Apolitical Staples

Just because China and India don’t have targets doesn’t mean they aren’t working to reduce their own level of greenhouse gas emmissions. And both those countries are expected to have targets applied to them in the next phase of the Kyoto Accord.

And no, Australia and the US haven’t done more under a non binding agreement. The US hasn’t reduced their ghg emmissions by one bit. They still continues to rise out of control.

China and India don’t give a flying fuck about Kyoto and will never sign on to any version of this stupidity that impinges on their economic expansion. Both countries are massive emitters because the burn vast amounts of coal.

Wake up suckers - Kyoto is an economic treaty - its another UN scam just like the “oil for Saddam’s palaces & Kofi’s buddies bank accounts”

Thank god somebody in Ottawa woke up and pulled the plug instead of sending billioins of dollars overseas to buy “credits”

Always remember - the same people who 30 years ago were screaming about the coming of the next ice age are the same fools who are now screaming the sky is falling over global warming.

Go figure …

Always remember - the same people who 30 years ago were..

..denying that smoking causes cancer or denying that sulphur emmissions cause acid rain that’s destroying our lakes or denying that CFC’s are punching a hole in the ozone layer or denying that dumping mercury into our waterways causes flipper babies are the same fools who are denying global warming now.

Robert, how do you figure that China and India are working on reducing ghg’s?

What are you basing this on?

May 18, 2006 STANDARD-FREEHOLDER Rookie environment minister taking heat over climate change

She’s stopped telling the lie and unleashed a major hoopla in a portfolio that was never one of Harper’s top priorities

Don Martin CanWest News Service OTTAWA

The bureaucrats suggested she duck. Keep her head down for another 18 months until safely after the next election. Pretend the Kyoto accord was a pollution-reduction target fact and not a mission-impossible fiction.

In other words, continue spreading the big Liberal lie even knowing the former government’s $10-billion plan would never come close to cutting greenhouse gas emissions to a level six per cent below 1990 levels.

To her credit, Environment Minister Rona Ambrose arrived at her new job and asked them to translate the Kyoto-enforced reduction of 195 megatonnes of carbon into terms she could understand.

The bureaucrats fiddled with calculators and pencils. Well, they said, it’s a bit more than all the power generation in Canada. If the country went dark and cut back a few hundred thousand cars, it could hit the target.

That’s when the rubber hit the road for the petite firecracker MP from Alberta. She declared Kyoto, as we know it in Canada, dead.

Ambrose takes the chair job in Bonn, Germany, this week at an international conference on climate change in a curious position. She’ll represent the first signatory of the Kyoto accord to publicly admit her home country can’t meet its treaty commitment of reducing gas emissions to six per cent below 1990 levels.

Long before the $45 million (!!!!!) conference in Montreal in the thick of last November’s election campaign, the event where an electioneering Paul Martin scolded the United States for having a superior gas-reduction record, that much was obvious.

“At that time, they knew we could not meet the targets and no one said a word,” Ambrose said in an interview Friday. “We could have kept lying and continued through the next election, but I told them we should admit it and get out of the target business. It sent shock waves through the department. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying.”

TRIUMPH OVER PIPEDREAMS In a triumph of pragmatism over pipedreams, Ambrose went to work eliminating plans to purchase hot air abroad in favour of tangible investments at home.

She killed Canadian plans to purchase a forest in Costa Rica as part of the Kyoto caper. She vetoed trips by senior environment officials to Russia to buy fixer-upper factoriese for the emission credits they could generate.

And she axed a continuing push to direct Canadian foreign aid and development assistance away from the most needy recipients into the hands of less-deserving beneficiaries just because they offered clean-up credits.

“The tentacles of this target-chasing went through almost every department,” she says. “That really blew my mind.” And yet, she hedges still in delivering last rights to the contentious global treaty, pushing for Canada’s greenhouse gas reduction requirements to be softened.

By how much? you ask. She doesn’t know. “If we set a domestic target, it will be a reachable target.”

And what’s the penalty if we break our international commitment? Again, she doesn’t know for sure.

But on this point, Ambrose sounds resolute. Canadian taxpayers will not be sending billions overseas to buy hot air rights. The money to fight our pollution will be invested in Canadian know-how.

It sounds simplistic. But transferring pollution rights from countries that have no intention of polluting to those seeking a bigger carbon belch doesn’t add up to a reduced global discharge in my rudimentary math. OK, true, companies forced to pay for their pollution will find ways to eliminate it, but it still smacks of a massive transfer of wealth from developed to developing countries, which might not be the best Earth-saving strategy.

So give Ambrose credit. She’s stopped telling the lie and unleashed a major hoopla in a portfolio that was never one of Stephen Harper’s top priorities.

Beyond the greenhouse gas fight, she has set in motion water, air and soil reviews, an environmental-protection overhaul and a renewable energy strategy, which will be unveiled in a few weeks.

But the toughest fight will be killing Kyoto once and for all. “It’s not like I don’t know the Liberals haven’t sold Kyoto to Canadians. It’s got the support of 89 per cent of Quebecers. But we’ve got to tell Canadians the truth.”

That’s one heckuva green minister talking. But in this department, that’s a compliment

since when has the McClellend weenie ever had Facts to Back up his Libcomsimp rhetoric?

With him if it isn’t in the Jack Layton book of “Correct” phrases and truths (ahem) it is “Capitalist Imperalist Lies”

For a guy with his own blog he sure spend a lot of time trolling the conservative world. McClelland your a Gnat!

The Liberals are idiots, that’s why they aren’t in power now. Where is the Conservative plan to reduce greenhouse gases?

Oh and it is a “binding paradigm” only if you enforce it (as Stockwell Day is showing us with gun control). The Liberals were great at signing things but not so great at enforcing things. That’s one of the reasons (aside from sanity) that I am not a Liberal.

Yeah, that is why I used so-called.

Anybody know of any scientific discussion of the practical feasibility of significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions and what the effect on global mean temperature would be if we actually did reduce emissions to the extent mandated under Kyoto? I saw a commenter over at BBG the other day suggesting the job wouldn’t be finished until CO2 levels were at pre-industrial levels. That seems absurd on its face.

Well all laws are only as binding as you choose to enforce them.

Further to OC’s point, I read (I can’t remember where) that Canada is responsible for 2% of the worlds CO2 emissions. Say we reduce to where we promised we would, global rates go down by what? 0.5%?

I assume that gets gombled up in a month of Chinese growth not to mention Indian growth.

Hey, I am all for being a responsible player in the world community but we have to have players involved for this to work.

And OC brought up another good piont last week. Can we actually reverse this trend in the short-term? And if not is investment better served in preparing for it or at a minimun in conjunctiom with?

Robert, how do you figure that China and India are working on reducing ghg’s? What are you basing this on?

The info is easily found with a google search. Here’s a couple of examples.

However, although no UN figures are available, analysts say there is evidence to back up Chinese claims of a reduction in emissions during the late 1990s, largely due to increased efficiency and slower economic growth. China’s leaders recognise that climate change could devastate their society and ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2002. In 2004 Beijing announced plans to generate 10% of its power from renewable sources by 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3143798.stm

China Cuts Greenhouse Gases, Contradicting U.S.

Robert, the BBC article you quote from shows ~50% growth in CO2 for China from 1990 to 2002. I would expect that an economy growing at ~10% a year would have seen their emissions increasing still.

Besides, they are the No.2 emitting country in the world. Why should they be exempt?

And while we are looking check this out (http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1223/p01s04-sten.html)

“The official treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions hasn’t gone into effect yet and already three countries (China, India and US) are planning to build nearly 850 new coal-fired plants, which would pump up to five times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce.”

…”China is the dominant player. The country is on track to add 562 coal-fired plants - nearly half the world total of plants expected to come online in the next eight years. India could add 213such plants; the US, 72.”

This story is from 2004 - which is after your second article and shows they will have growth in CO2 far beyond the graph at the BBC (as well as for US and India).

Again I ask, how will anything Canada does in CO2 reductions help if these other countries continue to outstrip our reductions by several orders of magnitude?