The Bruce Report

New Brunswick’s redoubtable energy minister, having returned from a fact-finding tour of the American southland where shale gas operations are resuscitating thousands of formerly dying communities, hopes to shred the misconceptions that plague the industry’s development in this province.

Ever since Craig Leonard’s boss, Premier David Alward, announced he would not erect unnecessary barriers to exploring the Frederick Brook formation, near Elgin (where, it is thought, as much 67 trillion standard cubic feet of gas lay trapped in sedimentary layers), opposition has been gathering a head of public steam.

The controversy concerns the technology that uses jets of water to liberate the gas from the country rock – a process called hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, which many environmentalists and some geologists contend contaminates drinking wells with toxic slurry. The actual science on the subject is far from definitive, and Leonard, for one, dismisses the hyperbole out of hand.

Speaking to reporters after a speech to the Saint John Board of Trade last week, he insisted, “When the director of the [U.S.] Environmental Protection Agency states very clearly that she doesn’t know of any situations that there’s been a proven link between hydrofracking and any issues with water, that’s a pretty strong message that people have to pay attention [and] understand that hydrofracking is not the high-risk enterprise that people are trying to make it out to be.”

Fair enough. Still, there are many varieties of risk in any industrial enterprise, as a recent New York Times investigation, published in banner style on its front page yesterday, reveals. And, if the reporter Ian Urbina is even partially correct, the real problem with the shale gas boom may be more fiduciary than ecological.

In 4,000 words, The Times presents the results of its research; its findings as compelling as they are troubling. “Natural gas companies have been placing enormous bets on the wells they are drilling, saying they will deliver big profits and provide a vast new source of energy for the United States,” Urbina begins his piece. “But the gas may not be as easy and cheap to extract from shale formations deep underground as the companies are saying, according to hundreds of e-mails and internal documents and an analysis of data from thousands of wells.”

On the face of it, the content of these communiques are, indeed, damning.

“Money is pouring in [from investors even though shale gas is] inherently unprofitable,” The Times quotes an unidentified analyst with PNC Wealth Management. “Reminds you of the dot coms [bubble].”

Added another from IHS Drilling Data, an energy research company, “The word in the world of the independents is that shale gas plays are just giant Ponzi schemes and the economics just do not work.”

Urbina stops short of accusing the gas companies of deliberately misleading investors and government departments, from which they hope to extract big subsidies for continued development. But one petroleum geologist and former Amoco employee he consulted suggests that six major producers in Texas are overestimating the volume of their commercially exploitable reserves by anywhere from 73 to 350 per cent. “This kind of data is making it harder and harder to deny that the shale gas revolution is being oversold,” Art Berman declared.

Of course, these putative revelations do not, in any way, attach to those companies currently exploring in New Brunswick. But they do at least suggest that provincial government’s responsibility is not limited merely to regulating hydrofracking; it’s also obliged to assess the viability of the industry, itself, especially if, as it has said, shale gas production could be just what the doctor ordered for dozens of small, struggling, rural communities.

History proves that nothing is more anathematic to long-term sustainable economic development than reliance on primary resources when commercial exploitation is not first girded by innovation, technology and, most importantly, the capacity to accurately determine the quantity and quality of the raw materials.

Without this perspicacity, plants inevitably close, unemployment balloons, tax revenues shrink, and, before you know it, we’re right back where we started: Wondering how our misconceptions had led us so depressingly astray.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. . .

Only, this time it’s not some Hollywood shark that should haunt the dreams, and unsettle the souls, of countless, thrill-seeking movie goers. It’s a report from a consortium of marine scientists – released, oddly enough, almost 33 years to the day of the premier of “Jaws II” – which concludes, nightmarishly, that ocean life is “at high risk of entering a phase of extinction unprecedented in human history.”

If the findings of International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) are credible, that would mean there’ll be no more tuna, salmon, turtles, dolphins, whales and, yes, toothy, man-eating leviathans to exploit when my two-year-old grandson turns 50. Worse, says Oxford University biologist Alex Rogers, who is also the report’s scientific director: “If the ocean goes down, it’s game over.”

Of course, the real question is whether the game’s outcome is already foretold.

Ever since the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) raised the alarm about the effects of manmade global warning four years ago, the backlash against expertise – even science, itself – has stunted almost all efforts to deal practicably with the problem.

A vocal minority’s accusations of data tampering (clearly unfounded), grant hoarding (evidently false) and professional collusion (patently unproven) by the scientific community engaged in a conspiracy to hoax the world into funding lucrative, but unnecessary, research projects have distracted policy makers just about everywhere. The politically tepid, if cynically astute, response has been to weigh both sides of the “debate” with equal consideration, and thereby provide a patina of lofty objectivity.

And while there’s nothing especially objective about lending identical measures of credence to both verifiable knowledge and passionate ignorance, the tactic does get the job done. No electoral capital gets squandered, so who cares if nothing meaningful ever gets done to repair the injured planet?

Sadly, this new report falls rather neatly into the familiar trap.

According to IPSO, “Unless action is taken now, the consequences of our activities are at high risk of causing, through the combined effects of climate change, overexploitation, pollution and habitat loss, the next globally significant extinction event in the ocean. It is notable that the occurrence of multiple high intensity stressors has been a prerequisite for all the five global extinction events of the past 600 million years [Baronosky et al., 2009].”

Specifically, the research concludes, “Human actions have resulted in warming and acidification of the oceans. . .The speeds of many negative changes to the ocean are near to or are tracking the worst case scenarios from the IPCC. . . The extinction threat to marine species is rapidly increasing. . .Timelines for action are shrinking.”

It recommends an “immediate reduction in carbon dioxide emissions,” the restoration of “the structure and function of marine ecosystems” and the “urgent introduction by the United Nations Security Council and the United Nations General Assembly of effective governance on the High Seas.”

You may as well ask the world’s politicians, with their competing agendas, to link arms and sing Kumbaya for all the success you’ll have appealing to their collective sense of responsibility.

For global issues like this and those of broader climate change, the time for rational appeals to men and women in power passed long ago. The audience is now the once-too-often silent majority, newly mobilized at the grass roots, armed with facts and workable options for their distinct and local habitats, fearless in the face of denial, self-interest and politically motivated recrimination.

And if the old game’s result is already in the books, then let’s tell the faithless, the venal, the mercenary, the ambivalent, the diffident, the polluting, the exploitative, the self-centered and the angrily defensive lovers of their own lunatic opinions among us that a new game is beginning.

And we, the informed, have changed the rules.

The green light to replace the causeway between Moncton and Dieppe with a bridge that permits both the Petitcodiac River and the traffic above it to flow freely waits patiently for the results of extensive environmental assessment.

That was the deal a year ago when the Province announced its plan to phase in the benighted waterway’s restoration first by opening the fish gates permanently and then by examining the effect of the move on the area.

In this respect, freshly minted Moncton-Riverview-Dieppe MP Robert Goguen is right to embrace his conservative soul when he insists on biding his time until monitors tell him “how to proceed with the next phase,” as he did in an April survey by the Petitcodiac Riverkeeper organization.

But he is on far less defensible ground when he further ties his support to the “wishes of the residents” of his constituency and the “other levels of government,” implying erroneously that sufficient opposition exists to justify killing the project.

In this, he echoes the sentiments of his Tory colleague Rob Moore, MP for Fundy Royal, who told the CBC earlier this month, “I think it is a little easier to push for funding for things where there’s unanimity and people are universally endeavouring to obtain funding for a project rather than one where people are divided on it.”

By these plebiscital standards, neither Moore nor Goguen would be sitting in Parliament now. They surely wouldn’t be hemming and hawing over the future of a public work nearly 80 per cent of Greater Moncton voters already support.

But never mind. If there’s one thing for which the muddy Petty is even more famous than its wounded condition, it’s the politics it manages to ignite.

Just before he left office – and after decades of studies, environmental assessments, foot-dragging, false starts, bitter recriminations, threatened lawsuits, and archly political public relations campaigns – former Premier Shawn Graham committed upwards of $20 million to begin the long-delayed river fix, which was expected to end in 2015 and cost a total of $68 million.

The decision effectively recognized that the causeway, built in 1968, had all but destroyed the Petitcodiac, both environmentally and economically. The dam it created had, over the years, cost the metropolitan area tens of millions in lost tourism and recreational fishing revenues. It had also strained municipal budgets at peak flood times when the river was incapable of accommodating natural run-off below the artificially bloated head pond.

Even Ottawa agreed. Recognizing the Crown’s legal and constitutional obligation to protect natural watercourses in Canada, government lawyers filed an official affidavit in the Fredericton branch of the Federal Court, to wit: “Transport Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans have now completed their regulatory review process under the Navigable Waters and Protection Act and the Fisheries Act, and have decided to issue their respective approval and authorization in relation to replacing the causeway with a 280-meter-long bridge.”

That should have been the end of it. Naturally, it wasn’t.

A vocal minority of dedicated opponents – mostly landowners around the head pond who feared plunging property values and contaminated runoff from ground sources leaching into the expanded basin – hit the bricks, at one point launching a legal, ultimately failed, appeal. And despite repeated assurances by real estate developers, geochemical engineers and marine biologists, they remain ardently committed to a demonstrably damaging status quo.

Meanwhile, since the gates came up, the pace of the river’s recovery has exceeded all expectations, producing none of the deleterious effects predicted and  many more efficacious surprises in the number and variety of marine animals returning to their ancient habitats.

It’s only prudent to wait for the final environmental audit of this first stage of restoration before deciding how next to proceed. And it’s entirely, if lamentably, possible that neither the federal nor provincial government have the cold, hard cash – given the state of their respective finances – to worry about the river that runs through us.

But it is politically craven to suggest that debunked arguments raised by the few should play any role in determining the the future of the Petitcodiac for the many.

One of New Brunswick’s more devoted climate-change skeptics urges all of us to resist the claims of those “who have negligible scientific knowledge and who have not studied the subject beyond reading simplified reports in the media.”

Among those Ian L. McQueen of Glenwood lists as lightly informed – in a commentary carried by the Saint John Telegraph-Journal the other day – are “political scientists, economists, agriculturists, journalists, environmental activists” and “columnists”.

Instead, he wants us to direct our attention to sources he deems credible, and irrefutably so, on the subject of anthropogenic global warming and its putative effects. He seems especially excited about a 2007 research paper by Natural Resources Canada, which he suggests supports his position that the December storms along the East Coast had “nothing to do with climate change.”

Fair enough. Let’s take a look.

The report, “From Impacts to Adaptation” (http://adaptation.nrcan.gc.ca/assess/2007/toce.php#ch4) is actually subtitled “Canada in a Changing Climate”. About the future of Atlantic weather, the study explicitly states, “Atlantic Canada will experience more storm events, increasing storm intensity, rising sea level, storm surges, coastal erosion and flooding.” It then observes: “Vulnerability to climate change in the Atlantic region can be reduced through adaptation efforts focused on limiting exposure and through careful planning.”

In fact, the document’s summary makes this rather unequivocal claim: “The impacts of changing climate are already evident in every region of Canada. Climate change will exacerbate many current climate risks, and present new risks and opportunities, with significant implications for communities, infrastructure and ecosystems.”

To be accurate, the study’s authors do not distinguish between natural and manmade causes; they concede the likely agency of both. They clearly acknowledge, however, that “climate change” is a real, observable phenomenon and that far from having no effect on, for example, the increasing ferocity of coastal tempests, its impact on the weather is direct and causal.

But if Mr. McQueen finds himself contradicting his own citation on a matter so central to his thesis, what are we to make of his next assertion? “As for the supposed coming sea level increase of 50 centimeters worldwide,” he writes, “it is at odds with information from the most trusted sources on sea levels, like Nils-Axel Morner.”

Would that be Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, the retired head of the department of paleogeophysics and geodynamics at Stockholm University, who also claims to be an expert on “dowsing”, the effort to locate subterranean water by waving a y-shaped twig over a patch of ground? Or would that be the Dr. Nils-Axel Morner who refuses to believe the raw, unfiltered data, collected from tidal gauges and satellite altimeters, that clearly show sea levels rising in almost every year since 1948?

Still, Mr. McQueen is not yet done with us. Don’t forget that big, orange ball in the sky: “The sun has few or no sunspots, which is always associated with cold periods.”

In other words, the planet is not warming up; if anything it should be cooling down. But, if it is, what would we call that particular trend? Climate change, perhaps?

Regardless, reported Scientific American about a year ago, “Many scientists agree that sunspots and solar wind could be playing a role, but the vast majority view it as very minimal and attribute Earth’s warming primarily to emissions from industrial activity – and they have thousands of peer-reviewed studies to back up that claim. Most up-to-date climate models incorporate the effects of the sun’s variable degree of brightness in their overall calculations. Ironically, the only way to really find out if phenomena like sunspots and solar wind are playing a larger role in climate change than most scientists now believe would be to significantly reduce our carbon emissions.”
What a diabolically elegant way to finally resolve the climate-change debate.

Until then, we’ll just have to heed Mr. McQueen’s warning about those “who have negligible scientific knowledge and who have not studied the subject beyond reading simplified reports in the media.”

Indeed, we shall, Mr. McQueen.

Indeed, we shall.

The joists beneath Canada’s social policy framework are beginning to creak, thanks to the excessive weight that’s generated when a nation’s leaders house too many contradictory plans and priorities under the same roof.

We tremble before our rolling debts and structural deficits; yet don’t even think about raising our taxes. We worry about our children’s future, but if public investments in education necessitate a two per cent hike in the price of a bottle of gin, then forget about it and pass the martini shaker.   

We know we’re responsible for the shape we’re in. Still, we insist in one of the many moments of pure rationalization we allow ourselves every day, some are more responsible than others. And he always seems to be the other guy.

So it is we observe federal Environment Minister John Baird declaring – and not for the first time – that Canada will only agree to a binding set of reductions to greenhouse gas emissions when other major polluters, such as the United States, China, India and Brazil, similarly agree under a single, if virtually unenforceable, pact.

Apparently, according to government officials, this “only makes sense” as anything less would put Canada in an untenably uncompetitive position with respect to its international trading partners (read: the good old stars and stripes).

But does this argument “only make sense”?

It does if you believe that climate change is merely a figment of some grant-hungry, United Nations scientist’s fevered imagination. Clearly, though, this is not Baird’s position – or it wasn’t on Monday when he announced a new national marine conservation area north of Baffin Island that he said, according to one news report, “will become increasingly important as the effects of global warming lead to greater human activity in Canada’s North.”

What, then, do our leaders want: A more stable climate or a warmer one?

If it’s the former, why are they making plans to manage and exploit an ice-free Northwest Passage? If it’s the latter, what are they doing at the Cancun summit this week, hashing out the terms of their endearment with the rest of the post-Kyoto world?

The simplest explanation is that they are playing both sides against the middle in a dangerous game of geopolitical poker, rather than articulating a consistent national policy on climate change.

The Canadian government’s latent interest in the North is the direct result of what science has been predicting for more than 20 years: The ice is melting. That’s not an opinion; it’s a verifiable and measurable fact. Baird and his people know this. Indeed, they welcome it, and all the strategic oil exploration and sovereign assets it bestows.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world marvels at the exquisite irony of our position: Our leaders now actually hope to profit from a process that only scant years ago they rejected as mere conjecture. They have become believers, where once they were sceptics. Their venal and chauvinistic interests, it seems, have shown us all the light.

Still, they also show up periodically at these ludicrous assemblies of global warming hand-wringers and teeth-gnashers to assure the international community that they’re perfectly willing to work with it, if only it will work with them.

Nobody’s buying this horse-pucky, so why do they bother spreading it around?

Apart from ushering an embarrassing loss of prestige on the world stage, Canada’s climate change contradictions rob it of the opportunity to become a global leader in coherent, consistent environmental policy, and divert our attention from the hard, but inevitable, work of weaning ourselves from the teat of fossil fuels; from capitalizing on the enormous economic opportunities explicit in renewable energy technologies and skills.

This country – like many others – needs a framework unburdened by reflexive and dichotomous overtures to political gamesmanship. When everything is a priority, nothing is, and nothing good, noble or even useful ever gets done under the weight of such greed.

Margaret Wente is one of Canada’s more widely read commentators on topics both arcane and commonplace. Her columns appear regularly in the Globe and Mail editorial section where she time-shares with the likes of Jeffrey Simpson and Lawrence Martin.

Generally, I like her stuff. It’s clear, concise, often amusing and almost always provocative. But sometimes she gets carried away, which is not a crime of which she, alone, is guilty.

Still, Ms. Wente’s  effort last Saturday left me scratching my head. In it, she declares, among other things, “The delusional dream of global action to combat climate change is dead. Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme is dead. Chicago’s carbon-trading market is dead. Public interest in climate change has plunged, and media have radically reduced coverage.”

Moreover, she insists, “Now that global warming has stopped sucking all of the oxygen out of the room, some of those who care about the planet will turn to more pressing problems. Humans are encroaching everywhere on habitats and species.  . .Worry about the lions and tigers, which face extinction within our lifetime. Their problem isn’t climate change. It’s us.”

Isn’t that a little like saying we should ban cigarettes, but not the second-hand smoke they produce?

In fact, the biosphere is one giant, enormously complex, intra-connected organism. If we should “worry about the lions and tigers” whose habitats we humans are destroying, should we not also worry about the climate – which supports these habitats – we humans are similarly threatening with our dirty energy and wasteful ways? This seems reasonable, if only from a cost-benefit perspective.

Apparently, though, I am deluded, as are my biologist daughter and her marine biologist husband who, you know, actually ponder the science of these matters for a living. As Ms. Wente states, “Before they were drawn into the giant vortex of global warming, environmentalists did useful things. . .They believed in conserving the planet from the worst of human despoliation, rather than false claims to scientific certainty about the future, unenforceable treaties and utopian social reform.”

Of course, because there are so many straw men in this argument, you’ll have to forgive me for whipping out my Zippo.

Climatologists who conclude that human agency is largely responsible for global warming over the past 50 years, aren’t making “false claims to scientific certainty”. They are reviewing the historical record and analyzing the chemical composition of particulate matter contained in ice, rock and organic samples to trace its origin to either natural causes or industry.

Then, based on these verifiable findings, they extrapolate probable temperature and sea level rises resulting from continued use of fossil fuel, benchmarked against current consumption.

Consider that when wildlife biologists first warned of species at risk of extinction, due to mankind’s rapacious predilections, more than a century ago, they, too, were characterized as trouble makers, false prophets, and nutters. Decrying their “chicken-little” routines, we insisted that lions and tigers were meant for rugs and zoos, and that they were perfectly renewable resources. We don’t think this anymore because history proved the “experts” right.

In fact, most environmentalists I know or study have no interest in “unenforceable treaties”, and even less in “utopian social reform.” Most believe (hopefully, I might add) in practical approaches to solving problems, if only because the alternatives only exacerbate the climate woes all of us must, sooner or later, face.

The notion that “global action” and nothing else is a prerequisite for combating global warming is chimerical. Millions of local actions are what leads to meaningful change in any society. Likewise, concluding that climate change is an inflated invention of fevered minds simply because policy-makers, financial markets and a segment of the general public either don’t believe it exists, or can’t figure out how to make a buck out of it, is absurd.

C’mon Peggy, take your own advice: “Please grow up. You have important work to do.”

It’s thick, colourful, verbose and, like just about every other policy document issued by the global warming industry these days, brimming with irony.

On the one hand – reports the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy’s (NRTEE) new tome, Degrees of Change – the Earth is heating up thanks to human activity. There’s no point in denying it anymore, and Canadians had better adapt.

On the other hand, the warming weather expected over the next 50-plus years presents the country with an unprecedented wake-up call to lead the developed world in low-carbon commerce, technologies, skills, investment, and governance.

So, the logic goes, our addiction to fossil fuels is actually driving our progress towards a new enlightenment and a future of sustainable, clean, renewable energy. It’s another version of the adage that instructs us to, when stuck with lemons, make lemonade – a tasty and refreshing alternative to the bitter fruit we’ve harvested since the Industrial Revolution.

Still, despite the unintended satire, there is much to credit in this study, released last Tuesday. Apart from anything else, it represents Canada’s first authoritative, non-partisan investigation into the potential impacts of, and possible responses to, climate change. In fact, its diagrammatic approach does not predict the rate of temperature increase, as much as it outlines what we might reasonably expect under different conditions.

If, for example, the mercury rises by an annual average of two degrees Celsius, we’ll probably see more northern cod in the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and a longer golf season in Ontario cottage country. If it jumps by four degrees, the Halifax waterfront might disappear, but Minto, New Brunswick, could become the wheat-growing capital of Canada.

Admittedly, some of this falls within the realm of thought experiment. (If my grandmother grew a moustache, would she be my grandfather)? But the overall hopeful tone of this research – which also incorporates the customary admonishments to do better – is what separates it from the portfolio of UN reports that makes you either want to stick your head in the Petitcodiac mud, or run for the Caledonia hills.

“There are risks to climate change, clearly, but there are also opportunities,” the NRTEE’s president and CEO David McLaughlin told John Ibbitson of the Globe and Mail. “[It] is happening, and we can deal with it, and we can gain from it.”

Naturally, how is the question and the subject of “Climate Prosperity”, a supplement to the organization’s main report. In it, the NRTEE posts what it describes as “a composite index of 15 indicators, equally weighted across five low-carbon performance categories.”

These are: emissions and energy; innovation; skills; investment; and policy and institutions. This index, according to McLaughlin, will “help governments, industry, and policy makers think in new ways about what really matters in this transition. It gives us a strong starting point in figuring out where we stand, so we can determine how we must go forward.”

Actually, thanks to the research, we already know something about where we stand, if not exactly how we must go forward. The NRTEE reports that Canada ranks sixth in the G8 on low-carbon performance – behind, in ascending order, the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany and France. We scored well in the skills and innovation categories (placing first and third, respectively), but dismally in the emissions and energy, and policy and institutions (ranking sixth in both).

Still, the NRTEE remains sanguine: “While clearly not a low-carbon performer, the index does show Canada positioned to do better relative to some of its main competitors, particularly the United States, if actions are taken to reduce our energy emissions profile and institute low-carbon growth plans and policies.”

In other words, if our federal and provincial governments finally heed the siren call of opportunity, recognize their own culpability in whetting the nation’s appetite for dirty coal and oil sands revenue, and change their ways accordingly, then Canada will, indeed, be ready to lead the world towards a new enlightenment.

What more needs saying?     

After all, an exquisite irony needs no crass sarcasm to make its point.

Somewhere up there – in the blue bowl that has turned my pint-sized garden into an out-sized paradise for two, glorious weeks, and engendered in me a wholly convincing, if entirely unfamiliar, mood of utter contentment – the atmosphere is having a mid-life crisis.

I know this thanks to a report the other day on CNN.com, which I inadvisably pursued after reading the deeply disturbing T-V crawl, “Scientists baffled by unusual upper atmosphere shrinkage.” As the story elaborates, “An upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere recently shrank so much that researchers are at a loss to adequately explain it, NASA said on Thursday. The thermosphere, which blocks harmful ultraviolet rays, expands and contracts regularly due to the sun’s activities. As carbon dioxide increases, it has a cooling effect at such high altitudes, which also contributes to the contraction.”

That’s not all, of course: “Even these two factors aren’t fully explaining the extraordinary contraction which, though unlikely to affect the weather, can affect the movement of satellites, researchers said. ‘This is the biggest contraction of the thermosphere in at least 43 years,’ John Emmert of the Naval Research Lab was quoted as saying in NASA news report. ‘So we’re probably going to work in the next couple of years to try and unravel this.’”

Hey, John, good for you: Get back to me on that, okay pal?

Meanwhile, let your big brain cogitate on this priceless morsel of doom and gloom, which appeared on the Globe and Mail’s front page last Saturday: “It is the summer of our sun-stricken discontent. . .This week, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration revealed that the Earth is on course for the hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880. The jet stream remains at an abnormally high latitude. . .Cold fronts have been stalled by weather blocks. . .International climate experts are at a loss to explain why these phenomena are happening all at once.”

So they, too, are baffled?

I don’t mean to temper my normally high regard for anyone whose genetic gifts and workaday diligence earned him a Ph.D. in anything other than applied basket-weaving from the Berkley College for Anxious Trust-Fund Babies, but what the hell is going on around here? And by “here”, I mean dear, old Planet Earth, of which my blossomy refuge is a miniscule, if rapidly transforming, panic room.

Isn’t the science of climate change all but definitive? Why, just the other day, didn’t we witness a panoply of educated experts confidently declare – nay, quantify – mankind’s specific and deleterious effects on the biosphere? No offense to them, but their conclusions are getting a little hard to credit when the atmosphere decides, for no discernable reason, to go for a walk around the cosmic block.

Or as Stanford University physicist and Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin says, “The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we gaze into the future, not because it’s unimportant but because it’s beyond our power to control. The Earth doesn’t care about any of these governments or their legislation. It doesn’t care whether you turn off your air conditioner, refrigerator, television set. It doesn’t notice when you turn down your thermostat and drive a hybrid car.”

Writing in his regular column for the Globe and Mail, Neil Reynolds brings the professor’s controversial opinions to light. To wit: “Common sense tells us that damaging a thing as old as [Earth] is somewhat easier to imagine than it is to accomplish – like invading Russia.”

Is he right? Who knows?

But at least he doesn’t appear baffled. And if certitude is no guarantee of accuracy, it at least comforts those of us who believe that the primary responsibility of the human species is to preserve, conserve and protect what it can control; individually, on the ground.

And in the garden.

Nothing about Yves Gagnon telegraphs the ambitions of an environmental reformer. Not the 65-foot, paved driveway that leads to his two-car garage. Not the multi-thousand-square-foot home he shares with his wife, Mylene, and 12-year-old daughter, Gabrielle. Not the expanse of perfectly manicured lawn or the conspicuous absence of windmills, solar panels, compost heaps and any of the other accoutrements you typically associate with a dedicated, lifelong friend of the earth. . .

(For more of this feature by multiple-award-winning journalist Alec Bruce, go to Atlantic Business Magazine online, the best and winningest business magazine in Atlantic Canada).

The studiously crafted furrows etched into BP CEO Tony Hayward’s brow – an effect achieved by filming the man’s face in full Louisiana sunshine – are meant to convey deep concern and empathy for the millions of Gulf coast residents now contending with one of history’s great environmental blunders.

But the T-V ads, currently running in a continuous loop on CNN, are evoking only more anger at the mega-corporation, which has lost more than $70 billion in market value, and almost all credibility, since its doomed rig snapped a pipe 50 days ago.

Commenting on the campaign (rumoured to cost upwards of $50 million), one reader of The Huffington Post Online wrote, “The chance of BP doing the right thing about this mess they caused is about the same odds as one finding beach front property without oil on it. This is window dressing created by their marketing department for the sole purpose of rebuilding their corporate image.”

Another added: “The notion that BP can ‘clean this up’ and ‘make things right’ is arrogant, nonsensical, CEO-speak. Tiny Tony’s company has damaged the gulf irreparably. It’s not like cleaning up your olympic-sized backyard pool, Tony. There are ecosystems there that have developed over millions of years.”

Though small, the sample appears to be representative of public opinion in general, which is hardly surprising considering Hayward’s earlier, and astonishingly ill-chosen, words:

“It’s a very big ocean. . .”

“The environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest. . .”

“You know, I’d like my life back. . .”

But, apart from keeping its feckless CEO’s lips buttoned, was there anything BP could have done to stem the flow of outrage?

Public relations is, to be sure, an imperfect science. Still, it can be an extremely effective tool for anybody – or any company – who finds himself on the wrong side of history. The problem is most fail to acknowledge its first, and only, golden rule: Always tell the truth.

When, in 1982, several people died after ingesting cyanide-laced Tylenol, Johnson & Johnson acted swiftly and forthrightly, pulling the capsules from the shelves and reintroducing the product, some years later, with tamper-proof tops. Though it was not responsible for the poisoning, it correctly adduced it was responsible for the welfare of millions of customers. And it said so early and often during the crisis.

Maple Leaf Foods responded in similar fashion a couple of years ago when a number of people succumbed after consuming tainted meat produced by one of its Toronto factories. The company’s CEO, Michael McCain, issued an immediate recall, issued a heartfelt apology, settled a lawsuit without debate or even much comment, and set about fixing the technical problem which caused the outbreak.

In both instances, both companies survived their respective disasters. It would be crass to ascribe calculation to their motivations. It would also be wrong. Their CEOs honestly believed some things trump corporate image: human life, for example.

What, pray tell, supersedes BP’s organizational objectives? From the outset, the company has underestimated the extent of the damage, downplayed the environmental impact of the spill, virtually ignored the fact that the explosion also took the lives of 11 employees, overestimated its own ability to rectify the situation, shifted blame for the catastrophe to its various suppliers, and poked around like a six-year-old at a funeral hoping the whole thing would just end already.

Had Hayward declared from the get-go that the spill was clearly BP’s fault and, therefore, also BP’s responsibility – had he also laid his cards on the table and admitted the company was not equipped to remediate the circumstance without immediate, additional expertise from all corners of the world – he might now have a solution.

That he did not only guarantees – belated T-V mea culpas, notwithstanding – that he has more acrimony, the price of which remains incalculable, as does the cost of BP’s blunder to the environment.