Hot Air: Meeting Canada's Climate Change Challenge by Jeffrey Simpson & Mark Jaccard & Nic Rivers

Author:Jeffrey Simpson & Mark Jaccard & Nic Rivers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Earth Sciences, Science, General, Political Science, Environmental Science
ISBN: 9781551994185
Publisher: Emblem Editions
Published: 2011-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

THE TOO-GOOD-TO-BE-TRUE SYNDROME

The flip side of the environmentalists’ gloomy rhetoric is eloquent, incandescent hope that most people will see the light, as environmentalists define it, and shift to the low-footprint lifestyle they promote. They are like most people in their refusal to accept evidence that challenges their beliefs. Environmentalists will insist they have the greatest faith in science, and that science backs their every assertion, but present them with sound scientific research that contradicts their fundamental assumptions about the low cost and achievable possibilities of energy efficiency, or the inherent cleanliness of renewable forms of energy, and watch their blood rise.

The research that most interests environmentalists suggests great technological potential for energy efficiency. Their hero is the American guru Amory Lovins, who has made a career of preaching the ease and importance of energy efficiency gains. As Lovins told Scientific American in 2005, “Focusing on energy efficiency will do more to protect the Earth’s climate – it will make business and consumers richer.” Ralph Torrie and others, in a 2002 report for the David Suzuki Foundation, an institution that promotes low-footprint lifestyle as a key to “saving the planet,” offered an unfounded assumption of energy efficiency profitability, saying, “Conservatively assuming a $15 cost saving for every gigajoule of energy productivity, the low carbon scenario would yield total annual cost savings rising to $30 billion by 2030, or a cumulative total of $200 billion between 2004 and 2030.” There is an old rule that should be applied to predictions like this one: if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

If, for example, you focus on only the relative costs (investment and operating) of a light bulb, it would appear that the most energy-efficient device (which can be 75 per cent more efficient than its competitor) will also be the most economically efficient. By this measurement, it is estimated that throughout its economy Canada could profitably reduce its energy use by 35 per cent. There are “experts” who take their analysis to only this level, then write reports on the basis of which politicians such as Dalton McGuinty make promises about shutting coal plants. These profitable investments in energy efficiency, insist the “experts,” can replace the one-quarter of Ontario’s energy generation that comes from coal – a politician’s win-win dream, the too-good-to-be-true syndrome.

An economy shifting to different patterns of energy use and placing a price on emissions will face economic costs for investments that would not have been required otherwise. Trying to reach the Kyoto target in a short space of time would impose costs on businesses and on the Canadian economy generally. Reasonable people could argue about how great the costs would be, and how to mitigate them. Reasonable people could also insist that if the proper regulations and incentives were in place, there would be future economic benefits. But environmentalists of the purest variety are not prepared to admit these realities. Instead, as crusaders for a cause, they paint wildly optimistic scenarios of nothing but economic gain.

Ralph

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