In the awesome pantheon of Liberal environment ministers, David Anderson wins the contest for longest period hanging out on the shaky limb of climate change. It follows, therefore, that he seems set to go down with the biggest thud. Over the years, the Prime Minister dispatched some of the dimmest Liberal policy bulbs into the environment portfolio. There, before self-destructing, each minister valiantly attempted to sell Canadians on the merits of an untested global plan to slow economic growth by some order of magnitude in order to stave off hypothetical global warming.
The first burn out in this loopy task was Sheila Copps. Her grasp of climate change was limited to her ability to read speeches in which she described bizarre weather events as proof of global warming, and then forecast more climate horrors, such as rising sea levels and prairie droughts, if nothing were done. Sergio Marchi followed, his comments peppered with new weather scares and claims that atmospheric pollutants were killing babies. Christine Stewart, like all environment ministers, wandered into the lair of the Green bureaucratic indoctrination monster at Environment Canada and emerged with the same, programmed analysis.
Mr. Anderson, probably the smartest of the lot and a committed Green, nevertheless fell into the same policy ecosystem: Mountains of scary weather forecasts and rivers of advocacy, but not a trace of economic or scientific fact to support the Kyoto agreement. Desperate for selling points, Mr. Anderson did the only thing he could do, take up the sad legacy. Here are some of the warnings Mr. Anderson was prompted to deliver as selling points for Kyoto: Violent weather, more intense storms, damaged eco-systems, subsiding infrastructure, eroded coasts, more drought, more pestilence, more air pollution and increased damage to human health. What else could he say? Like all ministers before him, he had no real economic information to provide.
But it was Ms. Stewart who presided over Environment Canada when the Chrétien government -- with no debate, no numbers, no plan and no clue -- flew off to Kyoto, Japan, in late 1997 to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, sight unseen. Whatever it said didn't matter, so long as it looked like Canada was going to trump the United States as the Green Boy Scout of climate change.
In December, 1997, a few days after Kyoto, here's what I wrote in The Globe and Mail: Kyoto "appears to be an agreement to slow growth in developed nations, kill jobs and set up a global system of state intervention not contemplated since Lenin mused about how to transform the Russian economy into a Marxist utopia."
Not only was Kyoto undesirable, it was unworkable. "Unless the government is planning to orchestrate a national recession by imposing carbon taxes and limiting immigration to limit population growth, there appears to be little hope that Canada can begin to meet these objectives." Furthermore, "There are many reasons to suspect that the Kyoto agreement will unravel over the next few years, in Canada and abroad. The targets are unrealistic, the mechanisms hopeless, the calculations mindless, the science unproved, the structures unfinished."
Sorry about this self-satisfied I-told-you-so aside, but looking back reminded me of the mountains of snide letters that used to flow into the Globe. Among them was a long note a few days later from one John M. Last, emeritus professor of epidemiology, from Kyoto: "Terence Corcoran's tiresome rantings are sometimes at such variance with the facts that the record must be corrected in case anyone takes him seriously. His column is junk journalism at its worst."
The trouble is that nothing has changed since 1997. More than four years later, and after spending a couple of billion dollars on this and that research, the federal government has still not produced a meaningful set of economic assessments of the impact of Kyoto. The more Canadians look at the protocol, the more they realize it's a risky prescription for slower growth and a falling dollar.
Turning back on Kyoto now is no great loss to the climate or the economy. Indeed, tinkering with the world economy through Kyoto poses greater economic risks while offering negligible environmental benefit, as many of the world's leading scientists have frequently stated.
We also learn more almost daily that the great climate scare remains an untested and unproved hypothesis. If human-induced global warming is a threat to life on Earth, and science provides convincing proof, there will be future opportunities to look at policy options. Let Kyoto die.
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