GOLDSTEIN: Why the ‘great reset’ failed to change the world

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Anyone remember the “great reset” theory during the pandemic, which among other things was supposed to put the world on a permanent path to addressing climate change by dramatically lowering industrial greenhouse gas emissions?

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Simply put, it never happened.

The great reset plan endlessly spouted by “progressive” politicians, the United Nations and think-tanks like the World Economic Forum was all the rage in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic four years ago, including by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who told a UN conference in September 2020 that: “This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to re-imagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like … climate change.”

A year later, then-federal environment minister Jonathan Wilkinson told The Globe and Mail that because of the pandemic that was officially declared by the World Health Organization in March 2020, 2019 would be the last year that Canada’s annual greenhouse gas emissions would increase and that for the next decade they would steadily decline.

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“We will see year-on-year reductions — absolute reductions — starting in 2020 through to 2030,” Wilkinson said. “We have high confidence that’s actually going to be the case.”

But that was then and this is now.

Last week, the authoritative Statistical Review of World Energy released its latest annual report, which described global energy use in 2023 as “a year of record highs in an energy hungry world” during which the use of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions hit record levels.

Emissions from energy rose by 2% compared to 2022, exceeding 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent for the first time.

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Global fossil fuel consumption also reached a record high, up 1.5% from 2022, as did total primary energy consumption, up 2% from 2022, 0.6% above its 10-year average and over 5% above 2019 pre-COVID levels.

Fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas — continued to be the world’s dominant energy sources, accounting for 81.5% of the global energy mix, only marginally down from 82% in 2022.

The story was much the same in Canada, where unlike the Statistical Review of World Energy the federal government reports our emissions two years after the fact, meaning the latest data available comes from 2022.

That said, despite Wilkinson’s “high confidence” in 2021 that emissions by now would be on a steady, downward march heading toward 2030, Canada’s 2022 emissions at 708 million tonnes were up 1.3% from 2021, when emissions at 698 million tonnes were up 1.8% from 2020 emissions (686 million tonnes).

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The reason the great reset never happened is that it relied on the illogical belief that the global economic recession caused by the pandemic in 2020 was the beginning of a rapid, worldwide shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.

In reality, the only times global emissions have gone down significantly — but also temporarily — were during major recessions.

Prior to the pandemic in 2020, the last major global recession where emissions fell rapidly and dramatically was in 2008-09, set off by the subprime mortgage derivative scandal in the U.S. that eventually led to a global credit freeze.

Emissions fall significantly during major recessions because people have less money to buy goods and services, almost all of which are created using the fossil fuel industry.

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But once the economy begins to recover, the demand for these goods and services, along with the need for more fossil fuel energy to produce them, increases.

While the use of renewable energy is increasing globally — accounting for 15% of primary energy use in 2023 including hydro and 8% without it — the reality is that renewables such as wind and solar aren’t yet capable of providing the amount of power needed to replace fossil fuels, particularly in the developing world, which is now the primary source of increasing emissions.

In the real world, replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy is hard, expensive and slow as the historical record, as opposed to the political rhetoric, demonstrates over and over again.

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