Environment & Energy

Dead_Parrot

(14,478 posts) Mon Mar 19, 2012, 01:21 PM Mar 2012

(Canada) Why is the timing never right for action on climate?

Ten years ago, a very senior federal deputy minister told me that implementing Canada's Kyoto Protocol target to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to six per cent below 1990 levels by 2012 would force an adjustment on the Canadian economy greater than that of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States. (The FTA, which was ultimately of great economic benefit to Canada, had a significantly disruptive effect on the Canadian economy, especially the manufacturing sector, in the short term.)

This bureaucrat's comment on Kyoto, made five years after Canada signed the Protocol and the year it was ratified by Parliament, reflected the dominant view within the government at that time. Even with the relatively strong Canadian economy that then prevailed, and with a decade in which to implement Kyoto, conventional wisdom in Ottawa held that Canada's target was a bridge too far. And this was the opinion within the Chrétien government, which signed Kyoto and remained rhetorically committed to it. As a result, nothing meaningful was done to reduce Canada's GhG emissions at the federal level during the Chrétien years.

And while the short-lived minority government of Paul Martin claimed adherence to Kyoto's goals, and proposed "Project Green" under then environment minister Stéphane Dion to help Canada reduce its emissions, it too failed to seriously come to grips with the problem. Neither the Chrétien nor the Martin governments had the stomach, even during periods of strong economic growth and when protecting the environment ranked historically high in public opinion, to move forward with the most effective and efficient tools for reducing carbon emissions - a carbon tax and/ or a "cap and trade" regulatory regime. During the Liberal era, the prevailing orthodoxy of fear over the alleged dire political and economic costs of reducing GhGs had an iron grip on the Ottawa mind, even when the political economy conditions for a strong federal push to curb emissions seemed at their most accommodating.

Enter Stéphane Dion, Liberal Opposition leader from 2006-'08, a climate change theologian who became a Kyoto High Priest when he chaired the 2005 UN Climate Change Summit in Montreal, which extended the Kyoto Protocol and sought to deepen GhG reductions among its signatories. As Liberal leader, Dion, sensing the political winds on the environment generally and climate change specifically were blowing in his favour, ran an entire general election campaign in 2008 on the moral imperative for Canada to cut its GhG emissions, and on the thesis that this could be done in an economically beneficial way that was of no fiscal cost to the taxpayer (in other words, the free lunch version of cutting emissions).

More: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/timing+never+right+action+climate/6322188/story.html

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