Hot Air: Meeting Canada's Climate Change Challenge - Softcover

Simpson, Jeffrey; Jaccard, Mark; Rivers, Nic

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771080972 ISBN 13: 9780771080975

Publisher: Emblem Editions, 2008

Synopsis

Here’s a clear, believable book for Canadians concerned about our situation — and it offers a solution.

It’s a brilliant mix. To “Canada’s best mind on the environment,” Mark Jaccard, who won the 2006 Donner Prize for an academic book in this area, you add Nic Rivers, a researcher who works with him at Simon Fraser University. Then you add Jeffrey Simpson, the highly respected Globe and Mail columnist, to punch the message home in a clear, hard-hitting way. The result is a unique book.

Most other books on energy and climate change are: (a) terrifying or (b) academic or (c) quirky, advocating a single, neat solution like solar or wind power.

This book is different. It starts with an alarming description of the climate threat to our country. Then it shifts to an alarming description of how Canadians have been betrayed by their politicians (“We’re working on it!”), their industrialists (“Things aren’t that bad, really, and voluntary guidelines will be good enough.”), and even their environmentalists (“Energy efficiency can be profitable, and people can change their lifestyles!”) All of this, of course, reinforces the myths that forceful policies are not needed.

Hot Air then lays out in convincing and easily understandable terms the few simple policies that Canada must adopt right away in order to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades. It even shows how these policies can be designed to have minimal negative effects.

With evidence from other countries that are successfully addressing climate change, Hot Air shows why these are the only policies that will work — and why this is a matter of life and death for all of us.

About this title

About the Author:

Jeffrey Simpson has been the Globe and Mail’s national columnist since 1984 and is a nationally recognized figure and an Officer of the Order of Canada. A former Governor General’s Award—winner, he is the author most recently of The Friendly Dictatorship.

Mark Jaccard is a professor at SFU’s School of Resource and Environmental Management and an internationally respected authority on climate change. His academic publications have won him the Best Policy Book Award and the Donner Prize. As the leading Canadian authority on climate change, he is the sixth most frequently interviewed professor in the country, and Roy MacGregor has called him “Canada’s best mind on the environment.”

Nic Rivers is a researcher and writer at SFU who assisted with research, and with the fifteen maps and graphs that help explain the book’s message.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter Seven
What We Should Do

Canadians ought to know by now what does not work in lowering greenhouse gas emissions. We have witnessed two decades of information and subsidy policies from our leaders — policies that continue to inspire the Harper government. The numbers do not lie: Canada’s record of greenhouse gas emissions is appalling, and the information and subsidy policies of yesterday and today will not materially change that record. Worse, as governments develop increasingly expensive policy initiatives, such as the Harper government’s “eco” policies throwing billions of dollars into all kinds of programs, the cost of failure grows in wasted money and time. In the scathing words of Johanne Gélinas, Canada’s commissioner of the environment and sustainable development at the time, describing the history of Canada’s climate policies, “On the whole, the government’s response to climate change is not a good story....Our audits revealed inadequate leadership, planning and performance.” Gélinas further noted that to address climate change effectively, a “massive scale-up in efforts is needed” by the federal government.

A massive scale-up is indeed what Canada needs to reduce GHG emissions, but not just any collection of policies, however massive, will suffice. Politicians, when they think of doing something “massive,” instinctively think of spending more taxpayers’ dollars. This instinct leads to the politically attractive option of crisscrossing the country announcing funding for this or that special project, as Canadians observed when the Conservatives rolled out their “eco” projects at a series of photo-opportunity announcements by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, with ministers playing their assigned roles in the background like bobblehead dolls.

Photo ops and eye-popping financial commitments seem irresistible to politicians, even though most of the announcements miss the target of what must be done. There is no silver bullet to reduce GHGs, but one cardinal principle stands out: The only way Canada can lower emissions appreciably over the coming decades — and this will be a decades-long challenge — is to design and implement either charges on emissions or regulations on emissions or technologies, or a mixture of both. We need economic tools and/or regulations to get the job done. There is no effective alternative. Until Canadians and their governments understand this truth, we will continue to squander money, waste time, pursue variations of failed policies, and make scant progress. We might even continue to go backwards. We need, in other words, to stop digging in the same hole.

Canadians want answers, and if those on offer for so many years cannot suffice, which ones will? This chapter and the next one aim to provide a credible set of answers, illustrating the kind of policies governments can adopt that will lead to success. We will apply the CIMS model to our own policies to show why they will work much better over time than the Liberal and Conservative plans examined earlier.

Bear in mind two points in all that follows, and in everything you hear in public discussion of GHG emissions. First, successful policies will require decades to produce substantial reductions in GHG emissions. But we need to start implementing such policies as soon as possible, because the more time we fritter away pursuing failed policies, the greater the subsequent challenge of reducing GHG emissions. Second, while the specific design of GHG policies obviously matters to individuals, regions, and industries, the bedrock idea of any approach must be that unfettered, cost-free dumping of GHG emissions into the atmosphere will no longer be permitted. The atmosphere can no longer be considered a carbon dump.

About this edition

• Publisher: Emblem Editions
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0771080972
• ISBN 13: 9780771080975
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288