What Happens Without The Kyoto Protocol?

"The Kyoto Protocol's first phase is dead. The death is a pity, perhaps a tragedy. But it's dead, and no amount of exhortation from environmentalists can resurrect it.

Climate change -- the curbing of which was Kyoto's aim -- is very much alive and growing as a global threat. So there's the rub: The threat is real, the initial means are not.

What to do? The Harper government doesn't know. It has precise targets and means in other areas such as the GST cut, mandatory minimum sentences, family allowance cheques, and lengthening the Afghan mission.

On climate change, however, the Conservatives are at sea. They know what they don't like: Kyoto and the Liberals' failed attempts to craft a coherent policy. But they don't know what they want and, therefore, how to get there.

The Conservatives promised a 'made in Canada' policy, which inferentially meant rejecting Kyoto while leaving unclear an alternative. Since the election, they have been killing Liberal climate-change programs one after another and otherwise waffling.

Yesterday, they fulfilled another campaign promise: to increase the use of alternative fuels such as ethanol. The budget had added a tax credit for public transit passes. Together, these hardly constitute an answer to climate change, although the government probably will trumpet that they do.

Kyoto is dead because 35 of 163 countries that signed the original accord won't collectively meet their greenhouse-gas targets. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said as much, and he's as keen on combatting climate change as any major world leader.

Canada, of course, is arguably the worst offender among the signatories. Canada was supposed to have reduced its carbon emissions by 6 per cent. Instead, they have grown by 24 per cent, according to United Nations figures, and by 35 per cent, according to the Harper government.

Either way, it's been a terrible record, compiled under the Liberals who are now waxing indignant that the Conservatives are admitting what the Liberals were too cowardly to admit: Canada hasn't a hope of meeting those original targets."

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