Our wonderful Conservative federal government commissioned a study to show that Canada will suffer a severe recession if we even make some attempt to honour our Kyoto Protocol obligations. Guess what they got? You guessed it: a study showing that Canada will suffer a severe recession if we even make some attempt to honour our Kyoto Protocol obligations.
This is a worse-case scenario, circumscribed and, arguably, rigged document. Or you could call it scare-mongering, or defeatist, or self-serving, or any number of other pithy epithets.
In the immortal words of Our Glorious Leader: “This party has no intention of doing anything that will destroy Canadian jobs or damage the health of the economy”. Did I detect an awkward pause after “This party has no intention of doing anything...”?
So, let’s commission another study, one which would include the potential economic benefits as well as the potential costs, one which compares the costs of doing something with the costs of doing nothing, one with a more balanced remit.
What? That’s already been done? IPCC? Stern Report? Pembina Institute? George Monbiot?
So, maybe we don’t need to prevaricate any more after all.
And even if we were to ignore all those studies, and we only looked at the bad news ones, well let’s honour Kyoto anyway, because it’s the right thing to do, whether it costs us money or not, and because an obsession with putting the health of the economy above the health of the planet is partly what’s to blame for our being in this position in the first place.
And, don’t forget, Kyoto is just a tentative first step on a long and costly process of reparation, and the longer we put it off the harder (and more costly) it will be.
Here’s ends today’s lesson.
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