One thing to say about the new regulations of oil sands development reported in The Globe and Mail March 9: finally Ottawa is talking about the problem.

Environment Minister John Baird’s climate-change plan includes requirements for new oil sands developments to capture and store emissions. It’s the wrong system, the plan is too vague, and it will still allow Alberta oil production to increase, but it’s a start.

And the oil sands are something we need to talk about — the mining of oil from the tar pits of Alberta is an environmental crime of the highest order. Getting oil — or synthetic oil — out of the sands expends more energy than it produces, and will leave a swath of land larger than New York State strip-mined and barren. Already, 18 per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the production of oil in the oil sands, a number expected to rise to 25 per cent by 2020. And that’s just getting it out of the ground. The product produced by all that heavy pollution is, of course, the primary source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

Rather than acknowledging the problem this represents and taking steps to cease production of oil from the sands, Canada has instead staked our future as an “energy superpower” on development there. The health of our economy, not just in Alberta but across the country, has been unwisely tied to oil exports, which will become a problem whether we decide to acknowledge it or not.

American environmental legislation setting greenhouse gas standards for imports there already threatens us. The Canadian government has been quietly sending signals that the “Energy Independence Act” could prevent Americans from purchasing oil produced in the tar sands, which would be a problem for Canada’s economy and also proves inconvenient for oil-hungry Americans, since Canada is their largest supplier.

The economic catastrophe is the result, of course, of the fact that oil sands development is such a ludicrously inefficient and dirty way to produce energy. No matter how painful the economic hit, there is simply no way to seriously address global warming in Canada that involves continuing the orgy of oil production in Alberta.

So the experimental storage options proposed by Ottawa are not enough. What’s really needed are strict emissions-­reduction regulations and a carbon-trading system that would encourage corporations to become more efficient. And further, we need to ween ourselves off oil while winding down production of oil in Alberta.

The consensus regarding the extent of global climate change and the need to urgently cut greenhouse-gas emissions has become near-universal in the past two years. If we fail to take steps immediately, the oceans will rise up and the mountains will fall and so on.

But now comes the difficult part, which is turning that awareness into real action, and that will sometimes be painful. The economic effects will be real, as the case of the oil sands so clearly demonstrates. But there’s really no alternative.

This week’s headlines show that finally that message is trickling through even to Conservative minister John Baird, and finally the discussion of what to do about Canada’s disaster-in-progress is on. The proposals put forward so far are not nearly enough. But they’re a start, and we’re thankful for that.