A year ago, after the shock of war and human disaster, I called an electric car dealership. Well no, not a Tesla, I took the cheapest on the market. Energy was becoming a major issue; the war between Russia and Ukraine has brought about a new world order for fossil fuel supplies. The supplier had just changed.
When the car arrived nine months later (today it’s more than two years for the same one), the war was still not over. And we have never heard so much about energy sobriety as in 2022.
The Élysée heats up to 19°C on the other side of the ocean, turtlenecks are trendy, small toques too and Minister Fitzgibbon was testing the water temperature by telling us to start our dishwashers at midnight, a direct attack on our individual freedoms (I’m ironic).
Maybe he should have mentioned spas. In terms of “energy drunkenness” (seeState of energy in Quebec 2023, published last week), a spa used once a week consumes more annually than my new car, which will average 15,000 km/year. It will cost me $312.73 (2790 kWh/year) to fill up, compared to $430.76 (4667 kWh/year) for a spa used once a week according to Hydro’s calculator.
You will tell me, there are more cars than spas. TRUE.
And yet, the spa culture is not about to evaporate, judging by the number of customers at the Bota Bota outdoor spa—public transport, compared to the individual Jacuzzi—full to bursting with young millennials this week. Average age: 32 years old, at a glance (but I didn’t have my glasses). All in a state of advanced energy inebriation at -10°Celsius in February.
I’m talking about spas, but I could mention a thousand other things that are part of our untouchable lifestyles. Here, the Place Versailles shopping center which burns its snow with so-called natural gas, is on the front page of The Press Monday. We are used to wasting what is not expensive.
I love Hydro, a little, a lot, madly.
The electric car comes with a direct awareness of the resource. The play I love Hydro, carried by the actress and investigator Christine Beaulieu, did an excellent job for that too. Normand Mousseau, scientific director at the Trottier Energy Institute, saw several versions of the play and Sophie Brochu, the future ex-CEO of Hydro, was also inspired by it. We know the rest…
You cannot implement an energy policy simply as a purely economic matter. It has always been a foreign policy issue.
When you hear François Legault repeat that we will need ½ more Hydro-Québec, he is referring to the Trottier Institute. “The issue in Quebec is not the car,” Normand Mousseau explains to me. This will fetch about 15% of what we produce per year. No, the issue is the building: commercial buildings, our homes and the whole manufacturing sector. Our homes are too big to heat, there are fewer of us per square meter and a house consumes more energy than an apartment (44% less per household).
“Transformations take time, reminds the scientist. Designing cities takes a long-term view. It will not be done over 7 years, or even 30 years. We will not raze the suburbs and the regions to redevelop the territory! »
Mr. Mousseau rightly points out that it is always scaling up that is problematic. Eight million people doing the same thing is energy disaster. This is why we talk about densification.
This is why politics must get involved. “There is no political will,” Normand Mousseau points out to me. Hydro-Québec, today, it is 40% of our consumption. Because yes, since 2016 – apart from the pandemic – we have been consuming more oil than electricity. Mousseau deplores the lack of a strategic plan to align with 2050 and decarbonization. In 2013-2014, he co-chaired the Commission on Quebec’s energy issues and then…: “Nothing has been done. We make decisions on the margins that contradict each other without a specific objective. Europe has a vision, in a reasonable direction. We align energy with other issues. »
The endless world
The best-selling book in all categories in France in 2022? At more than 750,000 copies, a voluminous comic book signed by engineer Jean-Marc Jancovici and designer Christophe Blain: The endless world, which costs almost $50. Notice to publishers, anything is possible!
I brought him here because I like Jancovici, an engineer specializing in carbon assessments. This sturdy book is about energy and our adaptation as a species to ecological challenges. It is an exciting book of science popularization, history, on our economy and our consumption and on the energy which carries our needs and desires (whims included), on ecology and agriculture. The changes needed will be major.
The multiplication of humans propelled by the industrial revolution – ten times more in 200 years – has increased the energy needs accordingly. But, as Jancovici points out: “All energy becomes dirty on a large scale. To choose an energy, it is to arbitrate the disadvantages. »
The speed at which the system must be reformed is not compatible with the maintenance of individual freedom accompanied by the standard of living to which we are accustomed today.
It must be said that the engineer is pro-nuclear and does not hesitate to minimize the damage, which has been reproached to him many times. However, if there is one thing to remember, it is that all alternative energy is intended to maintain our current way of life (electric vehicles included) and that we are boosted with speed and immediacy by All. We have also gone from ignorance to denial when it comes to energy consumption. We will not escape degrowth or sobriety, according to Jancovici.
It also touches on the taboo subject of overpopulation, “a shitty stick”, and that of individual freedoms, the rat race.
The author recalls that GHG must be divided by 3 by 2050, by -4%/year. To do that would require a COVID pandemic every year to ground energy saving and consumption, planes and everything else.
But it goes without saying that a nuclear war would settle everything much more quickly.