Turning Down the Heat is intended to assist in the search for ways to reduce Canadian greenhouse gas emissions. It examines the potential role for emissions trading in implementation of Canada’s greenhouse gas emission reduction commitments under the Kyoto Protocol.
This paper begins with a brief description of existing international and domestic environmental law relating to climate change. It then describes the science and politics that are shaping development in international climate law, and then describes the emerging international regime of greenhouse gas emission limits. This describes how Canadian governments are responding to the possibility of limits on emissions, and identifies the resulting risks and opportunities.
Despite the urgent need for early action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, this brief is in part intended to alert readers to the potential negative implications of developing a credit for early action system. A poorly designed credit for early action system could prove to be ineffective environmentally, inefficient economically, and inequitable politically. It could potentially shift considerable wealth to some firms while at the same time imposing corresponding costs on the government or economy.
While the Kyoto Protocol is potentially an important first step in averting global climate change a number of potential weaknesses and loopholes could make the difference between it representing a first step and it being largely ineffective.
The Canadian position on the treatment of sequestration of carbon by forests and under the Kyoto Protocol is scientifically unsound and could lead to massive increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.
Recently released data shows that, if adopted, the Canadian position on the treatment of forests and soils under the Kyoto Protocol would obliterate the environmental impact of the Kyoto Protocol.
This report card evaluates the negotiating positions of the 27 nations that are members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and signatories to the Framework Convention on Climate Change. These are the world's leading nations. They are economically the most powerful and most developed, and they include most of the largest per capita greenhouse gas emitters in the world. Of the 27 nations reviewed, Canada scores second to last.
While greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced dramatically through measures that are worth doing for reasons that include protecting human health, improving competitiveness, saving consumers' money and improving the liveability of cities, delaying action will likely prove expensive. Barring an almost unimaginable derogation of responsibility towards the citizens of the globe, the increasing scientific consensus around the need to act makes international greenhouse gas emission limits a virtual certainty. Canada needs to position itself for this inevitability.
The Canadian government, and its insistence on ''credit for sinks,'' was blamed for blocking progress on an international deal to stop climate change. Why the concern over credit for sinks? This report provides background analysis for the joint West Coast Environmental Law/David Suzuki Foundation report, Taking Credit: Canada and the Role of Sinks in International Climate Negotiations.
"Taking Credit: Canada and the Role of Sinks in International Climate Negotiations" examines the science and policies surrounding controversial sections of the Kyoto Protocol that deal with carbon sinks. The report was released today by the David Suzuki Foundation and the West Coast Environmental Law Association in the lead-up to the critical climate summit in Germany in July 2001.