From Hero to Hustler - Copenhagen - Dirty Oilsands

From Hero to Hustler

Hero…

Ten years ago, Canada was a climate change champion.

It was one of the first countries to sign the Kyoto protocol.

At that point, Canada’s attitude toward the threat of climate change was still largely embodied by the consensus statement of the 1988 Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere:

“Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences are second only to global nuclear war.”

As late as 2007, Canada agreed that a post-2012 agreement must be based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change analysis that industrialized countries cut their emissions 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

...Hustler

But the facts on the ground tell a different story.

No other government has simply walked away from its Kyoto Protocol targets while embarking on a massive increase in global warming pollution – up more than 26 per cent since 1990 at a time when Canada was supposed to be reducing emissions by six per cent.

And as the world gathers in Copenhagen, the Canadian government has quit pretending.

“We will not be the boy scouts at the [Copenhagen negotiating] table.”
—- Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice

Canada’s leaders have now so twisted their country’s climate change position in service of dirty oil sands, that perhaps the Guardian’s George Monbiot captures it best:

“The real villain is Canada. [Canada] is now to climate what Japan is to whaling”.

For more information

• Canada is Killing Copenhagen
• TAKE ACTION: The Tar Sands Blow
• Canada-Kyoto timeline, CBC News, 2/14/07
• Canada’s image lies in tatters. It is now to climate what Japan is to whaling, guardian.co.uk, 11/30/09
• When Canada Led the Way: a short history of climate change, Policy Options, 10/06, p. 49.