US sticks to divisive climate change policy.

Canada seems to go along with the US policy and has become along with Japan to some extent the main ally of the US on climate policy. The US policy will result either in no agreement or an agreement with no teeth. The two are virtually equivalent but the latter sounds more impressive.
THe US is virtually the only important developed country not to sign Kyoto now that Australia has signed on. However, although Canada has signed it has not done anything significant to meet Kyoto targets. Our present prime minister Stephen Harper was until recently a climate change denier but now for his political health he has changed his tune but still does little but blow more hot air.

US sticks to divisive climate change policy - official





NUSA DUA, Indonesia (Thomson Financial) - The United States delegation at a UN climate change summit said Thursday they would not commit to deep greenhouse gas emissions cuts at the key meeting in Indonesia, despite growing pressure.

Harlan Watson, head of the US delegation, said neither a recent US Senate committee move to limit greenhouse gas emissions or the decision by Australia to ratify the Kyoto Protocol would influence their stance.

'We're not changing our position,' he said on the fourth day of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Bali.

Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol on Monday after being sworn in as leader last month, leaving the US as the only rich nation that is not party to the 1997 climate change-tackling pact.

On Wednesday, an Australian delegate said they supported the outcome of a meeting of Kyoto nations in August that recommended greenhouse gas emissions cuts for developed nations of 25 to 40 percent by 2020, although Rudd on Thursday stressed that his government did not support binding targets.

The European Union has also called on industrialized nations to recognize their responsibility for global warming and support deep emissions cuts.

Watson said the US was hoping to come up with their own set of figures on cuts when a meeting of 17 nations that are major emitters of greenhouse gases, organized by US President George Bush, takes place next year.

'We're not trying to detract from the United Nations process,' he added.

Delegates from nearly 190 nations are gathered in Bali to try and draw up a roadmap of negotiations leading to a new plan to tackle global warming when the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

Ahead of the meeting, Bush reiterated that his administration was opposed to any international constraints on curbing carbon emissions if it undermined economic growth.

Angela Anderson, of the US-based National Environment Trust, said however that US interventions at the Bali summit had so far been mostly constructive.

'We're not seeing overly obstructive behavior by the US, and we hope that trend continues,' she told Agence France-Presse.

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Australia urges US to sign on to Kyoto

The US may be the only industrialized country to refuse the binding targets of Kyoto but Canada has signed on only to do nothing much under the Liberals while emissions rose and now under the Conservatives we have a follow the US lead backwards regime. At least Australia has signed on to Kyoto and not followed the US lead as Howard did.
It seems that while the US and other developed countries want the developing countries to sign on to emission reductions they are unwilling to provide the clean technologies or cash to help them adjust to climate change requirements.

Rudd urges the United States to ratify Kyoto
The Associated PressPublished: December 5, 2007




BALI, Indonesia: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia urged the United States on Wednesday to follow his country's lead and ratify the Kyoto Protocol, as divisions emerged over what a future international climate change pact should look like.

Rudd signed documents this week to formally adopt the Kyoto accord, reversing a decade of resistance and leaving the United States as the only industrialized country to refuse its binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions.

"Our position vis-à-vis Kyoto is clear cut, and that is that all developed and developing countries need to be part of the global solution," the newly elected prime minister told the Southern Cross Broadcasting radio network in Australia.

"And therefore we do need to see the United States as a full ratification state."

His comments further put the United States on the defensive at the Bali Climate Change conference, where nearly 190 nations aim to launch two years of serious negotiations on a future regime to head off dangerous climate change.
Birth centennial of Lin Biao, once second only to Mao, a nonevent

Scientists warn that a strong new deal is needed to ward off everything from severe droughts and floods, to melting ice caps and rising sea levels, to deaths linked to heat waves and disease.

The 175-nation Kyoto Protocol of 1997 requires 36 industrialized nations to reduce their emissions of "greenhouse gases" - carbon dioxide and some other industrial, agricultural and transportation byproducts - by an average 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The United States says it wants to be part of the negotiations on a follow-up accord but refuses to endorse mandatory cuts in emissions favored by the European Union.

Although the Bali conference is in its early days, differences already are emerging mostly over what should go into the "Bali road map" which will lay out the subjects for discussions. Japan, for one, offered up a proposal that does not include targets, while the EU has come out with a detailed wish list that includes demands for industrialized countries to take the lead in cutting emissions.

Meanwhile, delegates and activists say that poor countries led by the Group of 77, which represents 132 mainly developing countries and China, have been kicking up a storm over demands that rich countries provide them with clean technologies and funds to adapt to the impacts of global warming.

Rudd's Labor Party swept to power last month, ending more than 11 years of conservative rule under former Prime Minister John Howard, a staunch ally of President George W. Bush.

Signing the Kyoto documents was Rudd's first official act. The policy switch was greeted by applause at the Bali conference when it opened.

Kyoto framework still best

The Canadian Prime minister, Stephen Harper, has allied himself more closely with the US on many issues than the former Liberal Government. Anderson was in the former government. Although the government signed on to Kyoto it did little and in fact emissions grew. So the former govt. took the moral high ground and then in practice made the environment worse. Stephen Harper blows hot air at very high temperatures and his idea of fairness is to not do anything as long as developing countries such as China and India do not sign on to targets even though as the article points out they certainly have quite legitimate complaints and suspicions about the US and Canada idea of fairness.

Kyoto framework is still best hope for the world

Nov 30, 2007 04:30 AM
David Anderson

The major objective of President George Bush and Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the Bali Meeting of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol that begins Monday is to replace the emission reduction Kyoto targets for the developed countries with an agreement that also includes targets for the developing countries.

Unfortunately, by abandoning the Kyoto approach of starting global reductions of greenhouse gas emissions with the developed industrial nations, Bush and Harper make the chances of getting the developing countries to accept emission reduction targets less likely, not more so.

The starting point for the developing countries is their firm and correct understanding that the increase in the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the past two centuries overwhelmingly has been caused by the use of fossil fuels in the developed countries of the world.

The global warming problem thus is a problem created by those developed countries, not by them. This belief then leads to the not unreasonable conclusion that if the atmosphere now has a dangerous level of greenhouse gases, then those responsible for those emissions should be the first to step up to the plate and do something about it.

The position of Bush and Harper, by contrast, is not based on that increase in the contamination level of the past two centuries, but rather on the emissions currently occurring. It is not a two-century buildup of the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that they focus on; instead, they talk of the current rate of flow of contaminants into the atmosphere. Thus, the responsibility of the developed nations for the acute nature of the current problem is not, in their view, relevant to the current question of reducing emission levels today.

We have a dialogue of the deaf. Canada and the U.S. are talking of current flows of greenhouse gas emissions, while the developing countries are talking of accumulated stocks of greenhouse gas emissions. As long as each ignores the argument of the other, the likelihood of agreement is nil. One is talking of the contaminated pond, the other of the contaminating stream.

The Kyoto process bridged this gap by introducing a staged approach to emission reductions. The developed countries that ratified (essentially the European Union countries, Japan and Canada under the Chrétien government) agreed that the developed nations of the world should be the first to implement serious reductions. Then, after their good faith in dealing with a problem that they were responsible for had been demonstrated through significant reductions in emissions, discussions would take place on emission reduction programs for developing countries as well.

The key was overcoming the suspicion of developing countries that international greenhouse gas emission reduction programs would be used to hamper the development of their economies and their efforts to provide a better life for their citizens.

An important component of the developing countries' argument was the issue of international fairness. The atmosphere surrounding our world is equally necessary to the survival of each and every one of us. Therefore, fairness dictates that we each have an equal share of this common resource. Why then, they ask, are the per capita emissions of the developed countries so flagrantly in excess of the global averages and why are the developed countries not reducing their per capita emissions to that global average?

The question of equal share of the common global resource was sidelined by the agreement of the developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol to reduce emissions, as the reduction targets they accepted implicitly recognized the validity of the fairness claim of the developing countries.

Without Kyoto, this fairness or moral question will come once more to the fore. Indeed, the failure to achieve the Kyoto emission reduction targets that we in the developed world committed ourselves to 10 years ago will increase the suspicion of the developing countries that emission targets are not in their interests, and make this issue even more difficult to handle than ever.

The Kyoto Protocol was the result of extremely difficult negotiations, took a very long time, was a compromise, and is by no means perfect. Unfortunately, it was and still is the best the international community, working together, has been able to come up with.

The central problem with Harper's and Bush's proposed changes for a system with emission targets for all countries is that if they return to that starting point and ignore the difficult factors that Kyoto took into account through so many painstaking compromises, they will likely achieve far less in Bali than was achieved at Kyoto. The Kyoto approach, imperfect though it may be, is still the world's best hope.



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David Anderson is director of the Guelph Institute of the Environment at the University of Guelph. He served from 1999 to 2004 as the federal minister responsible for the climate change file, and during that time represented Canada at the international meetings on climate change.