Pollution Probe Gala Event

Thank you, Michael [McSweeney, Cement Association of Canada]. It's a pleasure to be here. There are so many close and productive links between Pollution Probe and the University.

I'm especially pleased to join you on this particular evening, when you are paying tribute to His Excellency David Johnston, my distinguished predecessor as President of Waterloo.

Academic excellence, scholarship and innovation can all exist together. David cherished them all and worked tirelessly to strengthen them at the University.

I'm glad to see so many strongly committed people here tonight who have come to support and celebrate the work of Pollution Probe.

The fact is that we have made a mess of our planet. Take for example our personal electronics. A lot of obsolete hardware gets dumped into China as "e-waste" for retrieval of materials — and a lot of those materials are toxic: lead, cadmium, mercury, chromium.

Without proper protections in place, the result is heavily polluted air, water, and soil, and people suffering from related illnesses.

Then there are the famous catastrophes, like Chernobyl, and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

But it doesn't take disastrous events to mess things up. Look closer to home. According to the Ontario Smart Growth Network, four million new people will be moving into the Golden Horseshoe region by 2035 or 2040. We'll be working to put up energy-efficient buildings — but we'll also have thousands and thousands of additional cars locked in traffic jams, running their engines and pumping pollution into the air.

What will be the net result?

What we are doing to our environment is largely a consequence of our demand for energy. That demand increases as the population grows. Population, energy and pollution have pressed us into an unsustainable position on this planet.

So we cannot carry on with business as usual. Innovation is not just desirable, it's essential if we want to have a world that is fit to live in.

The first thing we need is more information about what is actually going on. I'm an engineer; I know that we need to dig down and get the facts and figures. Of course, it's not always easy to reach a consensus on what is happening and why.

For example, I have found that when I bring up the subject of global warming, half the audience will be shaking their fists at me for taking it seriously. But if I don't bring it up, the other half will be shaking their fists at me for leaving it out.

Of course, sometimes you just have to ignore the shaking of the fists. If we're talking about reducing our personal greenhouse gas footprint, it's a good thing to reduce it whether or not it is tied in with climate change.

That's because it's better to have less carbon dioxide, less methane, less nitrogen oxides, less sulfur oxides and less particulate matter in the air we breathe.

What is really difficult is coming up with practical, meaningful, cost-effective solutions under real-world constraints. We have become dependent on our conventional energy sources: fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear.

But their acceptable usage is becoming more and more limited. Energy and pollution present complex problems with many dimensions: economic, political, social, technological and cultural.  

These are global problems, in two senses of the word. They are world-wide, ignoring national boundaries. The air has no walls. And they are global problems in that they affect many interlocking aspects of human life.

In the 1990s I conducted a project in western Africa with funding from CIDA. The milling of rice was leaving behind mountainous heaps of indigestible rice husk.

Meanwhile, the people were cutting down trees to provide fuel for their cooking fires. This led to deforestation.

I suggested a way of gasifying the rice husk to produce a clean-burning fuel for cooking, and also for diesel engines. Extensive use of biomass fuels like this can mean that you don't have to spend 30% of your GDP on importing oil.

There was also a cultural dimension to this project. Cooking in that part of the world is not simply food preparation. It is also important for families as a traditional activity that helps keep them together.

If we are going to mount effective attacks on our energy and environmental problems, we can succeed only through a cross-disciplinary approach. That is the way we do it at Waterloo. I'll mention only three of our major initiatives:

The Climate Change Adaptation Project has identified six priority challenges: agriculture, biodiversity, city infrastructure, First Nations, freshwater resources and insurance. A lead expert in each challenge will direct in-depth research and propose an adaptation action plan.

WISE is the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy. It features collaborative teams across Engineering, Science and our Faculty of Environment. Their research covers solar, wind, bioenergy, fuel cells, batteries, clean diesel, greenhouse gas mitigation, power system reliability and policy. 

The Waterloo Water Institute is a world leader in water quality research. By 2030 it's expected that the world supply of fresh water will fall 40% short of the demand. We have more than 100 faculty members from all six of our faculties working together in key areas of research: Aquatic ecology and ecotoxicology, hydrological and atmospheric sciences, water treatment and technology, and water policy, management and governance.

We're proud of what we're achieving at Waterloo. But wider collaboration is needed in the face of these fundamental problems.

We need a Canadian energy strategy based on large-scale interdisciplinary thinking, with involvement from all levels of government and stakeholders. Such a strategy should deal with:

  • Clean energy supplies: less polluting, less water- and carbon-intensive.
  • Reduction in demand for energy in our communities.
  • Leading-edge technology that we invent here and sell around the world with economic benefits.
  • And widespread improvement in energy literacy, for the average citizen as well as industry and government policymakers.

Every human being deserves to have clean and safe drinking water and to breathe unpolluted air. We have the responsibility to ensure that our children will grow up in a healthy environment. As things are now, their future is in jeopardy.

Let's dig in, get the facts, get the numbers, and find practical, effective, long-term solutions. Let's see what we can do about fixing this — together.

Thank you very much.