Spend time on the websites of Canada’s leading environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) and you will see repeated references to the “energy transition” — the shift away from fossil-fuel energy sources to no- and low-carbon alternatives, to help lower the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that lie behind concerns over climate change. 

While most countries — albeit not Donald Trump’s America — notionally support the 2015 Paris Agreement goal to limit global temperature increases to between 1.5 and 2.0 degrees Celsius, few are on track to slash their emissions sufficiently to reach that target. Indeed, emissions are still climbing, mainly due to the ravenous appetite for energy in many emerging economies. 

Notwithstanding decades of climate change conferences, humanity remains firmly wedded to fossil fuels, which currently supply about four-fifths of global primary energy demand — a share that has fallen only slightly since the late-1990s. Moreover, as Canadian energy scholar Vaclav Smil recently noted, the absolute quantity of fossil fuels consumed by the world has risen by more than half since