Gore Calls Canada Climate Plan a "Fraud"

[captainsunshine]

From The Associated Press, April 30, 2007

Al Gore condemned Canada's plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, saying it was a fraud "designed to mislead the Canadian people."

Under the initiative announced Thursday, Canada would reduce greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by 2020. But the government acknowledged it would not meet its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol, which requires 35 industrialized countries to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The country's emissions are now 30 percent above 1990 levels.

The Conservative government's strategy focuses both on reducing emissions of gases blamed for global warming and improving air quality. But the plan failed to spell out what many of its regulations will look like.

"In my opinion, it is a complete and total fraud," Gore said Saturday. "It is designed to mislead the Canadian people."

Gore said he was surprised that the plan focused on reducing the intensity of emissions rather than tough, overall curbs.

He said "intensity reduction" - which allow industries to increase their greenhouse gas outputs as they raise production - was a poll-tested phrase developed by think tanks financed by Exxon Mobil and other large polluters.

Canadian Environment Minister John Baird rejected Gore's criticisms.

"The fact is our plan is vastly tougher than any measures introduced by the administration of which the former vice president was a member," Baird said in a statement.

Baird also invited Gore to discuss climate change and the Conservatives' environmental policies with him.

Gore, who was in Toronto to present his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," at a consumer environmental show, acknowledged that as an American, he had "no right to interfere" in Canadian decision.

However, he said, the rest of the world looks to Canada for moral leadership, and that was why Thursday's announcement was so "shocking."

Canadian opposition Liberal Leader Stephane Dion said Sunday that Gore was right.

"Mr. Baird is embarrassing Canada around the world," Dion said. "The world expects Canada will do its share - more than that, that Canada will be a leader and we are failing the world. We are failing Canadians."

[phishtaper]

Gore's right.

[Jaimoe]

The Green Plan misleads some Canadian people: i.e., those that want to be mislead for financial purposes and party loyalty. Everyone else knows that Baird is Queen's Commerce fat-head.

[edger]

:::shakes head in dismay::::

Definitely not shocking though...

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I get a kick out all the letters to editors saying the Gore has no right to come up here and criticise "how we do things". How about, for once, we see Americans interfering in another country in order not to fuck it up?

[Baj]

go GORE

[SmoothedShredder]

Gore's Ecological footprint probably rivals John Travolta's.

"Matt Damon!!!"

[AD]

Gore's Ecological footprint probably rivals John Travolta's.

"Matt Damon!!!"

ha!

Maaaat Daaaamon... hahah

[timouse]

old news. harper's been wandering around promising to reduce "intensity of emissions" for a real long time. full story.

The Conservative government was criticized harshly last fall when it announced that its targets for at least the next 13 years would not require companies to reduce their overall emissions, but rather reduce their intensity. That means greenhouse-gas emissions from the production of each barrel of oil would decrease, but if a company is selling more barrels of oil each year -- as is widespread in the oil sands -- overall emissions would keep going up.

The government documents set a target for the oil sands of reducing the intensity of emissions by 40 per cent by 2020. If all oil sands projects go ahead, Mr. Bramley said, industry could meet that target while allowing total greenhouse-gas emissions to rise 248 per cent higher than 2000 emission levels. The documents also appear to acknowledge this, he said.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I've been digging this story all day. Candidate for best Godwin of the year (and I'm inclined to agree with the sentiment, which May only quoted).

Uproar erupts over May's 'appeasement' remarks

Updated Tue. May. 1 2007 10:15 PM ET

CTV.ca News Staff

Other politicians have seized on weekend remarks by Green Party Leader Elizabeth May comparing the Conservatives' climate policies to appeasement of the Nazis by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

"It is time for the Liberal members opposite to stand up against outrageous, hateful, mean-spirited comments by their candidate in Central Nova," Environment Minister John Baird said in Tuesday's question period.

"It is inexplicable how they could not stand up against people who bash Christians and invoke Nazi-era atrocities."

May isn't running as a Liberal in the Nova Scotia riding, but the Liberals won't be running a candidate against her. She has praised Liberal Leader Stephane Dion's environmental philosophy and policies.

Dion, who won't face a Green candidate in his Montreal riding, said May should withdraw the comment.

"We should not use it -- for the very reason that in the spectrum of power, the Nazi regime is beyond any comparison," Dion said outside the Commons.

"So I'm uncomfortable with the reference to Chamberlain about anything else than what happened in the Second World War."

NDP Leader Jack Layton, whose party has only a narrow lead over the Greens for third place in public support, also said the comments were something his party didn't consider to be either wise or appropriate.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper cited a letter of complaint from the Canadian Jewish Congress.

"Whatever the Earth is doing, warming up, it has nothing to do with what the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe," said Congress spokesperson Ed Morgan.

However, two public figures in Britain have used a similar analogy on the climate issue.

Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said last week that climate change should be thought of as "climate security" and compared the pre-Second World War actions of Winston Churchill with those of Chamberlain, who history sees as having been a Nazi appeaser.

"It was a time when Churchill, perceiving the dangers that lay ahead, struggled to mobilize the political will and industrial energy of the British Empire to meet those dangers," she said. "He did so often in the face of strong opposition and not always with success."

On Tuesday, Prince Charles made the point in a speech to a business conference that "I do not want my children and grandchildren, or anyone for that matter, saying to me, 'Why didn't you do something when it was possible to make a difference and when you knew what was happening?'"

May's position

May has said she considers her weekend remarks misrepresented and that the Conservatives are only trying to deflect attention away from their climate change policy.

"Mr. Harper and Mr. Baird are desperate to deflect attention from their own vile, despicable, reckless behaviour," she told CTV News by phone.

She added: "What I said is that in the eyes of the World, Canada is attracting unprecedented criticism."

May earlier told The Canadian Press that she was simply repeating the comments of British journalist and environmental author George Monbiot.

The author of Heat: How To Stop the Planet from Burning reportedly told a conference in Toronto on Saturday that there's a new climate change "axis of evil" -- U.S. President George Bush, Australian Prime Minister John Howard and Harper, she said.

The Conservatives have abandoned trying to reach Canada's Kyoto target of a six per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2012. The U.S. and Australia signed but never ratified the treaty.

The three countries are the world's top per capita producers of GHG emissions, eclipsed only by Luxembourg.

May, who claims to have taken notes, said Monbiot called the three "more culpable in the eyes of history than Neville Chamberlain's attempt to appease the Nazis."

Monbiot made a similar analogy on the climate change issue in a 1995 column for The Guardian, a British newspaper.

May made her statements while speaking to a church congregation in London, Ont.

Monbiot was comparing the moral failure of those who don't want to meet the Kyoto Protocol with Chamberlain's failure to appreciate the risks posed by Adolf Hitler's Germany in the late 1930s, she said.

"We run the risk of losing civilization," May told CP.

Dion said climate change is indeed a threat to global security, on the same scale as terrorism or nuclear weapons.

"All these threats are worrying enough," he said. "You don't need to go over the top."

With files from The Canadian Press

[dancingbear]

i think any comment that tries to compare genocide with anything else usually rings cheap and hollow.

Why even focus on it?

Typical politicians, not focusing on the issue.

Which by the way is why i like danny williams, as although my political views are very non-conservative, he answers questions directly, and fights for a better newfoudnland.

PLEASE HELP SAVE DARFUR,

spencer

[Hux]

So many people with so many agendas. Why can't we all just get along?

[Freak By Night]

i think any comment that tries to compare genocide with anything else usually rings cheap and hollow.

To be fair, she didn't actually compare the climate policies with the Nazis, she compared them to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of the Nazis.

Either way it was a dumb thing to say.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Maybe a dumb thing to repeat; she didn't come up with it. But I don't think the jump to the matter of genocide is quite warranted (if inevitable); I think the point was that there are incalculably complex disasters looming in each case that political dithering and pandering to the status quo would only help to encourage.

[ollie]

go GORE

I wonder what Al Gore would call a plan that involved bringing 25,000 glowsticks to a festival.

Sorry, not gonna let that one go just yet.