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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

“There’s what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I do find this interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

Not a single one got the answer right: Canada.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Jiri Rezac, Courtesy of Greenpeace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Jiri Rezac, Courtesy of Greenpeace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RBS headquarters in London. Photo Credit: Zoe Cormier

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

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

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

Photo Credit: Zoe Cormier

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

“But he said he would look into it.”

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

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

Photo Credit: Zoe Cormier

Reaching Higher

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

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

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

Going Digital

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Denialist boom

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

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

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

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

Changing tactics

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

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

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

Reason to hope

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

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