By Ralph Torrie The Trottier Energy Futures Project’s Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy for Canada shows that our supplies of sustainable, low-carbon energy will be more than enough to meet our needs through 2050. But one of the biggest questions is…
By Ralph Torrie The Trottier Energy Futures Project’s Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy for Canada shows that our supplies of sustainable, low-carbon energy will be more than enough to meet our needs through 2050. But one of the biggest questions is…
An Inventory of Low-Carbon Energy for Canada shows that Canada’s supplies of solar, wind, hydroelectric and biomass energy are much larger than the current or forecast demand for fuel and electricity, and technology costs have been falling in recent years.…
What is a barrel of oil really worth?
The answer starts out sounding like a joke that begins, “An oil producer, an economist, a consumer and an ethicist walk into a bar…”
Canada epitomizes the dilemma of the petroleum addiction that has the world in its grasp.
Like the other industrial economies of the OECD, Canada has had constant access to cheap and abundant oil over the past century, which has played no small role in shaping the type of society we have become. Everything from our industrial structure to our settlement patterns, from our food production to our supply chains, is predicated on cheap, abundant petroleum, and we feel threatened by the prospect of higher oil prices.
Many of the most promising and exciting opportunities to cut energy use and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are actually only indirectly related to energy.
The Trottier Energy Futures Project (TEFP) found a lot of similarities, a few differences and one almost universal gap in its study of eight national scenarios of a low-carbon energy future.
The TEFP’s new report, Low-Carbon Energy Futures: A Review of National Scenarios, summarizes research from eight wealthy, industrialized, mostly urbanized economies: Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.
It’s easy to fall into the assumption that using less energy means doing without, that a low-carbon, low-energy economy will leave us all freezing in the dark.
But if you somehow drew that conclusion from Low-Carbon Energy Futures: A Review of National Scenarios, the report released last week by the Trottier Energy Futures Project (TEFP), you’d be missing the point of the research.
An 80% reduction in Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions is achievable by 2050, according to the Trottier Energy Futures Project (TEFP)’s review of low-carbon scenario research from eight industrialized countries.
But the report, Low-Carbon Energy Futures: A Review of National Scenarios, shows that an 80% reduction is also transformative, requiring us to use energy and organize our economy in new and different ways.
Perhaps no other industry but farming is as affected by the weather as the electric power sector. When the lights go out, the weather is usually at least part of the cause. And the weather itself drives demand for space conditioning-heating and cooling are strategically important markets for the electric power industry.
The market for energy resources and commodities is at the centre of every industrial economy, and that won’t change in a low-carbon energy future. But the transition to that future will depend in part on our ability to shift the focus from the Joules and kilowatt-hours Canadians consume to the energy services we require to live, work, study, and play.
There was a long, loud echo in the room when youth delegate Anjali Appadurai addressed the UN Climate Change Summit in Durban December 9. Appadurai pinpointed a disconnect in global climate meetings that has been evident since 1995, when the first Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change convened in Berlin.
The improvement in Canada’s energy commodity productivity is the single largest contributor to the country’s energy security over the last 40 years.
One of the first steps is to stop assuming that price signals will be strong enough or fast enough to deliver the climate change action we need, when the history of energy pricing tells an entirely different story.
