Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a process wherein rock is fractured by a pressurized liquid. Popularized by the discovery of horizontal drilling in the late 1990s, it has led to the natural gas and tight oil boom currently powering the ongoing energy revolution in North America. Thirty-one states now contain potentially viable shale gas plays, including Michigan.

Few issues cause as much political heartburn as the expansion of fracking in the United States. The International Energy Agency estimates that U.S. gas output will continue to increase for the next five years, on top of the sixfold increase that has occurred since 2007. Proponents such as John Griffin, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute in Michigan, believe that the continued expansion of natural gas is a necessity. “It’s strengthening America’s energy security, and creating jobs at home,” says Griffin, “all while reducing overall emissions.”

Opponents of fracking are convinced that industry is glossing over the environmental consequences. From fears about fresh water depletion, methane emissions and earthquakes, community opposition to new wells has been fierce. But the greatest concern remains groundwater contamination. To dislodge oil and gas from within rock formations, a mixture of sand and chemicals is added to water during the fracking process. Local residents are apprehensive about these chemicals infiltrating local water supplies. Further complications arise during the treatment process, as wastewater needs to be stored before being treated or reused.

There has been some evidence of groundwater being affected around drill sites, including a recently published study by researchers at the University of Texas that found higher levels of heavy metals, including arsenic, in groundwater around fracking sites in the Barnett Shale deposit. Another study released this year found elevated radium levels in wastewater discharged from a Pennsylvania treatment plant. Other research, however, has found no such link. An ongoing U.S. Department of Energy study in Pennsylvania tagged tracers with unique markers. Described as the first independent look at the movement of toxic chemicals during drilling operations, a year in it has showed no evidence of chemical contamination of drinking water.

Little federal regulation currently exists on fracking, largely due to the original passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Language within the bill, known as the “Halliburton loophole,” exempted drilling companies from complying with the Clean Water Act. Subsequent bills in Congress aimed at defining hydraulic fracturing as a federally regulated activity under the Safe Drinking Water Act have gone nowhere, which has forced individual states to establish their own guidelines.

Wyoming was the first state to require disclosure of fracking fluids to the public in September 2010, followed by Arkansas, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Fifteen states now have laws on the books, with legislation pending in an additional seven states. Some regulatory structures only require confidential disclosure of fluids to regulators, none of which are released to the public. Even in states that require public disclosure, according to Jennifer McKay, a policy specialist for the Michigan-based Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council, a “trade secret” exemption allows companies to omit information to protect intellectual property.

At a recent State Senate hearing in Texas, Marc Edwards, Halliburton’s senior vice-president of completion and production, defended the necessity of trade secrets. “Halliburton has the only frack fluid that is sourced entirely from the food industry,” he told committee members. “Without proprietary protection, it would not have invested in its development.” Lawsuits are underway in several states challenging the use of trade secret exemptions, including one suit currently pending before the Wyoming Supreme Court.

Twelve states have made the submission of chemicals to the website clearinghouse FracFocus a disclosure requirement. The online registry for chemicals, with 45,000 records from more than 400 companies, is managed jointly by the Groundwater Protection Council and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, testified at the same hearing as Halliburton about the problems with the system. “The problem with FracFocus is that it’s not a government website with specific requirements and a legitimate process to determine what actually is a trade secret,” she explained. A Harvard Law School study in April showed some companies claiming a chemical as proprietary in one state while disclosing it in another.

Some companies, like Canadian natural gas giant Encana, have developed their own internal rules for screening chemicals with the potential to impact human health. The Calgary, Alberta-based company, which has extensive shale gas plays across the U.S., launched the Responsible Products Program in conjunction with a third-party toxicologist. “To give you a scope of the program,” says Spencer Forgo, a communications advisor for the company, “over the course of 2012 we assessed in excess of 350 fluid system products across our operations.” Fluids containing arsenic, cadmium, chromium and other metals have been banned by Encana already, and the company is pushing to adopt the practice across the industry in North America.

Fracking remains in its infancy in Michigan, with only 19 new wells having been drilled since 2010. That pales in comparison to the 13,540 wells drilled in Texas alone in 2012. It’s for this reason that proactive regulations should be put in place to ensure the growth of a well-regulated industry, says McKay. “Our top priorities remain the full disclosure of chemicals, paired with baseline testing,” she said. Companies are not required to release information on fracking cocktails until 60 days after fracking occurs, making testing for specific fracking fluids all the more difficult. Some companies, such as Encana, offer free tests to homeowners who live near wells, but homeowners are often wary to accept these offers. “Some residents just don’t trust companies to remain objective,” says Emily Whittaker, a policy specialist at Freshwater Future. In August, the environmental NGO began offering its own testing program for any Michigan citizen with concerns.

With many fracking cocktails proprietary and likely to remain so in the future, those conducting tests often don’t know what they’re looking for. Scientists have been looking for alternative ways around this, including the idea of putting tracers in the fracking fluid. Using a similar method as the Department of Energy study, competing companies that began at Rice University and Duke University are racing to bring trace fracking fluids to market. A field test is currently underway at a well site in Texas. The appeal of this technology is that it would allow companies to continue to guard trade secrets, while adding definitive traceability into the process.

Lawmakers have already put forth bills in the Texas legislature to mandate the use of tracers, but industry remains non-committal on the subject. “If companies want to adopt this on a voluntary basis they should go right ahead, but in my opinion adding another layer of regulation for companies is not necessary,” says Barclay Nicholson, an energy and commercial litigation attorney at Norton Rose Fulbright’s Houston office.

For some, hydraulic fracturing will never be safe enough to accept. Activists are currently circulating a petition to place a Michigan fracking ban on the 2014 state-wide ballot. LuAnne Kozma, the spokesperson for Ban Michigan Fracking, explained her reasoning when announcing the creation of the group. “We know enough now to demand a ban,” she declared in a press release.

This article was made possible with the generous support of the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources.

The post Testing the waters appeared first on Corporate Knights.

When completed, they will be the first nuclear units constructed in America since 1979. But getting them built is the problem. The expansion, which will consist of two 1,100-megawatt generating units, is 14 months over schedule and nearly $1 billion over budget. It could be 2018 before either reactor finally starts feeding the grid.

The project has sparked widespread backlash from consumer advocates, environmentalists and even a local libertarian Tea Party group. This summer, an economist working for Georgia’s Public Service Commission slammed the project, saying that if regulators knew how expensive the process would be from the beginning, the expansion never would have been approved.

“If a decision had to be made today to build a new nuclear project, it would not be justified on the basis of these results,” Philip Hayet, a nuclear consultant with the commission, said in August.

Just a week before that rebuke, Duke Energy announced plans to scrap a 2,200-megawatt nuclear power plant in Florida as the projected costs climbed to $24 billion and the estimated time of completion was moved out to 2024. Duke had already spent $1 billion on the cancelled project, which ratepayers will need to soak up in the coming years. In Ontario, ground zero of Canada’s nuclear industry, plans to build new reactors totaling more than 2,000 megawatts were scrapped in October because of the high price tag and falling power demand in the province.

Meanwhile, 2,600 miles away in California, the future of the power sector is starting to emerge. There, in the first half of 2013, more than 7,300 solar photovoltaic (PV) systems were installed on residential rooftops without any help from state incentives. Although the 33 megawatts of systems did qualify for net metering (a payment from the utility for the retail value of the solar electricity) and a federal investment tax credit, installers were able to make the economics work outside the state’s solar promotion program.

“It would be hard to overstate the significance of this,” said Shayle Kann, vice-president at GTM Research, who crunched the numbers (disclosure: the author of this article works for GTM’s sister media division). “This is emblematic of a sea change in the solar industry and, even more importantly, the energy industry.”

Directly comparing the baseload generation potential of a fully constructed nuclear plant with several thousand distributed solar systems would be a stretch. But the juxtaposition of these two experiences – years of delay and billions of dollars in cost overruns for building a centralized nuclear plant versus the rapid installation of distributed solar PV with fewer incentives – offers a look at where the electricity industry is headed.

The last five years have set the stage for a major transition in the U.S. power sector. With natural gas prices still hovering at historic lows, utilities are scrapping plans for nuclear and coal plants in favour of combined-cycle gas plants. And with the cost of wind and solar dropping, renewables are also dominating new power plant development. For example, U.S. utilities could purchase wind power in 2011 and 2012 for an average negotiated price of 4 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

In 2012, wind was the single biggest source of new generation capacity in America, beating even natural gas. And two-thirds of all distributed solar PV has been installed in the U.S. in just the last two years. The industry is expected to double solar installations in the next two years – deploying between now and 2015 what it previously took four decades to install.

Companies in the power sector are taking notice of these trends, which will bring big changes to the way electricity providers build, own and operate assets on the grid.

“The change is going to be about empowering the end-use consumer to make energy choices for themselves rather than having the government and the public service commissioners tell them how they’re going to get the power,” declared David Crane, CEO of the independent power company NRG Energy, in a recent television interview.

The Edison Electric Institute (EEI), a trade group representing the nation’s utilities, agreed with that assessment. Over the summer, the institute released a landmark report on disruptive energy technologies, declaring a coming transformation in the sector. But its prediction for the future wasn’t nearly as rosy as the one from NRG’s Crane.

“The financial risks created by disruptive challenges include declining utility revenues, increasing costs, and lower profitability potential, particularly over the long-term,” wrote Peter Kind, author of the EEI report.

There’s a much catchier phrase for those challenges that is becoming common in energy circles: “utility death spiral.”

Since the dawn of the electric grid, utilities have been tasked with building ever bigger facilities to meet ever-growing demand for power. In most cases, regulated utilities’ rate of return is tied to selling more electricity, so they have very little incentive to invest in energy efficiency or encourage their customers to invest in technologies like solar. This is the model that allowed large projects like the Vogtle nuclear plant to get financed with the help of ratepayers – even when costs skyrocket.

However, a few things have shaken up that traditional model. The first was deregulation in the 1990s, which broke up utility monopolies in some markets and gave consumers more choice. The second is the falling demand for power in America over the last few years. The third – one that is just now starting to emerge – is the improving economics of efficiency and distributed renewables. Growth is now coming quickly enough that utilities are worrying about what happens when customers don’t need to rely on the grid as much.

While that could be a good thing for people who are able to invest in a technology like solar, it could also lead to a smaller number of customers paying for the upkeep of the electrical grid. And if the cost of paying for grid-based electricity rises, investing in distributed energy looks even more attractive to those remaining customers. This is the iterative cycle known as the utility death spiral.

“We’re not seeing electric utilities pulling down their poles and their wires. We’re a long way from there. But we need to start planning now for when that does happen,” said Richard Caperton, managing director of energy at the Center for American Progress. “The ongoing technological improvements that make these new energy resources cheaper and cheaper will lead us down the path to the utility death spiral.”

Along with this summer’s report from EEI, a number of analysts have written detailed reports in recent months on how utilities can turn this potential death spiral into an opportunity. The latest, America’s Power Plan, was reviewed and authored by over 150 experts in the industry. It lays out a broad range of actions that regulators and power providers can take today to prepare for the future.

One of the most important changes would be to scrap traditional rate-of-return regulation for some kind of performance-based model. Rather than simply reward utilities for selling more units of energy, regulators could reward them for the quality of service they provide. This could enable utilities to use their expertise to manage third-party service providers and not feel threatened when customers consume fewer kilowatt-hours.

“We know that distributed energy resources are taking off so fast – it’s unstoppable,” said Sonia Aggarwal, one of the authors of America’s Power Plan. “We need to look at the way policies and market design can catch up with the technology.”

In theory, many of these policies are quite easy to implement, both in the United States and neighbouring jurisdictions in Canada. But in reality, there is often resistance from vertically integrated utilities, skepticism from regulators and ratepayer advocates, and concerns from policymakers in states with heavy dependence on fossil fuels. However, the conversation is starting to shift.

“The mere fact that we are seeing the beginning of customer disruption and that there is a large universe of companies pursuing this opportunity highlight the importance of proactive and timely planning to address these challenges early on,” concluded EEI’s Kind in his report.

For years, people talked about distributed energy in abstractions. But now that these technologies are growing faster every year, thought leaders in the power business are starting to address the new reality. The question is: will they address it quickly enough?

The post Utilities under threat appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Executives at the Walmart Global Sustainability Milestone Meeting in September rolled out two ambitious initiatives meant to reduce chemical and pesticide use throughout its supply chain. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer will be working with suppliers to institute the Consumables Chemicals initiative, a policy to eliminate 10 priority chemicals from household cleaning, personal care, beauty and cosmetic supplies in products sold at both Sam’s Club and Walmart. Developed in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund, it will also focus on expanding public disclosure of ingredients. Some companies have issued restricted substances lists, says Sarah Vogel, director of EDF’s environmental health program, but “no other company is requiring the all-important, but often forgotten, second step to truly transformational phase-outs: putting a system in place that avoids regrettable chemical substitutions.”

With groceries accounting for 51 per cent of Walmart’s U.S. sales last year and expanded home delivery service on the horizon, pesticide use now accounts for roughly half of the retailer’s carbon footprint. The company also announced new agreements with 15 key suppliers to lower pesticide use, with the goal of cutting fertilizer use by up to 14 million acres of American farmland by 2020. “Using less energy, greener chemicals, fewer fertilizers and more recycled materials is the right thing to do for the planet and it’s right for our customers and our business,” said Walmart president and chief executive Mike Duke in a statement.

The world’s largest retailer has grown increasingly aggressive in pursuing sustainability initiatives, even as its fierce opposition to organized labour and higher wages remains a contentious issue. Hundreds of U.S. employees took part in demonstrations across 15 cities in September. The company has been accused of deliberately avoiding Affordable Care Act health insurance requirements by hiring more temporary workers. This has been paired with attempts to reduce the number of employees per store to save costs, which has affected sales. In a victory for labour advocates, Walmart backtracked on the temporary worker policy in late September by moving 35,000 workers to full-time status in an attempt to improve employee performance and retention.

Zero: JP Morgan

A wholly owned subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase is currently under criminal investigation for obstruction of justice in regards to a regulatory probe into electricity market manipulation. The largest bank by asset size in the United States settled Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) allegations that it exploited electricity power market loopholes with a $410 million payment on July 30, but may have attempted to head off the investigation by withholding key documents from the FERC. The commission alleged that JPMorgan exploited loopholes in the electricity trading markets to drive up prices in the Midwest and California between 2010 and 2012. It suspended JPMorgan from participating in the electric power market in November 2012 while conducting its investigation on the grounds that the company “made factual misrepresentations and omitted material information over the course of several months.” JPMorgan did not admit any wrongdoing in the July settlement, and is “pleased to have this matter behind us,” according to JPMorgan spokesman Brian Marchiony. It has stated repeatedly that all required documents were turned over to the FERC in a timely manner. No charges have yet been filed.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office began to investigate JPMorgan’s actions in the aftermath of the July settlement, after several federal lawmakers began questioning the terms of the agreement. Massachusetts senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey wrote FERC demanding to know why no employees who “impeded the commission’s investigations” were being held accountable. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has launched its own probe into the terms behind the FERC settlement, focused in part on allegations of a cover-up.

Faced with over a dozen investigations by separate federal agencies, states and foreign governments on everything from foreign bribery allegations to questionable debt collection practices, JPMorgan posted a rare loss in the third quarter, with fines wiping out quarterly profits. It has paid $3.68 billion in total throughout 2013. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sept. 25 that JPMorgan may be facing the largest bank fine in history ($11 billion) over the fraudulent sales of mortgage-backed securities.

Click here to view our complete Heroes and Zeros series.

The post Heroes & zeros: vol. 12 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

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.

The post Transit done right appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The federally funded agency, established in 2001, has been at the heart of the country’s clean technology sector for the past decade. During that time – and over 22 funding rounds – it has awarded about $600 million in grants to nearly 250 cleantech projects, tackling everything from crop protection and clean transportation to experimental wind technology and nuclear fusion.

But that’s just scratching the surface. For every $1 SDTC commits, the recipient company has to raise another $2.20 from project consortium partners. This has resulted in another $1.6 billion of mostly private capital flowing to Canadian cleantech companies.

Total impact: $2.2 billion. That funding has helped carry cleantech ventures through the dreaded “valley of death,” an industry term referring to the challenge of bringing a new innovation to market at a time when a company is struggling with negative cash flow.

In recent years, the SDTC team has worked to make the agency more accessible. With every funding round it now travels across Canada, visiting a dozen cities over a three-week period and typically engaging 800 to 1,000 potential applicants. From that pool of innovation, up to 120 serious project pitches are submitted, at which point SDTC winnows them down to a short list of between 35 and 40.

It doesn’t stop there. Those three dozen or so lucky companies are invited to submit detailed project proposals, and once received, SDTC staff spend the next two months doing their due diligence. Roughly half of those projects are then selected for review by the agency’s investment committee, which has the task of picking up to 15 projects that will be offered funding. Over the past 10 years, SDTC has reviewed more than 2,400 pitches.

Complementing this process is a new virtual incubator program, started by the agency last year. “Over the years, we noticed that we were turning away companies that had a promising technology but were missing other vital components such as industry partners or business planning,” explains SDTC spokesman Patrice Breton. “Through the incubator we are working with companies earlier, introducing them to industry and financing partners. The incubator acts as a feeder to the application process.”

Up until early this year it was thought SDTC was on its last legs as a funder of new projects, as its pool of public money had nearly run dry. But in March the federal government re-funded the agency with $325 million and a new eight-year mandate.

That mandate included a much bigger push for commercialization of the technologies SDTC was funding. To that end, the government made the surprise announcement in June that Jim Balsillie, co-founder and a former chief executive of BlackBerry (Research In Motion), would be joining SDTC as its new chairman.

As a former technology reporter for two of Canada’s biggest newspapers, I have known Balsillie for more than a decade, both his hockey-loving philanthropic side and his driven, self-assured and headstrong approach to doing business side.

I watched him build Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry from a company with a dozen employees into a global enterprise of 18,000 workers with a world-leading smart phone product used addictively by leaders of business and government, including President Barack Obama.

BlackBerry has since fallen from its high perch, and with that decline came Balsillie’s resignation from the company early last year. When it was revealed he was taking on the role of chairman at SDTC, it made some sense. He served as private sector representative on the United Nations’ High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability, and is founder of the Centre for International Governance Innovation, a Waterloo-based institute that considers “energy and environment” as one of its four key research mandates.

He’s concerned about humanity’s footprint on the planet, but he’s also interested in the technologies that will help shrink it. In 2010, while I was writing my book on clean energy innovation, Mad Like Tesla, Balsillie made time in his busy schedule to read an early draft and offer feedback.

Mind you, he still has a lot to learn about clean technology and SDTC. “I’ve been drinking from the fire hose,” he says of the past few months since his appointment. “I thought I knew what they were doing but realized they are doing much more.”

Corporate Knights had a chance to chat with Balsillie about his new position and what he has to offer:

CK: What attracted you to this position?

BALSILLIE: I value the mandate of SDTC. They’re crucial as a platform for supporting commercialization of Canadian sustainable technology. They have a very valuable and ambitious role to play. If it’s done right, they have an enormous potential for positive impact. Narrowing it more personally, it allows me to further my knowledge and networks after I served on the UN high-level panel for sustainability, so I’m keen on learning and leveraging what I’ve done.

CK: And does this drive your interest in clean technology itself?

BALSILLIE: I’ve always had a passion for transformative technology since a very young age. And I’ve always believed from the very early days of tech that it has the power to disrupt the status quo. That’s the stuff that intrigues me the most. As for the application to cleantech, that’s a rapidly emerging aspect of technology generally.

CK: There are pretty heavy issues we have to address right now as a species. What’s the biggest problem as you see it?

BALSILLIE: What interests me personally is our relationship with energy, domestically and globally. Energy consumption is just growing with GDP around the world. How do we grapple with the energy question, and the energy-natural capital scarcity nexus? Seeing the oil sands, you see a tremendous amount of innovativeness, a tremendous amount of energy resources ready to use, and you also realize that we live in a world where we have to ask, what is the carrying capacity of a planet and how do you manage this nexus? What’s the carrying capacity of carbon in the atmosphere and how does that complex system work? And what are the feedback loops? Nobody knows for sure. So I think the capacity of innovation to move us forward is a powerful part of the answer. Is it a complete answer? Probably not. There are aspects of policy that have to go with that.

CK: As a funding mechanism for advancing clean technology, what makes SDTC effective?

BALSILLIE: The focus of the organization is to be really engaged, flexible, adaptable and collaborative. Their critical role is to ensure cleantech is a commercial success in Canada. If you’re not fitting to the market you’re going to be sorry. So I think their focus is right. There’s no rigid dogma about them.

CK: Is their approach, and the core capacity they have built, something that could benefit other countries?

BALSILLIE: Absolutely. The team runs very well, so as far as extending this kind of approach globally for other countries to mimic, this is a pretty good model from what I can tell.

CK: You mentioned earlier that it’s pretty easy to get enthusiastic about the role of clean technology once you start reading through all the business plans that flow through SDTC. Does that create a sense of optimism for you?

BALSILLIE: Human beings need hope. It’s a precondition of thriving. We need hope and we need aspiration, whether it’s Elpis in Greek mythology or the second coming in Christian mythology. Hope is a precondition for cultural advancement. It propels us forward. So yes, it’s easy to get excited by these companies and easy to get optimistic, and I think that’s a very constructive aspect of the answer.

CK: What do you feel you can bring to SDTC to help it achieve its goals?

BALSILLIE: The number one issue for the sector, for companies, for the government, is commercialization and expanding globally. This has to be about jobs and sales. The part that I think I can help with is this whole aspect of supporting Canadian companies to scale up. Having done that (with BlackBerry) and gone around the world and seen the opportunities, that’s one particular reason they approached me. Really, tech is tech. Understanding the basic design aspects of a business and commercialization opportunities and engagement strategies, that’s where I can help.

CK: As a bit of a cleantech nerd myself, I’m somewhat envious that you get to see all of the business plans and project proposals that flow through SDTC.

BALSILLIE: [Laughs] I want to learn. I want to learn about these companies. I want to learn about these business plans. I mean, I like to help, but I want to learn. I’m not surprised you’re envious.

The post The Balsillie boost appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Given the casual dress code, the big black dog resting in front of the bar and the beautiful interior of glass, wood and steel, the brewery appears a nice place to work. So do the other boutique businesses on this trendy stretch of Toronto’s Ossington Avenue. What makes the brewery different is the formal commitment made to its workforce as one of the original signees of Wagemark – a recently launched international standard for workplace wage ratios.

To receive Wagemark certification, an organization’s top-paid employee cannot make more than eight times the average compensation of the bottom 10 per cent. The foundation of research the non-profit builds on suggests the wider the income gap, the poorer the performance of both companies and countries. But will the idea sell?

“We actually are pro-capitalist,” says Peter MacLeod, Wagemark’s founder and interim executive director. “We just want everybody to enjoy the fruits of their productivity. It’s about competitiveness. It’s about business, sustainability, the durability, the resilience of an organization.”

MacLeod argues places such as Scandinavia and Japan are examples for the rest of the world. “You look to societies with low income disparities and you see that they not only outperform us around [quality of life], they also outperform us on some important economic indicators, whether it’s productivity, whether it’s a social-economic indicator, like generational mobility.”

In a report published by the University of California, Berkeley, in September, economist Emmanuel Saez found that post-recession income gains made in the U.S. from 2009 to 2012 were 31.4 per cent for the top 1 per cent compared to 0.4 per cent for the remainder. Bloomberg reported in April that J.C. Penney’s CEO had been paid 1,795 times as much as the average company employee.

MacLeod says Wagemark isn’t about “naming and shaming” companies and their leaders, nor does he expect such companies to sign up. But J.C. Penney could learn something from the fallout after its CEO’s golden parachute, when the company’s share price slid, MacLeod points out. “The company has rarely been in a weaker position. They can take whatever lesson from that they like.”

Income disparity has received increased political attention in the United States lately. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is preparing to vote on a proposal that will require companies to reveal the pay gap between CEO compensation and the median compensation of their workforce, based on a sample of employees. The proposal is a mandate of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and expected to pass with three out of five SEC votes; two Democratic and one independent versus two Republican.

While not as extreme as those in the U.S., pay gaps in Canada have also increased. According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the 50 highest paid CEOs made over 200 times as much as the average Canadian wage in 2011, compared to 85 times in 1995.

Wagemark, which is Toronto-based, was inspired in part by The Spirit Level, a book written by British epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson. The two researchers argue that equal societies are better for all who live in them. Wilkinson has served as an advisor to Wagemark. “It’s at work we have most to do with each other, yet it’s at work we are most divided by hierarchy. We can change that,” says Wilkinson on the phone from London. “Work ought to be the place where we can get our sense of purpose and our sense of self-worth and appreciation by others.”

Taking a step back, Wilkinson argues, “The big, long-term objective for progressive politics, as well as dealing with sustainability, has got to be to democratize our economic institutions, to extend democracy by pursuing all forms of economic democracy. I do regard the bonus culture as an indication of a lack of any democratic constraint on people at the top. They think they can do just what they like.”

When The Spirit Level was published in 2009, it was predictably lauded by the left and lambasted by the right. As Pickett and Wilkinson write in a postscript to their 2010 edition, the criticism has often been political, not scientific. They maintain that mental health, physical health, obesity, educational performance, teenage births, violence, social mobility and imprisonment all relate to levels of inequality.

The authors dedicate a chapter of their book to the connection between inequality and sustainability. “Given what inequality does to a society, and particularly how it heightens competitive consumption, it looks not only as if the two are complementary, but also that governments may be unable to make big enough cuts in carbon emissions without also reducing inequality,” they write. Interestingly, according to data cited in The Spirit Level, business leaders in more equal countries tend to be more positive towards public policy that complies with international environmental agreements than their peers in more unequal countries.

MacLeod says he doesn’t expect every company to agree with the worldview Wagemark represents, but he’s not necessarily going after the Fortune 500. His focus instead is on medium-sized organizations that have hundreds of employees, not tens of thousands; that have tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, not billions; and that have strong corporate cultures where people still have a sense of being a part of the same organization.

He also doesn’t expect Wagemark to be a silver bullet for workplace inequality, but more of a long-term contribution to a broader movement for societal equality. Included in this movement are Pickett and Wilkinson’s organization, the Equality Trust, and other national and international advocacy groups and policy initiatives, such as those pushing for increases to minimum wage or “living wage” levels.

It’s a work in progress, and adjustments could become necessary in some scenarios. Take outsourcing. What if a profitable company meets Wagemark’s standard within its own facilities, but not when taking into account the factory workers who produce the company’s product through a contractual arrangement?

“We can’t write a licence that prohibits explicitly all sorts of business activities,” says MacLeod. “But to be perfectly frank, I don’t think those kinds of businesses are going to be attracted to Wagemark initially.”

Some big American companies, on the other hand, have demonstrated a commitment to maintaining modest wage gaps relative to others in their industries since long before Wagemark. Costco is one frequently cited example. In the midst of the economic downturn, while competitors struggled and tightened belts, Costco raised employee salaries, which are over double minimum wage – yet the company has thrived. According to Businessweek, the company plans on expanding internationally, opening outlets in France, Spain, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea over the next five years.

But falling within Wagemark’s 8:1 pay ratio will be a huge challenge for big companies, more so in specific sectors that have a proportionately higher number of low-skilled, lower-paid workers. According to data compiled by Corporate Knights Capital – which looks at CEO compensation relative to a company’s average worker pay (as opposed to an average of the bottom 10 per cent) – the global average ratio is 133:1 and 113:1 for consumer discretionary and consumer staples, respectively.

At 139:1, Costco is above the global average, according to U.S. union federation AFL-CIO. But compared to Walmart, which comes in at 597:1, Costco still looks like a champion of the people. On the other hand, ratios for the high-skilled utilities and health care sectors are 57:1 and 53:1, respectively.

“We completely accept that in different industries it could be more difficult,” says MacLeod. “We’re starting with 8:1, and it’s our hope and intention over the next two years to bring on several thousand organizations. On the issue of how we evolve the standard, it’s a question we’ll have to pose to our membership, so stayed tuned.”

Already, Wagemark is preparing this fall to unveil its Tier 2 certification designed to appeal more to larger companies. The pay ratio standards would range from 9:1 to 30:1 depending on a company’s revenues. The higher the revenues the wider the allowable pay gap.

Small and medium-sized companies, meanwhile, continue to sign up to Wagemark. Mike Clark, co-owner of Bellwoods Brewery, doesn’t see the current standard too much of a burden. As one of the more than 20 companies that have so far joined, the brewery is aiming to have a pay gap of between 3:1 and 4:1 over the next few years. Today, it has 35 employees, but Clark has plans to expand. Complying with Wagemark, he says, shows employees they are being treated fairly and with respect, and helps retain them.

“It just makes me feel so good about the people that I’m working for and the fact that they’re conscious of building a team that’s going to progress together,” says Bellwoods staffer Kristi Porter.

The post Corporate pay pals appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In September last year, some 300 workers died in a garment factory fire in Pakistan, many because they were trapped behind locked emergency exits. Six months later, another 1,100 seamstresses were crushed to death when an eight-storey building collapsed in Bangladesh, despite warnings it was unsafe.

As the multi-trillion-dollar textile industry struggled to respond to these tragedies, the much smaller global toy industry was able to call on a resource no other consumer product industry can match.

In short order, big toy brands and retail members of the International Council of Toy Industries (ICTI) were able to tap into a one-of-a-kind database they have built over the past decade known as the ICTI CARE (Caring, Awareness, Responsible, Ethical) Process (ICP).

The trove of data, which includes wage rates, hours worked, worker age and 200 or so other metrics at thousands of toy factories, allowed big toy buyers to rapidly identify manufacturers located in the areas affected by the recent labour disasters for focused follow-up. Within weeks, industry executives started to develop and roll out tougher rules to all of the factories in the ICP network, guiding inspectors to enforce stricter requirements for fire escapes and building integrity.

The quick response was made possible by a combination of ICP’s carefully cultivated industry collaboration together with a recent decision to port its unique database onto a web-based platform provided by Enablon, a supply-chain software service provider founded in 2000.

“Not long ago, this sort of information was considered proprietary. A single factory might have two dozen clients, but they didn’t want to talk to one another, for fear of competitive disclosure” says Philippe Tesler, co-founder and CEO of Enablon North America.

A combination of factors has rewritten these habits. There’s a growing recognition that risks can be lowered and costs minimized through collaboration. “Reporting has gone from a defensive response to a more proactive process,” says Tesler.

Back in 2002, the toy industry was facing a series of relatively small-scale labour mishaps at overseas factories. “Pressure was building from retailers, from consumers, NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and investors to boost regulation,” recalls Christian Ewert, president and CEO of the ICTI CARE Foundation, which oversees the supply chain program.

Instead, the industry group pushed for self-regulation and established the ICP, a framework in which toymakers would share and compare information towards the end of “ensuring safe and humane workplace environments for toy factory workers worldwide,” says Ewert.

Notably, the ICP was established as a standalone not-for-profit, overseen by a board that includes NGO and civil-sector experts, and on which active toy industry executives are in a minority.

Streamlining inspection efforts has been a central priority from the beginning. When Ewert started in the toy industry in the 1990s, he worked with a manufacturer that faced 64 audits per year, each asking for similar information. “I’d much rather have seen those auditors inspecting 64 different factories, rather than the same factory 64 times,” he says.

The move to Enablon’s platform has helped transform this process from a cumbersome paper chase into a more scalable, easier to use and fast-evolving technology. On a factory floor in China, auditors and factories can input data wirelessly. On the other side of the planet, ICP members can log in and tweak standards on the fly, and do deep data analysis across the factories they are working with.

Today, the system tracks data on roughly 2,500 factories that employ some one million workers. Most are based in China, home to a vast majority of the world’s toymakers. Just 1,600 factories are currently certified as meeting ICP’s criteria. New factories join each year, but year to year about 13 per cent lose their approved status.

The most frequent causes for such a loss? A lack of transparency about whether workers are paid correctly or companies are demanding too many hours of work, says Ewert. Picking up such malpractice early can nip bigger problems in the bud, lowering the risk to corporate reputation.

“Companies don’t want to be named and shamed,” says David Metcalfe, CEO of Verdantix, an independent analyst firm focused on energy, environment and sustainability issues.

Over time, Metcalfe adds, the best employee health and safety plans can evolve to do more than protect workers. They can also proactively improve supply chain operations by identifying potential trouble spots, focusing corrective responses and avoiding the cost and hassle of switching factories following a crisis.

ICP, for example, goes beyond simply tracking auditors’ reports. It reaches out to workers directly. Factories are required to post a hotline to which workers can anonymously phone in problems. The organization receives up to 350 such calls per month. When the software detects a spike in calls from a given factory, ICTI CARE can increase its training efforts with both staff and management, before a crisis breaks.

And if early action doesn’t work, the threat of being de-certified is a potent motivator, says Ewert. After all, it’s not a single buyer pulling out, but the entire ICP network. Ewert is confident the transparency will continue to grow as technology advances.

“Workers can call us today,” he says. “In time, they’ll be able to send pictures of dangerous conditions too,” as smart phones emerge as another tool to help the industry identify and repair risks before they become tragedies.

Click here to view our complete Tech Savvy series.

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The post Top women in sustainability 2013 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Enter the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council (SPLC), launched this past summer. The non-profit’s mission is to provide a space for measuring, guiding and recognizing leadership in sustainable purchasing. One of its greatest strengths, the broad stakeholder representation, also provides one of its greatest challenges: How to prioritize so many different interests? It’s a challenge the council’s interim executive director and members say they’re eager to face.

According to SPLC executive director Jason Pearson, the council’s ambitions within sustainable, institutional purchasing are analogous to the accomplishments of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards established by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

“One of the reasons that USGBC has been successful is that it has identified a place in the marketplace where some very important decisions are made by a relatively small group of people,” says Pearson. “We see the decisions that are being made by the procurement profession as a similar type of decision, a very important decision that once made has significant economic, social and environmental consequences.” By the council’s calculations, institutional purchasing in the U.S. alone accounts for 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The SPLC grew out of an earlier initiative, the Green Product Roundtable, which focused on two questions: What is a green product? And what is a credible green product claim? The results of those discussions became the intellectual framework for the council, which is made up of 33 initial members – 15 institutional purchasers, 11 suppliers and seven advisors.

Pearson says one half of what the council will do is coordinate, support and enhance the activities of its members. Second, it will build resources, including a set of principles for leadership, a global survey of existing resources in the short term, and a rating system expected to be in testing by 2015. Although the council is global in aim, the initial system will focus on North America.

To create these resources, the council will have to prioritize the varied interests of its membership. Pearson says the SPLC will likely identify some broad categories of particular importance. “Some examples that I think are obvious would be electricity purchasing, purchasing of food and food services, construction, fuels – we know that these are very important categories to understand and focus on.”

Pearson uses institutional food purchasing as an example of how prioritization will also need to be done at a sub-category. Some organizations might be inclined to focus on whether food is organic, others on whether it’s local and still others on how much food is being wasted, he says. “The question of what leadership looks like and how much weight you assign to any of those actions – buying organic, buying local, reducing food waste – will be an interesting conversation,” says Pearson. “One that we look forward to, but one that will be challenging to resolve.”

From a seller’s perspective, a major challenge in the past has been what CarbonNeutral’s Mark LaCroix calls the “institutional inertia” of large, bureaucratic organizations. “My hope is that we stop looking at sustainability as this separate department or program and we start integrating it into the lens through which we view the entire business,” says LaCroix. “We offer a service or a product that is, frankly, not well understood,” he says, referring to environmental credits. A typical corporate procurement group, according to LaCroix, won’t know what questions to ask.

“We need help,” agrees Kent Allin, chief procurement officer for the state of Minnesota. “Cleaning products is one example of where you start looking at those environmental labels and your head starts to spin.” Without support, Allin says, “The issues get so complex that the buyers really can’t be experts in all the things they need to know.”

Billy Goldsmith, U.S. national coordinator for Fair Trade, a founding member of and market advisor to the SPLC, describes the council’s challenges as opportunities. “I have not seen a more diverse, yet focused group of stakeholders come together for something like this before,” Goldsmith says. “In my mind, the challenge is really going to be navigating all those opportunities and just figuring out the most strategic steps forward.”

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Having made our way through Lagos’ dingy airport, we were transferred by van to a hostel. As night fell we drove through a seemingly never-ending street market, a sea of Nigerians selling every conceivable thing out of baskets balanced on their heads, carts and mobile stalls. It was my first taste of the so-called Third World. I had never seen humanity on that scale and it was overwhelming.

Living in the West, the population explosion that has taken place in the last century reaches us in the form of numbers. Lagos, 10 million people when I visited it, is now home to 21 million. By 2100, the United Nations expects Nigeria at an estimated 914 million to be the world’s second-largest country after India and before China. The UN’s most recent projection envisions the world population in 2100 at 10.9 billion. That’s the medium variant; the high variant projects 16.6 billion, the lower 8.3 billion, depending on fertility rates, over which demographers bicker endlessly.

It all seems pretty abstract. But as the world’s population, currently at 7.2 billion, continues to grow, we’re becoming more aware of its impact: climate disruption, plant and animal species extinction, land degradation, ocean acidification, the spread of toxic compounds, increased susceptibility to infectious diseases, groundwater depletion and resource wars. It’s a depressing litany for which history offers little consolation; we’re not talking about the rise and fall of a regional civilization, like the Mayan or Egyptian, but the potential collapse of a global one.

Humans are good at denial. We’re also good at blaming others. And as British environmentalist and occasional Corporate Knights contributor George Monbiot points out, the rich white Western men that dominate the population control conversation are more inclined to blast the breeding habits of far-away brown people than to acknowledge the impact of their own overconsumption. The uncomfortable fact is that I, with my trans-Atlantic, first-worldly existence, will have consumed a whole lot more of the world’s resources in the last 20 years than probably all the yam vendors on that street market combined. In fact, Paul Murtaugh, statistical ecologist at Oregon State University, estimates that an American born today will produce a carbon footprint 86 times that of a Nigerian down the generations.

This fact can’t be taken to condone population growth in the developing world, providing it remains poor. Population-curbing support to the developing world is indeed worthwhile but it won’t solve the problem of overpopulation, let alone begin to address the arguably more egregious one of overconsumption. Begging the question of what, if anything, will.

Humankind is not grappling with this problem for the first time. Ever since populations began blossoming in the Industrial Revolution, cautionary voices have been raised. Writing in 1798, Reverend Thomas Malthus predicted that with human numbers increasing exponentially and food supply growing arithmetically, mankind was headed for a catastrophic crunch. Being a man of the cloth, Malthus’ recommendations were of a moral nature – abstinence and delayed marriage – but his morality did not extend to the poor or “defective” whose reproduction he thought should be forcibly prevented. Otherwise and less desirably, Malthus believed that war, disease or starvation would take care of the overpopulation problem.

While the Malthusian catastrophe was averted by advances in agriculture and birth control and his thinking subsequently roundly denounced for its pessimism and inhumanity, the notion that the unwashed masses threaten the well-being of the rich has proven remarkably tenacious. And his basic tenet, that human population will ultimately outstrip global resources, has gained currency with time. During the postwar boom of the last century as the world’s population growth peaked, reaching a 2.2 per cent annual increase in 1963, the World Bank, UN and major American philanthropic foundations made population control in the Third World top priority, more or less deaf to calls that what was needed as much as contraception was development aid aimed at reducing poverty and child mortality and improvements in women’s health and education. Soon developing countries were taking matters into their own hands. When Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in 1975, her son and advisor Sanjay implemented a sterilization program – initially voluntary and then forced – in which over eight million Indian men are said to have been snipped. In 1978, China introduced its one-child policy, which was only eliminated fully last month. It was credited by the Chinese government with having prevented the births of 400 million people.

The extent to which these measures kept the numbers down is debatable. Many, including Karan Singh, India’s health minister under Gandhi, maintain that it was advances in development more than sterilization and abortions that put Indian population growth in check – consider the difference between fertility rates in developed southern states like Kerala (1.6 children born per woman) versus impoverished northern ones like Bihar (3.4). Likewise, demographers of China will point out that fertility rates were already in decline when the one-child policy was introduced, and that with urbanization and poverty reduction, the population was bound to drop.

Not only is their efficacy questionable, such coercive measures cause collateral damage. The selective abortion of girls which has drastically skewed China’s gender balance, the notorious abuse of power by local bureaucrats trying to fill quotas or their own pockets by kidnapping and selling “illegal” children for international adoption – all these offend Western (Christian, human rights, feminist, democratic) sensibilities to the point that even today’s most vehement population control advocates won’t defend them.

India’s health minister maintains it was advances in development more than sterilization and abortions that put Indian population growth in check.

American ecologist Paul Ehrlich, for instance, who in the 1960s supported certain forms of coercion, including suspending food aid to countries deemed “hopeless,” now talks less about adding sterilants to drinking water than about empowering women and reversing wealthy countries’ tax systems so that additional children cost more. A biologist and butterfly specialist at Stanford University, Ehrlich is in no way anti-life. But he fears the worst and, within a generation, his concerns have migrated from the margins to the mainstream.

In his 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb, Ehrlich predicted that global overpopulation was going to cause imminent catastrophe in the form of widespread disease, famine and/or war. His critics don’t tire of reminding him that none of this came to pass. But as with Malthus, Ehrlich’s prognosis was followed by something of a miracle – the Green Revolution – in which agricultural yields and thus food supply were dramatically increased particularly to those parts of the world that needed it most.

But even Norman Borlaug, the so-called father of the Green Revolution, described these gains as “bought time” and took his 1970 Nobel Lecture as an opportunity to warn of the ongoing “magnitude and menace of ‘the Population Monster’.” Today, with 852 million people suffering chronic malnourishment, the vast majority in developing countries, Borlaug’s concerns have been validated.

It’s unlikely that the world is going to be blessed with another miracle. In fact, as Alan Weisman points out in his just-published Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?, the next two billion people are going to have a more devastating impact on the planet than the last two billion did, as we scrape the bottom of various resource barrels. Modern-day cornucopians and free-market environmentalists who claim that technological advances will continue to support unfettered consumption of energy, food and stuff sound like increasingly deranged voices in a rather barren wilderness. Carbon capture, ethanol, genetically modified organisms, space colonization – none of these advances, if that’s what they are, are going to rescue us from ourselves. We are faced with the most inconvenient truth that we might actually have to change our own habits.

Is it too late, or as a paper Ehrlich recently presented to the Royal Society in London cheerily asked: “Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?” Despite a grim collective assessment of the current state of affairs – Prince Charles calls humankind’s current behaviour an “act of suicide on a grand scale” – Ehrlich and others find reason for hope.

For one thing, population growth rates are steadily dropping. In the last 60 years, women have gone from having an average of 6 to 2.5 children. Population numbers will continue to increase as the postwar bulge works its way through the system, but fertility rates continue to fall. The burgeoning middle classes in China, India and Africa – increasingly educated and urbanized – are having fewer children than their foremothers. And they’re not behaving as badly as we sometimes claim; in 2012, China committed to put a quarter of its land mass under ecosystem protection.

Furthermore, Ehrlich applauds Europe’s negative population growth and calls on wealthy countries to dispense with early retirement and to plan for rather than bemoan their aging populations. “It’s easier for a 70 year old to be economically productive than a 7 year old,” the 81-year old professor said in a recent phone conversation from California, before jumping on a plane to Australia and New Zealand for lectures, conferences and field work.

The biggest challenge, Ehrlich believes, is to wean the economic system off its addiction to growth. Steady-state economic systems have to be designed and, trickier, sold to a consumer-driven public. Ehrlich makes a plea for a culture of “foresight intelligence” which would eclipse short-term selfishness, enabling people to pay a price today for benefits that will accrue to others tomorrow. Too bad that can’t be sprinkled in the drinking water.

According to Sara Parkin, a further challenge is the male domination of the population debate. The former British Green and founder of the sustainability charity Forum for the Future has observed in her careers as both nurse and politician that men simply can’t talk about sex. They prefer calling for “chalk boards and dollar bills” than anything to do with the reproductive act. While for Parkin, the key lies in contraception.

“Look at Cleopatra,” Parkin exclaims. “She saw half an orange and thought womb cup.” Perfectly shaped and acidic to boot.

Parkin would love to debunk the myth that poor women want lots of children. Poor women are acutely aware of mouths to feed; they simply want children that survive to adulthood. She believes that if women have constant access to contraception – not predicated on roads that wash out, refrigeration that fails and spouses that won’t comply, as is still the case in much of the world – global population could be brought down to the UN’s lowest projection trajectory by 2100.

Honking our way through that chaotic Lagosian street market 20 years ago, I remember thinking of my grandmother, who had fretted about my going to Nigeria. For her, the place was a something of a black hole. A fan of Silent Spring author Rachel Carson, she kept a huge garden at her home in the countryside outside of Hamilton, Ontario, where a rainbow sticker on the front door reassured visitors: “You are entering a nuclear-free zone.”

Every generation has its challenges. My grandmother had six children, but none of her 13 grandchildren have had more than three. In fact, most of my cousins, in their 30s and 40s, are childless. And there hasn’t been nuclear war.

No doubt, with enlightened (and maybe a little more female) leadership, global population can be kept under control, too.

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