Some Perspective on Global Warming

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are co-authors of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. In a special to the Ottawa Citizen they make some cogent points about Canadian climate change policy.

Too often nations ask how they can reduce their own emissions without taking into consideration the larger picture of energy modernization and technology innovation. Were Canada to halt all emissions tomorrow it would have zero impact on climate change.

While that statement would seem irresponsible given the mass media's portrayal of Canada's poor carbon dioxide emissions per capita standing we often forget to consider the big picture...

To get a sense of the scale of the challenge, consider that, this year, the increase of China's emissions will be larger than Canada's total emissions. Given this, Canada's focus should be on making clean energy technologies cheap, so that they could be picked up by fast-developing nations such as China.

That is a sobering statistic.