Remember: it was the Liberals who kicked Kyoto to the curb
By MICHAEL DEN TANDT, The Gazette November 30, 2011
"We didn't get it done," wailed Michael Ignatieff about Canada's lacklustre, ineffectual attempts to meet this country's Kyoto Protocol carbon emission targets, back when the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien was serious about pretending it took climate change seriously.
Ignatieff was, of course, spot on: Ottawa's Kyoto commitments died on the operating table in the waning years of Chrétien's third term, as the first of three Canadian prime ministers came to realize that implementing Kyoto faithfully would doom the oilpatch and Canada's economic future with it. None of Chrétien's Kyoto plans had teeth.
Which raises the question: How can the Liberals continue to holler about Kyoto today, as though they were the treaty's greatest champions? After promising to adopt it, it was they themselves who kicked it to the curb.
In 2002-03, far more than now, a clear disavowal of Kyoto would have been politically disastrous in centrist Ontario and left-leaning Quebec. Who in his or her right mind could be seen to be against saving the planet?
So prime ministers Chrétien and Paul Martin in turn adopted the same clever, disingenuous policy: Pay careful lip service to the religion of global warming (because to do otherwise incites the theological fury of the true believers) but move sure-footedly to ensure that neither Canadian industry nor consumers pay a measurable price, for which you'd be blamed later at the polls. It worked not too badly, until sponsorship came along.
In 2006, Stephen Harper inherited Chrétien's strategy and refined it. The Harper government in all but name withdrew from Kyoto on Day 1. Conservatives have continued to gamely insist they believe enthusiastically in the battle against climate change - because that's what the strategy requires. Unlike the Liberals, though, they never bothered to even try to persuade us they would slash Canada's GHG emissions to six per cent below 1990 levels by 2012, as Kyoto requires.
Here's what both Liberals and Tories would say about climate change, if they were being honest.
The Kyoto Protocol has not mattered globally since 2001, when President George W. Bush unilaterally withdrew the United States. Even before then, this ramshackle, bloated attempt at global engineering was dead on arrival because of the non-participation of China, India and Brazil, among other huge and fast-growing economies.
Why did the Kyoto sacrifice never really take off in Canada? It's not complicated: We have a conflict of interest. According to Statistics Canada, households directly or indirectly contribute about half the country's emissions. We do that by driving cars and heating homes, and by consuming products or services created with the use of fossil fuels.
As both home insulation and cars become more energy efficient, you'd think, emissions must fall. And they do. But economic growth acts as a counter. Between 1990 and 2004, for example, the intensity of Canadian household greenhouse gas emissions decreased by more than 20 per cent. But a 25-per-cent increase in household spending over the same period offset any GHG reductions.
In other words: where there are jobs there are emissions, in equal measure. The only surefire way of slashing emissions across an entire economy is to have a deep and lasting economic collapse, as happened to the former Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion's Green Shift, which he rode into a wall in 2008, was a sincere but politically naïve attempt to decarbonize the Canadian economy by applying monetary levers to the habits of ordinary Canadians. It was offered as a given that said transformation was a necessary and good thing. Dion's plan went supernova because he asked that Canadians accept a lower standard of living - in the form of higher real prices for energy - in exchange for his vision.
But now even that old discussion is being superseded. The skeptical science, for years confined to the scruffy margins by the International Panel on Climate Change and its supporters, took a huge leap forward earlier this year with the discovery by no less than the CERN laboratories, based in Switzerland - arguably the most prestigious scientific group in the world - that fluctuations in the Sun's magnetic field have a very large, perhaps dominant effect on the Earth's climate.
If further study bears this out, then policy-makers will soon be left with the rather stunning conclusion that all of it - Kyoto, Copenhagen, Durban - has mainly been a waste. Even as that work begins, the CERN findings are steadily trickling through the blogosphere, quietly altering the political discussion everywhere - including in Canada, beyond Ottawa.
mdentandt@postmedia.com.
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