The Complete Hypocrisy about Kyoto
Canada's new Environment Minister, Rona Ambrose, is getting grilled by the party of hypocrisy, the Liberals. Under the recent 12 year Liberal reign, Canada never came close to meeting our emission targets. Yet now these underachievers are blaming the new party, just 100 days into their reign, of not living up to the Kyoto agreement. Pathetic.
The truth is that Canadians would have to dramatically change the way they live their lives if there was any hope of Kyoto being met. No one else on the face of the earth is prepared to make such changes, so why should we? Yet there are those Liberals, claiming we should. The sad thing is that such words do appeal to their base - people who clearly find "logic" and "facts" too great an impediment to their thinking, so they never bother using them.
With a minority government currently in power, there will almost surely be another federal election sometime next year. At that time, Canadians will have an important decision to make: Do we return to the old days of rarely to never walking our talk, or do we actually grow up and start accepting some small degree of accountability and responsibility?
Sadly, I fear that most will opt for the easy route.
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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
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