Kyoto Targets Not Near Enough

This week the Government of Alberta revived its confrontation with Ottawa over the Kyoto Protocol. The provincial government is objecting to federal regulation of the greenhouse gas emissions targeted by Kyoto. Instead, the province wants to regulate those emissions itself.

Jurisdictional squabbles probably put smiles on the faces of those whose job is to fill newspapers. But the reason why Kyoto is now international law and why governments — both provincial and federal — want to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, is that the climate change caused by those emissions is no laughing matter at all.

Some readers will exclaim in frustration that climate change is a hoax and greenhouse gases are no more harmful than babies' breath. But when the G8 countries' national science academies tell governments they must urgently cut greenhouse gas emissions, and when CEOs of companies like Shell Canada, Alcan and Falconbridge tell the Prime Minister (as they did earlier this month) that "the world must act urgently to stabilize the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," we know this problem is real.

The world's governments are gathering in Montreal next week at the largest and most important conference on climate change since the Kyoto conference in 1997. The challenge: to agree on a process and a deadline to negotiate much deeper reductions in greenhouse gas emissions once the first set of Kyoto targets — never intended to be more than a first step — expire in 2012.

To help citizens get a better sense of what their governments need to achieve through these negotiations, the David Suzuki Foundation and the Pembina Institute have just published The Case for Deep Reductions, an analysis of the amount by which Canada and other industrialized countries will have to cut their emissions after 2012.

We start by reviewing scientists' latest projections of climate change impacts. If the global average temperature rises 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level, tens of millions of additional people worldwide are projected to be at risk from coastal flooding and hunger, hundreds of millions from malaria and billions from water shortage. Up to one third of land-based species would be "committed to extinction" by 2050 under mid-range warming scenarios. Climate warming is already threatening the cultural survival of communities in the Arctic.

The Suzuki/Pembina report goes on to examine the maximum levels we can allow greenhouse gases to reach in the atmosphere, the amount by which the world will have to reduce emissions to keep within those levels, and reasonable ways to share out emission reductions between industrialized and developing countries.

Our conclusion: if Canada is to pull its weight internationally, it must reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 25% below the 1990 level by 2020 and 80% below the 1990 level by 2050.

These targets are ambitious, but they are also realistic. Princeton University experts recently published technology options for deep emissions reductions. They concluded: "Humanity can solve the carbon and climate problem in the first half of this century simply by scaling up what we already know how to do... Every one of these options is already implemented at an industrial scale."

Governments urgently need to commit to these targets. As the CEOs explained in their letter to the Prime Minister, "we need policy certainty for post-2012. We need a strategy now for the next 50 years, with short and medium-term targets to guide us. Governments must set clear markers along the way to unleash competitive market forces... Only then will we secure the deep reductions needed to prevent human interference with the climate system."

Alberta's current climate change plan falls woefully short of this prescription. The plan's target is to reduce the province's greenhouse gas "intensity" — emissions per dollar of GDP — by 50% between 1990 and 2020. This sounds superficially impressive, but the plan itself admits that the 50% intensity target can be met even while the province's actual emissions in 2020 remain 27% above the 1990 level. No deep reductions here.

But what should we do about the oilsands? They're the number one contributor to rising greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. The Pembina Institute believes that oilsands producers have a leadership opportunity to show they can be part of a deep reduction scenario by pledging to become "carbon neutral" by 2020. This could be achieved by combining Alberta ingenuity in cutting emissions on-site with the purchase of credits (representing emission reductions achieved elsewhere) to offset 100% of the remaining emissions.

We need to go far beyond Kyoto and we need to start now. But with imagination and ambition, all can be part of the solution.