Canada was given a good kicking at today’s Climate Action Network press conference, spicing things up after the desperately dull fare the NGOs served up yesterday.
They accused Canada of reneging on Kyoto, steering away from binding targets, and attempting to rile China and India into derailing progress.
Canada’s performance against its Kyoto targets is indeed lamentable. Its greenhouse gas emissions have risen 25% since 1990. Include land use and forestry, and the news gets worse: a 54% rise. Canada’s Kyoto target was to achieve a 6% cut.
Meanwhile, Steven Harper, Canadian PM, is no friend of Kyoto. In 2002, while opposition leader, he described it as a ‘essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations’ in a letter begging for money to defeat legislation needed to ratify the treaty.
At the time, he was unconvinced by the science (‘tentative and contradictory’, carbon dioxide is 'essential to life') and warned that:
[quote]Workers and consumers everywhere in Canada will lose. THERE ARE NO CANADIAN WINNERS UNDER THE KYOTO ACCORD.[/quote]
Once in power, he took a new tack, becoming vociferous in his criticism of the previous government's failure to live up to the deal it had signed up to.
[quote]They did practically nothing to achieve [the Kyoto] goal. Instead, they maintained policies that pushed emissions in the other direction. In fact, when we came to office last year, Canada’s emissions were 33% above the target and rising. Which meant, with only months before the targets kicked in, it had become impossible to meet the Kyoto commitment without crippling our economy.[/quote]
Recently, his government has started to promise action. A target has been set to reduce emissions by 20% by 2020, and 60-70% by 2050. That's from levels in 2006, though, not 1990. Harper has promised that Canadian emissions will peak 'by at least 2012 and as early as 2010.'
Even under these new plans, however, Canada will not only miss its Kyoto target, its emissions will still be above 1990 levels when 2020 comes around. The EU, meanwhile, is committed to being at least 20% below 1990 levels by then.
Harper has also emerged as a strong advocate of making developing countries take a share of the burden. In Uganda, at the recent Commonwealth Summit, he dubbed Kyoto 'a mistake' that shouldn't be repeated.
[quote]We already did the 'One-third of the countries will take binding targets and let's hope the rest fall into line.' We're already there. That hasn't worked.[/quote]
There are two ways of looking at this position - at face value or as a tactic to ensure China and India are angered into blocking any progress on negotiations.
At the press conference, Steven Guilbeault, a Canadian activist, was scathing in his criticism of the Canadian position:
[quote]Yesterday, in the Canadian House of Commons, the Environment Minister, John Baird, recognised that for average temperature increases to reach 2 degrees would be unacceptable to the planet.
You can't on the one hand recognise a 2 degree increase as a threat to the planet and, on the other hand, have Canada not reach its Kyoto target before 2025, if you're lucky.[/quote]
In its plenary statement yesterday, the Canadian delegation conceded that 'the international policy response has fallen well behind what the science is telling us is needed.'
However, it omitted any reference to mandatory international targets and, in a late addition (handwritten on the printed script), welcomed the Japanese stance - a sign that these two countries may be finding common cause.
This will further irritate the NGOs, who also used today's press event to accuse the Japanese of 'abandoning Kyoto'. Japan shares Canadian ambivalence to binding targets.
At today's press event, there were dark mutterings that similarities between Japanese and Australian language in their statements was 'no coincidence'.
(By the way, it would be nice to be able to put forward the Canadian government's view but, as yet, they have no press briefings planned.)