Representatives from nearly 200 countries agreed at the COP28 climate summit on Wednesday to begin reducing global consumption of fossil fuels to avert the worst impacts of climate change, a first of its kind deal signaling the eventual end of the oil age.
I just looked up whats going on in Canada. Phase out of combustion engine cars starting with a ban 2035 sounds good, free heat pumps for poor households also sounds like a good plan, having a minimum carbon price is also at least a decent idea.
From what I see the problems are extremly high emissions from trucking, which should be solveable by electrifying the rail network. The other huge problem seems to be massive mining everywhere, which includes a lot of fossil fuels. That should be the easiest one to solve as most Canadians do not work in the mining sector right?
The ban on combustion vehicles is a ban only on sales of new combustion vehicles. It’s a start, but a step that should have been taken 30 years ago so that we’d already be 10 years into the ban. That 30 year gap is exactly what I meant when I said that there has been no real action associated with any “commitment” to date.
Free heat pumps for the poor is inaccurate. Maximum $5000 dollars, including electrical upgrades and professional installation by certified professionals. That means a maximum of about 20,000 BTU, probably less. My cost would be somewhere in the $6-8k range, partly because of our requirements, partly because of the substantial electrical upgrades, partly because of how far we are from certified installers. Oh, and we don’t qualify anyway, because the only housing we could afford is a mobile home built in 1968 and nobody thought to remove the axles and hitch. So another couple of grand for something that has no relevance beyond getting past a filter. (To qualify, a mobile home must be on a foundation, where foundation is defined as tied down, no axles, no hitch.)
It’s true that only a minority of our population works in mining, but it’s still an important sector. Saying we can shut down mines because they don’t employ many people is like saying we can shut down agriculture because it doesn’t employ that many people. The transition away from fossil fuels doesn’t eliminate the need for raw materials.
Electrifying the rail network is a good idea, but Canada has spent the last 50 years moving away from rail and really accelerated that project about the time we should have been stabilizing and adding to it.
Building codes are also at least 30 years behind the times. Here in Saskatchewan, there was a 1980s project to figure out how to build a truly low-energy house. With the right construction techniques, plenty of insulation, and passive heating and cooling, they cut energy requirements so far that it wasn’t even worth hooking up to natural gas. And there is still nobody building like that.