Energy Probe Research Foundation is one of Canada's leading environmental and public policy research institutes.

It has four main goals:

  • to provide the public, media, business, and government with information on resource-related issues;
  • to promote sustainable resource use;
  • to encourage individual responsibility and accountability;
  • to help Canada contribute to global justice and prosperity.
What's In a Label?

The real meaning of the fair trade label on your gourmet coffee.

Fair Trade: What Price for Good Coffee?

Ever since Jesuit monks brought coffee to Guatemala three centuries ago, raising the beans has been a losing business for small farmers. Conditions are miserable — try lugging 100 lb. of fertilizer up a mountain — and even though coffee is the world's second most valuable traded commodity, after oil, the money it brings in is measly.

Kenya's coffee trade falling 'near to irrelevance'

Decades of underinvestment, compounded by successive years of poor weather, are reducing Kenya's once-mighty coffee industry to an irrelevance in world trade.

Kenya's coffee exports, which topped 2m bags in 1990, are on track to fall to less than one-third of that figure in 2010-11, a report from the US Department of Agriculture's Nairobi bureau said.

The scan that cures

‘This is the first time that we have seen clear evidence of a significant reduction in lung cancer mortality with a screening test,” said Dr. Christine Berg of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, referring to the CT scans that led to a 20% decline in cancer deaths in the largest-ever study of its kind.

“Really stunning,” said David Naidich, professor of radiology and medicine at NYU-Langone Medical Center, a member of the study’s executive oversight committee.

Lawrence Solomon: New Zealand’s Climategate –Act II

Last November, I reported on accusations from New Zealand that a government agency called NIWA — New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research – had cooked the books on global warming.  According to global warming skeptics at the Climate Conversation Group and the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, the country’s temperatures had not climbed over the last century, as graphs produced by the agency claimed.  Based on the actual raw data for the last century, New Zealand’s temperature has been steady over that same period.

Energy Probe has a new home!

Energy Probe has moved to a new website! Click here to go to the new site. While this Energy Probe site will continue to house our extensive archive, all new material will be published on the updated site.

Save Stave Lake's P3

In this National Post op-ed, Elizabeth Brubaker reviews Abbotsford, B.C.’s, proposed Stave Lake water project. If it earns voters’ approval in a referendum, it will be Canada’s largest privately financed undertaking in the water sector to date.
 

Using private funding and expertise to bring Canadians high quality water services – at low cost, too

In her annual letter to supporters, Elizabeth Brubaker writes that Canada’s water is under threat. It’s threatened by the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the Council of Canadians, who have teamed up to oppose private financing and operations of water systems. Their approach is wrong-headed and dangerous.
 

Performance-Based Contracting

This article in Municipal World discusses Elizabeth Brubaker’s report, A Bridge Over Troubled Waters: Alternative Financing and Delivery of Water and Wastewater Services. It focusses on performance-based contracts, which can encourage innovation and create financial incentives for water utility operators to perform well.

Tuvalu – the touchstone of global warming and rising sea level

(Nov. 26, 2010) “…Tuvalu has become “hot news” as the favourite island to be doomed by sea level rise driven by global warming, allegedly caused in turn by anthropogenic carbon dioxide.”
Introduction

Lawrence Solomon: Europe’s press (and Canada’s) turns against global warming

(Nov. 28, 2010) More media outlets express their global warming scepticism.

Hockey stick coverup, a sequel

(Dec. 03, 2010) Another scandal surrounding the infamous hockey stick graph comes to light.
More fallout over the University of Virginia’s mysterious conduct concerning the infamous hockey stick graph, the UN icon that purported to show that temperatures were steady over the last thousand years before shooting up in the last century.