Message to the Canadian oil, gas, chemical and coal industries, and to your biggest champion, Alberta Premier Ralph Klein: you are going to lose the battle of Kyoto because you have fundamentally misread both the public mood and the politics of the situation.

Those full-page "Message to All Canadians" advertisements spelling out potential horrors and uncertainties that could follow a ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change do wonders for the bottom lines of our newspapers but they only add to the skepticism of most readers. Ditto for the Horatio-on-the-bridge stance of Mr. Klein, girding for a fight on an epic scale to portray Kyoto ratification as another National Energy Program the evil Ottawa Liberals imposed in the early 1980s.

Begin with public perceptions and politics. Like it or not, the global warming issue is linked in the minds of most Canadians to clean air and pollution. Technically, they may not be the same phenomenon, but it is all pollution. And when people see who is paying for the ads, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Coal Association of Canada, the Canadian Chemical Producers Association and the Canadian Plastics Industry Association to name a few, their rationale runs as follows: if the polluters are against Kyoto, then maybe we should be for it.

That is why the public-opinion polls indicate a wide majority of respondents favour ratification -- even in Alberta -- because they think Kyoto is at least a first step toward doing something about a problem that they only have to look outside their windows at their burnt lawns to appreciate.

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien knows this and he is going ahead with ratification because he has the power to do so: A large majority of his caucus members support ratification, even if they don't support him. Three of the four opposition parties also support ratification with only the Canadian Alliance opposed, reinforcing its image as a Western regional party.

So the question for the oil patch and its champions like Mr. Klein is: Do you try to stop the bulldozer by standing on the road and spitting at it, or do you try to negotiate with the bulldozer driver to influence the path and timing?

Why not begin with the scare estimates about the billion-dollar cost? In C.D. Howe's time, it may have been political suicide to ask what's a billion. But today, a billion dollars represents one tenth of 1 per cent of the annual gross domestic product.

Economic modelers have placed the 10-year impact of meeting the Kyoto reductions somewhere in the range of plus half a per cent of GDP to minus between one quarter to 2 per cent -- all within the margin of error of the econometric models.

These are tolerable costs, as long as they are spread equitably. Most people realize there cannot be a cost-free solution to global warming. They know we have been running an overdraft in the ecological bank and we are going to have to pay up some day.

The question becomes an equitable distribution of the burden. So, wait for it, why not a carbon tax? According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a carbon tax or a system of domestic-emissions trading, which has the same impact, would be the most inclusive and the most efficient system. As Robert Hornung of the Pembina Institute for Appropriate Development points out, a carbon tax would set one price for carbon emissions and since every one faces the same marginal cost for emitting a tonne of carbon, those who can most economically reduce those emissions will do so first. "The market signal that comes about is the one that everyone sees."

Mere mention of the words carbon tax sent shivers through the oil patch and the provincial government in Edmonton. But it does not have to be confiscatory and it is a concept whose time will eventually come.
hwinsor@globeandmail.ca