Foot-dragging is a tradition

At the Second World Climate Conference in 1990, Canada committed to stabilizing its emissions of greenhouse gases at then-current levels within a decade. The pledge was repeated in the federal government’s Green Plan of that year.

There followed a federal-provincial National Action Strategy on Global Warming, the federal Efficiency and Alternative Energy Program (1991), and a National Action Program on Climate Change (1995). A revised commitment, at Kyoto, to reduce emissions by 6 per cent from 1990 levels by 2008-12, resulted in the National Climate Change Process (1998), soon overtaken by Canada’s First National Climate Change Business Plan (2000), not to mention Canada’s National Implementation Strategy on Climate Change and, inevitably, a second National Climate Change Business Plan (2002). Meanwhile, the federal government was churning out Action Plan 2000, a Climate Change Plan for Canada (2002), and, in 2005, Project Green, billed as “a plan for honouring our Kyoto commitment.”

Altogether, I make that two programs, four plans, a process, two strategies, and a project. The result: by 2004, Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions were nearly 27% above their 1990 baseline, having risen in more or less a straight line throughout this period. Ottawa alone had spent, by the federal environment commissioner’s count, $6-billion on sundry climate change schemes, to no discernible effect.

So before we start, let us discard this notion that the Conservatives’ Clean Air Act, with its leisurely timetables and hazy specifics, represents some radical new achievement in the field of foot-dragging, wheel-spinning and pointless busywork. If they see further -- all the way to 2050! -- it is because they are standing on the shoulders of giants.

For that matter, there’s not a lot of difference in how the two parties would proceed from here.  The Conservatives’ short-term timelines are not far off those the Liberals had in mind, their regulatory approach -- cap and trade -- is broadly similar, and their long-term targets are in the same ballpark as those proposed by the Liberal leadership candidates. (My own plan: let the greenhouse gases escape through the hole in the ozone layer. Mind you, I am not a licenced climatologist...)

If it seems ludicrous for governments to be setting emissions targets for 2050, when they cannot even hit their budget targets for the current year, it is. But that simply reflects the scale of the problem. To turn around something as vast and unmanageable as global warming -- assuming we can do anything about it -- will take decades. You have first to slow the growth of emissions, then reduce them in absolute terms, before you can finally stabilize atmospheric concentrations -- the accumulated residue of all those yearly emissions -- at levels that will, even then, merely halt the increase in global temperatures, never mind actually reverse them. The critics are screaming because the Tory plan would do little to reduce emissions in the next four years. But what does it matter if the long-term target is the same?

I understand that the longer we wait to get started, the greater the reduction we will eventually have to make. But since the same critics seem to believe we can slash emissions by 30 to 40 per cent in the space of two years -- the kind of effort that would be required, at this late date, to meet our Kyoto targets -- it is surely possible to reduce them by 60 or even 80 per cent over 30 years. 

Yes, there’s a danger, should concentrations rise above a certain level, that we may pass a tipping point, where the very processes unleashed by atmospheric warming give rise to further warming. But it is impossible to fix that point with any precision. The head of climate science for NASA, James Hansen, warns that global emissions must be capped by 2016. The Conservatives propose to do so starting in 2020. Four years marks the difference between whether the planet lives or dies?

Four years, moreover, in Canada -- a country that accounts for just 2 per cent of world emissions? To listen to some of the more hysterical of the government’s critics, you’d think they held the fate of the world in their hands. They -- we -- do not. We have a moral obligation to do our part, and we hardly set a good example when we renege on our international commitments, either de facto (the Liberals) or de jure (the Tories). But the cold fact is that Canada is largely irrelevant to the overall picture.

This is a problem, in sum, that will require concerted international action over the better part of a century. That’s a hard thing for democratic societies to manage, even one at a time, let alone trying to herd 160 or so countries with wildly diffferent resource bases, standards of living, and political ideologies inside the same corral. Now consider that the costs of global warming are distant and uncertain, while the costs of preventing it are real and apparent, and it is easy to understand why politicians are so slow to come to grips with it. The same public that demands action on global warming screams blue murder if the price of gas rises a nickel.

That points to both the importance, and the insignificance, of Kyoto. It’s a treaty: nothing more, nothing less. Its targets were not decreed by cosmic writ, but were the result of the usual horse-trading and grandstanding -- witness the 6 per cent figure to which Jean Chretien committed Canada, on the basis that it was 1 per cent more than the Americans had promised. 

Still, you have to start somewhere. Without some such agreement, the temptation for every nation would be to free-ride on the others. So it’s unfortunate and embarrassing that we have not lived up to our commitments. But it’s not -- well, it’s not the end of the world.