magazine / mj01
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May/June 2001 issue |
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EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK
World-class energy gobblers
Our sorry, whining excuse to a world community anxious about climate change runs something
like this: Canada’s a big, cold country. We heat our homes eight months a year or more,
and we tend to cross by car — often the only means of transportation available now
that most of us have given up snowshoeing and dogsledding — the great distances that
separate us. So please don’t accuse us of being energy pigs.
All of which is true. And all of which seems like such a wasted opportunity.
We burn fuel like Olympic sprinters. We use more energy per capita than any other country.
We are the world’s third largest per-capita producers of greenhouse gases.
Our geography is immutable. We can’t change the distances we travel, and we can’t
make the place any warmer, although if we keep emitting greenhouse gases at the current rate,
we just might. So why aren’t our winters and open spaces opportunities? Why aren’t
we leading the world in energy-efficient technologies and design? Why aren’t our governments
and corporations and research institutes and universities propelling us to the forefront
of the new energy future? Who or what are we waiting for?
The oil-price shock of 1973 set off a creative scramble for alternatives. We designed and
built tight, energy-efficient houses. We began buying fuel-efficient cars. This time around,
we seem so much more blasé; it’s as though we have all concluded that the price
of oil is spiking temporarily, and soon we’ll be back to cheap gas.
“The world is leaving Canada behind,” laments Per Drewes, an engineer and Canadian
solar pioneer. Across the country, people are keenly interested in energy alternatives. In
1989, Drewes, who was then working for Ontario Hydro, wrote a piece for us on small solar-energy
systems."We had to hire a secretary to handle all the mail we got because of the story," he
recalls.
But we’re still balking at converting to alternate energy systems, mainly because
of their cost and inconvenience. We’re not yet willing to ante up the extra $200 for
an energy-efficient fridge. And we have yet to be convinced that a solar-powered system is
as trouble-free as a natural-gas-fired water heater. What’s it going to take to accelerate
change? Higher oil prices or something simpler, like the example of the Joneses next door
installing solar shingles on their roof?
In this, our sixth annual environment issue, we asked writer Lawrence Scanlan to update
us on the prospects for solar and wind technologies. We sent Gordon Laird, who is just finishing
a book on energy in Canada, to Fort McMurray, Alta., to peer into the depths of the old energy
economy, the oil sands, which has suddenly become a magnet for investment capital. Candace
Savage probed the caribou-for-oil trade-off that the Bush Administration in Washington has
resurrected. And our ever optimistic cartographer, Steven Fick, created a map of Canada’s
windiest places to demonstrate the vastness of the untapped potential of nature’s most
benign energy source.
As part of our ongoing coverage of national parks and their struggle with the principle
of ecological integrity, Kingston, Ont., writer and editor Alan Morantz visited Canada’s
smallest national park — St. Lawrence Islands — and one of the most threatened.
He found its administrators grappling with what to do in a park slowly being overwhelmed
by its visitors.
Finally, Silver Donald Cameron filed a story about how the people of Nova Scotia managed
to reduce by 50 percent the volume of trash they send to landfills every year. It’s
an inspiring tale of citizens who said "no" to the construction of an incinerator,
then pushed and prodded their own governments into showing real leadership on an environmental
problem for which there seems such an obvious solution. And an energy-efficient one at that.
— Rick Boychuk
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