This article was written by Mia Rabson and was published in the Toronto Star on June 23, 2023.
More than one in four Canadians told a polling firm this week that they have been affected by the record-setting wildfires that have rocked much of Canada over the spring, and more than three in four say they think there are more fires now than in the past.
The Leger poll comes just after Environment and Climate Change Canada issued an updated summer forecast that predicts the conditions that led to the spring wildfire catastrophe are not going to let up in July and August.
“Canadians have experienced a hot and dry spring,” said Environment Canada warning preparedness meteorologist Armel Castellan. “Current seasonal forecasts suggest the anomalously hot conditions will continue across the country this summer.”
He said that means the risk of a high number of wildfires, more evacuations and smoke-filled skies continues.
There have been more than 2,700 wildfires in Canada so far this year, which have burned 59,000 square kilometres of forest and other land. That’s a total area more than 10 times the size of Prince Edward Island.
On Tuesday, 409 fires were still burning, 202 of them out of control.
The fires have led to tens of thousands of evacuations, and multiple warnings about high-risk air quality as smoke from the fires settled over major urban centres, including as far south as Washington, D.C.
In a Léger poll for The Canadian Press, 26 per cent of Canadians and 23 per cent of Americans said they have been directly or indirectly affected by fires this year.
In Alberta, where the fires have been particularly troublesome for two months, almost 40 per cent of respondents said they had been affected by the fires.
The Léger poll surveyed 1,500 Canadians and 1,000 Americans online between June 16 and 19.
The poll cannot be assigned a margin of error because online polls are not considered to be truly random samples.
The Léger poll suggests 61 per cent of Canadians think extreme heat is becoming more frequent, while 77 per cent said wildfires are more common. It showed 69 per cent said poor air quality is more common and 63 per cent said large swings in temperature are becoming more frequent.
Also, 67 per cent of respondents said the changes in climate are worrying to them, and 37 per cent said they think it’s already too late to reverse climate change.
Half said they think there is still time to do so, while 12 per cent said they did not believe in climate change.
This editorial was written and published by the Globe & Mail on June 23, 2023.
The National Energy Board was established in 1959 and headquartered in Calgary. It oversaw the export of oil and natural gas. Eight years later, on Canada’s centenary, it published its first long-term energy outlook, focused on fossil fuels. Each forecast that followed maintained that focus.
A different view of the future arrived this week. The Canada Energy Regulator – rebranded in 2019 – published its first map of what the country’s road to net zero greenhouse gas emissions could look like. It’s not a prediction of what will happen but serves as a sketch of what shape success might take.
The conclusion is net zero 2050 is doable but there’s a lot of work to do. The array of current and pending climate policies, including the rising carbon tax to 2030 and cutting fossil fuels out of the electrical grid by 2035, won’t be enough. Political debate is stuck on whether Canada’s doing too much. The fact is it’s not doing enough.
The CER is late to the game. Two years ago, the Paris-based International Energy Agency published a landmark report: Net Zero by 2050. IEA forecasts, like those of the CER, had long been about fossil fuels. The 2021 report instead detailed a lot more renewable power and a lot less oil and natural gas. In late 2021, however, the CER’s annual outlook remained rooted in the past. This space was critical of the behind-the times approach, because the CER’s work serves as a widely used reference document. The Liberal government soon after asked for a reboot.
The result landed on Monday. It is an essential report but its main findings contain no surprises. The outlines of what’s necessary, in Canada and around the world, are already well known: lots more electrical power, to replace fossil fuels in everything from transportation to heating homes; and generating that new power from clean sources. The total supply of electrical power needs to more than double by 2050, the CER calculated, a similar conclusion as others have found. Wind power is predicted to be at the fore of change, with the CER citing “low capital and operating costs.”
The CER modelled two main scenarios, one in which Canada and the world make it to net zero by 2050 and a second in which Canada succeeds but the world doesn’t hit the deadline. The difference between these two outlooks is best seen in what happens to oil – and there are two key lessons.
Oil output is at a record level, close to 5-million barrels a day. In a net zero world in 2050, demand for oil collapses, by about 75 per cent, around the same as what the IEA foresees in such a scenario. (Demand for natural gas also plummets.) But in the CER forecast where the world doesn’t reach net zero by 2050, Canadian oil production could still be 4.1-million b/d – driven by continued global demand.
The lessons are clear. First, the future of Canada’s No. 1 export is one of long-term decline. It is a major challenge for the country’s economy. But, second, it doesn’t make sense to force lower oil production just to claim lower emissions. The CER charts a way for domestic net zero in 2050, as oil and gas output is largely decarbonized, while still selling a sizable volume of fossil fuels abroad, if there is demand.
Of the CER’s main conclusion – that net zero 2050 in Canada is doable but there’s a lot of work to do – the main question is what more is to be done.
The primary policy tool should be the carbon tax, an ever higher rate to increase the squeeze across the economy away from fossil fuels.
Ottawa made a big bet on the carbon tax in late 2020 but more recently shifted to increasingly complicated regulatory measures. Some of that can be valuable – planned federal subsidies for clean power make sense – but the carbon tax should be Canada’s main lever. And as revenue from carbon pricing rises, Ottawa has to make sure it is fully revenue neutral, rather than just another source of general revenue.
The CER’s work also details of what’s possible on the road to net zero.
Clean power, a hot debate this spring, is an example. Alberta and Saskatchewan say they believe in net zero 2050 but don’t think it’s possible in power generation by 2035. The CER indicates clean power on the Prairies by the mid-2030s can happen, led by investments in wind power.
It took too long for the CER to produce a map to net zero. Now that it’s here, it becomes a guiding document as Canada builds its clean energy future.
This article was written by Amanda Stephenson and Jeff McIntosh, and was published in the Toronto Star on June 21, 2023.
The Canada Energy Regulator says that if the world is successful in reaching its 2050 climate targets and holding global temperatures to 1.5 C of warming, global fossil fuel use will drop by 65 per cent from 2021 to 2050. That would prompt a collapse in global oil prices, to as low as $35 (U.S.) per barrel by 2030 and $24 per barrel by 2050, it says.
New modelling from the Canada Energy Regulator suggests Canadian oil production will plummet by 2050 if the world achieves its Paris target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions within that time.
The report, released Tuesday, marks the first time the regulator has presented a longterm outlook for Canadian energy using net-zero as a baseline.
It paints a picture of a dramatically different energy sector, especially if the world is successful in reaching its 2050 climate targets and holding global temperatures to 1.5 C of warming.
In that scenario, in which domestic and global climate policy successfully reduces the world’s emissions to net-zero, the Canada Energy Regulator says global fossil fuel use will drop by 65 per cent from 2021 to 2050. That would prompt a collapse in global oil prices, to as low as $35 (U.S.) per barrel by 2030 and $24 per barrel by 2050, it says.
The report concludes that as a result of these low prices, Canadian crude oil production would fall to 1.2 million barrels per day by 2050, 76 per cent below 2022 levels.
“In a net-zero world, not only for Canada but for the rest of the planet, the supply and demand dynamic that we see today will be very different,” Canada Energy Regulator chief economist Jean-Denis Charlebois told reporters Tuesday.
“Because there will be less demand for hydrocarbons, producers of hydrocarbons will need to be increasingly efficient at managing their costs in order to remain competitive.”
The regulator also modelled two other scenarios — one in which Canada achieves net-zero by 2050, but large developing countries like China and India move at a slower pace.
In that scenario, the CER said global oil prices will likely remain above $60 per barrel all the way to 2050, with Canadian oil production declining by just 22 per cent.
The report also looked at what would happen in a “business as usual” case, which assumes no additional efforts to reduce emissions beyond what is already in place, and no further attempts to reach Paris climate targets.
In that scenario, Canadian oil production would actually rise to reach 6.1 million barrels per day by 2050 — 20 per cent higher than in 2022.
Charlebois told reporters the three scenarios laid out are models, not forecasts, and the regulator has not made any predictions about which is most likely to become reality.
“At the end of the day, we don’t comment or opine on the likelihood of it happening,” he said. “It remains to be seen whether it will actually look that way in the real world.”
But he acknowledged that under the global net-zero scenario, the rapid decline in oil prices would put pressure on Canadian companies to drastically reduce their costs in order to remain profitable.
And he said that could put pressure on higher-cost producers, especially oilsands companies, which are more carbon-intensive than conventional producers and face steeper costs to lower their emissions.
“In the two net-zero scenarios, we see conventional production being more resilient than oilsands production,” Charlebois said.
The Pathways Alliance, a consortium of oilsands companies, has pledged to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. However, it has said the carbon capture and storage network it wants to build in order to help it reach that goal will cost $16.5 billion.
This article wa written by Emma Graney and was published in the Globe & Mail on June 21, 2023.
Clean electricity will become the cornerstone of Canada’s energy future and the use of fossil fuels will drop significantly if the country is to reach its goal of net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050, according to a new federal analysis.
The report, released Tuesday, is the Canada Energy Regulator’s (CER’s) first long-term outlook modelling net-zero by 2050. It outlines three scenarios: global net-zero, Canada net-zero and the continuation of current measures. But the agency emphasized that the scenarios aren’t predictions about the future or policy recommendations but sketches of Canada’s possible energy future.
“Uncertainty is inherent in all energy modelling exercises,” Gitane De Silva, the CER’s chief executive, wrote in her introduction to the report. “I am sure not everyone will agree with the assumptions we made, nor our findings.”
Nevertheless, Ms. De Silva said the report presents scenarios “that can help Canadians and policy makers see what a net-zero world could look like, visualize the goal, and make informed decisions.”
Canada, the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, is grappling with how to best balance its economic reliance on fossil fuel production with the global goal of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
Under the global net-zero scenario, Canada achieves net-zero emissions by 2050 and the rest of the world reduces emissions enough to limit global warming to 1.5 C. The Canada net-zero scenario envisages a future where we hit net-zero by 2050 but other countries move more slowly.
The current measures scenario relies on a model whereby Canada sticks to the emissions-reduction measures in place today – the eventual $170-a-tonne carbon tax by 2030-31, for example, but not an oil-and-gas emissions cap being developed by Ottawa.
This editorial was written and published by the Globe & Mail on June 21, 2023.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to meet Wednesday with the premiers and territorial leaders in Whistler, B.C. Infrastructure spending is on the agenda. Hopefully, the Prime Minister and premiers will pay attention to the road on the way up to the mountain resort town.
That road is the Sea to Sky Highway. It was upgraded ahead of the 2010 Winter Olympics to improve traffic safety – and to better withstand the risks from extreme weather such as severe rainstorms, which are increasing as the climate warms.
Canada needs much more of that kind of climate-resilient infrastructure. Spending now to fortify bridges and roads will save money in the long run, when a bridge does not collapse or a road is not washed away. That is simple common sense; less simple is the answer to the question of who will pay for it.
The premiers want to use the Whistler meeting to lay out demands for more money from Ottawa. Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson, as chair of the Council of the Federation, outlined the premiers’ ask in a letter to the prime minister last week. The premiers want cash transfers in the form of block funding with each province collecting base funding, plus a per capita amount. And they want to decide which projects Ottawa should help pay for.
After all, they argue, who better understands each province’s unique infrastructure needs.
The premiers are right, in part: Ottawa shouldn’t be deciding which highway or interchange gets a green light. But simply handing over bags of cash in the vague hope that the provinces will spend it on climate-minded projects isn’t much of a strategy.
It’s very much in Ottawa’s interest, indeed the national interest, to accelerate the pace of climate-proofing infrastructure.
One approach could be for Ottawa to set up a fund to pay for the incremental costs of building infrastructure to climate-resilient standards. That would preserve the provinces’ ability to decide what infrastructure to fund, while allowing Ottawa to push its climate-resiliency goals.
In 2019, an expert panel laid out the top climate risks in Canada. They warned of damage to critical infrastructure from heavy precipitation events, high winds and flooding. The chances of power outages and grid failures are growing. Coastal communities are especially at risk due to sea-level rise and storm surges, while thawing permafrost threatens Northern communities.
This year’s federal budget was laden with clean energy investments, with a new tax credit to build renewable energy infrastructure, and a new program that gives grants to companies, as well as provincial and territorial governments, that are looking to modernize existing power grids or install renewable power.
Additionally, the federal government has tabled a draft of its $1.6-billion climate adaptation plan. The plan as proposed was incomplete. The Canadian Climate Institute, an independent policy research group, described it as a set of targets and priorities that failed to identify the country’s top climatechange risks. If the final plan addresses those concerns, it will help build communities that can adapt to extreme heat and ice storms, wildfires and flooding.
Mr. Trudeau’s political agenda is clear enough, putting climate resiliency at the centre of discussions over infrastructure. Pragmatic fiscal considerations point the same way. Disasters are increasing in frequency and severity across Canada. They are costly to everyone involved, but the federal government, under the Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements, ends up with the largest financial burden when the recovery bill lands.
There is of course an additional cost to engineering for extreme weather – but it is a much smaller figure than paying for recovery after disaster strikes.
The Climate Institute calculates billions of dollars in savings with pro-active investments in fortifying roads and railways. With small changes in maintenance and replacement work, such as altering asphalt mixes and surface sealants to better withstand rising summer temperatures or greater precipitation, repairs down the road will cost less.
There are also simple, low-cost measures that can be taken now to improve the resilience of the electrical grid that will be so important in our increasingly decarbonized world.
It’s time for governments to co-operate, to make Canada more resilient.
Taking up these technologies that are already catching on would cut the average Canadian household’s carbon footprint by 80 per cent, according to a Corporate Knights analysis
This article was written by Marco Chown Oved and Ralph Torrie, and was published in the Toronto Star on June 20, 2023.
If someone had told you in 2008 — the year after the first iPhone was released — that in the next 15 years, virtually everyone in Canada would have a smartphone, you might have rolled your eyes all the way to the internet café (as you slowly tapped out a text on your numbered keypad).
Nowadays, it’s hard to believe we ever lived without the internet in our pockets.
But that’s how adoption curves work: New technology wins converts slowly at first, then all at once.
The digital technology that swept our lives into this millennium changed the way we communicate and shop, plan trips and watch shows. But it also came with a heavy cost to the planet. The greenhouse gases produced by online video streaming exceed one per cent of global emissions. Bitcoin miners produce more carbon emissions than some entire countries.
The next wave of technological upgrades to our lives, however, will emit zero carbon. It’s going to change how we get around, the way we heat and cool our homes and what we use to cook and take showers.
The electric vehicle (EV), heat pump, induction stove and heat-pump water heater may not alter our behaviour as much as texting and email have. But they will revolutionize society, allowing us to continue to do many daily activities — only faster, more efficiently and without producing emissions.
And they are poised to go from curiosity to ubiquity faster than you think.
The carbon-saving potential is enormous. According to an analysis by Corporate Knights’ research division and shared with the Star, these four technologies alone would cut the average Canadian household’s carbon footprint by 80 per cent. If everyone made the switch, it would eliminate 92 megatonnes from Canada’s national emissions annually — more than produced by all of the country’s oil sands.
The financial benefit is even greater. If everyone in Canada swapped out their existing gas-powered car, furnace, stove and water heater for these green technologies, the collective yearly savings would be more than $65 billion, the analysis found — $4,300 per household.
These ecological and economic incentives have created the conditions for rapid adoption, motivating governments that have emission-reduction targets to meet, as well as individuals feeling the squeeze of fossil-fuel-driven inflation.
Critics say fear of climate change will not prompt people to adopt new technology. They argue that we just love our gas stoves and gas-guzzling SUVs too much. But dozens of car dealers and HVAC professionals who spoke with the Star said EVs and heat pumps are popular not because they’re green — people are buying them for other reasons: convenience, comfort and savings.
The result is a win-win. People’s lives get better. They save money. And the faster these technologies are adopted, the fewer emissions Canada will produce.
The Star has partnered with Corporate Knights to analyze the benefits of these clean technologies, quantifying just how much cash Canadians in each province can save by adopting them, and what their impact will be on emissions.
The results vary widely across the country.
In Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia, where hydro dams provide cheap, carbon-free electricity, the benefit of ditching fossil fuels is the greatest. An average British Columbian household switching to these four technologies would save more than $4,800 per year and virtually eliminate their carbon footprint (more than 97 per cent reduction).
In provinces with carbon-intensive electricity, such as Alberta and Nova Scotia, switching off fossil fuels has a smaller impact — and can even make your emissions rise in some cases — but the financial benefits are not insignificant. An average Nova Scotian household adopting the four green technologies would save $5,200 per year and shrink their emissions by five tonnes (or 64 per cent).
Switching now is also future-proofed. As the carbon tax rises, the cost savings grow — reaching an additional $790 per year on average for every household in 2030. And as the electrical grids in these provinces decarbonize, the already low emissions will piggy back them right down to zero.
We’ve reached out to early adopters to find out about the benefits and challenges of these technologies, and have created calculators so you can figure out the estimated cost and emissions savings associated with each technology depending on where you live.
While no one would say these four pieces of green technology are a panacea for solving climate change, they’re a big start. And they’re something individuals can do without waiting for the government to act (though the incentives and rebates help).
Each EV, water heater, heat pump and induction stove on its own may not make a big difference for the warming planet, but they will save a family hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a year. And as Canadians switch away from burning fossil fuels and electrify their lives, the cumulative power of individual action is undeniable.
Electric vehicles (EVs)
David Hollingworth is an active skier, someone who heads up to Whistler from his home in North Vancouver for a day on the slopes whenever the powder is fresh.
But unlike many of his neighbours, he straps his skis to the top of his EV (a Nissan Leaf) for the trip into the mountains, and leaves his family’s gas-powered Honda CRV at home.
“It’s just a no-brainer, the cost savings,” he said. While it costs more than $100 to gas up the CRV, Hollingworth estimates that an overnight charge for the Leaf runs him only about $2.
In the eight years since he bought his EV, Hollingworth says he’s grown more enamoured with it. The Leaf serves his family’s day-to-day needs so well they’ve cancelled the insurance on the Honda except for a few months in the winter when they go on longer ski trips.
“I don’t keep a log of the expenses for both vehicles, but it’s just obvious. I’m sure that we’ve saved thousands of dollars in fuel and maintenance (with the EV),” he said. “Even driving the CRV a lot less, it seems to cost us at least $1,000 in repairs every year. And the Nissan Leaf, it’s basically maintenance-free.”
EV owners often cite fuel and maintenance savings as the top benefits. In B.C. — which has the highest gasoline prices in the country and some of the lowest electricity prices — those savings are $2,450 per year on average, according to the Corporate Knights’ analysis.
(The savings figure assumes charging at home using average electricity prices. Of course, many EV owners minimize their costs by charging overnight when electricity is cheaper and searching out free charging, still widely available.)
These prices don’t include the $5,000 federal EV purchase subsidy, which is topped up by certain provinces, ranging from $2,500 in Newfoundland and Labrador to $7,000 in Quebec. (Ontario cancelled its EV purchase rebate in 2018 when Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives came into power.)
In B.C. and Quebec, the purchase subsidies are coupled with a sales mandate, requiring dealerships to have EVs available for purchase. (The federal government announced a nationwide sales mandate last December.) This combination has fueled the fastest uptake of EVs in the country. Last year, EVs made up 16 per cent of all new-car sales in B.C. and 12 per cent in Quebec.
In addition to savings, EVs also boast souped-up climate impacts.
Even in provinces with electricity generated from fossil fuels, EVs dramatically reduce emissions because they’re so efficient. In an EV, up to 91 per cent of the energy in the battery goes directly to turning the wheels, while in a gas-powered car, 84 per cent of the energy from the gas tank is lost to heat and friction.
So in Alberta and Saskatchewan, where most electricity is generated by burning coal and natural gas, an average family would reduce their carbon emissions by 1.2 tonnes by switching to an EV, the Corporate Knights analysis found.
In Quebec, Manitoba and B.C., where most electricity comes from hydro dams, an EV would cut a family’s carbon emissions by far more: 3.1 tonnes per year.
Nationwide, if everyone switched to an EV, it would lower Canada’s carbon emissions by 57.8 megatonnes, or about 8.6 per cent of all emissions. This assumes we maintain our current electrical-generation sources. But if the federal government succeeds in getting our electrical grids to net-zero by 2035, EV adoption would reduce emissions by 67 megatonnes, or 10 per cent.
On each trip up to Whistler in his Leaf, Hollingworth has to make a 20-minute stop in Squamish for a quick charge. He uses the opportunity to stretch and admire the mountains — taking pleasure, he says, in knowing he’s doing his part to protect the beautiful scenery from climate change.
“There is some type of endorphin or dopamine that happens when you know you just saved a bunch of carbon emissions,” he said.
He said he thinks everyone will soon be driving EVs, not only to reduce emissions, but because they’re so much cheaper and more convenient to operate.
“We’re in a transition period now. People will roll their eyes in the future when they look at how we lived today.”
Heat pumps
Shortly after Brian Gifford retired and moved back to Halifax, he knew he had to do something about the oil furnace in his basement, which was costing him $2,500 to run each winter.
Not knowing that he had any choice but to continue to use oil, he added insulation to his basement, walls and attic — and saw his heating bills go down to $1,700.
Five years later, he was told his firebox had a crack and the furnace would have to be replaced, so he looked at switching to natural gas — newly available in the Maritimes — or buying an electric heat pump.
“Both environmentally and financially, heat pumps made a whole lot more sense,” he said.
Installed in 2015, the heat pump has reduced his annual heating bill to $700 — about a quarter of what it used to be.
“The heat pump is a huge, huge benefit, especially in places like the Maritimes, where heating costs are relatively high because we use oil,” he said.
“We’re saving a lot of money,” he said. “We’re really happy with that.”
For decades, heat pumps weren’t powerful enough to heat through Canadian winters. But the new generation of cold-climate heat pumps have been shown to work in the deep cold of Whitehorse. They also do double-duty, running in reverse to provide air conditioning in the summer.
Much like the EV, the heat pump electrifies something that’s traditionally powered with fossil fuels. And like an EV, switching to a heat pump to heat your home saves money and reduces emissions — even on a dirty grid, like Nova Scotia’s — because the technology is so much more efficient.
While the newest natural-gas furnaces operate at 98 per cent efficiency, heat pumps are 220 to 320 per cent efficient in Canadian conditions. This means that in a furnace, one unit of energy in natural gas produces 0.98 units of heat in your home. But with a heat pump, one unit of energy in electricity produces 2.2 to 3.2 units of heat. (This works because heat pumps use ambient heat in the air and concentrate it, gaining a multiplier effect on the energy used to power the process.)
As a result, heat pumps promise cost savings not only for people who switch from natural gas and oil furnaces, but for those switching from electric baseboards, because they will use far less electricity to produce the same amount of heat.
The Corporate Knights research division calculated that for a typical single-family detached house in Nova Scotia, switching from an oil furnace to a heat pump would save $1,750 in annual heating costs. They would save even more switching from baseboard heating: $2,773 per year.
The price to install a heat pump can vary from around $4,500 for a hybrid (one that works with your existing furnace) to upwards of $20,000 for a top-of-the-line centrally ducted model. Federal government rebates of up to $5,000 and zero-interest loans of $40,000, both offered through Ottawa’s Greener Homes Initiative, can significantly reduce how much you pay out of pocket at the outset.
Greener Homes can even eliminate the cost: if you’re switching from oil to a heat pump, there’s a special federal program that will cover up to $10,000. Provincial rebates can also stack on top of the federal ones, offering an additional $5,000 in Ontario and Nova Scotia, and up to $20,000 in Quebec, reducing upfront costs even further.
Since the federal subsidies were introduced in 2021, heat-pump adoption has shot up, surpassing sales of natural gas furnaces in Canada for the first time, according to wholesale shipment information tracked by the Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Institute of Canada.
Because of their efficiency, heat pumps use far less energy to heat than furnaces, but just how big their impact is on carbon emissions is mostly determined by how the electricity is generated. In Nova Scotia, where the majority of electricity comes from coal and oil, switching from an oil furnace to a heat pump will reduce a typical household’s emissions by 1.2 tonnes.
In provinces with lots of carbon-free renewable electricity, the greenhouse-gas reductions are even greater. In Ontario, for example, a household switching to a heat pump would reduce its emissions by 4.2 tonnes and save $489 a year at today’s gas prices — savings that will nearly double by 2030 as the carbon tax increases.
Canada-wide, if everyone switched to heat pumps, it would produce annual savings of $13.5 billion and an emission drop of 26.3 megatonnes, or four per cent of the nation’s total, the Corporate Knights analysis found.
For a peek at the future, look no further than Sweden, where heat pumps have almost entirely replaced oil for residential heat. Since 1990, the pumps have been responsible for chopping carbon emissions from heating by 95 per cent, according to Martin Forsen, the president of the European Heat Pump Association, who gave a recent presentation in Toronto.
The adoption of heat pumps has gone so well in his Scandinavian country that he sees their global dominance as an inevitability.
“I don’t think it’s a question of if. It’s just a question of when,” Forsen said.
Heat-pump water heaters and induction stoves
Anya Barkan’s water heater was 15 years old and “a piece of garbage” when she called her rental company and asked for it to be replaced.
After some back-and-forth that left her frustrated, she decided to break free from the rental contract she had inherited when she bought her home and get a heat-pump water heater.
“It just made sense. We wanted to stop that monthly fee and get something that is much more energy-efficient and also not reliant on natural gas,” she said.
Breaking the contract proved much harder than getting the water heater. But ever since, Barkan said she has been happy, and not only because she no longer pays the monthly rental fee.
“You can make your house more efficient and lower your bills. But also it’s better for the environment in terms of fighting climate change,” she said.
Water heaters don’t have a huge impact on gas bills on their own. But like gas stoves, they are often one of the few links to the natural gas system in a home. If swapping these two gas appliances for electric means being able to cut your gas line, it supercharges the savings because it eliminates the fixed monthly charge for natural gas, which comes to $325 a year in Ontario.
Because gas water heaters consume relatively little gas, the Corporate Knights research found that swapping one out for a heater that operates with a heat pump would save an Ontario family just $124 per year. For an induction stove, the annual savings in Ontario for switching from a gas stove is only five dollars. But if switching lets you cut your gas line, those combined savings jump to $439 a year.
While the ensuing uproar prompted the head of the agency to walk back talk of a ban, the health hazards are real. Health Canada’s residential indoor air-quality guidelines estimate that 25 per cent of houses with gas stoves exceed the exposure limit for nitrogen dioxide (NO2), one of the toxic compounds released when a gas stove is turned on, “for brief periods of time after cooking” — even with “moderate ventilation.”
Soon, people moving into new houses and apartments could have no choice but to go without gas appliances. Dozens of cities across the United States, recently joined by Vancouver, have banned natural gas hookups in new developments. The state of New York just passed a similar ban and Toronto and Montreal city councils are considering similar measures.
Even though they burn little gas, the climate impact of eliminating these gas-burning appliances isn’t negligible. Switching from a gas stove to induction will reduce an average Ontario household’s indoor emissions of greenhouse gasses by 370 kg. Swapping a gas water heater for a heat-pump version saves 640 kg.
If everyone in Canada made these changes, the collective impact would reduce emissions by 7.6 megatonnes, more than one per cent of all emissions in the country.
It’s what analysts refer to as the light bulb effect. When incandescent light bulbs were replaced by LEDs, the difference in electricity consumption was tiny for any one lamp or light fixture. But multiplied across households, apartment buildings, university campuses and sport stadiums, the cumulative impact was enormous.
That’s where we’re at right now with climate change. The solutions are all readily available. The wind turbines and solar panels that provide clean electricity are being adopted much faster than anyone predicted. Now it’s time to electrify and use that clean power to eliminate carbon emissions.
“It’s not just your individual action that will change the world,” said Barkan. “We need to go at it together.”
Droughts, storms, wildfires and heat waves: Extreme weather around the world is becoming more intense and more frequent. The toll is huge and mounting, with lives lost, homes destroyed, livelihoods stolen and economies upended.
Countries must phase out coal and other fossil fuels to avert climate “catastrophe”, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned on Thursday in New York.
Guterres warns companies not to ‘kneecap progress’ by undermining climate measures
This article was written by Frank Jordans and was published in the Toronto Star on June 16, 2023.
The head of the United Nations launched a tirade against fossil fuel companies Thursday, accusing them of betraying future generations and undermining efforts to phase out a product he called “incompatible with human survival.”
Secretary-General António Guterres also dismissed suggestions by some oil executives — including the man tapped to chair this year’s international climate talks in Dubai — that fossil fuel firms can keep up production if they find a way to capture planet-warming carbon emissions.
He warned that this would just make them “more efficient planetwreckers.”
It’s not the first time the UN chief has called out Big Oil over its role in causing global warming, but the blunt attack reflects growing frustration at the industry’s recent profit bonanza despite warnings from scientists that burning fossil fuels will push the world far beyond any safe climate threshold.
“Last year, the oil and gas industry reaped a record $4 trillion (U.S.) windfall in net income,” Guterres said after a meeting with civil society groups. “Yet for every dollar it spends on oil and gas drilling and exploration, only four cents went to clean energy and carbon capture — combined.”
“Trading the future for thirty pieces of silver is immoral,” he said.
Guterres called on the industry to put forward a credible plan for shifting to clean energy “and away from a product incompatible with human survival.”
Investing their massive profits instead in renewable energy would allow the industry “to survive the transition and remain very important and relevant actors in the world economy,” he said.
Fossil fuel companies have lately pushed the idea that they should be allowed to keep pumping oil and gas out of the ground as long as they remove greenhouse gas emissions in the process, a suggestion experts reject as too complicated and costly to deliver the urgent cuts of greenhouse gas needed.
“The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions,” Guterres said, a nod to recent comments made by Sultan al-Jaber, the United Arab Emirates official who will lead the next UN climate summit. “It’s fossil fuels — period.”
Al-Jaber, who is also the U.A.E.’s minister of industry and chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., has come under fire from environmentalists and western lawmakers for his close ties to the fossil fuel industry. Al-Jaber was chosen by the U.A.E. to lead the COP28 talks and any criticism by the UN chief — albeit veiled — is highly unusual.
In a statement, al-Jaber’s office noted that he has backed ramping up of renewable energy, recently called the phasedown of fossil fuels “inevitable” and urged the industry to up its game when it comes to cutting emissions.
Guterres’s comments Thursday came as negotiators from almost 200 countries wrapped up two weeks of talks in Bonn, Germany, in preparation for COP28.
The UN climate office confirmed Thursday that it will require delegates attending the summit in Dubai to disclose their affiliation in an effort to clamp down on undue influence by fossil fuel companies and others.
Participants will also be asked to provide optional information on their relationship with the government agency or organization that’s nominated them and those declining to do so will be flagged accordingly.
Civil society groups welcomed the decision, which will apply to them too, but said participants should also have to disclose who is funding their attendance.
Guterres echoed their concerns, warning that fossil fuel companies are undermining climate measures and said they must “cease and desist influence-peddling and legal threats designed to kneecap progress.”
“I am thinking particularly of recent attempts to subvert net zero alliances, invoking antitrust legislation,” Guterres said, referring to efforts in some U.S. states aimed at preventing insurance companies from setting environmental standards for the companies they invest in.
Trading the future for thirty pieces of silver is immoral. ANTÓNIO GUTERRES UN SECRETARYGENERAL
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Mobilize, Canada! 