Mind the Gap: The crucial gap in Canada is not the one between our actions and our Kyoto commitments, but between what we are doing and what we need to do

It is relatively easy to spin out "ecotopian" visions of solar powered civilizations, but how do we get there from here? The challenge in this type of scenario work is to stretch as far as possible without tearing the connection to the here and now. The "stretch" is provided by our goal of illustrating a possible low carbon future. To ground the effort, we went out only thirty years, and we used a mathematical model in which Canadian greenhouse gas emissions are represented in physical and engineering terms as the sum of several thousand separate computations, each representing the emissions from a particular type of activity. For example, the emissions from water heating in single family dwellings of a certain age would be equal to the number of dwellings in that category times the hot water energy per dwelling times the share of that energy provided by each fuel and the emissions per unit associated with each fuel. This type of end-use model allows the scenario builder to try various assumptions regarding the level and mix of activity, technological efficiency, and fuel shares (in the case of the energy related emissions) and to see the effect on greenhouse gas emissions.