Urban Renaissance Institute

Lawrence Solomon
FP Comment
March 7, 2009

Ontario’s Green Energy Act should more accurately be called Ontario’s Gangreen Act.

No piece of legislation in memory will do more to simultaneously undermine Ontario’s economy and environment. This one act rolls back decades of environmental gains in the energy sphere and opens the door to a future of environmental outrages.

All forms of energy supply have environmental drawbacks, including the much touted renewables; hydro dams can damage river ecosystems, solar arrays can consume large amounts of land, wind farms kill birds and bats. The environmental drawbacks are then compounded by the need to deliver the energy to market over great distances; underground pipeline construction for oil and gas does mostly temporary harm and transmission towers for electricity leave permanent blights. For such reasons, the traditional energy preference of environmentalists has been conservation, by far the most benign of all the energy alternatives.

Two other factors make conservation or energy efficiency, as conservation is also known, a hands-down winner: The untapped potential for savings remains phenomenally large and these savings can be had at low cost, if only governments allowed conservation technologies to compete on a level playing field against their energy supplying and energy consuming competitors. Because governments have steadily been removing subsidies as part of the economic liberalization that has gone on over the last few decades – tar sands plants, mega dams, nuclear plants and the automobile are among the many that saw their government favours erode – conservation has made steady gains.

The Green Act undermines the advance of conservation by making renewable energy, particularly wind power, the enemy of conservation.

Under Ontario’s Green Act, energy developers are entitled to build wind farms without need to consider whether a conservation technology alternative could do the job at less cost. The subsidy to wind development companies is so high, in fact, that Ontario consumers will be forced by law to pay these developers up to three times as much per kilowatt-hour as they do for other forms of energy. This direct state-sanctioned gouging of electricity consumers will then be augmented by the indirect gouging of consumers.

The Green Act allows wind developers to stake out the province, including remote parts of the province, and demand that the power from their wind turbines be transported to distant markets via massive transmission corridors all at public expense. In the past, environmentalists have rallied to stop uneconomic long-distance transmission corridors, aided by the many affected communities. These corridors slice through rich farm belts, pristine forests and wilderness areas, cottage country, rural communities and finally urban centres, creating grievances along their entire path.

In future, such opposition from affected communities will be knee-capped, partly because the Green Act denies communities their long-standing rights to public participation in projects that affect their local environments, partly because many environmentalists have switched sides in opposing transmission towers. To further worsen the odds that local communities now face, corporate lobbies in the renewable energy business, many of them multinationals, back both the environmentalists and the government, and fund both too.

The environmentalists are content with this bargain, unmoved by those whose properties will be expropriated. Or by those who live adjacent to the transmission corridor, whose quality of life will be devalued by their unsightly new neighbour. Or by those who work in the eco-tourism business or other industries that depend on unspoiled nature. They argue that these costs are necessary for the greater good. (The environmentalists may be less content in future – this precedent that they’ve created can just as easily be applied to squelch the public’s rights in opposing the siting of a nuclear or coal plant, or any other project that environmentalists might oppose.)

Environmentalists will argue that the Green Act is good for conservation, because of the acts provisions for home energy audits and utility conservation targets. In fact, the Green Act has put conservation in a box, capping its potential to the trickle that will come of a few high-profile sectors, for which government conservation programs can be devised. Meanwhile, the gushers of potential conservation in the greater economy – virtually every product and service involves the consumption of energy – are left to languish. The only way to encourage across the board energy conservation, and obtain the massive reductions in energy consumption that are economically justified, is to stop subsidizing energy in all its forms and force society to face the true cost of energy.

Even the energy savings from the government’s targeted conservation programs are likely to backfire and actually spur wasteful consumption – this is the sorry history of government-mandated conservation programs. And to complete the wrong-headedness of the Green Act, its chief objective, the replacement of fossil fuel use with renewables, will fail miserably. Because the wind doesnt always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, every kilowatt of wind capacity that is built in some remote part of the province will need to be backed up by almost as much fossil fuel power.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
February 20, 2009

During President Barack Obama’s visit to Canada this week, he and Prime Minister Stephen Harper pledged to spend billions developing technologies that would capture carbon and then store it underground.

Carbon capture and storage, as these schemes are known, is misguided environmentally, economically, and in the long term, politically too. Carbon capture has only one virtue: It solves short-term political problems for both leaders.

Harper has an overarching aim in funding carbon capture – the continuing development of the Alberta tar sands. Environmentalists castigate oil from tar sands as “dirty oil” for one reason above all: Tar sands oil generates more carbon dioxide than does oil from conventional sources. With carbon capture technology promising to counter much of the greenhouse gas associated with tar sands development, Harper can neutralize the main opposition to more tar sands projects.As a bonus, he will be fulfilling a campaign promise to address global warming.

Obama has two aims in funding carbon capture. For one thing, he needs oil from Canada’s tar sands to fulfill his campaign promise of weaning the U.S. off Middle-Eastern oil; for another, as this week’s U.S.-Canada Clean Energy Dialogue makes clear, he wants to exploit America’s vast coal reserves, both for their economic benefits and to promote U.S. energy independence, another campaign promise.

Carbon capture and storage, however, is not as green as it seems – underground burial of carbon dioxide presents immense new risks to society. If the carbon dioxide is stored in deep ocean masses, as sometimes proposed, environmentalists fear that ocean acidification could devastate marine eco-systems. If the carbon dioxide is stored in geologic formations near fossil fuel plants, as is more commonly proposed, the harmful effects would directly affect human life: Research at Columbia University by one of the world’s leading geohazard scientists ranks carbon storage as one of the five top coming causes of man-induced earthquakes, a prediction all the more scary because the earthquakes would tend to occur near the fossil fuel plants, and population centres. In another potential danger, some fret about the consequences of an accidental release of carbon dioxide from underground storage facilities. In Cameroon in 1986, 1,800 people died after an unexplained release of carbon dioxide from beneath Lake Nyos, which has deep stores of carbon dioxide beneath its bottom.

Apart from these unknown future risks of stuffing carbon dioxide underground, carbon capture technologies are chock-a-block with known problems, all stemming from the fact that these technologies are, in the parlance of environmentalists, energy pigs. As one example, a typical coal plant employing carbon capture technology requires between 24% and 50% more energy for every kilowatt-hour produced.

At this level of resource gluttony, the world’s store of non-renewable fossil fuels would be consumed at a fast clip wherever carbon capture technology was applied. Worse, other pollutants that environmentalists have long fought would also increase. The “clean coal” plants that President Obama touts would produce one-third more in nitrous oxides, a major contributor to smog. Likewise, carbon capture technology applied to tar sands plants would mean that additional tar sands plants would need to be developed just to run the tar sands carbon capture facilities.

Ironically, carbon capture technology would not only worsen air quality and more rapidly scar the tar sands landscape, it may also harm the global environment if it is successful in its goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide stimulates plant growth and leads to a greening of the planet. In fact, satellite measurements now show the planet to be the greenest in decades. Little wonder that, in surveys of scientists, the great majority view carbon dioxide as a beneficial gas that’s indispensable to plant growth, and insignificant to any deleterious global warming.

To add to the irony, even if carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that plays a significant role in warming the planet, there may be good reason to encourage its release into the atmosphere. A decade ago, the planet stopped warming and a year ago, global temperatures began to decline markedly. If, as many scientists now speculate, Earth could be entering a new Little Ice Age, carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases could mitigate the hardship that would come with a cooling planet.

The environmental drawbacks in carbon capture also spell economic trouble. The complexity of the technology, and its energy inefficiency, translate into high prices. Estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show customers should be prepared to pay as much as 50% to 70% more for their power. With cost penalties on that scale, industries will leave carbon capture jurisdictions for less punitive climes, and captive consumers will rebel.

At heart, what politicians and the public most want is clean energy and a clean environment. Rather than sinking billions into carbon capture schemes likely to do nothing but damage the environment and the economy, Obama and Harper should target true environmental hazards such as the mercury, NOX and SOX in coal, the air and water emissions associated with tar sands. And they should come clean with the public over carbon dioxide, and admit that too little worrisome is known about its risks to start burying it, and too much worrisome is known about the risks of burying it.