Photo: Adrian S. Jones

Thud! That’s the sound the next assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will make when it starts to land on the desks of bureaucrats in 2013. This, like previous ones, will be a massive document, and quite intimidating for those expected to act on it. The previous assessment was roughly 3,000 pages.

Andrew Weaver, a professor at the University of Victoria and generally recognized as Canada’s top climate scientist, worries about the approach.
We know climate change is bad, getting worse and expected to get downright nasty. We also know what kind of broad strokes we need to make and the tough decisions that lie ahead. It’s time, he recently told me, to get focused.

“The problem is so big, people don’t know where to begin,” said Weaver. “So this has to be tackled in little pieces. We need to see international efforts moving to deal with specific issues.”

In other words, stop operating with hammers and start using more scalpels.

I would argue this approach is just as relevant on a national level. It’s often said we shouldn’t sweat the small stuff, but perhaps the best way to move forward on the climate-change file in Canada is to identify a lot of smaller opportunities, set achievable targets, and deal with them with a healthy and creative balance of government and private-sector support.

In 2009, the federal Conservative government announced its $1 billion Clean Energy Fund as a major pillar of its commitment to tackling climate change. The money, dispersed over five years, had no particular focus—research, development and demonstration projects of all kinds could apply.

At least half of the fund has been earmarked for expensive carbon capture and storage demonstration projects—experimental pipe dreams that may well prove disappointing. Dispersal of the rest of the fund has been somewhat scattershot.

“Canada has no plan,” Weaver lamented.

This got me thinking about Canada’s off-grid north. Years ago, I wrote about the potential of getting our most remote communities off diesel fuel and onto a combination of wind and energy storage, such as hydrogen or flow batteries. Sure, there was some talk and the odd pilot project, but nothing ever came of it.