nonprofit technology

2012-01-15T20:42:00.001-08:00

Juggler Red in Victoria

2010-11-22T12:29:00.001-08:00

Juggler Red in Victoria
Originally uploaded by chrisholtphotos

This is an interesting shot

Why is a Woman Suing Google for Bad Directions?

2010-06-04T16:09:00.000-07:00

Why is a Woman Suing Google for Bad Directions?

Cutting Edge Software

2010-05-20T15:39:00.000-07:00

Cutting Edge Software

2010-05-12T10:38:00.000-07:00

Nuclear Energy: Safe, Clean, and Affordable

2010-03-29T17:19:00.001-07:00

Dr. Mir F. Ali

In these days of climate change and energy crisis, it’s too bad that the word “Nuclear” has a connotation that brings back memories about the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl and the near miss of Three Mile Island. People are rightfully scared of potential accidents and the proliferation of nuclear weapons even though it has been proven that those accidents were the result of mismanagement. Over the last few decades nuclear plants have proven to be reliable and have in general a superb safety record. It is critical to note that nuclear plants have the capability to generate an incredible amount of clean and non-polluting energy which could be instrumental in mitigating the current global crisis of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions drastically, if not entirely. Perhaps the question should be asked: Is nuclear power worth a serious look?

The international community for nuclear energy is well aware of the atrocious affects of nuclear accidents and it has invested unprecedented efforts on preventive and safety measures to make sure that nuclear plants around the world are safe and reliable. As part of its regular programme of work but also its 21 international joint projects, the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) which is a part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) continually strives to help ensure that nuclear energy remains safe, clean and affordable. Its work as Technical Secretariat of the Multinational Design Evaluation Programme (MDEP) and the Generation IV International Forum (GIF) also contributes to this goal. Under the MDEP, nuclear regulators are aiming to enhance safety worldwide through increased co-operation, aiming in particular at improving the efficiency and the effectiveness of the design review process and at achieving greater convergence of regulatory practices. The GIF is looking to develop Generation IV reactors with improved sustainability, economics, safety and reliability, proliferation resistance and physical protection.

It is a most common and accepted practice that most countries with operating nuclear plants have active programmes to develop disposal facilities for high-level nuclear waste. It was reported that these programmes have made significant technical progress in the past 20 years in identifying suitable sites and procedures for safely isolating radioactive waste from the environment. There is a wide agreement among scientists that geological isolation is the best method to dispose of high-level and long-lived wastes. Most governments have adopted this approach.

As a result of all these international efforts, things are starting to look better for the nuclear industry from a safety point of view. The NEA projects that nuclear energy capacity is set to increase by as little as 55% and as much as 375% between now and the middle of the century. To achieve this increase, a growing number of reactors will need to be built from now until 2030, followed by an average of 23 to 54 1000 MWe reactors per year (low and high scenarios) between 2030 and 2050. It was stated that these construction rates are fully compatible with the historical building experience of the 1970s and 1980s.

According to a report, as of July 2008, there were more than 430 operating nuclear plants in 31 different countries around the world and together they provided about 15 percent of the world’s electricity in 2007. Some of these countries depend more on nuclear power than others. For instance, in France 77 percent of the country’s electricity comes from nuclear power; Lithuania comes in second, with an impressive 65 percent; and in the United States, 104 nuclear power plants supply 20 percent of the electricity overall, with some states benefiting more than others. The irony of course is that no nuclear plants have been built in the US in decades.

It was reported by the Nuclear Energy Institute, that the power produced by the world’s nuclear plants would normally produce 2 billon metric tons of CO₂ per year if they depended on fossil fuels. In fact, a properly functioning nuclear power plant actually releases fewer radioactivities into the atmosphere than a coal-fired power plant. By not depending on fossil fuels, the cost of nuclear power also isn’t affected by fluctuations in oil and gas prices.

Tom Terbush of the Electric Power Research Institute stated that a typical nuclear generating unit can produce enough power for nearly a million homes.

Here is an indication of current global interest in nuclear energy:

The Indian Prime Minister’s recent visit (November 25, 2009) to Washington was to tie up the details of the highly important and quintessentially symbolic bi-national nuclear cooperation agreement. Accordingly, India is planning to build an additional seven nuclear power plants by 2020 and access to American nuclear technology is key to India’s plans. India, is reported to be concerned about the mushrooming demand for electricity,and in addition to building the current reactors, it has a further 23 nuclear plants on the drawing boards to add to its existing 17 plants, according to industry group the World Nuclear Association;
At the same time, the central government in China is backing ambitious growth in their nuclear plans and has 20 nuclear plants under construction. They will have built another 32 new plants by 2020, and the long range plan is to have 300 more nuclear plants by 2050; and
As far as France is concerned, they are planning to meet their total electricity needs with nuclear power in the next few years and this is going to help them with a daunting target of slashing its carbon dioxide emissions by 75 percent by the year 2050.

According to a report published by OECD, with a growing number of countries planning to build new nuclear reactors, under the MDEP, national regulatory authorities are aiming at increasing the protection of the public and the environment. In particular, through this enhanced co-operation, regulators will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the design review process and will increase convergence of regulatory practices.

The nuclear regulators of ten countries, including Canada, China, Finland, France, Japan, Korea, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States, are participating in the MDEP. The NEA is the Technical Secretariat for the programme. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also takes part in MDEP activities.

The main use of nuclear energy is to generate electricity and indeed the demand for electricity is growing palpably. According to the OECD World Outlook 2008:

From 1980 to 2006 total world primary energy demand grew by 62%, and to 2030 it is projected to grow at a slightly lesser rate (45%, average 1.6% per year, from 491 EJ to 712 EJ). Electricity growth is even stronger, and is projected to almost double from 2006 to 2030 (growing at average 2.6% per year from 18,921 TWh to 33,265 TWh). Increased demand is most dramatic in developing countries. Currently some two billion people in the world have no access to electricity, and it is a high global priority to address this lack;
With the United Nations predicting world population growth from 6.5 billion in 2006 to 8.2 billion by 2030, demand for energy must increase substantially over that period. Both population growth and increasing standards of living for many people in developing countries will cause strong growth in energy demand, expected to be 1.6% per year, or 45% from 2006 to 2030; and
The 2006 edition of this report demonstrates that nuclear power could make a major contribution to reducing dependence on imported gas and curbing CO2 emissions in a cost-effective way, since its uranium fuel is abundant. However governments must play a stronger role in facilitating private investment, especially in liberalized electricity markets where the trade-off between security and low price has been a disincentive to investment in new plant and grid infrastructure. The 2008 IEA report said that investment of US$ 26 trillion is required by 2030 under the reference scenario, and $6.5 trillion more under an alternative low-carbon energy scenario. Under this, nuclear capacity increases 85% to 680 GWe and energy demand reduces by some 10% and CO2 emissions reduce by 27% compared with 2006. Of the $26 trillion amount, $13.6 trillion is for electricity: about half for generation and the rest for transmission and distribution.

It was also reported that apart from nuclear being virtually carbon-free, it points out that energy security is enhanced due to nuclear fuel’s high energy density, which means that transport is less vulnerable and storage of large reserves is easy.

The main resource for generating nuclear energy is uranium, a material for which there is little other use.

Here are the characteristics of uranium according to World Nuclear Association:

Uranium is a very heavy metal which can be used as anabundant source of concentrated energy;
It occurs in most rocks in concentrations of 2 to 4 parts per million and is as common in the Earth’s crust as tin, tungsten and molybdenum. It occurs in seawater, and can be recovered from the oceans;
It was discovered in 1789 by Martin Klaproth, a German chemist, in the mineral called pitchblende. It was named after the planet Uranus, which had been discovered eight years earlier;
Uranium was apparently formed in supernovae about 6.6 billion years ago. While it is not common in the solar system, today its slow radioactive decay provides the main source of heat inside the Earth, causing convection and continental drift;
The high density of uranium means that it also finds uses in the keels of yachts and as counterweights for aircraft control surfaces, as well as for radiation shielding; and
Its melting point is 1132°C. The chemical symbol for uranium is U.

Like other elements, uranium occurs in several slightly differing forms known as ‘isotopes’. These isotopes differ from each other in the number of particles (neutrons) in the nucleus. Natural uranium as found in the Earth’s crust is a mixture largely of two isotopes: uranium-238 (U-238), accounting for 99.3% and uranium-235 (U-235) about 0.7%.

There is enough uranium known to exist to fuel the world’s fleet of nuclear reactors at current consumption rates for at least a century, according to the latest edition of the world reference on uranium published recently.

Based on official information gathered from 40 countries, Uranium 2007 - Resources, Production, and Demand, provides a comprehensive review of world uranium supply and demand as of 1^st January 2007. Here are some highlights:

The uranium market has demonstrated recent strength, with major new investments and expenditures for exploration increasing more than 254% over the two-year period from 2004-2006. Over $774 million was spent globally on exploration in 2006. While global production dipped by 6% from 2005-2006, significant production increases were noted in Kazakhstan and the US;
The demand picture is increasingly complex, with significant nuclear power builds underway in China, India, Korea, Japan and the Russian Federation, and phase-out programmes underway in several European countries. Yet the report notes that new builds along with plant life extensions should increase global installed nuclear capacity in the coming decades, thereby increasing demand for uranium. Projections for 2030 indicate a range of expected growth in demand from a low estimate of 38% to a high case of roughly 80%; and
In contrast to some other energy resources such as oil, the geographical distribution of uranium resources remain quite varied. Currently uranium is mined in 20 countries, with Iran being the latest entrant. Canada and Australia currently account for 44% of global uranium production, and other top uranium producers are Kazakhstan (13%), Niger (9%), Russian Federation (8%), Namibia (8%), Uzbekistan (6%), and the United States (5%).

The bottomline is that in spite of investing billions of dollars on the development and promotion of renewable technologies for years, it is utterly disappointing that only 2 percent of world’s total electricity is met with renewables whereas nuclear energy is meeting 15 percent of the total electricity needs in the world. It is abundantly clear from various reports that the global population is growing at an alarming rate which will continue to generate a massive demand for electricity and the combination of efficiency, conservation, and renewables may not be enough to meet the future electricity demand with clean energy. Maybe the obvious and sane option that is available for the world is to further capitalize on the enormous potential of nuclear energy in order to bridge the global gap between the supply and demand of clean energy. Incidentally, this will require people around the world to overcome the conscious or unconscious fear associated with the safety of nuclear plants and invest munificently into nuclear energy as governments alone may not be able to keep up with the investment opportunities for this industry.

The good news is that clean energy will not only help protect the environment and improve the quality of human lives but it will also help create new jobs for a sustainable global economy.

This is the first introductory article of a series of articles that Dr. Ali will be writing as a result of his research on the subject of nuclear energy.

Way to Copenhagen

2010-03-29T17:18:00.001-07:00

Dr.Mir F. Ali

The December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, from December 7 to 18, will involve 192 countries, and more than 150,000 heads of state and government officials, advisers, diplomats, campaigners and journalists. The list of global dignitaries includes the American President Barak Obama and the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. It is interesting to note that on his way to the Conference, Harper is proposing a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from 2006 levels by 2020, and up to 80 per cent by 2050. He favours to having realistic targets which are feasible within the timeframe.

Obama will “put on the table” a U.S. commitment to cut emissions by 17 percent over the next decade, on the way to reducing heat-trapping pollution by 80 percent by mid-century, the White House said.

According to the newstimes.com, cutting U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by one-sixth in just a decade would increase the cost of energy as electric utilities pay for capturing carbon dioxide at coal-burning power plants or switch to more expensive alternatives. The price of gasoline probably would increase, and more fuel-efficient automobiles - or hybrids that run on gasoline and electricity - probably would be more expensive.

It was also reported that Obama’s promise of GHG emissions cuts will require Congress to pass complex climate legislation that the administration says will include an array of measures to ease the price impact. The bills before Congress, for example, would have the government provide polluters free emissions allowances in the early years of the transition from fossil fuels, as well as direct payments to many consumers facing high costs.

The Kyoto Protocol runs out in 2012. To keep the process moving forward there is an urgent need for a new climate protocol. The purpose of the upcoming conference in Copenhagen this week where the parties of the UNFCCC meet for the last time on government level before the finalization of climate agreement, is to renew the Kyoto Protocol for the next five years starting from 2013 to 2017. The topics on the conference agenda include: Preliminary negotiations at various global climate conferences; Geopolitical issues related to industrialized nations and emerging nations; and the Scientific and corporate issues that will impact the debate.

Just as a background, there were two international treaties designed to address climate change — the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol. These two treaties represent the international response to the compelling evidence, compiled and repeatedly confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that climate change is occurring, and that it is largely due to human activities. Here are some highlights:

The UNFCCC adopted the Convention on 9 May 1992, and it entered into force on 21 March, 1994. The countries which adopted this Convention were aware of the fact that its provisions would not be sufficient enough to adequately address future climate change;
At the first Conference of the Parties, held in Berlin, Germany in early 1995, a new round of talks was launched to discuss firmer, more detailed commitments;
After two and a half years of intensive negotiations, a substantial extension to the Convention was adopted in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997. This Kyoto Protocol established legally binding emissions targets for industrialized countries, and created innovative mechanisms to assist these countries in meeting these targets;
The Kyoto Protocol entered into force on 18 November 2004, after 55 Parties to the Convention had ratified it, including enough industrialized countries - who have specific targets - to encompass 55 per cent of that group’s carbon dioxide emissions in 1990; and
The United Nations Climate Change Conference 2007 in Bali was held from Monday, 3 December to Friday, 14 December 2007. 187 countries in Bali agreed to launch negotiations towards a crucial and strengthened international climate change deal. The decision includes an agenda for the key issues to be negotiated up to 2009. It was concluded that negotiations in 2009 will ensure that the new deal can enter into force by 2013.

The Copenhagen Climate Treaty is a proposal for a Copenhagen Agreement and was drafted by individuals from around the world reflecting on member’s countries’ national circumstances and debated with the knowledge that transformation is required. It is a work in progress; although the views on targets and the ambitious emission pathways will not change, the finer points are likely to evolve in step with the negotiations themselves. It is meant to encourage and provoke countries into thinking hard about the level of ambition, scope and detail that needs to be agreed in Copenhagen, the path to get us there and what comes afterwards.

It was clearly stated in the introduction of the proposal that the Treaty is based on the premise that all peoples, nations and cultures have the right to survive, to develop sustainably and to alleviate poverty.

The final agreement must balance the need for short-term action with medium and long-term certainty and vision on all aspects of the Bali Action Plan and the need for a legally binding form. It must be ambitious but must also safeguard the poorest people. There must be no trade off between ambition and equity.

The shared vision maps out the international effort required to fundamentally tackle climate change while meeting sustainable development goals. It outlines the overall long-term global objectives for the four building blocks, mitigation, adaptation, technology, and finance, showing what it takes to transform the world to a zero-carbon economy over the coming decades, including global emissions cuts of at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. It will additionally enshrine equity and the right to survival for countries, communities, cultures, and ecosystems, as well as the right to develop sustainably in accordance with the UNFCCC principles. The agreement then operationalizes the shared vision for a 5-year commitment period for 2013 to 2017, to be followed by subsequent 5-year periods, for all four building blocks. Here are some highlights of the proposal:

1. The Treaty’s Legal Structure:

The Copenhagen Climate Treaty should consist of three pieces: an amendment to the Kyoto Protocol, a new Copenhagen Protocol and a set of decisions by the supreme body of the Convention and its Protocols;
The Copenhagen Protocol and amended Kyoto Protocol should be viewed as a package encompassing the international community’s response to avoiding dangerous climate change; and
The Convention and Protocol decisions should lay the groundwork for the immediate and early action needed up to 2012 for mitigation and adaptation, including some of the decisions that will need to be adopted at COP16 by Parties to the Copenhagen Protocol.

2. The Global Carbon Budget:

The overall ambition of the Copenhagen deal must be to keep the rise of the world’s average annual temperature as far below 2°C warming as possible, compared to pre-industrial levels, to avoid catastrophic climate change;
The world must stay within a maximum carbon budget that cannot be overspent nor borrowed against in the future. It reflects the total amount of greenhouse gases the planet can bear before it tips into instability;
The planet’s annual global carbon budget from all sources of greenhouse gases would in 2020 be no higher than 36.1 Gt CO2e (giga tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions), roughly equal to 1990 levels and would need to be reduced to 7.2 Gt CO2e in 2050, in other words by 80 % below 1990 levels. To put the world rapidly onto an emissions reduction pathway that can achieve that, global emissions need to come back to 1990 levels by 2020;
For the annual reduction rates between 2010 and 2050 to be achievable, total global greenhouse gas emissions would need to peak in the 2013-2017 commitment period and decline thereafter. The physical emission paths would be:
- Industrialised countries’ fossil fuel and industrial greenhouse gas emissions would have to drop from present levels rapidly and almost be fully phased out by 2050;
- Deforestation emissions would need to be reduced globally by at least 75% or more by 2020; and
- Developing country fossil fuel and industrial greenhouse gas emissions would need to peak before 2020 and then decline, which emphasizes the need to provide high levels of binding support by industrialized countries.

3. Historical Responsibility:

All countries must contribute to preventing dangerous climate change. However, the largest share of responsibility for staying within the carbon budget rests with the industrialized countries, obligating them to reduce emissions at home whilst enabling and supporting developing countries to develop in a low-carbon manner;
Given that the remaining atmospheric space has been constricted as a result of the excessive use of fossil fuels by industrialized countries to date, these countries need to provide significant financial, technological and capacity building support that can be monitored and measured to ensure that developing countries have the means to stay within such a carbon constrained budget and to begin to remedy the historical inequities;
To achieve the necessary emission reductions, however, more advanced developing countries must also take up the call to action. Therefore the Treaty outlines their common but differentiated responsibilities and details the support to be provided; and
Newly industrialized countries like Singapore, South Korea and Saudi Arabia should also take on binding targets in line with the Convention principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. The criteria for designating newly industrialized countries should be negotiated in Copenhagen.

What is critical to recognize is that the window of opportunity for limiting climate change is closing and therefore unprecedented international cooperation and commitment is critical to success of this initiative. It is feasible to “progress much faster, catalyzing the world onto a low-carbon development pathway that is ambitious, effective and fair and ensures that the right to survival for the most vulnerable is not sacrificed.”

Dr. Mir F. Ali is a senior consultant with Turner Lane Consulting Corporation where he is responsible for promoting and delivering management consulting and sustainability consulting solutions to the public and private sectors.

The Concept of Ecolabelling

2010-03-29T17:17:00.002-07:00

Dr. Mir F. Ali

The purpose of ecolabelling is to communicate with the potential consumers, stating that the product or service they are considering is less harmful to the environment than other similar products or services available in the same category in the market. It offers enormous potential for reducing the environmental deprivation associated with the production materials and processes. The simple fact is that the market for green products is growing rapidly and the global green economy is expanding into an annual market of trillions of dollars.

Ecolabelling is defined by Global Ecolabelling Network as a voluntary method of environmental performance certification and labelling that is practiced around the world. An “ecolabel” is a label which identifies the overall environmental impact of a product or service within a specific product/service category based on life cycle considerations. In contrast to “green” symbols or claim statements developed by manufacturers and service providers, an ecolabel is awarded by an impartial third-party in relation to certain products or services that are independently determined to meet environmental leadership criteria.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) an ecolabel is the voluntary granting of labels by a private or public body in order to inform consumers and thereby promote consumer products which are determined to be environmentally more friendly than other functionally and competitively similar products.

The concept of eco-labelling came into existence to create a market based incentive for environment-friendly products and services and this concept was introduced in Germany for the first time in the late 1970s in the name of the Blue Angel Programme. The concept of ecolabelling schemes became popular gradually in Germany and it took off completely in the 1990s when the industrialized countries around the world started developing these schemes for a wide range of products and services.

Recognizing the usefulness of the eco-labelling schemes, in 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) endorsed the ecolabelling schemes where governments around the world agreed to encourage expansion of environmental labelling and other environmentally-related product information programmes designed to assist consumers to make informed choices.

In 1993, the International Standards Organization (ISO) established a technical committee to develop international environmental labelling standards. These standards are intended to incorporate requirements for consistency and accuracy, and create fair competition in the marketplace. CAN/CSA-ISO 14021 is one of a family of international environmental labelling standards. Environmental labelling, based on international standards, is recognized as an effective instrument of environmental policy by the World Trade Organization (WTO) secretariat, provided that it does not lead to unfair trade.

The ISO committee identified the following three types of eco-labelling:

Eco-labelling Type 1: Voluntary, multiple criteria, 3rd. party programs that award a licence indicating overall environmental preferability and based on life cycle considerations. These labels are independently verified by a third party through a testing process at the request of the manufacturer of the product. The eco-label indicates that a product will, for example, improve energy efficiency, reduce hazardous waste by-products, and make use of recycled materials. The Energy Star logo is another type of eco-label, which is awarded to top products based on energy efficiency (e.g., energy-efficient appliances, equipment, windows, and doors). The consumer should keep in mind that eco-labelling programs or schemes do not assess the whole range of products available in the marketplace; there could be equally “green” products that have not been tested or certified.

Eco-labelling Type 2: eco-labelling environmental claims, made without independent 3rd. party certification. These labels are self-declared environmental claims. These labels are the kind of claims that are made by manufacturers, importers, distributors, or any person who promotes a product/service or business interest who is likely to benefit from the product’s environmental claims. These claims are usually based on a single attribute (e.g., a manufacturer’s claim that a product is “biodegradable”) without taking into account the environmental impact of a product’s entire life cycle, and without independent verification or certification by a third party. However, these claims must be verifiable, accurate, meaningful, and reliable if consumers are to understand the value of the environmental information they represent (e.g., their ability to protect the environment). The credibility of these claims can be increased if companies and organizations are able to support their claims by providing reliable information to potential purchasers; and

Eco-labelling Type 3: Quantified information about products based on life cycle impacts (ISO 14040) or Environmental Products Declarations (EPDs) which are comprehensive data lists that profile environmental information on a product throughout its life cycle; their level of detail is similar to that provided on nutrition labels on food. As these claims require disclosure of comprehensive data relating to environmental performance, the consumer might not always have the ability to assess such claims in terms of identifying and weighing the environmental risks related to a product or service.

The Government of Canada founded an ecolabelling program called EcoLogo in 1988. The EcoLogo program is a type 1 ecolabel, as defined by the ISO ecolabel, which is North America’s largest and most respected environmental standard and certification mark. The EcoLogo is one of two such programs in North America that has been successfully audited by the Global EcoLabelling Network (GEN) as meeting ISO 14024 standards for eco-labelling.

According to their website, EcoLogo provides customers - public, corporate and consumer - with assurance that the products and services bearing the logo meet stringent standards of environmental leadership. With thousands of EcoLogo Certified products, EcoLogo certifies environmental leaders covering a large variety of categories, helping you find and trust the world’s most sustainable products.

In a study commissioned by the Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA), it was reported that Canadians want high quality foods that are safe and produced under environmentally sustainable practices. Most importantly, more and more, they want to buy Canadian:

90% of Canadian consumers felt Canadian grown product should be easily identifiable in stores;

95% of consumers would prefer to buy Canadian grown product that is competitively priced;

80% of those surveyed felt a “Canadian Label” concept was a good/very good idea, and the most appealing aspects were its quality attributes and ease of identification; and

46-50% of Canadian consumers were willing to pay premiums for “labelled” fruits, vegetables, poultry, beef, pork and grain products.

It was further reported that in rural and urban regions alike, Canadians want to buy local, buy Canadian, and when they go shopping they want truth in labelling Canadian-grown product. The emphasis, of course, was on “truth”.

Acknowledging the fact that the type 2 ecolabels are not subject to the third-party verification which leaves entirely up to the manufacturers, service providers, and advertisers to make sure that the data they have provided on those labels is authentic, the Competition Bureau decided to partner with the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) with the objective to develop a best practice guide to comply with the provisions of the statutes that prohibit false or misleading representation. The Competition Bureau is an independent law-enforcement agency of the Government of Canada that protects and promotes competitive markets and enables informed consumer choice for the prosperity of Canadians.

The premise of this initiative was that adherence to the advice contained in the Guide on environmental claims will enhance the provision of meaningful information to consumers and will assist industry by providing “best practices” for self-declared environmental claims. This Guide provides examples of preferred approaches and discouraged approaches to illustrate commonly used environmental claims; shows how to avoid misleading or deceptive claims relating to an implied or expressed environmental benefit; establishes the guidelines for Mobius loop markings; and suggests methodologies for tests that can be used to clarify claims.

Environmental Claims: A Guide for Industry and Advertisers was published in June 2008 by Canadian Standards Association to provide assistance to industry and advertisers in complying with certain provisions of the Competition Act, the Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act, and the

Textile Labelling Act which are administered and enforced by the Competition Bureau. This Guide is primarily based on CAN/CSA-ISO 14021 and thus supersedes Principles and Guidelines for Environmental Labelling and Advertising (PGELA), published by Industry and Science Canada in 1993.

This Guide is not a regulation. The Competition Bureau considers that the guidelines advocated in this document reflect “best practices”. While the Bureau supports the use of voluntary standards, which encourage conformity with the laws and regulations, businesses are free to adopt any business practice they so choose, as long as the claims they are making are not false or misleading. Therefore, while the Competition Bureau will use this Guide as a reference for evaluating environmental claims, deviations from the Guide might not, in and of themselves, represent a contravention of the Competition Act and/or the labelling statutes enforced by the Competition Bureau. Environmental claims that raise concerns under these statutes may be examined on a case-by-case basis, and each case will be assessed on its own merits.

The bottomline is that those manufacturers, service providers, and advertisers who are interested in using the type 2 ecolabels should know that it is in their best interest to establish and sustain credibility in the market by following the best practices included in the Guide. At the same time they should also know that while the Guide is not exactly a regulation, it would help them to stay away from getting into trouble with the Competition Act as the subsection 52(1) - Criminal Regime: False or misleading representations - prohibits knowingly or recklessly making, or permitting the making, of a representation to the public, in any form whatever, that is false or misleading in a material respect. Needless to say that this subsection is designed to make sure that the public is protected.

Dr. Mir F. Ali is a senior consultant with Turner Lane Consulting Company where he is responsible for marketing and delivering the management and sustainability consulting services to the public and private sectors.

Clean Energy Technology: Carbon Capture & Storage

2010-03-29T17:17:00.001-07:00

Dr. Mir F. Ali

Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently announced funding for the carbon capture project west of Edmonton. The federal and Alberta governments pledged $769 million on October 14, 2009 to retrofit a coal-fired electricity generation plant to capture and store some of the carbon dioxide generated from the project.

Alberta will spend $436 million over the next 15 years on the project, with most of the money coming from its $2-billion Carbon Capture and Storage Fund. Ottawa is kicking in $343 million from its Clean Energy Fund. The government is promoting it as a “leading-edge coal-fired electricity generation plant” that will capture and store up to one million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year.” The captured CO2 will be used for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) in nearby fields or stored almost three kilometres underground.

The CCS technology is getting a lot of attention lately. Last month Canadian Environment Minister, Jim Prentice and US Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, presented the Clean Energy Dialogue Report to President Obama and Prime Minister Harper in Washington D.C. which identifies ways Canada and the US can jointly develop energy solutions to reduce greenhouse gases and to combat climate change. This was the first report of the Joint Canada-U.S. Working Groups who have developed an Action Plan for cooperation and one of the three areas covered by this plan identifies the CCS among the available clean energy technologies with the enormous potential to control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Last week at the Carbon Capture and Storage Conference in London, chief Nobuo Tanaka, International Energy Agency (IEA), cited that the world needs to build 100 major projects for capturing and burying GHG by 2020 and thousands more by 2050 to help combat climate change. He further stated that the drive, mostly to capture emissions from coal-fired power stations, would cost $56 billion by 2020 alone. The IEA estimates that after the $56 billion investment in CCS globally from 2010-2020, a further $646 billion will be needed from 2021 to 2030. UN studies have indicated that CCS could do more to limit greenhouse gas emissions this century than a shift to renewable energies such as wind or solar power. CCS has been limited by high costs.

Perhaps the most common definition of CCS is that it is a method for reducing GHG emissions to the atmosphere by capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from large stationary emitters and disposing of it in deep geological formations. Studies show that CCS has broad application wherever fossil energy is used. It is one of the only ways to manage GHG emissions growth in coal-fired power generation and in the rapidly expanding oil sands sector. It is suggested in various reports that CCS is a potential solution for these and other sectors across the nation, as the whole country uses oil, gas, or coal in refining, petrochemicals, manufacturing, cement, and steel. However, it was identified in various studies that there are economic costs associated with the use of CCS, and it presents various risks to the environment and to human health.

CCS projects are being pursued around the world in a variety of countries including Norway, the United Kingdom Denmark and Australia. According to the ecoENERGT Carbon Capture and Storage Task Force report, Canada-wide potential for CO2 capture and storage may be as high as 600 megatonnes (Mt)/year, or roughly 40 percent of Canada’s projected GHG emissions in 2050.

On July 8, 2008, the Alberta Government announced it will contribute $2 billion to reduce GHG emissions through new CCS projects. The expected result is five million tonnes in annual reductions by 2015— comparable to taking one million vehicles off the road.

Alberta committed to reducing projected emissions by 200 megatonnes by 2050—70% of which will be achieved through CCS. CCS will be a process that captures CO2 emissions and stores them in geological formations deep inside the earth. The CO2 will be separated from other emissions, then dehydrated, compressed and transported by pipeline to a storage site where it will be injected one to two kilometres deep into the porous rock formation. It will then be sealed and monitored by experts to ensure there is no leakage or impact on either public safety or the environment.

The cost associated with the process of capturing CO2 from the source, which is typically a smokestack, is the most expensive part of the CCS process. Retrofitting existing facilities to capture CO2 would have significant costs, as it would be to integrate CO2 capture into the design of new plants.

Transporting the CO2 through a pipeline is the least expensive part of CCS and injecting it deep into the earth is more expensive than transporting it.

In addition to help reducing GHG emissions, the use of captured CO2 for EOR is turning out to be a real success. When the captured CO2 is injected into the oil reservoir, it mixes with the oil and mobilizes more of it – like turpentine cleaning paint – and then allows it to be jumped to the surface. A good example of EOR is the Dakota Gasification Project which creates synthetic gas and takes the CO2 from that process and pipelines it to the Weyburn oil field in southeast Saskatchewan, Canada, where the CO2 is injected into a depleted oil field.

Weyburn oilfield covers more than 210 square kilometres (53,000 acres) and contains approximately 1.4 billion barrels of enhanced oil. It is also the world’s largest carbon sequestration site. They currently produce approximately 28,000 barrels of oil per day at Weyburn - an 18,000 barrel per day increase over the 10,000 barrels of oil per day that would be produced without the carbon dioxide flood from the Dakota Gasification Project, which began in 2000.

David Biello in his article which was published in Scientific American included the following examples where EOR was used to boost the production:

The Scurry Area Canyon Reef Operators Committee oil field, better known as SACROC, near Snyder, Tex., has slurped 140 million metric tons of liquid CO2 since 1972—80 million metric tons of which has stayed trapped in the reservoir. Pumping all that CO2 down has meant pumping more oil out;
For 36 years, oil services companies like Denbury Resources and Kinder Morgan have piped carbon dioxide from naturally occurring reservoirs in Colorado to the declining oil fields of the Permian Basin in West Texas; and
The U.S. has at least 100 such projects like SACROC and 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) of CO2 pipelines. All told, companies have injected some 10.8 trillion cubic feet of the greenhouse gas since the 1970s, according to petroleum engineer R. Tim Bradley, Kinder Morgan’s president of CO2, to raise the yield from oil fields by some 650,000 extra barrels a day—more than 10 percent of daily U.S. total production.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has invested more than $3 billion since 2001 to fund multiple CCS projects being conducted by seven regional partnerships, including demonstrations of ammonia capture technology at the massive coal-fired Pleasant Prairie power plant in Kenosha County, Wisc., and the R. E. Burger plant in Shadyside, Ohio. The Obama administration may even resurrect the FutureGen project—a 275-MW IGCC power plant that would capture 90 percent of its emissions.

Australia and China have demonstrated that post-combustion capture is possible in pilot plants. At Loy Yang Power Station in Victoria, a pilot plant run by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) will capture 1,000 metric tons of CO2 a year; the Australian research organization has also collaborated with China’s Huaneng Group to use an amine scrubber to capture CO2 from a co-generation power plant in Beijing and then sell it.

In spite of numerous success stories around the globe about the use of CCS and EOR, there is a fear that is commonly associated with this technology that trapped CO2 might suddenly escape to the surface with deadly consequences. However, this technology is being used commercially for three decades and there have been no dangerous leaks. Typically, each CCS project is being monitored extensively by international team of scientists to make sure that there is no CO2 leakage. Furthermore, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fully supports CCS technology as does the International Energy Agency and the International Panel on Climate Change which also should mean that the CCS technology is safe.

UN Summit on Climate Change in New York

2010-03-29T17:16:00.001-07:00

Dr. Mir F. Ali

If any Canadian ever had any doubt about Harper’s apathy about the environment, the Prime Minister’s recent decision for not showing up at the UN Summit on Climate Change, should help them to make up their minds. It was reported that Canada was hardly a factor in the climate summit, which came a day ahead of the annual UN General Assembly that traditionally turns midtown Manhattan black and blue with armoured limousines and police escorts. It was further reported that:

In an apparent strategy of engagement if necessary, but not necessarily engagement, Prime Minister Stephen Harper skipped the morning session featuring the major addresses of Hu, Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy of France and others and instead had lunch with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The meeting with Bloomberg, the Prime Minister’s Office said, was to “raise the Buy America clause and the importance to promote open and free trade”.

Speaking to reporters outside New York city hall, Harper dismissed suggestions Canada is on the debate’s sidelines, saying his government is working with the Obama administration on a “truly continental approach” to climate change. He stated: “Our position is very clear - we want to see an effective international accord, one that includes all the major emitters of greenhouse gases.”|

Harper later joined in the climate discussions, including a UN dinner at the behest of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon involving a quarter of the nearly 100 world leaders gathered in New York. And he will get another opportunity to assert a Canadian position during the two-day G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

Canadian climate policy critics said the new commitments yesterday show developing nations are beginning to rise to Ottawa’s challenge and called on the government to act in kind. “The ground is shifting under the feet of the Harper government, which has consistently refused to take action on climate change,” said Greenpeace Canada’s Dave Martin.

Enough about the domestic politics.

The current Kyoto Protocol to prevent climate change and global warming will run out in 2012. Recognizing the urgency and the magnitude of efforts that will be required to keep the process on the line, the members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meet at the conference in Copenhagen 2009 (December 7-18) and this is the last time these countries are meeting at this government level before the climate agreement needs to be renewed. Government representatives from 170 countries are expected to be in Copenhagen in the days of the conference accompanied by NGO’s, journalists and others. In total 8000 people are expected in Copenhagen during the climate meeting.

The climate change issue was described, in L’Aquila on 9 July at the Major Economies Forum, as “one of the major challenges of our time.” At that meeting, the MEF leaders agreed on C02 emission reduction targets, setting out to halve them by 2050. They also pledged to restrict the rise in temperature to 2 degrees centigrade, with a particular eye to the poor and developing countries and their involvement in the battle against climate change. They also pledged to make further headway along this road at the Copenhagen Conference itself.

The wish for clarity is expressed by Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, in an interview with Environment & Energy Publishing (E&E). According to Yvo de Boer, the four essentials calling for an international agreement in Copenhagen are:

How much are the industrialized countries willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases?
How much are major developing countries such as China and India willing to do to limit the growth of their emissions?
How is the help needed by developing countries to engage in reducing their emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change going to be financed?
How is that money going to be managed?

The Summit on Climate Change in New York was convened on September 22, 2009. This summit was one of the major milestones and it was attended by the heads of state and government of over 90 United Nations countries and delegations from all 192 UN members. One of the central topics of the summit was “Paving the way for December’s conference”.

Hundreds of presidents, prime ministers and officials from across the globe took airplanes to the United Nations meeting, some accompanied by dozens of people. Limousines and motorcades ferried the dignitaries from airports to meetings to hotels and back, often getting stuck in Midtown Manhattan gridlock. But since the goal of this meeting was to reduce the global emissions that have been linked to global warming, the United Nations decided to try to do something about all the carbon dioxide produced by the delegates: it bought carbon offsets.

Under a new and expanding program for offsetting emissions, United Nations administrators calculated that the meeting would generate the equivalent of 461 tons of carbon dioxide, with air travel being the single largest component. They offset those emissions by directing money to a power project in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, through which agricultural leftovers like rice husks and sunflower stalks are turned into electricity for the local grid.

There is no doubt that the United States is considered to be critical for success in Copenhagen. Unfortunately, the United States never joined the 1997 Kyoto accord, the first major attempt to limit emissions in a global treaty, partly because the accord did not set mandatory targets for powerhouse developing states like China. The United States and China account for more than 40 percent of the total carbon emissions, roughly divided between both. Here are the highlights of their Summit on Climate Change speeches:

Mr. Obama acknowledged at the summit that the United States once played down the issue, but now recognized its gravity. The world “cannot allow the old divisions that have characterized the climate debate for so many years to block our progress,” he said, adding that forging consensus would come slowly. “And so all of us will face doubts and difficulties in our own capitals as we try to reach a lasting solution to the climate challenge.” However, he didn’t make any specific commitments;
Even some enthusiastic Obama supporters expressed disappointment that he had not used such an important global pulpit to make a stronger case for both international action and a forceful declaration of what the United States would do.
China’s president, Hu Jintao, spoke of reducing the “carbon intensity” of his fast-growing economy, or cutting emissions as a percentage of future economic output, by a “notable” margin that he did not specify;
Analysts gave China credit for taking carbon emissions more seriously. Its leaders now accept the need to reduce pollution, partly because their country is vulnerable environmentally and partly because they hope to become leaders in green technology. But Mr. Hu neither defined “notable” nor accepted any binding cuts on emissions. He also tied the emissions reduction effort to the growth in China’s gross domestic product, so the amount of emissions per dollar of output - or “carbon intensity” - might shrink, but the overall number could still rise as the economy expanded.

There was a general consensus at the summit as well as around the globe that presidents and prime ministers of countries large and small spoke at the summit with soaring promises about the importance of confronting the problem for future generations. But when it came down to the nuts-and-bolts promises of what they were prepared to do in the next decade, experts and analysts were disappointed that there were no bold new proposals from any of those countries which could be taken to the Copenhagen Conference.

British Columbia’s Approach to Climate Change

2010-03-29T17:15:00.002-07:00

Dr. Mir F. Ali

Like other Canadian provinces and territories across the country, British Columbia got sick and tired of waiting for the federal leadership for climate change and decided to adopt the attitude, reflecting the popular phrase – Lead, follow or get out of the way.

Consequently, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act (GGRTA) was given Royal Assent on November 29, 2007 and brought into force on January 1, 2008. This piece of legislation is considered to be a major step forward in the fight against global warming. With British Columbia’s annual emissions exceeding 66 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), this legislation signaled a major step towards confronting the Province-wide contribution to global warming. This legislation defines British Columbia’s reduction targets for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and the government’s commitment to a carbon-neutral public sector by 2010.

The GGRTA established specific targets mandating that total BC emissions be reduced by 33 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 from 2007 levels. The Province subsequently set interim targets of 6% reduction by 2012 and 18% by 2016 based on realistic and economically viable strategies.

Recognizing that 43% of emissions are under the influence of regional districts and municipalities, the Province requires that all local governments identify GHG reduction targets, policies, and plans in their Official Community Plans. In order to forward these efforts, the Province has recently released draft Community Energy and Emissions Inventories (CEEIs) for all local governments in British Columbia.

According to an explanation provided under the heading “Why does my local government need a CEEI report?”, an energy and GHG emissions inventory can be a valuable tool that helps local governments plan and implement GHG and energy management strategies, while at the same time strengthening broader sustainability planning at the local level. CEEI reports have two primary purposes:

To fulfill local governments’ Climate Action Charter commitment to measure and report their community’s GHG emissions profile; and
To establish a base year inventory for local governments to consider as they develop targets, policies, and actions related to the Province’s new Green Communities Legislation (Bill 27).

As an additional benefit, CEEI Reports support BC local government members of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Partners for Climate Protection program to achieve Milestone. One of the community streams – a community GHG emissions inventory.

According to the CEEI user guide, the following are included/excluded in each sector of the report:

Buildings:
- Included: This sector includes all electricity and natural gas delivered by the four major utilities in the Province – BC Hydro, Fortis BC, Terasen Gas Inc, and Pacific Northern Gas Ltd. This information is broken down into residential, commercial, and industrial subsectors. For each subsector, the energy consumed and the related greenhouse gases is shown along with the number of physical connections or accounts which is illustrated in the next graph; and
- Excluded: This sector does not include electricity distributed by systems not owned or operated by BC Hydro or Fortis BC (industrial self-generation, remote community systems, etc.), but does include electricity purchased by local governments to service a segment of their community (e.g., Nelson Hydro). This sector also does not include heating oil, propane, except as noted above, or wood, due to the existing difficulty in obtaining province-wide data for these energy types.

On Road Transportation:
- Included: Only vehicles on-the-road included. This represents all vehicles registered to be driven on public roads, including personal vehicles such as small passenger cars and large passenger cars, light trucks and vans passenger vans, and sport utility vehicles; motorhomes; motorcycles and mopeds; commercial vehicles such as cargo vans, panel trucks, heavy trucks, ambulances, and fire trucks; tractor trailer trucks; and buses, representing transit and private buses; and
- Excluded: It does not include vehicles not licensed to be driven on public roads such as bulldozers, forklifts, all terrain vehicles, etc. It also does not include slow moving heavy equipment that is licensed to be operated on public roads such as rollers, pavers, backhoes, graders, etc. Also, the draft 2007 CEEI Reports do not include marine, rail or air transportation. One or more of these sectors may be added in the future.

Solid Waste:
- Included: It includes estimates of the annual mass (tonnes) of municipal solid waste (MSW) disposed of at all regional district landfills and attributed to contributing municipalities, as well as each community’s estimated share of CO2e (methane) emissions; and
- Excluded: Waste that is not disposed of at a regionally operated landfill (e.g., a forestry landfill), some industrial waste, compostable material, green waste, and waste originating from federal lands, not included in the Reports. There are also no estimates CO2e provided for closed landfills. Demolition, land clearing and construction (DLC) waste, which is considered relatively inert, has not been included in the tonnage figures where known. The waste shipped to Metro Vancouver’s Waste-to-Energy facility and the overall CO2e contribution has been included in the tonnage figures.

Out of all municipalities in BC that were included in the CEEI reports, a municipality which represents a relatively small population of under 15,000 was selected to conduct a walkthrough with the objective to explain how CEEI could be used in a meaningful way. The following three graphs are designed to provide three different views of the respective CEEI inventory:

1. Carbon Oxide Equivalent (CO2e) Tonnes by Sector:

The graph on the left shows that a total of 1,116,158 GJ of energy was consumed by their Building and Transport sectors in 2007, resulting GHG emission equivalent indicated on the graph on the right.

The graph on the right shows that in 2007, this municipality has emitted a total of 56,980 tonnes of community CO2e in the atmosphere which represents 36,874 Tonnes or 64.7% for their Transportation, 10,529 Tonnes or 18.5% for their Buildings, and 9,577 Tonnes or 16.8% for their Solid Waste.

2. Energy Consumed/Emission Emitted View:

The graph (Figure2) is designed to illustrate what kind of energy is being used and as a result of the use of the energy, what kind of GHG emissions are emitted in the atmosphere in this particular municipality. Buildings are split into three categories – Residential, Commercial, and Industrial.

3. GHG Emitted by each type of Energy:

The graph presented above (Figure3) is designed to demonstrate the magnitude of each type of energy is being consumed in this municipality and as a result what kind of GHG emissions are being emitted in the atmosphere.

Here is an approach (Figure4) to setting GHG emission targets, developing strategies, producing action plan, and monitoring/reporting GHG emissions reductions in a municipality:

This graph is designed to illustrate the ways to handle the community and corporate components of the GHG emissions in a municipality. The following represent the highlights of the proposed approach:

The first thing to recognize is that the CEEI inventory is only for the community component of GHG emissions not the inventory for the corporate component;

The CEEI inventory is provided for the three sectors – Buildings, Transportation, and Solid Waste whereas the corporate inventory will be required on all municipal facilities and municipal operations including: municipal buildings, street and traffic lights, Municipal fleet, operational waste, etc.;

The first step in the process of setting GHG emission targets is to project the amount of emission for the future years. A typical practice is to aggregate the amount of emission by the growth factor for the population of the municipality. For instance, if the growth factor for this municipality is determined to be 3 percent increase in the population for the next 10 years and assuming that the population of the municipality was 100,000 in 2007, the aggregated emission for the future years will look like this:

103,000 Tonnes for 2008;
106,090 Tonnes for 2009;
109,273 Tonnes for 2010;
112,551 Tonnes for 2011; and
115,927 Tonnes for 2012.

If 2007 is going to be used as base year and municipalities were not provided the CEEI inventory until 2009, the chances are that municipalities will focus on the year 2010 to start taking action to reduce GHG emissions which also means that they have to take into consideration the aggregated total in 2010, which represent 109,273 not 100,000 as shown in the example above;

Similarly, if they decided to reduce their GHG emissions by 5 percent in 2010, 2011, and 2012. They must realize that their target of 5 percent will help reduce only two percent of the inventory (target 5 – 3 growth factor);

The focus of the strategies will be different for the corporate and community components, therefore, they have to be developed independently from each other. However, a common approach should be used to determine what will it take to accomplish the targeted results, what kind of time frame is feasible, what kind of resources will require, who is going to do what and when, etc.;

The development of an action plan is a combined effort to consolidate both, corporate and community plans, avoiding duplications, overlaps, and ambiguity. The action plan can be used as a blue print to reducing the desired level of GHG emissions in the municipality;
The finalized action plan is summarized and incorporated into the Official Community (OCP); and
The function of monitoring and reporting is a critical activity, ensuring that the Council as well as the public is kept informed with the progress and their feedback is channelled back into the process for necessary action. Furthermore, the progress report is provided to the provincial government.

While the provincial government has good intentions towards climate change and they have initiated a critical process to achieve those intentions, the following is a very aggressive and unrealistic agenda which is going to put businesses (Municipalities are required to become carbon neutral by 2012) in a very peculiar position as they are faced with some real fiscal challenges:

The GGRTA requires the public sector to become carbon neutral by 2010 and to make a public report available annually that details action taken towards carbon neutrality. The provincial government (including individual ministries and agencies), schools, colleges, universities, health authorities and Crown corporations are all included in this commitment.

The European model for reducing GHG emissions was immensely successful simply because the European municipalities were empowered by their provincial and federal governments and they were provided with ample financial incentives for all sustainable projects and initiatives throughout their jurisdictions. The BC government started out on a very positive note by recognizing the need for climate protection and making some financial provisions in their pre-election budget which earned them enough votes to have another majority government. Sadly, in their last budget, they clearly demonstrated that they lost interest in any and every climate change initiative and no significant financial provision were included in the budget.

Despite of the financial adversity, most, if not all, municipalities in British Columbia appear to believe in climate protection and they seem to be totally committed to the reduction of GHG emissions in their jurisdictions. They are eagerly seeking ways to proceed with the plan to set realistic GHG emissions targets, develop necessary plans and policies to be incorporated in their Official Community Plans with the objective to make them happen. They may not be able to meet the requirements of the GGRTA to become carbon neutral in 2012 but they are on their way to accomplishing what they can. What they need to make sure of is that in their attempt to reduce GHG emissions in their jurisdictions, they are not neglecting their basic responsibilities and they are not compromising the quality of services they are responsible for delivering to their citizens.

Potential Impacts of HST on the Construction Industry

2010-03-29T17:15:00.001-07:00

Dr Mir F. Ali

This article is a follow up to the article which was posted on the subject of the HST on July 24, 2009.

Unfortunately, at this stage, very little information on the proposed Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) has been provided by the BC provincial government. Transitional rules and other specific details may be released as late as March 2010, leaving almost eight months from the sudden and unexpected announcement of the HST in July until March 2010 for the speculation and only little over three months for the clarification and implementation of the HST. Either this is a direct reflection of the poor planning or overconfidence of the provincial government. Alternatively, it could be a combination of both.

According to a government report, it’s estimated that the HST will remove over $2 billion in costs for B.C. businesses. That includes an estimated $1.9 billion of sales tax removed from business inputs, which enhances competitiveness, increases investment and productivity and, ultimately, increases prosperity. For example, some savings would include about $880 million for the construction industry, $140 million for manufacturing, $210 million for the transportation industry, $140 million for the forestry sector, and $80 million for mining and oil and gas. In addition, B.C. businesses will also save an estimated $150 million annually in compliance costs.

It is hypothesized that the construction industry will be the single biggest beneficiary of the newly-refundable provincial portion of HST. BC Finance estimates that, of the $1.9 billion of PST currently paid by businesses, the construction sector will save $880 million, or 46% of the total expected business savings from conversion to HST.

According to the BC Construction Association Bulletin published on August 06, 2009, commercial real estate customers are the big winners as the provincial portion of HST becomes newly refundable throughout the distribution chain (e.g., forestry, manufacturing, construction) as well as on selling, purchasing and/or rental costs. Here are some observations which were made in an attempt to visualize the impacts of the HST on certain aspects of the construction industry:

Observation 1:

Under the current setup, businesses associated with commercial real estate are entitled to claim or remit their net GST based on its 5 percent. However, under the proposed tax structure, they will pay 12 percent tax (GST 5 + PST 7) on their purchases and collect 12 percent from their customers on their sale, either claiming or remitting the net HST.

Here is an example of the current and the proposed tax structures for purchasing building materials from a wholesale supplier and selling it to a construction company:

No	Description	Current Tax Structure	Proposed HST Structure
PURCHASES
1	Cost for Goods (Building Materials)	$100,000	$100,000
2	GST Paid	$ 5,000
3	HST Paid		$ 12,000
	TOTAL COST	$105,000	$ 112,000
SALES
1	Selling Price (Building Materials)	$ 125,000	$ 125,000
2	PST Collected	$ 8,750
3	GST Collected	$ 6,250
4	HST Collected		$ 15,000
	TOTAL SALE	$ 140,000	$ 140,000
Remittances:
1	GST Collected	$ 6,250
2	GST Paid	$ 5,000
	Net GST (Payable to Federal Govt.)	$ 1,250
	Remittance to Provincial Govt.	$ 8,750
	TOTAL TAX	$ 10,000
1	HST Collected		$ 15,000
2	HST Paid		$ 12,000
	Net HST (Payable to Federal Govt.)		$ 3,000

Similarities and Differences:

Under the current sales tax system, goods purchased for resale are PST exempt, therefore, only GST in the amount of $5,000 is payable. GST is fully refundable for the reporting period in which the purchase was made, therefore the TOTAL COST is $100,000. Similarly, under the proposed HST structure, the 12 percent HST will be fully and immediately refunded for a TOTAL COST of $100,000;
TOTAL SALE and TOTAL COST are the same under the both tax structures but in case of the current tax system, the amounts for GST ($6,250) and PST ($8,750) are documented and reported separately whereas the amount of HST ($15,000) will be calculated and remitted together to one taxation authority and potentially subject to only one audit review;
Under the current sales tax system, the combined tax remitted by the business is $10,000 (after deducting the GST input tax credit of $5000) whereas the net amount to be remitted under HST will be $3,000, i.e., $15,000 - $12,000;
Under HST, the business’ supplier will collect and remit $12,000 on its sale of materials to the business whereas the net amount to be collected and remitted under GST was only $5,000; and
There may be a timing difference, i.e., a positive or negative cash flow effect depending upon whether the business must remit the net GST or the net HST to the government on its sales before or after it pays the tax to its suppliers on credit purchases.

This is the most pure example of “revenue neutral” under the proposed HST.

Observation 2:

Contrary to the popular belief that no changes are applied to homes for $400,000 and under, here is an example of a new home:

No	Description	Amount
PURCHASE PRICE:
1	Price of a Home	$ 350,000
2	Applicable HST	$ 42,000
	Sub-Total	$ 392,000
APPLICABLE REBATES:
1	Less GST Rebate	-$ 6,300
2	Less Provincial HST Rebate	-$ 17,500
	Sub-Total	-$ 23,800
	Net Cost	$ 368,200
PAYABLE TO CRA:
1	Amount to be remitted	$ 18,200

Here is an explanation:

Applicable HST is based on 12 percent of the price of the home;
Less GST Rebate is calculated “36 percent of 5 percent rebate” and the formula is:
- (Price of a home*5/100)*36/100
Less Provincial HST Rebate is calculate 5 percent of the price of the home; and
Amount to be remitted to CRA is calculated by subtracting Price of the Home from Net Cost.

However, under HST, the developer will not pay PST on the cost of construction. Construction Cost (Building Materials, etc.) in this example is $200,000, the developer is required under the current setup to pay $14,000 PST on the construction cost, plus net GST of $11,200 (net 3.2% x $350,000). In other words, the developer is getting a break under HST.

Observation 3:

There are a number of grey areas that need to be addressed but based on the information available for the homes priced above the threshold of $400,000; the following example will illustrate how much more a consumer will have to pay for purchasing a new home under the proposed HST:

No	Description	Amount
PURCHASE PRICE:
1	Price of a Home	$ 500,000
2	12% HST	$ 60,000
APPLICABLE REBATES:
3	Minus Rebate	-$ 20,000
4	Embedded PST Credit 2% on price	-$ 10,000
	TOTAL REBATES	-$ 30,000
5	HST After Rebates	$ 30,000
6	Current 5% GST	$ 25,000
7	Increased Tax	$ 5,000
	Percentage of Increase	1.00%

Here is an explanation:

A rebate of $20,000 is offered to minimize the amount of HST regardless of the size of the price of a home;
The other tool that the government is offering to reduce the impact of the tax is the Embedded PST Input Credits. While government press releases indicate the input credit will be approximately 2.5 percent, some reliable sources indicate it is more likely 2.0 percent or less. Therefore the amount of $10,000 calculated based on a 2 percent credit;
When the combination of a rebate and the embedded PST credit is applied against the applicable HST, the HST amount is shown as $30,000;
The result of the comparison between the calculated GST under the current setup with the proposed HST setup shows that the consumer will pay $5,000 more under the proposed HST for purchasing a home for $500,000 which represents 1 percent; and
The amount of difference grows as the price of the home increases. For instance, in case of a home with the price of $600,000, the difference grows to $10,000 which represents 1.67 percent increase whereas in case of a home with the price of $1,000,000, the difference grows to $30,000 which represents 3 percent increase.

Urban Development Institute (UDI), Pacific Region, forwarded the following recommendations to the Premier in Response to the New HST:

Significantly increase the $400,000 threshold in the growth areas of the Province – Vancouver, Victoria and Kelowna. Greater Vancouver house prices are the highest in the country;
Index the threshold, so it increases as housing prices rise;
Increase the maximum rebate in growth areas to reflect higher housing costs in these areas;
Grandfather pre-sale contracts written before July 1, 2010 (even if ownership and the transfer of title occurs after this date);
For housing units that are completed but not pre-sold or those that need to be self assessed for rental purposes, ensure that any PST obligation which occurs before July 1, 2010 can be offset against HST, irrespective of the date of sale or self assessment of units; and
Further discussion is needed to review and mitigate the impact of the HST on rental housing; specifically, self supply assessment on new purpose built units and the lack of flow through of HST charges on services (e.g. landscaping, janitorial, and property management) from landlords to renters under the Residential Tenancy Act on new and existing rental units.

It is clear from the information presented in this article that consumers are going to end up paying more tax under HST but the developers and builders are going to get a break for not having to pay PST on the construction cost which will help boost the economy. At the same time, there is a strong possibility that the developers and builders are going to consider giving consumers a break by subsidizing the additional tax on new homes. Carl Beck in his article published in the BC Construction Association made his point that market forces will have much more of an effect on the price of new homes, resale homes and construction services than any form of taxation.

———————

The examples presented in this article were vetted by Carl Beck, CMA, Sales Tax Advisor. Carl Beck has extensive experience advising clients during sales tax transitions, having been directly involved in the implementation of GST in 1991, Quebec Sales Tax (QST) in 1995 and HST in the Maritimes in 1997 (carl.beck@telus.net)

Carbon Neutrality

2010-03-29T17:14:00.001-07:00

Dr. Mir F. Ali

An incredible number of businesses, universities, and governments around the world are totally committed to the principles of sustainability and they are going through the process of taking inventories of their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions with the objective to set reduction targets for their respective organizations and jurisdictions. They clearly understand that because greenhouse gases mix in the global atmosphere, the location of greenhouse gas emissions and emission reductions has consequence. Emissions occurring in one area can be neutralized by activity that occurs anywhere in the world, so the emission and the reduction activity do not necessarily need to occur in the same area. They also understand that in the absence of any regulatory support, they can only accomplish so much within a certain period of time but they know for sure that carbon neutrality is their ultimate goal.

Here are some facts that illustrate the magnitude of carbon: Human activity emits roughly 32 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2)—the primary greenhouse gas— into the atmosphere each year. Worldwide, about 80 percent of those emissions come from the combustion of oil, coal, natural gas, and other fossil fuels; the remaining 20 percent comes from deforestation. Because plants take in CO2, removing them releases some or all of that carbon. Currently, in any given year, the equivalent of about half of total CO2 emissions are absorbed by the world’s oceans, soil, and vegetation, which (together with the atmosphere and fossil carbon deposits) make up the natural reservoirs through which carbon flows over time. The other half of those emissions remain in the atmosphere.

Carbon neutrality is a way of addressing the other half or 16 billion metric tons of CO2 which contributes to the rising atmospheric concentration of CO2 and the gradual warming of the Earth’s climate.

Carbon neutrality could be defined as a net-zero carbon footprint or no net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions emitted in the atmosphere as a result of performing any agricultural, manufacturing activities or delivering services by a business or government during a particular period of time. The reality is that it may not be possible for some businesses or governments not to emit GHG emissions in the atmosphere due to the nature of their operations which will require those businesses/governments to balance a measured amount of carbon released with an equivalent amount of sequestered carbon or offset.

Here is how carbon sequestration and carbon offset work:

Carbon Sequestration: It is the use of practices, technologies, or other measures that increase the retention of carbon in soil, vegetation, geologic formations, or the oceans with the effect of offsetting carbon dioxide emissions from other sources. For instance, agricultural producers can help address greenhouse gas concerns by implementing practices that cause the land to act as a sink for carbon, by decreasing emissions of greenhouse gases from agricultural production activities. Many of the activities that increase the organic content of soils, and thus sequester carbon, also increase agricultural productivity as well as improve soil, air and water quality; and
Carbon Offset: It is a mechanism by which the impact of GHG emissions is neutralized through the implementation of an action elsewhere that will consume or reduce emissions by an equivalent amount of GHG emissions. A carbon offset is a financial instrument aimed at a reduction in GHG emissions. Carbon offsets are measured in metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e). One carbon offset represents the reduction of one metric ton of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in other greenhouse gases. There are two markets for carbon offsets. In the larger compliance market, companies, governments, or other entities buy carbon offsets in order to comply with caps on the total amount of carbon dioxide they are allowed to emit. In the much smaller voluntary market, individuals, companies, or governments purchase carbon offsets to mitigate their own greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, electricity use, and other sources.

In addition to CO2, the focus of carbon neutrality includes other five greenhouse gases regulated by the Kyoto Protocol which are measured in terms of their carbon dioxide equivalence (CO2e) - the impact of a GHG has on the atmosphere expressed in the equivalent amount of CO_2. The names of those greenhouse gases are: Methane (CH₄), Nitrous Oxide (N₂O), Hydrofluorocarbons (HFC), Perfluorocarbons (PFC), and Sulphur Hexafluoride (SF6).

Local governments from across B.C. signed a Climate Action Charter in September 2007 with the Province and the Union of BC Municipalities, committing to a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2012.

In addition to a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2012, local governments pledged to measure and report on their community’s greenhouse gas emissions profile and work to create compact, more energy efficient communities.

The BC Climate Action Charter recognizes that carbon neutrality involves measuring the greenhouse gas emissions that come from government operations such as buildings and fleet vehicles and then reducing those emissions to net zero. Governments achieve carbon neutrality by reducing emissions where possible, by purchasing carbon offsets to compensate for its greenhouse gas emissions or by developing projects to offset emissions. Such projects may include converting to energy efficient buildings and replacing old fleet vehicles and buses with hybrids.

BC Premier Campbell said that the province will work in partnership with the Union of B.C. Municipalities to develop a framework to track what local governments pay annually in carbon tax. They will be required to report annually on steps they have taken to achieve carbon neutrality by 2012.

“If communities do that, and publicly report on their plan and progress in meeting that goal, they will be eligible to receive a grant equal to 100 per cent of their carbon tax costs,” Campbell said.

The province of British Columbia issued the Community Energy and Environmental Inventory (CEEI) for all BC municipalities in June 2009 which will allow the municipalities a little over three years to set emission reduction targets and do every thing possibly they can do to reduce emissions to zero which may not be realistic for most of the municipalities around the province. As a result, municipalities cannot afford to get excited with the imposed timelines which are supposed to be “volunteering” and they are looking for ways to set realistic reduction targets/timelines and develop action plans and policies to proceed towards their ultimate goal of carbon neutrality. They know that it is going to take a little longer than 2012 but they will get there.

Municipalities may consider using adaptation as a supporting tool for mitigating GHG emissions in their jurisdictions as it helps minimize the overall cost of mitigation. Smart economists like Stern are convinced that adaptation will be crucial in reducing vulnerability to climate change and is the only way to cope with the impacts that are inevitable over the next few decades.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defined adaptation as adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderate harm or exploits beneficial opportunities. The following graph demonstrates how response to climate change through effective policies could use adaptation as an effective tool to help mitigate the overall damage:

Accepting the fact that adaptation is a response to climate change and climate variability, the graph shows how a planned adaptation can help to minimize the impacts and vulnerabilities while policy responses through human interfaces attempt to mitigate climate change and its variability.

Policy-driven adaptation can be defined as the result of a deliberate policy decision. Autonomous adaptation is undertaken in the main by the private sector (and in unmanaged natural ecosystems), while policy-driven adaptation is associated with public agencies either in that they set policies to encourage and inform adaptation or they take direct action themselves.

Unfortunately, there is currently no single independent global standard or international certification scheme for carbon neutrality that can be referred to in support of a claim of neutrality.

Dr. Mir F. Ali is a Sustainability Analyst with Turner Lane Development Corporation, a real estate development company with the commitment to build sustainable communities in British Columbia, Canada (mir@turnerlane.com).

Dr. Mir F. Ali The Climate Greenwash awards are out! The Climate Greenwash Awards are organized by Corporate Europe Observatory, Attac Denmark, The

2010-03-29T17:13:00.001-07:00

By Dr. Mir F. Ali

IDEAcarbon, an independent provider of ratings, analysis and advice in the carbon sphere, has launched, The Carbon Ratings Agency (CRA), “the world’s first independent carbon credit ratings service.”

The service will provide a cross-section of ratings and rating analysis on existing Kyoto Protocol CDM/JI projects, as well as for many voluntary carbon reduction projects, the service will also be available on the Bloomberg Professional^® service.

Welcoming the launch of this new service, Ian Johnson, Chairman, IDEAcarbon, said: “We are delighted to provide this service on Bloomberg. This innovative and intelligent offering provides objective information to carbon market professionals around the world. Investors, traders and analysts now have access to unrivalled details on the agency’s Market Initiated Ratings and a clear, transparent and unbiased declaration of these risks, to enhance transparency within the carbon market.”

The service also will provide detailed credit ratings for carbon offset assets in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), Joint Implementation (JI), and voluntary carbon markets. Each asset studied will be given a rating based on a detailed analysis of the underlying project, leading to an assessment of the likelihood of it delivering its stated emissions reductions in the stated time period. The CRA also considers the economic and social development benefits that the project does, or does not bring.

The Carbon Ratings Agency’s ratings provide a rigorous assessment of the likelihood of a project or portfolio delivering its stated emissions reductions in the stated time period. In addition, each rating evaluates the economic and social development benefits that the project does, or does not bring. Improved transparency and better risk management - including ratings - are an integral part of the process to turn carbon into a new asset class.

Each emission reduction project is unique and has its own risk profile. Carbon ratings will help to standardise carbon as a commodity and create a new asset class. Rated projects will no longer be unique but comparable to other projects with the same rating.

The initiative is similar to the GLOBE Carbon Registry, which is soon to be launched by the GLOBE Foundation.

The CRA will provide ratings to market participants both on a mandated basis (where project owners or investors commission the agency to rate their carbon assets) and through the Agency’s Market Initiated Ratings Service, which will give subscribers access to a representative range of carbon asset ratings on an ongoing basis.

Independent credit ratings are well established instruments for enhancing the transparency and efficiency of financial markets. Like standard credit ratings, the service will award scores ranging from AAA for the highest-quality, lowest risk offset assets, through to C and D for the highest risk assets which are least likely to meet their stated goals.

The following graph illustrates the current status of Carbon Ratings Agency projects:

IDEAcarbon has also announced the launch of IDEAcarbon Weekly, a new carbon market intelligence service. IDEAcarbon Weekly analyses and interprets climate policy, carbon market trends and other key factors in order to give carbon market participants a heads-up on the next price move.

IDEAcarbon Weekly’s goal is to help market players to strengthen their positions - and to give new investors the confidence that they need to enter this critically important new market.

The weekly briefing is structured based on the following topics:

Short-term trading strategy ideas for the carbon market;
A week-ahead technical view of the most liquid carbon instruments, i.e. front-year EUAs and CERs;
Context-setting explanations of major policy decisions that will have immediate and longer term impacts on the carbon markets;
Insights into the main driving energy product - crude oil;
The IDEAcarbon Weekly pCER Price Index, a weekly survey of the risk appetite of buyers and sellers of primary carbon credits;
The IDEAcarbon Voluntary Carbon Index; and
The Carbon Calendar^TM which brings together information and analysis about market events, policy processes and key conferences.

Dr. Mir F. Ali is a Sustainability Analyst with Turner Lane Development Corporation, a successful real estate development company committed to build sustainable communities.

Greenwashing is nothing but Hypocrisy

2010-03-29T17:12:00.002-07:00

Dr. Mir F. Ali

The Climate Greenwash awards are out!

The Climate Greenwash Awards are organized by Corporate Europe Observatory, Attac Denmark, The Climate Movement, ClimaX and Friends of the Earth Denmark to challenge the corporate capture of the UN climate talks and to highlight the way in which big businesses are increasingly turning to green spin to hide their polluting agenda. Energy companies, many of which once denied that climate change was happening, are now keen to portray themselves as green heroes in the fight against climate change. However, the awards organizers warn that many of the so-called solutions being put forward by businesses will not help reduce emissions. Companies are advocating unproven technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and failed mechanisms such as carbon trading, to justify their continuing pollution.

There were six nominees - ArcelorMittal, BP, DONG, Repsol, Shell, and Vattenfall. Swedish energy giant Vattenfall was revealed as the winner of the Climate Greenwash Award 2009 at a ceremony in Copenhagen on the eve of the World Business Summit on Climate Change on Saturday 23 May. Vattenfall, which won with 39% of the vote, was nominated for “its mastery of spin on climate change, portraying itself as a climate champion while lobbying to continue business as usual, using coal, nuclear power, and pseudo-solutions such as agrofuels and CCS”.

The Danish Government was also given a special award for its role in helping establish the World Business Summit on Climate Change - which is expected to attract some of the world’s most polluting companies; for providing business lobbyists with direct, privileged access to negotiators ahead of crucial UN Climate Change talks in December; and for withdrawing support for Danish wind energy and failing to meet its Kyoto targets

This is not really news as these tricks have been practiced for a long while. For instance:

In an advertisement in National Geographic magazine in 2004, Ford Motor Company tried to convince readers of its commitment to the environment by announcing the launch of the Escape Hybrid SUV and the remodelling of its River Rouge factory. One print ad read, “Green Vehicles, Cleaner Factories. It’s the right road for our company, and we’re well underway.” What Ford failed to tell readers is that it only planned on producing 20,000 of its Hybrid SUVs per year, while continuing to produce almost 80,000 F-series trucks per month. Moreover, just prior to the campaign’s release, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that Ford had the worst fleet wide fuel economy of all major automakers. Ford’s failure to live up to its environmentally friendly image earned the company first prize among America’s “Top Ten Worst Greenwashers” of the year;
The Coca-Cola Company was presented recently with the Polaris Institute’s first Corporate Greenwashing Award at its annual general meeting in Wilmington, Delaware. The award was presented to companies that have pushed profits higher while investing millions of dollars into covering up environmentally damaging services with corporate social responsibility projects. “After careful consideration, the Coca-Cola Company stood out as the company that has worked the hardest this year to present itself as socially and environmentally responsible - while continuing to harm environments and communities through the production and distribution of its products”, says Verda Cook, Campaigns Coordinator at the Polaris Institute; and
According to the Toronto Star April 17, 2009 in a story by Catherine Porter, of the more than 2,000 self-described environmentally friendly products in North America examined by the environmental marketing firm TerraChoice, only 25 were found to be indisputably “sin free.” The rest were greenwashing. According to TerraChoice, they are not revealing the specific stores visited for the report. However, store types included major ‘big box’ retailers in the following categories: Pharmacies, Grocery Stores, Office Supplies, ‘Big Box’ Multi-category, hardware/DIY and toys/baby products stores. Knowing the specific companies, firms and people that are committing these “sins” would be useful.

“Greenwashing,” a pejorative term derived from the term “whitewashing,” was coined by environmental activists to describe efforts by corporations to portray themselves as environmentally responsible in order to mask environmental wrongdoings. The term “greenwashing” was originally confined to describing misleading instances of environmental advertising, but as corporations’ efforts to portray themselves as environmentally virtuous have diversified and proliferated, so have charges of greenwashing. The term is now used to refer to a wider range or corporate activities, including, but not limited to, certain instances of environmental reporting, event sponsorship, the distribution of educational materials, and the creation of “front groups.” However, regardless of the strategy employed, the main objective of greenwashing is to give consumers and policy makers the impression that the company is taking the necessary steps to manage its ecological footprint.

The practice of greenwashing is having a huge negative impact on the overall perceptions of corporations. According to a 2009 Edelman study of more than 20 countries, global trust in business is at an all-time low and diminishing, with people less trustful of all sources of information about companies. The “Edelman Trust Barometer,” an output of this research, shows trust in advertising is down to 13 percent from 30 percent, and trust in company websites is down to 21 percent from 30 percent.

Paradoxically, other studies show that demand for environmentally low-impact products remains high. The 2009 “Cone Environmental Survey,” for example, found that attitudes toward environmentally responsible products remain strong despite a weak economy which is indeed good news.

It is important to keep in mind the variations within the consumer group when considering customer perceptions. The Natural Marketing Institute’s 2008 U.S. consumer segmentation model identified the following groups:

Here is the explanation:

LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability):
- Purchase green goods and are active in environmental stewardship;
Naturalites:
- Focus on health and organic goods but are not politically active in environmentalism;
Drifters:
- Have good intentions but various factors other than the environment influences their behaviour.
Conventionals:
- Do not have “green attitudes” but take mainstream actions, such as recycling and conserving energy; and

Unconcerned:
- Do not conduct behaviour that prioritizes the environment or society.

Here is a graph about the types of greenwash which is included in the guide published by Futerra Sustainability Communications under the heading of Understanding and Preventing Greenwash (A Business Guide):

Here is the explanation for each aspect of the graph:

1. Misguided Greenwash:

This category includes companies that have made substantial efforts to improve the environmental performance of their products and processes but are unable to communicate these efforts effectively. These companies may be making sweeping generalizations in their claims to try to sound “environmentally friendly,” or they may be using language that turns off potential customers. They have the potential to move towards the “Effective Environmental Communications” quadrant by focusing their messages accurately on key impacts backed up with data;

2. Unsubstantiated Greenwash:

At first glance, these companies seem to be doing commendable work and providing data to back up their claim. However, a deeper dive shows that the company does not deserve as much credit as it seems. It may be lobbying against the very environmental policies it claims to uphold, or it may be putting more resources into its communications than its actual initiatives. False efforts will eventually be uncovered as the public becomes more educated and sensitive to greenwash, and it is only a matter of time that these companies will be sent to the “Greenwash Noise” quadrant;

3. Greenwash Noise:

In cases where a company says, “We’re green,” but does not have much to back up this claim, these messages are not compelling to consumers. Much work needs to be done to move these companies to the top right quadrant, but it is feasible. By assessing the company’s impacts throughout the value chain, developing and implementing an environmental strategy, and then communicating these efforts accurately, these companies can create a path to the “Effective Environmental Communications” quadrant; and

4. Effective Environmental Communications:

These businesses are improving the environmental and social performance of their products and aligning these efforts throughout various functions within the company. They are able to communicate their efforts so that consumers clearly understand the impacts and other businesses look to these companies for leadership.

In the final analysis, having effective communications may not be good enough to restore consumer confidence in corporations. Perhaps the best strategy for the authentic corporations to explore the ways of getting their green products and services certified with the objective to demonstrate their indisputable commitment to sustainability which should help them to distinguish themselves from Greenwashers. The concept of certification of products and services based on their origins or manufacturing is not entirely new, but the recent trend toward certification has occurred on a broader scale and with a wider geographical reach than any of its historical precursors. As a result, the need for third-party certification companies to test and certify green products and services is growing immensely and creating astonishing job opportunities for the people with adequate skills set.

Ironically, while the green certification helps authenticate green products and services, the cost of the certification is justified by increasing the prices of the green products and services. In other words, regardless of whether they can afford it or not, consumers with the commitment to purchase green products and services are subsidizing the cost of the certification which is a direct result of the greed, dishonesty, and hypocrisy of Greenwashers who should have been prosecuted if there were proper laws in place.

The Cost of Building Green

2010-03-29T17:12:00.001-07:00

Dr. Mir F. Ali

Commercial real estate executives are increasingly seeking greener office space — and are less inclined to pay premiums for it, according to a recent survey by CoreNet Global and Jones Lang LaSalle. “They are less willing to pay a premium for sustainable space because they understand that it doesn’t cost the owner more to make that space efficient,” said JLL Senior Vice President Michael Jordan.

It’s nothing but a pure misconception on part of commercial real estate executives. There is a cost associated with building green - you better believe it.

It’s true that green buildings are designed to reduce the overall impact of the built environment on human health and the natural environment by:

Efficiently using energy, water, and other resources;
Protecting occupant health and improving employee productivity; and
Reducing waste, pollution and environmental degradation.

However, these wonderful characteristics of a green building come with a price tag which is shared directly or indirectly, willingly or unwillingly by the real estate developers, builders, owners, and tenants. It’s also true that most of the additional or green cost is recoverable through low Life Cycle Operating Costs, low Insurance Rates, Churn Rates, higher Productivity Gains, higher Property Values, and Absorption Rates. Typically, the green cost recovery and potential economic gains for the investments take years depending upon the size of the investments and unfortunately, the commercial real estate executives don’t seem to understand this part of the equation.

There is a huge difference between green and conventional buildings. It takes less energy, electricity, and water for constructing and maintaining green buildings whereas conventional buildings consume natural resources at an alarming rate, accounting for a significant percentage of the world’s energy, electricity, and water consumption. More specifically, the construction of conventional buildings accounts for: 40% of the world’s energy; 25% of the timber harvested; 16% of the fresh water used; 50% ozone depleting CFC’s; 30% of raw materials; and 40% landfill waste.

The following graph (Figure 1) illustrates the consumption of energy in buildings and homes which is based on the Energy Efficient Building Strategy: More Action, Less Energy:

Green Building:
Green building design takes an environmentally sensitive approach to construction and it is a structure that is designed, built, renovated, operated, or reused in an ecological and resource-efficient manner. Project goals, objectives, and results differ from project to project as they are driven by the owner and project team, and there is no formal evaluation process.

Smart developers, designers, and architects who are interested in building green buildings, but whom have no patience for the process to get their buildings certified, can stil build green structures regardless of official certification processes. A primary element in green building is the recognition of the impact of energy efficiency in green buildings.These developers can take advantage of passive design to make sure that the building envelop is air tight, realizing the fact that conventional buildings lose heat (See Figure 2) which has a direct negative impact on the ongoing operational cost. The graph presented below is based on the website, greenspree:

These developers typically incorporate the following passive design features in their building designs:

Orientation to the sun to provide natural heating and daylighting;
Building shape - compact building plans have less external wall area and therefore less potential heat loss while long, thin buildings are better for daylighting and cross-flow passive ventilation;
Harnessing of natural breezes for ventilation - to cool internal spaces and remove contaminants;
Zoning of rooms and occupant activities to take account of the sun’s movement, daylighting and potential sources of noise;
Using the thermal mass available in the building’s structure - for example in the concrete floor slab - to moderate temperatures and provide heating;
Using correctly sized roof overhangs and other forms of shading to cut out unwanted light and heat;
Carefully considered placement and sizes of windows and opening sashes;
Good thermal insulation; and
Choice of materials.

As a part of the process they also use the following key components which make a home an ENERGY STAR Home:

Sealed Duck System;
High Performance Heating & Cooling Systems;
Efficient Appliances & Lighting;
Better Insulation Windows & Doors; and
Performance Testing & Quality Assurance.

In addition to making building energy efficient, funds have to be invested in the tools and techniques to minimize waste, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and generate energy by using renewable technologies which is indeed a significant chunk of cost for building green.

The reality is that Green building design offers similar benefits to certification - less of an environmental impact, healthier and happier employees etc. It also offers some additional benefits:

No additional time required. With no formal process to adhere to, the project won’t be held up by red tape; and
Certification-like results without the additional cost.

However, while the big benefit of being green, but not certified, is skipping the arduous, costly process, that benefit is also a downfall. Lack of official verification of the project against a universally recognized standard can be problematic.

Nevertheless, building green even without getting certified is significantly more expensive in comparison with the cost of building conventional buildings.

Certified Green Building:
The most common certification program is the Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. LEED is a third-party certification program and an internationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings. It provides building owners and operators the tools they need to have an immediate and measurable impact on their buildings’ performance.

LEED promotes a whole-building approach to sustainability. Credits and Prerequisites are organized into the following six categories: Sustainable Site Development; Water Efficiency; Energy Efficiency; Materials Selection; Indoor Environmental Quality; and Innovation & Design Process. LEED encourages and accelerates global adoption of sustainable green building and development practices through the creation and implementation of universally understood and accepted tools and performance criteria.

Certification is based on the total point score achieved, following an independent review and an audit of selected Credits. With four possible levels of certification (certified, silver, gold and platinum), LEED® is flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of green building strategies that best fit the constraints and goals of particular projects.

LEED is a recognized standard for the construction industry to assess the environmental sustainability of building designs: A framework for integrated design; A point based rating system; 6 topic areas; 34 credits and maximum of 69 (70 for Canada) points; and 4 performance ratings.

A rapidly-growing number of private sector organizations and governments are adopting LEED certification in their policies, programming and operations, with the goal of achieving and demonstrating sustainability. The reasons for certifying include: Gain recognition for green building efforts; Validate achievement through third party review; Qualify for a growing array of government incentives; and Contribute to a growing green building knowledge base.

The following graph (figure 3) illustrates the incremental construction cost which is based on the document, Compliance with ASHRAE 90.1 and LEED, published by ASHRAE Vancouver Island Chapter:

It can also be noticed that the cost of building small green buildings in comparison with large buildings is significantly higher in all four cases.

What is interesting is that the difference in costs is minimized in case of higher levels of certification. For instance: Costs of small buildings are higher than large buildings by 300 percent, 233 percent, 200 [percent, and 168 percent respectively for the certified, silver, gold, and platinum categories or levels.

Another interesting observation to make is that the cost of constructing LEED certified green buildings differs from climate to climate. For instance, the following graph (Figure 4) illustrates the cost differences for building the LEED certified silver, gold, and platinum buildings in six different climates - UCSB, San Francisco, Merced, Denver, Boston, and Houston. This graph is based on a report, Costing Green: A Comprehensive Cost Database and Budgeting Methodology:

There is a need to understand that in addition to significant increase in building green which could be debateable but there is no argument that the certification of the buildings adds up significant cost to the total costs of buildings. According to a report, the following three relevant points are always brought up when discussing the LEED certification:

Certification can add time to the project: It’s a rigorous process that requires careful, constant management (usually handled by one person who does nothing but that) and you’ll lose a lot of time if you don’t plan properly;
It can get expensive: In addition to the registration and certification fees, you will also incur significant commissioning fees that typically add 20-30% to your budget; and
Un-weighted categories can lead to unfair comparisons: One point equals one point in the rating system, so the single point allocated for installing a $400 bike rack is worth as much as the point given for buying 50% of your energy from renewable sources. There’s no comparison between the environmental impacts of those alternatives-yet they both contribute equally to the certification level of a project.

The discussion about the cost of LEED buildings is only one side of the coin and the other side of the coin of course is the benefits associated with building LEED buildings. To this end, the following table will highlight the energy savings for each level of LEED certification along with the utility savings as well as a typical payback for each level of certification which is based on the document, Compliance with ASHRAE 90.1 and LEED, published by ASHRAE Vancouver Island Chapter:

Economics of LEED (Source: Enermodal Engineering) illustrated below:

LEED Rating	Certified	Silver	Gold	Platinum
LEED Points	26 to 32	33 to 38	39 to 51	52 to 70
Energy Savings	25 to 35%	35 to 50%	50 to 60%	> 60%
Annual Utility Savings	$0.75 sft	$1, 80 sft.	$1, 25 sft.	$1.50 sft.
Typical Payback	Under 3 Yrs	3 to 5 Yrs	5 to 10 Yrs	10 + Yrs

Source: Enermodal Engineering

The bottom line is that there is a cost associated with building green. Municipalities around the world are putting immense pressure on real estate developers to meet their ambitious energy efficiency requirements for building green. What they don’t seem to appreciate is that while the building technologies and renewable energies are widely available and accessible on a global basis, unfortunately they are not cost-effective enough to persuade many North American consumers. Ironically, North American consumers may be suffering from a delusion about the green cost. The fact of the matter is that the European real estate developers have been very successful in building and selling green buildings all over the map, partly because the European municipalities have access to green funds which they use to assist green developments in their jurisdictions and partly because an average European consumer is much more passionate about the environment and he or she is not just focusing on the cost/price when they are purchasing in a commercial or residential building, but the other benefits, social and environmental, are a part of the overall consideration.

Another reason for Europe being so ahead of North America in the field of environmental responsibility is that the taxes being collected by European governments in the name of “carbon tax” or carbon related taxes, are being invested into renewable energies which is helping them to make those technologies affordable and deployable. On the contrary, the carbon taxes or the revenue associated with the carbon related activities in North America is being treated as “Revenue Neutral” which means that that money is returned back to their citizens in the shapes of various tax breaks. In other words, the recycling of the carbon tax money is a huge administrative cost to the citizens without helping in any way to deal with environmental issues.

The good news is that those North American real estate developers with a strategic vision are committed to the concept of sustainability. They have been smart enough to recognize the severity of the situation and have accepted the fact that the only way to survive in this harsh market is to bridge the gap between the cost associated with conventional building and with green building. This will empower them to meet the realistic requirements imposed by their municipalities for building green and also meet the pricing expectations of their consumers who are desperately looking for bargains. They also found the best way to accomplish this objective is to tap into the brainpower of those who are capable of conducting the necessary research to capitalizing on the tools, techniques, and technologies in a way which will help bring down the overall cost of building green. It may take a little longer to find the ultimate solution to the challenge at hand, but these developers are moving in the right direction with a positive attitude and there is always a possibility that the research they are investing in may end up finding ways of optimizing cost, not only just to bridge the gap, but also to build green buildings cheaper than conventional buildings.

Municipalities must be vigilant in setting GHG reduction targets

2010-03-29T17:11:00.001-07:00

Dr. Mir F. Ali

It seems to be a popularity context in the midst of some municipalities to set higher targets for reducing GHG emissions with the ambition to be recognized as a national or global leaders depending upon the size of their ego. There are two things appear to be profoundly wrong with this picture:

Somebody forgot to tell those municipalities that setting up targets is important but only a small part of the overall scope of the initiative and rewards and awards are typically claimed based on how and when those targets were accomplished. More importantly, what was the costs of those reductions – were they justified by increasing taxes or charging more for the municipal services or imposing overwhelming restrictions on the developers/builders for building green in their jurisdictions, or boosting organizational effectiveness and efficiency of the municipalities or finally, a combination of all the above; and
If elected municipal officials are taking the risk of setting or approving unrealistic targets for 2020 or 2050 only for the 15 minutes of limelight and assuming that they are not going to be there to face the drums, they need to think it over. They will be leaving behind a huge mess for the next generation to clean up and this can’t possibly be fair from any point of view.

The good news is that no other governments, but local governments (Municipalities), are directly responsible for their buildings and vehicle fleets. They can use this to influence the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in their jurisdictions as they are aware of the emissions and energy consuming capabilities of the buildings as well as transportation.

The real challenge is how they are going to do it.

Here is a Canadian perspective for reducing GHG emissions in Canada according to the document, Kyoto and Municipalities:

Kyoto targets require Canada to reduce GHG emissions 6% below 1990 level by 2008-12;
Canada’s GHG emissions in 1990 were 607 Megatonnes (Mt);
Expected GHG emissions in 2010 estimated to be 809 Mt;
Expected reduced GHG emissions in 2010 based on 6% below 1990 is estimated to be 571 Mt; and
Therefore, the gap is about 240 Mt and is expected to be bigger - driven by economic and population growth.

Here is the Canadian strategy to reduce GHG emissions:

Federal government’s Action Plan 2000 to reduce = 50MCarbon sinks = 24Mt;
Emissions trading up to 144Mt;
Credit for “cleaner energy exports” = 70Mt;
Use of new technologies such as fuel cells; and
Purchase of credits from Russia and Romania.

Here is the Province of British Columbia’s perspective for reducing GHG emissions within the Province:

In support of the federal government’s plan for the reduction of GHG emissions, the 2007 Provincial enactment of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act (GGRTA) identified climate change as critically important. With British Columbia’s annual emissions exceeding 66 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, this legislation signalled a major step towards confronting the Province-wide contribution to global warming;
Significantly, the GGRTA established specific targets mandating that total BC emissions be reduced by 33 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. The Province subsequently set interim targets of 6% reduction by 2012 and 18% by 2016 based on realistic and economically viable strategies; and
Recognizing that 43% of emissions are under the influence of regional districts and municipalities, the Province requires that all local governments identify GHG reduction targets, policies, and plans in their Official Community Plans. In order to forward these efforts, the Province recently released draft Community Energy and Emissions Inventories (CEEIs) for all local governments in British Columbia.

Now it’s left entirely up to the municipalities to perform regardless of the following expected impacts and with very little or no federal or provincial financial incentives:

More threats to already shaky business enterprises in communities;
Reduced ability to maintain existing tax levies;
Restraints on wages with indirect impacts on other businesses and municipal undertakings;
Reduced revenues to higher levels of government and, in turn, reduced cash flows back to already constrained municipalities; and
Reduced ability of local government to provide services.

It must be recognized that in order for the municipalities to make a commitment to reducing GHG emissions, they have to be convinced about what the leading climatologists like NASA’s Jim Hansen have said that the window for action is closing and that if we – as a species — do not make significant progress reversing GHG emissions trends within the next ten years, it will be too late to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Thus, it is time for action and the municipalities’ action plans must be deemed failures if they do not produce the rapid response that is needed to mitigate GHG emissions.

Coming back to municipalities setting GHG emission reduction targets, municipalities must understand that target setting has to be an integral part of a performance management mechanism which should be designed to manage GHG emissions reductions on a timely as well as cost-effective basis and it should not be viewed as a statistical or administrative process carried out by a few in isolation of the overall GHG emissions reduction planning policy.

Furthermore, targets are generally expressed as a percentage reduction from the emission inventory baseline year. Targets are used as a tool to help reduce GHG emissions. Targets must be time bound, they must define a ‘desired’, ‘promised’, ‘minimum’ or ‘aspirational’ level of reduction and they must be measured via performance indicators. By the way, aspirations are the ultimate and desired levels of performance. They are not always achievable but reflect the ambitions of the individual, team, service or authority. They might also be described as vision or mission when related to the broadest or most fundamental objective of the organisation or partnership. Other terms used might be aims or ambitions.

Another important point to keep in mind is that since targets are set as a percentage of the baseline year, plans for reducing emissions must account for any growth the community will experience between the baseline year and the target year. Therefore, growth should be one of the factors considered when attempting to set a reachable target.

Targets for reducing GHG emission can differ between community emissions and municipal operations emissions. Typically, municipalities often set more aggressive targets for their own operations simply because they have more direct control over their operations.

According to the Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) program, targets are generally established with input from citizens, non-profit and community groups, the private sector and municipal staff; typically, through the advisory committee. Council must approve the target and timeline for achieving it. Preferred targets are 20% reduction in GHGs from municipal operations and at least a 6% reduction from the community, both within 10 years of joining the program. This target was adopted by the City of Toronto in 1990 as the first GHG reduction target officially adopted by any government body. It has been the standard for participants in the CCP campaign ever since. Other common targets adopted by local governments include:

A 10% reductions in emissions, within 10 to 15 years of the base year;
The national Kyoto Protocol target for the country in which the jurisdiction in located; or
No net greenhouse gas emissions – usually set as a target that drives continual improvement, or to make a strong political statement of commitment.

The target can and should be refined and the goal increased over time. Ultimately a 60% – 80% reduction in GHG emissions is needed to avert the impacts of climate change.

Here is a Performance Management Model which is designed to help municipalities manage their process of reducing GHG emissions in their jurisdictions:

Most of the provinces have already completed the baseline inventory of GHG emissions for their municipalities and those inventories are made available on their respective websites which is shown on the graph as a starting point. The majority of those inventories which are produced by various provinces indicate the energies consumed and GHG emissions emitted in a given year in a given municipality. GHG emissions in the inventories are divided into three categories: Buildings, On Road Transportation, and Community Solid Waste. The categories of Buildings and On Road Transportation are further divided into sub-categories. Here is a brief description of the graph (Figure 2), step by step:

Setting Targets: Municipalities review their baseline GHG emissions inventories in order to understand the relationship between the amount of energies consumed and the amount of GHG emissions emitted in their jurisdictions. They also try to compare their inventories with the compatible neighbouring municipalities’ inventories to understand the reasons behind the obvious differences. Then they develop their own vision for reducing GHG emissions in their operations as well as in their communities which helps them to come up with some realistic numerical values for setting up their targets. Before they finalize their targets, municipalities make sure that their targets are realistic, practical, and achievable. Once their targets are finalized, they need to develop rules or performance indicators for measuring and monitoring the progress for each target;
Developing Implementation Strategies: In this phase of the model, municipalities conduct a gap analysis, comparing their base inventories against their targets to determine the gap in that particular year. Once the gap is determined and defined, further analysis will be required to identify what is needed to be done to bridge the gap which will lead to the articulation of an action plan. In order to support the plan, necessary policies and guidelines will have to be developed by each municipality for their jurisdictions. Here is an opportunity for the municipalities to consider developing some complimentary strategies to minimize their operational overheads and maximize the performance of their resources which will help reduce the overall cost of the process;
Implementing Strategies: The activities identified and proposed as an action plan in the previous phase, need to be executed step by step, following the policies and guidelines;
Monitoring Progress: The progress needs to be monitored following the rules/performance indicators that were developed under the phase 1 of the model. Necessary analysis will be have to be conducted to explain the trends, progress or shortfalls based on the results; and
Reporting: The report produced under this phase of the model will include recommendations to the council and as a result of those recommendations; the council will approve the changes or realignment of the strategies to overcome any shortfalls.

It has been proven again and again that no model, regardless of how carefully articulated, is going to function as intended unless an accountability framework is formulated, describing who is going to do what, when, where, why, and under whose leadership. Here are a couple of realities or challenges:

Politicians seem to be the driving force for the green initiatives in almost all municipalities. This is the main reason we see municipal interest in green initiatives going up and down like a yo-yo. Interest depends upon who is elected to govern the jurisdictions; and
Generally, the municipal coffers are not rich enough to offer politicians any reasonable compensation packages which will allow them to dedicate their full attention to the municipal affairs. Consequently, their day jobs, businesses, and trades take them away to different cities and in some cases different countries for an extended period of time which is also a major problem for the municipalities.

Here is another reality. If the chief executive officers/city managers don’t become directly accountable for the green initiatives in their municipalities and assume the leadership role while fostering, educating, and assisting elected officials to seek public support, municipalities will continue to struggle and green initiatives will continue to suffer.

The chief executive officers/city managers in each municipality have to be visionary enough to look at the bigger picture and realize that ultimately each municipality is going to be allowed to emit so many tonnes of GHG emission in the atmosphere each year. If any municipality failed to live up to those expectations and exceeded their allocated GHG quota, they will have no choice but to purchase carbon credits to justify the excess GHG emissions from those municipalities which were successful in emitting less GHG emissions than what they were allowed to. This could very well be translated into a big money windfall or headache depending upon the size of the excess or credit and the price of the carbon credits at that time. This is no different than what will be happening to the provinces/states and countries around the world.

This is indeed a strategic opportunity for the municipalities to excel by working towards transforming municipalities into exemplary jurisdictions.

BC’s New HST Tax

2010-03-29T17:10:00.001-07:00

Dr. Mir F. Ali has written a primer here on the introduction of BC’s new HST tax which I think should stir up some controversy. Whether or not you are in favour of this tax (it’s too early to make a solid decision) it will be interesting to watch the debate over the next few months. If the NDP doesn’t go ballistic over this, I’d be surprised, but I guess we’ll see. My first impression is that we’re going to be shifting more of the tax burden onto the average working person and of course this is nothing new. This has been the trend with conservative governments for the last 40 years. I’ve read Naomi Klein’s latest book, The Shock Doctrine and you should too.

You’ll note that the organizations that are having their taxes reduced are: mining companies, forestry companies, manufacturers, etc… ie., the large corporate interests which, for the most part, are foreign owned. The guy paying more tax is the small business owner taking his partner out to dinner and paying more for his meal and drinks. Sure there are all sorts of tax rebates and credits thrown into the mix, but what government is going to go through all this trouble if they aren’t going to increase their revenues…what’s their motivation for stirring up such a pot? One can only wonder. It can’t be because they want to stimulate the economy or why would they put the burden on the consumer…if I don’t think I can afford to go out for dinner and have fun with my friends for a night on the town… I will feel more impoverished and less confident in the economy. The economy, lets not forget, runs on confidence.

But in the end what’s this got to do with non-profits…it remains to be seen, but all non-profits should start to examine this legislation and find out how it’s going to effect their clients and their staff, most of whom are marginally paid. It’s these folks who now will be paying more tax instead of the mining companies. Sure small business gets a harmonization and an elimination of the PST, but their staff and owners just get dinged when they go out for after work drinks…Want to stimulate small business which is actually the backbone of the province? Cut all personal income taxes on the first $100,000 of earnings and have the HST and let people go spend their money.

So I thank Mir for sending me his Primer which is a great introduction to the issue and I look forward to lots of comments on this.

A Glance at the Harmonized Sales Tax in British Columbia

Dr. Mir F. Ali

Premier Gordon Campbell and Finance Minister Colin Hansen announced on Thursday, July 23, 2009 that British Columbia will be implementing a harmonized sales tax (HST) subject to the condition that the Parliaments of Canada and British Columbia pass the Act. B.C. will have the lowest HST in Canada, by combining the seven per cent B.C. Provincial Sales Tax (PST) with the five per cent federal Goods and Services Tax (GST), for a single sales tax rate of 12 per cent.

The Province of B.C. and the Government of Canada have signed a Memorandum of Agreement setting out their intention to establish an HST in British Columbia effective July 1, 2010. The agreement establishes a framework for the proposal, setting out key features such as the timing, the tax base, the rate and the flexibility available to the province.

The HST would be administered by the federal government in the same way that they now administer the GST and the HST in other HST provinces. The federal government would provide revenue to the province based on an allocation formula which also means that:

Reduction of paper work for businesses now collecting PST and GST;
Single tax charged and paid to CRA;
One combined sales tax return; and
Will no longer be two levels of government audits.

Here is some background information on Canada’s sales tax:

1991, the Canadian federal government replaced its broad-based manufacturers’ sales tax (”FST”) with the national value-added tax (”VAT”) – the Goods and Services Tax (”GST”);
Since that time, four provinces – Quebec (1992), Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland & Labrador (1997) – have converted their provincial retail sales tax (”RST”) systems into a form of value-added tax that is virtually identical in principles and scope to that of the GST;
Five provinces – British Columbia, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Prince Edward Island – still rely upon their older retail sales tax systems. This leaves Canada in a unique situation. It is one of only two member nations of the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (”OECD”) that still utilizes the retail sales tax system to tax consumption (the other OECD member being the United States); and
On March 26, 2009 Ontario announced a plan to move to a single sales tax system – bringing the percentage of the Canadian population under HST to 68% and modernizing Ontario’s tax system to be competitive with 130 countries in the world.

According to Professor Michael Smart (2007) of the University of Toronto who examined the effects of harmonization in Atlantic Canada for the C.D. Howe Institute and made the following two important conclusions:

After the 1997 reforms, per capita investment rose by more than 11% in the harmonizing provinces compared to the non-harmonized provinces. In addition, total investment in machinery and equipment increased by over 12% annually above the level of investment that existed prior to the 1997 reforms (Smart, 2007); and
There was almost no change in overall prices even though a whole set of goods and services were now subject to the harmonized provincial sales tax. Specifically, he found that consumer prices in the harmonizing provinces fell after the 1997 reforms, which somewhat offset the imposition of the sales tax (Smart, 2007).

Finance Minister Colin Hansen estimated that the HST will remove over $2 billion in costs for B.C. businesses. That includes an estimated $1.9 billion of sales tax removed from business inputs, which enhances competitiveness, increases investment and productivity and, ultimately, increases prosperity. For example, some savings would include about $880 million for the construction industry, $140 million for manufacturing, $210 million for the transportation industry, $140 million for the forestry sector, and $80 million for mining and oil and gas. In addition, B.C. businesses will also save an estimated $150 million annually in compliance costs. Similar to PST exemptions, the B.C. HST will provide consumers with point-of-sale rebates on a number of products including gasoline and diesel fuel for motor vehicles, books, children’s-sized clothing and footwear, children’s car seats and car booster seats, diapers and feminine hygiene products.

The proposed HST will include:

Unlike any other province, B.C. will provide an automatic point-of-sale rebate so consumers do not have to pay the provincial portion of the HST at the pump for purchases of gasoline and diesel fuel for motor vehicles, including any biofuel components;
A partial rebate of the provincial portion of the single sales tax for new housing to ensure that new homes up to $400,000 will bear no more tax than under the current PST system, while homes above $400,000 will receive a flat rebate of about $20,000;
A refundable B.C. HST Credit paid quarterly with the GST and carbon tax credit to offset the impact of the tax on those with low incomes; and
A temporary delay in the provision of input tax credits for certain purchases by businesses with taxable sales in excess of $10 million.

It was also agreed that the federal government will provide BC with $1.6 billion in transitional funding in recognition of the improvement this change will make to business competitiveness in Canada. The full cost of administration will be borne by the federal government, saving the Province an estimated $30 million annually in administration costs. With this decision, the Province can now move forward and work with industry to implement the new HST.

To meet our unique requirements here in the province of British Columbia, the Harmonized Sales Tax would include the following point-of-sale rebates and tax credits for the provincial portion of HST:

Fuel: Gasoline and diesel motor fuels, including any biofuel components;
Other items: Books, children’s sized clothing and footwear, children’s car seats and car booster seats, diapers and feminine hygiene products;
Housing: A partial rebate of the provincial portion of the HST of up to $20,000 on all new housing; and
Low income tax credit: A refundable B.C. HST Credit to help protect low-income individuals.

There will be rebates/tax credits for municipalities, charities and eligible non-profit organizations to avoid tax increases for these sectors. And there will also be temporary restrictions of input tax credits for certain purchases by businesses with taxable sales over $10 million and financial institutions.

There is no mention of universities/colleges, school boards, and hospitals under the category of rebates/tax credits but these organizations can be qualified under the term of “non-profit organizations”. The following graph will illustrate the structure that is proposed by the Province of Ontario as a part of their overall proposed HST:

Bob Wilkinson, C.G.A in his report, What will it mean to Business?, which was prepared for BDO Dunwoody LLP on the subject of the HST for Ontario, anticipated the following steps for the conversion/implementation of the HST on July 1, 2010 which are quite appropriate and applicable to situation in British Columbia:

Convert accounting systems, cash registers to collect harmonized tax;
Expenses may need to be segregated between pre and post implementation amounts for proper tracking;
Review filing period (monthly quarterly, annually);
Planning of significant expenditures as conversion date approaches for businesses;
Recovery of PST after June 30, 2010;
Computer hardware/software, equipment, vehicles; and
Consumers – expenses subject to provincial component consider acquiring before June 30, 2010 (real estate acquisitions).

The proposed HST sales tax will be applicable to the same goods and services that the GST applies to, not to mention that it will include many items that were not subject to PST. All goods and services which are currently subject to only GST (5 percent), will be taxable at the rate of 12 percent. For instance, the tax on the food and beverages in the restaurants will go up from 5 to 12 percent. This is indeed a bad news for the restaurant industry which is already suffering from the economic downturn. History has shown that a seven-per-cent price increase translates into a seven-per-cent loss in sales, von Schellwitz said. “That’s going to cost our industry in B.C. annually $750 million,” he said.

According to the Ministry of Finance, the following goods and services are currently exempt from provincial sales tax (PST), but will be subject to the full 12-per-cent harmonized sales tax when it is implemented next July. With the new HST, businesses will be able to recover the PST portion of the tax they currently pay, rather than passing it on to consumers as part of the price of these items. Theoretically, that should mean that prices for these goods will come down by seven per cent as they become subject to the full tax.
• GOODS: Residential fuels (electricity, natural gas) and heating; Basic cable TV and residential phones; All food products (only basic groceries will remain exempt under new tax); Non-prescription medication; Vitamins and dietary supplements; Bicycles; School supplies (books will continue to be exempt); Magazines and newspapers; Work-related safety equipment; Safety helmets, life jackets, first-aid kits; Smoke detectors and fire extinguishers; and Energy conservation equipment (e.g., insulation, solar power equipment).

SERVICES: Personal services such as hair care; Dry cleaning; Repair services for household appliances; Household maintenance such as renovations and painting; Real estate fees; Membership fees for health clubs; Movie and theatre tickets; Funeral services; Professional services such as accounting and home care; and Airline fares within Canada.

Members of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business are split on the tax, Brian Bonney, the director of provincial affairs in B.C., said in an interview.

Dr. Mir F. Ali is a Sustainability Analyst with Turner Lane Development Company, a real estate development company with the commitment to build sustainable communities in British Columbia, Canada. (mir@turnerlane.com).

The Primer: Global Warming and Climate Change. Dr. Mir F. Ali

2010-03-29T17:09:00.000-07:00

Change. Dr. Mir F. Ali

In spite of unremitting controversy, the interest in global warming is increasing by the minute. It doesn’t take a huge effort these days for the global population to acquire the necessary knowledge on the subject so that they can make informed decisions in their daily lives.

People are beginning to appreciate the facts presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level;

Observational evidence from all continents and most oceans shows that many natural systems are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases; and
There is medium confidence that other effects of regional climate change on natural and human environments are emerging, although many are difficult to discern due to adaptation and non-climatic drivers.

While media attention and access to the information on the subject have been a great help to promote the concept, at the same time it has created some confusion due to the use of different terminologies, and the duplication of the information. This paper is dedicated to providing some basic background information on the subject.

Perhaps the best way to proceed with this paper is to provide the background information for the controversy about global warming. Here are some facts which were published in the London Times by Naomi Oreskes and Jonathan Renouf on September 7, 2008:

1. Hullabaloo of Global Warming:
The unnecessary and politically motivated debate about global warming has been going on for years, attempting to dispute almost every aspect of the overwhelming scientific consensus on the subject. Arguments aimed at presenting doubt have delayed significant political action which could have dealt with greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions much more effectively and earlier. Recent research reveals how the roots of this argument stretch back to two hugely influential reports written almost 30 years ago. These reports involve an organization of American scientists reporting to the US Department of Defence. At the highest levels of the American government, officials pondered whether global warming was a significant new threat to civilization. They turned for advice to the elite special forces of the scientific world – an organization known as JASON.

Jason was established (by whom?)in 1960 at the height of the cold war when a group of physicists who had helped to develop the atomic bomb proposed a new organization that would – to quote one of its founders – “inject new ideas into national defence”. So the Jasons (as they style themselves) were born; a self-selected group of brilliant minds free to think the unthinkable in the knowledge that their work was classified. Membership was by invitation only and they are indeed the cream of the scientific community. Of the roughly 100 Jasons over the years, 11 have won Nobel prizes and 43 have been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences.

In 1977, Jasons got to work on global warming. There was one potential problem. Only a few of them knew anything about climatology. To get a better understanding they relocated for a few days to Boulder, Colorado, the base for NCAR – the National Center for Atmospheric Research – where they heard the latest information on climate change. Then, being physicists, they went back to first principles and decided to build a model of the climate system. Officially it was called Features of Energy-Budget Climate Models: An Example of Weather-Driven Climate Stability, but it was dubbed the Jason Model of the World.

In 1979 they produced their report: Coded JSR-78-07 and entitled The Long Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate. Now, with the benefit of hind-sight, it is remarkable how prescient it was. Right on the first page, the Jasons predicted that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would double from their preindustrial levels by about the year 2035. Today it’s expected this will happen by about 2050. They suggested that this doubling of carbon dioxide would lead to an average warming across the planet of 2-3C. Again, that’s right in the middle of today’s predictions. They warned that polar regions would warm by much more than the average, perhaps by as much as 10C or 12C. That prediction is already coming true – last year the Arctic sea ice melted to a new record low. This year may well set another record.

Nor were the Jasons frightened of drawing the obvious conclusions for civilization: The cause for concern was clear when one noted “the fragility of the world’s crop-producing capacity, particularly in those marginal areas where small alterations in temperature and precipitation can bring about major changes in total productivity”.

Scientific research has since added detail to the predictions+, but has not changed the basic forecast. The Jason report was never officially released, but was read at the highest levels of the US government.

Here is a description of the role the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) plays in the world of global warming:

2. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):
The IPCC is a scientific intergovernmental body set up by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Its constituency is made of:

The Governments:

The IPCC is open to all member countries of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programs (UNEP), participate in plenary Sessions of the IPCC where main decisions about the IPCC work programme are taken and reports are accepted, adopted and approved. They also participated in the review of IPCC Reports.

The Scientists:

Hundreds of scientists all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC as authors, contributors and reviewers; and

The People:

As United Nations body, the IPCC work aims at the promotion of the United Nations human development goals.

The IPCC is a scientific body: the information it provides is based on scientific evidence and reflects existing viewpoints within the scientific community. The comprehensiveness of the scientific content is achieved through contributions from experts in all regions of the world and all relevant disciplines including, where appropriately documented, industry literature and traditional practices, and a two stage review process by experts and governments.

Because of its intergovernmental nature, the IPCC is able to provide scientific technical and socio-economic information in a policy-relevant, but policy neutral way to decision makers. When governments accept the IPCC reports and approve their Summary for Policymakers, they acknowledge the legitimacy of their scientific content.

The IPCC provides its reports at regular intervals and they immediately become standard works of reference, widely used by policymakers, experts and students. The findings of the first IPCC Assessment Report of 1990 played a decisive role in leading to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was opened for signature in the Rio de Janeiro Summit in 1992 and entered into force in 1994. It provides the overall policy framework for addressing the climate change issue. The IPCC Second Assessment Report of 1995 provided key input for the negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the Third Assessment Report of 2001 as well as Special and Methodology Reports provided further information relevant for the development of the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol. The IPCC continues to be a major source of information for the negotiations under the UNFCCC.

On Feb. 2, 2007, the United Nations scientific panel studying climate change declared that the evidence of a warming trend is “unequivocal,” the likelihood was 90 percent to 99 percent that emissions of heat-trapping GHGs like CO2, spewed from tailpipes and smokestacks, were the dominant cause of the observed warming of the last 50 years. In the panel’s parlance, this level of certainty is labelled “very likely.”

It was reported that global average air temperatures rose 0.74 +/- 0.18 degrees Celsius during the past century. Several climate scenarios illustrate how temperatures might increase during the 21st century (Graphic: Figure 1). Which of these scenarios becomes reality depends on how much CO2 and other GHGs will be emitted. Pre-industrial levels were around 280 CO2 parts per million (ppmv) molecules of dry air; they have since risen to the current level of some 380 ppmv. If global warming is to be limited to 2 degrees Celsius, CO2 concentration has to be stabilized at 400-450 ppmv or less.

It was also reported that the global climate is likely to rise between 3.5 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit if the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere reaches twice the level of 1750. It predicts that Arctic summer sea ice will disappear by 2080 and that weather patterns will change globally. Such changes could include heat waves, droughts, an increase in heavy rain and more intense storms. In Europe, rising temperatures could turn much of Spain, Italy and Greece into deserts.

Northern Europe, including Britain, would face more floods, heat waves and stronger storms. Much of Australia would become uninhabitable. By 2100, sea levels are likely to rise between 7 to 23 inches, and the changes now underway will continue for centuries to come.
Synthesizing reams of data from its three previous reports, the IPCC for the first time specifically points out important risks if governments fail to respond: melting ice sheets that could lead to a rapid rise in sea levels and the extinction of large numbers of species brought about by even moderate amounts of warming, on the order of 1 to 3 degrees.

“The world is already at or above the worst case scenarios in terms of emissions,” said Gernot Klepper, of the Kiel Institute for World Economy in Kiel, Germany. “In terms of emissions, we are moving past the most pessimistic estimates of the IPCC, and by some estimates we are above that red line.”

The panel presents several scenarios for the trajectory of emissions and climate change. In 2006, 8.4 gigatons of carbon were put into the atmosphere from fossil fuels, according to a study in the proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which was co-written by Dr. Klepper. That is almost identical to the panel’s worst case prediction for that year.

Most climatologists concur that the Arctic is melting like a candle, and a good deal faster than anyone expected. In 2007 parts of the Arctic Ocean reached 8F above normal, another record, while NASA satellite data reported at summer’s end that there was just half the volume of Arctic ice that there had been 48 months before. “It’s beyond our worst-case scenarios,” says Michael Byers, professor of global politics at the University of British Columbia, “and quite terrifying in terms of its potential scope.” Or, as Mark Serreze, senior scientist at a Colorado “snow-and-ice data centre” recently told the Associated Press: “The Arctic is screaming.”

How scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believe Earth will be affected:
· The world has already warmed by an average 0.7C in the past century. Temperatures in polar-regions have increased the fastest, with 5C rises in some areas;
· Another 1.3C of warming is inevitable because of GHGs already released into the atmosphere;
· Alpine ski resorts will be left without snow and many rivers will dry up. In Africa up to 250m more people will suffer water shortages by 2020;
· Worldwide agriculture could be devastated, especially in parts of Africa and Asia where some crop yields could halve by 2020;
· Tidal flooding will increase. Global sea levels are rising by 3.1mm a year and accelerating. Most is due to warm water expansion;
· Emissions of CO2 - the main GHG - grew by 80% between 1970 and 2004. Its concentration in the atmosphere is the highest for 650,000 years; and
· The amount of CO2 emitted by humans will rise by up to 90% by 2030 unless action is taken.

3. Global Warming and Climate Change:
It appears to be a common practice to use the terms “climate change” and “global warming” interchangeably, as if they were the same thing. But there are differences between the meanings of the two terms. Here is some clarification:
· Global Warming: An overall warming of the planet, based on average temperature over the entire surface:
o Planet Earth’s current warming trend is based largely on natural warming and cooling cycles that have been happening for eons; as well as human-caused additions to greenhouse gases, which are boosting the atmosphere’s ability to trap heat in the biosphere. Minor factors like an overall increase in the sun’s solar intensity play a smaller role; and
o While greenhouse gases are an essential component of a liveable planet—they’re what keep Earth from being a lifeless ball of ice—humans are causing greenhouse gas levels to increase so quickly that it’s causing the average global temperature to rise much faster than it would naturally.
· Climate Change: It is about much more than how warm or cool our temperatures are. Whereas “global warming” refers to increasing global temperatures, “climate change” refers to regional conditions. Climate is defined by a number of factors, including:
o Average regional temperature as well as day/night temperature patterns and seasonal temperature patterns;
o Humidity;
o Precipitation (average amounts and seasonal patterns);
o Average amount of sunshine and level of cloudiness;
o Air pressure and winds; and
o Storm events (type, average number per year, and seasonal patterns).

4. The Causes of Climate Change: Greenhouse Gases (GHGs):
It took more than 20 years to broadly accept that mankind is causing global warming with the emission of GHGs. The drastic increase in the emission of CO2 within the last 30 years caused by burning fossil fuels has been identified as the major reason for the change of temperature in the atmosphere.

GHGs are substances that exist in the earth’s atmosphere that allow sunlight to reach the planet’s surface, but can capture heat reflected back towards space, thereby contributing to a warming of the earth’s atmosphere. Normal levels of these gases help to insulate the earth and create a habitable planet.

Elevated levels of these gases are linked to historical rises in global temperature, and scientific research has concluded that human-caused emissions of GHGs most likely are contributing to the more rapid temperature increases experienced in recent decades. This phenomenon, which is expected to continue and to accelerate in the coming century, is known broadly as climate change, or global warming.

When sunlight reaches Earth’s surface some is absorbed and warms the earth and most of the rest is radiated back to the atmosphere at a longer wavelength than the sun light. Some of these longer wavelengths are absorbed by GHGs in the atmosphere before they are lost to space. The absorption of this long-wave radiant energy warms the atmosphere. These GHGs act like a mirror and reflect back to the Earth some of the heat energy which would otherwise be lost to space.

The reflecting back of heat energy by the atmosphere is called the “greenhouse effect”. Venus and Mars also have atmospheric gases that cause greenhouse effects. GHGs naturally blanket the Earth and keep it about 33 degrees Celsius warmer than it would be without these gases in the atmosphere.

Most GHGs exist naturally, but human activities, primarily the generation of energy through combustion of carbon-based fossil fuels, are pushing atmospheric levels of these substances higher than usual.

Humans cause significant emissions of GHGs that include: CO2, methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulphur hexafluoride (SF6). Examples of the atmospheric lifetime and GWP (Global warming potential) for several GHGs include:

1. Carbon Dioxide (CO2) has a variable atmospheric lifetime, and cannot be specified precisely Recent work indicates that recovery from a large input of atmospheric CO2 from burning fossil fuels will result in an effective lifetime of tens of thousands of years. CO2 is defined to have a GWP of 1 over all time periods.
2. Methane (CH4) has an atmospheric lifetime of 12 ± 3 years and a GWP of 62 over 20 years, 23 over 100 years and 7 over 500 years. The decrease in GWP at longer times is because methane is degraded to water and CO2 by chemical reactions in the atmosphere.
3. Nitrous oxide (N20) has an atmospheric lifetime of 120 years and a GWP of 296 over 100 years.
4. Hydrofluorocarbons HCFCs has an atmospheric lifetime of 12.1 years and a GWP of 1700 over 100 years.
5. Perfluorocarbons (PFCs) has an atmospheric lifetime of 50,000 years and a GWP of 5700 over 100 years.
6. Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) has an atmospheric lifetime of 3,200 years and a GWP of 22000 over 100 years.

CO2 is the largest component of human GHG emissions in terms of volume, and such gases are usually measured in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), a metric used to compare the contribution to global warming of various GHGs. For example, the global warming potential of methane is rated as 23 over 100 years, meaning that an emission of one metric tonne of methane is equal to emissions of 23 tonnes of CO2 in terms of contribution to climate change.

Atmospheric levels of GHGs have nearly doubled since large-scale industrialization began around 150 years ago, from 280 parts per million CO2e to 430 ppm. The World Meteorological Organization recently reported that global atmospheric concentrations of CO2 reached their highest levels ever recorded in 2005. Current atmospheric levels of CO2, nitrous oxide, and methane are higher than those in pre-industrial times by 35.4%, 18.2% and 154.7%, respectively.

The links between GHG levels, human activities such as the combustion of fossil fuels, and global temperature variability are the core elements of the climate change issue.

It is very likely that the observed increase in CH4 (Methane) concentration is predominantly due to agriculture and fossil fuel use. CH4 growth rates have declined since the early 1990s, consistent with total emissions (sum of anthropogenic and natural sources) being nearly constant during this period. The increase in N2O (nitrous oxide) concentration is primarily due to agriculture.

There is very high confidence that the net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming. Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations. It is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent (except Antarctica). During the past 50 years, the sum of solar and volcanic “forcings” would likely have produced cooling. Observed patterns of warming and their changes are simulated only by models that include anthropogenic “forcings”. Difficulties remain in simulating and attributing observed temperature changes at smaller than continental scales.

Advances show that discernible human influences extend beyond average temperature to other aspects of climate. Human influences have:

· Very likely contributed to sea level rise during the latter half of the 20th century;
· Likely contributed to changes in wind patterns, affecting extra-tropical storm tracks and temperature patterns;
· Likely increased temperatures of extreme hot nights, cold nights and cold days;
· More likely than not increased risk of heat waves, area affected by drought since the 1970s and frequency of heavy precipitation events.

The following graph demonstrates the sources of GHGs:

5. The Potential Impacts:
The full effects of climate change are uncertain, as it is difficult to predict the level of temperature increase that will actually occur and the impacts that these changes will have on complex natural systems. At the lower level of projected temperature increases, impacts may be minimal, while at the higher end, catastrophic changes could occur that affect all human life. The IPCC notes that although a slight increase in temperature may be beneficial to some regions, the net impacts of climate change are likely to be negative for most areas.

Through melting of Arctic sea ice and continued retreat of glaciers around the world, global mean sea levels are projected to rise by between 9 and 88 centimetres by 2100. Many coastal areas and low-lying island states have significant potential to be inundated with water, making areas uninhabitable or vulnerable to extreme weather. Coastal erosion, seawater intrusion into groundwater, and ecosystem changes are also predicted. Large-scale desertification could make much of the world’s agricultural land unproductive and uninhabitable. As many as 200 million people may be displaced by rising sea levels, flooding, and drought.

Melting of the Arctic may also free up a polar transportation route that is currently covered in thick sea ice, making the Northwest Passage a viable shipping route for up to 120 days compared to 20-30 days currently, predicts the ACIA. Melting of permafrost and a northward expansion of woodlands will have an effect on the ecosystem in Canada’s North, threatening species such as polar bears and caribou that depend on current climate conditions.

Evidence also points to an increase in pests and human diseases with a rise in temperature, though the extent of this has not yet been agreed upon by scientists. The pine beetle infestation in Western Canada is one example of the possible effects of climate change, as warmer than usual winters have allowed the non-native species to survive, damaging an estimated 10 million hectares of forest worth hundreds of millions of dollars and threatening the livelihood of at least 25,000 families.

Agricultural productivity in temperate zones may actually improve with small increases in temperature, while larger increases could threaten crops. Biodiversity has already been impacted in many areas as species migrate north to maintain their ideal climate, and birds and flowers respond to spring-type weather earlier in the year. Marine fisheries may experience positive and negative changes, with possible redistribution of species - more research on this subject is expected with the next IPCC Assessment.

An increase in extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, droughts, and fire has also been projected. Though a concrete link has yet to be established, scientists have shown that an increase in sea surface temperatures coincides with an increase in the number of intense hurricanes in the Atlantic. More volatile weather patterns are expected in most areas. Many insurance companies have responded by making climate change a major strategy consideration, offering products that encourage emissions reductions and mitigations strategies to limit losses. Leading companies such as Swiss Re consider climate change to be one of the most pressing business issues of this century.

In terms of predicting the economic impacts of these global changes, there is again a great deal of uncertainty. Some models predict losses in the GDP of developing nations of hundreds of billions of dollars per year by as early as 2010. A comprehensive economic review by former World Bank Chief Economist Sir Nicholas Stern estimates that climate change could cost the world economy 5 percent of its GDP, or around $3 trillion per year, equivalent to economic collapses such as the Great Depression; if wider impacts are taken into account, the projection leaps to 20 percent of world GDP, enough to cripple the global economy.

In general, the long-term economic impacts are very difficult to quantify, but certainly worst-case scenarios projected in climate models would have catastrophic effects on the livelihoods of billions of people worldwide, with corresponding volatility in the global economy. From a risk management perspective, many insurance companies are taking the position that the large-scale effects of climate change are simply too enormous to ignore.

6. Possible Solutions:
The question, what can be done about climate change? This question has been widely considered over the last two decades by governments around the world and by such global organizations as the United Nations. In broad terms there are two avenues open to us:
1. Adaptation:
Adaptation involves minimizing the negative effects of likely or occurring climate change through precautionary measures; and
2. Mitigation:
Mitigation involves a large-scale effort to reduce human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

Scientific modeling has shown that stabilizing levels of GHGs in the atmosphere could reduce or prevent damaging levels of climate change. Atmospheric levels of GHGs are currently around 430 parts per million, compared to a pre-industrial level of 280 ppm. Stabilizing this concentration between 430 ppm and 550 ppm will help to reduce the most serious risks of climate change.

In the short-term, slight climate changes are expected to occur as global economies are projected to continue consuming fossil fuels for the majority of their energy supply.

As a result, adaptive measures may need to be taken in many regions. These could include construction of sea barriers, altered agricultural methods, stockpiling of food, and improved protection against pests and diseases. Simply constructing buildings to withstand extreme weather events and maintain a constant temperature efficiently are some small adaptive measures that could be undertaken in Canada. Conservation efforts that will help northern peoples and animal species to cope with melting permafrost are also important aspects of climate change adaptation.

Adaptation is generally overlooked in favour of mitigation efforts however, as reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the only way to slow climate change. Ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions are well-known: improving energy efficiency, reducing fossil fuel consumption, diversifying energy supply by expanding the use of renewables, and decreasing deforestation. Energy use through the consumption of fossil fuels to generate electricity, for heating, and for transportation, is the source of most anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, so it is in this area that most new technologies have emerged.

Renewable energy such as hydroelectricity, wind, solar, biomass, geothermal and tidal power provide clear emissions reductions by displacing fossil-fuel consumption, but currently make up only a small portion of the world’s energy supply. Their usage is expected to increase nearly 60 percent by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, although their total share of world energy supply is expected to remain relatively constant at 14 percent.

In many cases, these emissions-free energy sources are a viable alternative. Wind turbines are becoming larger, solar panels are more efficient, and the costs for renewable energy are showing signs of convergence with traditional energy sources, though hurdles still remain.

Bioenergy - using plants, trees, and shrubs as fuel - is also emerging as a major energy sector. Biomass can be converted into fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel, or combusted directly using advanced technologies that reduce air emissions. Bioenergy is considered ‘carbon neutral’ because growing the crops needed to produce fuel offsets the greenhouse gas emissions from combustion. While economic and technical challenges to the wide-scale use of biofuels remain, ethanol markets will continue to grow, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that bioenergy could provide up to 25 percent of the world’s energy by 2025.

Hydrogen is also looked upon as a potentially major source of ‘clean’ energy in the future. This basic element is now being used in fuel cells to power buses and cars, and can also be deployed in large-scale power plants. When combusted, it’s only emissions are water vapour. Technical challenges must still be overcome surrounding the production, distribution, and cost of hydrogen technologies, but many believe the ‘Hydrogen Economy’ is well on its way.

Although the alternative energy sources listed above are sure to make up a growing component of the worldwide energy mix, most international organizations are projecting that fossil fuels will continue to dominate global energy generation until at least 2050. Faced with that reality, a push to demonstrate the use of ‘clean fossil fuels’ is underway. New technologies are emerging that allow for the gasification of coal to reduce its emissions, and one area of particular importance is that of carbon dioxide capture and storage.

Technologies now exist to capture carbon dioxide from point sources, and demonstration projects have established the viability of storing the gas for the long term in geological formations, abandoned oil wells, or deep sea reservoirs. In the case of the Weyburn project in Saskatchewan, injection of CO2 into an oil well for storage also results in the recovery of extra oil reserves. If fossil fuels must be combusted in the near-term future, then carbon capture and storage is likely necessary on a large scale to control global greenhouse gas emissions.

Energy efficiency is perhaps that largest area of opportunity for reducing the expected rise in global greenhouse gas emissions. The International Energy Agency has shown that that improved energy efficiency using today’s technologies can reduce expected growth in electricity demand by half, and cut the need for added generation capacity by one-third, even as global energy demand increases by fifty percent. Sustainable building techniques, efficient lighting technologies, and other existing products should not be overlooked for their energy and cost-saving potential.

Deforestation and the clearing of land for crops and pastures is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions, and the loss of tropical forests is a vital issue that must be tackled along with energy use. The carbon-storage value of many forests exceeds the value of the marginal lands they provide when cleared, and reducing deforestation can be a significant measure that developing countries can be encouraged to take.
Applying these technology-based solutions on a large enough scale to make the needed emissions reductions is a challenge, however. One way to make this happen is through the use of market-based incentives. This is where carbon trading becomes important.

7. Global Approach to Climate Change:
In 1990, the United Nations General Assembly decided to start work on a climate change convention.
Under the leadership of Brian Mulroney, the former Prime Minister, Canada was instrumental in organizing the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development which is also known as the Earth Summit. The conference was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 which was attended by 172 governments with 108 sending their heads of states to represent their governments, 2,400 representatives of non-government organizations (NGO) with 17,000 people at the parallel NGO “Global Forum” who had consultative status.

History was made here by recognizing the fact for the first time at an international level that climate change is occurring and that it is largely due to human activities.

Additionally at the core of international efforts to address climate change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was launched under the Bali Road Map. The UNFCCC treaty entered into force on 21 March, 1994.

The UNFCCC is an international environmental treaty and it is aimed at stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. The treaty as originally framed set no mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions for individual nations and contained no enforcement provisions, it is therefore considered legally non-binding. Rather, the treaty included provisions for updates (called “protocols”) that would set mandatory emission limits.

The principal update is the Kyoto Protocol, which has become much better known than the UNFCCC itself.

The following highlights the findings of the Thematic Debate of the General Assembly at the United Nations Headquarter, New York on July 31 – August 1, 2007 on the subject of “Climate Challenge as a Global Challenge”:

Global Approach to Climate Change:

The “blanket” of greenhouse gases that occurs naturally in the atmosphere serves the vital function of regulating the planet’s climate. Since the start of the industrial revolution some 250 years ago, emissions of greenhouse gases have been making this blanket thicker at an unprecedented speed. This has caused the most dramatic change in the atmosphere’s composition since at least 650,000 years ago. Unless significant efforts are made to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, the global climate will continue to warm rapidly over the coming decades and beyond;
The latest IPCC assessment, released during 2007, shows that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal and accelerating. This is based on evidence of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level;
Many countries are starting to take concrete action to adapt to future climate changes. This needs to be expanded and integrated into national and sectoral plans to ensure that sustainable development and adaptation progress together. The UNFCCC fosters adaptation by committing all Parties to formulate, implement, publish and update adaptation measures, as well as to cooperate on adaptation. A variety of support mechanisms for adaptation implementation in developing countries are supported; including, the provision of funding, insurance and technology transfer, as well as scientific and technical assistance;
National Adaptation Programmes of Action are an option for the Least Developed Countries and provide a rigorous assessment of urgent adaptation needs. They aim to expand the coping range of communities. In addition, the ‘Nairobi’ work programme on impacts, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change assists all countries in understanding and assessing impacts, vulnerability and adaptation. It enables informed decision-making on practical adaptation actions and measures and provides a structured framework for cooperation. The UN System, its specialised agencies and other international organisations also mainstream adaptation into their relevant work programmes;
Adaptation must be implemented through a holistic approach incorporating both local (bottom-up) and national (top-down) levels. The role of the UNFCCC is to catalyze adaptation efforts through this integrated and cross-cutting set of actions, which take into consideration current climate variability and future climate change. These actions should be linked to national and sectoral policies and objectives, as well as environmental objectives of other Multilateral Environmental Agreements. Bilateral, multilateral and regional collaboration must be included both in terms of assessment and implementation of adaptation measures;
It is critical that adaptation be brought forward on policy agendas. Parties to the UNFCCC have already highlighted the major challenges and the most important elements that might be part of an enhanced multilateral response to climate change when the first commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. Sustained sufficient funding for the implementation of large-scale adaptation initiatives is of key importance. Without sufficient and targeted funding, adaptation runs the risk of not being effectively addressed. Short-term emergency relief, or “reactive” funding, is costly and unsupportive of sustainable development approaches over the long term;
According to the IPCC, there is significant potential for mitigation, including increasing the use of clean technologies and improving end-use efficiency. There are significant economic potential for all sectors involved in mitigating global greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades. This potential is sufficient to offset the projected growth of global emissions or even to reduce emissions below current levels. The IPCC suggest that the macro-economic effects of mitigation towards stabilization (between 445 and 710 ppm of CO2e) in 2030 vary from a small increase in global GDP to a 3 per cent decrease, depending of the stringency of the stabilization target. The Stern Review suggests that the annual cost of emissions reductions leading to stabilization at 550 ppm CO2e is likely to be around 1 percent of GDP by 2050;
Some of the available mitigation options are in fact “no regrets” opportunities that can yield multiple societal and environmental benefits. At the same time, concerns of developing country oil exporting nations, which center on the negative impacts that mitigation measures in developed;
The wide deployment of climate-friendly technologies is key to meeting the mitigation challenge. Existing clean technologies need to be rapidly picked up by the private sector and deployed widely, including through technological cooperation between industrialised and developing countries. Addressing climate change will, however, require continuous improvement through innovation and the development of new technologies;
Governments can play a major role motivating the private sector to invest in innovative technologies by providing incentives that are clear, predictable, long term and robust. Governments are successfully using a wide range of policies and measures that address climate change, including regulations and standards, taxes and charges, tradable permits, voluntary agreements, subsidies, financial incentives, research and development programs, and information instruments;
Effective mitigation requires a diversified portfolio of policies to address all major sectors. Some of the cheapest options for reducing emissions involve electricity savings in buildings, fuel savings in vehicles and increased soil carbon content in agriculture. Policies to promote a shift to less carbon-intensive energy sources are particularly effective. Governments can promote a range of energy options, including the encouragement of natural gas as well as mature renewable energy technologies such as large hydro, biomass combustion and geothermal. Carbon capture and storage technology is another option to isolate carbon emissions from the atmosphere, and to store them, for example in geological formation;
Approximately 30 per cent of the projected emissions in the residential and commercial sectors – the highest rate amongst all sectors studied by the IPCC – could be reduced by 2030 with a net economic benefit. Improvements relating to transport, such as providing public transport systems and their related infrastructure and promoting non-motorised transport can further reduce emissions. The greatest potential for reducing industrial emissions is located in the energy-intensive steel, cement, and pulp and paper industries. Options for reducing agricultural emissions are cost competitive in achieving long-term climate objectives;
Current rates of deforestation contribute to more than 20% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, making deforestation across the globe a significant contributor to human-induced climate change. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that between 2000 and 2005, an average of 12.9 million hectares of forests was lost annually, mostly in South America, followed by Africa and Asia. Arresting today’s high levels of deforestation, promoting sustainable forest management and planting or promoting new forests could considerably reduce greenhouse gas emissions;
Climate policies can also bring many win-win benefits that may not factor into cost estimates – positive externalities. These include technological innovation, tax reforms, increased employment, improved energy security and health benefits from reduced pollution. Climate policies offering significant co-benefits have the potential to reduce greenhouse gases and provide substantial advantages for numerous economic sectors and for varying development goals;
Mainstreaming climate change mitigation is an integral part of sustainable development. The IPCCs findings confirm that sustainable development can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reduce vulnerability to climate change. Increasingly, strategies to address climate change are being integrated into national planning and sustainable development strategies. Many countries have already launched major national strategies on climate change with a range of government policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from industry, agriculture, and forestry, as well as ambitious energy efficiency and renewable energy goals; and
Projected climate changes can exacerbate poverty and undermine sustainable development, especially in least-developed countries. Global mitigation efforts can enhance sustainable development prospects in part by reducing the risk of adverse impacts of climate change. Effective multilateral cooperation significantly reduces the global cost of addressing climate change compared to the costs if each country was to act alone. The emerging carbon market resulting from the Kyoto Protocol is an illustration of how market incentives can be used to meet objectives set by an international agreement.

The Role of Business in Shaping Solutions:

The role of business as a source of solutions on global climate change is now universally recognized, and its interaction with the public policy agenda is increasing. The business community can offer new choices, innovate, apply knowledge and technology to problems and turn them into opportunities. Key to establishing such a role has been the growing number of corporations who have understood the vital importance of corporate social responsibility, risk mitigation, and performance dimensions associated with the sustainable production and use of energy. Actions to address climate change can also provide a platform for new economic growth, new jobs, new manufacturing and service industries, and new roles for sectors such as agriculture and forestry;
Many of the world’s leading businesses are stepping up to the problem of climate change because they understand its risks and recognize the need to act to minimize those risks. They also see enormous opportunities in the development of new, climate-friendly technologies that will help economies advance and grow — without continuing to pose a threat to the global climate. They also want to improve their competitive position in the marketplace and to get a head start developing the technologies and the strategies that will contribute to reducing emissions in the years ahead;
There is a wide range of activities that businesses can undertake to reduce their contribution to climate change. They can implement green power programs and cogeneration projects; they can develop energy-saving processes and products, clean fuels, biomass energy, clean-burning vehicle engines and much more. With assistance from governments, they can play an important role in the climate effort through partnerships. Both research partnerships and partnerships in the development of climate policy, can help ensure a factual basis about what can be achieved, how to achieve it and when; and
At the international and national levels, governments need to provide business with certainty of direction. The challenge is to continue to create the frameworks and partnerships that will allow business to play its essential role in protecting the climate. They need to know that climate change is a priority, to understand the direction and the ultimate goal of national and international climate policies. This will allow businesses to invest with confidence in the necessary technologies and strategies.

8. The G8 Summit:
The G8 summit 2009 took place in L’AQUILA, Italy in July 2009.
Leaders of the world’s eight foremost industrialized economies at the G8 summit in L’AQUILA, Italy, have established an aggressive new marker in the battle against climate change: holding the global temperature to a two-degree-Celsius increase.
To get there, the leaders agreed that the world’s 32 industrialized nations should slash their greenhouse-gas emissions 80 per cent by 2050, though they did not agree on the base year from which the cuts would be made.

Here are the details which were included in the G8 President’s report:
Climate Change and Environment – Fighting Climate Change:

This is a crucial year for taking rapid and effective global action to combat climate change. We welcome the decision taken within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Poznan to enter full negotiating mode, in order to shape a global and comprehensive post-2012 agreement by the end of 2009 in Copenhagen, as mandated by the Bali Conference in 2007. We must seize this decisive opportunity to achieve a truly ambitious global consensus;
We reconfirm our strong commitment to the UNFCCC negotiations and to the successful conclusion of a global, wide-ranging and ambitious post-2012 agreement in Copenhagen, involving all countries, consistent with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. In this context we also welcome the constructive contribution of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate to support a successful outcome in Copenhagen. We call upon all Parties to the UNFCCC and to its Kyoto Protocol to ensure that the negotiations under both the Convention and the Protocol result in a coherent and environmentally effective global agreement;
We reaffirm the importance of the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and notably of its Fourth Assessment Report, which constitutes the most comprehensive assessment of the science. We recognize the broad scientific view that the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed 2°C. Because this global challenge can only be met by a global response, we reiterate our willingness to share with all countries the goal of achieving at least a 50% reduction of global emissions by 2050, recognizing that this implies that global emissions need to peak as soon as possible and decline thereafter. As part of this, we also support a goal of developed countries reducing emissions of greenhouse gases in aggregate by 80% or more by 2050 compared to 1990 or more recent years. Consistent with this ambitious long-term objective, we will undertake robust aggregate and individual mid-term reductions, taking into account that baselines may vary and that efforts need to be comparable. Similarly, major emerging economies need to undertake quantifiable actions to collectively reduce emissions significantly below business-as-usual by a specified year; and
We recognize that the accelerated phase-out of HCFCs mandated under the Montreal Protocol is leading to a rapid increase in the use of HFCs, many of which are very potent GHGs. Therefore we will work with our partners to ensure that HFC emissions reductions are achieved under the appropriate framework. We are also committed to taking rapid action to address other significant climate forcing agents, such as black carbon. These efforts, however, must not draw away attention from ambitious and urgent cuts in emissions from other, more long-lasting, greenhouse gases, which should remain the priority.

Promoting the role of markets to reduce emissions:

We believe that efficient markets, including carbon markets, supported by stable and predictable regulatory frameworks, are central to achieving these objectives. A wide range of competitive instruments and mechanisms, such as emissions trading schemes and performance-based regulation, constitute some of the most flexible and cost-effective means to foster economically sound investments in energy efficiency, renewable energy, clean and innovative technologies. Other measures, including, where appropriate, incentives, fees, emission and other taxes, progressive reduction of fossil fuel subsidies, consumer labeling, innovative financing mechanisms and public-private partnerships, designed and applied consistently with our international obligations, can also be useful in the context of policies that promote green and sustainable development models and accelerate the transition towards a low carbon society;
The elimination or reduction of tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade in environmental goods and services is essential to promote the dissemination of cleaner low-carbon energy technologies and associated services worldwide. Efforts should be intensified to ensure a successful outcome of the ongoing WTO negotiations on the liberalization of environmental goods and services. Carbon leakage is an important issue to tackle. It must be addressed in a WTO compatible way. We support the aim of a comprehensive global agreement at Copenhagen, which we believe to be the most appropriate way to deal with any carbon leakage issues that may arise;
We support flexible, economically sound market-based approaches to emission reductions. In particular, cap & trade schemes, where implemented, have proved largely successful and improved understanding of the potential advantages, critical issues and indicators. The use of market mechanisms, including those under the Kyoto Protocol, provides opportunities to reduce emissions cost-effectively, while facilitating technology diffusion, low-carbon development and the involvement of emerging and developing countries. With a view to building on these experiences and to facilitate action under the global post 2012 agreement, we commit to:

a) Further explore, taking into account national circumstances, the potential of carbon trading systems and their possible linkages;
b) Cooperate among us and with other countries to expand carbon markets to the extent possible and reduce costs and align emission allowance trading schemes, with a view to developing transparent carbon markets which would expand to involve emerging and developing countries, including on a sectoral basis;
c) Support the development, reform and enhancement of project, programmatic and policy-based offset mechanisms, including the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), in order to encourage their use, enhance their effectiveness and environmental integrity, and facilitate actions from developing countries under the global, post-2012 agreement; and
d) Work with others to further develop market mechanisms under the Copenhagen agreement to possibly include sectoral trading and sectoral crediting mechanisms, to enhance the participation of emerging economies and developing countries in the market ensuring environmental integrity.

The private sector will continue to be an essential player in the efforts to address climate change. To trigger a change in direction and mobilise investments we will engage the private sector more actively, in order to bring its expertise into the international framework and enhance information exchange and partnerships between Governments and businesses;
Sectoral approaches can be useful tools to facilitate progressive involvement by emerging economies and reinforce economy-wide mitigation policies of developed countries. Analysis has highlighted the potential to curtail emissions by focusing on specific sectors and we welcome the ongoing work of the International Energy Agency (IEA) and others in this respect;
Attention should also be devoted to sectors, such as international aviation and maritime transport that represent a significant and growing source of emissions and are characterized by a predominantly international dimension. We will use our participation in ICAO, IMO and UNFCCC processes to reach an agreed outcome for the post-2012 period to rapidly advance towards accelerated emission reductions for the international aviation and maritime sectors.

The G8 agreement will put added pressure on the Harper government to revise its climate-change plan to force deeper emission cuts than it currently proposes, John Drexhage, an Ottawa-based analyst with the International Institute for Sustainable Development, said Wednesday.
“You can always finesse things in terms of what your allocation will be,” Mr. Drexhage said. “But by and large, the two-degree mark would call for reductions of a greater stringency than the current Conservative plan.”

The Group of Eight nations still have a substantial sales job on their hands as they try to persuade emerging economies like China and India to take a large share of the load. Representatives of those nations laid down their own line in the sand, saying they won’t allow greenhouse gases to be cut on the backs of their poor..

Less than 24 hours after Prime Minister Stephen Harper praised the G8 for its latest climate-change targets, his environment minister said those targets are “aspirational” and that Canada will not meet them. Jim Prentice said reducing emissions by 80 per cent by the year 2050 is an “aspirational objective.”

The best-case scenario for the Harper government’s climate-change program - which does not yet have enforceable regulations in place - is a reduction in Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions of up to 70 per cent by 2050. Prentice said Canada does not need to change its policy.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is criticizing Group of Eight nations for not going far enough in setting targets to fight climate change, a move that creates a bad example for developing nations.

Dr. Mir F. Ali, Sustainability Analyst, with Turner Lane Development Corporation, a real estate development company with the commitment to build sustainable communities in British Columbia, Canada.

American Clean Energy and Security Act

2010-03-29T17:08:00.000-07:00

Here’s another article by Dr. Mir Ali on the Obama Administration’s attempt to reduce carbon emissions. It certainly is a change; but is it enough?

American Clean Energy and Security Act

Dr. Mir F. Ali

The approach to limit or reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions which was adopted by both the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and by the Kyoto Protocol (KP) is known as an absolute target approach. This approach requires that GHG emissions be reduced by a specific amount by a specific time. However, the emission targets set up by the UNFCCC for developed countries are non-binding whereas the emission targets set up by the KP for developed countries are binding. The non-binding targets set up by the UNFCCC for the USA were ratified by the US Senate but the binding targets that were set up by the KP for the USA were rejected by the Bush Administration.

On March 13, 2001, President Bush backed away from his campaign pledge to seek cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) as part of a strategy to regulate together, rather than separately, four air pollutants emitted by power plants. In a letter to Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) explaining his reversal, the president cited a recent Department of Energy report that concluded it would be too costly to regulate CO2; he also claimed that CO2 is not considered a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

President Bush announced a new climate change strategy on February 14, 2002, setting a voluntary “GHG Intensity” target for the nation which expanded existing programs encouraging companies to voluntarily report and reduce their GHG emissions, and proposed increased federal funding for climate change science and technology development. Some elements of the Administration’s strategy may provide additional incentive to companies to voluntarily reduce GHG emissions. This strategy set a target for GHG intensity: the ratio of GHG emissions to economic output expressed in gross domestic product (GDP).

This approach minimizes economic impact by allowing emissions to rise or fall with economic output; however, it provides no assurance that a given level of environmental protection will be achieved since the degree of environmental protection is measured in relation to GDP. Theoretically a GHG intensity target can lead to a net reduction in emissions, but only if it is sufficiently stringent. The Administration’s target - an 18 percent improvement in GHG intensity over the next decade - allows a substantial increase in net emissions.

Just to give an idea about the baseline and the increase in GHG emissions, in 1990, total U.S. GHG emissions were 1,671 million metric tons in carbon equivalents (MMTCE) or 6,128 million metric tons in carbon dioxide equivalents (MMTCO2E). As of 2000, total U.S. GHG emissions were 14.1 percent above 1990 levels, or 1,907 MMTCE (6,994 MMTCO2E).

According to a report, although total emissions continued to rise, GHG intensity in fact fell over the last two decades. Contributing factors include energy efficiency improvements, the introduction of new information technologies, and the continued transition from heavy industry to less energy-intensive, service-oriented industries. In the 1980s GHG intensity fell by 21 percent. During the 1990s GHG intensity fell by 16 percent.

The Administration’s strategy aims to cut GHG intensity to a level of 151 metric tons carbon equivalent per million dollars of GDP by 2012, 18 percent below its present level. While this would represent a very modest improvement over the “business as usual” emissions projections for 2012 used by the Administration, it appears to continue the same trend of GHG-intensity reductions and GHG emissions increases experienced over the last two decades.

Consequently, in terms of actual emissions, total U.S. GHG emissions would grow 12 percent by 2012, resulting in GHG emissions of 2,155 MMTCE (7,900 MMTCO₂E). Emissions in 2012 would be 30 percent above 1990 levels (1990 is often used as a “base year” because the Framework Convention on Climate Change called for industrialized countries to return to their 1990 levels by 2000).

George W. Bush has said the US was committed to reducing global warming but disappointed many by refusing to drop his opposition to mandatory limits on carbon output. In a major speech (2007) in Washington Mr. Bush told representatives of the world’s 16 most polluting countries, which account for 80 per cent of harmful emissions, that each nation should design its own strategy, reflecting each country’s “different energy resources, stages of development and economic needs”.

On June 2, 2008, President George Bush weighed in against a Senate bill that would drastically cut GHG emissions, warning that it would impose crippling costs on “job creators” and consumers. The administration threatened to veto a bipartisan Senate climate bill, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, expected to be debated would cut emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and other GHG by about 66% over the next four decades.

On June 26, 2009, within six months of the Obama’s presidency, the House of Representatives passed the landmark American Clean Energy and Security Act, sponsored by Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Edward J. Markey, Chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

It was reported that the vote was the first time either house of Congress had approved a bill meant to curb the heat-trapping gases scientists have linked to climate change. The legislation, which passed despite deep divisions among Democrats, could lead to profound changes in many sectors of the economy, including electric power generation, agriculture, manufacturing and construction.

The bill’s passage, by 219 to 212, also established a marker for the United States when international negotiations on a new climate change treaty begin later this year. Here are the details on the voting:

Affiliation	AYE Votes	NAY Votes	ABSTAIN Votes
Democrats	211	44	1
Republicans	8	168	2
TOTAL	219	212	3

At the heart of the legislation is a cap-and-trade system that sets a limit on overall emissions of heat-trapping gases while allowing utilities, manufacturers and other emitters to trade pollution permits, or allowances, among themselves. The cap would grow tighter over the years, pushing up the price of emissions and presumably driving industry to find cleaner ways of making energy.

The bill contains the following key provisions:

Requires electric utilities to meet 20% of their electricity demand through renewable energy sources and energy efficiency by 2020;
Invests $190 billion in new clean energy technologies and energy efficiency, including energy efficiency and renewable energy ($90 billion in new investments by 2025), carbon capture and sequestration ($60 billion), electric and other advanced technology vehicles ($20 billion), and basic scientific research and development ($20 billion);
Mandates new energy-saving standards for buildings, appliances, and industry;
Reduces carbon emissions from major U.S. sources by 17% by 2020 and over 80% by 2050 compared to 2005 levels. Complementary measures in the legislation, such as investments in preventing tropical deforestation, will achieve significant additional reductions in carbon emissions; and
Protects consumers from energy price increases. According to recent analyses from the Congressional Budget Office and the Environmental Protection Agency, the legislation will cost each household less than 50 cents per day in 2020 (not including energy efficiency savings).

The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), H.R. 2454, is supposed to create jobs, reduce oil dependence, cut global warming pollution, and increase American competitiveness. It is considered to be a fragile compromise with support from utilities, energy companies, labour unions, and environmentalists. The debate guide describes below the major expectations of the Act:

Create Jobs:

A very recent study by the Pew Center on the States found that there are already at least 770,000 clean-energy jobs in the United States. A new analysis by the Center for American Progress and University of Massachusetts projects that the bill, combined with the clean-energy investments in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, could generate $150 billion in annual public- and private-sector clean-energy investments. This would create 1.7 million net new jobs. This includes 38,000 jobs in Indiana, 67,000 in Ohio, and 72,000 in Pennsylvania;

Reduce Dependence on foreign oil:

The United States imported 57 percent of its oil last year, sending $342 billion out of the country. Nearly three-quarters of oil use goes toward transportation.

The new fuel economy standards announced by President Barack Obama on May 19, 2009 will reduce oil use by 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the life of the program. The standards will produce a car and light truck vehicle fleet that would achieve the equivalent of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016. This is nearly a one-third improvement in fuel economy.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act would assist automakers in complying with these standards by providing resources for the development and production of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and other ultra-fuel-efficient cars.

Cut global warming pollution:

The United States produces about one-fifth of global carbon dioxide pollution. And U.S. emissions have grown by about 1 percent per year since 1990 except during recessions. Emissions will grow by an additional 20 percent to 52 percent by 2025 without action. The global warming report determined that “sizable early cuts in emissions would significantly reduce the pace and overall amount of climate change.”

Coal-fired power plants and motor vehicles are responsible for half of U.S. global warming pollution. The American Clean Energy and Security Act would reduce emissions from power plants and other sources. President Obama’s announced fuel economy standards would reduce global warming pollution from motor vehicles. The ACES requires greenhouse gas emissions to be 17 percent lower than 2005 levels by 2020. This is equivalent to taking half a billion cars off the road.

The provision to prevent tropical forest destruction would achieve another 10 percent reduction by 2020.

The bill would reduce greenhouse gas pollution by setting a “cap” on greenhouse gas emissions, and requiring all emitters over 25,000 tons to have an “allowance” for each ton of pollution. Companies can buy or sell allowances to meet their needs. The Congressional Budget Office projects that this bill “would reduce budget deficits … by about $24 billion” from 2010-2019.

Increase American competitiveness:

Germany leads the world in solar energy, while China has produced the first plug-in hybrid electric vehicle for sale. ACES would require utilities to generate 15 percent of their electricity from wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and other renewable energy sources by 2020 (although state governors could petition to allow utilities to substitute 3 percent of renewables with 3 percent efficiency). Utilities would also have to reduce electricity demand by 5 percent via efficiency measures. These provisions would lower global warming pollution as well as drive investment toward the clean-energy technologies of the 21st century.

The bill would provide incentives for research and development of cleaner cars, better batteries, and more efficient buildings. The Green Bank would provide capital to develop these and other new clean-energy technologies.

Stavros Dimas, the European Union commissioner for the environment, warned on Thursday that President Barack Obama’s goals to cut emissions over the next decade may not be ambitious enough to meet long-term targets. Under Mr. Obama’s plan, the United States would cut emissions by 1.5 percent each year until the end of the next decade. But Mr. Dimas warned the United States that small annual reductions now would require much larger annual reductions — as much as 5 percent a year — after 2020, if Mr. Obama’s long-term goal of reducing planet warming gases 80 percent by mid-century is to be reached.

In December, the 27 member states of the E.U. agreed to bring emissions down to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. They pledged to make it 30 percent if developed countries, including the United States, took measures to reduce emissions that are roughly in line with European efforts. So far, E.U. officials say, Mr. Obama has only pledged to bring emissions down to match 1990 levels by 2020.

Perhaps what matters most, is the drastic change in the American policy as well as the attitude towards climate change. The passage of American Clean Energy and Security Bill sent a dramatic signal to the world that America at last understands the need to put its own house in order on climate change and that it can see commercial advantages in clean energy that would haven been lost to Europe for ever.

It takes 60 votes to end the debate. Even though Democrats hold 59 seats in the Senate but the question is –Is this bill vulnerable due to the internal divisions among Democrats or/and the lack of support from Republicans? The reality is that the whole world is watching with keen interest and no Senator in his or her right mind can afford to take the risk of not support the bill.

Dr. Mir F. Ali is a Sustainability Analyst with Turner Lane Development Corporation, a real estate development company with the commitment to build sustainable community in British Columbia, Canada.

Sustainable Transportation - the time is now.

2010-03-29T17:07:00.000-07:00

Here’s another guest post below from Dr. Mir F. Ali about sustainable transportation.

His article makes me think about riding my bike more and maybe signing up for Victoria’s car share program and dumping my vehicle. We all know driving is a problem and that car pooling and taking public transit are necessary. IN the near future we are also going to have to get used to less air travel, which will be getting more and more expensive and we should be looking to increase rail services in North America both for freight and for public transportation. The Europeans and the Japanese are ahead of us on that account and it’s about time we started to build some high speed trains and let’s get off our political butts and use the rail lines we have for commuter trains.

Sustainable transportation is critical to reducing GHG emissions

Canadian transportation industries account for approximately 4% of Canada’s gross domestic product, and employ more than 800,000 people. Canada is a huge country with a massive transportation infrastructure which includes: 48,000 kilometres of track which makes Canada one of the largest rail networks in the world; Canada’s national highway system is made up of over 38,000 kilometres of national and regional highways; and 900,000 kilometres of roads which are being used by cars, vans, buses or trucks and this is enough to circle the globe 22 times.

The users of the transportation infrastructure include private cars and trucks which account for a large proportion of both passenger and freight movements; when commercial and private transportation are considered together, more than $150 billion a year, or one in every seven dollars spent in Canada, goes to pay for transportation. There are 17.3 million - 16.6 million cars and other light vehicles, and 575,000 heavy trucks registered in Canada.

Unfortunately, sensitivity to climate change was not one of the design considerations for designing modern transportation systems. Consequently, advanced transport technologies and a growing economy allowed governments around the world to continue to build infrastructure for automobiles that empowered people to travel faster and move their goods more quickly while at the same time consuming what seemed to be a limitless supply of energy for transportation.
The impact of this behaviour included:
1. Transportation is the second largest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Canada representing 27 per cent of total GHG emissions (From 1990 to 2005, this figure grew by 33 per cent, from 150 mega tonnes (Mt) to 200 Mt);
2. Passenger GHG emissions continue to grow (From 1990 to 2005, GHG emissions from passenger vehicles increased by 10 per cent, as passenger–kilometres increased by 30 per cent during the same period);
3. While GHG emissions from the transportation sector continue to increase, air pollution emissions, such as fine particulate matter, sulphur oxides, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, have shown a steady decline due to regulatory initiatives and automobile stock turnover;
4. Energy use for transport in Canada increased by 21.5% between 1990 and 2000, from 1,878 to 2,282 (Pet joules); and
5. Transportation is also the largest end-use source of CO2, which is the most prevalent GHG.
Furthermore, there are a number of associated environmental impacts which also occur during extracting, refining, and transporting crude oil for gasoline production and in the use of the vehicles. Chemical gases and particles which are released by cars and trucks do eventually fall out of the air onto street surfaces and land; at the same time vehicles often leak oil, gas, brake fluid, worn brake linings, windshield detergent, engine coolant and worn metal particles. Car tires leave a residue of zinc and other pollutants as they wear out and road salt is added to the mix in the winter. Hard pavement, streets and parking lots often provide direct conduits to storm sewers, allowing pollutants to wash directly into lakes and streams without any filtration.
According to a recent report, driveways and parking facilities have large economic and environmental costs. A typical urban parking space has an annualized value between $500 and $1,500, and even more for structured or underground parking facilities. Conventional standards often result in more land being devoted to driveways and parking facilities than to the buildings they serve.
In addition to emitting GHG into the atmosphere, transportation also has a direct impact on the environment in terms of air quality, ozone depletion, particulates, toxins, water quality, use of natural resources and noise. These pollutants not only contribute to global warming, but they also contribute to a variety of diseases, including cancer, respiratory diseases, and heart failure. The total health impacts of transportation pollution are difficult to calculate since there are so many different pollutants causing a variety of diseases, and most pollutants have other sources besides cars; however, the number of premature deaths from car pollution appears to be similar in magnitude to the number of deaths resulting from traffic crashes, although the exact amount is difficult to determine.

Perhaps the only way to reduce the GHG emissions including CO2 and also to minimize the consumption of energy in the transportation sector is to adopt the principles of sustainable transportation. Energy conversation is indeed a basic rule of sustainable transportation which insists that individuals and societies should not consume resources beyond the rate at which they can be renewed, otherwise it will not be available for future generations.
While it is difficult to find a perfect definition for sustainable transportation, the following definition developed in 1997 by the Toronto-based Centre for Sustainable Transportation is widely accepted and is used as a base for developing definitions around the world including the European arm of the Rand Corporation and several partners:
A sustainable transportation system is one that:
Allows the basic access needs of individuals and societies to be met safely and in a manner consistent with human and ecosystem health, and with equity within and between generations; Is affordable, operates efficiently, offers choice of transport mode, and supports a vibrant economy; and limits emissions and waste within the planet’s ability to absorb them, minimizes consumption of non-renewable resources, limits consumption of renewable resources to the sustainable yield level, reuses and recycles its components, and minimizes the use of land and the production of noise.
Transport Canada’s vision of a sustainable transportation system is guided by the following eight principles which are based on three elements of sustainable transportation – social, economic, and environment:
1. Highest practicable safety and security of life and property;
2. Efficient movement of people and goods to support economic prosperity and a sustainable quality of life;
3. Respect for the environmental legacy of future generations of Canadians;
4. User pricing that better reflects the full costs of transportation activity and transportation infrastructure decisions that meet user needs;
5. Reasonable access to the national transportation system by Canada’s remote regions;
6. Accessibility in the national network without undue obstacles for persons with disabilities;
7. Coordinated and harmonized actions across all modes of transport; and
8. Partnerships and collaboration among governments and with the private sector for an integrated, coherent transportation policy framework.

Studies have shown that the continued growth in population and employment forecast for the year 2020 will result in greater traffic congestion levels in the future. Unfortunately, each year in Canada, commuter trains provide 53 million rides to customers and taxpayers using only 500 kilometres of track. With 40 percent of greenhouse gases originating from urban transportation sources, especially private automobiles, providing alternatives to single occupant vehicles is clearly in the public interest. Canada has committed to reducing greenhouse gases to help minimize the impact of global warming. Commuter Rail and Rapid Transit (Sky Train, Light Rail, Metro/Subway, Bus Rapid Transit, Streetcar/Tram, and Kerb Guided Buses) can play an important role in meeting this commitment, while protecting existing green space that might otherwise be lost to highway expansion.

On November 27, 2008, BC Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon announced he will commission a half-million-dollar study to look at the options for commuter rail and freight on Vancouver Island’s historic route. Currently, a VIA rail passenger train makes one daily run along the old north to south line between Victoria and Courtenay on the island’s east coast. For years, island communities, which now own the rail bed, have pleaded for money to upgrade the tracks to provide a more reliable and more frequent service, with no result. Now, however, it seems the B.C. government has taken an interest. “There’s growing interest in alternative forms of transportation on Vancouver Island, so the time is right to do a thorough business case analysis,” said Falcon.

Another reason for the provincial interest in the commuter rail system is that transportation is one of the largest sources of air pollution and greenhouse gases in British Columbia.

Environment Canada’s most recent emissions summary indicates that on-road motor vehicle emissions deposited over 600 kilo-tonnes of criteria air contaminants (CACs) into the air in British Columbia in 2005, representing 20% of the total air pollutants generated by all sources (Env. Canada 2007).

Further, Environment Canada’s most recently released National Inventory Report indicates that on-road transportation generated 17 million tonnes or 25% of the total annual GHG emissions in British Columbia in 2004. The Inventory also indicates that, over the period from 1990 through 2004, greenhouse gas emissions from all transportation sources increased by 40% in British Columbia, in comparison to a national growth of 27% during the same period.

The government of British Columbia has committed to achieving a 33% reduction in GHG emissions by 2020 and as part of the Climate Action Plan $14 billion were allocated to the Provincial Transit Plan to build infrastructure and double ridership across BC by 2020. In order to accomplish this goal, it is critical that efforts to select and implement sustainable transit solutions are focused on developing and following transport and land use management strategies that improve mobility options, reduce total motor vehicle traffic, and create more accessible land use patterns. This will provide multiple benefits (Litman) including:

• Energy conservation and emission reductions;
• Reduced traffic congestion, and barrier effect (traffic delay to pedestrians and cyclists);
• Reduced parking problems and parking facility cost savings, which reduces development costs and increases housing affordability;
• Reduced costs to build, maintain and operate roadways;
• Consumer transportation cost savings;
• Improved mobility options, particularly for non-drivers;
• Reduced traffic accidents;
• Reduced land consumption, reducing stormwater costs, and habitat loss;
• Supporting strategic planning objectives, such as urban redevelopment and reduced sprawl; and
• Increased physical activity and associated health benefits.

Sustainable transportation is indeed critical to reducing GHG emissions. This is based on the concept of energy conservation which insists that individuals and societies should not consume resources beyond the rate at which they can be renewed otherwise it will not be available for future generations.

Dr. Mir F. Ali is a Sustainability Analyst with Turner Lane Development Corporation which is a real estate development company with the commitment to build sustainable communities in British Columbia. mir@turnerlane.com

Banning Bottled Water

2010-03-29T17:06:00.000-07:00

Here’s another story from Dr. Mir Ali which I’m happy to post. I have never understood why people buy bottled water when tap water is so prevalent and we spend so much of our tax dollars keeping a health water supply. The cost is ridiculous. I’m thinking canned fresh air from Alaska and Yukon might be a great seller.

The following photo is from photographer Chris Jordon and depicts 2 million plastic bottles (not all water)…the same amount used every 5 minutes in the US.

Resolution to Banning Bottled Water in the Municipalities

Dr. Mir F. Ali

Early bottled mineral water was so expensive that only the rich and upper classes could afford it. The situation began changing in the mid-1800s with the advent of the industrial revolution and shipping by railway. As early as the mid-20th century, worldwide production had already climbed to several hundred million bottles per year.

Even though bottled water didn’t take off in a real sense until the late 1980’s the world was absolutely amazed with the brilliant idea of using the plastic bottle that Vittel introduced in 1968. The affordability as well as the dazzling marketing strategy stimulated commoners around the world to pay more for a bottle of water than for gasoline. Perhaps the biggest boon to the bottled water industry was the introduction of the PET plastic 500 ml water bottle in 1989 which is made from fossil fuels. Light, cheap, durable and — at least in theory — completely recyclable, it helped make bottled water a convenience many of us couldn’t do without.

In a simple terms, bottled water is defined as drinking water that is put into bottles and offered for sale. There are three main types of bottled water:

Natural mineral water is, in the European Union, an extremely specific product responding to strict criteria. It is underground still or aerated water, protected against pollution hazards and characterized by a constant level of minerals and trace elements. This water cannot be treated, nor can it have any exogenous elements, such as flavours or additives.
Spring water in Europe is also underground water protected against pollution hazards. It cannot be treated, but it doesn’t need to have a constant mineral composition. Water from different springs can be sold under the same brand name.
Purified water is surface or underground water that has been treated in order to be suitable for human consumption. It differs from tap water only through the way it is distributed (in bottles rather than through pipes) and its price.

The global market for bottled water grew by 7 percent in 2006 to reach a value of $60.94 billion and 8.1 percent to reach a volume of 115.39 billion litres. They expect the growth of 41.8 percent in 2011 which is estimated to be a value of $86.42 billion. In 2011, the market is forecast to have a volume of 174.29 billion litres, an increase of 51% since 2006. Europe is the leading region in bottled water sales, holding a 52.9% share of the global market. 46.2% of all bottled water revenues are generated through supermarkets and hypermarkets. In 2006, 38 billion plastic drinking bottles ended up in Global Landfills which will begin to decompose in the year 2706.

The U.S. is the largest consumer market for bottled water in the world, followed by Mexico, China, and Brazil. In 2008, U.S. bottled water sales topped 8.6 billion gallons for 28.9% of the U.S. liquid refreshment beverage market, exceeding sales of all other beverages except carbonated soft drinks, followed by fruit juices and sports drinks.

In Canada, pre-packaged water (bottled water) is considered to be a food and is regulated under Division 12 of the Food and Drug Regulations. A Canadian study notes that a one-litre brand-name bottle of flat water costs about $1.50. That’s about 3,000 times more expensive than an equal amount of municipal tap water. $730 million of water bottles were sold in Canada in 2007 which is translated into 1.8 billion litres of water that Canadians drank in 2007. 30 per cent Canadians drink bottled water as a primary source of water. 1 billion: is the conservative estimate of the number of single-serve plastic water bottles Canadians go through each year. Unfortunately, 200 million of those water bottles end up in landfill sites each year in Canada.

A recent report summarized why consumers choose to drink bottled water: In many cases, bottled water is an alternative to tap water. Consumers think it tastes better than tap water (no chlorine taste), they perceive it as being safer and of better quality. They also look for security - food scandals in industrialised countries and water-borne diseases in developing countries have a great impact on their attitude. Bottled water is perceived as pure and safe, although it is not necessarily the case. Consumers care for their health and their well-being - they buy bottled water to feel well, to lose weight. Bottled water is a healthy alternative to other beverages.

However, bottled water processed with distillation or reverse osmosis lacks fluoride ions which are sometimes naturally present in ground water. The drinking of distilled water may conceivably increase the risk of tooth decay due to a lack of this element. According to a 1999 NRDC study, about 22 percent of brands tested contained, in at least one sample, chemical contaminants at levels above strict state health limits, some of which may pose health risks, if consumed over a long period of time. However, the NRDC report conceded that “Most waters contained no detectable bacteria, and the levels of synthetic organic chemicals and inorganic chemicals of concern for which were tested were either below detection limits or well below all applicable standards.” Meanwhile, a report by the Drinking Water Research Foundation found that of all samples tested by NRDC, “federal FDA or EPA limits were allegedly exceeded only four times, twice for total coliforms and twice for fluorides.

Here are some facts about bottled water:

The Pacific Institute, a California-based organization, estimates that the total amount of energy required for every bottle of water, from making the bottle to transporting, cooling and disposing of the empties, “is equivalent, on average, to filing a plastic bottle one-quarter full with oil;”
17 million barrels of crude oil are used annually to produce the plastic used to bottle water, according to the Earth Policy Institute. Bottled water is hauled long distances for distribution, burning massive quantities of fuel;
In 2006, the equivalent of 2 billion half-litre bottles of water were shipped to U.S. ports, creating thousands of tons of global warming pollution and other air pollution. In New York City alone, the transportation of bottled water from Western Europe released an estimated 3,800 tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere. In California, 18 million gallons of bottled water were shipped in from Fiji in 2006, producing about 2,500 tons of global warming pollution;
In addition, plastic bottles constitute a long-term environmental hazard as they are not biodegradable and reactions between them and various chemicals in the environment may result in the emission of gases that are hazardous to human health; and
In the case of bottled water, microbial monitoring results may not be typical of the entire water volume. Only a small amount of water is checked and the use of indicators might not reflect the presence of certain pathogens such as protozoa.

It was reported that the shift in public opinion about the environmental consequences of plastic in general prompted some Canadian municipalities to ban the sale of bottled water from their properties. Nelson was the first to prohibit its sales in city buildings last May, followed by London in August and Toronto in December. School boards across the country are also starting to ban their sale to students.

Federal Canadian Municipalities (FCM) passed a resolution on March 7, 2009 in Victoria, encouraging municipalities to “phase out the sale and purchase of bottled water at their own facilities where appropriate and where potable water is available.” Even though municipalities have no jurisdiction over banning on the sale of bottled water as regulating bottled water for public consumption falls under provincial and federal jurisdiction, it illustrates how municipalities are leading by example to encourage environmentally sustainable water choices. The resolution also calls on municipalities to develop awareness campaigns about the positive benefits and quality of municipal water supplies. Municipalities will determine their local course of action.

The reasoning behind this resolution is that bottled water containers may be recyclable but they still have to be manufactured and transported, which uses significant energy, between 40 and 80 per cent end up in the local landfill which is a burden on the environment and a cost for municipal taxpayers.

“If this resolution at the FCM goes through, it will send an important message to the rest of the world about the leadership of Canadian municipalities in reclaiming water as a public resource,” says Maude Barlow, senior advisor on water to the President of the United Nations General Assembly and national chairperson of the Council of Canadians. “The FCM adopting a policy opposing bottled water would also be an important step toward a national water policy that would improve the public system and ensure clean drinking water standards for all communities across the country.”

In January, the London chapter of the Council of Canadians worked with the city of London to have this resolution tabled at the FCM. So far, 27 municipalities across Canada have phased out the sale of bottled water in their facilities. In June 2008 the US Conference of Mayors passed a resolution encouraging mayors to phase out city spending on bottled water and to promote the importance of municipal water.

Far from being an urban myth, several peer-reviewed studies show chemicals can migrate from bottles into water.

According to a study by the University of Heidelberg in Germany, there is substantial leaching of carcinogens from PET containers into water. The study shows toxin levels can climb to 90 per cent for water that has been in single-use bottles for more than six months. Challinor says 93 per cent of Canadians have access to recycling. This does not mean they actually recycle. They stand by their statement that municipal water is more regulated than bottled water.

In the absence of provincial regulations for banning bottled water, Canadian municipalities are faced with a real dilemma. While they are interested in joining the municipalities which have already decided to ban bottled water in their jurisdictions, they don’t like to be responsible for the elimination of jobs associated with the bottled water industry. However, municipalities do have a choice to follow the example of the city of London, Ontario where the decision to eliminate bottled water sales in city-run facilities was passed by London’s city council. London’s new restrictions are being implemented in buildings that are already equipped with water fountains. Bottled water will still be permitted at many city-run events, such as upcoming summer festivals. Privately-owned retailers will not be affected by the ban.

Obviously, London chose a compromising approach to implementing the ban which may not be acceptable to every municipality, but it is entirely up to the public to decide. Here is a video which summarizes the findings: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPLx8MhLcpQ

New Trends: Smaller, Affordable, and Energy-Efficient Houses

2010-03-29T17:05:00.001-07:00

By Mir F. Ali

Here’s another guest post from Mir Ali about the current trend in home construction. If one takes the idea of net-zero emissions and smaller construction and pushes it further, maybe we could all become producers of power through waste management processes and through solar panels…maybe our exercise bikes could be plugged in to the grid….ok that’s a joke, but the concept of each one of our homes somehow being producers and not drainers would be well worth pursuing for government. I am sure there is a rats nest of politics and business in there somewhere. I am also completely onside with the desire for smaller and more efficient homes..after cutting my lawn and gardening and cleaning the house all last weekend, smaller has a great appeal.

Thanks for the article Mir.

New Trends: Smaller, Affordable, and Energy-Efficient Houses
Dr. Mir F. Ali, Sustainability Analyst

The global economic downturn is a mixed blessing for home buyers — if you’re lucky enough to hang on to your job, you should be in a much better position to buy a house, according to a report released by RBC Economics. The question is: What kind of house?

Experts from the NAHB and Better Homes & Gardens Magazine released some interesting research recently at the International Builder’s Show in Las Vegas. They found that Americans aren’t interested in McMansions or large homes anymore; they’re looking for something more practical. They’re looking for economic and cozy spaces with neat organization.

Here is how America is responding to the new housing trends …

“Buyers right now are focused on an affordable monthly mortgage payment, low utility bills and a home that fits their lifestyle while maximizing every square foot,” says Kent Goff, vice president of planning and design for Beazer Homes. “They want all the rooms and every bit of space in the home to work for them — and without sacrificing luxury.” The “less is more” idea has some builders scaling down the size of their homes. Beazer, for instance, found that by eliminating walls and underused hallways, it can use every square foot in the home more efficiently and “design homes that may be smaller, but feel just as big,” Goff says.
A recent study of 2,300 homeowners by the National Association of Home Builders found that more than 50 percent of those surveyed said they would pay $5,000 to $11,000 more up front for a new house if they could save on their utility bills. Other trends worth watching include:

smarter storage;
cleaner air;
built-in flexibility;
and uncompromised kitchen;
etc.

According to the surveys, consumers today want:

“Wii-sized,” media-centric family gathering rooms;
More storage to keep clutter under control;
Small homes with built in shelves for food storage;
Energy-efficient homes with lower utility bills;
Outdoor spaces, such as a front porch;
and a dedicated home office space.

This is in direct contrast to the notion of room count, which Cheryl O’Brien (President and Chief Designer of C. O’Brian Architects in Bala Cynwyd, PA) describes as “houses with 2,000 to 2,200 square feet having a living room, dining room, kitchen, breakfast nook and family room where none of the rooms functioned well.” Instead she prefers what she calls “sensible design: floor plans with a nice-sized kitchen; one gathering space for eating; a great room; and a flex room that can be used as a home office, a play room, an in-law suite, a formal dining room, or whatever function best fits the family’s needs.” ?
One reason for the shift away from several separate rooms, O’Brien says, are young buyers who don’t want and can’t afford to furnish all those rooms. “For people who are 30 years old, starting their families or single, I don’t think the Ethan Allen dining room set is on their list of dreams,” she says. “It’s the big-screen TV or the laptop - the technology. The design of the house needs to reflect what those people really want.” ??Carlos Bazbaz, president of Houston-based Lanterra Homes, sells to those buyers. The biggest battle his company faced when it designed affordable, starter patio homes for first-time buyers was convincing them that 1,300 square feet was big enough to meet their needs. He did it by essentially making the public spaces of the house - the first floor - a kitchen and a flexible dining and living space. “It’s good for entertaining, which is good for the younger crowd that is our market,” he says. “There’s lots of natural light and we have 9-foot ceilings on the first floor. That provides an open and large feel.” ?

Here is how Canada is responding to the new housing trends …

According to a recent report, Infrastructure Investment in Affordable Housing as Economic Stimulus, construction investment represents approximately 12% of Canada’s annual GDP. More than one million Canadians earn a living in the construction industry. Each new home built creates an estimated four to six person years of direct and indirect employment for Canadian workers. Housing development, maintenance and updating are one of the country’s main economic engines and provide jobs for years to come. The other findings of the report include:

On average, households spend roughly one-fifth of their income on shelter and related expenses. By investing in affordable housing, renters’ income contributes to Canada’s public infrastructure;
Lumber production in Canada is highly dependent on demands in residential construction, thus investment in affordable housing across Canada will support jobs for Canadians in lumber production; and
Available affordable housing will contribute significantly to local economies that would be able to attract and retain lower paid workers. This is particularly critical in high growth centres where labour shortages impact the well-being of these cities, which are widely acknowledged as the engines of national economic growth, competitiveness and productivity. High or rising housing costs are a deterrent to labour mobility, reducing labour supply and putting pressure on wage rates.

A visionary real estate developer, Les Bjola, is making history in Canada by launching Kettle Creek Station, in the City of Langford, British Columbia, to build up to 500 smaller, affordable, and efficient houses. Kettle Creek Station is an example of what can be done to better utilize land, create more affordable home ownership options, benefiting the community with local job creation.

The homes at Kettle Creek Station were originally planned to be high quality modular homes created off-site in Oregon. As the economy slowed many factors were taken into consideration, the developer decided to construct those homes on site with local labour and materials which is turning out to be another way of stimulating the local economy. They are getting local companies involved in the build out of Kettle Creek Station, offering approximately 50 jobs this spring and further jobs this summer.

As far as the energy-efficient houses are concerned, the government of British Columbia issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) to assist construction of homes and buildings that seek to achieve net zero or near-net zero energy performance. Net zero homes use super efficient design to minimize the need for energy, combined with clean energy supplies on-site or in the community. Passive design, including superior building envelope construction and passive solar gain through building orientation, is the primary design concept being encouraged on the path to net zero homes. Other design considerations will be the use of clean community energy sources and on-site clean power, heating and cooling supplies that supply as much energy over a year as purchased from utilities.
This program has a total budget of one million to construct a total of 100 super-efficient residential units and an educational building by March 31, 2012 in both coastal and interior regions of British Columbia. This budget is designed for assisting to make houses net-zero-energy-efficient not to construct them. Each project is expected to build five marketable, and net-zero-energy efficient homes with smaller-than average overall floor space. The marketability is the key to this program as being smaller and energy-efficient is not good enough — these houses have to be affordable.

It is important to understand that certain levels of energy-efficiency can be achieved with the passive design, but a net-zero emission building is characterized according to the government of British Columbia by significant reductions in fossil fuel use, with the remaining net energy needs met from community based or on-site, renewable and waste energy resources. In order to get to net-zero energy, new houses and buildings could either incorporate on-site. Net-zero energy supplies or meet their energy needs from clean energy sources.

There are several tools available in the market to help bridge the gap between the energy-efficiency achieved through the passive design and the desirable level of energy-efficiency to build affordable net-zero efficient houses. For instance, Terasen Energy Services builds, owns, and operates innovative geoexchange systems, community piping, and energy transfer systems to harness renewable energy sources. Their geoexchange ground source heat pumps (GSHP) use the solar heat stored in the Earth, just below the frost line or in a body of water, to heat or cool buildings. In colder months, heat pumps draw heat from the ground to warm buildings, while in warmer months, the systems use the cooler ground as a “heat sink” to cool buildings. The chief benefit of geoexchange is the high level of system efficiency, which is typically measured as a Coefficient of Performance (CoP). The CoP of a heat pump is the ratio of the output heat to the energy input. For a CoP of 3.5, it means that for every kilowatt of electricity needed to operate the system, the heat pump provides 3.5 kilowatts of heat energy. The CoP often ranges from 3.0 – 4.0, which translates to lower operating costs when compared to conventional systems.

While it takes time to change the human behaviour to accept the reality, Canadians seem to have started the process of recognizing the reality that the current economical conditions are not going to go away in a hurry and they must treat it as an opportunity for making intelligent decisions. The change in the attitude appears to be a testimony to the fact that Kettle Creek Station started selling their houses before even they finished building their show homes. The important thing is that the trends have been started and there is no doubt in anybody’s mind that smart Canadian developers will follow the success of Kettle Creek Station to build smaller, affordable, and energy-efficient houses all over the map, utilizing tools and techniques available to maximize the energy-efficiency without compromising the quality of life. This approach not only will change the landscape of Canadian communities and cities but it will also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions drastically.

Carbon Credits vs. Carbon Tax

2010-03-29T17:04:00.000-07:00

This is a follow up to the previous post.

Guest Post by: Dr. Mir F. Ali

It is no secret that the world opinion about global warming is divided into two categories – those who genuinely believe in global warming and those who think it as a big joke. At the same time, the world is becoming aware of the huge controversy among those who believe in global warming and the centre of this boiling debate is on the applicability and effectiveness of the carbon credits vs. Carbon tax for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The reality is that both approaches are designed to achieve the same results and the objective here is to make it more costly to emit carbon into the atmosphere as governments around the world are discouraging the burning of fossil fuels, encouraging producers to find alternative energy from renewable sources, and nudging consumers into using energy more efficiently. Each side, of course, can make a compelling case, depending upon the circumstances under which these approaches are being introduced in each country as each side has its advantages and disadvantages. Here is a brief overview of both sides:

1. The Carbon Credits Program: Carbon credits are a key component of national and international emissions trading schemes that have been implemented to mitigate global warming. The following two major mechanisms are covered under this program:

A. Cap-and-Trade:
The basic concept comes from the USA where cap-and-trade was used as a tool in 1988 to reduce the costs of meeting regulatory requirements for sulphur dioxide emissions associated with acid rain. Based on this success, it was recommended to be included in the Kyoto Protocol for reducing GHG emissions. It is based on the cap or maximum allowances granted to a company for emitting GHG emissions in the atmosphere and companies buy or sell those allowances depending upon whether they over emit or come in beneath their allowed quantity of emissions.

European Union (EU) were the first to implement a market-based system in 2005 to cap emissions from about 12,000 factories producing electricity, glass, steel, cement, pulp and paper. The European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) continues to be the largest carbon markets scheme in both volume and value and dominates allowance based transactions. It is a multi-national emissions trading system in the world and it is a major pillar of EU climate policy. It was implemented in 2005 as a European market for carbon dioxide (CO2) emission allowances. The value of trading on EU ETS doubled from $24 billion in 2006 to $50 billion in 2007.

The UK’s voluntary Emissions Trading Scheme was run from 2002 to 2006 which provided key experience to the London Exchange. It was reported recently that managing emissions has become one of the fastest-growing specialties in the London financial services, and companies are scrambling to find workers. Their goal is a slice of a market now worth about $30 billion and that could grow to $1 trillion within a decade.

B. Carbon Offset:
Offset is a complimentary mechanism to cap-and-trade. It is designed to reduce GHG emissions from sources which are not regulated to be covered under the scope of a cap-and-trade program. Typically, these areas represent industries or sectors where GHG emissions are more difficult to track, mitigate, and report.
Environment Canada has been working on the design of the offset system for a number of years. The system they came up with called Canada’s Offset System for GHGs which is a voluntary system designed to reduce or remove domestic GHGs. Each offset credit under this system will represent one tonne of CO2 equivalent. Offset credits will be tradable and bankable within the unit tracking system. If everything goes as planned including the re-election of the government of the day, the proposed regulations are to be finalized in 2009 to come into force as planned on January 1, 2010.

2. The Carbon Tax Program:
Quebec implemented Canada’s first carbon tax in October 2007, collecting just under one cent a litre from petroleum companies in the province, with the expectation to raise about $200 million a year to pay for energy-saving initiatives such as improvements to public transit. The tax amounts to 0.8 cents on every litre of gas sold in Quebec, and 0.9 cents on each litre of diesel fuel.

On July 1, 2008 British Columbia (BC) began to phase in a fully revenue-neutral carbon tax with built-in protection for lower income British Columbians. A carbon tax is defined as a tax on emissions of CO2, the leading cause of global warming. By taxing the burning of fossil fuels such as gasoline, aviation fuel and natural gas, a carbon tax is aimed at reducing their use. In BC, the tax is built into the price for the consumer.

The BC carbon tax started at a rate based on $10 per tonne of associated carbon, or carbon-equivalent, emissions and will rise by $5 a year for the next four years, reaching $30 per tonne by 2012. This works out to 2.41 cents per litre for gasoline, rising gradually to 7.24 cents a litre by 2012. For diesel and home heating oil, it works out to 2.76 cents per litre, rising to 8.27 cents over the same five-year period. Overall, the government estimates the carbon tax will bring in revenues of about $1.85 billion over the first three years, all of which will be returned to businesses and individuals.

Carbon tax is not exactly a new idea. Denmark, Finland, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Italy, and United Kingdom have implemented carbon tax in the 1990s. Monica Prasad, an assistant professor of sociology, in her article “The Politics of Free Markets”, she noted that the one country in which carbon taxes have led to a large decrease in emissions is Denmark, whose per capita CO2 emissions were nearly 15 percent lower in 2005 than in 1990. Denmark accomplished this while posting a remarkably strong economic record and without relying on nuclear power. There were two major lessons to be learned from Denmark:

1. Denmark avoids the temptation to maximize the tax revenue by giving the proceeds back to industry, earmarking much of it to subsidize environmental innovation; and

2. Carbon tax worked in Denmark because it was easy for Danish firms to switch to cleaner fuels. Danish policy makers made huge investments in renewable energy and subsidized environmental innovation.

Unfortunately, British Columbia didn’t follow the Denmark model. Instead of giving the proceeds back to industry to encourage environmental innovations, they decided to return the total anticipated tax revenue (Minus operating overheads) back to businesses and individuals. Furthermore, the government of British Columbia didn’t make any significant investments in renewable energy in order to subsidize environmental innovations. The general opinion in the province is that the distribution of $395 (Borrowed money) in the name of Lower Income Climate Credit - $100 per adult per year and $30 per child per year, rising by 5percent in 2009 – was a huge mistake and they feel that that money could have been invested in the environmental innovations. Additionally, British Columbians were not impressed with the fact that the government distributed 18,000 cheques to the wrong people who shouldn’t have been qualified for the credit and now they are spending money as well as efforts to collect back that money.

It is true that not every country that implemented carbon tax has been a success story. It didn’t help them to decline major emissions as expected in most of these countries. In case of Norway, the Wall Street Journal reported that GHG emissions have actually risen 15%, and industries deemed vital to the nation’s economy or image were spared the tax or given sweet deals. Though the oil and gas industry has become more eco-friendly, Norwegians are driving more than ever. Norway puts a positive spin on the admitted failure of the tax. The country has seen unprecedented economic growth since 1990, with GDP up 70%. And the government receives almost a third of its funding from taxes on petrodollars. But in a rural nation, even with gas prices around $10 a gallon, there are more cars on the road than ever.

Perhaps the question should be asked at this stage is “Which approach could be considered more effective in reducing GHG emissions – carbon credits or carbon tax?” The answer to this question differs from person to person depending up on who you ask.

For instance:
The living legend and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has come out against cap and trade as an effective mechanism for reducing carbon emissions. “I have grave doubts that international agreements imposing a globalized so-called cap-and-trade system on CO2 emissions will prove feasible,” he wrote in his recent book, The Age of Turbulence;

and Experts of cap-and-trade including DeVito the author of Colossal Optimism believe that “When you impose emissions-reduction caps and allow trading, you stimulate private sector investment in new technologies. “Where else can you be a part of a new market? New ideas in old markets are rare. New ideas in new markets are extremely rare. The modern energy economy requires entrepreneurship and a cap-and-trade system will help the innovators innovate.”

The reality is that there will always be advantages and disadvantages regardless of the choice you make. The United Kingdom had chosen both approaches and they have been very successful and managed to reduce CO2 emissions by 20 percent from the 1990/95 baseline to 2007. As far as British Columbia is concerned, in addition to the carbon tax already in place, on January 1, 2012, British Columbia will be implementing the cap-and-trade program as a part of the Western Climate Initiative (WCI).

The WCI is a collaboration which was launched in February 2007 by the Governors of Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington to develop regional strategies to address climate change. WCI is identifying, evaluating and implementing collective and cooperative ways to reduce greenhouse gases in the region. In the spring of 2007, the Governor of Utah and the Premiers of British Columbia and Manitoba joined the Initiative. Quebec joined in January, 2008 and moved from Observer to Partner status in April, 2008.

With Ontario becoming a member on July 18, 2008, the WCI now represents approximately 73% of Canada’s economy and 20% of American economy – Making it the largest cap-and-trade program in North America.

Dr. Mir F. Ali is a Sustainability Analyst with Turner Lane Development Corporation, a real estate development corporation with the vision to build an intelligent green city – The City Centre Colwood. mir@turnerlane.com

The Phenomenon of Carbon Tax

2010-03-29T17:02:00.000-07:00

By Mir.F. Ali

Here’s a great summary of the issue of carbon taxing from Mir Ali, a Sustainability Analyst with Turner Lane Development Corporation in BC. I’ve shared another story from Mir as well and I find he takes a common sense approach to environmental issues and is well worth reading. This is also a useful piece for locals to read given our election here in BC.

The majority of the people have accepted the fact that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHG), which result from the burning of fossil fuels, are gradually warming the Earth’s climate. While the amount of damage associated with the warming remains uncertain, there is an appreciation for the risk that could be large and perhaps even catastrophic.
One of the creative techniques to mitigate the environmental risk is the concept of carbon tax. A carbon tax is a tax on the carbon content of fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas). The idea of carbon tax is that polluters should pay for the environmental damage that they are responsible for. This is based on the understanding that a carbon tax may encourage polluters to avoid/minimize the amount of carbon emission in the atmosphere by changing their behaviour or help pay for offsetting the carbon credits that other individuals or industries have earned…..more…

Have fun out there, but walk….

Fiber Optic Networks: Connect Communities

2010-03-29T17:00:00.000-07:00

Dr. Mir F. Ali

Fiber optic technology advanced at an astonishing rate in the second half of the twentieth century. The discovery of fiber optics in 1966 was indeed a major landmark for which Charles Kao won a share of the Nobel Prize in physics in 2009. Working at the Old Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in the United Kingdome, Kao coauthored a paper with G. A. Hockham in 1966 on the subject of the theory and practice of the use of optical fiber for communications applications. In this paper, for the first time, they described how to transmit light over long distances using ultrapure optical glass fibers which enabled such transmissions to reach 62 miles. As a result of this discovery, the first ultrapure fiber was produced in 1970.

Related innovations, and improvements continued in the rest of the century from the development of fiberscope, light-emitting diodes (LED) and lasers to the emergence of dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) and the applications for optical fiber. Consequently, fiber optic technologies pervade a variety of industries around the world. For instance, delivering high-definition broadcast (HDTV) at resolutions of 1080p has become possible through the deployment of fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC/FTTH) networks which allows video on demand to become a reality and satellites transporting L-Band signals over fiber do not need to be demodulated which also suffer less attenuation.

The most common definition for fiber optic networks states that it is based on the principle that light in a glass medium can carry more information over longer distances than electrical signals can carry in a copper or coaxial medium or radio frequencies through a wireless medium. Furthermore, the purity of today’s glass fiber, combined with improved system electronics, enables fiber to transmit digitized light signals hundreds of kilometers without amplification. With few transmission losses, low interference, and high bandwidth potential, optical fiber is an almost ideal transmission medium.

Needless to say that smart telecommunication companies around the world are taking advantage of the fiber optic networks to provide voice, video, and high capacity broadband data services to their customers and these networks will allow them to continue to provide the capacity and speed necessary to deliver advanced broadband applications today and into the future.

Everybody has accepted the fact that the Internet has become the new marketplace and countries around the world are recognizing that the capacity to deliver electronic services is not only crucial to their economy but it is also critical to their health care, security, education, and workforce. It was acknowledged by the US government when they included $7.2 billion in the economic stimulus package of $787, for broadband deployment in underserved communities, the telecommunications industry is expected to help stimulate new jobs, enhance high-speed Internet services and make technology more accessible in rural areas.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Council on Broadband Development also recognizes the growing importance of broadband and its principles have been instrumental in fostering broadband development. The development and use of broadband has flourished in most countries since the Recommendation made by the Council. It’s interesting to note that since December 2004, broadband subscribers in the OECD have increased by 187%, reaching 221 million in June 2007. Broadband is available to the majority of inhabitants even within the largest OECD countries. A number of countries have reached 100% coverage with at least one wired broadband technology and up to 60% with coverage by two. Wireless Internet connections at broadband speeds are also increasingly available and are particularly important in under served areas.

The major finding of the report that was produced by Connected Nation Inc. on the subject of the Economic Impacts of Stimulating Broadband Nationally, clearly stipulates that adopting a national policy to stimulate the deployment of broadband in under served areas of the U.S. could have dramatic and far-reaching economic impacts. For instance, just a seven percentage point increase in broadband adoption could result in:

$92 billion through 2.4 million jobs created or saved annually;
$662 million saved per year in reduced health care costs;
$6.4 billion per year in mileage saving from unnecessary driving;
$18 million in carbon credits associated with 3.2 billion fewer lbs of CO2 emissions per year in the United States;
$35.2 billion in value from 3.8 billion more hours saved per year from accessing broadband at home; and
$134 billion per year in total direct economic impact of accelerating broadband across the United States.

A study by George Ford and Thomas Koutsky of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies evaluated whether broadband investments by municipalities have an effect on economic growth. They compared Lake County, a small county in central Florida, with other Florida counties. The finding of this study was published under the title of “Broadband Economic Development: A Municipal Case Study from Florida“. Here are the major points of the study:

In 2001, Lake County (A small, central Florida county of nearly 250,000 residents and 953 square miles) began generally offering private businesses and municipal institutions access to one of Florida^‘s most extensive, municipally-owned broadband networks, with fiber optic connections to hospitals, doctor offices, private businesses, and 44 schools;
The Lake County municipal system was constructed by private companies, the system leases capacity to private network providers, and customers use the system to supplement services from other providers;
Their economic model showed that Lake County has experienced approximately 100% greater growth in economic activity - a doubling - relative to comparable Florida counties since making its municipal broadband network generally available to businesses and municipal institutions in the county;
Their findings provide support for the position that municipal broadband infrastructure may better serve the overall community than simply relying solely on private telecommunications firms; and
These findings were consistent with other analyses that postulate that broadband infrastructure can be a significant contributor to economic growth and their results suggested that efforts to restrict municipal broadband investment could deny communities an important tool in promoting economic development.

Public Technology Institute, a national and member-supported organization, based in Washington, D.C., endorsed and helped distribute “The Municipal and Utility Guidebook to Bringing Broadband Fiber Optics to Your Community” which is coauthored by David Chaffee and Mitchell Shapiro. The purpose of this publication was to set examples and share success stories with local government officials and utility companies. The report is the result of extensive analysis of four cities where fiber optic networks were deployed to deliver broadband services and the following highlights represent the conclusion for each city:

BRISTOL, VIRGINA:

First Muni-Fiber System to offer triple-play;
Year service launched: 2003;
Premises passed: Approximately 13,000;
Penetration of premises passed: 63 percent;
Generating net income since 3Q07;
Incumbents are Charter and Embarq;
Has expanded beyond core service area through partnerships; and
Created business unit to help other communities deploy and operate municipal networks.

BURLIGTON, VERMONT:

Burlington is Vermont’s largest city with a population of roughly 38,000;
Year residential service launched: 2006;
Premises passed: Approximately 18,300;
Penetration of premises passed: approximately 21 percent overall and 43 percent in initial launch area, which has had service available since February 2006;
Expected to generate net income by 2009;
Financed via capital lease;
Incumbents are Comcast (formerly Adelphia) and Fairpoint (formerly Verizon); and
Former project director Tim Nulty is now spearheading multi-town Muni-Fiber project planning to serve 23 small Vermont towns.

JACKSON, TENNESSEE:

At launch, offered retail video and wholesale voice and Internet;
Transitioning to full-retail model;
Year residential service launched: 2004;
Premises passed: Approximately 35,000;
Penetration of premises passed: 44 percent;
Expects to generate net income by year 7 of operations;
Nearly $8 mil. in consumer savings over 4 years from lower rates in Jackson;
Incumbents are Charter and AT&T; and
JEA’s experience highlights importance of retail service model and problems with wholesale-only model.

REEDSBURG, WISCONSIN:

Year residential service launched: 2003;
Premises passed: Approximately 4,400;
Penetration of premises passed: 61 percent+;
Relatively high capital cost due to underground construction;
Expected to generate net income in 2008;
Initial financing was interest-only “Bond Anticipation Note” from local bank; refinancing in 2008;
Incumbents are Charter and Verizon; and
Provides local schools with 100 Mbps links for less than $500/mo., compared to the $650-$750/mo. they were previously paying for just 1.5 Mbps connections.

The report clearly illustrates that each city has been successful in accomplishing their objectives. It also demonstrates that investments in municipal fiber can pay for themselves and cities can start generating revenue within three to seven years depending upon the size of the city and the magnitude of their investments.

The reality is that while there are numerous towns and cities that are revolutionizing the world of telecommunications by building community-owned and community-controlled fiber optic networks to connect their members to each other and to the rest of the world via high-capacity fiber optics, there are hundreds of thousands of towns and cities around the world who are still struggling to make decisions about fiber optic networks. It is not easy to make decisions when it comes to deploying fiber optic networks for the communities.

In addition to justifying financial expenditures and finding right business partners for their projects, the city officials also have to worry about how those fiber optic networks are going to be built in their cities. These officials are acutely aware of the fact that the implementation of fiber optic networks in their cities requires to cut trenches into and under city streets in order to install conduit, splice vaults, and building entrance facilities. These activities cause pollution, ccommuters get frustrated by traffic delays, and downtown shops along the affected streets lose business when customers stay away to avoid the traffic congestion. What is worse is that the repair of the streets after excavation rarely left the streets in acceptable condition. These forces the city officials to issue moratoriums on new open cut excavations involved in the last mile work. The last mile is being the section of a network that connects an end-user building to the city-area network that surrounds a city.

The city officials must know that they have an option to build their fiber optic networks without worrying too much about their streets and traffic jams. The idea of leasing space inside of existing sewers by telecommunication companies is becoming popular around the world according to which owners of existing sewers get to generate a new revenue stream and telecommunication companies could install their optical cables in their sewers at an attractive cost. Typically, every building, every facility, every business, and every house in a city is connected to a common sewer system. This common sewer system is already in place and has existing routes beneath the city streets. Perhaps most importantly, the robotic technology to install fiber optic cables carefully and successfully in sewers is available in North America.

Paradoxically, North America is way behind Europe, Korea and parts of South Asia, Eastern Europe and some other countries when it comes to utilizing and delivering true high speed broadband services. Fiber optic networks offer strategic opportunities for North America to catch up to the rest of the world by connecting their communities, using robots to install fiber cables inside live storm and sanitary sewer pipes. The robots can install fiber in sewer pipes as small as 8 inches at 30 to 60 percent less cost in comparison with trenching cost and two to six times faster. This as a consequence will help improve the quality of life, increase productivity, conserve energy, reduce pollution, create new jobs, enhance real estate value, and redistribute wealth in North America.

2009-08-11T13:56:00.000-07:00

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2009-06-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

How to Start a 501c3 Nonprofit Organization

2009-05-29T13:46:00.001-07:00

Here’s an article in Wiki How that explains the process in the US to start a charity.

Always useful info to have handy.

And I love the open source attitude here from wikiHow. Content sharing for social purpose corporations and the benefit of their clients can only be a good thing.

Steps

Understand what a nonprofit is: an organization whose primary objective is to support some issue or matter of private interest or public concern (such as the arts, charities, education, politics, religion, research, or some other endeavor) for non-commercial purposes. There are different kinds of nonprofits, one of them being a 501(c)(3), which is exempt from income and (sometimes) property tax, and able to receive tax-deductible charitable contributions. Before you spend your money, at least consult with an attorney who is experienced in the area of nonprofit law so that you do not make one of the many major mistakes that people make when they try to incorporate by themselves.
Formulate a mission statement. As a non-profit organization, you exist to accomplish your mission, which should be crafted based upon your purpose, services and values. The mission statement is a concise expression that covers in one or two sentences who the organization is, what it does, for whom and where. It should also be compelling, as it will be used in all published materials, funding requests and public relations. It should also portray how your organization is distinct from others. (See Tips for a sample mission statement.)
Form a Board of Directors. Forming a board requires careful thought and extensive recruitment efforts. Each state has regulations that determine the minimum size of the board, typically three, but the optimum number of people who sit on the board should be determined by the needs of the organization. Based on what your organization would like to accomplish, you should decide what special skills and qualities you will require of the individuals on your board. Identify qualified individuals who are supportive of your mission and are willing to give of their talents and time (see Tips for more information).
File Articles of Incorporation. Articles of Incorporation are official statements of creation of an organization filed with the appropriate state agency. They are important to protect both board and staff from legal liabilities incurred by the organization, making the corporation the holder of debts and liabilities, not the individuals and officers who work for the organization. The specific requirements governing how to incorporate are determined by each state. You can obtain the information you need to proceed with this step from your state Attorney General’s office or your state Secretary’s office. Before you spend your money, at least consult with an attorney who is experienced in the area of nonprofit law so that you do not make one of the many major mistakes that people make when they try to incorporate by themselves.
Draft bylaws. Bylaws are simply the “rules” of how the organization operates. Although Bylaws are not required to file for 501(c)(3) status, they will help you in governing your organization. Bylaws should be drafted with the help of an attorney and approved by the board early in the organization’s development.
Develop a budget. Creating a budget is often one of the most challenging tasks when creating a nonprofit organization. A budget is the expression, in financial terms, of the plan of operation designed to achieve the objectives of an organization. New organizations may start the budgeting process by looking at potential income – figuring out how much money they have to spend.
Develop a record-keeping system. Legally, you must save all Board documents including minutes and financial statements. It is necessary to preserve your important corporate documents, including board meeting minutes, bylaws, Articles of Incorporation, financial reports, and other official records. You should contact your appropriate state agency for more information on what records you are required to keep in the official files.
Develop an accounting system. If your board does not include someone with a financial or accounting background, it is best to work with an accountant familiar with non-profit organizations. Nonprofits are accountable to the public, their funders, and, in some instances, government granting bodies, and it is vital to establish a system of controls (checks and balances) when establishing the organization’s accounting practices. Responsible financial management requires the establishment of an accounting system that meets both current and anticipated needs.
File for 501(c)(3) status. To apply for recognition of tax-exempt, public charity status, obtain Form 1023 (application) and Publication 557 (detailed instructions) from the local IRS office. The filing fee depends upon the size of the organization’s budget. The application is an important legal document, so it is advisable to seek the assistance of an experienced attorney when preparing it. Both of these documents can be downloaded from IRS web site listed below.
Apply for a federal employer identification number. Regardless of whether or not you have employees, nonprofits are required to obtain a federal Employer Identification Number (EIN) — also referred to as the federal ID number. Available from the IRS, this number is used to identify the organization when tax documents are filed and is used not unlike an individual’s Social Security number. If you received your number prior to incorporation, you will need to apply for a new number under the corporate name. Ask for Form SS-4 when applying for your EIN.
File for state and local tax exemption. In accordance with state, county, and municipal law, you may apply for exemption from income, sales, and property taxes. Contact your state Department of Revenue, your county or municipal Department of Revenue, local Departments of Revenue, and county or municipal clerk’s offices.
Fulfill charitable solicitation law requirements. If your organization’s plans include fundraising, be aware that many states and few local jurisdictions regulate organizations that solicit funds within that state, county, or city. Usually compliance involves obtaining a permit or license and then filing an annual report and financial statement. Contact the state Attorney General’s office, the state Department of Commerce, state and local Departments of Revenue and county or municipal clerk’s offices to get more information.
Apply for a nonprofit mailing permit. The federal government provides further subsidies for nonprofits with reduced postage rates on bulk mailings. While first-class postage rates for nonprofits remain the same as those for the for-profit sector, second- and third-class rates are substantially less when nonprofits mail to a large number of members or constituencies. For more information on eligibility, contact the U.S. Postal Service and ask for Publication 417, Nonprofit Standard Mail Eligibility (also available at the link below)

Tips

Sample mission statement: “The National Mental Health Association is dedicated to promoting mental health, preventing mental disorders and achieving victory over mental illnesses through advocacy, education, research and service; The National Consumer Supporter Technical Assistance Center’s purpose is to strengthen consumer organizations by providing technical assistance in the forms of research, informational materials, and financial aid. The mission of Texas Mental Health Consumers is to organize, encourage, and educate mental health consumers in Texas. TMHC supports and promotes the mental health recovery process through peer directed and operated services, advocacy, economic development, and participation in public mental health policy design.”
What to look for in a board member: Look for individuals whose values reflect your statement of purpose. Although it is recommended that the majority of your board be consumers, include the community at large, not just your specific community of focus (e.g. the mental health community). Consider the religious community, local service clubs, legal professionals, and colleges and universities as sources for prospective a Board of Directors. Do not overload people who already serve on many committees – seek a balance between old and new leadership.
The organization needs to open a bank account and ascertain whether to use the accrual or cash method of accounting. The difference between the two types of accounting is when revenues and expenses are recorded. In cash basis accounting, revenues are recorded when cash is actually received and expenses are recorded when they are actually paid (no matter when they were actually invoiced). In accrual basis accounting, income is reported in the fiscal period it is earned, regardless of when it is received, and expenses are deducted in the fiscal period they are incurred, whether they are paid or not.
Hire an attorney to help you with your Certificate of Incorporation and the By-Laws. Hire an attorney or accountant, particularly one who has experience with 501c3 nonprofit corporations, to help you file the state and federal exemption forms. It will save you time and money in the long run.
You may want to secure a domain name that matches the name of your proposed organization.
Design a logo and tagline that will help distinguish your organizations from others and be representative of what your mission is.

Warnings

Do not use an Incorporation service or Paralegal document processing service to start your nonprofit. They often only provide part of your documentation needed for full Tax Exempt Corporation status. You could also consult a nonprofit law attorney, an experienced accountant or a professional 501(c)(3) consulting service, but be sure to check them out. Most paralegals, attorneys and accountants have little experience in this area. You can usually check out these services via the local legal bar association, references, or the Better Business Bureau.
It is important to file your 1023 within 27 months of the date when your organization was established, or when your Articles of Incorporation were filed. Although the IRS may approve an additional extension under certain circumstances, missing the deadline may result in your charity or foundation not getting 501(c)(3) recognition retroactive to its incorporation date.

Related wikiHows

Sources and Citations

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Start a 501c3 Nonprofit Organization. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Check out Intuitech - I've moved over there to be more consistent

2009-03-16T23:33:00.000-07:00

So I've collected most of my posts on Intiutech.biz and there are new ones there and I spend more of my time over there now..if you like what you see here head there...and thanks for following, much appreciated

Why bother with non-profits?

2009-03-06T18:59:00.000-08:00

I guess I am being a bit reflective today.

I have spent almost 30 years engaged with the non-profit sector either on the front line, in development and management, as a board member or as a consultant. While I have made a living working in this industry I certainly ain’t flying my own Gulf Stream. Even when I started my first technology company, I had a team building a product (SectorLynx) principally aimed at the non-profit sector. Had we spent our efforts developing SOA products for the business sector we might have been drastically more successful…monetarily. But the mission of our company was not to build a billion dollar company, but to build a great product that could bring service providers together to benefit their clients. And we did that, producing one of the first Internet based client case management systems for the nonprofit sector. Secorlynx is alive and well out there.

I sometimes wonder at the career path I have chosen and for the most part what I have always found to be most rewarding is the people involved in the sector. Whether the staff and boards or clients of the various organizations in which I’ve played a role. This is an industry dominated by heart and not wallet.

The organizations in general prioritize their bottom line as those whom they serve and not the shareholders. The non profit industry is made up not of shareholders, but of stakeholders - foundations, government departments, non-profit community agencies, individual advocates, individual donors, teams, and clients.

The sector also includes faith based organizations, sports and arts organizations, hospitals and research organizations. Most of my involvement has been with social services oriented agencies and service to people suffering from poverty, mental health, and housing issues.

These are social purpose organizations and I enjoy working with organizations that have a mission which launches from the heart. In these tough economic times, many non-profits will suffer and this will be passed onto their clients. But there are ways to work through tough times, including the development of beneficial partnerships, using new methods for fund raising, diversifying your delivery, social entrepreneurship and working smarter.

Here’s a very successful and worthwhile non-profit which demonstrates which I’ve been saying. I’ve had the pleasure of being involved with the Power To Be Society both as a consultant and as a Board member.

If you have any thoughts on this I’d love to hear them.

Thank you.

The damn best Advertising company

2009-03-06T18:58:00.001-08:00

For all you non-profits, corporate empires and general SMEs out there, when the economy starts to tank you need to step up your efforts to get your word out. Now is not the time to shrink your brand through cutting back on your advertising budget, but to take advantage of the fears in the market place and spread the news about your service or product. It’s natural for people to grab and hold in times when the market drops, but the adage that makes people wealthy is not the one that says “Hide”, but the one that says “Buy low sell high.”

Well it’s a low market out there right now and while everyone is hiding under the covers, shaking and holding on it’s the entrepreneurs who go out and work this marketplace.

If there is one marketing and branding company that I will endorse it is Artemis PR and Design here in good ol’ Victoria. Check ‘em out. You will never be disappointed in their work. They have heart, talent, insight and love what they do. They have produced TV, Radio, magazine, and Internet campaigns and work with large and small companies and non-profits. They do have discounts for non-profits as well. One recent campaign of note is helping the Mary Manning Centre. Artemis successfully helped Mary Manning increase their funding built them a beautiful web site and developed a series of social marketing materials.

The Maze

2009-02-27T07:59:00.000-08:00

If you've been using Facebook, Twitter and Flickr etc..then you've got some idea of the fun you can have social networking. And while those are pretty mainstream sites do you know about Newsvine, Twiki and Socializr? Or how about Yelp, magnify.net, or Swurl? And what do you do with all this possibilty?

There are so many Web 2.0 thingys coming on line these days that is can be overwhelming to see how they all fit together. A graphic view of the WEB 2.0 social network world might help and as with everything else on the web if you think of it -- it's probably out there somewhere. Posted below is a fantastic graphic from a fellow blogger named Brian Solis which shows you a fairly current matrix of cool web services. The graphic called The Conversation breaks the services into their categories and thereby gives you at least a feel for the larger context of what's happening out there. It's easy to Google social networking or look it up on Wikipedia, but you don't really appreciate the breadth of what's happening until you see The Conversation.

For the non-profit world, many of these technologies offer various ways to connect with your stakeholders and create new ones, but it helps to have a context to see them. So for today just click the graphic for a larger view and see the matrix. I'm also adding links from these categories in the link section of Intuitech.biz to make it usable. Have fun and be careful out there..don't get lost :).

The demise of non-profits

2009-02-03T17:48:00.000-08:00

I’ve just read an article by Joanne Laucius in the Ottawa Citizen that came out yesterday predicting the demise of 20% of Canada’s non-profit sector. This economic tsunami running rampant over the globe is hitting our shores according to the Wellesley Institute.

If you feel that the media tends to sensationalize and bring us mostly bad news to capture our attention then this article hits the mark. While it is obvious that we are in a downturn and most obvious to those who’ve lost jobs and investments, it’s not the end of the world. The non-profit sector will survive…we could thrive if we followed the article’s advice and cooperated with each other.
The non-profit sector has grown faster than any other sector over the last few decades as the money has been flowing into foundations and government coffers. One wonders a bit about the ratios between needs and funding, but that’s a different analysis.

If you read through some of this blog you can see that I’ve advocated for non-profits to work together for years with the idea that they could be a dominant force for positive social policy change in government. I’ve advocated that the solution lies with shared technology.

Maybe this downturn will force some efficiencies and more non-profit organizations will look at ways of joining together. If the non-profit sector took the initiative to work collaboratively and had a single voice or set of voices speaking the same tune and representing the whole sector, the political and moral power of the sector would be enormous.

Wired Hospitals Save More Lives

2009-01-28T23:38:00.001-08:00

The following article certainly demonstrates how a shared communication system regarding patients can improve outcomes in hospitals. It can also be done at the community level though integrated electronic case management systems like Sectorlynx. So maybe we have to get the hospitals on line first and then move out into community through the clinics and disease specific management organizations and then work our way into the other organizations working on the other social determinants of health.

Anyway, check out the article from Technology Review....

The more wired the hospital, the better off its patients: there are fewer deaths and complications, and lower bills. That's the conclusion of a large study of Texas hospitals released earlier this week. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of hospitals and doctors' offices in the United States are wired, and the country lags far behind other developed nations in implementing such systems. However, legislators and health-technology specialists hope to change that with a $20 billion cash influx, part of the U.S. government's proposed stimulus bill. ....more

C3 - A New Model

2009-01-23T13:26:00.001-08:00

President Obama started his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, where he saw firsthand what people can do when they come together for a common cause. Citizen participation will be a priority for the Administration, and the internet will play an important role in that – www.whitehouse.org

In order for government and for private foundations to make effective social policy reform decisions they need current real time information on the state of the social issue under consideration. Social policy planning is only as good as the information presented, i.e, garbage in, garbage out. Given the ad hoc and disjointed nature of the current social services map, the out of date information and the lack of coordination between organizations, municipalities, states and federal government, our collective response is inefficient at best and potentially damaging at worst. In order to effect positive change we must work together.
In order to work together we need a health framework for change and that framework I call the C3 model. Compassion, Community and Code.
C3 Model
The overriding composition of the C3 health model is one of:
1) Compassion for all people and the willingness to reach beyond simply providing symptomatic relief and to look for and deal effectively with the cause of illness through a diagnostic appreciation of the social determinants of health (SDOH) and how they effect this person.
2) Community and working collectively for the greater good and on behalf of each of our clients. Sharing our resources, collaborating to maximize our resources, communicating to sharing our knowledge and experience, working under a model that makes sense.
3) In order to do this effectively and efficiently and to maximize the outcomes we need Code which can integrate the data from all these social agencies into an integral model of health and be used for effective social policy development which respects the SDOH.
It is my view that with the proper use of information technology to share information between agencies involved in the provision of services related to the social determinants of health we can drastically improve healthcare services throughout the world, without massive reorganization or relocation of services. Through united communities working in a collaborative manner through data exchange standards and protocols, and collectively agreed upon data collection standards we can significantly assist disadvantaged people through more targeted and timely care. Through having access to critical information when it is needed, we can save lives, improve living conditions and help more people become integrated parts of a healthy community. In Canada, the Canada Health Infoway is attempting to bring this vision to fruition through the inter-provincial collaboration around a shared electronic health record. The C3 Model expands that concept to reach more broadly into our communities to enable a collective response to the debilitating dysfunctions in our social systems.
So what does this have to do with community? Community social services providers are primarily concerned with the provision of the social determinants. Housing, shelter, food, counselling, socialization, education, care for people with disabilities, child welfare, etc., all fall under the rubric of social services. After the physicians have stopped the bleeding and put on the band aid, it is community which takes up the care, or in many cases does not and leaves it up to the individual.
These determinants have a profound effect on a person’s health in that the more positive any of these determinants are for you, the more healthy you probably are. The two most powerful underlying meta-determinants of health are social status and income. These two factors alone outweigh the other determinants. A recent study by the Public Health Agency of Canada supports the growing international understanding of the importance of these determinants regarding a healthy population.
A wealth of evidence from Canada and other countries supports the notion that the socioeconomic circumstances of individuals and groups are equally or more important to health status than medical care and personal health behaviours, such as smoking and eating patterns (Evans et al., 1994; Frank, 1995; Federal/Provincial/Territorial Advisory Committee on Population Health, 1999). The weight of the evidence suggests that the SDOH have a direct impact on the health of individuals and populations, are the best predictors of individual and population health, structure lifestyle choices, and interact with each other to produce health (Raphael, 2003). In terms of the health of populations, it is well known that disparities-the size of the gap or inequality in social and economic status between groups within a given population-greatly affect the health status of the whole. The larger the gap, the lower the health status of the overall population (Wilkinson, 1996; Wilkinson and Marmot, 1998).
The C3 health model anticipates the evolution of healthcare to include a broader definition of health and a more integral approach to healthcare. It anticipates a time where traditional medical services, i.e, hospitals and physicians become a pillar in a healthcare structure that also directly involves a person’s social and economic context.
It defines a person’s health as a combination of biological health, social wellbeing and economic sufficiency. Being healthy is not just a matter of disease management, but is an outcome from a combination of factors labeled : The Social Determinants of Health (SDOH).
So what are the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH)? The following is a list from the Canadian Government’s Public Health Agency of Canada who are very active in promoting research into community healthcare.
1. Income and Social Status
2. Social Support Networks
3. Education and Literacy
4. Employment/Working Conditions
5. Social Environments
6. Physical Environments
7. Personal Health Practices and Coping Skills
8. Healthy Child Development
9. Biology and Genetic Endowment
10. Health Services
11. Gender
12. Culture

The C3 health model brings medicine, sociology and economics together under the rubric of healthcare. The model anticipates a need for information technology at the core of this process to manage the ever increasing complexity of issues that define a person’s health.
The social determinants of health are the underlying fabric of the holistic reality of personal healthcare and are fast becoming recognized as integral elements to personal health and the health of a community. The one stop concepts discussed above are a recognition of this more holistic approach to social services.
The following quote from “The Solid Facts” published by the World Health Organization sets the stage for the importance of the social determinants of health and underscore the need to move away from a purely biological model of healthcare.
Even in the most affluent countries, people who are less well off have substantially shorter life expectancies and more illnesses than the rich. Not only are these differences in health an important social injustice, they have also drawn scientific attention to some of the most powerful determinants of health standards in modern societies. They have led in particular to a growing understanding of the remarkable sensitivity of health to the social environment and to what have become known as the social determinants of health.
With Internet oriented technologies growing in sophistication and stability the prospect of new ways of using software are being developed all the time. One of the most significant is the concept of Cloud Computing. In general, Cloud Computing is online software delivery via ASPs (Application Service Providers). The breadth of software is amazing. The vast majority of successful ASPs provide very particular business to business software like inventory management or supply chain management software or social networking and gaming applications. ASPs for human services are still in their infancy however, but beginning to emerge in the same areas that the applications development process took, i.e, donor management, scheduling, volunteer management. Cloud technology on the other hand is really the forefront of technology development and the Internet is fast becoming the operating system of the world.
But these technologies are shells in that they don’t have content nor define content. Content is the king in an information age of course, so even with all these fantastic technologies hooked into a global infrastructure we still don’t have a unified human services infrastructure that we can use to gain a comprehensive picture of the social dynamics of our communities. Two things are needed:
1. Framework technologies that can adapt to many different kinds of social services agencies and enable each organization to function through the features the framework can be configured to handle;
2. a set of standards that are agreed for comparative analysis.
On point one, a number of companies have discovered this approach and are now beginning to make inroads into government and community and on point 2 little is being achieved yet and is where I propose the C3 Health Model.
Public health and security issues are beginning to attract significant attention both due to the enormous cost, but also as major political issues. Homelessness, disease surveillance, community justice, depression in the workplace, addictions management, child welfare, disabilities management and so on are now front page issues and billions of our tax dollars are supporting organizations trying to deal with these issues without a comprehensive record of outcomes. With the election of President Barack Obama, a former community organizer, government may be waking up and want to know where the money is going and the only way they will ever be able to make sense of this is through the right mix of technologies

Mocking Up with Balsamiq

2009-01-12T22:57:00.001-08:00

A couple of days ago I was surfing around and bumped into a site which promotes a simple tool for mocking up websites.

Now I’ve used Visio and Gliffy for making wire frames, but relied on ol’ pen and paper for the initial mock up. But being that pen and paper is so archaic now, I am more comfortable on screen, and generally end up working on the details of wire framing before it’s advantageous to do so. Wouldn’t it be great to have something that I could use on my laptop that would be like pen and paper and as much fun, but maybe faster and something I could email?

Wire framing is not so fun and the creativity can be lost because of the technical look of everything at the beginning of the creative enterprise, at least for me. So I was pleased to find Balsamiq and their fantastic website mock up tool.

This small, quick, cross platform gem makes mocking up a website a piece of cake and replaces that pen and paper component, but keeps you in the fun zone for longer.

I downloaded the app and within 15 minutes had designed a mock up for a simple equestrian site without once having to go and find a FAQ or help file…it was so obviously user friendly that I did not even think to look for one.

With a menu of the most used items across the top of the work space, it’s all drag and drop, a bit of double clicking to edit and some frame dragging and you’re good to go.

You can check out my very quick mock up here.

One of the most useful aspects of this non-intimidating tool is the ability to sit down with a client and work with them to mock up their vision and then email the design to them and get a SIGN OFF on this critical step. I have seen so many projects go sideways because of poor communication at this very early stage…visions not lining up… cost millions.

The same, of course, applies to teams who can collaborate on the initial design concepts without messing with complicated and cumbersome software programs…

Balsamiq is a piece of cake, not a bit of vinegar in it, in fact…it’s sweet!

Charities in hard times

2009-01-08T13:57:00.000-08:00

The economic collapse in 2008 will be remembered as the result of unregulated markets combined with human greed. I would love to write about the failure of the free market system and the Chicago School of Economics philosophy which lead us to this disaster (see Naomi Klein), but I will refrain from that tangent and instead comment on the non-profit sector. Charities are hurting in this economic climate. But they can adapt through a few strategies and help their many clients better than ever.

While charities can often benefit from economic declines because of a renewed enthusiasm for altruism in people stimulated by the collective experience of suffering, at this moment things may be more complex. There are more charities than ever, accounting for so many niche focuses that the average person is being asked to contribute to more and more causes. With more than 2 million non-profit organizations in North America, the vast majority asking for money...how can they survive?

The steps charities can take to strengthen their ability to provide for their clients include:

Feedback to granting agencies
o Charities of all stripes need to recognize the necessity of providing high quality, current and useful information to their funders. With money being tight these days, it's important to value the relationship with funders. This is more than just output reporting, but needs to be outcomes reporting that clearly demonstrates the value in the services provided. The more detailed this can be the better. Think how useful it would be from a fund raising perspective if a charity could report on how a $100 from a given donor was spent. I.e, $10 for office infrastructure and the rest provided 50 hot meals for homeless people, or provided a secure bed for the night and an hour of counselling for a runaway child. Charities need to have a method for collecting outcomes based information and being able to cross reference the success with the donations. This necessitates a need for appropriate case management technology.

Collaborate on shared services
o Why do small organization have their own payroll clerks or accountants. Why not outsource or collaborate on payroll and accounting? PayWorks is a simple and effective online payroll service that makes it a literal waste to have an in house payroll department.

Use the web and social media for promoting your brand/causes, awareness, lobbying, and fund raising
o Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Blogger.com, Orkut, WiserEarth, SecondLife...there's a new one every week....

Use technology for optimizing and collaboration amongst complimentary services
o Why not have a housing organization and an employment counselling service work together through sharing client information, sharing research and funding opportunities. Joint fund raising is also an approach that could be successful. Check out Civicrm, Kintera, Convio, SectorLynx
* Fee for service
o Social enterprise development is another avenue for charities to explore. Charities can earn a significant portion relative to their operational budgets before loosing their charitable status.

Partnerships and Associations
o No longer can NGOs work independently. Much like in the business world where collaboration is being aided by technology, the NGO world needs to work together as well. Band together for more political lobbying power and shared services. There is power and survival in numbers. Funders love partnerships and shared responsibility. There is more social return and less risk for their money. The biggest obstacle is control of projects but this can be dealt with through partnership contracts and clear communication. The focus in on client service after all.

In 2003 The Harvard Business Review printed an article by Bradley, Jansen and Silverman, called the Non Profit Sector's $100 Billion Opportunity. This article was the result of a survey of 200,000 non-profits in the US. The thesis of the article is that through five very straightforward measures the non-profit industry could free up $100 billion for more services. I have kept this article in my back pocket for years as it is a road map which the non-profit sector has yet to realize, but now is the time.

The main points relate directly to my ideas above and ultimately are all about collaboration. Given it is five years later, I think the authors would now be promoting the exploitation of technology to achieve many of these ends:

1. Reduce Funding Costs
Be more efficient in fund raising promotion
2. Distribute Holdings Faster
Foundations need to spend more faster
3. Reduce Program Services Costs
Use performance measurement approachs to become more efficient in service delivery. i.e, more bang for the buck
4. Trim Administrative Costs
Use outsource services for as much admin as possible and smaller organizations should share in outsourced services
5. Improve Sector Effectiveness
This is where partnerships and collaboration play a significant role. Avoid unnecessary duplication in services.

We need a revolution in thinking in the non-profit sector to have these millions of organizations see their collective value. Right now the sector is characterized by chaos and division due to the consistent struggle for funding. Think of the power of a united Third Sector sharing information and working collaboratively to solve the social challenges we face. That would be a revolution which could change the world. Look at the "Yes We Can" movement of Barack Obama and now enhance that with a united sector.

In a recent speech Google Enterprise product manager Rishi Chandra said said it plain and simple: "Today the world is not about individual productivity. It is about team or group productivity."

Michael Moore's SLACKER UPRISING

2008-09-22T23:05:00.001-07:00

Michael Moore's SLACKER UPRISING
check it out...you can watch it for free.

The Presidential Debates to be twitter'd

2008-09-16T14:28:00.000-07:00

Current TV to broadcast 'tweets' during debates

From Idealist.org.....Campaigning for Service: Service Nation Summit Hosts Obama, McCain Today

2008-09-15T16:17:00.000-07:00

Today and tomorrow, 500 leaders from public, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors will come together in New York City to call on the next President of the United States to "enact a new era of voluntary service and civic engagement in America, an era in which all Americans will work together to solve our greatest and most persistent societal challenges" at the Service Nation Summit.

Senators Barack Obama and John McCain (presidential nominees of the two major parties) will speak back-to-back Thursday night at Columbia University, moderated by PBS Newshour Senior Correspondent and Political Editor Judy Woodruff and TIME Managing Editor Rick Stengel (here's an article on the campaign by Stengel). The forum will be broadcast live on CNN at 8 pm EDT and will take place live before an audience of September 11th family members, military veterans, Columbia University students, and other key stake holders. Submit your own questions to ask Senators McCain or Obama about national service on the Service Nation web site.

The aim of the summit will be to lay out a policy blue print for solving tough social problems through expanding national and community service. Among the hundred or so speakers on Friday will be Senator Hillary Clinton, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Just in time for the summit, thought leaders from NYU Wagner, National Peace Corps Association, and the Brookings Institution have been voicing their ideas on how to make national and international service stronger in the next administration. To read more about the presidential candidates's support of national service go here.

The Service Nation campaign is a coalition of 110 organizations (including Idealist.org) that has been organized by Be the Change Inc. and founded by City Year's founder Alan Khazei. The initiative will come to a service project near you on September 27 with over 1000 events in communities across the country on the Service Nation Day of Action. Check out the Service Nation web site for a project to participate in, or to register your project!

Also, check out the Service Nation page on Facebook and follow Service Nation news through BetheChangeInc on Twitter.

Power To The Bottom | Newsweek International Edition | Newsweek.com

2008-09-12T13:44:00.001-07:00

THE TECHNOLOGIST

Power To The Bottom

Social enterprise has a soulmate in Web 2.0, a powerful new tool for bottom-up, collaborative innovation.

By Lily Huang | NEWSWEEK

Published Sep 6, 2008

From the magazine issue dated Sep 15, 2008

In Tajikistan, Georgetown graduate student Dan Zuckerman is the face of Kiva, a San Francisco-based microlending organization operating in a region that currently hums with nearly 3,000 Kiva-sponsored entrepreneurs. Zuckerman has to get to know them and act as their bridge to their remote lenders by sharing their stories, both with the people providing loans and with the local microcredit institution, MLF MicroInvest, which is Kiva's partner. In all of Tajikistan, he works alone. How does Zuckerman, 25, manage to cover all this ground without support staff and with a supervisor 11,000 kilometers away? Between field visits, he logs on to the Kiva Fellows wiki page, which allows him to tap into ideas about best practices from the experiences of Jara Small in Tanzania, Javed Rezayee in Afghanistan, Cynthia McMurry in Bolivia and the rest of the 100 Kiva Fellows dispersed among 45 countries. The wiki not only makes Zuckerman and his colleagues more effective, it also, as Kiva president Premal Shah puts it, gives them the ability to "co-create Kiva."

The rapidly expanding field of social enterprise has found a soulmate in Web 2.0. The Kiva Fellows' online workbook is an ongoing, communal work-in-progress, which is exactly what Kiva itself is. Running on a platform like Pbwiki, an online wiki-provider who offered Kiva its services for free, it demonstrates the new nature of social enterprise, in which change and growth start from the ground—a level heretofore known as "the bottom." A wiki is not a message board: content isn't simply added, it is edited, so only the most updated information remains on the page. The edit trail is still accessible but separate—no need for scrolling through lengthy back-and-forths before finding what you need.

Wiki technology is one part of the Web 2.0 boon to social enterprise, which, after two decades of importing ideas and practices from business, is now forging on across new terrain. The goal of business is "to capture a market," says Bill Drayton, founder and chairman of Ashoka, the oldest funding and support organization for social enterpreneurs. "A social entrepreneur's goal is to change the world. So it's inherently an open architecture." Now into that openness walks—a wiki. A platform for collaborative content, negotiable by everyone involved, gives rise to a community that largely regulates itself. Kiva grew so quickly, Shah says, "we couldn't scale fast enough until we created the Fellows program. The next question became, how do you keep these people in sync?" A single staff member manages the entire Fellows program, but once in the field, the Fellows learn by and large from one another, not headquarters. "The quality of what's on the wiki is much higher," adds Shah, "because it's coming from people in the field."

As social entrepreneurship expands to new sectors, so does bottom-up innovation; as the 2.0 model proliferates, it inspires new social enterprises. "Just ask yourself," says Pbwiki vice president Ramit Sethi, " 'What happens when information-sharing and collaboration becomes really easy?' " You get communities like PatientsLikeMe.com, made up of people who suffer from life-altering diseases—Lou Gehrig's disease, Parkinson's, HIV/AIDS and others—and who share the progress they're making with particular treatments. The idea is to "see everything everyone is trying," says cofounder and CEO Ben Heywood. Physicians and researchers log on to the site as well, quickly seeing results from treatments on a large, diverse group of patients. On the research end, too, the 2.0 model has invigorated collaboration: the Myelin Repair Foundation is a collective investigation of multiple sclerosis which relies on the open-source model, not only to spark ideas from all corners of the research community but to rally disparate resources to quickly turn good ideas into effective practice, on a substantial scale.

Four years ago, following a conversation with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Drayton hit upon a new philosophy: that of making "everyone a change-maker." But only in the age of online social networking, open platforms and Wikipedia did Ashoka and the rest of the growing movement begin to realize just what that philosophy could mean. (Empowering individuals has since become the cornerstone philosophy of the Omidyar Network, Omidyar's philanthropic firm that supports social enterprises, including PatientsLikeMe.com.)

Ashoka's newest Web initiative, change makers.net, is a marketplace of ideas to address social problems. Anyone can enter the "collaborative competitions," and others can critique the ideas. The author of a proposed initiative then modifies his strategy accordingly before a final vote. Winners get $5,000 in start-up funds and even greater exposure in the network and beyond. Greg Dees, professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke and a pioneering teacher of social enterprise, calls the site "a powerful innovation." It is, like many other 2.0 applications, an innovation for innovations.

Nearly 30 years since he began Ashoka, Bill Drayton is witnessing a transformation in the field he helped modernize. "This is the big change," he says, as he looks to a world of change-makers ready both to create and to collaborate—"a world where problems cannot possibly outrun the solutions." Even in the farthest reaches of Tajikistan.

An open letter from Leonard Peltier to Obama

2008-09-12T09:53:00.001-07:00

An Open Letter to Barack Obama

Symbolism Alone Will Not Bring Change

By LEONARD PELTIER

I have watched with keen interest and renewed hope as your campaign has mobilized millions of Americans behind your message of changing a political system that serves a small economic elite at the expense of the peoples of the United States and the world. Your election as president of the United States, where slaves and Indians were long considered less than human under the law, will undoubtedly constitute a historic moment in race relations in the United States.

Yet symbolism alone will not bring about change. Our young people, black and Native alike, suffer from police brutality and racial profiling, underfunded schools, and discrimination in employment and housing. I sincerely hope your campaign will inspire some hope among our youth to struggle for a better future. I am, however, concerned that your recent statement on the Sean Bell verdict, in which the New York police officers who fired 50 shots at a young man on the eve of his wedding were acquitted of criminal charges, displays a rather myopic view of the law. Until the law is harnessed to protect the victims of state violence and racism, it will serve as an instrument of repression, just as the slave codes functioned to sustain and legitimize an inhuman institution.

As I can testify from experience, the legal institutions of this nation are far from racial and political neutrality. When judges align with the repressive actions and policies of the executive branch, injustice is rationalized and cloaked in judicial platitudes. As you may know, I have now served more than three decades of my life as a political prisoner of the federal government for a crime I did not commit. I have served more time than the maximum sentence under the guidelines under which I was sentenced, yet my parole is continually denied (on the rare occasions when I am afforded a hearing) because I refuse to falsely confess. Amnesty International, South African Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, my Guatemalan sister Rigoberta Menchu, and many of your friends and supporters have recognized me as a political prisoner and called for my immediate release. Millions of people around the world view me as a symbol of injustice against the indigenous peoples of this land, and I have no doubt that I will go down in history as one of a long line of victims of U.S. government repression, along with Sacco and Vanzetti, the Haymarket Square martyrs, Eugene Debs, Bill Haywood, and others targeted by for their political beliefs. But neither I nor my people can afford to wait for history to rectify the crimes of the past.

As a member of the American Indian Movement, I came to the Pine Ridge Oglala reservation to defend the traditional people there from human rights violations carried out by tribal police and goon squads backed by the FBI and the highest offices of the federal government. Our symbolic occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 inspired Indians across the Americas to struggle for their freedom and treaty rights, but it was also met by a fierce federal siege and a wave of violent repression on Pine Ridge. In 1974, AIM leader Russell Means campaigned for tribal chairman while being tried by the federal government for his role at Wounded Knee. Although Means was barred from the reservation by decree of the U.S.-client regime of Richard Wilson, he won the popular vote, only to be denied office by extensive vote fraud and control of the electoral mechanisms. Wilson's goons proceeded to shoot up pro-Means villages such as Wanblee and terrorize traditional supporters throughout the reservation, killing at least 60 people between 1973 and 1975.

It is long past time for a congressional investigation to examine the degree of federal complicity in the violent counterinsurgency that followed the occupation of Wounded Knee. The tragic shootout that led to the deaths of two FBI agents and one Native man also led not only to my false conviction, but also the termination of the Church Committee, which was investigating abuses by federal intelligence and law enforcement agents, before it could hold hearings on FBI infiltration of AIM. Despite decades of attempts by my attorneys to obtain government documents related to my case, the FBI continues to withhold thousands of documents that might tend to exonerate me or reveal compromising evidence of judicial collusion with the prosecution.

I truly believe the truth will set me free, but it will also signify a symbolic break from America's undeclared war on indigenous peoples. I hope and pray that you possess the courage and integrity to seek out the truth and the wisdom to recognize the inherent right of all peoples to self-determination, as acknowledged by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. While your statements on federal Indian policy sound promising, your vision of "one America" has an ominous ring for Native peoples struggling to define their own national visions. If freed from colonial constraints and external intervention, indigenous nations might well serve as functioning models of the freedom and democracy to which the United States aspires.

Yours in the struggle.

Until freedom is won,

Leonard Peltier
# 89637-132
U.S.P. Lewisburg,
P.O. Box 1000,
Lewisburg, PA USA 17837

Job Training: Taxpayers Taken for $24 Bus Ride more news from the Privatization Front

2008-09-06T15:45:00.001-07:00

Job Training: Taxpayers Taken for $24 Bus Ride

FOIs reveal billing for services not provided.

How private contracts inflated cost of welfare-to-work programs.

By Andrew MacLeod
Published: September 4, 2008

TheTyee.ca

At least one company that helps people on welfare find jobs was billing the government for services it never provided, billed more than once when it did provide services and charged an administration fee of as much as $18 to distribute a $6.40 bus ticket.

The details are included in audits of the contractors providing the B.C. Employment Program and were obtained by The Tyee through a freedom of information request. In most cases, the names of the companies and identifying information were removed from the audits prior to their release.

The companies delivering the program are WCG International Consultants Ltd., GT Hiring Solutions (2005) Inc. and the B.C. Society of Training for Health and Employment Opportunities. In August the provincial government cancelled an $8 million contract with WCG to provide services in the Interior, and awarded it to GT Hiring.

The government began auditing the employment programs after they were revamped in 2005. Previously, the government would pay the contractor as long as the client was no longer on welfare, leading critics to suggest the companies may have been paid for some people who left the province, disqualified for welfare or died.

As it was put in an October 2007 information note for Deputy Minister Cairine MacDonald, "The new programming has an increased emphasis on a post-review and audit function to maintain service quality and ensure financial accountability."

The government inspectors visited various offices throughout the province, starting in 2006. At each office they would review several files. In many cases they found the contractors or subcontractors were doing a good job and made only minor suggestions for improvement. At others they had more wide-ranging concerns.

Government billed, no service provided

A Dec 20, 2007 report, which was released without the contractors name being removed, found a JobWave office was billing for services it didn't provide. On the day a participant started, it said, JobWave billed the government for 18.5 hours of service. "These services were billed by the Service Provider but were never provided to the participant," it said.

The report also found JobWave was using identification codes that did not match the ministry's system, "making comparisons impossible."

JobWave was also having clients sign their "confirmation of employment," a form that would allow the company to collect from the government, even though the forms were blank. At one office, all five of the forms the inspectors looked at had been signed even though they were blank.

"The Confirmation of Employment is signed up front as it is sometimes impossible to have participants come back to sign the form once they become employed," the report explained. "I suggested form could be mailed out or [redacted] after hours service could contact participant during non working hours to confirm employment, however, no resolution was achieved."

Same service, several charges

A summary of monitoring made between October and December 2007, which does not name the contractors, said that when some contractors helped clients by providing things to aid their job search, they "charged for every individual support issued, even if multiple supports are being issued at same time." The fee was between $17.50 and $18, the summary said, often on top of a $40 base fee for the visit.

In some cases, the summary said, the administration fees were "near equal to or greater than [the] value of supports issued." For example, it said, the contractor was regularly billing the government $18 just to hand out a $6.40 bus ticket.

In other cases, it said, clients in remote locations had no access to the contractor's resource room with fax machines, phones and computers, but the contractor still billed the government as if the client had used the resources.

A November 2007 update for the ministry said that in some cases participants were using fax machines, phones and computers that belonged to the provincial government, in government offices, and yet the contractor "billed [the] ministry for such service."

There are also examples of contractors spending government money to send people to training that may not have been appropriate for them. In one case a contractor billed $11,000 for services to a single client, including $3,800 for a "workshop that appears unrelated to identified strengths and barriers." The client was later referred to another program where "persistent multiple barriers to employment" were identified.

High price, little help

In other cases, clients got little help. "BCEP Clients are left on there [sic] own to accomplish tasks without any assistance," said a Dec. 14, 2007 report. "One client was using the computer and phone on the second floor, there didn't appear to be any... staff around to provide assistance to the client who appeared to be struggling with his tasks."

For out-of-town clients, getting help via computer, there was even less assistance. "It really isn't clear what and how the service provider delivers service to virtual clients," the report said. "What is described in their service delivery model and what is documented on the client records doesn't match."

In at least some cases, the government employs a prime contractor, such as WCG International Consultants Ltd., which in turn hires subcontractors to provide services in smaller centres throughout the province. A January 2008 review said that in some cases the government was paying the prime contractors for as much as 5.7 per cent more services than what the subcontractors had invoiced.

A plan for future monitoring said there will be more inspections in the fall of 2008, and in the spring the government was going to begin more work verifying the accuracy of invoices from its contractors.

The documents obtained by The Tyee also included several records related to the Employment Program for Persons with Disabilities. Notes from a March 20, 2008 meeting said that WCG, which also holds contracts in that program, was over budget because the company had "misunderstood the budget year."

When WCG's chief operating officer, Darlene Bailey, said the company could stop serving clients to make up for the short fall, a government representative objected. Bailey, the minutes said, assured the official that "first and foremost concern for the client but when the bottom line comes the bottom line comes and we need to work within our means."

There was one item on the agenda they didn't get to: "WCG would like to work with ministry on positive press issues."

A government representative assured them, "We also like to get good news stories."

In August, the government took the $8-million contract to provide BCEP services in the Interior of the province away from WCG and awarded it to a competitor, GT Hiring Solutions (2005) Inc., which runs Destinations.

WCG disputing termination, says ministry

Housing and Social Development Ministry spokesperson Seumas Gordon said the government started doing compliance checks on contractors in the program in July 2006.

"WCG's performance did not meet our expectations in the Interior region and we have provided termination notice in accordance with the contract."

WCG is disputing the termination, he said, and the company and the government are following a dispute resolution process set out in the contract. The government is seeking legal advice, he added.

WCG remains a "valued partner," he said, and still holds eight contracts with the ministry. The company will stop delivering the BCEP in the Interior on Oct. 31, and will be replaced by another contractor November 1.

The Tyee previously reported that GT Hiring, which runs Destinations, is expected to take over the contract.

The ministry is working with WCG to ensure a smooth transition, Gordon said.

Related Tyee stories:

Liberals to JobWave: You're Fired
$8 million job training contract cancelled; work goes to B.C. competitor.
Brar Targets Job Program Sale
NDP critic raises concerns about timing, client privacy.
'Welfare to Work' Didn't Work
BC Libs sat on own report showing no real gains.

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Job Training: Taxpayers Taken for $24 Bus Ride more news from the Privatization Front

Job Training: Taxpayers Taken for $24 Bus Ride

How private contracts inflated cost of welfare-to-work programs.

By Andrew MacLeod Published: September 4, 2008

TheTyee.ca

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By Andrew MacLeod
Published: September 4, 2008