In the media scrum after last week’s speech before the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Prime Minister Chretien refused to answer journalists’ questions on global warming and the Kyoto Protocol.
And no wonder. U.S. President George W. Bush’s decision to renege on his country’s Kyoto commitment, deeming it against the economic interests of the United States, has exposed Chretien’s climate change rhetoric for the sham that it is.
Up to now, Ottawa has been able to follow the Americans on the tricky global warming file. By doing so, Canada’s political leaders have had it both ways. They have earnestly stated their concern about climate change.
They have sworn Canada’s commitment to the Kyoto process. And they have watched as our greenhouse gas emissions rise despite Canada’s Kyoto target.
Similarly, the former U.S. administration expressed their concerns about global warming, but teamed up with Canada to make sure serious action was never taken. At the climate negotiations in Bonn last fall, the two countries derailed progress by insisting on so called “flexibility mechanisms” that were rejected by most of the world because they would have crippled the treaty.
These loopholes would have allowed some countries to technically meet their targets without actual, significant, reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, the Kyoto Protocol would have been a climate treaty in name only, an apt symbol of Chretien’s approach to the problem.
Some call Chretien’s approach hypocritical, but it has been an easy political ride so far. He has avoided offending the petroleum and auto industries by staying away from innovative new policies that would encourage us to use energy more efficiently or switch to renewable energy.
By pushing for expanded tar sands instead, he’s been able to claim he’s building bridges with the West. Luckily for the prime minister, the Official Opposition has been too busy investigating his personal financial deals to notice the glaring discrepancy between rhetoric and action.
But now, George W. Bush has vapourized Prime Minister Chretien’s cover.
The U.S. president’s insistence that narrow, short-term U.S. economic interests take precedence over the welfare of everyone on the planet has offended leaders from across the globe.
But at least the president’s rhetoric now matches his country’s climate change policy. It’s impossible to call for a continental energy deal based on massive oil and gas expansion and still reduce greenhouse gas emissions to meet climate goals.
Chretien has separated himself from Bush by restating Canada’s commitment to Kyoto. But his unseemly haste in embracing Bush’s continental energy proposal directly contradicts his words.
Boosting petroleum production for export to the U.S., particularly from the oilsands, will cause our greenhouse gas emissions to skyrocket.
The emissions from a typical 150,000 barrel-a-day tar sands facility are equal to those of 1.35 million additional cars.
Yet there is absolutely no doubt about the urgency of attacking emissions now. In the last three months the world’s best experts have released three of the most unequivocal, alarming reports yet on the deteriorating state of our atmosphere due to greenhouse gas emissions.
Sound accounting means that the revenue from new petroleum exports must be balanced against the climate costs.
These costs include damage such as crop destruction and land erosion from droughts, deluges and other erratic weather; losses in fisheries as salmon retreat north from southern rivers and in forestry from forest fires and insect infestations; and in public health from heat illnesses and intensified air pollution.
Despite the need, Ottawa has no specific strategy for emissions reduction — only last year’s promise to spend $500 million by 2005 to see what ideas emerge.
The only economically viable way to curb the emissions crisis is by quickly bringing on clean, renewable energy sources and boosting energy efficiency. But after 20 years of subsidizing the oil and gas industry — $43 billion since 1970 — and starving the alternatives, Ottawa’s instinctive response to Bush’s continental energy pact is still “yes.”
In last week’s speech, Chretien asked his audience to judge him by looking to the future, not the past. We agree.
But the future is not in producing more dirty fuels to meet profligate energy consumption. It is in clean energy, energy efficiency and the multitude of high-technology and construction jobs to support this direction.
The future must be clean energy, not more dirty fuels.
(Jim Fulton is executive director of the David Suzuki Foundation.)
