Ottawa Citizen, 19 Aug 2023, NP3
It’s not just a failure, it’s a scam. It’s a way for fossil fuel vendors to carry on their business as
usual and for the federal government to pretend that it is dealing with an issue that has been
understood by science, but generally ignored by politics, for more than a century. Until Canada
caught fire in an exceptional way this year. PM Mulroney, the first to sign the UN Convention on
Climate Change in 1992, was an exception. That turned out to be the easy part.
A fundamental problem is that the breadth of federal policy thinking is far too narrow, being limited
mainly to economics. Since the dawn of powerful computers (The IBM 360, 1965-1978), the
analysis of energy systems in technological detail has been possible. That’s appropriate because
the current issue stems from the invention of the steam engine by James Watt in 1776, the dawn
of the Industrial Revolution. The International Energy Egency fostered collaborative research by
its member countries in the analysis of energy systems, starting in 1977. Canada participated in
the research for a couple of decades, but the the federal government has not yet used it to
develop sound policy and programs. It is high time that this tool was added to its policy toolbox.
John G. Hollins, Ph.D.
Gloucester
Past Chair of the IEA Energy Technology Systems Analaysis Program (1984-1997).
Past Chair of the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome, a think tank.