How to sabotage the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol
- Keep insisting that you're developing a really thorough and comprehensive plan that will solve all the problems and make everyone happy. When a deadline for presenting the plan approaches put it off but insist that the plan, when it's finally unveiled, will be even better than everyone is expecting.
- Take advantage of the period between the presentation and approval of a budget and the presentation of the legislation that actually implements that budget to insert a clause that makes a drastic change to environmental laws with no warning or public debate. This is guaranteed to enrage the political opposition and cause environmental groups to protest that you're going about this the wrong way and possibly doing more harm than good.
- When people insist on calling your half-assed plan, well, half-assed, throw up your hands and tell everyone that they've ruined the best chance they'll ever have to see the Kyoto Protocol implemented in Canada.
And, incidentally (from that last link), lower the emissions targets instead of raising them.
The federal government has slashed its emissions-cutting targets for large industrial polluters by more than a third from the goal set out in Canada's original climate change plan, The Canadian Press has learned.
Oh, look. Kyoto's dead and the way is clearer than ever to "harmonize" our environmental standards with the U.S.
Could Dithers have done it any better if he was trying?
Are you suggesting he isn't trying? After the Texas 2 step, I'm pretty convinced that Martin is deliberately trying to out Harper Harper. The only thing worse than a conservative is someone who claims to be a liberal and then acts like a conservative. There are two federal conservative parties - one that is honest about its orientation and lies about its policy and one that just lies about everything.
I'd like to believe that Dithers isn't really trying to sabotage this but that would make him even more incompetent than I thought he was. And that would make him pretty incompetent.
Me, I think it is a combination of weakness and incompetence. I think there is division in the Liberal caucus on Kyoto and Dithers cannot bring them into line. Worst PM ever.
Scholars will ponder the enigma of Paul Martin Jr. for years (like maybe 2 or 3, then everyone will get bored and forget about him):
Just how stupid was Paul Martin Jr.?
Also, just how sleazy was he?
Were his vacillations and destructive policies the work of an incompetent? Or someone deliberately trying to destroy Canada and hand it over to a genuine moron in the White House?
And of course, the last question will be:
Why was he so fixated on becoming Prime Minister?
The other day, the Conservatives were saying that the Liberals' efforts to pass a law that would bring greenhouse gas emissions under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act was nothing but a carbon tax that is worth waging a federal election over. Since the economists, some anyway, argue that a carbon tax is the most cost-effective and equitable way to limit emissions (e.g., http://www.ffwdweekly.com/Issues/2002/0711/view.htm), could the Liberals be tempting the Opposition to precipitate an election, which would feature a principled stand by the Liberals on the right way to meet their Kyoto commitment?
I might be inclined to give that theory credence if the Liberals had actually announced their intention at the proper time and explained both to parliament and to those of us in the cheap seats what they were doing and why.
But the way they're doing this makes a mockery of solving the "democratic deficit" and looks like either completely incompetent governance or a deliberate attempt to monkey wrench either their own minority or any serious effort to tackle the environmental issues they claim to champion. Or both.
But you agree a carbon tax is the way to go?
Look the Liberals had 3 champions for the environment, Charles Caccia, Clifford Lincoln and Karen Kraft Sloan. For years they struggled against their colleagues in the Liberal party. They were the ONLY environmental concerned individuals in the whole damn party. Now they are gone.
You just need to recall what Martin did to Caccia in the last election to know he couldn't give a rats ass about the environment. And who is the new chair of Environment and Sustainable Development committee? Alan Tonks. What a damn sick joke.
Even if the Kyoto thing is ever implemented (to the screams of every major polluter in the country, not including those people who drive SUV's), don't expect much improvement. A friend of mine, the polymath Dr. C... "sat through one of the "methodology" papers on uncertainty in the GW modelling. The last slide had projections and uncertainties under a number of assumptions. Someone at the back next to me asked what about assuming that Kyoto gets implemented? The answer was an apology about the slide - one of the curves had "Present (2000) Green House Gas Production" and JUST below it was assuming full compliance with Kyoto - they were virtually indistinguishable unless you looked closely."
Sure, it is generally understood that Kyoto goes hardly anywhere toward addressing the risk of global warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. China, which will soon be the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, is not a signatory, neither is the other Asian giant, India. But if you cannot take even a small first step, you have to acknowledge that, if greenhouse warming occurs, we are doomed.
As to the Liberals, they may not "give a rat's ass for the environment" but they care about power. The Greens have a very effective slogan. Tax what we don't want, such as pollution, remove taxes from things we do want, such as jobs. Is it inconceivable that the Liberals would steal someone else's idea?
In any case, the Conservatives have threatened to precipitate an election because the Liberals plan to bring in what is "tantamount to a carbon tax." So are the Conservatives right to oppose this? And would the Liberals be wrong to insist that they had no such intention? And in particular, whatever may be the intentions of our slippery politicians, is a revenue neutral carbon tax not the way to go to meet our Kyoto obligation?