The stunning turnaround by the Federal government to embrace last year’s Kyoto accord, which that for years had been buried under layers of political “yadda yadda” and dithering, may have surprised many environmentalists and activists, but it didn’t make them giddy and silly.
Welcome to Paul Martin’s perfect little blue planet, where every now and then a little scandal, say over patronage, pay-offs, and train and transport executives stealing from us taxpayers, results in an appeasing environmental program called Moving Forward on Climate Change: A plan for Honouring our Kyoto Commitment.
Well it’s here, but it’s more than likely that it will return from whence it came.
Kyoto obliges Canada to cut the output of greenhouse gases by six per cent to 1990 levels by 2012. Canada’s overall emissions in 2003 were 24 per cent above 1990 levels. Ottawa said it would have to cut 270 megatons of emissions a year by 2012 to meet its target. The plan also involves purchasing credits from countries that are under their Kyoto targets.
Environmentalists and activists are actually relieved. If Canada would try and reduce our emissions by one-third over the next six years, rather than buying emission credits from countries that could use the money, it would devastate our economy and collapse our way of life. No government would want that.
The only way Ottawa could meet its Kyoto expectations in the short time remaining before 2012 would be to enforce emission reductions. It would have to dictate the closing of factories, or at least, as a compromise with the elite business and industrial lobbyists, restrict their hours of operations.
There’s a good chance that workers in manufacturing, transportation or natural resources will be standing in the pogey line at the local manpower office. At home, you would be forced to restrict your lighting and find alternatives to how you keep your bones warm on a typical Canadian winter night.
Expectedly, The Canadian Gas Association said the plan was a good starting point but in no way should consumers not use gas.
“There is nothing inherently wrong with a regulatory approach, provided that the regulatory framework reflects energy and industrial realities,” said association President Michael Cleland.
Conversely, a coalition of 11 environmental groups said in a statement that “the amounts of mandatory reductions by industrial large final emitters are so limited that it places what is likely to be a large burden on the rest of the plan.”
That burden would fall on us, the low level polluters. The plan looks good until you touch it. Then it falls apart.
It is an extremely tough challenge, a far more difficult economic situation than that faced by most countries because Ottawa followed the lead of the U.S. in setting an ambitious target for itself, before President George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of Kyoto. Ottawa knows it, because to meet Kyoto Canada objectives they would have to bring emission levels back to where they were in the late 1980s.
So Ottawa’s Kyoto plan is symbolic but lacks in substance. It is the appearance of doing something to combat climate change, reinforced by wads of money to prove how committed everyone is. It is without any clue of how it will actually reduce worldwide emissions.
Which brings us to this week’s U.N. Conference on Climate held here in Montreal. Aside from pressuring the U.S. to get on board–a country that rightly so addresses the economic improbability of Kyoto–demonstrators buried their heads in the sand when it came to addressing the economic flaws of meeting the Kyoto objectives.
It is easy to gloss over the plan because it is absurd, but a lesser known objective of the Conference is the revamping, or creation of a new accord for beyond 2012.
This “new” declaration will provide two rather paradoxical choices; go ahead and reduce emissions by 1990 levels at the detrimental expense of the economy and our way of life, or do nothing and let the inevitable environmental disaster creep up on us and destroy our way of life. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.
