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"Let's be honest," Michael Ignatieff told young followers last week in Vancouver. "We got killed at the doorstep with the Green Shift."

Mr. Ignatieff is clear that campaigning on a carbon tax was suicide. But, in British Columbia, Premier Gordon Campbell is sticking with his own carbon tax as he leads his Liberals into a May election.

Does that make him an idealist, willing to go down fighting if it means showing how to save ourselves from global warming? More likely, he's crazy like a fox, having crafted a political image that doesn't match his actions.

You wouldn't know it from his eco-hero photo ops with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger or the soft ride he gets from environmental groups. But, among Western leaders, Mr. Campbell is actually doing more than most to hasten global warming.

Let's lay out the game Mr. Campbell is playing and, so far, winning. First, the zig: In B.C., the green-minded swing vote can make all the difference, and environmental protesters can make life hell for candidates they don't like.

Mr. Campbell has all but co-opted those forces with his year-old carbon tax, which levies $10 on carbon-based fuels for every tonne of greenhouse gases they generate. (The money is refunded to British Columbians rather than invested in green projects.)

What that means now is two or three pennies added to the price of a litre of gas. Green wonks will privately admit the tax is too low to seriously deter B.C.'s emissions. "But it's a needed start," they will say. The tax might have a real effect if it rises to a planned $30 a tonne - three years after this spring's election.

For Mr. Campbell's foes, the carbon tax has shredded the delicate labour-environmentalist coalition that some B.C. New Democrats have spent years trying to establish. Jockeying for a populist issue, NDP Leader Carole James has opted to slam Mr. Campbell's "gas tax." Her stand has enraged climate-change worriers, and Mr. Campbell is only too glad to welcome these voters into his Liberal tent.

Now the zag: For a guy supposedly so concerned about global warming, Mr. Campbell is quick to back what causes it, like putting more vehicles on the road and revving up Alberta's tar sands production.

Last week, he joined Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Surrey to brag about their governments' joint $1-billion, 40-kilometre freeway, part of the Gateway Plan to beef up the province as a conduit for Asia. Critics say the road will pave over farmland and generate pollution. But the Campbell message was jobs, jobs, jobs.

Less reported, yet potentially much worse for climate change, are the twin pipelines Enbridge wants to build connecting Alberta's tar sands with the port of Kitimat, B.C. Right now, there's no direct way to get tar sands oil out of North America. Fretting that President Barack Obama will tighten that tap, industry is pushing hard to get the Enbridge project approved. Mr. Campbell's government has promoted the idea of a pipeline "corridor" across B.C. to fuel Asia and other markets.

The Enbridge project would carry more than a third of the tar sands' current 1.4-million-barrel daily production. Producing those barrels would create 15 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year; burning that fuel would emit 60 million tonnes more.

The Times of London pointed out that the tar sands "are already the single largest contributor to Canada's greenhouse-gas emissions. If they were all to be mined, the climatic consequences would be unthinkable." The paper urged U.K.-based Shell to pull out.

Zig: Two years ago, Mr. Campbell vowed to cut greenhouse emissions by at least a third by 2020.

Zag: On Monday, he downgraded the status of his climate-change secretariat, moving the job out of the Premier's office.

Zig: Mr. Campbell has championed a "cap and trade" approach to using market forces to lower emissions in B.C.

Zag: How B.C. regulates such emissions from its own citizens and businesses will have but a smidgen of impact on the rest of the globe. But those gains will be wiped away by Canada's mega-project on the Athabasca - which now has a friend in Mr. Campbell.

I know. Times are rough. Another premier might just say that green ideals must wait while we build ports and highways and oil and gas infrastructure to create jobs and revenue. But, then, that premier wouldn't get to be a global warming guru, too.

David Beers is editor of the Vancouver-based online magazine The Tyee.