Canada “cautiously optimistic” about new climate deal

Environment Minister Peter Kent: “We want to avoid another Kyoto-like pact at all costs.” (PHOTO BY FRANK TESTER)

MIKE DE SOUZA
Postmedia News

DURBAN, South Africa — The Canadian government has left a historic climate change summit that salvaged the Kyoto Protocol, warning that it will drive a hard bargain to establish new international laws, or their equivalent, to slash all major global sources of heat-trapping pollution.

The 195 members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change finished a record-breaking, marathon session two days behind schedule, and charted a course towards a new regime to be finalized by 2015 in an effort to stave off dangerous human interference with the atmosphere.

“Although these negotiations will be difficult, we are cautiously optimistic that we will reach a new agreement by 2015,” said Environment Minister Peter Kent.

The Kyoto agreement, signed and ratified by virtually all of the countries, apart from the United States, in 1997, will be extended, but will not have the participation of Canada, Russia and Japan, who all said they wanted the other large emitting countries, including China and India, to take on their own commitments.

“We want to avoid another Kyoto-like pact at all costs,” said Kent. “Kyoto was not effective and was not good for Canada. The previous government should not have ratified it.”

Although countries agreed on terms to make a new global green climate fund to support efforts in developing countries to adapt to climate change and promote clean energy growth, Kent said Canada would not provide any new money for the fund until the recipients committed to targets and transparent reporting of their efforts.

Steven Guilbeault, co-founder of Equiterre, a Quebec-based environmental group, credited the European Union, the Alliance of Small Island States and the least-developed countries for leading the summit to its final package.

But he said the deal could have been much stronger if the Canadian government and its allies had shown more ambition.

“A historic agreement was within our grasp in Durban, but the combined efforts of the U.S., Canada and Japan have undermined a positive outcome here,” said Guilbeault. “We leave with an agreement that does not do enough to take us away from the current path of four degrees Celsius of warming and towards dangerous climate change.”

Countries have agreed that they must limit global warming to two degrees Celsius of average global temperatures above pre-industrial levels to avoid serious damage to ecosystems and the economy.

The UN’s top climate change official said the new regime would compel countries such as Canada to show leadership and do more.

“They will now engage over the next few years in a very constructive conversation about how the responsibility that lies on every single shoulder is going to be taken forward,” said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN’s climate change secretariat.

“Of course developed countries will have to take the lead and they will have to continue to provide funding and technology to developing countries.”