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I have enjoyed reading your articles for some time but felt the need to comment after reading your recent piece on Canada and the Kyoto Accord.
I am a 4th year university student at the University of Regina who has just completed the requirements for my BSc (Biology) and have one year left for my BA (Economics). In my recent 400-level biology course (Global Biogeochemistry), the Kyoto Accord came up quite frequently. My professor felt that the accord was a great policy, but I often argued with her. I stated that the accord was nothing more than rhetoric pretending to be action...Canada would preach to the US about the environment, and then increase our emissions at a faster rate. People sneer about what the Americans are doing as if they are raping the environment for fun...yet their plans are actually cutting emissions faster. After several classes of pointing this out to my professor (who, like many biologists I have yet, seems to be a well-meaning idealist) stated that the actual results of the accord did not matter but being a signatory did.
Canadians seem to have this picture in their heads that we are environmentally friendly (no, we're quite wasteful and polluting) and that emissions can be cut simply by sitting around for a decade and doing nothing. What a joke. When bringing up in class how devastating it would be to punish carbon emitters just to meet Kyoto, I was confronted by many students in the class that felt it would be better for all of the Canadian economy to collapse...as long as we stuck to Kyoto.
I believe emissions must be cut, and can be. But not through useless accords filled with loopholes and made toothless through negotiation. Research and development is the key to solving this issue, not attacking industries while being ignorant of how that would affect out standard of living.
My province is powered almost entirely by coal (except for very small amounts of wind power, which is price-targetted to people that think by paying more they are getting something clean from their wall sockets). We could slash our emissions through nuclear power and sell the excess to the States. But no. People think any nuclear generator will lead to horrific disasters (nevermind how Chernobyl is impossible in a Western reactor). So we sit and wait for the problem to solve itself. It seems that's the Canadian way.
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Thank you for your terrific letter!
I'll leave it to the scientists to determine how much of a threat global warming is to the planet. I haven't studied the issue enough to be able to give an informed opinion. What I do now, however, is that the burning of fossil fuels does cause a negative externality (air pollution) which is not accounted for in the price mechanism, so there's an important role that public policy can play.
I'm sure your biology professor does have the best of intentions, but there's a real risk in these "symbolic" policy declarations. The risk is, once the policy is deemed a failure (like Kyoto will be in Canada), no politician will want to touch the issue because it's too hot.
Consider the issue of child poverty in Canada. This from the Toronto Star:
- We promised. It's time for Canadians to keep faith with our children.
More than 1 million children, one in six kids in Canada, live in poverty. Nearly three times more aboriginal, immigrant and visible minority children are poorer than the national average.
As leader of the New Democratic party, Ed Broadbent — back in Ottawa as an NDP MP after a 15-year hiatus — moved the 1989 parliamentary motion to end child poverty. A generation of children has grown up seeing that vow unfulfilled.
Canada is one of the richest countries in the world. Yet thousands of women, children and men during any given month, cannot afford adequate food or housing. That is a scandal that challenges the core belief of Canadians in our country as a caring nation.
In the case of Kyoto, it may be that the Americans were right all along - that a broken promise is worse than a promise never made.
If you would like to send me an e-mail on Kyoto or any other economic issue, you can do so by using the feedback form.
