Mark Jaccard and climate change

He wasn’t expecting it – in fact, he was betting it wouldn’t happen. On the same day that B.C.’s new carbon tax was unveiled, Mark Jaccard told a gathering of SFU alumni who were honouring him with an Outstanding Alumni Award that the news came as a pleasant surprise. “I plan to get drunk tonight,” he quipped.

And who would blame him?

After more than two decades as an environmental economist carrying out research; writing papers, opinion pieces, even books; and speaking around the globe about why we need better environmental policies, there was suddenly a light in his own backyard.

The government’s new tax, which applies to nearly all fossil fuels and has added about two cents a litre to the price of gas at the pumps, was quick to reap criticism. Jaccard – who had no hand in crafting it nor, in fact, has he even met Premier Gordon Campbell – soon found himself defending it.

“It would seem really strange for me to see a politician being hammered for implementing the policies that I have said are essential, and for me to then go and hide somewhere,” says Jaccard, a professor in SFU’s School of Resource and Environmental Management who is no stranger to the public debate on climate change. Myriad governments and political parties have sought his expertise. “I feel I have a responsibility as a citizen and an independent academic to be out there explaining why those policies are superior.”

Two years ago he told the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers that the fossil fuel industry must “play the leading role” in creating policies that would point the global energy system toward zero greenhouse gas emissions. Fossil fuels, he believes, can fuel the system for years to come – and in ways that don’t pollute.

Jaccard’s interest has always been policy, not politics. He has advised governments across the political spectrum and around the world on environmental policy – most recently working with B.C.’s Climate Action team.

His view of what Canada needs to do – and his ability to drive home his message in plain terms – has led to his growing public image as Canada’s green guru, the country’s leading thinker on environmental policy, and “the best Canadian mind available on the environment” (that from the Globe and Mail’s Roy MacGregor).

“Mark Jaccard is hot these days – very hot,” declared the Globe’s Jeffrey Simpson in a column titled, “Here’s the Jaccardian Approach to Clean Air.” Jaccard and Simpson have since collaborated, along with graduate student Nic Rivers, on the book Hot Air: Meeting Canada’s Climate Change Challenge (2007).

How does Jaccard define himself? “The media view aside, I’d say I’m a mediocre academic economist who is applied and engaged in public debate – emphasize ‘mediocre,’” he insists. “I would argue that the best energy and environmental economists in the country would agree with that assessment.

“Being an applied economist, I get a lot of national and international recognition, and so I’m named to things. It’s where I like to be, quite frankly. I want to be out there making an impact.”

That, he tells his four children, makes him the luckiest guy in the world. “I tell them I am extremely blessed because I am paid to do my hobby, which has always been to figure out how humans can live sustainably on this planet,” he says. “That’s my passion. I think about it all the time. I dream about this stuff.

“I’ll wake up with these ideas, lots of them, and it’s not unusual for me to get up and write them down, or they’d be lost.”

The author of several other books besides Hot Air, including the Donner Prize–winning Sustainable Fossil Fuels: The Unusual Suspect in the Quest for Clean and Enduring Energy (2005), Jaccard is in the process of writing yet another and has others simmering on several backburners. Stay tuned.

“My best ideas come when I’m running – so I’ve developed one of those memory tricks. When I think about four different things I start a chant that goes through a word that helps me remember each of those items. Then when I get home, even though I’m soaking wet and I mess up the paper, I write down enough to remember them. Otherwise I’m in big trouble.

“I’ll think about other things too – like ‘oh man, the Canucks should have re-signed Naslund’ – but the ideas are never far away.”

To wind down from “the substantive stuff” that fills his thoughts, Jaccard will reach for a New York Times crossword puzzle. Another escape is his subscription to the twice-monthly New York Review of Books – something he stays on top of while commuting or before sleep.

He’s a fanatical reader – his older sisters taught him to read long before he started school, and by 14 he was reading the philosophy of thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre. His favourite place to hang out when he travels is in a library.

“My parents inadvertently gave me a very open and expansive environment. They weren’t religious or nationalistic, unlike a lot of people around me. So I didn’t develop an identity with my country; I started to feel like an internationalist. Reading National Geographic, I was always in love with the rest of the world.

“I had the freedom to already be scanning around with my brain – my father is a very critical thinker – and that freed me to believe that I don’t have to just assume. I can always look behind what someone is saying. So I think I developed some skills then that have helped me.”

He developed an early love of the outdoors, and as a young teen he convinced his father to drive him into the mountains on weekends. “I spent most of my teens and early adult life there. I had a real passion for nature,” he says.

After Jaccard graduated from Burnaby South High School, his father suggested he study electronics at BCIT. Instead he followed his own path to SFU, graduating with a bachelor of arts degree.

He spent the next several years in unfamiliar territory, first as a commercial fisherman, then motorcycling across Australia and even hitchhiking across Canada twice.

He returned to SFU to do graduate studies and spent a semester at UBC studying creative writing and poetry. “I was very keen on writing and I was always trying to make myself a better writer – a better communicator. I really try to consider what others are thinking or feeling when they read my writing. That seems to make a difference, especially in a field like economics.”

He completed his PhD at the University of Grenoble in France and found work quickly in a field that had few positions available.

“The big thing in 1985–87 was finance economics or international trade. The job ads had nothing to do with the environment for an economist then. The energy crisis had gone by.”

Jaccard proved a good fit at SFU’s new school of resource and environmental management. Early on he created the Energy Research and Materials Group, and with his team devised an economic model that has become a standard used by governments and industry.

He also established M.K. Jaccard and Associates, a company he intended to phase out after completing an off-campus project several years ago. But it carried on, and while the company bears his name, he is rarely involved with its work. It is now run by former students under director Chris Bataille. The company consults for governments worldwide – and was responsible for undertaking the modelling work behind B.C.’s carbon tax.

“When I went into economics I said I was interested in power in society and that if we’re going to save the planet from humans we’ve got to deal with the power structure that’s going to destroy it – and that’s our economic system,” he says.

As he recently told the Burnaby News Leader: “We’re never going to get rid of that get-rich economic system, and yet it’s going to keep pressuring that environmental world that I treasure so dearly.”

With that in mind Jaccard intends to leave the climate change issue for a bigger one.

“We’ve got to solve climate change, but the solutions are obvious now,” he says. “The bigger issue is all of the material throughput that we’re going to have as people get richer. There are some huge issues about how our economy is organized and going forward.