One of the most far-out conspiracy theories mentioned by my critics was that the green revolution was somehow the result of a Soviet plot to undermine the West through carbon taxes or cap and trade programs.

The funny thing is that the very evening I posted that article, I attended a business networking event in downtown Vancouver with representatives from clean tech companies.

The people I met there were the very definition of entrepreneurial — not one Russian accented apparatchik in sight. Though the green technology that they offered was cutting edge, many of them were already profitable or in the process of winning contracts worth millions of dollars (and if some of these technologies start getting exported, as is the plan, we’ll be looking at billions). These firms employ skilled professionals and executives who are earning big bucks and doing award-winning work.

This business reality is diametrically at odds with the view of climate change skeptics.

They still look at the green movement as something that is going to be a net drain on our economy. It’s weird, because most of them are rational enough to recognize the value of what these companies are offering.

Some would certainly see the theoretical appeal of an electric vehicle with excellent range that you never have to fill up. They would see that a company with technology that can lower energy use and utility costs by 15 to 20 per cent is good, too. Hell, they can see the value of a longer-lasting lightbulb.

The skeptics see these, but they cannot see the big picture. Our country has hemorrhaged good-paying manufacturing jobs. China, India and other rapid-growth countries are increasingly eating our lunch. Now, here we are at the start of a technological revolution that can help us start actually building industries again and selling stuff besides oil, lumber and copper.

And what do the skeptics say? “Thanks, but no thanks. We’ll stick to the way we’re already doing things. Things are going just swimmingly.”

Some theorize that climate change skeptics could be persuaded about the need to make significant changes to the way we work and live, if only they would listen to the vast preponderance of scientific studies on the issue. I don’t think so.

I think the main problem is that the skeptics are not, by and large, entrepreneurial. They know little to nothing of running a business. And they wouldn’t see an opportunity if it was delivered to them on the back of a polar bear.

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If you’re curious about what I wrote that deserved this honor, here are the articles that were recognized for extraordinary awesomeness:

• Vancouver: The Greenest City in the West
• Happy city, happy planet
• Vancouver in 2050

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Boy, were we ever wrong.

Nice business model: “We’re going to get this product out of the ground and sell it for many billions of dollars every day. But if there is a catastrophic failure, well… we’ll improvise a solution if that happens. We’re not in the business of crossing our bridges until we come to them, you know? Why set aside significant resources for safety features that will cost huge dollars when our legal liability will be limited to a small fraction of the damage?”

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To illustrate the paradox, just imagine that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper takes a break from — well, whatever he is doing while parliament is prorogued — in order to make an unexpected announcement: “We will build a city of the future in Yellowknife!” he shouts with a wild look in his eye. The hastily-assembled reporters move as a unit towards the back of the room and look to the exits.

“Now, I know the Al Gore crowd won’t like this, but the oil sands development in Alberta will double its production capacity to fund this gleaming northern metropolis. Not to worry, taxpayers — to ensure that this city is built as fast as possible while getting the best value for your money, Yellowknife will be designated as a special economic zone. The developers will be able to employ slave, er, ah, inexpensive foreign workers not subject to Canadian labor laws. Oh, and did I mention we’re going to build a commercial and residential tower more than twice the size of the Empire State Building?”

Sounds utterly ridiculous, right? The only question is which group would tear Harper apart with their bare hands first: the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, or his own caucus. The environmental damage alone for building a huge city in a fragile and largely frozen ecosystem would be obvious to a small child. Add robust oil sands development into the mix and there’s a good chance the United Nations Security Council would authorize military intervention to topple the Harper regime.

A Cautionary Tale for Urban Planners
So why is this scenario actually playing out in Dubai with so little attention paid to the environmental damage it is doing to the planet? Just so we’re clear about the scale of the problem in the world’s least sustainable city:

Dubai consumes more resources per capita than any other country in the world, including the US. The city is a monument to indulgence, luxury, and, thus far, utter disregard for ecological footprint or sustainability: for example, Dubai currently consumes a whopping 250 million gallons of water per day (around 97% of which is desalinated sea water) to sustain a city of less than 1.5 million people.

Of course, all those seawater desalination plants require tremendous amounts of energy, which comes from the burning of fossil fuel, namely oil. One would think that a desert kingdom with such challenges would try to conserve some of its precious resources. Instead, the scorching hot desert city plans to literally evaporate its wealth by building the world’s biggest water fountain:

The fountains, which has yet to be named, will be capable of shooting water over 150 metres into the air – the height of a 50-storey building – and stretch over 275 metres – the length of two football fields. The $218 million project will be 25 percent larger than the iconic fountains at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas.

The 828 meter-tall Burj Dubai building will only add to the city’s troubles. It essentially added a city on top of the existing city. All the Vancouver city planners in the world — and Dubai certainly tried to get all of them — won’t be able to fix the basic problem: they built a decadent, modern city in a place that lacked enough natural resources to properly provide for a small medieval town.

Sour Grapes and Sweet Crude
Some will characterize my analysis as a bitter, sour-grapes rant of a patriotic Canuck motivated by the demotion of the CN Tower to second-best status. Others will point out that cities in North American are filled with skyscrapers — why can’t the Middle East aspire to this kind of prosperity and engineering feats?

But let’s remember that the West built up most of it’s cities at a time of cheap energy and no general consensus on the threat of global warming. We may have developed and achieved high levels of prosperity at a high cost to our environment. But until the last few decades (and for most of the population, until the last few years), our society did not understand the potential link between our industrial development and environmental degradation. Now that most of us are clear on the connection (and the dangers), we now aspire to incorporate environmental sustainability into everything we do. We are horrified by urban nightmares of places like Los Angeles and Atlanta. Freeways are out, bike paths are in. We may still fail most of the time in achieving sustainable cities — even Vancouver doesn’t yet come close to being carbon-neutral — but at least we’re aiming for a greener future.

As for Dubai, they have access to exactly the same data on environmental degradation and climate change that we’ve got, but the simple fact is that they don’t care. To oil shiekdoms like the United Arab Emirates, phrases like “peak oil” don’t frighten. They conjure dollar signs in their eyes. All the better to help them get rich and have some fun.

Prosperity and fun are are not intrinsically terrible things. But when unaccompanied by sustainable planning (which at this point, would entail massive forced depopulation of Dubai and other parts of the UAE), these all-encompassing aims are terribly irresponsible. They’re bad for Dubai citizens. They’re also potentially dangerous for the rest of the world.

In the absence of a technology revolution involving renewable resources like solar energy, places like Dubai will be overtaken by the desert, probably sooner than later. The difference is that when Las Vegas finally goes down, the citizens of that doomed mirage will be able to take haven in other parts of the USA. When Alberta dries up, parched cowboys will flee to the rainy west coast.

But when Dubai goes down? Will their people run to the other sun-blasted parts of the Arab world when their own ecosystem has been used up? Or will they come here? This brings up the bigger picture problem: is the West destined (and obligated) to become a life raft for cities and nations that destroyed their own ecosystems?

The Wealth of Nations and the Movement of Peoples
As the Copenhagen summit demonstrated, the Third World wants the “rich and decadent” West to transfer massive amounts of wealth, no questions asked, so that they can keep running their countries into the ground. Many Westerners are quite happy to hand over these suitcases full of unmarked hundred-dollar bills out of a misplaced sense of guilt towards countries that have in most cases been the victim of their own internal corruption, political intransigence and fanaticism.

These wealth transfers will occur, likely starting in 2010, if the frenzied one-upping promises of politicians at Copenhagen is any indication. So we will continue to invest in the environmental degradation of what we might call rogue nations, ecologically speaking.

It’s unclear whether places like Dubai will be the eventual recipients of this climate change prevention fund. It’s hard to imagine Canadian taxpayers forking over millions so that Dubaians can keep their desalination plants running, so that they can keep operating their water slides. Then again, no one will be keeping track…

But that’s not where the story ends for places like Canada. Eventually, no amount of cash transfer will be enough to support artificial nations that have literally pissed away their wealth and built their cities on a foundation of sand. That’s when we will be asked to take in people from Dubai and other arid parts of the world — again, no questions asked, since that would be cruel and clearly racist. Will our society, already coping poorly with a stream of immigrants from certain parts of the world where “Canadian values” are poorly understood, be able to cope with the coming flood?

Can we simplify this problem? Imagine, in the course of gaining some temporary measure of prosperity, a man you know destroys his own house and damages the property of his neighbors. Are you ethically bound to give him shelter? Is your decision based on generosity, or the idea that if you deny him shelter and force him to sleep rough, he will instead attempt to break into your basement?

In the bigger picture, when it comes to dealing with the waves of climate refugees, these questions will not remain hypothetical for long.

Where Are the Eco-Warriors?
The well-heeled public relations squad for Dubai has certainly earned their keep. In all the coverage of the biggest building in the world, I saw no condemnation of this engineering monstrosity by the usual green pundits. In fact, the only criticism I’ve seen leveled at Burj Dubai is that owing to the economic downturn, it may not have been timed right in order to guarantee full occupancy.

Are the greens worried about “offending” certain ethnic sensibilities? Perhaps they don’t want to be tarring Dubai’s powers-that-be with the same brush as the one they use to smear colonial, or so called neo-colonial Western nations. Hitting Dubai over it’s big useless tower standing in the bleached desert just doesn’t give the same sense of satisfaction as beating up Canada over the oil sands, or even rising star China over building a new coal plant every week.

The Burj Dubai hides in plain site from environmentalists and gets a free pass this week. Meanwhile, we’ll see if a news cycle can go by without some environmental organization slamming Canada as the real planet killer.

Dubai’s Wild Wadi Water Slide. Dubai’s Vaunted Wealth Goes Down the Drain. So Much for Sustainability

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Will we be best served by his separateness from the federal leadership at this summit when it comes time to ask for federal resources to fund our green schemes? Perhaps a more united front from the Canadian contingent would have worked better.

I expand on these ideas in my new Granville Online article, Mr. Happy Planet versus Darth Vader. Enjoy.

The Conservatives’ Top-Secret Plan for, um, Saving the Planet?

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That said, I’m struck by the panicked reaction of world leaders, media and protesters of the Copenhagen summit. At this point, it’s not even about getting a good deal that makes sense for all stakeholders. It’s about getting a deal, any deal. That’s not democracy in action. That’s a farce.

Damn the torpedoes, or the strangeness of debt-choked developed nations handing over billions of dollars to the developing world, no strings attached, with which nations can in turn fund eco-friendly initiatives or machete-wielding armies that employ rape as a general policy against their enemies. (Instead of using the West as middle-men, wouldn’t it make more sense for these climate-change endangered nations to simply go directly to Saudi Arabia or China hat-in-hand?)

It’s certainly clear that people, particularly the youth, in a great number of countries are concerned about environmental degradation and the possible effects of climate change. Reducing carbon output seems to be the clear goal. So on that level, it would seem to make perfect sense for world leaders to meet and discuss general principles for meeting this challenge.

But there is no such general agreement on the specific solutions for lowering carbon emissions. Carbon caps on paper? Gasoline taxes? Subsidies and investment in bio-fuels? Electric cars? Tree-planting? Stowing of carbon underground? In concrete? Paying Third World villagers to sit around, not chopping down the lungs of the world? Shutting down the tar sands project by government fiat? All of these solutions have pluses and minuses.

Canada is not unique in hosting disagreement over what sorts of solutions would work best. Every country in the world is asking the same questions. While it might sound more manageable to just get world leaders in the same room to hammer out an agreement, it hasn’t worked in practice. World leaders can’t put forth concrete and robust proposals because they largely have not been able to work out these plans even towards their domestic audience. World leaders literally don’t know what they can offer at these summits.

Canadians were never asked for input on what the government would offer at Copenhagen. There were no town hall meetings. There was no referrendum. No intense national debate. You can’t even say that the Conservatives already had a mandate for specific environmental policies vis a vis Copenhagen from the last election. The summit certainly wasn’t on anyone’s radar back then. And even if Canadian voters had been aware of an upcoming summit, there’s no way they could have voted for a particular party on the basis of its support for specific proposals — even shortly before the end of this summit, there still aren’t any.

For Canada’s government — or any government, for that matter — to take a strong position on any of the Copenhagen proposals would be extremely challenging when these issues haven’t been resolved at home. They can’t represent their constituents when they don’t know what they’re representing.

This failing was not inevitable, by the way — if all national governments paid as much attention to defining environmental policy as they do with foreign policy and defense, leaders would be able to represent their nations with a mandate even to make policy based on strict guidelines on the fly. But that hasn’t happened. So governments at Copenhagen, even if they have strong popular support at home, can’t act democratically at this summit.

That said, the issues being discussed at Copenhagen are too dire to ignore.

Given the limitations of what can really happen at these summits, we ought to go back to using them to discuss general principles. When it comes to hard figures, technical solutions and economic intervention, these general principles can be a guide for bilateral or regional international solutions. That seems to be the best we can do for us and the planet.

Recommended Reading
The Copenhagen Shakedown Con
Copenhagen and ridiculousness
Bad Boy of Copenhagen

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Canadians are being singled out as premier environmental villains — for legally providing energy resources to an international market that is starved for new sources of energy. The critics might as well just come up with a list of the top ten oil and coal producers in the world and condemn all of them at the same time, while nations continue to purchase all that nasty stuff that makes their cars and factories work.

I also wrote about the real need to confront environmental disasters of our own making — not just what critics like to narrowly define as “climate change”, in Environmentalists Have Been Framed!

This is also interesting: Christ Banned From Copenhagen Global Climate Summit

Also read Why It’s Copendead

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In my latest Cityview column for Granville Magazine, I decided to take the “shooting-ducks-in-a-barrel” approach and looked at the awful state of public transit in Los Angeles. As I noted on a recent trip, the car-clogged freeways of that part of the American nation are a testament to bad planning predicated on an unsustainable assumption (a lie, really) of long-term access to cheap energy.

Los Angeles has invested billions of dollars to pick away at the problem with subway lines and new clean-energy buses. But the fact is that despite these efforts, transit ridership on the whole hasn’t moved in decades.

One can no more fix Los Angeles’ traffic issues with transit than you could fix a badly infected broken arm with a band-aid. There’s just too much of a legacy of expensive road infrastructure to maintain and a persistent attitude among the locals that they are “entitled” to their cars — and the “loser cruiser” is for the poor (This attitude contrasts not just with Vancouver but L.A.’s polar opposite, New York City, where Wall Street traders in suits and briefcases rub shoulders with working class Joes on the packed subways).

My look at Los Angeles certainly wasn’t meant to slag our American cousins. We certainly have our own mutated versions of this unsustainable model: Calgary and most other prairie cities, have spread out in the absence of natural geographic limits to growth, taking on all the unfavorable characteristics of “Edge cities” — lacking distinct neighborhoods, utterly dependent on ring roads and freeways, and ineffective mass transit.

The question is what these cities will do with all of this legacy of expensive, unsustainable infrastructure. Will taxpayers simply keep on subsidizing these urban disasters? Will these urban wastelands just be abandoned (or at least vastly depopulated) a few decades from now? I expect both of these things to happen in succession. The only question is how much longer taxpayers are willing to put up with subsidizing failure.

Recommended reading: I’ve seen one possible future for Vancouver and it’s scary

Also: Calgary Transit Sucks

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The science of climate change can never conclusively prove that humans are to blame for increasingly wacky weather and climate phenomena (ie. melting icecaps, increasing incidence of forest fires, floods, hurricanes and me shoveling the six feet of snow that built up on the roof of my Vancouver apartment building last winter). With so many variables affecting weather and climate, someone can always claim that climate change is really caused by all of the energy expelled in the production of climate change science reports. Without definitive proof, the climate change “debate” degenerates into PR battles that cherry-pick facts to prove… well, nothing. For climate-change “deniers”, that’s the point — lack of 100 per cent verifiability leads to indecision and lack of action. They win by default.

There’s no question that the green movement got its biggest boost in recent history with the screening of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. Since then, the environmental movement has kept on using that film as a centerpiece of green evangelizing. This takes focus off of related environmental issues that seem to have a better chance of changing minds about the need for action at the state level, not just at the local level of those who already buy local, recycle, bike to work and so on. Just a few examples:

1. We’re running out of energy. Remember how high energy prices got before the economy took a nosedive? Back when the economy was humming, demand outpaced supply, driving up the cost of not just the stuff we put into our cars, but everything else. When the economy picks up, energy demand will rise once more, worse than before.

2. Desertification is spreading. When all the water and forests are gone, bad things happen. Look at the poorest, most messed-up countries in the world and you’ll notice that most of them don’t have any trees in them. The area we call the “Fertile Crescent” is practically devoid of forests (as the denizens of this ancient land chopped them down long ago) and is also the number-one flashpoint for violence and conflict in the world. Coincidence? Nope. It’s not all about religion and culture; environmental degradation has already been the cause of poverty, misery, riots, revolutions and interstate conflicts.

3. Pollution kills people. As an example, we have Bangladesh, where air pollution is blamed for taking the lives of 46,000 people per year. That’s fifteen 9/11-sized casualty counts, per year, for one country.

Climate change is important and is connected with all three of the issues mentioned above. But it’s not the only point of discussion. Environmentalists need to hit the obstructionists with the issues — all of the issues. The alternative is debating climate change until long after the environmental issues have become environmental disasters.

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