Climate change is the issue that Canadians refuse to address.

We talk about it.

But in the end, too many of us are unwilling to do anything serious about the greenhouse gases that, according to a United Nations scientific panel, threaten to inexorably alter the planet.

Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government failed to meet the emission targets it had agreed to in 1997. Canadians didn’t care. They re-elected the Liberals twice more.

Stephen Harper’s Conservative government admits that it is not close to meeting the much- reduced emission targets it agreed to in 2009.

Yet in 2011, Canadians gave Harper a parliamentary majority.

Indeed, the only major party leader to run on a platform aimed specifically at combating climate change has been Stéphane Dion.

Canadians rewarded Dion by inflicting a humiliating defeat on his Liberals in the 2008 election.

When Harper famously said that no country in the world would risk short-term economic interests in order to curb greenhouse gases, he wasn’t simply justifying his own inaction.

He was also expressing a sad political reality.

All of which is to say that no one should be surprised by what happened, or to be more precise, by what didn’t happen at the recent United Nations climate-change conference in Lima, Peru.

Delegates from more than 190 nations gathered to hammer out a preliminary consensus in preparation for a sink or swim climate-change showdown slated for Paris next year.

A UN scientific panel says that to avoid climate-induced disaster, the world must limit carbon emissions to zero by the end of the century.

The Paris conference is supposed to show us the way there. Lima was supposed to be the set-up for Paris.

But Lima accomplished all too little.

Delegates agreed Sunday that all countries, including developing nations, bear some responsibility for fighting climate change. But they couldn’t agree, even in broad terms, how the cost should be divided.

Delegates agreed that all countries should submit plans for combating greenhouse gases. But there was no suggestion that nations would be required to live up to their own plans.

Nor, under the Lima pact, are countries required to explain exactly how they would reach their voluntary targets.

Most important was the lack of clear goals. Delegates couldn’t decide whether the Paris summit should focus on eliminating net greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century.

Nor could they decide on whether the summit should focus on encouraging the world to adapt to a new reality of extreme weather and submerged coastal cities.

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According to news reports from the conference, no country emerged from Lima with glory. The Chinese were prickly, the Americans obdurate and Canada unjustifiably smug.

Canadian Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq may have said more than she intended when she told delegates: “Our record speaks for itself.”

Still, it’s hard to blame the politicians when voters aren’t pushing. A recent poll done by the Environics Institute for Survey Research (and paid for, in part, by the David Suzuki Foundation) illustrates the problem.

The pollsters did find that 88 per cent of Canadians want the government to do more on climate change.

But do what exactly? A small majority of 56 per cent said they favoured some kind of carbon tax.

Yet when asked if the average household should pay $100 more a year to fight climate change, that slim majority evaporated. Instead, respondents were virtually split down the middle.

Do Canadians care that much about global warming anyway? Is it shaping up to be a ballot-box issue in the next election?

The poll found that only 50 per cent of Canadians are “extremely” or “definitely” concerned about climate change — down from 57 per cent in 2007.

In spite of all evidence to the contrary, two-thirds of those polled said the Harper government’s record on climate change is equal to or better than those of other countries.

If this is what Canadians think, is it any wonder that no major political party is crusading against global warming?

If this is what the world thinks, is it any wonder that scientists say we’re headed for catastrophe?

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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