Harper's learned his lesson

The new environment minister has hardly been appointed, but already the outlines of the Tory environmental strategy are clear. It is to remake themselves as the Liberal party, only more so. You like recycling? So do we! We’re one big blue box of failed Liberal policies.

The original Conservative plan was premised on the idea that the public was ready for a little straight talk on global warming. Face it, they said: there’s no way we can meet our Kyoto targets. The targets were picked out of thin air in the first place, and there had been no serious effort to meet thm in the intervening eight years.

Indeed, the Liberal “plans” were a mish-mash of exhortation and dubious subsidy programs, anything but the one indispensible ingredient for sensible economic behaviour: full-cost pricing. (It is sufficient to say economic in this context, since a true understanding of the word takes due account of environmental costs. Likewise, “full-cost” is here interpreted to mean not only the “internal” costs of producting a good or service, but also the external costs, borne by society at large.)

So the Tories set about dismantling them, on the theory that the public would prefer effective policies, at the price of some delay, to ineffective ones now. But they allowed too much time to elapse; expectations raced ahead of education. By the time the Conservatives unveiled their own plan, they had set themselves up for a public relations debacle.

Yet the Tory plan was not that bad, in substance: certainly no worse than anything the Liberals had produced. The media, in particular, seemed amused, even offended, by the choice of 2050 as the long-term reference point for greenhouse gas reductions, apparently unaware that that is the standard target date in such discussions.

The Tory target, a reduction of 45 to 65% by mid-century from 2003 levels, was more or less identical to those of the leading Liberal leadership contenders, for example. Do the math: by 2003, emissions were 25% above where they were in 1990. So a 60% reduction from 2003 levels is equal to a 50% reduction from 1990 levels, which was Michael Ignatieff’s proposed objective. And it’s twice as much as the 25% reduction recommended as a global target by the Stern Review, a report to the British government whose sobering findings were otherwise much reported on here. (Talking of the Blair government, its own global warming plan calls for a 60% reduction in emissions. By what year? By 2050.)

So, too, the Stern report called for capping emissions -- that is, for beginning to reduce them in absolute terms,  after first slowing their rise -- around the year 2020: the same as in the Conservative plan. Remember the controversy over “intensity” that consumed so much print beforehand -- the idea that the Tories would only require reductions in the short-run in the amount of emissions per unit of output, rather than in absolute terms? Total red herring. It’s simple arithmetic. There’s no way to get to absolute reductions except through reductions in intensity. Before you can make a U-turn, you have to slow down.

At any rate, the Tories have learned their lesson. It isn’t efficacy by which the parties’ commitment to curbing global warming will be assessed, but motion. It isn’t progress the public wants, but the appearance of it; not concrete improvements, but gestures of concern. The core of both the Liberal and Conservative plans, the part that will actually make much difference, is “cap-and-trade,” a system allowing companies to buy and sell emissions credits under an overall regulatory ceiling. But that takes a while to get up and running, and in the meantime it’s important to be seen to be Doing Something -- though not something that will cost anything, at least to any identifiable interest or region.

And so those same Liberal programs the Tories had taken such care to strangle -- subsidies to retrofit your home, or to encourage wind power, or biomass fuels, and so on -- will now be revived: not because they work, but because they fill space. As policy, these programs will remain as problematic as ever -- subsidy only encourages whatever activity it occurs to the planners to subsidize, and only for as long as the subsidy remains, whereas simply putting a price on emissions, as with tradeable emissions credits or carbon taxes, harnesses millions of minds to the task. They find ways to economize no one could have anticipate, and without any of the same perverse side effects. (Offer people a subsidy to switch to more energy-efficient refrigerators, and what do they do with the old ones? Stick them in the basement and use them as beer fridges. Result: more energy consumption than before.)

But however ineffective, they offer the appearance of action. Jean Chretien knew this better than anyone: in politics, you have to have a story. It doesn’t matter what the story is. It just has to be something. You think anyone read the Red Book, the famous platform the Liberals used to such effect in the 1993 election? No. It was just a prop, something to fend off accusations that he lacked substance. 

And so the Tories, in their turn, will have their Green Book. I can think of no more affectionate tribute.