SPINNING OUR WHEELS
Documenting failures on climate change
There’s a scene in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai where the Japanese commander of a prisoner-of-war camp looks hopelessly at a model of the crucial bridge he has been ordered to build.
The scale model is perfect, a work of art. But his real bridge is behind schedule and pieces keep collapsing because the British prisoners who are forced to build it do intentionally shoddy work.
The film paints a pretty good picture of Canada’s long struggle to build a bridge to a cleaner future. We have ambitious models, targets and promises, but these have never yet reflected the real world.
At the University of Ottawa, Monica Gattinger sees this parallel clearly.
“It makes me think of some of the techno-economic modelling that gets done around what is possible in terms of reducing (greenhouse) emissions,” said Gattinger, a political scientist.
“In many instances, yes, there are lots of tools that can be put in place to move in the right direction,” ranging from carbon taxes to new technologies, she said.
“But those models rarely if ever take into consideration the political and social realities of actually doing that.” People often “push back” when they don’t like the reality of energy-saving measures, she said. “So that, to me, is where the metaphor (from the film) works really well.”
Gattinger heads a research group on energy policy called Positive Energy, and it recently published a long analysis of why attempts to reduce climate change have struggled.
It believes there’s a “dangerous optimism” in trying to model the path to a cleaner future.
For example, one key to reducing emissions is by getting most of our energy in the form of electricity, though without burning coal or gas to generate it. That leaves nuclear or hydroelectric power, but these aren’t straightforward to build.
Today, British Columbia is building a hydroelectric dam called Site C, which faces strong local opposition from people who argue damming the Peace River would flood 100 kilometres of the valley. Yet a major shift to clean electricity “would require 120 Site Cs,” Gattinger said.
“We have a really hard time getting one Site C built. The optimism that we can make these large-scale changes in a rapid fashion — I think that’s dangerous … because it underestimates the social and political realities of making large changes to our energy system.
“If we are looking to electrify the Canadian economy, that requires changing our energy systems in massive ways,” with massive new infrastructure, she said.
Climate has surged as a public issue in Canada. One recent poll picks climate change as a top-three federal election issue, just inches behind cost of living and health care. Cities (including Ottawa) have declared climate emergencies.
But now what? How much are we able — or willing — to do?
Unfortunately, we have been down this road many times before.
Canadian governments at all levels have spent 30 years making promises they don’t know how to keep, repeatedly vowing to cut emissions even though actual emissions keep rising.
Now, under the Paris Agreement of 2015, we are committed to cutting nationwide emissions by 30 per cent (from 2005 levels) by 2030, and by 80 per cent by 2050.
But any talk of achieving these goals requires context — in this case, a look at three decades when our governments adopted successive targets and commitments, but our country’s greenhouse emissions continued to rise.
Here is a timeline of our work so far, both locally and nationally. It will look repetitive — but that’s the whole point. Our promises, and our failures to keep them, show a lot of repetition.
In 1990, the great green wave was at its peak. Less than two years earlier, a science conference in Toronto called The Changing Atmosphere had turned greenhouse gases and climate change into well-known public issues for the first time.
Ottawa city council was quick to board the bandwagon. Minutes show that a citizens’ group (unnamed) had asked the city to reduce all greenhouse emissions in Ottawa by 20 per cent, but the councillors decided to go all out. They promised a cut of 50 per cent by 2005.
A year later, Ottawa wrote a section on emissions cuts into the Official Plan, but it’s vague stuff — encouraging cycling and walking, protecting trees and regulating (it doesn’t say how) development.
“That would be another example of underestimating the scale of what would be required,” Gattinger said.
By 1992, nothing much had happened. Coun. Diane Holmes told this newspaper that year that the original promise came about with little thought. Both council and its staff were committed to allowing more cars on the roads, she said, and few were willing to consider radical changes.
But this didn’t stop them from promising again. They rewrote the 1990 pledge into an “official commitment to a 20 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions” by 2005, and “a goal” to complete the rest of the 50 per cent cut by 2020.
As before, there was never any plan on how to do this.
By 1997, our regional council was also in the mood for commitment. There was a movement spreading through the Federation of Canadian Municipalities called the Twenty Per Cent Club, which involved promising to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent either by 2005, or within 10 years of joining the “club.”
Count us in, said Ottawa-Carleton — though it chose evasive language.
The minutes show our council resolved to “communicate to the FCM its support for the Twenty Per Cent Club and its expression of interest in participating in the Club.”
Again, the region undertook no effective planning or actions in the years that followed.
There were “a few success stories” among the 178 municipalities in the club, according to a 2009 analysis by Christopher Gore and Pamela Robinson of Ryerson University. But they note that “intent to reduce emissions is different than achieving reductions.”
In parallel with our city’s efforts, the federal government kept promising to cut emissions.
We made our first promise (to “stabilize” emissions) at the Rio Summit of 1992.
The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 was our most ambitious effort, a binding international deal making us subject to penalties if we didn’t keep our promises. A complicated formula meant we committed to cuts of six per cent below the 1990 level. That would have taken emissions down to about 433 million tonnes (megatonnes) a year, by 2012. Instead our emissions are now above 700 million tonnes.
The government put out statements like this one from 2007: “Canada has met and will continue to meet a series of requirements under the Kyoto Protocol.” But these successes were mostly about doing analyses and writing reports — paperwork, not reaching our targets.
Canada pulled out of Kyoto in 2011, recognizing we could not meet its legally binding commitments.
The next international deal came from Copenhagen in 2010. Canada has now thrown away all pretence of chasing levels from 1990; we now hope to reduce from our 2005 levels (731 million tonnes) down to 607 million by 2020.
The reality: Canada’s sustainability commissioner, Julie Gelfand, has projected we will make only a slight improvement and miss the target by 111 million tonnes.
(A note of perspective: One car emits on average about 4.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. So 111 million tonnes is about the annual emissions from 24 million cars.)
We did make some serious gains, but not the way anyone planned. The great recession of 2008-2009 did reduce our emissions, especially in Ontario, which lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs.
Massive layoffs, and some plant closings, hit Ford in St. Thomas, General Motors in Oshawa and St. Catharines, Chrysler in Windsor and Brampton, as well as smaller plants — Budd Automotive and BFGoodrich in Kitchener, Sterling Trucks in St. Thomas and Volvo in Goderich. Stelco in Hamilton stopped steel production.
With industry shutting down, we had less need for electricity. Ontario has now closed all of its coal-burning generating stations. Coal is a huge source of carbon dioxide.
This made our 2009 emissions data look good, but at a great cost to workers. And since signing the deal in Copenhagen in 2010, our emissions have risen slightly, back to 716 million tonnes after dipping slightly below the 700 million line.
The latest promise: In Paris in late 2015, the newly elected government of Justin Trudeau basked in global attention after signing another cutback promise. It’s ambitious: Cut emissions by 30 per cent by 2030, and by 80 per cent by 2050.
Environment Minister Catherine McKenna recently told this newspaper voters can trust that this time, Canada will achieve the targets. This is “because we have a serious plan to do it and because we have actually taken the measures that you need to do that are the base of (the government’s) plan. You have to put a price on pollution,” i.e. a carbon tax.
“We did it. We have made $70 billion in investment in public transportation, in renewable energy and clean technologies, in net-zero buildings,” she said. The $70 billion in investment is spread across many individual projects in wide sectors: More public transit, clean technology projects, better batteries, efficient buildings, and so on.
“Those are critical. We continue to look at other measures. So the reality is that we are actually doing the hard work and we’re working across the board with cities, with provinces. And if they don’t want to take the measures that they committed to, we are backstopping those measures.
“We don’t just have a target. We actually have a concrete plan that we are working on, that we are implementing and that we are investing in.”
McKenna blamed the Conservatives for doing nothing while in office, leaving the Liberal government to start from scratch four years ago.
“We’ve invested $70 billion, we’ve got a price on pollution, we’re phasing out coal, there are methane regulations.… You have to do it every day, working across every single sector,” she said. Governments must also figure out how the economy can grow without causing more emissions, she said.
“I am very confident we will meet the 2030 target and I think that we can exceed it.”
After all those ambitious targets and commitments, we are still not on track to meet near-term goals. And our role as an energy-producing nation is a major reason why our emissions are so high. It takes a lot of fossil fuels to produce fossil fuels, and emissions from Alberta and Saskatchewan have risen as other provinces have cut back.
A report last year by provincial, territorial and federal auditors general summed up the problem that governments don’t fully understand what to do: “For the most part, auditors found that governments’ plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions consisted of high-level goals, with little guidance on how to implement actions.”
They add: “Canada is not expected to meet its 2020 target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Meeting Canada’s 2030 target will require substantial effort and actions beyond those currently planned or in place. Most Canadian governments have not assessed, and therefore do not fully understand, what risks they face and what actions they should take to adapt to a changing climate.”
Energy analyst Tom Adams sums up their report this way: “(It) found that Canadian governments were generally foggy on what cutting emissions would look like.”
And he said most people don’t recognize how much work it would be to wean ourselves off gas and oil.
“To get to these targets that people talk about so loosely — like 50 per cent. What are we talking about here? That’s a dramatic social and economic transformation of the whole country,” he said.
“These are really puzzling questions and they deserve a skeptical eye and a serious conversation.”
Manypoliticianspickeasy-sounding answers such as renewable energy, he said. But technically many of these — geothermal heating, electricity from wind — don’t work well enough to keep us warm and moving in a cold winter.
“People have not really wrestled with the actual solutions, and really pressed for answers,” he said.
We have dammed most of the rivers that can deliver hydroelectric power, he said. If we want a steady supply of electricity we would need many new nuclear plants — and Adams has spent years criticizing the nuclear industry.
“Great on paper (but) practicalities look difficult,” he said. Nuclear stations tend to hit expensive cost overruns, there’s the problem of radioactive waste, and it’s tough to find communities that want them.
Other experts agree transforming our energy system would be hugely difficult. An analysis by the Canadian Academy of Engineering and Conference Board of Canada concludes that both the financial costs and lifestyle changes would be staggering — in the trillions of dollars. Carbon taxes alone are only minimally effective, they say:
“Pricing carbon and decarbonizing our electricity system will need to be accompanied by trillions in investment spending on clean energy infrastructure and significant changes to the way we consume energy to achieve our commitments under the Paris Agreement.”
Most forecasters see a future world where we would need massive investment in electrical generation and railways to maintain our current homes, workplaces and (to some extent) cars. In fact, the Quebec Ministry of Transport has become the Ministry of Transport, Sustainable Mobility and Electrification.
What would that look like? More railways, more “net-zero” buildings, and many more generating stations. But it’s not going to be easy.
British Columbia, with years of aggressive anti-greenhouse measures, reported this month it has made a gain of less than one per cent in the past 10 years.
And the politics of energy is often confrontational.
Positive Energy’s analysis points to “growing levels of political and economic uncertainty, partisanship, parochialism and polarization both at home and abroad (which) are creating an increasingly challenging environment for public authorities charting Canada’s energy future.”
And while there are some positive steps, it says, “the country as a whole lacks a coherent narrative, an integrated, co-ordinated evidence-informed policy and a shared understanding of the way forward on energy in an age of climate change. This not only challenges the individual and collective effectiveness of disparate initiatives and policy measures, but it constrains the capacity for real change and concrete progress on simultaneously lowering emissions while realizing the full potential of Canada’s vast energy resources and consistently meeting the energy service needs of Canadians.”
As for our long-range targets, “targets are important if they are viewed as ambition. It’s an ambition to try to move in the right direction,” Gattinger said.
“The ambition is really important, but where we have been less successful is ongoing, positive, steady progress in reducing emissions. Instead what we have found ourselves with,” especially at the provincial level, she said, “is wild swings in policy. Just look at the issues around carbon pricing. One day you have a carbon price in place and the next day you don’t and now it’s before the courts.”
Still, we keep on believing we can reach lofty targets despite past experience.
“Human cognition is not rational: it is motivated and therefore subject to irrational biases,” said Bruce Morton, who teaches psychology at Western University.
“In this case, I think we are motivated to believe emissions will change. We want this to be true. Upholding this belief provides comfort.
“Believing emissions will not change induces fear, which is an unwelcome emotion. It is unsettling.
“Since beliefs are not rational per se, but motivated, they can be resistant to evidence.” tspears@postmedia.com twitter.com/TomSpears1