Ontario, we’re told, is Canada’s new rust belt. The high dollar is pummelling the province’s exports. Big manufacturers are fleeing. The Liberal government is slashing spending to maintain the province’s credit rating.
Humankind will have to invest staggering resources to find and produce new oil if global output is to grow steadily. We’re likely much closer to the tipping point than optimists think
There’s really only one label for the pathetic exercise we’ve just witnessed in South Africa: deceit. The whole climate-change negotiation process and the larger political discourse surrounding this horrible problem is a drawn-out and elaborate exercise in lying—to each other, to ourselves, and especially to our children. And the lies are starting to corrupt our civilization from inside out.
A quarter of a century after we first heard it, the word “Chernobyl” stands in our minds for technological calamity borne of incompetence. Environmentalists used the label to deliver a near-fatal blow to the nuclear power industry. What will Fukushima mean to us in 2036, and how will we have used the label to change our world?
Standing on the deck of this floating laboratory for Arctic science, which is part of Canada’s Coast Guard fleet and one of the world’s most powerful icebreakers, I can see vivid evidence of climate change.
Skeptics often say Earth’s climate is showing a trend toward stable or even declining temperatures. But they have to cherry-pick data from the climate record to support this argument.
We Canadians like to think we are green, but when it comes to protecting the environment, we are among the world’s worst actors. Whether the metric is carbon output per capita, toxic waste emissions or protection of endangered species, Canada regularly ranks near the bottom of the list of similarly wealthy countries.
If our economy’s incentives start pulling in the same direction as our ethical impulses, Canadians can do better. At present, they are pulling in opposite directions.
A critical conversation about climate change is going on right now through the UNFCCC process; a key stage in this process will be the Copenhagen meeting at the end of this year. This conversation, to the extent that it is prescriptive, generally emphasizes technology and economics. It stresses strategies for dealing with the climate problem that involve technical aspects of, for instance, societies’ energy mix and energy efficiency. I don’t want to disparage these approaches or suggest that they shouldn’t be pursued. But, the fact remains that despite all our efforts we seem to be falling further and further behind.
Alberta appears to be in a box – an energy box – that constrains policy options in every direction. The province’s wealth is critically tied to exploitation of its vast hydrocarbon resources.
Paper Prepared for the 20th Anniversary Conference of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, Ottawa, Ontario
