Premier Stelmach says that Michael Ignatieff and Jack Layton disparage Alberta with their talk of carbon pricing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (See “Stelmach throws down gauntlet to Liberals, NDP; Premier invites leaders to defend cap-and-trade proposals to oil industry,” The Edmonton Journal, April 21, 2011).
If this is disparagement, I welcome it.
Not a day goes by that the media doesn’t report on at least one climate catastrophe around the world. In the same issue the Stelmach story appeared, The Journal published an article on the extent of the ice loss in the Arctic (“Six years of glacial melt nearly enough to fill Lake Erie,”).
Is the Premier not aware that our escalating use of fossil fuels is the main contributor to many of these events?
Evidently not. His advice to Ignatieff and Layton is that they forget any talk about reducing GHGs and focus instead on the economic benefits of the oilsands, and his advice to the electorate is that we vote for the Harper Party whose work on the environment earned them an F in the Sierra Club’s recent Environmental Report Card (the Liberals and the NDP got Cs, the Greens an A).
With all due respect to the Premier, we can do without this advice. How many more Lake Eries do we need to fill before politicians like Stelmach come to their senses and understand that we need aggressive action on climate change and we need it now?
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