climate strategy as engineering

17-Jul-25

People who like hard problems often overlook climate change because it looks like politics. The trick is to treat it like engineering. We have a target, net-zero 2050. We have subsystems, power, transport, buildings, industry. Each subsystem leaks carbon the way a program leaks memory. The job is to trace every leak, patch it, and ship a clean build.

Start with electricity, the root call. A non-emitting grid by 2035 makes every downstream fix cheaper. Wind, solar, batteries, a smarter grid, and demand response already work. Provinces handle the wires, Ottawa sets the headers, both must compile the same code. Carbon pricing provides the runtime check that catches backsliders.

Buildings come next. Heating with electrons beats piping gas. Make electric heat the default for new construction, freeze network expansion, push heat pumps into retrofits, and tighten codes so the path of least resistance points to zero. The cheapest tonne lives here.

Industry behaves like a mixed bag of algorithms. Steel and cement run on high-temperature processes, oil and gas emit methane along with CO₂. Some fixes are cheap, others need research. A portfolio wins. Put most capital into safe bets, energy efficiency and renewables. Seed the wild cards, small modular reactors, advanced geothermal, carbon capture and storage. Keep a scoreboard that measures cost per avoided tonne so money flows to code that runs. Workers need new skills, regions need new industries, and investors need a taxonomy that flags stranded assets before they sink capital.

Some people think policy means one master plan. It works better as version control. Federal law sets the main branch, provinces fork features that fit local conditions, pull requests merge when they clear the tests of fairness and cost. Evidence provides the tests. A policy that cuts emissions at a lower social cost passes, one that fails rewinds.

The world that hits net-zero will use much less oil, about a quarter of today’s level, and half as much gas. Companies that pivot early will own the clean markets, hydrogen, biofuels, geothermal heat. The slow movers will watch pipelines and refineries turn into stranded steel.

Climate strategy rewards people who write code and run it. Deploy what works, experiment with what might work, measure everything, and iterate fast. The planet does not care about announcements, it only measures parts per million.