B.C. Environmental iconoclast Tzeporah Berman. Photo by Dina Goldstein

Canadians who care about climate change have good reason to be depressed about our history of climate change politics, which goes something like this: Jean Chrétien promises a lot, does little; Paul Martin promises more, does a bit, but not much; Stephen Harper promises nothing, and delivers.

What explains this pattern? The answer has a lot to do with a woman from Vancouver named Tzeporah Berman, and her spectacular failure to make a good idea succeed.

Tzeporah Berman is probably Canada’s third most famous environmentalist, trailing only grandfatherly CBC host David Suzuki and Green Party leader Elizabeth May. She made her name in the early 1990s during the Clayoquot Sound anti-logging protests in British Columbia. She was such an effective organizer and gadfly that the then Premier branded her “an enemy of the state.” She was instrumental in convincing 86 per cent of Canadians that logging in Clayoquot should be stopped. An irritated Crown prosecutor charged her with 857 counts of criminal aiding and abetting (all dismissed by a judge shortly thereafter). After a few years working for Greenpeace in Europe, Berman returned to B.C. to found ForestEthics, a group committed to pressuring businesses to reduce their impact on forests by alerting consumers to dubious corporate supply chains. For example, in 2005, she became appalled by the environmental impact of millions of Victoria’s Secret catalogues made from rare boreal forests—tiny pieces of lacy underwear printed on huge numbers of dead trees. Berman launched a campaign called Victoria’s Dirty Secret with a full page ad in the New York Times featuring a scantily clad blonde bombshell toting a chainsaw. Berman emerged, as usual, with concessions from a contrite corporate giant.

An epiphany in late 2007 convinced Berman to switch her focus from forestry to climate change. “I realized fighting for forests without taking on climate change was like repainting the Titanic after hitting the iceberg,” she said. Loggers were less of a threat to Canadian trees than rising temperatures and a resultant onslaught of ravenous pine beetles.

Berman watched Canada’s 2008 federal election in horror. Liberal leader Stéphane Dion proposed a carbon tax, the most fervent wish of climate change activists. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives savaged the “Green Shift” plan, and Dion’s salesmanship flopped. When Dion talked policy, Harper talked price. Dion reassured voters the plan was “revenue neutral,” discouraged pollution, gave tax breaks to low-income families, and so on, in an incomprehensible wonkish muddle. Harper said: Liberals want to tax everything, “screw everybody,” and raise gas prices. Harper won the debate.

While Dion flailed, the champions of environmentalism stood on the sidelines. Some of the larger non-governmental organizations issued press releases to tepidly commend the Green Shift platform, but nothing more. Said a former senior advisor to Dion: “We certainly expected more from environmentalists.”

Berman imagined an alternate future. Her diagnosis was simple: environmentalists were failing to organize themselves in a politically effective way. “We have never had a politically relevant infrastructure,” she says. “We need people who are trained as organizers, with coordinators in critical ridings. We need money for polling and focus groups. And we need volunteers trained to do electoral gruntwork.”

Canadians consistently prioritize climate change in poll after poll, but this concern has not been harvested and channeled in the right way and in the right electoral ridings to impact elections. Environmentalists have succeeded in raising awareness, but failed at changing votes. The best-resourced organizations spend much of their time and resources researching and writing policy reports, advising conscientious citizens on how to green their lifestyles, and jockeying for visibility in major news outlets. They are non-partisan, and don’t address Canadians as voters—which is why they are ineffective at affecting elections, and therefore politicians. So Berman decided to create a climate lobby with enough electoral muscle to force politicians to listen.

Her plan was simple but ambitious: pick 40 swing ridings with small margins of victory in the most recent federal election, and doggedly target them with polling, volunteers and advertising. Berman wanted a whole new political infrastructure to mobilize Canadians around climate change, built to reward green politicians and punish dirty ones. Organizers would be trained to make calls, knock on doors, produce intelligible materials and learn to talk to such constituencies as the God-fearing Tim Hortons-drinking suburban soccer moms.

In the United States, this kind of on-the-ground in-your face organizing is a proven model, for good (the League of Conservation Voters) and ill (the National Rifle Association).

Berman also drew lessons from Australia’s 2007 election, in which an environmental group called the Climate Institute raised gobs of money to help defeat the incumbent, carbon-loving John Howard. To do this, they sponsored the political campaign of a grade 4 student, Jack Simmons, who took some time off school to run for Prime Minister. He coiffed his hair just so, donned his first suit, filmed some advertisements, and hit the road to meet voters. His novelty—and the free ice cream he gave out everywhere he went—attracted voters and media alike. Of course, he couldn’t get his name on the official ballot, or even vote himself. But it didn’t matter much, because he was the perfect spokesman for climate change politics, a vehicle for present concern for future consequences. “I can’t vote, but you can. Vote climate,” he squeaked. His ice cream truck carried a sign rating the party platforms, signaling clearly to voters that the ruling Liberal Party had an abysmal climate change record. All told, picking a cute kid to talk about environmental apocalypse was a slick move. It also helped that the cherubic set piece was backed by a savvy media campaign sitting on a war chest of a few hundred thousand dollars.

It was the kind of campaign Berman thought Canada desperately needed. In 2008, the Conservatives won 143 seats, the Liberals 77, the NDP 37. Even as a minority government, it looked like a solid Conservative victory.

Or was it? Guess how many votes separated the Conservatives from a Liberal-NDP coalition? 7,189. Yes, if a mere 7,189 Conservative voters had changed their minds in fifteen key ridings, a Liberal-NDP caucus would have had 129 seats, and the Conservatives 128. This calculation is part hocus-pocus—it assumes a coalition and 29 ridings with one-vote victories. The point is that winning margins in certain ridings are consistently small, and political organizers could target a relatively small number of voters to have a large electoral impact.

Berman vowed next time would be different. She founded a new advocacy group, PowerUp Canada, and set out looking for funding to enact her vision. She projected it would take $3.7 million across 40 ridings to prepare the ground for the next federal election. It was a big idea, big enough to transform Canadian environmental politics.

Perhaps at this point you are wondering why you have never heard of PowerUp Canada. That is, quite simply, because it was a dismal failure. Over time, as it failed to attract donors and support, its ambitions receded. Berman stopped talking about 40 ridings. They would target just 10. Later, they abandoned the federal scene altogether, and focused on promoting the carbon tax and renewable energy policy in the 2009 B.C. provincial election. After that, they settled for a blog, ZeroCarbonCanada.ca. Some high profile endorsers signed a pledge. A handful of people wrote policy-focused blog posts, but the grassroots never showed up. PowerUp Canada became exactly the kind of toothless think-tank it had criticized, and then it folded altogether shortly thereafter. What went wrong?

For starters, Berman’s timing was impeccably bad. She launched her fundraising drive as the markets crashed in 2008. But more than that, and more frustratingly, PowerUp received lukewarm support from Canada’s other established environmental groups. There was little willingness to pool resources around a new political campaign. As Berman says, “the sad fact of the matter is that we couldn’t get environmental groups to invest in it and set aside their own brands.” This is a troubling explanation, though unsurprising. Canada’s environmental NGOs compete for limited resources, defend issue turf and hoard donors. Most were cautious when faced with Berman’s ambition. They adopted a wait-and-see attitude, and as they watched PowerUp shriveled up and died.

Chris Hatch, PowerUp’s onetime organizational mastermind (and Berman’s husband—they met in 1993, protesting in the woods of B.C.), gives a more expansive diagnosis of the failure, and a damning one: “Environmental groups are staffed by do-gooders, and political operatives are a different breed of people. This means there are very few people in the environmental movement who have experience in politics, and those that do get a hard time from the rest.”  Asking environmentalists to electioneer is like asking stones to swim. The notable and major exception is the Green Party, though what Hatch and Berman have in mind is creating a political force with the flexibility to support any party at a given time.

Hatch observed that the environmental movement exists largely as a subset of the political left. “If becoming politically relevant means becoming relevant to parties across the spectrum, there is almost no interest,” Hatch says. “Every group says they want to be politically relevant, but they don’t take the necessary steps to achieve this.”

Pragmatism is a defining feature of Berman’s career—much to the chagrin of some of her purist colleagues. During her time at Forest Ethics, she engaged with major corporations and earned a reputation as a realist negotiator who helped businesses choose lesser evils. On the eve of the 2009 B.C. provincial election, Berman publicly criticized the NDP, and praised Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell for his carbon tax and renewable energy policies. Later, at the 2009 UN climate talks in Copenhagen, Berman presented Campbell with an award.

The response from within the environmental movement was swift and vitriolic. After all, B.C.’s carbon emissions had risen in 2009, carbon tax or not. Campbell was building more highways for carbon-spewing cars for the 2010 Olympics, investing in more oil and gas extraction, and, expanding hydropower development. Campbell was no ecological saint, and didn’t his plan for more river hydropower disrupt the wildlife and forests Berman supposedly cared so much about? Berman was called a co-opted naïf, a shameless sellout, and worse.

“I am not saying that I agree with everything that the Liberal government is doing,” she said in an interview at the time. “I’m saying that we need to prioritize leadership on climate change, because we’re racing against the clock…the greatest threat to British Columbia’s biodiversity and wilderness today and our kids is climate change. I think that the time for purely oppositional politics is over. We need to look for climate leadership and support it when we see it…And there is no perfect party.”

She concluded with an uppercut to her critics: “I thought I was part of a movement, not a cult.”

Lacking the resources—and, increasingly, the goodwill of her former comrades-in-arms—to continue operating PowerUp Canada, Berman shuttered the group in summer 2010 and left for Amsterdam to work for Greenpeace International as their chief climate change campaigner. When she left, Canada arguably lost its most promising visionary for a new approach to climate change advocacy. It seems Canadian environmentalists weren’t ready to embrace Berman’s style of environmentalism, or her embrace of politics.

“Tzeporah raised a lot questions that haven’t been answered,” says a senior environmentalist from a respected climate think tank, who requested anonymity because she was not authorized to comment. “When we talk about what’s the problem with climate change, why our government is so timid on this issue, fundamentally it is a lack of political will. We all know that what motivates politicians is votes. If you have the ability to move votes in ridings, if political candidates hear about the environment on people’s doorsteps, then you can be influential.” Some environmental problems do not require broad-based popular support, and savvy lobbying and media work can suffice to make a minor regulatory change. Climate change is not one of those problems.

Graham Saul, the Ottawa-based head of the Climate Action Network, a sprawling coalition of environmental NGOs, notes the same basic problem that Berman built PowerUp to address: “Canadian environmentalism has developed a base in places that are not political battlegrounds. These people are mostly urban, wealthy, and white—most of the voters in Canada’s swing ridings are not.”

Karel Mayrand, the Quebec director of the David Suzuki Foundation, echoes Saul’s observation. “Basically, we recruit at university campuses and at Starbucks.” He adds that the basic challenge with climate change politics is that its primary political constituency is the unborn, the people who will suffer the future (and worse) consequences of climate change. In the meantime, environmentalists struggle to figure out a way to build political clout.

The failure to do so is producing mounting disappointments and embarrassments. In December 2009, the David Suzuki Foundation persuaded 10,000 Canadians to contact the Prime Minister urging action on climate change, but to little effect: this convinced Harper to “take three days out of a busy schedule to go to Copenhagen to appear to do something,” says Mayrand, “though he did nothing.” Copenhagen was widely regarded as a failure; the following year’s summit in Cancun barely drew notice. In December 2011, Canada announced it would become the first country to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol. That decision took a lot of the shine off an admittedly timid global climate plan, agreed just days earlier at another UN summit in Durban, South Africa.

How do Canadian environmentalists plan to turn the tide? “We have no real game plan,” says Mayrand. “It really bothers me. We are weak.” He adds, “When environmentalists win a battle in Quebec, it’s because the artists or the unions join us.” If it were up to him, “my goal would be to reach out to the people in the suburbs, where elections are won and lost. We need to go to work on the ground to reach the people who don’t follow us yet. In the medium term, in a couple years, like bodybuilders, we will build our muscles.”

Desiree McGraw, co-founder of Climate Reality Canada, a group that trains speakers to deliver Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth talk, shares the feeling that something is amiss with the Canadian environmental movement. “We have failed to translate enormous concern for the environment into action,” she says. “We, as environmentalists, have to assume some responsibility for the fact that our climate change policy and our emissions are a mess. We have failed to hold our governments to account in a way that translates into Canadians making this vote-worthy.”

Last spring and summer I spoke to a number of other senior Canadian environmentalists, and all agreed that building some political infrastructure like what Berman had envisioned would be helpful. And yet none had any plans to do much about it. The lone exception was a commendable campaign during the fall 2011 provincial election in Ontario, which featured a young girl named Penelope campaigning in the mould of the young Jack Simmons in Australia.

What explains the seemingly gaping hole in environmental strategy Berman failed to correct? A want of imagination and ambition is certainly part of the problem, but there are significant financial, legal and regulatory hurdles as well.

Professional political organizing is expensive. As one veteran political organizer from Ontario estimated, a local campaign intending to “move a few hundred votes” in a relatively compact urban riding can cost upwards of $25,000 over the course of a few months. Leaflets, staffing, databasing and, yes, robocalling (at 2 cents per call) cost money. And that doesn’t include the capacity to “buy eyeballs,” through television or newspaper advertising.

Even with a treasure chest on hand, there are limits on how to spend money in politics. Most Canadian environmental organizations are charities, and charities must abide by rules: they are legally bound to restrict “advocacy” to 10 percent of their spending, and strictly barred from any partisan activities. This is why the Pembina Institute, though it craves a national carbon tax, could offer only vague support for the ideas in the 2008 Liberal “Green Shift” platform, and certainly couldn’t instruct voters to support the Liberals. It’s also why the David Suzuki Foundation can ask people to call the Prime Minister demanding leadership in UN talks at Copenhagen, but falls silent during elections. A group like Greenpeace does not register as a charity precisely for the political latitude this affords.

There are further legal limits to what “third parties” (that is, groups not registered as official political parties) can do during elections. During a federal election, a third party is not allowed to spend more than $150,000 nationally and no more than $3,000 per riding on “election advertising”—a loosely defined term. There are also restrictions on spending during provincial elections, though these tend to be far less strict.  Of course, organizing, advertising, and door-to-door campaigning can happen outside of the election cycle (and they do), but the bottom line is that Tzeporah Berman could not buy an election, even if she wanted to.

The regulations exist for good reason: they are intended to stop deep-pocketed groups and individuals from exercising undue influence. In theory, this is a good thing. In practice, it means burnt-out activist volunteers lurch from one campaign to the next, while corporate giants smoothly and continuously leverage political power in less overt ways.

Perhaps the greatest barrier of all lies in the nature of the Canadian political system, which, by design, is insulated from grassroots lobbying. Even if a determined environmental group could muster the clout to swing a few dozen ridings and elect suitably carbon unfriendly Parliamentarians—itself a herculean task—ultimately most political power would remain with the Prime Minister. Leverage over local candidates translates into remarkably little influence over the all-important Prime Minister’s Office. This equation changes somewhat in minority Parliaments, but only to a degree. In this respect Canada differs markedly from our Southern neighbour, where grassroots organizing proliferates precisely because individual members of Congress wield far more power and independence than Canadian MPs.

Finally, Canadian environmentalists simply don’t agree that climate change should be their top priority, and different environmental priorities conflict. To take the most obvious example: nuclear power is carbon free, but nuclear waste is toxic. What’s the virtuous environmentalist to think? People like Tzeporah Berman argue that climate change is the mother of all environmental problems, worthy of prioritization, focus, and pragmatic sacrifice. Some of them, notably British firebrand George Monbiot, are willing to hold their noses and accept nuclear as a necessary evil. But far more disagree. What is the way forward? An expansive environmental agenda remains contradictory. Rallying environmentalists around climate change is like rallying the righteous with realpolitik.

Of course, even if Berman created her green political machine, it may still fail spectacularly. It would still face the entrenched political and economic interests of Canada’s growing fossil fuel juggernaut.  Perhaps Canadians cannot be persuaded to care enough about climate change to put their votes where polls say their hearts are. The consequences may still seem too remote, the sacrifices too large. Perhaps we need an environmental catastrophe of sufficient calamity at home to capture our attention—the rampaging pine beetle and the melting of the far North being inadequate, obviously—like a ragtag flotillas carrying climate refugees reaching our shores.

Then again, according to the most recent serious poll on Canadians and climate change by Sustainable Prosperity, 80 percent of Canadians believe climate change is real, 73 percent think it is a “serious” problem, 65 percent think the federal government has “a great deal of responsibility” addressing it, and 55 percent support a carbon tax, and the majority are willing to pay $50 each month in increased energy expenses. This should not be a lost cause. But without political influence—at the ballot box, in the House of Commons, and at the climate negotiation table—failure is likely.

Rick Smith, head of Environmental Defense Canada and one of Berman’s former co-conspirators, acknowledged the many explanations that might explain the failure of PowerUp, but added: “Those are all excuses. We desperately need more organizations working in a politically relevant way, period. We’re activists. If something doesn’t work, we have to try to find another way around. It couldn’t be clearer that climate change is the challenge of our generation. We need to find another way to win.”

James Cagney, Greenpeace, Syncrude, and other menaces to society.

Conservative provocateur Ezra Levant suggested in a Calgary Sun column last week that, according to Section 467.1 of the Criminal Code, Greenpeace should be prosecuted as a criminal organization.

That section of the Code defines a “criminal organization” as a group numbering more than three people in or outside Canada that “has as one of its main purposes or main activities the facilitation or commission of one or more serious offences that, if committed, would likely result in the direct or indirect receipt of a material benefit, including a financial benefit, by the group or by any of the persons who constitute the group.”

For the record, a serious offence is defined as that which carries a maximum punishment of imprisonment for five years or more.

Levant argues that Greenpeace, which is clearly composed of more than three people both in and outside Canada, financially benefits from repeated illegal activity—Greenpeace’s protests sometimes employ direct action and civil disobedience—through donations after the fact. And because break and enter—a common charge for protesters—is considered a “serious offence,” Greenpeace ought to be categorized as a criminal organization for encouraging it. Levant’s suggestion? Prosecute the bosses.

Now, let’s play along with him and accept for the sake of argument that Greenpeace leaders ought to be tossed behind bars. But as long as we’re cracking down, let’s take a look around for other nefarious criminal organizations hiding in plain sight. Who else was breaking the law in northern Alberta?

Oh, right. There was that consortium of oil giants, Syncrude, which was guilty of breaking two laws—the Alberta Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, and the federal Migratory Birds Convention Act.

Now, we’re not sure yet what kinds of penalties Syncrude will face, as those won’t be handed down by the court until later this month. But more importantly, we do know what penalties Syncrude could have faced.

According to the Migratory Birds Convention Act, anyone who is convicted of an offence under that Act can be imprisoned “for a term not more than three years”. And if they are convicted a second time, that penalty can double to six years.

Let’s recall the definition of a serious offence: “an indictable offence under [the Criminal Code] or any other Act of Parliament for which the maximum punishment is imprisonment for five years or more.”

If my math is correct, a six-year prison term is longer than five years. So if Syncrude screws up again and a few thousand ducks pay the price, we might have a new criminal organization among our ranks.

Since the federal government is all about getting tough on organized crime these days, we thought they might like to know.

Protesters against the G20 in Toronto. Photo by Jesse Mintz.

From June 25–27, the world’s most influential political and economic leaders will descend upon Muskoka and Toronto for the G8 and G20 summits. Joining them will be thousands of protesters advocating everything from anti-globalization to climate justice.

If you want to get in on the dissent, check out this advice for emerging activists from Mike Hudema, the man behind Greenpeace’s “Stop the Tar Sands” campaign and someone who’s no stranger to direct action.

Connect…with people you trust. Attend activist training camps, join a Facebook group, and talk to local and indigenous communities to discover how you can support them. Good places to start are the Toronto Community Mobilization Network and No One is Illegal.

Arm Yourself…with knowledge. Educate yourself about the rich history of civil disobedience and all the rights we enjoy today because of it. Read classics like Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience or books by AK Press, an anarchist publisher with a great alternative bookstore.

Pack…protective shoes you can run in; heavy-duty gloves; shatter-resistant eye protection; clothing that covers most of your skin; a gas mask or goggles with a vinegar-soaked bandana for protection from chemicals; and noisemakers. Optional: rollerblades and a hockey stick to shoot back tear gas canisters—Canadian-style.

Be Aware...of the variety of tactics employed by diverse groups of activists. Some may feel that vandalism is warranted, whereas you may not. Decide beforehand what tactics fit with your personal convictions. And watch for police provocateurs who may show up undercover to incite violence and discredit activists.

Prepare…to be arrested. If you decide that you are willing to risk arrest, speak to a lawyer or civil liberties association beforehand so you know your rights and what to expect. Get a jail support person off-site who knows of your personal needs (e.g. if you need regular medication) and will be able to communicate with your lawyer and advocate for you.

Reconnect…once it’s over. Travelling to the summits is great, but make sure to also support causes in your own community. The old adage still stands: act locally!

Google Earth detail showing part of the Athabasca tar sands mining operation. The tar sands is both the most carbon- and capital-intensive project on earth. Photo via Flickr user Skytruth.

Nothing brings out patriotic pride like the Olympics. But before we get busy reading about gold medals and new heights of athletic glory, let’s take a few moments to reflect on a few shameful Canadian records that you likely won’t be hearing about during any Olympic broadcasts:

1. The Alberta tar sands hold two shameful world records: Highest carbon footprint for a commercial oil project and largest capital project, says a September Greenpeace report. The organization commissioned award-winning journalist Andrew Nikiforuk to write the paper, in which he declares that the tar sands are likely to hold onto these records as production continues to expand over the next decade.

2. In 1989, the federal government promised to end Canadian child poverty by 2000. The kids that promise was made to are adults now, and one child in seven still lives in poverty. The Conference Board of Canada’s annual benchmark exercise scored us 13 out of 17 countries on child poverty; only Italy, Germany, Ireland, and the United States ranked below us.

3. Canada is the only G8 country without a national mental health strategy. Stephen Harper announced the creation of the Mental Health Commission of Canada in 2007, but so far the commission only posted a draft framework for what the strategy will look like on its website. With one in five Canadians dealing with a mental illness at least once in their lives, we hope the Commission stays on target to finish the plan by 2011.

4. We’re also the only G8 country without a national housing strategy. Though Bill C-304, an act to ensure secure, adequate, accessible, and affordable housing, passed its second reading last September, Libby Davies, the NDP member who proposed the bill, says that there is still much work to do to make it a reality. For example, educating our governing party on the importance of such a strategy: With one exception, Conservative MPs voted against the bill.

Stephen Harper's grim, digitally aged face stares down at travellers passing through the Copenhagen airport. Greenpeace is pressuring world leaders to take decisive action at the Copenhagen climate summit Dec 7–18.

Greenpeace predicts world leaders will be making a big apology in 11 years if they don’t step up at the Copenhagen climate summit next week.

A new line of giant ads in the Copenhagen airport features Harper, Obama, and 6 other serious looking, digitally aged world leaders saying, “I’m sorry. We could have stopped catastrophic climate change… we didn’t.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s billboard appears next to an advertisement informing travellers of the efforts the airport has taken to reduce their CO2 production. At least someone’s trying.

The project is a partnership between Greenpeace and tcktcktck.org, a hub for mobilizing individuals and groups to urge world leaders for a binding agreement to take bold action on climate change.

“If leaders like Obama, Sarkozy, Merkel and Brown don’t deliver at this summit their legacy will be mass starvation, mass migration and mass famine. If that happens sorry might be the hardest word, but it won’t be enough,”

“Now is the time to act on climate [change] in order to save our future. Not next year – and not the year after. If we want to have any chance of stopping climate chaos, global emissions must peak by 2015.”

Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director of Greenpeace International and Chairman of tcktcktck.org.

Another project allied with tcktcktck.org is Love Letters to the Future. The site asks people around the world to post letters, tweets, pictures, or videos with their thoughts for the people of 2109. The love letters voted into the top 100 will be put in a time capsule in Copenhagen on December 13, to be opened in 100 years.

The messages apologize for environmental destruction, promise to do more, and share images and descriptions of snow, trees, slow loris, and blue skies – just in case the time capsule out lives them. A scary thought indeed.

98% of so-called "green" products really aren't. Creative Commons photo by fotdmike.

It seems like everything has “gone green” these days. From retailers to celebrities, airlines to hotels, banks to even runway fashion, the environment is sexy in the marketplace for the first time. But is all the publicity really helping Mother Nature? When consumers are being “greeenwashed” in their attempt to fit into a petite size footprint, there is a serious problem-the status quo.

Greenwashing, like whitewashing, is masks inconvenient truths about the sustainability of products and services. By appearing to be environmentally sensitive, companies are earning billions in “green” revenue. Meanwhile, consumers are misled in their attempts to live green, unknowingly contributing further to planetary destruction.

“It’s greenwashing when a company or organization spends more time and money claiming to be ‘green,’ through advertising and marketing, than actually implementing business practices that minimize environmental impact,” says the Greenwashing Index, a web site that rates the authenticity of companies’ and products’ eco-friendliness.

And the sad reality is most green products out there are bogus. Exactly 98% of products that claim green labels in the market place are greenwashed, says a report by the TerraChoice Environmental Marketing in April. The company says there are seven eco-sins that companies commit, including: misleading consumers about the environmental benefits of a product or the practices of a company; hidden trade offs, for example, energy efficiency versus the production of hazardous chemicals; and vagueness, such as using terms like “green,” “eco-friendly,” and “natural.” Does a naturally-occurring substance like formaldehyde conjure up ideas of eco-consciousness for you?

One example of a greenwashing company is Shell. Shell Canada is currently providing grant money for up to $100,000 towards four major initiatives that improve and preserve the Canadian environment, and $10,000 grants to grassroots, action-oriented projects. And in its ad campaigns, Shell promotes itself as sustainable and eco-friendly. Is this true? Is Shell becoming a business leader in our ecologically pivotal time?

I think not. Shell is spending billions to be the lead company in the business of dirty and unconventional oil with the Alberta Tar Sands. That helps to extend our dependency on fossil fuels and contributes to the most destructive and greenhouse gas-intensive method of oil extraction on earth. The Tar Sands produces 40 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions annually for Canada through this project. Such projects make it impossible for us to meet any significant global climate agreement, like Kyoto, and probably Copenhagen.

However, there is an immune response to all this consumer corruption. Today, there are a number of groups that work as third parties in environmental labelling, such as EcoLogo, Energy Star or Green Seal. There are science-based marketing firms that assist in transforming companies to the ‘green path,’ like TerraChoice. And there are numerous references and indexes for the every-day consumer in verifying the genuine nature of a product, like Greenpeace’s Electronics Report and GreenwashingIndex.com.

But with this surge of green-labelling – including some companies that mimic third-party environmental certifications, such as HP’s Eco Highlights products – it’s no wonder why so many of us are still in the dark about greenwashing. Perhaps, as Treehugger.com argues, we need a universal eco-labelling system to make it easier for consumers to really go green.

Or perhaps we need to get our heads out of our greenwashing asses. Making change involves getting smarter. We cannot keep expecting someone else to do it for us. Being informed as a consumer and human being in our choices is our responsibility. Relying on the other guys is what got us into the mess we are in. Like brainwashing, let’s take back our brains back – and leave the washing for cleaning our hybrid cars with biodegradable products.

[image source]

Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine’s resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and is the eco-correspondent to MTV News Canada.

A whale being hauled up the slipway of the Japanese whaling flagship, the Nisshin Maru. Photo by Joshua Gunn

It’s a sight I’ll never forget: a whale being hacked up in front of me, cut into tiny squares, its excess blood and guts discarded. One minute, it was a whole whale; 20 minutes later, nothing but a spinal cord and the harpoon that killed it.

It was February 6, 2009, and I had spent two months in the Antarctic Ocean with Sea Shepherd, the radical conservationist group. Sea Shepherd is notorious for the extreme tactics it uses to stop whaling in the southern oceans each year. Its ship, the M/Y Steve Irwin, had chased and harassed the Japanese whaling fleet for weeks to prevent them from hunting. But on this particular day, the whalers killed in front of us, and at first we could only watch from a distance. But it soon became a confrontation.

The Yushin Maru No. 3, a harpoon ship, attempted to transfer a dead whale to the mother ship, Japan’s whaling flagship, the Nisshin Maru, the floating factory that processes whale meat at sea. The Irwin moved to block that transfer by manoeuvring into the Yushin Maru’s path. Within seconds, the boats collided with a loud crash and screeching noise that rang through our ears. The Irwin tipped 30 degrees on its side—it felt as if the ship was going belly-up. I was on the outside deck of the Irwin, hanging on to a railing watching the water approach from below. The Yushin was pushed down into the water by the force of the impact. I can only imagine the crew must have thought they would have to abandon ship. But 22 seconds later, when the two boats scraped apart, all had survived, with only minor damage to the vessels. It was a collision of two boats—but also a collision of worlds.

The Institute of Cetacean Research in Tokyo, along with many of its supporters, argue that the annual whale hunt by Japan is the country’s national heritage, and that efforts to end Japan’s whaling is colonial Western arrogance. The critics, such as Sea Shepherd, claim that the Japanese government is simply playing a “culture card” to stymie criticism. They believe that conservation—preserving wildlife—outweighs any such cultural differences.

However, are eco-issues, like whaling, really a simple matter of culture versus conservation? Are these two opposing sides? Can they be reconciled? And if they are in opposition, is it right for cultural concerns to trump environmental ones? I take the issue personally. In high school, I lived in Japan for a year on an exchange program. I lived with a Japanese host family, attended a Japanese-speaking high school, and grew to love the culture, country, and my new friends: Japan became a second home for me. But my first home is the environmental movement. My parents, Robert and Bobbi Hunter, were ecoactivists who had fought on the first anti-whaling campaigns against the Soviets in the North Pacific in the 1970s. My father co-founded Greenpeace, which has campaigned against the global whaling industry for decades.

So you can understand why, on one hand, I felt it was important to be part of the environmental battle for the whales. But on the other, I believe cross-cultural understanding and co-operation is vital. The issue is more complex than black and white. Japan claims that its annual whale hunt is for scientific purposes. The “research” hunt is run by the Institute of Cetacean Research, which is heavily subsidized by the government of Japan. The ICR studies whale-stock demography and health. To do this, the Japanese whaling fleet targets around 900 Minke whales annually. In addition, each year a different endangered species of whale is targeted, including humpback and fin whales.

Once the scientific data is collected, the whale meat is then sold for commercial use by Kyodo Senpaku, the same private firm that runs the fleet. Selling whale meat for commercial use after collecting it for scientific use is acceptable under current international whaling laws. Recently, however, the hunt has also been called “cultural” by the ICR, which says that Japan is simply continuing its centuries-old cultural practice of whaling. Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace, among others, dismiss these claims as a smokescreen. If it is in fact commercial and not scientific, that would make the hunt illegal: there has been an international ban on commercial whaling since 1986.

Believing the law is on its side, Sea Shepherd was the lone group to oppose the Japanese whaling hunt in Antarctica this past winter. Sea Shepherd fights the whaling industry everywhere, whether Norwegian, Icelandic, or Japanese. Sea Shepherd’s members don’t buy the cultural basis of the hunt any more than they buy its scientific value. And so the group engages in radical direct action to stop the hunts, such as ramming ships at sea and sinking ships in port, which is why some governments have labelled Sea Shepherd “eco-terrorists.” Its activities have undoubtedly stopped or limited whaling activity around the world.

Some critics, such as Milton Freeman, a specialist in ecology and culture at the University of Alberta, view groups like Sea Shepherd as difficult cases. He worries that their anti-Japanesewhaling line leads to rhetoric that is simply anti-Japanese. Freeman views anti-whaling actions as not just an animal-rights issue, but also a type of cultural bullying. It’s Western ecogroups campaigning against the remaining whaling nations, such as Japan, demanding they cease their hunt and assimilate Western cultural beliefs about whales and conservation.

This is what’s increasingly known in academic circles as “political ecology”—essentially, the politics of nature and the different ways people understand and treat nature. For some, a whale is just another fish in the sea, a resource like any other to be harvested. Others put a different value on a whale, and see a socially complex, highly intelligent sentient being that deserves the chance for a full and healthy life.

Freeman argues that our own Western views on whaling don’t give us the right to attack Japanese beliefs about it: “Seeking to stop a culturally valued activity, in any society,” he says, “is to attack those people’s culture and identity.”

Jun Hoshikawa doesn’t feel attacked. “What is taking place in the Southern Ocean is not part of Japanese culture and traditions,” says Hoshikawa, director of Greenpeace Japan. “There is a difference between coastal whaling in Japan and the industrial hunt in the Southern Ocean. Coastal whaling has taken place for centuries and continues today on a small scale with boats and spears. That can be argued to be part of Japan’s culture and identity … The industrial hunt in the Antarctic was introduced by western countries post-World War II, and is run by the government of Japan today using a six-ship fleet with exploding harpoons and guns, and it kills whales on a mass scale. It was and is purely a commercial industry. I do not call that culture.”

Hoshikawa says 82 percent of people in Japan do not eat whale meat. The profits come mainly from delicacy food restaurants or “public provisions,” where whale meat is provided to high school cafeterias, jails and the military. Mainly, it “goes to people who cannot reject the whale meat,” Hoshikawa says in a phone interview from Tokyo.

In the past, the whale-meat industry regularly produced ¥7 billion annually (US$74 million) in profit. But in recent years, profits have dropped off due to decreasing demand in Japan and unfilled catch quotas because of interference from groups like Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace. In 2007, the industry saw profits of just ¥5 million (US$51,000). The government of Japan has heavily subsidized the ICR’s whale program over the years to allow its work to continue, despite the financial loss. The real reason Japan persists with whaling, says Hoshikawa, is not because it is a profitable industry any longer, but because “the whaling issue has been framed through a lens of nationalism. It has less to do with whales or the industry and more to do with protecting the sovereign right of a country.” With so much negative international attention focused on Japan because of its whaling, the country is being pressured by other nations to stop the whaling project. In the last few years, nationalism has crept onto the scene: although the hunt is commercially unviable, countries like Japan that still run whaling hunts now see it as a political defeat to cave in to international pressure.

This is not an abstract issue for Canada: many of the same dynamics are at play when it comes to Canada’s annual seal hunt. On this issue, we are regarded with much the same contempt by the international community that Japan bears for its whaling.

“Every state is sovereign and can do whatever it wants” says Calestous Juma, former special advisor to the chair of the International Whaling Commission and professor of International Development Studies at Harvard University. “You can’t condemn sovereign states for exercising their rights because they will just go ahead and do it.” The International Whaling Commission is the international body that regulates whaling. Over the years, the IWC has sent letters of protest to Japan against the hunt in the Southern Ocean. In the IWC’s 2007 letter, it wrote that the lethal hunt of whales was unnecessary for Japan’s research, and called upon the government of Japan to suspend the whaling program.

But there are no real consequences for flouting the IWC rules, since as Juma says, there is no separate enforcement body for the treaty. The IWC comprises 84 member states that meet once a year to set quotas and regulations on whaling. But without an enforcement body, the regulations are toothless. Norway for example, works outside of the IWC and engages in commercial whaling despite the moratorium. Japan, in contrast, attempts to work within the framework by using the scientific loophole. This is because Japan has a real interest in doing things legally. “They want to be a good global citizen,” says Juma.

Ironically, the Japan Whaling Association states on its website that the purpose of the Japanese scientific research in whale stocks and health is to gather evidence that will lift the moratorium so that commercial whaling can resume. Dr. Hiroshi Hatanaka, director-general of the Institute for Cetacean Research in Tokyo, says that because the ICR believes whale stocks to be plentiful and healthy, “there is no need or reason to prevent sustainable commercial whaling in the Antarctic under IWC management procedures.”

The international community has reacted, but so far the results have been lacklustre. Panama de-registered the whaling fleet’s cargo vessel late last year, but Japan re-registered it under its own national registration; the Australian and New Zealand governments toughened their stance against Japan’s whaling, threatening to take action legally in international courts. But so far, these diplomatic and legal actions have been unsuccessful or stalled. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said in June 2008 that Australia and Japan would simply have to agree to disagree.

Over the winter, a small group of IWC countries have been working at negotiating an agreement with Japan that would gradually phase out whaling in the Southern Ocean by reducing the catch by 20 percent per year for five years. In exchange, Japan would get permission to kill an increased but yet-to-be-determined number of whales off Japan’s coasts in the Pacific Ocean.

The package was developed at the request of the American chairman, Bill Hogarth, a Bush administration appointee. It was intended to be a step forward in ending Southern Ocean whaling and break the deadlock with Japan. However, most environmental groups, such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare, believe this was a compromise that would both allow Japan to continue its commercial hunt, and effectively lift the global moratorium on commercial whaling. But Japan refused the deal. Japan’s Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries minister Shigeru Ishiba said, “We cannot accept any proposal that would allow outside countries to prohibit Japan from continuing its research hunt.”

So the question becomes: is whaling simply a question of sovereignty? In this case, does diplomacy trump ethics, leaving the international community powerless to stop the killing? The Japanese whaling industry has cunningly used the term “culture” as a get-out-of-jail-free card—by framing this as an issue of culture or sovereignty, it aims to make any antiwhaling group look like they are colonialist and discriminatory. But the reality is that the hunt is senseless slaughter in service of fake science, a dead industry, and nationalist posturing. The whales should not bear the punishment for our foolishness.

How far are we willing to go—how much environmental damage are we willing to do—in the name of culture, heritage, national pride? None of these things will be of much use in an environmentally devastated land- and seascape.

More than 30 years ago, in 1977, my parents fought to end whaling in Australia. Their protest, in Albany, Western Australia, led to international attention, that culminated in the end of whaling in Australia. It is now one of the strongest anti-whaling nations in the world.

At the end of the anti-whaling campaign I went on this year with Sea Shepherd, I found myself in Australia and decided to visit Albany. What I found there was a miniature eco-haven: a dozen wind-power generators spinning on the horizon and organic crops in the fields. One of the old harpoon ships of the Australian whaling fleet, Cheynes IV, is now an on-land museum, and boats go out every day filled with tourists for whale-watching. The whale-watching industry has now surpassed the profitability of the whale-killing industry of 30 years ago.

I took a boat ride myself to see the whales. We got to see them up close, close enough that I could touch them. They played together in their pod, diving and chasing, waving their fins out of the water as they breached, tails in the air. It’s another sight I’ll never forget.

Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, became a convert to nuclear power during a visit with James Lovelock, considered by many to be the godfather of the environmental movement. During a day spent strolling through the fields around Lovelock’s home, the two spoke of many things, but returned again and again to nuclear energy, which Lovelock insisted was the only way to prevent catastrophic global warming.

Nuclear power: such a bright idea?

For Moore, it was not an easy argument to swallow. Like many in the first generation of the environmental movement, he’d cut his teeth protesting nuclear power and nuclear weapons. “Next to nuclear warheads themselves,” he once said, nuclear power plants were “the most dangerous devices that man has ever created.”

But he had to pay attention. This was James Lovelock, the man who had created the Gaia hypothesis—the idea that the Earth is essentially a living creature—and whose research laid the ground for Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, without which there might not have been an environmental movement. And he supported nuclear power?

As Moore listened, and Lovelock argued, he started to see why. Other than hydroelectric, what had done more to keep carbon emissions from skyrocketing? It wasn’t wind, it wasn’t solar, and it wasn’t hybrids—it was nuclear power. Without the electricity it had produced since the 1960s, global warming would have progressed much further, Lovelock argued, perhaps already passing a point of no return.

Moore became a convert. At first, some former colleagues chalked it up to greed—he has since worked as a consultant for nuclear power associations—but they soon discovered he was far from alone. Included in the ranks of pro-nuclear environmentalists are the likes of Steward Brand, founder of Whole Earth Catalog; Bishop Hugh Montefiore, a former longtime trustee for Friends of the Earth; Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel; as well as a host of others grouped under the umbrella organization Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy. Their message is simple: climate change cannot be stopped without more use of nuclear power.

In Canada, it seems, the message is starting to resonate. A new nuclear facility is planned for Ontario and potential for a second is being evaluated New Brunswick, while Saskatchewan and Alberta are both considering building their first nuclear power plants. In terms of carbon dioxide emissions, the result would be staggering: Canada could get nearly halfway toward its Kyoto obligations by doubling its nuclear portfolio. But are new nuclear plants the only way out? Are they worth the risk? And have we really entered an era when being pro-environment might also mean being pro-nuclear?

Not long ago, the idea would have been absurd. Thanks to aggressive lobbying, mostly by progressive organizations, nuclear power looked bound for the scrap heap. In Ontario, home to most of the countrys nuclear power plants, Bob Rae’s NDP government had banned the construction of new nuclear facilities, leaving coal plants to fill the gap instead of maintaining existing nuclear stations. South of the border, no reactors had come online for more than a decade.

At first, global warming changed none of this. Fresh from successful battles against acid rain and the ozone hole, there was even reason for optimism among environmentalists. But as carbon emissions continued to rise and Kyoto Protocol targets fell by the wayside, it became clear that halting the growth of greenhouse gases would not be so easy: beyond the ever-growing number of cars on the streets and the meagre success of well-intentioned conservation efforts, there was the fact that most of the world, Canada included, was hooked on fossil fuels for electricity generation. And there are no quick fixes.

“We’ve tapped out hydro in this country,” says Steve Aplin, Vice President of Energy and Environment with HDP Group, an Ottawa-based management consultancy whose former clients include the Ontario Power Workers Union. Aplin, who runs a blog on Canadian energy issues, points to the Albany River, considered Ontario’s most viable undeveloped hydro site, as a perfect example of whats left: the river drops so gradually that damming it would flood large areas upstream—some of it First Nations territory. It could be done, but it would be expensive, politically untenable, and environmentally disastrous. And the gains would be slight—a few hundred megawatts at most, equivalent to one nuclear reactor like Pickering or a small coal-fired plant.

“Plug-in hybrids are going to be featured on the roads within 10 or 15 years,” Aplin adds. “If that’s happening, then we need an increase in generating capacity.” The same goes for geothermal heat pumps and tankless hot water heaters, the two most promising sources of CO₂-free heating. They burn no natural gas, but can in some cases require much more electricity than conventional furnaces and hot-water tanks. In other words, even after conservation and improvements in efficiency, the future will require more electricity, not less. Together, three sectors—transportation, electricity, and heating—account for most of Canada’s emissions, but none can be addressed without a clean source of electricity. There are only three choices: wind, solar, or nuclear. Deciding what it will be has become one of the most important environmental questions of our time.

Whenever a new nuclear facility is planned, many people ask, why not just build wind turbines instead? The question seems so obvious, in part because it seems like the rest of the world is outpacing Canada on this front: just last year, for instance, Spain generated 40 percent of its electricity from wind power on a particularly breezy day. So why not us?

To answer that question, you just need to take a stroll to one of Canada’s most prominent wind turbines, located on the shores of Lake Ontario. This lone turbine sits not far from downtown Toronto, and isolated as it is, it should be an incredible comfort to a city where the smog is often thick enough to taste. But on those days— when heat and humidity trap smog, when tons of coal are shovelled into the furnace to power millions of AC units cranked to max—youd be lucky to see the blades make a single turn.

The shores of Lake Ontario, unfortunately, are just not all that windy—they produce, on average, Class 2 wind, which may sound quite good, but is actually the second lowest on the scale used to rate wind-power sites. (Compare that to northern Texas, home to North Americas largest wind farms, where the wind almost always blows at Class 4, often rising to Class 5.) Torontos turbine still produces electricity, and in educational terms, it’s an unqualified success: quiet, attractive, and no piles of bird carcasses at its base. But it does hint at the challenge facing wind power, especially in Canada: our best wind resources are simply not where most of us live.

“All this new wind requires transmission,” Aplin explains. “That’s not just expensive; it’s difficult. [Power companies] have to buy rights-of-way from property owners all along the route of those lines.” Such rights of way are costly at the best of times, but it can be crippling in places like Ontario, where the best onshore wind sites also happen to be the best places to put million-dollar cottages. And these Ontario sites are only moderately good. The best sites—off the coast of B.C. and Labrador, and on the Gaspé Peninsula—all happen to be in provinces that already get almost all their power from hydroelectricity. To connect them to hydro-poor provinces would require thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines.

“And what do you get when you put in all that effort, and pay for all of that?” ask Aplin. “You’ve got intermittent power, which you still need to back up.” It’s this need for backup that is proving to be the true undoing of both wind and solar power. While the technology continues to improve, the simple problem remains that if the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine, the power doesn’t flow.

To illustrate this problem, Aplin checks another website he is developing, which provides real-time tracking of power production.

“Right now weve got close to 900 MW of wind power installed in Ontario,” he says, clicking a link. “If you look at the output from just today, well, at 2 oclock this morning, wind was putting out 310 MW of electricity, then at 3 o’clock it dropped to 268, and then at 4 oclock it went back up to 309.”

Fluctuations aside, it’s hard not to notice the gap between capacity and actual production. Unlike a 900MW coal plant, which will produce pretty close to that amount, a wind system only produces maximum power if every turbine receives peak wind, all at the same time. Needless to say, that never happens. To guarantee 900 MW of power from wind, every hour of every day, something closer to 2,700 MW of turbines would need to be built—an expensive proposition at a base price of $2.2 million per megawatt, not including the cost of buying land and laying new power lines.

And this is a small problem compared to those fluctuations. Forty-two MW is no big deal, but how about 420, or 4,200? It’s a lesson the residents of northern Texas learned the hard way last February, when a sudden drop in wind weakened energy supplies so badly that the state had turn off the lights on non-essential customers to prevent rolling blackouts. And this is in a place that gets less than 10 percent of its energy from wind.

Batteries seem like the obvious solution, but they remain much, much too expensive: the best on the market costs $3.7 million and provides just enough backup to power a few city blocks—about 500 homes—for seven hours. That’s why the only real solution at the moment is buying power elsewhere, or using coal or natural gas as a backup. In fact, big wind-power success stories like Spain and Germany are heavily dependent on both— and ironically, a lot of the power they buy comes from Frances nuclear reactors.

Canada has no France to fall back on—the closest we have is Hydro-Québec. All plans to phase out nuclear power call on provinces to buy more power from HydroQuébec. But “Hydro-Québec makes a killing selling power into New England,” Aplin notes. If the rest of Canada wants their electricity, we’d have to match their prices. “No one is going to do that.”

That leaves using natural gas as a backup. In fact, many plans to phase out nuclear plants, in Canada and elsewhere, involve building redundant gas-fired generators to use when the wind falls off, or when the sun doesn’t shine. Conservative estimates are that natural gas emits only about 35 percent less CO₂ than modern coal plants, so calling it cleaner is a bit like trading in your Hummer for a pickup truck. Moreover, it makes the grid even more captive to oil companies and commodity speculators.

“So why not just add to your existing nuclear stations?” Aplin asks. The question is fair enough, given the benefits of doing just that: two of Ontario’s three stations— Darlington and Bruce—as well as New Brunswick’s Point Lepreau, all have enough room to increase the number of reactors on-site. This one change would all but eliminate CO₂ from electricity production, allowing Canada to realize the full benefits of plug-in hybrid cars and other substitutes for fossil fuels. So why not?

One word: Chernobyl. The catastrophic meltdown of the Soviet reactor in 1986 continues to weigh on minds today. In Canada, it is the basis for a website and Facebook group called 30km.ca, which uses the Chernobyl evacuation zone to show what would happen if the Pickering reactor went up in a similar way. It is promoted by a mock newscast on YouTube, where the anchor talks about “widespread chaos,” “mass exodus,” and “a cloud of nuclear fallout not seen since the Chernobyl disaster,” before the screen abruptly shifts to a test pattern, stopping the announcer mid-sentence. On related sites discussion boards, it’s clear that the threat weighs heavily in many minds: “at least wind power wont melt my face” reads one post, while another, echoing Moore’s early statement, claims nuclear “will be the end of the human race one day.” While no residents near Chernobyl had their faces melted—that can only be caused by extreme gamma and neutron radiation right after an atomic bomb blast—the comments do show how Chernobyl remains the ultimate deal breaker. If there is a chance—any chance—that it could happen here, the nuclear option is off the table. Period. But could it really happen?

It was a question asked by a team of scientists, including Nobel laureates, after the incident—Western governments were worried about the same thing, given the large number of reactors close to population centres. Among other tests, the scientists modelled the size of the explosion to see if would have been held by the containment structures that surround North American reactors.

These containment structures are seldom talked about, but they mark a big difference between Chernobyl and most other reactors. Chernobyl was essentially a nuclear reactor with a low-rise office building perched on top. When it blew, there was nothing between the radioactive cloud and the population. In contrast, North American reactors are surrounded by steel-lined, prestressed, reinforced concrete walls over a metre thick. The panel studying Chernobyl found that even under the Chernobyl scenario—impossible in non-Russian reactor designs anyway—this wall would contain any explosion. The U.S. military decided it wanted to be sure, and in typical Pentagon fashion, flew an F-4 fighter jet into such a wall at almost 800 kilometres an hour. The result? The jet disintegrated on impact. The wall, on the other hand, sustained a six-inch dent. Theres a reason bomb shelters are made of the same material.

“Post-[Chernobyl] accident analyses indicate that if there had been U.S.-style containment, probably none of the radioactivity would have escaped, and there would have been no injuries or deaths,” notes Bernard Cohen, a professor of physics at the University of Pittsburg who studied the disaster extensively.

In fact, far from a Chernobyl, the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island revealed what happens when an accident occurs in a non-Soviet reactor. The outer container was not even required: the partially melted core was held in the primary container surrounding the core, exposing plant workers to a small increase of radiation—the equivalent of a few additional X-rays—with exposure outside the plant not even reaching the level of a typical dental exam. There were no deaths.

Not ideal, but certainly less tragic than your average plane crash. More like a parking lot fender-bender. And just as it would be foolish to slap an “Apocalypse Averted” headline onto every non-fatal accident, it is unfair to exaggerate what happened at Three Mile Island. Cars are designed to withstand accidents. Thankfully, outside of the former Soviet Union, so are nuclear power plants. Yet a lot of opposition to nuclear power continues to raise the spectre of Chernobyl. Just last year, for instance, Greenpeace activists staged a “die-in” on the streets of Toronto with mock rescue workers treating radiation-sickened survivors of a Pickering explosion. While these tactics undoubtedly have an effect, it is probably growing more and more limited. After all, the fact that Pickering will not explode is more or less common sense: if a catastrophic meltdown was really possible, would successive governments, of every political stripe, allow thousands of motorists to drive by the reactors each day on Highway 401 or, for that matter, allow millions of citizens to live just a few kilometres away? It is easy to believe that a corrupt, totalitarian regime would do so, but not a government so obsessed with safety that today, every Ontario family must stick their children in special car seats until they turn seven.

That’s why for many citizens, the worry isn’t a meltdown—it’s the effect of low-level radiation and nuclear waste. This is a much more reasonable concern, because every year thousands of people worldwide will die from inhaling radioactive isotopes—atoms that have the “wrong” number of neutrons, making them unbalanced and likely to fall apart, damaging living tissue and sometimes leading to cancer. This may sound like a damning indictment of nuclear power plants, but it’s actually a damning indictment of going into your own basement: radon gas, produced by natural radioactive substances in soil, is found in almost every house. Every Canadian is exposed to radon to some degree, and it accounts for half of all the radiation were exposed to in our lifetime. But only a tiny percentage of us—a few hundred Canadians a year—will experience negative effects from it. In contrast, one-tenth of one percent of the radiation were exposed to in our lifetimes is attributable to nuclear power. Simple math demonstrates how low the risk is. Cancer patients are routinely exposed to far, far more radiation than the workers were at Three Mile Island.

But the dire warnings continue. A Greenpeace report released a few years ago said there were so many radioactive particles in the air around the Pickering and Darlington nuclear stations that young children and pregnant women should not live within 10 kilometres, and no one should eat fruits or vegetables grown nearby. To Greenpeace’s credit, it is true that a small number of studies, mainly from Britain and Germany, have found small increases in the rate of childhood leukemia and thyroid cancer among people who live near nuclear power plants. But it is also true that many more studies have found no effects, and some have actually found lower rates of cancer near nuclear power plants.

The problem is that cancers such as childhood leukemia and thyroid cancer are already so rare—in Canada, 5 and 12 in 100,000 respectively—that the statistics are unreliable. A handful of cases in any given sample could double the number, or just as easily halve it. Moreover, when cancer cases appear to increase, it usually just means weve gotten better at spotting them (the Journal of the American Medical Association recently published a study attributing all increases in thyroid cancer rates to improved diagnosis).

Nevertheless, provincial authorities wanted a better test, especially in the face of Greenpeaces warning. In Darlington, the municipal health authority took a novel approach. Instead of just looking at rates of thyroid cancer and leukemia, they looked at all cancers. If the nuclear power plant was causing the cancer, you’d expect to see a pattern—increases in leukemia and thyroid cancers, small increases with other cancers loosely associated with radiation, and no increases in cancers that researchers knew were not caused by radiation.

They didn’t find that pattern. Their results “did not indicate a pattern to suggest that the Pickering NGS and the Darlington NGS were causing health effects in the population.” What’s more, when they compared their results to a control group—an area of Ontario with no nuclear power plants—they found an equally random pattern. It’s easy—intuitive, even—to blame nuclear power plants for health ills because they are so large and visible, but the reality is simply far more complex.

Yet many still dislike nuclear power, almost instinctively. Part of the reason undoubtedly has to do with its complexity. But passenger jets are also complex, and millions of us board them every day, despite the fact that statistically they are far more likely to kill us. Rationally, we know the thin aluminum shell can’t protect us from a crash, there aren’t any parachutes, and the thing is filled to the brim with highly flammable jet fuel. Nuclear power plants, in comparison, have walls more than a metre thick, multiple containment and safety systems, and emergency shutdown devices. They’re also less vulnerable to random flocks of geese. Yet we don’t trust nuclear power plants, and we do trust airplanes. Why?

The nuclear industry must take a lot of the blame here. It has operated behind closed doors for decades, failing to report problems that do occur and insulting the intelligence of the public with advertising that shows blue skies and children frolicking in fields of flowers, rather than levelling with us: this is complicated technology and it can be dangerous if not properly regulated, but here’s why you are safe, and here’s the absolutely staggering benefits of this sort of power. But instead, their PR has treated the public either as complete naifs or as opponents to be defeated, not as a constituency to serve.

Interestingly, France has taken a different approach. “Theres a famous story of an executive with [French nuclear giant] Areva who was having a meeting with locals who were concerned about radiation,” recalls Aplin. “She got them a bunch of radiation detection devices, and said, Here’s how to use them. Go up to the site, turn on the detectors, and wander around the site and tell me what you find. That’s what they did, and they found nothing that different from the background radiation.”

That sort of openness leads to confidence, which is why France has chosen nuclear power. In Canada, the story has been very different: just last December, there were two minor leaks at the medical-isotope-producing reactor at Chalk River—yet despite repeated calls from reporters, the leaks were not confirmed until late January. Although Atomic Energy Canada Ltd. and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission are now reporting every incident, of any size, the public and media can’t help but wonder: if they seem to be hiding minor incidents, what else could they be covering up?

But if the nuclear industry is to blame, so are some environmental groups: not for opposing nuclear power—everyone has a right to do that, and to their credit, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and others have written proposals outlining how we could stop using coal and nuclear power (but not natural gas). Reasonable people can talk seriously about how realistic those plans are: how much they cost, how soon they can be accomplished, and whether the assumptions they make, about everything from importing Quebec hydro to changing human behaviour, are really realistic, especially given the short time frame to deal with climate change. This is a legitimate debate.

What is not legitimate is constantly raising the spectre of a “Canadian Chernobyl,” or claiming that a small uptick in a rare form of cancer is conclusive proof of the danger of nuclear energy. It just isn’t.

In the end, all of this back and forth may prove to be of little consequence because there are deeper forces in human psychology that are pushing us back toward nuclear power. The ultimate reason we get on the airplane is not only that we trust the pilots—it is also because there is a significant benefit to doing so: namely, that we dont have to waste three precious days of vacation time stuck in a car. In simple terms, most of us believe flying is worth the risk.

Soon, many people might believe the same about nuclear power. Partly this is because of a better understanding of the risks and how we can limit them. But mostly it is because the risk of not cutting global carbon emissions is far greater. No energy source is free of risk, but continuing to burn fossil fuels has become far more dangerous than even the worst-case scenarios for nuclear power. If fact, given what we now know about the numbers of premature deaths caused by airborne pollution, there is an argument to be made that nuclear was always the safer option. Climate change just clinches it.

While we undoubtedly have some lingering cynicism after years of hearing the nuclear industry over-promise and under-deliver, especially on costs and transparency, today much of the green-power industry could be accused of the same: solar power will get cheaper (honest!); a better battery is just around the corner (promise!); this time, people will take conservation seriously (we hope!); installing rooftop solar water heating is sexier than buying a flatscreen TV (really!). The question we must ask is: do we really have time to wait?

For all the warnings that our nuclear power plants are going to explode in a Chernobyl-like disaster, theyve kept chugging along. Yes, they are not perfect, and yes, they are expensive to build, but at last count, they were preventing about 85 million tonnes of CO₂ from entering Canadian skies each year. If we believe the growing body of research that says we may have just 20 years to stabilize emissions, we can’t make wind power our first and only choice. To do so would require many variables to fall into place: finding sites for as many as 100,000 wind turbines, building them, securing rights of way for new transmission lines, and then hoping someone invents a more efficient and longer-lasting battery. There’s no room for error, and that’s a lot of variables, some with potentially staggering price tags, and all of which would have to happen in a very short period of time.

The better solution is to double Canadian nuclear capacity. It could be done on existing sites, and even though it would take 10 to 15 years to build, the grid connections would be simple. The moment we turned on these new plants, Canada’s emissions from electricity drop close to zero (a new nuclear power plant in Saskatchewan or Alberta would be enough to supply Western Canada). Keep building wind turbines and researching solar, but lets not mistake where we want to be in 50 or 100 years with where we need to be in just 10 or 20.

To build these plants does not mean that nuclear is perfect—it is not, and many of its early proponents did more harm than good by claiming that it was. But hard as it may be to admit, we also know that without it, we would be in a much bigger mess than we are in today. Climate change is far too grave a problem to ignore any solution. If we are remotely serious about stopping it, we must give nuclear a fair chance.