About to tip
Cameron Smith wrote an article in the Star which explains just how perilously close we are to ecological devastation. There is absolutely nothing I can add.
| — Adriana Mugnatto-Hamu on 2007 May 9 in Ecology & sustainability, Scaremongering |
I have no intention to disagree with numbers in the article. I just don’t understand one thing: why the current government is to blame for all environmental problems. Could anybody remind me how previous liberal governments helped to fight global warming?
The current government has very little responsibility for the level of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada today. The majority of the increases occurred during the Liberal years due to negligence.
The fact that the Liberals understood the problem enough to sign on to the Kyoto accord makes them more culpable — guilty of neglecting action on a problem they recognized. In a way, I can almost sympathize more with Stephen Harper, who until recently made it clear that he didn’t even believe a problem existed.
But conscience is not the measure of good policy.
Before the last general election, the Liberals had commissioned a study with the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy to determine how we might achieve 60% reductions by 2050. I assume that they intended to follow the suggestions it contained.
When Stephen Harper formed the government, he made it clear that he had no intention of meeting any emissions cuts at all, indeed that he was willing to oversee an acceleration in emissions growth. He also stripped out the government information website about global warming and cancelled the Energuide program, one of the few successful programs the Liberals had introduced.
So he has taken us backwards.
Meanwhile, the Liberals have now selected a leader who gave up a few weeks of campaigning for his seat during the last election in order to help broker an agreement on emissions reductions between the squabbling nations of the world. In addition, Stéphane Dion made combatting climate change the central part of his platform in his run for the Liberal leadership.
So I do hope that a Liberal government today would do more to cut emissions. It would certainly be hard to do worse.
Since Stephen Harper was elected, his approach to environmental problems has changed significantly. He has shown he is open to changes. Of course, he is doing it only to attract voters. But I don’t think Liberal’s have any different motivation for going
green suddenly. IMO, if there is no public pressure, any of these
parties would do nothing to fight global warming.
Dion may be a good person and an avid environmentalist, but I think his personality is disqualifying him from being the right person to lead the country. Liberals are in a mess, they are not
going to win an election for a while. So, we are stuck with Harper and his government for next several months or years. Who knows…
One of the things which attracted me to Green Party was a positive approach to the reality. I have been feeling too much negativity recently and I don’t like it. The demonization of Harper and his government is just one of them.