How can the NDP swallow this from Baird?

Well lets hope these can be done away with in negotiations.

It still adds to my worry that the Cons are simply not sincere in their new environmental champions role.

Intensity-based targets don’t work and are a gift to industry to allow them to keep polluting and producing GHG. I cannot imagine Jack and the party agreeing to that.

If they do, I join the Greens for an election.

Hard caps or no deal, I say.

I am no big fan of intensity targets, but there are two simple facts to consider:

i) An intensity target can be more stringent than a hard cap, it is just that when George Bush says it, he appears to mean 0.99 of today’s 1.0. However, a 0.6 target is more stringent than anything in the world today.

ii) The Liberals introduced intensity targets to Canada, Stephane Dion, not Rona Ambrose. Dion’s LFE plan was based on intensity targets.

The Tories wouldn’t have a choice LrC, if the NDP insist on it..minority government, remember?

And, I’ve already stated that Layton’s proposed private members bill on this does have hard caps. It would probably have the support of the Liberals and the BQ, and it could be passed over the Tories objections. So, unless Harper threatens to call an election over it, (highly unlikely), we can have a bill that has hard caps in it, whether “Baird minimum” likes it or not.

>we can have a bill that has hard caps in it

Yes we can, but this particular type of legislation is going to crash into some fairly hard economic and engineering realities down at the “little guy” level. I predict a still birth, because I doubt very much the Liberals want to do more with this issue than win an election. It’s the equivalent of a promise to remove the GST or cancel the FTA.

If you don’t have hard caps and real reductions, you have nothing. Therefore if Layton moves at all on these, he has lost the issue. That’s a matter of letting the science and the timelines determine the politics.

And remember, LrC, the oil patch and the car companies have always cried doom when asked to do ANYTHING differently. I don’t doubt there will be mixed economic impacts, but there is no reason to take your estimates from the oil lobby.

>Are you suggesting that if he were to be elected, he’d throw all that out the window?

I’m stating - not suggesting - that a politician’s promises to get elected aren’t worth very much.

I’m not taking my estimates from the oil lobby. The “little guy” is the voter who has a home to heat and a commute to work and, above all, a job. Put any one of those in jeopardy and see what comes apart under the strain. I’m betting a Liberal government will at least make sure it isn’t their hold on the House.

How can you say that a country such as Canada which has a growing population and a large number of immigrants can possibly not have some growth in CO2 emissions? It is faulty logic to assume that taxation of business will have a negative effect on carbon emissions anyways; the only negative effect will be in loss of jobs to countries such as China and India, who to my understnding are exempt from the Kyoto protocol. It will no longer be econimocal for industry to produce in Canada (not that much is really produced here now anyways, but it can get much worse). It was reported in the news this month that China is already planning or building coal-fired generators on a massive scale (somewhere inthe order of thousands). Could it be that they are already planning ahead for the huge economic boom that will come to them in a Kyoto world?
In addition to crippling our economy and causing untold of poverty and despair, the only way for our country to compete after Kyoto will be to build a massive nuclear energy program, a scheme that will pollute our world with radioactive waste and add to the terrorist threat greatly in terms of easier availability of fissionable material for WMDs. Nuclear energy is massively expensive and in no way ‘clean’.

Why are we being forced into taking a politicized, reactionary approach to global warming? One only has to look at the situation to realize that there are many sides to this issue, and many camps that stand to gain a great deal from pushing this mass-hysteria onto the public, while ignoring all other environmental issues. What about the rainforests? I guess they are no longer disappearing? And water pollution has been taken care of? Think people! Don’t always take whats told to you be the media as fact. Most of the time the media has a reson or something to gain by pushing one side of an issue…

Maybe he is saying that because it just might happen to be the truth!!!
How can a country immediately reduce its emmisions to pre 1990 levels, when the population of said country is quite a bit higher than it was 17 years ago? Each of these people required food, which is grown with fossil fuel based petrochemicals, cultivated with tractors burning fossil fuels, shipped, stored, cooked, and and so on with fossil fuels.. Try looking at the straight picture. We as a world are dependant on fossil fuels.
How do you propose the Conservatives should handle this? Enact a dictatorship and declare that from now on anyone who produces carbon is instantly locked up or killed? Think about it!
All Harper has been saying is that in todays present economic reality, it is impossible for any country to reduce co2 emissions without drastically harming an entire population in very bad ways. We built the rollercoaster of our fossil fuel dependencny, and now we have to figure out how to get off of it without crashing the entire ride. To continue like we are may very well bring about massive destructive climate change, but to stop using fossil fuels immediately will result in mass starvation and death also. It’s becoming less and less popular to be of this viewpoint, but unfortunately its the only viewpoint I can with good concsious support.

The liberal party has no right to criticize a governments environmental policy that has only been in power for 1 year, when the Liberals did not reduced emisions at all in the 12 years they were in power. Dion knows this. He wants to pull the wool over an entire nation in order to get back into power.

[quote comment="1278"]“So we’re back to intensity targets now, are we?”

-Scott, I’m not sure if you heard Harper today, but he
-reintroduced Ambrose’s discredited line, saying Canadians
-wouldn’t be able to drive or heat their homes if we do what the
-opposition asks. “Planes, trains, automobiles”? The more you
-hear, the more you realize that nothing has changed, except the -packaging.

Intensity targets= unmitigated copout[/quote]

Here is a testament to the Liberals record on the environment, from an article in EYE weekly, April 18,1996:

“Rather than push the envelope of environment-friendly technology, Ottawa continues to throw its support behind the industry that gives us greenhouse gas emissions, smog and acid rain.

The federal budget that won finance Minister Paul Martin such general approval contained a largely unnoticed amendment to the Capital Cost Allowance section of the Federal Income Tax Act.

It was a wonderful gift to the oil industry from the Liberals, no doubt, among other things, guaranteeing the re-election of Energy Minister Ann McClellan in Alberta. Led by Syncrude boss Eric Newell, the blue-eyed sheiks had lobbied furiously for $702 million in new tax breaks over the next eight years to kick-start tar sands development.

They got almost exactly what they asked for in Martin’s second budget.

It took the form of a new writeoff. In the past, a tar sands producer could only write off the value of his investment over the life of the property, and then only in the case of major expansions.

Henceforth, courtesy of smiling Liberals covering their western flank, when a company digs a hole in Alberta’s northern boreal forest, it can write off the entire cost immediately.

OK, cowboys, off you go!

Unfortunately, tar sands production is known to devastate delicate northern ecosystems.

Greenpeace’s atmosphere and energy campaigner, Kevin Jardine, points to a study by the Pembina Institute which claims that the production of synthetic crude oil from tar sands generates 10 times more carbon dioxide, as well as 12 times more sulphur dioxide and three times as much nitrogen oxides, as the production of ordinary oil.

Jardine adds: “Martin’s defense of the tax breaks is that they will create jobs, but the oil industry is one of the least labor-intensive industries in the Canadian economy. A million dollars spent on oil production creates, on average, about seven jobs. By diverting money away from the general economy into the job-poor oil industry, Martin will actually increase unemployment.”

The sheer scale of the tax loopholes already available to the oil industry is awesome.

Oil companies owe $10 billion in deferred federal income tax, which was one-quarter of the total of $40 billion owed by Canadian corporations in 1994.

They can defer indefinitely.

And then there were those grants amounting to $341 million that the feds handed out last year to the oil companies. As well, the government paid for another $229 million in economic analysis and marketing that the oil companies really ought to be doing for themselves instead of behaving, if you’ll excuse the expression, like tar babies.”

Doesn’t sound like a government with any plans on reducing greenhouse gas production.