MaxedOutMama: Kyoto And Canada

Visit Freedom's Zone Donate To Project Valour

Monday, November 28, 2005

Kyoto And Canada

Darcey of Dust My Broom is mocking his own government about the Kyoto Treaty. He links to this article comparing Canadian deeds to Canadian words:

This should be a proud moment for Canada, where a major conference to find a successor to the Kyoto climate change treaty opens on Monday. Instead, the government is faced with an embarrassing predicament.

How can a country that has campaigned vocally for the world to do more to combat climate change be doing so poorly when it comes to curbing emissions of its own greenhouse gases?

Under the Kyoto treaty, Canada committed to cutting its emissions by 6 percent from 1990 levels by 2010. Recent U.N. data show those emissions were in fact almost 25 percent above 1990 levels in 2003.

Well, no country is doing very well with Kyoto. Nuclear power is the best way to get there, and most of the environmental lobby seems to hate nuclear power. Darcey notes cynically that the Canadian government is literally lying to its own citizens to make them believe that Canada is helping to save the world while it is doing the exact opposite:

Developing the oil sands in the province of Alberta will cement Canada's profitable position as the largest exporter of energy to the United States, a fact that critics say exposes what they call the Liberal government's hypocrisy.
...
The truth is that although Canada ratified Kyoto in 1997, it has done little in practice to meet its targets. The Liberal government produced a plan in 2001, but it relied in part on advances from technologies which had not yet been invented.

The article goes on to talk about public transportation. In a country the size of Canada? I can't find any country that is going to comply with Kyoto. It's time for the world to figure out another way to get there. Not that it's going to change the temperature one bit, though. We'd have to put out an awful lot of CO2 to warm up the earth.

The sun is putting out more energy, and that's why we have global warming, which should now be renamed "solar system warming". Here's an interesting, non-political article discussing the history of the solar system. Water vapor is a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. When the sun gets hotter, the earth gets warmer and moister, and that probably accounts for our relatively stable temperatures even while the sun's output has varied.

People ought to be worrying about the sun getting colder again. People have been around for a long time, but during the ice ages agriculture wasn't possible over most of the earth's surface. Everything we have is due to living in a warm period in the earth's history.

// posted by MaxedOutMama @ 11/28/2005 08:41:00 AM