Advertisement
Bill McKibben: Canada's biggest problem with meeting its climate targets is the tar sands. Much of Canadian politics was centred around that development in Alberta for the last decade, which made it impossible for Canada to be a real participant in the global fight on climate change. It really had become by the end of the Harper years a rogue nation—maybe the most prominent one in the developed world.
Advertisement
I think it's still early days to get a sense how serious the commitment is going to be. We have no choice around the world but to radically ramp up the pace at which we're building out renewable energy. Look at what's happened this winter: we've had the warmest months by far ever recorded on this planet. In the far north we've had month after month of temperatures ten, 15 degrees above average leading to record Arctic ice melt. Early thaw melts across the Boreal forest mean we're now seeing horrific forest fires. In the tropics over the last few weeks we lost huge swaths of the world's coral reefs—one of the most important ecosystems on the planet.The question about renewable energy is not: Are we going to do it? It's going to be how fast we're going to do it. Are we going to take advantage of the low price on solar panels and put them on every south-facing surface we can find? Are we going to keep building windmills at a pace that allows Canada or the US to catch up with, say, the Danes who generated half their power from wind last year.
Advertisement
Many of these companies simply have no other impulse. They made a lot of money in the past doing this, so they want to keep trying to do it even though the world no longer needs this fossil fuel nor can it possibly afford to burn it. But there's a lot of momentum so people are still trying to build new coal ports, and new oil train terminals and things. The fossil fuel industry understands they've only got a few more years before people say, "No more. We're done." So they're doing their best to get it all in while they can.Have you really got that signal? What are your indications the oil companies think they've only got a few years?
Heck, even the Saudis, the biggest oil guys on Earth said earlier this winter they're envisioning moving beyond oil. They're going to try to sell off some of Saudi Aramco [the country's national oil and gas company] and invest in other things so Saudi Arabia won't be dependent on oil. If the Saudis have figured it out, that's a pretty good sign.This week you're focusing on the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion here in BC, which could be approved later this year. With dozens of other projects on your radar—all at different stages—do you feel pressure to go after the really immediate, carbon-intense ones?
Advertisement
There are battles going on everywhere, and the good news is there's no central direction of the movement, it's more of a sprawling resistance. There's not some great central leader who's telling people what to do. People are rising up in opposition everywhere, fighting in their local places, and we need to be coordinating those actions on a national, continental and global scale. Now we have a political movement that looks the way we want the energy movement to look: not a few big centralized operations, but a million solar panels on a million roofs, all interconnected.What about liquefied natural gas in BC specifically? It's been branded as a cleaner alternative to coal in Asia, should people be blocking that too?
If you're worried at all about global climate change, and you should be, we've come to understand that natural gas is at least as dangerous as coal, that the leakage from methane at every stage of the operation fills the atmosphere with a greenhouse gas even more potent than carbon dioxide. We don't need a world that runs on natural gas any more than we can manage a world that runs on coal. What we need is sun and the wind. And the engineers are doing a good job there. They've brought down the price of a solar panel 80 percent in the last decade. It's time to take advantage of that. Everyone for years has said, "Oh, it's the bridge to renewable energy," whatever. That was a much better argument before we knew as much as we know about methane chemistry now. It turns out it's just another grave fossil fuel danger.So then, is there such thing as a good megaproject? Here in BC we have debate over a massive hydroelectric dam, also branded clean energy.
I think building big solar farms and things is defensible in some locations, but I think the place the world really wants to go is what the engineers call distributed generation—lots and lots of small facilities, rooftops, five-acre farms, so on and so forth. These have the virtue of not only providing energy, but providing it locally, allowing people to keep their money close to home, supporting their neighbours. Watching farmers grow electrons is just as useful as watching them grow calories.Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.