Geoff Simpson, still one of the smartest journalists in Canada, on the disconnect between Canadian and US policy on climate change. Most definitely worth a read.
Heads firmly in the sand, such as those in the Alberta cabinet, might miss what will be proposed, but no one else will. Mr. Obama will propose what he’s always promised: emissions caps for greenhouse-gas emissions that cause global warming. He will create a market for permits to be purchased from the government, then traded among emitters. These permits might bring the U.S. government $300-billion in a decade or so.
Nothing like this has been proposed by the Harper government. It has preferred useless policies such as tax credits for public transit and expensive subsidies for corn-based ethanol that waste taxpayers’ money. The centrepiece of the Harper approach has been that companies will have to reduce the intensity of their energy use and emissions and, if not, pay into a technology fund that might some day come up with ways of lowering emissions.
This intensity approach is quite different from Mr. Obama’s hard cap. But we are now in the Orwellian world of Ottawa’s climate-change policy. The Prime Minister and his spokesmen have been saying the two systems – intensity and hard caps – amount to the same thing, when, in fact, they do not. It’s the same weird disconnect that had Mr. Harper blaming George Bush for the failures of Canada’s own climate-change policies.