News and views from SA Canada Ottawa is a culprit in Copenhagen climate fiasco
2010Barry Weisleder 2010-01Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 8 →
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For the Canadian government, the 12-day Copenhagen climate-change summit in December 2009 was a public relations disaster—deservedly so, as the Stephen Harper Tories slavishly followed Washington’s lead, even trying to scupper the weak legacy of the Kyoto Accord.
Environmentalist activists at Copenhagen ‘awarded’ the daily Fossil of the Day to Canada, on its own, or as one of a group of countries, 10 times—more than any other state present.
Toronto Mayor David Miller, followed by Ontario and Quebec’s representatives, condemned the Harper regime. A leaked cabinet document suggested the emissions from Alberta’s oil sands would rise 165 per cent in the coming years. And an elaborate stunt by social media pranksters exposed Ottawa’s perfidious position to the world media.
Still, Prime Minister Harper maintained that his government’s insistence on ‘realistic targets’ was vindicated by the bargaining process at Copenhagen. The result, of course, was no enforceable agreement on emission reductions, and only offers of inadequate aid to less developed countries, to be meted out via imperialist financial institutions. It’s a case of finding ‘vindication’ in an elite-crafted failure. Canada is the only country to ignore its international obligations under the previous Kyoto climate treaty. At Copenhagen it blocked all attempts to reach a new treaty to significantly cut carbon emissions.
“Canada is the dinosaur at these talks,” said Canadian David Cadman, president of ICLEI, Local Governments for Sustainability, an international association of local governments that hosted a Mayor’s Conference on climate change. “They are all about protecting Canada’s fossil fuel sector instead of protecting the interests of the Canadian public,” Cadman told TerraViva.
Canada is “throwing a spanner into the works wherever it can”, agreed Dale Marshall of the David Suzuki Foundation, a Canadian environmental group. “They are even blocking agreement on the use of 1990 as the base year,” Marshall said in an interview. It’s not hard to understand why. Not only are Canada’s emissions 34 percent higher than the 1990 baseline and rapidly growing, its massive Alberta tar sands production is believed to be the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions.
The emissions cut offered by Stephen Harper’s government is just three percent under 1990 levels by 2020—less than the Kyoto obligation of cutting six percent by 2010. Scientists have repeatedly warned that to have any chance of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (which is likely insufficient to avoid eco-catastrophe), industrialized countries must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent by 2020 compared to the baseline of 1990.
Canada also lobbied hard alongside the U.S. to abandon the Kyoto Protocol process entirely, to the outrage of developing countries. Ottawa expects them to make significant emissions reduction commitments despite Canada’s unwillingness to live up to its legal obligations from 1997. The poorer countries, represented in a bloc known as the G77, want the Kyoto deal extended past its 2012 deadline. China, India, Brazil, and South Africa called on rich countries to take on targets under an extended Kyoto plan that would cut emissions by 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020.
New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton said “despite the support of Canadians for a real plan to cut emissions, Harper has sided with the big polluters”. He’s right. Unfortunately, Layton’s solution is a ‘carbon trading’ scheme, which the British environmentalist author of “Heat”, George Monbiot, says is like the medieval Catholic Church selling indulgences. It might make some people feel better about their sins, but it won’t reduce carbon emissions.
destruction of nature. Consider the scope and trajectory of the problem. How can a system that has consumed more resources and energy in the last 50 years than all previous civilization be made to stabilize and reduce its rate of resource depletion and pollution emission? How can such a wasteful, poisonous and unparticipatory society. A century ago the great socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg predicted the future for humanity would be “socialism or barbarism”. In light of the fiasco at Copenhagen, and the deepening crisis of climate change, we are compelled to revise the slogan to read: “Eco-socialism or extinction”.