Cancelling or otherwise…

Cancelling or otherwise reducing our belated and meagre initiatives to turn around or slow down our spiraling path to disaster is the very, very worst thing a democratically elected Provincial government could do. Given the international panel's latest report, only a few days old, we are cascading toward unconscionable conditions for our grandchildren, now alive and innocent victims of our greed and neglect, and their children's children. How can we do this? How can we act as criminals on this Earth, on the trust that we have received? All of the evidence tells us indisputably now that human activity has contributed over the last almost 200 years to the gradual warming of our atmosphere. We may not be causing climate change, but every credible signal now tells us that we are accelerating it and exacerbating it. And putting a modest price on carbon emissions is a very small and a very modest step in the right direction to help all of us achieve a much needed course correction. It is not a solution. But it draws upon our understanding of human economics, as I think the Premier claims to understand and subscribe to, to shift our preferences for high cost carbon dense energies to lower carbon and even non-carbon sources. We are shifting the costs on the supply curve to gradually modify the demand curve - for everyone's longer term benefit. It is now a moral imperative to do this. It may actually be too late. But to deny this modest initiative on the basis of dogged ideology and simplistic "business" bombast is intolerable and an insult to the social and democratic values of all Ontario residents. I say this as an Ontarian, a business person, a citizen, a father and grandfather, and as a person of conscience.