Blame Canada
Okay people. It’s time for all of you to pile on Scott and Chris. Turns out they’re the bad guys in the whole climate change kerfuffle:
At last year’s climate summit, Canada was voted the Fossil of the Year—an award handed out byClimate Action Network International to the conference’s most obstructive country. So far, Canada is on track for a repeat victory—in the daily “fossil” awards at Copenhagen, it has landed in the top three six times. George Monbiot recently wrote that Canada is now to climate as Japan is to whaling. And on Monday, Canada took the second to last place on the Climate Protection Index, a project ranking major polluters on their efforts to curb emissions. Only Saudi Arabia scored lower on the list.
And Canada is about to become even more unpopular. On Tuesday, leaked documents from the Harper administration indicated that the nation is considering even weaker emission reduction targets for fossil fuel industries. The documents suggest that the Tories plan to abandon a 2007 plan that called for cutting emissions from the oil and gas sectors by 48 megatonnes. A new proposal only calls for a 15 megatonne decrease—raising questions about whether the country could reach its stated pledge at Copenhagen of reducing emissions 20 percent by 2020.
Canada’s new slogan?
No more Mr. Nice Guy.
Good for you, Canada! Way to stick it to the man!
Well, only Saudi Arabia has more oil than we do.
I don’t agree with my government’s position on this, though, and there’s been quite a lot of protests (including people climbing the Parliament building and hanging a pro-climate-action banner off them) against their refusal to act. But our PM is from Alberta, which views the oil sands as the foundation of its prosperity (as well as providing jobs for about half of employed Newfoundlanders), and he’s not going to do anything to endanger that. Which is probably a bad call given that a fairly plausible result of climate change would be another prairie dust bowl.Report
It’s worth noting that a number of Canadian provinces — Quebec, Ontario, BC — have gone to Copenhagen with their own, much more aggressive targets on emissions reductions.Report
Good for the Canadians. Let some other country play the nice guy on this issue.Report