Frak. The article indicates that these findings are fuzzy science, and don’t fall in line with other studies done, but I’m more inclined to believe Dr. Suzuki than I am a politician who tells me that Canada is cleaning up their act using that joke without a punchline, the Kyoto Accord.
*Dr. David Suzuki is very well-known in Canada for his environmental activism. From this site:
Well, I must say I was shocked to find Turkey at the top of the list. And Poland is up there, too, but I read through their accession agreement to the EU a while ago and was surprised to find that they’d been granted large and long-term exemptions to EU environmental standards, allowing them to continue operation heavily-polluting and inefficient powerplants from the Soviet era. Slovakia, too, but not as much. I’m surprised that countries so dependent on such industires that they were an issue in the EU accession talks would be leaders in sustainable development. If memory serves, one of Poland’s exemptions was to allow a particular substandard plant to operate to 2019 – hardly an incentive to develop alternative energy.
On the other hand, Denmark has been leading the way in both wind power and district energy systems, so it’s not unbelievable to see them ranked third.
Colour me skeptical. I haven’t read the report in full yet, though. Stephane Dion was just on As It Happens saying that the day before this report came out, another was released by a different group that placed us 8th in the OECD.
I’m a fan of David Suzuki, too, and I strongly believe that we need to do much more with regards to pollution, sustainability, and the environment in general, but I’m not sure we can take this report as gospel. Do we really believe that Canada’s environmental regulations are worse than Korea’s? Or that the pollution anywhere in Canada rivals that in Mexico City?
These comments are just my first impressions, though. I’ll read the report before I argue anything further.
By the way, Dion also made the argument that the comparison between Canada and certain other developed nations can be flawed because (paraphrasing/reciting from memory) “there are a lot of nations in Europe who have a very green economy because their industry is outside their borders”. The idea is that if Switzerland buys all its stainless steel from a country not in the OECD, then it manages to be very productive without – as far as this report is concerned – releasing any of the SO[sub]2[/sub] that nickel smelting produces. While Switzerland’s industries may be using alloys produced in an environmentally-atrocious way, the report doesn’t count that because it’s not from an OECD country. Meanwhile, in Canada, where for example the vast Sudbury nickel operations have reduced their sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide emissions by over 90% in the last 30 years, our emissions are counted.
That argument may have some merit, because by and large Canada doesn’t import primary products from elsewhere. We mine our own metals and smelt and refine them here, and either export them or turn them into cars and jets. In some cases, we are even the country to which raw materials come to go through their pollutive primary fabrications, only to be shipped somewhere else for secondary manufacturing or processing. The chief example of this (that I can think of) is aluminum – Alcan mines bauxite all over the globe, but ships the stuff to Quebec to be refined, because that’s where the cheap hydro power is. (Aluminum refining uses large amounts of electricity.)
If it’s true that the economies of other countries are farming their pollution out to non-OECD places such as China, and if it’s also true that Canada has better environmental standards than places like China, then while Canadian industry produces more pollution in Canada than Swiss industry does in Switzerland, Canadian industry is nonetheless responsible for less pollution than Swiss industry. After all, the atmosphere doesn’t care where the pollutiuon is released.
I’m not sure if the allegation about other OECD countries farming their primary-products sectors out to environmentally-lax countries is true, though. If it is, then Dion’s argument has some merit, and overall, the world is better off to have INCO and Alcan spewing out dioxides in Sudbury and Beauharnois at Canadian standards than in Shenzou at Chinese standards.
It’s ludicrous to even suggest you can rank “environmental performance” on a linear scale. The standards used are almost wholly arbitrary; you could een get two people to agree on exactly how such performance should be measured. These “rankings” mean nothing. Mexico’s more environmentally friendly than the United States? Has Dr. Suzuki ever been to those two countries? Turkey better than Canada? Huh? (And really, did anyone think they’d construct the criteria in any way that would allow the USA to NOT be last? That wasn’t going to be allowed to happen.)
The funniest part, though, was one thing we allegedly did well:
Well, yes, when you have fifty gabzillion acres of forest, that’s not a hard thing to rank high on. Much of our forest is totally unsuited to logging. We’ll always have a good ratio. How many of the other categories are basically accidents of geography?
I would agree in general that Canadians are not the environmentally friendly folks they think they are; there seems to be this myth up here that we’ve always been the greenest country around. I remember once having to spend a lot of time explaining to some folks that Canada was at least PARTIALLY responsible for overfishing the Grand Banks; they simply refused to believe Canadians would do something like that.