Jaccard won this year's $35,000 Donner Prize for Sustainable Fossil Fuels: The Unusual Suspect in the Quest for Clean and Enduring Energy (Cambridge University Press). In making the announcement on April 28, the judges picked it as the most important book on Canadian public policy to come out in 2005.
Donner-winning books tend to have far-reaching influence on government and industry.
A professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., Jaccard specializes in resource and environmental management.
How soon is the world going run out of oil and other fossil fuels?
We may soon reach a peak in conventional oil discovery and production, followed by a gradual decline. This may well be associated with a very tight market and high prices, such as we are experiencing now, for perhaps a decade or even more.
But further into the future, we could exploit fossil-fuel alternatives to conventional oil at relatively low cost. These include oil sands from Alberta, heavy oil from Venezuela, oil shale in several countries, and even coal.
Today South Africa produces perhaps a third of its transportation fuels from coal, and a new plant like this would be profitable when the oil price is above $35 a barrel. Today it is above $70. The planet has vast coal resources.
Wind power, hydro, fuel alcohol, solar energy, atomic energy — what are the pros and cons of each of these alternatives?
Yes, renewable energy sources can replace fossil fuels, but it will be extremely expensive to force fossil fuels out of the global energy system in just 100 years, which is the scenario I look at in the book.
This is true even when we compare renewables to converting fossil fuels into clean energy like electricity, hydrogen and heat in processes that capture almost all of the carbon and other by-products that we don't want circulating in the biosphere.
The challenge for renewables like sunshine and wind is that they are less energy-dense than fossil fuels and intermittent in supply. Advocates get excited about these alternatives, but we do need to estimate the extra capital and energy costs for concentrating low-density energy such as ethanol and storing intermittent energy like wind power.
What will the automobile typically run on 50 years from now?
Given our current policies, the automobile will run on a hydrocarbon fuel like gasoline or diesel, and if the scientists are correct, we will be in very big trouble with the Earth's climate. We need policies now to reflect the risks of using the atmosphere as a free waste receptacle if we are to change this trend.
If we do so, then future vehicles are likely to run on electricity (plug-in hybrids) or hydrogen (fuel cell or maybe combustion) or biofuels (ethanol, biodiesel) or some combination of these.
In my view, much of the electricity and hydrogen would be produced from fossil fuels in conversion processes that capture all carbon and store it safely underground.
What do we have to do as a society to use our fossil fuels more efficiently, to make them last?
I do not believe the chief worry is the longevity of fossil-fuel resources. If the climate scientists are right, we will do great environmental damage long before running out of fossil fuels. We need to focus almost completely on clean energy, in my view. When this effort leads to somewhat higher energy prices, there will be opportunities to encourage greater efficiency.
But to focus on efficiency at the expense of clean energy is to put the cart before the horse and delay action on what absolutely must be happening right now: the conversion of our energy system to zero emissions.
You favour a carbon tax to accomplish this. How would it work?
A carbon tax or some facsimile is essential. There is no other way. A carbon tax would mean that people who purchase cars that use less gasoline or that use a non-greenhouse-gas-emitting alternative like biofuel, cleanly produced electricity or cleanly produced hydrogen would save money.
An alternative policy that approximates this is to regulate emission caps and allow people to trade emission permits that add up to the total cap. This would have about the same price effects as the carbon tax.
Finally, another alternative with similar effect is to give the fossil-fuel industry a gradually rising requirement to take responsibility for the fate of the carbon it extracts from the Earth's surface, to make sure that this carbon never reaches the atmosphere.
The U.S. government has set average fuel-efficiency requirements for car manufacturers. If they produce a few highly efficient models, hybrids perhaps, they get credits toward making SUVs that get 11 miles to the gallon. Hence there is no net environmental gain when you or I buy an efficient car. It means only that the other guy can buy the SUV.
I don't agree with your conclusions. A regulation that pulls down the average forces automobile manufacturers to encourage people to buy more efficient vehicles on average.
If this does not happen by free consumer choice, they will need to increase the prices of SUVs in order to lower the price of efficient cars enough to attract customers to lower the total fleet average.
More likely, it is the SUV driver who is subsidizing you by paying above production cost while you pay below production cost.
Why don't governments give tax breaks or grants to people who want to install solar or geothermal heating?
I think they do in a lot of jurisdictions. But our mistake is to rely on subsidies and information alone.
You do not address the climate-change risk unless you charge or somehow constrain people from using the atmosphere as a free waste receptacle.
Otherwise, for every business or household who makes a choice that uses less energy or cleaner energy, you will find many more who make a choice that emits more greenhouse gases and other undesirables. Right now it is backyard patio heaters, air conditioners, outdoor spas, roof de-icers and driveway heaters. Tomorrow it will be something else.
You quote one policy expert who says that human ingenuity is the only resource that really matters. How optimistic are you about human ingenuity to solve future energy problems?
I quote him, but I do not agree with him. I consider myself a technological, economic and policy realist, as opposed to an optimist. An optimist, as I define it, would be someone who simply believes as a matter of faith that human ingenuity can solve our energy challenges without asking for technological and economic details.
My book is all about the details. I want to know what the possibilities are, technologically, economically and politically.
The evidence has slowly convinced me that, with a serious commitment to clean energy over the coming decades, we are likely to shift to cleaner uses of fossil fuels rather than their forced abandonment.
This may be the best chance we've got to make significant change quickly.