An oilsands processing plant near Fort McMurray, Alta., Sept. 7, 2008. (Rodrigo Sala)

CTV.ca

The meeting of Arctic states held in Chelsea, Que. earlier this week was billed as a way to spur international efforts concerning global warming and the Far North.

Instead, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized Ottawa for failing to invite more foreign governments and other stakeholders, such as aboriginal groups, that are concerned with Arctic issues.

“We need all hands on deck because there is a huge amount to do, and not much time to do it,” Clinton said in a prepared statement. “What happens in the Arctic will have broad consequences for the Earth and its climate. The melting of sea ice, glaciers and permafrost will affect people and ecosystems around the world, and understanding how these changes fit together is a task that demands international co-operation.”

Yet when it comes to understanding how the climate of the Arctic will change in coming years, scientists say Canada is falling off the map.

Last week, a climate research centre at the University of Montreal, known by the acronym ESCER, warned that such groups are being forced to close across the country.

A lack of federal funds for climate and atmospheric science has “sounded the death knell for research groups working in this field in Canada,” Rene Laprise, ESCER’s director, wrote in a statement.

His centre has lost two staff, who found government jobs after learning that their salaries would not be guaranteed past September 2010, Laprise told CTV.ca by email. Five others are expected to leave “any time,” he wrote.

Climate scientists across the country say they’re in a similar situation — with dwindling funds and poor prospects to secure more money, they’re preparing to shut down major projects while their staff seeks jobs abroad.

Financial woes

Laprise and other scientists in his field are frustrated that the 2010 federal budget, made public last month, set aside no new money for the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, the main source of federal funding for climate-related research.

CFCAS was founded in 2000 and has doled out $116 million on 198 research grants at universities from Victoria to Halifax.

Canadian scientists who have contributed to international initiatives such as the World Climate Programme and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rely on the foundation for a large part of their research money.

And while CFCAS’s mandate runs to March 31, 2012, it hasn’t received any new cash since 2003, and the money it has received was “fully committed” two years ago.

“There are no more funds to be distributed,” Kelly Crowe, a spokesperson for the foundation, told CTV.ca by email. “Our researchers are all looking at wrapping up their projects for good.”

A spokesperson for Environment Canada said that last year, the ministry received a funding request from CFCAS for $50 million to be spent over three years. But the request hasn’t been approved.

“The government will continue to consider this proposal, in the context of our current fiscal constraints,” Tracy Lacroix-Wilson wrote in an email. “We cannot speculate on any future funding at this time.”

Brain drain

Meanwhile, climate and atmospheric science researchers have begun to leave the country.

In December, Katrin Meissner quit a tenure-track position at the University of Victoria and moved her family to Sydney, Australia. She now studies climate change at the University of New South Wales, with two other researchers who also recently left Canadian universities.

“The possible closing of the CFCAS was certainly part of it,” Meissner said, referring to her decision to leave.

Theodore Shepherd, a veteran physicist at the University of Toronto who studies atmospheric dynamics, said people like Meissner are pulling up stakes because the international landscape for climate-change funding no longer favours Canada.

When CFCAS was created in 2000, Shepherd said Canadian universities began attracting climate scientists from Europe who would otherwise have gone to the U.S.

But economic stimulus programs introduced in the wake of the recession injected cash into climate-change research in the U.S. and in many European countries. That’s made them more attractive destinations for scientists in related fields.

The situation is changing “partly because they’ve got more money, partly because we’ve got no money,” Shepherd said.

He admits he has started to look for opportunities abroad, due to persistent funding problems in Canada.

“Not super actively,” he said. “But I’m realizing it’s going to be very hard to do what I want to here.”

Atmospheric research on the Arctic, an area that experts say will be hit particularly hard by climate change, is also being threatened by federal funding problems.

James Drummond is an Oxford-educated physicist at Dalhousie University, and the principal investigator for the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory, located 1,100 kilometres from the North Pole.

He expects the lab will be forced to close unless Ottawa announces additional public money to pay for salaries and operational expenses.

“At the moment, we’re operating on the principle that something will turn up,” he said by phone from Halifax. “The reality is that the funding stream has been broken.”

In recent years it has become harder to get federal money in all areas of atmospheric science, Drummond said. And while many scientists in that field don’t expect to run out of funding until later this year or early 2011, he said they need new money now in order to map out their work next year.

“It’s not research that can be turned on and off like a tap,” Drummond said.

With no additional money, he added, the issue of brain drain has become “very real” in the world of Canadian atmospheric science.

“And once those people leave it will be very hard to get them back, because they’ll say ‘well, look what happened last time.’”

Turbines on a wind farm in Alberta. (pembina.org / David Dodge)

Arise Technologies Corp. has been mulling whether to expand south of the border ever since U.S. President Barack Obama was elected last year.

The 13-year-old Waterloo, Ont.-based company produces photo voltaic cells used in solar panels – from a factory in Europe. Thanks to an $80-million investment offer by the German government, Arise built its first factory in Bischofswerda, near Dresden, in 2006.

About 100 people work at the plant today. It supplies Europe’s solar energy market, which founder and Chief Technology Officer, Ian MacLellan, calls “far more established and mature” than Canada’s.

The European Union set up an emissions trade system in 2005. It forces emitters who exceed an absolute limit on greenhouse gas emissions to buy credits from less-polluting companies. One result is that 250,000 people now work in Germany’s renewable-energy industry.

MacLellan is anticipating that governments in the U.S. and Canada will put into force the same kind of green energy laws within a year. His industry will expand on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, he expects. So Arise is positioning itself to take advantage.

“People are anticipating some significant growth opportunities in North America,” he says. “I think in 2010, it will be the turning point where this industry will become more mainstream.”

Arise has located firms with operations in the U.S. that it could potentially partner with if it decides to expand there, MacLellan says. Over the next couple of months, his publicly traded firm also plans to set up a 68,000-square-foot pilot plant in Kitchener, Ont. It would produce silicon for solar applications.

“What we’ve been holding our breath on, is the Ontario government following through with implementing regulations for the Green Energy Act,” he says.

The province passed that piece of legislation in May. Proponents say it will create tens of thousands of jobs and help to shore up the province’s ailing manufacturing base. One of the goals of the Act is to encourage investment in renewable energy firms such as Arise.

Regulations to support the Act could be voted into law as early as September. But there are rumours that a debate over whether to include “Buy Canadian” provisions could cause delays.

Meanwhile in Ottawa, a timetable to begin enforcing a proposed national industrial-emissions plan has been pushed back from 2010 to 2011. Green-energy firms, experts and groups concerned with global warming say they know little about what the proposed plan will look like, or how tough it will be.

Environment Minister Jim Prentice has said the emissions scheme will be unveiled before December. That’s when governments from around the world will convene in Copenhagen, Denmark, to negotiate an agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Experts have been arguing for years that making climate-warming gases more expensive to produce is the best way to fight global warming.

“I tell politicians that they have to price carbon if they are serious about reducing GHG emissions,” says Mark Jaccard a professor of energy policy and modelling at Simon Fraser University who has been advising the federal government.

“We can make substantial reductions, at least over a 10-year timeframe, without a huge cost to the Canadian economy,” he says. “You don’t have to reduce output, per se.”

Jaccard points to North America’s first consumer-based carbon tax as an example. It was introduced in B.C. in 2008, and it’s designed to rise each year before leveling out at $30 per metric ton of carbon dioxide in 2012.

Still, Canadian emissions policies pale in comparison to what the U.S. government has been working on.

Congress approved US$59 billion in funding for green-energy initiatives in February as part of Washington’s expansive economic recovery program. The U.S. Senate is also set to debate a bill for a European-style emissions trade system this fall, after the House of Representatives passed it in June.

Syncrude oilsands operations in Northern Alberta. (pembina.org / David Dodge)

As developed countries on both sides of the Atlantic move more aggressively to discourage carbon emissions, climate-change groups are warning that Canadian renewables firms may be left behind.

“We’re clearly one of the laggards internationally,” says Clare Demerse, an associate director at The Pembina Institute, a national sustainable-energy think-tank. That’s creating “very serious competitiveness issues” for local green energy firms, she says.

There are close to 1,000 such companies operating on Canadian soil, according to the federal government.

Ottawa’s 2009 federal budget included $1 billion for the Green Infrastructure Fund, which deals with electricity generation, and $1 billion for the Clean Energy Fund, which targets renewable-energy technology.

However, the U.S. government will invest six times more per capita in renewable-energy and energy-efficiency projects this year compared to Ottawa, the Pembina Institute calculates.

“When they see the amount of support on offer in the United States versus Canada, it’s pretty obvious where a company would want to invest,” Demerse says.

Yet there are signs Ottawa could be heading towards an emissions-trade system similar to the one in Europe, and like the one being considered in Washington.

Last month at the “three amigos summit,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper, U.S. President Barack Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderon issued a joint statement, pledging to cooperate to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions across the continent.

But Jaccard doubts that the federal government’s climate-change policy will keep pace with that of its southern neighbour.

“I myself speculated that Canada would move fairly quickly to harmonize with the U.S., or perhaps even anticipate where it’s going,” he says. “Now I’m not convinced.”

“They could just as easily drag their feet some more.”

Canadian activists attending climate-change protests near London, England.

A handful of First Nations activists returned home last week after grabbing national headlines in England for protesting Alberta’s oilsands developments.

They had travelled to a London suburb as part of a week-long gathering of several thousand environmental campaigners, dubbed the Climate Camp.

Among other concerns, the First Nations group hoped to pressure British Petroleum to halt plans for an oilsands extraction project in northern Alberta.

British Petroleum began a joint venture with Husky Energy, a Canadian firm, in 2007. Production is scheduled to begin in 2012 and reach 200,000 barrels per day by 2020.

“It’s kind of a situation where they’ve bought the house but they haven’t decided whether or not to move in,” Clayton Thomas-Muller, a campaigner with the Indigenous Environmental Network who made the trip, told CTV.ca by phone from Ottawa.

Clayton-Muller’s organization advocates for indigenous communities across Canada and the U.S. that come into contact with oilsands infrastructure such as pipelines and refineries.

He hoped the visit would “spark a movement, if you will, in the United Kingdom around Canada’s tar sands,” he said. “By the end, it became the primary issue.”

The “camp” culminated in a series of protests on Tuesday. Organizers targeted a range of British companies that they say are contributing to global warming through their work in fossil fuels.

More than 100 protesters blockaded Royal Bank of Scotland’s headquarters. Seven people in the crowd reportedly glued their hands to the building’s windows, police said.

“We went on a sort of tar sands tour of central London,” said Jess Worth, one of the Climate Camp organizers.

Protesters also stopped in front of the Canadian embassy in Trafalgar Square and sang a bastardized version of “Blame Canada,” a 1999 Oscar-nominated song from the U.S. film “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.”

“That went down quite well,” Worth said. “It was very funny.”

“What we were pointing out is that Canada is now, because of the tar sands, one of the biggest climate criminals in the world.”

Local media outlets picked up on the protests’ Canadian bent. The Guargian newspaper published a scathing opinion piece by George Poitras, a former chief of the Mikisew Cree in northern Alberta, after he arrived in London.

“My people are dying, and we believe British companies are responsible,” Poitras wrote. “UK oil companies like BP, and banks like RBS, are extracting the dirtiest form of oil from our traditional lands, and we fear it is killing us.”

Poitras said the community he’s from, Fort Chipewan, Alta., is suffering from abnormally high rates of rare cancers and other diseases. He suspects it’s because of the oilsands, which lie 250 kilometres away. About 100 of the community’s 1,200 residents have died since 2000, he said.

As less expensive, conventional reserves decline, production from the oilsands developments is expected to triple by 2020. The region contains an estimated 315 billion barrels of oil.

There are three major lawsuits currently underway in Canada due to concerns over how the growing oilsands developments may be affecting nearby First Nations communities, Thomas-Muller said.

One of the cases is underwritten by a British financial institution. In July, Co-operative Financial Services donated $94,000 to help another aboriginal community in northern Alberta sue the provincial and federal governments.

The lawsuit revolves around treaty rights, and the impact that oilsands extraction is having on the lands used by the Beaver Lake Cree Nation. It could take years to hear a decision on the case, and may cost millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, Thomas-Muller is planning a return trip to the U.K. in November to lecture at universities near London, as well as in Scotland and Ireland.

He said he hopes that Canada’s oilsands will become a central issue for British environmental campaigners, in the lead up to a meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December.

That’s when governments from around the world will try to negotiate an agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.