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The same 'If everyone isn't in, then there's no point' position of the Harper gov't. Wow...what leadership!
| quote: | No deal unless big polluters in, PMO says
Jul 02, 2008 04:49 PM
Steve Rennie
THE CANADIAN PRESS
OTTAWA–Stephen Harper will make the case to fellow G8 leaders next week that it's futile to reach a global agreement on climate change without including the world's biggest polluters.
The prime minister will argue that major emitters of greenhouse gases like the United States, China and India must be part of any climate-change pact, Harper spokesman Dimitri Soudas said today.
"At the end of the day, if we don't get an agreement where major emitters play a role in helping to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, we're simply not making any progress," Soudas told journalists at a pre-summit briefing.
"In order to genuinely tackle climate change and to start seeing concrete results, we need to have major emitters on board. That includes countries like the United States, China and India."
It's a message Harper took to Europe in May when he donned his travelling salesman's hat on a whirlwind trip to France, Germany, Italy and Britain.
Harper's office billed the visit as an opportunity for the prime minister to explain Canada's green plan on an international stage, prior to the G8 summit.
The Group of Eight wealthy industrialized nations faces mounting pressure from environmentalists to devise mid-century targets to halve greenhouse-gas emissions.
There are also expectations that this year's summit on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido will build on last year's G8 meetings in Germany, where member countries vowed to work toward significant reductions to greenhouse gases.
Clare Demerse, a senior policy analyst at the Pembina Institute, said Canada's opposition to any climate-change deal that doesn't include the big emitters could stunt progress at the coming summit.
"There's a real risk that either they don't make progress from what they said last year, or they even slip back," she said.
Already there's a wide chasm within the G8, and between richer and poorer countries, over how to shoulder the burden of tackling climate change.
That clash of nations manifested itself last December at high-level United Nations talks in Bali, Indonesia, where Canada sided with the United States, Japan and a small group of other countries in opposing specific references to emissions targets for developed countries by 2020.
The Conservatives have staunchly maintained that the battle to cut greenhouse gases is for naught unless all major polluters curb their emissions. Both Canada and the U.S. oppose any new agreement that does not contain targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from the big emitters.
A White House spokesman reiterated this week that the G8 nations alone cannot set effective long-term goals to cut greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide.
"To us, it is not appropriate for the G8 countries alone to set a goal or to pick a numerical target and then seek to impose it on major developing economies," said Dan Price, assistant to U.S. President George W. Bush for international economic affairs.
The UN official in charge of the climate change file, Yvo de Boer, has described this all-or-nothing approach as hypocritical.
The Bali talks last year yielded an agreement that countries would strive for a new global climate-change treaty by the end of next year, covering the period after Kyoto's obligations expire in 2012.
Japan has proposed a post-Kyoto plan to halve global emissions from current levels by 2050. The Japanese plan would earmark US$10 billion to help developing countries cut their greenhouse gases. Tokyo, however, hasn't specified which year it would use as a baseline.
The European members of the G8 – France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. – will likely align together on any climate-change agreement, Demerse said.
She added Canada's position could leave it isolated with the United States at the G8.
The Harper government has also faced scorn at home and abroad for flaunting its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol to cut greenhouse gases six per cent below 1990 levels by 2012.
The Conservatives have pledged to cut greenhouse-gas emissions 20 per cent below 2006 levels by 2020 through a tangle of regulatory measures, a cap-and-trade scheme, investments in green-technology funds and credits for companies that reduced their emissions before 2006.
Key regulations will be tabled next fall, and will likely come into effect in 2010.
Critics charge the Tory plan is less stringent than the Kyoto targets since it uses 2006 as its baseline year, when emissions were higher than 1990 levels. Canada's emissions in 2006 were 721 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, compared to 592 megatonnes in 1990.
The Conservatives say the Kyoto targets are unattainable, and trying to meet them would tank the economy. Complying with Kyoto, they say, would lower Canada's gross domestic product by 6.5 per cent, cost 276,000 people their jobs, reduce per capita income by 2.9 per cent next year and squander $51 billion in national economic activity.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called for a tax on products imported from countries like Canada that don't respect Kyoto.
The G8 includes Britain, Canada, the U.S., France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia. Japan has also invited Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Korea and South Africa to a parallel summit on climate change on July 9.
The G8 summit marks the departure of Bush, whose presidential term ends this year. And it marks the first appearance by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who took over from his mentor Vladimir Putin in May. |
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