Green ambition

Susan Riley
The Ottawa Citizen
Monday, September 10, 2007

The most astonishing news from the recent APEC summit in Australia is that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's rhetoric on climate change has almost caught up to Paul Martin's.

This is not unalloyed good news, of course, given Martin's tendency to become so intoxicated by the wonders of his imaginary world that he never got around to doing much about climate change, or anything else. Harper, a more deliberate man, tends to avoid over-promising - with one Martinesque exception. Canada, he told a business audience in Sydney last week, wants to become "a world leader in the fight against global warming and the development of clean energy."

Uh, too late. While our politicians dithered over climate change, or - not naming names - fiercely rejected the science and the urgency of the problem, other countries went about inventing, marketing and selling green technologies. Most of the giant windmills that increasingly dot our countryside come from Germany. A majority of the fuel-efficient, or hybrid, cars nosing their way onto Canadian streets are Japanese. California companies are pioneering solar technology, green building codes and sustainable farming methods. And, while we continue to experiment with carbon capture and storage, as Harper mentioned, so do other countries.

In fact, the world leader in green technology will probably be California and the U.S. private sector - driven to innovate by the strictest greenhouse gas emissions caps on the continent. We, an "energy superpower," have been too busy making money on fossil fuels to care much about alternatives.

Nor are innovation, or the changes required to make our economy sustainable, likely to accelerate on Harper's watch, despite his change in tone. His government's regulations for large emitters have been widely described as timid -- a leisurely stroll toward an unverifiable 60-per-cent reduction in real emissions by 2050, when Harper is long gone, and with him, perhaps, the polar bears. This is the model he recommended to his fellow APEC members, who had the courtesy not to smirk.

Yet for them, for anyone befuddled by a complex topic, Harper may sound plausible. What he is doing, along with retooling Liberal notions, is trying to reframe the climate debate, implying that the Kyoto accord is some wildly impractical, job-crushing monster on one side, while fossilized climate-deniers and corporate polluters occupy the other extreme. He positions himself in the middle, the champion of "balance" - of "realistic benchmarks," market-driven solutions, a global gentlemen's voluntary agreement to behave sustainably, rather than crude arbitrary targets.

Of course, it is easier to look progressive in the company of Kyoto dissenters George W. Bush, Australia's John Howard, and other members of the business-oriented, trade-driven APEC fraternity who prefer "aspirational" targets even to Canada's feeble efforts. But Harper's real audience is at home: he is trying to neutralize the environment as an issue in the next election, by inching away from Bush and counting on our short attention span.

The old Harper doubted the science of climate change. He saw Kyoto as a socialist scheme. Meeting its targets, he said, would mean economic armageddon. Hardly anyone believed him, so he has changed course. The new Harper recognizes climate change as a real and threatening phenomenon. "The physical evidence is there for all to see," he said in Sydney. He cited the retreat of ice in the Northwest Passage and the pine beetle infestation in British Columbia as byproducts.

As for Kyoto, he was called upon to clarify his views after he was praised by Prime Minister Howard for saying that "Kyoto divided the world into two groups: those who would have no targets, and those that would reach no targets."

That was a little world-leader inside joke, apparently, although Harper had trouble mustering much enthusiasm for the accord when he explained. "I don't think (Kyoto) is irrelevant, in the sense that, in fairness, the UN established a process that gave us the Kyoto protocol and that process is still under way," he said. The targets that Canada undertook are legally binding, too, although he didn't mention that inconvenient truth.

But will Harper get away with what amounts to an unapologetic, poll-driven conversion in rhetoric if not policy? That depends on whether the other parties, particularly the Liberals, can sell credible and tough measures to curb emissions. It also depends on how dramatically emissions continue to grow, how visible the impact, and, above all, it depends on the weather. It is hard to downplay the urgency of the issue when entire cities are flooded and too many forests are on fire.

"For more than a decade, most governments, including Canada's, paid what can be charitably called lip-service to the issue of climate change," the prime minister said in Sydney.

Same service. Different lips.

Susan Riley's column runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail: sriley@thecitizen.canwest.com

© The Ottawa Citizen 2007