I particularly enjoyed this article from the Toronto Sun that defends Canada's innocence as a "corrupt petrostate" (it's crime is the Alberta tarsands) but then ends with this:
Let's emerge from our long Kyoto stupor and recall we are a sovereign nation and no one decides our energy policy but us.
If we want to lower emissions significantly - and every federal party, to varying degrees, claims it does - we must abandon these useless UN gabfests at the world's five-star resorts and decide on the following unglamorous issues here in Canada:
First, who, exactly, should be in charge of putting a price on carbon emissions and determining what that price will be - the federal government, or the provinces?
Second, which level of government ultimately controls fossil fuel resources and is responsible for determining emission reductions and enforcing them?
Third, since reducing emissions will disproportionately impact on Alberta and Saskatchewan, who is responsible for paying the costs - them, or all Canadians?
Without first making these decisions in Canada - and without a national understanding and acceptance that lowering our emissions at the rate the UN wants means lowering our standard of living by paying much more than we do even now for energy, our continued participation in the Kyoto-to-Cancun process is pointless.
And you know, if Canada was actually going to do all of that, I'd say hallelujah. Here's another Canadian article, this one less substantive, but including the factoid that Ban Ki-Moon "doubts a comprehensive deal will be struck at a conference in Mexico later this year."
There's a more substantive piece on the politics behind Cancun here. Still nothing terribly hopeful... apparently a bunch of countries are in talks now and trying to come to some sort of agreement, but that doesn't mean the agreement will actually solve the climate crisis. To be honest, the only sort of agreement I could see the U.S. signing onto right now, with our government, is one that would completely suck.
Here's a piece about China's hope for an agreement in Cancun, which is nice, but still not terribly promising. And one thing that isn't being said is that China might be the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, but an awful lot of the stuff manufactured there then goes to other countries where it is sold and used. So it's not just China that has a problem. Reducing China's emissions will also involve people in the rest of the world changing their lifestyles (i.e. buying less shit made in China that they don't even bloody need).
And, for one last depressing article to read, here's one about how all of the world leaders are "frankly in a deadlock" on climate change negotiations. |
