Juno News - Trudeau’s billion-dollar bet on carbon capture

00:00:00.000 you're tuned in to the andrew lawton show

00:00:05.920 we know that canada has committed itself as have many countries around the world to this idea of

00:00:13.720 net zero which means we are supposedly uh going to get down to net zero in our carbon emissions by

00:00:20.560 the number keeps changing 2035 2030 i think it's supposed to be next week or something

00:00:26.300 if you give them enough time they just keep moving it closer and closer and the way we get there

00:00:31.920 is always the key it's one thing to just set a target and set a date on a calendar and say net

00:00:36.620 zero by x time on x day of x year it's another thing when you talk about what that actually means

00:00:41.940 on the ground and we see no shortage of quite radical proposals put forward in the name of

00:00:47.160 achieving net zero and most of them end up coming down to that idea of a just transition of just

00:00:53.260 transitioning our economy away from one that involves oil and gas without any real alternative

00:00:59.280 proposed well one that we have talked about which has been proposed by folks in the oil and gas sector

00:01:05.260 is this idea of carbon capture now i am not going to insult you by uh describing probably poorly the

00:01:12.840 scientific basis of it but carbon capture is essentially this idea of not ceasing the production

00:01:20.160 of things that result in carbon emissions but rather finding ways to harness and capture that

00:01:25.700 carbon those carbon emissions and doing so in a way that they still contribute to the overall goal

00:01:31.540 of reducing emissions so uh let's talk about this in a bit of context because there is a little bit

00:01:36.320 of criticism of carbon capture and some of it was put forward in a recent piece that was co-authored

00:01:42.660 by a gentleman who joins me now dr kenneth green who is a senior fellow at the phraser institute

00:01:48.160 uh kenneth good to talk to you thanks for coming on today good to be with you now i admit not being

00:01:53.880 a scientist i've bought into some of the hype on carbon capture because it's kind of proposed by

00:01:58.760 conservative politicians by people in the oil and gas sector as being this market-friendly way of

00:02:04.640 achieving the government's goals which if you accept the goals or at the very least are not optimistic

00:02:11.000 that those goals are going anywhere it's a night it's a better alternative than say just outlawing

00:02:16.600 the industry which is i think where a lot of the activists want but you're a bit of a skeptic

00:02:20.780 yes i am it's uh and i'd love to get back to the other topic you were talking about which is

00:02:25.540 uh all the environmental measures that are coming on have the same pattern of implementation that you

00:02:30.400 can actually understand them by looking at how they're implemented rather than what they're supposed

00:02:34.020 to do but back on carbon capture and storage i am a skeptic of this i i view it as and i discuss

00:02:39.440 i discuss it as a fig leaf that's appealing to many many people first of all there is a little grain

00:02:44.360 the truth the nugget of truth in there which is oil companies have been using the idea of taking

00:02:49.320 carbon dioxide re-injecting it into old wells and old fields to push up more oil and gas they've been

00:02:56.360 doing that that's carbon storage part they've been doing that for decades and it works well and so

00:03:01.840 there's a small reality there which is somebody can say look they've taken many many tons of co2 and

00:03:06.920 put it into the ground and it stays there and so it's technologically feasible

00:03:11.500 um but it's a fig leaf because really it's not feasible to capture carbon dioxide emissions from

00:03:18.580 power plants or from agriculture or from any other source capture them bind them chemically store them

00:03:26.100 somewhere underground at any kind of scale that would have any impact at all on global greenhouse gas

00:03:33.240 emissions or air concentrations or warming or anything else and so but but it's a fig leaf because

00:03:39.540 governments governments as you said right when conservative governments get to say

00:03:43.040 we have an alternative to your socialist net zero 2050 plan uh right which is technology made by good

00:03:50.480 old-fashioned private canadian companies carbon capture and storage is one of those things so so

00:03:56.360 they love it because it's a good fig leaf for them the industry loves it because they get to say

00:04:00.400 even though they know they really can't reduce emissions very much anymore because of by efficiencies

00:04:04.540 they've they've they've plumbed the depths of how efficient they can be and they're way efficient

00:04:09.360 right but they've hit the limits on that so it's a fig leaf for them to say we listen we get it we

00:04:14.460 hear it you don't want us submitting carbon dioxide so in the air so we'll do this carbon capture and

00:04:19.660 storage thing and but so now let us keep operating let us stay in business right so you'll like it

00:04:24.700 the environmentalist groups like it because it's a fig leaf for them that when they get to a

00:04:28.540 negotiation where companies are saying and have proven that a proposed environmental plan is

00:04:33.880 completely unaffordable and they'll simply have to go out of business the environmentalist can say

00:04:38.500 we'll give you this little loophole of you can pretend that carbon capture and storage is going

00:04:43.440 to work and that we're going to actually let you go ahead and do it uh so that you can to take away

00:04:48.440 your ability to claim that you're going out of business but they really never have any intention

00:04:52.560 of allowing the kind of environmental disruption it would take to do carbon capture and storage so it's

00:04:57.760 sort of a universal fig leaf everybody loves it but nobody believes it's actually going to happen

00:05:01.400 um and and there's with good reason it's never going to happen now does your skepticism extend

00:05:08.260 to kind of related phenomena like carbon recycling these other things that we also hear about as

00:05:13.260 being ways to just reduce uh the carbon in the atmosphere without reducing it at source

00:05:18.180 well yes i mean it's it's i wouldn't call it skepticism it's in this case it's really simply

00:05:23.500 uh an understanding of physics right carbon dioxide the best way to understand

00:05:27.580 carbon dioxide which you breathe out every time you exhale is it's a waste gas that means there's

00:05:33.120 no energy inherent in it it's a thermal stable chemical that really has no energy inherent in

00:05:39.240 it that you can you can exploit so to do anything with it you have to pump energy in to trap it to

00:05:44.980 bind it to split it apart in order to do anything with it and that means the very idea that you're

00:05:49.960 going to somehow use that to reduce your energy production is silly right you're actually going to

00:05:55.740 have to pump more energy in to to bind co2 than to leave it alone and so yeah i'm generally skeptical

00:06:02.200 of anything that claims to be taking co2 and making anything useful out of it because it is essentially

00:06:07.220 a planetary waste which has no energy potential for exploiting uh is mostly inert it's chemically inert

00:06:14.440 uh and so um yeah i'm generally dubious not to say skeptical i'm scientifically and engineering dubious

00:06:22.740 of those kind of claims so what what would be a better policy then if i can just put you on the spot

00:06:29.500 there uh or is it basically challenging the premise that we need to go after it this way in the first place

00:06:35.180 well i think i think so a better policy that's a big question i hope you got a couple hours but

00:06:42.520 but um a better policy um i think a better policy is is uh moving our focus away from controlling the

00:06:51.920 global thermostat by indirect control of gas emissions we can barely measure well much less

00:06:59.320 control that being greenhouse gases and co2 and we should shift our focus to asking if the climate

00:07:05.740 is warming or cooling or is more variable than we ever thought it was which we know how can we make

00:07:11.940 ourselves as societies more adaptive more resilient and better able to deal with whatever climate future

00:07:18.420 eventuates right happens to us and we can do a lot of that with conventional engineering conventional

00:07:24.280 economics um we don't have to be using invoking speculative technologies to do that sea level rise

00:07:30.920 countries uh the netherlands and others have dealt with rising sea levels and sea levels above their land

00:07:36.120 decades and centuries uh the romans dealt with moving massive amounts of water from areas that had

00:07:42.460 had water that areas that didn't have water so we can deal with drought we can move things around

00:07:47.220 we can harden areas california's earthquake damage i grew up in california my first earthquake

00:07:53.060 experience 1969 i was eight years old nine years old the silmar earthquake destroyed massive amounts

00:08:00.100 of the san fernando valley by today's standards an earthquake much stronger than that hundreds of times

00:08:04.740 stronger than that would not do anywhere close to the level of damage that was done before because

00:08:09.060 we learned engineering technology we do learn and so we could be addressing the risks of climate change

00:08:15.060 flooding drought heat waves cold spells whatever you want to call it through conventional technology

00:08:21.140 technology locally globally globally as well um but instead the world for reasons i won't can't get

00:08:28.580 into i'd love to but for political reasons has chosen this laser focus on controlling the greenhouse gases

00:08:35.860 and explicitly doing so only through redistribution of wealth that's the part i would get to on a whole

00:08:40.500 program which is when you dig down into every program and you can ask what's the root uh what's the

00:08:46.340 root thing that that in this program the government will not do without it's the component that says

00:08:51.700 we're going to take the money from these people and give it to our constituents who will vote for us

00:08:55.940 who like our agenda and so um well just to add to that that's also baked in even at the global level as

00:09:02.340 well it's you know within countries like canada it's redistribution of wealth and on the global scale

00:09:06.660 it's redistribution of wealth from canada to tubaloo or something well it has been since the united

00:09:11.940 nations framework convention on climate change the very first treaty ever signed created the principle

00:09:17.220 that developed countries would go first that developed countries would fund the transition

00:09:22.340 for the developing countries by giving them giving being the operative term technologies and money

00:09:28.660 massive wealth transfers in order for them to build out their their their uh energy systems and things

00:09:34.340 without producing greenhouse gas emissions that that that was actually the central operating principle

00:09:39.780 of the very first climate agreement and has stayed the central operating principle of every climate

00:09:44.420 agreement ever since regardless of the fact that china moved from developing country to developed and

00:09:49.860 is the by far the biggest greenhouse gas submitter in the world and will be over the over time

00:09:55.620 overwhelmingly the world's largest contributor to the to the increase of greenhouse gases around the world

00:10:01.140 it's still based killed the paris accord the previous client u.n accords are all based the central operating

00:10:08.260 principle is redistribution of global wealth there is a an aspect of this that you touched on a couple

00:10:14.340 of answers ago about the difficulty in even measuring objectively and and accurately uh emissions um and i i

00:10:21.540 think also global temperature is one i've seen some criticism about so you know we pin so much on those

00:10:27.060 two metrics the idea of you know global temperature right now we've you know got to get uh to no more than

00:10:32.260 1.5 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels is the goal but measuring global temperature is not

00:10:38.020 as ironclad an objective as uh the u.n likes to say and nor is the measurement of admissions

00:10:43.700 no and it's funny you should mention that but we have a study coming out of the fraser institute in

00:10:47.860 the next couple of weeks or a month oh i'm excited comparing comparing whether we should be using

00:10:52.900 measurements of the climate or models computer models of the climate in order to make our decisions

00:10:57.940 about what policies to implement with regard to climate change so you can look for that fraser

00:11:02.340 institute uh www.fraserinstitute.com now they'll love me uh even more which is good and um but

00:11:09.220 back to your question i mean yes measurement of climate is a problem that you can't just stick a

00:11:13.700 thermometer into the atmosphere and and wave it around to get the temperature of the earth any more

00:11:18.420 than you can get the actual at temperature of a room you're in if you think about the room you're

00:11:22.100 in right it's warmer toward the ceiling it's colder toward the floor near the air conditioning

00:11:25.940 vents it's colder still over by the window it's warm how would you compute just the temperature of your room

00:11:32.340 while you'd it'd be a huge exercise dividing your room into little squares taking in that temperature

00:11:36.660 at the center of each square doing a spatial average and try to do that for the globe so yes

00:11:41.620 humility is definitely um required in in asking the question can we know the earth's average

00:11:48.660 temperature of the atmosphere the average temperature of the earth's atmosphere uh on the

00:11:53.380 other hand the modeling the question of can we model it with a computer is even more absurd right so

00:12:00.820 it is true the temperature measurements are i mean i i would not want to depend upon them for some sort

00:12:06.900 of industrial process that had to be tightly controlled like making chips i wouldn't just say

00:12:11.700 that level of measurement would be good enough for me but it's better than simply running a computer

00:12:15.700 model that looks like a video game and saying wow in this one in this scenario the rcp 8.5 uh the world

00:12:22.660 gets super hot and zombies take over okay well yeah we'll go with that one so um well and this

00:12:27.860 is imperfect but better the the famous hockey stick graph which i think it was was a paul martin that

00:12:33.220 mailed out a copy to like every canadian household and it's been the subject of you know vociferous

00:12:38.740 debate and and even litigation on that but but again i mean we've we've seen to go back to the

00:12:44.020 covet question the perils of modeling which uh you know that what you get out of it is no better and in

00:12:49.460 some cases worse is worse than what you put into it and i'm even more glad you mentioned that because

00:12:53.860 i have a book out called the plague of models that's by me kenneth p green you can get it on

00:12:58.500 google play i am proudly censored by amazon which is not allowing works on code policy that are contrary

00:13:04.020 to get through unless you have divine intervention or the intervention of somebody like elon musk

00:13:08.580 in order to get your book approved uh but you can get mine on google play the plague of models and

00:13:12.900 basically it talks about exactly this in the 1970s here's the thing in the 1970s computers got cheap

00:13:18.340 and labs got expensive and so people started replacing regular and regulators wanted to

00:13:24.500 move really fast on regulations and rules much faster than they could based on laboratory experiments

00:13:29.620 done in traditional laboratories with scientists working on liquid wet chemistry and biology and

00:13:35.060 things so models increasingly took over as evidence but they're not evidence a model actually

00:13:41.300 is it takes away information it doesn't give you more right a picture of a supermodel doesn't tell 0.99

00:13:46.180 you much about the actual person a picture of a truck doesn't tell you that much about the actual

00:13:51.140 truck a picture of bugs bunny doesn't tell you anything about the actual behavior of rabbits

00:13:56.340 right those are models and and so when we moved to models and away from research

00:14:02.500 we took this huge step into speculation and it's across the board it's on almost virtually any topic that

00:14:08.420 we now we you see you see a chart or a graph on it's about any any model that that actually projects

00:14:14.740 into the future is inherently modeled right since nobody has a crystal ball so all of these things

00:14:19.220 saying by 2050 we're going to do this by 2050 our emissions are going to go like this by 2050 the

00:14:23.860 temperature is going to go like that by 2050 this is going to happen that's going to happen all of

00:14:27.540 that is completely speculative based on assumptions about the world there's there's no data in it

00:14:33.540 it's right it's originally a data free exercise and so we have to be very wary of anything based

00:14:38.820 on modeling as you said covid being a case in point curiously as people will notice in my book

00:14:44.340 people are blaming the wrong models for for the covid the problem of the covid the initial models

00:14:48.740 of how lethal it was were more accurate than you'd think but the models suggesting that the

00:14:53.940 measures like lockdowns masks social distancing that those things would work those models were

00:15:00.420 horrible and those models were relied upon for the for the governments to say yeah we want to do

00:15:05.220 these crackdowns because this model says this will flatten the curve right trudeau would say plank

00:15:10.980 the curve he had to get cutesy with the whole planking thing because you know he did that when

00:15:14.580 he first ran for office yeah yeah so uh the whole plank the curve flatten the curve thing was based on

00:15:20.980 modeling that's that said that these measures um of masking distancing staying at home closing schools

00:15:28.260 would slow the spread of covid even though historically we knew that the evidence from all previous

00:15:34.420 infectious diseases and recorded where there is evidence knew we knew those would not work we knew

00:15:41.460 those would not work so uh that that's the covid scandal part which again you can read about

00:15:47.460 yeah and just you know i remember an episode of the west wing a while ago where you know the president

00:15:51.780 was sitting with a couple of economists and asking them for their predictions of what was going to happen

00:15:56.260 and you know one says you know we're gonna you know the economy is going to get better one says we're

00:16:00.260 gonna go to a recession the third says we're gonna hold and he's like two of you are gonna look very 0.98

00:16:04.420 stupid in six months time which i think is a pretty good way of of summing up uh you know how unscientific

00:16:10.020 some of these uh so-called scientific uh measures are well it's a fascinating uh piece and a fascinating 0.96

00:16:15.380 topic and i look forward to the ones that are uh coming down the pipeline uh especially as you've

00:16:19.780 been able to tease some stuff i didn't even know about that's coming up dr kenneth green senior

00:16:23.940 fellow with the fraser institute thank you so much a pleasure to be with you today thanks for

00:16:28.020 listening to the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news

Juno News - June 13, 2023

Trudeau’s billion-dollar bet on carbon capture

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