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COLUMN: Protecting the climate and growing the economy

In 2017, a colleague asked, “All right, if global climate change is real, how do we fix it?”
10035320_web1_BC-Wildfire-Service

In 2017 BC experienced another frightening season where more than 200,000 hectares were scorched by wildfires.

California is facing extensive wildfires. Cape Town is tackling a severe water shortage attributed to a drought, climate change, and corrupt government. In 2017, more ice caps calved, glacial melting accelerated, coral reefs bleached and died. Plants and animals continued to perish in what scientists describe as the sixth mass extinction. Global climatic change is now undeniably in our faces.

In 2017, a colleague asked, “All right, if global climate change is real, how do we fix it?”

The short answer is imagination.

We need to harness our imaginations to what is technically possible. Impressionism was an artistic revolution. It demonstrated how imagination harnessed to new technologies turned the staid art world onto its head. Impressionists enabled by vibrant new synthetic pigments, paints in tubes and rail access to the countryside abandoned their studios and captured images of real people working, real people relaxing, and unembellished nature rather than staging mythical fantasies using models adorned with silly props.

An energy revolution fuelled by our collective imagination and today’s technologies will permit us to (1) consume less energy, (2) use the energy we consume more efficiently, and (3) switch from fossil fuels to solar energy in its various guises.

Consuming less energy doesn’t mean a drop in our standard of living. Among the most innovative developments in the past seventeen years is the Now House project. Architects reimagined a modest, 60-year-old, single family, post-WWII bungalow in Toronto. They retrofitted it to achieve net zero energy so it now generates as much energy as it consumes. This was as revolutionary as Monet, Degas or Pissarro when they combined their creativity with new technologies to smash the old and create a new paradigm suited to the times.

Prior to the renovation, the Now House’s annual energy bill was $3000. Now it’s zero. Energy savings will pay for the renovation and lower home-ownership costs. The house is less drafty, less mouldy, more comfortable, better ventilated, more valuable, and has more living space because the basement was converted from an uninsulated cellar to cozy quarters. Imagine the thousands of home renovation jobs as the Now House process is improved and energy prices rise. Imagine the reduction in energy consumption and the reduction in greenhouse gases.

Have you ever looked at flat-roofed buildings – schools, grocery stores, shopping malls, hospitals, industrial buildings, warehouses - and imagined how to harness the unrealized value of sunlight they intercept? If entrepreneurs rented those roof-tops, purchased Canadian manufactured solar panels at wholesale prices, hired unionized tradespeople to install and maintain the solar panels, sold the power, paid rent to the owners, and pocketed the difference they’d create a Site C in every Canadian city without further environmental damage. Imagine who those entrepreneurs might be.

Peter Ladner reported in a 10-Feb-15 Business in Vancouver article, “a report from the International Energy Agency calls energy efficiency ‘the world’s first fuel’ and says the global market for energy efficiency could be worth $310 billion.”

He cited a 2012 Canadian National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy study that found transitioning to a low-carbon, fuel-efficient economy would create an additional 178,000 jobs by 2050.

Peter recalled a 2009 study by the Center for American Progress and the Political Economy Research Institute that concluded, “an economy based on clean, renewable energy creates more than three times as many jobs as an economy based on fossil fuel energy” and a study by the Acadia Centre that estimates the Canadian economy could reap a net return of $5 to $8 on every dollar spent on energy efficiency, with savings in the hundreds of billions.

As Peter concluded, “we could meet our climate goals and still have economic growth.”

In 2018, let’s imagine.

Robert Macrae

Applied Microbiology, Environmental Chemistry, Water and Air Pollution Chemistry, Selkirk College