International Security Assistance Force troops at Kandahar Airfield. Creative Commons photo by Aramis X. Ramirez/ISAF.

On October 7, 2001, U.S. and U.K. forces began an invasion of Afghanistan aimed at capturing or killing the perpetrators of 9/11, believed to be sheltered there by the Taliban. Canadian forces soon joined the fray as part of the International Security Assistance Force, beginning The Forces’ longest and most controversial military engagement in history.

After nearly a decade on the ground in Afghanistan, reaching nearly 3,000 soldiers at their peak deployment, Canadian combat troops withdrew over the summer of 2011. Approximately 950 personnel are scheduled to remain in Afghanistan through 2014, now focused on training Afghan security forces, including its army and local police.

As we approach the 10-year mark for Canada’s Afghan mission, This Magazine asked three expert observers to talk about Canada’s role in the war-torn country, what has—and has not—been achieved, and what the legacy of this conflict will be for Canada’s military and diplomatic standing on the world stage.

The panel:

Amir Attaran is an Associate Professor in the Faculties of Law and Medicine at the University of Ottawa, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development Policy. He is a frequent commentator in the press, having written for the Globe and Mail, New York Times, The Guardian, and the Literary Review of Canada, among others.

John Duncan is the director of the Ethics, Society, and Law program at the University of Trinity College in the University of Toronto. He is the founder of the international bilingual society for the study of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, and the co-founder and academic director of the Humanities for Humanity outreach program at Trinity and Victoria University in the University of Toronto. He writes on philosophy, the humanities, and politics.

Graeme Smith is a Globe and Mail correspondent who was stationed in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2009. His reporting from Kandahar and Southern Afghanistan won numerous awards, including three National Newspaper Awards, the Canadian Association of Journalists’ award for investigative reporting, recognition from Amnesty International, and an Emmy for Smith’s online video series of interviews with Afghan insurgents, “Talking to the Taliban.”

The conversation:

This: The stated formal objective of the Afghan mission for Canada is “to help build a more secure, stable, and self-sufficient Afghanistan that is no longer a safe haven for terrorists.” By your estimation, are any of those criteria currently being met?

John Duncan: Terrorism is being suppressed, according to a few limited measures. But security within Afghanistan is now actually the worst it has been since 2001, which is to say violence including terrorism is a brutal fact of life for many Afghans, deepening resentment toward the West in the country and the broader region, which does not bode well for anti-terrorism internationally. In general terms, development has not been significant, governance is abysmal, and the situation of women and girls across the country has not improved significantly in 10 years.

Graeme Smith: You can make an argument that even though security’s worse right now in Afghanistan because the number of attacks keeps going up and up, there has been development in some places, and that in some places, it’s much harder for an organization like al Qaeda to organize their training camps. So you can argue that, in the short term, there has been progress. I think you really have to look at where the arc of this is going: where is Afghanistan going to be 10 years from now? And I worry that 10 years from now, all three of those indicators are going to be worse.

Duncan: Our allies in Afghanistan—the ones who are going to become incredibly more important as the drawdown continues over the next few years—are a bunch of people infiltrated by the warlords we supported against the Soviets, or their successors. And most of these folks are very nasty people. Take the assassination this summer of Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. He was one of our staunchest allies, but I can’t think of anyone who believes he was anything like a straight-up guy. There’s a real sense that we won’t be leaving the place in significantly better hands than the Taliban.

Amir Attaran: The strongest remedy to terrorism is actually a government that functions. That was the reason Canada could deal with FLQ terrorism, or the British could deal with the IRA. Unless you have a functioning government of your own, one in which people can trust, you won’t solve it. What Canada, the U.S., and NATO seem to have missed is the very basic lesson that the Afghans have to solve the problem of violence in their own midst. We can’t do it for them.

Smith: Afghanistan had a functioning country in some ways before we came in in 2001. That’s a qualified statement: the Taliban had been relatively successful in establishing a regime and you could argue that if you were looking for a partner to fight terrorism—a partner to take on al Qaeda and make sure that the country would remain stable with some kind of rule of law—in 2001, your best partner would have been the Taliban.

This: The Taliban is obviously still a going concern. Are they still a kind of government in waiting? Will they ever be back at the table? Is this something that can be negotiated? Will they take over anyway?

Smith: It’s often been said that if NATO leaves Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai would be kicked out sometime within an hour and a day, and the insurgents will run the country again. Karzai’s regime has no strength without NATO. Now, that’s all supposed to be changing between now and 2014 as we withdraw and build up the Afghan security forces, but the Afghan security forces have proved to be extremely unreliable, the police especially. My analysis is still that we’re headed for a civil war and not that we’re headed for an immediate Taliban takeover.

Attaran: I can’t make up my own mind any longer whether it’s possible to negiotiate with the Taliban. I think that should have been tried years ago, and I think it would have succeeded years ago. One of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s gifts—apart from promoting his own interests—was that he was actually able to talk to the Taliban pretty well, as well as talking to the West. Back in 2008 he urged Canada to open a line of communication and that was done, somewhat covertly, although the government always denied it. Had that been done in earnest, I think we would be looking at a much happier situation today. But I don’t know that it’s possible today.

Duncan: The military leaders’ people have said all along that the campaign can’t be won militarily and there has to be a political settlement. I’m not sure our side is taking negotiations seriously, but anyway we need a partner with which to negotiate, and the insurgents are not serious about negotiations because they also see that NATO cannot win militarily. They see victory in the long run. “We have the watches, they have the time,” as is often said.

Maybe the most hopeful scenario we can see is that the regime won’t collapse as we withdraw, but will be able to hold significant parts of the country as well as the regime did after the Soviets left in 1989. But we’re standing up a bunch a guys there that are not humanitarians. Canada continually tries to sell the war to its own citizens on the basis of the idea that we’re improving the lot of women, and bringing development to these folks, but really we’re not standing up anything like feminists or pro-development people.

Smith: We’re not even standing up effective bad guys. Even if we were to make that compromise, and say, “Ahmed Wali Karzai is not a nice man but at least he can keep control of Southern Afghanistan,” at this point, at this level of desperation, that might be a bargain that we’re willing to make. But he wasn’t that guy.

Attaran: All three of us appear to agree that civil war is the most likely outcome in a few years. So the question ought to be on the part of policy-makers: “How do you minimize the intensity of the civil war?” Give up on the idea that you can avoid it. Just concentrate on minimizing its intensity. And to do that you need to take a page out of the playbook for resolving ethnic wars. That means going around to each of the affected interest groups and asking: “What will it take for you not to fight the people closest to you?” Find out grievances, find out wishes. Then a disinterested interlocutor could try and negotiate an agreement that bribes people to keep the peace. It will require subsidies, and incentives to settle old scores, except through non-violent means.

But of course through our stupidity of the war on terrorism, we’ve made this very difficult. Because today, under most countries’ laws, if you speak to a terrorist group and offer them training on making a peaceful transition, under the laws of Canada, the United States, Britain, and others, that’s considered giving material support to terrorism. So the international organizations or NGOs who specialize in peace-building negotiations and exercises, and who might be able to find a way out of this mess for the NATO alliance, would be criminals for doing their work, under the very stupid laws that exist in NATO countries today.

This: Let’s talk about the Afghan National Army. This has now become the primary focus of Canada’s mission there, to have Canadian military and police trainers on the ground to help the Afghan army and police reach a level where they can provide enough security for development to occur safely. Is the Afghan National Army in a position to provide that?

Attaran: Emphatically no. In successful states, it’s the state that holds what’s called the “monopoly of violence.” The current Afghan military, the police, and the National Directorate of Security are not able to maintain a monopoly of violence in the country.

Duncan: They can’t even do it with the help of 140,000 NATO troops, including overpowering air support and all the rest of the sophisticated NATO technology.

Attaran: No, it can’t. And in this case, one has to turn this axiom on its head. You have to say, “Whoever can provide the monopoly of violence becomes the state.” I think that’s how you have to do it. To minimize the intensity of the civil war that is coming, one has to send credible emissaries, and I have no idea who they are because every NATO country has no credibility on this issue now. You have to send a neutral emissary to approach all potentially violent factions and ask, “What will it take for you—by way of money, land, political influence—what will it take for you to not fight and not settle old scores? It all has a price.

This: If the NATO allies have no credibility when it comes to doing that kind of negotiation, is there a figure who could come in from outside who could do that negotiation and bring people to the table?

Attaran: In the past we relied on Norwegians or other usefully helpful small countries like Canada to solve big global messes for us. I don’t know that that can happen anymore because Canada doesn’t have any credibility with the insurgents, being a member of NATO in Afghanistan. I don’t think that even the Norwegians can do it. I think the only possible answer is for the emerging countries to really flex their diplomatic muscle. I’m thinking as far away as Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa. Unless countries of that tier in the world begin to do part of their role in setting and accomplishing big projects in global diplomacy, there’s no one to get NATO out of their mess.

Smith: Not only NATO but also the United Nations. One of the difficult things about this conflict is that the United Nations has taken sides. In previous iterations of Afghan civil wars you had the United Nations acting as the neutral go-between, the honest broker. The UN will not be able to play that role this time around.

Attaran: I think this is sure to be an unpopular thing to say: Afghans will develop a certain trust in institutions once they see those institutions able to prosecute Westerners for war crimes. Nobody disputes that Western militaries caused unlawful civilian deaths, or utilized unlawful means such as torture—much of that is admitted by NATO countries themselves. If we want Afghans to believe in the power of global institutions, one thing that will help is for certain Westerners to be made criminally responsible by Afghan institutions. If they can see their own institutions flex muscle and show that they are not about to bow before the most powerful nations on the earth’s face, then they will believe those institutions matter.

Duncan: You’re right that it’s an unpopular thing to say; I can’t imagine Canadians feeling too comfortable about it. But it’s also right that anyone who commits a war crime ought to be prosecuted.

Smith: Here’s my main concern about using war crimes as the bully stick. I’m worried that in the coming decades, I’m going to be standing in some war-torn country—Libya, Syria, Somalia—and I’m going to be writing stories where people are calling for foreign intervention, people are calling for peacekeepers to prevent an atrocity. And that if the lawyers warn the international forces that there is some percentage risk of exposure on the war-crimes front, that that intervention will not happen, and that lots of people will have to die because we’re afraid to stick our necks out.

Attaran: It’s undeniably a risk. Part of going forth in the world and trying to change things, whether you call it “responsibility to protect,” as it’s called on the left, or “regime change” as it’s called on the right, means going forward and doing so in accordance to the laws of armed conflict, such as the Geneva Conventions and international human rights law. And if you don’t, it doesn’t matter whether your reasons for the foreign sojourn is prompted by the fear of terrorism on the right, or the desire to rid the world of despots on the left. The reasons are irrelevant; you still have the same laws to abide by.

This: Let’s come back to the situation of Canada’s diplomatic corps. What is the legacy of the Afghan conflict for Canada’s diplomatic reputation, and how is this changing foreign affairs currently?

Smith: Well, we’re certainly seen as a country that can kick some ass. That wasn’t the case before, for better or for worse.

Attaran: Our diplomatic corps is certainly viewed as compromised. We had a great relationship with a great many countries in the world, and that did indeed land us on the UN Security Council with regularity in the past. It’s failed not because we’ve succeeded in alienating a huge number of countries—although I think we’ve done that for other reasons—we weren’t actually successful in getting on the Security Council in the last session because the U.S. declined to campaign for us. That’s the most shocking thing. Even though we showed ourselves to be willing to kick ass and to appeal to Washington in that regard, it wasn’t good enough for Washington. And for the first time that I know of, Washington did not campaign on Canada’s behalf, did not ask other countries to vote for Canada for the Security Council seat. The moral of the story is: being able to kick ass but losing your broad-based diplomatic respect among many nations doesn’t work to win your influence. It simply makes you a somewhat boring, middle-sized, un-influential country, which is what Canada is in danger of becoming.

Duncan: Former Liberal cabinet minister John Manley, who produced the very influential 2008 report on the Afghan mission, has made the argument in public a number of times that the great sacrifice Canada is making in Afghanistan is something that politicians in Ottawa need to make clear and well-heard in Washington, to make sure we improve our recognition down there, with our neighbour, with our dominant trading partner, and with the world’s leading power.

Smith: You know, behind the scenes, we do still have this role as a moderating influence within NATO. So, for example, when the Americans were thinking about sending in chemical sprayers to eradicate the poppy fields of southern and eastern Afghanistan—which would have just thrown gasoline on the fire and been a disastrous move—the Canadians and the Brits quietly persuaded the Americans to see reason, and persuaded them not to escalate the conflict that way. So there are times, I think, when Canada still can be part of this club of nations that is taking unpopular actions and doing some harm reduction, as it were.

Attaran: Our diplomatic standing is about much more than how we comport ourselves during wartime. We have to remember that as much as we try to suck up to the Americans by taking the most dangerous part of Afghanistan militarily, we weren’t successful in getting the backing of our closest ally to be in the UN Security Council, because on enough other diplomatic fronts, we’ve proven to be very irritating. Stephen Harper’s government displeased the United States on climate change, on Omar Khadr’s repatriation, and on a very personal level, on President Obama’s campaign to become president, where it appears we leaked information about what he said in a briefing on NAFTA. If, diplomatically, Canada behaves like this—practices bush-league diplomacy, which is a growing specialty of ours—we are going to lose influence, despite making blood sacrifice.

Duncan: There is a debate in the military and academic literature about this. Some people have worried since the bombing runs Canada carried out in Yugoslavia that our sacrifices, the things we’ve done in hardcore military efforts, have not been sufficiently recognized because our forces were too integrated with other forces as in Yugoslavia. So the idea for Afghanistan was to make sure that everyone could see that Canada was there doing really heavy lifting in the specific region of Kandahar, to achieve some real salience, boosting our recognition, our credibility, and ultimately our influence on the world stage.

In addition to this debate, there’s another about trying to understand what our diplomatic and military mission around the world has been, is, and should be. Some say we have often intervened for peace—our peacekeeping heritage—but others say that national interests have actually always trumped peacekeeping in Canadian interventions. Now, since the Canadian self-understanding is largely wrapped up in the perception of a peacekeeping heritage, the concern with Afghanistan has been about whether too much heavy lifting—that is, war fighting—will alienate Canadian popular support for the mission.

So we have tough talk about “killing scumbags,” on the one hand, and doublespeak about “peacemaking” and “peace-building,” on the other hand. We see from these debates, as well as from mainstream press coverage of the war, that a major concern has been not to alienate Canadian support for the war. I’m no fan of promoting war, but at least the analysts arguing for salience and national interests are straight shooters with respect to Afghanistan, where about 90 percent of the funding has gone to the military mission—not to development, governance, women and girls, and so on. Despite the rhetoric, this has been war fighting for 10 years, and if that is not bad enough we also have to face the grim truth that the war fighting has achieved virtually nothing.

This: So this conflict has changed our diplomatic reputation; how is it changing the Canadian Forces themselves?

Smith: We talked about the Canadian Forces becoming blooded, becoming more combat ready, and I think it’s had that effect. Though our presence in Kandahar may, at the end of the day, have done some harm to Kandahar, I think it may have done some good to the Canadian Forces as an organization. They now have more airlift capability, they now have a cadre of experienced counter-insurgency experts, so should the Canadians have the stomach for another overseas adventure, the Canadian Forces will certainly be ready.

Duncan: There has been a lot of press lately about athletes suffering serious long-term effects from even mild concussions. Well, many Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan have suffered serious concussions from improvised exploisve device blasts, as well as other serious injuries and illnesses. For many returning soldiers we don’t really know how long-standing or severe their problems are going to be, and there are things to worry about there, such as whether or not there is sufficient support or care for them, what the effects will be on their families and communities, and what the effects will be on the military itself. Already there are worrying cases of inadequate care and support, and south of the border there are alarmingly high rates of soldier and veteran suicide.

Attaran: I don’t think this war has been good for the forces. There will be a great many young veterans who will be less well-cared-for than in previous generations because of the change to veterans’ benefits in this country. I think our military leadership—the brass if you will—has become markedly arrogant to the point that they’re showing their ill schooling. I blame no one for this more than General Rick Hillier, because he was the one who signed the status-of-forces agreement with Afghanistan. That is what launched this mission in southern Afghanistan, the Kandahar mission, and he did so on terms that were wholly unrealistic. When I read it I was gobsmacked to find his name above a statement to the effect that our mission was to “eradicate” the Taliban and al Qaeda. Eradicate—that was the word he used. History teaches that insurgencies are almost never eradicated, so for General Hillier to set that goal was stupid from the get-go. I’m profoundly in agreement with those who think the military would be better off reaffirming Canada’s territorial claims in the Arctic. We’re a country who’s been around since 1867. We have to think in 100-year, 200-year cycles, and in the long run, will Afghanistan matter to this country? Hardly. But the Arctic? Definitely. That’s what we gave up by going on this adventure.

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Null Value.

“We do not use statistics as an excuse not to get tough on criminals.” That was federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson’s astonishing response to Statistics Canada’s finding in July that crime rates in Canada now stand at the same level they did in 1973. Don’t bother us with the facts, was Nicholson’s meaning, our minds are made up. We’re going to get tough on crime—despite the fact that the criminals have gone soft on us.

Stephen Harper’s new majority government vowed last spring to pass an omnibus crime bill during the first 100 sitting days of the new parliament, a deadline that is fast approaching. The bulk of the bill is dedicated to introducing new mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offences. For instance, the last incarnation of the bill (it was never voted on before the last election and could change) specified a minimum one-year sentence for any drug crime on behalf of a gang or involving a weapon. The minimum raised to two years if the crime was committed near a school. Producing a drug nets a mandatory three years if the production posed a threat to minors or public health.

You don’t have to condone criminality to see that mandatory minimums, especially for drug-related crime, are the kind of cynical laws that play well on voter doorsteps and fail miserably in almost every other context. They don’t make the general public any safer; they harden minor criminals in the crucible of prison; and they cost a fortune.

Judges don’t like them, since they tie their hands and leave no room for context or, well, judgment (Justice John Gomery calls such legislation “a slap in the face” to judges). Prosecutors seldom like them, since they provide defendants no incentive to plead guilty in exchange for a lesser punishment. Corrections officials’ feelings are mixed at best; their budgets inevitably swell, but overcrowding causes greater problems.

Even the United States—the world capital of magical thinking on drug crime—is backpedalling on mandatory minimums for drug cases. A CBC report found a dozen states— Republican- and Democrat-run—that are repealing mandatory minimums. They cite a comprehensive array of complaints, from abstract doubts about the constitutionality of the practice, to practical, bottom-line problems with out-of-control policing and corrections costs.

The facts show that Canadians are safer than they have been in two generations, yet the Harper government is plunging ahead anyway. This policy will inflate the government’s corrections budget to $3.1 billion in 2012–2013 (including $466 million just to build new prisons). For that price tag you’d hope to bag the kingpins—but of course, that’s not what this is about. Instead we will victimize and incarcerate the most impoverished and desperate small time crooks and call it justice. If you believe that poverty reduction, alternative sentencing, addiction counselling, and evidence-based policymaking are better ideas, this government has one word for you: tough.

Canada is a nation of wild, legendary rivers. The Mackenzie, the Fraser, the Churchill, and dozens more all empty into our national identity. They flow through our landscape, history, and imagination. They are vital to any history textbook, Group of Seven exhibit, or gift-shop postcard rack.

Canada is also a nation of river-tamers. We revere our waterways—but we also dam them. Trudeau canoed the epic Nahanni and two years later presided over the opening of the mammoth Churchill Falls hydroelectric dam in Labrador. We are, as the Canadian Hydropower Association says, a “hydro superpower.” Almost 60 percent of our electricity supply comes from dams—compared to just 16 percent globally—and only China squeezes more electricity out of its rivers than we do.

The heyday of big dam construction in Canada began around the late 1950s. What followed was an exhibition of progress in the raw. Surveyors and bulldozers headed to the frontier. Mighty men tamed mighty rivers. Engineering prowess replaced natural grandeur.

As rock was blasted and cement poured, legacies were forged, both geographical and political. In Manitoba, the two largest rivers and three of the five largest lakes were dramatically re-engineered. In Quebec, 571 dams and control structures have altered the flow of 74 rivers.

The construction phase lasted through the ’80s, then slowed, even though the country’s hydro potential had only been half tapped. Now, after two decades of limited construction—with the exception of Hydro-Québec, which kept on building—the dam-builders are rumbling to life again.

In the next 10 to 15 years, Canadian utilities will spend $55 to $70 billion on new hydroelectric projects. This would add 14,500 megawatts to Canada’s existing 71,000 megawatts of hydroelectric capacity. Most new projects are in Quebec (4,570 MW), B.C. (3,341 MW), Labrador (3,074 MW), and Manitoba (2,380 MW). The largest of these, Labrador’s 2,250 MW Gull Island project, will produce as much power as 750 train locomotives.

The extent and cost of construction will vary over time, but one thing is certain: the push for more hydro is on.

Most of these projects are driven in large part by the prospect of exporting power to the U.S. American interest in hydropower is linked, in part, to its low cost and its low greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this context, the push for more hydro is also a push by the industry to position its product as an answer to climate change.

Jacob Irving heads the Canadian Hydropower Association, which represents the interests of the hydro industry. He says hydropower is “a very strong climate change solution,” because it can displace the use of coal and natural gas to generate electricity. The argument is simple and compelling: use more hydropower, use less fossil fuel. The industry especially touts exports of hydro to the U.S., where 600 coal-fired plants produce 45 percent of the nation’s electricity, with another 24 percent fuelled by natural gas. The CHA says hydro exports already reduce continental emissions by half a million tons a year. They want that number to grow.

Given the dire climate prognosis—emissions in Canada, the U.S., and everywhere else are well above levels in 1990, the year used as a benchmark in the Kyoto Accord—the urgency of reducing fossil-fuel consumption is great. Perhaps Canada’s wild rivers, if harnessed, can be our gift to a warming world. Maybe a concrete edifice nestled in a river valley is just as quintessentially Canadian as a lone paddler on a pristine river.

This presents a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too scenario for Canadian utilities. They can build more dams—obviously still a cornerstone of the corporate culture—cash in on lucrative exports, and enjoy eco-hero status. But is damming more of our rivers an optimal strategy for addressing climate change?

Despite the virtues of hydro power, dams can only reduce emissions indirectly. Their climate value hinges in part on the extent to which they substitute for fossilfuel-fired generation, as opposed to displacing nuclear, wind, or other sources. Though displacement is hard to prove, Irving reasons that “were we not to be sending that electricity down to the United States, the next most logical source of generation to meet their load requirements would generally be natural gas and/or coal.” The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) actually predicts that over the next 25 years, 11 percent of new generation in the U.S. will be coal-fired and 60 percent natural gas (which is roughly half as bad as coal in terms of emissions).

In Canada, most new hydro projects are located in provinces with minimal fossil-fuel-fired generation, so limited displacement will happen here. Exceptions are Ontario, Labrador (where 102 MW will be displaced), Nova Scotia (which will import from Labrador), and possibly Saskatchewan, which could use hydro from Manitoba.

While the fossil-fuel displacement argument has obvious merit, it also has weaknesses. Utilities can argue that hydro exports help save the planet, but critics can say these exports just keep the most wasteful society on earth air-conditioned and recharged. They can say that hydro exports just feed an addiction with more and more cheap power, every kilowatt of which reduces the imperative to curb consumption. The basic argument is that reducing demand must be the obvious and dominant priority in energy policy, rather than endlessly ramping up supply.

Government agencies predict electricity demand in Canada will grow almost 10 percent between now and 2020, and in the U.S. by approximately 30 percent between now and 2035. Ralph Torrie says we can and must go in the opposite direction. “We could double the efficiency with which we use fuel and electricity in Canada,” he says. If you want to see how it’s done, he adds, “just take a vacation to Europe.” Torrie, whose energy expertise is internationally recognized, serves as managing director of the Vancouver-based Trottier Energy Futures Project. In contrast to Irving, who accepts that demand for electricity will grow, Torrie advocates a “new way of thinking about the energy future.”

“There is no demand for electricity,” he says. “Nobody wants a kilowatt hour in their living room.” We want the services that electricity can provide, and we must “focus on how we can best meet the underlying needs for amenity with less rather than more fuel and electricity.” That, he says, is the only hope for “anything we might call a sustainable energy future.”

“We waste half the hydro we produce,” says John Bennett, who heads the Sierra Club of Canada. The solution to climate change is “to use less energy,” he says. “That’s where the major investment should be.”

Torrie says large hydro is environmentally preferable to many forms of energy supply, but still, reducing demand can achieve the same thing at a lower cost, and without the decade-long turnaround time for planning and construction. He views conservation as a resource. “There’s almost always a kilowatt of electricity that can be saved for a smaller cost than building the ability to generate a new kilowatt.” Plus, the resource gets bigger with every new innovation in efficiency. As Torrie puts it, “The size of the resource goes up every time somebody has a bright idea.”

Cutting electricity demand by half would include a range of technologies, including LED lighting, sensor-driven smart controls that reduce daytime lighting in buildings, and continued improvements to virtually every device that uses electricity.

But even if we as a continent cut our energy use by half, we still need some energy—and should not a maximum amount of that come from low-emission hydro? Can’t conservation and new hydro be dual priorities?

According to energy consultant Phillipe Dunsky, total spending on efficiency and conservation programs in Canada is only about $1 billion per year. Despite that, Jacob Irving says, “energy conservation has to be forefront of all decisions.” Then he adds a caveat: “There’s a lot of analysis that says energy consumption will grow, and so we need to be ready for that.” Whether demand shrinks or expands, the simple prohydro argument—more hydro equals less fossil fuel— still stands.

But for Tony Maas, who works for the Canadian branch of the World Wildlife Fund, it’s not that simple. He says new hydro projects must be part of an overarching plan for “net reduction in GHG emissions.” He cites Ontario’s Green Energy Act as an example of a plan that commits to overall GHG reduction.

But, as John Bennett points out, “we don’t have a North American plan to reduce emissions,” so new hydro projects “can’t be part of that plan.” The EIA predicts that without policy change, coal use as well as GHG emissions from electricity generation, will continue to increase over the next 25 years. Bennett says building more dams to meet increasing demand is like doubling the fuel efficiency of cars so that people can drive twice as much.

In a release this April, Hydro-Québec, Canada’s largest generator and exporter of hydropower, said, “The major environmental challenge facing North America is to replace coal to generate power and oil used in transportation.” While climate change may be the “major” environmental challenge of the day, it is not the only one. Just because hydro dams do not have highly visible carbon-spewing smoke stacks does not necessarily make them environmentally friendly. Behind the question of whether dams are a climate solution lies a more fundamental question: is hydro actually clean, as utilities and governments regularly assert?

Jacob Irving says, “When people refer to [hydro] as clean, it’s in the context of air emissions.” But rarely is this specified. The categorical use of the term by utilities, without caveat or qualification, is misleading. Tony Maas says he gets “nervous” when hydro is called clean because “it almost implies there are no impacts.” But dams harm the environment. A dam is not an environmental improvement or solution for a watershed.

One of the main impacts is the disruption of the natural “flow regime” in a waterway. Maas says the natural fluctuations in water levels are the “master variable in organizing a river ecosystem,” giving key “cues” to other species. Thus, a WWF report says, “Dams destroy the ecology of river systems by changing the volume, quality, and timing of water flows downstream.” The evidence of this is visible in dammed Canadian rivers, as it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars paid to mitigate and compensate for damages caused by dams. Manitoba Hydro alone has spent over $700 million to address damages from its “clean” hydro projects.

The WWF takes a more nuanced approach. It says some hydro projects can be built without unacceptable harm, but its 2011 global energy plan still “severely restrict[s] future growth of hydro power to reflect the need for an evolution that respects existing ecosystems and human rights.”

Similarly, a 2011 report about Canada’s boreal forests by the Pew Environment Group considers both pros and cons of hydro. In a section about hydro called “How Green Is It?”, the report says:

Although [hydro dams] are comparatively low carbon emitters in comparison to many conventional energy sources, hydropower projects have resulted in significant impacts to wildlife habitat, ecological processes and aboriginal communities.

In a later section, the report states:

While it is clear that allowing our societies to be powered by carbon fuels is not sustainable, this does not mean that alternative or renewable energy sources can simply be viewed as having no cost whatsoever.

The report, entitled “A Forest of Blue,” does not offer a simple verdict. Rather, it says, “We must understand as many of the implications and complexities of the issues as possible.” The candour and openness to complexity demonstrated in the report are exactly what is needed in the assessment of any climate-change strategy.

In keeping with the Pew report’s frank and thorough nature, it also discusses the role Aboriginal peoples play in hydro development. This is an essential part of any discussion of hydropower in Canada since virtually all hydro projects occupy lands to which First Nations have rights. In the past, Aboriginal people vehemently (and mostly unsuccessfully) opposed major dams. That has changed: in some cases Aboriginal opposition has succeeded. The $5 billion, 1,250 MW Slave River project in Alberta has been “deferred” after project proponents were unable to reach a deal with Smith’s Landing First Nation last year.

The proposed Site C Dam, a 1,100 MW, $7.9 billion project planned for the Peace River in B.C., faces resolute opposition from four First Nations in the area. But the outcome of that David-and-Goliath battle will not be know for some time.

Elsewhere, opposition has given way to participation—David and Goliath have become allies. Most recently, members of the Innu Nation in Labrador voted in June to allow the massive Lower Churchill River projects—Muskrat Falls (824 MW) and Gull Island (2,250 MW)—to proceed. In exchange, the 2,800 Innu receive $5 million per year to assist with their process costs during and prior to construction, up to $400 million in contracts during construction, and share of project profits thereafter (5 percent of “After Debt Net Cashflow”).

The broad Tshash Petapen (New Dawn) Agreement, in which these provisions are contained, also includes an agreement in principle on land claims and $2 million a year as compensation for damages related to the existing Upper Churchill Falls dam.

Meanwhile, the Inuit (distinct from the Innu), who are concerned about downstream impacts in their territory, say they have been largely left out of the process.

In Quebec, the James Bay Cree receive over $100 million a year in hydro, forestry, and mining royalties as a result of the 2002 Peace of the Braves agreement. In it they consented to the Eastmain-1-A/Sarcelle/Rupert Project (918 MW) while securing the permanent abandonment of the Nottaway-Broadback-Rupert project, which would have flooded 6,000 square kilometres.

First Nations near proposed dam sites in Manitoba have been offered lump-sum compensation packages, along with the opportunity to invest in projects. For instance, the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, with its 4,500 members, will be entitled to a third of the profits of the nearly completed Wuskwatim Dam if they can come up with a third of the $1.3 billion cost of the dam. They also benefit from $60 million of employment training.

In June, four other First Nations joined Manitoba Hydro in announcing the start of construction on the 695 MW, $5.6 billion Keeyask dam. Like Nisichawayasihk, they will be offered the chance to invest in the dam, as well as employment opportunities.

What’s clear in all these cases is that Canadian utilities cannot ignore Aboriginal demands. “We can stop development,” says Ovide Mercredi, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations and the recently retired Chief of the Misipawistik Cree Nation in northern Manitoba. His community sits right next to the 479 MW Grand Rapids Dam, which floods 115,700 hectares. In reference to the water flowing through that dam, Mercredi’s message to the province is simple: “That’s not your water, it belongs to our people and we want a share of that money.” The dam’s 50-year provincial licence expires in 2015 and Mercredi wants licence renewal to be contingent on public acknowledgement of the harm, increased mitigation of damages, and a revenue-sharing agreement. In part, the message is that if utilities do not deal with Aboriginal concerns now, they will have to later.

Whether First Nations are defiant or eager for new dams to power their economic future, the broader environmental questions remain. While Aboriginal influence has led to a reduction in the size of dams and increased environmental mitigation, and First Nations consent improves the general ethical perception of a project, there is still no tidy way to pour thousands of tons of cement into a river.

No matter who is involved, the merit of the case for hydro as a climate solution can be tested by the assumptions it rests on. These assumptions are that hydro is clean; that demand for electricity will grow; and that the primary alternative to more hydro is fossil-fuel generation. Are these solutions part of the solution or the problem?

Ultimately, the solution to climate change, as well as to watershed health, may never be found unless we move past these assumptions and replace them with better, more accurate premises.

First, dams are not green or clean in themselves. To disrupt the flow of a river and blaze a transmission corridor through kilometres of forest is, in itself, bad for the biosphere. To solve one environmental problem (global warming) with another (pouring hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cement in a free-flowing river) is counterintuitive. That said, desperate circumstances may require desperate measures.

Second, energy demand can and must be substantially reduced. The logical outcome of letting demand increase indefinitely and meeting that demand with ever more hydro and other renewables is to have every river dammed, the landscape saturated with wind and solar farms, and consumption still increasing. The ultimate, unavoidable solution is to use less energy. This must be the dominant priority.

Finally, dams do not reduce GHG emissions per se. They increase energy supply. Apart from a demonstrated continental commitment to dramatically reduce emissions (and energy demand), the case for hydro as a climate solution is, for the industry, a rather convenient truth. Hydropower can’t be part of the climate-change solution if there is no solution.

Climate change is one of humanity’s greatest challenges, and to address it we may need to conjure greater creativity than just reviving electricity generation megaprojects conceived of decades ago. Dan McDermott of the Sierra Club’s Ontario Chapters says, “The age of big dams is over.” According to him, hydro proponents “have their heads turned backwards attempting to mortgage the future to maintain the past.”

The large hydro projects currently in the works were envisioned before global warming concerned anyone, in an era summed up by former Manitoba premier Duff Roblin when he rose in the legislature in 1966 and prophesied a grandiose future for hydropower, saying, “We can have our cake, we can eat it and we can make a bigger cake, and sell part of that.”

Though hydro prospects are framed differently now, dam proponents still appear to share Roblin’s belief in limitless, consequence-free development. Now the question of whether taming more of our iconic rivers will help the climate becomes a question of whether Roblin was right.

Alyssa Manning. Photo by Robin Hart Hiltz.

Not every punk-rock high school dropout grows up to become a refugee lawyer, but Toronto-based attorney Alyssa Manning isn’t exactly ordinary. Barely into her 30s, Manning has made a professional niche for herself by working with U.S. war-resister files, defending such high-profile clients as Jeremy Hinzman, James Corey Glass, and The Deserter’s Tale co-author Joshua Key—American soldiers seeking sanctuary in Canada because of their refusal to serve in Iraq on moral grounds.

As a sharp street kid in Kingston, Ontario, a city of seven prisons, Manning observed glaring flaws in the Canadian justice system through her daily interactions with on-again, off-again inmates. This spurred an interest in criminal justice, and eventually led her to law school. It was a placement at Parkdale Community Legal Services in Toronto that ultimately steered her toward immigration and refugee law, where one of her first files happened to be a war-resister case.

“It was sort of an intersection of a couple of different things that I’d studied in my past,” says Manning. Her interest in the criminal justice system—which is, for civilians, what the court-martial system is for military personnel—was an added bonus.

Manning finds her work rewarding and stresses that “people who are aware of the war resisters’ situations are supportive.” However, there is the occasional misconception that war resisters “‘should have stayed in the States and fought it in their own countries.’ Unfortunately, there really isn’t an opportunity for them to do that.”

The reason, Manning explains, is the United States’ outdated court-martial system that refuses to hear testimony of human-rights violations on the ground in Iraq in cases of desertion. In other words, war resisters have little choice but to flee to Canada to avoid imprisonment and, arguably, to receive a fair trial. As such, Manning believes the deportation of war resisters results in a violation of both Canadian and international law.

“Under the international law that’s applicable to refugees,” she explains, “someone is entitled to refugee protection if they are refusing to participate in actions that would be considered breaches of the Geneva Convention or International Human Rights Law. So technically, refusing to participate in Iraq, whether or not the war itself is illegal, but just based on what’s actually happened there, all of these men and women that have done that are entitled, and arguably required, to do so.”

Manning makes no attempts to conceal the respect and admiration she feels for her clients: “Their dedication to have made the sacrifices that they did, leaving behind their homes and their families to stand up for something that they really believed in—I really find that admirable.”

— Kelli Korducki

“People spend an average of 14 minutes a day on Facebook,” says Vancouver-based Haas Lyons, a 33-year-old public engagement consultant who sees an opportunity to steer Canadians toward more political conversations in that space. “We can start to really advance civic capacity to be taking leadership on pressing issues.” During a six-year stint with America Speaks in Washington, D.C., Haas Lyons helped integrate social media into the massive nonprofit’s citizen engagement initiatives, such as following up on Hurricane Katrina relief programs and grappling with how to bring jobs back to Ohio’s Rust Belt. But, she is quick to add, the goal is “never to replace face-to-face conversation, but to augment face-to-face conversation.”

Her current focus is the Alberta Climate Dialogue, a citizen-participation initiative that brings together individuals, businesses, and NGOs to help Alberta municipalities mitigate and adapt to climate change. After five years, the group wants to be able to share its views and experiences with the provincial government in an effort to change the political conversation on the always-heated topic. The tools and technologies may be new, but it comes down to a core belief that will be very familiar to activists of earlier generations: the personal is political.

“My hope is that in each of these individual democratic engagement pieces, we’re building civic capacity to have hard conversations,” Haas Lyons says. But she also knows there are challenges ahead for activists in social media. “People go on Facebook to look at photos and watch funny videos. We have to make it relevant, not just available.”

Earlier this year, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing reported that expensive fees and lack of inclusion in the cultural sector are hurting citizen wellness across the board.

Though some politicos are beginning to twig to the problem—an Ontario government committee has asked that Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum deliver an improved access plan by December—there are still lots of barriers to experiencing culture at our large institutions.

Here’s a rundown of the most and least open, and comparisons to their international counterparts. Click to enlarge:

Illustration by Chris Kim

Aging sucks, says Michael Roy Ames. At 45, he sees signs of his own mortality every time he looks in a mirror—the greying and thinning hair, the creases in his face. Ames doesn’t despair, though. He expects to see the day when scientific advances will reverse his aging process, replace his body parts as they wear out, and allow him to live forever.

“I’d rather live to a million and 45 if I possibly can,” says Ames, a Vancouver resident and president of the Canadian chapter of the U.S.-based Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “I don’t want to die any time soon.”

“The Singularity” is the name of an event that Ames and others like him predict will happen sometime in the near future: the emergence of a technological, artificial intelligence many times smarter than any human brain. An intelligence whose thought patterns will be as inconceivable to us as our own thoughts are to, say, a lab rat. The awakening of this superhuman consciousness, Singularitarians believe, could happen gradually or quickly, with beneficent or malicious intent. But one way or another, they believe it is inevitable. And imminent.

“It’s going to happen sooner than we think,” Ames says. “A few years ago, I was thinking of 2015 as an optimistic date—so five years from now. I would still hold to that as an optimistic date. Five years from now is looking doable, definitely, from a hardware point of view.”

By profession, Ames is in his last year of an apprenticeship as a linesman with B.C. Hydro. He used to be a computer programmer, but decided he’d rather work outdoors. He’s still interested in computers and programming, but now it’s for fun. And he has an ongoing interest in how accelerating changes in technology will radically alter the structure of human society. “I mean, we’ve seen the internet do things with our society that were unimaginable 30 years ago,” Ames says. The Singularity could occur suddenly, he says, in a “hard landing,” or gradually, a “soft landing.” (There are as many interpretations of the Singularity as there are believers.) But in any case, it would involve a transformation of what it means to be human. It could range from radical life extension to the total merging of human and machine intelligence.

The ramifications of such a future are mind-boggling. Since nobody can predict the shape of things on the other side of that looking glass, the nature of politics, economics, and culture in a post-Singularity world—if those things continue to exist at all—also defy prediction. Will it involve humans surrendering their freedoms to a super-intelligent entity? Will only certain guests be invited to that party, with the vast majority left outside those digital gates? Nobody knows, although Ames notes that previous technological marvels such as colour TVs, microwave ovens, and cellphones were initially available only to wealthy elites but eventually became affordable for the masses. Computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, the most prominent Singularitarian, envisions a future where nanotechnology, fabricating everything from the molecular level, reduces the cost of every object effectively to zero, eradicating poverty, hunger, and disease in the process.

One doesn’t have to buy into such a sea change, though, to acknowledge that technological innovation will continue to be a dominant force in human lives, just as it was in the 19th and 20th centuries. Until the Industrial Revolution, technological changes occurred slowly. One response to the upheaval in the shift from agrarian to industrial society was the Luddite movement, which recognized the threats posed by new machines but underestimated their potential to enhance and improve people’s lives. Out of that, however, grew the modern labour movement, a political force that succeeded, often through costly and bloody struggles, to ensure that the fruits of technology were more equitably distributed. Those struggles led to the five-day workweek, the eight-hour workday and occupational safety standards that workers in the industrialized world now take for granted.

Today, political and regulatory change tends to follow technology because of simple cause and effect; governments couldn’t mandate seat belts until the automakers invented them. In the future, though, waiting for bold new technologies to emerge before taking political or regulatory action might have dire consequences. See, for instance, nuclear weapons or deep-sea oil drilling, the kind of experiment-now-regulate-later technologies that have proved so dangerous. Nanotechnology in particular poses an existential threat, says Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom (more on that shortly).

Dealing with such issues, which involve the entire planet, will require international co-operation. But as we’ve seen from the difficulty in driving action on climate change, negotiating effective global agreements isn’t easy. And while climate change is a massive process taking place over decades, risky new technologies are likely to emerge much faster.

The mission of the Singularity Institute is to ensure that nascent super-intelligent technology is friendly and not menacing, and that it helps humans enhance their lives—not destroy them, or the rest of the life on the planet.

Not all people who believe in technology’s power to transform humanity are Singularitarians. Transhumanists, as their name implies, also expect technology to alter the species. “These are two communities that seem to have a connection,” says George Dvorsky, president of the Toronto Transhumanist Association. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that one follows the other. I happen to know many transhumanists who don’t buy into the Singularity at all.”

While both groups believe that rapid technological progress will radically reshape our lives, the Singularitarians believe a unified, superhuman intelligence is a necessary part of that change. Transhumanists believe no such super-intelligent entity is necessary. Either way, both believe that our future will be completely unrecognizable. “We are talking about transforming what it means to be human,” Dvorsky says.

“Combine faster intelligence, smarter intelligence, and recursively self-improving intelligence, and the result is an event so huge that there are no metaphors left,” states the Singularity Institute’s definition. Kurzweil interprets this as a future where humans can upload their minds to a supercomputer system. All he has to do is stay healthy long enough for computer systems to advance to the point where that becomes possible. Kurzweil has become famous for popping up to 200 vitamin pills and supplements a day in his quest to keep pace with advances in life extension. He has even mused on the possibility of bringing his own father back to life in that cyber realm.

Ames and Dvorsky each have a more modest vision of the future that includes radical life-extension without having to upload their minds to a computer or raise the dead. Their respective movements are also very modest, numbering, at most, a couple of dozen each in Canada, although both have thousands of adherents scattered around the world.

One might even observe that the movements have lost steam in recent years. One prominent Canadian transhumanism website now exists only for “archival purposes.” Even the main website of the Singularity Institute isn’t updated as frequently as one might expect of an organization that purports to be on the vanguard of technological change. Viewed on July 1, 2010, the “Latest News” on the site’s Updates & Press page was from 2007, although postings on its blog were current.

Dvorsky concedes that his group, which he has led since its founding in 2002, was more intensely organized at the beginning and would draw 20 to 40 people to its weekly meetings, depending on the topic. (Life extension was a good draw, he says.)

“What we did after that is we lost a little momentum,” Dvorsky says. The audiences were getting smaller and it tended to be the same small group coming out to the events, he says. About two years ago, the meetings were cut back to two or three hours once a month. “There is no interest in having a group dedicated to transhumanism at the chapter level.”

David Coombes, the vice-president of the Canadian chapter of the Singularity Institute, admitted earlier this year that he hadn’t thought about the Singularity for weeks. He was preoccupied with the here-and-now challenges of his work as an immigration consultant. Yet his century-old heritage home in Victoria, B.C., is still the Canadian headquarters of the institute, as it was when Ames was staying there four years ago.

“You don’t bump into a transhumanist on every street corner,” Dvorsky jokes. Today there are just a few handfuls of true believers “who get it,” he says, and Singularitarians are similarly scarce. But regardless of their current numbers, they believe their activities today are key, because if and when the Singularity occurs, it will involve everyone on Earth.

“It’s going to be one for the planet,” Ames says. “You think about the internet. There’s no Canadian internet; there’s no American internet; it’s the internet for the planet.”

It would be tempting to dismiss transhumanism and Singularitarianism as fringe movements, given their small sizes and outsized ideas. The Singularity, for example, has been called “the Rapture of the Nerds,” even though it’s an entirely secular notion that doesn’t invoke anything supernatural. As Coombes put it four years ago, “I believe there could be a higher power when we make it or when we become it.”

But to dismiss transhumanists and Singularitarians as kooks would be a mistake, says Toronto-based futurist Richard Worzel. “The fact that they don’t share mainstream views may say more about the mainstream than it does about them,” says Worzel, who has speculated about such areas as radical advances in medicine. “Einstein was roundly viewed as a charlatan and a fraud and detracting from the proper study of physics. When he started, he was the only one who held his views. I think it’s fairly clear which way history went.”

That doesn’t mean transhumanists and Singularitarians are modern Einsteins; they could still be proven wrong, Worzel cautions. “But I don’t think there’s any question that what they’re doing is a legitimate pursuit of knowledge,” he says. “And that’s the real test.”

Worzel expects to witness cures for all cancers, the growth of replacement organs, and the making of prosthetic limbs that exceed the capabilities of natural ones. “There’s probably disagreement over how quickly we get there,” he says. “There’s probably disagreement to the extent to which we are going to become transhuman. But yes, they’re headed in a direction that we are going.”

Both Worzel and Victoria, B.C.-based futurist Ken Stratford agree that what transhumanists are contemplating borders on science fiction. “That doesn’t mean to say it can’t become science fact,” Stratford says. “You know, the further you play out a piece of rope, the less control you have over where it goes.”

Much of the criticism surrounding transhumanists and Singularitarians isn’t that they’ll be proven wrong, but that they’ll prove to be correct—and with dire consequences. Among those sounding that alarm is computer scientist Bill Joy, the founder of Sun Microsystems. In an oftcited 2000 Wired magazine essay titled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Joy outlined the dangers of biotechnology, nanotechnology and super-smart artificial intelligence. Biotechnology would enable a genetically engineered plague. Nanotechnology would allow a destructive force to convert all biological matter on the planet into grey goo. Humanity would be hunted and enslaved by a malevolent machine intelligence à la the Terminator or Matrix movies. (While Kurzweil acknowledges the threats, he disagrees with Joy that preventing them might require restrictions on technological advancements.)

In a 2002 essay on existential risks, Swedish transhumanist Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher, noted it will be “considerably easier” to create a destructive nanobot system than to create effective defences against one. “It is therefore likely that there will be a period of vulnerability during which this technology must be prevented from coming into the wrong hands,” he wrote. The future convenience of such technology, combined with its capacity for quickly gobbling up the biosphere, makes it potentially even more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Bostrom even argued that to save the planet it will be necessary to launch a pre-emptive strike against any rogue state that doesn’t go along with international monitoring of nanotechnology. Bostrom is best known for his “simulation argument,” in which he posits that the reality we inhabit might be a computer simulation run by an advanced civilization. While the argument itself doesn’t estimate the likelihood that we exist in a simulation, in interviews Bostrom has put the odds at about one in five. He even includes a sudden shutdown of such a simulation as an existential threat, although he offers no ideas on what those trapped inside it might do about it.

Compared with that simulation scenario, Kurzweil’s ideas seem fairly prosaic: he graphs exponential increases in biological evolution, and even the evolution of the universe itself, from the Big Bang through the appearance of the first hydrogen atoms to complex molecules to the formation of life. He takes Moore’s Law (the 45-yearold observation by Intel founder Gordon Moore that computer processing power doubles every 18 months) and applies it to all technology.

Since the creation of the first computer in the 1940s, processing power has doubled about 32 times. In 2005, Kurzweil estimated it will take only about five more doublings for a super-computer to “emulate the human brain.” A decade beyond that, today’s equivalent of a desktop computer will have that capacity. He expects the Singularity to arrive by 2045. By 2080, he says, a $1,000 processor will be able to compute the total sum of human knowledge in a fraction of a second. By then, in Kurzweil’s vision, reality will have merged with virtual reality, enabling super-consciousness to zip across the cosmos at light speed or even faster.

We’re accelerating toward this but simply haven’t noticed, Kurzweil says, because at this stage, the exponential graph is still relatively flat. Once it reaches what he calls the “knee of the curve,” it turns upward sharply. Technology is getting close to the knee now, he says.

Kurzweil’s hypothesis is controversial, to say the least. In a 2005 paper, physicist Jonathan Huebner argued that the exact opposite has been happening. He concluded that technological innovation peaked in 1873, has been decreasing ever since, and by 2024 will be evolving at the same rate as it did during the Dark Ages. Singularitarians have questioned Huebner’s methodology, which examined patent data and about 7,000 subjective “important technological developments.” By that measure, the automobile was an “important technological development,” but every refinement since the Model T didn’t register.

P. Z. Myers, a biology professor at the University of Minnesota, accuses Kurzweil of cheating in his graphs that purport to show biological and technological evolutions increasing exponentially. For example, Myers describes one of Kurzweil’s charts as “an artificial and perhaps even conscious attempt to fit the data to a predetermined conclusion.” Myers succinctly dismisses Kurzweil as a “first-rate bullshit artist.”

Despite this, the idea of the Singularity has friends in high places. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel counts among the financial backers of the Singularity Institute. Bill Gates praises Kurzweil’s predictions. And motivational speaker Tony Robbins gushes about the tech guru, who also has cred as a computer expert and inventor. (speech recognition and optical-font recognition devices count among his innovations). Kurzweil recently co-founded, and is the first chancellor of, Singularity University at the NASA Ames Research Park at Moffett Field, California, The university’s officers include its co-founder and X Prize CEO Peter Diamandis, internet pioneer Vint Cerf, SimCity creator Will Wright, Nobel-winning physicist George Smoot, and futurist Paul Saffo. (The skew toward maleness is not imaginary; however, the Canadian chapter of the Singularity Institute counts two women on its board of directors, one of whom, Kay Reardon, is a grandmother whose official bio says she is “still kicking ass.”)

While Kurzweil popularized the subject with the publication of his 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, mathematician and science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge actually coined the idea in a 1993 paper. (In a 2007 presentation, Vinge called post-Singularity events “as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm.”) Kurzweil, though, has become the public face of the Singularity, including starring in a 2009 documentary, Transcendent Man, and producing a 2010 film based on his best-known book. While his fans consider Kurzweil a visionary, University of Waterloo professor Thomas Homer-Dixon calls him “a menace.”

“I think he plays into this type of false optimism, this kind of techno-hubris or techno-optimism that says we can solve our problems,” says Homer-Dixon, author of The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down. “I can’t tell you how many times, especially in the States, I run into people who say we don’t have to worry about climate change; we’ll just fix that problem when we come to it, when it gets bad.” He acidly observes, “It’s going be extremely ironic if Mr. Kurzweil dies of cancer.”

Homer-Dixon says the obstacles are simply far more complex than technology optimists think. The biggest hurdle is what he calls the “curse of dimensionality.” Parsing the human genome, for example, has revealed that few diseases have a single genetic cause; most are caused by complex genetic interactions combined with environmental factors that are very difficult to model.

“What we’ve found out is that many of the challenges, specifically in human illness, are enormously multi-factorial, and that we actually know very little more now, even knowing the human genome, than we did before. It’s actually interesting to read the stories that are coming out in Nature on this that the scientists are really frustrated. They thought this was going to be a huge breakthrough and it turns out it is just an incremental step in the direction of solving problems.”

The Singularitarians and transhumanists acknowledge current realities but serenely insist their moment is coming. In 2002, 51 “top researchers in the field” of human aging endorsed a statement published in Scientific American that included this unambiguous observation: “there are no lifestyle changes, surgical procedures, vitamins, antioxidants, hormones or techniques of genetic engineering available today that have been demonstrated to influence the processes of aging.” However, the statement also noted: “Most biogerontologists believe that our rapidly expanding scientific knowledge holds the promise that means may eventually be discovered to slow the rate of aging. If successful, these interventions are likely to postpone age-related diseases and disorders and extend the period of healthy life.” One prominent researcher on that list of signatories, Aubrey de Grey, has famously proclaimed that the first person who will live to be 1,000 years old has already been born.

Even before new technologies approach anything remotely resembling the Singularity, they are bound to have impacts on our lives, and those changes will require radical revisions of public policy. From bioethics to civil rights to education and beyond, new technologies require, and will continue to require, difficult choices at every level of government. Plenty of the philosophical questions Singularitarians debate are, for today at least, sheer fantasy. But some of those questions urgently need answering now, today. What does privacy mean in a networked age? Should we keep patients alive just because we can? Do corporations have the right to claim ownership of the building blocks of life? In each of these cases, technological capabilities have already far outrun public policy. And the Singularity, even if it never materializes, provides a useful frame for thinking about how technology and society interact, and what we want our future to be.

Ames knows what he wants from the future: another million years of life. Until then, he’s keeping the faith. “I’m sure there will be a time in my life when I’ll say, ‘Maybe I’ve had enough now and I’ll just end it,’” Ames says. “But until that time comes up, hey, I’m game.”

Gary Freeman, AKA Joseph Pannell, pictured circa 1976.

He was branded Canada’s very own Black Panther. In 2004, Gary Freeman, born Joseph Pannell, was arrested by Toronto police at gunpoint outside of his workplace, the Toronto Reference Library. It turned out that this friendly library assistant, father, and husband was harbouring a secret past. In Chicago in 1969, he had shot a cop three times, leaving him with a partially paralyzed arm. He then skipped bail and fled to Canada.

Juicy story. But there’s no evidence Freeman was a Black Panther Party (BPP) member. He denies it. Former party members haven’t heard of him. And U.S. authorities didn’t even attempt to link him to the group in their criminal proceedings against him. The case itself was also rife with irregularities. The injured officer’s account of the incident was inconsistent, which mainstream media never reported on, and he was also the case’s investigating officer—a major conflict of interest.

Although Freeman knew a trial would reveal the holes in the evidence and the reality of police brutality against blacks at the time, he accepted a plea bargain in 2008. At that point, he’d spent years in pre-extradition custody and he just wanted it to be over. Freeman served 30 days in the U.S. and paid a fine of $250,000, which went to a charity chosen by the injured officer. But despite this, Freeman is unable to resume his life in Toronto with his family.

Canadian authorities won’t let him back in, claiming he is linked to a “terrorist organization,” the Black Panthers. But the only evidence the government has provided to substantiate its claim is news stories; furthermore, BPP is not even designated a terrorist organization in Canada, and other members, including former Panther Angela Davis, cross the border without incident.

Last fall, Freeman was even denied permission to visit his dying father-in-law, with whom he was extremely close, and was later prevented from attending his funeral.

“It’s so cruel, we really don’t understand,” says Freeman’s wife, Natercia Coelho, who visits her husband at his parents’ house in Washington, D.C. as often as she can. Their four children also visit when able, but the distance weighs on the family. They continue to fight for Freeman’s return by circulating petitions and sending letters asking authorities to allow him in on humanitarian grounds.

Artist's rendering of a Masdar public square. Click to enlarge.

Looking out over the site of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, it takes some imagination to consider that this slice of hardscrabble desert will soon contain the world’s first carbon-neutral, zero-waste city. A six-metre sign at Masdar’s entrance is the only confirmation that my cab driver and I have arrived at the right place. Despite its ambitious nature, Masdar—the Arabic word for “source,” a reference to the sun—is not a household name in the region, and for the moment its seven square kilometres, demarcated by a corrugated white plastic fence, is home to little more than shrubs and debris.

It’s early December, and one of the last hot days of the year before the mild winter begins. Even at 30 degrees Celsius, today’s temperature is nothing compared to the heat of summer. Migrant labourers dressed in white lay paving stones over the sand. Some of the men wear turbans while others are in baseball caps.

Workers in boots, alternating with workers in suits, come and go from the development’s temporary headquarters, a series of white, two-level portables shaded by circus-sized canopies the colour of desert. Inside, an image framed on the wall projects the future HQ, a wavy steel and glass structure that produces more energy than it consumes.

Once complete, Masdar is supposed to be home to 50,000 residents and 1,500 companies with 40,000 people commuting daily from Abu Dhabi. At its centre is the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, a sustainable-research hub, which as of today is the only building that has started to sprout. By 2018, Masdar is meant to contain two city squares housing day-to-day activity, outside of which will lie all the infrastructure required to sustain an eco-city in a desert: solar-power plants, a waste-to-power plant, an algae farm for biofuel, a solar desalination facility, a tree nursery, and a water-treatment plant.

The form of the city—itself an experiment in sustainable design—will mirror its function, which is to develop a completely new economic sector. Masdar City is the planned home of the Masdar Initiative, a foreign direct-investment fund for renewable energy technology. The end result, its leaders hope, will be Abu Dhabi’s own version of Silicon Valley.

The irony, of course, is that the United Arab Emirates is both a massive oil exporter and produces more carbon per capita than any other nation on Earth. The Abu Dhabi government’s rhetoric is lofty—Masdar will be a “testing ground for the future of humanity,” its purpose to create “a manifesto for sustainable life”—but it’s not empty: there is money behind it. Lots of money, even with Abu Dhabi now feeling the effect of the recession that has been devastating its neighbour Dubai. Oil brought wealth to the tiny emirate only a generation ago, and leaders know the supply is limited. Masdar is an attempt to ensure future security for a newly rich people.

The timing is canny. As the scientific and political consensus has shifted from if there is a climate crisis to how severe it will be, governments, industries, and citizens are increasingly looking for action to take. While change threatens to disrupt many traditional businesses, others see the transition to a post-fossil-fuel economy as a gold rush in the making. In 2008, for the first time, investments in renewables outpaced those in traditional energy: $140 billion was invested in wind, solar, and others, compared with $110 billion for fossil fuel and nuclear. What was once the marginal turf of environmentalists is now fought over by titans of industry. (The UN predicts renewable energy could create as many as 20 million new jobs over the next decade.)

Despite the economic potential, Canadian government policy—fixated on the tar sands—has not kept pace with science. Short-term thinking, buttressed by entrenched industrial interests, has stunted innovation here. Abu Dhabi, by contrast, has kept a long view, developing a vision for a fossil-fuel-free future, and is working to realize it. The motive is self-interest, but the results have the potential to be world-changing.

Political will, of course, is easy to mobilize in a wealthy monarchy unconstrained by democracy, election cycles, or budgets. But still, in striving to wean its prosperous economy off ever-scarcer fossil fuels, the tiny Muslim territory can be seen as a microcosm for the rest of the world, and one we would do well to take a lesson from. Whether it succeeds or fails—and there are bets placed on both outcomes— the emirate knows something that Canada doesn’t seem to: you can’t build a sustainable future without a blueprint.

Arriving in Abu Dhabi, the 20-kilometre drive from the airport to the city’s centre is quick in time more than distance. People in the UAE drive fast: traffic accidents are the number one cause of death here. Brand new SUVs hurl themselves down a 10-lane desert highway that not too long ago was desert itself. The drive to Dubai takes about an hour, but anyone over 50 will recall when the trip could be made only by camel, taking three or four days.

Abu Dhabi’s history reads like a rags-to-riches screenplay: the largest of the seven independent sheikdoms that comprise the United Arab Emirates, it was a poor pearl-farming outpost for the first 60 years of the 20th century, watching from the sidelines as oil strikes elsewhere in the Persian Gulf made its neighbours rich. When Abu Dhabi’s own huge oil reserves were discovered in 1959, residents expected the new wealth would bring long-awaited modernization, but nothing happened. Crown prince Sheik Shakhbut had grown paranoid from decades of dealing with the British, who maintained a presence in the region, and hoarded the wealth in case he should need it to fight off a military threat. By the mid-1960s, the problem was obvious to all, and Shakhbut was overthrown by his youngest brother, Zayed, kicking off an overnight transformation into a modern petrocracy. The nomadic population traded palm huts for air-conditioned villas, camels were swapped for cars (though there were few roads to drive them on), and high rises sprouted. Each Abu Dhabian received at least two plots of land—one for home, another for business—and a lump-sum cash payment. For most, it was a bewildering windfall: it was not uncommon at the time to see residents unaccustomed to keeping bank accounts leaving banks with cardboard boxes full of cash on their heads.

In 1968, when Britain announced its plan to withdraw from all territories east of the Suez, Zayed—fearing the prospect of being swallowed by a larger neighbour—successfully united the region’s quarreling sheiks under the flag of a federated UAE in 1971. Abu Dhabi is the largest and richest of the emirates, holding 90 percent of the country’s oil, about 10 percent of total global reserves. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the notoriously secretive sovereign wealth fund tasked with keeping the country rich, is thought to be worth about US$350 billion.

Headquarters of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Click to enlarge.

ADIA, as the investment authority is commonly called, makes its home in a 36-storey black skyscraper with rounded edges that wouldn’t look out of place in a Star Wars movie—and it dominates the view from where I am staying. My friends’ Abu Dhabi home is a four-bedroom, four-bathroom apartment, palatial, with marble floors and high ceilings. It rents for US$50,000 per year—a bargain by Abu Dhabi standards. With the influx of Western expatriates seeking large, tax-free incomes here, demand for housing outpaces the supply.

Our 14th floor balcony looks directly onto ADIA’s five-storey, airconditioned parking garage, which is topped by a gym featuring a pool that looks like it should be filled with dollar bills—which, in a way, it is. Water in the UAE is desalinated from the Gulf: nine million tonnes of oil are used each year to turn salty water sweet. (Even so, the UAE is number three in water consumption globally— behind the U.S. and Canada.)

I pour a smaller version of the ADIA pool in my en suite bathtub and think about what’s on the other end of the water pipe. In my imagination, it’s sinister machines belching black smoke while men in robes sit around lighting shisha pipes with dollar bills—but at least they are talking about wind farms.

The truth is the sheiks are talking about oil and wind farms—and Formula One racetracks and branches of the Guggenheim designed by Frank Gehry. Along with the new economic sector represented by Masdar, Abu Dhabi is focusing on tourism, aiming to make itself the cultural centre of the Middle East. Call it bet-hedging. The emirate has a lot to lose. If Masdar is successful, it may just happen that Abu Dhabi, a latecomer to the industrial age, will be among the first out the other side.

Nicholas Parker knows something about trying to move past fossil fuel dependence. The Canadian coined the term “cleantech” eight years ago when he founded Cleantech Group, a venture capital company that specializes in technology and knowledge related to the mitigation of ecological crises. Cleantech as an investment category includes everything from energy production to wastewater management to compliance management, and today, it’s the fastest growing sector there is.

Parker sits in the backyard of his home in Toronto’s High Park neighbourhood on a sunny June day. In a sweatshirt, sandals and socks and khaki pants, he looks much more at home than in the suits his business dealings often demand. Parker comes across as generous, gregarious, and as something of a rebel.

To me, he represents the convergence of environmentalism and business that has become our best hope for progress. “I’ve always had a passion for two things: entrepreneurship—I really celebrate that—and sustainable development, social justice, the environment,” he says. “Most of my life I felt schizophrenic; my lefty friends think I’m a right-winger and my right-wing friends think I’m a hardcore revolutionary.”

Parker says he founded Cleantech to “bring the radical disruptive mentality that exists in Silicon Valley and put it at service of the major sustainability challenges of our time.” That, and he claims to be unemployable. It’s true Parker is hard to pin down. He’s a venture capitalist who hasn’t owned a car for 23 years, a lifelong Liberal—but for a dalliance with the Green Party—and a Zen Buddhist.

In his business, the stakes here are high, both financially and environmentally. “If we’re focusing on energy, this is a $6-trillion-a year industry,” says Parker, adding that no other industry gets measured with numbers close to those for power generation. By now, most people know generally what is at stake with global warming. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that Earth’s average temperature will rise somewhere in the range of 1.1 to 6.4 degrees over pre-industrial times by the end of the century. The IPCC’s overall veracity was called into question last year with the exposure of emails suggesting it used questionable sources to advance questionable claims in its groundbreaking 2007 report, but “Emailgate” aside, these warming estimates are widely believed to be conservative, as actual increases have so far outpaced projections.

Beyond two degrees Celsius, the scenarios become apocalyptic: polar ice caps melt, three-quarters of the world’s species face extinction, and rising sea levels threaten coastal settlements. As it is, we’re 0.7 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures and the carbon we’ve emitted so far has us committed to at least another 0.2 degrees. To avoid the worst, environmental scientists believe we must reduce emissions by 80 percent before 2050. The numbers don’t leave a lot of room for optimism.

Parker’s company is at the forefront of innovation in trying to keep us away from the precipice, and he says he spends a lot of time spurring competition in the race toward a greener future. “My job is to run around telling everyone they’re behind everyone else,” he explains with enthusiasm.

When it comes to the environment, Canada has chosen to lag in pretty much every way. Our Kyoto commitment was a six percent reduction below 1990 levels, but we’ve increased emissions by 22 percent since signing on. Environment Canada attributes this trend primarily to increases in fuel production for export (specifically, the Alberta tar sands), as well as new vehicles on the road and our continued reliance on coal-fired power plants. In keeping with its demonstrated priorities, government spending on clean technologies has been almost entirely earmarked for non-renewable nuclear as well as carbon capture and storage, in which emissions are captured at the source and injected into the ground—at best a technological stop-gap. The Tories’ 2010 budget committed Canada to becoming “a leader in green job creation,” but failed to back the pledge with investment in renewable energy technologies.

Canada’s approach to climate change, or lack thereof, became hard to ignore in the weeks leading up to December’s UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, and during the proceedings, where the Canadian government’s disregard for emissions reduction led to loud international scorn. (For the third year running, Canada won the “Fossil of the Year” award, presented by the Climate Change Action Network to the country that has done the most to obstruct progress on climate change.)

This country’s regressive stance means Parker doesn’t do a lot of business close to home. “Canada doesn’t have a top 10 company in any cleantech category,” he says. “That’s why I live here, and I don’t work here.”

Parker is hopeful about the future, but not convinced we will make enough progress to avoid catastrophe. “I think this is an experiment,” he says, “and it’s quite possible we’ll fail. It’s incredible to be smart enough to know we’re fucking it up and stupid enough to still be doing it—it’s an amazing thing to be a human being.”

José Etcheverry is trying to make sure we succeed. A member of the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University and president of the Canadian Renewable Energy Alliance, Etcheverry argues that a future in which all energy is derived from renewable sources is possible, if only government would wield policy to stoke innovation—not to mention the jobs it would create. “What we need to do is implement policies that make it possible for project developers to do what they do best,” says Etcheverry. “Entrepreneurs are by definition very creative and what we are missing is the political will to open market possibilities and create policies that give people the will to invest.”

This is what Abu Dhabi is trying to do, and it’s hardly a new idea. Denmark currently derives 19 percent of its energy from wind, thanks to an aggressive policy of government incentives implemented in the 1970s, spurred by the energy crisis. The windswept nation used to get 90 percent of its energy from petroleum sources, and the transition was pure self-defence. Today, Denmark is an energy exporter, and has reduced its carbon emissions by 13 percent since 1990.

John M. R. Stone is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University and until recently was on the bureau of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Opportunities here are abundant, he says, but Canada has not stepped up. “We’ve got a prime minister who doesn’t want to tackle this issue, who would prefer if it simply went away,” says Stone. “And the main reason is because he doesn’t know how to square it with the development in the tar sands. It’s unimaginative.”

Parker says there’s no shortage of imagination: researchers have shown that, theoretically, the planet’s total energy needs could be met with solar arrays covering around four percent of the world’s desert (if it were one plot of land, it would be about the size of the Gobi). “You can make deserts into valuable land,” says Parker, “leave the lights on all night, and it won’t matter, if we get this right. We’re five years, maybe 10, from solar being cost competitive from baseload fossil fuel power, so why aren’t we pursuing it?”

In a plush-seated auditorium in Abu Dhabi’s Chamber of Commerce, Masdar’s leaders are gathered for a specific, important purpose: to convince local businesspeople to sign up for the ecocity’s vision. They are having trouble sourcing materials and labour locally due to the stringent green standards inherent in the project. For local companies—providers of everything from lighting systems to floor finishings to roofs—to do business with Masdar, they must first green their own supply chains, rising to the same environmental and ethical standard Masdar has set for itself.

Masdar City is planned to be 99 percent carbon-free, with the remaining one percent (of what a comparably sized community would emit) offset or stored. The city is being constructed using the World Wildlife Fund’s One Planet Living principles, which include zero-carbon and zero waste, as well as sustainable transport, sustainable water and local food.

The WWF initiative began as a public relations campaign designed to communicate the ecological consequences of overconsumption. By 2035, the WWF figured, Earth’s residents would require a second planet, having exhausted the resources of the first. Its involvement in Masdar, however, goes beyond cheerleading. One Planet Living also acts as an accreditation system. Each principle of sustainability is a target that a project must meet in order to get WWF’s seal of approval. According to WWF, Masdar City goes beyond their expectations.

But even with all the political will and money in the world, people need to be convinced that the change is worth the risk.

At the chamber of commerce, a row of men in flowing white dishdashas take turns speaking, introducing Masdar and its aims in an effort to win the attendees to their view. There is interest—the 400-seat room is more than half full—but this is not an easy sell. Sultan Ahmed al Jaber, CEO of Masdar, lectures to the crowd, his talking points jargon-filled and clearly well-rehearsed. “We are going to direct you. But you must look for opportunities and solutions around the world. Contribute to the knowledge transfer, the making of a knowledge economy. You as the private sector have a major role to play. Don’t underestimate your contribution; the opportunity here is huge. The project we are working on now is a paradigm shift. You must be aggressive.”

But the people who have gathered here are still a few chapters back, and with good reason. This, after all, is a city that doesn’t even have a recycling program. “Why is Masdar next to the airport?” asks the first person to stand up. (He is reassured the development is not under any flight path.) Other questions range from how multicultural the city will be to how fast carbon neutrality can realistically be achieved. A cynical comment gets al Jaber back on his feet, full of fight. “We need to make a choice,” he says, fiercely. “We can do what we usually do—sit in the passenger seat and have others develop the technology and sell it to us. Or, we can take that pioneering and become owners of intellectual property and shop it around the world. Which one would you choose?”

As far as al Jaber is concerned, the choice is made, and the big-picture elements are well under way. The Masdar Initiative’s $250-million venture capital fund has invested in about a dozen early-stage companies around the world. One is Atlanta-based EnerTech, which does waste-to-energy conversion. Since coming on board with Masdar as a small shop, it’s signed a contract with the city of Los Angeles, and could end up meeting as much as 20 percent of L.A.’s energy needs through the conversion of septic sludge. (The process is called SlurryCarb, and it works by using heat and pressure to mimic the natural processes that turn once-living materials to fossil fuel.) Masdar also has high-profile investments in projects such as London Array, the world’s largest offshore wind farm.

As an idea, Masdar is irresistible. It’s compelling, the thought of a green utopia springing forth from the desert within the world’s biggest polluter, funded by the oil money of far-sighted sheiks trying to diversify away from a diminishing and damaging resource. And it’s still early enough that Masdar is a blank canvas on which everyone involved can project their fondest hopes.

Gerard Evanden sits overlooking the Thames at a small round table in the Foster and Partners London offices. Evenden, a stylish fortysomething with spiky salt-and-pepper hair, is lead architect for Masdar City. The architectural firm founded by celebrated British architect Lord Norman Foster is a pioneer in sustainable design—the firm renovated Germany’s Reichstag, the world’s first energy-positive parliament building—but Masdar is their biggest project yet, a chance to engineer a complete city from scratch.

Evenden shows me slides illustrating Foster’s vision: pedestrian walkways elevated seven metres off the ground, with driverless electric taxis bustling below and monorails gliding overhead. According to the plan, no resident will ever be more than 150 metres from emissions-free public transit.

“It’s not just about providing power for buildings and it’s not just about collecting energy,” Evenden says. “It’s about everything from the research through to the way people live, through to the way people move.” Evenden believes Masdar is the most important project in the world right now, and for this team of architects, it’s a dream come true.

Others, however, think of it more as a pipe dream. Christopher Davidson is a fellow at the Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Durham University in the U.K., who studies the UAE, and has published numerous books on the region. He points out the political dimensions to Abu Dhabi’s motives. As a monarchy, he says, Abu Dhabi continuously needs to prove itself legitimate. “Abu Dhabi in the past couple of years has hit on a fantastic new legitimacy resource, which is championing the environment,” says Davidson. “It’s political and economic. Anyone who claims that Abu Dhabi can diversify away from oil and all related industries is living in a dream cloud. That’s just not accurate.”

But that doesn’t mean its leaders can’t have it both ways. “Despite the titillation we may feel over Abu Dhabi, a massive oil exporter, doing this, once we get over that irony, I think what we can see is a great initiative,” Davidson continues. “They’ve seized on a great opportunity, and in the long term, they might become an international hub for environmental industry.”

When I reach John Stone on the phone, he has just come from a meeting at Parliament in Ottawa—a gathering of a conservation caucus that brings together MPs with scientists and members of NGOs to talk about environmental issues. “They even listened to me,” he jokes.

Stone points out that it’s possible now, with existing technology, to rapidly move to a low-carbon future, and questions why we in Canada are not doing just that. “We should be working as hard as we can toward a new energy system that is carbon free, if possible,” says Stone. “And we have the technologies that we need already: photovoltaics, solar thermal, wind and the like. We basically know what we need to do. We just need to go on and do it.”

Despite the federal government’s foot-dragging, there’s more hope at the regional level. Etcheverry calls Ontario’s energy legislation the most progressive on the continent: the Green Energy Act of May 2009 is the first in North America to mandate feed-in tariffs, compelling electricity utilities to pay renewable energy providers at a premium rate. The law makes it possible for every home, office building, or neighbourhood to produce renewable energy and guarantees a market to sell it. Such a system currently provides 12.5 percent of Germany’s electricity, and adds about $2.20 to the average German home’s monthly energy bill. Solar City, a development in Freiburg, Germany, produces all its own electricity from solar arrays (in one of the cloudiest spots in Europe) and sells the surplus into the grid. A combination energy plant in Kassel, Germany, sells wind and solar power, and switches on biogas combustion to meet peak demand. Based on the Combined Power Plant, German scientists believe that country could be powered entirely with renewables within 40 years.

“It’s very difficult to make a quantum leap if you’re stepping into the unknown,” says Etcheverry about imagining a different future. “For me it’s easy. I have solar power in my own house, and have seen what others have done, and what we could do if we got our collective act together.”

Currently, nearly 60 percent of Canada’s grid is powered by a renewable source: hydro. Other renewables are a tiny 0.5 percent, with the balance coming from coal, natural gas and nuclear. According to world average numbers from the Canadian Renewable Energy Alliance, coal is still the least expensive power source at four to seven cents per kilowatt hour. Wind comes in second at six to nine cents, followed by nuclear at 10 to 13 cents (CanREA factored building-cost overruns into its equation). Expensive carbon capture and storage facilities, which are key to “cleaner coal” schemes, will soon push the price of coal above 12 cents per kWh. The prices for solar and coal are expected to meet within the decade.

Traditional problems with renewables—only being able to produce power when the sun shines or the wind blows—still pose challenges. The most compelling fix is to reconfigure the energy grid as a two-way, distributed system linking together many different types of generation facilities. The same redundancy and flexibility is what makes the internet possible: when one node fails, others pick up the slack. The electricity equivalent, advocates say, would be greener, more efficient, and more resilient.

But business as usual is tempting. It’s easier, for one, and there is still a lot of money to extract from the ground. North America is sitting on a lot of coal—probably enough to last at least 300 years, if we don’t mind tearing mountaintops off to get it. Oil has maybe 100 years; accessible uranium, 40. But climate change is the real catalyst for developing alternatives. From an ecological perspective, diminishing oil stocks are irrelevant. “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones,” quips Stone, “and the oil age is not going to end because we’ve run out of oil.”

When it comes to energy and climate change, the path forward is as fundamentally uncomplicated as it is urgent. It’s last call for the oil age. The only question now is, how long until we kick the old drunk out of the bar?

Artist's rendering of the completed Masdar City development. Click to enlarge.

A sign at the entrance to the Masdar site dwarfs everything around it. At its top is an aerial illustration of what the city will look like on completion. The rest of it lists the various businesses that are partnering to make it happen.

Masdar’s associates undoubtedly feel good about the project’s noble cause, but the sign would be empty if these companies weren’t making money. The Masdar Initiative is a business: the city is intended to be a magnet for foreign investment, the eventual home of 1,500 companies looking to profit from clean technology. The physical city is one big carbon offset project, generating carbon credits that will be sold on international markets. There is no ambiguity: the motive here is financial; environmental benefits are a bonus. Regardless of the reason for its existence, the Masdar Initiative shows what clearly defined policy and political leadership can do.

Through its two facets, the city and the initiative, Masdar shows that climate change is both an individual problem and a macro one, and that the best tool for change is policy. The city, with its emphasis on living lightly, while retaining a high standard of living, shows what individuals—in intelligently planned surroundings—can do. The initiative is political and economic, creating an environment favourable to the pursuit of alternatives.

There are politicians in Canada who have attempted, in smaller ways, to use policy to fight climate change. Stéphane Dion wanted to put a price on carbon to reduce emissions, but his Green Shift plan—centred on a carbon tax—failed to connect with voters. Similarly, B.C. premier Gordon Campbell did not come away unscathed after implementing a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The public knee jerks at the mention of the word “tax,” but just as there is consensus among scientists that humans are changing the climate, economists are in agreement that carbon pricing is essential if we are serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Before the October 2008 federal election, 230 of Canada’s leading economists from universities across the country signed an open letter to the federal parties urging a coherent economic plan to combat climate change. “In the absence of policy, individuals generally don’t take the environmental consequences of their actions into account, and the result is a ‘market failure’ and excessive levels of pollution,” reads the letter, which goes on to warn: “Even those who are not convinced by today’s scientific evidence need to consider the costs of not acting now. Any action (including inaction) will have substantial economic consequences and, thus, economics lies at the heart of the debate on climate change.”

Industrialization produced the emissions that threaten the climate balance, and moving to a low-carbon society must also largely be driven by economics. Yale University economist William Nordhaus believes that all the conflict and contortions of 2009’s Copenhagen summit, and the next round of wrangling scheduled for November 2010 in Cancún, Mexico, could be avoided if the world could simply agree on a price for carbon. He told a pre-Copenhagen conference that “to bet the world’s climate system on the Kyoto approach is a reckless gamble. Taxation is a proven instrument. Taxes may be unpopular, but they work. The Kyoto model is largely untested and the experience we have tells us it will not meet our objective—to stabilize the world climate system.”

The threat to polar bears may not stir their consciences, but slashand-burn capitalists will respond to threats to their pocketbooks: Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, projected in 2006 that investing one percent of global GDP in emission-reduction measures would spare the world an economic contraction of as much as 20 percent this century. As an investment, that’s a winner. (Two years later, Stern has revised his figure to two percent because climate change is progressing more rapidly than anticipated.)

The first evacuations directly attributable to man-made climate change occurred in 2009 in the Carteret Islands in the South Pacific without much fanfare. If we were paying more attention to such evidence, we would be sprinting toward a clean energy future. Instead, we have been sauntering. As people have discovered there’s money to be made, it’s picked up to a jog. As Parker says, “We’re learning. But the problem is that the situation is deteriorating faster than we’re learning.” Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the economics favour action. “The longer we delay,” says Stone, “the graver the threat, and the more expensive it will be to address.”

There are lessons to be learned from the desert, and they are familiar ones. We’ve mustered political will for important things before. “Other prime ministers have said we will have railroads that will connect the country from coast to coast,” says Etcheverry. “We will have public health care, we will have a Canadian broadcasting corporation, and so on. The big 21st century Canadian project is making our country a generator of clean power, truly clean power. And it could make us rich in the process.”

“I’m Canadian.”

This became my opening for every interview at the tax day Tea Party rally at the Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC.

It seemed like the best way to distance myself from the camera crews and journalists who were swarming the interesting or outrageous among the two-to-three thousand ralliers.

“I’m Canadian and I just want to know what’s happening today,” I would explain. And It was true. I went to the rally because I really don’t understand what’s happening in the United States today. I read blogs, watch the news, and catch Daily Show highlights like anyone else, but it doesn’t capture the sometimes hopeful, sometimes intimidating, always ethereal sense of change happening in America.

I went to the Tea Party not to judge anyone or enforce misconceptions, but to try to figure out what is mobilizing people from across the country to take part in an undeniably influential grassroots movement.

What I learned first was that most of these people were skeptical of the media. They eyed me, recorder and camera in hand, with suspicion. Those who were talkative often used the interview as a platform to expose whatever bias they thought I had.

Those who were interested in talking talked a lot. Tom, for example, approached me and the people I was with seemingly out of the blue, and took a great interest in whether or not we were Jewish.

Once Rick and Sharon started talking, they had a lot to say. They commandeered the interview to interrogate me about the quality of Canadian health care.

Carolyn and Ryan, two of the few students at the rally, seemed reasonable, even if our politics don’t match up. And like the few young people I spoke with, stressed that there were a lot of young people present

Another important lesson I learned was that the “Fair Tax” movement is not the same as “Tea Party” movement. Fair Tax might organize Tea Party events, but, as Jabari explained, the two aren’t synonymous.

I tried to be as non-judgmental as possible and to allow the interviewees to speak for themselves. The question I most wanted an answer to was, “why are you here?” Here are some of their answers:

Caroline

Caroline from Arlington, Virginia

What brings you out here today?

I’m a conservative. I once was a Democrat, but the Democratic party was once conservative, too. It was once pro-life. And then I was a Reagan Democrat for years, and worked for Pat Buchanan–he’s a great conservative. I believe in following the constitution; small government; and right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–life number one. That is our most troubling issue. Three thousand, one hundred children will be killed today by abortion. Today. More than died on 9/11, died of abortion in the United States. That is such a huge problem. And the Democratic party is supporting it. It’s disgraceful. So that’s my number-one issue.

And I also believe in subsidiarity, distributes, small government. If it can be done in the family, it should be done in the family. If it can be done in the county level or the city level, do it there. If it needs to go to the state–and some things do–there. And the federal government is supposed to have a military to defend us, and not a whole heck-of-a-lot more. And we’ve just gone farther, and farther, and farther, and of course we have this terrific debt. And I’m upset that George Bush was involved in spending more money than he should have, although he has so much in the plus column. So supportive of the pro-life community. So you see how I got where I am.

And you look around here and you see authentic people. You see hand-made signs that tear your heart out. And you look at the protestors [that protest the Tea Party supporters] going by, I see them–I pray at Planned Parenthood five days a week–I see them at Capital Hill demonstrating. But they have signs that somebody handed them, and then they all leave at the same time because they’re all told to go. Their bosses told them to go, “You must go to the demonstration.”

Did anybody tell these people to go? No. This is not an engineered crowd. And a lot of us are saying, “Where do we meet? Is it 11? Is it six?” We’re trying to find out where to go, when.

Where do you get that kind of information?

Well, I got some in the Washington Times yesterday. And then on Fox news this morning they talked about [it].

It’s so authentic. It’s so real. It’s so American. These people here. [A man walks by, one of the many vendors selling flags an buttons, Caroline points at him] Now, he’s selling flags. He’s in business. He’s a small business man, God love him. So he’s here trying to earn money today, and that’s good. That’s good. That’s good. We love that!

We’re authentic. We’re for real.

Do you agree with everything the tea party believes in?

We don’t have a list of things we believe in. There is no membership card, there are no dues. It’s just people getting together. If I came down here and I saw something and I heard something I don’t like, I’d just leave. You look around and people are saying, “God bless you, I love you. What’s your first name? Where are you from?”

This is authentic. These are real people. They’re precious! And you’re precious. And I love you, and God loves you […] look around. Look around. This didn’t happen by a big bang or by accident. There was a cause, that always was, and always will be. And most of us call that cause God, call it whatever you like. But it’s… It’s… God. God love you, sweetheart.

Jabari and Marilyn

Jabari Zakiya, Washington, DC
Marilyn Rickert, Oak Forest, IL

A lot of people are talking about “authentic Americans” here today. Do you think the people here are “authentic Americans”?

Marilyn: Yeah, we’re all volunteers, we all pay our own way, nobody gets a salary, we have basically a nation-wide grassroots organization and there is maybe a handful of people that actually collect any kind of a salary at all.

Jabari: Well, you have to define. If authentic means “real”, then yeah, they’re real, but there is all levels of real. I mean, I don’t consider myself a tea party person, but there are elements of their concerns I agree with. I don’t agree with 100% of the political stuff. But one of the things that makes America America is that we can have all kinds of diversity in thought, but we can come together around a lot of common interests. I mean, the most right-wing person and I can cheer for the same sports teams, you know? And in the same way, that’s what our movement is about. We have a lot of different people from a lot of different movements with a lot of different ideologies, but we all agree on the fair tax. Even the tea party people that don’t agree 100% that the fair tax is the way, we’re trying to convince them that the reform is the fair tax.

Carolyn and Ryan

Carolyn Bolls from Washington, DC and Ryan Gilroy

Why are you here today?

Carolyn: Well, basically we’re sick of our government spending our money. We’re spending more to save more, that doesn’t make sense to us. We’re protesting this big government control of our country. We don’t want to end up with the government controlling every sector of our lives. It’s not just about taxes, it’s about government control of our personal lives.

Ryan: We’re tired of watching government spend, spend, spend. Honestly, both parties are spending so much money, they don’t realize that they’re stealing jobs away, they’re stealing our generation’s wealth. They’re robbing Peter, who isn’t even born yet, to pay Paul now.

Do you think anything like that was happening with the last generation?

Carolyn: I think it’s cyclical. I mean, we have elections, that’s why we have a democratic republic, we will be able to voice our opinions on November 2nd. That’s when we get to change, and I hope that’s the change that our country needs.

Ryan: It seems like we need it more than ever. The Republicans had control from 2000-2006 with a Republican congress, a Republican senate, and a Republican President. You figure taxes would go down. But no, it got ratcheted up even higher. That’s the problem: people want to be in power, so they try to get votes. They pass projects and say, “Hey look! If you help me get my vote, I’ll get your vote.”

Carolyn: Even with the last administration, with the George Bush administration, he spent–you know, No Child Left Behind, you had all these federal programs, the bailouts towards the end of his term as President. I don’t support that either. You know, I call myself a Republican, but I’m a Conservative first, and Conservative also insures fiscal responsibility.

Ryan: And also, you realize Medicare Part D is the tip of the iceberg. Then you got Obama and healthcare, which is putting another thing on top of another thing, and realizing […] it’s bi-partisan. Most people would hate to say, “oh, it’s the Democrats”. No, it’s both parties [that] like to spend a lot.

Are you proud to be representing young people with your politics? Do you think there should be more young people here today?

Ryan: I think there’s a lot of young people here. Look around you. there’s plenty of young people behind you. I think it’s a good mixture of everything, young, old, everything in between.

Carolyn: I agree, but I think those that care the most are the ones who are paying taxes, and so that will generally attract an older population. I’m definitely proud to be here. My generation has to stand up and speak for ourselves otherwise we’ll be in debt for the rest of our lives, and for the lives our children, and children after that.

Tom

Tom Wallin from Springfield, Illinois.

What religion are you?

I was baptized Anglican.

I’m just curious. I thought you might have been Jewish, and if you were I was wondering: do you support Obama or the people here?

Well, I can’t vote here—

I mean, but who would you support?

I don’t know, I don’t have all the information. I don’t live here.

Do you have a point of view on this event today?

I’m here because I’m asking people about their points of view.

Well I want to know who you are first, because you might distort what I have to say. I rode here 800 miles on my motorcycle to be part of it.

What kind of motorcycle?

A Yamaha FJR 1300. Yup.

Very nice.

It is. I hit a construction barrel coming in the other day, and it went off my bike like a ping pong, or a bowling pin.

Holy cow. So why are you here today?

I’m here because I think the government is out of control. I think it’s taking our tax money. And I think a lot of the stuff it’s doing is unconstitutional. I think they are ruining our medical system by changing something that was probably the best. [In the] the country there’s just a small number of people that needed to be insured. And they didn’t do things that would really cut costs.

I think president Bush–I love president Bush for many things that he did–but he was trying to befriend liberals, and he spent way too much money, and I think that made his government a toss up on whether he should go on Mount Rushmore or not. I think what he did to fight enemies of ours country, I think he should be respected like a Mr. Rushmore president. I mean, for eight years he fought against people trying to make him look bad. From the very, very beginning, the people that were trying to take over tried to make him look bad. And he didn’t have the courage to say “no” to the big spenders. But I think he’s a good, honest man, and I loved him for what he was, and I think the people who say he was dumb were just absolutely wrong. He was a very smart man. He’s countrified a little bit like I am, but that doesn’t mean he was dumb, that means that he didn’t appear to people like we used to establish-mentize.

What would you say to someone who wants to understand what’s happening in America right now?

It’s kind of like if you want to ask a motorcycle rider why he likes to ride a motorcycle. If you have to ask, you won’t figure it out.

I mean, this is the greatest country on Earth, and what they’re doing is just going to take it away. You know, you how to ruin a great country? You spend it to death. You know, people like Saul Alinsky, people that Obama likes to quote, all of his crowd, I mean–look at his friends. I don’t know who these young men were that were with you, but they were nice respectful guys. I don’t know what they do in their personal lives, but if they were anything like Obama’s friends, you would run for the hills, buddy. You would run for the hills, because his friends are evil. Reverend Knight, I mean, there’s the catholic priest…

What did you think of us when you saw us? You seemed really eager to talk to us.

I wanted to talk to you because, I wanted to ask—and I love Jews, Jewish country, Israel, I just totally respect [Benjamin] Netanyahu and everything he stands for—I wanted to ask you a question: how could you support Obama if you were Jewish? Because, 95% of American jews support Obama, and that’s one of the greatest things I don’t understand about this country.

Richard and Sharon

Richard and Sharon from Michigan

Richard: Do you like your healthcare up there? Have you ever used it?

Yeah.

Richard: Have you ever used it?

Yeah, of course. I mean, I’ve never had trouble with it. I’ve never been seriously ill, so I’m very thankful for that.

Richard: Well that’s a good thing.

We were in England in October. I came down with a kidney infection. And I got into their health system. And if Canadian health system is anything like English, you don’t want it.

I went into the emergency room, and the guy says, “oh I got some drugs that will do away with this.” Because we wrote on the little slip that I was passing blood in my urine. [He] never checked me one bit. Just read that little note that I wrote, or she wrote, on my admit.

Sharon: Didn’t check his vitals.

Richard: And he went to get the drugs and he came back and said, “It’s going to be a couple of minutes.” I said, “Well what about my fever?” And he says, “I’ll go see about the drugs.” Then he came back, to check my [temperature].

As soon as he checked that, he said, “Oh everything changed.” And they put me in the hospital. But he was going to let me go home, with a 100, 102 temperature without giving me anything for it.

Sharon: And he was supposed to be drinking water. They told him he was supposed to drink a whole lot of water while he was there. And the nurses would say they’d bring it when he’d ask them, and they never brought it. I’d have to go get it for him. That’s our only experience with government health care. That’s why we’re not happy.

Is that the reason you guys are here today?

Sharon: Well, we don’t like the spending.

Richard: We’re from Michigan. We don’t like the spending. We’re both—I’m retired, she never worked—

Sharon: [laughs] Well, thank you!

Richard: —well, outside, you know.

We have two kids. No grandkids. And we sit here, thankful, that we don’t have grandkids. Because of the debt that we’re putting onto our grandkids.

Do you think previous generations have left that kind of legacy?

Sharon: I think each generation has done better for a while now.

Richard: I think that after the war, we had such a baby boom that we could take care of our folks. But there’s too many of us now to put that debt onto our kids, you know? This year there’s less money coming in for social security than going out.

Do you think this will change things? The people here today?

Richard: Let’s hope.

Sharon: Well I think you gotta speak up and try. That’s why we’re here.

Richard: You got to try to stop it. I mean, look how much the government spent this year already, and last year.

Sharon: We’ve written to our congressman and the like. You know, doing what you can. There’s only so much you can do.

Has any other issue brought you to rally like this?

Sharon: a lot of the people here, it’s the same thing. They haven’t done this kind of thing before.

Richard: Back years ago we was too busy making a living. You know, going to work five, six days a week. Didn’t have time to do this kind of stuff.

Sharon: This is the fifth one we’ve been to. We went to two in Jackson, two in Lansing, and this one.

Where do you get information about the rallies?

Sharon: They have some information online. A lot of it is from there. TV.

What kind of TV do you watch? Which networks?

Richard: We watch Fox, because the other ones are so biased. I mean, we watch the other ones, I mean, I have CNN, and MSNBC. I look at all them, but they don’t bring up–like Brian Williams, you know, on NBC. He don’t bring up the tea parties. He just shows you what they want you to see.

Fox, you get mad at Fox because they don’t–they might spend too much time saying how great something is, but you don’t think it’s worth a damn. But they’re the best of the networks.

What would you say to someone who doesn’t understand this and just wants to know more?

Richard: I guess they could sit at the Ambassador bridge and watch the ambulance coming from over there to bring people to the hospital over here. They say there’s 40 to 60 ambulances bringing people from Canada over to here, because the health care is better here than there, you know.

Pronoblem

Pronoblem, from another dimension.

Why are you here?

That’s a pretty deep question, man.

Yeah, it is pretty deep. What do you think?

I don’t know. I try to do good, raise good kids. Be fair and honest.

What do you represent?

When people asked me that before, you know what I told them?

No, what did you say?

That I was Canadian.

Why did you come out here today?

I heard there was some good Ethiopian food in town.

What does your button say?

I bought that here.

Do you believe in the message?

Oh, no. not really. What does it say?

It says “Welcome to Obamunism”.

Okay, so that means Obama has a philosophy.

I guess that’s not too hard to believe. Is this an average day for you?

Actually, yeah.

With files from Ryan Briggs