It's Time To Get Serious About Global Warming

The United States, which produces 25% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, has not signed on to Kyoto and is rumoured to be the only one of the eight member Arctic Council refusing to recommend steps to limit emissions. The Arctic Council, made up of Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, the Russian Federation, Sweden, and the United States, released it’s report at the International Scientific Symposium on Climate Change in Reykjavik, Iceland on November 8.

Clearly, it is time that Canada acted and acted quickly. These actions, if they are to have an impact, need to consider our trade practices. It is too late to stave off the effects of global warming, we are now into harm reduction and damage control. We need to get a handle on things before they spiral even further out of control.

What we need is a new National Energy Program. Those are dirty words in the west, I know, but we need it just the same. Greenhouse gases come overwhelmingly from the use of energy derived from fossil fuels. We need a national program that encourages not just Canada, but other nations, to move away from fossil fuels and develop clean energy sources.

There are some things we should seriously consider as part of this new National Energy Program:

Canada should, over the next five years, phase out fossil fuel sales to any nation that has not signed onto Kyoto and made real progress on meeting or exceeding its Kyoto goals. Allowance can be made for nations which have not signed Kyoto but are progressing towards goals that meet or exceed what their Kyoto targets would be, but that progress must be measurable and include an actual reduction in the production of greenhouse emissions.

There is no doubt that will bring cries of impending doom from Alberta, but Canada is more than one province and there are other markets besides the United States. It would also serve to put pressure on the United States to move away from its dependence on fossil fuels and return to the world community.

Canada must reduce emissions from automobiles. This must include SUVs and light trucks. Since our domestic auto industry is wholly owned by foreign companies who consider the United States their major market, trying to enforce CAFÉ standards is unrealistic. Much more realistic is a gas guzzler tax paid yearly throughout the life of the vehicle. To reduce the hardship on people who need large vehicles for their jobs, an exemption for those who make the majority of their living from construction, courier work, or farming should be available. The tax should decrease as vehicles age so that low-income Canadians do not lose their access to personal transportation.

All money gathered from such a tax should go directly to the development of environmentally friendly energy and energy-saving technologies.

Canada must fund mass transit. Rail travel is non-existent in most of the country. What is available is too often expensive and inefficient. It is only available between major centres and the service is sporadic.

In our cities, especially the smaller cities, mass transit is unreliable or unavailable; slow; inaccessible; relatively expensive; and, all too often, dirty. It’s inconvenience precludes use, encouraging people to use private automobiles. For those who commute to major centres every day, a place where they could leave their cars and access mass transit would save at least some fuel and reduce rush-hour traffic.

A return to shipping by rail must be encouraged. Our highways are full of trucks shipping goods from coast to coast and from north to south. The highways have to be maintained and each truck burns diesel. Rail uses much less energy because more goods are shipped at once. It uses its own infrastructure so it causes much less wear and tear on our public infrastructure.

We need to stop subsidising the use of fossil fuels. The oil industry gets huge subsidies both directly and indirectly. More subsidies are given through even less direct means such as the maintenance of infrastructure. Those subsidies need to be removed from fossil fuels and applied to alternate energy sources.

Housing is an area we can achieve a lot in. Most of Canada’s buildings are heated with either natural gas or heating oil. Our houses are inefficient and there is a trend towards larger and larger houses even as family sizes are shrinking. The Canadian government needs to do more to encourage the retro-fitting of older houses with insulation, vapour barriers, and high-efficiency doors and windows. Simply removing federal and provincial sales taxes from these products would go a long way to encouraging their use. Offering an income tax break on money spent on the purchase and installation of these products would offer a further incentive, as well as stimulating local economies.

We need new building codes that stress efficiency and rebates and tax breaks for those who are willing to use alternative building materials and methods. Houses built of straw bales or old tires are not only energy efficient, but use waste products that themselves cause other environmental problems.

There is much more to housing than the materials used to build them. We also require new ways of designing cities to stop urban sprawl and encourage the use of mass transit and alternative methods of personal transportation such as bicycles and walking.

We need to tele-commute more. There is no reason for many people to show up at their offices every day. Increasingly business is done through computers and over the telephone. Most people have at least somewhat of a home office already set up to house their computer and peripherals. Encouraging companies to encourage their employees to work from home would save not only the fuel required to make the trip in each day, but would reduce lost productivity and wasted fuel caused by traffic grid-lock.

Urban sprawl is a major problem. It costs us not just in fuel, but in quality of life and lost productivity because of the time spent travelling each day. The issue can be dealt with in three ways...tele-commuting, putting parking lots on the edge of cities to give commuters access to mass transit, and renewing areas of cities that have been allowed to fall into disrepair.

The re-zoning of urban neighbourhoods as multiple use and the refurbishment of urban neighbourhoods would also go a long way towards addressing greenhouse gas emissions. To do so requires the availability of services however. People need places, preferably within walking distance, where they can purchase groceries, rent videos, or buy fast food. In many urban neighbourhoods these services simply do not exist, encouraging people to remain in or return to the suburbs.

The housing also needs to be reasonably priced. There is a tendency in some cities to favour the installation of high-priced condos in such neighbourhoods, negating the ability of young people to move to the area. A condominium with a list value of a quarter million dollars is hardly a starter home in cities such as Winnipeg, yet it is young people who are most likely to be open to living in such areas.

We need, as a country, to realise that we are leaders in technology, including the technology of environmentally friendly energy. We must make this technology available to developing nations in order to help them avoid travelling down the same wasteful and harmful path that we have chosen.

China and India are on the cusp of becoming major contributors to greenhouse emissions. Both countries are developing burgeoning middle classes that want the luxuries that we take for granted in the west. We cannot deprive them of these luxuries but we can help them to avoid a dependence on fossil fuels. While the west has built an infrastructure that very much reflects our addiction to fossil fuels, the infrastructure in China and India is still in its infancy. They can add infrastructure for alternative fuels without the massive restructuring that the west would require.

China and India are examples of how Canada can help developing nations. It is important that we engage them and others as customers of our environmentally friendly technologies.

Canada, with its large northern territory, is bearing the brunt of global warming along with only a few other nations. Although all nations will eventually be affected by the changes to come, we are among the first. As a wealthy, technologically advanced nation with an educated population, it is important that we develop a strategy to reduce our own environmental impact and encourage others to do the same.

That does not mean that Canada must push itself into bankruptcy. On the contrary, technological advances and changes have historically led to increased wealth, as has trade of new technologies. The fear that moving towards these new technologies will somehow cause massive unemployment and economic hardship has no basis in fact. It is simply fearmongering by those with a vested interest in old, dirty technologies...modern-day Luddites who have seized power.

The scientific results are in and things are getting bad. Global warming is happening much more quickly than we thought it would. It is time for Canada to step up to the plate and do what we can to save our country. We have the people, the technology, and the industry required to move forward. All that is really required is the political will.