Mr. Harper Goes To New York

Of course Mr. Harper likes to invoke the Montreal Protocol and the success in reducing emissions that damage the ozone layer. It’s a useful item for the Harper government to remind people of because the Mulroney government signed it. What Mr. Harper ignores with his invocations is that the Montreal Protocol insisted on hard targets. There was no deal where as long as you made a profit, you could keep on using them. Also inherent in the Montreal Protocol was the recognition that the wealthy nations should eliminate them first, to be followed by developing countries as new technologies were developed and more options became available. Mr. Harper would give no such break to developing or newly developed nations when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. He insists that China and India must cut back as much or more than Canada, the US and Australia if there is to be any future deal. There are a few problems with that. The largest is that Kyoto recognized that developing nations could not cut back without help. China and India are not known for innovative solutions or developing new technology. They are at the stage of development where they use their chief resource, cheap labour, to manufacture technologies developed in other countries. We failed to develop suitable technologies and make them available to countries like China and India, which was one of our obligations under Kyoto. China and India also have obligations under Kyoto and, while those obligations do not include reductions in emissions, both countries have met their obligations. The second largest problem is related to Stephen Harper’s insistence on intensity-based targets. If we are allowed to use such a dishonest formula, so are China and India. Their economies are growing far faster than ours, so their emissions will continue to skyrocket. If we stick with hard targets—real reductions—then China and India will have to do the same. If they refuse, we can effectively reduce their emissions through trade sanctions, since producing cheap consumer goods for the North American market causes most of their emissions. Those aren’t Harper’s problems though, they problems that Harper is causing. His problem is furthering the neo-conservative agenda. That is a dangerous agenda for Canada, especially in regard to global warming and international relations. Harper’s only real allies are John Howard in Australia, who is likely to be replaced shortly, and George Bush, who is not only destined to be gone soon, but is currently a lame duck and presently vying for the title of worst US president in history. Once Harper’s allies in the plan to undermine Kyoto are gone, it is unlikely that the international community will remain patient with Canada for long. The United States is, we’re told, the world’s only remaining superpower. Australia is a regional power that has influence in Asia because it supplies raw resources. Once Bush and Howard are gone, Stephen Harper will stand alone in his wish to put corporate profits ahead of the environment. It is likely that the other members of the developed world will begin to look at out emissions and our wealth and decide that if Canada insists on being an international scofflaw, they can institute trade sanctions against us. In the present context of a failing US economy, an economy that Mr. Harper and his predecessors have insisted on tying us ever more closely to, that would almost certainly lead to further economic problems. Those problems are likely to hit the manufacturing base in Ontario and Quebec harder than Harper’s Alberta base, but anything that hurts our economy hurts Mr. Harper’s chances of ever forming a majority government. Harper’s mantra that reducing emissions will hurt the economy makes little sense anyway. More efficient factories mean savings for the corporations. New technologies mean more economic growth and highly paid jobs with good benefits. Greener energy production means reduced costs for healthcare. Increased public transit means lower infrastructure costs in the long term. Business as usual, the bottom line of Harper’s plan, means increased costs for energy and health. More importantly it robs us of a chance to develop new technologies and locks us into a nineteenth century mindset. That regressive mindset is very much the one that Stephen Harper uses when he thinks about policy. He does not see Canada as a nation that can build wealth through innovation and technology. He sees us very much as hewers of wood and bearers of water. Harper’s is a paradigm that would turn Canada into nothing more than a supplier of raw materials, especially oil, to his masters in the United States. That those masters will soon be gone and we will be left behind has apparently not occurred to the Prime Minister. While Stephen Harper stood at the UN talking about a slow, balanced approach to reducing emissions such as finding cleaner ways to burn hydrocarbons, Democrats in the US are looking at new, effective technologies that are not dependent on oil. They are doing so because they are hearing the increasingly urgent warnings from the scientific community, but they are also aware that they are being left behind as Europe and the developed countries in Asia develop new technologies to reduce energy consumption, and to produce energy with fewer, if any, greenhouse emissions. Prime Minister Harper is trapped by his own past rhetoric and the beliefs so apparent in his party. The rhetoric can be ignored, of course. Mr. Harper is a politician, after all, so the past pronouncements carry little weight. What does carry weight, or should, is the continued ignorance displayed by Harper and his cohorts. There is little doubt that they still consider Kyoto to be some sort of socialist plot, but more troubling is the perfect storm of greed and purposeful ignorance that allows so many of Harper’s supporter to deny that global warming is occurring or, if it is occurring, that it has anything to do with our emissions. The greed needs little explanation. The Conservative base is still very much invested in the oil industry. The relative newcomers to the Reform/Alliance/Conservative Party that are not from oil country are from other energy intensive backgrounds and have profited in the past from a lack of environmental regulation. They see the environmental movement as a threat to their pocketbooks. Harper’s statements, past and present, show him to be very much a part of this set of Conservatives. The other draw to Harper’s party is social and religious conservatism. If you are a religious fundamentalist—Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—global warming theory is a direct challenge to your religious beliefs. If god created the earth and the atmosphere, then he did so for us to use as we please, the thinking goes. Therefore global warming is either not happening or is god’s will. More importantly, if the scientists are right about global warming, they are also right about the greenhouse effect and that effect is integral to evolution on this planet. We aren’t sure exactly how Mr. Harper’s religious beliefs affect his personal views on global warming, he has gone out of his way to make sure that we don’t know exactly what his beliefs are. There is no doubt that Christian fundamentalists make up a large part of Mr. Harper’s base though, and if they are threatened by government acceptance of global warming science, then Mr. Harper will be threatened as well. His party has split before, in part over the role religious belief should play in government. The Harper government’s inaction on global warming is driven by neo-conservatives from the United States, nineteenth century economic thinking, and the kind of religious thought that should have out of style about the time the church admitted that Galileo was right after all. If Harper is allowed to continue to refuse to act, the result is likely to be that Canada will become a technological and economic backwater. Greed and ignorance will leave us with no future at all. [Proofreader’s note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on September 25, 2007]