Steve Lapp — keynote at the Climate Action Network’s Feb 20/20 workshop — outlines in detailed and practical terms how Ontario can decarbonize by 2050 — how our energy needs for transportation, building heating and cooling, and industrial energy will be met and what will it cost.

Steve Lapp graduated as a Mechanical Engineer from Queen’s University in 1980 and worked for two years to 1982 in the steel industry as a junior engineer at the blast furnaces of Stelco.  Through that experience, his passion shifted to the environmental side of mechanical engineering and he went back to school and completed an M.Sc. in solar thermal processes in 1985. Over the next twenty years his career covered design engineering and lead engineer roles for transit vehicles with UTDC; fuel cells and batteries for electric vehicles with Alcan: and as an independent consultant, renewable energy systems for on and off-grid in Ontario, Lesotho, India and Jamaica. After teaching part-time in the Mechanical Engineering Department of Queen’s University in 2003-2004, in 2005 he was recruited by St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ontario to develop a program in Sustainable Energy Systems Engineering and Technology.  In 2018 Steve retired from that role and is continuing his enjoyment of education through presentations to various community and government groups on societal decarbonization and electric vehicles. In 1989 Steve bought his first electric car, and since 2001 has used a hybrid car, grid-connected photovoltaics with a solar thermal assisted heat pump home heating system. He purchased his second electric car in 2014. He believes the successful path to global decarbonization is an almost fully electrified world using cost-effective energy from renewable energy systems with storage.

Climate Action Network Workshop, Feb. 29/20: 115 Lanark residents attended a day-long workshop to plan deep climate action for our community. The Climate Action Where We Live workshop was organized by the Climate Action Network.

Steve Lapp provided a compelling presentation on how Ontario can reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions by 80% by 2050.

In the afternoon, participants met in 10 Working Groups, each on a different topic: health and climate change, local government, energy supply, transportation, farms, forest, engagement and communications, and energy in buildings.

The Climate Action Network of Lanark County, Smiths Falls and Region was created by the Lanark County Stewardship Council in February 2019. It represents over 20 local organizations, many individuals and several key agencies. The mission of the Network is to connect, coordinate, facilitate, initiate and support collaborative efforts and actions by and for the community to address the impacts of climate change through both mitigation and adaptation.

Special thanks to Pinegrove Productions for videotaping Steve’s speech and producing this video: Franziska von Rosen and Miles Finlayson.