Climate change makes politics very difficult: Hugh Holland | Commentary

By Hugh Holland

What’s the most important problem to fix? Anyone with a child facing a life-threatening illness would say that illness is the most important thing. It consumes your life. Well, our grandkids are all facing a life-threatening situation. It’s called climate change and the root cause is our addiction to fossil fuels. By now, that should be obvious to anyone with eyes and ears. Like many illnesses, we didn’t suddenly acquire this problem or acquire it on purpose. It just kind of sneaked up on us accidentally over the last 100 years. But now that it’s become so obvious, is it even possible to beat this illness? The answer is yes. But like most life-threatening illnesses, it will not be easy. Let’s try focussing on what we now know.  

What are the known alternatives to fossil fuels in 2022? We can replace gasoline with clean electricity to power electric cars and equipment. Due to their high efficiency, we already have much of the electricity we need to charge EVs at night when demand and rates are down. We can replace diesel fuel with hydrogen made by combining intermittent wind and solar energy with water. The hydrogen provides the storage needed for intermittent energy. Newfoundland and Quebec are already working on projects with ThyssenKrupp to supply hydrogen from the east coast to energy-starved Germany. We can replace gas for residential and commercial heating with the new cold-climate heat pumps. They work very well right here in Huntsville. By 2030, new and emerging safe and flexible small modular reactors (SMRs) are being developed in several countries including Canada. SMRs can simultaneously co-generate both clean electricity and clean heat to replace natural gas for industrial heating applications such as oil extraction and refining, fertilizer plants etc. And there are several other technologies like tidal power and wave power that can make small contributions. We will need every kwh we can muster from all possibilities. 

Most of the devices that produce and use energy will be due for normal replacement over the next 30 years. The incremental cost of replacing old tech with new tech is very affordable when compared to the cost of extreme weather events if we don’t do it. Insurance companies estimate the cost of the recent hurricane that destroyed a portion of one city, Fort Myers, Florida, at $67 billion. The full cost of this year’s hurricanes, fires, droughts, torrential rains, floods, and freak snowstorms is unimaginable. Industrialized countries that produce much more than their share of carbon emissions will have to help the poorer countries they are affecting, so they can stay where they are, or we will end up taking them in as climate refugees. That was the big thing to come out of the recent climate conference in Egypt. 

Eighty-five per cent of the world’s proven reserves of oil and gas reside in only 15 of 195 countries. That fact has kept the world in turmoil for over 100 years. OPEC has weaponized its good fortune on several occasions and Russia is doing it right now. A gradual but urgent transition to clean energy offers the possibility of most countries becoming self-sufficient with their own unique mix of clean energies. All countries can use wind. Sunbelt countries like Arizona and the Middle East can use more solar. Northern industrial countries like Canada and Germany will have to use more hydro, nuclear, and deep geothermal.     

Similarly, having 85% of Canada’s oil reserves in one province has kept Alberta at odds with the feds and other provinces since 1975. Transfer payments were enshrined in Canada’s 1867 constitution “to ensure provincial governments have sufficient revenues to provide reasonably comparable levels of public service at reasonably comparable levels of taxation”. Equalization payments provided the foundation that still enables Canada to rank among the top countries of the world in education, health care, and social stability. From 1905 to 1975, Alberta was a net receiver of transfer payments provided by Ontario and BC. By 1975, Suncor was in large-scale production in the oil sands and Alberta had become the province with the highest GDP per capita, (now 140% of the national average), the lowest tax rates, and the main provider of transfer payments. Notwithstanding their good fortune, it seems Alberta still resents helping others by making transfer payments.   

But Alberta has all the expertise and resources needed to make a responsible and gradual transition to the next generation of zero-emission energies. If they do that, they will gain all the benefits of being an early adapter and could still be fortunate enough to continue as a net provider of equalization payments in return for the federal money they will receive to assist with the transition. If not, Alberta will slowly but surely return to being a net receiver. Canada’s system of equalization payments is the best insurance policy Alberta will ever get. 

 It’s pretty clear what needs to be done, but to get elected, political parties are all struggling to put their own stamp on a set of solutions. So, which political party has the most effective solutions? Who should I vote for?  I can’t vote Conservative because they are so tied to Alberta, they continue to twist themselves in knots clinging to dying forms of energy instead of exploiting the inevitable change. Just as we thought Alberta politics couldn’t get any more bizarre, they did. Premier-by-default Danielle Smith turned everything upside down by saying they will do whatever they want. I can’t vote Green until I hear national leader Elizabeth May say that safe small nuclear is an essential part of the solution. I can’t vote NDP because they want to kill fossil fuels this year when in fact it will take a Herculean effort over the next 30 years. So that leaves me with the Liberals as having the most realistic solutions and the most realistic timetable. Eight billion people cannot live without energy. The Liberals supported building the least-problematic Trans Mountain expansion and the Coastal Gas Link pipelines because they understand that during the transition, the world will need more oil and gas from Canada as the world’s smaller reserves are depleted. The Coastal Gas Link terminal at Kitimat could also be used to export hydrogen made in Alberta. Those projects will be completed in 2023, and Europe could use them now. Are the Liberals perfect? Of course not, but in my studied judgment, they offer the best path to leaving our grandkids and our country with a liveable climate. That is the most important thing for me.  

So, please let’s solve or at least mitigate the climate change problem, then we can get back to fighting about “important” things like the 1980 National Energy Program that ended in 1985, or whether people should have the freedom to wear a headscarf or a MAGA hat, or fly an F-Poilievre flag on their truck.

In summary, some key points are worth repeating. There are three very good reasons for this energy revolution. And there is still time to mitigate these three reasons, provided there is not too much resistance to the needed changes. But fear of the inevitable is emanating from oil and gas-producing states and provinces and is a major cause of short-sighted thinking, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and vitriol infecting today’s public discourse. Our federal government can and is helping to turn the energy revolution into a positive force for the oil and gas-producing provinces as well as the entire country. Like old energy, each new type of energy has its strengths and weaknesses. But we need them all.

Hugh Holland is a retired engineering and manufacturing executive now living in Huntsville, Ontario.

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