Climate Change: Canada’s New Plan ‘Pretends’ to Curb Emissions, Say Activists
BROOKLIN, Canada - Canada’s newest plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions will be much too little and too late, environmentalists said Thursday.Its third climate action plan in less than two years, the Canadian government proposal titled “Turn the Corner”, released Thursday afternoon, proposes to reduce emissions 20 percent by 2020. However, that would be a 20 percent reduction from 2006 levels.
“That would leave Canada 11 percent above its Kyoto commitments many years after the country is legally obligated to meet them,” says John Bennett of the Climate Action Network Canada, a coalition of environmental groups.
“This government is all about pretending to reduce emissions,” Bennett told IPS.
In a statement, Canada’s Environment Minister John Baird said, “winter is disappearing as we know it” and then acknowledged that Canada has “one of the worst environmental records among industrialised countries”.
The “Turn the Corner” plan recognises the urgent need to take action, “while also respecting our responsibility to keep Canadian families working,” Baird concluded. There was little mention of the Kyoto Protocol, whose reduction targets the present Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said is unrealistic.
“This is not Canada turning the corner but Canada turning its back on the world,” said Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada.
Before Canada became a major oil exporter it had been a champion of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to reduce emissions. Under that agreement, 35 industrialised nations are obligated to reduce emissions by an average five percent below 1990 levels by the 2008-2012 period.
Canada went one better and agreed to reach six percent by 2012.
What a difference a decade makes.
Now more than two million barrels of crude flows from the northern oil sands regions of Alberta province south to the U.S. state of Texas and elsewhere for processing into gasoline for the ever-growing U.S. market.
Extracting crude from Canada’s oil sands — deposits of bitumen, heavy, black viscous oil — is expensive and highly polluting, so much so that the region is now the single largest and fastest growing source of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Not surprisingly Canada’s emissions have shot up 30 to 35 percent since 1990 — twice the U.S. increase in emissions over the same period.
A 110-billion-dollar expansion currently under way will triple oil sands output by 2020. The oil sands represent the largest pool of oil reserves outside of the Middle East.
“For just one or two dollars a barrel, oil sands production could become carbon neutral,” Climate Action’s Bennett says.
He is referring to a cost analysis done by the Alberta-based non-governmental Pembina Institute that showed the oil sands sector could reduce, offset and sequester all of its greenhouse emissions by 2020 at a cost of 1.75 dollars per barrel.
Under the “Turn the Corner” plan, the oil sands sector, along with other major industrial emitters of climate-changing gases, will be required to make cuts based on intensity, or the emissions per volume of production. Companies must cut that intensity by six percent a year over the next three years and by two percent a year after that.
However, new facilities — such as expansion of oil sands processing — will have a three-year grace period.
Companies will also be able to choose between various ways of meeting their emission targets, including actual reductions, using a domestic emissions-trading system, or contributing to a technology fund. Other sectors such as cement, pulp and paper and lime, receive exemptions.
“This is more about protecting the oil sands than it is about trying to reduce greenhouse emissions,” said Bennett.
It’s also designed to fool Canadians into thinking their government is taking real action agree Bennett and May.
Canada’s choice of a 20-percent reduction by 2020 appears to be the same as the European Union target, except the EU’s baseline year is 1990 and Canada’s is 2006. That makes this latest plan even weaker than last year’s “green plan”, which was rejected by environmentalists, opposition political parties and even the broader public, said May in a statement.
“I have never dealt with a more partisan government, everything is about politics” says Bennett.
“Even worse, they think people are stupid and will believe stupid things.”
Copyright © 2007 IPS-Inter Press Service.
Prime Minister Harper is, I remind you, one of the “three amigos.” Together with the president of Mexico, he looks forward to the North American Union (NAU) — i.e., the annexation of Canada and Mexico by the U.S. Therefore, Harper’s “green” plans cannot be significantly different than Washington’s. Besides the surrender of what’s left of Canada’s sovereignty, central to this Anschluss is the guarantee of Canadian oil to the U.S. Anything that interferes with this oil deal is out of the question — as this latest charade of a green plan blatantly demonstrates. While 70 percent of the oil from the tar sands is promised to the U.S., Canada will get to exercise “sovereignty” over the mess left behind: carbon emissions from the tar sands are forecast to increase from 23.3 million tonnes per year to between 83 and 175 million tonnes per year.
I want new government now. The conservatives are as unimaginative as they are unfit to rule.
They say the changes are too expensive… they are not supposed to be telling us how things get done - we elect them to represent us, not the other way around. It’s too expensive to have dinosaurs in office!