So-o-o, it's now clear that Canada can meet its original Kyoto targets
after all. All we have to do is euthanize a good portion of the country's
most important export-revenue-generating industry, ship large
numbers of jobs and cash from Western to Central Canada, and levy
carbon taxes on individuals and businesses that would make St\u00e9phane
Dion's "Green Shift" plan seem benign.

The David Suzuki Foundation/Pembina Institute report advocating this
plan came exactly 29 years after the Oct. 28, 1980, announcement of
the infamous national energy program by Pierre Trudeau's Liberal
government. To those whose jobs and businesses were destroyed in
the aftermath of the NEP, there is something surreal about both the
dates and the Toronto-Dominion Bank's sponsorship of the report.
Why? Because the bureaucrat who led the grand design and
implementation of the NEP was none other than TD's chief executive

program to re-engineer the economic and social life of the country
around energy, its implications pale in comparison with the sheer scale
of this new enviro-social master plan.

This so-called ground-breaking study would have us tear up Canada's
economic foundations and throw the pieces high in the air, serene in
the belief that all-knowing government agencies will catch and arrange
them flawlessly into a new utopian order where flowing waters,

nuclear power, the only zero-emissions technology capable of
producing reliable electricity on a scale needed to make a real
difference. I say "reliable" because the wind doesn't blow and the sun
doesn't shine on demand.

Scientists with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) have developed models that predict the Earth will warm by 0.2
degrees over the next decade, compared with 0.1 degrees if global
greenhouse gas emissions are dramatically reduced. This is not a large
difference. During my engineering career, I learned that mathematical
models of virtually any natural system are badly distorted by minute
changes in the vast array of assumptions, and by factors impossible to
accurately account for in the model.

For example, while IPCC models try to account for as many land,
ocean and atmospheric effects as possible, there is no reliable way to
account for the natural sun intensity variations that many scientists
believe are the biggest driver of terrestrial temperature variation.
Another challenge for climate modellers is the carbon dioxide
absorption effect of the oceans. Even regularly occurring ocean
phenomena such as El Nino and La Nina are difficult to model. And
IPCC models failed to predict recent temperature data indicating global
warming has stalled over the past seven years, leading some scientists
to postulate that we are entering an anomalous cooling period.

While scientific climate modelling is notoriously unreliable, econometric models are even more vulnerable to failure, because human behaviour is virtually impossible to predict. The Suzuki/Pembina study relies

heavily on econometric modelling by consultant Mark Jaccard, a
professor of resource management at Simon Fraser University. The
Jaccard models attempt to predict the response of Canada's 33 million
people to the massive business and personal disruptions proposed in
the study. My business experience tells me that, as frightening as the
Jaccard predictions are, the real effects on our already challenged
economy would be far worse.

But here's another sobering outcome of the study: Even such a
government-imposed economic tsunami wouldn't meet our Kyoto
targets. Canadians would still need to send billions of our precious
loonies offshore to purchase "emissions credits," supposedly to help
developing countries reduce their emissions. A Financial Times study
found a long list of carbon-credit projects, such as tree planting in
India and solar power in South Africa, that are "carbon cowboy"
enriching boondoggles. And some of the countries that would receive
our carbon-credit cash are the same ones against which Canadian
manufacturers and service providers are playing a losing game.
Nothing like hog-tying your domestic businesses, while shipping off
taxpayer's money to help the competition.

One key point has been lost amid all the noise and finger-pointing
leading up to the Copenhagen climate talks. Canada is one of the only
Kyoto target countries that is both self-sufficient and a growing
exporter of oil and gas. Yet, when former prime minister Jean Chr\u00e9tien
agreed to our Kyoto targets, no allowance was made for this reality.
Almost all of the Kyoto target territories, including Japan and Europe,
import their oil and gas from producing countries that have no Kyoto
targets. Small wonder that the study concludes that eviscerating our
oil and gas industry is necessary, given that our Kyoto targets were
set as if the industry didn't exist.