Durban and Canada: Whistling Past The Climate Change Graveyard

( Photo via PANDArchitecture )

The most recent United Nations conference on climate change has come to a close, with the result being a 190-nation agreement to ostensibly “save the planet.” But the devil is in the details, as they say, and even a cursory examination of this deal reveals a more cynical truth. And even as a new global deal to fight climate change is reached, other polluting nations are breaking away from such compacts.

The UN conference in Durban, South Africa ended earlier this week with a global accord that pledges to take steps to combat climate change and reduce the amount of carbon emissions causing a consistent escalation of worldwide temperatures. The “big four” of global polluters — China, India, the European Union and the United States — finally agreed to the framework of a climate treaty that carries on the legacy of the Kyoto Protocol after most of the highly anticipated Durban meetings were spent haggling over frivolous details.

While the “Durban Platform” succeeded where previous efforts at  a post-Kyoto direction for global climate negotiations failed at Copenhagen and Cancun the past two years, the call for emission reductions in the deal is not legally binding until at least 2020 and most observers say that the result is a toothless waste of time that will have no effect on rising temperatures.

More than 190 countries managed to finally agree a new climate change deal amid chaotic scenes in the early hours of Sunday morning in Durban, South Africa.

UN scientists have stated that emissions need to peak and start coming down before 2020 to stand a chance of keeping temperature rise within the ‘safe zone’ of 2C.

Breathless coverage by the mainstream media and opaque spin from the United Nations have cloaked the results from Durban with an aura of “groundbreaking” transcendence. But the lack of a firm legal basis for compliance, along with inherent risk of an accord reliant on political action, makes the latest “landmark” UN climate treaty “less than meets the eye,” writes David Roberts in Grist.

Here’s one thing you can say for the DPEA (Durban Platform): it probably saved the U.N. climate process from total dissolution. But, as Michael Levi argues, it is far from the triumph a credulous media is peddling. It initiates “a process to develop a protocol, another legal instrument, or an outcome with legal force under the Convention applicable to all Parties.”

Most reporters are taking “outcome with legal force” to mean “legally mandated reductions in emissions for everyone.” But that’s a rather heroic assumption. As Levi notes, it’s not exactly clear what “legal force” means. Any formal decision of COP could be taken to have some legal force — just maybe not that much. And what’s to say the legal force might not just apply to transparency or technology transfer, not emission reductions? And what does “applicable to all Parties” mean? Kyoto was applicable to all parties, but it didn’t require emission reductions of all them.

………

And let’s get serious: agree in 2015 to do something in 2020? Anyone think that will be a serious constraint on President Romney? Or any government four years from now, much less nine years from now?

There is little dissension over the fact that climate change has become more of a visceral threat to societies and economics this year more than ever before.  Extreme weather has plagued the planet in 2011, with the United States experiencing some of its most dramatic climate change-related consequences in history, from super-tornadoes in Missouri to epic droughts in Texas.

One new study finds that unchecked carbon emissions from China are changing weather patterns across most of the western US, limiting precipitation and leading to prolonged drought.

Data released this summer shows that 2010 was a record year for carbon emissions, and a new British report released just as the conference in Durban was getting underway this month indicates that the globe is on pace to suffer “dangerous” effects from man-made climate change.

The  report put out by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research reveals that global carbon emissions are rising at a much faster rate than previously estimated; emissions are up by almost 50 percent since 1990 and jumped by nearly 6 percent last year. Despite marginal increases in renewable energy production the globe still gets 80 percent of its energy from fossil fuels, churning out more and more carbon emissions each year.

To avoid “catastrophic and irreversible” effects`ts of climate change, scientists say, emissions must start peaking by 2020. The new Durban agreement allows for rising emission up to and then past that crucial year.

Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have increased by half in the last 20 years, giving the world much less chance of avoiding dangerous climate change, according to new data.

She said the problem was urgent, as the chances of holding global temperature rises to less than 2C above pre-industrial levels (which scientists regard as the limit of safety) beyond which climate change becomes catastrophic and irreversible, were dependent on emissions peaking by 2020 at the latest.

And even as 190 nations were meeting in Africa to take on the increasingly dire complications derived from man-made climate change and a warming planet,  one important Western nation was unilaterally taking itself out of all binding climate agreements, placing a great deal of doubt on whether industrialized nations will ever get serious about climate change.

The conservative government of Canada announced on Monday that it will withdraw from the 1990′s-era Kyoto Protocol, the active climate accord that preceded what was just “accomplished”  in Durban. All nations that signed on to the Kyoto deal have a legal right ti withdraw at any time, and Canada’s decision was not unexpected.

The government under Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, taking a cue from “pro-business” lawmakers in the United States, complained that a mandate to curb carbon emissions is an “impediment”  to “jobs and economic growth,” and that Canada’s place in Kyoto “was the legacy of an incompetent Liberal government.”

Canada will formally withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the minister of the environment has said.

Peter Kent said the protocol “does not represent a way forward for Canada” and the country would face crippling fines for failing to meet its targets.

The move, which is legal and was expected, makes it the first nation to pull out of the global treaty.

The protocol, initially adopted in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, is aimed at fighting global warming.

“Kyoto, for Canada, is in the past, and as such we are invoking our legal right to withdraw from Kyoto,” Mr Kent said in Toronto.

He said he would be formally advising the United Nations of his country’s intention to pull out.

He said meeting Canada’s obligations under Kyoto would cost $13.6bn (10.3bn euros; £8.7bn): “That’s $1,600 from every Canadian family – that’s the Kyoto cost to Canadians, that was the legacy of an incompetent Liberal government”.

He said that despite this cost, greenhouse emissions would continue to rise as two of the world’s largest polluters – the US and China – were not covered by the Kyoto agreement.

“We believe that a new agreement that will allow us to generate jobs and economic growth represents the way forward,” he said.

Much of Canada’s opposition to limits on emissions is based on the oil sands being aggressively collected in western Canada with the full backing of the Canadian government. The Harper administration has pledged its full support for oil companies seeking to mine the rich deposits of oil sands found in Canada, including taking on international regulations aimed at discouraging the use of what is one of the most dirty sources of energy in the world.

Peter Kent, the environment minister that announced Canada’s exit from Kyoto, has criticized international efforts to curb oil sands production and has publicly applauded the development of oil sands as a means of “maintaining the economic recovery” in the country.

For years, the Canadian government has dismissed efforts by politicians and environmentalists in other countries to characterize oil-sands production as “dirty oil.” A report from the UK Guardian claims that the Canadian government is concerned that proposed European legislation would penalize imports of oil derived from its tar sands and so restrict access to the European market for Canadian oil.

Federal environment minister Peter Kent said earlier this year that the Canadian government will not subject the industry to greenhouse gas regulations for at least several years. “Our focus for the next several years is going to continue to be on maintaining the economic recovery and we will do nothing in the short term which would unnecessarily compromise or threaten to compromise that recovery,” Kent said.

The controversy over Canada’s oil sands and its contribution to global warming also closely involves American politics. The Keystone XL pipeline proposed to send oil from Canadian oil sands deposits through the middle of the United States has become a veritable political football, with President Obama’s administration linked with the backers of the pipeline while simultaneously trying to appease environmentalists that have raised alarms over the project.

Republicans in Congress, making dubious promises that the pipeline would lead to cheaper gasoline and create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, have now threatened to insert a provision mandating construction of the pipeline without a formal review into a politically popular bill that would cut payroll taxes for working Americans.