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The following letter was sent to Helena Guergis, Conservative Member of Parliament for Simcoe-Grey.

October 27, 2006

Ms. Helena Guergis
Member of Parliament, Simcoe-Grey
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON, K1A 0A6

Re: Proposed Clean Air Act - Poor Response to an Urgent Threat

Dear Ms. Guergis,

I am writing to express my deepest concern that the Clean Air Act proposed by the Government of Canada grossly underestimates the threat to humanity posed by climate change.

This should not be a partisan political issue. It is a threat to all humans that is not being taken seriously enough in any country on the planet, especially in North America.

The previous Liberal government was not making substantive progress. The Clean Air Act, recently proposed by your Conservative government also truly fails to convey the required sense of urgency. It muddies the debate by mixing ground level smog reduction and greenhouse gas emissions, and even indoor air quality, ensuring that the public will continue to be confused about government policy on climate change.

The proposed act does not ensure progress on a myriad of other practical initiatives that can be taken immediately to slow the growth of GHG emissions both within the sectors it targets and other sectors, including use of transportation and future intensification of development in our large cities, among others. The proposed Act clearly shows that large fossil energy interests trump the notion of leaving the planet for future generations in better shape than we found it.

Delaying mandatory emissions targets on industries until 2050 is completely disconnected from the warnings we are receiving from the global science community. In a presentation to SOLAR 2006, Conference on Renewable Energy, Denver Colorado, 10 July 2006, one of the world's leading climate scientists, Dr. James Hansen, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute of Science Studies warned that "We are near a tipping point. If global emissions continue on a BAU (Business as Usual) course for even another decade, it may become practically impossible to avert climate changing with devastating consequences.”

He continues "We are not taking the practical steps needed to level out GHG emissions. Continued BAU, with growth of emissions that Energy departments like to claim are inevitable, will bring known positive feedbacks into play, producing what is, literally, a different planet. We can say that for certain, i.e., with confidence much greater than 99%. We still have a window of opportunity, but if we do not take it, if we hand our children a planet with climate change out of control, history will judge us severely. Our descendants will have little reason to forgive us - we should have known better. We can no longer claim that we were ignorant and did not understand the system." (emphasis mine).

James Hansen is far more than a lone academic selling a theory. He was the first prominent climate scientist to bring the concern about climate change to the attention of the US Senate in 1985. He has been actively participating in the growing global scientific understanding of the contributions of humans to global warming and climate change ever since. His current warnings of potential disaster incorporate the findings of very recent research, particularly from studies of Antarctic and Greenland ice cores.

Mr. Hansen's complete and compelling presentation can be found at www.Columbia.edu/~jeh1 . It has not gone unnoticed by the New York Times that the administration of George W. Bush has tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent Hansen from making his views known to the public. It is also worth noting that Hansen considers that the movie An Inconvenient Truth, based on a slide show that former US Vice President Al Gore has given more than 1000 times, and Mr. Gore's book of the same name, "is scientifically accurate and yet should be understandable by the public..." (The Threat to the Planet - The New York Review, July 13, 2006).

I therefore urge you - no, I implore you - to focus hard in your caucus on the Canadian Government's moral responsibility to our children and to all living beings on Earth to treat Climate Change as the most serious threat our species has ever faced, and to act accordingly. It can be done without destroying our economy.

I have a small personal stake in the evolution of climate change policy in Canada. I was the lead author of three studies commissioned by the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) in the 1990's, focused on transportation, climate change and related policy options. My efforts are included in the massive body of carefully researched information and policy advice that the NRTEE has been providing to the government and the Canadian public since the 1980's on the many sectors of the economy that contribute to human forcing of climate change. You will find a wealth of information and access to their publications on their website www.nrtee-trnee.ca .

It is a source of profound frustration to me that so little of the work and advice of the NRTEE and others has found its way into the policies of the governments at all levels, especially in the transport sector, which was the focus of my professional career.

Canada emits about 2% of global greenhouse gases. We pride ourselves on being a moderate, responsible middle power with positive influence in the world far beyond what could be expected of 30 million people on a planet of 6+ billion. But along with the US and Australia, we are the world's highest per capita users of fossil energy.

By global standards we are fabulously wealthy. What possible moral argument can we use with rapidly developing countries such as China and India, that they should reduce their growing emissions, when we and the US are largely responsible for human-caused GHG concentrations in the atmosphere and are doing so little to curb our own emissions.

Regulating “energy intensity”, as the Clean Air Act intends, might or might not be adequate if we had a century to prepare. But it is an irresponsible policy, if the time to act is measured in one or even two decades.

Canadians have been studying and consulting on this topic for more than a decade and a half. If the powers behind Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Premier Dalton McGuinty and Mayor David Miller were convinced of the seriousness of the threat, as clearly they are not, I submit that we would have policies in place now to begin to curb our addiction to fossil energy, at least in Ontario.

We could then argue, with moral conviction, that the rest of the world should join us in the battle for a livable world. We now have scientific consensus on the threat. We have all of the practical technologies, regulatory and fiscal tools available to us to prevent catastrophe. As a national and global collective, we clearly do not yet have the will to act.

I urge you - no, I implore you - to use your influence as a Member of Parliament to help. I would appreciate hearing from you about the specific actions you have taken, or will take to address this urgent challenge. And I would be more than willing to talk in further depth with you about issues I have raised, for which I have some relevant knowledge.

I have also sent a version of this letter to Bruce Stanton, M.P. Simcoe North. I live within a few hundred yards of the southern boundary of his constituency.

Yours truly


Ronald Neville
Elmvale, Ontario