Attacking Dion on Kyoto

I had a conversation this morning that wandered down the path of Dion's advocacy for Kyoto, and in particular why Dion has not better articulated his reasons for arguing that we should pursue our Kyoto commitments.

My thoughts on this are as follows:

1) Dion needs to articulate his reasons more clearly, this is true enough. However, the other side of it is that he may well tip his hand too if he does articulate all of his reasoning "too clearly.

2) One thing is painfully obvious - without targets of some sort, there is little or no likelihood that our industries will even consider adjusting their activities. For good or bad, Kyoto at least has some sense of goals and targets, and it has consequences for a lack of activity.

3) I suspect that Dion's "carrot-and-stick" approach will be construed by Alberta conservatives as a resurrection of the NEP. Of course, it isn't - anybody with their eyes open will have long ago realized that without some kind of consequences, the oil patch in Alberta is unlikely to even try to change their behaviour, especially in the Oil Sands region.

4) As I argued here, in order to deal with climate change adequately, we are going to have to retool our economy on a scale not unlike what we had to do during WW II, when our efforts were entirely focused on producing materials to support the war effort itself. The severity of the analysis in the recent UN climate report makes it quite clear that this is not going to be either easy or trivial to do.