First: The Slew began as a one off project between turntable acrobat Kid Koala, and Dynomite D to create a soundtrack to a feature length documentary. Unfortunately, the documentary went bust, but rather than kill the project all together, D and Koala decided to take their music on the road. The result of their collaboration is the album 100%. Check out the title track here:

Second: Lee Harvey Osmond is comprised of former Junkhouse and Blackie and the Rodeo Kings‘ Tom Wilson as well as, according to their website, “some Cowboy Junkies and Skydiggers.” Not too shabby. Their first album, A Quiet Evil, is held together tight with a restrained tension that runs the course of the record. Punctuated by Wilson’s raspy vocal whispers, “Queen Bee” ushers in enough atmosphere and suspense to make Hitchcock proud.

Finally: The lone jazz performer on the list is vocalist Elizabeth Shepherd. While the Polaris Prize likes to pride itself on ignoring financial success or radio ubiquity when making its selections, the contest generally leans heavy in the direction of guitar based bands with lots of hooky choruses. Not that that is a bad thing, but when a jazz vocalist manages to sneak her way in amongst all the guitar heroes, it makes us smile. Listen to “Seven Bucks” off her new album Heavy Falls the Night.

For the full list, check out the Polaris website here.

1. Create your own “pure” water by investing in an at-home water filtration system. Get a water-quality report from your municipality to see if there are any contaminants you need to be aware of (usually only an issue in rural settings) and to find out whether you need a point-of-entry unit that will filter all water before it’s distributed through your house, or a smaller unit that treats water once it’s out of the faucet.

2. Pick up a stainless-steel water bottle to carry that tap water in. With the safety of reusable plastic bottles in question for containing bisphenol A (BPA), a suspected hormone disruptor and carcinogen, it’s time to ditch that “indestructible” Nalgene bottle in favour of a shiny, metal version. Bring it everywhere.

3. Pass on overpriced bottled water when you’re out to eat and request a glass of free ice water instead. No need to be afraid: Canadian tap water is more rigorously screened than the bottled stuff.

4. Lobby to make tap water more convenient. Contact your city council and ask to have more drinking fountains and water spigots installed around town.

5. Create a bottled-water-free bubble at your school or office. On World Water Day in March, 2008, the Polaris Institute launched a campaign to discourage bottled water use on Canadian campuses in an attempt to reject the commodification of one of the world’s most precious resources. Visit PolarisInstitute.org for more details and talk to your powers above to create your own tap-water-only zone.

6. Donate your autograph to the cause. Head over to Article31.org and sign a petition asking the United Nations to declare access to potable water a human right.

7. Do the math. A litre of tap water in most Canadian municipalities costs less than a tenth of a cent, whereas a litre of bottled water can cost $1 or more. The switch should be a no-brainer.

Syncrude's Mildred Lake mine site near Fort MacMurray.

[This is the first in a three-part series on the Alberta tar sands. Also note: EcoChamber will be moving to Mondays starting today.]

There is a sense of progress in the air. For the first time in over a decade, G8 countries and developing nations, including China and India, have agreed to reduce their emissions in absolute numbers. But as this global parade marches on, Canada is being left behind as our emissions continue to climb.

The G8 Summit, lead by President Obama, last week finished talks in Italy with industrialized nations and emerging economies agreeing to an 80 per cent emissions cut by 2050, as well as a 2° C threshold. There is still much work to be done, including establishing the essential base year for reductions, the debate ranging from 1990 to 2006 levels. However, for the first time there is American leadership on our climate peril that is driving change not only domestically, but internationally.

“I know in the past, the United States has sometimes fallen short of meeting our responsibilities. So, let me clear: those days are over,” said Obama last week in L’Aquila, Italy.

In the United States, since Obama took office, C02 has been declared officially a danger; $60 billion is being pumped into renewables; and the House recently approved the Waxman-Markey climate bill that will change American fossil fuel reliance, as well as spell out action internationally at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December. Which is not to say there hasn’t been criticism of the Obama administration and the climate bill itself, but these are the first signs of action by a political leader on our global meltdown.

But where does all this political change in climate change leave Canada? According to the WWF’s 2009 Climate Scorecards, dead last.

Canada ranked last out of all the G8 countries for its climate performance. In 2008, the U.S. held this spot. But since Obama took the lead in climate initiatives, Canada is now the one stalling progress.

“Canada’s per capita emissions are among the highest in the world (next to Russia)” states WWF.

We currently emit 24 tonnes of C0₂ per capita and, despite being one of the first countries to sign the Kyoto Protocol, we are one of the furthest from our Kyoto target. The Kyoto Protocol required a 6 percent emissions decrease by 2012. Since the Accord was established, we have increased emissions by 26 percent. One of our biggest emitters is the Alberta Tar Sands project.

“The Alberta Tar Sands are becoming Canada’s number one global warming machine,” says Tony Clarke, Polaris Institute Director, in his book Tar Sands Showdown.

With Middle East and African oil presenting problems of price fluctuations and political uncertainty, Alberta’s unconventional but secure sources of oil are looking increasingly attractive to global markets. However, production of one barrel of oil from these bitumen deposits produce three times more greenhouse gases (GHGs) than conventional oil. The project pumps out 27 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions per year, or 16% of the total emissions of Canada.

And the government only has plans for expansion. The project is expected to multiply as much as four to five times by the year 2015 to meet growing demand. That’s 108 to 126 megatonnes of GHG poured into the atmosphere annually. That would make the tar sands the single largest industrial contributor of greenhouse gases in North America.

Reducing GHGs by 80 percent, as Canada pledged last week to do, while planning to expand the tar sands project, is simple math that does not add up. We can’t have our cake and eat it too – or in this case, have our bitumen cash crop and claim sustainability. Even if our only emitting producer were the tar sands project and we lived in some eco-utopia otherwise, we are still overextending our GHG emissions with further development of this project.

Singlehandedly, the tar sands sabotage any possibility of Canada fulfilling a Copenhagen climate agreement.

Yet in last Saturday’s Globe & Mail, in an interview with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, he said: “A realistic commitment (in the battle against climate change) is consistent with growth in the oil sands.” Frankly, no, it’s not.

[Next week in Part 2 of 3: why carbon-capture and storage is no silver bullet solution for the tar sands]

Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine’s resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and is the eco-correspondent to MTV News Canada.

More recyclable, sure, but that doesn't make it "green"

The Claim:

Nestlé Waters Canada says its bottled water is a “healthy, eco-friendly choice” and, feeling so confident about this claim, ran an ad in the October 20, 2008, issue of the Globe and Mail stating that its “bottled water is the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world.” [See the ad here — PDF, 700kb]

The Investigation:

At first glance, there might be something to Nestlé Waters Canada’s claim: It’s made major cuts to its material usage—30 percent less plastic, 20 percent fewer paper labels, 65 percent less corrugate—and plans to make further reductions this year. The company claims to have the “lightest plastic beverage container in the industry,” says John Challinor, director of corporate affairs. And Nestlé Waters Canada and its partners fund nearly 50 percent of Canada’s recycling programs.

But recycling still produces five to 10 percent of the energy used to make new plastic. And due to health regulations, these bottles can only be recycled as non-food products such as carpets, fleece shirts, and blue boxes, rather than as new beverage bottles. Then there’s the fact that one plastic bottle takes anywhere from 450 to 1,000 years to decompose in a landfill. According to Nestlé Waters’ own claims, in Ontario that’s where about 40 percent of water bottles end up.

“Nestlé is trying to spin the bottle by declaring it eco-friendly, when the fact of the matter is there is no green solution for bottled water” says Joe Cressy of the Polaris Institute. Frustrated, his group teamed up with the Council of Canadians, Ecojustice and others to file a complaint with Advertising Standards Canada against Nestlé’s Globe ad.

The Verdict:

That complaint was dismissed for violation of confidentiality after the groups sent out a press release in December 2008, but environmentalists don’t need to hear ASC’s opinion to reject Nestlé’s claims. Says Meera Karunananthan, national water campaigner for the Council of Canadians, “When the carbon footprint of drinking out of your tap is zero, you can’t deny that the environmental impact of bottled water is more harmful.”