Waiting it out is not an option
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has told the world Canada will stop producing and using fossil-fuel energy by the end of the current century. What a guy! Just imagine the progress we’d have made on, say, votes for women if political leaders a century ago had shown similar determination to that of Harper and his G7 colleagues last weekend.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin must now be wondering if he could end their disapproval of his Ukraine policy by committing to the same 85-year deadline for halting violations of international borders.
Of course, what the world needs isn’t a fantasy energy goal that someone else is going to be stuck with after we’re all gone. Nor do we need a moral judgment on a particular source of energy, which — who knows? — may someday be usable without environmental consequences.
Rather, we need practical, significant, incremental road maps for reducing to sustainable levels the negative side-effects of all the energy human beings use right now.
The most peculiar thing about Harper’s promise is its similarity to the Chretien Liberals’ muchmaligned Kyoto strategy. Apparently, if Jean Chretien had just kicked the can farther down the road and offered even less detail on how reductions of greenhouse gas emissions might actually be accomplished, it would have been OK to Conservatives.
Coincidentally, Harper’s fossil-fuel promise at the G7 meeting in Elmau, Germany is sharing this week’s news cycle with a call by 100 American and Canadian scientists and economists for an immediate moratorium on the development of new projects in Alberta’s oilsands.
This demand, by notables such as Alberta’s water expert David Schindler and Simon Fraser energy economist Mark Jaccard, may be seen as approaching the climate-change problem from the exact opposite direction.
Harper is essentially hoping that if we wait long enough, something will come up to make the problem go away. The scientists believe the only way to make “something come up” in the way of new energy sources or cleaner technology is to act unilaterally against the status quo.
If we were forced to choose one or the other, the path of moratorium would seem more responsible, having more incentive within it for immediate change.
One can’t help but wonder if Alberta’s new NDP government might be able to chart a middle ground, perhaps by dedicating the extra revenue from a new royalty regime to research on energy science and technologies, and to environmental reclamation.
Clearly, OPEC’s current efforts to increase production and lower oil prices are meant to hurt North American energy producers and developers, thus to create a future in which we are more dependent on foreign supplies produced by the cartel. Surely, if we worry about better environmental policies making our oil more expensive, we should remember that at least this is better than paying high prices to Middle Eastern producers when they have again tightened their grip on the market.
For too long, with Harper’s Ottawa as a fellow traveller, Alberta’s government has transparently done as little as possible to tackle the threat of climate change, and thus to protect our fossil-fuel franchise and our reputation as sincere preservers of the environment.
The prime minister’s almost contemptuous 85-year-promise plays into that narrative, and makes calls for drastic immediate action more credible and difficult to resist by comparison.
It all makes a person want to console himself with an adult beverage. And if that seems bad, why, we can always set a deadline of 2100 for swearing off that vice, too.