to the uninformed eye appear to be out of control, but the fact is that this is one of the most highly regulated industries in the world — this is anything but the Wild West,” premiere Ed stelmach says soothingly at a press conference.

On the other side: activists and environmental NGOs, most infamously the Rethink Alberta campaign, widely broadcast in early 2010 throughout the U.S. to discourage tourism to the province. “Alberta’s greed threatens to keep America, Europe and Asia addicted to oil for many more decades,” the ad’s narrator warned, against a backdrop of oil-covered ducks, to the beat of harsh piano chords. “Thinking of visiting Alberta? Think again.”

“Let’s face it: there is a great deal of distrust aimed at professional environmental campaigners,” says Thompson. “I think ordinary Canadians who are mildly interested in this issue are just as distrustful of the ENGOs as they are of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. The message of the Rethink Alberta campaign came across as spin — people got the sense that they were being manipulated.”

The only solution, he says, is to base one’s opinion on science.

A Scientific Vacuum

But until very recently, there was no science for the public to see. The only monitoring of the river was conducted not by the province of Alberta but by an industry-funded organization, the regional Aquatics

Monitoring program [RAMP], which did not release its data to the public.

“We monitor water quality carefully, and to date all the data shows no long-term effects on water quality from oil sands development,” Stelmach maintained consistently for years.

But few were convinced. “In the absence of transparency, it looked like a conspiracy,” says Thompson.

The government always conceded that there were chemicals in the Athabasca River, but have long contended that they were “natural,” leaking from the river banks. Inputs from the tailings ponds were said to be negligible, and nobody could disprove them.

“I think industry likes it this way — as long as there is confusion, there won’t be any regulation,” responds Schindler. “We’ve seen this with acid rain, tobacco, and right now with climate change — [manufacturing doubt] is a standard industry tactic. After 40 years, I am tired of seeing this fool people time after time.”

The crux of the confusion lies in the sources: though simple water testing shows high levels of arsenic, mercury, lead, other heavy metals and carcinogenic byproducts of petroleum refining, it was difficult to prove that these derived from the tailings ponds and the smokestacks. A small study released in December 2007 and profiled in detail in H2Oil found extremely high levels of heavy metals in the water and in the wildlife. Nonetheless, despite high cancer rates and deformed fish, it remained difficult to prove industry as the source until recently.

Manufacturing Doubt

One of the keys to industry’s defence has been a deficiency in their monitoring program: they did not measure airborne inputs, a glaring omission in a region dotted with giant smokestacks so impressive they were once dubbed “dark satanic mills” by National Geographic.

To provide the necessary evidence, Schinder sampled the contaminants in winter snow, which would have to have come from man-made pollution falling from the sky. Samples collected near the stacks are grim and black. Calculations reveal that within a 50-kilometre radius, 11,000 metric tonnes of particulate would have been deposited during four months of snowfall — the equivalent of a major oil spill. The findings were reported around the world.

Its hand forced by the global spotlight, Ottawa appointed a panel to review Alberta’s monitoring program. The result, announced this December: a unanimous decree that RAMp is inadequate, and a new one will be created.

Of course, reliable monitoring is still a long way from actually changing the way the oil sands operate. But one thing, at least, has been accomplished: the story of Fort Chipewyan has reached the world.

“When the early films like H2Oil were made, this community had no voice,” says Thompson. Years later, the arrival of James Cameron in Fort Chipewyan was covered by The New York Times, the Oprah Winfrey Show and Time magazine. “Now they feel they have been heard.”

The Tipping Point

The Tipping Point will go on from its high-profile launch on CBC’s Nature of Things to international distribution in markets ranging from Al Jazeera to broadcasters in Norway, Japan, Greece and Sweden. When the film reaches a global audience, ideally, more people around the world will understand the consequences of our oil-driven society.

“To me the issue is that we have gotten very used to the convenience of oil — when we pull up at the pump, we can’t see (and don’t care to see) the enormous ecological, social and economic factors at play,” observes Suzuki. “I hope this film helps show some of those costs to people around the world.”

But, at the end of the day, will anything in the sands change? global oil demand goes up by two per cent a year, reserves go down by seven per cent a year, and Alberta’s 176 billion proven barrels remain slated for development for 150 years. Production is set to triple by 2020. Some may adhere to the belief that we can “shut down the tar sands,” but most people think that is impossible.

Even if America turns its back on Canada’s oil, there are plenty more that will take it: China, Thailand and India are all fuelling their conversion to western-style economies with our dirty oil. And there are resources like this all over the world—tar sands in the Congo, Madagascar and Venezuela, oil shale in the U.S., Australia and China, just to name a few. “As a civilization of oil consumers, we are standing at a crossroads,” says Thompson. “We are at a tipping point—the tar sands may just be the beginning.”

But as dreary as this could sound, there are still reasons not to despair, says Suzuki.

“The enormous success of our species is attributable to our foresight — our ability to look ahead and imagine a world as it would be, avoiding dangers and exploiting opportunities,” he contends. “No other animal has the ability to invent a future and then work to achieve it. Though now we are turning our backs on the very survival strategy of our species, i don’t think anyone can say it is too late. If we work hard to give nature some room and some time, she might be far more forgiving than we deserve.”

‘We felt the best thing was to give these victims the chance to appeal to the Quebec government as human beings, face to face,’ says Laurie Kazan-Allen, founder of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat based in London, one of a number of advocacy groups that provided financial support to help the delegation make the trip to Canada.

Among those victims was Jeong-Rim Lee, suffering from mesothelioma, an incurable and fatal cancer of the lining of the lungs which she developed after living near a factory which used the material in South Korea. You can listen to an interview with her and another delegate, Anup Srivasta, on CBC radio here.

As Asian delegates met with Canadian officials and journalists in Quebec and Ottawa, the IBASheld a small protest in front of the Canadian High Commission in London, England, while anti-asbestos groups held their own protests in Paris, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, London, Mumbai, Delhi, and outside Canadian diplomatic offices around the world.

There is now barely a week remaining before the Quebec government decides whether or not to guarantee a $58 million loan to the Jeffrey Mine – the announcement is set to be made between 20 and 30 December. This would occur during the annual low point in media activity – hardly a coincidence, say critics.

The possible reviving of the mine – one of the last remaining in Canada – has incited anger and controversy all year. Demonstrations like last week’s were seen in front of Canadian consulates worldwide on Canada day, 1 July, in the hopes that the country would finally cease exporting the mineral and funding the ‘scientific’ studies that support its use. In August this year it seemed that the mine was certain to close, but then in September the owner was given a $3.5 million line of credit by the Quebec government to allow the mine to operate long enough to court new investors.

Investors were found, and if the Quebec government matches their financing with a $58 million loan, the mine will expand and increase its output ten-fold up to 250,000 tonnes a year – roughly a tenth of all global trade. For the next quarter century Canada would continue to export asbestos to China, India, and other fast-growing economies in the Global South.

The key word is ‘export’: the Canadian government does not allow the mineral to be used in construction projects in its own country. Though Canada (and other developed nations) once used various forms of the mineral in thousands of applications, almost every white fibre is now exported.

The World Health Organization estimates that asbestos is responsible for one in three work-related cancers worldwide – a sad truth that is unlikely to change, given that more than 120 million people are still exposed every single day at work around the globe. All forms of asbestos are carcinogenic, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and there is no ‘safe limit’ for exposure.

Yet the Chrysotile Institute, based in Montreal, promotes white asbestos as ‘safe for use under controlled circumstances’ – a claim ridiculed by all medical experts, including the Canadian Medical Association, which describes this as a ‘shameful political manipulation of science’. The prestigious British medical journal The Lancet drew attention to Canadian ‘hypocrisy’ last week.

Just days now remain before the announcement is made. ‘This really is the last stand,’ says Kazan-Allen.

Under the banner ‘Peasants Cool The Planet’, they will demand that more attention be given to matters of social justice – such as the transfer of $30 billion in aid from developed nations to developing ones, a pledge that was made last year that rich countries now appear to be ready to drop. La Via Campesina, the Indigenous Environmental Network and other NGOs from around the world are also extremely concerned about the emphasis at the talks being given to measures such as REDD (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) which they contend only undermines human rights by transferring ownership and control of forests away from the people who depend on them.

The turnout at the demonstration today will no doubt be dwarfed by the 100,000 people who marched this time last year in Copenhagen – largely because the UN conference last year drew far more attention in the run-up to December. Many described COP15 in 2009 as our ‘last chance’ to seal a binding and effective international accord to prevent dramatic climate change. Hopes were high.

But after last year’s unambiguous failure, this year’s conference has utterly failed to rouse the same level of enthusiasm. Press coverage is scant in comparison. Few politicians, journalists or activists believe much will come out of COP16 but more hot air, late nights, and meaningless pieces of paper.

Yet again, little more but sound and fury – both from politicians proclaiming that progress is afoot, as well as angry activists, understandably frustrated by the inability of all United Nations Climate Change Conferences to halt the global rise in carbon by even the tiniest degree. Two decades of jet-fuelled meetings have achieved nothing but a steady rise in global greenhouse gas levels, and steady shrink in forests (and other carbon sinks), and a seemingly inexorable march towards dramatic climate change.

Thousands of demonstrators and NGOs have converged on the city, yet their impact on the conference is likely to be even less marked than last year, due to the cosy confinement of the delegates inside the complexes of the Mexican beach town, a cotton-woolled resort that has long secluded wealthy tourists away from Mexico’s slums. The barricades around Copenhagen’s Bella Centre pale in comparison.

Nonetheless, activists and NGOs from around the world are still making the trip to Mexico to make what stamp they can. One of those is the Polaris Institute, based in Ottawa, Canada, who last week made their way towards the beach resort town from the small community of Cerro San Pedro, 500 kilometres north of Mexico City. Travelling southwards in a collection of caravans, they are meeting with a dozen communities that have been affected by massive industrial projects, such as those near Cerro San Pedro which have been coping with impacts created by huge mines operated by Canadian company New Gold.

“We want to highlight the social and environmental destruction that is created by these huge projects,” says Richard Girard, Research Coordinator from the Polaris Institute. “In Canada a few small populations are impacted by the tar sands, but our same companies impact millions of people in Mexico, and their voices are not heard.”

The Canadian government as well is a target for impacted communities – Canada was named last week by the Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres as one of three countries (together with Russia and Japan) trying to kill the Kyoto Protocol, the only international accord on climate change to date with any bite. This comes as little surprise – Canada was again named the Colossal Fossil last year in Copenhagen for obstructing progress at the talks, in large part due to massive expansions in the Canadian tar sands.

“Though the local populations in Mexico and around the world see their local battle as a regional struggle of their own, on a larger scale the degradation and pollution that comes about from these projects is part of the whole process that is causing climate change,” Girard says. “A lot of the NGOs who come to talk about climate change are only thinking about polar bears and trees – they are not familiar with how people’s lives are impacted. This is something that is, unfortunately, often missing from the broader environmental movement.”

Julie’s Bicycle is a not-for-profit music industry watchdog that provides research and information for sustainable business practices, and manages the Industry Green certification programme. “In lots of ways, festivals have led the entire music industry in waste management,” Helen Heathfield, director of energy and environment for the group, tells Access. “They are way ahead of fixed venues in so many ways because the rubbish left behind is so visible.”

The average punter, Heathfield says, will produce about two kilos of rubbish every day, so festival organisers need to think carefully about how to manage all of that before it starts piling up. Fortunately, festival crowds tend to be just the right demographic to work with.

“They tend to be quite environmentally minded,” Suzanne Clark, business manager at Aktrion Recycling & Waste Management, says. “And obviously giving out a green message is something that sponsors can boast about.”

More festivals and events are paying attention to their eco credentials, and as trendy as all things green are, the BS 8901 ‘specification for a sustainability management system for events’ can now provide some assurance that any ‘environmentally friendly’ festival isn’t guilty of greenwashing. The 47 recipients of this year’s Greener Festival Award include a good number from the UK, the best of which will be named at the UK Festival Awards on November 18.

And industry groups like the Sustainable Event Alliance and A Greener Festival are working to help organisers everywhere understand how to minimise the mess.

Plan Ahead

The most important step to getting rid of all the rubbish as quickly as possible is to come up with a careful plan. So more waste management providers are popping up to help.

“I have worked providing crew and technicians for 12 years, and was always disgusted at the amount of good material that went straight into the skip,” John Diamond, operations director at Edinburgh-based Diamond Event Services, says. The company duly added recycling and waste management services to its portfolio earlier this year.

“The easiest thing to do is to chuck everything and send it to landfill, but it’s definitely not the cheapest. Anything you recycle will actually save you money because facilities will accept recyclable material for nothing.”

Tax on waste sent to landfill in the UK is currently £48 per tonne, and will increase by £8 per year until at least 2014/2015, when it will have reached £80 per tonne. The goal is to prevent any paper or plastic from reaching a tipping site by 2013, and nothing at all by 2020.

“The average event is now achieving a 15 to 30 per cent recycling rate. Add composting and you could get up to 40 per cent,” Ed Cook, business manager at Network Recycling, says.

Festivals routinely leave out brightly labeled bins so people can chuck their paper plates, plastic cups and metal cans into the right batch. Wooden cutlery, napkins made from recycled paper, and plastic beer cups made from PET as opposed to polypropylene, are all helping. And the greenest festivals are now setting out bins to capture food waste for composting or biogas generation.

One of the most progressive changes is the cup deposit system. Instead of a thin disposable, bars at festivals like Latitude are giving out durable plastic pint pots, like those produced by the Incredible Cup Company, for a £2 deposit.

“I can’t believe how sceptical I was five years ago when these first came out,” Cook says. “They are brilliant, and they have had a massive impact.”

Elsewhere, many festivals are implementing a deposit scheme of 5 to 10 pence per cup on the regular paper and plastic kinds, so the young and the skint go around collecting them to earn spare change.

“Even if an event organiser doesn’t have the funds to invest in a reusable cup initiative, a deposit system can help them improve recycling rates and spare their conscience without spending a penny.”

Human Error

Even with the best and most carefully laid plans, a lot of any festival’s impact is in the hands of the audience. The most clearly labeled and thickly dotted recycling bins won’t make a difference if people don’t bother to separate their waste properly. Carelessness remains a problem.

“The big challenge is to get people to use the facilities properly,” Matthew Ball, special events manager for Grundon Waste Management, explains.

Which is why it sets up only one bin for all recyclable materials, in order to make it as simple as possible for the public. “We can then separate all the paper, plastic and glass ourselves afterwards.”

Even then, there will always be a huge number of cups, forks, napkins, leaflets and plates left on the ground. A small army of litter pickers can quickly gather up most of it, but the smaller bits require weeks of work.

Take cigarette butts, an estimated 20 million of which are left behind on the fields of Glastonbury, and tent pegs. Both have to be painstakingly picked out of the grass to prevent illness and injury when Michael Eavis’s dairy cows return. And there is a new, growing problem. Festivalgoers, often sleep deprived, lazily leaving big things behind in campsites, from sleeping bags to folding chairs and whole tents.

“As long as Asda sells tents for £10 this is going to be a problem,” Heathfield says. “It comes with the assumption of disposability that runs through our whole culture.”

It’s Only Natural

There is of course the matter of the waste that no amount of planning, scolding or coaching can prevent.

“You can never have enough toilets,” Clive Owen of A1 Loo Hire says simply, and the company has provided for Glastonbury, Latitude, Reading and Leeds festivals among others. Numbers are subject to realistic budget constraints, but on the plus side, the number of attendants A1 provides to clean the toilets has increased dramatically. “Sometimes we are able to get round three times a day and people really appreciate that,” he says.

Nonetheless, punters are still making careless additions to their loo deposits. “We are constantly having our pipes blocked up by beer cans and cups that people throw down the loos,” Owen says. And when it comes to long drops, the mess becomes even more of a nightmare. “People throw all manner of things down there. We’ve pulled all sorts of things out, wellies, bin liners, even entire tents.”

Heathfield is a big fan of compost toilets. Not only do they negate the use of chemicals, they also cut down on water use, and return waste to the soil rather than using up energy and water at sewage plants. Alongside which, the open air environment can be a lot more pleasant than an enclosed space.

“Punters really like them, and I think we can expect to see them more and more in the future,” she says.

Australian compost loo provider Natural Event, supplier to Secret Garden Party, Sunrise Celebration, Waveform and other festivals around the UK, even attempts to give patrons an experience that makes them feel ‘happy and respected’ by covering the doors of every stall in floral art and cheeky graffiti.

In The Pipeline

There are other innovations that Heathfield expects to go mainstream, most to do with food waste, which will remain a big source of rubbish no matter how high the percentage of cups and plates that gets recycled.

“I’m really looking forward to composting becoming truly standard,” she says. “Having anaerobic digesters right on site linked to all the catering stalls so all the food waste can go directly to producing energy.”

In a perfect world everyone would bring their own cups, plates, pint glasses and cutlery. Mural-splattered compost toilets would be ubiquitous. All sets would be made from reclaimed and recycled materials, and reused the next year. No toxic metals in the wiring or hazardous chemicals in the fabric. And that’s just material waste. There’s still the emissions and air pollution from transport and energy to consider. A green festival utopia would be powered entirely by micro wind turbines and solar panels. Everyone would reach the site by train or electric car. All food would be sourced locally from sustainably managed farms. There’s a lot that can be done.

“But the bottom line is that festivals are pretty good,” Heathfield concludes.

“They have taken huge amounts of action over the years, and started incorporating these initiatives long before local authorities in many cases. By providing alternative behavioural spaces where people can try out new things, they have done a lot to raise people’s awareness of all the issues and have played a vital role in waste management leadership. They receive a lot of criticism because the waste left behind is so visible.”

What we throw out at home, after all, is channeled away. Out of sight, and out of mind. Anyone who tuts at the mess left behind by a weekend of music would be wise to keep things in perspective. “If you could see what the average street produces in a weekend it would be one interesting comparison,” she nods.

It all boils down to one challenge: how do we prosper without any increase in our gross domestic product (GDP)? What might seem like a purely academic concern to the uninitiated—or borderline heresy to traditional economists—is the single most important question we ought to be asking, according to economist Tim Jackson in his new book, Prosperity Without Growth.

Avoiding runaway climate change means reducing the carbon intensity of every dollar 130 times, says Jackson.

This cannot be done without forgoing economic growth, he says – a difficult task, given that GDP growth has been the single most important policy goal for a century.

Thanks to his book’s critique of the “iron cage of consumerism,” many label Jackson’s work as anti-capitalistic. But, he argues, capitalism can exist without growth — just not capitalism as we know it.

Why do you dismiss as “delusional” the Stern Report’s conclusion that spending three per cent of our GDP on abating climate change is sufficient?

The main inspiration for this book was this seductive idea that clean, clever, and efficient technologies are all we need. But real progress has been hampered by perverse incentives towards efficiency that encourage the development of new technologies, wasting more resources in the process.

Do we just need to reconfigure our thinking?

That is the thrust of the argument. Environmental economics tried to account for the failings of the model with slight adjustments, such as carbon taxes. But what we really need is to change the internal dynamics of our current economic model, because it pushes us towards expansion or collapse—not stability.

What critiques of your work bother you the most?

One is simply ignoring my idea. Another is claiming that profit-driven economics are in accord with the natural motivations of people who are inherently selfish. We have institutionalized this narrow vision of humanity into an economic system that calls on us to be myopic, individualistic novelty-seekers in order to drive material output.

What is your reaction when people accuse you of being anti-progress?

I characterise my position as “trans-modern”: many of the ways that society was traditionally organized were valuable, such as locally-organized economies and strong communities. Those have been swept away by a vision of modernity that functions merely to fuel consumerism. We need to retrieve those ideas and use them as the building blocks for a new definition of shared prosperity.

I have derision for those who would throw traditions away to maintain a derelict system. That is a very destructive way to treat human history and how we understand progress.

The book was written when the economic crisis was just kicking off. What do you have to say about recent events?

In the aftermath of the crashes in 2008 there were a number of attempts at reform that turned into false starts. That was very disappointing. The British elections did not feature any questioning of the model whatsoever in a country where the national debt grew at a million pounds every eleven minutes while the recession loomed in 2008.

It is understandable, looking at the horrible situation in Greece, that people are nervous to talk about changes to the model, but my point is that Greece is a casualty of the model.

Do you have hope for the future?

Absolutely. I have faith in humanity’s inordinate ability to adapt to difficult circumstances. And I think it’s a responsibility to have hope. Hope is a psychological strategy for achievement.

Farther away, other horrors, instantly. Everyone looking in that direction would be blinded. Those spared instant incineration would die in agony over minutes, or hours, slowly from blood loss and radiation poisoning. And still others would be covered in burns from head to toe – most would die solely where they lay, but others might be lucky enough to find themselves taken to any hospital not blown apart in the blast. But there they would find themselves one of thousands in line for treatment by exhausted doctors, binding, swabbing and dabbing.

But what would the treatment matter anyway? Within half an hour the same scenario would play out halfway across the world, then in nearby nations, the earth blanketed with the pitter-patter of nuclear missiles. If the shower rained hard enough, most life on earth would end – cockroaches might survive, but we at the very least would all die.

This scenario is a familiar but forgotten one. When was the last time you saw a film, fictional or factual, about the threat of nuclear war?

But according to Lucy Walker, director of Countdown to Zero, that threat is still very real. There are good reasons people are calling this the “scariest documentary of the year.”

“It’s hard to compete with big-budget mainstream horror films, but this should be the scariest film you’ve ever seen,” she says.

There are still tens of thousands of nuclear warheads ready for launch – possibly up to 100,000 – all around the world, from America and Russia to Pakistan and India. And those are just the weapons we know about.

Since the breakdown of the Soviet Union, there has been a slow leak of weapons-grade uranium from Russian reactors and military bases. Lax security (exacerbated by the breakdown of the USSR), opportunistic smugglers and eager buyers in central Asia – notably terrorist cells operating in Afghanistan and neighbouring countries – have made for a most unfortunate combination. Unknown quantities, no doubt sufficient to kill almost all life on earth, sit in the hands of those most keen to use deadly force. As it is put in the film, Al Qaeda’s stated objective is to kill four million people; you don’t do that by flying planes into buildings.

Could Islamist terrorists set off a dirty bomb in an American (or Canadian) city? Without a doubt. Smuggling tiny amounts of uranium over national borders is laughably easy: shipping containers are not checked for fissile material at most ports, and even when they are in airports, the detectors are so easily set off by tiny amounts of radiation that they are worse than useless.

Want to get uranium into the US? Hide it in kitty litter. A hundred pounds of uranium would fit into six beer cans.

The implications are terrifying beyond measure. “When I started making this film,” says Walker, “I thought we should be afraid of the potential for smuggling, but I didn’t realize that every single step that could lead to New York being blown up had already happened.”

A film that at first glance might be about security and terrorism is actually about a very different problem altogether: the continued existence and production of nuclear weapons in the first place.

“There is no credible alternative to zero: the only answer is zero,” asserts Walker.

As long as fissile material continues to exist anywhere in the world, we all remain in danger. Even without the threat of rogue terrorist attacks, the risk of a nuclear missile being launched by one of the armed nations is still very real. Theoretically, the probability of a launch is not zero; therefore, it is almost bound to happen. There is a first time in history for everything.

And in reality, it has almost happened on such a huge number of occasions it is almost sickening to consider. Both the Americans and the Russians have mistaken flocks of geese and rising moons for nuclear warheads, and retaliatory shots were almost fired. This happened as recently as — are you ready? — 1995; Russian officials marched into Boris Yelstin’s office and asked him to fire missiles, and the Russian president — thankfully, “not drunk for a change” — broke with protocol and refused to do so.

Why so many mishaps? A big part of the problem is that efforts to make the system more reliable, by adding in larger safety nets and complex security measures to thicken the web, have made the system less reliable. A more complex system has more interactions that can be difficult to monitor. Simply put: complexity is the enemy of reliability.

Those stories revealing the giant holes in our safety net continue throughout Countdown to Zero. A training tape accidentally slipped into the computers at NORAD, and everyone there thought America was actually under attack. It was only after U.S. forces went through a frenzied checklist that the error was spotted. On another occasion, a single malfunctioning chip that costs less than a dollar was responsible for eight minutes of launch preparations that were only cut in the nick of time. Another time, a B-52 loaded with six nuclear warheads flew across the U.S. from South Carolina. The missiles weren’t logged as missing for 36 hours.

And nuclear material has gone missing, as well, while an ounce of gold has never gone missing from Fort Knox.

“You wouldn’t use a phone from the 1950s, and yet so much of the equipment pointing missiles from Russia to the U.S. and vice versa are just as old,” she says. “You would think the arsenal would be the most safely guarded equipment in the world.”

As the film puts it, “Every man woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or madness.”

But perhaps what is so striking about Countdown to Zero is not that it covers terrifying subject matter, but that it stands alone in doing so.

The past five years have seen a torrent of films about climate change and other environmental issues. The tar sands (and Fort Chip alone) have taken centre stage in at least half a dozen films produced over just two years.

But how many documentaries have been made in the past two decades, let alone the past two years, about the threat of nuclear war? For a threat so massive, so staggeringly great that “it kills in numbers the human mind simply cannot comprehend,” as the narrator of Countdown to Zerosays, why have we heard barely a word about such an unparalleled threat since Reagan and Trudeau were in power?

“People think this is yesterday’s issue, but it’s such an illusion to think that we are out of the woods,” Walker says. “That’s why the subtitle is ‘how I learned to start worrying and hate the bomb’. [It’s also a cheeky reference to the subtitle of Stanley Kubrick’s black comic satire on nuclear war, Dr. Strangelove.] Unfortunately, without giving people too much to worry about that they become paralysed with fear and passive, there is simply nothing not to worry about.”

This brings us to the obvious but unavoidable question: Why have we forgotten about the threat of nuclear war, if it never really went away?

“That’s exactly why I wanted to make this film. My childhood was haunted by the spectre of nuclear war,” recalls Walker. “My mother taught us that if it happened we wouldn’t need a shotgun to survive the aftermath, we’d want cyanide to end it all. Why did this issue fall off the radar?”

Interviews with random pedestrians throughout Walker’s film reveal a telling story: nearly all say they aren’t too concerned about weapons. Except for one man, an old man: “Isn’t everyone worried?”

It is undeniable that for activists and environmentalists, the issue is almost completely nonexistent. In Scotland, a sad, solitary protest camp sits next to the port holding the U.K.’s Trident nuclear submarine fleet. The few dozen campers have been there for decades, and almost all of them are over 40. Young activists have taken up climate change and other issues. Old greenies in the U.K. often say they long to put the ‘peace’ back in ‘Greenpeace.’

“But there is no point in worrying about global warming if we don’t live long enough to see it,” Lucy Walker says. “The advent of nuclear weapons changed everything, except our way of thinking. As human beings, we now have the ability to actually kill all life on earth but most people’s thinking hasn’t caught up with that game-changing discovery.”

Which is where Countdown to Zero comes in: to shock the audience into truly grasping how serious the threat is. Not merely to educate, the film — like all others made by Participant Media (Fast Food Nation, Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck) — aims to turn audience members from passive viewers into impassioned actors.

Making a documentary like this is obviously not easy: “Sleeping three hours a night for something that should have been done yesterday is not easy. I worry more about the impacts of stress on my health!” she says. “But money is not what I’m after. You know that line about supermodels who won’t get out of bed for less than $10,000? Well, I won’t get out of bed unless the idea is completely gripping. Making documentaries is just too hard financially — it’s such a slog. In this case, I was on a need-to-know basis: I wanted to know why nuclear weapons had fallen off the radar.”

The film is making big waves in Europe already, though, unfortunately, not simply for the subject matter. A feature on Walker in The London Times was titled “The Blonde’s Bombshell” (Walker is undeniably attractive), a tiresome label she refused to comment on. As to her gender, she does say that “it’s really interesting that there are lots of really cool women making amazing documentaries right now.”

Countdown to Zero is often compared to An Inconvenient Truth (naturally, given it was made by the same producer), but the aim is the same: to convince the audience of the urgency of a pervasively unappreciated threat, and to inspire them to actually do something about it.

“You couldn’t not see that movie and walk away thinking the reality of climate change was debatable,” she says of the Al Gore-narrated environmental feature-doc. And she hopes to do the same.

The making of Countdown to Zero is a story in itself. “What you see in the film is just the tip of the iceberg of what we did,” she says.

Walker put herself in considerable danger countless times, bartering with Georgian prison officials to obtain an interview with an incarcerated Russian smuggler, riding trains with missiles on board, visiting old nuclear test sites in Kazakhstan where even a single radioactive particle entering her lungs would virtually guarantee lung cancer.

One of the most impressive features of the film is the cast of interviewees, including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Valerie Plame (a former undercover CIA agent, famous now for being ‘outed’ in a notorious scandal), and a raft of high-ranking American nuclear specialists.

“Absolutely none of these interviews was easy to get. Every single one was a giant pain in the ass,” she says.

Blair’s interview is particularly chilling: “The threat of this falling into other people’s hands kept me awake at night,” he says in the film.

“I thought it was really cool of him to do this interview with us after the whole WMD [weapons of mass destruction] issue being his downfall,” comments Walker. One of her most striking interviews is with Oleg Khintsagov, a small-time hustler who was caught stealing several kilograms of uranium in small amounts, a crime for which he is serving time in Georgia, the corridor between Russia and Azerbaijan — the “highway for stolen uranium.” He wanted the money to buy a new fridge. Undercover agents posed as Islamist terrorists, and nabbed him trying to sell them weapons-grade plutonium. So if a small-time hustler can do this, imagine what real professionals with an ideology, brains and an agenda can do.

And it is not difficult in the slightest to create a nuclear device capable of killing millions of people once you have the uranium. The hard part was achieved more than half a century ago: doing it the first time. Once Oppenheimer and the rest of the Manhattan Project scientists cracked the secrets of splitting the atom, the rest was easy. The genie, once out of the bottle, cannot easily be put back in. What makes the launch of weapons truly foolproof? Nothing. As long as there is one weapon, there will always be that slim chance.

So the argument and the solution are quite clear, and thankfully Obama and the other leaders of armed countries right now do seem to understand that the only solution is zero, and are working to achieve that goal. Simple story, good news, the end is nigh — wrapped up, done deal? Something we can finally feel good about, as though humanity has fixed one of its errors?

If only. Unfortunately, particle physicists have been busy working toward the development of thermobaric nuclear weapons (an issue Walker did not have space for in the film), which would harness the power of nuclear fusion — the fusing of hydrogen atoms to produce incredible bursts of heat and energy (the same reaction that takes place inside the stars and our sun). Sadly, most members of the public are not aware of the development of these weapons. If they are aware at all, they might know of the friendly PR face for laboratories like the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California. The NIF is working toward nuclear fusion using lasers inside giant mirrored domes, ostensibly under the guise of developing clean energy — but only 15 per cent of the facility’s time is used for peaceful research; the rest is geared for weapons.

The only credible solution for nuclear weapons — or any weapon of such lethal scale — is zero.

Will we learn the lesson soon enough before new, even more sophisticated and more destructive weapons are produced, proliferated, and even used? We can only hope.

“I just want to wake people up to what is going on — people haven’t debated this issue in film for so long,” Walker says. “Part of the problem is that nuclear weapons are just so difficult to talk about: the scale of human horror is on such a scale that it defies the imagination. We need to change our way of thinking and eliminate these from the face of the earth, before they do the same to us.”

The Jeffrey mine, one of two remaining mines in the country, has been given a $3.5 million line of credit by the Quebec government to allow it to operate for a month – long enough to attract crucial investors from London and India, who are touring the mines now, according to the Montreal Gazette.

Though Canada restricts white asbestos – also called chrysotile – it was the world’s fifth largest producer in 2009, mining 153,000 metric tonnes of the material. More than 95 per cent of this was exported, primarily to Indonesia, China, Mexico, and other fast developing nations in the Global South. In such nations the mineral apparently can be used “safely” though it is tightly restricted in developed nations, and banned outright in over 50 countries (including the entire European Union).

As sales of the mineral declined in Europe and North America, producers shifted their attention to developing nations, such as Mexico and China. Now sales in the West are nonexistent, but business in the developing world is booming – Indian imports of the mineral have risen 83 per cent since 2004.

Documentation of construction workers wearing handkerchiefs and hauling sacks with their bare hands can be seen freely online in the CBC documentary, Canada’s Ugly Secret.

Health officials describe India as fostering a “ticking time bomb” of cancer, set to explode later this century (just as Western nations are still dealing with one).

Though an extremely useful material – once considered a miracle substance – handy for such applications as insulation, electrical resistance, and reinforcing cement, the wispy fibres of every form of asbestos are notoriously carcinogenic. More than 100,000 people die every year from asbestos-related diseases, it is responsible for one in three occupational cancers, according to the World Health Organization, and 120 million people are still exposed every day in the workplace.

Death from mesothelioma, an incurable cancer in the lining of the lungs, is slow, intractable, and incredibly painful. Every other form of the deadly mineral is banned worldwide altogether – only one form remains in use: chrysotile, or white asbestos. It is classified as carcinogenic by the International Agency for the Research of Cancer, yet promoted as “safe for use under controlled circumstances” by its producers – most notably the Chrysotile Institute, based in Montreal, Canada, which has been funded by Canadian tax monies to the tune of $20 million for the past quarter century, according to an investigation by the Centre for Public Integrity. In turn, the Chrysotile Institute provides funds to the Indian lobby group the Asbestos Cement Products Manufacturers Association, which promotes asbestos as entirely safe.

Though Canada remains a small producer of the mineral on a global scale – Russia is both the largest producer and consumer, followed closely by China – its role is vital to the continued survival of the global trade.

Canadian support provides legitimacy to a lethal product, as documented by the New Internationalist a year ago.

Canadian lobby groups have been integral to blocking the addition of white asbestos to the Rotterdam Convention, a UN-kept list of hazardous substances. The Canadian Medical Association Journal has lambasted this as a “shameful political manipulation of science” and Kathleen Ruff, Senior Advisor on Human Rights to the Rideau Institute in Ottawa, says: “Our government should not be funding this manipulation of science – Canadian scientists should stand up because this is scientifically indefensible as well as morally indefensible.”

Though Canadian global influence is considerable, the domestic industry is marginal – unnoticed by most Canadians. Just two mines remain, both of them in Quebec. Struggling to survive, the Jeffrey mine – once one of the largest asbestos mines in the world – is gasping for breath.

The end of the Canadian asbestos industry seemed certain two months ago – Bernard Coloumbe, owner of the mine, declared the mine would only be able to stay open with a $58 million loan. The Quebec Medical Association – for the first time in history – joined the Canadian Medical Association in calling for the government to stop funding the mine and the Chrysotile Institute with federal cash and to put an end to Canadian asbestos mining and export.

Public demonstrations on 1 July (to mark Canada Day) by asbestosis victim support networks in Australia and Asia demanded that the mines be shut.

The Asbestos Diseases Foundation of Australia issued a press release on 16 August expressing relief over the news that the mine seemed certain to close, declaring: “For the Canadian authorities to even consider in this day and age subsidizing the export of death for the sake of about 200 Canadian jobs is just appalling.”

Two days later the Asia Regional Conference on Asbestos, Jakarta, issued a similar statement, demanding that the exports cease and adding: “Canada portrays itself as a defender of human rights, while continuing to export deadly chrysotile asbestos to Asia.”

Yet now it is an entirely different story: investors from India and London are touring the Jeffrey Mine, being courted for the necessary funds to reopen the mine and breathe life back into a dying, and deadly, industry. The Canadian Cancer Society calls this “deplorable”.

Do you agree? Sign the petition asking Canada to end the trade in asbestos.

Picturesque Edinburgh, itself a UNESCO world heritage site. Photo Credit: Zoe Cormier

After centuries of English domination, the Scots are taking back their country, reclaiming national identity as the Edinburgh Parliament slowly wrests control from London, gaining new parcels of sovereignty bit by bit. The pride is evident: Blue flags are flying, Gallic lessons are filling up and designers are rebranding men in kilts as – oh yes – sexy.

At the same time, greater national sovereignty has led to a green revolution in Scotland: Old trees are taking root once again; an eco-erotic shop opened in Edinburgh; venison and wild boar adorn organic menus; majestic predatory birds are now nesting; and there’s even talk of bringing wolves back to stalk the hills. With new freedom to set many of its own laws, the Scottish government is taking bolder and more ambitious moves to set higher environmental credentials than almost any other country in the world.

A year ago, the government set for the independent-minded country a legally binding target to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 42 per cent by 2020 over 1990 levels. Half the country’s energy will be supplied by renewable energy, mostly by wind. And thanks to the spectacularly strong swells where the North Sea meets the Atlantic, Scotland is leading the world with groundbreaking tidal- and wave- power projects. In March, the government picked 10 new projects – including the world’s first commercial wave and tidal plants, prompting First Minister Alex Salmond to dub Scotland the “Saudi Arabia of marine energy.” Up to a third of the United Kingdom’s energy needs may one day be served by the seas. First up for tidal power: the idyllic island of Islay, home to the world’s “peatiest” – meaning smokiest – whiskies, such as Laphroaig and Bowmore.

Rail lines are being electrified, including between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Forests are being replanted; rather than the postwar monocultures of evergreen trees for the timber trade, diverse forests of native broad-leafed deciduous trees now flourish. Bird species lost just a century or two ago are being reintroduced, such as eagles and ospreys, thanks to National Trust breeding programs.

And enterprising Scottish citizens are restoring their heritage too. On the Alladale Reserve in the farthest north of the country (home to the luxury Alladale lodge and spa) populations of elk, wild boar and otters are being nurtured. The owner of the private land hopes – controversially – to complete the restoration with the wolves, bears and lynx that used to roam the landscape. More than just nostalgic, such predators would restore the highland’s environment, keeping the country’s sapling-devouring deer population in check.

From predators to peaty whiskies to pleasure products, Scotland’s brave eco-stance beckons.

Wonder at the wayward piles of hexagons on the Isle of Staffa. Photo Credit: Zoe Cormier

A GEOLOGICAL WONDER

Austere and sensible the changes may be, but the Scottish landscape is anything but. Formed from a completely different landmass than England, it is the very definition of sublime: misty mountains, craggy valleys and surprisingly spectacular islands. Take the unrivalled Isle of Staffa. A small, uninhabited rock 10 kilometres from the nearest port, it has been home to a solitary family in the 18th century and, even further back, one lone hermit. There are no trees, no bushes and no boulders (use the loo on shore before heading out), just a handful of nesting seabirds and the occasional seal pup. Not much else, save for a rain-drenched donation box for the National Trust of Scotland hewn into the rock. That’s it.

Except for the rocks – hexagonal basalt columns – and the multicoloured grass covering them. It’s just like the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland (Staffa is the geological tail end of it) except draped sideways. There, I finally understood why anyone would be interested in geology – and why the discipline was born in Scotland. The wayward piles of hexagons, like Play-Doh or cake icing squeezed through a template, look too sequenced to be natural. The soaring and tumbling bunches of basalt literally look painted onto the landscape. Most enchanting of all is Fingal’s Cave – fit to inspire the famous overture by Mendelssohn.

The nearest island is tiny green Iona, famed as the birthplace of Celtic Christianity. A stone’s throw from the cathedral’s ancient tombstones, gardens of leafy salads, potatoes and other vegetables are grown for the Argyll Hotel and the St Columba, certified organic in 2008. The St Columba hotel sources 90 per cent of its salads and 30 per cent of their root vegetables from the garden, heats water with solar energy and creates biodiesel from cooking oil. Both hotels have been recognized by Visit Scotland’s Green Business Tourism Scheme.

Bass Rock is home to the largest single colony of gannets and is the site of the ruins of a 16th-century prison which was the inspiration behind Robert Louis Stevenson's Catriona. Photo Credit: Zoe Cormier

THE ALCATRAZ OF THE NORTH

Off the coast about a half-hour from Edinburgh lies Bass Rock – described as one of the wildlife wonders of the world by Sir David Attenborough, home to the largest single colony of gannets and the site of the ruins of a 16th-century prison (dubbed the Alcatraz of the North) that was the inspiration behind Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona, the sequel to Kidnapped.

Catch a boat to Bass Rock from the Scottish Sea Bird Centre, home to puffins, seals and the gannets. The centre features a myriad of fun and subtly educational playthings for kids, including remote-controlled cameras that let them explore the islands and zoom in on seals, puffins and gannets from afar.

Or for a more involved experience, from August to April, you can help uproot and control the invasive tree mallow on the neighbouring islands of Craigleith and Fidra. The alien plant (probably introduced on the islands for makeshift toilet paper on account of its broad, soft leaves) grows up to three metres tall and has overrun the islands, blocking burrows and preventing puffins from nesting, causing their population to plummet from 28,000 pairs to just a few thousand. Since the effort began, puffin numbers have started to recover. “We really are seeing a huge difference now – we can see areas of the rock that we haven’t seen in over 10 years,” says Maggie Sheddan of the Craigleith Management Group, a guide on the centre’s boat trips.

There are new threats to the birds though, she says: Changing sea currents linked to climate change have led to declines in the populations of the fish on which the birds feed, meaning they need the help even more.

Special to The Globe and Mail

WHERE TO STAY

St Columba Hotel Isle of Iona, Argyll; 44 (0) 1681-700-304;www.stcolumba-hotel.co.uk. Sustainability awards: Silver – Green Business Tourism Award from Visit Scotland. Double room: $190.

Argyll Hotel Isle of Iona, Argyll; 44 (0) 1681-700-334;www.argyllhoteliona.co.uk. Sustainability award: Gold – Green Business Tourism Award from Visit Scotland. Double room: $144.

Loch Ossian Youth Hostel Corrour, by Fort William; 44 (0) 1397-732-207;www.syha.org.uk/hostels/highlands/loch_ossian.aspx. Sustainability award: Gold – Green Business Tourism Award from Visit Scotland. Cost: $25 a night. Grey-water recycling, solar and wind panels, compost toilets and a vegetable garden – but no showers or fridges.

Apex Waterloo Place Hotel 13-27 Waterloo Place, Edinburgh; 44 (0) 131-523-1819; www.apexhotels.co.uk. Green Business Tourism Scheme. From $134. An urban hotel with eco-friendly chemicals and green policies.

Radisson SAS Glasgow 301 Argyle St., Glasgow; 44 (0) 141-204-3333;www.radissonblu.co.uk/hotel-glasgow. Gold – Green Business Tourism Award. From $157.

WHERE TO EAT

Iglu 2b Jamaica St., Edinburgh; 44 (0) 131-476-5333; www.theiglu.com. Specializes in organic, wild and local fare at reasonable prices, including vegetarian haggis samosas, Shetland mussels, wild boar and, because you’re in Scotland, Aberdeen Angus rump steak.

Stravaigin 2 8 Ruthven Lane, Glasgow; 44 (0) 141-334-7165;www.stravaigin.com. Global, local, organic, fair trade – the works, with chic and sophisticated decor.

WHAT TO DO

Climb a mountain: After enjoying Arthur’s Seat, head to Cairngorm Mountain (www.cairngormmountain.com; Gold – Green Business Tourism Award from Visit Scotland). If your bones can’t take the hike, trains here generate energy that is sold back to the grid. Cairngorm now offers biodegradable “poo bags” to visitors (yes, human “deposits” were a problem).

Drink whisky: Peaty drams from Islay, such as Laphroaig, Lagavulin, Bowmore and Caol Ila, are renowned for their uniquely Scottish smoky flavour. Soon the entire island will be powered by tidal energy. On the mainland, in Speyside, sustainability award-winning Roseisle distillery (operated by Diageo, which owns Johnny Walker) will recycle its water and produce just 15 per cent of the carbon-dioxide emissions of a typical distillery. Cut down on packaging and pour it straight from the cask at boutique shop Demijohn in Glasgow or Edinburgh (www.demijohn.co.uk).

Shop for vintage in Glasgow: Best bet: Starry Starry Night, 19 Dowanside Lane, Glasgow; 44 (0) 141-337-1837. This is the oldest vintage shop here; it features dresses, top hats and opera costumes up to 200 years old.

Explore eco-erotica in Edinburgh: Organic Pleasures, 71 Broughton St., Edinburgh; 44 (0) 131-558-2777; www.organicpleasures.co.uk. Organic satin corsets for $315, blindfolds from $47.25, and more.

Go birding: The Harbour, North Berwick; 44 (0) 1620-890-202; www.sea bird.org. Gold – Green Business Tourism Award from Visit Scotland.

This economic crisis has left us with many memorable images: vast tent cities in the US, the richest country in the world. Hunks of marble hurled by angry anarchists beneath the Greek Parthenon, the birthplace of Western democracy. But one image sticks out as particularly memorable, if simply for its sheer quirkiness: newly laid-off employees from the bankrupt financial firm Lehman Brothers – one of the first to fall – leaving the building, office trinkets boxed up. And smiling.

Along with razed rainforests and Shanghai skyscrapers this could become one of the defining images of our era: employees happy to be ejected from their well-paid jobs.

This strange combination of joy and loss forces us to ponder a very serious question: why do we work the way we do?

We have come to see a 35-40 hour working week not only as normal but also as essential for a thriving society. But the Commissioner for Health with the UK Sustainable Development Commission begs to differ. Anna Coote argues that long work hours are linked to extreme gaps in wealth, environmental degradation, climate change and lots more besides.

As co-author of the New Economics Foundation (NEF) report 21 hours, Coote proposes that a 21-hour working week should be the norm. In some respects, it already is – each person in Britain already works an average of 20 hours a week if you spread working hours evenly across the population.

It all comes down to what we consider ‘work’: what labour we think is worth paying for. If all the time spent in the UK on unpaid labour – raising children, cooking, household chores and so on – were paid at the minimum wage, it would account for 21 per cent of the country’s GDP. ‘Informal carers’ who attend to the sick and the elderly without pay already ‘save’ the British economy $125 million year.

Rather than allowing that labour to remain unaccounted (and unappreciated), we could ‘redistribute paid labour, reduce the differential between paid and unpaid work, and make better use of human assets,’ says Coote.

Halving the normal working week could solve a litany of social problems: it could slash unemployment (as well as the attendant crime) and reduce state benefits and other social costs. Providing more free time to workers would create space in their lives to exercise, play, sleep and – put simply – enjoy life. Studies consistently show that more leisure means more productivity to boot. Health costs from stress-related illness – one of the greatest burdens on developed nations – would plummet. And gender norms could even improve: men could take on more of what is considered ‘women’s work’ – and fathers could spend increased time with their children.

Such a drastic shift couldn’t happen overnight. Changes would need to be brought in gradually – an increased minimum wage, progressive taxation and slow reductions in legal working hours. ‘This is intended more as a provocation: we want people to consider what society could look like,’ says Coote.

There will be obvious hurdles: ‘We don’t want to dump on communities that already suffer from a lack of paid work.’ Nonetheless, the report is making waves. ‘It really seems to have struck a chord,’ she admits.

Reducing unemployment and giving the overworked more free time makes intuitive sense. But on a global scale the maths becomes truly interesting: reducing working hours could be one of the keys to solving climate change. On a country-by-country basis there is a direct correlation between the average number of working hours and per capita greenhouse gas emissions.

The Washington-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research estimates that if Americans were to work the same number of hours as Europeans (who work up to 300 hours less per year) they would reduce their carbon footprint by up to 30 per cent. Less time spent at a factory or office translates into less time spent driving to work, less energy consumed in the building or on the road, and fewer materials used in production. For example, when the state of Utah brought in a mandatory four-day working week for state employees to avoid layoffs in the wake of the 2008 recession, carbon emissions fell by 4,535 tonnes in one year. Driving public vehicles three million fewer miles cut fuel consumption by 744,000 gallons and saved $1.4 million.

Other jurisdictions have also brought in shorter working weeks as emergency measures to reduce unemployment. In 2008 France adopted a 35-hour working week and the slogan, ‘Work less, live more.’ Hard-hit Canadian auto companies have experimented with shifting to four-day weeks to avoid job losses.

Frequently, employees are extremely hostile – at first.

‘Families are working way longer than they were in the 1970s and going deeper into debt to buy bigger houses and fill them with fancier gadgets – they are on a treadmill of consumerism that is hard to get off,’ says Andrew Jackson, National Director of Social and Economic Policy with the Canadian Labour Congress. ‘But we have found that once people have moved to shorter work weeks, they are reluctant to go back – they start to live their lives in a different way.’

Once he cut his working hours Conrad Schmidt, a former software developer and founder of the Canadian Work Less Party, never looked back. ‘My life was so much better with less money but more time. I wanted to introduce other people to the idea of ‘voluntary simplicity’, he says. ‘This is not about working less – it’s about doing different kinds of work and more important kinds of work.’

Schmidt sold his car to reduce his ecological footprint and suddenly found himself saving $400 a month. ‘I could have spent this on a computer or some other gadget. In other words I could have just consumed more. It was wondering what to do with my extra cash that introduced me to the Jevons Paradox,’ he says.

The 19th century British economist William Stanley Jevons found that improvements in efficiency and lower prices actually spur consumption and resource use. For example, increased gas mileage in the 1970s in response to skyrocketing oil prices led to people driving their cars more. So our working hours have only lengthened when academics and politicians believed labour-saving technologies would free us. In practice, increases in energy efficiency have historically translated into increases in energy use.

‘It is efficiency that got us in this mess in the first place,’ says Schmidt. Rather than see gains in material efficiency translate into higher consumption (or mass unemployment and demoralizing automation), we could see technological innovations and increases in efficiency do what they were supposed to: liberate us from labour.

The Work Less Party has no illusions. The goal is merely to get the message out. ‘We’ll never win a seat – but we always win the debates,’ says Schmidt.

Which makes sense, says John de Graaf, founder of the Take Back Your Time coalition. ‘All our surveys consistently show that people are most dissatisfied with two things in their lives: time and financial security – not stuff,’ he says.

Since 2004 the coalition has advocated for people to reduce their working hours voluntarily in the US. ‘There are no laws regarding paid vacations and about half the workforce took less than one paid week off last year,’ de Graaf says. ‘And yet look at Denmark – they went on a general strike to raise the legal paid vacation time from five weeks to six.’

He believes that the recession combined with the ecological crisis and widespread unhappiness in wealthy countries – the subject of his film Affluenza – could lead to a dramatic paradigm shift in how we think about work.

Changing our working week ultimately means changing the way we think about work – the question of how many hours we should work strikes at the very heart of ‘work’ itself. Is work growing a potato? Minding the kids? Fixing somebody’s bathroom sink? Organizing somebody else’s day? Putting words into a series of ones and zeros and sending them across the globe in a second? For many of us, what we do as ‘work’ is inseparable from our sense of self worth.

‘A lot of who we are has so much more to do with how we feel our talents contribute to our community and how valued we feel, rather than our ability to make lots of money,’ says de Graaf.

And that is the point, says Anna Coote. ‘One of the key findings of the 21 Hours report is that the amount of control you have over your time is almost as important as how you use that time – possibly even more important,’ says Coote. But our time, like our labour, has become commodified, she says.

Wresting back a bit of control over both would go a long way. ‘We want people to understand that this not about slacking – this about balance,’ stresses de Graaf.

More time outdoors, more time to play musical instruments and rediscover our creativity, more time with our kids, fitter bodies, reading more, cleaner air, less worrying about the fate of the planet – what’s not to like? Throw in less disparity between the rich and the poor, a more affordable standard of living and less corporate control over our time, and we approach what some might be tempted to label utopia.

But how to achieve such a society?

‘It’s all in how you package the message,’ reckons Erik Assadourian, Director of the Worldwatch Institute’s State Of The World: 2010. ‘The Take Back Your Time movement is a perfect example: instead of telling people they should want less money, tell them they should want more free time. Who on earth doesn’t want more free time?’

Telling people to buy less stuff is hard. But offering more time is easy.

‘This is the beauty of our message – rather than being gloomy and negative, “sacrifice for the sake of the planet”, we’re offering people something that they will genuinely enjoy,’ says de Graaf.

Nonetheless, re-engineering our culture won’t be easy. The biggest challenge isn’t economics or technology – it’s psychology.

‘That is the million dollar question,’ says de Graaf. ‘How to change our consciousness and our culture? Other than educating people that this is not about slacking but about balancing, nobody really has the answer yet. It will boil down to having to make the choice: time versus stuff.’

And while we can always make more stuff, we can’t make more time – each of us only has so many grains of sand in our hourglass. As difficult as our mortality may be to contemplate, we each need to learn that our lives are not going to get longer – and in fact, the stress of punishing schedules and sedentary jobs can shorten them.

There is only one way to manufacture more time: to learn how not to waste the amount we already have.

The most significant point of the day was, perhaps, when the driver of a red Ferrari tried – and failed – to cross the picket line.

With giant red signs reading CLOSED, banners strung from the roof and very noisy drums, activists shut down a Shell petrol station in Islington, North London for a few hours on Saturday. The point? To protest the oil company’s ongoing expansion in the Canadian tar sands, as well as its never-ending destruction of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, and its attempts to build a pipeline despite community opposition in Ireland, days before its annual general meeting.

The Ferrari driver did not understand at first that he would not be able pump any gas – one of very few motorists to make such a mistake that afternoon. Halting with his shiny red car on the driveway, it took several minutes for him to realise that he would suffer the inconvenience of having to drive several minutes down the road to refuel.

This was the second time activist groups, including Rising Tide and UK Tar Sands Network, shut down a gas station in the British capital. They did it the same at a BP terminal in west London a month ago in the same fashion: loud samba, bright flags, and ‘CLIMATE CRIME SCENE’ yellow tape wrapped around the pumps.

Responsible for three to five times more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil, the tar sands are the primary reason that Canada’s emissions rose 26 per cent from 1990 levels (and why the country is such an obstinate hurdle at international climate change negotiations). They are also the main reason that Canada claimed title as the largest supplier of foreign oil to the US in 2007.

Though it was thought that Alberta crude never flows to Europe, only south to the US and east to Asia (and China in particular), Greenpeace Canada recently disclosed that oil from the sands is in fact filling European engines as well.

The Shell demo coincided not only with the company’s AGM, but also with a tour by Alberta’s Environment Minister Rob Renner across Europe to promote the province’s ‘clean energy story’ (the significance of that last word, ‘story’ not being lost on the keen of eye).

In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the tar sands are being promoted as a clean and safe alternative to offshore drilling – which many consider a laughable comparison, considering that tar sands extraction produces giant tailings ponds through their normal course of operations, rather than as a matter of accident.

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

Moreover, the Canadian government is quickly inking plans for the construction of an Enbridge pipeline to pump crude direct from the sands to the Pacific for Asian markets by 2015. Tankers twice the size of the Exxon Valdez are slated to ship oil through the narrow and rocky waters around the Charlotte Islands – routes that would be a nightmare for such large ships to navigate, say local communities. ‘We could suffer a disaster that would make the Valdez look like a walk in the park,’ said Chief Ha’eis Clare Hill, Eagle Clan Chief-in-waiting of the Gitga’at First Nation on British Columbia’s coast, visiting London last year to raise awareness about the proposed pipeline.

At a time when expansion of the sands looks more certain than ever, some feel the need to express dissent more necessary than ever.

Older people paused to congratulate the demonstrators for ‘putting their feet down’. Children joined in the dance, to the bemusement of their puzzled mothers, glancing over flyers. Even the most jaded would have found it impossible not to enjoy the rousing crescendo of noise raised for a passing wedding party – and the delight the new couple took in the cacophony of samba clanged just for them.

Nonetheless, the jaded would invariably question the purpose of such a protest and perhaps label it futile and insignificant. Granted, a tempting characterization to make given the economic and political power of the Alberta energy industry, the second largest reserve of oil in the world, responsible for one in nine jobs in the province, and increasingly host to energy and extraction interests from every corner of the globe.

Which brings us back to the age-old question: what’s the point in protesting anyways? What does a noisy rabble or a quiet sit-in accomplish in the face of power on such a scale? Was the action intended to stem the tide of Canadian tar flowing into British motors? To permanently damage the station? Or to make even the tiniest dent in Shell’s considerably sizable profits that day?

Of course not. Sometimes, the point is that the point needs to be made. Even if the momentum behind the tar sands seems unstoppable, the political power insurmountable, some will let it be known that they, at least, are neither ignorant nor wilfully complicit. And sometimes the goal is even more basic, and more immediate: to spread the word about a project that is both the largest in human history and yet so pervasively unknown.

Even if most Britons do not know about the sands, their financial contribution and the presence of its products in their engines, anyone passing by that day would have found it hard to avoid noticing the point a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens were trying to make.

Except for the man in the red Ferrari, incredulous that anything could prevent him from filling up his tank, oblivious to the world around him.

But this heavy-metal soup of arsenic, mercury and cadmium, mixed with carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic compounds, isn’t fully contained by the sandy bottom of the so-called “ponds”. Industry and government long contended that leaks were marginal and actively managed – but we now know that at least 11 million litres of toxins flow into the Athabasca River every day.

Communities all over the Athabasca rivershed are exposed to whatever flows downstream – and none more so than Fort Chipewyan. This isolated town is made up of just over 1,200 members of the Mikisew Cree, Métis and Athabasca Chipewyan First Nations, who live on the shores of Lake Athabasca, the tail end of every leaky tailings pond.

A tailings pond created by a Syncrude upgrader upstream of Fort Chipewyan. Photo Credit: Jiri Rezac, Courtesy of Greenpeace.

For years, people worried. Fish were caught with tumours on their sides, or with deformities as extreme as two mouths. Duck meat didn’t taste quite right. Moose livers were covered in lesions. This would be disturbing to any community – but especially to one that still hunts, fishes and traps as regularly as the people in Fort Chipewyan. Moose meat and walleye fish aren’t occasional rustic treats for weekend cottagers. Many in Fort Chipewyan eat them every single day.

They noticed people growing sick – much sicker than they had been in the past. Immune diseases. Diabetes. Lupus. And cancer – not just in the old, but also the young. Rare cancers that should not be occurring in such high numbers in so small a community. Dr John O’Connor, the local doctor, was so worried that in 2006 he decided to go public with his concerns, unleashing a battle to get to the truth that is still continuing today.

Cancer cover-up

The federal government’s first response was to rush out a study which concluded that the community did not have higher than average cancer rates, and claimed that contaminants in the river were not at levels that should cause concern. Soon afterwards, to the deep consternation of the community, Dr O’Connor was placed under formal investigation.

Nobody in Fort Chipewyan believed the government’s findings. They commissioned their own study of the rivershed from Dr Kevin Timoney. Published in 2007, it found “worrisome” levels of many heavy metals and carcinogens in the water and wildlife – for example, some 90 per cent of male whitefish exceeded mercury levels that were safe for consumption.

Bowing to pressure, the government agreed to conduct a more thorough analysis. Towards the end of 2009 it published a study that concluded that the rate of cancers in Fort Chipewyan was 30 per cent higher than expected – but, to the community’s frustration, stopped short of concluding that the tar sands might be a factor.

“The argument over whether or not the cancers in Fort Chip are caused by the tar sands is ridiculous,” says Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, a young woman from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation who has become a prominent anti-tar sands activist. “The increase in health problems has coincided with the increase in development of the sands.”

One of the leading voices calling for a comprehensive baseline study into local pollution and its health impacts since 2003 has been George Poitras, former chief of the Mikisew Cree. “It is like pulling teeth,” he reveals. “The government doesn’t want to resource anything that will act as an impediment to their ability to exploit the tar sands.”

Mikisew First Nation former chief George Poitras, outside Buckingham Palace on his first visit to London in September, 2009.

This lack of resources has meant paltry monitoring of the state of the downstream rivershed since extraction began in earnest. Another independent study, by Professor David Schindler of the University of Alberta, found “serious defects” in the government’s monitoring programme. The analysis, published in December 2009 in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that pollution in the river was up to five times higher than government figures had stated.

These findings just scratch the surface of how the community could be being affected. Little is yet known about how the different toxic metals and petrochemicals interact, or how their effects could be magnified given that the flow of contaminants into the rivershed during spring melt coincides with when fish fry are growing.

What Fort Chipewyan needs, argues George, is a comprehensive, baseline health study that would do a thorough analysis of the entire community, and then track changes in the future based on that. Unfortunately, the lack of good information from the past means that the baseline would have to consist of current data – 2010 at the earliest. He acknowledges that it wouldn’t be able to show changes to Fort Chipewyan over the past 15 years. “That is disappointing – but we can’t go backwards in time. The next best thing we can do is to determine people’s health now and monitor as we go along.”

Considering that the government has a 50-100 year plan for increasing output from the sands, there will be plenty of monitoring to do.

Licence to spill

Meanwhile, the government continues to grant new licences to any company looking to expand its operations in the region. “Our communities are given no part in the decision-making process when licences for exploration are granted,” says George, who until recently held the role of consultation co-ordinator with government and industry for the Mikisew Cree. “First Nations are kept totally out of the loop. We are only consulted at the application stage for specific projects.”

In many cases it is not the provincial government which consults but a third-party entity, and usually the consultation is no more than tokenistic. “Industry has its hand in the pot that pays these groups to make sure consultation is done,” claims Eriel – who works as a campaigner with the Rainforest Action Network, because “when I first saw the devastation of the boreal forest, I knew I had to devote my life to preserving my beautiful homeland”. She has experienced these sham “stakeholder engagements” first hand. “In many cases, they only consult when they already have the bulldozers lined up. They simply come in, give a presentation, and tick off the box saying they’ve consulted.”

Even more suspicious, she feels, is the groundwork that industry lays down in advance. “They will come in and sponsor things like ice rinks and playgrounds and computer labs – then come in a month later for their consultation process. They will dangle the carrot of a few jobs – it is clearly manipulative. These are communities with deplorable living standards and a severe housing crisis. These corporations know exactly what they are doing.”

Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, a Dene woman from the Athabasca community of Fort Chipewyan demonstrating outside the Royal Bank of Scotland's London headquarters in November 2009.

But in many cases it works. The oil industry has been active in Alberta for 40 years, and, says George, “it has given the impression to the local communities that this is the only industry people should rely on – so they’ve become very dependent on it. Young people see the sands as the be-all and end-all in terms of careers and vocations. It has become a blinding force.”

Yet, as with any economic boom zone, many social problems are now plaguing the industrial heartland of Fort McMurray and spilling over into communities like Fort Chipewyan all over the Athabasca region. “Drug addiction, crime, prostitution, domestic abuse…” lists George. “We are only now starting to deal with these problems head-on, because the cancers have forced us to – we’re just at the tip of the iceberg.”

Nevertheless, Eriel believes it’s easy to understand why some communities do deals with the oil industry. “The communities often feel as though the companies already have the permits. They could spend 10 years fighting them or just strike a deal. The leaders will do what is best for their communities when they need food and jobs, and they figure: “Well, they’re going to destroy our land anyways so we might as well get some money first.” I don’t blame them,’ she says. ‘This is all part of a subjugation tactic by the Canadian Government. If people no longer have the ability to rely on the land, their only choice for an economic base is industry offering them deals.”

Fight for treaty rights

However, as the social, environmental and health impacts of the tar sands bite, more and more indigenous communities are taking a position of opposition. In 2008, chiefs from across Alberta and the neighbouring provinces of Saskatchewan and British Columbia came together to call for a moratorium on all new tar sands developments, and threatened to back this up with legal action.

This poses a genuine threat to the long-term future of the project. All tar sands developments in Canada are taking place on the traditional territories of indigenous First Nations. Most of them signed treaties with the crown in the 19th century giving them certain legal rights, including the right to consultation on new projects that would infringe on their abilities to hunt, fish and trap in their traditional territories.

This is one topic, says Deranger, that the mainstream media in Canada has brushed over in its coverage of the tar sands. “The Government of Canada has recognized native treaty rights in the constitution, but actually going forward and recognizing what those rights mean hasn’t happened in this country yet. It would open a Pandora’s box of issues – this is just not something the Canadian public is prepared for.”

The concept of “free prior and informed consent” – in other words, the right of indigenous peoples to say “no” – to any new development on their lands was recently enshrined in international law through the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. But its application has been conspicuously absent in Canada, which has refused to sign the Declaration. Many leaders of First Nations and experts in aboriginal law believe it may be the enforcement of these treaty rights through legal challenges that stands the best chance of stopping further expansion in the tar sands.

However, getting treaty rights taken seriously by the Alberta government is proving to be a challenge. George suspects there may be a racist component to the way Fort Chipewyan’s concerns have been treated. “It’s hard to prove racism, but I suspect they see us as a predominantly aboriginal community ’so to hell with them’.”

Charges of environmental racism are not new in Canada. All over the country, indigenous communities have been affected by industrial developments, from mega-dam projects flooding reserves in Quebec, to reckless uranium mining near Inuit communities in the Northwest Territories, to the construction of petrochemical refineries on land ceded from First Nations in Ontario. The resulting loss of land, health and traditional ways of living – from hunting and fishing to even swimming in lakes – can be summed up in two words, according to Eriel: “cultural genocide”.

Ada Lockridge, a member of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation in southern Ontario, overlooking the Suncor refinery sitting on land that once belonged to her community.

I will not be silenced

The sidelining of critical indigenous voices can have serious consequences for the individuals involved, as George found late last year when he was forced by the oil industry to step down from his position as consultation co-ordinator with the Mikisew Cree First Nation.

“The president of the longest-running company in the tar sands met with our leadership and in no uncertain terms said they did not like that I travel internationally [to raise concerns about the tar sands in Europe and the US] on Mikisew time to bring negative media attention to the tar sands industry,” he explains. “So, they said, either the Mikisew would have to terminate my employment or somehow silence me, or the Nation would lose contracts.”

This, he says, is standard practice. “In a nutshell: penalize the First Nation when they are showing a lack of support. We are simply identifying concerns related to tar sands development, but apparently we are not allowed to do that.”

George admits he found the experience shocking. “You would expect that kind of treatment of indigenous peoples by multibillion-dollar oil companies and corrupt Third World governments where indigenous peoples have no voice whatsoever. But this is Canada, a developed G8 nation! It is 2010 and we are still dealing with the same old issues.”

After fighting the tar sands for five years, and leaving his job as a result, has he had enough? “The thought of giving up did enter my mind, of living my life and having a garden at the back of my house,” he muses. “But only momentarily. Actually, it’s had the opposite effect. When Dr O’Connor was first charged, it lit a fire in me to show to the rest of the world what was going on. This has made that fire much stronger. And now I am able to speak up much more freely.”

His plans now? “This will be my full-time vocation,” he announces. “And as long as they have a 50-100 year plan, you can be sure we have our work cut out for us. I’ll die doing this.”

Activist shareholders lost their bid today to force oil giant BP to disclose detailed information about the risks associated with investing in the energy-intensive Canadian oil sands. Still, they chalked up a significant victory in the company’s response to their effort.

For the first time, BP disclosed information regarding the expectations of demand for tar sands oil and future regulations on carbon emissions that the company used when deciding on the viability of a planned $2.4 billion joint investment with Husky Energy in the Sunrise oil sands field in Alberta.

Special Resolution No. 25, presented to shareholders at BP’s annual meeting today in London, asked that BP go farther and commission reports reassessing its decision to proceed with the oil sands project, including looking at the projected price of carbon under potential international climate change treaties and other legislation and at fluctuations in the price of oil.

Supporters of the resolution — including the managers of the multibillion-dollar California state pension funds CalPERS and CalSTRS — worry that oil derived from the tar sands could become more costly with increasing regulation of greenhouse gases and tariffs placed on high-carbon fuels, such as those proposed in California.

“The oil sands are an expensive business — we are asking for relatively innocuous disclosure and transparency,” said Niall O’Shea, head of responsible investing at The Co-operative Asset Management group and a BP shareholder who filed the resolution.

“A company with such expertise and wealth should be innovating in the right direction [with investments in clean energy].”

Just over 6 percent of shareholders voted in favor of the resolution. An additional 9 percent abstained, taken as a sign by some of opposition to the Sunrise project but a reluctance to vote against management.

BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg still recognized the shareholders concerns, telling the meeting:

“This resolution raises perfectly legitimate concerns — I understand the concerns, but I disagree with the analysis.

“The decision to move into the sands is a strategic one — most analysts think it is a stretch to think we can meet future energy demands without fossil fuels, we will need at least 50 million barrels a day of new oil.”

The Problem with Bitumen

The oil sands deposits in northern Alberta are the second largest reserve of oil in the world, behind only Saudi Arabia, and the main reason that Canada is the largest supplier of foreign oil to the United States.

A low-grade mix of bitumen, sand and rock lying beneath northern boreal forest, the oil sands cover an area roughly the size of Florida. About 3 percent of this area has been developed, and this region is considered by many to be the largest industrial project in the world.

Large quantities of water — two to four barrels of water per barrel of oil — is required to isolate crude oil. This water, left with high levels of heavy metals such as mercury and cadmium as well as petrochemicals like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, is collected in large “tailings ponds” covering more than 50 square kilometers. A recent report from RiskMetrics Group warned that new Canadian laws that will require cleanup of those toxic ponds could put a serious dent in the corporate bottom line.

The carbon intensity of oil sands extraction has also brought the region under scrutiny for its impact on climate change. According to WWF, if fully exploited, it would generate enough carbon dioxide emissions to raise atmospheric levels by 12 parts per million.

“This would result in temperature rise of six degrees Celsius and lead the planet into catastrophic climate change,” Louise Rouse, director of investor engagement with FairPensions, told the board.

The oil sands projects are also having an impact on the traditions and resources used by the regions’ First Nations communities.

During the meeting, George Poitra of the Misikew Cree First Nation questioned BP’s executives about the impact their plan would have on the Cree and Metis communities, noting in particular the high cancer rates in downstream Fort Chipewyan and high levels of heavy metals in the Athabasca River, whose water is used for tar sands production.

“We have become environmental hostages on our own lands,” Poitra said.

Clayton Thomas-Muller, a Canadian aboriginal rights activist from the Indigenous Environmental Network, asked if BP would “respect the standing resolution by all 44 chiefs representing First Nations in the region for a moratorium on new projects.”

Protesting the Tar Sands

As the meeting was under way in London, Greenpeace members protested outside BP’s Alberta headquarters dressed in business suits with money flowing out of their pockets, “greenwashing” the corporate office with green paint.

UK Tar Sands Network protesters add their voices in the UK, where activists have been unique in the world (outside of Canada) in actively protesting the tar sands operations. They have demonstrated against the Canadian government, as well as British banks that invest in the tar sands and oil companies, including shutting down a BP gas station over the weekend in west London.

Campaigners in the UK have been strategically targeting BP because the company is not yet active in the sands, unlike Shell, which faces a shareholder resolution vote on the same concerns at its own annual meeting in May.

BP’s final decision to move into the Sunrise oil sands project has been delayed until later this year, the fourth time in three years that the verdict has been postponed. The company expect the Sunrise joint venture to produce 200,000 barrels a day by 2020. It would use in-situ techniques, rather than more environmentally damaging surface mining, but a recent Pembina Institute report finds that in-situ mining still results in more greenhouse gas emissions because of the highly energy-intensive process necessary to extract the oil and process it.

During the meeting, BP CEO Tony Hayward stressed that the oil company was still looking beyond petroleum, including investing $4 billion in alternative fuels since 2005.

“All forms of energy will play a role in our future, from oil sands to solar,” Hayward said.

Rouse disagreed with BP’s high continued reliance on fossil fuels.

“Their business strategy assumes that world energy demand will increase by 40 percent, 80 percent of which will be met by fossil fuels — but those assumptions are based on International Energy Agency’s reference scenarios of ‘business as usual’ without any action on climate change, any international regulation,” she said.

“Copenhagen did not achieve a lot, but it did determine that that scenario cannot be allowed to pass.”

As the old adage, “water water everywhere but ne’er a drop to drink” goes, fresh water on our planet may seem plentiful and abundant, but we are actually facing an imminent water shortage. Thanks to intensive irrigation for agriculture and industry, we move water around just as we do oil and gas, depleting underground aquifers and damming rivers. The former Soviet Union’s notorious Aral Sea – turned into a parched desert when its waters were drained for cotton production – could be a sign of things to come.

“On water we are 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 Advisor on Water to the 63rd President of the United Nations General Assembly. 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.

Here’s what you can do with your diet to reduce your water footprint – and improve your health at the same time.

Eat less meat

Eating less meat is absolutely the easiest thing you can do if you’re on the carnivorous side of things, and your heart will thank you. Any kind of farmed animal meat will have a larger water footprint than any fruit or vegetable, due to all the water needed to grow their feed. A kilogram of potato flakes costs 900 litres of water to grow, but a kilo of pork slurped up 4,800 litres in its production. And some meats are even more water-wasteful than others: a kilo of beef requires a staggering 15,500 litres of water to create, compared to just 3,900 litres for a kilo of chicken.

Cut back on sugar

Sugar cane is one of the most water-thirsty crops, coming in with 1,500 litres of water per kilo of white sugar, compared to, say, cereals such as wheat (1,300 litres) or corn (900 litres). An estimated 200 litres of water are needed for the sugar in one can of cola, for example.

Eat local

Water is also required to produce other materials besides food–industrial facilities, whether they produce metals, plastics or fabrics, will need a lot of water. Anywhere from 70 to 170 litres of water are needed to produce a single tank of gasoline (so just imagine the water footprint of air-freighted food). Cutting back on the mileage from farm to your plate will save water, too. And you’ll benefit from fresher food, often much riper when picked and higher in vitamins by the time it reaches your plate.

Eat less processed food

Water is needed for every stage of food production, and that certainly includes any kind of refining, processing, or canning. So pick fresh meats and produce and cook things yourself, rather than buying pre-fab sauces and processed junk food. Eat fresher food, cut back on added sugar, preservatives and chemicals; hone your skills in the kitchen, make a healthier home and host more dazzling dinner parties. What have you got to lose?

Drink less coffee

Go gentle on the java – 140 litres of water are needed for just one cup of coffee. A cup of tea, on the other hand, rings up only 30 litres of water. Save the stains on your teeth, the strain on your tummy and the unpleasant jitters. Your bones, vulnerable to weakening from too much caffeine, will also thank you.

It takes as many as 70 litres of water to grow just one apple.

We use far more water than we realize – for example, a pair of jeans cost 11,000 litres of water to produce. This “hidden” or “virtual” water is invisible to most of us, which is why the Water Footprint Network in the Netherlands is researching the “water footprints” of the things we buy, “to try and make that link between production and consumption, and to help people understand how their choices impact global water supplies,” says Professor Arjen Hoesktra, creator of the water footprint concept. “There are lots of things that people can do, but in the end we are really talking about food,” he says. Around 86 percent of world water use goes to crop production, and what we eat accounts for about 70 percent of the average person’s water footprint.

Wondering how much water it takes to produce the food you eat every day? Here’s what goes into your daily bread…

Apple: 70 litres

It takes 70 litres for a “big mac,” almost entirely from the water soaked up by the trees in an orchard during the apple’s growth. Crop irrigation is also the main factor in an orange’s water footprint, which is 50 litres.

Red wine: 240 litres

It takes 240 litres of water to produce a 250 mL glass of red wine, almost entirely from vineyard irrigation. Beer interestingly comes in lower with 75 litres of water for the same sized glass.

Coffee: 140 litres

A single cup of black coffee takes 140 litres of water to produce. It requires 21,000 litres to grow a kilo of coffee beans, which translates to about 140 litres for the seven grams of java needed to make one cup of coffee. Add in another 20 litres of water for a splash of milk (20 mL), and another 13.5 litres if you take sugar (two teaspoons).

Hamburger: 2,400 litres

A burger costs 2,400 litres of water, almost entirely due to the 2,300 litres needed to create the 150 grams of meat. Beef is one of the most water-needy things you can eat because of how much time and energy is needed to raise cattle: A cow usually produces about 200 kg of boneless beef, taking about three years from birth to slaughter. And in its lifetime, a cow usually eats 1,300 kg of grains, along with 7,200 kg of hay and other roughage, consuming more than 3 million litres to grow the crops over those three years. On top of that, throw in the 24,000 litres of water the cow eats and the 7,000 litres of water for “servicing” (washing the animal and its waste away). And if you slap on a slice of cheese (say, an ounce) that brings the total up to 2,550 litres.

Eggs and toast: 480 litres

A slice of bread will chalk up 80 litres in water, thanks to the water needed to grow the wheat. And a single egg costs 200 litres in water to produce the grain needed to feed the chickens.

Chocolate: 2,400 litres

Are you ready? It takes 2,400 litres of water to produce just 100 grams of chocolate.

Of course, water footprints for the same product made in different parts of the world will vary. But just because a product from one region of the world has a higher water footprint than from another country doesn’t make it a more ecologically prudent choice. Wines from, say, rainy British Columbia will have soaked up more water in their growth than wines from more arid regions like California. But they represent a more water-wise choice than wines from somewhere like drought-stricken Australia, a continent that is suffering acutely from the ravages of poor water management.

Remember: It’s not just what you eat, it’s where it comes from that counts, too.

Hard, clear and resistant to heat and impact, polycarbonate plastics made with bisphenol A “are excellent,” says Joe Schwarcz, director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, “and that’s exactly the problem for suppliers now that BPA has become a dirty word.”

So the race is on to make to make something just as good.

“If it was easy, somebody would have done it already,” says Geoff Coates, a chemist at Cornell University and co-founder of Novomer, a company now testing technology he devised that produces something biodegradable, non-toxic and largely made of carbon dioxide.

According to Prof. Coates, cost is an issue, just as it is for products that employ polylactic acid, which is made from corn and biodegradable but melts at much lower temperatures.

Donald J. Darensbourg at Texas A&M University is, like Prof. Coates, chasing a successor that uses carbon dioxide, but so far can’t offer a replacement for BPA. He points out that there are other hard, clear plastics on the market. One produced in Tennessee by Eastman Chemical Co. contains no BPA, but, again, it is more expensive and melts more readily. “These are totally fine for baby bottles and water bottles – I have one on my desk right now,” Prof. Darensbourg says.

Meanwhile, Kyu Yong Choi of the University of Maryland is taking a different approach. He published a theoretical model last year for producing polycarbonates that minimize their BPA residue, he says, “fairly simply by controlling the reaction conditions.” He has since done the lab work to prove that the process is chemically possible, and now is looking for about $500,000 (U.S.) to carry out a feasibility study.

The future is more promising for the other big source of BPA exposure, the plastic lining on tin cans.

Prof. Coates’s company is working with a Dutch firm on a carbon-dioxide-derived resin that Novomer chief executive officer Jim Mahoney says will be “very cost-competitive” – and should be on the market next year.

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.