This is an interview with Tzeporah Berman, Executive Director and co-founders of PowerUp Canada. If you don’t think the U.S. is doing enough, you’ll love what our northern neighbors are (not) doing:
Let’s just look at clean energy. This year in the budget, Obama is outspending Canada 14 to 1 per capita on green stimulus, 6 to 1 if you just look specifically at new investment into clean energy. And the result is Canada is bleeding jobs, good investment, and good renewable companies to the U.S. We are missing the boat on developing the low-carbon economy and creating an alternative to the oil and gas money that’s flowing into Ottawa. So there’s two issues that we need to look at on what any government is doing to address this challenge. One is: how quickly are they reducing global-warming pollution, and what policy mechanisms are they putting into place to do that? And how quickly are they scaling up the alternative in clean energy? And the Harper government’s doing neither. So there is not a single policy in place to reduce global warming pollution since they came into power. Not a single policy. So they’ve talked about cap-and-trade, but we have nothing on the books. They’re just waiting, waiting, waiting. And Canada’s emissions are going up, not down. We’re one of the top ten polluters in the world. And we’re one of the only countries — in fact, the worst record of any G8 country in terms of how fast our global warming pollution is going up.
Ouch!
