The EPA’s page explaining the causes of climate change now focuses on how “natural processes,” like variations in Earth’s orbit and in solar activity, influence the climate.

“Human causes are not even on the list, which is simply misinformation. It’s false,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. “And moreover, it’s clearly deliberate, because a week ago, that page correctly reflected the scientific understanding of climate change.”

At least 80 pages related to climate change vanished from the EPA’s site in early December. It’s one of the most far-reaching removals of climate change information from government websites since President Donald Trump took office in January. “Up till now, we really had not seen hardly any changes on EPA pages,” says Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.

While important resources have already disappeared from other government sites – including the National Climate Assessments, a series of congressionally mandated climate reports translated for public consumption – many of the previous changes were language swaps, replacing “climate change” with more innocuous phrases like “future conditions” or “extreme weather.” The EPA’s most recent overhaul represents a more radical rejection of mainstream science.

“Yes, there’s been climate information coming down, but so far it hasn’t actually necessarily been the nuts-and-bolts climate science information,” Swain says. “This is pretty fundamental physical science.” The resources on the EPA’s site were used by teachers, businesses, and local and tribal governments, as well as the public, since they translated the jargon-filled language of scientific reports into something more useful and accessible.

For example, the agency deleted a resource explaining the signals of a warming world – everything from rising temperatures and melting ice sheets to the damage toll on wildlife and human health – with more than 100 charts and maps. Also gone is a website quantifying the physical and economic risks. The effect is to isolate climate change from the issues that affect people’s lives, Gehrke says: “It’s specifically targeting the information about why we should care.”

In response to questions about why the EPA’s climate change resources were removed, the agency said it was upholding “gold-standard science.”

“Unlike the previous administration, the Trump EPA is focused on protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback, not left-wing political agendas,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement. “As such, this agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult.”

Swain says the changes could be a way for the EPA to bring its public-facing information in line with the proposal to reverse the agency’s own “endangerment finding,” the scientific basis that allows the EPA to regulate carbon emissions. The agency is expected to finalize the repeal soon, in what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has promised to be “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”

Mark Carney trades climate allies for controversial oil-patch solutions

The post The Trump administration has purged climate change data from the EPA website appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Five environmental groups and one farmer’s union are working together to dissuade Health Canada from approving a new systemic pesticide that could prove harmful to bees, birds, small mammals and other organisms. The pesticide, called flupyradifurone, attacks the nervous systems of insects and has the potential to contaminate pollen, fruits and seeds of plants. Bees and other pollinators, for one, are already having a hard time coping with the effects of neonicotinoids, which is widely believed to be a major cause of mass bee die-offs. “Scientists have called for a global phase-out of neonics. The last thing we need is another systemic pesticide contaminating the environment,” said Karen Eatwell, a spokesperson for the National Farmers Union. Health Canada has initiated a public comment period on its proposed approval of the new pesticide, says the group, which includes the Sierra Club Canada Foundation and the David Suzuki Foundation. Comments are being received up to November 3.

32 countries at “extreme” risk of conflict

An analysis of 198 countries has identified 32 nations that are most likely to experience conflict and civil unrest as a result of climate change. Bangladesh was found to be the most at-risk country in the world, followed by Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Nigeria and Chad, as well as island nations the Philippines and Haiti. Perhaps even more alarming is that growth economies like Cambodia, India and Pakistan are also on the “extreme risk” list, raising an important question about how much climate change could destabilize our increasingly globalized economy. Maplecroft, the analytics company that produced the report, said that one unifying characteristic of all these economies is their heavy dependence on agriculture for job creation and growth. “Changing weather patterns are already impacting food production, poverty, migration and social stability – factors that significantly increase the risk of conflicts and instability in fragile and emerging states alike.”

85,000 buildings in NYC flood zones: Report

You can bet insurance companies are taking note of this one. A policy brief released this week from the Office of the New York City Comptroller has determined that 84,596 buildings and 400,000 residents in NYC now lie within the so-called 100-year flood plain thanks to the rising effects climate change. The building count more than triples the previous estimate from 2010 and represents property value of nearly $130 billion, according to the analysis. The new estimate came about because of the $14 billion in devastation caused two years ago by Hurricane Sandy. “With such immense value arrayed along the city’s coast, we must act now to make the necessary investments to protect our homes, our businesses and our neighborhoods from the future effects of climate change and the potentially destructive force of another hurricane,” the brief states. “While the costs of resiliency projects are high, investing in the city’s future will pay enormous dividends, both to our waterfront communities and our broader economy.” The brief follows a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists that urges eastern and Gulf coast communities to prepare for chronic flooding over the next 15 and 30 years. To assist with adaptation, New Jersey just launched its Energy Resilience Bank, also in response to Hurricane Sandy. The bank will spend $200 million (U.S.) toward development of distributed energy resources at critical facilities so they can stay operational during outages caused by extreme weather. As Corporate Knights’ Ashley Renders reported today, Canada isn’t immune to the expected rise in flooding events. Unfortunately, it is the only country in the G8 without overland flood insurance.

Climate depression… It’s real

If all of this news about flooding and conflict is getting you down, you’re not alone. Madeleine Thomas at Grist.org wrote an insightful piece this week pointing to the struggle some climate scientists, environmentalists, and other “frontliners” are having with anxiety and depression as a result of climate research. “From depression to substance abuse to suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder, growing bodies of research in the relatively new field of psychology of global warming suggest that climate change will take a pretty heavy toll on the human psyche as storms become more destructive and droughts more prolonged,” wrote Thomas. “For your everyday environmentalist, the emotional stress suffered by a rapidly changing Earth can result in some pretty substantial anxieties.” Corporate Knights had a story on this important but underreported issue in our Summer 2014 magazine. Two years earlier, we ran a feature looking at the impacts of climate change on the mental health of employees working at companies perceived to be contributing to or solving the problem.

Tall travellers of the world unite!

The problem tall people have sitting in airplane seats isn’t really comparable to climate change, but it can cause considerable stress and discomfort – particularly for long flights, and when the person sitting in front insists on permanently reclining their own seat. As The Economist’s business travel blog wrote this week, “Spending three hours wedged into a seat that cannot physically accommodate your legs may not technically qualify as medieval torture, but it’s a close call.” The blog points to the fact that many airlines now accommodate extra-large – that is, heavier – passengers by finding them a complimentary second seat that allows them to spread out. So, it asks, why not adopt the same policy, official or otherwise, for tall people? It’s a reasonable suggestion, and such a call for civility would only be fair. After all, tall travellers have a proud history of helping their shorter peers get their luggage into and out of overhead compartments. But as one of Corporate Knights’ Twitter followers replied, “KLM would go out of business” with such a policy. True, those Dutch folks are pretty tall. But we love them just the same.

The post Time to talk about the birds and the bees appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Use of “coffin nails,” as they’re sometime called because of their known contribution to lung and heart disease, is even on the decline within the companies that make them. Just this week, cigarette maker Reynolds American, the second-largest tobacco company in the United States, told its employees they can no longer smoke at work. The company said the new policy was “the right thing to do.”

The trend may be positive for our collective wellbeing, but it has left North American tobacco growers scrambling to find new markets and uses for their crops. Part of the answer, according to one Canadian company, is not what you’d expect: using tobacco plants to help fight the spread of the Ebola virus.

According to one report, health agencies in Canada and the United States have asked Guelph, Ontario-based Plantform to develop preventative vaccines for Ebola strains by genetically engineering tobacco plants. The company’s use of tobacco plants as a living pharmaceutical factory isn’t limited to Ebola. Plantform is also using the plant to make drugs for treating breast cancer, protecting against nerve agents, and fighting HIV/AIDS.

Tobacco plants are known for having unique properties. For example, when bugs land or crawl on a plant its leaves release chemicals that paralyze and kill parasitic insects. For Plantform, tobacco plants are ideal because they grow fast. On its website, the company says it can produce its plant-based vaccine or other drugs in as little as eight weeks, and at a fraction of the cost of using cells from animals or bacteria.

Indeed, even Reynolds American is getting into the business. Its subsidiary, Kentucky BioProcessing LLC, is working with San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical on a tobacco-derived drug for treating Ebola, using a cocktail of antibodies developed at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory and licensed to Toronto-based Defyrus.

That experimental drug, called ZMapp, was given to Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, two aid workers who became infected by the virus this summer while in Liberia. Both have made a full recovery, which is probably encouraging to the doctor in New York City who reportedly tested positive Thursday for Ebola.

On its own, it’s a good news story. But the plant-derived Ebola treatment is symbolic of a new area of science that isn’t immune to controversy. Its critics consider it the antithesis of sustainability, while proponents paint it as a more sustainable path to drug development in a growing world filled with pain and poverty.

Health and Social Benefits

Manipulating plants to produce pharmaceutical compounds is a relatively new technique called plant molecular farming, and the results of early experimentation date back about 25 years. More colloquially, the practice is referred to as “pharming” – and it’s not limited to tobacco. Corn, rice, canola, alfalfa, safflower, tomatoes, and potatoes have all been used in laboratory settings as hosts in drug production, tackling everything from cystic fibrosis to tooth decay.

In essence, scientists isolate or synthesize a specific gene that creates certain proteins, such as those in insulin. This DNA is then inserted into a seedling plant, which as it grows creates the proteins as if it were their own. The plants can also be modified so that the target proteins become concentrated in leaves or seeds. The leaves, for example, can sometimes be dried and taken orally, or the proteins can be extracted, refined and used in the production of pills or liquids that can be injected.

In 2012, the first plant-derived drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for human consumption was produced from carrots, which were genetically modified to carry an enzyme that alleviates painful symptoms related to Gaucher disease.

Plant pharming not only allows for faster turnaround of vaccines and other drugs. Biotech companies are lured to its promise because the process is relatively low-tech and, as a result, much less expensive. It doesn’t require the costly and complex bioreactor vessels typically used when working with bacteria and yeast.

This holds great promise for the research of pharmaceutical products for illnesses that, because they are so rare, don’t represent an attractive market for drug developers. The potential for lower-cost manufacturing of drugs would also benefit poorer countries that lack affordable access to medicines and vaccines.

It’s also easy to scale production up or down as demand requires. “It has been estimated that 250 acres of greenhouse space would be sufficient to meet all of South Asia’s requirements for hepatitis B virus vaccine,” according to the Pharming the Future research project, conducted through the University of Calgary. A 2011 study from microbiology researchers at the University of Central Florida contended that an “acre of tobacco could yield up to 20 million daily doses of insulin per year.”

Finally, in the case of vaccines and other temperature-sensitive drugs, the end product can often be in the form of a freeze-dried, edible plant that doesn’t require refrigeration. Its natural “packaging” can be in the form of seeds and fruit, not capsules or vials. The fact it can be stored without needing to be kept cold is a huge benefit in the developing world where electricity is unreliable or non-existent.

Environmental Question Mark

When it comes to genetically modifying any organism, however, there’s always a tradeoff that many are not willing to make. We’re stuck with an enduring question with no easy or obvious answer: Do we take advantage of fairly certain social gains, such as better access to medicine and potentially more affordable drugs, knowing there are environmental and health uncertainties we may regret over the medium and long term? Do we accept what risks exists or fall back on the precautionary principle, as Europeans have when it comes to genetically modified foods?

The controversy came to a head in 2002 when it was revealed that a corn crop engineered to make a protein for a pig vaccine was plowed into the soil, which was used a year later to plant 500,000 bushels of food-grade soybeans. The soybeans became contaminated, and while the problem was discovered before it could affect food supply, it still fed the fury of environmental and food-industry groups strongly opposed to pharming.

Friends of Earth accused the U.S. Department of Agriculture of “endangering the U.S. food supply.” The Grocery Manufacturers of America warned there was “no room for trial and error.” A consumer, environmental and farmer coalition ended up suing the government, calling its subsequent attempts to strengthen regulation too weak and ineffective.

The biotech industry didn’t think so. The new rules proved too heavy-handed – many clinical trials were discontinued and startups working in the area collapsed. “That ended most entrepreneurial interest in biopharming,” Henry Miller, a molecular biologist and fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote in a recent column on Forbes.com. It created a chill north of the border, too. To this day, pharming still hasn’t been approved in Canada on a commercial scale, though more tightly controlled research trials have been permitted in recent years.

The risk to food-grade crops was and is real, and potentially serious. But Miller dismissed this fear as “overblown” and easy to avoid with certain measures. “Production in a non-food crop is an obvious one,” he wrote, pointing out that one developer of a Norwalk virus vaccine used tomatoes at first but then switched to tobacco plants to avoid tussling with regulators and environmentalists.

“The risk of plant-made drugs getting into food products is now virtually non-existent because the companies involved have switched to production in facilities with rigidly controlled environments, using mainly tobacco,” Miller added.

The move toward highly controlled facilities, such as greenhouses and labs, is crucial. The use of open-air fields doesn’t just risk contamination of nearby food or animal feed crops through the spread of pollen and seeds, it also threatens wildlife or livestock that might be grazing in the area. It could also harm or negatively alter organisms that live in the soil, not to mention pollinating and plant-eating insects – and it’s not like bees and butterflies don’t have enough problems with which to deal, such as insecticides sprayed on “normal crops.”

“Compounds from plants developed for plant molecular farming purposes may have physiological effects on humans and other organisms,” warns the Canadian Food Inspection Agency on its website. And while research so far shows no significant behaviourial and reproductive impacts on the pollinators and other organisms that have been studied, it’s still early days. The Canadian government will eventually allow commercial pharming – it seems all but inevitable – but currently it will only say it is “investigating policy options.”

A Net Gain?

Nuclear power. Genetically modified food production. Manipulation of algae to create biofuels. All carry risks. It comes down to what risks we are willing to accept in exchange for the known benefits, such as preventing an Ebola pandemic. It also comes down to the trust we have in the people in charge of limiting those risks.

Clearly, much can be done to minimize any health or environmental threats posed by plant-derived pharmaceutical production. Crops can be grown in specially constructed greenhouses that prevent entry by rodents and insects and stop pollen and seeds from escaping. Such structures can have air-lock entry systems for workers, who can be made to wear protective suits and required to shower down when departing.

There has even been talk of building these facilities in underground caverns and mines, and work has been done to grow sterile plants that can’t reproduce, even if seeds somehow enter wild fields or the food system.

As environmental journalist and Cornell University fellow Mark Lynas once wrote, “this application of modern technology to agriculture need not be remotely scary.”

Some precaution and good old common sense can go a long way. But like the GMO controversy generally, the debate seems destined to continue indefinitely. When it comes to pharming specifically, crisis is what will likely drive us – in one direction or the other.

The post Can “pharming” be sustainable? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Corporate Knights recently caught up with Lynas during his recent visit to Toronto to speak with Ontario farmers. In a wide-ranging interview, he spoke of the anti-GMO movement, the ongoing battle over labelling requirements for GM foods, and some promising public-sector GM projects in the works.

CK: Tell us about your transformation from GMO opponent to supporter.

LYNAS: I was one of a large group of people involved in the early stages of the anti-GMO movement, but was certainly neither the most vocal nor the most effective. That being said, I’m really the only one that’s discovered science, to put it simplistically, and come out and talked about it. So I’m in a unique position of being somebody who’s publicly reversed their position on this – and that’s brought me a lot of attention, some of it welcome and some of it unwelcome.

CK: Why is it that many environmentalists place so much trust in science when it comes to climate change or loss of biodiversity, but these standards change once GM crops come up?

LYNAS: Anti-GMO people have been described as the climate skeptics of the left. Although that’s a simplification of the issue, it illustrates that what we’re talking about is a political issue. Climate skeptics (on the right) tend to be anti-big government. They’re against climate science because it will almost certainly require government intervention into the economy, while anti-GMO people are against the involvement of big corporations like Monsanto. They’re against biotechnology because it appears to only privilege big corporations. Now neither of these two positions is evidence-based, but the problem is that people find their information through the process of confirmation bias to justify pre-existing positions.

CK: Opponents of GMOs tend to focus on corporations like Monsanto being very litigious and protective of their seeds, at the expense of smaller farmers. Is that your thinking?

LYNAS: Monsanto did sue various farmers, and there have been numerous cause celebre like Percy Schmeiser. The question is, if all these GMO crops had blown into his field, how come they were in such neat rows? He clearly wanted to use the technology without paying for it. The reality is, if you contaminate someone’s property, you can’t sue them for property theft. The whole charge is absurd and wouldn’t stand up in court. Monsanto’s never taken out a case that’s alleged that, but that myth is persistent and still very powerful.

In hindsight, it’s clear that Monsanto should have refrained from suing anybody to avoid developing such an image problem. Even so, they felt the need to protect their intellectual property (IP) from farmers who wanted to save their seed and basically steal their IP. Farmers who use it have to sign an agreement that they won’t save the seed. It’s a biologically self-replicating technology.

Now if you’re concerned about IP and the patenting of crops, for me the logical corollary is to promote the development of GMOs in the public sector. I’ve been working with Cornell University, where I’m a visiting fellow, on a new project regarding Bt Brinjal, a GM eggplant that is pest-resistant in Bangladesh. Farmers there are currently spraying toxic insecticides without any kind of protection, often wearing nothing more than flip-flops. They spray it a hundred times a year during growing season, which leads to tens of thousands of poisonings annually. The GMO version would not need to be sprayed. It would be a vast improvement both environmentally and in terms of public health. The use of genetic modification, done in the public sector by a consortium of international and Bangladeshi scientists, has nothing to do with Monsanto.

I can’t say this enough: if you’re concerned about corporate monopolization, you don’t try and ban an entire technology in response. Back in the day, if you were concerned about Windows being a monopolistic approach to an operating system you didn’t try to ban all computers. What you want to do instead is to make the technology more available in the public sector, in a non-IP protected way, for the benefit of the poorer farmers. For me, that is way more interesting because there are so many applications, from golden rice to Brinjal, where GMOs can promote food security and the sustainability of agriculture.

CK: You mentioned golden rice. Can you discuss the controversy around it?

LYNAS: Golden rice is a single, targeted approach to tackling vitamin A deficiency, which kills two million or so children per year. Millions of families are dependent on rice for their staple food, so if there was beta-carotene in that rice it would reduce that deficiency and save a number of lives.

The opposition to golden rice is internationally supported. There’s this mentality in the west that promoting agro-ecological organic farming is the way to go for poorer countries, but the reality is that it confines farmers to a form of very low productivity farming. If they’re at subsistence level, they are currently struggling to feed themselves and their families. So you’re actually promoting food insecurity by externalizing the urban foodie biases of the modern world onto developing countries where they need to increase their productivity.

CK: Battles have sprung up in a number of individual states across the United States over proposals to mandate labelling on all food grown using GMOs. What’s your position on this?

LYNAS: This is where I get very critical of the biotech industry, because I think their strategies have been entirely counterproductive. Effectively spending millions of dollars trying to stop consumers from knowing where their products are being used is essentially the opposite of advertising. That’s tailor-made to make people feel scared about something, if it looks like there is an effort to cover up what the ingredients are in their food.

The way to dispel some of this mythology and fear mongering is to give people access to information. Opponents want a big GMO label because they want to stigmatize the product and get it off the shelves. They’re into prohibition, but there’s got to be some kind of middle road where we can actually give people the information that they want without the skull and crossbones stigmatization attached to it. You have to give people the option of finding out what’s in their food. Transparency should be the friend of science on this. If you don’t fill the void, the void will be filled by the conspiracy theorists. Let’s have farmers explain why they’re using GMO crops, and scientists demonstrate why they’re continuing to develop them. If you’re Monsanto and you want to explain why it’s beneficial for farmers to use this, you can if it’s labelled. You can’t if it’s hidden.

CK: What are the biggest barriers to the sort of open-source GMO research you’re advocating for?

LYNAS: Currently, it costs tens of millions of dollars in the United States to get through a regulatory system that is only applied to GMOs, but not any other form of crop breeding. In the U.S. and Europe, the only players that can navigate the system are the very biggest players, so the activists have created a situation where only corporations can afford to commercialize biotech crops. In the U.K. we’ve got Rothamsted Research and the John Innes Centre doing fantastic GM crop research. They’ve looked at aphid-resistant wheat, which wouldn’t need to be sprayed with agrochemicals. Can they get that through the European Union system? No way. So farmers are effectively banned from being able to access this technology. That’s the real stumbling block.

CK: Some GMO opponents have accused you of being an industry stooge. How do you respond to these accusations?

LYNAS: I’m a shill for science, I’m not a voice for hire. No one’s ever tried to buy me. It’s a classic ad hominem technique – if you can’t discredit someone’s argument then you try to discredit them personally.

CK: Some people have even drawn comparisons to Greenpeace activist turned industry consultant Patrick Moore…

LYNAS: For me, he’s a model of what to not end up as, because the only asset you have in my position is your independence, your credibility.

The post Open-source GM crops? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Rand makes clear he doesn’t think we have to boil to death. “The good news is that we can solve the climate problem,” he writes. “The capital we need sits in our pension funds and money markets, the policy tools to unlock it are well understood and emerging innovations are fully capable of powering our civilization.”

Yet the fossil fuel party keeps rockin’ in the face of the risks, challenges and opportunities. The vested interests, the captains of industry, the politicians are all “paid very well to continue doing what they do.” They hire pseudo-experts to confuse and deny. They claim change is natural and we have nothing to do with it. They claim that it is simple fraud. They claim that other issues should have priority.

Rand explains why people so easily “rest blissfully in denial.” He distinguishes between “active” and “passive” deniers. Active deniers, he explains, are those who don’t actually believe what they are saying when they go on about it all being a left-wing plot to create a new world government. Passive deniers are similar to those who lived through the cold war years – they suffer from the “psychic numbing” of living under the constant threat of nuclear destruction, so they simply put the issue out of their minds.

“There are lots of reasons for passive denial,” he writes. “It’s not unreasonable. We may feel powerless or overwhelmed. We might want to avoid feelings of guilt. We are afraid of what it means for our children.”

Rand proposes a way to change the conversation and suggests that we take advantage of our cognitive biases, put on a happy face, and promote “a brave new world of clean energy abundance and sustainable economic growth.” The trouble is, everyone kind of likes things the way they are, with their cars and their granite counters their plane flights. Party on. But as notes, “The best parties are often followed by the worst hangovers, and the fossil fuel party has been a great one.”

Indeed it has. Unfortunately, we keep doing everything we can to postpone that hangover, thanks to hair-of-the-dog innovations like fracking and arctic drilling aimed at squeezing those last bits of hydrocarbons out of rocks and seabeds. Yet Rand says we have to cut our carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2030. “It’s a massive affair. Replacing it in a generation – which we must do if we are to avoid catastrophic climate disruption – is daunting.” To do so, he proposes an energy moon shot – “a publicly directed new low-carbon energy mission that unlocks the engineering, industrial and financial might of the global market economy.”

It’s a huge job, writes Rand. Indeed, it’s much more ambitious in scope than the original moon shot. “The energy moon shot is a multi-stakeholder effort. Everyone rows in the same direction. Science sets the goal. Government provides the right policy support. Industry’s job is to get us there, not obfuscate the science or lobby against the policy. Industrialists, financiers, and captains of industry contribute to the debate and start by saying, ‘We get it, we’re on it.’”

This 21st century moon shot would include a serious carbon tax, next-generation nuclear (breeder reactors), carbon capture and enhanced geothermal systems that tap the heat of the earth 10 kilometres down. That’s big stuff requiring big engineering, reflecting Rand’s own bias as an optimistic engineer.

Then there is the low hanging fruit that you pick by fixing buildings. Rand did it himself with his own Planet Traveller hotel in Toronto, cutting its carbon footprint by three-quarters. The irony here is that having a planet of travellers comes with a much larger carbon footprint, and as Rand writes, “we’ll never go without long distance air travel… it’s part of the glue that makes us a global community.”

So we’re left with the belief that we can all live in a brave new world, all row in the same direction, and at the same time we can get captains of industry to say “we’re on it!” Rand is truly convinced we can avoid the hangover.

But the unanswered question remains: Will we?

The post Waking the frog appeared first on Corporate Knights.

And so it was the latter late Tuesday, when the Government of Canada gave its conditional green light to Enbridge’s controversial Northern Gateway Pipeline project, which will carry oil sands crude from Alberta to a marine terminal in Kitimat, B.C., where supertankers will carry it to Asia.

There were some strings attached, namely the 209 conditions recommended in December by a Joint Review Panel established by the Minister of the Environment and National Energy Board. The panel’s “rigorous science-based review” concluded that the project was in the public interest – that the benefits outweighed the costs, be they catastrophic oil spills or other serious environmental harms.

And who can argue with the science? Even more, who’s going to argue with rigorous science? (Though just how rigorous the panel review was is a matter of intense disagreement).

In case you didn’t know, Stephen Harper loves science – when it serves his agenda. Late last month, during an interview with the CBC about the importance of vaccinations, Harper rightly spoke out against those who “go off on their own theories and not listen to the scientific evidence.”

“Don’t indulge your theories,” Harper said. “Think of your children,” he appealed. “Listen to the experts,” he lectured, with Melinda Gates of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation nodding in agreement by his side.

If only Harper spoke in such terms and with such conviction when addressing climate change. Is it an indulged theory when 97 per cent of peer-reviewed global warming studies published between 1991 and 2011 acknowledge climate change as a human-caused crisis?

Should we not think of our children when we make economically motivated decisions today that will contribute to negative environmental, health and economic outcomes tomorrow? And should we not listen to those experts – trained climate scientists and public health officials – when they warn us, in an increasingly vocal way, about the implications of those decisions?

As Corporate Knights reported in its most recent issue, climate change is already bringing more extreme weather and new diseases to Canadian communities, and public health officials are worried that healthcare institutions and workers aren’t prepared for it.

And we’re not just talking physical health. The psychological toll, in the form of anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses, is currently poorly understood but expected to grow. This will have a serious impact on worker productivity.

“Some of these health impacts are already underway,” warned an 800-page report released by the White House last month as part of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. “As threats increase, our ability to adapt to future changes may be limited.”

And who’s behind this report? Only 300 experts with oversight, in part, by the National Academy of Sciences. A group worth listening to? We had a group like that. It was called the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy. Harper killed it when he didn’t like what they were saying.

That the government has chosen to give little weight to, if not completely ignore, such climate science is bound to backfire.

“It’s official,” said Grand Chief Stewart Phillip shortly after the Northern Gateway approval was announced. “The war is on.”

Ben West of ForestEthics Advocacy said Harper will “regret” trying to push such a politically toxic project through British Columbia, particularly with a 2015 election just around the corner.

“There will be court cases, and if it comes to it, peaceful civil disobedience, as over 20,000 people have pledged to work with First Nations to stop this project,” said Greenpeace Canada spokesman Mike Hudema.

Author and environmental Tzeporah Berman, who helped spearhead clearcut logging protests in B.C.’s Clayoquot Sound in 1993 – then the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history – said Northern Gateway protests will be much bigger.

Cellphones, the Internet, social networking – such technology just didn’t exist the way it does today. Northern Gateway, said Berman on Twitter, “will make Clayoquot look like a walk in the park.”

Both government opposition parties, meanwhile, vowed they would scrap the project if elected.

Despite the Harper government’s approval Tuesday, many say it’s doubtful the project will ever get built. The number of conditions placed on the approval, said Environmental Defence’s Tim Gray, “is as good as a no.”

The post Stephen Harper loves science appeared first on Corporate Knights.

To help cut cement’s supersized carbon footprint, Halifax, Nova Scotia-based startup CarbonCure Technologies is tinkering with the age-old recipe for how cement cures into concrete, its final rock-like form. The company’s answer: carbonated cement.

“Every day millions of tonnes of concrete is produced globally,” says Robert Niven, chief executive and founder. “Every tonne is a lost opportunity to sequester carbon dioxide.”

Devising greener concrete is no easy task, in part because the recipe is deceptively simple and has proven to be such a remarkably good building material for so long.

It is, quite literally, the stuff from which civilization has been built. Today’s cement traces back to formulations first used 7,000 years ago. Some Roman-era structures, such as the domed Pantheon, are as sturdy today as when they were erected two millennia ago.

Today’s megastructures are likewise possible only because of concrete’s peculiar mix of performance and affordability, from the biggest dams to our tallest towers.

The problem? The manufacturing of cement emits 5 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases, on par with about half of all emissions from car, truck and other road transport. Among industrial sources of CO2, the industry trails only the much larger petrochemicals sector.

Making cement emits roughly equal shares of CO2 at two stages: first, from the fuel used to heat a mix of limestone and traces of other minerals to 1,450 degrees Celsius; and second, from the resulting chemical reaction, where limestone breaks down into lime, giving up nearly half its mass as CO2.

Unless better recipes are devised, emissions will keep growing. A building binge across the developing world is expected to more than double global cement production this decade, according to the Carbon War Room, a London-based think tank.

CarbonCure is tackling that problem by focusing on how cement cures into concrete. The company’s proprietary process injects anthropogenic CO2 – captured from big industrial sources such as natural gas reformers – into the mix as concrete is being formed into an array of masonry products, including blocks and pavers.

As the CO2 percolates through the mix, it triggers a chemical reaction, remaking microscopic bits of limestone in the concrete matrix, permanently locking the gas into a rock-like structure. The resulting concrete block is not only greener; it turns out stronger than the standard stuff.

The carbon savings can stack up quickly. As a rule of thumb, every standard concrete block made using CarbonCure’s recipe sequesters around 30 grams of CO2. Thus, some 3,000 of them can lock up as much CO2 as a mature tree does in a single year.

The first U.S. structure to be built with CarbonCure’s green blocks was completed at the University of California, Davis in the spring. Exterior walls of the Jess S. Jackson Sustainable Winery Building, a one-storey, 8,500-square-foot research facility, were built with more than 2,500 specially manufactured blocks made by Basalite Concrete Products, based in Dixon, California. The result, says Niven, is the lowest-carbon concrete-block wall ever built in the U.S.

CarbonCure is currently working with four partners in North America that are producing its low-carbon blocks, pavers and other masonry products. Atlas Block, a major Canadian concrete manufacturer, is in negotiation to supply the low-carbon blocks for several sports complexes being built for the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto. “This is easily the most exciting technological improvement I’ve seen in years,” says Atlas chief executive Don Gordon.

Another dozen partners are in the pipeline, says Niven. In time, he hopes to expand the company’s reach to China – where more than half of the world’s concrete is currently being produced – and other global markets.

He also hopes to see CarbonCure move beyond masonry to apply its process to larger precast structures and ready-mix, the wet slurry of concrete and aggregate delivered in big mixing trucks.

Given that roughly 12 billion tonnes of concrete is produced every year around the world, if CarbonCure can adapt its technology to all concrete types, “the potential to reduce carbon is huge,” Niven says.

Indeed, green efforts are advancing in other aspects of concrete production. Industrial waste, such as fly ash or slag, offers a low-carbon alternative to cement. And major manufacturers such as Lafarge and Holcim are using more low-carbon or carbon-neutral fuels, such as biomass, to replace fossil fuels used in cement kilns.

Taken together, these green steps suggest that concrete could someday be “carbon neutral, or even carbon negative,” says Niven.

Click here to view our complete Tech Savvy series.

The post Tech Savvy: CarbonCure appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The inner hive is in fact pulsating with tiny yellow-and-black Melipona bees. Humming squadrons quickly take formation to alight on her hand and hair. As nectar is drawn up into her chef’s syringe, then dabbled onto a spoon for strangers to taste, more Meliponas arrive and seem poised to attack the invaders. But instead, the stingerless bees merely tickle as they crawl across human arms and eyebrows, apparently foraging for some new exotic blossom to savour and pollinate. No doubt they are dismayed to taste only salty sweat, since they lose interest and quickly disappear.

By contrast, the amber gold nectar they produce glides across the palate like liquid silk. More fluid than honey made from domestic bees, it transmits a translucent sparkle and has a unique lemony finish and a tart hint of acidity to temper the natural sugar. Only a single drop is needed to trigger a delighted grin.

Nobody knows that better than Richardson Frazao, a Brazilian biologist who has become a leading scientific authority on the wild bees of the Amazon. He is also the field manager of an innovative program to protect the Meliponas and the biodiverse habitat they both depend on and sustain.

Rodrigues’s 70 wild bee boxes, built in a grove of tropical fruit and nut trees some 200 kilometres from the equatorial port of Belem, Brazil, serve as the most successful pilot project among a dozen poor, remote communities in the eastern Amazon. Each hive produces about one litre per year, which Rodrigues bottles and sells as nectar. She also uses the wax-like propolis to make distinctly scented soap, shampoo and cosmetic products.

The annual income this generates for her family is modest by Brazilian standards, and meagre by North American or European standards. But in a region ravaged by high unemployment, such self-generated income is a domestic godsend.

More strategically, Rodrigues’s income from wild nectar husbandry is higher – and more sustainable – than the only alternative: being paid low wages to slash, burn and raze tropical forests for lumber and cattle interests. To date, some 70 million hectares have already fallen in Amazonia, and her small land holding is on the northern front of approaching clear-cuts.

The bulwark against this, Frazao has calculated, will be rural communities that replicate Rodrigues’s example and discover that they can earn higher, more enduring incomes by protecting their forests rather than being temporarily hired to help destroy them.

His daring plan has the backing of the Peabiru Institute (a science-oriented foundation based in Belem), the Netherlands’ Royal Tropical Institute, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy. All agree that Frazao’s wild bee initiative may be the most effective way to protect remaining Amazon forests, restore biodiversity and promote economic equity among some of Brazil’s poorest peoples.

That is a lot of weight to rest on the delicate wings of an insect barely bigger than a fingernail. But the saving grace is that there are billions of them, in hundreds of species, each of which has been selected through evolution to pollinate distinct trees, flowers and shrubs. That means they are the lynchpin of biodiversity.

In the densest parts of still-intact Amazonia forests, Frazao has recorded up to 79 species of Melipona bees in a single hectare. This confirms a jaw-dropping level of indigenous forest biodiversity there, but it is by no means an isolated example.

Of the 20,000 wild bee species globally, there are some 400 known species of Melipona bees in the Amazon basin, which extends into Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. About 10 new species are discovered each year. Frazao himself may soon be credited with one if independent tests verify his discovery.

Shy with strangers, but quick to flash a genial smile – especially within tasting distance of Melipona nectar – Frazao hopes to maximize community bee projects by combining science and social engagement.

“I get lots of pleasure from identifying wild bees, and from doing pure science,” the PhD candidate says during a translated interview in his Peabiru Institute office. “But science is only part of the solution. The other part is to show communities the real value of biodiversity, and to empower them to protect it.”

To that end, since 2006, Peabiru and global foundations have helped finance more than 2,000 bee box placements with 350 families in 16 remote communities. There, typical cash incomes average less than $3 per day. The recipients include indigenous tribes, Afro-Brazilian slave descendants called Quilombolas, and the rural poor.

In each setting, Frazao looks for entrepreneurial champions, like Rodrigues, to ignite community interest with bottom-line economics. A typical bee box costs $25 to make with local labour and materials, but yields nectar worth up to $90 each production season. The bee pollination also increases the nearby yields of edible fruits and nuts, which can be harvested for subsistence food or sold for cash.

As with domestic bees, Melipona hives can be split and transplanted to new bee boxes, which in turn can be divided again. So, in the manner of bank bonds paying compound interest, Frazao and Peabiru Institute hope to soon see their original investments (jointly shared by Peabiru and community associations) accelerate in scale and value.

They have plans to enlist Brazil’s network of embassies and globally famous chefs to promote the “Amazon Amber” Melipona nectar; sell the scented soap and cosmetics under special labels; and scale up production by using solar-powered extractors where power grids don’t exist. Long-range goals include a portable, commercial-grade honey processing unit, which also refrigerates the nectar so it does not crystallize or ferment before it can reach outside markets.

However, Frazao cautions, the health of the wild bees and the forests they sustain will remain the highest priority. Their plan includes carefully confining each Melipona species to its endemic location, not mixing species in adjacent bee boxes or districts, and resolving not to torque production beyond the natural limits defined by evolution.

“As more poor communities join in wild nectar production, they will fight to protect and even begin restoring native tropical forests,” predicts Joao Meirelles, a noted Amazon scholar, author and founder of Peabiru. “The numbers are on our side. Every hectare saved can support 50 to 80 Melipona species, and up to 500 bee boxes with a foraging range of 600 hectares.”

Frazao nods, adding: “My dream is that these Amazon communities can position themselves in a market where they are paid proper value for their work and unique, high-quality product, while at the same time protecting their forest and biodiversity.”

And does the scientist who works with bees all day dream of otherworldly Melipona nectar at night? A surprised, faintly guilty grin telegraphs his answer.

The post Biodiversity in a bottle appeared first on Corporate Knights.

To that end, McNaney designed the Filabot, a breadbox-sized machine that melts existing plastic waste into the filament used by 3D printers. In that way, today’s water bottle can be recycled into the printing “ink” that forms tomorrow’s iPhone case.

In late 2011, the Vermont Technical College student launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter with the goal of raising $10,000. A month later, he closed at more than triple his goal. The funding allowed him to further develop his invention, which can now process a variety of thermoplastics, including nylon.

McNaney, a self-described altruist, plans to start selling the Filabot this year. He priced it at $350 during the campaign and hopes to keep it at that level so it can reach a wide range of users, particularly in the developing world.

People in developing countries have plastic all around them, he says. “If they could use 3D printing as a means to make something as simple as a fork, that would be amazing.”

McNaney’s creation looks to solve two of the biggest current issues with 3D printing. At around $40 per one-kilogram spool, the plastic filament used in many home devices is still too expensive for the mainstream. The Filabot can eliminate that cost and get rid of the waste produced by printing test objects, since those items can simply be recycled into more filament.

3D printers themselves have been around for more than 20 years, but they’ve also been expensive and therefore used strictly by industry. Rapidly improving technology and falling prices in recent years, however, have brought them within reach of small businesses and individuals, with desktop models now available for less than $1,000. And while plastic has generally been used for output, recent strides have been made in printing metal and even edible goods. The replicators seen on Star Trek, with which Captain Jean-Luc Picard could instantly order up a cup of tea, don’t seem so fantastical anymore.

The worldwide market for 3D printing is thus expected to double to more than $6 billion by 2019. Not surprisingly, hype is at a fever pitch. Over the past year, the media has mused on everything from how the technology might be used to pull manufacturing back to North America to the creation of a moon base.

Lost amid all the noise, however, is the question of whether 3D printing is even economic – and environmentally sustainable – in the first place. Like all technologies, it holds much promise, but is there any peril?

On the plus side, 3D printing could significantly lower carbon emissions. If it does indeed lead to manufacturing repatriation, the environmental savings on shipping goods across long distances will likely be huge. Additive manufacturing, where an object is created by adding material to it rather than by machining excess away as in traditional manufacturing, also produces much less waste by its very nature.

Conversely, it still takes energy to produce the printing materials and convert them into objects. There’s also the question of what happens to printed items when they’ve outlived their usefulness. If the materials are toxic, they could be expensive to dispose of.

Manufacturing experts say it’s hard to determine whether 3D printing is economically and environmentally desirable because this sort of research hasn’t been done yet.

“It very well may be the greatest thing for the environment since beer in a can or sliced bread,” says David Dornfeld, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. “But you have to think about the energy that comes in the door with every kilogram of metal or material that you’re using. We don’t yet have the numbers for that on the powders and extruded pastes used in additive manufacturing.”

Coming up with such data is a task Dornfeld has assigned to his students. One of the problems they’re encountering, however, is that the materials used in 3D printing – both large-scale industrial and individual-level home tinkering – have not yet matured, which means costs are still in flux.

On the economic front at least, studies are emerging. Some are showing that 3D printing is, contrary to conventional wisdom, more cost effective when it comes to creating complex objects rather than simple ones.

A study by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, for example, found the cost of making a single lead bullet through traditional manufacturing to be about a tenth of a cent. Using a direct ink write process cost considerably more, at 66 cents per bullet.

A comparatively complex knee implant, however, cost approximately $1,900 to make through traditional means, but only about $1,650 through additive manufacturing. That’s because 3D printing can make a single object with complicated dimensions, while traditional processes need to break it down into multiple parts. Complex additive manufacturing therefore stands to get even cheaper, which could indeed spur large-scale industrial adoption. But how will that affect the environmental cost of manufacturing?

Proponents believe the technology will have indirect environmental benefits on the consumer end. As more people learn about how things are made and perhaps even create them at home, they may end up buying fewer things. Combined with the sort of recycling promised by the Filabot, this could have a profound positive impact.

“When people become re-engaged with what they use in-house and spend their time with it, it’s going to take away from the consumerist culture a bit,” says Aaron Pratt, vice-president of marketing for 3D printer maker Afinia. “That’s going to be a bigger long-term impact than any gains from production.”

Still, the cost questions may be a big reason why large players have so far resisted getting into the technology. The likes of HP and Epson, both of whom declined to be interviewed for this article, hold patents in the area, but have not ventured forward publicly as of yet.

The legal and ethical questions may also be a disincentive. 3D printing could make the copyright battles over music and movie file-sharing look like a spring training warm-up, once the swapping of patented designs becomes widespread. The Pirate Bay – the infamous file-sharing repository – already has a “physibles” category.

The fights have already started, with U.K. toymaker Games Workshop last year sending a cease-and-desist letter to a man who created and shared his own Warhammer miniatures.

There’s also the possibility that 3D printers will be used to create guns and other weapons, with some tinkerers having already succeeded.

In both cases, the technology will likely force regulatory and legal reforms. Copyright and patent laws, which are already considered horrendously outdated, will need to be amended to reflect how people are actually using digital technology. 3D printing proponents also hope its potential negative uses don’t provoke irrational responses. After all, the Internet made it much easier to make weapons, too.

“Those who wish to do damage will do damage,” says Pratt. “I don’t know that there’s a way to stop it.”

The post The promise and peril of 3D appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Anastas, who first coined the term “green chemistry” in 1991, was at the time a staff chemist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Warner was an industrial chemist at Polaroid trying to get regulatory approval for a new low-impact chemical manufacturing process the EPA didn’t really understand. The two men found themselves allies in an effort to push a concept that was largely foreign to the teachings of chemistry: to make materials in an environmentally benign and responsible way, rather than tolerate harmful side effects.

Warner is now president and chief technology officer at the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry, an organization he founded in 2007 that is “dedicated to the development of non-toxic, environmentally benign and sustainable technological solutions for society.” Corporate Knights had an opportunity to chat with Warner about the field of green chemistry and why it’s so important.

CK: You are often referred to as one of the founding fathers of green chemistry. What’s behind that reference?

WARNER: I was working at Polaroid for 10 years and while there invented a technology (for a benign manufacturing process). I went to the Environmental Protection Agency to go through all the regulatory hurdles and I was having a hard time getting it through. Not because of anything to do with toxicity or environmental impact. It was just different. I found it ironic that the (existing) process we were using used some questionable, nasty stuff and here was a new technology that was head and shoulders better and the EPA was making it more difficult to do new things than continue to do old things. Everyone (at the time) was talking about measuring, monitoring, characterizing, remediating, recycling and dealing with hazardous materials after they’re in commerce, and here I was, a synthetic organic chemist, inventing something that is better in the first place. And although that seemed so obvious and straightforward, there was no language for it. There was no science to actually contemplate that.

CK: Can you explain that last comment, that “There was no science to actually contemplate that”?

WARNER: The way science grows is to be communicated, so we create a little pocket of knowledge, we give it a name and we start talking about it in journals and conferences. In 1990, there was no such thing as people communicating how to invent things that are benign in the first place. Everything about pollution was how to deal with it after the fact. The point of “green chemistry” was to come up with a science to grow a body of knowledge so that as we progressed in the future, it would be part of the lexicon of science.

CK: This must have been frustrating at the time.

WARNER: I really got discontent about this. I started looking around and I realized that not one college, not one university on the planet trained scientists who make things to identify what makes them toxic. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, architects, engineers; all these professions have to take a test to get a licence and in a few years have to take a test to maintain a licence. My father was an electrician. He couldn’t come to your house and change a light bulb without a document saying he could do it safely. And yet, anyone can take a molecule that has never existed in the universe before – potentially making the most potent neurotoxin in history and nowhere in their education did they get any kind of training to anticipate that. We’re starting to make progress, but it is slow coming.

CK: What you developed at Polaroid you described as a “benign” approach to manufacturing, and in our discussion you’ve compared it to biomimicry – copying how nature does things. Can you explain the connection between the two?

WARNER: Humans have been at chemistry for 150 years. If you look at the molecules in our drugs and our cosmetics and our electronics, it’s breathtaking. We are so amazing, we should pat our backs at just how cool are the things we have done. But if you look at our manufacturing processes, we use high temperature, we use high pressure, we use nasty reagents to do all this stuff. Now, if you look at nature, and you look at the molecules in nature, we have to react with a great deal of humility. Nature outperforms us in the diversity and complexity of structures it makes. But not only is nature better from that perspective, it does everything at room temperature, it does everything at ambient pressure, and for the most part water is the solvent. Humans force molecules to do what we want them to do, whereas nature asks molecules, “What do you want to do?” and builds the system around that. At Polaroid I looked at manufacturing processes and asked myself, “Can I put two molecules together that help each other so that together they will do things at room temperature and ambient pressure?” That was the stunning success. But because it was so freaky and weird, the EPA didn’t know what to do with it.

CK: Is curriculum heading in the right direction?

WARNER: I’d say well over 70 per cent of the colleges and universities in the United States have faculties passionate about green chemistry and trying to bring it into the curriculum. But I don’t see any colleges or universities at the department level that have embraced it as part of the required curriculum. Now, if a student wants to know this, it’s becoming easier and easier for them to learn it, but I think that’s missing the point. What aspect of chemical education could be more important than this – how to keep people safe and not make toxic materials? But changing curriculum is a challenge.

CK: You have mentioned that most of the big companies are embracing green chemistry to a certain extent, but who would you say are the leaders?

WARNER: It’s hard to point to a company and say that company is a leader. There are pockets within companies that have leadership roles, so there is a group at Pfizer, for example, that is doing phenomenal green chemistry work. There is a group at Dow Chemical. There is a group at ATMI. So there are dozens and dozens of companies that have a senior vice-president, a director of research, or research groups that embraced and successfully implemented green chemistry. Have the companies themselves embraced it? Maybe in some cases by just allowing it to happen. The pharmaceutical industry was one of the first industries to get on board, and you can understand why that is so obvious. When you think about it from one level, pharma is the only industry that does tox-tests (toxicology testing) on humans. So they’ve always understood the balance between toxicity and the benefits of a molecule.

CK: Is it that big pharma is now paying attention to more than just the final product?

WARNER: What would happen before is that the person inventing the molecule at the laboratory benches wasn’t aware of all the real-world manufacturing procedures. Yes, they’d do the human toxicology tests, but what about the solvents that are being used in the manufacture? On average – and I hear different quotes – for every gram of pharmaceutical product, anywhere from 200 to 1,000 grams of waste is being generated. So the proportion of waste per product is so massive that reducing waste by 10 per cent can translate into hundreds of millions of dollars in cost savings. The pharmaceutical industry is just the high-margin place with an R&D budget that can afford to do green chemistry and can see the benefits.

CK: Where are you focusing your time these days?

WARNER: After 10 years of Polaroid, and after 10 years (teaching) at the University of Massachusetts, I met Jim Babcock and we started a for-profit, beakers and flasks chemistry research company called the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry. It’s a 42,000-square-foot facility with millions of dollars of state-of-the-art chemical research. We’ve got about 35 scientists and what we do is invent technologies. We’re working with companies that have a great deal more experience in the field than we do and infinitely more resources, yet they’re asking us to invent. And I would argue we have an incredible success rate.

CK: Why have you achieved so much success?

WARNER: Not necessarily because we’re smarter or cleverer than other scientists, but because we start from the principles of green chemistry – it places us at a different starting point than everyone else and it points us in different directions. I’d argue that it profoundly enhances the innovative process within any company. And just because companies aren’t standing on the mountaintop beating their chests doesn’t mean they’re not embracing it. If a company spends tens of millions of dollars to invent less toxic materials, how can they go to the public and announce that what they were selling last year was toxic and this year it isn’t? So you’re not getting the whole picture. In the case where we see big companies having active research programs, they’re not wearing it on their sleeves.

CK: What’s your own underlying motivation? Were you always an advocate of green chemistry, or did your interest evolve over time?

WARNER: I am driven by an amazing amount of passion. I lost a child to a birth defect. Before that, I won every award, was on the cover of Celebrity Magazine as an uber scientist, at 19 spoke at the National Academy of Sciences, and graduated (with a PhD in organic chemistry) from Princeton in three and a half years. I got every pat on the back you could get for an industrial chemist. But lying in bed on the night of my son’s funeral I asked myself, “What if something I touched caused my son’s birth defect? What if something I got an award for caused my son’s disease?” It was a disease that no one knew the cause of, but the fact that I had no tools to even answer that question is what made me leave Polaroid and go to the University of Massachusetts to try to change the way we teach science.

The post Do no harm appeared first on Corporate Knights.