Listen, I have been a staunch environmentalist since An Inconvenient Truth.
We lost. Climate change is here, and all we’ve seen is the first few paragraphs of the prequel.
Do what you want with that information, and I will keep doing what I can personally to help, but the era of possible political action on the climate is over…we might as well do what we need to do to be a global leader, yes including developing and selling all our oil. It’s either that, or a global superpower is going to take it for pennies on the dollar.
There is that perspective. If that’s what we’re doing, I’d like to take all the money and put it into public infrastructure that can help. E.g. mass renewable deployment (to insulate us from fossil fuel market instability), heat pump in every home, tree planting in concrete jungles, etc. Instead most of it is going to the US owners of the oil & gas firms.
Heat pumps aren’t a very effective solution. Depending on generation source, the electricity a heat pump uses to heat could be dirtier than the fuel that would otherwise be burned.
A better solution is to first reduce demand. For existing buildings, start with improving airtightness and reducing summer solar gain (add shading), then insulate where practical (following good building science), and only after that, modify mechanical systems to suit the new, reduced demand. New buildings take the same approach.
Not gonna argue with insulation and demand decrease first but heat pumps are multiple times more efficient than using the electricity for heat or the fuel that creates the electricity, regardless of how the electricity is geberated. That’s because they don’t convert the input energy into heat. They use the input energy to move heat from the outside to the inside or from the inside to the outside (when cooling). These days 2x to 5x heat than input energy is common.
Quick primer on heat pump operation.
I’m well aware of how heat pumps work. What I meant by that was that some electrical grids, like Saskatchewan, for example, have a high GHG intensity. So, despite a heat pump’s high efficiency, it can still result in higher overall GHG emissions than if the same amount of heat were delivered by burning natural gas in a condensing furnace.
Now Saskatchewan has been making good progress on cleaning up their grid, so it might not quite be the case now, but energy and GHG modelling I did a couple years ago showed just the case above.
Almost like we should nationalize the oil industry
Now now, let’s not get ourselves invaded or couped just yet. 🤭
But yeah, absolutely.
