Oil sands, nuclear reactors, pipelines, liquified natural gas, hydro dams — these are what politicians and economists believe will make Canada into an energy superpower.
Their strategy: Ship more and more energy for people in the U.S., China, Europe, etc, to consume. Foreign owners of our resources get richer. Our environment gets wasted.
Actually, the whole planet gets wasted, but we get it worse. Forest fires destroy our homes and our health.
And for what?
We already produce far more energy than we consume. Statistics Canada says primary energy production in 2023 was 22,915 petajoule (PJ) (62 PJ/day); energy consumption was 8,485 PJ (24 PJ/day).
Do the math — 63 per cent goes to other countries.
PJs are not pyjamas — they are “petajoules” — energy units, quadrillions of joules. Picking up an apple off the table and lifting it over your head consumes about one joule. We consume quadrillions every day.
Our real energy superpower is Mother Nature.
NRCan’s solar resource maps show that each square meter of southern Canada gets around 15 million joules (15 MJ) of solar energy per day. It’s used mostly for evaporation plus “transpiration” (release of water vapour through plant leaves). These two processes are often lumped together as “evapotranspiration” (ET).
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) provides this example of ET: “On a summer day, net solar energy received at a lake reaches 15 MJ per square metre per day. If 80% of the energy is used to vaporize water, how large could the depth of evaporation be?”
Answer: 1 MJ/m2/day vaporizes 0.408 mm/day, so 15 MJ x 0.408 mm/day X 0.8 = 4.9 mm/day.
FAO also provides “Average ET” for different agroclimatic regions. For much of southern Canada, values are 1-2 mm/day at 10C, 2-4 mm/day at 20C, and 4-7 mm/day at 30C. These values increase slightly in arid and semi-arid regions in western Canada.
Southern Canada, where most of us live, has an area of around 4.2 trillion square meters. Conservatively, if 2.5 MJ of solar energy per square meter per day is used for ET, total energy consumption is 10,500 PJ/day.
That puts our daily consumption of 24 PJ of fossil fuel/hydro/nuclear energy to shame!
That solar energy can potentially lift over 10 billion tons of water into the sky each day, maintaining the hydrologic cycle. ET absorbs energy from its surroundings, cooling the land and the air. When water vapour condenses back into liquid water (or freezes into ice), it forms clouds and releases stored energy back to the atmosphere.
Use of solar energy for ET cools the country and moistens the atmosphere. Much of the 10,500 PJ/day of energy is released again in the atmosphere when water vapour (a gas) condenses back to a liquid and forms clouds. Clouds have a cooling effect on the underlying surface by blocking sunlight. They provide rain and snow.
As clouds form and release heat, they make the air in the cloud warmer and more buoyant. This can cause rising air currents, more cloud formation, and rainfall. This hydrologic cycle drives weather patterns and atmospheric circulation, and provides wind energy.
Water is life. Water cycling is a good thing. But we can destroy it, as we’re doing in so much of southern Canada: cutting down forests, draining wetlands, paving over the landscape, expanding the oil sands. Look at a map of where forests are burning. Many are near the oil sands, where we’ve destroyed the water cycle and dried out the landscape.
Or we can enhance water cycling. Obviously, we want to avoid the loss of croplands. But we can also devote a larger percentage of the landscape to healthy natural forests. Forest ET is greater than crop ET because trees typically have more leaves and deeper roots than lawns or crop plants. This means they take up and release more water to the atmosphere. We can curtail forestry practices such as clear cutting and herbicide spraying that cause forest degradation and dry out the landscape.
Or we can keep extracting more oil, gas, water, and timber and watch Canada burn.
The sensible route to becoming an energy superpower is to work with Mother Nature and find ways to increase our use of solar energy, particularly to maintain ET and the hydrologic cycle.
There are attractive and completely feasible ways to do this.
All we need to do is reverse the current trend of clearing and degrading forests, converting crop lands to housing developments, building parking lots and roads, draining wetlands, expanding the oil sands, etc.
Actually, we already have a national nature strategy that includes a commitment to restore degraded ecosystems (“Target 2: “Ensure that by 2030 at least 30% of areas of degraded terrestrial, inland water, and marine and coastal ecosystems are under effective restoration, in order to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, ecological integrity and connectivity.”)
We’re just not doing it.
This is a far more promising energy superpower strategy. It will provide many benefits. We will be able to feed ourselves, reduce forest fire frequency, provide clean drinking water, engage in outdoor recreational activities, generate hydroelectricity and wind energy, and so forth.
This represents real nation building.
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