It used to take six months to a year, or more, before getting a good feel for the drift of a new government. With the Stephen Harper government, I’m getting the idea already. For reasons unknown, except that ideology does funny things to people, the plan seems to be to imitate everything President George W. Bush has done wrong.

Consider the deepening bog of environmental non-policy into which the Conservative government is already up to its eyeballs. The idea was to chuck out everything the bungling, bureaucratized and discredited Liberals have done and come up with something better.

The scheme is already off the rails. Dumping Canada’s leadership role in the Kyoto process — in fact, arguably dumping the principle of reducing greenhouse gases altogether — has led to international embarrassment and to friction with the provinces that had invested in the process, notably Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

More specifically, there’s the wanton destruction of the EnerGuide program, by all accounts a very successful initiative that was gathering steam, getting results, and into which the provinces had dovetailed their own home retrofit initiatives. Under the plan, homeowners who invested in energy efficiency received a grant, with the amount based on the energy savings as established by a professional audit. A $75-million investment from 2003 to 2006 is expected to bring a return in energy savings of up to $1 billion in the long term.

Several of the bigger provinces have announced they will continue the program on their own. The Quebec government, in particular, is angry; and between EnerGuide, Kyoto and Afghanistan, the honeymoon between Harper and Quebec is already fraying. This is an issue that should be coming up in the Nova Scotia election campaign as well, with Nova Scotia (along with other small provinces) putting pressure on Ottawa to have the program restored.

As for coming up with something better, there the story gets even worse. The main element of the new direction so far is the promotion of ethanol, which is alcohol made from wood or vegetable matter.

If that’s the heart of the plan, which I suspect it is, then it’s a policy for idiots. Since agriculture is energy intensive, it takes at least a litre of fossil fuel to create a litre of ethanol. And since ethanol has some 20 per cent less actual energy in it than gasoline, the energy equivalency, according to studies done at Cornell University in the U.S., is closer to 1.3 times more fossil fuel to create the ethanol equivalent, and even more greenhouse gas in the end.

Furthermore it’s not cheap and has to be subsidized — constituting a perverse agricultural subsidy, and a new cycle of ecological damage to create vast new cornfields specifically for ethanol. In Brazil, the largest ethanol-producing country, the cost of that production (from sugar cane) is an accelerated destruction of the rainforest.

The inspiration for Harper’s ethanol policy is the United States where, after six years of encouraging energy waste, President Bush has blurted out that “we’re addicted to oil.” His policy calls for a doubling of ethanol production annually to 2012. This has created its own perversity. Iowa is the main corn-producing state, and also the place where the first, and thus highly symbolic, presidential primaries occur. So those considered among the main contenders — Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and John McCain for the Republicans — who had panned ethanol as a solution before, are now soft-pedalling it.

As far as Stephen Harper is concerned, is there more to come? The government promises a new environmental policy in the fall, private-sector stuff that will really work, as opposed to the Kyoto bungling of the Liberals.

The fact is that the Harper Conservatives, like the Bush Republicans, are beholden to the oil patch — in this case, especially to the Alberta oil sands play, which is responsible for a good deal of Canada’s increased greenhouse gas emissions. The talk about joining the Asia-Pacific initiative as an alternative to Kyoto is a signal that the government’s intent is to do nothing, and to hope that token gestures will keep the controversy down. Asia-Pacific is an alliance of large polluters — mainly the U.S., Australia, China and India — that intend to keep polluting.

The Harper government is hostile to the very idea of meaningful environmental policy, seeing it as left-wing fluff. No use waiting for the fall, in other words. The time to hold the Harper government’s hand to the fire is now.