`Axis of Oil' more important to Prime Minister

`Axis of Oil' more important to Prime Minister than health of planet, says Linda McQuaig
Linda McQuaig, The Star, 22-Oct-2006

Reality emissions check: business wins, we don't
Jeffrey Simpson, Globe and Mail, 21-Oct-2006

Clean Air Act News Release
Includes links to the Clean Air Act, Gov't of Canada, 19_Oct-2006

just one terrifying bit of the evidence that the Harper government is ignoring...
Tiny beetle is a huge menace
Paula Simons, Edmonton Journal, 21-Oct-2006

COMMENT: Roundly trounced by just about everyone, the Clean Air Act released by Stephen Harper's Conservative government didn't even need a legion of outraged environmentalists to point out its vacuousness. Dubbed the Hot Air Act, it is a national disgrace.

Jeffrey Simpson predicts, "After George Bush is mercifully gone from the White House, the Americans will move fast on emission reductions, leaving Canada behind and exposing once again the hollowness of Canadians' moral superiority about their American neighbours."

Exxon, the world's richest and mightiest corporation, was the leading force behind a massive 10-year campaign to block the Kyoto accord and ensure the world remains hooked on oil.

This was no easy battle, even for Exxon. Lined up against it was the scientific world — and most of the world community.

In the end, not even Exxon was able to block the signing of the historic Kyoto Protocol, as the world came together in 1997 in a far-reaching bid to shake its planet-endangering oil addiction.

But Exxon did score one huge victory when the new administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, close Exxon allies, withdrew U.S. support for Kyoto. The withdrawal of the U.S., which emits roughly one-quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, was a devastating blow. Still, the world community pressed on with Kyoto.

Into this titanic, ongoing struggle between the world community and the Bush-Cheney-Exxon axis of oil, Canada has now definitively entered on the side of the oil interests.

With the release last week of the Harper government's "clean air" bill, Ottawa has signalled its abandonment of Kyoto.

The previous Liberal government certainly shares some of the blame.

While it signed onto Kyoto and renewed that commitment last year, it failed to take meaningful steps to reach Kyoto targets, recklessly allowing Canada's greenhouse gas emissions to continue to rise.

But Harper's "green" plan is the final nail in the coffin for Canada's Kyoto commitment. The plan doesn't even mention Kyoto, instead calls for yet more consultations with industry and sets actual reduction targets an incredible 44 years into the future. By then, presumably even industry will be sick of consulting.

It won't matter much though, since the earth will almost certainly have warmed to the point where the damage will be irreversible.

Even the much more demanding deadlines set out in the Kyoto Protocol are a long shot at reversing the horrendously destructive course we're on, before it's too late. It now seems Canada will be the only nation failing to meet targets it agreed to in signing Kyoto.

This lackadaisical approach to the world's most urgent problem is utterly consistent with Harper's long-time indifference to the global warming crisis.

Like others close to the oil industry, Harper has tried to discredit the scientific conclusion that human actions are causing global warming — a conclusion which virtually every climate scientist in the world considers about as open-and-shut as the case that smoking causes cancer.

Harper knows the Canadian public, particularly in Quebec, wants action, but that means clamping down on Canada's fastest growing source of greenhouse gases: Alberta's booming oil sands.

And Harper has absolutely no intention of getting tough on the oil industry.

Harper has now clearly shown which side he's on.

But he's hoping we'll be so dazzled by his talk of a "green" plan for "clean air" that we won't notice the Bush-Cheney-Exxon axis lurking in the background.

Linda McQuaig is a Toronto-based author and commentator.
lmcquaig@sympatico.ca.

http://tinyurl.com/ykzq3s

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VANCOUVER -- Kathryn Harrison of the University of British Columbia got it right. In a paper analyzing Canada's record before and after ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, she wrote: "While industry may have lost on the high-profile question of ratification, behind the scenes they have won battle after battle."

And they are still winning, while the climate loses.

This week's damp squib of a climate-change policy from the Conservative government had industry hesitations, objections and lobbying written all over it. No wonder business groups greeted it so enthusiastically; they could have written it.

No greenhouse-gas (carbon dioxide and methane) targets until 2020. Intensity reductions for energy use rather than absolute ones. A very modest national target by 2050. No carbon taxes. And three years of consultation. Or we should say three more years of consultation.

Does anyone remember the National Climate Change Process of 1998, the year after the Kyoto negotiations? Likely not. It involved 450 experts, 225 stakeholders and 16 "issue tables." Notes Prof. Harrison: "Each met many times over several years to examine a different aspect or sector of the climate-change problem, an exercise one participant referred to as the 'Air Canada subsidy program.' "

Does anyone also remember the cross-Canada consultations the federal government launched in 2002 after the release of a "discussion paper"? Do we not remember the Liberal government's three climate-change plans, including the much-ballyhooed and almost totally useless 2002 Climate Change Plan for Canada that amounted to, again quoting Prof. Harrison, "a plan to develop a plan."

Some companies got it (let's mention Alcan as a fine example, with emissions down 30 per cent from 1990 to 2005) and a few industrial sectors did something serious about it. Business-as-usual plans -- 1-per-cent annual reductions, improvements in "intensity" -- weren't good enough. These companies and industrial sectors believed in Wayne Gretzky's slogan: Head for where the puck is going, not where it is. They got out in front of the issue, and have remained there.

Alas, most of Canada's business community focused on where the puck was. The Council of Chief Executives, the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and the Canadian Chamber of Commerce all lobbied hard against Kyoto, its ratification and serious steps toward reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

They published scary studies about hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, serious declines in Canada's standard of living, and "higher prices and higher taxes" (to quote from a business lobby ad). Time and again, they got the Chrétien and Martin governments to back off, slow down, weaken commitments.

Now they have the business-friendly Conservatives in office. Judging from this week's weak-kneed policy pronouncement, business has again triumphed. Things will get done, eventually, slowly. Emissions will keep on increasing for at least a decade, albeit less rapidly.

Even the Conservatives' headline number -- emissions reduced by 45 per cent to 65 per cent by 2050 -- is a mirage. The government chose 2003 as its base-line year. Since 1990, emissions have grown about 30 per cent.

A reduction of 45 per cent to 60 per cent by 2050, taking account of the 30 per cent by which emissions have already grown, would mean a drop of only 15 per cent to 30 per cent from the year the rest of the world is using as a baseline. Almost every scientist who's studied climate change believes much more is needed.

Canadians are tied with Americans as the world's second worst per capita greenhouse-gas emitters. (Australians are the worst.) Canada's emissions increased from 1990 to 2004 more than any large country except Spain.

Where did these higher emissions come from? They rose 50 per cent in the oil and gas production, distribution and refining sector; 37 per cent in electricity and heat generation; 36 per cent in road transportation; and 22 per cent in agricultural emissions (mostly methane). Consumers account for 70 per cent of emissions, energy producers 30 per cent.

There isn't a single company that doesn't brag about what it's doing about emissions, yet they keep remorselessly rising. Companies blame consumers. Oil and gas companies point at utilities. Utilities blame government. It's been a merry-go-round of finger-pointing and inadequate inaction -- which will now continue during another three years of Conservative "consultation."

Norway, a big energy producer, puts a tax on carbon and buries (sequesters) some of it in aquifers under the North Sea. Germany, Norway and the Netherlands all use graduated taxes on larger, more polluting vehicles. California has mandatory auto-emission standards, as do the northeast states. A hundred U.S. cities have greenhouse-gas abatement programs. Sweden uses garbage for city heating. Workable ideas are everywhere. They represent where the puck is going.

Here's a prediction: After George Bush is mercifully gone from the White House, the Americans will move fast on emission reductions, leaving Canada behind and exposing once again the hollowness of Canadians' moral superiority about their American neighbours.

jsimpson@globeandmail.com

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Paula Simons
The Edmonton Journal
October 21, 2006

The mountain pine beetle.

The name doesn't sound so scary. Heck, you can imagine walking into some trendy apres-ski bar and ordering a mountain pine beetle, on the rocks.

But for anyone who cares about the health of Alberta's forests, the mountain pine beetle is the 21st century version of the red menace.

The beetle isn't big -- about the size of a grain of rice. But it's hungry. And it's deadly. At least if you're a pine tree.

Mountain pine beetles don't gobble up whole trees. They carry the spores of a blue stain fungus. When other kinds of beetles attempt to bore through the bark of a healthy lodgepole pine, the tree will produce copious amounts of resin as a defence. But fungus colonizes the sapwood and circumvents the natural defensive response of the trees.

It's a symbiotic relationship. The fungus catches a ride with the beetle while the beetle benefits as the fungus blocks resin production by the tree, and allows the beetle to bore beneath the bark to feed, lay its eggs and hide from predators like woodpeckers. Young trees are more resistant -- old stands suffer most.

The fungus causes dehydration of the tree while the beetle larvae eat into the tree's phloem tissue, cutting off its food supply. The combined attack turns the trees' needles a reddish brown, their trunks a greyish blue. It can take as little as two weeks to kill a tree, leaving behind a stark standing skeleton. And each infested tree produces enough new beetles to infect a dozen more.

The mountain pine beetle has already decimated an estimated 8.7 million hectares of pine forest in the interior of British Columbia, wiping out trees in an area roughly the size of Vancouver Island or New Brunswick.

This year, the beetle killed more than 400 million cubic metres of merchantable timber, up 45 per cent from the year before.

At this rate, the B.C. forestry ministry estimates that up to 80 per cent of British Columbia's interior pine stands could be killed by 2013 -- with more than half of them dead by next summer.

But the mountain pine beetle is no longer B.C.'s problem. Summer winds carried millions of the parasites over the Rocky Mountains. The beetles have spread as far east as Fox Creek, as far north as Peace River.

The West has had a couple of bad pine beetle outbreaks before, one in 1975, one in 1985. But neither was anything like this. And both infestations were snuffed out by cold snaps.

We haven't had a -40 C winter like that in a decade. Unless we get a deep, sustained cold period, Alberta's pine forests are in serious trouble.

Maybe you don't believe in global warming yet. Maybe you think this is just a statistical blip, a natural, normal variation in the Earth's climate cycles.

Maybe you're not worried that the Harper government has turned its back on its international treaty obligations and introduced a plan that won't halve greenhouse-gas emissions until 2050.

Doesn't matter. The beetle doesn't care about political ideology or climate change debates. It just wants our trees.

Left unchecked, the consequences for our forestry industry, our tourism industry and our forest ecosystem will be dire.

Who'll want to vacation in a Banff or Kananaskis or Jasper or Willmore Wilderness filled with ugly dead trees?

But the loss of tourist dollars will pale in significance if deforestation leads to flash floods, serious soil erosion and the destruction of animal habitat.

If we're not going to take meaningful, timely action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, we'll need some strategies to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Take those beetles. The B.C. government has a $500-million plan to fight them and to deal with their damage. In Alberta, where Sustainable Resource Development Minister Dave Coutts says pine beetles are his top priority, we've budgeted just $20 million to combat the problem this year.

Meanwhile, the Harper government, actually cut $11.7 million in "unused" funding for pine beetle control in its effort to trim "wasteful and ineffective" programs from the federal budget.

It's dangerously short-sighted. Nothing short of a major cold snap will stop the beetle.

Still, we can act to slow the spread of this infection, before it becomes a full-blown boreal pandemic.

That might mean everything from more comprehensive surveillance programs to big "surge cuts" to bring down the most vulnerable trees.

It might mean changing provincial quota rules to allow forestry companies to do more culling and cutting without financial penalties.

Another complication: Ottawa's new softwood lumber agreement with the United States effectively caps Canada's softwood lumber exports to the U.S. If Alberta suddenly does start cutting great swathes of pine to help control the spread of beetles, it won't be easy to find markets for it. The provincial Liberals are calling for a provincial plan to compensate forestry companies for surtaxes they might pay for exceeding their quotas. It's an idea worthy of consideration.

Will all this be expensive? Oh yes. And the economic and social costs of global warming are only going to escalate, as more warm-weather parasites and diseases find niches in Alberta, as our water sources start to evaporate, as drought becomes more common.

We can debate the causes and cures of climate change ad naseum. But if we really have decided, as a nation, that it's too expensive, too difficult, too economically and socially disruptive to take serious steps to reduce or sequester carbon dioxide emissions, we'd better start planning now to cope with the consequences.

psimons@thejournal.canwest.com

© The Edmonton Journal 2006

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