Stephen Harper says Canada will no longer be burning fossil fuels by 2100. Well, sort of.
His ambition about the elimination of fossil fuels is "aspirational," the Prime Minister's aides quickly asserted, a word that in the usual aimless gobbledegook of government-speak means maybe someday, somehow by means yet unknown we might, perhaps, under certain circumstances, depending upon factors beyond our control, including the unpredictability of technology and the state of international relations, and the governments that are elected between then and now; and the leaders who are not yet born, assuming that they become seized of the issue of climate change, which may or may not have electoral salience in the decades ahead, which in turn will depend upon the state of public opinion through the forthcoming decades; and the willingness of states to co-operate in the pursuit of this "aspirational" goal, the attainment of which, were it to occur, would be a welcome development, provided that in the meantime its achievement did not have a negative impact on economic growth and the general well-being of the population, which, if the past be any guide, is more concerned with the here and now than possible eventualities a century or so from today, unless these eventualities were certain to be triumphs of the human spirit, which, of course, given what has been appropriately called the "crooked timber of humanity," can never be taken for granted, what with so many uncertainties that must perforce lie ahead, such that no reasonable political leader today can make a surefire commitment but rather must take account of the likely unpredictable nature of future developments, and therefore couch commitments in language that would allow for these unpredictable twists and turns to unfold in their own mysterious ways and according to their strange internal dynamics, which not even the most prescient among us could be expected to understand even incompletely, let alone fully, so that it would be intellectually wrong and politically dangerous to mislead the public, whose interest in the collective welfare of today is often flickering at best, let alone the public's interest in the state of the world almost a century hence, that we were to attempt to discern the future certain clarity would unquestionably lead us toward the shallows of speculation and the caverns of error where so many past decisions based on the false certainty of predictive capacity have perished; so that the wise leader knows he can see only so far ahead, but that if he wishes to appear more resolute than he is, an "aspirational" goal is a worthy unassailable statement of the finest of intentions, the opaque definition of which will remain unencumbered by facts, targets and deadlines but which conveys a sense of purpose that he himself will never be called to pursue, the attainment of which will remain so distant that no one can ever call him to account for failing to achieve it, or praise him for its achievement, and the vagueness of which allows him and his successors to find whatever reasons might be required to explain how developments conspired, in ways no one could have predicted, to frustrate what had otherwise been an abiding commitment born of long study and deep concern for the well-being of our children and grandchildren, who, yes, deserved a better hand than the one they will have been dealt by us strugglers through the valleys of the unknown but who, by learning from the difficulties of the past, will rededicate themselves to this same higher "aspirational" purpose and, God willing, might find the means that escaped our generation to achieve perhaps by 2200 a goal that will by then be more than "aspirational;" and that when that dawn finally arrives, they will be moved to think charitably back upon those of us who first imagined the light but, for myriad reasons that with the benefit of hindsight seem difficult to understand – the past often being difficult to understand fully by those who live in the present and superimpose on the past the values and assumptions of today – could not move through the thickets of fear and vested interests toward the real progress that would have certainly been desirable but which, given the difficulty of the obstacles and the obduracy of established ways of thinking, made progress beyond the "aspirational" too painful to contemplate, let alone achieve, in an age where circumlocution was more highly valued than straight talk and concrete deeds.