Category: Science

On CBC’s The Current this morning, Kenneth Green – the Senior Director for the Centre for Natural Resources at the Fraser Institute – made quite a string of erroneous claims about climate science, renewable energy, and the climate change activist movement.

His most serious error, I think, was arguing that states like Ontario and Germany are going to regret their decision to invest in climate-safe and renewable forms of energy. Like a lot of mistaken analysis about energy politics, Mr. Green’s ignores the necessity of decarbonizing the global economy if we are not going to cause so much climate change that we completely wreck human prosperity, while simultaneously endangering huge numbers of lives and critically important natural systems.

In the decades ahead, it’s going to be states like Canada that seriously regret the energy choices they made at this time. While others will have begun the necessary transition to energy sources that we can rely on indefinitely, Canada will eventually need to make the same transition more rapidly and at greater expense. We will need to scrap inappropriate high-carbon infrastructure including oil sands projects, pipelines, and tight oil and gas hydraulic fracturing projects – and do so well before the end of what their economically viable lifetimes would be in the absence of climate change. Then, we will need to build appropriate infrastructure at a greater pace and a higher cost, while suffering worse impacts from climate change. These impacts will be worsened both by Canada’s direct contribution to the severity of climate change and by the indirect way through which Canadian inaction has encouraged continued fossil fuel dependence in the rest of the world.

It’s disappointing that quality current events programs like The Current still feel the need to bring on fossil-fuel-enthusiast dinosaurs whenever they discuss climate change. As organizations from the United Nations to the World Bank to the Pentagon have long recognized, the question now is how to succeed in the transition to a climate-safe global economy, not whether there is any viable case for remaining tied to coal, oil, and gas.

Hopefully, this weekend’s People’s Climate March will help instill a sense of urgency and determination in political leaders and the general public. As the major economic assessments of climate change like the Stern Report have concluded unequivocally, the intelligent choice in purely economic terms is to do what states like Germany have begun: to stop investing in high-carbon infrastructure projects that are no longer appropriate for the world in which we live, to phase out fossil-fuel energy beginning with the most harmful forms like coal plants, and to commit to the deployment of a new energy system which is climate-safe and which can be relied upon indefinitely.