10/02/07, Rex Murphy, Don't single out Alberta
Post
No one seriously believes Canada is going to meet its Kyoto targets. The very greenest of the green no doubt see an evangelical value in keeping a stiff ecological upper lip on the subject, but even they know the practicalities of the Canadian economy and Canadian politics will not allow wrenching emissions back over the next five years to come out even with the Kyoto scoreboard.
Anyone wishing to see that reality underlined merely has to read yesterday's Globe on the University of Toronto researchers' ranking of the industrial countries that comprise the G8: Canada comes last of those that have pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Five years to go and all alone at the back of the pack.
With that as our starting point, we also absolutely know some things that are not going to happen. Ontario is not going to shut down its coal-burning generating plants and replace them in five years. There is not going to be some wickedly steep new tax placed on gasoline as a blunt discouragement to everything but the most necessary driving. Which party is going to go to the polls promising, say, a $2 hike per litre of gasoline?
Jets are a big source of emissions we are told. Are we going to see a ban on the great herd flights south over March break? Fines or taxes on all intercontinental travel? Not a chance in several hells.
The great global-warming debate is, at bottom, a great political conundrum. Now that, for the moment, green is all that is left of the once multi-hued spectrum, all the parties have to talk a great game, genuflect to Gaia and waft the organic incense. But what can they actually pledge to do? That is, what will not have every Canadian from St. Anthony to Tofino stage the equivalent of mutiny at the polls.
It's really too bad there's not a conveniently concentrated, symbolically powerful, easily defined source of really major greenhouse gas emissions. Something that the politicians could point to, and with all the zeal of missionaries who have found the perfect sacrifice, say -- hey, we're going to put a hold on that.
I'd suggest something to do with big oil. Everybody knows (I'm going to capitalize now) Big Oil is Really Bad. Something heavily industrial way off in the hinterlands would really be ideal. Nothing more outrages the downtown imaginations of the most environmentally conscious than something big and ugly happening way out there in the pristine periphery. Something in Alberta would be best of all. Alberta is both rich and far away.
Now we have not yet reached critical mass on the greening of Canadian politics. An early election, however, and another flare of warming weather in central Canada, could bring us there. And at that point, I truly wonder if the competition for votes might inspire one or more of our major parties to start pointing westward, and muse aloud in a dialogue with the voters about the wisdom of halting, of shutting down the Alberta tar sands?
Fanciful, maybe. Though by some recent words from Alberta's new Premier Ed Stelmach I can tell he's not entirely at rest with the idea that it is just a fancy.
Well, if it is a thought, it should be suffocated before the words are found to mouth it. It is a very foolish cliché to think of the tar sands as benefiting Alberta alone. Half of the social and political economies of this country are running off that project.
Just to take a very ready example: Young and old in their thousands after the fishery collapse found a real rescue in Alberta. Newfoundland was hit hard when the nets were lifted from the water. Alberta jobs were the dividing line between a hardship and a desolation. The great string of surpluses that adorned every successive federal budget in the past decade didn't spring from a bush. Some Alberta money is in every hospital in Canada.
There are more subtle national benefits from what is going on in Alberta. Alberta job sites are one of the real blending grounds of our current Confederation -- people are there from every province, working at all levels. This country is renewed when its citizens mix.
So, if the equation exists that since carbon emissions are a great driver of greenhouse gases, and the tar sands is the oil megaproject par excellence, therefore, Alberta should be the principal battleground against global warming, and pay the principal price -- let us nullify that equation before it hits the blackboard.
A repetition of the offensive national energy program -- for so Albertans will, and ferociously, see it -- would make the rattling of Quebec separatism, at its most intense, sound like the sweet cooing of a chorus of poppy-dazed doves.
If anyone thinks putting a halt to Alberta's economic future would pay a dividend in cooling the planet, they might also want to contemplate that it would simultaneously ignite a political inferno within, what we are so often pleased to regard as, the world's most successful Confederation.
Anyone wishing to see that reality underlined merely has to read yesterday's Globe on the University of Toronto researchers' ranking of the industrial countries that comprise the G8: Canada comes last of those that have pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Five years to go and all alone at the back of the pack.
With that as our starting point, we also absolutely know some things that are not going to happen. Ontario is not going to shut down its coal-burning generating plants and replace them in five years. There is not going to be some wickedly steep new tax placed on gasoline as a blunt discouragement to everything but the most necessary driving. Which party is going to go to the polls promising, say, a $2 hike per litre of gasoline?
Jets are a big source of emissions we are told. Are we going to see a ban on the great herd flights south over March break? Fines or taxes on all intercontinental travel? Not a chance in several hells.
The great global-warming debate is, at bottom, a great political conundrum. Now that, for the moment, green is all that is left of the once multi-hued spectrum, all the parties have to talk a great game, genuflect to Gaia and waft the organic incense. But what can they actually pledge to do? That is, what will not have every Canadian from St. Anthony to Tofino stage the equivalent of mutiny at the polls.
It's really too bad there's not a conveniently concentrated, symbolically powerful, easily defined source of really major greenhouse gas emissions. Something that the politicians could point to, and with all the zeal of missionaries who have found the perfect sacrifice, say -- hey, we're going to put a hold on that.
I'd suggest something to do with big oil. Everybody knows (I'm going to capitalize now) Big Oil is Really Bad. Something heavily industrial way off in the hinterlands would really be ideal. Nothing more outrages the downtown imaginations of the most environmentally conscious than something big and ugly happening way out there in the pristine periphery. Something in Alberta would be best of all. Alberta is both rich and far away.
Now we have not yet reached critical mass on the greening of Canadian politics. An early election, however, and another flare of warming weather in central Canada, could bring us there. And at that point, I truly wonder if the competition for votes might inspire one or more of our major parties to start pointing westward, and muse aloud in a dialogue with the voters about the wisdom of halting, of shutting down the Alberta tar sands?
Fanciful, maybe. Though by some recent words from Alberta's new Premier Ed Stelmach I can tell he's not entirely at rest with the idea that it is just a fancy.
Well, if it is a thought, it should be suffocated before the words are found to mouth it. It is a very foolish cliché to think of the tar sands as benefiting Alberta alone. Half of the social and political economies of this country are running off that project.
Just to take a very ready example: Young and old in their thousands after the fishery collapse found a real rescue in Alberta. Newfoundland was hit hard when the nets were lifted from the water. Alberta jobs were the dividing line between a hardship and a desolation. The great string of surpluses that adorned every successive federal budget in the past decade didn't spring from a bush. Some Alberta money is in every hospital in Canada.
There are more subtle national benefits from what is going on in Alberta. Alberta job sites are one of the real blending grounds of our current Confederation -- people are there from every province, working at all levels. This country is renewed when its citizens mix.
So, if the equation exists that since carbon emissions are a great driver of greenhouse gases, and the tar sands is the oil megaproject par excellence, therefore, Alberta should be the principal battleground against global warming, and pay the principal price -- let us nullify that equation before it hits the blackboard.
A repetition of the offensive national energy program -- for so Albertans will, and ferociously, see it -- would make the rattling of Quebec separatism, at its most intense, sound like the sweet cooing of a chorus of poppy-dazed doves.
If anyone thinks putting a halt to Alberta's economic future would pay a dividend in cooling the planet, they might also want to contemplate that it would simultaneously ignite a political inferno within, what we are so often pleased to regard as, the world's most successful Confederation.
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