Terence Corcoran: The big zero in Ottawa's net-zero carbon plan

You can’t get to zero without a plan, which Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan admitted Ottawa does not have. Blair Gable/Reuters files

Canada can never get to net zero — not without a miracle from a saviour who walks into Alberta and changes all the fossil fuels into carbon-free energy

One of the key politicians overseeing Canada’s natural resources policy crisis is Trudeau’s Natural Resources Minister, Seamus O’Regan, who flew to Alberta this week to explain that Ottawa does not have a plan to achieve the miracle of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. “Net-zero, we believe, is a marker for your ability to take this seriously,” he told the CBC’s Power and Politics. In an interview with the Calgary Herald, O’Regan announced that “You cannot get to net zero without Alberta, you cannot get to net zero without the Canadian oil and gas industry.”

And you can’t get to zero without a plan, which O’Regan admitted Ottawa does not have. “The sooner that we have a plan … the sooner that investors know what direction we’re heading in and what the rules are,” he told the CBC.

But here’s the reality. Canada can never get to net zero — not without a miracle from a saviour who walks into Alberta and changes all the fossil fuels into carbon-free energy that can be extracted with an app via a cellphone.

Canada signed on to the net-zero carbon targets — adopted in 2015 at an “historic” United Nations’ Conference of the Parties meeting in Paris — without having a clue as to the feasibility of net-zero targets. Nor did the rest of the nations in Europe, Asia and South America — who signed the agreement (see graph).

Even greens are now conceding that the net-zero targets are fantastical creations of the UN policy mobs dedicated to promoting global climate panic and radical economic policies. Vancouver’s National Observer, home of relentless climate agitation, last week bannered a headline “The Paris Agreement set an unrealistic target for global warming. Now what?”

There is plenty of high-level policy wonkery around that claims to have solutions that seem wildly unconnected to the real world. The piece in the National Observer cited the example of bioenergy and carbon capture and storage as a replacement for fossil fuels. But it notes, citing a Nature Magazine article, that such a combination would require a land mass 1.5 times the size of India.

There is no viable alternative to fossil fuels at scale and there is no technology available to capture carbon. Lack of technology, however, has not prevented advisers, consultants and policy-makers from using carbon capture as the black hole into which all the problems of net zero are stored. We have no idea today how to hit the 2050 targets, so let’s assume we will have the technology some time in the future.

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Source: Terence Corcoran | Financial Post