From the we-all-knew-the-Conservatives-don't-care-about-the-environment department

In Saturday's Globe and Mail:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed tough new measures to reduce the health toll from air pollution around the Great Lakes by forcing lake freighters to stop burning dirty bunker fuel.

Hey, the U.S. is on to a good thing! But wait for the Canadian torpedo:

But the plan has an unusual opponent: The Canadian embassy in Washington has quietly asked the EPA to weaken the measures, arguing that they could harm trade. It wants ships to be allowed to continue using the high-polluting fuel and to instead install smokestack scrubbers that would clean up their emissions. The Canadian recommendation, if accepted, could delay the clean-air measure for years, because the technology for the scrubbers does not yet exist.

Notice a pattern here? The approach is the same as their approach to climate change. Rather than address the problem today with solutions that exist now, the Harper Government wants to delay actual progress by artificially pinning hopes onto some future technology that either doesn't exist at all or doesn't exist in the scale required to solve the problem.

It's the same subterfuge used by Harper and his environment minister of the day (Ambrose / Baird / now Prentice) as the Conservatives try to sabbotage and scuttle any meaningful action on climate change.

Scrubbers that don't exist are like the equally false solutions "clean coal" and effective widespread "carbon sequestration". These two technologies are often promoted as a panacea by the conservatives on both sides of the border, but neither practically exists.

Clean coal is the same pipe dream George Bush also used to smoke, and carbon sequestration exists today only in four test-sized projects around the world, including one which has already operated for years. That project, co-funded by Canadian and U.S. governments in partnership with EnCana, saw a trial carbon sequestration project started in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Since that trial has begun there has been no meaningful follow through by industry. Now the government is plowing money - our tax dollars - into these things rather than tapping on the energy industry to make the necessary investments.

Former NDP Premier of Manitoba Gary Doer is heading to Washington to take up his new post as Canadian Ambassador to the United States. Given his previous support for Kyoto, clean air and water legislation, his plans to eliminate coal burning factories, and his support for many other environmental initiatives, can we expect Doer to stand up to his new boss Stephen Harper and stop launching torpedoes at U.S. efforts to clean up our planet and most importantly, our own act?