Healthy Living

Imagine if it were possible to prevent vast amounts of human suffering in B.C. while saving the provincial treasury hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

The possibility exists, but it requires rethinking what we mean by "health care". It means shifting our efforts toward disease prevention rather than focusing on crisis management. On that front, we have a long way to go.

Consider this: in spite of a mountain of evidence for the personal dangers and public costs of smoking, doctors in British Columbia are not allowed to bill the provincial health-care system for helping patients kick their addiction to tobacco. That remarkable policy illustrates just how little emphasis we have put on preventing, rather than curing, disease in B.C.

In fact, doctors are not typically allowed to bill the Medical Services Plan for helping their patients deal with poor diet, lack of exercise, or excessive drinking—all of which result in very expensive burdens on the health-care system. Fully 25 percent of all direct medical costs in Canada—$9.7 billion—results from a very short list of risk factors such as smoking, obesity, poor nutrition, and lack of exercise.

A major part of good health care should be offering proven, cost-effective means of reducing these risks to people who come to see health professionals.

Yet according to a 2005 B.C. Health Ministry report, preventable conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, and lung cancer cost the province a whopping $1.28 billion annually, clogging our hospitals and emergency rooms with droves of people who need not be there. The World Health Organization estimates that 90 percent of Type 2 diabetes and 80 percent of coronary heart disease could be avoided or delayed with regular physical activity, quitting smoking, and reducing stress.

All of this drives Vancouver doctor and former city councillor Fred Bass crazy. He cofounded the nonprofit Society for Clinical Preventive Health Care (SCPHC) 10 years ago to try to move standard medical practices in B.C. toward what science tells us is actually effective clinical prevention.

"We got started way back in 1990 in the B.C. Stop Smoking program," Bass says. "We had very good evidence even then that…we could double or triple the rate at which people stop smoking."

He believes this is a good example of how a small investment in prevention can reap big rewards for the health-care system. "If patients going for elective surgery have stopped smoking, they cut down their use of intensive care…their length of stay…their likelihood of complications of surgical wounds, and their cardiovascular complications."

Although many British Columbians have kicked the habit, smoking still costs the province $525 million in direct medical costs and another $904 million in lost productivity, a 2004 Health Canada report noted. If only 10 percent of smokers quit, it would save the province more than $2.9 billion over their lifetimes.

Yet unlike other provinces, such as Quebec and Ontario, B.C. does not cover the costs of stop-smoking medications for people who want to quit—one of the most cost-effective interventions in all of medicine.

According to Bass, tobacco use is an example of people being stigmatized rather than helped. "There is a lot of prejudice and a lot of lack of understanding around smoking: ‘It’s a dumb choice; people deserve what they get.’ They don’t understand, in fact, that a lot of smoking is explained by the genetics of smokers. The two major predictors of smoking are years of education and smoking behaviour of the biological parents."

Many doctors now feel that tobacco is so addictive that smoking should be considered a disease rather than merely a bad lifestyle choice.

You don’t have to tell Roger Perron that. The antismoking activist lost both his legs to tobacco. He was so addicted to smoking that he would rather smoke than eat. "When I was hitchhiking, I could go three days without food as long as I had cigarettes."

Perron believes he is living proof that growing up in a smoking household is a major risk factor. His entire family smoked. "Very few people come from a smoking family and can walk away from it.…I was born addicted. No doubt in my mind. I had my first smoke when I was 11 and never stopped."

He only gave up cigarettes after he had lost both his legs to Buerger’s disease—a gruesome inflammation and clotting of the circulatory system in hands and feet caused by tobacco; the condition can lead to ulcerations and gangrene.

"I took my work boot off one day and two of my toes just split open. You could see the bone. You could see the meat.…I went to the doctors and they zipped them off. The second foot was the same thing—just like a sausage, it was so full of gangrene." He was only able to quit cigarettes when the condition was threatening to take his arms as well.

Incredibly, his tobacco-related tragedies were far from over. His 17-year-old son died when the cigarette he was smoking caused an epileptic seizure and he fell into a lake and drowned. "He quit for about six months. That morning, for whatever reason, he went over the lake, decided to light up, had a seizure, fell in the lake, and drowned.

"It’s the worst nightmare in your life. I knew a couple of people that had lost their child, and I would say, ‘I would kill myself.’ I remember, I used to say that…" Recalling it now, he asks, "Why am I still here? Maybe I’ve got something to say, and I’m saying it now."

In spite of his tragedies, Perron is far from a bitter man. He volunteers in his community and at sporting events. He did all the renos in his well-kept condo. But his primary mission in life now is to tell his story and warn others—especially children—of the dangers of smoking.

His book, My Addiction to Smoking (Trafford Publishing), tells his unvarnished story. "I’ve had people read the book right there in front of me, and they had tears in their eyes, and they ask me, ‘When is the good stuff going to happen?’ and I say, ‘Right now, I’m laughing.’"

Perron stresses that he does not feel sorry for himself or want others to feel that way. "I’m not mad. I’m not angry. What I am is I’m pissed off at those [government and media] who can do something with the smoking issue…and they won’t do anything about it."

Sitting in his wheelchair with no legs, Perron makes a powerful point. Why won’t the B.C government offer more help for doctors to help their patients stay healthy? Bass offers these thoughts: "This province has a long history of not doing preventive measures, of using the health-care system for only diseases and injuries, and this is part of that tradition."

Smoking is just one example of how skewed our health-care system is toward "acute care": namely, dealing with health problems after they develop into a serious medical issue rather than supplying the more preventive "primary care" that could be provided by many family physicians.

Look no further than the health-care budget to see where our priorities lie. Health care is the biggest thing that government does. It consumes almost 40 percent of the provincial budget—more than $13 billion for the current fiscal year. Given that kind of money, one would hope that we are not making major mistakes in how it is spent.

Yet primary care garners a mere seven percent of provincial health-care resources. Proven clinical prevention, of the type that Bass and the SCPHC have been trying to promote, has even less support: less than 0.5 percent of the health-care budget.

Theresa Negreiff, executive director of the SCPHC, is particularly frustrated by how effective delivery of preventive heath care appears to have been hijacked by the government’s need to blow its own horn. "I think that part of the resistance from government is the fact that they need to be very public in what they are delivering. It [doctor-delivered prevention] is very effective but it is very low-key…there’s not going to be billboards about it; there’s not going to be television advertising about it."

Numerous studies have shown that the best place to reach people to help them adopt healthy behaviours is in their doctors’ offices. However, Victoria has chosen to cut funding for groups like the SCPHC, despite the B.C. Liberals’ recent announcement of a $4.1 billion surplus for the 2006 fiscal year.

Now the B.C. government’s main response to promoting health is the advertising-based Act Now campaign—something that does not impress those on the frontlines of health promotion.

"The irony is that the premier’s office came out with the Act Now program, citing these lofty goals of reducing tobacco usage and increasing physical activity and eating fruits and vegetables, but how is this going to happen?" Negreiff asks. "I don’t see a lot about how this is going to happen besides sending out nice advertising and telling people to do it. Eighty percent of the population goes to see their doctors every year.…It is one of the best places to do it [prevention]."

Besides politics, another obstacle to improving preventive health care in B.C. appears to be the payment scheme for doctors. British Columbia uses a "fee for service" funding model for about 80 percent of the province’s physicians. Simply put, this means that most doctors are paid for units of health care provided: the number of patient visits, prescriptions written, referrals made, et cetera. Ever wonder why when you go into a walk-in clinic your actual time with the doctor is about five minutes or less? Our fee-for-service model is largely to blame.

According to Dr. Jim Thorsteinson, executive director of the BC College of Family Physicians, this pay structure can be equally frustrating for doctors. "It’s not uncommon for a patient to come in with six health problems, but we’ve got one fee, whether it’s one minor problem or six major problems, so the fee structure is not well set up to help physicians spend the time they need to focus on their patients."

Basically, if a doctor does want to do more preventive health care, she is likely forced by our billing system to do so out of the goodness of her heart—and pocketbook.

"I’ve often said that to take time out of your practice to plan proactively for care was simply a donation," Thorsteinson says. "You weren’t seeing patients, then you weren’t being reimbursed. Frankly, nobody valued that time. Your patients might appreciate it, but it was not going to pay the bills.…It truly has not been valued by our health-care system."

Other jurisdictions have invested in a more population-based billing model that pays doctors per patient, not ailment, and with impressive results.

When English doctors got paid to prevent disease rather than just treat it, practices changed fast. According to Thorsteinson, "the result was that very, very quickly, practices reorganized, they hired additional staff, identified the subpopulations within the practices and called them in for appropriate follow-ups, both for various disease conditions and risk conditions.

"Practices that are allowed to operate on a population-based funding model can do a lot more care over the phone. They can delegate more care to nursing staff and others and focus more on managing their overall population, and identify people that have fallen off and focus on getting them back into the practice and getting them assessed. It opens up a range of possibilities which the fee-for-service system doesn’t, where the doctor has to see the patient eyeball to eyeball before they can be paid."

Paying doctors to keep their patients healthy rather than only when they get sick seems like a no-brainer, but we have a long way to go. In a recent international survey, only 13 percent of Canadian doctors reported any financial incentives for enhanced prevention of disease. In the United Kingdom, that figure was 72 percent. Not surprisingly, in the U.K. 97 percent of patients regularly receive reminders of preventive and follow-up care, versus only 28 percent in Canada.

Thorsteinson concedes that some changes are happening in B.C., but he is not yet convinced they will make a major difference. "There is a new and complex fee system that does provide for payment for some planning care that has just come into place in B.C., and we will have to see how that works."

He would prefer to see more fundamental changes in our billing system. "A population-based funding model that still allows for some fee for service…is probably the way to go," Thorsteinson says.

Other issues in our health-care system as basic as record-keeping remain primitive. Incredibly, most medical records in B.C. are not electronic. This means that if you come into a hospital unconscious and have a serious drug allergy, your life could be at risk because doctors have no ready access to your medical history. Only 23 percent of primary-care doctors in Canada are using electronic medical records.

Besides being dangerous, our outdated medical-record system also costs a lot of money. A 2002 report for the Canadian Medical Association showed that electronic medical records in Canada could save more than $1.3 billion annually in duplicate testing, administration costs, and adverse drug reactions.

There is also mounting evidence that a team-based prevention model involving other health-care providers saves money, provides better care, and is far more efficient.

A 2005 report from the BC Medical Association—which negotiates the fee-for-service rates on behalf of the province’s specialists and general practitioners, as well as doctors’ fees in private labs—found that such multidisciplinary care provided better treatment and reduced hospital admissions for a variety of ailments, including asthma, mental disorders, diabetes, and chronic congestive heart failure.

Multidisciplinary teams are becoming more popular in Ontario and Alberta, largely due to differing funding models available to their doctors and dedicated provincial funding. Ontario now has 54 such team-based health centres, with funding to open 22 more by 2008.

In contrast, B.C. has fewer than 10—only two of which are well-established multidisciplinary clinics. One of them is the Mid-Main Community Health Centre, a nonprofit association in Mount Pleasant that has been operating since 1986. Patients there have access to doctors as well as dental services, counselling, a pharmacist, a podiatrist, and chronic-disease management. It also offers group counselling on diabetes, quitting smoking, women’s health, heart disease, and stress management. The idea is to provide as many different kinds of health care under one roof as possible so patients can get the help they need without making multiple appointments in different locations with different doctors.

According to Mid-Main’s executive director, Dr. Irene Clarence, paying doctors to do the right thing is critical. "The fee for service does not work [for complex patients]. Basically, the doctor is rewarded for doing the wrong thing." She puts it more bluntly: "If the doctor does a good job, they go broke." Instead, all Mid-Main’s staff are on salary.

Clarence says that the public is being misled by the mainstream media on health-care issues.

"There has been a real push in the media to say…we can’t afford good health care so we have to settle for bad health care. Somehow that message just keeps being put out there, and people are starting to believe that, but it’s not true. We need to make sure that the public doesn’t buy that. Good health care can be afforded, but there has to be the will to make that happen."

Not only is the multidisciplinary model more efficient, it also makes for happier doctors. A survey in the 2005 BCMA report found that 96 percent of B.C. physicians working in a team said that they planned to stick with multidisciplinary practice for the next five years. This was in spite of the fact that they were likely making less than their fee-for-service colleagues.

So if this is the way to go, why isn’t it happening?

"What’s lacking is structured fund ing and incentives," Thorsteinson says. "There’s interest by family doctors, there’s generations of literature dating back to the ’60s and ’70s, and, most recently, the [2002 Roy] Romanow report [on the future of Canadian health care] stating that this is the way to go. Our governments just haven’t been able to get away from acute care to commit to this area. I guess this is just not as sexy and it just doesn’t get the headlines. Preventing diseases five or 10 years from now just doesn’t have the same impact in the headlines as someone who can’t get in the operating room yesterday."

Contacted by the Straight, B.C. health minister George Abbott voiced his support for preventive health care and multidisciplinary teams but conceded that we have a way to go. "I think we have tended to emphasize the acute-care side of the ledger previously in B.C.…I think we are behind some jurisdictions, particularly Alberta and Ontario, but we are working hard to catch up. I think we need to go there, and we need to go there as quickly and effectively as we can."

Abbott agrees that keeping people out of our hospitals is going to be more important than ever. "I have religion on primary health care and prevention. I think those are the two lights at the ends of the tunnel that are not onrushing freight trains."

Colleen Fuller, a health- and drug-policy research associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, is not convinced. She points out that many preventive services that used to be covered by the public health-care system—such as physiotherapy, podiatry, massage therapy, and annual eye exams—have been delisted by the B.C. Liberals.

"If you have diabetes, one of the best ways to prevent blindness is to have an annual checkup with an ophthalmologist. This is the single most effective intervention that you can offer people with diabetes so they don’t go blind."


Yet according to Fuller, the provincial government is "decreasing access to a lot of services that are properly defined as preventive health care, so it is absolutely impossible to believe George Abbott when he says that this government in Victoria is supporting preventive health care. They’re not."

That stated B.C. Liberal commitment to preventive health care does not seem to be trickling down to innovative models like Mid-Main.

In spite of international recognition for its work, Mid-Main was forced to lay off staff this year due to lack of matching funding from the provincial government. Ottawa infused start-up money between 2003 and 2006 in preventive health care, but there were never any matching or follow-up funds from Victoria.

"It’s so sad. On one hand, we were taking around dignitaries from Sweden and Norway and they were saying ‘Great work,’" Clarence says. "On the other, the money is slowly fading away to do this great work."

The fate of the Society for Clinical Preventive Health Care is even more shocking. In a sad testament to B.C.’s lack of commitment to prevention, it was forced to close its office this month due to lack of provincial funding.

With an annual budget of slightly more than $200,000, the SCPHC developed preventive-health-care programs that could save the provincial treasury tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. After three cuts to its budget in two years, there was no choice but to lay off staff and permanently shut the doors.

"It’s insane-making," Bass says.

The bright side, if there is one, is the enormous potential for improving health care in B.C. However, it will require rethinking what we mean by health care and wellness. From eliminating carcinogens in the environment to reducing homelessness, from improving diet and exercise to reducing well-known risk factors such as smoking, we have a tremendous opportunity to make B.C. a healthier and happier place.

This piece was published in the Georgia Straight on July 19th, 2007

You've Got Nothing to Lose Stephane

Stephane Dion needs to make a big move. Public support for the Liberals is languishing around 32% - virtually unchanged from a year ago. Any hopes that their protracted leadership race, or time in the penalty box would easily return Canada’s “natural governing party” to power now seem delusional. Any thoughts of returning to the days when Liberals coasted from majority to majority are pure fantasy.

In fact, we haven’t seen a majority government elected in Ottawa since 2000. That is no accident. While the Harper Conservatives don’t want to admit it, the public seems to have grown weary of the Versailles-like arrogance of majority governments. Quite rightly, Canadians appear to no longer trust either national party with absolute power –a condition that may be permanent.

Dion should seize this as an opportunity rather than a problem. How? By following the inspired lead of many provincial governments and publicly committing to a process leading to federal electoral reform, such as proportional representation. The timing for this move is almost perfect.

First and foremost, Canadians would take notice that Dion is the Liberal leader and is acting like one. That in itself would be a major political accomplishment. Harper has shrewdly made such bold moves, including recognizing Quebecois as a nation within Canada, that have both impressed the public and isolated the Liberals.

Embracing electoral reform would be a similarly daring policy shift for Dion and force Harper to defend an electoral system that regularly fails to accurately represent the will of the voting public – a sticky spot to put any conservative leader.

Because Harper has waited such a long time for his turn at majority rule, he can be counted on to defend the status quo - an unsavory position for someone who has invested so much in being unlike the Liberals. Dion could then rightly claim it is now the Conservatives who are defending the politics of entitlement – something that would make Harper blow a gasket.

It would also elegantly isolate the Bloc, which has enjoyed a free ride under our antiquated first-past-the-post voting system. In the last election the Bloc attracted only 10% of the national vote but elected 17% of the nation’s MP’s. They have shown no hesitation in wielding this disproportionate political power and most Canadians are sick of it.

Changing the electoral system would also be relatively simple. Unlike the past decades of seemingly endless constitutional debates that essentially changed nothing in lives of average Canadians, changing the electoral system could be done with a simple act of parliament.

In fact, the main obstacle of electoral reform lies not with the voters, but with vested interests in major parties. Like compulsive gamblers, backroom powerbrokers in both Liberal and Tory camps yearn for the political jackpot of majority rule.

Fortunately, Dion owes the backroom boys of the Liberal party very little. The split of the Liberal brain trust, backing either Rae or Ignatieff allowed Dion to come up the middle and win the leadership.

However, the hoary pragmatists in the Liberal party have not gone away and they will not hesitate to toss Dion from the hive should he lose the next race, which might well occur if an election was held today.

Those backroom boys should look beyond the latest polling results - they might realize that electoral reform would actually help them in the long run. The political left is increasingly fragmented in Canada and Liberals better get comfortable in the opposition benches – they could be there for a long time.

However, a governing coalition of Liberals, NDP and Greens under a proportional voting system would hold a clear majority voting block and ensure the Liberals had a place in government for the foreseeable future. They just wouldn’t enjoy absolute power – thank God.

The transformative power of electoral reform could also make the political pie bigger. Only 65% of eligible Canadians bothered to vote in the last election - and for good reason. The politics of confrontation and the childish spectacles of question period typical of our first-past-the-post system are enough to make any self-respecting voter stay at home.

This leaves an untapped pool of over 8 million Canadians - fully 35% of registered voters – who could be tempted to participate again in democracy if they felt there was a good reason to do so. Dion could capture a large portion of those disenfranchised voters if he came out with a bold vision to improve our democratic system.

There is also the small matter of good governance. First-past-the-post is an electoral museum piece now shared in the developed world by only the UK and the US. Those countries that instead enjoy some type of proportional representation have much higher voter turn outs, less scripted bickering among politicians, far more elected women and more progressive social policies.

You’ve got nothing to lose Stephane. Surprise us. I might even vote for you.
This piece was published in The Tyee on May 10, 2007

Climate Change Time Machine

What will climate change look like? It's a harder question than you might think. The impacts may be massive, myriad, and happen long into the future, all depending on the path we choose. So how can we better visualize those impacts before they happen–when there is still time to act?

That's what researchers at the University of British Columbia are attempting to do: help citizens and decision makers visualize how climate decisions made today will change the way things look 10, 50, and 100 years from now.

Stephen Sheppard is professor of landscape architecture and forestry at UBC and is the lead investigator of the Local Climate Change Visioning Project. He says he wanted to boil complex climate science down to something that people could more easily relate to.

"People need to make sense of this huge overwhelming thing called climate change that affects virtually everything you can think of; so how on Earth do you deal with it? It struck me that the kinds of visualization tools that we are using in normal everyday planning could be a very effective tool to get climate information across to people."

His team is using a geographic information system and computer-simulation technology to create scientifically based images of how different climate-change policies will play out in the Lower Mainland. And there are plenty of issues to work with.

Will low-lying areas like Delta and Richmond be flooded if we do nothing to adapt? How will the water supply in the Lower Mainland be affected by 2100 under different climate scenarios? What will the snow pack on the North Shore mountains look like in 50 years?

Getting the public to understand these issues is a challenge. Although the implications of global warming are enormous, many people can't follow along when subjected to unvarnished climate science. For instance, what does a 3.5-degree global temperature increase this century mean to the average person? Most people want to know, "What will it look like in my community?"

Alison Shaw, a research associate and the project's manager, hopes their effort will help. "What we are trying to do is bridge the gap between global science and local action.…We want to bring this information down to a level that people will understand and test whether science-driven images in local places will motivate people to change certain behaviours or think about certain things they haven't thought about in the past."

Places like Delta are on the frontlines of those challenges. Aptly named, the city is largely built on the Fraser River delta, and many areas are either at or below sea level. The dike system to protect these areas is designed to handle a "200 year" storm, a tempest with a half-percent chance of hitting in any given year. However, this comfortable margin of safety assumes that weather patterns and sea levels will remain constant in the future. They won't.

Global warming is already under way, and the changes we are causing to the atmosphere may cause global sea levels to rise by more than a metre this century. Climate scientists are also predicting more frequent and intense winter storms, like the ones that lashed the Lower Mainland this winter. This one-two punch will create some compelling climate-change challenges never before dealt with by local governments such as Delta's.

UBC researchers want to help them meet this challenge by drawing them a picture. Poring through mountains of data from climate-change models, GIS systems, and regional socioeconomic projections, they created computer-generated graphics of what we can expect to experience in places like Delta and the North Shore, specifically, under different climate futures.

They are working with selected local residents to create images of places that people easily recognize, such as the North Shore mountains, under these different climate scenarios.
Like Ebenezer Scrooge, communities will be presented with visions of how the future may unfold, and they will be offered choices to, hopefully, avoid the worst.

According to Shaw, "What we hope to do is take these visualizations out into those communities…to see whether these visualizations develop some kind of emotional response in people. We want to learn whether people's awareness will increase if they see these types of impacts in their own back yard or in places that they know intimately. Will this awareness change their behaviour? So we've set up a second phase of the project to test that."

In attempting to measure the visceral, usually uncharted territory for academia, Sheppard and his team are aiming beyond the more scientifically comfortable territory of reasoned arguments.

Has anyone ever tried this work before? "Not as comprehensively as we are trying to do it," Sheppard says. "We are learning an incredible amount just in generating the pictures.…It's been a very instructive process for everybody involved because no one sees the big picture; we all work on a piece of it. There's a sea-level expert, a farming expert, a wildlife expert, and its only when you start linking all these things up and joining up the dots that you say, 'Ahh…'; that can be quite profound."

The results so far are compelling. The images from their worst-case scenario in Delta show the dikes level with the sea during severe winter storms in 2100, and that is being conservative. Those images are based on less severe projections than the worst-case scenario of the latest report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has been criticized by some scientists as having low-balled future climate impacts from greenhouse gases.

The more optimistic climate futures used by the UBC researchers assume that the effects of climate change are more manageable due to emission reductions and urban densification. "Our most positive future scenario is one that represents all kinds of social-political-economic-cultural changes that enable us to take action earlier in the century to mitigate greenhouse gases, while also adapting to the potential climate change," Shaw says. She adds, "This is the only scenario that stabilizes the climate by 2100.

"That future scenario involves changing the nature of development and the way we look at land-use planning entirely. We would move away from suburban development, where's there's a dependence on cars, particularly single-occupancy vehicles, to get us to where we need to go. We would instead focus on new styles of communities that are more high density and more complete, with nodal areas where people can go for entertainment, social activity, and groceries. These would be connected by sophisticated transit lines linking all the different areas in the Lower Mainland and interlinked with alternative-energy technologies such as solar, biogas, and wind. The Agriculture Land Reserve would also remain protected in its entirety to ensure local food security."

IT IS STILL early in the project, but the residents who have attended the workshops and seen the images seem supportive of the project. "So far, so good", says Marcy Sangret, environmental planner for the Corporation of Delta. "The people that have participated kept coming back to meetings. They are supportive of bringing their time into the process to make it better, and I'm not aware of anyone that doesn't support the study."

As far as the city planning department goes: "We are in the stage now where we are definitely onboard with the study and think they are going about it in a very scientifically credible way," Sangret says.

The project tries to help people grasp the more indirect impacts of our climate-altered future. "What we are finding is that people think about climate change and they think about temperature change," Shaw says. "They don't think about increased storm events or increased precipitation intensity or the effects that climate change may have on more vulnerable populations around the world."

Those implications go far beyond the local scale. "For instance, 50 percent of the world's population lives along coastlines," Shaw notes. "So what proportion of those coastlines will be affected by sea-level rise? How many of those people living along those coastlines are affected by increased weather events and increased hurricane events? With that increased vulnerability existing in other parts of the world, how is that going to impact us in the region? Will we be getting a huge amount of environmental refugees showing up on our shorelines?

"We want to evoke in people's thinking these potential secondary impacts of climate change. So between 2050 and 2100, in our worst-case scenario, we have assumed that the rest of the world is going to be more vulnerable to climate change than we will, and that we will be a desirable location. On our land-use map for Delta, we have incorporated environmental-refugee settlements." Shaw adds: "That has created a bit of a dialogue, for sure."

Although housing refugees may sound bizarre, it is important to realize that places like Bangladesh may see 30 million environmental refugees by the end of this century. Those people will have to go somewhere, and Canada is a likely destination for at least some of those displaced in our climate-altered future.

This project also tries to crack an old political nut. How can politicians allocate resources on issues that might not affect us for 50 or 100 years? Or, put more bluntly, how can decision makers be convinced to spend money to avoid future disasters that might not happen until long after they have left office?

According to Delta Mayor Lois Jackson, that problem is real but hopefully changing, due to our new global imperative. "I've been in politics a long time, so I've seen some politicians who only think about the next election.…I think that is particularly true of the senior levels of government. They don't plan out for 50 years, but they should be.…I think that is the wave of the future, that governments have to plan out these major shifts as far as they can using the science that is available."

Jackson is very supportive of the climate-visioning project and its potential to change political thinking. "A picture is worth a thousand words, and when you couple the words with a picture it is much more powerful than simply a document that is 50 pages long. So the picture being attached to the science is really a good idea."

She adds: "I think they are doing a tremendous job. It's a huge feather in the cap of UBC…the people here are really quite amazed, especially the younger people, because it's going to affect them much more than the older folks that won't be here to see the expected impacts."

Jackson is also enthusiastic about the potential for replicating this work in other communities around the world. "I know some of the people in the U.S. are getting jumpy about what is going to happen to Florida and elsewhere in the world," Jackson says. "I think it would really be wonderful to be able to use this as a tool to educate other countries and other politicians across the world as to what could possibly happen to their particular area."

According to Shaw, there is already worldwide interest in the study, but replicating it elsewhere would be a major effort and may be impossible in areas with limited resources. "The potential exists as long as the data exists. This is an immensely data-driven research project that we've undertaken. So we are using the best available science that exists at the local and regional level, and we are trying to integrate those into our story lines of alternative climate futures."

The scale of this effort is also daunting. Researchers in B.C. have involved virtually all levels of government, including the B.C. Environment Ministry, the Ministry of Agriculture, Environment Canada, Natural Resources Canada, and the Corporation of Delta and District of North Vancouver.

The real test of this ambitious effort is whether or not it can encourage people to make choices that will avoid, rather than just cope with, the worst of climate change. Being able to see into the future helped even Ebenezer Scrooge change his ways. Maybe we are not beyond hope either.

This Piece ran in the Georgia Straight on April 19th, 2007

Follow the Money

Does it seem strange that some oil companies seem willing to acknowledge the massive implications of global warming while others are fighting it tooth and nail?

David Anderson was wondering the same thing when he was Canada’s Environment Minister between 1999 and 2005. About half of the oil companies he dealt with including Exxon Mobil were very resistant to reducing carbon emissions, or even to admitting that global warming was real. And the other half?

According to Anderson, “the other half were very friendly. Shell, PB, Syncrude, Suncor, all those companies were quite willing to put in restrictions [to curb climate change].”

And why not? Ballooning oil prices meant soaring profits so they could easily afford the costs of mitigating carbon emissions.

“God, they were making money like it was going out of style. You just wouldn’t believe the money that’s being made. They could quite afford the trivial amount, which was about 38 cents a barrel as the calculation for climate change measures to make them carbon neutral. Christ, they were getting up to $75 a barrel... Everything over $20 a barrel is profit,” says Anderson.

So why does the former Minister think companies like Exxon Mobil weren’t willing to move on this? He offers some interesting speculations:

“One of the issues that I think is really important is the impact of the quarterly statement. No one likes to have their quarterly statement doing anything but going up and up because that affects share price. Share price affects bonuses and pay of executives. The head of Exxon gets paid $70 million per year. A lot of money would be affected by what you might call tremors in the market that might come from climate change measures…”

Stock options have become a very popular way for North American companies to motivate senior executives to pump up the share price. The idea is simple, rather than paying managers a straight salary, companies give them stock options to buy company stock at a set price. If these executives can increase the share price they can cash in those options and reap staggering profits.

“The use of stock options has skyrocketed over the last 20 years,” said Kin Lo, Associate Professor of Accounting at the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business.

However, making senior management fixated on share price rather than business fundamentals can also affect corporate ethics. “I believe the prevalence [of stock options] contributes to some of the malfeasance that you have seen, the big blowups with Enron and WorldCom”, says Lo.

However in the case of oil companies, it also creates a gravy train that most senior executives would want to keep going at all costs.

Soaring global oil prices have meant that oil companies are recording record profits, and sending share prices into the stratosphere – regardless of company performance. For instance, Exxon Mobil’s share price has almost doubled since 2004. This is making some senior oil executives very rich, whether they are doing a good job or not.

According to a recent study from the Institute for Policy Studies, in 2005 the average CEO compensation for top 15 US based oil companies was a whopping$32.7 million - more than four hundred times what the average oil industry worker is paid. Compare that with the average pay of CEOs for all large US firms at $11.6 million.

And then there is the paycheque of former Exxon Mobil CEO Lee Raymond. In 2005, Mr. Raymond’s base salary was $4 million - not bad jack to be sure, but the real money came from soaring share prices. That year, Mr. Raymond made an additional $65 million compensation in the form of stock options and other benefits - fully 93% of his compensation. With a payday like that, who wants to rock the boat by dealing with climate change?

Compare that to the compensation paid to executives with the world’s number two and three oil companies in the world: BP and Shell – both based in Europe. BP CEO Lord Browne made $5.6 million in 2005 – not so shabby either, but a mere 8% of what Exxon’s CEO was paid. Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer made just $4.1million – one sixteenth what Lee Raymond was paid.

Interestingly there are also some striking differences in the way these companies dealt with climate change. BP now officially stands for “beyond petroleum”. The CEO of Shell has stated publicly that global warming makes him "really very worried for the planet". Both companies signed onto a letter to UK Prime Minster Tony Blair calling for urgent government regulation on climate change and are investing heavily in alternative energy technologies.

In contrast, Exxon has been dubbed by Greenpeace the “the world’s number one climate criminal” stating that they have “done more than any other company to stop the world from tackling climate change”. They were recently implicated by the Union of Concerned scientists of funding a Big Tobacco-style PR campaign to misinform the public on climate science.

Anderson speculates that the over reliance on stock options puts many North American oil company executives in a compromised position. “Deep down most of these people knew the game had to end eventually and we had to take climate change measures. Deep down what they were really saying was ‘I know that I’m not doing the right thing but I am going to pass that on to my successor to handle the problem. I’m going to get out of here with my bonuses intact and I am going to get out of here a wealthy man.’”

That last point might be particularly poignant in the case of Exxon Mobil. When Lee Raymond retired as CEO of Exxon Mobil at the end of 2005, he was awarded one of the most lucrative retirement packages in corporate history – totaling almost $400 million, including stock options, pension, use of a corporate jet, and $210,800 in country club fees and other perks. This includes the $69 million in cash and stock options he made that year.

When I contacted Exxon Mobil by phone they denied that compensation schemes of senior executives like Mr. Raymond could effect on how the company has responded to climate change. “The largest portion of his compensation is restricted stock and those restrictions are five and ten years and those restrictions maintain on stock even after he retires…He can’t sell it until the restriction matures and some of those restrictions go out to the year 2015”, said Mark Boudreaux, Media Relations Manager for Exxon Mobil Corporation.

Mr. Raymond will be 77 in 2015. It seems rather strange that he will not be able to fully collect for all his years of work at Exxon Mobil until he is two years past the life expectancy of the average male in the United States.

Perhaps is not as simple as that. According to Lo, “what someone can do is to arrange an 'equity monetization,' which allows him in essence to ‘short’ the [restricted] stock with an investment banker. It’s the same as selling the restricted stock at that date. Later on when the restriction comes off you can net out the two positions… There are plenty of investment bankers that would be willing to do that for a fee.”

If there are specific restrictions prohibiting Raymond from short selling his restricted stock, Exxon is not telling their shareholders about them. Looking at the legal filings of Exxon Mobil to the US government, it appeared to Lo that “there is nothing to prevent to Lee Raymond… to arrange for a separate side deal to get around the restrictions.”

Interestingly, Raymond also sits on the advisory board of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which recently offered scientists $10,000 plus expenses to undermine or dispute the findings of the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Exxon partially funds the American Enterprise Institute.

Could something as trivial as the personal finances of already obscenely wealthy individuals caused some powerful oil companies to resist dealing with the most pressing issue of our times? It's a big world. Stranger things have happened.


Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer living in Vancouver. The piece ran in the February 15, 2007 issue of the Georgia Straight.

California Dreamin

Will he or won't he? That was the question on the minds of many British Columbians this week as Gordon Campbell prepared to release the throne speech and announce whether B.C. was really going to follow the lead of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and bring in mandatory caps on carbon emissions.

The verdict? Nice wrapping, but not much inside.

First, the good news. While some North American governments are still questioning the science behind climate change, that time has now thankfully passed in B.C. Campbell has gone on record as stating this is an urgent problem requiring serious action.

According to Lisa Matthaus of Sierra Club B.C., "the province is now saying out loud climate change is real, the science is indisputable, we can no longer procrastinate, and that living up to these obligations is going to mean economic opportunities for British Columbia." The public can begin holding him, and future governments, to that self-evident truth.

It's about time.

The other significant point about yesterday's announcement is that the B.C. government is for the first time committing to hard caps on carbon emissions. Specially, Campbell committed B.C. to reducing reduce carbon emissions 10 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. While that is more than Arnold Schwarzenegger announced last August, 2020 is long way off and it remains very unclear how (and if) we are going to get there.

On the bright side, Campbell has let the carbon cap genie out of the bottle and it will be very difficult to put it back in. That milestone, no matter how mushy at present, should be applauded.

There is also the old political principle of "only Nixon could go to China." Campbell is a pro-business premier. It would have much more difficult for the NDP to make the same announcement without howls of indignation from the business community.

But before we get too giddy, let's have a hard look at the details -- or in this case, the lack thereof.

The major concern is timing. Governments are inclined to make sweeping announcements that come into effect only after their current term in office expires. This announcement is no exception.

Of all the initiatives announced yesterday, only two have any immediate impact. First, all new vehicles bought or leased by the B.C. government will be hybrids. Big deal.

More importantly, Victoria will now begin requiring all new coal-fired generating plants to sequester 100 per cent of their carbon emissions. This new requirement may well kill the two proposed coal plants planned for the B.C. Interior. That would be significant, but time will tell what actually happens.

The rest of the throne speech dealt largely with policy to be developed at some undetermined time in the future, or targets fully 13 to 43 years from now.

While there have been many glowing comparisons between Campbell and what Schwarzenegger introduced in California, let's not get too starry eyed. The Governator legislated hard targets, with hard short-term milestones, after a long period of meaningful consultation with a variety of stakeholders.

Campbell consulted with no environmental groups prior to this week's announcement, the first target is not until 2020, and there is currently no legislation to back it up. In the words of Lisa Matthaus of Sierra Club B.C., "I think Gordon's still has a bit of beefing up to do."

For these reasons, the response from many in the environmental community has been largely lukewarm. "I think it's a start, I don't think it's a good start, but I think it's a start. We still have a long way to go," said Karen Campbell of the Pembina Institute. "Climate science is telling us that we need to act now. The longer we wait, the more action it's going to take later on. The quickest, most decisive action needs to happen now, not thirteen years from now."

Also worrisome is that while the 2020 target is province-wide, the interim targets (yet to be determined) are "sectoral" targets. That means that car emissions might go down while oil and gas emissions could go up. Without short-term province-wide caps, there is no guarantee that we would reduce overall emissions.

Perhaps most concerning was what was not announced yesterday. For instance, a good chunk of the throne speech was devoted to limiting urban sprawl but there was certainly no talk about canceling the much-disputed Gateway project to expand local highways and twin the Port Mann Bridge.

The province is actually maintaining with a straight face that this $3 billion boondoggle will actually reduce greenhouse emissions by reducing cars idling in traffic, rather than instead encouraging single-occupancy commuting and further urban sprawl in the Fraser Valley.

There was also no talk of canceling proposed new subsidies to the oil and gas sector. This month, Provincial Energy, Mines and Petroleum Minister Richard Neufeld announced that he was considering a "net-profit" royalty scheme for oil and gas companies that would let them avoid paying B.C. taxpayers until their capital costs are paid off.

This type of perverse corporate giveaway helped fuel the explosive growth in Alberta's tar sands, and is something that even the federal Conservatives seem to be cooling to. Oil companies do not need more taxpayer money to assist them in making our climate problems worse, especially while health care, child care and education are going begging.

Yesterday also would have been a fine time to announce a tax on carbon emissions. This simple policy shift would negate the need for much costly and cumbersome regulation by putting an economic cost on something that currently is a freebee, namely dumping climate-altering carbon into the air. We charge a tipping fee at the dump; what's the difference? This policy was noticeably absent from the throne speech.

Lastly, it was ironic that a speech so focused on meeting the enormous challenges of climate change was completely silent about meeting our obligations under Kyoto. That glaring omission was not lost on environmental policy experts. "I am concerned that by [B.C.] walking away from Kyoto, that this may actually be giving an out to the Harper government so that they can walk away from Kyoto too. This is not the time to be walking away from Kyoto," said Pembina's Karen Campbell.

It seems that what was really announced this week was that the political ground in B.C. has shifted a long way to the green end of the spectrum. Future governments of any stripe can no longer ignore the environment, and that is a major accomplishment.

While Campbell deserves some credit for yesterday's announcement, the real accolades should go to the B.C. public. What is driving this sea change in environmental policy in Canada is not some enviro-epiphany on the part of our elected leaders. It is pure political pragmatism. Soaring public concern about the environment means that politicians ignore this growing issue at their peril.

So give yourself a pat on the back. Don't get too comfortable though. The devil is in the details and we all need to keep a close watch in what is announced in next weeks budget.

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer based in Vancouver. This piece was published in the Tyee on February 14, 2007.

Journalistic Malpractice

"Global warming is an unproven theory."

"Trying to stop it will cost the economy dearly and accomplish nothing."

"It is being promoted by environmentalists as a cynical ploy to raise money."

Wait a minute... Does it seem like you're reading your local newspaper?

Many North American media outlets continue to supply the public with such a steady diet of such misinformation and skewed science on the critical issue of global warming that it might be best described as “journalistic malpractice”.

Hyperbole? Hardly.

Consider this thought experiment: Would it be ethical for a news editor in 2007 to publish an opinion piece by a tobacco industry funded “expert”, long inactive within the scientific community, stating that there is no proven link between tobacco and cancer?

Such journalistic mischief went on for many years, clouding the public debate and no doubt costing many lives. However the days when such “balanced reporting” would be considered acceptable have long past.

Even Exxonmobil, which funded the climate-change deniers for years, finally admitted this month that global warming is real -- even though it has been obvious to the scientific community for many years that humans were contributing to the problem through emissions of greenhouse gases.

Yet many papers like the National Post and Los Angeles Times repeatedly published articles by such deniers as Patrick Michaels, and S. Fred Singer – who some might remember from his previous efforts to ally public fears about the dangers of ozone depletion and second hand smoke.

And then there is the curious case of Dr. Tim Ball. He is a long retired professor from the University of Winnipeg and a well-known climate change denier who has not published a peer-reviewed scientific publication on climatology in over a decade.

That not to say that Dr. Ball hasn’t been busy writing lately. Over the last five years he has published no less than thirty-nine opinion pieces, and thirty-two letters to the editor in twenty-four Canadian newspapers. Fifty of these pieces ran in papers owned by Canwest Global. These efforts totaled an incredible 44,500 words. As a freelance writer myself, I am in awe at Dr. Ball’s success in placing his writing in the nation’s papers.

This is even more surprising given the monotony of his material. Virtually all of these articles were variations on a single theme: that science does not support that global warming is caused by humans. In the byline of every opinion piece, he was characterized as an expert on climatology. What is the public to think?

Among his unorthodox views, published as recently as last month in Calgary Sun:

- Global temperatures have declined since 1998 in direct contradiction to computer models on which Kyoto is based.

- Ice core records show temperature rises before CO2 rises, not as a result of it.

- Evidence mounts that pre-industrial levels of CO2 may have been much higher than the 280 ppm assumed by environmentalists.

- New research shows changes in output of the sun accounts for most of the recent warming and cooling of our planet.

- The primary evidence of human influence on climate, the "hockey stick" temperature graph of Michael Mann, has been debunked as manipulated and wrong.

A basic tenet of journalism is fact checking. Do these surprising claims have any scientific basis?

I phoned up Dr. Richard Gammon, Professor of Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington to ask. Somewhat exasperated, he refuted all of these points as either scientifically baseless or grossly misleading.

Strange.

I then called Dr. Andrew Weaver, a leading Canadian researcher in the field of climate science who holds a Canada Research Chair in Climate Modeling in Analysis at the University of Victoria.

He is also the chief editor of “Journal of Climate” – the leading academic publication in this field, and a lead author with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is the largest peer review exercise in the history of science, involving 2000 climate researchers from 100 countries.

Weaver also quickly confirmed that Ball’s well-published assertions have no scientific basis.

What’s going on? Do newspaper editors not possess a phone? How can it be that Dr. Ball managed to publish all those articles stating more of less the same thing if what he is saying lacks scientific merit?

First let’s start with the basics. Here is what Gammon had to say about Tim Ball’s doubts that there is no link between humans and climate change.

“This is like asking ‘is the moon round?’ or ‘does smoking cause cancer? We’re at a point now where there is no responsible position stating that humans are not responsible for climate change. That is just not where the science is…for a long time, for at least five years and probably ten years, in the international scientific community has been very clear”

In case there is any doubt, Gammon goes on. “This is not the balance of evidence argument for a civil lawsuit, this is the criminal standard beyond a reasonable doubt. We’ve been there for a long time and I think the media has really not presented that to the public.”

How does Gammon explain many of the climate science holdouts? “You can always find somebody paid for by the Western Fuels Association or Exxon Mobil to stir the pot and say that we don’t know yet or we are still confused and we need to listen to all sides and ExxonMobil will take that point of view.”

The role of the media in shaping the so-called climate debate is much larger however than merely providing space to industry actors claiming scientific credibility. Consider the editorial positions of many of the major newspapers in North America.

From the Los Angles Times last year: “Major news media have gone after scientists who argue there's still time to study global warming rather than plunge into some half-baked environmental jihad that could waste possibly trillions of dollars.”

Vancouver Sun business columnist Michael Campbell regularly holds forth on climate change. Last year he scolded the scientific community for their slapdash work:

“I see little evidence that proponents of man-made global warming know how damaging the shoddy science behind some of their claims has been to their cause. They don't seem to understand that for many of us, global warming is not an article of faith, but rather of science. And when the science is faulty, it damages the credibility of their cause.”

We can only assume that Mr. Campbell is referring to those dullards at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Their 2001 assessment report stated “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities” .

Perhaps he was referring to the Academies of Sciences of 11 countries including the US and UK, who released a joint statement in 2005 stating that, "the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action.”

By the way, Mr. Campbell’s academic training is in economics.

In his polysyllabic fashion, Rex Murphy also hectored the nation on the issue of climate science last month in his column in the Globe and Mail: “It is emphatically time for the most scrupulous and disinterested inquiry to determine the solid core of what is really known about the subject, separated from the great clouds of speculation, advocacy, geopolitics and calculated alarmism that overhang and shadow that core.”

It is as if these opinion writers and the scientific community exist on separate planets. Has the media never heard of the numerous, if pedantic, ways that the world’s scientific community has been trying to warn the world about global warming? When does it become unethical for the media to be used as a PR tool by a powerful corporate sector to delay meaningful regulation?

That was the question asked by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in a report released this month called “Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's Tactics to "Manufacture Uncertainty" on Climate Change”

This report draws the obvious parallel to the infamous and highly successful PR campaign by the tobacco industry to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of the public about the link between smoking and cancer.

Like oil companies today, Big Tobacco faced costly regulation due mounting scientific evidence of the dangers of their product. However they had a problem. They knew that almost no one would believe them if they tried to tell the public themselves that cigarettes were safe.

Their solution? Tobacco companies realized that they must instead fund phony scientists to speak on their behalf. These “skeptics” had two important advantages over real scientists.

First, they didn’t have to bother defending their positions in the scientific community because scientists weren’t the audience of this campaign, the public was. Like a washed up boxer who now only picks fights in bars, these skeptics, many of whom have impressive sounding credentials, restrict their pugilisms to the popular press rather than the peer reviewed scientific journals.

On this footing, it is a rather unfair fight. The rules of engagement in the media are very different than in the scientific community. The mastery of the sound bite rather than possessing robust data and an elegant question almost always carries the day in the media minute. The notoriously bad communication skills of some active researchers do not help matters.

The second advantage is that “skeptics” do not have to win the public debate, only cloud public opinion so as to delay regulation.

A now famous internal memo from the Brown & Williamson tobacco company put it bluntly: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

Compare this with a memo from the American Petroleum Institute in 1998 calling for a “campaign to recruit a cadre of scientists who share the industry’s views of climate science and to train them in public relations so they can help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify.”

What was old is new again. Remarkably, this chilling plan by Big Oil to use the media to deceive the public was largely ignored by news outlets when it became public.

According to the USC report, Exxon Mobil “funneled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science”

If there is a significant difference between the PR efforts of the tobacco industry and fossil fuel sector, it is size. The oil, gas and coal sectors make Big Tobacco seem positively puny by comparison.

The fossil fuel industry is the largest industrial sector the world has ever known, currently worth $8 to 9 trillion annually. This is four to five times larger than the next largest industrial sector . By this yardstick, the amount of money invested in funding climate change deniers is pocket change to Big Oil.

The oil industry is also refreshingly frank about where they put their dollars. In their own words, “ExxonMobil is committed to supporting organizations that…promote informed discussion on issues of direct relevance to business and the company’s ongoing operations."

Has this campaign against climate science been successful? You bet. It may well go down as the most audacious, successful and cynical campaign in public relations history.

Consider a recent paper entitled “Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press”, published in 2004 on the very subject of how climate change science is distorted by the media. The authors analyzed media stories from the five most prestigious newspapers in the US, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal over a five-year period to see what relative weight was being given to mainstream (i.e real) scientists and so-called “skeptics”.

“From a total of 3,543 articles, we examined a random sample of 636 articles. Our results showed that the majority of these stories were, in fact, structured on the journalistic norm of balanced reporting, giving the impression that the scientific community was embroiled in a rip-roaring debate on whether or not humans were contributing to global warming.”

The report found that the “US prestige-press coverage of global warming from 1988 to 2002 has contributed to a significant divergence of popular discourse from scientific discourse…that the prestige press’s adherence to balance actually leads to biased coverage of both anthropogenic contributions to global warming and resultant action.”

In plain English this translates as: the public is being misinformed on climate science by a poor journalism that continues to tell both sides of the story, even when there is no other side. The resultant political inaction might well kill the planet.

Returning to our original question, is it then ethical for an editor to provide space to industry-funded spokespeople claiming scientific credibility they don’t have?

“In my opinion, that is where ethical problem lies”, says Eric Jandciu, Research Coordinator at the UBC School of Journalism. “You are in effect proving misinformation to the public because there is no more [scientific] debate on this and we seem to be very far behind in Canada and the US. In the European media for years now they have stopped with this debate.”

While it must be tempting for editors to run material that runs counter to conventional beliefs, is there something else going on? For instance, could major sponsors be affecting editorial content?

According to the Canadian Newspaper Association of the top 30 advertisers in Canadian papers, 15 are from the auto industry. Car ads represent fully 54% of those revenues – totaling $549 million to Canadian newspaper publishers each year from the top 30 alone.

But what does money have to do with anything?

Considering the enormous consequences of continued inaction on climate change this shoddy journalism is not only unfortunate, it is irresponsible in the extreme.

Has this systematically inaccurate coverage influenced public opinion? Of course. That’s the whole point. Consider these public opinion numbers.

A poll from the fall of last year showed that fully 50% of Canadians still believed that “most scientists disagreed with each about whether global warming was happening”. In the US, the numbers are even worse. An ABC news poll last year showed that 64% of Americans believed the majority of scientists are still arguing whether global warming was even happening.

Which brings us the crux of the matter. How important is public opinion for influencing politics? Perhaps mark Twain said it best;

“Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.”

I asked Former Environment Minister David Anderson about the limitations that public opinion can place on policy makers, and how the oil sector influenced climate coverage while he was Minister. Did skewed coverage on climate science make his job as Minister more difficult?

“Of course”, said Anderson. “There was a very professional group of people who managed to get a large number of articles and letters to the editors [from climate skeptics] into Canadian media – they worked hard at it”, says Anderson.

“If you look at the columnists in Canada, you will find a very surprising interest in the views of dissenters. Just about every columnist in the Globe and the Vancouver Sun recites this intellectually pre-prepared stuff on climate science. Where does it come from? In Canada there has been a successful campaign to get the views of the deniers into the media, and it has been enormously successful. It has been very secretive and someone has been funding it…”

Why did Big Oil care about so much about little old Canada? Anderson is blunt:

“Bush said restrictions on greenhouse gases will destroy the US economy.”

Therefore the US based oil companies “never wanted a North American economy - Canada, close to the US in every respect –to succeed and prove him wrong. We were quite important to the American campaign. We succeed, and Bush looks as incorrect on climate and the effect on the American economy, as he is looking on Iraq.”

“They did not want Canada to succeed [in creating a green economy] because they knew that it wasn’t that hard. They knew the loss, especially in a growth economy such as ours, would be essentially imperceptible. No calculation suggested that this was going to be a severe dislocation to the Canadian economy.”

So what then is Anderson’s explanation for the Liberals lack of greater progress on climate policy? “You had the official opposition against you, had the provinces against you, you had business against you…” and lastly “you had a coherent campaign in the media against you.”

Anderson believes Canadian editors “were consistently getting under their noses the results of a sophisticated campaign of communications,” and that newspaper columnists “repeat some things in language and format which is so consistent across the board that it can only come from one source... that’s the people to whom the communications experts were focusing on. They focused on media.”

That campaign didn’t make Anderson’s job any easier. While the liberals record on reducing greenhouse gases was admittedly abysmal, so was the public understanding of the issue. In 1999, when Anderson became environment minister, only 2% of Canadians believed global warming was the most important environmental issue.

The political importance of keeping the public confused about climate science was made clear in a remarkable memo by Whitehouse spin-doctor Frank Luntz to the Bush administration in 2003:

“The debate is closing (against us) but is not yet closed. There is still a window or opportunity to challenge the science… should the public come to believe the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate…”

Perhaps the most compelling evidence that the North American public has been grossly misled by our news media comes this month from the biggest oil company of them all, ExxonMobil.

While Tim Ball and Michael Campbell seem utterly steadfast for the need for greater scientific debate and research, Exxon seems now not so sure.

This month the world’s largest oil company executed a stunning flip flop on global warming. Kenneth Cohen, Exxon's vice president for public affairs, acknowledged that "we know enough now -- or, society knows enough now -- that the risk is serious and action should be taken.”

They also took the opportunity to publicly announce that they were cutting support to such notorious climate change deniers as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and “five or six” other groups active in the so-called climate science debate. According to Cohen, "The issue has evolved.”

That is not to say that much precious time has not been wasted, but this development will hopefully begin to shift the public debate from arguing science to debating policy.

Weaver agrees. “Debating the science is good but it doesn’t happen in the opinion editorial pages of newspapers, it happens in the scientific community”. At the same time he feels “debating the policy [of global warming] is crucial and that is what has to happen in public discourse”

Gammon thinks that media coverage is improving but has a long way to go. “It’s beginning to move to where we need to be but not nearly fast enough. In my mind people are not scared enough. It’s a funny issue because the scientists are more worried about it than the general public.”

“You just can’t give up though because these guys [climate deniers] don’t give up. As long as they can plant the seed in the public mind that this is all controversial, they’ve won. That’s all they have to do. We need to keep strengthening the science and saying it as clearly as possible and working with the media so that the media gets the right message out.

Personally I believe Gammon is being far too charitable. I find it hard to believe that media professionals - typically superb at research and fact checking - have simply not yet figured out that science resolved this debate five to ten years ago.

How much is a stake here? Do scientists like Weaver think dealing with global warming is urgent? “Incredibly urgent. On a scale of one to ten, how about ten? I don’t worry so much for me as a Canadian; I worry about the global instability that will result from it. An example I give is “ what are we going to do about 100 million people that are displaced from Bangladesh this century?”

The possibility of tipping points are particularly troubling to Weaver. “Permafrost in the northern hemisphere is a massive reservoir of carbon...If you look at the last time there were massive methane releases [that would result from melting permafrost], 94 percent of species of life on the planet died. If we don’t have this baby turned around by 2030, it’s game over for an awful lot of people.”

What about the assertion that we need more research before we can act? Weaver bristles. “What bugs me most is that I have been criticized that the only reason I am doing this is that I want more research money. The irony is that [scientists] are saying we don’t need more research. What we need is action…we know what’s going on. We know what needs to be done. The thing that would get me more research money would be to say ‘yeah, there’s a lot of uncertainty and I really think before we do policy, we need to spend some money to figure this thing out’”. That would be the purely selfish thing to say but that has not been the response from the [scientific] community.”

He also offers this advice to the media: “ What newspaper editors have to realize is that there are people out there who are using them. People don’t liked being used but they have to realize that they are being used… Rather than thinking that they are serving the public discourse, ask the question ‘am I being used to further an agenda?’ And the answer with the issue of climate change is yes.”

There is a certain irony in a career scientist like Weaver seeing so clearly what is wrong with how the media covers climate change, when he has had to endure so many media commentators publicly lecturing him on science.

Lastly, there has been a fascinating twist to the Tim Ball story. In April of last year, one of his op-eds in the Calgary Herald slamming the science of climate change raised the ire of a real scientist, Dr. Dan Johnston at the University of Lethbridge.

Johnston wrote a letter to the editor questioning the qualifications and academic credentials of Dr. Ball, and was quickly sued for defamation (no irony there). Ball filed a suit against not only Johnston, but the editors of the Calgary Herald for $325,000 for among other things “damages to his income earning capacity as a sought after speaker with respect to global warming”

The court documents filed by the Herald in their defence are illuminating. They state that Ball “is a member of the Friends of Science, a group dedicated to discrediting mainstream scientific beliefs and theories regarding the contribution of human sourced greenhouse gases to global warming” and that “the Friends of Science and the plaintiff are, at least in part, supported and funded by members of the oil and gas industry who have a vested interest in limiting the impact of the Kyoto accord on their business.”

The Herald also stated that Ball has published few articles in academically recognized peer-reviewed scientific journals”, and that he “has not conducted research regarding the relationship between climate and elements within the atmosphere.”

Lastly, here is how editors of the Herald characterized the credibility of a man whose opinion pieces on climate change they had chosen to publish eight times in the last five years: “the plaintiff is viewed as a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a practicing scientist”.

Strange. This was not how he was identified in his bylines. In his op-ed of April of last year, the Herald cited him as “a Victoria-based environmental consultant. He was the first climatology PhD in Canada and worked as a professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years.”

Therein lies the heart of the matter. This is not about freedom of speech. No one is suggesting that papers should not have the freedom to publish whatever and whomever they want, as long as it is not violating any laws.

The question instead is one of properly identify their sources – a basic tenet of good journalism.

Imagine if the next time Dr. Ball was cited in the popular press he was instead identified as “a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a practicing scientist”, as the editors of the Calgary Herald stated in their sworn statement to the court.

That might better arm the reading public to draw their own conclusions, both about his provocative comments, as well as the wisdom of the news outlet in publishing them.

Not much chance of that it seems. Incredibly, Tim Ball’s controversial op-eds have been published an additional eight times in Canwest papers since Ball sued the editors of the Calgary Herald on September 1, 2006. In all of those cases, Ball was cited as a former professor at the University of Winnipeg.

What if we demanded more from our media on what is emerging as the leading issue of the 21st century. What if the mainstream media stopped being a big part of the problem, and became part of the solution?

Does it seem strange for instance, that while the environment is the number one issue of concern for Canadians, that the Globe and Mail or the Vancouver Sun have no one writing a regular column on the environment? Arguably, both these papers already have several commentators that regularly spill buckets of ink questioning our movement towards a greener world. A bit of balance would be nice.

Or how about our venerable CBC?

Radio One has dedicated programs for business, sports, advertising, science, Quebec culture, pop culture, food, story telling, spirituality, comedy, and theatre. There are three separate shows on writing and books, and fully eleven programs on music. CBC’s television networks include stand-alone programs on fashion, hairstyles, gardening, antiques and even fly-fishing.

Amid this dizzying Can-Con diversity, however, there is one glaring omission. At present, there is no dedicated CBC radio or television program on the number one issue of concern to Canadians: The environment.

If any of these editors and producers need a writer, I’m available.

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer. This piece ran in the Georgia Straight on January 25, 2007

Harper and the Environment Part 2

Expediency has always been the mainstay of politics. Former Alabama Governor George Wallace famously recanted his segregationist beliefs in the American South as the political winds changed. Jean Chrétien flip-flopped on the distinct society issue when the time was right.

Into that storied company strides Stephen Harper, who last week newly proclaimed his commitment to the environment. “We've clearly determined we need to do more”, announced the Prime Minister as he replaced Rona Ambrose with John Baird, one of his most valuable players.

There is nothing like a stiff change in public opinion to send our politicians back to the ideological drawing board. However, before we embrace his newly minted green credentials, let’s have a look at what Mr. Harper has actually done on the environment in his last year in office. Some notable milestones:

April 13: Three months after his election, Harper quietly cancelled fifteen federal programs meant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This announcement was made on a Thursday afternoon before the Easter long weekend, presumably in an effort to sweep this important policy shift under the carpet.

The axed programs included the “One Tonne Challenge” as well as the Energuide program, which provided incentives to retrofit 300,000 Canadian homes since the late 1990’s - saving on average 30% in energy use. Also cut were 40 public information offices across the country and several scientific and research programs on climate change.

These cuts were made in spite of the fact that a recent Treasury Board review had determined the majority of these programs were cost effective.

That same day, Environment Canada scientist Mark Tushingham, who had penned a novel set in the near future about how climate change could affect Canada, was forbidden by the Rona Ambrose’s office to speak at his own book launch. His editor had driven from New Brunswick to Ottawa for the abruptly canceled event at the National Press Club.

Mr. Harper’s comment on this affront to the public service, free speech and scientific thought did little to quell speculation that the gag order actually came straight from the top: “I not only hope, but expect, that all elements of the bureaucracy will be working with us to achieve our objectives”

April 25: Rona Ambrose announces to reporters that Canada now supports the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate - an alternative to the Kyoto Protocol championed by George Bush that lacks any mandatory emission targets and is widely ridiculed by the environmental community.

May 2: The Conservatives' first federal budget fails to even mention the Kyoto Protocol to control greenhouse gas emissions.

May 10: Minister Rona Ambrose tells Parliament that Canada had “no hope” of reaching the reductions of greenhouse gases Canada committed to under Kyoto.

The international optics of this surrender are particularly embarrassing. At the time, Canada was the chair of the Kyoto treaty and played host to the world on the treaty not five months prior in Montreal. Then Minister Stephan Dion had helped broker a pivotal deal to keep the international agreement alive.

The new Canadian government now seemed to be telling the world that any efforts by Canada to meet our legal obligations under Kyoto work are essentially a waste of time. Ironically, Ms. Ambrose was scheduled to chair a UN meeting the following week in Bonn Germany to expand the Kyoto agreement to include developing countries. The David Suzuki Foundation and Climate Action Network both called for Ambrose to resign as president of these important international negotiations.

October 19: The “Clean Air Act” is introduced to Parliament. It is widely criticized as far too weak, lacking any mechanisms to cap carbon emissions until at least 2020.

November 12: Rona Ambrose represents Canada at a UN conference in Nairobi to combat climate change. Her message to the world? “We are on track to meet all of our obligations under the Kyoto Protocol, but not the target.”

So absurd was this position that it was difficult for Canadian environmentalists attending the Nairobi conference to keep a civil tongue in their head. “What kind of misleading nonsense is this?" demanded Steven Guilbeault, the climate critic from Greenpeace – a member of the environmental community from whom Mr. Harper is now apparently seeking counsel.

November 30: Mr. Harper axes a further five climate change programs at Agriculture Canada, bizarrely asking the soon-to-be-redundant public servants to help with media spin control. Approximately 10 per cent of Canada's greenhouse gases come from agriculture.

January 17, 2007: A Radio-Canada investigation reveals that shortly after he was elected, Harpers’ government quietly met for two days in Houston Texas, with their US counterparts and oil industry executives. The apparent purpose of the meeting? Canada committing to a five-fold expansion in oil sands production in a “relatively short time span”.

A week later, George Bush makes his state of the union address, stating that the US is addicted to oil and that he wants to makes America’s dependence Middle Eastern oil “a thing of the past” - now a national security objective of the US government. Where will this missing production come from? Apparently from us. Thanks for letting us know Stephen.

The Alberta oil sands development is already the largest source of new greenhouse gases in Canada. So energy intensive is this bitumen boondoggle, it takes up to 1,500 cubic feet of clean natural gas to produce one barrel of dirty crude. The oil sands now consume 600 million cubic feet of natural gas per day – enough to heat 3.2 million Canadian homes.

According to the minutes of the Houston meeting, this massive increase in the oil sands production will mean Canada will have to “streamline” environmental regulations for new energy projects.

January 19, 2007: Harper announces his “new” green energy program, which appears to be a re-tread of a Liberal program cancelled by the Conservatives last year.

Reviews from the conservation community are less than stellar: “It is no more than a regurgitated Liberal plan with a few less bucks and one less year,” says Beatrice Olivastri, CEO, Friends of the Earth-Canada. “I am shocked and appalled that there is less on the table for renewable power production.”

January 21, 2007: The Conservatives announce a $300 million “EcoEnergy” program over four years to retrofit Canadian home to promote energy efficiency. This “new” program bears a striking resemblance to the old Energuide program axed by the Conservatives last April.

The significant difference is that the government will no longer fund expert audits for homeowners – perhaps because these highly qualified people have moved on to other work since the old program was abruptly cancelled by Harper last year.

This last point is important. Whipsawing public policy like this is not only shameless, it is highly inefficient as well. Environmental programs buried just last year are now being exhumed by Mr. Harper and propped up as “new” ideas - expect to see some spoilage and decay.

Politics is politics and Mr. Harper can be forgiven for trying to recast his government to more accurately reflect shifting public opinion. Indeed that is the whole point of a representative democracy such as ours.

However, as in the famous conversion of George Wallace to the civil rights movement, the public can also be forgiven for doubting his sincerity. Actions, as always, speak louder than words.

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer living in Vancouver. This piece was published in the Tyee on Jan 24, 2007.

The Red Green Show

Stephane Dion’s surprising smackdown of the Liberal backroom boys was not just highly amusing, it may also signal a much-needed infusion of new blood into Canada's "natural governing party".

More importantly however, it showed that the old Liberal powerbrokers had grossly miscalculated the growing importance of the environment to Canadians as the defining issue of coming century.

As a longtime environmentalist, I can attest that the political machinery of all leading parties have never really treated this issue as anything more than a baby kissing photo op. Seeing Chrétien at the podium last weekend thundering about how he had championed Kyoto, while his government presided over a 25% increase in carbon emissions was a stomach-churning case in point.

However, the days when such empty rhetoric would pass public muster appear to have thankfully come to an end. An Environics poll this month showed that the environment is now second only to health care as the leading issue for Canadians. This rapid climb from public opinion obscurity has been astonishing.

In the 1990’s the environment as the leading issue to Canadians hovered around 5%. Even in the last election, only 4% of Canadians felt it was the most important issue. Five months ago, it had risen to 10%. Last month’s poll showed the environment was the leading issue for 13% of Canadians – ahead of the economy, the mission in Afghanistan or crime.

On climate change specifically, the numbers are even more compelling. In 1999, only 2% of Canadians polled thought global warming was the leading environmental problem facing the country. By 2004 that figure had risen to 4%. Last year it was 7%. By this year it had rocketed up to 20%.

This surge of support for a clean and healthy environment shows no signs of slowing and Mr.Dion shrewdly surfed this wave to victory past his party’s establishment, and the anointed frontrunners. His 53-page energy and climate platform clearly distinguished him from other candidates in the running, and struck a chord with younger delegates whose future hangs in the balance.

The sea change of public opinion is being driven by a realization by average Canadians of the enormous implications of global warming. This is a culmination of ever more stark scientific findings on what a climate altered Canada would mean for our children, as well as what Canadians are seeing already with their own eyes.

Vancouver just ended the largest boil water advisory in Canadian history as a result of record-breaking storms battering the BC coast. Recent research from the University of Washington shows that this type of “extreme” weather on Canada’s west coast will likely become the norm as a warmer North Pacific Ocean churns out more powerful and wetter winter storms.

Warming winters in BC have allowed an explosion in the mountain pine beetle population, which now affects an area of forest three times the size of Vancouver Island and is growing by 40% every year. By the time this epidemic has run it’s course it will have impacted 25,000 forest dependant families in 80 BC communities and obliterated $20 billion dollars in commercial timber.

Canadians are waking up to such challenges and are looking for leaders with vision and commitment that will lead our country into the new century. Mr. Dion appears to be such a man and his victory will provide Canadians a very clear choice in the next election.

For his part, Stephen Harper’s credibility on the climate file is only slightly more balmy than absolute zero. His much-hyped Clean Air Act was widely ridiculed as an empty ruse that would do nothing to cap carbon emissions until at least 2020.

Last April, Harper signaled his disdain for fighting global warming by abruptly canceling fifteen federal programs meant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Last month he axed a further five related programs at Agriculture Canada, bizarrely asking the soon-to-be-redundant public servants to help with media spin control.

While Harper is no eco-hero, he is also a shrewd and capable politician. Can Dion beat him at the polls? Given that Dion has just vanquished the most seasoned political veterans in his own party, so far I am impressed.

If he does become Prime Minister it remains to be seen whether the Liberal party, which in the past has failed miserably to reduce carbon emissions, can be trusted to deliver on this critical issue.

However, Mr. Dion’s victory over not only his rivals but the party establishment means two things: Not only does he now hold the reins of power to begin to effect such changes, he will also face much less internal opposition from the hoary pragmatists in his party that have blocked such progress in the past.

Godspeed Mr. Dion. I might just vote for you.

Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer living in Vancouver. This piece ran nowhere.