Tom Rand has got himself a pretty ambitious to-do list.
Let’s see:
- roll out a trillion or so dollars in government green bonds to juice up the private-sector marketplace and make capital affordable to develop green energy technology;
- establish a continent-wide renewable energy grid;
- replace fossil fuels with renewables; and
- change the weather.
That’d be a full week in any busy executive’s calendar.
Rand’s an author (Kick the Fossil Fuel Habit: 10 Clean Technologies to Save Our World), venture capitalist and green entrepreneur – a passionate one at that.
He sailed into town from his Toronto base on the latest green tide to attend Clean Energy BC’s annual fall conference.
According to his resumé, Rand’s the co-developer of Toronto’s Planet Traveler hotel, which his public relations machinery touts as the “greenest hotel in North America.” So he’s got a lot of currency in the carbon emissions combat zone. But some might wonder what planet his Traveler hotel has its foundations in when it comes to achieving aforementioned to-do list.
A chat with the engaging Rand finds him focused on three fundamentals to save the world from the evils of fossil fuels:
- green energy can power our civilization;
- “[it’s] absolutely necessary to decarbon our economy”; and
- it’s going to be hard – really, really, really hard.
Rand is also a fan of solar thermal energy and what he calls “enhanced” geothermal. Energy from the former, he says, can be stored in giant thermoses to be used when the sun’s not shining. Enhanced geothermal, meanwhile, harnesses the heat from the Earth’s core.
But his green vision, as Rand concedes, depends on establishing a North American power grid that would allow the intermittent sources of renewable energy to be drawn from one part of the continent when wind and sun are not available in another.
It also requires finding several trillion dollars to fund such enormous undertakings as building transmission lines to remote renewable energy areas.
Government printing presses aside, that kind of investment is hard to come by, especially for technology that has yet to be proven economically viable or industrially reliable.
Say what you will about fossil fuel, but its key appeal is that it’s energy rich and has no practical substitutes in a lot of key applications. Jet fuel springs immediately to mind.
Meanwhile, to appreciate the challenge of securing the co-operation needed to make that continent-wide renewable energy grid a reality, look no further than the public outcry over upgrading even a few kilometres of transmission lines along BC Hydro’s Tsawwassen right-of-way or the time it took Grouse Mountain to get its windmill plugged into the Metro Vancouver power grid.
Rand’s green passions are laudable. They’re also rooted in the mantra that man-made carbon emissions cause climate change, a theory he’s as convinced of “as I am that gravity is real.” But gravity has been subjected to more scientific rigour than has man-made climate change.
So some suggested additions to Rand’s to-do list:
- consider that the practical approach to greening North America’s energy economy is not a fossil-fuel-bad-renewable-good equation;
- make the shift to renewables in stages by first switching to less polluting fossil fuel options like natural gas, which the continent has in abundance, so that the economy can survive to support renewable technology innovation initiatives; and
- review source material for man-made climate change beliefs and consider that, when it comes to energy, things are not as black and white as green disciples would have the world believe.