Lawrence Solomon is Environment Probe’s Executive Director.

Lawrence Solomon is a Canadian author and columnist on energy, health and environmental issues. His book,The Conserver Solution (Doubleday), which popularized the Conserver Society concept in the late 1970s, became the manual for those interested in incorporating environmental factors into economic life. He was an advisor to President Carter’s Task Force on the Global Environment (the Global 2000 Report) in the late 1970s, and at the forefront of movements to privatize and deregulate energy systems, foreign aid, and convert free roads to toll roads. The Deniers, his 2008 book exposing the global warming fraud, became the #1 environmental best seller in both Canada and the U.S. and deemed one of the “10 Books That Drive The Debate” by the US National Chamber of Commerce.

He has been a columnist for the National Post (Toronto), Globe and Mail (Toronto), a syndicated columnist, a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and the editor and publisher of the award-winning The Next City magazine. He is author or co-author of seven books, including Energy Shock (Doubleday), In the Name of Progress (Doubleday), Breaking Up Ontario Hydro’s Monopoly (Energy Probe), Power at What Cost (Doubleday), and Toronto Sprawls (University of Toronto Press). 

Solomon’s 1982 model for electricity reform was endorsed by the leaders of Ontario’s three major parties and adopted by the Thatcher government in the UK in 1989, leading to the demise of uneconomic power plants in the UK and its adoption of high-efficiency natural gas technologies.

The Ontario Conservatives under Mike Harris incorporated his electricity reforms in their Common Sense Revolution. His recommendations in the late 1980s and early 1990s for reforms in Ontario’s natural gas sector contributed to an industry restructuring that yielded both economic and environmental benefits. His 1996 model for the dynamic tolling of roads via satellite is being implemented in the island state of Singapore and is in use in various jurisdictions in the U.S.

Solomon is a founder and managing director of Energy Probe Research Foundation. He also helped found the World Rainforest Movement, Friends of the Earth Canada, and Lake Ontario Waterkeepers.

He can be reached at LS@lawrencesolomon.ca.

Elizabeth Brubaker is Environment Probe’s Executive Director Emeritus.

Brubaker is the author of Greener Pastures: Decentralizing the Regulation of Agricultural Pollution, published by the University of Toronto’s Centre for Public Management in 2007. The book traces the evolution of laws permitting farms to create nuisances that harm their neighbours. It argues for a return to a rights-based regulatory regime in which individuals and communities are empowered to protect themselves from polluting farms.

Brubaker’s previous book, Liquid Assets: Privatizing and Regulating Canada’s Water Utilities, was published by the University of Toronto’s Centre for Public Management in 2002. Brubaker has written and spoken extensively on water – including its pricing, allocation, regulation, and quality – during the last decade. She has also participated in a number of regulatory hearings regarding water, including the Demand-Supply Plan Hearing in the early 1990s (the environmental assessment of Ontario Hydro’s nuclear and hydroelectric expansion plans) and the Walkerton Inquiry, for which she prepared a study on water utility privatization.

Brubaker is also the author of Property Rights in the Defence of Nature (published by Earthscan in 1995), a book investigating the extent to which the property rights regime developed under the English common law can serve as a force for environmental protection. She has also worked on the establishment of property rights in fisheries.

Brubaker has contributed chapters to 14 books published in six countries. She has written frequently in the popular press and has lectured in Canada, the United States, France, Australia, and China.

Between 2008 and 2011, Brubaker was a member of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, an independent federal agency that provided advice to the government and the public on the integration of environmental conservation and economic development.