CEOs and business leaders on the COMPAS panel were asked about their views on the controversies relating to climate change and the recent report from the Pembina Institute and the Suzuki Foundation on the GDP costs to Canada and Alberta of reducing CO2 emissions.

Panelists were asked to score the degree to which various players have been acting responsibly. No consensus emerges at all. In a variation on the theme of “a small plague on all your houses,” no group or individual is perceived as acting in an especially responsible way while most are perceived as mildly irresponsible. The only group that is perceived as somewhat or slightly responsible consists of those who say that the climate is changing but don’t actually take a position on whether such change is caused by human activity or natural factors.

The David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute are perceived as acting semi-responsibly or, perhaps, slightly irresponsibly in issuing their recent report. Their report forecasts GDP impacts as a result of reducing CO2 emissions. Finance Ministry Flaherty, who condemned the Suzuki-Pembina report, is perceived as acting semi-responsibly, perhaps fractionally less irresponsibly than the David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute.

The debate about the David Suzuki Foundation-Pembina Institute report can be seen against a backdrop of evolving business panel views of climate change and its potential causes. Using a tracking question deployed in previous panel surveys for Canadian Business magazine, COMPAS found panelists’ opinions to be essentially unchanged since 2008.

Between 2006 and 2008, panel support for the view that human activity caused climate change fell. In 2006, those who perceived the climate as changing and attributed such change to human activity outnumbered 2:1 (41% vs. 20%) those who believed that climate changes are a normal variation in the planet’s climate. In 2008 and again in November, 2009, these two groups are equally matched, each with support from almost a third of the COMPAS business panel. Over the past year, it appears as if support for the anthropogenic perspective on climate change has remained unchanged.

These are the key findings from this past week’s Internet survey of CEOs and business leaders on the COMPAS panel. The weekly business survey is undertaken for Canadian Business magazine under sponsorship of BDO Dunwoody LLP.

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