Canada moves to protect U.S. market for dirty oil

The world enjoyed the first environmental dividend of an Obama presidency yesterday when a worried Canadian government proposed a joint North American action plan to address climate change.

Although it appeared that Canada's real goal was to ensure a continued U.S. market for its huge dirty-fuel tar sands project, this could still be a solid step toward a continental cap-and-trade program - which would be the first significant gesture from the world region that, so far, has been the least responsible in its approach to global warming.

 

It’s tempting, but most certainly optimistic, to view President Bush’s 2008 State of the Union as his last gasp at blocking progress on global warming. He will, after all, be gone from office before the year is out and it’s tempting to think he hasn’t sufficient time to further damage efforts to reign in climate change.

But there’s no time to lose. And continued obstructionism by the Bush Administration doesn’t just highlight its continuing failure to grasp the urgency of the problem, it also ensures far greater difficulties for its successors, who will have to arrest the problem at home while pressing other major polluters like China and India to act.

As we now all know, COP-13 did not set the hard emissions-reductions targets that humankind so desperately needs. But there was a silver lining in the South Pacific, argues the legendary journalist who is perhaps best known for his 1980s TV miniseries War.

Dyer's new column pulls back the scope, and places COP-13's non-outcome in the wider context of human evolution. We're getting there, folks, he says, and everything's going to be alright.

As dust settles from the recent UN climate-change conference in Indonesia, some observers are looking to China as the looming pivotal factor in the global-warming struggle.

The world’s most populous nation, now also neck-and-neck with the U.S. as its biggest greenhouse polluter, was the subject of a recent news article under the banner “As China goes, so goes global warming.”

The best the Bali delegates could achieve was two more years of talks on setting emission curbs, but with China building new coal-burning plants at the rate of one a week, in what states of peril will the planet be two years hence?

Honoring the the will of the lowest common denominator - the worst polluters and most resistant policy makers in the world - 191 countries negotiating global greenhouse emission limits in Bali have come to a "compromise" that doesn't mention actual limits.

The head of the Canadian delegation's security contingent threatened a group of young environmentalists with the prospect of spending time in an Indonesian jail, yesterday - and then followed up by summoning Indonesian police, as CanWest News Service's Mike de Souza reports here.

It's fortunate that the Indonesian police have a sense of occasion - even a tolerance for democracy - that goes beyond what is being shown in the Canadian delegation. The police interviewed the young environmentalists briefly and then left them to their task.