Metro Vancouver is hitting the road with its latest proposal for disposing of 500,000 tonnes of the region’s waste (about a third of our total) by burning it instead of dumping it in landfills.

It won’t be an easy sell. The science and facts are solidly on Metro Vancouver’s side, but politics has a way of interfering in these things. In this case, Environment Minister Barry Penner, the ultimate decision-maker, continues to muse publicly about the availability of an expanded Cache Creek landfill, where the waste is currently being trucked, where he’s prepared to brush aside Nlaka’pamux Nation tribal council opposition, where the local mayor is desperate to keep the jobs, and where two senior B.C. Liberal ex-colleagues, Ken Dobell and Gary Collins, are busy lobbying. He also talks about shipping the waste to Vancouver Island to be burned to make power for the grid in Gold River, where the proponent Covanta’s case is being pushed by former B.C. Liberal Party president Andrew Wilkinson.

Neither of these solutions is recommended by Metro Vancouver. It wants to find an incineration option within the region, as it should. Our so-called “waste” is an asset that can be burned to produce heat and power, displacing other greenhouse gas emissions and actually reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions in this region.

This is part of a wider paradigm shift sometimes known as “integrated resource management,” a concept that repositions all liquid and solid wastes as assets with the potential to generate heat, power and revenues through district energy loops. Extracting heat from the sewers to warm the buildings in Southeast False Creek is one local example. Metro Van is also planning a plant in Surrey that will convert food and yard wastes into biofuel.

Some local environmentalists are adamant that our first priority should be reducing waste, not burning it. Fair enough. That’s also on Metro Vancouver’s agenda, with a one-stop Eco-Centres for recycling just announced for Surrey and Coquitlam. The region’s target is to divert 70% of all waste from landfills, up from 52% today. Disposal bans at landfills are being stepped up to enforce existing recycling laws, and legislation from the Province is painfully slowly adding to the list of products (plastic packaging is next) that have to be taken back and disposed of by those who produce them.

But in the meantime, and even after we get to 70%, we should follow the lead of the Green Party in Germany in promoting incineration rather than landfills, which have now been banned in Germany.

Environment Minister Barry Penner is sensitive to the hysteria in his home riding of Chilliwack about increased harmful emissions from incineration in this airshed. But look at the record from Germany. Since stringent new emission standards were introduced for incinerators, German incinerators now emit one-thousandth of the dioxins they used to emit. Chimneys and fireplaces in private homes emit 20 times more dioxins than Germany’s proliferating incinerators.

The capacity of German incinerators has doubled since 1990, but their contribution of dioxins in the air has gone from a third of the nation’s total to less than one percent. Similar reductions also apply to arsenic, fine particulates and lead and mercury, all enhanced by the replacement of emissions from traditional power and heat stations. Compared with the extensive incineration of household waste in Germany, lead and mercury emissions from other sources, including cars and heating plants, are a thousand times greater.

Citizens in Chilliwack and Abbotsford concerned about air pollution should be campaigning against wood-burning fireplaces and increased vehicle traffic from the new Port Mann Bridge and highway expansion, rather than the tiny emissions from well-designed incinerators which will displace other air pollution in the region.

These are the facts, but in spite of Metro Vancouver’s best efforts at public consultation, politics and perception may rule the day.

Next month the world awaits the outcome of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. Many in the business community and in our federal cabinet are eager to doubt not just on the human impact on global warming, but whether it makes economic sense to fight it, or whether we should “wait and see” and maybe focus on mitigating possible effects.

Hey, we’ll get warmer wheatfields and more agricultural produce, goes the thinking, so what’s the problem? The Club of Rome was wrong in the 1970s—why should I listen to all this doom and gloom now?

The key to a lot of this thinking is the cost of the economic backlash against carbon emitters—the loss of jobs, business and tax income. A lot of us benefit directly or indirectly from the extracting and selling tar sands oil, from mining coal or from driving and selling cars with big engines and can’t see anything comparable in immediate economic impact from the green side of the ledger.

As Armstrong, B.C. resident Bill Rahn wrote in a letter to National Geographic after its article on the tar/oil sands, “I worked in the oil sands…for the past eight years. I do have concerns with the way the environment is raped and pillaged up here. I also have concerns as to how I will feed my family.”

With the weight of those economic concerns on our shoulders, anyone who can challenge the prevailing thinking on climate change is embraced in certain circles as a saviour.

Unfortunately for the long-term economic stability for humans on our planet, the vast majority of climate change deniers are misinformed, misleading, and financed by those who will do anything to stir up uncertainty and stop real action to slow down carbon emissions.

“The Crusade to Deny Global Warming” has now been meticulously exposed in Hoggan and Associates president Jim Hoggan’s new book, Climate Cover-Up.

Based on journalist Richard Littlemore’s sleuthing on DeSmogBlog.com, the book explains that most of the faux scientists purporting to know better than the Nobel-prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are financed by oil companies like ExxonMobil for the express purpose of sowing doubt about real scientists’ claims. This is the same tactic that was used to delay action on curbing tobacco use.

Take for example, the recent visit to Vancouver by Lord Christopher Monckton, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, sponsored by the Fraser Institute. (Nowhere on its website does the Fraser Institute name the “thousands of individuals, organizations, and foundations” that fund it, but www.exxonsecrets.com, a website described in Hoggan’s book, claims it has received $120,000 from ExxonMobil). Brenchley has a background in classics and journalism and can in no way be described as a scientist, yet he gets paraded around Vancouver as some kind of expert.

To combat the plethora of truth-twisting campaigns and phony petitions served up as legitimate debate, Hoggan challenges us to ask three questions of anyone denying the human impact on climate change:

1. Does this “expert” have scientific training connected to climatology or atmospheric physics?

2. Is this “expert” a practicing scientist publishing in peer-reviewed journals?

3. Is this “expert” taking money from vested interests, including think tanks beholden to their major funders?

According to a study cited by Hoggan and published in the journal Science, University of California professor Naomi Oreskes analyzed every refereed scientific journal article on climate change published between 1993 and 2003 and found that all 928 articles agreed with the consensus that human release of greenhouse gases was causing climate change.

If I had to go with non-scientists, I’d be listening to the Institute for Environmental Security, made up of 10 high-ranking military officials from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the US.

They’re calling on governments to produce an “ambitious and equitable” international agreement at the Copenhagen climate talks in December. Without such an agreement, they say that “preserving security and stability even at current levels will become increasingly difficult”.

Canadians should be ashamed of our federal government’s foot-dragging on this issue. Hoggan’s book is yet another reason to get moving on real change and shake off the misinformation that stubbornly feeds our short-term, self-destructive self interests.