In the battle for energy hearts and minds, are you Gates or a McKibben? By Stewart Muir
A
great argument is raging on what caused
break it down to small steps, and then solve each step
Texans to go without heat and water during
individually. But not everyone thinks this way. Stiff
the Arctic blast of February 2021.
resistance to Gates’s new title How to Avoid a Climate
For a state with a higher GDP than all of
Canada, you wouldn’t expect to find a regulatory system so messed up that people were dying of cold in their
Disaster immediately emerged. Climate writer-activist Bill McKibben, whose use of the inaccurate term “tar sands” offers a clue to his perspective, was indignant.
own homes. Frozen wind turbines and unprepared gas
Instead, McKibben said in a New York Times review,
networks have both been blamed.
everyone should be following the advice of U.S. activist
We’ll find out in time what the exact causes were. The episode stands as a reminder that public perspectives
Mark Jacobson, who is convinced that renewables can provide 80 per cent of energy needs by 2030. A review in London’s Financial Times dismissed Gates’ ideas, because
about energy – and the future of how we use it – remain
the problem with technology is that “it might encourage
divided in 2021, and if anything those divisions are
inaction and distraction.”
growing.
Critics of humanity’s overwhelming reliance on petroleum
How voters see energy and climate directly influences the
and coal seem able to see only the problems - and they are
policies that politicians enact. Energy literacy matters.
real ones - associated with legacy fuels. Consequently, we
Recently, I learned of a member of Parliament sitting on
have the confounding situation today of opposition to the
an influential committee in Ottawa who was unaware that
very solutions that are reducing emissions.
plastic is made from petroleum.
A good example is fracking, which has done more to
The same week as the Texas disaster, something else
reduce emissions than all government policies. Yet it is
happened that underlined where public discourse on
stiffly opposed. Similarly, liquefied natural gas (LNG)
these issues is headed.
displaces higher emitting fuels making it a climate
In a new book, Bill Gates argues that defeating the
solution, not the problem that some claim.
reality of climate change means eliminating greenhouse
Process improvements that brought deep and fast
gas emissions by a mixture of solutions, including
reductions in Canada’s upstream oil and gas emissions
investments in new technologies.
are met with stoney silence among those who insist on a perfect solution, or no solution at all.
Gates’ often refers to Canadian researcher, Winnipeg’s Vaclav Smil, who in numerous books over his long academic career has shown why grand predictions inevitably turn out to be wrong, and why the transformation of energy systems will not be an
40
Electric vehicles are positioned as a miracle cure for what ails the environment. Exxon projects that if all new cars were electric by 2025, and the world’s entire light-duty fleet was electric by 2040, liquid-fuel demand in 2040
“exceptionally speedy” affair.
would remain the same as it was in 2013. This is due in
Like a typical computer programmer, Gates knows
trucks, and rail because most of the world’s population
that the way to solve a complex problem is to first
wants to live as we do in Europe and North America.
Resource Connector North 2021
large part to growth in heavy-duty uses like shipping,
