An independent, hardly radical, body weighs in on climate issue
Stephen Hume
Vancouver Sun
Friday, June 23, 2006
The Kyoto accord may be vanishing from the lips of federal bureaucrats faster than the party airbrush made purged members of the politburo disappear from Soviet photographs but, like it or not, climate change remains on the national agenda.
Mentioning this will doubtless earn me yet another round of proselytizing from climate change deniers and angry clucking from those ostriches who don't wish to have their comfortable assumptions troubled by such unpleasantness.
However, please note that this time it's not me who has put climate change and global warming back on the agenda quite so firmly, it's Canada's National Round Table on the Economy and the Environment, an independent advisory body set up by statute more than a decade ago.
Some readers may suspect this organization is a front for the global ecoconspiracy that I'm repeatedly told is led by hordes of either incompetent or duplicitous scientists who -- for reasons known only to themselves -- propagate the hoax that humans have something to do with climate change.
Not so.
Members of the round table include an executive vice-president from Suncor Inc., the 200,000-barrel-a-day Alberta oilsands giant that generated $11 billion in revenue in 2005; the president of Luscar Ltd., Canada's biggest coal mining company with eight pits in production supplying thermoelectric generating plants; the chair of Falconbridge, third-largest zinc producer on the planet with mining operations in 18 countries and revenues of more than $8 billion last year, and the president of General Electric Canada, manufacturer of equipment for huge electrical utilities, among other things.
And what these folks announced Wednesday was that not only can this country dramatically reduce its contribution of the greenhouse gases that most scientists believe help drive the global warming that is accelerating climate change, it can do so using existing technology and, if done right, with relatively insignificant impact upon economic growth.
Um, isn't this precisely the opposite of the economic apocalypse predicted by the doom and gloom purveyors who have been whipping up opposition to the Kyoto plan?
Last month, Conservative Environment Minister Rona Ambrose was warning that to merely reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the six per cent that was the Kyoto target we'd have to take every car, truck, bus, train and plane out of service while shutting down every thermoelectric generating plant in the country.
This month we've got highly respected magnates from the energy biz telling her that we could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent between now and 2050 while continuing to increase energy production and that we'd still be able to drive our cars, keep the computers running and remain thoroughly competitive.
Is the scenario ambitious? You bet. It calls for a quadrupling of Canada's capacity to generate electricity from wind power and additional development of all the clean energy alternatives -- solar, tidal, run-of-the-river hydroelectric, geothermal, biomass -- while simultaneously deploying known technologies for clean burning of coal, capture and sequestering of carbon dioxide emissions, developing next-generation nuclear plants, increasing automotive fuel efficiency and shifting to gasoline that is 85 per cent ethanol.
What's most interesting is how this round table appears to see much of what others have characterized as dreadful economic burdens as both opportunities and incentives to retool and reinvest in infrastructure to our own ultimate profit.
For example, 90 per cent of Canada's built inventory should be retrofitted to maximize energy efficiency. Habitation patterns should evolve so that 70 per cent of Canadians are living in dense, multi-unit housing in the kinds of livable urban cores envisioned by "smart growth" advocates instead of sprawling over suburban hinterlands and choking the roads. Transportation systems should be upgraded and rationalized to maximize convenience and efficiency.
Indeed, the round table study says, two-thirds of the greenhouse gas reductions it visualizes could be achieved simply by aggressively pursuing these kinds of efficiencies.
All this makes eminently good sense. The question now is whether all the emotional energy squandered so far in denying that global warming is occurring can be channelled instead into encouraging the political will and public conviction necessary to make these things happen.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006