A Fossil Fool

                                                        http://toronto350.org/

Stephen Harper is at the UN today to attend a meeting of the Security Council. He chose not to attend yesterday's meeting on climate change. As appalling as Harper's decision to skip that meeting was, Tom Walkom writes that, in the end, he probably did the climate a favour. In the past, when Harper has attended such meetings, his strategy was two fold: to obstruct and to delay:

He made an alliance of convenience with Russia, Australia and, at one point, Japan to deep-six any attempt to resurrect Kyoto.

In 2011, Canada became the first country to formally withdraw its ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.

For a while, Harper aligned himself with U.S. President Barack Obama. Canada, the prime minister said, would follow Washington’s lead on the climate-change file.

He gleefully supported Obama’s efforts to replace binding international commitments with voluntary ones.

To that end, Harper solemnly agreed, at the 2009 Copenhagen summit, to reduce Canadian greenhouse gas emissions in lock-step with the Americans.

But the prime minister never delivered. The U.S. under Obama is on track to meet its 2020 targets. Canada, by the federal environment department’s own admission, is not.

Two days ago, the Rockefeller Foundation announced that it was moving its assets out of fossil fuels. Stephen Heintz, the president of the Rockefeller Fund, announced that "progress toward complete divestment from fossil fuels is being made slowly but surely." When the family that made its fortune from Standard Oil says that the future is not in fossil fuels, you would think that announcement might give people like Mr. Harper pause.

But he's always been slow on the uptake. That's because he's a fossil fool.

Consider The Record

Last week's throne speech made mention of "polluter pays" legislation. It appears that the Harperites will offer Barack Obama a carrot, if he approves the Keystone XL Pipeline. Unfortunately, the pending legislation is a little late and, simply put, only a little.

Two weeks ago Michael Harris wrote a column questioning the competence of Mr. Harper's new Minister of State for Science, Greg Rickford. Rickford responded to the column, claiming that he wanted to "set the record straight."

Harris sets out that record, and it illustrates just how fraudulent the Harper government is when it makes promises.  Harper once declared that "the fundamental challenge of our time is to make real progress on environmental protection while preserving jobs and standards of living." It's interesting to compare that statement to Harper's record on science and environmental protection. Harris directed Mr. Rickford to very recent history:

Consider that atmospheric and climate research in Canada is now funded at 70 per cent of the level it was when you came to power in 2006.

• Your government walked away from Kyoto and still hasn’t bothered to come up with a plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector.
• Your boss dumped the Office of National Science Advisor in 2008 — but we did get an Office of Religious Freedom.
• Your government cut the foundation that funded Canada’s Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) in 2011. Peter Kent came up with a great defence: The Harper government hadn’t shut down PEARL, just the funding programs that paid for it.
• Point by point, Kent’s public statements about PEARL were called “factually incorrect” by one of the co-founders of the research facility. Or when a minister says it, does it become a fact?
• Your government made the decision to close the Mersey Biodiversity Centre in Nova Scotia as of 2014.
• Your government axed the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences.
• Your government closed seven of nine marine science libraries in Canada.
• Your government closed the Ocean Contaminants Program, lock, stock, and barrel and fired Dr. Peter Ross, a leading world expert on the effect of pollution on marine mammals.
• Your government close the Habitat Management Program at Fisheries and Oceans Canada — but why not, since under the new gutted Fisheries Act there was no habitat to protect anyway?
• Your government fired 136 scientists from Environment Canada and cut its budget by $200 million in 2011 and $53 million more in 2012.
• Your government fired 436 scientists and professional staff at Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
• Your government would rather appoint David Suzuki to the Senate than bring in a carbon tax.

The record shows that the Harperites are masters of misrepresentation. But you already knew that, didn't you?

The Speech You'll Never Hear

The evidence keeps piling up. When Hurricane Sandy tore up the Jersey Shore and flooded New York City, Americans started talking about climate change. But when Calgary was inundated last month, Jason Kenny called it a "once in a century event," claiming that everybody cleaned up and went about their business the last time Calgary was flooded, in 1892. When Toronto's subway stations were under water last month, you would think that Stephen Harper -- whose real home town is Toronto -- would have taken note.

Edward Greenspan writes, in the Toronto Star, that the event should have prompted a speech from Harper, which would have sounded something like this:

“Friends, while the cause of a single extreme weather event is unknowable, their greater frequency is irrefutable. Federal scientists are right: there is something fundamental happening out there, and Canada both contributes to the problem and suffers from the consequences.

 “Thus I want to reach out today to four groups in particular: government scientists, who will once again be allowed to speak freely; President Obama, who has reasonably challenged us to craft a Keystone proposal that ‘does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution’; the young people of Canada, starting with my children Ben and Rachel, who, while they don’t yet vote, deserve a government obsessed with a better future; and, finally, the oil industry based in my flood-ravaged hometown to whom I want to invoke a famously wise Conservative nostrum: ‘Short-term pain for long-term gain.’

 “Friends, our current trajectory is unsustainable. Let’s get on a new one.”

Barack Obama has made the pivot. Bur Harper hasn't, because he's sold his soul to Big Oil. He has pinned his future  -- and the country's future -- on black goo.

No, there will be no such speech.