Natural gas is often called a “transition” fuel because it emits fewer greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants than coal and is a good dance partner with renewables — that is, when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow a natural gas-fired power plant can kick in quickly to fill the gap. But beyond serving that purpose, the two organizations argue natural gas shouldn’t become the default option, especially if a rising portion of that gas is coming from shale deposits where drilling and extraction processes can affect local drinking water and lead to higher emissions compared to conventional natural gas development.

“Shale gas requires up to 100 times the number of well pads to extract the same amount of gas as conventional sources, and recent shale gas development in the U.S. has had major environmental impacts,” said Dale Marshall, climate change policy analyst for the David Suzuki Foundation. “Expanded natural gas production in Canada would bring a host of problems — as well as making it harder to fight climate change.”

I’ve written extensively about the environmental risks of shale-gas development, how low natural gas prices resulting from shale development are contributing to increased oil sands development, and how the physical footprint of shale gas developments should give wind NIMBYs pause for thought. I’ve also been sounding the alarm for a couple of years now on the dangers of becoming over-dependent on natural gas and how this “cleaner” fossil fuel would, with the rise of shale gas, eventually become a lightning rod in the climate-change (and water quality) debate. In my view, and to reuse one analogy I’ve used in the past, natural gas might be the “light” fossil fuel, just as you can purchase “light” cigarettes. But in the case of cigarettes, whether light or normal, they still cause cancer and heart disease, and certainly smoking twice as many light cigarettes to wean yourself off regular cigarettes will make matters worse. The point is you have to wean off all cigarettes, period. We need to treat natural gas like we treat nicotine patches and gums — something that’s used temporarily and in moderation to beat an addiction to something we know, from a health and environmental perspective, is bad for us over the long term.

Stephen Colbert gets it. (link only works for Canadians — Americans can see clip here).

Unfortunately, when Canada’s energy ministers meet next week in Alberta, I’m sure any talk of a national energy strategy will put the economy first. After all, we know asbestos causes cancer yet Quebec is permitted to continue selling the dangerous stuff to third-world countries. So will the Pembina-Suzuki report have any impact on outcomes? I doubt it. There will be welcome talk on the need to develop shale gas resources more responsibly, but the focus will be simple: let’s develop as much as possible as quickly as possible, sell it to the world, create jobs, and make a few hundred people really rich. There will be no talk of moderation, either for natural gas development or the oil sands.

That seems, these days, to be the Canadian way. Drill baby drill. Extract baby extract. Sell baby sell.

Keith Stewart is climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace Canada

NOTE: Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts solar could represent 4.3 per cent of U.S. electricity supply by 2020, in line with Greenpeace report. “Policy, rather than sunshine, will remain the U.S.’s greatest solar resource for the next few years,” said Milo Sjardin, Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s U.S. head of research. “By the middle of this decade, however, the U.S. retail solar market will be driven by fundamental, unsubsidized competition, which should transform the U.S. into one of the world’s most dynamic solar markets.”

When the Alberta government announced last week that it would be handing over $745 million to Shell Canada so it could move ahead with its Quest commercial-scale CCS project, and when the federal government said it would chip in another $120 million, it didn’t sit well with environmental and energy think-tank The Pembina Institute.

It’s not that Pembina is against developing this technology. What it doesn’t particularly like, and I can’t help but agree, is the fact that the Alberta and federal governments’ are covering two-thirds of the cost for this $1.35 billion project, which will be designed to capture CO2 from the steam methane units at the Scotford Upgrader in Fort Saskatchewan. It’s part of the Athabasca Oil Sands Project, a joint venture among Shell (60 per cent), Chevron Canada (20 per cent) and Marathon Oil Sands (20 per cent).

Why, Pembina asks, are taxpayers covering the majority of a project’s costs when the companies benefitting from this public freebie are some of the most profitable companies in the country? Pembina is also opposed to the governments being “singularly focused” on end-of-pipe technologies, such as CCS, at the expense of investments in technologies and energy sources that reduce or altogether eliminate carbon emissions at the front of the pipe — renewables, energy efficiency, etc…

Rather than carry the load for the private sector, the government should be moving quickly to establish a cap-and-trade regime that would put a sufficient price on carbon, Pembina argues. Ultimately, polluters should cover the whole cost of CCS deployment and that will only happen when they factor in the cost of not doing so once carbon pricing hits their bottom line. Pembina also argues that the government shouldn’t be so narrowly focused on CCS that it ignores the much broader, and less risky opportunities out there. “In parallel to its support for CCS, the government needs to support a massive scale-up in renewable energy and energy efficiency, the most sustainable solutions to climate change,” it says.

Fact is the federal government appears to be pulling its support from the ecoEnergy for Renewable Power program, which covers 1 cent of the cost for every kilowatt-hour of electricity produced from green energy sources, primarily wind. The program has been successful and is expected to run out of allocated money this fall. Here’s the problem: even if the government at some point renews the incentive, and there’s no indication it will, the fact that there’s likely to be a period of inactivity creates a boom-bust situation for renewable energy developers. We saw the negative impact this had on the U.S. wind industry just a few years ago, so it’s concerning to see the Canadian government heading in this direction. I asked Lisa Raitt, Minister of Natural Resources, about this concern and she’s very aware of it. But she said the government has to be cautious about how it spends money over the next few years given the huge deficits caused by unprecedented stimulus spending and lower government revenues. Translation: end-of-pipe projects that allow us to produce more oil and coal, those are fine, but lower priority goes to renewable energy that avoids emissions in the first place. Don’t even get me started about the government’s complete lack of interest and support for geothermal power.

The other concern has to do with the enormous risks associated with CCS. According to a recent report out of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, “The technology holds the promise of massive reductions in emissions but any success may ultimately be limited to a relatively few projects due to cost, liability, technology, scale and public skepticism.” It goes on to say that CCS “may turn out to be another costly Faustian bargain” because it merely justifies and prolongs our addiction to fossil fuels while offering no long-term certainty:

Nobody knows how billions of tonnes of highly compressed carbon dioxide will behave underground. Could CO2 eventually leak and find its way into underground sources of drinking water (USDW)? Could plumes of pressurized carbon dioxide displace salt water from the saline aquifers into USDW? What would happen if sequestered carbon dioxide were to leak into the atmosphere or creep into an underground source of drinking water 50 years from now? Who would be responsible? Who would monitor the carbon dioxide underground for centuries? What would happen if carbon dioxide injected in one jurisdiction migrated into a neighbouring jurisdiction?

In other words, are we really willing to put so many eggs — and future generations — in one basket? The reality, according to the Munk report, is that “Instead of buying us time to find alternate sources of clean energy, CCS is buying politicians’ time to avoid making tough, unpopular decisions.”

Those tough, unpopular decisions can be found in the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2009, or at least an early excerpt from that outlook. To limit CO2 levels in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million, the agency estimates that $10.5 trillion (U.S.) will need to be spent globally between 2010 and 2030 on top of what’s been spent or committed up to mid-2009. In total, $6.6 trillion will need to be invested in “low-carbon power generation,” with 72 per cent of that committed to renewables, 19 per cent to nuclear, and 9 per cent to CCS. The good news is that total fuel savings are estimated to be $8.6 trillion over that period, so there are clearly economic and environmental benefits to aggressively pursuing this path.

But let me just emphasize: The IEA figures 72 per cent of those trillions should be spent on renewables, with just 9 per cent spent on CCS. It also says fossil fuel energy consumption must peak by 2020 and then begin falling to achieve the 450 parts per million target. Given this, why is the Canadian government giving so much attention to CCS, a technology that encourages greater fossil fuel consumption and is burdened with massive risk, when the world’s energy agency clearly shows that limiting fossil fuel use and spending heavily on renewables should be the chief goal?

I think it’s a fair question for all Canadians to be asking. The country’s national energy and climate policy shouldn’t be primarily based on the economic interests of Alberta.