Hot Air - the book
By Jan Triska, Greenerpolitics correspondent
What do you get when a top-flight journalist teams up with a well-known expert on economics of sustainable development and they take on the issue of Canada’s response to climate change?
After hearing that Jeffrey Simpson and Mark Jaccard have co-written a book titled ‘Hot Air’, I couldn’t resist the temptation to actually hear Mr. Simpson speak to a live audience. And I must admit, the presentation, although detailed and quite technical, held my attention for the full hour or so…it was definitely an insightful and critical examination of our struggles to put forward meaningful policy on the climate change issues.
What Simpson and Jaccard argue - and, in my humble opinion, prove - is that our federal government has been caught in a difficult spot, unprepared, insufficiently aware of basic underlying facts, and facing a tall order that Canada had originally set out for itself. Our GHG emission reduction targets, as adopted under the Kyoto protocol, are nowhere close to being met, even with the increasing number of policy tools and methods available to policymakers. Despite having no fewer than seven distinct ‘Climate change action’ plans or similar federal strategies over the past decade, Canada has not made any significant headway. Simpson and Jaccard discuss the root causes, point out the political context, and, ultimately, try to provide some alternatives to get Canada back on track.
Mr. Simpson wasted no time pulling out detailed graphs. Among the more interesting ones was the comparison of the long-term effects of the ‘Dion plan’ (as adopted in 2005 when Liberals were still on power) and the ‘Baird plan’ (the current federal government action plan). According to the projections of how many tonnes of GHGs Canada might reduce due to different strategies and policy tools, the authors demonstrate that neither of these two most recent ‘action’ plans will lead the country into a long-term carbon reduction scenario, and will get us nowhere close to Kyoto-compliance status. If anything - and I’ve found this particularly ironic - it is the Baird plan that came looking a bit better, a bit more forceful than the Dion plan.
Why, does one ask, is Canada having such a hard time with achieving meaningful and lasting GHG reductions?
Jaccard and Simpson argue that we have not chosen the appropriate strategies: instead of reaching for regulatory measures and establishing a viable carbon trading market, Canada’s policy leaders put forward a suite of voluntary measures, small consumer incentives, and a whole batch of short-term programs to aid the development of some clean energy technologies. Simpson, in his presentation, stated that voluntary measures rarely work, that the consumer incentives available to Canadians to motivate us to “alter our carbon footprint” are too low to achieve the behavioural change necessary; and, last but not least, the carbon market is only coming in now, years later than it would have been useful.
It was interesting to hear the authors critically pan programs such as the One Tonne challenge. Promising in theory, programs of this type often grind down due to insufficient implementation, insufficent technical and other staff to go and perform the actual work of inspecting people’s houses and doing assessments. Canada may have state-of the art environmental legislation and a growing list of programs to lower energy use but if we are not prepared to invest in the resources to implement, monitor and verify the changes, then we are doomed to fail.
I prefer to think that my glass is most often half full. After hearing Mr. Simpson, I had to admit to myself that our collective glass is still half full, that there is still some time to install the kind of policies that will eventually start lowering the overall GHG emissions…but, we have certainly missed the first significant opportunity to reach the opening period of Kyoto Protocol. 2008 is soon, in a mere month or so. Canada will continue to belch the much-maligned greenhouse gases, at one of the highest per capita rates in the world, for some time to come. Perhaps with the current crop of regulations and ‘hard cap’ programs for industry, we’ll lower those emissions levels in the next 10 years. I am hoping we will.
