Angry in the Great White North

Because Canada refuses to hobble its economy so that it can shave a few points off the tiny 2% contribution to global greenhouse emissions, it is a bad country.

Every climate alarmist had been beating that drum in the weeks leading up to the Copenhagen conference.  Here, a professional thinking guy by the name of John Drexhage, thinks out loud about what Canada's role should be:

Canada's reputation and credibility in the multilateral world continue to suffer as climate change has taken on greater significance internationally. We are attracting domestic and international criticism due in part to:

• A lack of a domestic regulatory framework for large greenhouse-gas emitters;
• A lack of complementary policies and price signals that would address the "consumption" side of Canada's emissions;
• A desire to both retain Canada's status as a party to the Kyoto Protocol and disregard its obligations to meet its emission-reduction targets.

Either we're in, or we're out.

These factors suggest to other countries that Canada isn't serious. Actions (or more accurately inactions) on climate change have affected Canada's traditional profile as a champion of multilateralism and an effective bridge between other negotiating blocs, such as the European Union and the United States.

However, next month's climate-change talks in Copenhagen offer Canada an opportunity to demonstrate its seriousness on the issue and re-establish its reputation on multilateralism.

Despite having promised to have a plan in place for the talks, the government appears to have backed off, noting that it would be difficult to institute a plan until there is a more coherent understanding of how the United States and the rest of the world intend to manage their greenhouse-gas emissions. However, not going to Copenhagen with a clearer plan runs the risk that Canada will be irrelevant in the negotiations.

Wow.  Well, there's what you get when you spend a lot of time thinking as director the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

So if only we had a domestic regulatory framework for large GHG emitters....

...like the Europeans have.

And if only we taxed consumption in order to discourage it...

...like the Europeans do.

And if only we were committed to the Kyoto targets...

...like the Europeans are.

Well then...we'd be in, and not out, right?

Wrong.

The Europeans have spent billions trying to be good little Kyoto-bots, with their citizens being made to accept grotesquely large increases in heating bills and electricity bills to save the planet from something or other -- carbon dioxide, I guess, or maybe it's warming, or just change -- and for all that, the Europeans were definitely out at Copenhagen:

But members were grasping for answers on how to proceed after Copenhagen revealed a gap between the EU's ambitions to lead the fight against global warming and its limited clout on the world stage. The EU had believed its stature as the first bloc to pass binding emissions reductions targets and its leadership on climate finance for developing countries would give it a prime seat at the table. Yet it was not even invited to a final meeting at which leading developed countries struck the decisive deal with the US.

"We've been taught some lessons about the realities of the so-called multi-polar world," Carl Bildt, Sweden's foreign minister, told the Financial Times. "These lessons will have to be taken into account when we go for a more comprehensive global agreement."

Diplomats acknowledged that the EU's strategy of offering to deepen its emissions cuts - from 20 per cent below 1990 levels to 30 per cent - if other nations showed comparable efforts had failed to provide leverage over the US or China.

Drexhage thought Canada would be irrelevant if Canada did not commit to some dramatic and expensive plan to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.

Hah!

The Europeans did exactly that, and attempted to execute that plan, paying billions in public funds.  And the Europenas were completely irrelevant.  So it seems like you can waste billions and be irrelevant, or not waste billions and be irrelevant.

I pick being irrelevant on the cheap.

Politically, Drexhage thought Canada could be a bridge between the US and the Europeans.  The Europeans were never at the table!  Canada would have been a bridge to nowhere!  Barack Obama had no interest in talking to the Europeans, with or without the Canadian help that Drexhage thought would have come in so handy.

So keep this in mind the next time you hear a Kool-Aid drinking climate alarmist moan about how bad Canada looks to the rest of the world.  Having good environmental credentials are of no value at an environmental conference where the topic is never the environment but rather how much money rich countries will pay poor countries to get them to shut up until the next conference rolls around.

Hey, if the Europeans hadn't spent all that money reducing emissions(which ultimately did little to reduce gas emissions, but rather just drove the cost of everything up), the EU would have had more money to give to corrupt kleptocracies.

I have a different post-Copenhagen environmental plan.  Now I admit I'm not a deep thinker like Drexhage, but then given just how spectacularly wrong he was on the question of Canada's credibility and the leverage that would be earned by being a good country, I'm not so worried.

So here goes.  My plan has two key elements:

1. We don't spend a nickel on this climate change crap (except, I suppose, the minimum we need to to keep US markets open, for as long as that Obama fool is in office and the teleprompters tell him he needs cap-and-trade or something).
2. We don't give a dime to developing nations above what we already give them for general aid.

It's very different from Drexhage's approach, I agree.  But I think it's safe to say that at future conferences, it won't make a difference which plan we follow when it comes to our "credibility" and "leverage".

Or for that matter, it makes no difference to the environment.  But then the environment is not really relevant here.  I'm sorry I brought it up.

But there is one difference between these plans.  My plan costs enormously less to achieve the the same effect.

Why do you need a bridge anyway?  Don't most Europeans speak English?  And if their English is rusty, well, there are people who can translate whatever Barack Obama says into other languages.  But then, maybe that's the problem.  A translator is attempting to convey the meaning of the speaker's words.  Most of Barack Obama's speeches are essentially devoid of semantic content.  A translator might just sit there, silent, waiting for Obama to actually say something, instead of just burp the words "hope" and "change" and "success" over and over again.  Canada's role as a bridge, had Barack Obama deigned to speak to the EU delegation during his brief appearance at Copenhagen, would likely have been more sympathetic, as in being able to say "Hey, I don't understand what he's saying either" in English and French.