BURNS, AUTHORIZED AND UNAUTHORIZED

Folks are talking about wildfires. They’re just talking about them because they’re visible at this moment. When Ontario or Quebec burn it gets noticed. Our friends to the south are certainly noticing, too.

The outrage at forest fire smoke drifting over the border, and the responses to that outrage, has been quite amusing. Talk of climate change. Talk of climate change denial. Comparison of this year’s burns to other years. All the usual on those fronts.

With that though, people were also claiming Canada lacks the tools or funding or any number of other things. Other people notice that whenever fire breaks out in the US, Canada seems to have enough firefighting resources to send water bombers and firefighting crews, which doesn’t imply an absence of resources. People also assert that, unlike other G7 nations, Canada lacks a national wildfire response team. Others notice that not only is that untrue but that British Columbia alone (population 5 million) has a forested area (~60 million hectares) roughly that of all the forests of the UK, France, Germany, and Japan (population 340 million). Comedy.

Thinking about all this I went looking for details about Canada’s proposed “Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage” strategy. I’d read about how the plan was to construct nearly half a trillion dollar domestic industry to meet our stated climate goals (45% emissions reduction from 2005 levels by 2030 and net-zero carbon emission by 2050.) Naturally, all I really ever heard about was the government focusing on support for high-value jobs and economic growth, directed at Alberta.

Turns out that on this front mitigation is currently said to be around 4 million tons of CO₂ per year, with a 2030 target of 16 million tons and a 2050 annual target of 60 million tons. From what I can tell the program involves a bunch of different phases and projects, largely in the Prairies. And it looks like the cumulative investment would be at least $300 billion, probably more, by 2050, implying an average annual spend of maybe $10 billion. Of course, with any national mega project of this sort the spend could blow out to twice this sum; or, at least, if they didn’t tack on another $150 billion it would be the first time in history.

To my mind this means that if the peak carbon capture is achieved, a hypothetical 60 Mt/year, we would be sequestering something like half the CO₂ released in a typical wildfire season but only 5% of the most extreme years on record. But, if you look, none of that is in the capture picture. Apparently we humans and human activities are no part of nature and nature is irrelevant, or something.

So then we can just look at the problem they do identify and seek to address. In 2024, the last time this math was done, it looked like we were pumping out greenhouse gas emissions to the tune of around 685 Mt. If we only consider such anthropogenic sources, our peak CO₂ capture would be around 10% of Canada’s current annual GHG emissions.

That, to me, seems like nothing for the proposed expense. Still, if everything remains static and we look at this whole picture, for $10 billion per year we might be able to reduce CO₂ from typical wildfire seasons and current anthropogenic sources by roughly 8% per year. That’s a hypothetical best. Still, in a big wildfire year, like 2023 that was almost ten times the norm, we would sequester effectively nothing.

That begs the question of whether we might do something better with all that taxpayer dough. The most obvious, to my simple mind, would be attempting to do the math on the CO₂ impact of just removing internal combustion vehicles from the road.

It seems like just the exhaust from cars, SUVs, and light trucks alone account for ~12% of that annual ~685 Mt volume. Something around 85-95 Mt per year. But you double that, to maybe 20-25%, if you add busses and transport vehicles. And if you’re not narrowly focused on CO₂ and care about smog, those nitrogen oxides, or the particulate matter composing all the soot and dust that alights on all surfaces in our cities, towns, and suburbs and causes heart and lung issues for everything that breathes, then obviously the impact is immensely higher…

Given that most of this year’s electric vehicle offerings, a dozen SUVs and small cars, range from 380-500km and cost between $40,000 and $46,000 new, I think we should be creating every incentive to encourage folks into electric vehicles or creating an industry to convert old vehicles of every sort rather than embarking so forcefully on such limited carbon sequestration that directly or immediately benefits effectively no taxpayers.

The incentives Canada currently offers on electric vehicles are up to $2,500 on plug-in hybrids and $5,000 on battery electric vehicles. Provinces like BC and Quebec have their own additional rebates: $4,000-7,000. Others offer little or nothing. So it makes all kinds of sense to me to forego the carbon capture program and triple the EV incentives to take a serious whack out of 25% of our CO₂ emission — and perhaps inside of a decade while also largely giving taxpayers back their own money — rather than hoping to one day achieve at best a 10% cut.

Too, in this light, does this $300 billion spend look like anything more than further payoffs for Edmonton and Calgary and continued bolstering of their oil and gas sectors and the foreign companies who've taken all the nation's wealth for decades? That’s how it smells to me — but that might just be all the particulate in the air.