On infrastructure, Kermit’s right: it’s not easy being green

Those who grew up with Sesame Street know this song by Kermit the Frog lamenting being green. Kermit sang long before green referred to the environment and well before being green was cool. Now, the word “green” is everywhere, from green energy to green growth to green infrastructure. But has it become easy to be green? A growing body of research by the University of Ottawa’s Positive Energy initiative suggests not. Why? Start with communities. Permitting and building ostensibly green infrastructure—whether it’s electricity transmission lines, hydro projects, or wind and solar farms—can be far from easy. Canadians support action on climate change in principle, but in practice they don’t always support infrastructure in their communities, green or otherwise. Different priorities—local environmental impacts, and health, social, cultural, and economic imperatives—can trump climate concerns and fuel opposition to projects. Now take the word “green” and how casually it is used. It is often a shorthand for climate-friendly infrastructure, and especially certain forms of renewable power: wind and solar. This overlooks the fact that all infrastructure has impacts beyond the climate, hence the potential clash with communities about local impacts on land, wildlife, and water. Defining “green” so narrowly also fosters fuel and technology determinism by ignoring infrastructure that reduces emissions in other ways. Think investments in energy efficiency, nuclear energy, large-scale stored hydro, or carbon capture, storage, and conversion for fossil fuel combustion. This is important stuff for a country charting its infrastructure future in an age of climate change. It is especially important for a federation with a large natural-resource base distributed unevenly across the country. For one, reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the scale envisioned for mid-century in the Paris Agreement is going to require new infrastructure—a lot of it. Some credible scenarios for Canada to achieve deep emissions reductions call for more than doubling the country’s electricity generation capacity. To put this in perspective, it’s the equivalent of building more than 100 projects the size of British Columbia’s Site C hydro dam, along with all of the associated transmission lines. And doing that in 30 years. Recall that it took well over 50 years to build most of the hydro infrastructure we have today—and that was before projects took into account Indigenous rights, engaged communities, and considered broad concerns over the environment. Will communities accept this scale and pace of infrastructure development, even if it’s “green?” This is a very open question and one that decision-makers would do well to attend to sooner rather than later. The assumption that green infrastructure will be accepted by communities by virtue of being good for the climate will fast be put to the test. Having communities onside and decision-making arrangements parties trust will be pivotal. The controversy surrounding Bill C-69, the government’s proposed overhaul of impact assessment, suggests governments have a good deal of work to do on that front. Add to this challenge that green infrastructure may mean one thing in one place and another thing elsewhere. If the aim is reducing emissions, networks of electric-vehicle charging stations may make great sense in hydropower-producing provinces. In urban areas, distributed solar power with storage may become important, but this needs to be thought through carefully in relation to natural gas, a flexible, affordable, and increasingly clean-burning fuel. In remote areas, meanwhile, small modular nuclear reactors to power communities and industrial processes might be the bigger bang for the buck. Failure to recognize these differences and to have evidence-informed emissions-focused discussions about infrastructure—not fuel or technology deterministic debates—risks needlessly polarizing energy and climate issues. It also risks reducing progress on emissions reductions. None of this is intended as a critique of the principle of green infrastructure. Far from it. Rather, the point is that it is dangerously optimistic to casually define “green” or to assume that infrastructure can be permitted and built at a rapid clip. Canada must meaningfully attend to environmental and climate impacts when it comes to infrastructure. But Kermit is still right after all these years: it’s not easy being green. Mike Cleland is a senior fellow with the University of Ottawa’s Positive Energy initiative. Professor Monica Gattinger is director of the University of Ottawa’s Institute for Science, Society, and Policy, and chair of Positive Energy. The Hill Times