It's Time for Rhetoric to Give Way to Ambition, Action

The UN climate conference scheduled to end on Friday in Bali is a critical moment for the world's governments to show collective leadership. It is also an unparalleled opportunity for Canada to improve its dismal position in the fight against global warming - a position resulting from years of procrastination, abandonment of treaty obligations, weak targets, and even weaker policies.

Average global warming of 2ºC above pre-industrial temperatures is widely recognized as a danger threshold. To have a chance of avoiding it, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has shown that global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2015, then fall to about 45-85% below the 1990 level by 2050. This can only be achieved if governments conclude a new global agreement to initiate deep emission cuts after 2012, when the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol ends.

At previous UN climate meetings, governments failed to start serious negotiations on the post-2012 agreement. The essential task of the Bali conference is to agree on a formal, sufficiently detailed mandate for those negotiations, with an end date of 2009. That is the latest moment that allows a good chance of enough countries ratifying the new agreement so it can enter into force by 2013.

The immensity of projected climate impacts, the size of the emission cuts needed to prevent them and the lack of time for negotiations create an unique sense of urgency in Bali. Last month the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, put it this way: "I need a political answer. This is an emergency and for emergency situations we need emergency action."

For the Government of Canada to show genuine leadership in Bali, it must do two things.

First, it must state ambitious, clear and fair objectives for the post-2012 climate agreement. The government must articulate a clear global emission reduction target that is consistent with the 2ºC global warming limit - a limit that Minister Baird endorsed in Question Period last week. Contrary to its position at the recent Commonwealth summit, Canada must clearly recognize that countries like China and India - with per-capita emissions and wealth five to ten times lower than ours - cannot realistically take on the same types of obligations as us immediately after 2012.

Second, the government must reposition its current targets and policies as an initial commitment, one that it is willing to improve substantially as part of a global effort. Canada's current target for 2020 would see our emissions remain above the 1990 level, a far cry from the 25-40% reduction below 1990 that the IPCC's analysis shows is needed from developed countries. Worse, a series of independent analyses have shown that the government's current policies are far too weak to meet even its own target for 2020. Its proposed regulations for heavy industry (responsible for half of Canada's emissions) include "compliance options" that provide no assurance of actual emission reductions and fail to put a price on emissions high enough to drive significant change.

For Canada to make a real contribution to the collective leadership so desperately needed in Bali, rhetoric must give way to ambition and action commensurate with the climate challenge.