Was Nova Scotia’s Energy Minister Cecil Clarke embarrassed to release Nova Scotia’s fatuous Green Energy Framework just one day after GPI Atlantic (Genuine Progress Index) released its careful analysis of the province’s energy situation? If not, he should have been.

The answer to a question depends on how you frame the question. GPI Atlantic is in the business of asking good questions. For example, how heavily does Nova Scotia consume energy? What are the visible and hidden costs of that? What could we do to reduce them?

Last month, GPI issued its “Energy Accounts,” an attempt to measure what our present energy regime really costs us, and what we get for the expenditure. The report is absolutely shocking. Canada is the worst air polluter in the OECD, and Nova Scotians are the worst in Canada. Commuting, trucking and heating all contribute, but the overwhelming problem is our reliance on coal for electrical generation. Nova Scotia Power is, all by itself, one of the country’s four worst polluters.

So here we sit, my friends, issuing sulphur dioxide emissions that are, per capita, seven times the Canadian average. When you turn on your lights, you pollute the air.

This is scary stuff. It’s getting hard to breathe in this country. In September, Marjorie and I drove to Toronto. We shouldn’t have, but our elderly whippet couldn’t fly, and couldn’t be left behind. In Toronto, the choking air blocked our view and burned our eyes. On our return, the cloud of smog remained with us all the way to Montreal and Quebec City, and half-way down the St. Lawrence.

I find this terrifying. If you can’t breathe, nothing else matters. And Canadian air has gone rotten in a single generation.

Nova Scotians are at least as guilty as the wicked Upper Canadians and the big, bad Americans. We’re among the highest energy users in the world — and we’re getting greedier, using 12 per cent more since 1991. Worse, this province relies almost entirely on imported oil and coal, having sold our natural gas to multinational corporations who ship it away.

Our extravagant appetite for fossil fuels hastens the end of oil and natural gas, contributes to climate change, and contaminates the land and the water — in addition to fouling the air. GPI estimates that Nova Scotians damage their own environment to the extent of $600 million annually, or $660 for every person in the province. Not that the money will matter very much to people who can’t breathe.

We don’t even track this stuff well. We have no idea how many Nova Scotians are suffering from “fuel poverty,” spending more than 10 per cent of their incomes on energy. But we can be sure that number is rising as the price of energy climbs.

And what’s the province going to do about all this? On October 20, the Minister told us.

Nothing.

The Minister’s “framework” calls for us to “develop a vision.” Not easy, since the air has become so murky. The government opines that we can add more windmills and start using biomass as a fuel. It nods approvingly at conservation and co-generation, which uses the heat from electrical generation to heat homes and buildings. It lusts after every available federal dollar.

Pleasant pieties. But will the province actually take any action? Will it introduce legislation? Anti-pollution regulations? Specific targets for Nova Scotia Power? Tax incentives or subsidies for conservation, efficiency or green energy initiatives?

For example, Denmark once gave subsidies for wind generation. Today it doesn’t need to; the wind will soon provide 29 per cent of Denmark’s electricity, and that tiny nation is now the world’s largest exporter of wind turbines. Nova Scotia, by contrast, penalizes wind generation projects. In Ontario, GPI reports, the taxes on a 20 megawatt wind project amount to $42,785. In Nova Scotia that figure is $679,810 — the highest in the country.

Is that about to change? Is anything about to change?

Well, maybe. Sometime. If it doesn’t cost too much. If Ottawa will pay for it.

Look, Minister. Smokers poison themselves and those immediately around them. Agreed: both Marjorie and I have stopped smoking. Power plants and vehicles, however, poison every living thing downwind from them. How can you guys stand there with your bald faces hanging open and announce mandatory smoking bans almost everywhere — and still maintain your bovine docility about poisoning the atmosphere?

The issue of air pollution is, literally, vital. Bad air is already killing people, though we usually call it “respiratory failure.” And the air knows no borders. A recent posting on a sailors’ discussion list notes that sextant users now find it hard to get a clean horizon at sea because of “all this global warming fluffy, murky stuff in the sky.”

N.S. Liberal leader Francis MacKenzie called Cecil Clark’s framework “a three-billion-dollar unfunded fantasy.” It’s worse than that. It’s lethal negligence, and it ought to make all of us gag.