ENVIRONMENT-CANADA: Kyoto So Close…Yet So Far Away

By Stephen Leahy Reprint | | Print |

Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Feb 7 2005 (IPS) - Canada will be hard-pressed to meet its Kyoto targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even as scientists warn that the risks of climate change are more serious than previously thought.

Last week, scientists at a major international climate change conference in Exeter, England unveiled a long list of potential future calamities, from widespread droughts in Africa and South Asia to irreversible melting of the Greenland ice caps, extinction of polar bears and acidification of the world’s oceans.

The participants concluded that "major investment is needed now in both mitigation and adaptation".

A ray of hope in all that climate gloom would seem to be the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which finally comes into force on Feb 16. The 136 countries that ratified the accord are legally bound to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by an average of five percent from 1990 levels each year between 2008 and 2012.

As modest as that reduction may appear, some countries, and Canada in particular, will struggle to achieve it.

"Canada is the furthest behind of any country and is very unlikely to meet its target," said Dale Marshall of the David Suzuki Foundation, an environmental group in Vancouver.

Canada was an early and ardent whistleblower on global warming, hosting one of the very first international conferences on climate change in 1988. Participants at that meeting called for a 20 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2005.

At the second Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, Canada strongly supported the Rio Convention that called on the world to stabilise 1990 greenhouse gas emissions by 2000.

And during the 1997 Kyoto negotiations, Canada pledged to go 1 percent better than the treaty requirements and reduce its emissions 6 percent below the levels of 1990.

But since the early 1990s, rather than going down, Canada’s emissions have soared. They are now about 20 percent higher than 1990 and climbing, leaving the country to dig itself out of deep hole.

So what happened?

Dithering politicians and a selfish corporate sector are to blame for the mess, says Matthew Bramley, director of climate change at the Pembina Institute, a non-governmental organisation in Alberta.

"We’ve wasted years in consultations and meetings trying to get industry to buy in and keep everyone happy," Bramley said in an interview. "There’s been a complete failure of leadership."

More than 85 percent of the Canadian public supports Kyoto, Marshall told IPS. "People will do what they can to reduce their emissions as long as they see other sectors of society doing their part."

Overall, manufacturers have made significant reductions, but emissions from the booming energy and transportation sectors continue to climb upwards.

"The automotive industry has been incredibly resistant to improvements in fuel efficiency," Bramley said.

After heavy lobbying, Canada’s automakers received an exemption in 2002 from having to cut emissions from their factories in exchange for a 25 percent improvement in car and truck fuel efficiency by 2010. Now the industry is balking at this target.

Canada needs that 25 percent improvement to have any chance of coming close to its Kyoto commitments. Intense lobbying is underway this week as the final draft of the government’s five-year plan on how it will reduce its emissions is being hammered out.

"The prime minister is committed to reaching our Kyoto target," said government spokesperson Ghyslain Charron. The details of the Kyoto plan will likely be released when the government brings in its new budget on Feb. 22, Charron told IPS.

Documents leaked to Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper last week reveal a 1.9-billion-dollar plan of Kyoto tax incentives and subsidies to convince business and consumers to reduce their emissions. These include quick tax write-offs for improving the energy efficiency of commercial buildings to a 1,600-dollar subsidy for super fuel-efficient vehicles like gas-electric hybrids.

However, even that will not be enough to get more than 65 percent of the needed reductions. Experts believe that Canada will need to spend as much as a billion dollars a year to buy emissions credits from countries like Russia and Ukraine.

"I think Canadians would prefer real emission reductions than paying Russians for their economic collapse in the 1990s," says Marshall.

Under Kyoto, countries can buy international emission credits that can be offset against their own emissions. Russia has plenty of credits to sell because its emissions are currently much lower now than in 1990, when the state-supported pollution-heavy industry was in full production.

Canada could reach its targets on its own if it took a hard line on regulating sector-specific emission cuts instead of relying on voluntary deals, said Marshall.

But that isn’t likely to happen. Over the past two years Canada’s biggest polluters – electrical utilities, oil companies, aluminum smelters and cement plants, which are responsible for more than half of all emissions – appear to have avoided making serious cuts in their emissions. Nor do they have any upper limits on those emissions.

"A cap on emissions from the oil and gas sector is absolutely needed," says Bramley.

With the U.S. trying to wean itself from Middle East oil, Canada is now its biggest foreign supplier of oil and gas. The province of Alberta is second only to Saudi Arabia in proven oil reserves. There is also a proposal to pipe 400,000 barrels of Alberta crude a day to the Pacific coast for export to China.

A growing portion of this oil bonanza will be from tar sands, which require tremendous amounts of heat and water to extract the oil. It is an expensive and energy-intensive process that is only profitable when oil prices are high. Many billions of dollars have been invested in the past few years in expectation that prices will get even higher over the long term.

The growth of emissions from the tar sands has been enormous, and they are expected to quadruple between 2000 and 2010, says Bramley. "Without caps, the government will have no choice but to buy international credits."

Still, over the long term, the bulk of emissions will be coming from countries like China and India, notes Pierre Alvarez, president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

"Rather than buying credits, the government should invest in a fund for research and development into alternative energy that could be shared with the developing world," Alvarez told IPS.

Climbing emissions from the oil and gas sector is driven by growing consumption from the end users – the public – who have bigger vehicles and houses and more electronic goods, he said.

For its part, the industry has reduced the intensity of its emissions on a per barrel or cubic foot of production basis. It flatly rejects any cap on total emissions.

As for Canada’s Kyoto commitments: "Canada agreed to an unreasonable target," Alvarez said.