One out of every five Australian households are turning to solar energy for their electricity or hot water, new data has reveled.

RenewEconomy in Australia reports that the Australian Bureau of Statistic (ABS) shows that 19 per cent of households nationally now currently use either rooftop solar panels or solar powered hot water systems – up from about 5 per cent back in 2011, when the ABS first started publishing statistics on solar.

Of the 19 per cent, 14 per cent of these households have rooftop PV, according to the ABS’s Karen Connaughton.

“Add in solar hot water heating and we’re up to 19 per cent, so one in five households are now using some form of solar power.”

South Australia scored highest for rooftop solar installations, with a huge 24 per cent of households there tapping electricity from the sun.

The ABS’ statistics also found that almost all households in Australia (99.7 per cent) used electricity as a source of energy, while half (50 per cent) used gas.

One in five households used LPG/bottled gas (20 per cent), and 14 per cent of households used another source of energy.

The report also notes that three-quarters of Australian households use some form of cooling, with just under half choosing reverse cycle air conditioning and the remainder mostly split between refrigerated air conditioning and evaporative coolers.

“The hot spot for cooling was the Northern Territory,” said Connaughton, “where 97 per cent of households had some form of cooling.” Tasmania had the least, with only about half of all households having air conditioning.

– This article was first published at RenewEconomy.

Annette Verschuren is the CEO of energy storage company NRStor.

Interviewed by Brenna Atnikov.

Atnikov: What keeps you up at night?

Verschuren: The discussion of the economy versus the environment. We’re never going to create innovation if we polarize ourselves on these two issues. Why can’t we both add value to our industries and take greater responsibility for managing our natural resources? It’s healthy to have differences of opinion, but not when we reduce issues to black or white. When you’re too far to the right or to the left on an issue, you very rarely succeed in solving problems. The gray area is where the resolutions happen. Right now, we’re fighting on the details and not on the big issues. We have to find more things we can all agree on.

There’s not enough concern in our country about the economy. The jobs aren’t there, the pension funds aren’t there, people aren’t living happily ever after. Maybe we haven’t hit the wall hard enough. I am worried about where the new jobs are going to come from and that other countries are going to steal them away. The clean technology that’s happening in Korea, China, Japan, and in parts of Europe is so advanced relative to what we’re doing. We’ve got to catch up.

A weakness in Canada is that there aren’t enough women in senior leadership roles. Imagine how much more productive our country could be if we called on all of our talent as opposed to parts of it! We have the brains and are blessed with the greatest natural resources in the world; we now need a lot of courageous leadership to be able to sustain and build on what we have.

Atnikov: If things turn out well over the next 20 years, what needs to happen?

Verschuren: The new economy is going to come from finding more productive ways to produce food and energy, to use water, to extract and refine oil and gas, to extract minerals. Why can’t we be the country that takes on the challenge of reducing the carbon footprint? Why can’t we be the country that most responsibly produces fossil fuels and minerals and the like? We’re really good at so many things! We’re one of the leaders in the world at brain research and cancer diagnostics. We also have some great stuff happening in information and communications technology, in data management, in big data analytics. With our educated workforce and the myriad of research facilities across the country, we have enormous potential to solve all kinds of problems.

I would love the story to be that Canada was a little bit stuck for a few years on where it was going, but look at what it did. It reduced its energy footprint. It’s got the best cities and transit systems. For these things to happen, we need to take a longer-term perspective; we can’t just wait for the next quarter and see what the results are.

Atnikov: How would we shift to more of a longer-term mindset?

Verschuren: There are all kinds of things we could do, but you’ve got to know where you’re going. Deficit cutting is great, but sometimes too much deficit cutting hurts the economy. If you know where you’re going, you can develop whatever you need. For instance, we could do what London did and institute a congestion charge to manage the number of cars in our cities and increase money towards transit. We could start to think about pricing greenhouse gases. Healthcare is another area that has enormous potential. We aren’t talking enough about what we can do to build the healthcare business; instead, we focus on costs, costs, and costs!

Atnikov: Are there examples of where we’ve done particularly well in addressing such challenges?

Verschuren: The forestry industry faced a crisis, got together, and made changes. There’s a lot of progress happening in the mining industry and in the oil and gas businesses. You learn from trying. All kinds of spinoffs and new products come out of doing things innovatively. For example, the clothing that people wear in the winter came out of the American and Canadian space programs. We’ve got all these innovation incubators—we now need to advance the commercialization of some of the research they’re doing.

Atnikov: What important upcoming decisions does Canada have to make?

Verschuren: Canadians have to rethink what we want to be and how we want people to see us. We’re not putting the right investment in the right places, because we don’t know where we’re going. We have to be more optimistic and find ways to move our society towards creating value. People want to rally behind a future, and right now, nobody is describing what that future is. Leadership can really create change, and people will follow behind a sensible vision for the country. If the vision is clear, we will find a way to get there. We need inspirational leadership—from unions, First Nation, business, government—to take us to that point.

– This interview originally ran on Possible Canadas.

There’s a lingering perception that solar power is expensive. It’s a myth that Joseph Barker spends his days happily busting. In fact, he says, it’s not only free but a money-making opportunity for consumers.

As senior broker and managing partner at Solar Brokers Canada, Barker loves nothing more than ensuring that people across the Greater Toronto Area and other select communities not only get free installation of solar panels, but also showing them how they’ll make money doing it.

In select markets, Solar Brokers Canada and its partners can finance solar panel installation and share the profits from Ontario’s unique MicroFIT (feed-in-tariff) program. The profits are shared with the home owner, while also ensuring that there is zero cost for them.

The typical southern Ontario suburban home can generate an annual revenue of over $4,500, says Barker, which translates to a return on investment of over 10 percent.

“There’s a perception that solar is too expensive,” says Barker, “but now we have financial models that make it accessible. I’m literally offering you, as a home owner, $60,000 in investment with no strings attached.”

“Honestly, it’s too good to be true.”

Barker recently found out he’s not the only who thinks it’s too good to be true. He says a woman who was recently quite interested in the program shared it with her financial advisor, whom she had known for a long time. The advisor declared that it couldn’t be true – that there must be a catch – and told her not to go through with it.

Barker just shakes his head now at the memory but getting through to people is part of the work he, and others like him, have cut out for him in this relatively new industry.

He says the biggest correlation in sales is whether or not one’s neighbor has a solar system installed.

“Once neighbours hear about it from each other, it sells itself,” he says.

There’s no doubt neighbours must be talking. Barker says his organization is less than three years old, and last year they had eight percent of the market. In just the last three months, they now have 50 percent of the contracts.

According to Solar Brokers Canada’s website, as a part of the free solar program, the home owner can share in the profits without spending their own money, and can be paid upwards of $32,000 (based on a 10kW solar system, which requires approx. 800 square feet of roof space) over the term of the MicroFIT contract.

Once the term is completed, the solar system is transferred to the home owner, which increases the home’s value. Furthermore, the home’s hydro bill can be reduced by up to 100 percent by using the power generated by the solar panels.

The Ontario government launched the MicroFIT program in 2009 with the goal of increasing renewable energy in the province.

Barker points out it is the “largest climate change initiative in North America.” It essentially encourages the development of ‘micro’ renewable electricity generation plants (of 10kilowatts or less) on home owners’ properties.

Once this is established, the program participants are paid a fixed price for the electricity produced which is then delivered to the province’s electricity grid.

For more information about the solar programs offered in Ontario, visit Solar Brokers Canada.

Roger Gibbins is senior fellow at the Canada West Foundation.

Interviewed by Monica Pohlmann.

Pohlmann: What concerns you about Canada these days?

Gibbins: We’re losing our sense of community in terms of the country as a whole. Many people feel that, if you’ve got a great local community and you have a rapid rail line to an international airport, that’s all you need. So the provincial and national communities become irrelevant. The opportunity to go and experience the world and then come back to a base is great, but I worry about a loss of purpose for Canada as a whole. We’re losing faith in our political institutions and our capacity to do things together. There is a narrowing of perspectives that’s not unique to Canada, but nonetheless, having people in this large, ungainly country turn inward is alarming.

Overall, the situation with aboriginal people is positive, with a lot of energy and innovation. But at the same time, I fear First Nations will become more and more isolated rather than part of the national mainstream. That isolation is not going to be healthy. When groups are close to the larger society, all of the positive things about integration can work. It’s the small, remote communities that concern me. That’s not a future.

We have a fetishlike approach to the environment: We focus on these seven trees or this particular lake, and fail to engage in trade-offs. You would hope that if I’m in my neighbourhood protecting my trees, there’s a local attachment, but also in the back of my head there’s something about, how does this work for the province? How does this work for Canada? You want that internal debate in people’s heads, and I don’t think that’s there right now.

Pohlmann: What important decisions do we have to make?

Gibbins: We are a resource-based economy. It is a pretty sound prediction that a resource-based economy is not going to serve us well 20 years down the road. We’ll have to transform ourselves, but how do we do it? A lot of people want to establish Calgary as a leader in the energy field. But we’re never going to out-compete the Chinese on solar power or the Germans on wind power. If we have a niche in the global economy, what is it?

We import a lot of water these days through agricultural products such as tomatoes and avocados. Water is difficult to move around—it’s heavy, it’s expensive—but the products that come from water are easier to move. Water is going to be a strategic asset. Do water shortages elsewhere create openings for Canadian agriculture? Is agriculture in fact, one of our niches? If so, what form of agriculture? And how can we be promoting that?

Pohlmann: What lessons do we need to learn from our past failures?

Gibbins: You’ve heard the old Alberta expression, “Give me another oil boom, and I promise not to piss it away!” Alberta is a great example where we took in huge amounts of wealth but this didn’t leave us better off. In BC, Premier Christy Clark has a vision that the resource wealth from liquid natural gas will generate a bounty that can be used to do different things within the province. She is on the right track, in that we have to use that bounty in a transformative way.

If you’re in the travel business, you sell the destination not the trip. Christy Clark is trying to sell the trip, and that’s not good enough. Harper has a destination in mind, but he hasn’t clearly articulated it. If people fear the end that Harper has in mind, they are not going to buy into the means. If we had a clear vision of where we are heading as a country or as a province, a vision that is a bit better than lower taxes or higher salaries, then it would be easier to sell. We haven’t articulated that vision. As a consequence, it’s hard to counter the opposition that comes up.

Pohlmann: What energizes you about Canada?

Gibbins: I like what we’ve done in urban Canada; despite the big challenges out there, we’ve been able to create urban environments that are pretty safe, interesting, and energetic. We’ve created a degree of political tranquillity in the country that in some ways is stifling but also has given us a great deal of internal comfort. In our national politics, we don’t tear people down. We’ve done reasonably well in knitting together a difficult country into a society that is remarkably inclusive and diverse. We have been a significant international player. We beat ourselves up all the time about our track record on the environment, and yet we’ve accomplished quite a bit at the local scale. There are exceptions, but nonetheless, we have done things pretty well. We should take pride in what we’ve accomplished in this country.

Pohlmann: As a country, what should we be talking about that we are not?

Gibbins: The 150th anniversary provides an opportunity to push Canadians into thinking about the future. In 1967, the premiers of Ontario and Quebec hosted a conversation called the Confederation of Tomorrow Conference. It’s time for us to have another national conversation about a whole set of pressing concerns. The world seems to be going to hell in a hand basket in ways that are quite discouraging. It makes it even more important for Canadians to begin to talk in constructive ways about our own country, what can we do here, and how can we protect the kind of prosperity and social harmony that we’ve had. The infamous UN report of 20 years ago or so that described Canada as the best place in the world to live may have done us a disservice by making us complacent. We didn’t get here by accident; we’ve created the kind of country we have through an act of will. If that will weakens or loses its focus, then a lot of what we have will be precarious. My fear is that we’ve solved the problems of the past but we’re rapidly being overtaken by the problems of the future. We somehow need to crystallize our best thinking into a vision for the future.

– This article originally ran on Possible Canadas.

Tamara Vrooman is the president and CEO of Vancity.

Interviewed by Monica Pohlmann.

Pohlmann: What has shaped your perspective?

Vrooman: I started out as a public servant, mostly because I was interested in how decisions and laws were made, and why some were made in what appeared to be the favour of certain sectors and not others. I learned that finance is at the heart of many decisions. How we allocate capital is one of the biggest single determinants of the future that we create. Loaning money to a local entrepreneur is quite different from loaning it to a multinational corporation—the two things have different consequences. So my work became focused on understanding how we can make our individual and collective financial decisions more aligned with our personal and national values.

Pohlmann: What keeps you up at night?

Vrooman: We’re becoming passive and run the risk of taking for granted the many things that have made Canada the tolerant, open, diverse, and welcoming society that we’re privileged to live in. Our greatness didn’t happen by accident. If we don’t work at it enough, we are at risk of diminishing and losing it. Then what kind of country will we leave for our children and our grandchildren?

We have a tradition of working together, talking about things, and being tolerant of different opinions. But we don’t see a lot of that anymore. Debates are becoming polarized and institutional rather than engaged and personal. There aren’t opportunities for individual voices to be cultivated and nourished. I worry that in our race to get things right, to be competitive, to be efficient, we’re making decisions that are not inclusive, are short-term, and don’t benefit from the perspectives of many. It may feel like we are making a decision and getting on with things, but ultimately, we will regret not including the many voices, because we won’t have made the best decisions. In the end, then, this approach will slow us down and will cost us money, time, social capital, and natural capital. We need to go back to our tradition of engaging, consulting, debating, listening, and reflecting.

I am concerned about the economy. Just as we know that healthy workplaces and healthy ecosystems are diverse, a healthy economy needs diversity as well. I don’t see enough focus on contributing to economic value by embracing different ways of thinking and operating. We’re not encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation like we need to.

Pohlmann: What energizes you about Canada?

Vrooman: Relatively speaking, we’re a very diverse nation and society. That contributes tremendously to our strength and our ability to see things differently and create a different future. In Vancouver, 75% of young people 17 and under have a parent who’s not from this country. That brings a tremendous sense of renewal, energy, tolerance, and creativity for what’s possible.

I’m energized by the fact that we’re starting to have a long overdue conversation of reconciliation with indigenous and aboriginal people. Non-indigenous people are only beginning to understand what a gift it is to share a country with indigenous people, who have lots to teach us. The wisdom of indigenous people is a tremendous part of our history as well as our future. I’m just so impressed with how the reconciliation effort is being taken up across the country.

Pohlmann: What are important lessons from the past that you think we should be reflecting on as we move ahead?

Vrooman: It’s hard to judge the actions of others who operated in a different context, but in retrospect, when things have not gone well, it is because we failed to listen to, understand, and collaborate with others. The residential schools are an example. Aside from the obvious racism and personal suffering for which we’re responsible, we missed out on a whole generation of opportunity to learn and grow together. It was a huge loss of human capital, of human potential.

Pohlmann: What do you aspire to contribute through your work?

Vrooman: It’s hard to have political democracy and engagement if we don’t have economic democracy and engagement. The work I do is about making sure that people have access to information and support so they can make informed decisions. We’re also looking for ways to include more people in the economy and in the finance system—people who may not have access to bank accounts and things that you or I would take for granted. We’re increasingly hearing about income inequality. To think that economic democracy and income inequality are unrelated would be like saying that the right to vote and use of universal suffrage were unrelated. Of course they’re related.

— This article was originally published by the initiative.

Armine Yalnizyan is senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

Interviewed by Monica Pohlmann.

Pohlmann: What keeps you up at night?

Yalnizyan: The way we are transforming our views about immigration in Canada. In the coming decades, nation states will be competing to attract people, not just capital. Population aging is occurring in all advanced industrialized nations. Without newcomers, the Canadian labour force would start to shrink in the next year or two. An unsettling trend has emerged in Canada. Public policy now favours a rise in temporary foreign workers over permanent economic immigrants. When companies say they face a skills shortage, all too often the solution is bringing in a foreign worker temporarily for what is often not a temporary shortage. These workers are tied to their employer, and can get deported if they complain about anything.

In such a workplace environment, it’s hard for any worker to ask for anything better. People are constantly looking over their shoulder, wondering, “Will they find a cheaper me?” It’s a recipe for growing friction between “us” and “them.”

The problem arises from a common view that low wages and low taxes are “good for business.” What may be good for an individual business is a dead-end path for society and the economy as a whole. Wages and taxes are never low enough for businesses. Their job is to maximize profits. But the continuous drive to lower wages and taxes erodes the economic heft of a country. The message to workers is “expect less,” even when companies grow and profits rise. The idea that labour is simply a cost, rather than the essential building block of performance, is destructive nonsense.

Middle-class jobs are being cut, replaced by more low-paid and some higher-paid work. Wages aren’t keeping up with costs for most people, and savings rates are falling. A rising proportion of Canadian households don’t have enough funds to last a month should they lose their pay cheques. We pay tribute to a large and resilient middle class as the mark of a flourishing economy around the world, but our own middle class is being squeezed in every way, ironically in the name of economic growth.

Pohlmann: Do you see any positive shifts happening?

Yalnizyan: There’s a growing awareness that tax cuts are not the solution to every problem. In the public sphere, people are beginning to recognize that what we’re facing is less a spending problem than a revenue problem. Bridges are collapsing, and sewers and pipes built 100 years ago need to be repaired. We’re awash in easy money, but oddly have no money for these essentials. But we’re paying a bundle privately to repair our homes and cars from the damage caused by deteriorating infrastructure. Some communities are putting their money where their mouths are, investing in preventive oral care for all school-aged children, to improve health and reduce costs down the road.

Whether it’s roads or teeth or childcare or affordable housing, there’s vibrant discussion about how public spending can save money, and improve the quality of our lives. It harnesses the power of bulk-buying, reducing unit costs for things that are the underpinnings of every-day life, things that create more and better opportunities for everyone.

Newfoundland and Labrador offers a good example. Their rapid economic growth is largely based on oil. They saw Alberta’s boom-and-bust economic model and decided they needed a prosperity plan that ensured everyone saw lasting benefits from oil money. Labour, government, and business have hammered out long-term strategies on a wide range of issues.

We can learn a lot from the beacon on the rock. One lesson: for growth to translate to broad-based prosperity involves endless debate and eternal vigilance over the role of government. That’s why democracy matters.

Pohlmann: What’s your sense of the state of our democracy?

Yalnizyan: We have a troubled relationship with our democratic institutions. We need to get over the idea that government is something and someone else. The government is us. The idea that governments are largely useless, that they’re more likely to make a mess than fix things, is exactly what corporations would like us to think. It gives them more freedom to use the enormous power of the state to their advantage.

We are becoming a corporatocracy, a state that serves the interests of corporations first and foremost. Business groups write legislation. lobby, use campaign finance to shape the public sphere—how big it is, what it does, who it serves. This is the biggest test democracy faces today.

There is the beginning of a pushback, an awakening that began with the Occupy movement. It’s not very effective yet, but I don’t think it’s going away. Hundreds of years ago, people decided to separate the church from the state. Now, we’re looking for ways to separate corporations from the state.

Pohlmann: What energizes you about Canada?

Yalnizyan: Business is the most powerful force in society right now. Given what I just said, this may seem strange, but I think, with strong democratic institutions in place, that power could be harnessed to make a better world. We’re on the edge of an explosion of technological change—from artificial intelligence to biomimicry to miraculous medical breakthroughs to the internet of things. Canada could provide leadership on how innovations get applied. It starts with making sure we have all hands on deck, so we can make the most of the ingenuity that resides in our population and build their capacity to put good ideas into action.

Pohlmann: What important decisions do we have to make?

Yalnizyan: Resource extraction and exportation is such a 19th-century game plan for growth, complete with a 19th century distribution of benefits and calculation of costs. We need another plan. Not a Plan B, because there’s no Planet B. Canada’s Plan A should help us become a 21st century energy superpower by developing the world’s most energy-efficient homes and forms of transit. We live in a cold climate and have to travel long distances. We should be world leaders in maximizing energy efficiency, whatever its source. Instead of Energy East, think Energy Least. Climate change is forcing every society to address this challenge. Nations can’t succeed on a planet that fails.

Pohlmann: What are examples of where Canadians have met their challenges well?

Yalnizyan: Healthcare would be at the top of my list. We did it early, and we did it well. We should never forget that our model of Medicare comes not from plenty but from poverty. My father had eight heart attacks and died before Medicare came to be. My family lost almost everything because of his illness. Early on, our country recognized that things like healthcare and electricity and education were public services that everyone should be able to access to improve the quality of their lives.

 — This article was originally published by the Possible Canadas initiative.

Preston Manning is the President of the Manning Centre for Democracy and is the former leader of the Reform Party of Canada.

Interviewed by Brenna Atnikov

Atnikov: When you look at Canada, what’s got your attention?

Manning: I’d like Canada to be the best governed democracy in the world, with the strongest economy and the highest quality of life. One way to strengthen democratic governance is to raise the knowledge, skill, ethics, and capacity of elected officials. Many more think tanks, interest groups, and training programs exist for elected provincial and federal officials than for the more than 25,000 municipal officials. Likewise, you need 30 hours of training to be a barista at Starbucks, but you can become a lawmaker in Parliament without one hour of training. Is that smart? Moreover, it is becoming impossible to persuade competent people at the peak of their abilities to get involved in the political arena because they are not willing to subject themselves or their families to the personal attacks and scrutiny that occur in the media.

We have what we might call a “democracy deficit,” particularly with younger people. The simplest measure of it is declining participation in elections. People feel that their votes don’t count. Polls on Canadians’ perceptions of the performance of government and the processes of democracy are overwhelmingly negative. In this climate, the few who do take an interest can control the whole system. I call it “The Iron Law of Democracy”: if you choose not to involve yourself in the politics of your country, you will be governed by people who do.

At the highest level, politics is about reconciling conflicting interests. The hardest ones to reconcile are the ones in which both sides are good. As a nation, we’ve desperately been seeking the middle way right from the beginning, and that’s helped keep the country together. It’s why we’re bilingual; it’s why we chose a combination of the British Parliamentary system and the American Federalist system. We need to continue to seek that middle way on newer fronts, including the economic-environmental front. Otherwise, we could be heading towards another national unity crisis, prompted by the Western provinces and their sense of, “Why are we subsidizing everything east of the Ottawa River?”

Atnikov: What keeps you up at night?

Manning: Canadians need a dose of realism with respect to the economy. The resource sector is the horse that’s pulling the current economic cart. We have to give more attention to strengthening those industries and recognizing what they’re contributing. To maintain our high quality of life, the economy must be strong enough to pay for the social services network. As our population ages, the demands on our healthcare and pension systems will increase.

We also need to address environmental concerns, particularly as they interface with resource development. We can’t continue to engage in a polarized environment-versus-economy argument. Nobody is out to destroy the environment or the economy—you need both—but a lot of people are willing to take one side or the other. There are different ways of reconciling the economy with the environment, some of them on the supply side and some of them on the demand side. Few groups in society talk about constraining demands.

A spiritual awakening amongst Canadians could be a part of a renewed willingness to temper our demands for the sake of the future. Instead, environmental groups focus on using regulations to stop certain activities. But if you look at the development of the oil sands plants in Alberta, the reason the companies have delayed the projects isn’t because the National Energy Board issued some regulatory order; it’s because of economic factors. When the price of gas went sky-high, it led to a slowdown of the development of the oil sands because the companies are using natural gas to fuel the extraction. The signals that get through to the oil sands developers that cut the most ice are the financial ones and market signals.

Conservatives can play a big role in reconciling these interests. The words “conservative” and “conservation” come from the same root. Living within your means—something that fiscal conservatives believe in—is actually an ecological concept. You can’t take more out of a natural system than goes back into it. Conservatives could make the harnessing of market mechanisms to environmental conservation their signature contribution.

Atnikov: If things unfold badly over the next 20 years, what would the story be?

Manning: Because of the way research and development [R&D] is defined, the federal government’s list of companies that do R&D has only one oil company on it. Actually these companies have unlocked billions of dollars worth of wealth through their research and innovations, but their contributions to innovation and our economic development are not recognized. These industries have a service component to them as well as a scientific and technological component that is amongst the most sophisticated in the world. If we don’t acknowledge that they are contributing more than just money, our economic growth and employment rates will suffer.

Also, I wonder if this baby-boom generation is going to pursue its self-interest to the bitter end. If baby boomers insist on the maximum level of healthcare and the maximum technology right till the end, they’re going to bankrupt the healthcare system and make aspects of it unavailable to the younger generations.

Atnikov: And if things turn out well over the next 20 years, what would have happened?

Manning: The central doctrine of the Christian faith is reconciliation, whether between people and whoever they conceive God to be, people and others, people and themselves, or people and the physical world. The renewed interest in environmental stewardship—in restoring the relationship between people and nature—has some spiritual elements to it. That spiritual perspective has a role to play in helping people recognize the need to sacrifice immediate satisfaction for something in the future, the next generation, the environment. If we constrained our material demands, we would have more time for our personal, family, and social relations. If we spent more time looking after each other, we wouldn’t have to go to the government for support. This is an alternative approach to trying to fix everything by regulation or law. It’s easy to talk about the future in terms of what it should be economically, environmentally, socially, and politically. I would add the spiritual dimension.

 — This article was originally published by the Possible Canadas initiative.

Mark Jaccard is a professor of sustainable energy at Simon Fraser University in B.C.

Interviewed by Monica Pohlmann.

Pohlmann: What concerns you about Canada these days?

Jaccard: Our current federal government and its rapid expansion of fossil fuel industries is unconscionable. There’s an unwillingness to take on the powerful forces that make a lot of money from this endeavour. The thing is, what I call true conservatives aren’t inherently keen to expand the fossil fuel industry regardless of the planetary implications. Many right-of-centre politicians, including Gordon Campbell in British Columbia and Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, have implemented effective climate policies.

We are living in the Anthropocene Era, and we know we are influencing the planet. The question is, how can we do so in a far less reckless way, especially today with respect to greenhouse gas emissions? If you look at Quebec with its recent link up to California’s cap-and-trade, if you look at what was achieved in British Columbia just five or seven years ago with our zero-emission electricity policy and carbon tax, if you look further afield to examples like California with its regulations on fuels, vehicles and electricity, you see there are things that can be done.

At the Canadian level, we need to make sure not to confuse national energy policy with national climate policy. We must have a national climate policy with teeth, even if we have to build it one province at a time. But a national energy policy with teeth is highly unlikely because of divergent resources (fossil fuel in some provinces, hydropower in others) and hence divergent interests—and we don’t need a national energy policy anyway.

Pohlmann: If things turn out well over the next 20 years, what would the story be?

Jaccard: Canada will continue to grow economically, but it won’t be pollution-intensive growth. Also, that growth will be distributed more equitably so that the children from less advantaged families have opportunities that are similar to those from well-off families. I’m a fairly optimistic person, and I see humans grappling effectively with all sorts of huge problems. As a grad student, I studied environmental problems that we eventually were able to address fairly effectively, such as urban air pollution, the depletion of the ozone layer, and acid rain. When people try to make a bigger deal out of climate change than I think they need to, I bring up those earlier successes.

Pohlmann: What important decisions do we have to make?

Jaccard: My focus has been on helping our society achieve growth while preserving and conserving the natural world. We shouldn’t demonize fossil fuels; fossil fuels are an incredible form of chemical energy that have led to our well-being today. It’s carbon pollution that’s the problem.

Stephen Harper promised that our greenhouse gas emissions would be down 17% by 2020. We probably can’t hit that goal, but we should now be enacting new effective policies. One of them would be to encourage coal plants to reduce net emissions over the next five years by putting in carbon capture and storage or converting to natural gas or using some combination of gas and renewables. Another would be to stop the expansion of the oil sands. The people who work there now will keep their jobs and maybe their kids will have jobs; it’s just avoiding the insanity of doubling or tripling the size of the oil sands.

Canada’s biggest emissions are still from vehicles. Californians are working to develop near-zero emission vehicles. If we adopted California’s vehicle emission standards, more of these kinds of vehicles would get built in Canada.

Pohlmann: What legacy do you want to leave?

Jaccard: There’s a lot of delusion going on. My job as an academic is to see what the leading scholars are finding and then to sort out how to communicate that knowledge. It’s not easy, because people want to believe that renewables are inexpensive, or that offsets are effective, or that energy efficiency is cheap, or that you can expand oil sands without affecting the environment.

Pohlmann: What are important lessons from the past for Canada?

Jaccard: As a global citizen, Canada can have more weight than we may realize. Back in World War II, we declared war on Nazi Germany before the Soviet Union and the Americans did. We showed real leadership. Of course, leadership isn’t just about joining some military expedition; it’s about setting an example.

Similarly, Canada could play a leadership role on issues such as carbon capture. In 2005-2008, there was a real push for Canada to become a world leader in carbon capture and storage. I’m extremely disappointed that we didn’t play that role when there was a real interest, even among the corporate sector, in doing so. When Stephen Harper came to power, all that stuff died. Canada could still be a leader. We could say, “Here’s what we’re doing, here are the policies. Who can match us?” And we could be selling our technologies and know-how in ways that really helped developing countries, like China, rapidly reduce emissions without the huge expense of rapidly closing all their coal plants.

— This article was originally published by the ‘Possible Canadas’ initiative.