Canada’s Greenhouse Gas Record Is A Mess

What nation stands as one of the biggest impediments to cutting greenhouse gas emissions?

Surprisingly, that is Canada.

Under Conservative Prime Minister Steven Harper, Canada has abandoned the limits that it agreed to under the Kyoto Protocol.

It was supposed to cut greenhouse gases 6% by 2012. So far, those emissions have risen 26%.

Harper’s response?

“This country is headed to be 50 percent over its Kyoto target in 2012. We can’t tell the Canadian population to heat their home one-third less of the time,” Harper said in 2007.

The climate change performance index assesses the actions of the 60 wealthiest nations. Canada came in 59^th, just ahead of Saudi Arabia.

It is because Canada is an oil-producing nation that the Canadian government has decided to ditch Kyoto. You see, Canada is not just any oil-producing nation. In Alberta, the world’s second largest oil reserves sit waiting to be tapped.

The problem is that these reserves are among the dirtiest and most expensive petroleum resources to extract in the world.

The Alberta tar sands contain a toxic mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and organic chemicals. To process this mess, the sands must be heated and washed. It takes two to three times the energy to refine the tar sands that it does conventional oil fields. It also requires three barrels of water for every barrel of oil. The tailings are left in open pits to foul the environment.

The Harper administration worked hard at a commonwealth conference in Nairobi and UN climate conference in Bali to make sure none of the recommendations coming from those conferences had binding emission limits.

While many countries have cut emissions or at least stabilized their output, Canada is going the other direction. As the tar sands are exploited, the situation will only get worse. Today, as production is only beginning in the tar sands, the area is already the single largest industrial source of carbon emissions in the world. By 2020, the tar sands will produce more emissions than some European countries.

That does not take into account the enormous environmental destruction in an area that covers the size of Alabama.

Canada does not look quite as green anymore.