With a big snowstorm blowing through and nowhere to go really, I decided to watch Al Gore's movie: "An Inconvenient Truth". I bought a copy of it while I was in Hong Kong. I'm not sure if it's in video rental places like Blockbuster, but if you come across it on video or in a theatre, you should watch it. It's basically about his presentation on how bad our environment is getting and he does point out some alarming data.
After the movie I decided to start clearing our long driveway from up to 3 feet of snow. It took me around 2.5 hours to clear it even with the help of our inefficient and highly polluting snow blower.
If you keep up with the news in general, then you'll know that the environment is in the headlines quite frequently these days. Canadian politicians are competing for the public's attention on the subject with the Conservative Party all of a sudden turning into champions of the environment and experts on how to fix it without hurting the economy.
They also keep pointing out that Canada's CO2 emissions rose sharply under the Liberal government and that our record is worse than that of the US. I don't know why, but it seems to me that the Liberals and the other opposition parties are failing to point out some vital facts to debunk the Conservative rhetoric:
1. The substation portion of the increase in Canada's emissions is due to the development of the Oil Sands in Alberta which became financially viable and profitable once the price of oil rose to it's current value. The political base of the Conservative party is predominantly in Alberta and they are not about to put the reigns on any businesses in Alberta.
2. Our levels of pollution are not worse than that of the US. Granted we are far above our Kyoto targets, but we are a long way from being worse polluters than the US.
Have a look at this graphic from Nationmaster.com. In 2003, the US produced 5,762,050 metric megatons of CO2 from energy use and cement manufacturing, while Canada only produced 521,404 from the same type of sources. Canada's CO2 emissions are around one tenth of that of the US. Not even close.
I think that the whole issue about pollution would be a lot clearer to the public if everyone stuck to the facts and not try cloud the issue with rhetoric and half truths.
1 comment:
True... Canada as a whole was way less than the US, even after taking into account the CO2 emissions per capita. Although, per capita, we are still among the top 10, while China and India are way below.
-Fadi
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