Wednesday, July 14, 2004
An op/ed by Dr. David Suzuki

While there was certainly no shortage of hot air during Canada's recent federal election campaign, at least some of it was channeled in the right direction: wind energy.

During the election period, several of the major parties included substantial new commitments to wind energy as part of their platforms. Promises ranged from small investments to generating up to 10 percent of Canada's energy supply through clean, renewable wind energy over the next decade.

Such investments are badly needed. Canada currently lags behind almost all other industrialized countries when it comes to wind power. In spite of our vast country's incredible wind energy potential, wind generates less than 0.2 percent of our electricity needs. Many provinces still rely on fossil fuels like coal and natural gas to provide power.

Unfortunately, burning these fuels also causes air pollution and releases vast amounts of heat-trapping greenhouse gases that are changing our climate. Canada has committed to reducing these emissions through the Kyoto Protocol, but we have yet to begin making those reductions on a large scale. Wind power could be an important part of meeting our commitments.

European countries have already proven wind to be a cost-effective, reliable, nonpolluting energy source. The wind-energy industry is forging ahead in these countries, helped by government policies that encourage more clean-energy production.

In the last year, for example, Germany installed eight times more wind-energy turbines than Canada has in total. And in less than a decade, Spain has gone from having no experience in wind energy to being a world leader. It took just six months for a Spanish company to install a new 50 megawatt wind farm near Chicago. That's nearly three times more installed wind power than is found in all of Ontario.

But wind is not the be-all, end-all of our energy needs. There are other clean, renewable energy sources — such as solar, small-scale hydro, sustainable biomass, and geothermal — that also need to be harnessed if we are to power our economy without dangerously disrupting the planet's climate and adding more and more pollution to our air.

Critics sometimes insist that it would be impossible to power the world with renewable energy alone. They point to the explosive growth in global energy demand as proof, saying that renewable energy could never catch up.

For example, Americans now consume 50 percent more electricity per capita than they did 25 years ago.

But that argument misses the point that much of the energy we consume is wasted. Fossil fuel combustion, even at the best of times, is not the most efficient way to provide our power needs. Plus, decades of access to cheap oil has made us lazy and complacent about energy. We just aren't very efficient.

Consider this: In just 20 years, the personal computer has gone from being practically unheard of to being accessible in the palm of your hand. The information superhighway, which didn't even exist, has become so much a part of life that it's a cliché. Having instant access to vast amounts of information anywhere in the world is now simply taken for granted. What did we do before Google anyway?

Compare these advances to those in the automobile or electrical power industries. Our cars still get the same fuel efficiency on average (or worse) than they did 20 years ago. Dirty fossil fuels still dominate much of our electrical production. Our homes, by and large, are only marginally more energy tight than they were 20 years ago.

This isn't to say that we haven't had advances in these areas; hybrid cars are finally coming to market, better building technologies do exist, renewable energy technologies are available. But they only have toe-holds in Canada compared to much of the world.

Our leaders can change that. Efficiency and renewable-energy technologies are taking off in other countries. Worldwide investment in renewable energy reached nearly $27 billion in 2003. Canada needs to get on board, or we could find ourselves in a situation akin to the rest of the industrialized world running on supercomputers while Canada still pecks away at a typewriter.

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Source: David Suzuki Foundation