I began my hunt for solutions to the climate crisis more than 15 years ago with no clear idea what I was looking for. The first place I found myself was an island in Denmark — Samsø, a slight spit of flat farmland in the channel between the Danish mainland and populous Zealand, where Copenhagen is found. The year was 2005, and Samsø had been chosen by the Danish government as a showcase for its emerging expertise in renewable energy and other emission-cutting efforts. It would become the world’s first “renewable energy island,” completely free of fossil fuels. That was the promise.

The reality was impressive enough for 2005: some of the first industrial-scale wind turbines I’d ever laid eyes on, gathered in small clusters of two or three in farmers’ fields, solar thermal plants large enough to heat whole towns, and hyper-efficient district heating plants burning pellets made of waste straw. And it would soon achieve net-zero emissions. Fossil fuels hadn’t literally been eliminated, but Samsø’s energy planners added enough wind power to offset the emissions from the cars and ferries that continued to burn oil. Most of the world had paid little but lip service to the climate crisis, which few even called a crisis yet. And here was a thriving net-zero community in prosperous Denmark to lead the way. 

Still, Samsø was a one-off, an eccentric slice of extravagant Scandinavian design on an island not even Danes thought much about except as a source of delicious potatoes in season. Who knew where it would lead? The few of us who knew of Samsø’s ambitious experiment hoped it was a snapshot of our future, but there was no clear path from there to anywhere at all.

In 2019, I was reminded how remote from the centre of the world’s energy future Samsø had felt when I found myself on another Danish island with big ambitions. Bornholm isn’t much larger than Samsø, but from its western shore you can gaze at the horizon and marvel at the global energy transition Danish islanders helped launch, now reaching full stride. In the next few years, the Danish grid operator Energinet will build one of Europe’s largest renewable energy installations just over that horizon. This “Baltic Sea energy island” will consist of two mammoth gigawatt-sized offshore wind farms, connected to the Danish grid by a huge platform anchored offshore. 

This is no longer a handful of hopeful turbines spinning their blades in a Danish farmer’s field to keep the lights on in a nearby village. This is a floating Hoover Dam. This is the backbone of a new kind of national grid, an engine of climate optimism built to global scale.

The decade and a half between my visits to windy Danish isles may well have looked from some angles like an escalating climate catastrophe. But even as wildfires, floods and hurricanes took their brutal toll and political leaders dithered and corporate beneficiaries of the fossil-fuelled status quo dragged their heels at every turn, there were tinkerers, technocrats and entrepreneurs toiling hard to assemble a climate-solutions toolkit equal to the enormous task. And the reason I call myself a climate optimist is because I believe they’ve succeeded. 

The past 10 years has seen the launch of a truly global energy transition. Year after year, renewable energy – wind and solar, primarily – has expanded at rates exceeding the estimates even of its boosters, driven by plunging costs; since 2015, renewables have made up the largest share of new electricity on grids worldwide. Electric transportation – from the heavily hyped Tesla to the simple e-bike – has also grown beyond all expectations, with pledges from pacesetting jurisdictions now in place to ban the sale of vehicles with internal combustion engines by 2035 or earlier, and automakers responding with plans to rapidly expand production of all-electric cars. Similar patterns of rapid cost declines and unprecedented growth have been seen for battery storage, green building design, even the humble heat pump (which enables the electrification of interior heating and cooling). 

The state of the planet’s ecological health, to be sure, remains deeply troubling. Globally, greenhouse gas emissions have only just begun to reach a plateau, and the goal of keeping global warming below 1.5°C (the target agreed upon by virtually the whole world at the 2015 Paris climate conference) looks less likely to be achieved by the day. But the older target of 2°C is looking much more viable than it did just a few years ago. And the global transition necessary to reach it – and perhaps even come very close to the more ambitious goal – is accelerating, and its progress is now guaranteed. The decade just passed (which, as I said, exceeded most expectations on nearly every front) was mere prelude; the next 10 years are certain to see much more dramatic changes in how the world generates and uses energy, accompanied by steadily declining emissions. 

There is a mounting sense of inevitability around this transition, and intangible as that might sound, it is the key to its success. This is because inevitability generates the vital climate-solution fuel of political will. Too often in the climate discussion over the past decade, political will was treated as an afterthought, intoned as if it was some incidental feature that would emerge naturally from the sheer volume of damning climate data or non-binding climate-emergency declarations. But political will is not a force that can be produced or sustained simply by insistent calls to “listen to the science” or wishing for the expediency of a “war footing.” In a disaster, political will can just as readily gather around reactionary calls to retrench around the old status quo, regardless of how precarious it might appear. 

The optimistic energy of inevitable change is a more powerful magnet for political will. It explains why the state of Texas became North America’s leader in wind installations, impervious to the rhetoric of local and national politicians touting the merits of “clean, beautiful coal” (as one former president liked to put it). It explains how Vietnam, seeking to expand its national grid, shifted investments from the coal-fired power plants it initially planned to solar installations instead – not because the Vietnamese government got wise on the climate crisis but because it was easier to get financing for solar from risk-averse international banks, and solar was competitive in terms of price. (In 2020, Vietnam exploded out of nowhere to become the world’s third-largest installer of new solar power.)

I like to think of it this way: You can gaze at the distant line where the sea meets the sky and see warming waters, declining ecosystems, an overheated sky overburdened with carbon dioxide turning the world’s oceans more acidic. These are all true and harrowing facts. They are signs of catastrophic crisis. But the solutions to the crisis don’t emerge from that view. I look to that horizon instead and think of Bornholm – its gigawatt-scale wind farms, its next-generation smart grid, its efficient buildings lit and heated and cooled by clean energy, and its place in a nation leading the charge to an emissions-free world in the decades to come. These, too, are all true facts about the scene. I choose the optimistic view not because it’s the only way to see that horizon but because it’s the only way to see it that leads somewhere better.

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But this boast is worth more consideration than usual. Canada Nickel’s bold plan could have serious implications far beyond its operations in Timmins. Just weeks before Canada Nickel launched NetZero Metals, the European Union unveiled its pandemic recovery plan. It’s one of the grandest gestures in the history of a political body known mostly for stuffy bureaucratic pronouncements – more than €1.8 trillion in grants and loans, equivalent to nearly 5% of the EU’s GDP. And it leans heavily into a global energy transition whose standard bearer, Germany, was a lead partner in selling the other 26 member nations on the plan. Fully 30% of the package will be spent on initiatives aimed at “climate concerns,” with a similar focus for the other trillion dollars in the EU’s upcoming budget (which covers EU initiatives from 2021 to 2027, not just the pandemic recovery). France – the other lead partner in the EU deal – has since announced that it will spend €30 billion of its domestic recovery package on clean energy initiatives as well.

“With nickel as a preferred metal to power the clean energy revolution,” said Canada Nickel CEO Mark Selby at the launch of NetZero Metals, “our commitment to net-zero carbon production is the right step to take for the environment, for consumers, and for our investors.” You have to assume he was looking past Ottawa and not even glancing in Washington’s direction when he said it. Canada Nickel’s bet is that the EU’s green-saturated recovery is the future of the global economy and the best target for even an established heavy industry like mining. Manufacturing electric vehicles and renewable energy equipment, after all, requires an awful lot of nickel and cobalt.

Now, to paraphrase the great philosopher Ferris Bueller, Canadians aren’t European, nor do we plan on being European, so who gives a crap if they’re green industrialists? Canada’s largest trading partner, by a margin so wide as to be irreducible from the perspective of any particular government’s policy agenda, is the United States. (The current numbers are about 75% of all exports and 51% of all imports; no other nation has more than a 13% share of either end of Canada’s trade.) This is as true for nickel and iron as it is for softwood lumber, auto parts and pro hockey players.

But as one of those exported hockey stars once so famously put it, the way to win – in business as in hockey – is to focus not on where the puck is but on where it is going. And that’s where Canada Nickel’s net-zero bet comes in. If Canada’s heavy industries want to steer clear of a rust-belt scenario, they need to move now to where this century’s best economic opportunities are emerging – and those are increasingly found in the fast-growing cleantech sector. What’s more, Canada’s federal government has a net-zero pledge of its own. The deadline is a distant mid-century, to be sure, but Canada stands now at the bottom of that long ramp alongside numerous EU countries, leading U.S. jurisdictions like California and New York, and pace-setting companies like Google and Microsoft.

And more than that, Canada has a powerful set of assets to bring to the worldwide net-zero movement – its world-class mix of abundant natural resources and low-emissions electricity grids. Nationwide, 81% of Canada’s electricity is derived from non-emitting sources, with hydro powerhouses like British Columbia and Quebec already boasting virtually emissions-free grids. Hydro-Québec, for example, now actively courts data-centre clients on the merits of its clean power. And the choice of Montreal for the world’s first emissions-free aluminum production facility (Elysis, a joint venture of Rio Tinto and Alcan, catalyzed by Apple’s demand for zero-carbon aluminum) was a direct result of its climate-friendly virtues.

“The race for clean materials is certainly one that Canada could play a role in and could be important for Canada,” says Sarah Petrevan, policy director at Clean Energy Canada. Beyond the mineral wealth touted by Canada Nickel, she says, Canadian exports like aluminum, steel, concrete and fertilizer could all be valuable in markets like the EU where a smaller carbon footprint will increasingly impart competitive advantage.

And Canada Nickel is far from alone in its ambitious gaze to that low-carbon horizon. In British Columbia, Lafarge has launched plans for the nation’s lowest-carbon cement plant, bringing in carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology and fuel from non-recyclable waste. In Alberta, oil sands producer Cenovus Energy has a net-zero pledge of its own, and numerous companies are making big investments in everything from CCS to hydrogen fuel to shrink-the-oil-patch’s footprint. In northern Ontario, Goldcorp has opened the world’s first emissions-free gold mine, converting all on-site equipment to electric power. The list goes on, and many eyes in such firms are looking to export markets as climate plans grow stronger.

Beyond direct trade, though, Petrevan argues that the EU’s green recovery is the right “level of ambition.” If Canada’s climate goals – its 2030 Paris pledge as well as the net-zero target – are at all serious, then Canadian aspirations need to catch up with European plans. “The EU is the gold standard by which Canada should be judged,” Petrevan says.

Canada’s own pandemic recovery plans, then, represent a golden opportunity to bring our climate policies in line, finally, with our lofty goals. Government procurement rules, for example, don’t yet oblige the government to purchase the kinds of low-carbon materials Canada needs to be producing more of to hit its climate targets – and encourage the growth of companies like Canada Nickel.

“We’ve got everything we need to succeed,” says Chris Bataille, a researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris who has worked on decarbonization policy in Canada and internationally for more than a decade. “We’ve just got to reorient our efforts.”

Chris Turner’s most recent book is The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands.

With the support of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Canada.

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Carbon fibre is a material perfectly suited to electric vehicles. Manufactured from long strands of carbon blended with plastic resin (think fibreglass, with carbon replacing the glass), it’s far stronger than steel – up to 10 times as strong – and much lighter. Plus it doesn’t corrode. Owing to these advantages, carbon fibre has been coveted by car makers since it was first introduced in the early 1980s. Because of its steep price, though, it has until recently been used primarily in racing cars and next-generation prototypes. (Carbon fibre costs as much as US$7 per pound wholesale, compared to about 40 cents per pound for steel or 80 cents for aluminum.) The explosive growth in electric vehicle sales, however, creates a unique and potentially enormous market for carbon fibre – especially if the manufacturing costs of the stuff can be slashed somehow.

And this is where Alberta’s oil sands come in. Alberta produces nearly three million barrels of bitumen from the oil sands each day – heavy oil in need of expensive and energy-intensive processing to be turned into transportation fuel. The industry faces an uncertain and perilous future as the high cost and large carbon footprint of its product becomes harder and harder to sell as demand for oil begins to level off and eventually decline, in part due to the rise of emissions-free technologies such as electric cars. Might there be a place for bitumen instead in the carbon-fibre frames of those vehicles?

This was the question Alberta Innovates, the Alberta government’s research arm, aimed to answer with its Bitumen Beyond Combustion program, launched three years ago to begin exploring new commercial uses for bitumen. The program’s research identified a range of potential new markets, including asphalt for paving and the production of vanadium, a metal present in relatively abundant quantities in bitumen and in increasing demand as a component in new battery technology. But nothing else so far has shown the “major mid- to long-term potential” that carbon fibre has. What’s more, its greatest weakness as a transport fuel – its heaviness, owing to the very large carbon molecules that comprise it – becomes an asset.

“Bitumen is a bigger molecule, and you are competing with lighter oils as transportation fuel,” John Zhou, vice president of clean energy at Alberta Innovates, explains. “You are always at a disadvantage. But when you are making big molecules like carbon fibre, that high carbon in the bitumen compared with other oil becomes a competitive advantage.”

To transform bitumen into the lighter crude oils that are refined into gasoline and transportation fuels, oil sands operations either add a lighter petroleum product called diluent to their bitumen to make it flow down a pipeline to a distant heavy oil refinery or use costly, energy-intensive upgrading facilities that “crack” the bitumen into smaller molecules, turning it into synthetic crude. In recent years, oil sands companies have been developing “partial upgrading” technology, which cracks off a smaller piece of the bitumen molecule and allows it to be shipped without diluent. One of the heavy carbon molecules cracked off the raw bitumen is called asphaltene, and it shows enormous promise as a feedstock for producing the long carbon fibres that go into the lightweight, ultra-strong carbon-fibre panels used in cars like the Toyota Prius Prime.

Asphaltenes make up around 15 to 18% of a typical barrel of bitumen. Produce 100 barrels of bitumen and send them through a partial upgrader, in other words, and you have 15 to 18 barrels of asphaltene on your hands. The world’s current supply of carbon fibre is about 100,000 tonnes per year, a total that oil sands operators could easily exceed with the widespread use of partial upgrading.

“The supply is not the issue,” Zhou says. The big question is whether carbon fibre produced from bitumen could cut carbon fibre costs to the point where the material made sense not just for a flagship Prius but for Honda Civics and Ford Fusions. “If you can reduce the cost of carbon fibre by 50% or more, you will have a chance to get into medium-priced vehicles. So you will open up a much greater market.”

It’s an enticing possibility, especially for an oil sands industry battered by low prices, fleeing investment capital and a barrage of criticism over its expanding greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts. “It’s early days in looking at the potential for carbon fibre production from bitumen; however, we think there’s value in looking at different ways of optimizing our barrels – value in the traditional sense and in potential environmental benefits,” says Carrie Fanai, who is leading Suncor’s participation in the carbon fibre project at Alberta Innovates. With partial upgrading technology perhaps only three years away from commercial-scale operation, oil sands companies will soon have stronger motivation to find uses for the by-products of bitumen processing.

“When you are making big molecules like carbon fibre, that high carbon in the bitumen becomes a competitive advantage.”

–John Zhou, Alberta Innovates

The carbon fibre market, though, remains a young and volatile one, and that means any plans regarding its future role come freighted with caveats. Cecilia Gee, an analyst with Lux Research who tracks the carbon fibre market, explains that carbon fibre is at present a niche product, and many factors beyond the price and availability of the raw material, in the automotive market and beyond, will determine future demand. At present, the use of carbon fibre in EVs, for example, is limited by a lack of standardized production and supply chain certainty, and as much as 70% of the cost associated with using carbon fibre comes from the high price of manufacturing and installing components made from carbon fibre – not from the cost of the raw material the oil sands might one day supply. Meanwhile, plummeting battery prices are taking some of the pressure off EV manufacturers to pay a premium to reduce the weight of their vehicles. BMW, for example, recently announced it will no longer be using carbon fibre in some of its electric cars as it expands production.

“Is there an opportunity for the oil sands? Yes,” Gee says. “Are there a lot of unknowns about that future? Also yes. But if they have the opportunity to make things more circular, more green, why not?”

In any case, Alberta’s carbon fibre industry is a long way from supplying frames for hundreds of thousands of Civics; at present, it’s not even an industry. In the wake of the Bitumen Beyond Combustion program’s final report in January 2018, Alberta Innovates freed up $2 million in seed money for a handful of initiatives, one of which is a laboratory at the University of Alberta now working on developing an industrial process for converting bitumen-derived asphaltenes into carbon fibre. The early results have been so promising that Alberta Innovates has already connected the lab with industry heavyweights like BASF and Mitsubishi Chemical. A representative from SGL, a market leader in carbon fibre manufacturing, has paid multiple visits to the lab and has made plans to connect the researchers with similar projects at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy’s top energy research lab.

These are, to be sure, very early days. There remain many hurdles yet to clear. But presuming that partial upgrading expands at the rate Zhou and his colleagues in the oil sands hope it does and that the lab research on bitumen-derived carbon fibre continues apace, there could be viable commercial-scale carbon fibre production in Alberta by around 2030 – which just so happens to be around the time experts predict electric vehicle sales will roar into overdrive worldwide.

Zhou concedes that from an investor’s point of view, the project is very much in the high-risk, high-reward category. At a recent funding meeting with federal officials in Ottawa, he compared it to the $50 million the government recently invested in General Fusion, a Vancouver start-up working on nuclear fusion reactors. Still, the long timeline and uncertain payoff don’t worry Zhou much. “If in 10 to 15 years we can create a multi-billion-dollar business in Alberta, I will be very happy,” he says. Significantly less time, come to think of it, than it took bitumen production to go from Karl Clark’s lab at the University of Alberta to the first mine site north of Fort McMurray.

Chris Turner’s most recent book is The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands.

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And the announcement came on the back end of the single most energetic year for climate policy in the country’s history. Trudeau had recommitted Canada to the UN’s international climate action process in Paris, brokered a deal with all 12 provinces and territories to put a price on carbon, and introduced a nationwide phaseout plan for coal-fired power. After this, he hands the oil sands industry free rein to add another 600,000 barrels per day to the export of its already massive carbon footprint?

Partisans on either side of the narrow Liberal centre on the issue immediately broadcast their outrage. Left-wing critics and environmentalists labelled the Trans Mountain approval a betrayal of Trudeau’s Paris promises and a negation of any real action his government had taken – or ever would take – on climate change. Condemnations and cries of confusion rained in from outside Canada as well, as the American and European climate advocates who’d fallen in love with Trudeau’s dynamic Paris leadership wondered how he could have strayed from the path so far and so quickly. Political opponents on the right and in some sectors of the oil and gas business, for their part, accused Trudeau of shallow political theatre, posing as a friend of the industry to win a few Red Tory votes by pretending to put his weight behind a project his environmentalist allies would surely block. And he did so while overruling the National Energy Board on another pipeline, Northern Gateway – a move without precedent, even if it applied to a project few still believed was viable.

Who was the real Trudeau? Was he a climate crusader or an industry shill? Which side was he on? The answer is both, or perhaps neither. Trudeau’s Trans Mountain approval – and the political calculus behind it – was a rejection of the idea that he or any other Canadian must choose from two diametrically opposed sides. It was an embrace of the ambiguity of Canada’s relationship with its extraordinary natural bounty, its longstanding dual role as both a ravenous natural resource economy and a proud environmental steward. The pipeline approval, in the Trudeau government’s estimation, was a necessary trade for the broad support it needed to move forward on climate change on other fronts. Trudeau was, if nothing else, thoroughly Canadian in his decision.

The paradox of these custodial and exploitative approaches to the environment is as old as Canada. The voyageurs, middlemen in the fur trade upon which colonial Canada’s economy was first built, were both skilled wilderness explorers and harvesters of animal pelts. Cod fishermen had to intimately understand the sea and its raw, brutal power in order to pull fish from it by the boatload. Loggers on the Ottawa River or in the British Columbia wilderness, western settlers living off of and clearing prairie land to prepare it for farming, gold prospectors in the Klondike, oil sands pioneers punching holes in the boreal forest – all of them became intimate with Canadian nature even as they transformed it from ecology to commodity.

For the first three centuries or more of European settlement in Canada, there was nothing understood to be contradictory in this relationship. The idea of nature as a storehouse to feed human needs and treasure trove to feed human ambitions was a pillar of western civilization. If not for fur and fish and logs, gold and wheat and nickel and uranium and oil – if not for commodities, why would anyone have established a colony or founded a nation here?

Even Canada’s first national parks – beginning with Banff, established in 1885 – reflected this dual role. It was understood by the government of the day that parkland was being set aside both for its aesthetic and ecological merits and for its natural resource value. Until the 1920s, the shores of Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park were home to a thriving coal-mining camp. Only with the National Parks Act of 1930 did resource development start to be restricted in Canada’s national parks.

As a collective ecological consciousness rose and environmentalism emerged throughout the industrialized West in the years after the Second World War, Canada found a tenuous but manageable balance between its resource development economy and its increasingly stewardship-minded civil society. Guided by a series of broadly liberal governments and managed by a professional, evidence-driven bureaucracy, Canada’s resource economy girded itself with environmental assessments and regulations understood to be as smart and stringent as any in the world.

What’s more, Canada came to be seen as a leader in the emerging political art of reining in an industrial economy’s environmental oversights and excesses. Research conducted in the 1970s and 1980s at a small but globally influential field laboratory called the Experimental Lakes Area, operated by the federal government in northern Ontario, drove international initiatives to reduce water pollution from phosphates and the air pollution causing acid rain. When scientists discovered a huge and growing hole in the earth’s ozone layer, Canadian researchers and bureaucrats were so central to the response that the ensuing global ban in the manufacture of ozone-depleting chemicals would be named the Montreal Protocol. And in civil society, the global environmental movement traces its origins in significant part to a small gang of Vancouver activists, whose “Don’t Make a Wave” campaign against nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific Ocean morphed into Greenpeace, one of the first environmental groups with truly worldwide reach.

Canada’s resource economy, of course, remained far from benevolent in its environmental impacts. Overfishing off the Atlantic coast, in part owing to the federal government’s willful ignorance of its own best science, would lead to the catastrophic collapse of the cod fishery. Nickel mining turned the landscape north of Sudbury, Ontario, into a barren wasteland so similar to the surface of the moon that NASA used it for field training. Clearcut logging of old-growth forests on the west coast left a global stain on the nation’s reputation. And Canada was home to the same smoggy mix of coal plants and steel foundries and aluminum smelters as any advanced industrial economy.

Still, in the main, Canadians thought of themselves as the good guys on the environmental front, striving often as not for a respectable middle ground – a prosperity built on the nation’s extraordinary natural bounty that took the necessary steps not to exhaust it in the process. We were voyageurs in canoes making an honest living, not Hudson’s Bay factors plundering the wilderness. We were loggers dancing lightly atop felled trees on the river, just like in the National Film Board cartoon, not pulp mill operators dumping effluent into it. Beaver dams, the echoing call of a loon, a game of shinny on a frozen pond or a cottage on a lake – our symbols and myths placed us unobtrusively in the foreground of a tranquil wilderness, if we appeared in the scene at all.

“A Canadian is someone who knows how to make love in a canoe,” Canadian author Pierre Berton once said, and we like to nod along even though more than three-quarters of us live in urban environments clustered around industrial cities built on the proceeds of natural resource extraction and export. We are a population still not far removed from the “hewers of wood and drawers of water” whom the Canadian historian Harold Innis lamented in his 1930 history of the fur trade. “We live to survive our paradoxes,” the latter-day Canadian mythmaker Gord Downie sings, hinting at the internal contradictions we’ve carried along with us in our figurative canoes for centuries.

When climate change began to emerge as a substantial environmental issue in the late 1980s, Canada’s initial response was to extend its expertise in environmental research and stewardship to the newest challenge of the day. The first major international meeting of climate scientists was hosted by the Mulroney government in Toronto in 1988, and it led directly to the Rio Summit in 1992 and from there to the Kyoto Protocol, a solution surely as noble and final as the Montreal Protocol.

Climate change, however, was not the product of a refrigerant manufactured by a handful of chemical companies. It was pervasive, universal and ongoing, emergent everywhere and visible nowhere, at least at first. It was caused – was being caused, day by greenhouse-gas-emitting day – by almost every single thing citizens of an industrial economy like Canada did from the moment they left home in the morning to drive to work until they settled back in at night, warm in homes heated by natural gas and lit by lamps often powered by coal. And Canada, it turned out, was one of a handful of the most egregious contributors to the great emissions bonfire, our carbon footprints swelled by homes in need of heat, great distances in need of crossing and fossil fuels in search of profit. Our national footprint was among the half dozen largest on earth in per-capita terms.

Climate change has called into question the very foundations of Canada’s economy, spilled sand in the prosperous lubricant of its placid civil society, smeared and distorted the symbolic good guy image in the national mirror. In response, Canada has grandstanded, backtracked, equivocated and dissembled. The federal government of the 1990s under the Liberals signed on to the Kyoto treaty but did nothing to fulfill its demands. Under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, one of the world’s most spitefully reactionary governments on the climate change file, Canada became a global poster child for the cause of the crisis. And now, under Justin Trudeau, it attempts to stare itself full in the face of climate reality’s mirror for the first time.

There remains an impressive side to that image, tarnished though it might be. Trudeau’s Liberals have worked with provincial governments across the country to usher in a nationwide end to coal-fired electricity and a national carbon price, finishing projects begun by the governments of Ontario and British Columbia during the reactionary years in Ottawa. These are major steps, as bold and unprecedented in their leadership as the Montreal Protocol and the acid rain treaty of yore, placing Canada among the front ranks in climate change action.

But then there is the lingering legacy of all those resource-driven years of prosperity, which has come to be embodied by the oil sands industry in northern Alberta, and especially in the pipelines that carry the bitumen produced there to ports and international markets. The oil sands were, for nearly a century, a national project seen as all upside. Here was the world’s third largest oil reserve, and a technological challenge in turning it into a commodity that fired the Canadian engineer’s imagination and employed its skilled workers the same way national railroads or the forestry business once did. Researchers from both the Alberta and federal governments had been mucking around with bitumen in the boreal forest since the 1920s. Alberta’s government ushered the first oil sands mine to completion in 1967 and joined with the federal and Ontario governments to provide almost a third of the capital needed to build the second one. Well into the 1990s, even as climate summits began to make headlines, the industry enjoyed financial support and enthusiastic partnership from government and the public at large. Canada – in the broadest collective sense, in whatever way we are all one – is as fully dug in on the production of oil sands crude as it has been in any of its resource projects. As we debate our entire national commitment to climate change action through the proxy of an oil sands pipeline project or two, we should remember every one of us has had a hand in getting the bitumen into that pipe.

Canada will not solve its own greenhouse gas conundrum – let alone the world’s – simply by deciding whether or not to continue to extract 2.4 million barrels of oil per day from Alberta’s oil sands, whether to increase that amount by another million or two or whether to reduce it to nothing as fast as possible. This is not the entirety of our climate change problem, nor even the majority of our emissions. It is, however, the ideological battle that might well define who we are in the climate change era. And it may well be that we remain as we have always been, prosperous and exploitive, broadly well-intentioned and guilty of egregious environmental sins.

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The vast mountain range that surrounds the city abounds with fast-moving water, and hydropower is far cheaper in Colombia than any other fuel source. So it just makes sense that the municipal government would want to swap expensive, polluting oil for streams of electrons in its transportation system.

Bogota already has one of the developing world’s most envied and widely copied public transport networks, centred on a 109-kilometre web of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lines – dedicated bus lanes linking 125 rail-like stations and nine terminals. About 1.5 million passengers are carried between these stations and terminals every day.

The system traces its origins to a trailblazing decision made by charismatic mayor Enrique Penalosa when he took office in 1998. International experts advised the new mayor to build freeways to alleviate the fast-growing city’s mounting traffic woes. Instead, Penalosa opted to bet big on mass public transit and bike lanes.

Bogota lacked the funds for a subway system, so the city instead chose to borrow the BRT concept from Curitiba, Brazil. In a few short years, Penalosa broke the chokehold that the city’s notorious drug cartels had long maintained on the private bus networks and built a BRT system called TransMilenio. Almost overnight, it became a source of civic pride and an envy of cities across South America.

A key difference between subways and buses, however, is that while the former run almost exclusively on electricity, the latter almost never do. And so as Bogota unveiled ambitious plans this year to start running its BRT network on electricity and even introduce a citywide fleet of 20,000 electric-powered taxis – reducing operating costs and pollution in one grand gesture – it encountered a unique problem. Bogota wants to introduce 790 low-emission hybrid buses next year, and the city plans to entertain bids on a fully electric fleet and convert TransMilenio’s trunk lines exclusively to zero-emission vehicles as soon as possible. The trouble is, no one can readily fill the city’s order. “Producers,” said Susana Muhamad, secretary general, city of Bogota, “don’t have the capacity to meet the demand.”

There is a word, in business circles, for a burgeoning demand that far exceeds supply. That word is opportunity.

Muhamad outlined Bogota’s conundrum as she accepted a laurel in the “urban transportation” category at the inaugural C40 & Siemens City Climate Leadership Awards in London (disclosure: Siemens covered the cost of sending the author to this awards event). The C40 organization is a network of big city governments around the world, and Bogota bested projects based in wealthy First World cities (Stockholm and Paris) in its category. It also beat out Buenos Aires, which qualified as a finalist on the strength of a transportation system that copied Bogota’s own.

Bogota might not be a name closely associated with innovation north of the equator, but it has become a mobility model for the global south – and the supply gap it has encountered holds lessons for sustainable businesses around the world.

It’s taken for granted in urban design circles that cities are engines of innovation. From the agora of Athens to the bohemian coffee houses of Victorian London to the creative-class enclaves of the contemporary metropolis, the city has long been understood as a vital wellspring of new ideas and the primary generator of the intellectual capital that drives modern economies.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that even a global-scale challenge like climate change has found some of its best ideas and most important innovations in cities. Indeed, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group was itself born of a distinctly urban reluctance to wait on the decisions of higher levels of government.

The organization first came together in 2005 to share best urban practices in response to climate change, and in 2009 it staged a high-profile (and much more productive) alternative summit to the Copenhagen Climate Conference. The rural-urban balance tipped in favour of cities that same year – more than half of humanity now resides in cities, and 80 per cent of us will be urban dwellers by 2050 – and as most national governments continue to stumble in their flailing search for durable climate change solutions, urban leadership has never been more critical.

Which brings us back to Bogota, whose electric-bus problem is both a welcome model of innovation and an illustration of the city’s limits. Bogota’s TransMilenio is one of the most transformative and easily copied urban infrastructure inventions of the last decade. Though Curitiba’s BRT had been up and running in Brazil since 1974, it was the unprecedented boosts to commuter speed and passenger capacity of TransMilenio, rapidly deployed in the heart of a sprawling, traffic-choked metropolis in 2000, that launched the modern wave of BRTs.

The concept has since spread to 150 cities as far away as Jakarta and Johannesburg, and marks a rare case where industrialized cities – among them celebrated sustainability leaders such as Amsterdam, Melbourne and Vancouver – have widely adopted a developing country’s model. In Buenos Aires, a flagship BRT lane now carries 200,000 passengers per day down Avenida 9 de Julio, Argentina’s answer to the Champs-Elysees. The city’s C40 transportation initiatives borrow as heavily from Bogota as from famously livable Copenhagen.

The spurs to further innovation on Bogota’s streets are not strictly climate-related. In March 2012, riots erupted in the city over TransMilenio, with protestors demanding more affordable fares and a solution to the system’s chronic overcrowding. (Major TransMilenio stations are frequently so crowded at rush hour that passengers can’t even get off the buses, let alone make room for the waiting crowd to board.)

Efforts are already underway to reduce tariffs, and by switching from diesel engines to electric ones, the municipal government hopes to cut costs even further. But of course that goal would require manufacturers in distant lands, subject to national political and economic factors far beyond Bogota’s control, to step up their efforts to bring electric buses and taxis into mass production. Volvo has already tested hybrid buses on Bogota’s streets and the Chinese electric vehicle pioneer BYD has a handful of demonstration electric buses, and Bogota will start considering bids for the larger order next year. There’s no guarantee, however, that any manufacturer will be able to deliver what the city needs. In the meantime, Bogota’s commuters continue to pack into overcrowded stations as they wait for relief.

This is the flipside of the urbanization coin. As humanity crowds into cities, the opportunities for unexpected interactions yielding wild new ideas may well increase, but meanwhile city halls the world over are barely coping with the strain of rapid growth. And just as often as not, they are held back by limited municipal power structures set too low in an entirely different and less urban age.

In London, for example – birthplace of the C40 network under its founder, former mayor Ken Livingstone, and host of the City Climate Leadership Awards – a booming financial and cultural capital is struggling to expand its infrastructure to manage its current transport needs and anticipate the next phase of growth. “The transport system quite honestly is creaking at the seams,” said Jeremy Hinds of Network Rail, a lead partner in Thameslink, a multibillion-dollar commuter rail project.

Thameslink is a staggeringly large and complex undertaking – a new hub in the heart of London for one of the world’s densest and busiest rail networks. Designed to lash together a disjointed tangle of existing rail lines in the north and south and increase train traffic between them by 250 per cent at peak hours, the project has required 15 years in debate and planning and still has five more years of construction to go. Among other challenges, it has necessitated a major overhaul of London Bridge station while keeping it open and busy, as well as the laying of two new rail beds essentially on top of historic Borough Market.

By itself, Thameslink would be the transit project of a generation, but it’s but one piece of London’s transportation puzzle. Crossrail, an east-to-west sister project, comes with a £14.8-billion price tag, 21 kilometres of tunnel, and a radical expansion of Farringdon Station. London’s pioneering congestion charging and Low Emissions Zone systems, meanwhile, continue to grow – and grow in complexity – around the city. (The congestion charging system applies a levy to all vehicles entering central London during working hours, with the £150 million per year spent on public transit; the Low Emissions Zone is a restrictive tariff on large, exhaust-spewing vehicles across a larger patch of the city.) And municipal leaders are also calling for a second high-speed rail line to link London to Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester to the north – a project that has led to political squabbling over costs and benefits and that demonstrates the limits, even in London, to what a city can do on its own.

In her final book, Dark Age Ahead, the massively influential urban thinker Jane Jacobs talked about a concept she called “subsidiarity.” She defined it as “the principle that government works best – most responsibly and responsively – when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses.” The C40 network is a case study in the value of subsidiarity and its limits in the climate change era. The world over, cities have led the conversation on climate change and developed some of the most innovative strategies to tackle it.

Germany’s transformative national energy policy, the feed-in tariff for renewable energy, began as a municipal ordinance. Congestion charges – whether in London or Stockholm or Singapore – have proven to be among the most effective and efficient Pigovian taxes (i.e., taxes on negative externalities) yet created to put a clear and fair price on greenhouse gas emissions. And of course the C40 network is rife with examples of urban innovation, many of them finalists or winners in the first City Climate Leadership Awards.

Copenhagen is well on its way to a municipal target of carbon neutrality by 2025. Munich has concrete plans to become the first city of more than a million people to be powered entirely by renewable energy. San Francisco’s recycling program has as its goal nothing less than the obsolescence of the landfill itself. In Melbourne, 1,200 buildings in the downtown core will receive hyper-efficiency retrofits. In cities around the world, forward-thinking governments, spurred often as not by more immediate crises and exercising their intrinsic subsidiarity, have found their way to sustainable solutions to problems of energy use, transportation, air quality, resilience and waste.

In Bogota – as in so many cities – the traffic was a nightmare. The conventional wisdom said to build on-ramps, overpasses and freeways. Instead, the mayor created space on its streets for everything but cars – TransMilenio buses, yes, but also bicycles and pedestrians – and the city ignited a worldwide boom in a new system of transit.

That system is better positioned than any freeway ever will be to become the world’s first zero-emissions bus network. But it will need partners in industries far away to see the opportunity hidden in the urban chaos.

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With a single 15-minute phone call to NASA, Spears had learned all he needed about the American research team’s role in the project. His e-mail query to the NRC, however, would spend nearly a full day pinging from inbox to inbox, as NRC communications officers fretted over the wording of their background materials, “massaged” replies, and debated whether an interview was necessary. Eventually, the most senior communications bureaucrat in an 11-message e-mail chain decided it wasn’t.

The Citizen ran its story without comment from the NRC or anyone else in the Canadian government, making only passing mention of the NRC’s participation. The newspaper also filed an access-to-information request, eventually uncovering the byzantine bureaucratic communications chain through which a dozen NRC employees had spent six hours deciding not to grant an interview. When the Citizen posted the full document on its website, it quickly became the talk of Canada’s science journalism community, confirming what many of them had experienced firsthand: in Stephen Harper’s Ottawa, it had become nearly impossible to ask a government scientist a simple question.

In the halls of a government increasingly hostile to basic scientific research and the potential obstacles it might present to its resource-extracting energy-superpower agenda, the muzzling of scientific discourse had achieved an absurd apex. The government was unwilling to discuss what it knew about why snow fell. “This is the kind of process that occurs when you’ve turned information into something that has to go through a bureaucratic grind,” says Stephen Strauss, a veteran science journalist and president of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association. “You’ve heard about the satanic mills of the Dickensian era? Now we’ve seen the satanic mills of Stephen Harper’s information era.”

Until recently, journalists on the science beat enjoyed the same collegial relationship with government scientists as they did (and still do) with university researchers. Background detail or a colourful quote was rarely more than a quick phone call away. Since 2008, however, government scientists in every field have been obliged to pass on even the most mundane queries to their affiliated media departments, which almost always insist on seeing written questions before approving interviews (a break with many generations of standard journalistic practice) and rarely provide much more than background detail and bland, canned talking points.

On topics deemed sensitive or controversial, government media reps have sat in on interviews and even banned government scientists from talking to the press about their work. When Kristina Miller of the Pacific Biological Station published a groundbreaking report on collapsing salmon stocks in the prestigious international journal Science in early 2011, for example, her media minders killed a planned press release and refused numerous requests for interviews from major national and international media outlets. And at a recent International Polar Year science conference in Montreal, Environment Canada’s research contingent was accompanied by a phalanx of government media observers who monitored their colleagues’ presentations and obliged the scientists to refer any follow-up queries to their handlers.

To Strauss, this routine muzzling represents a misuse of government resources and a breach of the public trust. “The purpose of our taxes is not to prevent government scientists from talking to a free press and explaining to journalists what they’ve found in a way that they make sure doesn’t upset government priorities and programs. That’s not the purpose of us (taxpayers) funding this research. We are funding the research to find out how nature works, how things work. And because they are our servants – that is, the scientists – they should be able to speak freely to the press and explain what they have found with our money.”

The muzzling trend would be worrisome enough on its own, but it has been accompanied in recent months by a furious round of federal budget cuts to basic research – particularly in the field of environmental science – and increasingly ferocious rhetorical attacks on environmental groups. This is not, in other words, simply an extreme case of the Harper government’s legendarily strict message control; it appears to be part of a concerted effort to limit the Canadian public’s access to basic knowledge about the scientific implications of government policy – particularly when it comes to resource extraction and energy production.

In its first year as a majority, the Harper government has displayed a clear pattern of mounting hostility to environmental science, environmental activism, climate research and the monitoring of industry’s environmental impacts. The 2012 budget cut funding for the measure of industrial emissions, closed an oil spill monitoring facility in British Columbia and a global water quality monitoring centre in Ontario, slashed funding for atmospheric research – resulting, among other things, in the partial closure of a vital research station in the High Arctic – and killed the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, which had been created by the Mulroney government.

At the same time, the budget bill came freighted with legislation intended to “streamline” environmental review processes in the hope of fast-tracking oil pipelines and other large energy infrastructure projects, and it has handed the Canada Revenue Agency $7 million to intensify its scrutiny of environmental charities – especially the ones labelled “foreign radicals” by Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver in a fiery Globe and Mail op-ed calling for approval of Enbridge’s $5-billion Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta’s oil sands to the coast of northern B.C.

“This smearing of environmental groups, this undermining of the role of environmental organizations in the environmental debate, is blatant and aggressive and gratuitous,” says Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence. “This is not something we’ve ever seen before.” Smith points out that his organization has worked closely and amicably with the Harper government on a range of issues from toxic chemical regulation to consumer product labelling – in sharp contrast to the “outright anti-environmentalism” of the 2012 budget.

“We’ve been a respected charity in this country for 28 years,” Smith explains. “We’re not going to be intimidated. We have a long track record of productively working with this government and that speaks for itself.” And the government’s own agenda, he argues, isn’t being served by its hardball tactics. “It’s made the people angry, it’s needlessly inflaming the government’s relationship with first nations, it is alienating local communities who feel disempowered and disenfranchised in the planning process. This attempted expediting of infrastructure projects with this circumventing of democratic debate is going to backfire on the government in the end.”

Several environmental groups, including Environmental Defence, have seen donations grow markedly since Oliver launched his first rhetorical attack, while two of the groups most active in their opposition to Northern Gateway – ForestEthics and the David Suzuki Foundation – have restructured to avoid a government crackdown on their “advocacy” work (which by law can only comprise 10 per cent of a registered charity’s activity).

Smith also notes that the repercussions extend beyond the debate over any given pipeline – under Harper, the Canadian government has become a global laggard on basic climate science. “The capacity of our federal government to generate important climate change science, to monitor climate change impacts, is absolutely threadbare after this latest round of cuts proposed in the budget,” says Smith.

It’s a point echoed by James Drummond, an atmospheric scientist at Dalhousie University and principal investigator at the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL). The lab, which is located on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic and monitors atmospheric chemistry, ozone depletion and climate change, saw its operating funds vanish in the recent round of budget cuts. The cuts to PEARL’s funding are particularly surprising, Drummond says, given the Harper government’s rhetorical emphasis on Arctic sovereignty and Arctic exploration. “Sovereignty is not just a matter of military presence,” he explains. “Sovereignty is a matter of knowing the region, of understanding the region, and being able to effectively represent that region to the rest of the world. And we’re falling down on the job.”

Though PEARL may be able to reopen for part of the year under a new pool of Environment Canada atmospheric research funding (which will have to bankroll a broader range of research with 30 per cent less money than the funding channels it replaces), it likely won’t be able to operate as it had previously through the long Arctic winter night. PEARL was the only research station taking measurements during that cold dark time – data which, as Drummond points out, would be vital to operating large-scale oil drilling operations year-round in the region. “If we are going to do resource extraction in the Arctic, which seems to be something that we’re told is going to happen, then we really ought to know what’s going on in detail, because the Arctic is an extremely fragile region.”

From the roof of PEARL, Drummond notes, you can still see the tire tracks of the construction equipment that built the facility in the 1990s. Even the building of a small research station leaves a permanent mark on the Arctic. If and when the Harper government and its industrial partners arrive, they’ll be stumbling blindly through this landscape, lost without scientific guidance in the long Arctic night.

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