God Help Us

God Help Us

It now looks like Russia will ratify the Kyoto protocol after all. This is terrible news for Canada. Jean Chretien foolishly vowed to pass Kyoto at some international junket, before it had even been debated in Parlaiment. And in his quest for the UN Secretary-General's job, he forced it through caucus and thus through Parlaiment. If Russia ratifies it, then Canadians are stuck with paying billions - perhaps tens of billions of dollars every year to some of the worst polluters on the planet, in the farcical "greenhouse gas credits" - this even though Canada has some of the most extensive forests in the world, natural carbon sinks.

Basically the way Kyoto works is: poor countries are exempt and can pollute to their heart's content; industrialized countries pay developing nations in exchange for some kind of "credit" - which does nothing whatever for the environment.

Canada simply cannot comply with Kyoto. We live in a country that has winter for more than half the year, where distances to neighbouring cities are measured in the hundreds of kilometers (Calgary and Edmonton are neighbours, three hours apart by highway). Even if every Canadian stopped driving - all personal vehicles, delivery vans, 18 wheelers, everything - we would still fall short of our Kyoto targets due to power usage in the winter and the immense distances that freight trains and airplanes have to travel in this country.

So in order to meet Kyoto, everyone would have to stop driving, a few of us would have to starve, and a few would have to freeze to death. Perhaps only a few thousand people every year would have to die for the sake of making Kyoto.

So Canada, which has huge forests for sucking up CO2 and plants more trees than anyone, will fall short of the artificial Kyoto target and have to make that up, in greenhouse gas credits. These are only available from certain countries, among them some of the worst polluters (like Russia for instance). These credits have no intrinsic value, they are merely a reason to extort money from wealthy countries.

If any other Canadians are reading this (hi mom :D ) I want you to consider the Liberals' support of and the Conservatives' opposition to the Kyoto accord. We do have an election coming up this summer.