This month's goofball is Rona Ambrose, the Minister of the Environment for Canada. Although she is pretty cute.
She earns this achievement because of the latest Clean Air Act from the federal tories and from her weak presence as the Minister of the Environment. This so called "clean air act" was suppose to be her baby. Yet the PM,Stephen Harper, was the one who actually unveiled it. All Rona did was stand in the back and keep her mouth shut. She's a good soldier Stevie would tell you. Stevie runs a tight ship. Stevie doesn't like to share. You got to do it Stevie's way. My personal favourite; Stevie's gettin' upset!..... where was I ....
Anyways, this clean air act seems a little too slow. There's no short term targets. We'll really start to see change by 2050. That's a long time to wait. If cleaner air will help reduce global warming. And Canada is a major contributor. Then shouldn't the targets be sooner. So we could start to see noticeable changes by 2020, or even 2030. I could live with that. But 2050, seems to me the tories are starting to read from the liberal red book.
I read an interesting article in the financial post by Ross McKitrick about this Clean Air Act. I'm gonna paste and copy it. So if you are so interested continue reading. But before I go.
Congratulations Rona Ambrose you're the Goofball of the Month for October 2006
Targets in the air: The Clean Air Act
It is unclear why the federal Conservative government is introducing new air pollution regulations at all
Ross McKitrick, Financial PostPublished: Friday, October 27, 2006
At last, Canada has a Clean Air Act. Or, at least, another Clean Air Act: a law with the same name was enacted back in 1971. But at last we have a government willing to introduce clean air standards.
Except, that is, for all the provincial governments that have had air pollution standards on the books for decades. Ontario Regulation 419/05, for instance, lists 344 substance-specific standards based on the so-called point of impingement criterion. This means that if you emit a substance to the air, once it leaves your property and impinges on your neighbour the concentration has to be sufficiently low as not to be damaging.
OK, but at last we have a government willing to put fixed emission caps on large final emitters. Well, except for the fixed emission caps already imposed by provincial governments. In Ontario, for example, Regulation 194/05 lists the large final emitters of sulphur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) and their specific emission limits. The Imperial Oil refinery at Sarnia, to pick one, must reduce its SO2 emissions from 23,938 tonnes this year to 9,200 tonnes by 2009.
But at least a federal government inspection staff will investigate emission infractions. Although, what with all the provincial inspectors, compliance officers and environmental consultants currently doing the same job, they may need to drive around the block a few times waiting for a parking spot at the factory. Just last summer, for example, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment did an inspection sweep of the Sarnia petrochemical sector. So it is unclear why the federal Conservative government plans to fund a new investigative branch to do the same thing.
In fact it is unclear why the federal Conservative government is introducing new air pollution regulations at all. Their notice of intent (NOI) to regulate certainly doesn't clear things up. Their explanation is that "Canada has historically relied on a variety of non-compulsory measures to reduce air emissions. However, these have not proved sufficient to reduce the health and environmental risks across the country." The idea that Canada's current pollution laws are non-compulsory would probably come as a surprise to the many firms and individuals who have been prosecuted under them. And air quality has improved substantially since the 1970s, as shown in the government's own data.
z Monthly average SO2 levels were never very high out west, and in the east they have fallen dramatically since the 1970s. Prior to 1970, they averaged over 100 parts per billion (ppb) in Toronto. By the late 1970s, SO2 levels in eastern cities averaged 20 or 30 ppb and today they typically average five to 10 ppb.
z Monthly average total suspended particulate (TSP) levels in Canadian cities were, on average, well over 120 micrograms per cubic metre (mg/m3) in the 1970s. Since then they have fallen in many places to near or below 60 mg/m3. Vancouver has typical levels of 10-30 mg/m3; Toronto and Montreal are slightly higher, usually coming in at 30-60. Halifax has always (back to 1974) had TSP readings below 50, and currently they are below 30.
z In all Canadian cities, monthly average carbon monoxide (CO) levels have been steady in recent decades at about one part per million (ppm). The eight-hour Environment Canada desirable standard is eight ppm.
z The Environment Canada annual average desirable standard for NOx is 32 ppb. Most Canadian cities exceeded this standard for some months of the year up to the late 1980s, but since the mid-1990s they have had average levels between 20 and 30 ppb per month. Edmonton has a slight tendency to exceed the 32 ppb level, but otherwise Canadian cities are below 30 ppb.
z Canadian cities exhibit seasonal ozone patterns with monthly averages varying between 10 and 40 parts per billion. The Canada-wide desirable annual average standard is 65 ppb. There was little or no trend in ozone levels from 1970-1990, but there is an upward trend after 1990 in some cities. Ozone mainly becomes a concern during short episodes of intense summer sun and atmospheric inversions. Since the process of ozone formation is highly complex, it is not entirely clear what types of emission controls would reduce these temporary spikes, but to the extent NOx and volatile organic compounds are at fault, they are already subject to regulation.
As for the health and environmental risks, the NOI makes far stronger claims than the underlying science assessments warrant. The 1999 Health Canada science assessment of then-proposed national ambient air quality objectives for particulate matter noted that while epidemiological studies have generated a range of small and uncertain correlations between air pollution and health indicators (such as mortality and hospital admissions), controlled human and animal exposure trials do not back up the claim that current air pollution levels are a health risk. They concluded: "Despite the fact that the ranges of particle concentrations [in laboratory experiments] usually exceed those experienced by the general population, little evidence for a dose-response relationship has been documented in the clinical toxicological literature.... Overall, the clinical data does not lend much support to the observations seen in the epidemiology studies, particularly to the observations that high ambient particulate concentrations are associated with mortality within hours or a few days at most." The evidence since 1999 has continued to be ambiguous.
The federal Conservative government rightly emphasizes "measurable" results. Yet it is conspicuously indifferent to the relevant measurements on air pollution trends and impacts already available. Even a Sierra Club spokesman admitted to me, on a Vancouver radio show the day the new Act was announced, that air pollution is not an urgent issue in Canada.
The Clean Air Act tidies up some loose ends in federal air quality regulation but nothing that needed eight months of hype to motivate. So people naturally speculate about what the federal government's real motives are. Perhaps the over-hyped air pollution provisions are a cover for what many (though not me) see as a disappointing lack of greenhouse gas emission controls.
The Conservatives, like the Liberals before them, find it much easier to say what they don't want to do than what they want to do. They don't want to do Kyoto, they don't want to impose costly emission caps and they want to wait a decade before imposing anything on specific industries. These are rational positions to take, but the relentless drumbeat of hype and alarm about global warming makes rational choices sound controversial. So they deflected criticism by wrapping them up in some irrational air pollution initiatives. It might just work.
Perhaps what they really want is for the dilemma to go away. If so, 10 years is about right. In another decade people will not be debating global warming. All the lurid threats about an imminent 'tipping point' leading to freakish climate chaos will have been proven right or discredited, and discussion can begin to take place amidst less hyperbole. If, as I expect, winter 2016 is roughly as long and cold as winter 2006, it may be possible to talk about a reasonable course of action without the alarmist noise in the background.
Of course, maybe I'm wrong and Al Gore is right. Maybe the Arctic is heating up and winter will soon cease to exist around Hudson Bay, as they warned on the CBC a few years ago. So here's a proposal: Schedule the talks on greenhouse gas emission targets at an outdoor location in Churchill, Man., for, say, February 2017. If the day comes and the meeting has to be cancelled because the participants will freeze to death, then we will have a strong hint that the targets were not really needed after all.
Ross McKitrick is associate professor and director of graduate studies at University of Guelph's department of economics.
