Bush on Climate Change
Today’s Toronto Star reports:
President George W. Bush called on the world’s worst polluters today to come together to set a goal for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the climate to heat up. “By setting this goal, we acknowledge there is a problem, and by setting this goal, we commit ourselves to doing something about it.” …
Bush’s emphasis is on using green technologies and other voluntary efforts to tackle global warming. The president said the reduction goal should be finalized by next summer, along with ways to measure progress toward it.
The report goes on to say:
Environment Minister John Baird represented Canada at the Washington talks.
Baird insists Canada can act as a bridge between Europe, which is promoting deep emission cuts, and other countries like the United States, China and India that don’t want mandatory reductions.
But the Conservatives have moved away from supporting caps on total emissions. Harper is instead proposing a system of intensity targets that call for emissions to decline by a certain percentage for each unit, such as a barrel of oil.
Hmmm. Both Stephen Harper and John Baird have spent a lot of time beating their chests, maintaining that their Climate change policy absolutely includes hard caps. Yet here they are, on the one hand, supporting intensity based targets, even though that would actually allow emissions in Canada to rise because sales of oil and other fuels increase every year; and, on the other, supporting George Bush’s push for voluntary targets, something that they have repeatedly slammed the previous Liberal government for allowing.
I wonder how long Canadians will accept this kind of overt deceit by our minority government.
Also, a note to Mr. Bush: Goals and Targets have already been set for reducing climate change, and progress measurements towards tracking those goals are already in place. It’s called the Kyoto Protocol.