Leaders and Legacies Canadian leaders and leadership stories
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.