A Postcard From the Future of Decarbonization

What to do once your electricity supply is carbon free?

Many US states have set goals for 100% zero emission electric power. California, the US leader on climate change policy, is aiming to meet that goal by 2045. Joe Biden was elected on a hugely ambitious platform to get the entire country there by 2035.

But what happens when you get there? What if your electricity generation already produced almost no carbon dioxide emissions? Well, then you’d be Quebec.

Quebec’s Daniel Johnson dam, the largest arch and buttress dam in the world

As far as decarbonization is concerned, Quebec is a postcard from the future. Its electricity supply is almost entirely hydroelectric, so it doesn't produce any CO2 to generate electricity (although it did emit some CO2 when dams and reservoirs were originally constructed). As a result, Quebec already has some of the lowest emissions per capita of any state or province in North America. Its hydroelectric power generation is even an important element of Quebec’s national pride. 

So once your electric supply is nearly carbon free, what next? How do you get to zero for everything else? Not surprisingly, Quebec’s remaining carbon emissions are dominated by transportation. They make up 43.3% as of the most recent emissions inventory.

The Plan pour une economie verte or ‘Plan for a Green Economy’, released this month, is the Quebec government’s outline of the path forward. It made international headlines by proposing to ban the sale of new fossil fuel vehicles by 2035, a few weeks after California had announced a similar policy.

But the plan contains more than that. Large investments are proposed for electric vehicles, chiefly by extending an existing $8,000 CAD subsidy for EV purchases. That’s in addition to a $5,000 federal subsidy, which means taking $13,000 CAD off the sticker price of an electric vehicle. As a result of those incentives, Quebec has already become Canada’s EV leader. Half the EVs sales in Canada are in Quebec, despite the province having less than a quarter of Canada’s population.

The continuation of those subsidies makes up the largest financial commitment in the plan. But there are other initiatives. Starting in 2025, any bus bought by a transit agency with public funding needs to be electric. That’s no small commitment given that winter temperatures in my  home province can take a serious bite out of battery capacity.  All new school bus purchases will be electric after 2022, and 100% of public light duty vehicle fleets are targeted for electrification by 2030. Hydro Quebec, the nationalized electric utility, controls the majority of charging infrastructure in the province and plans to add 4500 chargers by 2028. Also proposed (though not detailed) is a Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate for trucks inspired by California.

In the area where I’ve spent a lot of my career - taxi and ride hailing - the goal seems to me insufficiently ambitious. The plan proposes 40% of taxis being electric by 2030. Given that Uber and Lyft have committed to 100% electric by 2030, it seems like there’s an opportunity to push a little faster on Quebec’s 11,000 taxis.

Local reaction to the plan has, largely, been marked by disappointment. The most obvious reason is the Plan vert doesn’t meet Quebec’s previously set target of a 37.5% emissions reduction by 2030 (relative to 1990 emissions). Given the growing consensus that we need to decrease emissions even more quickly than previously imagined, that target had already been criticized as too weak. And yet this plan would get less than halfway to the government’s own existing goal, leaving many scratching their heads.

At a high level, the plan is also drawing criticism for avoiding any policy “sticks” and only using “carrots”. As only one example, an earlier version of the plan leaked to the media proposed funding the EV subsidies using a tax on heavier polluting vehicles like SUVs, but that was stricken from the final version.

The proposals also came in for another common criticism - they focus too much on subsidizing cars, and not enough on alternatives to cars, something we covered in a previous edition of this newsletter. That's a fair criticism of the plan, since its major investment is in vehicle subsidies. But in fairness to Quebec, transportation infrastructure investment here already favors public transportation in a way that would be the envy of advocates in the US; from 2020-2030, the province is proposing to spend more on public transportation investment than on roads.

At one level the disappointment is easy to understand. The plan fails to meet the government’s own targets, and appears significantly watered down from earlier versions. The counter argument I’ve heard from some observers is that this government - ‘conservative’ in the Quebec context - came in without much of a platform on the environment.  So there weren’t huge expectations for what they would produce, and they’ve outlined a fairly significant financial investment in decarbonization.

It’s not as ambitious as it needs to be, and it doesn’t set Quebec up to be a global leader on decarbonization alongside countries like the UK. Quebec needs to do more than is being outlined in the plan. But if this sets the bar for what a conservative government with no obvious environmental agenda does in the middle of a pandemic, it might just be a positive sign of what’s to come.

New & Worth a Read

After this newsletter took an extra week off for US Thanksgiving, we’ve got tons of news:

• Barcelona expands its car free streets.

• 1% of people cause half of global aviation emissions – study

• Utilities and mobility companies form a lobbying group to push for zero emission vehicles, ZETA 2030. Uber, Tesla, Rivian among founding members. 

• Running a leaf blower for 30 minutes creates more emissions than driving a F-150 pickup truck 3800 miles

• Speaking of F-150s, a report released by EPA career civil servants revealed that illegal tampering with diesel pickup trucks is a huge contributor to climate change.

• An EU focused advocacy group reveals that plug in hybrids may be much less green than previously thought.

• How will the electric grid cope with electric vehicles? The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) released a new tool to help with that analysis. Here’s what the charging load of a 10,000 vehicle fleet in Boston might look like.

• A $1B investment in clean hydrogen for vehicle fuels, particularly forklifts.

• There’s not a lot of coverage of how we decarbonize rural transportation, but two recent pieces of news deal with that. The Union of Concerned Scientists released a study of clean transportation in the rural northeast, and the UK is seeking public comment on a similar topic. 

• The UK also released a climate plan that makes it a global leader on many issues ahead of hosting the big UN climate summit (COP 26) next year. Notably, it banned the sale of new internal combustion engine vehicles after 2030.

• DiDi and BYD announced the first EV designed for ridehailing.

• Auke Hoekstra debunks more EV myths. Bad faith arguments put out by the oil and car industries sometimes end up in urbanists’ arguments against electric vehicles. It’s worth following Auke to decipher what’s true from what’s not.

• Big electric trucks and buses are coming. Here’s how to speed up the transition

• 63% of climate tech is invested in mobility & transport

• A primer on Canada’s upcoming Clean Fuel Standard.

• Some Biden administration coverage:

  • The impact of the Biden administration is already being felt - GM pulls out of California preemption lawsuit around emissions standards.

  • Yonah Freemark estimates it would cost about $16.7B/year in operating subsidies to meet the Biden administration’s goal of high quality (specifically in this case, Chicago quality) transit in every city of at least 100,000 people.

  • Four Easy Ways Biden Could Revolutionize Our Cycling Culture

  • Hopes to transition Americans to electric vehicles are on a collision course with the environmental impact of mining.

  • The administration hopes to embed climate policy in departments like transportation.

Till Next Time,

Andrew