All I can think of is that old line from Get Smart, the classic television series.

If only he had used his powers for niceness instead of evil.

This story is about the hardest working man (or woman) in DC. It’s none other than that single employee at Bonner & Associates who was deemed too sleezy to work there. I know, I know… That’s a mighty high bar to hurdle, but Bonner actually dropped this guy like he was nuclear waste. (At least, we think they did. Maybe. But not for the reason they sold to the media).

Anyway, I digress. If you’re new to the story, let me lay it out.

Bonner & Associates — an astroturfing group — was hired by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy to create a fake grassroots campaign while the epic Waxman-Markey bill was wending its way through the House. And so they went to work, doing what they do, running vocal, incendiary, dishonest crusades that are prepared by Wall Street professionals, but made to look as if they originated on Main Street.

Bonner and the ACCCE almost got away with it.

But in early August, we learned that Tom Perriello, a Democratic congressman who voted for the Waxman-Markey bill in the House, received six letters from two advocacy groups complaining that his support for this climate bill would cause power rates to rise, and put a strain on tight budgets.

The problem is that all six letters were forgeries crafted by AN employee at Bonner & Associates. Bonner immediately fired said employee, describing the person as a bad apple who deviated from standard company practice.

The advocacy groups aren’t buying it.

“They stole our name,” said Tim Freilich, an executive at Creciendo Juntos, a nonprofit network that tackles issues related to Charlottesville’s Hispanic community. “They stole our logo. They created a position title and made up the name of someone to fill it. They forged a letter and sent it to our congressman without our authorization. It’s this type of activity that undermines Americans’ faith in democracy.”

The other forgeries were purported to be from the NAACP.

But now the plot thickens. Three weeks later, a bevy of other letters have surfaced, appearing to come from advocacy groups for senior citizens, all complaining about Democratic support for Waxman-Markey. Letters trying to put the fear of God in people who are doing what is right for America, and right for the planet.

The letters are forgeries. Once again, Bonner & Associates and the ACCCE are to blame. They just didn’t take responsibility for when the story first broke because of letting sleeping dogs lie, and all that.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m thoroughly impressed that a single employee — a bad seed — could accomplish so very much in such a short time. Presuming that he is a he, this employee would have to recreate the letterheads for dozens of advocacy groups; write letters that are all subtly different (mentioning concerns particular to each group); create job titles and fake names; work on his forged signatures; and then address each letter and get it in the mail all before the June vote. But that’s not all! Since he’s probably the “new guy” at the office, I’ll bet that he had to do the Dunkin Donuts run every morning, and put up with all manner of horseplay as the old timers gave him the business.

Imagine how much closer we’d be to passing a meaningful climate bill if only he’d used his powers for niceness, instead of evil.

And make no doubt about it. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy and Bonner & Associates are evil.

Every week, as part of my job, I read hundreds of articles that show where the clean technology and renewable energy industries are heading. And every week, Canada lurches off in the opposite direction. Every week, billions of dollars flow through the European Union, Obama’s America, China, South Korea, India, Japan — in fact, every major economy in the world. And every week, that money ignores Canada because the federal government has put all our eggs into the Alberta Tar Sands basket.

But Nova Scotia now has an intelligent, pragmatic leader, faced with just the slimmest chance to reposition our province for the coming century. Darrel Dexter must be bold, visionary, and decisive. It will be a difficult road, but our energy-rich natural bounty and the resourceful nature of Bluenosers give me reason to hope.

To begin, we have to transform Nova Scotia into Canada’s renewable energy capital.*

So we need money, fast. Dexter should raise consumption taxes this instant, and only offer rebates to the poorest — short term pain on the road to prosperity. Bump the HST back to 15 percent, implement a temporary 10 cent surcharge on gas while it’s still cheap, and, toughest of all, impose a carbon tax of $10 per ton for fossil fuel CO2 emissions, rising by $10 every second year.

And then we work tirelessly to make those taxes irrelevant. In so doing, we’ll develop a stable growth industry, so that our sons and daughters can find clean energy jobs right here at home, rather than reluctantly working dirty energy jobs out West.

Offshore Energy: Make Mine Renewable

Firstly, Premier Dexter needs to court — and win — a major wind turbine manufacturer. Whatever it takes, he needs to convince General Electric, Vestas, or another high-quality producer to make us, not Ontario, Canada’s turbine manufacturing hub. Then we strive to ensure those turbines never leave the province, because we’re perfectly positioned to sell renewable wind power to the United States. Under Obama’s climate change agenda, the U.S. will impose onerous renewable energy requirements on utilities over the next decade. It’s already begun in New England and New York. Those states — heck, the whole eastern seaboard — will soon be crying for wind and wave power, and if we’re ready, Nova Scotia can sell almost every kilowatt we produce from our massive onshore and offshore wind farms. We’ll keep some for ourselves, and shoot the rest across the Bay of Fundy on high-energy direct current cables.

The minutia will matter. Siting the factory in Shelburne or Sydney, areas that need an economic boost, will offer the advantage of deep, open harbors, so we can easily deploy turbines offshore. The next generation of turbines are enormous and difficult to transport over land, so our natural resources will work in our favor. We’ll ramp up turbine manufacturing and repair programs at Community Colleges province-wide, giving Nova Scotians the chance to work at home in high-paying green jobs.

Depose King Coal

Secondly, we put Nova Scotia Power to work. Without any competition, the corporation has been slow to implement low-carbon policies. A carbon tax will encourage NSP to stop burning coal, which contributes massively to global warming, and as we phase out the coal, consumers pay less carbon tax. Coal hurts everyone, emitting a cocktail of mercury, sulphur, radon and more, even with top-quality scrubbers in place. If NSP needs a nudge, we can educate consumers about coal’s inefficiency and NSP’s numerous energy options: geothermal, combined heat and power, tidal power, and many more crucial low-carbon technologies.

To force the issue, Dexter must stand firm on his 25 percent renewable energy standard for NSP by 2015. Yes, it can be done. A flurry of new construction will follow as we sprinkle the province with turbines — some in less populous areas, some offshore — and build facilities to store excess energy. Dozens of solutions can overcome wind power’s intermittency, from fuel cells to thermal energy, and we’d be wise to become experts in their deployment.

Cutting Power Bills

Thirdly, Dexter must decouple profits at NSP, so the power company makes more money by selling less electricity, as in California and Oregon. NSP would have incentive to install smart meters in every home, so consumers can see and modify their energy use, and offer consumer rebates to install insulation, solar panels, and other devices that are repaid over time from energy savings.

In that vein, Dexter’s government should update our building code so that future construction doesn’t overburden the grid. Buildings account for 40 percent of global CO2 emissions The UK has adopted legislation ensuring that homes built after 2016 will be carbon neutral, tight as a drum, and powered by renewables. If they can do it, so can we.

Saving Kilowatts

Fourthly, energy efficiency is king everywhere but Canada. Just this week, McKinsey & Company reported that investing $500 billion in energy efficiency will save U.S. businesses and consumers more than $1.2 trillion over the next 11 years.

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel; Cambridge, Massachusetts has done the work for us. There, the Cambridge Energy Alliance works with banks to offer businesses simple, one-step, low-interest loans to improve their equipment’s efficiency. The loan is paid back exclusively through the business’s energy savings. Here, too, existing energy efficiency technologies could easily cut business’s utility costs, and lower overhead costs mean more money for growth.

Peak Oil

Finally, peak oil is upon us, and gas will likely cost $2 a liter in 3 years. Automakers are building plug-in hybrid cars that can travel 40+ miles on electricity alone, and EVs that can go twice that distance. Let’s plan ahead, like cities, states and countries around the world that are now creating the electrical infrastructure needed to charge EVs in 15 minutes or less. Consumers merely pay a subscription fee, cutting annual transportation costs by 50 to 80 percent. If we follow suit, most of that saved gas money will stay right here, in Nova Scotia, supporting our province.

Even better, if we tie our EV network to the tourism industry, we can create low-carbon vacations for visitors. If we’re smarter still, we’ll plow profits from our lucrative renewable energy sector into an electric rail system to connect and rejuvenate our small cities and towns as they grow flush from long-term wind farm lease revenues. An inexpensive, reliable rail system would open up the province to both city and country mice. With the option of catching a train to see an evening performance of the symphony and dinner at Fid, we could easily attract more doctors and professionals to rural areas.

Our choice now is to rise to the greatness of our forebears who made Nova Scotia a prosperous and promised land in the 1800s, or fall into high-carbon obscurity. Until now, both our national and provincial leaders have been perfectly happy to trot blindly along the same economic and energy path we wore out in the twentieth century. The past thirty years haven’t been kind to this province, but now is our chance to turn things around and show Canada and the world just how profitable a low-carbon economy can be. Let’s start today, and maybe tomorrow Alberta’s youth will be going-down-the-road to a work in clean, green, prosperous Nova Scotia.

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*A much shorter version of this commentary appeared in The Chronicle-Herald this week. I cut it by one-third to make it fit the op-ed format.

** Nova Scotia’s has an exceptional capacity for wind energy; a Université de Moncton professor rates our wind energy resources as among the best in the world.

Imagine that you’re a tobacco company CEO in the 1960s, and the Surgeon General announces that your product kills people. What would you do? Perhaps you’d experiment with new filters and blends for a few years, trying to minimize the harm. But a decade passes, nothing changes, and you face a horrible truth.

Your product is lethal; cigarettes aren’t safe under any circumstances. In fact, the statistics are staggering. You know that nicotine is almost as addictive as heroin. You know that lung cancer could be virtually eliminated if people stopped using your product. You know that tobacco kills close to 480,000 people in North America each year — more than double the total number of combined deaths attributed to alcoholism, car accidents, AIDS, suicides, homicides, fires, crack-cocaine, heroin and marijuana.

You know your product hurts the innocent. Every year, tobacco smoke causes up to 300,000 respiratory infections in children younger than 18 months in the U.S. It results in as many as 26,000 new cases of asthma. More than 200,000 asthmatic children will be hospitalized this year because a parent smokes in their home.

If you’re a tobacco company CEO, what would you do?

Would you try to muddy the waters by paying lobbyists to write pseudo-scientific papers that portray cigarette smoking in a favorable light? Would you expand your operations to developing world countries and try to hook generations of foreigners? Would you lie to Congress, proclaiming that your product is safe and non-addictive?

An ethical CEO would do none of these things. Seen in such a stark light, the only moral thing to do would be to slowly put yourself out of business. You’ve enjoyed a good run, and tobacco created staggering wealth for generations. But if you’re a compasionate human being, you’d stop marketing your product to children, and you’d ensure that cigarettes didn’t hook another generation. You’d help existing customers quit, and you’d support growers during the transition as they replant fields with another, less harmful cash crop.

Of course, none of that happened. Forty-five years after the Surgeon-General’s landmark report, tobacco companies are still strong, still making money through scandalous exploitation, still trying to hook another generation of Canadians and Americans if they can — but young Pakistanis and Chinese will work in a pinch, and so will everyone else they can find. So you’ll forgive me for thinking that Big Tobacco is an evil industry.

Tar Sands Precipice

Oil sands producers are now sitting on that same precipice.

I write environmental newsletters for Fortune 1000 companies, and I read hundreds of clean technology and low-carbon articles and studies every week. I know what the media hasn’t properly reported — that the International Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report is woefully out-of-date. Every month, the science proves that global warming is here now, that it’s advancing much faster than expected, and that we have to cut emissions immediately.

Last March, the world’s leading climate scientists held an emergency session in Copenhagen to update the climate change science to better convey this urgency. Among the jaw droppers were these frightening revelations: The coming decade will be the warmest ever, and summer arctic ice will largely melt by 2020. Droughts will intensify, and hurricanes will become ever more potent. By 2100, we should expect sea levels to rise by between 5 and 7 feet; that 85 percent of the Amazon rainforest will die; that 40 to 70 percent of species will go extinct; that agriculture will fail in California; that the American Southwest will be turned into a permanent dust bowl; and that a few billion people in Asia to have no water for life. And that’s but a sampling of dozens of apocalyptic predictions.

It’s already happening. Small Pacific Islands like Kiribati are making evacuation plans because rising sea levels are destroying their homes. Sure, it’s just a few thousand people here and there, but what happens when the world has millions — perhaps hundreds of millions — of climate refugees? Who should we blame when skirmishes over scarce water supplies erupt, and farmland in the emerging world turns to desert, creating a dozen Darfurs?

I’m not for a minute suggesting that we immediately turn off the spigots at the Alberta oil sands. But if you produce Alberta oil, heavier in greenhouse gases than Saudi Arabia’s light sweet crude, then you should see the writing on the wall. Oil sands carbon capture won’t work fast enough, and it delays the inevitable. It’s time for producers to change industries, to invest in renewable power, in creating railways, in building wind turbines, in doing everything they can to hasten the transition to a low-carbon economy.

If they don’t, then oil sands producers will become the tobacco industry of the 21st century, reviled throughout the world for the pain and suffering that they’ve caused.

In a wide-ranging and candid interview with The Globe & Mail’s Editorial Board, Canada’s Environment Minister has admitted what environmental activists have been saying for years — that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology probably won’t work at the Alberta Tar Sands. Nevertheless, over the last 18 months, the provincial and federal governments have offered the Alberta oil industry and power utilities almost $3 billion in funding to establish CCS demonstrations in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Most oil producers have shown little interest, but a few coal-fired power demonstration pilots will likely be approved.

“CCS is not the silver bullet in the oil sands,” said Prentice. “It’s important, but it is really in the upgrading of bitumen that CCS has more promise, rather than in the mining or in situ production.”

Minister Jim Prentice said that he is watching several projects closely that are testing solvents — instead of natural gas — in the extraction process to see if they cut GHG emissions. The Alberta oil sands are the fastest growing source of carbon pollution in Canada, and a big reason why the government is only promising to cut CO2 emissions by 2% by 2020 over 1990 levels.

Prentice does believe that CCS holds promise for capturing emissions that are produced by upgrading bitumen to a usable product. The problem with this acknowledgment is that most tar sands oil is sent to the US for refining.

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I have to say that this is the very first time that our Environment Minister has actually sounded like an Environment Minister. I’m still trying to figure out if he went off-script.

For more current news on the Alberta Tar Sands, have a look at Clearing the Air of Oil Sands Myths at the Pembina Institute.

Although many countries are setting ambitious carbon reduction targets, a few are still struggling to find ways to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Among G8 economies, Canada has the worst GHG record, and Environment Canada attributes Canada’s poor showing to large increases in oil and gas production.

Environment Canada says that carbon dioxide emissions rose to 747 million tons in 2007, up dramatically by 4 percent from 718 million tons a year earlier, and up 26 percent above their 1990 levels. Canada has violated the country’s Kyoto commitment to cut emissions by 6 percent; Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said that he never had any intention of honoring the agreement.*

The federal government blamed a cold winter and petroleum production for the rise in emissions, the fastest rise ever recorded in the Great White North. In fact, GHG from the mining, oil and gas extraction sector have risen by 57 percent over the period from 2004 to 2007. A Pembina Institute spokesman says that Canada’s emissions are likely to continue to rise, as the government has not announced any policies to confront the issue.

Canada’s poor performance could become a trade issue. The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy recently suggested that Canada faces possible US trade sanctions if it doesn’t agree to a cap-and-trade program similar to that proposed by the Obama administration.

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* In fact, Prime Minister Harper has described Kyoto as a socialist plot to suck money from rich countries.

Harper and Environment Minister Jim Prentice have muzzled Environment Canada scientists to keep our international failings quiet.

Just six days into office, Kansas Governor Mark Parkinson has signed an agreement that will let Sunflower Electric Power Corp build one 895-MW coal-fired power plant near Holcomb. The company had originally wanted to build two 700-MW coal plants, but this compromise will overcome a two-year stalemate that saw former governor Kathleen Sibelius veto the projects four times.

“We have been at an energy impasse for the past couple of years,” says Parkinson, a Democrat. “I thought it was time to bring an end to that impasse.”

The new project is expected to produce 6.67 million tons of CO2 emissions per year, as well as becoming a major source of airborne mercury, uranium, and sulfur dioxide. As part of the agreement, Sunflower will bolster its investment in wind energy, close two old oil-fired plants in Garden City, increase its use of biofuels, build two transmission lines to carry power west, and dedicate 1% of gross sales to energy efficiency programs.

Parkinson’s back room deal elated Sunflower executives and plant supporters, surprised most lawmakers and disappointed environmental groups. “Today, Kansas took a big step backwards,” said Sierra Club spokeswoman Stephanie Cole. “We cannot build new coal plants and claim to want to slow global warming at the same time.”

Kansas Governor, still wet behind the ears, is nevertheless this week’s Climate Change Double Dumb Ass.

You can call Parkinson’s press secretary, Beth Martino, at (785) 368-8500 to voice your displeasure, or send an email via a webform; You can also send an email to Wayne Penrod, Environmental Manager at Sunflower to voice your displeasure. He’s not doing a very good job, either.

Humanity has burned half the fossil fuels required to force a 2°C rise in average global temperatures, and at the current rate, we’ll have 40 years to become a 100 percent renewable-energy society. That’s the message in a new study published in Nature last week which tries to simplify the climate debate by suggesting that developed and developing countries need to cap total emissions at one trillion tonnes, or it will lead to dramatic warming with severe consequences for the planet. The problem is that we’re already getting perilously close. Since the industrial revolution, we’ve burned 500 billion tons of carbon; now we’re emitting more than 10 billion tonnes — and rising — of carbon annually. So time is running short.

Professor Myles Allen, a physicist and climate expert at Oxford University who led the study on global carbon emissions, says that “Mother Nature doesn’t care about dates. To avoid dangerous climate change we will have to limit the total amount of carbon we inject into the atmosphere, not just the emission rate in any given year.”

This new research pushes the reset button so that stakeholders can think about carbon emissions in a streamlined and intriguing way. Allen and his colleagues are trying to encourage politicians and policy makers to consider the big picture, and understand how dawdling now with put an unfortunate burden on society in just a few years. In fact, the study would seem to indicate that that we need to start rationing fossil fuels sooner rather than later, with an eye towards turning the spigot off in less than two generations. And even if this reframing is successful, and we stop burning fossil fuels, we’ll still likely see warming of 2&deg.C,*which most scientists still believe will create serious problems for many countries, especially in the emerging world.

“If you use too much [carbon] this year, it doesn’t mean the planet will come to an end,” Allen says. “It means you have to work harder the next year.”

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By a renewable energy society, I mean one that burns no fossil fuels. And two degrees warming will undoubtably cause a great deal of sorrow and heartache, and that could lead to dangeous tipping points that bring an even greater rise in temperatures.

If we start urgently creating a renewble energy society now, we’re still on a trajectory that will leave more than a billion people in Asia with an inadequate water supply; the summer ice in the Arctic will still be gone; huge swathes of the Amazon rainforest will still die; the Colorado River will stop serving about 25 million people; and worldwide crop yields will fall significantly, to name just a few of the things to which we can look forward.

The Lung Association brought forward astonishing statistics this week — that in the world’s richest country, more than 186 million people live and work in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution. In fact. the air quality results in 2008* were much worse than 2007, according to the advocacy group’s State of the Air report.

“Despite almost 40 years since the Clean Air Act passed in 1970, six in 10 Americans still live in dirty air areas, areas where the air is unhealthful to breathe,” says the Lung Association’s Paul Billings.

Los Angeles has the country’s worst ozone — or smog — pollution, a dubious distinction it has held for years. Bakersfield, CA, has the worst year-round particle pollution, and Pittsburgh finished last in the short-term particle pollution category. Some major cities, including LA, NY, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Washington, have managed to improve air quality over the last decade, but it turns out that 2008 was bad news just about everywhere, with declining standards. Last year’s figures showed that 125 million people were living with dangerous pollution levels.

The State of the Air report also noted that the nation’s biggest polluters are also the biggest contributors to global warming, and recommends that a resurgent EPA under Lisa Jackson kill two birds with one stone.

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Read more about this frightening story at Reuters. If you search on Google News, you’ll also find news reports from individual states and cities. Finally, the State of the Air is available for download.

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*George Bush: The gift that keeps on giving. Former President Bush kneecapped the EPA and the weakened the Clean Air Act repeatedly during his time in office; I’ve read dozens of stories about it in my day job, including this series about US Schools at USA Today.

Jackson and the EPA have already acted on this report.

The number of climate change lobbyists in Washington, DC has tripled in five years, according to a new report from the Center for Public Integrity. The study says that in 2008, 770 companies and industry groups spent $90 million US on 2,340 lobbyists — about five for every member of Congress. In 2003, slightly more than 700 special interest group representatives were working on climate change legislation in Washington, and 70 percent of those acted on behalf of carbon-intensive industries. Now, “virtually every segment of the economy was seeking to weigh in” on the issue, including lobbyists from the industry, financial services, unions, local governments, alternative energy, and environment and health sectors.

Interestingly, a coalition of environmental groups led by Bill McKibben of 350.org will be protesting at this 100-year-old plant today to convince Congress — and Americans — that fossil fuels are driving the climate crisis, and that the transition to clean, renewable energy must happen much sooner than most Americans realize. (Source: The New York Times)