Ottawa should abandon its unworkable and harmful net zero plan.

Under the Trudeau government’s plan, Canada will reduce greenhouse gas emissions to “net zero” by 2050, largely by “phasing out unlimited fossil fuels.” However, given current technologies, virtually all fossil fuels are “unabated” – that is, they generate greenhouse gases when burned. Essentially, the plan is to phase out fossil fuels, use wind and solar energy to power our lives, and switch to electric vehicles.

But this plan is simply impossible.

In a recent study, Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, highlights some uncomfortable realities. Since the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which essentially put the world on a net-zero emissions path, global fossil fuel consumption has increased by 55%. And the share of fossil fuels in global energy consumption has barely dropped from 86% to 82%. In other words, writes Smil, “there will not be a complete global decarbonization of the energy supply by 2023, after a quarter of a century of targeted energy transformation. Exactly the opposite. Over this quarter of a century, the world has significantly increased its dependence on fossil coal.” It’s worth noting that Smil is not some kind of “climate denier” – he is a firm believer in human-caused climate change and sees it as a serious threat to humanity.

In another recent article, Mark Mills, a renowned energy policy analyst, boldly states: “The energy transition will not happen,” in part because the development of computer technologies such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) will require more energy than ever before “dispelling any illusions that we will reduce supplies.” Mills gives some striking examples of how the cloud and artificial intelligence consume huge amounts of energy. A high-power AI chip uses as much electricity per year as three electric vehicles (and, by the way, one electric vehicle per household would double residential electricity demand).

Mills notes that chipmaker Nvidia has produced about five million such chips over the past three years, and demand for them is growing rapidly. The appetite for AI chips is “explosive and essentially limitless.” Cloud computing data centers also have astonishing energy consumption, with each having an energy appetite often greater than that of skyscrapers the size of the Empire State Building. The largest data centers consume more energy than steel mills. And the energy used per hour of video (thanks to all that cloud computing) is more than the share of fuel used by one person on a 10-mile bus trip.

And yet, in the march toward the unattainable goal of net zero energy, government policies have forced the abandonment of coal-fired power generation in favor of more expensive natural gas power generation, significantly increasing energy costs in Canada. The shift to lower-GHG energy production has raised energy costs, particularly in provinces dependent on fossil fuel energy, while a federal carbon tax raises the cost of energy production. All this at a time when a significant number of Canadians are falling into energy poverty (when households must use a significant portion of their after-tax income to cover the costs of energy used for transportation, home heating and cooking).

No government should base public policy on wishful thinking or make arbitrary commitments to achieve impossible results. This type of policy leads to failure. The Trudeau government should abandon its 2050 net-zero plan and never-never phase-out of fossil fuels, and end the economically damaging energy, tax and industrial policies it has implemented to advance this agenda.