Environment
Mark Jaccard Talks Climate Change - continued
By James Glave published Mar 1, 2010
SFU economist and climate change expert Mark Jaccard on Earth Hour, energy-efficient light bulbs, and our capacity for self-delusion
And even as we get more efficient, rising incomes come into play.
Right. We learned how to make condensers and refrigeration units, and that led to the expansion of water-cooler desktop fridges. I saw a mini-freezer at a conference the other day so that we could all have ice cream at the break.
Thus the phenomenon of the Energy Star-rated bathroom television. Exactly.
Will you be turning your lights off for Earth Hour this month?
My household electricity consumption is about 2,500 kw/h per year while a typical bill for a house that size is 13,000 kw/h. I have power bars everywhere; my kids turn them off. When they turn the TV on, they have to wait 30 seconds before they can change channels. They bought into all of that. A couple of years back, I was in Toronto for Earth Hour. Some people had been watching my house and wrote on a blog that all my lights were on for Earth Hour. My kids were home and having a party. I had people emailing me, saying I was a hypocrite. I wanted to write an article about thought control and Maoist China. Are we going to start watching each other? Is that really going to get us anywhere? I’m actually one of the few people who isn’t using a lot of electricity.
You’re on a project in China called the Task Force on Sustainable Coal?
Yes. The Chinese Council, which reports to the premier, has task forces on sustainability. I was asked to co-chair one of them. The other chair is the vice-chair of the coal industry in China. He said that China is going to be the climate-solutions leader. But he also said that his country is going to go from burning 2.7 billion tonnes of coal per year to 3.8 billion tonnes.
How does that square?
It doesn’t. I mentioned carbon capture and storage [CCS, a system of capturing carbon dioxide from power plants and piping it into underground rock formations] and they replied, “Well, that’s expensive.” So I said, “It looks like your coal use is going to need to go from 2.7 billion tones to 1.4 billion in order to meet those 2050 [carbon reduction] targets if you aren’t doing CCS. And there’s going to be the damage to your environment.”
Many environmentalists dismiss carbon capture and storage as science fiction. Isn’t it just a “big coal” stalling tactic?
All I know is that we are on a path to destroy the planet, and the more likely outcome—that we are going to shoot sulphates into the atmosphere, or that we are going to put up parabolic mirrors—is way more science-fiction than carbon capture and storage. When you’re trying to save the planet, you have to remember the degree of difficulty. [Jaccard gets out of his chair and holds his hand high overhead.] Here’s the degree of difficulty to get the Chinese to put in carbon capture and storage in their coal plants. Then ask yourself, what’s the degree of difficulty over the next three decades of getting them to stop using coal altogether? And that degree of difficulty would be [pointing skyward] somewhere in that cloud up there.
So carbon capture’s got to be in our toolbox then.
We should be going down that path to find out; we’ve already begun to. We have plants to capture carbon. The enviros and the skeptics all told me this was a new technology that you could never scale up, but we are already using it. My message is, “Don’t be arrogant.” How can one be so arrogant as to say, “This one’s ruled out”?
Arrogant is a word that’s sometimes mentioned when your name comes up in green policy circles.
Sadly, some people question your personality in the hope of undermining the research results you report. The truth is, it’s pretty difficult to be arrogant when you’re the perpetual butt of jokes for the four young adults who live with you.
