There is pressure mounting on large companies to increase transparency of their environmental damages. Pressure is coming from three places, consumers, investors and other companies. Just recently, Whole Foods, which drives over 21 million miles a year, has decided to boycott tarsands produced oil (article here).

Recently I visited many Canadian companies websites to see who is ISO 14001, but one interesting thing struck me – at least 80% of companies now have a page dedicated to their environmental work or policies on their site. This is rather new and quite promising, companies seem to understand that strong environmental stewardship is becoming part of daily business activities.

Another major source of pressure is investor groups – notably ethical and pension funds. A good outline of various “green” investors was done at the Davis blog here. As we all know, money talks; if major funds are requesting greater environmental transparency then companies will have to take this seriously.

China is building a train network that should wake you up (NYT article here). Their voracious appetite for energy has spurred China to build a high-speed network of trains to remove traffic from the existing rails so that coal and raw materials can more easily be transported around the country. The middle kingdom will build 5000 miles of high-speed trains by 2012. Canada and America have no high-speed trains and the first one might be working in 2014. Talk about being asleep at the wheel.

Things are really unraveling at the IPCC, with officials finally admitting that the UN panel has to improve its procedures when reviewing reports.

The worst part about any scandal is the cover-up and Climategate is no exception. Had climate scientists come down hard, early on, on the practices at East Anglia and the methods of the IPCC, this series of blunders could be more easily corrected and forgotten.

Here’s what the Observer has to say about the series of blunders committed by the IPCC lately:

“[Deniers] deal not in the balance of risk but the exposure of uncertainty. Tiny doubts on the periphery of the case, they say, undermine the whole story, banishing the threat.

That isn’t true, but it is bad science and bad politics to counter scepticism with righteous indignation. In the long run, public confidence will be inspired more by frankness about what science cannot explain.”

Even a top British government scientist is on the record for saying that the panel is losing all credibility.

It will take years before this community of scientists will be able to repair their damaged reputation.

A new report from the Chinese government outlines that water pollution, mainly from agricultural fertilizers, is much worse than previously thought. The report outlines the 30 million tons of effluent sent into the waterways and how it is a major obstacle to future growth. The New York Times has a good rundown of the report here.

In 2005, I lived in Beijing and worked for a steel equipment manufacturer. I travelled to many industrial towns and saw the tremendous pollution caused by China’s growth. What I saw in China made me reconsider my career as a metallurgical engineer and turn my focus to environmental consulting.

In 2009, I returned to Beijing and China, though only there for three weeks, the difference was quite remarkable. Beijing is not the best example as it was largely cleaned up for the Olympics, between 2005 and 2009, they built 5 metro lines, removed millions of cars from the streets and now bicycle paths are starting to reemerge. A steel factory I worked at, which was accessible by metro was completely disassembled and transferred to another city 300 km away. They have made progress.

However the shear size of China makes the clean-up task daunting. Canada, 34 million inhabitants, is smaller than Beijing. China has 30 Canadas in it and less space. China has a great mountain to climb and the damage done to their rivers and soil may take many generations to repair. There are no easy answers, but it is good to see China more openly acknowledge the damage done and the task ahead to repair it.

A funny superbowl ad pits the “green police” against your everyday polluters – plastic bags, hot tubs, composting, … worth a quick watch.