The folly of Kyoto
The folly of Kyoto
National Post
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Pablo Rodriguez, a Liberal MP from Quebec, has a private member's bill proceeding through the House of Commons that has the backing of all three opposition parties. If it passes, as appears likely, the resultant Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act would require Ottawa to honour Canada's Kyoto commitments and reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions by more than a third over just the next five years.
Working Canadians and taxpayers had better hope Mr. Rodriguez's legislation fails, because there are only two ways to achieve his goal by 2012, both unpalatable. Either the federal government could force a radical change in Canadians' lifestyles -- restricting automobile use, limiting electrical consumption and shutting down industries employing hundreds of thousands of workers, thereby sending our economy into a tailspin -- or it could send tens of billions of tax dollars abroad to buy "carbon credits" from developing and underdeveloped nations.
Mr. Rodriguez, his Liberal caucus mates and environmentalists are reassuring Canadians that the emissions targets imposed by the new bill could be achieved with very little pain for ordinary Canadians. But that is a pipe dream. There is no magic new technology on the horizon that would enable a nation of 32 million to cut hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide output in five short years -- no hydrogen cars, no emissions-free smelters, no solar-powered 18- wheelers. In order to reach our Kyoto targets at this late date, Canada would have to shutter all its coal-fired power plants, plus all its auto plants and Alberta's oilsands. In the late 1990s, the Liberals' own economic forecasts projected 450,000 lost jobs from such reductions.
Mr. Rodriguez's bill is naive in the extreme. It would consign us all to freezing together in the unemployed darkness. And despite all this sacrifice, it wouldn't even do any good against global warming.
The Kyoto accords were more about symbolism than substance. None of the large developing nations -- China, India, Indonesia or Brazil -- is covered by its strictures. Not only do they not have to scale back their emissions under Kyoto, they are not even required to hold them constant. Their emissions may grow without penalty.
Russia and the former Soviet bloc states, which are covered by Kyoto, have since been exempted from its emission targets. Which means the only countries to which the reductions apply are Western industrial nations. And even if they all managed to cripple their economies to meet their limits, their actions would serve to delay the warming expected in the next century by only four years.
The other option is for Ottawa to buy emissions credits from other countries, notably Russia. (Russia has unused emissions room because since 1990, Kyoto's baseline, a lot of the country's old, dirty Soviet-era power and manufacturing plants have been closed.) This, though, is just a feel-good accounting trick whose only purpose would be allowing Canada to assert technical bragging rights about meeting its Kyoto targets -- it wouldn't result in preventing a single molecule of actual carbon dioxide from being emitted.
Canada has already spend about $1-billion buying up Russia's unused emissions room. To meet Mr. Rodriguez's targets, it would have to spend another $20-billion to $60-billion. As well as being a complete waste of money from the point of view of Canadian taxpayers, consider where the cash would be going: the authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin -- which is helping to protect Iran's nuclear program at the UN, turning Chechnya into scorched earth, bullying its European neighbours and rolling back domestic civil liberties to the Cazarist era -- would become Canada's biggest foreign aid recipient, larger than all others combined.
We have a question: If it were so easy to cut Canada's carbon dioxide output by nearly 35% -- the reduction needed to honour our Kyoto commitments -- why didn't the Liberals bring forward legislation when they were in government that obliged them to do so? The answer: Because it can't be done except by devastating the national economy.
The Liberals were in charge of the Kyoto file for over eight years. During that time, our greenhouse gas emissions went from 12% above 1990 levels to more than 30% above. From 1998 onward, the Liberals spent over $6-billion on environmental initiatives. But as former environment commissioner Johanne Gelinas said in her final report last fall, much of that money could not be accounted for, and none of the spending produced any measurable improvement in Canada's emissions. The Liberals -- including then-environment minister Stephane Dion -- could never figure out a way to reduce emissions, or even slow their growth.
Now for crass political gain, the opposition parties seem set to saddle the Tories with Pablo Rodriguez's pie-in-the-sky bill, and perhaps start a recession in the process. When the next election comes, voters should remember who set Canada down this road.
© National Post 2007
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
=0)document.write(unescape('%3C')+'\!-'+'-')
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National Post
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Pablo Rodriguez, a Liberal MP from Quebec, has a private member's bill proceeding through the House of Commons that has the backing of all three opposition parties. If it passes, as appears likely, the resultant Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act would require Ottawa to honour Canada's Kyoto commitments and reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions by more than a third over just the next five years.
Working Canadians and taxpayers had better hope Mr. Rodriguez's legislation fails, because there are only two ways to achieve his goal by 2012, both unpalatable. Either the federal government could force a radical change in Canadians' lifestyles -- restricting automobile use, limiting electrical consumption and shutting down industries employing hundreds of thousands of workers, thereby sending our economy into a tailspin -- or it could send tens of billions of tax dollars abroad to buy "carbon credits" from developing and underdeveloped nations.
Mr. Rodriguez, his Liberal caucus mates and environmentalists are reassuring Canadians that the emissions targets imposed by the new bill could be achieved with very little pain for ordinary Canadians. But that is a pipe dream. There is no magic new technology on the horizon that would enable a nation of 32 million to cut hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide output in five short years -- no hydrogen cars, no emissions-free smelters, no solar-powered 18- wheelers. In order to reach our Kyoto targets at this late date, Canada would have to shutter all its coal-fired power plants, plus all its auto plants and Alberta's oilsands. In the late 1990s, the Liberals' own economic forecasts projected 450,000 lost jobs from such reductions.
Mr. Rodriguez's bill is naive in the extreme. It would consign us all to freezing together in the unemployed darkness. And despite all this sacrifice, it wouldn't even do any good against global warming.
The Kyoto accords were more about symbolism than substance. None of the large developing nations -- China, India, Indonesia or Brazil -- is covered by its strictures. Not only do they not have to scale back their emissions under Kyoto, they are not even required to hold them constant. Their emissions may grow without penalty.
Russia and the former Soviet bloc states, which are covered by Kyoto, have since been exempted from its emission targets. Which means the only countries to which the reductions apply are Western industrial nations. And even if they all managed to cripple their economies to meet their limits, their actions would serve to delay the warming expected in the next century by only four years.
The other option is for Ottawa to buy emissions credits from other countries, notably Russia. (Russia has unused emissions room because since 1990, Kyoto's baseline, a lot of the country's old, dirty Soviet-era power and manufacturing plants have been closed.) This, though, is just a feel-good accounting trick whose only purpose would be allowing Canada to assert technical bragging rights about meeting its Kyoto targets -- it wouldn't result in preventing a single molecule of actual carbon dioxide from being emitted.
Canada has already spend about $1-billion buying up Russia's unused emissions room. To meet Mr. Rodriguez's targets, it would have to spend another $20-billion to $60-billion. As well as being a complete waste of money from the point of view of Canadian taxpayers, consider where the cash would be going: the authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin -- which is helping to protect Iran's nuclear program at the UN, turning Chechnya into scorched earth, bullying its European neighbours and rolling back domestic civil liberties to the Cazarist era -- would become Canada's biggest foreign aid recipient, larger than all others combined.
We have a question: If it were so easy to cut Canada's carbon dioxide output by nearly 35% -- the reduction needed to honour our Kyoto commitments -- why didn't the Liberals bring forward legislation when they were in government that obliged them to do so? The answer: Because it can't be done except by devastating the national economy.
The Liberals were in charge of the Kyoto file for over eight years. During that time, our greenhouse gas emissions went from 12% above 1990 levels to more than 30% above. From 1998 onward, the Liberals spent over $6-billion on environmental initiatives. But as former environment commissioner Johanne Gelinas said in her final report last fall, much of that money could not be accounted for, and none of the spending produced any measurable improvement in Canada's emissions. The Liberals -- including then-environment minister Stephane Dion -- could never figure out a way to reduce emissions, or even slow their growth.
Now for crass political gain, the opposition parties seem set to saddle the Tories with Pablo Rodriguez's pie-in-the-sky bill, and perhaps start a recession in the process. When the next election comes, voters should remember who set Canada down this road.
© National Post 2007
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
=0)document.write(unescape('%3C')+'\!-'+'-')
//-->
posted by Gerry Surtees at Tuesday, February 13, 2007
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