The great consumerist orgy at the end of the year resumes. This series focuses on the socioeconomic, environmental and health consequences of a few inexpensive and over-consumed objects and services. Third stop: energy cheap.
If we had to bring energy consumption in Quebec to one image, it would be that of an oversized SUV parked in front of a large, poorly insulated suburban house, in a neighborhood without sidewalks, poorly served by public transit.
Like other Canadians, Quebecers use and waste energy as best they can. Our houses are still often sieves. The ecological standards for the construction of new homes date back another century. Private vehicles swell in size as much as residents. Rail, which has yet served to challenge this continent, now remains underused, when it has not completely disappeared for the transport of goods and people.
This fall report released by the International Energy Agency found that one inhabitant of Canada uses four times more energy (340 gigajoules per capita in 2019) than the world average (79 GJ) and twice as much as ‘a resident of the European Union. Canada is the world’s fifth largest energy consumer, behind Qatar and Iceland, but ahead of the United States or Russia. By adding up all their consumption (heating, air conditioning, lighting, transport, etc.), a Quebecer spends more than twice as much energy as a German or a French.
In short, here, we consume too much and we badly consume the excess energy. “There is an obvious relationship between the cost of energy and its consumption,” says Émile Boisseau-Bouvier, climate policy analyst at Équiterre, a Quebec environmental lobby group. If a product is not expensive, obviously, it is less of a problem to lose it, to squander it, to overconsume it. We can see it clearly in this holiday season: people are in a frenzy of shopping in front of all the discounts offered by merchants. We all react to price indices. “
A culture of overconsumption
Professor Pierre-Olivier Pineau, energy policy specialist at HEC Montreal, recalls another evidence concerning the production of cheap energy here.
“The lack of a geopolitical threat to supplies is having an impact,” he said. We produce everything in Canada, oil, natural gas, uranium, wood, electricity. This abundance allows for a certain nonchalance with regard to supplies and the maintenance of a culture of consumption. But what is also very clear is that we are using too much energy compared to what is necessary to maintain the same standard of living. We could keep it while consuming much less. “
In their book How our world got cheap (2018), which tells a “troubled story of humanity” around seven cheap objects, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore recall that the energy system of capitalism performs several tasks at the same time. Energy cheap reduces costs and increases profits. Cheap coal produces cheap steel. Inexpensive electricity or gasoline cuts spending on the family budget and keeps low earners afloat. Everything fits together and, when the production goes, a lot goes!
This productivist system has polluted the planet for two centuries with the consequences of climate change, which threatens the whole world. From an ecological point of view, the low price of energy does not reflect its real costs. Fossil extractions are low cost because they are subsidized and not taxed at the level of their environmental or social cost.
Between 2018 and 2020, Canada gave more subsidies to the oil and gas sector than any other G20 country. The average in this group was 2.5 times more funding allocated to fossil fuels than to renewables. In Canada, we give 14.5 times more.
Critics of this “cheapization” of nature and its resources do not ask “above all to return to the Stone Age”, as the spokesperson for Équiterre suggests in an ironic and colorful manner. They only want fundamental, reasonable, and fair changes for all people in Gaia.
“Other countries have the right to increase their standard of living in turn,” said Mr. Boisseau-Bouvier. We must give everyone a chance to improve their lot, and we must therefore demonstrate formidable efficiency in our resources. It is by reducing our consumption that we will make a real difference. We must produce less and better to allow others to increase their energy consumption. “
A world of waste
The height of consumption is waste. In transport, this economic-ecological sin borders on criminal fault. Quebec’s ever-growing fleet is now made up of more SUVs than cars. We even crushed the 1950s model with its passenger cars. The Ford Expedition (14 liters / 100 km city) now weighs 2,722 kg and is over 5 meters in length. The mythical and eccentric Cadillac Eldorado launched in 1953 weighed half a ton less for a comparable length.
“Engines use less gasoline, so people buy bigger ones,” notes Professor Pineau. Our collective wealth associated with the relative low price of oil and the efficiency of vehicles pushes back the constraints on their number and size. The mass effect means that we consume more oil than twenty years ago. It is quite a paradox and quite a problem. The small vehicle is offered, but it is not chosen and, that is our fault. “
Quebec is also among the dunces for its low marks in terms of eco-taxation (gasoline taxes, registration, parking, mileage, etc.). Équiterre relies on a bonus-malus system for punctures affecting large gasoline vehicles in favor of smaller models, electric for example. The group also wants to ban certain advertisements for SUVs, in the same way that the tobacco industry has already been regulated.
“In Quebec, we have the lowest price for residential electricity in North America,” recalls Émile Boisseau-Bouvier. Which does not encourage moderation. Big houses are overheated. The Building Code is outdated. The swimming pools or jacuzzis are heated even in winter. Each new connected object remains plugged in all night. In short, good energy habits do not come. We will have to change and become truly efficient and economical with our resources. “
A carbon-free future
Pierre-Olivier Pineau adds that, if we do not take this path of moderation and conservation here, it will become even more difficult to decarbonise the economy.
Quebec will need 137 TWh (billion kilowatt-hours), the equivalent of 17 La Romaine dams or 11 times the current wind farm to meet the demand for renewable energy. A Hydro-Québec report released in November shows energy savings potential of 24 TWh within a decade, including 5.6 in the residential sector, 7.4 in businesses and institutions and 9.5 in large industries.
“We must change the discourse on the use of energy”, says the professor, who evokes existing solutions, but all under-exploited, such as subsidies for eco-renovations, the brake on urban sprawl, carpooling or the return of rail for freight transport.
“Truck transport has developed in Quebec and in Canada in a bewildering fashion. We see it on the roads. Rail transport consumes ten times less energy per kilometer. It is also less expensive: a single locomotive driver drives fifty or even a hundred wagons, ”continues Mr. Pineau.
In this world of the desirable future, the image of energy consumption in Quebec would therefore rather be that of a shared electric vehicle in a LEED certified district served by public transport, including for the delivery of goods by train …