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September/October 2022 - ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 BCBUSINESS 39 BCBUSINESS.CA But the corollary question that "ZIP" raises still hangs in the air: Is zero possi- ble? Everyone from the B.C. and Canadian governments to Royal Dutch Shell and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC) is promising to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net- zero by 2050. Is there any reason to take them seriously? Is the goal—which IPCC scientists say is necessary to save the world from an irreversible climate catastrophe— even achievable? The optimistic answer is: yes! However, a report from McKinsey Global Institute, The Net-Zero Transition, says the bill will be $275 trillion. That's $9.2 trillion a year from 2021 to 2050—or about $3.2 trillion a year more than we are currently spending on energy and land-use systems. In 2021 dol- lars, McKinsey says, that amounts to half of all global corporate profits, one-quarter of tax revenues currently paid to all govern- ments, or 7 percent of all household spend- ing. So, even optimistically, the McKinsey answer to whether zero is possible seems to be: yes, but… There is a more manageable calcula- tion for Canada alone. The Canadian Cli- mate Institute, a not-for-profit organization funded mostly by Environment and Climate Change Canada, produced a similar report in 2021, called Canada's Net Zero Future. It concludes: "Net zero is achievable—if Can- ada plays its cards right." Dale Beugin, CCI's vice president, research and analysis, says the organization ran more than 60 mod- elling scenarios in the course of charting "many possible routes to net zero." There was, he says, "no magical thinking." Again optimistically, CCI calculated that Canada could achieve two-thirds of its 2030 emission-reduction goals using "safe bets," which CCI describes as "low-risk solutions that are available today"—ranging from energy efficiency and electric vehicles to "natural gas fuel switching." Getting to 2050 is tougher, especially if you're seri- ous about reaching a state where the entire population has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions to a point that any overshoot can be balanced by "negative emission solutions," everything from newly planted forests to carbon capture technologies that draw carbon dioxide ( CO2) straight out of the atmosphere. To reach net zero by 2050, Beugin says, we will need the full effect of safe bets, plus a big contribution from "wild cards," which CCI defines as "high- risk, high-reward solutions that are still in early stages of development." These are the solutions we dream about, solutions that innovators like the direct-air-capture company Carbon Engineering in Squamish have already demonstrated, but that have not yet been proven at scale or shown to be affordable. Returning to the part about Canada playing its cards right, Beugin says, none of this is "going to happen on its own. We are going to need aggressive, ambitious govern- ment policy." So, the McKinsey answer of "yes, but…" now becomes "yes, if…" Blowing hot air Looking back on the record of Canadian governments' historical level of climate ambition, that becomes an un-reassuring "if." Canada has been making these distant GHG-reduction commitments for decades, and while none satisfied the David Suzuki Foundation on the day they were made, some seemed pretty ambitious. Unfortu- nately, the government hasn't kept a single such promise. For example, at the Kyoto cli- mate conference in 1997, Canada promised to reduce national GHG emissions 6 percent from 1990 levels—which were 602 mega- tonnes of CO equivalent (602Mt CO2 eq)—by 2012. Instead, national emissions rose to 717 Mt, an increase of more than 19 percent. In 2000, when it was already falling behind on the 1997 target, the federal government promised to reduce emissions by 65 Mt a year—every year—from 2008 to 2012; that would have been a fabulous 325-Mt reduc- tion. Alas, emissions fell slightly thanks to the 2008 recession, but that (very tempo- rary) cut amounted to 19 Mt—less than 3 per- cent, rather than 45 percent, as promised. The B.C. provincial government has been similarly enthusiastic in setting soon- to-be unrealized emissions targets. For example, in 2007, the government of the day brought in the first North American car- bon tax, still the most progressive climate initiative on the continent, and it promised to reduce GHG emissions 33 percent from 2007 levels by 2020. Still no. B.C.'s emis- sions were up 7 percent by 2018, and they have continued to rise. If you're at risk of losing heart, this might be a great time to look more closely at the long-term promise of ZIP—or, rather, CICE (Ged McLean, who, by the time you're reading this, will be on a 46-foot sailboat on a long-planned voyage through the North- west Passage, pronounces it "sea ice"). The organization was conceived in 2021 as a hothouse for what the CCI call wild cards. The idea is to find and fund B.C.-based com- panies that have a capacity to: 1) reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and, 2) benefit the provincial economy. And to be clear, McLean says, this is not a redundant pro- gram for supporting blue sky research. To qualify, CICE applicants must have a proven, market-ready technology or idea, prefer- ably in one of the following categories: • carbon capture, utilization and storage; • the production, use and distribution of low-carbon hydrogen; • biofuels and synthetic fuels (including marine and aviation fuels); • renewable natural gas; and • battery technology, storage and energy management systems. You'll notice nothing fossil fuel-ish in that list, which raises the question of why Shell would step up as an equal partner. Shell Canada president and country chair Susannah Pierce says it's basically enlight- ened self-interest. The partnership gives Shell no insider status when it comes to analyzing or approving projects. Neither will CICE or Shell participate directly in any "We've already felt the brunt of extreme weather in B.C. in the last year: the flooding that did so much damage in the valley and the heat dome that killed hundreds of British Columbians. We've seen how this may go." –Ian Bruce, deputy executive director of the David Suzuki Foundation

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