MARGARET WENTE
mwente@globeandmail.com
June 24, 2008
VANCOUVER -- I have bad news for Stéphane Dion. Out here in B.C., the people are revolting. Gordon Campbell's much-applauded carbon tax was pretty popular in February. But now, as people are being hammered by record gas prices, the enthusiasm has cooled. A new poll says a whopping 59 per cent of British Columbians now oppose the tax - and it hasn't even kicked in yet.
Beware the fickle voters. Everyone loves carbon taxes, until they have to pay them. But there's a much bigger and more serious reason for people to be skeptical of carbon taxes, cap-and-trade plans, green shifts, offset schemes and all the other policy proposals that have fuelled such mind-numbing debate. The reason is that they won't work. And you don't have to be a climate-change denier to see why.
I know, I know. Mr. Dion likes to tell us the planet's fate is in our hands. Sorry! It's not. It's a big old world out there, and most of the six billion people in it are scrambling to use more energy, not less. The dimensions of the problem are hard to overstate. As we demand more wind, solar, geothermal and biofuels, the other five-odd billion demand more oil, coal and natural gas. As we debate the niceties of carbon taxes versus cap-and-trade, global energy demand is projected to increase another 60 per cent by 2030.
Despite our good intentions, we can't do anything about it. Last year, China clearly overtook the United States as the world's biggest CO2 emitter. It now accounts for two-thirds of the yearly increase in global emissions. China and India will build a new coal generator roughly once a week for the next 25 years. As we ditch our gas-guzzling SUVs, the Chinese are buying 20,000 new cars every day. Two billion people still lack access to electricity. If we try to tell them they can't have it, they'll just laugh at us.
Could we reduce our carbon footprint enough to compensate for all this furious growth? Not a chance. We'd have to repeal air travel, cars and the rest of the 20th century. Global warming is really hard to fix. But don't take it from me. A recent commentary in Nature, titled Dangerous Assumptions, argues that reducing CO2 emissions over the next century will be far more challenging than we've been led to believe. The authors - climate policy expert Roger Pielke Jr., climatologist Tom Wigley and economist Christopher Green - contend the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has badly overstated our technological ability to cut emissions. The idea that we can regulate our way to a completely new economy is, in Nature's words, "a fairy tale."
A lot of big scientific guns agree. Vaclav Smil, distinguished environment professor at the University of Manitoba, comments, "The speed of transition from a predominantly fossil-fuelled world ... is being grossly overestimated: All energy transitions are multigenerational affairs. Their progress cannot substantially be accelerated either by wishful thinking or by government ministers' fiats." Stanford's Christopher Field writes, "It is hard to see how, without a massive increase in investment, the requisite number of relevant technologies will be mature and available when we need them."
In other words, it will take a massive technological revolution to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions, and anyone who says otherwise is kidding you. It's all very well to say that we ought to lead by example, and do what we can. It's a good thing to start figuring out how we can eventually wean ourselves off fossil fuels. But if all our efforts to regulate carbon amount to scooping sand from the Sahara with a teaspoon, shouldn't we face facts?
"We may have set ourselves down the wrong path when we framed the challenge of mitigating greenhouse gases in terms of reducing emissions," says Mr. Pielke. He says only massive long-term investments in carbon-neutral technologies will do the trick. Keep that in mind during the next eye-glazing round of green debates.
Blogger's note: According to the Canadian Press, Dalton McGuinty seems to be Dion's only provincial ally in the carbon tax plan, which was unveiled last week after pre-emptive attacks by the governing Conservatives. Several provincial leaders have rejected Dion's proposal outright, while others have been reluctant to embrace it.
