No doubt it was hard for manual workers in the garment trade to adjust to the arrival of the industrial sewing machine in the early 1800s. Change is always difficult. So we should be sympathetic to those in our oil and smokestack industries who fear the coming innovations needed to address global climate change.

Of course, the 19th century garment workers, sometimes called Luddites, were a powerless lot who’ve been bad-mouthed for the past two centuries as resisters of change. Today we see a similar resistance to change, but it’s happening inside the boardrooms of some of our most powerful corporations, which enjoy high-placed political friends like Alberta’s Premier Ralph Klein and Ontario’s Ernie Eves.

Still, there’s no mistaking the fact that, powerful as these corporations are, they represent a wave of the past. Think of them as the voice of 19th century business.

It’s striking to note that the bulk of the greenhouse gas problem is concentrated in a subgroup of old-style industries — oil and gas, metals, steel, industrial chemicals, pulp and paper. According to Ottawa-based energy consultant Ralph Torrie, these “sunset” industries represent just 25 per cent of Canada’s overall industrial production, but they’re responsible for the vast majority — 80 per cent — of industrial greenhouse gas emissions. Their voices have been particularly prominent, however, in the debate over whether Canada should sign the Kyoto accord on climate change, and have exaggerated the difficulty for Canada in meeting the Kyoto targets.

Apart from this relatively small group of industries, whose greenhouse gas emissions have been growing, the rest of the country has mostly been reducing emissions in the last few decades. The energy crisis of the early 1970s changed things dramatically, as both consumers and businesses became conscious of the wastefulness and expense of high-energy consumption. Cars were made smaller and more fuel-efficient, new homes and buildings were better insulated, household and industrial appliances were redesigned to consume less energy.

Now it’s hard to see how this has been a bad thing. Today, for instance, it’s impossible to buy a fridge that uses more than half the electricity used by a fridge made a decade earlier. And yet fridges keep things just as cold today (not to mention meeting every other current need, from restocking ice cubes to keeping butter at whatever level of firmness one desires.)

If we’d kept on increasing our energy consumption at the rate we were going back in the 1960s, we would have spent an extra $50 billion-dollars on energy in the past three decades, Torrie calculates. For energy companies, that’s a loss of $50 billion. But to the rest of us, it’s a saving. Would we have been better off if we’d instead spent that money on higher gas prices, and bigger electricity bills?

Perhaps a certain nostalgia for old-style fridges, draughty houses and cars the size of floating cocktail lounges is inevitable. But let’s not mistake this nostalgia with some practical plan for a strong, high-employment economy. In fact, the energy sector employs relatively few people for the amount of money invested in it. If we were really interested in a strong economy, we’d seize Kyoto as an opportunity to get out in front of the pack — while the U.S. still clings to the fossil fuel sector, which has been so lucrative for many in the White House — by investing in energy-saving technologies that are the wave of the future.

Now there’s an opportunity for some made-in-Canada solutions, which should excite Ralph Klein, who insists we should replace Kyoto with a made-in-Canada solution to climate change. (Or is Klein’s sudden patriotism nothing more than a convenient guise to help his foreign oil friends to kill Kyoto?)

Ultimately, let’s not lose sight of what this is all about — taking action against a problem that threatens to make the earth less livable for our offspring and ourselves. The importance of this goal explains why most Canadians support Kyoto, despite any dislocations it may cause them. They are, by the way, resistant to change when it serves no higher purpose. Witness the resistance to another change in the energy sphere — electricity deregulation — which seems to be about nothing more than giving private entrepreneurs a cut of this lucrative market.

The Luddites of the 19th century met a cruel fate. In their desperation, some took to smashing the new industrial machines and were executed for their crimes — severe punishment for property vandalism. Today’s energy Luddites are keen on property rights and very close to the centres of power, so their fate will be kinder. But let’s see their resistance for what it is: an attempt to cling to the past — a past that’s served them handsomely, but that threatens to make a bleak future for those of us stuck living on this planet.

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...