COVER STORY: ASBESTOS ABATEMENT
When the Tsuu T’ina Nation reserve near Calgary, Alberta decided to demolish its Black Bear Crossing military housing development, the discovery of asbestos generated technical challenges and a practical solution.
by Rob Smith 8

FEATURES

PERSONAL PROTECTION
ONESuit protective suit helps in chlorine gas incident.
by Peter Kirk 13

SPILL CLEANUP
Sorbents for in-plant spills.
by John Hosty 16

DEPARTMENTS

Editorial 4
Up Front 6
Environment Business 46
HazMat Products 47
Chemical Corner 50
News 51
Ad Index 53
Blog 54

Brownfields Marketplace supplement – pages 31-43

EDITORIAL
BC Brownfields Renewal Strategy
by Jamie Ross 31

REMEDIATION TECHNOLOGY
Dispelling myths about chemical oxidation.
by Christina Caldwell 34

SOIL WASHING
Dredging and dewatering contaminated soil.
by Bastiaan Lammers 37

SOIL WASHING SIDEBAR
Ontario-Netherlands cooperation on remediation.
by Hans van Duijne 40

CLEANTECH CANADA supplement – pages 17-30

EDITORIAL
Announcing CleanTech North.
by David Pamenter 18

COVER STORY
Ontario Solar FIT program.
by David Oxtoby 19

WATERWORKS
Robot device for pipe inspection.
by Michael Stadnyckyj 22

INFRASTRUCTURE
Phosphorous recovery from wastewater.
by Phillip Abrary 24

WASTE-TO-ENERGY
Plasma gasifi cation for municipal solid waste.
by Rod Bryden 26

CLIMATE CHANGE
BC programs to reduce GHG emissions.
by Tony Crossman 29

The main differences you'll notice are:

-- The navigation buttons for different areas of our site are a simple horizontal row across the top of the page, without the redundant vertical ones that used to be on the left side of the home page.

-- In addition to our Headline News in the middle of the home page, there's now a space on the left side of the home page for one or more Feature Articles, that also allows for a robust use of color photos. Watch for more special news coverage, more "people in the news" and industry events, and highlighted useful products and equipment here.

-- Overall, a less cluttered, user-friendly website with video and other multi-media programming.

Finally, the changes are more than cosmetic. The new design is also part of a shift to a totally new online publishing platform that will enable us to seemlessly offer visitors more information products and services. So, visit us regularly. We're determined that our website be the destination of choice for professionals in the solid waste and recycling industry in Canada.

-- ed.

WISDOM FROM MILITARY MANUALS

'If the enemy is in range, so are you.' - Infantry Journal-

'It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over the area you just bombed.' -
US.Air Force Manual -

'Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword, obviously never encountered automatic weapons.' - General MacArthur -

'You, you, and you ... Panic. The rest of you, come with me.' - Infantry Sgt.-

'Tracers work both ways.' – Army Ordnance Manual-

'Five second fuses last about three seconds.' -Infantry Journal -

The three most useless things in aviation are: Fuel in the bowser (mobile fuel tank on the runway); Runway behind you; and Air above you. –Basic Flight Training Manual-

'Any ship can be a minesweeper. Once.' - Naval Ops Manual -

'Never tell the Platoon Sergeant you have nothing to do.' - Unknown Infantry Recruit-

'If you see a bomb technician running, try to keep up to him.' -Infantry Journal-

'Yea, Though I Fly Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I Shall Fear No Evil. For I am at 50,000 Feet and Climbing.' - Sign over SR71 Wing Ops-

'You've never been lost until you've been lost at Mach 3.' -Paul F. Crickmore (SR71 test pilot)-

'The only time you have too much fuel is when you're on fire.' -Unknown Author-

'If the wings are traveling faster than the fuselage it has to be a helicopter -- and therefore, unsafe.' – Fixed Wing Pilot-

'When one engine fails on a twin-engine airplane, you always have enough power left to get you to the scene of the crash.' -Multi-Engine Training Manual-

'Without ammunition, the Air Force is just an expensive flying club.' -Unknown Author-

'If you hear me yell;"Eject, Eject, Eject!", the last two will be echos.' If you stop to ask "Why?", you'll be talking to yourself, because by then you'll be the pilot.' -Pre-flight
Briefing from a Canadian F104 Pilot-

'What is the similarity between air traffic controllers and pilots? If a pilot screws up, the pilot dies; but if ATC screws up, .... the pilot dies.' -Sign over Control Tower Door-

'Never trade luck for skill.' -Author Unknown-

The three most common expressions (or famous last words) in military aviation are:
'Didyou feel that?' 'What's that noise?' and 'OhS...!' -Authors Unknown-

'Airspeed, altitude and brains. Two are always needed to successfully complete the flight.' -Basic Flight Training Manual-

'Mankind has a perfect record in aviation - we have never left one up there!' - Unknown Author -

'Flying the airplane is more important than radioing your plight to a person on the ground incapable of understanding or doing anything about it.' - Emergency Checklist-

'The Piper Cub is the safest airplane in the world; it can just barely kill you.' - Attributed to Max Stanley (Northrop test pilot) -

'There is no reason to fly through a thunderstorm in peacetime.' -Sign over Squadron Ops Desk at Davis-Montham AFB, AZ-

'If something hasn't broken on your helicopter, it's about to.'- Sign over Carrier Group Operations Desk-

'You know that your landing gear is up and locked when it takes full power to taxi to the terminal.' - Lead-in Fighter Training Manual -

As the test pilot climbs out of the experimental aircraft, having torn off the wings and tail in the crash landing, the crash truck arrives. The rescuer sees the bloodied pilot and asks,' What happened?' The pilot's reply: 'I don't know, I just got here myself!'

Better off with Bing
Lawrence Solomon
16 Jan 2010
Financial Post

Googlegate: The search engine may be standing up to Chinese censors. What about Google’s own censors?

This week, Google announced an end to its long-standing collaboration with the Chinese Communists — it will no longer censor users inside China.

That’s good of it. Maybe Google will now also stop using its search engine to censor the rest of us, in the Western countries.

Search for “Googlegate” on Google and you’ll get a paltry result (my result yesterday was 29,300). Search for “Googlegate” on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine competitor, and the result numbers an eye-popping 72.4 million. If you’re a regular Google user, as opposed to a Bing user, you might not even know that “Googlegate” has been a hot topic for years in the blogosphere — that’s the power that comes of being able to control information.

Despite Google’s motto of “Do No Evil,” it has long been controversial and suspected of evil-doing — and not just in its cooperation with China, or in protecting itself by hiding criticism of itself from unsuspecting Google users. In recent months, most of the evil-doing has focused on the Climategate scandal, the startling emails from the Climate Research Unit in the UK that show climate change scientists to be cooking the books.

For many weeks now, readers have been sending me emails describing how Google has been doing its best to hide information relating to Climategate, which has been the single biggest story on the Internet since the Climategate emails came to light on November 19. By Nov. 26, the term had gone viral and Google returned more results for “climategate” (10.4 million) than for “global warming” (10.1 million). As the Climate Scandal exploded, and increasing numbers of blog sites covered it, the number of web pages with Climategate continued to climb. On Dec. 7, Google’s search engine found 31.6 million hits for people who searched for “Climategate.”

Sometime around then, in early December, Google began to minimize the Climategate scandal by hiding Climategate pages from its users. By Dec. 17, the number of climategate pages that a Google search found dropped by almost 10 million, to 22.2 million. One day later Google dropped its find by another 8 million pages, to 14.1 million. By Dec. 23, Google could find only 7.5 million hits and on Dec. 24 just 6 million. And yesterday, when I checked, Google reported a mere 1.8 million climategate pages.

Bing, in contrast, didn’t make climategate pages disappear. As you’d expect from a search engine that wasn’t manipulating data, search results on Bing climbed steadily until they peaked at around 51 million, where they have remained since.

Starting in late November, Google has been keeping the public in the dark about Climategate in other ways, too. Ordinarily, when people begin keying in their search terms, Google helpfully suggests the balance of their text, through an automatic feature it calls Google Suggests.

At the very beginning of the Climategate scandal, before it became huge, Google Suggests worked as advertised. If someone typed in c-l-i-, Google would have shown them “climategate” on a list of options. Many people, in fact, learned about Climategate this very way, because most major media outlets had not yet picked up on the scandal. As Climategate rose in intensity, the term also rose in prominence on the Google Suggest list — anyone keying in c-l-i would see “climategate” at the top of the list.

But suddenly in late November, for reasons known only to Google, Google often would not suggest “climategate” to those who keyed in c-l-i. Even c-l-i-m-a or c-l-i-m-a-t-e-g-a-t weren’t enough to solicit a suggestion. Bing, in contrast, did not and does not steer users away from climategate — it has consistently suggested “climategate” to those who keyed in c-l-i or even c-l.

For those whom Google can’t steer away from “climategate,” and who key in all 11 letters to learn about the eye-opening emails, Google goes the extra yard in keeping people in the dark — it dishes up a page that trivializes the scientific significance of climategate. Those who click on Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” after asking for “climategate” find themselves on a Wikipedia page entitled “Climatic Research Unit hacking incident” that downplays the content of the emails and focuses on the “unauthorised release of thousands of emails and other documents obtained through the hacking of a server,” the “illegal taking of data,” the “Law enforcement agencies [that] are investigating the matter as a crime,” and “the death threats that were subsequently made against climate scientists named in the emails.”

For those who don’t use Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” feature, Google presents them with this one-sided Wikipedia page as the first item in its search results. Wikipedia actually has a page called “Climategate” that contains damning information about the scientists caught up in the scandal but its own censors won’t let the public see it — anyone who tries to key in “Climategate” on the Wikipedia site will be instantly redirected to the Wikipedia-approved version of climategate, where the scandal is described as nothing more than “a smear campaign.”

Why would Google want to tamp down interest in climategate? Money and power could have something to do with it. Search for Google and its founders and you’ll see that they have made big financial bets on global warming through investments in renewable and other green technologies; that they have a close relationship with Al Gore, that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is close to Barack Obama.

But search for Googlegate and you’ll also see that more than money is at stake. The accusations against Google of censorship are wide-spread, involving schemes to elect Barack Obama, attacks on Christianity (key in “Christianity is” and Google will suggest unflattering completions to the phrase), and political correctness (key in “Islam is” and nothing negative is suggested).

The bottom line? Google is as inscrutable as the Chinese, and perhaps no less corrupt. For safe searches, you’re best off with Bing.

Do Americans need to look north?

Jerry Powell
Resource Recycling
December 2009
Editorial Perspective

As a magazine editor for nearly 30 years, I am continually intrigued with what are recycling’s hottest topics at any given point. On far too many occasions, what intrigues me doesn’t seem to resonate as strongly with others in the industry.

The most recent example is a brand new term in municipal recycling collection and processing: full EPR. Let me explain on this page what this is and why it should be among recycling’s hottest issues.

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is a management system for obsolete, recoverable products. In this scheme, the makers of these products have a financial and managerial responsibility to get the used items collected, processed and recycled. EPR is typically put into place through legislation.

The most widely known EPR systems are those now approved in about 20 states, and nearly every Canadian province, for the recycling of selected electronics, such as computers, televisions and monitors.

Over half of Americans (55.1 percent) now live in states that have adopted the EPR approach for electronics. In this programs, such producers as Dell, Hewlett Packard, Sony and Panasonic must establish and maintain a recovery system in the state or province.
EPR is an approach that is being expanded quickly to other materials as well. For example, my home state of Oregon is the first state to use this concept for the recovery of post-consumer architectural paint.

Even with the rising interest, EPR has been limited to fairly small portions of the waste stream, and often to those portions that are hard to handle and recover (e.g., pharmaceuticals, paint, light bulbs, carpet, etc.). EPR in the U.S. doesn’t target common residential recyclables, such as paper, metals and plastics. Can it?

The answer is yes, given the experience in several Canadian provinces, where the makers of the things that end up in the residential recycling stream (think Coke, Heinz, Procter & Gamble, etc.) must pay a portion of the local-government costs of collecting and processing these materials.
For example, half the cost of the massive residential recycling system in Ontario is funded by these companies. In addition, these producers – called stewards – have put up $40 million ($Cn) to fund local recovery system improvements, so that residents are provided cost- effective and efficient recycling service. I happen to sit on an advisory body that develops policies for the distribution of those funds.

And now, the Ontario Minister of the Environment has decreed that the stewards will soon be required to fund all of the costs of curbside recycling. Yes, all. In a few years, local governments will be reimbursed for the costs of collecting and handling recyclables.

One of municipal recycling’s greatest barriers is that it costs money. City and county leaders are reluctant to spend more on recycling when they are being pressured to buy new fire trucks, repair school buildings, fix roads and aid the poor. Full EPR, as it’s called in Ontario, provides a way to address this funding problem. And, I’m surprised that full EPR for residential recycling has not received more attention among recycling’s most fervent advocates. You would think that governmental recycling officials would be very interested in taking a long, hard look at this option.

The December/January edition of the magazine will be in the mail at month's end and should be on your desk in early January. Enjoy!

George Monbiot on Canada and tar sands (30Nov/09)

1. Canada's image lies in tatters. It is now to climate what Japan is to whaling
The tar barons have held the nation to ransom. This thuggish petro-state is today the greatest obstacle to a deal in Copenhagen

When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world's peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country's government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee's tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I've broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.

So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

In 2006 the new Canadian government announced it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%.

It is now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto protocol can be enforced only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller than that of any other rich nation. Never mind special measures; it won't accept even an equal share. The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren't worth the paper they're written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void.

After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007, it singlehandedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country that had done most to disrupt the talks. The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world's 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th.

In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which showed the government was scheming to divide the Europeans. During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying. Last week the Commonwealth heads of government battled for hours (and eventually won) against Canada's obstructions. A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth.

In Copenhagen next week, this country will do everything in its power to wreck the talks. The rest of the world must do everything in its power to stop it. But such is the fragile nature of climate agreements that one rich nation – especially a member of the G8, the Commonwealth and the Kyoto group of industrialised countries – could scupper the treaty. Canada now threatens the wellbeing of the world.

Why? There's a simple answer: Canada is developing the world's second largest reserve of oil. Did I say oil? It's actually a filthy mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. The tar sands, most of which occur in Alberta, are being extracted by the biggest opencast mining operation on earth. An area the size of England, comprising pristine forests and marshes, will be be dug up – unless the Canadians can stop this madness. Already it looks like a scene from the end of the world: the strip-miners are creating a churned black hell on an unimaginable scale.

To extract oil from this mess, it needs to be heated and washed. Three barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil. The contaminated water is held in vast tailings ponds, some so toxic that the tar companies employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface. Most are unlined. They leak organic poisons, arsenic and mercury into the rivers. The First Nations people living downstream have developed a range of exotic cancers and auto-immune diseases.

Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. Alberta's tar sands operation is the world's biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions. By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark. Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun.

Canada hasn't acted alone. The biggest leaseholder in the tar sands is Shell, a company that has spent millions persuading the public that it respects the environment. The other great greenwasher, BP, initially decided to stay out of tar. Now it has invested in plants built to process it. The British bank RBS, 70% of which belongs to you and me (the government's share will soon rise to 84%), has lent or underwritten £8bn for mining the tar sands.

The purpose of Canada's assault on the international talks is to protect this industry. This is not a poor nation. It does not depend for its economic survival on exploiting this resource. But the tar barons of Alberta have been able to hold the whole country to ransom. They have captured Canada's politics and are turning this lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place.

Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of Neanderthals to trample over it. Timber firms were licensed to log the old-growth forest in Clayaquot Sound; fishing companies were permitted to destroy the Grand Banks: in both cases these get-rich-quick schemes impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this is much worse, as it affects the whole world. The government's scheming at the climate talks is doing for its national image what whaling has done for Japan.

I will not pretend that this country is the only obstacle to an agreement at Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?

I took a lot of flack for that article, but have always stood by it. Not because I'm pig-headed and not because I'm a climate expert. Instead, it was because I did a lot of research for that article, and had amassed great stacks of reading material on the topic for several years before I wrote the article. I knew as I wrote the piece that I knew more than most journalists about what came to be known as "climate change" (when the warming faltered), and my premise was that it was impossible to reliably conclude that global warming was real, from the information available. Instead, my journalistic instincts were aroused by many many instances where it seemed obvious to me that the scientific process had become corrupted and the results of various studies were being used and abused for political purposes, especially by agencies of the United Nations. I knew that if I couldn't draw anything like definitive conclusions, neither could the average reporter, and yet the media was repleat with articles and news stories stating that the theory of man-made global warming was proven beyond reasonable doubt.

That was before Mann's famous "hockey stick" chart (that purported to show a distinct warming trend) was exposed as a fraud.

In an international scandal involving the release of hundreds of internal emails from a scientific research agency, it has recently emerged that some of the top scientists whose data sets have guided international policy making on client have been "cooking the books" and falsifying important historic climate data to create the impression that a much larger climate warming is underway than is the case, in reality. While the people at the centre of the controversy are attempting to explain away their emails and their behaviour (what else could they do?), the fact is that their data is absolutely fundamental to most of the conclusions and policy recommendations flowing from the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Truly, a whole new prolonged exercise in credible scientific inquiry needs to occur, one that will take years. The entire house of cards has come tumbling down.

Talk about "an inconvenient truth!"

I now direct you to two recent articles from Energy Probe's Lawrence Solomon about Climage Gate; he does a much better job than I can explaining why the data fraud is so very devastating, and can't simply be swept under the carpet. How ironic that this whole fiasco has unfolded right before the "important" climate talks in Copenhagen.

Here are the two excellent articles.

Dirty climate data

Lawrence Solomon

5 Dec 2009

Financial Post

The data from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University — headquarters for Climategate — is now discredited. This discredits any findings by other research bodies that relied on the Climategate data.

How much falls from Climategate, whose participants read like a Who’s Who at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Not much, says CRU’s disgraced director, Phil Jones, pointing out that CRU’s data for global temperatures is but one of several datasets, all in general agreement. Besides, many argue, CRU was no linchpin to the science. The IPCC relied on numerous other sources. Throw CRU out, they say, and the IPCC’s conclusions remain unshakable.

In truth, if you throw CRU out, you’ve eviscerated the findings of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, the most recent and most definite opus from the UN. This is the report, received with universal acclaim in 2007, which scarily stated: “The warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”

The argument over global warming requires evidence that the globe is warming in dangerous ways. This evidence the IPCC presents forcefully in its third chapter on surface and atmospheric warming, which rests overwhelmingly on the official global temperature record of the United Nations World Meteorological Organization, called the HADCRUT3 temperature dataset.

And who produced the HADCRUT3 dataset for the World Meteorological Organization? The Hadley Centre of the UK government’s meteorological office (the HAD of HADCRUT3) and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (the CRU).

With HADCRUT3 in hand, the IPCC’s warming chapter confidently pronounced that “The rate of warming over the last 50 years is almost double that over the last 100 years,” that “2005 was one of the two warmest years on record,” and that “Changes in extremes of temperature are also consistent with warming of the climate.” With HADCRUT3, the co-authors of the IPCC warming chapter could show the temperatures going up, up, up.

Who were the IPCC co-authors who decided to use the HADCRUT3 temperature data? None other than two of the most questionable characters in the Climategate cast: the head of CRU, Phil Jones himself, and his cross-Atlantic correspondent, Kevin Trenberth, a lead author with the IPCC. Trenberth in 2004 also had a starring role in another noteworthy IPCC episode, held in the swirl of an active U.S. hurricane season. Not one to pass up an opportunity to sway the public to the urgency of global warming, Trenberth called a press conference to link global warming with hurricanes even though the IPCC’s own hurricane expert, Christopher Landsea, pleaded with Trenberth not to — the link of hurricanes and global warming had no basis in science.

If any chapter in the IPCC opus is more important than the warming chapter it is chapter nine, which concludes that man is the culprit “based on analyses of widespread temperature increases throughout the climate system and changes in other climate variables.” The source for the temperature data? HADCRUT3.

The centrality of HADCRUT3 data is no coincidence. The two British organizations, Hadley and CRU, have worked hand-in-glove since the Hadley Centre was created in 1989 by Margaret Thatcher. One year earlier, in a major address that established the UK’s early promotion of the global warming issue, Thatcher — a foe of the coal mining union and a fan of nuclear power — had pledged to tackle the greenhouse effect by replacing fossil fuels with nuclear power. She then promoted climate change science with funding and diplomacy, placing her people in senior positions at the nascent IPCC and elsewhere at the United Nations.

Hadley and CRU became major players in every IPCC report, in the World Meteorological Organization, in the IPCC’s iconic hockey-stick graph and in the UK government’s Stern Review that predicted economic calamity. In the minds of many, the Hadley-CRU datasets are the most authoritative source of global temperatures, both because their temperature records date back to 1850 and because they produced the first-ever synthesis of land and marine temperature data — the first truly global temperature record.

Except now we’re told that CRU disposed of the raw data some 20 years ago after it was manufactured into “homogenized” and “value added data.” The manufacturer 20 years ago? Another Climategate star, Tom Wigley, who was then the head of CRU.

But what of Phil Jones’s argument, that the Hadley and CRU datasets are nothing special. “Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others,” he says. “Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves.”

The answer to Phil Jones comes from the Hadley Centre itself, through another fact that speaks for itself. “The datasets are largely based on the same raw data,” the FAQ page at the Hadley Centre website states, in explaining that NASA, the National Climate Data Center and Hadley-CRU all use the same data. The different results these organizations sometimes obtain, it elaborates, stems not from the data but from its absence — where the data is poor or non-existent, the different agencies employ different types of guesswork.

There is no unimpeachable raw data in which we can have confidence. There is a large cast of impeachable characters in the Climategate drama with an evident appetite for cooking the books.

And there are but two honest options for our governments to now employ. They can choose to redo the studies, with data, scientists, and a peer-review process that can be trusted. Or they can recognize that the IPCC process has been politicized from the start, and that the prima facie evidence for dangerous global warming does not meet the threshold required to prolong the scientific sham of the generation.

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud

Climategate gang is writing the script for Copenhagen

Lawrence Solomon

7 Dec 2009

Financial Post

The Copenhagen Diagnosis, a year-long study to be unveiled at the Copenhagen climate change meetings that begin today, was designed to dramatize how little time we have left to save the planet from catastrophic climate.

But the Copenhagen Diagnosis, which is billed as an update to the last report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has a credibility problem. The Climategate gang -- the same crew now discredited by emails that emerged showing a conspiracy to cook the books -- had a dozen of its members in charge of producing the Copenhagen Diagnosis. More credibility problems: The Copenhagen Diagnosis relies on data from the Hadley Centre of the UK meteorological office and the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University -- two bodies that may now need to set aside the data altogether and start over.

The suspect data -- known as HADCRUT -- is a merged dataset comprised of marine temperatures provided by the Hadley Centre and land-based temperatures from the Climate Research Unit. Because the CRU portion of the data is so suspect with so much of the public, the Met Office has announced a three-year year investigation in which it will re-examine 160 years of temperature data. The Met took this step, which makes official the view that the world has been relying on suspect data, over the objections of the UK government, which fears waiting until 2012 before having solid data. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is among the most vocal of global warming advocates, having said that Copenhagen is the last chance to save the world from environmental disaster and characterizing those who disagree as "behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics."

The IPCC, has also announced an investigation into the Climategate scandal, as has East Anglia University and Penn State University, home to another infamous member of Climategate: Michael Mann.

Mann is the author of the hockey stick, the icon of the global warming adherents which purported to show that the Earth warmed rapidly in the 20th century. That graph was later found to be bogus, as hearings into it before the U.S. Congress determined. Yet now Mann is back - he is one of the authors of the Copenhagen Diagnosis -- and so is his hockey-stick graph!

All told, 12 of the 26 Copenhagen Diagnosis authors are implicated in the Climategate scandal, including Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, a much criticized Lead Author of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.

The prognosis for the Copenhagen Diagnosis is grim.

THIS WAS SENT to David Miliband...

NIGEL JOHNSON-HILL, PARKFARM, MILLAND, LIPHOOK GU30 7JT

Rt Hon David Miliband MP
Secretary of State.
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA),
Nobel House
17 Smith Square
London
SW1P 3JR

16 July 2009

Dear Secretary of State,

My friend, who is in farming at the moment, recently received a cheque for £3,000 from the Rural Payments Agency for not rearing pigs.. I would now like to join the "not rearing pigs" business.

In your opinion, what is the best kind of farm not to rear pigs on, and which is the best breed of pigs not to rear? I want to be sure I approach this endeavour in keeping with all government policies, as dictated by the EU under the Common Agricultural Policy.

I would prefer not to rear bacon pigs, but if this is not the type you want not rearing, I will just as gladly not rear porkers. Are there any advantages in not rearing rare breeds such as Saddlebacks or Gloucester Old Spots, or are there too many people already not rearing these?

As I see it, the hardest part of this programme will be keeping an accurate record of how many pigs I haven't reared. Are there any Government or Local Authority courses on this?

My friend is very satisfied with this business. He has been rearing pigs for forty years or so, and the best he ever made on them was £1,422 in 1968. That is - until this year, when he received a cheque for not rearing any.

If I get £3,000 for not rearing 50 pigs, will I get £6,000 for not rearing 100? I plan to operate on a small scale at first, holding myself down to about 4,000 pigs not raised, which will mean about £240,000 for the first year. As I become more expert in not rearing pigs, I plan to be more ambitious, perhaps increasing to, say, 40,000 pigs not reared in my second year, for which I should expect about £2.4 million from your department. Incidentally, I wonder if I would be eligible to receive tradable carbon credits for all these pigs not producing harmful and polluting methane gases?

Another point: These pigs that I plan not to rear will not eat 2,000 tonnes of cereals. I understand that you also pay farmers for not growing crops. Will I qualify for payments for not growing cereals to not feed the pigs I don't rear?

I am also considering the "not milking cows" business, so please send any information you have on that too. Please could you also include the current Defra advice on set aside fields? Can this be done on an e-commerce basis with virtual fields (of which I seem to have several thousand hectares)?

In view of the above you will realise that I will be totally unemployed, and will therefore qualify for unemployment benefits. I shall of course be voting for your party at the next general election.

Yours faithfully,

Nigel Johnson-Hill

Check your water footprints at the door

By Tom Rooney

From the Boulder Colorado Daily Camera

Carbon gets all the press. But more and more scientists are starting to figure out that it takes so much water to create energy, and so much energy to move water, that whenever we talk about the carbon footprint of energy, we really should be talking about its water footprint as well.

Here`s why: Except for wind and photovoltaic solar found on rooftops, most power plants big or small do one simple thing: They boil water. That`s it.

The water then makes steam, which spins a turbine, which runs a generator, which creates electricity in a way that is almost miraculous.

But with that miracle comes a price: Water. Lots and lots of it.

No matter if it is coal powered, or nuclear, or oil or even large scale solar, all that heat has to be cooled down. Thus the water. It takes at least a gallon of water to create one kilowatt hour of power -- enough to run your air conditioner for one hour.

The numbers tell the tale: Rachelle Hill and Dr. Tamim Younos of Virginia Tech University estimate that "fossil fuel thermoelectric plants use between 8 to 16 gallons of water to burn one 60-Watt light bulb for 12 hours per day.

Over the duration of one year this one incandescent light bulb would consume about 3,000 to 6,300 gallons of water."

That`s a lot of water for a little bit of light. Other household appliances are just as thirsty: A central air conditioner running for 12 hours a day will drink up 16,800 gallons of water every year at the power plant. A laptop computer uses 200 gallons a year. A coffee maker perking two hours a day needs 672 gallons of water every year to brew that cup of Joe.

Different types of power plants require different amounts of water. Coal and oil plants need about a gallon or two per kilowatt hour. Hydropower plants in the Northwest, for example, need 18 gallons for the same amount of energy. Power plants in Arizona use seven gallons per kilowatt hour.

In California, 49 percent of all the water withdrawn in the state is used for energy. Much of the water used to cool power plants is returned to the river or ocean whence it came, true enough. But not before killing billions and billions of fish and marine mammals every year. Not before a lot of it evaporates.

All that happens just at the power plant. Take one step back to the mine or the oil field, and every day, billions of gallons of water are consumed coaxing energy from beneath the earth. The amount varies from the one gallon of water it takes to extract a gallon of oil from conventional means, to up to 350 gallons of water for every gallon when the oil is harder to find.

That is still only half the picture. It also takes a tremendous amount of energy to move, treat, and ultimately dispose water.

In California, 20 percent of the energy in the state is used to move water.

So we use water to create energy, and we use energy to create water -- to create more energy to create more water. And on and on and on it goes in a downward spiral that completely distorts the way we think and act about water and power.

Whenever we waste energy, we waste water. Big transmission lines, for example, that carry energy from the thirsty power plants to energy-hungry refrigerators and light bulbs hundreds of miles away leak energy like a sieve. They lose seven percent of their juice before lighting a single bulb.

That`s not just wasting power, it’s wasting water too.

Not all power plants create heat. Photovoltaic solar panels -- the kind found on roofs and backyards and schools and wineries and farms and roads and office buildings and hotels -- create electricity, not heat.

So except for a few spritzes to wash them off, they do not need water. But they do need a magnifying glass if you want to see their water footprint.

Tom Rooney, of California, is the chief executive of SPG Solar Co.

Commentary
November 6, 2009

What are the “Deniers” denying?

By Dr. Stephen MurgatroydColumnist
Troy Media

There is a growing anxiety amongst the supporters of a climate change treaty that the “deniers” are exerting an undue influence over the Copenhagen negotiations and are sowing the seeds of confusion and doubt in the minds of the general public.

But what are the deniers denying? Basically, the deniers are denying four things:

1. They are denying that CO2 is the primary cause of climate change. They do not doubt that climate change is occurring, it always has and always will and it is nature's response to a complex array of conditions. While emitting CO2 in ever-growing volumes is not a desirable thing, reducing these emissions, even dramatically, will not unduly influence climate.

2. The deniers deny that there is a consensus within climate science that man is the primary cause of global warming. There are many areas of dispute amongst the scientific community with respect to climate, including explanations for changes in Arctic and Antarctic ice, the role of the sun in determining climate and the validity and robustness of computer models of climate change. As Einstein noted, it takes a single set of observations linked to an alternative theory to trigger a shift in thinking in science. The theory that humans are the primary cause of climate change is not, like Newtonian laws of mechanics, a closed theory – it is still open to question.

3. The deniers deny that many of the events attributed to climate change – the melting of the ice on Mount Kilimanjaro, hurricanes, the spread of malaria in Africa and so on – are connected to climate change. For each of these events there are other, more plausible explanations. For example, the melting of the ice cap on Kilimanjaro is strongly linked to deforestation of the area in close proximity to the mountain, which results in a lowering of moisture levels which impact ice formation.

4. Finally, the deniers deny that taxing carbon and developing carbon markets will have an impact on the climate. Indeed, the economists who are deniers are skeptical about the economics of many green “solutions” – wind farms, solar farms, cap and trade, carbon taxes and emissions control. They do not deny that reducing CO2 emissions may be desirable for other reasons – air quality being the most important. But they are not convinced that all of these investments will produce the return expected – a cooler planet.

To support their denials, deniers use peer reviewed scientific papers which call into question the currently dominant scientific view and comprehensive economic analysis. There are many such papers by experts in climatology, including some who are or have been part of the scientific team used by the UN to create the technical documents which are said to inform the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. They also make extensive use of observational data and measurements of temperature, ocean level, emissions and so on. They do not put their faith in computer models, which in any case produce contradictory findings: rather they rely heavily on direct measures.

Because the deniers have been very vociferous, they have also come under attack. The attacks take three basic forms. The first is to question the scientific credentials of those why deny the man-made global warming thesis. The same standards are not applied to the IPCC itself or to many “warmists” – the head of the IPCC (a former railway engineer), David Suzucki and Al Gore, for example, have no qualifications in climatology. Second, there is the standard accusation that deniers are funded by big oil or the coal industry. This ignores the funding granted to the “warmists”, which runs into billions, by interest groups and governments which should not be regarded as neutral sources of funds. The final accusation is that they ignore the human suffering their denials may cause. This is not at all the case – the primary action plan suggested by the deniers is that we should focus our actions on adaptation and technologies to combat warming, cooling and the other effects of the natural cycle of climate change.

Skepticism is healthy and necessary condition of science. It is also a necessary condition of public policy development. Trying to weigh evidence and make decisions is tough, but the warmists refuse to debate with the deniers and the policy makers have their minds set on a course of action, despite growing evidence that it will make little difference to the climate over time.

As we get near to the December meeting of world governments in Copenhagen, now less than four weeks away, frantic attempts are being made to salvage something from the meeting. What now looks likely is a high-level political agreement to be followed by more talks. The deniers will be blamed for derailing what could have been a powerful moment in Copenhagen, leading to the creation of a powerful global governance organization for climate change strategy management. The deniers certainly influenced public opinion, but the failure of Copenhagen to produce a binding agreement is as much a failure of the intellectual quality of the argument for such an agreement as it is about the politics surrounding it.

I'll be there all of the first day and most of the second day, so if you're at the show, please look me up via our exhibit booth. If I'm away it means I'm meeting with clients or possibly making the rounds with my video camera, for the short highlights video we produce for the magazine website each year. Leave me your card and a note and we'll get together somehow.

Watch for a report on the event in the next edition of Solid Waste & Recycling magazine (December/January)..

Any blogs you submit should have an environmental protection or waste management theme. Please include the URL for the blog, along with its formal name (if any) and a short one-sentence description.

Please put "Best blogs" in your email subject line and send to gcrittenden@solidwastemag.com

As Wikipedia summarizes, “Along the way, Pollan examines the ethical, political, and ecological factors that are intertwined in the industrial, large-scale organic, local, and personal (hunted-gathered) food chains, while describing the environmental and health consequences that result from food choices within these chains.”

Anyone interested in environmental issues should be especially interested in this expose of the food we eat.

I’m part way through the book and find every page fascinating.

Not having finished the book, I provide a fairly succinct summary from Wikipedia, not because I believe this source is totally reliable, but because it gives you the flavor of what the book is about quite effectively.

Industrial

Pollan begins with a deep exploration of the food-production system from which the vast majority of American meals are derived. This industrial food chain is largely based on corn, whether it is eaten directly, fed to livestock, or processed into chemicals such as glucose and ethanol. Pollan discusses how the corn plant came to dominate the American diet through a combination of biological, cultural, and political factors. The role of petroleum in the cultivation and transportation of the American food supply is also discussed.

A fast food meal is used to illustrate the end result of the industrial food chain.

Organic

The following chapter delves into the principles of organic farming and their various implementations in modern America. Pollan shows that, while organic food has grown in popularity, its producers have adopted many of the methods of industrial agriculture, losing sight of the organic movement's anti-industrial roots. A meal prepared from ingredients purchased at Whole Foods Market represents this food chain at the table.

Local

As a study in contrast, Pollan visits Joel Salatin's small-scale ecological rotation farm, where natural conditions are adhered to as closely as possible, very few artificial inputs are used, and waste products are recycled back into the system. He then prepares a meal using only local produce from nearby small-scale farmers.

Personal

The final chapter finds Pollan attempting to prepare a meal using only ingredients he has hunted, gathered, or grown himself. He recruits assistance from local foodies, who teach him to hunt feral pigs, gather wild mushrooms, and search for abalone. He also makes a salad of greens from his own garden, bakes sourdough bread using wild yeast, and prepares a dessert from cherries picked in his neighborhood.

Pollan concludes that, while such a meal is not practical on a regular basis, as an occasional exercise it helps to reconnect us with the natural origins of food as well as human history.

3. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)

The Parties share the common vision of moving towards a zero waste society by promoting the
goals of reducing the amount of waste generated, increasing the reusability of products and
packaging, and diverting recoverable wastes away from final disposal toward higher end
recycling uses.

The Parties agree to work together to achieve those goals by a shared focus on the development and implementation of policies and programs related to an EPR approach. EPR is a policy approach which shifts responsibility to producers for the end of life management of their
products and packaging as well as encourages them to reduce their environmental impact.
Collaboration on approaches to EPR will seek to minimize differences between the Parties and provide businesses with greater clarity.

3.1 Diversion programs

The Parties agree to explore ways to establish and harmonize diversion programs in the
following areas:

(a) Moving their programs for packaging and printed paper (e.g. blue box) towards increased producer responsibility;

(b) Ontario will seek to establish diversion programs to complement existing programs in Québec;

(c) Québec will seek to establish diversion programs to complement existing programs in Ontario including batteries, mercury lamps and other municipal hazardous or special waste, including electronic products such as televisions, computers, printers, phones, cameras and audio-visual equipment; and

(d) Ontario and Québec will work together to identify and establish new programs in other sectors.

3.2 Diversion program Implementation

The Parties agree to work towards reconciling their approach to waste diversion programs in accordance with the following principles:

(a) Apply a waste diversion hierarchy that focuses on reduction followed by reuse and finally recycling. Energy-from-waste should only be considered when the preferred options are not technically or economically viable;

(b) Seek to reduce the environmental impact of a product to the greatest extent possible;

(c) Move towards full EPR to the greatest extent possible;

(d) Producers should internalize environmental costs into the product price;

(e) Foster design for environment among producers;

(f) Endeavour to maximize environmental benefits while minimizing marketplace impacts;

(g) Work to implement programs that establish performance targets;

(h) Work to implement programs that incorporate end of life tracking and auditing requirements; and

(i) Work to implement programs that establish standards for those involved in managing the products and packaging.