Letter to the Editor published in the Globe and Mail, 2021 November 29
Canada’s Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development was correct: the time for talk, I add uninformed talk, is indeed over. However, after the talk is over, our parliament needs to understand fully the issue and find solutions that would actually work in practice. Andrew Coyne recently (November 27) made a conventional economic case for the polluter pays principle. Pollution by greenhouse gases, an existential issue, requires much more. Canada did not successfully address acid rain by taxing sulphur dioxide or depletion of stratospheric ozone by taxing chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in spray cans and refrigerators. It understood the technological roots of these problems and applied technological, as well as economic solutions. Canada as a leader in those issues needs to be equally well informed on greenhouse gas emissions and use modern computer simulation analysis to understand much better what its options really are. Until it does so it will, as the Commissioner wrote, continue to go from ‘failure to failure’ on climate change, extreme weather events, sea level rise, and acidification of surface waters.
Dr. John Hollins
Gloucester, Ontario
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