Okay, Show of Hands

All those who think Stephen Harper is ready to wrestle unruly Conservative premiers to the ground over greenhouse gas emissions raise your hands.

Yeah, thought so.

It's crunchtime for Stevie. Somehow he's going to show his face at the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen even though he's transformed Canada into a global pariah on the global warming scene.

Steve is going to stick to his 20% (2006 baseline) GHG emission reductions by 2020. He's going to say that but Steve knows that talk is cheap, especially when it comes from his mouth.

You see, even a modest cut like the one Steve's touting is going to take a lot of discussion, a lot of negotiation and a very tough agreement uniting some very diverse outlooks, notably Special Ed Stelmach's.

The clock is running down on the Athabasca Tar Sands. The miracle, carbon-capture technology we've been promised - forever - is nowhere to be seen. Yet Ed and Steve and their overseers also known as Big Oil are eyeing big increases in bitumen production. It's going to take the equivalent of cooked books to pull that off - intensity based emission targets (a fancy term for "scam").

2020 is just barely a decade away. That's not much time to cut emissions by one-fifth, not much time at all. And yet, beyond his hollow words, there's no activity in sight anywhere.

I think Steve's hoping that the American congress will take him off the hook by sinking Obama's emissions reduction initiative before it is launched. Then Steve will say Canada can't act without being led by Washington and he'll consign the whole business to the circular file.

This jerk is so terrified at the prospect of actual emissions cuts that he won't even deal with the challenges of adaptation to the change that's already coming from existing global warming. He's not lifting a finger to prepare the north for what's already happening or to prepare the coasts or to prepare central Canada or the prairies. It's as though, as far as Steve's concerned, nothing is happening.

Stalin deliberately ignored warnings that the Germans were poised to invade and how well did that work out for the Soviet people? Here in Canada there's trouble on the horizon and we've got our own leader busy staring at his shoes.