Don Pittis has reported on business for Radio Hong Kong, the BBC and the CBC. If you're thinking that there's gotta be a better way to stop global warming than handing $100 billion in "climate aid" to developing countries, you're right. And the better thing is research spending.

As I write, Copenhagen delegates are mud-wrestling over a proposal to put that sum — or more — into a fund to help poorer countries cope. It is well-meaning. Or politically expedient (of course, the politicians signing this deal will be long gone before it comes into effect in 2020).

There is logic in the plan. Poorer countries haven't yet had their so-called Dirty Growth Spurt. And their carbon production per person is still dwarfed by that of the rich, developed world. But such a scheme holds the danger of being like every other mass transfer of cash to developing countries — a horrible waste of money.

Instead that money should be pouring, now, into a Bell Labs-style research effort that will give developing countries an offer they can't refuse. We must make it cheaper for the poor world to be greener. Nobody can resist a bargain.

In Canada especially, it is realpolitik time. While California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger

Gone is our country's image of verdant mountains and endless wilderness. Now we are the land of tarsands and the polar bears who eat their young.

becomes the hero of market-driven environmentalism, Canada's Prime Minister, poor old Stephen Harper, has become an environmental villain. And he has taken Canada with him.

Pilloried by global pranksters and the media's search for a black hat, gone is our country's image of verdant mountains and endless wilderness. Now we are the land of tarsands and the polar bears who eat their young. The worldwide coal lobby must be chortling behind their hands as they lay low and let Canada take the heat.

It is politically impossible for the current Canadian government to cut carbon output right now. Harper knows that his fragile minority government could be smashed in a minute if he alienated pro-oil voters in Alberta.

But research will not only keep Albertans happy, it could well save the world. And it could fix our reputation.

Canadian Laboratory of Energy Efficiency

For several decades after the Second World War, Bell Labs was the world premier research institute, a hotbed of pure research. Assembled to do practical research for the telecom industry, the collection of brainpower was given licence to explore weird ideas of their own. Things like lasers and solar cells and transistors and microwaves. Bell Labs produced seven Nobel Prize winners and a core of inventions that propelled the electronic revolution. Practically every modern gizmo we use now would be nothing but a pretty brick without Bell Labs' science.

The world should be spending its billions on a Bell Labs equivalent. While Schwarzenegger's California is out of cash, Canada has spending power. Now is the time for this country to take the advantage. In Canada, a Canadian Laboratory of Energy Efficiency would be a high-tech engine of green growth.

It would have to be a massive spending project, like the cost of a war. But the benefits would be huge.

Internationally it would be a credible delaying strategy. While continuing to give the oilsands a break, Canada would do penance by contributing to future green technology.

To satisfy domestic politics the money could be spent in the places where the energy is being produced, creating jobs and spinoffs in Canada. And a credible green effort could even garner new Tory electoral support.

If Harper's skeptics are right, the technology would still create value because energy efficiency is money. According to many economists, all costs come down to energy content.

Inventing technology is expensive, but only technology can make green cheap.

If, on the other hand, the majority of climate scientists are right, eventually even Canada will have to scale back oil production. In that case, there will be another industry ready for the country to fall back on.

There are lots of good ideas waiting for research funding. One of the hottest and most crucial to the oilsands is research to find ways of extracting the oil without using so much water and natural gas. As CBC's Dave Simms reports, Alberta is already seething with energy innovations. One of my personal favourites is the idea of extracting electricity from heat differentials with things like Peltier and Stirling engines. With a simple gizmo, every Canadian furnace could create electricity without using any more energy.

But the most important inventions from such a research lab will be the ones we haven't even thought of yet. No one told the Bell Labs scientists what to invent, they just assembled a bunch of brilliant young minds, pushed them off and told them to get busy.

Inventing technology is expensive, but only technology can make green cheap.

When telecommunications exploded in the developing world, they didn't go through the tedious and expensive business of stringing wires to every house. By then mobile phone technology was proven and cheap. In a single leap, developing countries were able to catch up to the developed world.

Green technology can do the same thing. When green is cheaper than dirty, developing countries will leap over the Dirty Growth Spurt and catch up to the developed world even quicker.