On Tuesday, the Senate Standing Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources were in Prince George and met with students, staff and faculty at UNBC.
While the Senate is un-elected they do serve several legitimate functions - not the least of which is they have the time to meet with Canadians on specific issues and topics. The meeting at UNBC was no exception.
The committee chair is Richard Neufeld, a former B.C. cabinet minister and the committee were interested in exploring the economic consequences of moving to a low-carbon society.
So, what has this to do with science? Isn't this politics?
The meeting at UNBC was one of those occasions where the two spheres intersect.
The issue the committee wanted to focus on is the cost of societal change to address the issue of climate change.
Meeting our commitments to a low-carbon society is critical if we are to do our part in mitigating the damage. At the forefront of meeting those commitments is the necessity to engage in fundamental science and engineering.
There is a critical role universities will play, both in educating a generation of scientists and engineers ready to address the issue and in providing an environment in which unfettered research can explore the possibilities.
However, one of the most interesting points in the meeting with the committee was when Neufeld said he had not seen anything written on what a low-carbon society would look like. His contention was that there is a significant body of literature discussing what the world will look like if we do nothing, but not much on what it will look like if we take action.
He could be right, but that is, in part, because speculation about a post-fossil fuel society tends to read like science fiction. Indeed, Star Trek - both in movies and all the television series - is a world in which fossil fuel consumption has been essentially removed from the equation. Everything works on non-combustion based energy sources.
Suggesting the world will look like Star Trek in 20 or 30 years, though, is just not even close to realistic. The best guess from the physics community is that we are still decades from having functional fusion reactors despite billions of dollars spent trying.
In the meantime, between now and then, we need to wean our society off of fossil fuels and into a new reality. What would it look like?
I would preface the following remarks by saying we have only been heavily reliant on oil for a little over 100 years and on coal for a little over 200 years. In the 10,000+ years of human history, our fossil carbon consuming society is a mere blip.
The past might be a good place to start if we are talking about what the future could look like. Yes, the average lifetime was significantly shorter but predominantly due to early childhood mortality not the inherent life span of human beings.
That has increased but not nearly as much as the average.
In any case, 200 years ago, there were a number of public health issues which could result in early death, such as cholera epidemics or influenza outbreaks. With our modern understanding of diseases, it is doubtful human health would be severely impacted by stopping fossil fuel production.
Some modern medicines are built using chemicals obtained from petroleum but that is generally an exercise in convenience rather than necessity. That is, it is much simpler to get methyl ethyl ketone from a refinery than it is to distill and purify from other sources.
Indeed, the argument that we need to keep producing petroleum to supply the petrochemical industry - which gives us plastics and synthetics fibres - is a bit of a red herring. There are many useable sources of carbon in the environment.
Trees and plant are much better at making both complex and simple molecules than chemical engineers. All it will take is ingenuity to adapt natural pathways to replace industrial production.
Another big issue which arises in talking about a low carbon future is transportation.
There are 33 million cars and trucks on the road in Canada. How do we replace them?
Ironically, electric vehicles were plentiful in the late 1800s and early 1900s. But several technological developments favoured the internal combustion engine over electrical drive trains. It is much easier to burn gasoline than to design a fully rechargeable battery system. It has taken almost 100 years of developments in both chemistry and physics to get to the point where electric vehicles can now compete.
We don't really have a choice in moving to a low-carbon economy as the consequences of doing nothing far outweigh the costs of doing something.
All it will take is some imagination and the free market to change the world.
