Carbon Change: Canada on the Brink of Decarbonization

This is Dennis McConaghy’s third book, one that follows Dysfunction: Canada After Keystone XL and the Donner Prize winner, Breakdown: The Pipeline Debate and the Threat to Canada’s Future in 2019.A former senior executive at TC Energy, McConaghy brings refreshing perspectives to the current Canadian and international policy debates associated with decarbonizing energy systems. Carbon Change examines Canadian and international policies for energy and the global climate while providing a much-needed, perhaps overlooked, analysis of the true, and rapidly developing, costs associated with decarbonization. His timely warning, one that increasingly confronts the economies of the U.K. and the EU, centres on the true economic and political costs of policies required to achieve these climate goals.With a sensible, fact-based approach, McConaghy poses a direct challenge to reigning political and economic leaders by advancing arguments for the continued use of hydrocarbon resources while implementing practical measures for carbon reduction. Having advocated for carbon taxation as a key component of any market-driven energy transitions, the author decries the current lack of responsible and practical energy replacement systems, driven by unprecedented governmental interventions, with ever-more disastrous consequences for the economies of Western societies. He notes: “A cost/benefit analysis approach would create a more economically optimal outcome for managing the climate change risk than unconditional adherence to decarbonization.” The outrageous economic costs and penalties associated with current attempts to implement comprehensive energy transitions have persuaded many developing countries to adopt much more cautious approaches to decarbonization. Consequently, coal usage has increased significantly in the past few years – a development that will render moot the efforts of advanced Western economies, including Canada, to reduce global emissions. The author poses a seminal, urgent question for senior policy-makers: “How can we optimally use hydrocarbons for energy transitions so as to maximize global human welfare?”In this regard, he notes the limitation in current climate policy debates: “The official and loudest voices in the climate-policy world have limited the conversation by moralizing, and by considering only the potential damages that climate change might cause. This is an inadequate substitute for dispassionate cost/benefit analysis.”