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As the Harper government searches for an effective climate policy, it faces domestic and international pressure to sign on again to emission reduction targets. It should refuse to do so. Climate change is too serious a problem to justify yet another round of emission target-setting.

If Canada wants to make a real contribution to climate stabilization, it should avoid commitments to emission reduction targets. Instead, the government should set out a list of practical, doable actions that could make a significant contribution to energy-system transformation — which will be essential if there is to be any hope of stabilizing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. Then it should follow through. The issue is not "voluntarism," but what Canada should commit to. Commitments to targets are not credible, but commitments to actions, including a carbon price policy, certainly can be.

It is not difficult to set forth the outlines of a potentially effective climate policy. Unfortunately, what may be effective is not necessarily politically acceptable. It now seems that the main barrier to an effective climate policy is the obsession with emission targets — a legacy of the Kyoto Protocol. Emission targets stand in the way of concentrating on actions whose payoff is mainly beyond the targeted time frame. Worse, because of an effective effort by climate-change "campaigners" to portray the Kyoto Protocol as humankind's last best hope on climate change, emission targets have now taken on a life of their own, particularly in political arenas susceptible to grandstanding behaviour. The evidence is all around us.

The fundamental problem with mandated emission reduction targets is that they focus on ends rather than on the technological means of achieving those ends. Because targets are assessed only rarely in terms of what is doable but usually in terms of what pressure groups think ought to be done, target-based policies lack credibility in virtually the same proportion in which they are politically popular. The Conference of the Parties session in Bali will indicate whether there is a sufficient number of countries prepared to say that the target-setting emperor has no clothes, and are ready to put a moratorium on this failed approach to climate policy.

The potential harm done by setting long-term targets is illustrated by discussions last June at the G8 meeting, whose final communiqué emphasized an apparent agreement on a target of 50-per-cent global reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.

As is usual when discussions of targets come up, the emphasis at the G8 meeting was on what ought to be done rather than on what can be done. Had the appropriate arithmetic been done, it would have been clear that a reduction of global carbon dioxide emissions from eight gigatonnes of carbon in 2007 to four gigatonnes in 2050 is out of the question. Why? Because it is tantamount to requiring a transformation of energy systems and economies sufficiently great that, on average, the world economy would, in 2050, have the same carbon intensity as Switzerland (a centre of low-carbon economic activity such as banking and watchmaking that could not be more unrepresentative of the world's large industrial economies) had in 2004.

Not only will such a transformation be a slow process, but it will depend critically on development of the necessary energy technologies that, for the most part, are not yet ready. And they may never be ready if we continue to focus blindly on emission targets rather than on the energy technology race needed to bring to fruition technologies capable of large future emission cuts.

Someone has to lead. Another round of climate target-setting would be a prescription for another decade wasted. While it may be politically difficult to chart a new course, there is no alternative if we wish to cope with climate change. Canada could at least get out in front with projects and policies — putting a price on carbon, strengthening energy efficiency standards, and increasing carbon capture and storage — that have a strong probability of encouraging development of the green technologies that will be essential to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, even if the timing and magnitude of these reductions is inherently uncertain.

Canada should be less concerned with whether these reductions meet any particular individual's or group's view of what a future emission level ought to be and focus on defending its approach as an effective means of seriously tackling climate change.

Chris Green is professor of economics at McGill University and was a consultant to Environment Canada regarding the economic consequences of trying to meet Canada's commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. This article is adapted from the December issue of Policy Options (www.irpp.org/po).