Clean energy: the key to avoiding an economic nightmare

I think it’s reasonable to assume that an overwhelming percentage of Canadians would claim that they are concerned about the future of our planet. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who wasn’t at least a little bit concerned about our environment.

Canadian voting patterns, however, indicate something quite different. Election after election, Canadians tend to place the environment quite low on the list of election issues upon which they cast their vote. The economy has historically been among the top issues on the minds of voters, so let’s take a look at the environment through an economic lens.

Energy drives everything on our planet. We need energy to produce stuff and to consume stuff. In North America, we rely almost exclusively on non-renewable sources of energy. It’s no secret that these sources, including oil and coal, are the major contributors to pollution, global warming, and the general disarray of our environment.

The problem, in economic terms, is that these sources of non-renewable energy will not last forever (as the name suggests). The consequence of a diminishing supply is that prices will rise exponentially. When the price of energy eventually rises, the cost of everything else will rise along with it.

Rising energy costs will inevitably lead to the dreaded ‘stagflation’, which is when prices keep increasing while the number of jobs decrease. Consumer confidence erodes, resulting in less money spent on non-essentials and companies hesitating to hire. In short, it’s any economist’s nightmare.

So, how does one shift an economy out of a period of stagflation? In theory, the supply of energy needs to be increased and the demand needs to be cut. In practice, we introduce new sources of clean energy to increase the supply and begin to make our buildings, homes, and cars more energy efficient to cut the demand. These measures, together, will proportionally drop the price of energy.

At the moment, we have multiple clean energy sources available to us. Both wind and solar power are completely feasible and great alternatives. For example, did you know that the sun emits enough energy in one day to power our entire planet for one year? So, rather than increasing the supply by looking for more oil to drill or for other ways to extract nonrenewable energy, let’s start to focus on these renewable sources.

There are certainly a few barriers to shifting our entire country to clean energy. Significant upgrades to our infrastructure will be needed to accommodate these new energy sources. Also, there is still much research to be done to ensure that any new system we implement is as efficient as possible. The good news is that the private sector will have an interest in footing the bill for the costs of infrastructure and research for a piece of the pie.

Once we realize the economic benefits to shifting our economy to clean energy, it makes perfect sense to make a short-term sacrifice for long-term prosperity. The economic benefits should be motivation enough to start shifting our economy away from non-renewable energy.

If we act soon, we can be sure that our children will have a functioning economy and, as a meager consequence, our grandchildren will still have a planet.