There’s an obscure but very useful person in Ottawa, whose office hasn’t been cut yet, called the environment commissioner. Her name is Johanne Gélinas, and she has just reported that the Harper government has no plan for adapting to climate change and gives little sign that one is coming.

The issue of global warming is increasingly relentless and unavoidable. Even in the few months since the Harper government embarrassed Canada on the international stage by trashing the Kyoto protocol in favour of lining up with the Bush government’s policy of environmental repudiation, and since it cut the Energuide insulation program and other environmental initiatives, the issue has become visibly more pressing.

Last week, for example, yet another of those top-level scientific reports — this one from NASA — delivered more grim news: The Earth’s temperature is now the highest it’s been since the last ice age, and only one degree less than the hottest period in the last million years. The extinction of species is accelerating. “We are pushing them off the planet,” said James Hansen, the project leader.

And we’ve had some larger-than-life action from the Terminator, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, supported by Britain’s Tony Blair among others, who signed into law a world-leading cap on greenhouse gas emissions that challenges at every level the approach of the Washington-Ottawa axis of denial.

The move was hastened by an unprecedented heat wave last summer, in which 140 people simply dropped dead before the front moved on to create more of the same as far as New York. For people who thought they knew and loved heat, this was an eye-popper.

California has also launched a lawsuit against the auto makers for causing costly pollution, a move that is already being looked at by other states. Although auto makers are arguably no more responsible than the governments that encouraged cars by building too many highways, or the car-worshipping consumer culture, someone has to start somewhere, political show business or not. This might be it.

And while we were spared hurricanes this year, that might be because the action moved to the Pacific, where typhoons of monstrous power have been hitting from Australia to Japan for six months.

But more to the point, for our purposes, is that the frenzied development of the Alberta tar sands has finally emerged into the political fray for what it is: a looming environmental disaster.

Specifically, the calculations are that there’s no way Canada can reduce or even neutralize its carbon emissions if the tar sands go ahead as planned. Canada will just deepen its reputation as a global pollution pig.

As far as the Harper government is concerned, there are two things to keep in mind.

The pressure for this ruinous development is coming from the United States, where it’s seen as a politically secure source of oil in an increasingly insecure world. President George W. Bush himself has said as much.

As long as true conservation is not an option — which it isn’t at the federal level of either country — northern Alberta is to be environmentally devastated (or “economically developed,” as they say in the financial reports) and Canada is to keep polluting to service a gargantuan culture of waste.

And there’s the automatic reaction within Alberta itself, still smarting from the Trudeau-era national energy program, that any federal move that might slow development is “anti Alberta.”

Liberal leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff was defending himself from that last week for having suggested a carbon tax, which would apply to all Canadians.

Yet a carbon tax, the use of the tax system to encourage conservation and green power and to discourage waste, the elimination of subsidies to polluting energy (Green Party Leader Elizabeth May says the tar sands are subsidized by $1.3 billion a year), and Terminator-type caps on emissions are precisely what’s needed.

But the Harper government’s fealty to both the Bush administration and oil interests in its political base almost ensures that Canada will have no significant environmental policy under Stephen Harper.

Meanwhile, the political pressure will not and must not stop rising. Environmental policy must be one of the main points on which this government is judged.

So far it doesn’t look good. As the environment commissioner’s report put it, “the commissioner is more troubled than ever over the government’s longstanding failure to confront the issue.”

Me too.