"The Conservatives continue to throw the manure around when it comes to issues like the IT scandal and Kyoto. Many of the commercials keep harping on the "13 year" inactivity theme. Canadians should learn some of the facts regarding the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, so I've thrown a few together via my friends over at Wikipedia."Great. Finally the truth. And it's coming from a Liberal. I've been waiting for this one for a very long time... Let's see what the "facts" are:
"On December 17, 2002, Canada ratified the treaty that came into force in February 2005, requiring it to reduce emissions to 6% below 1990 levels between 2008-2012."
Gee that's interesting. Apparently Kyoto was only meant to be implemented in the 2008 to 2012 time frame. I've been living by the impression that long before 2002 the Liberals had been trying to implement Kyoto... Unfortunately that argument plain simply just doesn't match up with reality.
And that supposed "fact" is the brunt force of this Liberal blogger's argument apparently:
"The Cons would like to have Canadians thinking and believing that we sat around and didn't do squat since 1993. The FACT, the protocol wasn't even ratified until 2002, and did not dome into force until February 2005 - just months prior to an election call."The problem is that his "facts" don't add up:
"As of 2003, the federal government claimed to have spent or committed 3.7 billion dollars on climate change programmes."So the government had already spent 3.7 billion dollars on climate change initiates, yet they weren't planning on implementing Kyoto until 2005?
Did environmentalists live by the assumption that the targets of Kyoto were really going to be achievable in 4 years? Somehow I doubt that. Furthermore if that were true why is there so much a push to implement Kyoto NOW when by this bloggers own "facts" it wasn't intended to be implemented until 2008?
Heck, if we got 'till 2008 let's all rev up the SUV's until then n'est-ce pas?
The "fact" is that Kyoto was an issue years before the vote in the house of commons and the Liberals made half-hearted attempts to implement it before 2002. They're Kyoto implementation strategy consisted of running some ads with Rick Mercer trying to get people to take the "one tone challenge." That and they planned on getting green energy credits for the clean energy they exported to the US. In other words they planned on negotiating their way out of the problem and spending some money on Liberal comedians. The end result was they never got those green credits, Rick Mercer went from Liberal red to commie pink, and carbon emissions went up all the while.
So where does the "2008" number come from? Here's where it does:
"Kyoto sets out an agenda for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 per cent from 1990 levels (although "economies in transition," like Russia, can pick different base years). Some reports say the lower target is to be met by 2010. But that's shorthand for the actual target date, which is to achieve those emission cuts over a five-year average (2008 to 2012)."So, it's not that the emissions cuts are to be implemented in between 2008 and 2012, but rather it's that they are to be done before in anticipation for that five year average that will judge if they met their objectives or not. It means that over those five years if the average CO2 emissions are 5.2% lower than their levels in 1990, the treaty objective has been met.
That's hardly a 2008 implementation date and that's a far cry from the "facts" the Liberal blogger describes.
Another "fact" is that other nations were making attempts to implement Kyoto long 2005. Why would they do that if the treaty wasn't meant to be implemented before 2005? Why do we have an emissions trading markets already if it wasn't meant to be implemented before 2008?
It's a ridiculous revisionism that this Liberal blogger has bought into. I'm sorry, I wish I could say something better, but that's the "facts."
But the most damning of his "facts" is the one he ignores the most:
"By 2004, CO2 emissions had risen to 27 per cent above 1990 levels (which compares unfavorably to the increase in emissions by the United States of 16 per cent by that time)."Whoever wrote that Wikipedia must've been smoking some medicinal marijuana because how can anyone say that two values "compare favorably" when one is close to double the other?
The hard truth is that the US has shown more success in reducing it's CO2 emissions then Canada has. The question is just what is the US doing? Because we may want to think about following in the example of someone that has shown more success than we have.
So what's the moral of the story?
"The moral of the story is that Stephane Dion had 10 months to make sure, as environment minister, Canada was meeting its goals. 10 months. Not 13 years."No the true moral of the story is that Dion was a member of a government that sat and did nothing for 13 years while it committed the country to emission reductions it did not come close to meeting and actually made things worse.
Where was Dion in this government to push for action on climate change? He was silent by all indications. And that silence is something he should have to answer to - It's something that this Liberal blogger seems unable or incapable of of doing for Dion himself.
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