Canada officially pulls out of Kyoto agreement
OTTAWA — Canada will officially become the first country to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol climate change agreement Saturday, following years of criticism from the Harper government and lobbying from major industrial polluters.
The withdrawal, first announced by Environment Minister Peter Kent in 2011, coincides with new public opinion research by the Environics Institute that shows more than half of Canadians support British Columbia’s carbon tax and believe governments should s h ow more leadership with regulations and standards to get consumers and industry to change their habits and slash heat-trapping pollution.
“We (Canadians) are a large emitter of greenhouse gases, despite what the government would like us to believe,” said Steven Guilbeault, a veteran environmentalist who co-founded Equiterre, a Montreal-based conservation group. “We’ve contributed more than our fair share to this problem over the last few decades, so we have a moral obligation to do everything we can and to do our part, which we’re not doing right now to solve the problem.”
The 1997 agreement, signed in Kyoto, Japan, required developed countries to collectively reduce their emissions by about five per cent below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.
Kent declined interview requests from Postmedia News, but has previously said Canada supports efforts to reach a new binding deal by 2015 — coming into force by 2020 — that requires action from all major polluting countries, such as China, which was not required to meet binding targets under Kyoto, and the United States, which never ratified the agreement.
Guilbeault, who scaled the CN tower in 2001, posting a banner calling on the federal government to ratify Kyoto, said it’s easy for some critics to point fingers at the world’s largest sources of greenhouse gas pollution in China and the U.S., but that Canada must also join a collective effort to avert dangerous climate change.
The agreement’s legally binding targets, accepted by the Canadian Parliament in 2002, also helped create a free market global system that encouraged green technologies, while requiring polluters to pay for their emissions, prompting anti-Kyoto lobbying and marketing campaigns from the business community and climate change skeptics.
Meantime, the Focus Canada 2012 survey, an annual tracking poll of 1,500 Canadians conducted by the Environics Institute in November, revealed that 57 per cent of Canadians now believe it’s “reasonable” for the average household to pay $100 per year in higher taxes to support climate change action, up from 47 per cent from August 2008.
The poll also revealed that 64 per cent of respondents in British Columbia now supported the government’s carbon tax on gasoline and other fossil fuels, up from 54 per cent in 2008. Over the four years, the percentage of Canadians who believed governments should implement new standards and regulations to tackle climate change rose from 46 to 59 per cent, with the rest believing industry and consumers should take a larger role.
Kent formally announced that the Harper government was giving its required one-year notice to pull out of the Kyoto treaty at a news conference outside the House of Commons in December 2011. At the time, he argued that it would cost $14 billion for Canada to remain in Kyoto, but he later backtracked from this estimate, saying the amount would fluctuate based on prices in a volatile market.