This transcript, lightly edited, is a recorded conversation with a Canadian citizens action group where I walked through a practical, systems-level view of Canada’s decarbonization pathway, grounded in technologies that already work at scale. I focused on what is deployable now, not hypothetical breakthroughs, and explored everything from transmission and electrification to heat pumps, batteries, mass timber, and critical minerals. Along the way, we dug into the real barriers, which are less about technology and more about policy, communication, and political will. The discussion that follows, including the Q&A, reflects the kinds of questions I encounter regularly, ranging from nuclear and high-speed rail to methane, agriculture, and mining, and my aim throughout was to anchor the conversation in evidence, relative impacts, and actionable choices rather than ideology. You can watch the full video discussion on YouTube. Jim Byrne [JB]: Great, wonderful to see everyone. It’s a pleasure to welcome Michael back to SCAN. Michael is a good friend of mine, and he’s also recognized around the world for his work on practical decarbonization technologies, policies, and programs that work at real scale, that operate at real scale. Mike and I always get together for a few beers whenever I’m in British Columbia, and I must admit, it’s wonderful how British Columbia has such a plethora of fine establishments that make microbrews. We get to share some of those, and we have some great conversations about engineering, markets, and, again, what actually works for dealing with climate change. Mike brings real curiosity and rigor to those conversations, and he brings that to his publications and his global advisory work as well. He is regularly engaged by executives, investors, and policymakers on decarbonization pathways that can be deployed now, not in the future, and not unpromising or unproven technologies. He focuses on what works now, and what doesn’t work now too. If you ever want to get some of Mike’s really good writing, just search his name and put in carbon capture and storage, and you’ll find out how badly it fails us, despite what they say in Alberta, along with many other topics. Mike is not at all shy about engaging in difficult, controversial discussions and debates. He has published many well-researched analyses that challenge unsupported claims from industry, government, and NGOs. I could go on, but I’ll stop there, because this is Michael’s day. His work examines the real-world viability of solutions and non-solutions that might include natural gas, LNG, carbon capture, hydrogen, and nuclear energy, and how they might or might not meet current and future needs. Through his writing and advisory work, Mike has contributed to an evidence-based conversation on how experienced citizens can apply their knowledge, resources, and networks to accelerate the clean energy transition. It’s wonderful again to welcome Michael Barnard here to talk to us today. Good to see you, Michael, and welcome. I’ll turn it over to you. Slide from author’s presentation to a Canadian climate action citizens group. Michael Barnard [MB]: Good to be back. I was here a month ago, for those of you who were here, talking about the global perspective of pockets of the future. The focus today is on Canada, specific things about where Canada is and some things to think about as we consider Canada now. The “pockets of the future” work I did last time really had a theme: we have all the solutions for 98% of decarbonization. They are proven at scale in countries around the world. There’s nothing that isn’t proven. We don’t need to do pilots, we just need to pick stuff and implement what works. There’s an entire plethora of solutions, and many of them are homegrown. I’m going to speak for perhaps 35 or 40 minutes, and then we’ll have questions at the end. Slide from author’s presentation to a Canadian climate action citizens group. Let’s start with the basics. Canada is actually really well positioned for this in a few ways. We have some of the lowest carbon electricity in the world in our biggest provinces. Quebec and British Columbia have very low carbon electricity. Manitoba has about the lowest carbon electricity I’ve seen anywhere in the world. With our big hydro resources, Ontario’s electricity is pretty good, although they’re going in the wrong direction with more gas-powered generation, which is problematic. But Ontario also got rid of its coal plants back in the 2000s, eliminating about 37 million tons of CO2 per year, one of the biggest single interventions in decarbonization I’ve seen. Sadly, Alberta and Saskatchewan have largely removed the benefits gained in other provinces by increasing their carbon emissions. But that’s temporary. We also have cross-Canada rail, and we have more than enough land for all the wind and solar we need. I was in the Netherlands last year, which is about the size of half of the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, from Hope over to Vancouver Island, and they have gigawatt-scale wind, solar, and battery farms. At one point they had more rooftop solar than Australia. So we have all the space we need for clean energy, and all the space we need for pumped hydro storage, batteries, and transmission. The only thing stopping us is willpower. It’s certainly not availability. We also have an enormous amount of critical minerals necessary for electrification in the future, so we can be a real powerhouse in terms of mineral extraction, processing, refining, and some manufacturing from those minerals. There are a lot of advantages we have. That said, we’re not doing enough, and we’re not doing it quickly. Slide from author’s presentation to a Canadian climate action citizens group. This is a Sankey diagram, an energy flow diagram invented by a Scottish engineer with several names I can never keep straight. The last one was Matthew Henry Phineas Riall Sankey, which is why it’s called the Sankey diagram. I tend to use these not only for current energy flows for jurisdictions I’m engaging with, but I also turn them into future decarbonized energy flows. The way to read this is that primary energy comes in on the left and flows through conversions like refining or electrical generation. It then flows into energy use cases where useful energy is consumed to do something, and finally into one of two categories: rejected energy, which is wasted as heat, or useful energy, which is what we actually get value from. This is the future version, and it has 1,000 terawatt hours of useful energy consumed by Canadian society. That’s actually what it was in 2024. But the energy flow diagram for today’s system had about 1,500 terawatt hours of wasted rejected energy. In a future electrified system, fed dominantly by renewable electricity, you can see how much lower the rejected energy is compared to 1,500 terawatt hours. It really does invert things. An electrified economy powered by renewables is a vastly more efficient economy. That’s because the Carnot cycle and the diesel cycle, the thermodynamic processes behind internal combustion engines and thermal generation, are inherently wasteful. This mix of energy forms is sufficient to provide all the energy services we consume today, with all the economic benefits and far fewer negative externalities. About 300 terawatt hours of wind, 180 terawatt hours of solar, a large amount of hydro. I left nuclear in there because Ontario has extended its nuclear plants long past when they might reasonably be retired, so we’ll still have nuclear for a while. Ambient heat increases significantly, and biomass for biofuels for aviation and shipping also increases. That’s the general shape of the future energy mix. Slide from author’s presentation to a Canadian climate action citizens group. In order to take advantage of that, we need to build out transmission across Canada much more robustly than it is today. The good news is that there are things happening right now, including Mark Carney’s budget and related efforts. One of the key elements is that clean energy tax credits can now be taken by Crown corporations that build transmission. That wasn’t possible previously. The clean energy tax credits couldn’t be used by the Crown corporations responsible for transmission buildout. Now they have a new funding mechanism for long-term investment in transmission, and that’s going to unlock several projects. I’ve identified five interconnector projects that can form the incremental creation of what I call the second golden spike. The second golden spike project is a HVDC transmission backbone across Canada. High-voltage direct current has low losses, so electrons can flow from where they are in surplus to where they are needed with minimal losses. That requires more transmission or better transmission. There are several techniques we can use. We can deploy grid-enhancing technologies like dynamic line rating and reconductoring on existing transmission lines. We can also reuse existing corridors for high-voltage direct current transmission, effectively creating much bigger pipes for electrons. One of the things Seniors Climate Action Network can potentially support across Canada is countering NIMBYism around transmission, engaging in activities to promote transmission and grid-enhancing technologies, and speaking with MPs to help push this forward. It’s the same kind of effort as countering anti-wind and anti-solar narratives. There needs to be some effort put into that among civil society to move those forward. Slide from author’s presentation to a Canadian climate action citizens group. Batteries are a similar story. They’re a global, extraordinary success story, with massive growth because they can be used for all sorts of things. If transmission is a bit tight, they can be used for buffering at either end. They can shift solar generation into the evening hours when it’s needed. They can provide ancillary services like frequency and voltage control to keep the grid running smoothly at 60 hertz, 60 cycles per second. There’s also a lot of disinformation about batteries and fires right now. I did an analysis of the California battery fire you may have heard about last year. The batteries had replaced a natural gas plant that was running at about 60% capacity, fouling the air and causing health impacts in the local community. The battery fire was a single transient event. It was over quickly and caused zero releases, zero chemical impacts, and zero health impacts for the surrounding community. And yet people are afraid of batteries. There’s a lot of work to do to demystify batteries, especially grid-scale batteries, to push back against poorly thought-out setback rules that are emerging, and, bluntly, to counter the tendency of some fire departments to amplify risks in ways that drive larger budgets. Battery storage has been increasing by leaps and bounds. We’re now seeing battery systems with up to 10 hours of storage, which is starting to approach long-duration storage. They’ve become so cheap that one of the things I tell people is that if you’re not paying close attention to solar and batteries, everything you think you know is wrong. Costs have fallen so far that it’s now viable to put solar on the sides of buildings or even use it as fencing material. Batteries have become an extraordinary enabler of decarbonization. Slide from author’s presentation to a Canadian climate action citizens group. For Canada, one additional advantage is that we’re actually one of the global leaders in mass timber construction. Mass timber is essentially plywood on steroids. You can create structural beams and full floors, routed out for wiring, plumbing, fittings, windows, and doors. You put them together like Lego on site and construct a building with a much smaller number of trades, basically carpenters assembling panels and beams. The buildings go up much faster. Structurally, mass timber has comparable strength to reinforced concrete at about a fifth of the mass. What you end up with is a much lighter building, so your foundations are lighter as well. This enables us to avoid the use of cement and reinforced concrete, which is a significant source of carbon emissions. Mass timber is scaling quickly. The world’s tallest mass timber building, at around 50 stories, is already under construction. We already have about 700 buildings in Canada using mass timber in various forms, including cross-laminated timber and other engineered wood products. There are multiple techniques and names for it, but the key point is that it’s ready to scale. As we move forward, one of the key opportunities is to take advantage of it. Mark Carney’s housing policy is targeted at the bottom 20% of the socioeconomic ladder, focusing on social housing and multi-unit residential buildings, with about $7 billion in funding. The original target was $13 billion, but the budget came in lower. Still, that funding acts as a seed for private investment to create affordable, high-quality housing for the underhoused, while also building an industry around mass timber. That, in turn, enables higher value-added use of our forestry resources. Today, we often sell into low-value markets, which makes it difficult for forestry firms to generate the profits needed to invest in sustainable practices. Moving up the value chain changes that dynamic. Every ton of mass timber contains roughly a ton of carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere. Trees take in CO2, release oxygen, and retain the carbon as structural material. We don’t double count that carbon because it’s already accounted for in forest carbon inventories. At end of life, there are multiple pathways to manage the timber so that the carbon is not simply released back into the atmosphere when buildings are deconstructed. Slide from author’s presentation to a Canadian climate action citizens group. I’m just going to say this is a really obvious one. Heat pumps are an amazing technology. They’re vastly more efficient, and they work in much colder climates than they used to. If you’ve got forced air in a home, they plug into that system and make installation very straightforward. It’s actually much easier to install heat pumps in Canada than in the UK, where many homes use radiator systems, or in New York City, where steam systems are common. In Canadian homes, if you already have central air conditioning, you can convert that into a heat pump quite easily. There are also plenty of tools and approaches to smooth that transition. From a SCAN perspective, as a technology enabler, it’s worth looking at what the UK did to accelerate heat pump adoption. They changed regulations in two key ways and saw real benefits. First, they removed property line setbacks and limits on the number of heat pumps allowed on a property. Instead, they introduced a performance-based standard of 43 decibels at neighbors’ windows. Because modern heat pumps are so quiet, this allowed people to install them where needed and in sufficient numbers for multi-unit residential or larger buildings. The second change was removing the requirement for building envelope retrofits before qualifying for heat pump grants. The “fabric first” approach can be a trap. Real-world data shows that if people are still burning natural gas, envelope improvements often lead to rebound effects. People increase their comfort by turning up the heat, opening windows more, or wearing lighter clothing, so total gas consumption doesn’t fall as expected. In one major UK study, after four years, the same 55,000 homes were burning essentially the same amount of gas. So the better approach is to electrify buildings first, and then do targeted insulation retrofits that maximize the value of the investment. From a SCAN perspective, that means advocating for policies where insulation upgrades are not a prerequisite for heat pump grants, and reviewing local zoning bylaws to ensure there are no unrealistic or unnecessary restrictions that prevent people from adopting heat pumps. Slide from author’s presentation to a Canadian climate action citizens group. This is another obvious one. Moving goods and people with electricity is straightforward. Ground transportation, especially individual cars, represents about 70% of global oil consumption. Powering that with our low-emissions electricity grid is vastly more efficient from wind turbine to wheel than internal combustion vehicles are from well to wheel, with much lower emissions and lower costs for consumers. Electricity in Canada is relatively inexpensive, outside of Saskatchewan and Alberta, which have the highest electricity prices in the country, largely because of their heavy reliance on fossil fuels. It’s a useful counterpoint. If someone claims renewables are expensive, Alberta and Saskatchewan have the highest prices and the least renewables, so what exactly are they arguing? Electric buses are growing quickly. Don’t get distracted by hydrogen bus narratives. Harbin has a climate comparable to Edmonton. It hosts a globally recognized ice festival that spans hectares, so it gets very cold, and yet its buses are electric. They insulate them properly, use heat pumps, and add radiant heating inside. They work just fine. There are well-understood solutions. In-motion charging addresses most concerns about range and winter energy demand. This involves buses with potentially smaller batteries that can draw power from overhead trolley wires along parts of their routes, charging as they go. On hills, for example, they can use overhead power both for propulsion and to recharge. There’s a persistent claim that battery-electric buses can’t handle routes like the climb to Simon Fraser University, but in-motion charging solves that easily. It doesn’t require overhead wires everywhere, just in strategic segments. We don’t need to string trolley wires across all of downtown Vancouver to make this work. It’s very practical, well-understood technology. Slide from author’s presentation to a Canadian climate action citizens group. Another thing that is very important is methane. We have a lot of methane emissions, which is a very potent greenhouse gas, coming from our fossil fuel infrastructure. Unfortunately, we didn’t adopt Norwegian or northern European standards for infrastructure. We adopted North American, specifically United States, standards. What that means is that we flare a lot of methane and vent a lot of methane. When a pipeline is depressurized for maintenance, the methane is often just vented to the atmosphere as standard practice. We also have many actuators on pipelines that use pressurized natural gas to operate and maintain pressure. There are technologies available to replace these systems, but it requires political will to mandate their use and to change operational practices. One example that stands out is when neighbors complained about flaring. High-efficiency flares convert methane into carbon dioxide, which is imperfect but significantly better than releasing methane directly. In response to complaints, an operator turned off the flare and simply vented methane to the atmosphere to be a “good neighbor.” That kind of outcome highlights how poorly aligned incentives and understanding can be. There’s a lot of avoidable, counterproductive behavior around methane that we can fix in Canada, especially given the size of our fossil fuel industry. Some of the worst emissions come from cold heavy oil production with sand, particularly in southern Alberta near the border with Saskatchewan, where operations on both sides contribute significant methane emissions. But methane leakage is an issue across multiple parts of the system. A strong focus on reducing these emissions would deliver meaningful near-term climate benefits. Slide from author’s presentation to a Canadian climate action citizens group. Similarly in agriculture globally, when I spoke to the head of the Global Carbon Project, which does global carbon budgets for greenhouse gases including methane, he pointed out that from land use we actually get more methane than from the fossil fuel industry. A lot of that comes from a few key sources in agriculture. One of the big ones is ammonia-based fertilizers. When these are applied to land, especially quick-release forms, they convert into nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide has about 265 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide and persists for a long time, making it a major climate concern. There are slower-release fertilizers, such as oxamides, that should be more widely adopted in Canadian agriculture, but that’s addressing the downstream problem. Upstream, we produce ammonia for fertilizers from natural gas, mostly in Alberta. Roughly, a ton of ammonia results in 6 to 8 tons of carbon dioxide emissions during production, not including upstream methane leakage from the natural gas supply. This is an area where we need to push for decarbonization, ideally using green hydrogen. In practice, in Alberta and Saskatchewan, blue hydrogen is more likely. It won’t be as low-emissions as green hydrogen, but it would still be an improvement over current processes. There are also emissions from livestock. Dairy barns and cattle operations produce significant methane. There are straightforward interventions. One is a seaweed-derived feed supplement that reduces methane emissions from cattle by 60% to 80%. It’s proven and available now, and could be mandated periodically as part of feed practices. In dairy barns, where emissions are concentrated, there are methane-eating microbes that can be used in systems attached to ventilation to reduce emissions. For hog manure ponds, simple interventions like bubbling systems can ensure proper anaerobic decomposition and reduce methane release. There are many changes like this that are relatively simple and well understood. They don’t require changing diets. They require targeted interventions and compensation for farmers. Farmers are often at the weakest point in the value chain, with many intermediaries between them and grocery shelves. In many cases, the farmer’s share is less than 5% of the final price, so supporting them in adopting these practices is both practical and necessary. Slide from author’s presentation to a Canadian climate action citizens group. We have all the critical minerals necessary for decarbonization. I used to work for a global technology consultancy, and if I was working on a bid in Canada, I’d bring in the Australians because Australia is also a major minerals player. But if we were working outside of Canada, I’d bring in the Canadians, because it was seen as expertise from elsewhere. We have enormous depth and breadth of capability in critical minerals, along with significant raw material resources. If you’ve been opposing mining in the past, it’s worth reconsidering. We should be supporting mining in Canada, especially hard rock mining for the critical minerals needed for electrification. It needs to be done responsibly, and in Canada we generally do that well, but it is necessary for addressing climate change. We have the potential to be a global powerhouse in this space. At one point, Quebec’s hard rock lithium mining was the largest source of lithium in the world. We have the minerals we need, and we can power their extraction and processing with clean Canadian electricity. Much of this work is well suited to electrification using low-carbon power. Slide from author’s presentation to a Canadian climate action citizens group. I’ll say this again, there are no hair shirts involved in what we need to do for Canada. There are some changes. You plug in your car when you get home, and it charges overnight during low-demand periods. We install heat pumps instead of gas furnaces. We ride electric buses, and when we call an Uber, it’s an electric car instead of a gasoline one. We still have warmth, we still have heat, and we still have all the food we love. It’s just much lower carbon. This is all very manageable. Slide from author’s presentation to a Canadian climate action citizens group. There’s a bit here I’d like to talk about that SCAN can lean into. There’s a social psychologist out of the United States, Jonathan Haidt, and he developed something called moral foundation theory. He and his colleagues have done a lot of analysis on how people make decisions. I’m going to assume that, since this isn’t seniors for oil sands but seniors for climate action, most of you, like me, lean toward the progressive end of the political spectrum rather than the conservative end. It’s a continuum, not a binary. One of the things Haidt’s research found is that progressives tend to focus on care and fairness in moral reasoning. Those are the two foundations we emphasize most. We still consider loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty, but we tend to weight them lower. Conservatives, by contrast, also value care and fairness, but they weight them more equally alongside loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. What that means is that if you’re doing communications, whether it’s PR, advocacy, or campaigns, and you default only to care and fairness, you’re leaving some persuasive ground unused. The recommendation I make is to pair care or fairness with one of loyalty, authority, sanctity, or liberty in your messaging, so you’re engaging across the full spectrum. Right now, that’s relatively easy to do. The world is in an energy crisis, the second in four years and one of many since the OPEC oil crisis. On average, we see a global energy crisis every few years. In those periods, energy resilience, security, and affordability become central concerns. There’s nothing more resilient, affordable, or secure than electricity generated from wind, solar, and water within our own borders. If you want to speak to liberty, it’s right there in freedom from volatile gas prices. If you want to speak to affordability, you can point to places like Spain and Pakistan, which have weathered recent energy price shocks better than many others because of their investments in renewables. Spain in particular has a strong mix of wind and solar and a robust grid. Even when they experienced a grid outage, they restored it in about 12 hours, an extraordinary response. There’s a book on this that’s worth reading. And there’s also a practical shortcut. When you’re crafting messaging, you can use tools like ChatGPT or Gemini and ask how to incorporate additional moral foundations into your message. Large language models are very good at this kind of reframing. This isn’t about pandering. It’s about meeting people where they are and increasing the likelihood that they’ll hear and engage with the message. Slide from author’s presentation to a Canadian climate action citizens group. That’s the full set of slides. I got through them a bit faster than expected, which leaves more time for questions. Let’s move to questions. [MBush]: There’s a question here from someone who is tempted to purchase a Skywind Energy wind turbine to put on his roof. I think I know the answer to this, but what do you think, Michael, about this idea? [MB]: Let me just look at the Skywind turbine first before I respond. Yes, that one. The short answer is that wind energy needs to be big. The wind turbines in wind farms are large systems, and they need to be away from turbulence. If you have a large open field with good wind and can install a hundred-foot mast with a 10-kilowatt turbine, for example from Bergey Wind, then that can work well. But wind energy on top of buildings is essentially greenwashing. Don’t waste your time and money. You won’t get much energy out of it. It will be noisy, it will creak, it will break, and you’ll be annoyed. So don’t do it. Question: I’m learning a lot, but I don’t understand the first slide. It looked like nuclear and biofuel were going into wasted energy, and I suspect I don’t understand what you were showing as the energy that wasn’t useful in the bottom right corner. [MB]: Sure. Nuclear is a thermal generation process. We use the heat from the decay of uranium to boil water, then run that steam through a turbine to generate electricity. Only about 40% of that heat turns into electricity, so roughly 60% is lost as rejected energy. For biofuels, the main future use case is long-distance transport, especially crossing oceans. Great Lakes shipping can be electrified, and hybrid electric aircraft, such as turboprops for shorter routes, are viable. But for long-haul flights, we’ll still need liquid fuels, and those will be biofuels. The same applies to large ships and jets. Large jet engines are about 50% efficient at cruising altitude, around 38,000 feet, meaning about 50% of the energy is lost as rejected energy. On the runway, efficiency is much worse, with a lot of fuel effectively wasted without producing useful motion. During climb, efficiency is also lower than at cruise. Rejected energy refers to heat energy that doesn’t translate into useful work, such as forward motion for a plane or ship. Biofuels go through processing with some losses, and then additional energy is lost during use in transportation. Question: I think I touched on this a little bit, but I’m curious about your thoughts on SMRs that the Doug Ford government wants to put in Ontario. I’m not entirely against it myself, but I’d like to hear what you have to say. Slide from author’s presentation to a Canadian climate action citizens group. [MB]: Let me put up a slide I had prepared in case someone asked about nuclear. I’ve been paying attention to nuclear for a long time. I like nuclear as a 1970s technology. I understand it. It’s safe, low carbon, and low pollution. Fears of radiation are often overstated. However, it’s slow to build and expensive, and because of the nature of the technology, it carries a higher risk of going over schedule and over budget. Even China, which handles megaprojects very effectively, has only managed to keep nuclear costs from rising further. It hasn’t broken the cost curve and driven costs down. I started tracking the global comparison between nuclear and renewables in China around 2014 because it was a useful natural experiment. They didn’t have the same political or regulatory constraints often cited in Western contexts. Yet even there, nuclear hasn’t scaled particularly quickly. They’re averaging zero to three reactors a year and remain under 2% of grid capacity with nuclear, while wind and solar are around 60%. China began its commercial nuclear program in the 1970s, while its wind and solar expansion started around 2004. Renewables have grown exponentially, with increasing annual deployment, while nuclear additions remain relatively flat. The historical conditions for nuclear success are not being recreated. In Ontario, nuclear expansion was partly supported by broader geopolitical and industrial factors, including ties to uranium processing for military purposes. That kind of context doesn’t exist today, and most countries are not pursuing nuclear weapons programs alongside civilian nuclear power. Looking at small modular reactors specifically, the historical evidence shows that success came from standardizing and scaling a small number of large designs. In the United States, for example, dozens of reactors were built using only a couple of designs. Scale matters. Early nuclear systems, adapted from naval reactors, proved too expensive when deployed at small scale due to engineering complexity. To achieve lower costs, systems tend to scale toward gigawatt levels. You can see this trend even with SMRs, which are gradually getting larger. What started as concepts for very small units has moved toward designs in the hundreds of megawatts. We already have experience with reactors of that size, including CANDU designs. India, for instance, is now focusing on gigawatt-scale reactors rather than smaller units, because they are more economically viable. My view is that, in the 21st century, given the clear global success of wind, solar, transmission, and storage, nuclear is often used as a delaying tactic by some policymakers. Since climate change can no longer be denied, nuclear is presented as a future solution, allowing current action to be deferred. You can see this in Ontario, where additional natural gas generation is planned over the next 15 years while nuclear projects are developed. I’m not opposed to nuclear as a technology. If a country were clearly building the conditions for success and being transparent about it, I would support it, especially if it were alongside aggressive deployment of wind and solar. Question: There’s no end of really good examples of what could be done. I think the biggest barrier you pointed out when talking about methane emissions is the lack of political will. It’s pretty frustrating right now to have a federal government that has done things like cut green home standards and incentives and reduced funding for public transit. It’s also incredibly frustrating in Ontario dealing with nuclear policy. Several years ago, I was talking with a climate scientist who specializes in transportation. She had done a lot of strong work on the carbon burden of building public transit compared to other options. We asked her why she wasn’t making more noise about it, and she said she wanted the science to speak for itself. So the question is, when are scientists going to start speaking out? When are engineers who understand these issues going to start speaking out? Because it’s not just about having good examples. Even in the United States, there are 28 states right now that are about to enact legislation to allow balconies. [MB]: I know Michael E. Mann and Mark Z. Jacobson personally. I’ll tell a story about them. They have both been sued for defamation. Michael Mann won his case. Mark Z. Jacobson lost his case and is facing a $500,000 US judgment. The amount of money spent on SLAPP litigation, lawsuits intended to shut people up, is significant. The well-funded fossil fuel industry and its enablers are very powerful. Michael Mann is fearless, and I respect him tremendously. Mark Z. Jacobson as well. But it takes a special kind of person to stand up and become a lightning rod. Should we really expect scientists, the people advancing knowledge, and engineers, the people building systems, to also be the primary communicators and public advocates? As I was saying to Jim earlier, we were laughing about communication. He’s been trying to learn how not to sound like an engineer for years. That’s why I ended with the moral foundations framework. It helps people communicate more effectively and build broader support and political will for solutions. There are two major communication failures among progressives. One is assuming that if we give people information, they will make better decisions. That’s not how people work. The second is focusing messaging only on care and fairness, instead of also engaging with other moral foundations that resonate more broadly, including with conservatives. This is something we can change. It’s unfair to expect scientists and engineers to carry the burden of communication and advocacy. There are other people better positioned to do that work. [JB]: I appreciate Michael’s comments. I’ve screamed my head off for 35 years. There is an incredibly wealthy industry that works very hard to shut us all up. I’ve come very close to being sued, and I’ve managed to avoid it, probably because they don’t want to make a martyr out of me. Question: There’s a proposal for a high-speed electric passenger rail line between Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City. I’ve heard there is significant opposition in rural areas due to concerns about agricultural land being taken. Do you have any thoughts on that? [MB]: I did the math on this, not the agricultural land part, but the population density. For an equivalent distance line in China versus Ontario, it’s about half. We have about half the population that could be served by high-speed rail. Second, in China and Europe, there are feeder rail systems that bring people to high-speed rail. We don’t really have that. Third, in China, Europe, and India, there are strong cultural norms around using rail, whereas we have a culture centered on private automobiles. Fourth, I mentioned hybrid electric aircraft. I’ve flown out of Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport to Montreal many times. That route, which overlaps significantly with the major cities this rail line would serve, is well suited to hybrid electric turboprops in the near future. Fifth, if you look at California’s high-speed rail project, farmland wasn’t the main issue, city access was. One end is terminating about 140 miles from San Francisco and the other about 40 miles from Los Angeles. That’s not true city center to city center service, and I suspect we’d face similar challenges in Canada. I like rail. When I’m in Europe, I use it all the time. A couple of years ago, when my wife and I spent time in Toronto and Montreal, we took Via Rail between the two. But I don’t think the conditions for success for high-speed rail are really there in Canada yet. Question: Yes, thanks for that answer, because I live not too far from that high-speed rail route in Prescott County. I’m wondering more generally, for high-speed rail, transmission corridors, pipeline corridors, or any of these kinds of corridors, how do you prevent the areas they pass through from becoming sacrifice zones? It seems to me that in my area, if the high-speed rail goes through, we would, in a way, become a sacrifice zone, because there’s no feeder transit, no buses, or anything else to help people actually get to the city so they can take the train that’s going through their fields. [MB]: I think the term “sacrifice zone” is wonderfully emotionally laden and, in my view, inaccurate framing. It communicates your distaste for high-speed rail effectively, and it draws on the moral foundation of sanctity. People trying to build social license in communities like yours need to do a much better job of communicating the value proposition and ensuring there are real community benefits. So, in that sense, it’s effective messaging, even if I disagree with it in this case. For transmission, which I think is necessary, I don’t have a lot of patience for NIMBY arguments because they often rely on misleading claims, and I have a strong aversion to disinformation. That said, they are often very effective communicators, and that’s something proponents need to take seriously. I’ve worked on countering anti-wind narratives globally, including in Ontario, which has seen more anti-wind health lawsuits than any other jurisdiction, largely driven by disinformation. We need to get better at communication, share benefits more clearly, and ensure communities see tangible value. When we’re advancing major projects like transmission, we have to communicate across different moral foundations and bring local communities along, especially those who might feel they are being unfairly burdened. Question: Can you talk about Great Lakes wind? [MB]: Sure. As a matter of fact, on Great Lakes wind, that’s why I’ve had lunch with Margaret Atwood, just the two of us, twice. Great Lakes wind is a great idea. It’s perfectly sensible. We have excellent wind resources. The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald should tell us how powerful the windstorms are. The same storms that push water levels up in places like Chicago make that clear. The idea that people object because they might see blinking lights in the distance is frustrating. The fact that arguments about bird safety have been used to block projects is also frustrating. This is something we should be supporting. We have a tremendous resource. We could build a Great Lakes wind industry that powers both Canada and the United States. It’s an obvious industrial and electricity strategy. Wind farms, once operating, tend to create habitat benefits. Studies show fish and seabirds often thrive around them. Radar studies indicate seabirds fly around turbines. Songbirds migrating across the lakes typically fly at 5,000 to 6,000 feet, well above turbine height. Raptors, such as those crossing Point Pelee, soar up to around 10,000 feet and then descend, often crossing at about 2,000 feet. The evidence does not support claims of harm to birds from offshore wind in these contexts. By contrast, the largest impacts on bird populations globally come from habitat loss and industrial activity, including the fossil fuel industry. The arguments against Great Lakes wind do not hold up under scrutiny. Question: To what extent do you believe that Canada is going to be an energy superpower? There’s a view that this would primarily be based on oil and gas and future exploitation of the tar sands. There’s also a connection to moral authority and Jonathan Haidt’s insights. At a local event on Sunday, many of the primary participants were charismatic Christians who were interested in decarbonization and living off-grid, and they had their children with them. [MB]: Canada’s belief that it will be an energy superpower based on oil and gas is, in my view, deluded. Let’s start with LNG. I’ve modeled the five proposed plants on the West Coast and looked at global trends. Consider Pakistan. It installed about 32 gigawatts of solar in the past couple of years and then had to find buyers for 24 LNG cargoes it had already committed to under long-term contracts, because solar and batteries reduced demand. Solar and storage directly displace LNG. Right now, with instability around the Strait of Hormuz, countries are looking at places like Spain and asking how to reduce dependence on imported fuels and increase domestic energy security. Wind, solar, and storage provide that. A single container ship of solar panels from China can displace roughly 50 LNG tanker shipments over a 30-year lifespan. Countries are paying attention to that. India and China, both with populations of about 1.4 billion, saw LNG imports decline by double digits even before the latest energy disruptions. The idea that global demand for gas will keep growing indefinitely doesn’t hold up. Of the proposed LNG capacity on Canada’s West Coast, I expect only about a third to be built. Of those, at least one may shut down after its initial contract term, and others could see reduced utilization over time. LNG has a limited window. On oil, about 98% of Alberta’s production goes to the United States, primarily for refining into diesel and gasoline. Canada is not a major global exporter in that sense, it is heavily dependent on a single customer. In the early 2000s, the United States upgraded many refineries to handle heavy crude, anticipating continued imports. Then the shale boom changed the equation. Much of that lighter shale oil is exported because existing refineries are optimized for heavier crude. Now consider a future with declining oil demand and aging refining infrastructure. If the United States chooses to prioritize domestic production, it could reduce imports. Canadian oil is among the most expensive to extract, transport, and refine. It also yields relatively fewer of the petrochemicals that will still be needed when fuel demand declines. That puts it at risk of being among the first to be displaced in a shrinking global market. So the idea that Canada will be an energy superpower based on oil and gas doesn’t align with the direction global energy systems are moving. Question: Air-to-air heat pumps, as far as I can tell, do work down to minus 30, or so I’ve heard. But once you get below zero, doesn’t the electricity cost become so high that many lower-income people are worse off? Do you have a solution for that, or is that wrong? [MB]: No, it’s right up to a point. If you live in Edmonton, you’re in Alberta, which has among the highest electricity prices in Canada. That’s the first issue. The second is that natural gas there is extremely cheap right now. Western basin natural gas is effectively being given away, with most of the bill covering distribution and utility margins. Only about 17% of a typical bill reflects the actual energy, with the remaining 83% tied to the network. That’s going to change. As natural gas exports expand, especially with access to global markets, prices in Alberta could rise three to four times. That’s what happened in the United States when LNG exports increased, which is part of why there was a pause on new export terminals. So the current advantage of cheap gas is temporary. The broader policy approach is to reduce the “spark gap.” When gas is cheap and electricity is expensive, heat pumps don’t offer financial benefits. We need to invert that. In Germany, for example, electricity prices have been reduced to support electrification, and in parts of Australia, there are periods during the day when electricity is effectively free due to solar oversupply. There are also technical strategies. Heat pump water heaters can store thermal energy when electricity is cheap and use it later for space heating. That allows for load shifting. Seasonal thermal storage is another option. In Okotoks, there has been a system for about 20 years that captures solar heat in the summer, stores it underground, and uses it in winter. It has achieved about 95% of community heating needs from stored summer heat. Seasonal thermal energy storage works very well in colder climates. There are thousands of such systems in the Netherlands alone. The idea is simple: store excess heat in summer and retrieve it in winter. So yes, air-source heat pumps do become less efficient at very low temperatures, although they are improving. And yes, if electricity is expensive and gas is cheap, operating costs can be higher. But both policy and system design can address that. [JB]: If anybody wants, I actually have a two-paragraph analysis. I’ve had ground-based heating and cooling using heat from the earth since 2006, and I can send you the numbers on it. Mike, I always love when you talk about mass timber buildings, and I think it’s a great idea. I’m wondering about something I haven’t been able to investigate, so hopefully you have. Couldn’t British Columbia, instead of shipping so many raw logs, and I’m not sure what percentage it is anymore, literally raw logs that leave British Columbia and other parts of Canada, start designing apartment buildings in mass timber that would fit into one or two shipping containers and ship them around the world? Tell me what I’m missing there, if anything. [MB]: Mostly no. There may be some potential for export markets like Japan, but mass timber is largely a regional industry. You need a local source of lumber, regional high-tech design and manufacturing capacity, and then distribution by road over a few hundred kilometers. In British Columbia, that means serving the northwest region and extending into Washington. In Ontario, it would be Ontario and into Michigan and New York. In New Brunswick, you’d see similar regional patterns for the Maritimes. The challenge is that mass timber components are large and bulky. If you’re shipping beams, for example, they don’t fit easily into containers. Once you start thinking about global shipping, you’re competing with producers in places like Uruguay, where there are already mass timber facilities. Because the technology is becoming more widely accessible, it’s increasingly democratized. That shifts the advantage toward regional supply chains rather than long-distance export. You can design modular systems, but containerization introduces constraints that limit flexibility in what can ultimately be built. In my analysis, including a detailed report on mass timber, the conclusion is that a regional industrial supply chain approach makes the most sense, especially in a Canadian context. So it’s a reasonable question, but large-scale global containerized export of mass timber buildings isn’t likely to be the dominant model. Question: My question is more about communication and SCAN’s impact. I like the idea of moral foundations, and I’m going to read more about that. Do you think we should focus more on possibilities, helping Canadians learn about renewables, how inexpensive they are, and how they can take action individually or within their municipalities? Or should we continue with what we’ve been doing, such as advocating for government change and pushing back against fossil fuels? Do you have a sense of what is more impactful or what might work more effectively for us? [MB]: There are three or four answers, so you’re not going to get a clean one from me. But I’ll say this clearly: if you can influence how people vote so they choose better options, that matters. People may be frustrated with some imperfections of the Mark Carney government, but it’s still a better option than the alternatives. Voting matters, and talking to MPs about these issues is worthwhile. At the same time, people tend to do what’s easy and what’s available to them. I’m very bullish on giving people better options rather than expecting them to make sacrifices. For most Canadians, a heat pump is simply a better option, but it has to be easy to adopt. You also have to make it harder to choose high-emissions alternatives. In Vancouver, for example, new homes built after 2024 cannot install gas furnaces. That kind of policy shift matters. Similarly, ensuring that new buildings are solar-ready through zoning and building codes is important. These are regulatory and policy changes that shape behavior by changing the available choices. Generally, I think creating better choices is more effective than trying to persuade people to act against their immediate interests. But there are many ways to approach this, and each organization has its own strengths. I spend a lot of time working with organizations on strategy. The key is to start with a clear understanding of reality, then define policies that take advantage of opportunities and avoid risks, and finally create an action plan. This follows the framework from Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. It’s the one strategy book I consistently recommend. For SCAN, doing that kind of exercise to identify where it can have the highest impact would be valuable. It’s not trivial work, but it helps focus efforts. At an individual level, the best approach is to lean into what you’re good at and apply it in ways that move things forward. Follow up after consideration, not the response I gave in the discussion: As I considered the questions after the fact, one resonated with me. A participant asked what approach SCAN should have. My vague memory is of positive support for things or opposition to things. Subsequent questions sharpened this for me. SCAN members have seemingly had a history of opposing things such as mining within the boundaries of Canada. At least one current members is a NIMBY about high-speed rail, regardless of its conditions for success within the Golden Horseshoe. Some questions were about impacts of wind turbines on birds. These aren’t about fixing things globally, they are about preventing minor local impacts, lacking a denominator. So my iterated response to the participant’s question is that SCAN should working for things which move the needle on consequential climate actions, while minimizing—not eliminating—local impacts. How can you assist SCAN to be for positive climate action locally as opposed to diverting local impacts to other countries and preventing climate action? Question: Yes, my question is about a new passenger train in Ontario. You’re probably familiar with it. It’s called the Northlander. It’s supposed to run from Toronto to Cochrane, and one of the features being highlighted is that it uses new high-efficiency diesel. I wanted to get your opinion on high-efficiency diesel, if you have a comment on that. [MB]: I actually have an interesting perspective because I lived in Moosonee as a baby, so I took the train up there. I consider myself a Northern Ontario kid. I lived in Moosonee, Kapuskasing, and North Bay, so this is part of my childhood. I’ll compare it to a different example. In Winnipeg last year, they were trying to decarbonize their bus fleet and spent time and money trying to make hydrogen work, which it doesn’t. They ended up facing what’s called the transit death spiral. After COVID, fewer people used buses and subways, so revenues dropped. With less revenue, transit agencies reduced service. With worse service, even more people stopped using transit and kept driving. In 2025, they made a decision I respect. They bought 15 diesel buses to improve service levels and get people out of cars. A diesel bus is much more efficient than individual internal combustion cars, so overall emissions can go down even if the buses aren’t zero-emissions. There’s a parallel with the Northlander. Do I think we should be building new diesel trains in the 21st century? No. But if it provides transit for people who would otherwise drive long distances across Northern Ontario, it can reduce overall emissions and improve safety. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than more cars on the road. Question: In Norway, I believe wind turbine operators painted one of the three blades black, and it supposedly reduced bird kills by 80%. Question A: do you think that would be useful in Canada? And question B: do you think we’ll be using more solar thermal? In Ridgetown, for example, there’s a retirement centre that has solar thermal on the roof to preheat laundry water and domestic hot water, and it has cut their hydro bill considerably. Do you think there should be more of that in Canada? [MB]: On the first point, yes, that study was done, and yes, it reduced what is already a very small number of bird strikes per turbine. But no, it’s not really worth doing more broadly. Bird deaths from wind turbines have declined over time because siting has improved and turbine design has evolved. Older turbines, like those in California, were placed along raptor flight paths and had lattice towers that encouraged birds to perch, increasing collision risk. Modern turbines are taller, with slower-moving blades and no lattice structures. A 2014 study in the United States found that out of roughly 20 billion birds after nesting season, about 10% were killed by human-related causes. The largest contributors were vehicles, buildings with lit windows, and domestic cats. At that time, only about 1 in 86,000 bird deaths was attributable to wind turbines. Wind energy is a key solution to climate change, which itself is driving significant biodiversity loss, including among bird species. Adding extra constraints on wind development beyond sensible siting away from sensitive habitats is not a productive use of effort. If someone is concerned about birds, it’s reasonable to ask whether they’re addressing far larger sources of harm, like driving habits, pets, or building design. On solar thermal, photovoltaic solar is generally more effective in most cases. Solar thermal can have advantages in specific applications, especially when paired with seasonal thermal storage. But for most buildings, if you’re putting something on your roof, solar PV is typically the better choice compared to systems that circulate large volumes of heated water. Question: My question is about lithium. You talked about hard rock mining in Quebec. Here in Alberta, one of the byproducts of the oil sands is lithium, in parts-per-million concentrations, along with titanium, zirconium, and things like that. I’d like you to touch on the value proposition of extracting lithium from the oil sands, the tailings ponds, and the brine that is part of that process as well. [MB]: There are a whole bunch of byproduct minerals from different types of mining extraction. We get materials like gallium, for example, that we don’t mine directly, but that come out as part of mining for other things. It has to be cost-effective for us to extract them, which means the price has to be high enough to make it worthwhile. There’s a saying in mining: the solution for high mineral prices is high mineral prices, because that leads to a bunch of mines opening up and a bunch of alternative extraction approaches becoming viable. When it comes to extracting minerals from mine tailings, generally every mine has a different mix of tailings, and that means a very different mineralogical and chemical extraction process. That’s problem one. Every brine deposit is different. Every set of tailings is different. The composition is different, the concentrations are different, and you need different processes. That makes it very difficult to scale with a single technology that works in multiple places. Do we need to do it? Not really. There are a lot of better lithium brines than oil sands tailings. There’s other material in those streams that is probably more accessible. Frankly, many of the good lithium brines with high concentrations are in places like Alberta, and the same technologies used for directional drilling into oil and gas formations can be used to reach high-quality lithium brines. There’s a startup in Alberta trying to do that, not terribly successfully. One of the interesting things about lithium brines is that they are often very hot, so you can use organic Rankine cycle generation to produce electricity as well. They’re doing that near the Salton Sea. I did a techno-economic assessment of that last year, and it made sense. They could make money from both the electricity and the lithium extraction. It’s quite a nice combination. So unconventional extraction is interesting, and there is some promise there. A lot of people make claims about tailings extraction, but I haven’t seen good examples of it being economic. Question: I want to go back briefly to high-speed rail. My understanding is that because of the high speeds, you can’t have level crossings. I can also understand, having grown up in a rural area, how highways or freeways can cut across properties without following clean, straight boundaries. So I don’t fully understand how that would work in practice, and I can understand the concerns. I’m also wondering how that compares to high-voltage transmission lines. I assume those are just towers and don’t affect the land underneath in the same continuous way. Could you comment on that? I’m having trouble picturing how high-speed rail would actually be implemented. [MB]: High-speed rail came up in a conversation I had with Bent Flyvbjerg, the author of How Big Things Get Done. If you look at chapter nine, you’ll find my name in there. He and his co-author used some of my research, and I spoke with him about high-speed rail a couple of years ago. The challenge with high-speed rail is that, because of the speed, the alignment has to be much straighter. Curves have to be much more gradual, and if you need to go over or under roads, you have to start those transitions much earlier. So your concern is valid. These are engineering problems that can be solved, but they add cost. That’s part of the overall cost equation. That’s also why I mentioned population density, feeder rail, and cultural usage. Without those, it’s hard to achieve the ridership needed to make high-speed rail cost-effective. You either commit to it as a national project in the public interest and accept the cost, or you struggle to justify it financially. That’s what China did. They now have roughly 48,000 kilometers of high-speed rail, more than the rest of the world combined. Not all of it is profitable, but it was built to enable fast, efficient, low-carbon transportation between major cities, support economic activity, and deliver broader societal benefits. We could choose to do the same. In terms of land, major infrastructure projects have traditionally relied on eminent domain, compensating landowners at fair market value. That’s likely how it would be handled. That said, this is about the fifth time high-speed rail has been proposed for the Golden Horseshoe. It hasn’t succeeded before, and I’m not convinced it will this time either. [MBush]: I wanted to go back to your comment, Michael, about stopping opposition to mining. SCAN has a history of joining forces with First Nations around the Ring of Fire, and many of us have been deeply concerned about the impact of mining development not only on the traditional lands of the First Nations involved, but also on the environment in an area with permafrost and other sensitivities. I want to ask about that because it seemed like a categorical statement, but clearly some mines are better than others. The problem, it seems to me, is that many of the mining operations Canadians, and First Nations in particular, have had to engage with involve very poor mining practices. So I’m curious why you would suggest that we simply stop fighting mines, as opposed to stopping bad mining practices and opposing poorly conceived projects. [MB]: Because, in my experience, it’s not entirely categorical. There’s a lot of nuance. I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking at critical minerals, including doing a techno-economic assessment of deep seabed polymetallic nodule mining with a mining engineer last year. There are bad projects, but many of them can be improved. Some can be turned into projects that deliver strong benefits for the First Nations whose lands they are on. The problem is that we often define a “bad project” as one that is local, where we can see the impacts, as opposed to one in places like Indonesia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the harms are less visible and regulations are often weaker. In the West, we’ve effectively outsourced pollution and environmental damage by opposing mining domestically while continuing to demand the materials. From a fairness perspective, that’s problematic. The fact that we don’t see the impacts in other countries doesn’t mean they aren’t significant. At the same time, critical minerals are essential for addressing climate change. You mentioned permafrost. I’ve done projects involving northern regions like Inuvik, and the permafrost is thawing. Infrastructure is failing, buildings are shifting. That’s driven by climate change. I focus on relative impacts. The global and long-term harms of climate change are broader and more severe than the localized impacts of well-managed mining projects. That doesn’t mean ignoring those impacts, but it does mean weighing them appropriately. So my recommendation is to take a nuanced position. Push for better projects, stronger environmental standards, and meaningful partnerships and benefits for First Nations. But if the default position is simply to oppose mining altogether, I would suggest reconsidering that stance. [MBush]: Thank you, everyone. This has been very interesting, as it always is. It’s quite striking how Michael started by saying we have all the solutions, and yet it’s not happening. It suggests we need to examine ourselves and ask why, when we know the solutions, we’re not actually implementing and deploying them.