Conservatives Create Green Smokescreen

All through this week, the Conservative government has been occupied in busily painting itself Green. But like most slapdash jobs, they have done a bad job of it. The government seeks to convince the people that it is truly concerned about global climate change, and is taking action to fix it. That is just a bit difficult to swallow, because these are the same people who just a few years ago were denying that global climate change was occurring at all.

This week, the Conservatives announced three new measures:

1. $230 million for clean energy research over the next four years.
   
2. $1.5 billion for the construction of renewable energy projects over the next ten years.
3. $300 million for home and business energy efficiency incentives over the next four years.

This might be all well and good if it wasn't backloaded to hell and gone. None of this is going to be done now. And now is when we need it. These projects are clearly not going to accomplish much of anything. On the clean energy research, we already have commercially viable clean energy technologies, most prominently wind power. On the second, the funding will be backloaded into the final years, when the Conservatives will no longer be in power. They will not do anything, beyond pointing to this plan. The third part of the plan is the best part. Unfortunately, the Conservatives canceled a Liberal programme exactly like this one when they got into office and we have lost a year's worth of progress. Most importantly, none of these proposals include regulation to ensure that our greenhouse gas emissions continue to go down.

These proposals stink of voluntary measures. We have seen that these don't work. The previous Liberal government set voluntary targets for industry to cut emissions, and the emissions went up instead. What we need is immediate hard-cap targets for industry. If we really work at it, I believe that we can still meet our Kyoto Accord commitments. But of course, the Conservatives don't want that to happen. They are too beholden to the oil and gas industries to ever do anything that would threaten the profits of those industries. All the Conservatives want to do is bamboozle the Canadian people into believing, even for a minute, that Conservatives care about the environment. It simply isn't true.

What is equally true is that the Liberals are no better. They had years, and years, in government to make the decisions, enact the regulations and fund the programmes that would have allowed us to reach and surpass our Kyoto Accord targets. And now they cry crocodile tears for the environment, using it as a cynical means to regain power. As environment minister, Dion presided over some of the most dramatic growth in Canadian CO2 emissions in our history. People should know better than to think that the Liberals will take any action on the environment that is more than mere window dressing.

What we need to do is change our way of life. In Canada, we are one of the most dramatically wasteful societies in the world. We have per capita CO2 emissions higher than the United States. We need to use less energy and live in a much more sustainable manner. This means using energy efficient light bulbs, improving insulation, not driving nearly as much (instead choose to walk, bike or take public transit) and a whole host of other changes. Combined with that, we need to help the developing countries of the world to develop in a clean manner. We need to provide help to China and India to develop an economy driven not by fossil fuels but rather by renewables like wind, solar, tidal and geothermal power.

It is not to late, but we have got to do something soon.

Cheers

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