Wrote The Economist this week on climate change: “The national policies used to implement cuts need to be more efficient than the ones that are so far in place. That requires leadership from the politicians, and support from the voters. The world is, in the end, in their hands.”
Fine sentiments, worthy of an editorial writer who does not have to make decisions. In the real world, however, the difficulties within countries about reducing greenhouse-gas emissions are almost as hard as the ones between and among them.
In Canada, we have two major fossil-fuel-producing provinces (Saskatchewan and Alberta) and one minor one (Newfoundland and Labrador). The two western provinces, not surprisingly, have the highest per capita emissions. They claim, not without reason, that since their economic strength helps the whole country, and since consumers also pollute, their taxpayers and industries should not bear a disproportionate burden of reductions.
The best way to spread the burden would have been a carbon tax, applied on both producers and consumers. The tax could have been collected regionally and recycled into the regions where it was collected, thereby easing Alberta's and Saskatchewan's pain.
But those governments had their heads in the sands, hoping the whole issue would subside. So they did nothing in the one area that really counts: putting a price on carbon. (Alberta has a piddling carbon tax on emissions over a certain level that companies can avoid by paying $15 a tonne into an technology fund.)
Both are big supporters of carbon sequestration, an unproven, expensive method of lowering emissions. In Alberta's case, the taxpayers will spend $2-billion to reduce emissions by perhaps five million tonnes, which is about 2 per cent of the province's total emissions. The world sees this policy for what it is – expensive and inadequate, which is among the reasons why Alberta Environment Minister Rob Renner is going to take a pasting at the Copenhagen climate-change conference.
Ontario and Quebec, arguing that polluters must pay, don't want to be penalized by a national approach that lets the big polluters off the hook; the big polluters want their burden shared by consumers of their products elsewhere in Canada. The Harper government has no serious national policy. And given that it views almost everything politically, it obviously sees little gain in an aggressive policy, especially since its own coalition is full of deniers and skeptics.
In the United States, the Senate will have a decisive say in that country's policies. Barack Obama will give a heartfelt, serious speech (as always) in Copenhagen but then return home to find Congress balky or even resistant.
In Australia, which is another big per capita polluter, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has called climate change the “great moral challenge of our generation.” But his plans for a cap-and-trade scheme, based on an outstanding report done several years ago by some of the country's top public planning brains, have been wrecked temporarily in the Senate, where his Labour Party does not have a majority. Turmoil in the opposition party brought to power an extreme right-wing leader who is a climate-change denier. He and his friends have spoiled Mr. Rudd's hopes, at least for a while.
Even in Europe, divisions abound: between those with fossil fuels and those without; the poorer eastern countries and the richer western ones; those that accept nuclear power and those that don't. That having been said, the 27-country European Union has done a better job of presenting a coherent target at Copenhagen than the Canadian government representing 10 provinces and 3 territories, because the Canadian target of a 20-per-cent reduction by 2020 from 2006 levels is not considered credible by any of Canada's international partners.
It's easy to get pessimistic. But, on the cheery side, consider these developments since the Kyoto negotiations.
The United States is engaged, led by an administration that wants to take action. Europe has established an internal carbon-trading mechanism. Australia no longer has the reluctant John Howard as prime minister. China has moved from refusal to intensity-based improvements while making enormous investments in technology. So has India, albeit in a more moderate way. Brazil appears more inclined to curb rampant deforestation of the Amazon. So climate-change policy has moved from whether to how.
Sub-national governments – from some U.S. and Australian states to provinces such as British Columbia and hydro-rich Quebec – are way ahead of their national governments. And no government anywhere, from authoritarian China to semi-authoritarian Russia through all the democracies of the world, believes the climate-change deniers.
