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CLIMATE CHANGE: Canada's New Plan "Pretends" to Curb Emissions, Say Activists
By Stephen Leahy
BROOKLIN, Canada, Apr 26, 2007 (IPS) - 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."
(END)
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