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Canada gropes through a Kyoto fog Conservative government may look at long-term, made-in-Canada plan; may be cutting climate-control budgets by 40 percent Gary Park For Petroleum News
The Canadian government is tying itself in knots over Kyoto and environmentalists are more than eager to add to the tangle.
In the three months since they were elected, the Conservatives under Prime Minister Stephen Harper have sent out a succession of confusing and even conflicting messages.
Environment Minister Rona Ambrose set the ball rolling in a February interview with the Canadian Press when she said Harper has the political will to move “very quickly” on an action plan to adopt the Kyoto Protocol.
Elizabeth May, executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, welcomed the “very clear signal” from Ambrose that Harper wanted to pursue Kyoto.
If true, that would be a 180-degree turnaround for the Conservatives, who had threatened to cut spending contained in the previous Liberal government’s Kyoto programs.
But Ambrose quickly sent out a letter saying Canadian Press had “misrepresented” the government’s position that Kyoto is “seriously flawed.”
In a later interview with the Financial Post, Ambrose said the Conservatives have to “deal with the consequences” of the Liberal government’s pledge to meet Kyoto’s target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 6 percent below 1990 levels by 2012 — a goal she has said is “unrealistic and unattainable.”
Scrap Kyoto, develop made-in-Canada plan Since then, Ambrose has retreated, telling reporters she believes the government should scrap Kyoto and develop a long-term, made-in-Canada plan to deal with climate change, leaving environmentalists to stir the pot.
Sierra Club climate change adviser John Bennett, who has access to senior federal officials, said earlier in April that a “slash and burn” order has been issued to cut budgets devoted to climate change by 40 percent.
That would gut C$5.4 billion in federal funding promised by the Liberals for the next five years, he said.
Topping the list, according to Bennett, would be the elimination of a Climate Fund Agency due to get C$1 billion a year to engage in the global trading of emissions credits — a strategy the Conservatives say would involve buying credits from industries in the former Soviet Union that have been scaled down or closed altogether.
The government has only conceded that it will review the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, which incorporates limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
The best Ambrose has offered is that Ottawa is reviewing all 100 programs covered by the act.
Her office will neither confirm nor deny that decisions have been made to cut budgets by 40 percent.
However, Harper told reporters April 13 that other than terminating a “small number of programs that were set to expire,” wholesale cutbacks are not in the works.
Harper: ‘worst results in the world’ He said the government’s hand has been forced because the Liberals spent “billions of dollars on so-called climate change programs and we have the worst results in the world.”
Harper said the Conservatives will concentrate on building an action plan that moves from just spending money to achieving “some objectives.”
The latest figures show that, despite spending C$3 billion so far on Kyoto, Canada’s annual emissions have climbed from 596 megatonnes (a megatonne is equivalent to 1 million metric tons) in 1990 to 740 megatonnes in 2003.
Even without further increases, meeting the Kyoto target would involve lowering emissions by 240 megatonnes — a goal industrial leaders including those from the petroleum sector say would make Canada uncompetitive, costing thousands of jobs and billions in taxpayers’ dollars.
The latest statistics show the petroleum and electricity industries account for 38 percent of total emissions, 31.2 percent of which come from Alberta and 27.9 percent from Ontario.
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