Economies around the world are reeling as the COVID-19 crisis rages on. Here in Canada, the Bank of Canada is predicting the sharpest economic downturn in the country’s history, with no expectations for a quick or smooth recovery.

And yet some are saying if we spent our recovery dollars wisely, we can being the hard work of solving the climate crisis and build the strong sustainable economy of the future that we need.

“We’ve got abundant opportunity in Alberta and in Canada more broadly to be part of [the clean energy] transition and to benefit from it,” said Dan Woynillowicz, a policy director for Clean Energy Canada. “The recovery is an opportune time to actually put dollars towards training and getting people with the right skill set to be participating in that economy, and supporting those companies that are delivering the technologies and services that…allow us to clean up our energy system.”

The new Three Rs of the economic crisis

In an opinion piece for the National Observer, Woynillowicz and his co-author, Clean Energy Canada Executive Director Merran Smith, point to three Rs to weather this economic crisis: relief, recovery, and resilience and tackle the next crisis.

“Right now, governments are very rightly focused on relief,” Woynillowicz said. Federal and provincial governments shelling out economic aid to individuals, businesses, and larger industry in the form of emergency benefits, tax deferral, wage subsidies, and large-scale bailouts.

As the COVID-19 curves flatten, more attention is being paid to the recovery of economies devastated by the COVID-19 crisis. What is crucial, Woynillowicz argues, is that this recovery not simply rebuild economies of the past, but lead instead to a resilient future.

“We really have to think about this in terms of resilience. And so what does it mean to have a secure job?” asked Woynillowicz. The answer? “Shifting away from commodities that have a lot of volatility, but also shifting towards those industries and sectors that are offering the technologies and the services that the world is demanding in the 21st century.”

Future is climate capitalism

These days, volatility might as well be synonymous with oil and gas.

Economists predict the oil-centric economies of Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador to be the hardest hit and the slowest to recover. Since February, the oil sector has seen the price of a barrel of oil drop into the negatives, throwing the industry into a tailspin.

“Relief” in this context should not leave those impact by the COVID crisis or the oil crisis behind, but the “recovery” money should focus on building the economy of the future.

“The danger in that is that it’s actually doubling down on a business-as-usual that’s now obsolete,” said Woynillowicz.

“The halcyon boom days of the oil patch. You know, that’s simply not coming back.”

One culprit for this severe economic contraction is, of course, decreased global demand related to the pandemic—but there are other factors at play. For one, a production war between Russia and OPEC nations that flooded the already flagging market. For another, global market trends have been increasingly shifting away from carbon-based economies.

Skating to where the puck is going to be

“We need to be looking at how can we diversify,” said Woynillowicz, “How can we skate where the puck is going, to use an overused analogy…How can we make sure that we’re positioned to be to be competitive in a global economy that is going to continue to shift away from fossil fuels?”

“While it may be tempting to try to rebuild the past, we must be realistic and build for the present and the future. As clean-tech investor Tom Rand writes in his new book, The Case for Climate Capitalism, ‘looking in the rearview mirror is not the best way to gauge where you’re going,'” says Woynillowicz.

Part of the answer comes from scrutiny of where investment is moving. More than 200 recipients of the Clean50 Award in Canada just sent a letter to the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other leaders to focus their attention on a COVID-19 recovery that begins to build the sustainable economy of the future.

“Fortunately, the clean economy offers us a $26 trillion business opportunity, and millions of jobs globally in the next decade,” says the letter. “That’s 17.5 times bigger than Canada’s entire 2018 GDP of $1.71 trillion,” says the letter that comes from CEOs of companies, former environment commissioners and leaders of the clean tech sector in Canada.

“The CEO of the largest investment firm in the world, with over $6 trillion in assets, Larry Fink, of Blackrock, warns: ‘…because capital markets pull future risk forward, we will see changes in capital allocation more quickly than we see changes to the climate itself. In the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant reallocation of capital,’” the letter goes on.

You can see this at play in Bloomberg projections which suggest of $13.3 trillion in new investments in power generation globally by 2050, fully 77 per cent of it will go to renewables.

Or look at the car industry. Collectively the carmakers of the world are set to spend $300 billion exclusively on the development of electric cars and batteries. Expect to see more than 500 new electric car models by 2025. The capital has moved.

Follow the money to a future with jobs

To solve the climate crisis and to be part of the new clean energy economy it’s a good idea to follow the money and skate to where the puck is going to be, as Woynillwicz says.

“We have a very rosy forecast in terms of growth in [the clean energy] sector out over the next decade,” said Woynillowicz, referring to research completed by Clean Energy Canada last year.

The study showed that Canada’s clean energy sector—which includes everything from renewable energy production and biofuels to energy efficiency technologies and retrofits—already employs about 400,000 people. Under existing climate policies alone, that number is expected to jump to 600,000 by 2030.

To put it in perspective, that means that, before COVID, the clean energy sector was already growing at twice the pace of the rest of Canada’s economy.

The recovery from COVID-19 presents an opportunity, Woynillowicz says, to “step on the gas and do more and do it faster.”

What a pandemic can teach us about climate crisis

Even in the middle of a pandemic, Woynillowicz reminds us that “We can’t lose sight of climate change as an issue that’s still lurking out there.”

But, he says, the COVID-19 crisis, and our collective reaction to it, can teach us a lot about crisis management more generally — including those climate-related crises on the horizon.

“We can take lessons from the coronavirus in terms of the cost of being reactive as opposed to proactive,” he said. “It’s very clear that the cost of reacting to climate change, of adapting to climate change, are orders of magnitude greater than the costs of being proactive and making some changes.”

With this in mind, Woynillowicz and his colleagues in the clean energy sector also drafted an open letter to Prime Minister Trudeau earlier this month. Its message was clear.

Relief, necessarily, remains the focus of Canada’s governments for the moment. But as we move towards recovery, we must be realistic, and we must be proactive: A resilient post-COVID economy is one that supports climate recovery. It must be a green.

Dan Woynillowicz is a policy director at Clean Energy Canada. Learn more at greenenergyfutures.ca.