Politics undercuts Kyoto conference

Next Monday, the day the opposition parties plan to bring down Prime Minister Paul Martin’s government, a major United Nations conference on the Kyoto agreement and climate change is to begin in Montreal. As conference host, Ottawa will find itself in a most awkward spot. Participating countries that will be looking to Canada for leadership will be greeted instead by a caretaker government with no mandate to move the agenda forward on the planet’s most pressing environmental problem. In preparation for the conference, new reports on climate change have been issued in recent days at a furious pace. In one major report, the U. N. says progress thus far in cutting greenhouse gas emissions resulted more from happenstance than deliberate action. The report found that the 5.9 per cent reduction in such emissions in the developed nations from 1990 to 2003 came entirely from the economic collapse in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. With the return to growth in these countries and the lack of real progress in the rich Western countries where emissions actually rose between 1990 and 2003, the U. N. worries that by 2010 the developed world could end up spewing 10 per cent more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than in 1990. That’s a far cry from meeting the original Kyoto target of an overall reduction of 5 per cent. Add to that the increases expected in developing countries, notably India and China, and instead of a slowdown in global warming, the world could find itself speeding it up. The sense of complacency at the root of these U. N. projections is nowhere more evident than it is here in Canada. Among the world’s richest countries, including the United States which refused to sign the Kyoto agreement, no one has a worse track record than we do. Between 1990 and 2003, Canada’s emissions of greenhouse gases grew by 24.2 per cent. They are predicted to keep rising over the next five years in spite of Ottawa’s commitment to cut them to a level 6 per cent below 1990 levels. But if Canada appears to be less concerned about global warming than many other countries, another report says it has more at stake than any other industrialized nation. The study, prepared by a blue- ribbon advisory body at Martin’s request, warns that Canada is totally unprepared to deal with the “ unavoidable” impacts of climate change.

Saying the danger to the country is “ perhaps unmatched in times of peace,” the study predicts that even if emissions fell to zero tomorrow, no Canadian would escape the impacts of climate change. Citing the vulnerability of our forests, coastal areas, and the Prairies, the report castigates Ottawa for failing “ to adequately initiate and co- ordinate Canadian strategic policy responses to climate change.” The goal of the Montreal conference is to set rules for implementing the Kyoto Protocol and to develop an international action plan for further emissions reductions after the agreement expires in 2012. However, a group of Canadian business leaders is urging Ottawa to set its own tough, new decade- by- decade targets for emissions cuts all the way to 2050. That call for a long- term plan for combating climate change, and the dire warnings of the advisory body, which Martin has yet to make public, must not be left on the conference table after it ends. They raise fundamental issues that must be addressed in the coming election campaign.

Martin says the election will be about the economic challenges the country faces. But when his own hand- picked advisory body says climate change “ must be seen as an issue that touches on the foundations of Canadians’ way of life ( including) jobs and economic competitiveness,” it surely has to be a focal point of the election campaign.