The occasion of writing this column prompted reflection on my engineering career, in particular three critical junctures. The first was in 1970, when my teacher pointed to Northern Alberta on a map at the front of our classroom, declaring that the oil embedded in the soil there would be Canada’s most important contribution to the world. The second was a decade later, when I was launching my career as a chemical engineer. My job working on the design of a an oil sands upgrader offered total coherence of purpose: intellectual challenge, economic opportunity and national pride.
It is not so easy to reconcile those goals today. Engineers’ expertise in extracting and refining bitumen must confront scientists’ conclusion fossil fuels must remain in, or return to, the ground if we are to address global warm. Canada has committed to reduce our emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, yet continues to champion expansion of oil sands production.
It is similarly difficult to reconcile economic interests. There is no question the oil industry provides lucrative jobs for engineers and contributed to national prosperity more broadly. Yet those benefits will largely disappear if the international community follows the prescriptions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for deep emissions reductions. As demand for oil falls in response to regulation or carbon pricing, unconventional oil will be increasingly uncompetitive. Alternatively, if we do not reduce emissions, the economic benefits from fossil fuel extraction will be increasingly outweighed by the societal costs of global warming.
With respect to nationalism, while Canada trumpets its “ethical oil,” our repeated failure to meet a series of emissions reduction commitments since 1990 has significantly damaged our global reputation.
What’s an engineer to do? There is a natural tendency to screen out information that challenges one’s own goals or beliefs. In fact, a survey of engineers and geoscientists in Alberta found just 36 percent accept humans are the main cause of global warming. Although respondents were confident in their qualifications to evaluate climate science, it is striking how widely their views diverge from those of scientists who study climate for a living.
An alternative to denial or fatalism in this area is to redirect one’s expertise toward a new path: reducing one’s own carbon footprint, redirecting investments and even changing one’s career. Many of us are doing that in many ways, including using our specialized skills to design less carbon intensive processes and energy systems.
The third juncture in this engineer’s career involved a shift from process to policy research seeking to identify political strategies for carbon pricing. If such strategies are successful, they will halt expansion and gradually phase out production from Canada’s oil sands. And that may well be Canada’s greatest contribution to the world.
(Source: Kathryn Harrison’s full comment at Chemical Institute of Canada)
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