Piercing The Propaganda

It is indeed heartening to see so many young activists now regularly protesting the inertia that our political masters are mired in when it comes to climate change mitigation. If anyone has a right to feel outraged, it is the younger generation that will find life on our planet far less hospitable than the one their elders knew growing up.

Equally heartening however, is the growing realization of the economic consequences of the widespread costs being incurred in these still early-days of global warming:

...the Bank of Canada... has just announced that it will incorporate climate change and its effects on business and the economy into its ongoing assessments of financial stability, growth and inflation.

In its report on financial stability last week, the central bank has finally recognized that even though environmental concerns are a bit outside of its wheelhouse, the risks are too consequential to be ignored. Extreme weather hurts infrastructure and the daily functioning of the economy, but it can also affect the stability of banks, pension plans, insurance companies and other financial institutions.

More broadly, however, because the world is moving to a low-carbon economy, Canadian companies that don’t measure their exposure to carbon and figure out how to handle the shift could suffer deeply, the bank points out.

This, of course, begins to pierce the propaganda promulgated by many of the economic consequences of a rapid move to a low-carbon economy.

And speaking of the low-carbon economy, Don Pittis offers some interesting insights as he cites a report called Missing The Bigger Picture: Tracking the Energy Revolution 2019.

Not only is Canada’s clean energy sector growing faster than the rest of the country’s economy (4.8% versus 3.6% annually between 2010 and 2017), it’s also attracting tens of billions of dollars in investment every year.

And perhaps most importantly for the average Canadian, it’s a huge, and growing, employer. In 2017, clean energy accounted for 298,000 jobs in Canada—roughly equal to direct employment in the real estate sector.

The fact that the role clean energy is playing an increasingly important role in our economy is hidden from most Canadians, largely because it is

not even classified in most statistics as a sector at all.

As the executive director of Clean Energy Canada, Merran Smith says in her introduction to the report, "Put simply, it's made up of companies and jobs that help to reduce carbon pollution — whether by creating clean energy, helping move it, reducing energy consumption, or making low-carbon technologies."

... the concern of Smith and her group, and the reason for assembling today's report, is the blinkered view of many Canadians that the energy industry and the economy are somehow in conflict with green principles.

But nothing could be further from the truth:

Economic research has shown that making the world more energy efficient is exactly what successful businesses have done throughout history, because energy is a cost, and cutting costs is what thriving businesses do.

"The clean energy sector isn't just about fighting climate change — it's also about using Canadian innovation to create better and cheaper solutions for everyday life," said Smith.

And there is real economic heft to be found in that sector:

Studying the period from 2010 to 2017, not only did the sector outgrow the entire economy by more than one full percentage point, but jobs in that component of the economy increased by 2.2 per cent a year, compared to an annual increase of 1.4 per cent in jobs overall.

No doubt, the old canard about climate-change mitigation measures being inimical to economic imperatives will persist for some time. However, the louder young people scream, and the more economic data that becomes available to us, one hopes that blinkered and inaccurate mindset will weaken and ultimately disappear.