Green-energy claims don’t add up
More fiction than hard fact in jobs report
I don’t blame green activists for engaging in hyperbole or factual distortion in an effort to further their cause.
After all, that’s what pressure groups do. It generates news headlines, and environmental lobbyists are pros at this game. Facts are the first victims in any war, whether it’s over turf or ideology.
From James (“game over”) Hansen to Bill (“carbon bomb”) McKibben to Neil (“Hiroshima”) Young, the eco-army has perfected the art of demonizing the oilsands and scaring the bejesus out of a gullible public.
Enviro groups are also adept at playing the economic card. They insist economic and environmental goals are utterly compatible, and that a shift to a cleaner, greener economy will be virtually painless.
By playing up the growth of “clean energy” while playing down the importance of the oil and gas industry — a key theme of a report issued this week by Clean Energy Canada — the greens insist the future is friendly. All you have to do is rebuke those evil fossil fuels.
If all the fearmongering and skewed analyses actually led to a drop in global carbon emissions, and a cooling climate, one could conceivably argue that the ends might justify the means.
But it hasn’t. Carbon emissions are still growing, and won’t hit a peak for decades, despite warnings from the latest United Nations climate gathering in Lima, Peru that 2014 is shaping up as the hottest year on record.
Even China, the world’s top emitter, has no plans to cap emissions until 2030 — if then — and other major emitters like Russia and India have shown zero interest in joining any international agreement.
It’s no mystery why. In a modern industrial world, most people want modern industrial comforts, like driving in cars, flying in jet planes, living in heated homes and wearing affordable clothing.
China’s major cities may be choking on pollution, but the Chinese government isn’t about to slow economic growth to appease the folks at Greenpeace, even as China ramps up adoption of renewable energy.
As for the western industrialized world, all the polls show the public wants action on carbon emissions — provided someone else pays for it. In Canada, that would be Alberta, natch.
As Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall notes, the “Equalization East” pipeline doesn’t appear to generate the same concerns from “have not” provinces like Quebec and Ontario as the Energy East pipeline.
The anti-development crowd may yearn for a return to some kind of preindustrial Garden of Eden, but that’s a fantasy.
For all his proselytizing about saving the planet, even eco-evangelist David Suzuki lives a big, jet-setting life, with a personal carbon footprint exponentially greater than the average Canadian.
Put simply, if the planet is going to reduce carbon emissions, it has to be a joint effort that spares no one. Blaming a single industry or province or country for what is a global problem is not only dishonest, it’s counter-productive.
We all need fossil fuels, and we’ll need them for a long time. Wind farms and solar farms may be all the rage among enviro advocates, but even the engineers at Google have concluded it won’t be enough to change the trajectory of global carbon emissions,
In their view, only some as-yet-undiscovered breakthrough energy technology will fundamentally change the game. All the scaremongering by activists like McKibben won’t alter that simple fact.
As for all those clean energy jobs that green lobbyists believe will supplant Canada’s traditional fossil fuel sector, there’s little hard evidence to support such a rosy view.
According to a report this week by Clean Energy Canada — an affiliate of the antipipeline, anti-oilsands lobby group Tides Canada — the country’s clean energy sector directly employed more people in 2013 (23,700) than were directly employed in Alberta’s oilsands (22,340).
I’m not sure how the report’s authors came up with those facts, but I found them pretty hard to believe. So I went looking for corroborative data from other sources.
Here’s what the Canadian Energy Research Institute has to say about the number of direct oilsands jobs:
“Oilsands related direct employment in Alberta, including on-site construction, ongoing and turnaround maintenance, off-site prefabrication and modular construction, steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) well development, and cold bitumen well development, is expected to continue growing from the current level (in 2014) of 146,000 jobs, to a peak of 256,000 jobs in 2024.”
In other words, setting aside the slight difference in base years (2014 versus 2013) used to calculate the job numbers, CERI estimates there are more than six times the number of direct jobs in the oilsands than the number quoted in the Clean Energy Canada study.
What’s more, on a national basis, CERI expects the number of oilsands-related jobs to grow from 514,000 jobs in 2014 to more than 800,000 jobs by 2028.
Apparently, the Clean Energy data excludes construction jobs. But since much of the activity in the oilsands relates to projects under development — in essence, construction jobs — their data seems deliberately misleading.
Perhaps more importantly, in a world where Canada is a mere bit player in the manufacture of solar and wind energy components — sectors dominated by China, Japan, Germany and others — it’s hard to see where all those well-paying future green energy jobs will come from.
Even long-established homegrown alternative energy companies like Ballard Power and Westport Innovations have failed to earn any profit, after more than a decade of trying, and their shareholders have paid a steep price for it.
Unfortunately for them, that’s no fabrication. That’s fact. glamphier@edmontonjournal.com