Canada withdraws from Kyoto Protocol

The landmark pact reached in 1997 is the only global treaty that sets down targeted curbs in global emissions.
But those curbs apply only to rich countries, excluding the United States, which has refused to ratify the accord.
“Kyoto is not the path forward for a global solution to climate change,” Kent said. “If anything, it’s an impediment.

“We believe that a new agreement with legally binding commitments for all major emitters that allows us as a country to continue to generate jobs and economic growth represents the path forward.”
Canada agreed under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce CO2 emissions to 6,0 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, but its emissions of the gases blamed for damaging Earth’s fragile climate system have instead increased sharply.
Saying the targets agreed to by a previous Liberal administration were unattainable, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government last year unveiled its own measures aimed at curbing emissions, in line with US efforts.

Pulling out of Kyoto now allows Canada to avoid paying penalties of up to $13,6bn for missing its targets.
Kent also cited major impacts on Canada’s economy that will be avoided by withdrawing from the treaty. “Under Kyoto, Canada is facing radical and irresponsible choices if we’re to avoid punishing multibillion-dollar payments,” Kent said, noting that Canada produces barely two percent of global emissions.
“To meet the targets under Kyoto for 2012 would be the equivalent of either removing every car, truck, ATV, tractor, ambulance, police car, and vehicle of every kind from Canadian roads or closing down the entire farming and agricultural sector and cutting heat to every home, office, hospital, factory, and building in Canada.”

For Kyoto supporters, the anticipated Canadian pullout was expected to be a symbolic blow and badly damage a UN climate process already weakened by divisions. Last week at the UN climate conference in Durban, Kent had already said that Kyoto was “in the past” for Canada.
“It is an agreement that covers fewer than 30 percent of global emissions, by some estimates 15 percent or less,” the Canadian minister said.

The conference on Sunday approved a roadmap towards an accord that for the first time will bring all major greenhouse-gas emitters under a single legal roof.
If approved as scheduled in 2015, the pact will be operational from 2020 and become the prime weapon in the fight against climate change.
But environmentalists have called it porous.

Kent said that in the meantime, Canada would continue to try to reduce its emissions under a domestic plan that calls for a 20 percent cut from 2006 levels by 2020, or as critics point out, a mere  three percent from 1990 levels.

The latest data last year showed that Canadian carbon emissions were currently up more than 35 percent from 1990.
Meanwhile, pushing too hard at international climate change talks might have killed the only treaty regulating carbon emissions, host South Africa said after concluding tense negotiations on how the world should respond to global warming.

Given the international financial crisis and competing national political interests, trying to force countries to do more than they are willing and able to do “would have resulted in a ‘no deal’ in Durban, not only killing the Kyoto Protocol therefore, but possibly even the UN Convention on Climate Change itself”, Water and Environmental Affairs Minister Edna Molewa said on Monday.
South Africa presided for two weeks over the talks, nudging and sometimes pushing long-time rivals to agree. On Sunday, a day and-a-half after the talks were to have ended, negotiators in Durban agreed to extend the Kyoto Protocol by five years. The 1997 agreement has binding emission targets for some industrial countries but not the world’s biggest carbon polluters, the US and China. Durban’s accord also envisions a new accord with binding targets for all countries to take effect in 2020.

Some critics have complained the outcome lacked ambition. The agreement did not commit nations to ensuring their greenhouse gas emissions start to decrease before 2020, which scientists say is crucial to preventing global temperatures from rising more than 1,2 degrees Celsius above current levels by the end of this century.

Celine Charveriat of the anti-poverty group Oxfam called the Durban pact “a major disappointment”. Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute was more measured, saying it was significant that Durban set the world on course to a legally binding agreement that would cover both developed and developing countries.

Until now, developed countries who have been contributing to global warming since the Industrial Revolution had been seen as bearing the greatest responsibility for reducing emissions. They argue that countries like China, Brazil and India should do more, while those emerging economic powers say abandoning dirty energy too quickly would hurt growth.

Molewa acknowledged on Monday that South Africa is among the countries wary of “strangling our own industry, strangling our own programme of poverty eradication”. — AFP.