Net Zero in 2050 is meaningless; this heat tells us that we have to cut carbon emissions now.

Prime Minister Mark Carney is trying to thread his way through short-term crises, but it will bite him in the long run.

Adam Beck on University Avenue, Toronto

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney continues to break my heart. In his latest Forward Guidance, he notes that “climate change is worsening with bigger storms, heavier flooding, and more devastating wildfires.” He quotes my hero, Adam Beck, whom I have written about many times: “He had a true vision of the future, and it was all-electric."

Carney wants to double our electricity supply, tie our provincial grids together across the country, and invest in “a wide range of energy sources and technologies, including hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, gas, carbon capture, geothermal.” He actually understands the primary energy fallacy, noting:

“Electric machines are two to four times more efficient than those they replace. So as we electrify our transportation, our buildings, our industry, the electricity slice of our energy budget grows, but the entire pie shrinks.”

But it all falls apart in the short term because of the economy’s dependence on oil and gas and the politics of pandering to the Province of Alberta. (emphasis mine)

“The energy transition will be a great source of stability in the long run, but while it’s underway, it can equally be a great source of disruption. No country is better positioned to thrive in both eras than Canada, and we need not allow the transition from one era to another to pull us apart. The goal remains the same, but as times have changed, we must change our plan to get there. We can’t afford to restrain the growth of an important part of our energy mix, oil and gas, to meet a short-term goal.”

So no short-term carbon taxes, and look forward to an announcement of a new pipeline to the Pacific, more “low-carbon” LNG exports, and putting any measures that reduce Alberta’s production of fossil fuels on the gas-fired back burner. But don’t worry, Canada will still meet its 2050 commitments.

The problem is that we cannot wait for stability in the long run. Mark Carney is an economist and is no doubt aware of John Maynard Keynes’ quote from 1923, with the famous bit highlighted:

“But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.”

Forest fires in Canada at time of writing

We are all cooking in these tempestuous seasons of heat waves. We are facing unprecendented droughts. We likely are going to be sucking smoke from forest fires all summer long. This unrelenting crisis is an example of why Now is the new 2050, we need to take immediate action, that every tonne, every kilogram, every gram of carbon emissions adds to global heating.

We no longer have the luxury of thinking about Mark Carney’s long run; we have to think about short-term active survivability, a subject I have been discussing in a workshop with the Reimagine Buildings Collective.

The first thing we have to do is stop having these inane arguments about whether or not people should have air conditioning. The climate has changed, and in most cases, particularly with multifamily buildings, we have no choice. The late Monte Paulsen noted that even in the Pacific Northwest in Passivhaus designs, air conditioning would be necessary in multifamily buildings.

“Why? Multi family buildings are more dense than single-family dwellings. More people means more cooking, more showers, and more appliances, all of which add up to more internal heat gains.”

However, as engineer Ted Kesik has noted, we have to work our way down that pyramid. We should design for “thermal autonomy, where you design your building to need as little heating and cooling as possible, for as much of the year as possible. Doing this reduces energy consumption, extends the life of mechanical equipment, and reduces peak demand on the energy grid, an important consideration if we are going to electrify everything."

We need active and passive shading solutions to stop the heat before it gets in. However, unlike this building in Innsbruck, we also have to rethink window size. Windows make lousy walls and even if they are shaded, they are going to be hotter and will radiate heat into the interior.

It’s not good enough to just provide air conditioning; we have to prepare for when there isn’t any electricity to run it. In New York City they are testing portable batteries to help shave the peak loads; the batteries may have to be big enough to get people through the day.

We have to stop thinking always about single-family detached homes, which have so many surfaces exposed to the heat; we need more missing middle and Goldilocks Density housing with much lower cooling load per person, less floor area per person, and fewer cars per person.

We have to think about food and water, and how our homes should store enough of each to get through a couple of days of crisis.

We have to think about how we design our cities, how to reduce the seas of asphalt filled with cars that are making our environments unbearably hot.

Mark Carney says,

“The climate crisis is still with us, and our commitment to fighting it is absolute. But the certainties of the world of 2015 are long gone. Our neighbourhood hasn’t been this hostile since Canada was founded. The world hasn’t been this unstable geopolitically since the end of the Second World War. We must establish stability amidst this chaos.”

But continuing to expand production of oil and gas doesn’t bring stability. It brings more heat, more flooding, more fires, more climate chaos, more quickly than anyone imagined. That’s my little bit of foreward guidance.