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Harper, Stelmach feel the green heat Prime minister decides against boycotting Copenhagen summit; Alberta premier ready to accept climate-change goals in step with US Gary Park For Petroleum News
There is talk of a re-branding of the two Canadian political leaders — Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach — seen as the least supportive of cap-and-trade systems as part of climate-change legislation.
Feeling the heat from his global peers and under pressure at home, Harper has decided he will attend the United Nations-sponsored summit in Copenhagen Dec. 7-18, while Stelmach, in fending off increasing salvos from environmentalists, has agreed that whatever measures the United States takes he will go along with.
Harper, having already declared that Copenhagen was unlikely to reach a consensus, was left with no choice but to attend the forum when U.S. President Barack Obama and China’s Premier Wen Jiabao announced they would attend the summit.
He was also feeling a squeeze from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who called for Canada to set “ambitious” new targets for cutting greenhouse gases in the next 10 to 15 years.
“Many countries, developed and developing countries, have come out with ambitious targets,” Ban said Nov. 27.
“Canada is going to soon chair the G8 (the world’s leading economic powers) and therefore it is only natural that Canada should come out with ambitious midterm targets,” he said.
Harper looking for agreement Attending a Nov. 26-27 annual conference of leaders of Commonwealth (former British Empire) nations in Trinidad, Harper sidestepped questions on the impact of Ban’s statements.
“I notice the UN secretary-general made particular praiseworthy note of targets that President Obama has laid out. Those targets are of course completely in line with the government of Canada’s policy,” he said.
Harper said he is now eager to see countries reach a detailed agreement on greenhouse gas reductions in Copenhagen, but gave no indication that Canada is considering deeper cuts in the medium term.
Rather than setting “abstract targets,” he wants a comprehensive pact in Copenhagen where we will “actually get on with reducing emissions.”
French President Nicolas Sakozy, who visited the Commonwealth conference, said: “Over the last three days, things have really started to shift. We have entered into a very active negotiations phase.”
To boycott Copenhagen would have left Harper without an effective role in shaping global policy.
Stelmach undecided about Copenhagen Also in danger of getting left behind is Stelmach, who has not yet decided whether to join the premiers of Canada’s largest provinces — Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia — at Copenhagen.
He has been left to lash out at environmentalists, notably former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who has described the Alberta oil sands as a threat to the “future of human civilization.”
He said Gore’s claims about the carbon footprint created by the oil sands are “absolutely wrong. … In fact, they’re preposterous.”
Stelmach said Gore and some U.S. state governors should be more focused on the “issue they have right there in their own backyard,” arguing that coal-fired electricity generation is a much larger source of greenhouse gas emissions than the oil sands, which account for less than one-tenth of 1 percent of global emissions.
He said those critics want to “put the oil sands to bed, to just shut them down. We have to do whatever we can to protect our markets.”
While offering that familiar refrain, Stelmach also said Alberta, while not prepared to absorb higher energy costs or GHG reduction levels than other North American jurisdictions, was open to Canadian climate-change goals that were in step with U.S. policy.
“We’re not going to be boy scouts here and … start increasing the price of energy for Albertans and Canadians without our best trading partner doing the same thing,” he said.
But Stelmach said he remains resolutely opposed to cap-and-trade, arguing it is “silly” to contemplate sending money out of one jurisdiction to another to buy carbon credits without reducing carbon emissions.
He called on Canada’s provincial governments to join forces behind an achievable climate change plan and urged other provinces to resist casting the oil sands as the main villain in Canada’s bid to lower GHGs.
Report lays out dangers The dangers to the Canadian economy of ill-considered climate-change measures were laid out Nov. 27 in a Conference Board of Canada report.
It said Canada should lobby U.S. legislators and persuade them that certain elements of proposed U.S. policy, such as possible carbon tariffs on Canadian goods, should be dropped.
Environment Minister Jim Prentice has already spent time in Washington warning policymakers that providing cash rewards for companies that meet certain environmental benchmarks would give those businesses a financial advantage over foreign rivals and be a “prescription for disaster” for the global economy and trade.
Harper told a New York audience earlier this fall that such measures “would become a front for protectionism quicker than you could say hello.”
The conference board report said that forcing Canadian industries to buy emissions permits at the U.S. border if Canada’s climate-change policies were deemed to be lacking, could undercut cross-border shipments of paper, petrochemicals, plastic materials, iron and steel, aluminum and other nonferrous metals that were worth about C$48 billion in 2008.
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