Paris will be COP21. After decades of procrastination and missed deadlines, delays and industry sabotage, the Paris negotiations represent a real deadline. It is no longer possible to imagine a second chance to get this right. The levels of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have reached concentrations that make avoiding the worst and most catastrophic climate futures a matter of urgency.

The negotiations have made an effort to learn from past mistakes. The Copenhagen Accord, a stage managed US production achieved outside of the UN process, allowed nations to leave the climate negotiations with a promise to announce their domestic targets later. All nations agreed in the Copenhagen text to take collective action to avoid global average temperatures from rising above 2 degrees C what they were prior to the Industrial Revolution, and preferably to hold them below 1.5C. But as the pledges were analyzed, the scientists quickly realized that even if every country met its Copenhagen target, global average temperature would soar right past 2 degrees — to 4 degrees or higher. While 2 degrees C does not sound like much in a country with winter temperatures in much of the country well below 30 degrees C and summer temperatures swinging to above 30 degrees, it is important to remember that global average temperatures do not budge much at all. In fact, the difference between the global average temperature today and in the last ice age is only 5 degrees C. A 2 degree shift in global average temperature is huge.

In Lima at COP20, the negotiators decided that the targets must be tabled well in advance of the December 2015 conference. All countries, including Canada, agreed that planned emission and adaptation targets should be submitted to the U.N.by March 31, 2015. The goal of achieving a binding comprehensive treaty by early December 2015 requires substantial advance analysis.

Canada missed submitting targets by the March 31 deadline, but did announce them late Friday May 15, just before the Victoria long weekend. The upcoming G7 summit will be in Germany and Angela Merkel plans to make climate a focus. Apparently, Stephen Harper realized he could not get through a G7 with no target. So Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq has announced the weakest target in the G7.

Canada announced a commitment to a 30% reduction against 2005 levels by 2030. We used to have the same target as the US – adopted in Copenhagen. The U.S. is on track to hit its 2020 target of 17% below 2005 levels. Harper, having chosen the same goal as Obama, never put a plan in place to hit the target. By 2020, Canada is likely to have virtually the same emissions as we did in 2005 – despite substantial efforts by provincial governments. Even the GHG reductions achieved by Ontario shutting down all coal-fired power plants are erased as the oil sands expand.

The new US target is 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025. The real leader is the EU with a target to reduce 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. (Note the base year shifts. Cuts below 1990 levels are deeper and more meaningful).

Along with the announced target, Aglukkaq announced a few measures to be taken at the federal level. However, there will still be no regulation of carbon dioxide from the oil sands. The federal government will only regulate methane from the oil sands. This is not irrelevant, but it is not the major source of GHG pollution. The feds will also regulate the production of chemicals and nitrogen in fertilizer, as well as natural gas fired electricity.

Looking at the totality of announced federal action no credible reviewers believe this new target – weak as it is – can be realized. In fact, it appears that Harper is now prepared to abandon his previous opposition to what he once attacked as “hot air” credits. Leaks from the federal background papers confirm Harper anticipates buying credits from reductions achieved in developing countries. While such credits are open to fraud, properly designed, they could be of benefit in assisting poorer nations with multiple goals. For example, supplying solar cookers to villages where women spend most of their day scouring for firewood and then suffer ill health from poor air quality, cooking over wood burning stoves inside their homes, assists in improving health, reducing poverty, assisting women and reducing GHG. But when Minister Aglukkaq was asked at her press conference about whether the federal plan included buying credits, she ran from the podium.

We need a much more aggressive target for GHG reductions and we need a plan to achieve those targets. We need to constantly make the case that such a plan will create good Canadian jobs and boost our economy. Fortunately, there’s an election between now and when the Paris negotiations take place. We must ensure that climate becomes a key election issue.

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“In 2009, Stephen Harper announced Canada’s climate commitments at Copenhagen, but never put in a plan to reach these targets by 2020. If we had started working on this in 2009, we may have achieved them; now we are way behind. Once again, Stephen Harper has no clear plan to reach the targets he announced; when asked if the Conservatives would consider international carbon credits to make up for the shortfalls in their plan, Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq refused to answer and walked away from the press conference.

“We can do better than 30%, but we will not achieve the goal of lowering Canada’s emissions through provincial action alone, nor will methane regulations get us there. We need to stop subsidizing fossil fuels, ensure a manageable carbon pricing strategy, which covers all of our economy, and invest in infrastructure and serious energy productivity improvements.

“I challenge Stephen Harper to release the details for his plan to all Canadians; until he does so, his plan is merely a public relations strategy and simply not credible.”

Bruce Hyer, Deputy Leader of the Green Party of Canada and MP (Thunder Bay – Superior North), continued:

“Stephen Harper’s strategy to pull unrealistic numbers out of the air and claim credit for provincial targets is disappointing to many Canadians, who had hoped to see Canada take a leading role in the fight against climate change; it is not surprising though, given that he has abandoned any leadership on climate change since taking office in 2006.

“The Green Party has a realistic climate strategy that we can achieve through revenue-neutral pricing on the largest sources of emissions. Our plan, called a Carbon Fee and Dividend, will help to reduce income inequality and greenhouse emissions simultaneously. Canadians know they can look to the Green Party for clear direction in the fight against climate change and our plan is a clear example of this leadership.”

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Having worked on the climate issue from 1986, back when it was a future threat, to present times, where it is the stuff of daily headlines, I have to admit that it would be easy to feel discouraged. We have squandered decades that would have allowed humanity to avoid the climate crisis altogether.

Still, I am more optimistic now than I have been in the last nine years. Nine years ago—2006—was also a year that changed everything.

It was the 2006 election which allowed Stephen Harper to form a minority government—even though cooperation between the Liberals and the NDP would have prevented this. (Conservatives had only 124 seats, the Liberals had 103 and the NDP had 29. Imagine what our country would have been spared had the opposition parties been willing to work together.)

My non-partisan approach to politics at Sierra Club had made me fully aware of how firmly Harper opposed climate action. It was recognizing the horrors of partisanship that led me to leave my position of 17 years as executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada and run for leader of the Green Party. I knew, especially given the climate threat, that we needed to find a new kind of politics.

I had tried to brief Stephen Harper for years. In the spring of 2005, I had a very revealing conversation with a Conservative MP who was actually in favour of climate action and believed his ideas would be in his party’s platform. I urged him to get Harper to make the commitment to Kyoto. Despite being sympathetic himself, he said, “We will never do that. Stephen will always see Kyoto as one of those UN things.”

And so it was that even with only a minority, with no vote in the House, within the first few weeks of becoming prime minister, Stephen Harper cancelled our commitment to Kyoto and the climate plan put in place less than a year before. That Canada had no meaningful plan to meet Kyoto from when we signed on in 1997 until 2005 was appalling. But the plan put forward in spring of 2005 would, according to the Pembina Institute, have led to Canada getting fairly close to our Kyoto target.

With no analysis and no debate, however, the whole climate plan was shut down and billions of dollars in funding cancelled. Harper dispatched his first environment minister, Rona Ambrose, to a global climate negotiation which she, ironically, chaired in spring 2006. The mantle of President of the Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was one occupied ex officio by Canada’s Minister of Environment. We had hosted the negotiations in Montreal, scant months before and held the presidency until the next Conference of the Parties could be held. Rona Ambrose inherited the mantle from Stéphane Dion. Other nations could barely believe that Canada was prepared to flout our legally binding Kyoto target (6 percent below 1990 levels by 2012) and replace it with 20 percent below 2006 levels by 2020 (which it’s now clear we won’t meet).

As Harper took a machete to our climate goals, gradually we seem to have forgotten we ever had them at all. It is as though we have a collective amnesia.

Did we ever have a plan? People, even MPs, seem to have completely forgotten. Harper has even cancelled his own weak targets to replace them with weaker ones as he did in Copenhagen in 2009. The House of Commons passed Bruce Hyer’s private members’ climate bill, Bill C-311, in 2010—only to have the unelected Senate kill it prior to a single day of committee meetings. (My friend and fellow Green Bruce Hyer, MP for Thunder Bay-Superior North, was an NDP MP when he managed to twist enough arms to get the bill passed.) The Senate had never abused its nominal power to kill a bill passed by the elected House in its entire history. But amnesia settled in.

Harper decreed that climate scientists were not allowed to speak with the media—so reporting on climate dropped by 70 percent. He violated a practice of all previous governments in disallowing opposition MPs inclusion on Canadian delegations to international meetings—especially on climate. And so opposition parties stopped sending MPs to the Conferences of the Parties. The manipulation to a deliberate forgetting was skilful and far more effective than I would have ever imagined.

It has become familiar framing to say that Canada lacks federal leadership—or that Stephen Harper has not been active on climate change. If only it were so. In fact, Stephen Harper has been hyper-active—boosting GHG emissions from a constant growth and expansion policy for the oil sands, while destroying any science to study or programmes to reduce GHG emissions at home.

In Lima at COP20, Canada agreed that all countries should table their planned emission and adaptation targets with the UN by March 31, 2015. The goal of achieving a binding comprehensive treaty by early December 2015 requires substantial advance analysis. Incredibly, not only did Canada miss the deadline, Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq has tried to blame the provinces for federal failure. She claims the data on GHG emissions from provincial governments is needed before Canada can develop its targets. The national media never asked the obvious question: How did the European Union coordinate 28 individual nation states into a shared submission by the deadline, while Canada could not handle talking to 10 provinces and 3 territories?

The so-called “sector by sector” approach isn’t a climate plan; it’s spin. Harper claims credit for a GHG emission downturn that was entirely related to the 2008 financial crisis, and which ever since has shown a steady rise. Stephen Harper signed on to the Copenhagen weak target without any intention of meeting it.

From my vantage point, as a longstanding participant in the annual UN Conferences of the Parties, Harper’s actions amount to sabotage.

So why am I optimistic?

The rest of the world is moving. The USA and China have announced targets. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the OECD, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) are all calling for carbon pricing and an end to fossil fuel subsidies. The IEA is calling for two-thirds of all known fossil fuel reserves to be left in the ground until at least 2050.

Last year was the first one in which GHG levels did not rise globally, in the absence of a major financial disaster; 2014 was also the first year in which global investments in renewable energy outpaced investments in fossil fuels. These are bets made by people who want to make money. They are not a manifestation of global altruism. In some parts of the world, the lifetime cost of a new solar facility is actually cheaper than the lifetime cost of new coal.

And my single largest source of optimism for success in Paris is the knowledge that Stephen Harper will not be Canada’s prime minister by October 20. We will have scant time—five weeks—to pull the new parliament together to re-orient Canada. I am encouraged that we will have many more Green MPs, working across party lines to make up for lost time—nine years of lost time. Canada’s delegation will once again include opposition parties and civil society organizations, and give a prominent role to First Nations and youth. We need to be the country at COP21 that twists arms and pushes others to deeper and stronger commitment. All this we can do. 2015 is the year that changes everything.

Elizabeth May is the Member of Parliament for Saanich Gulf-Islands and the leader of the Green Party of Canada.

Originally published in Focus Online.

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Deadlines have come and gone. We had a Kyoto deadline (cancelled and then reneged), a Copenhagen deadline (undertaken by our current Prime Minister so the public claim is still made that “we are committed to the target,” while it is clear it will be missed by nearly 100%). This global deadline is no longer about politics and multilateral negotiations. It is about immovable red lines in atmospheric chemistry. In other words, the atmosphere is not negotiating with humanity. This is a deadline we, “we” meaning the community of nations, cannot afford to miss.

The odd thing is how little Canadians (the other political parties and media) are aware of the process. This was brought home to me when France’s President Francois Hollande spoke in Parliament in early November 2014. I was asked by reporters what I expected to hear in his speech. I suggested that as well as terrorism and the economy, he would be likely to focus on the climate crisis and the upcoming conference. Reporters responded with a blank stare at that.

After his speech, which did devote a significant portion to the issue of climate, reporters asked me if I had seen his speech before delivery. They believed I must have seen it in order to predict the speech so accurately. Had they been paying any attention to France’s role as host country, it would have been as obvious to them as it was to me. But, as the only opposition MP to have attended the climate negotiations over the last few years, I am getting used to Canada being unaware. While the NDP and Liberal MPs do not attend, neither do Canadian reporters. As a gathering consensus builds internationally, Canada, embarrassingly, appears to be a back-water of ignorance.

With an election October 19 and the most critical climate negotiations ever beginning within six weeks, everyone – Canadian political parties, the media and the citizenry – better get up to speed rapidly.

The goal of the process is to have a treaty by 2015, coming into effect by 2020 to avoid allowing global average temperature to cross a red line. That red line is a degree of warming of 2 degrees C global average temperatures above levels prior to the Industrial Revolution. No one knowledgeable about climate science thinks 2 degrees C is a safe concentration. The world will experience increasingly dangerous severe weather events at 2 degrees. And no one familiar with Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission rates thinks the goal will be easy.

What everyone can agree upon is that it is essential if we are to avoid a level of warming that itself triggers increasing self-accelerating warming referred to as “run away” climate change.

While Canada has been at the table in the annual meetings of the UNFCCC, under Stephen Harper’s instructions, we make no progress. In fact, Canada has undermined negotiations in critical ways since 2006.

Not only has the federal government ignored its obligations, undertaken by Stephen Harper personally at COP15 in Copenhagen, Canada has sabotaged larger global progress. It was Canada that first started fiddling with the base year. The entire climate framework in 2006, at the point the Conservatives formed a minority government, was predicated on all nations using the same base year against which reductions were pledged. All countries on earth used 1990 as the base year. But at the first set of meetings following Stephen Harper becoming prime minister, Canada abandoned Kyoto and announced we would reduce by 20% below 2006 levels by 2020. We later weakened the shell game opened the door for other countries, notably the US, to play the same game. We have blocked progress at every meeting.

Harper’s administration made us the worst country in the room, but now, with Abbot as Australian PM, we have competition. Tragically, there is no competition for best country in the room. The process is lacking any leadership. There is a big mushy middle. The EU, which used to lead, is increasingly compromised by its own coal-burning members and economic woes. The US talks a good game, but in negotiations, it operates more as a brake than an accelerator.

With an election six weeks before COP21, the Green goal is to have enough Green MPs to be able to work constructively with any other parties in a minority parliament to put Canada back in the leadership role we once had. It will be a short runway, but Green MPs will hit the ground running.

Originally published in Embassy.

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I learned climate science from Environment Canada scientists back in the 1980s when I worked for the federal Minister of Environment. No one thought there was controversy about the basic science as we organized the first major international conference on the threat in Toronto in June 1988. The myth of doubt had not yet been invented, nor heavily financed to delay action.

Procrastination, corporate lobbying and lack of political will has led to a tragic loss of more than two decades when actions would have been easier, greenhouse gases could have been reduced before hitting the current 400 parts per million (ppm), before condemning glaciers and sea ice and coral reefs and other ecosystems to dangerous levels of damage. Over the previous one million years, carbon dioxide concentrations never exceeded 280 ppm. Humanity has already changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, just as carbon dioxide mixing with ocean water is changing the acidity of our oceans.

The process of negotiating a treaty to move the world to a low-carbon future has been on-going since 1992. The third Conference of the Parties (COP3) took place in Kyoto, giving the protocol its name. Kyoto in its second phase still exists, but Canada dealt it several mortal blows.

The next big negotiation deadline was 2009 at COP15 in Copenhagen. That COP was a train wreck of an event. It sowed deep seeds of distrust as President Barack Obama took a handful of big industrialized countries, plus China, into a hotel room – outside the integrity and transparency of the UN process – and cooked up the bogus “Copenhagen Accord.” The targets were not legally binding but “politically binding.” It was accompanied with a blatant attempt to bribe the developing world into not protesting rising seas and droughts by providing a new Green Climate Fund, with promises to ramp up to $100 billion/year by 2020.

Prime Minister Harper personally attended Copenhagen, although he was not present as Obama crafted the back-room deal. Harper agreed to adopt the same target as the United States – 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. This amounted to the second weakening of Canada’s pledge since Harper became prime minister.

While Obama has delivered the US pledge, sadly, Canada has totally missed the target. Using Environment Canada’s own figures, Canada is set to miss its Copenhagen target of 126MT reductions by 116MT. With only five years left before Harper’s pledge falls due, his administration has failed to establish any plan to meet it. It will be challenging for any government to meet that target now.

Meanwhile, the world’s scientific body reviewing climate action, the IPCC, found that even if all Copenhagen targets were met, the world would shoot past 2 degrees risking far more catastrophic impacts.

Much more dramatic action is required. In fact, the IPCC is now calling for the world to cease using fossil fuels for energy entirely by the end of this century. The ramping up of renewable and green sources of energy is urgent.

The global negotiations continue. The deadline for the acceptance of the treaty that failed in Copenhagen will be next year at COP21 in Paris. COP20 last December in Lima was supposed to create an ambitious agenda propelling the last phase of negotiations forward. The Peoples Climate March and UN Climate Leaders Summit last September were all about injecting momentum into Lima. Still, COP20 fell far short of what is needed.

The tensions created by Copenhagen are still with us. At COP20, industrialized countries wanted the developing world to accept texts leaving out the litany of broken promises from industrialized countries, while giving the rich a weak set of self-selected targets of dubious enforceability. The Lima negotiation’s overtime hours only slightly improved a weak decision. References to assistance to developing countries and a call for more action for industrialized countries were mere sops to the chorus of complaints.

Before next year’s COP in Paris, Canada’s elections will likely deliver a new Prime Minister with a Parliament with a greener hue. It is my hope that the new Parliament, post-2015 election, will place Canada in the lead. We can be the country that saves the Paris talks. We know how to do this. Canadian negotiators, given proper instructions to negotiate the clear, aggressive and equitable climate treaty the world needs, can do it.

Between now and December 2015, we have to focus on the parallel challenges – get our own house in order by implementing meaningful climate action domestically while being prepared to play the role of global leader we once delivered for the world. Greens will ensure that climate is a key issue in the upcoming election.

Originally published in the HillTimes.

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She pointed out that if she had said that to me back then, it would have been pretty remarkable. She was three years old in 1986.

It is one of the moments that horrifyingly brings home to me that I have been working to arrest the threat of climate change a very long time – and not succeeding.

In June 1988, I worked within Environment Canada to organize the first international scientific climate conference in Toronto. It made an impact – that same year, the United Nations created a scientific organization to keep politicians informed of the growing threat, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The world appeared to be off to a pretty good start back in 1992 when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed by every nation on the planet at the Earth Summit.

Procrastination, corporate lobbying and lack of political will have led to a tragic loss of more than two decades when actions would have been easier, greenhouse gases could have been reduced before hitting the current 400 parts per million, before condemning glaciers and sea ice and coral reefs and other ecosystems to dangerous levels of damage.

Over the previous one million years, carbon dioxide concentrations have never exceeded 280 ppm. We have already changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, just as carbon dioxide mixing with ocean water is changing the acidity of our oceans.

The process of negotiating a treaty to move the world to a lowcarbon future has been going on since 1992. The third Conference of the Parties (COP3) took place in Kyoto, giving the protocol its name. Kyoto, in its second phase, still exists, but Canada dealt it several mortal blows.

The next big negotiation deadline was 2009 at the Conference of Parties (COP15) in Copenhagen. It was a train wreck of an event. It sowed deep seeds of distrust as U.S. President Barack Obama took a handful of big industrialized countries, plus China, into a hotel room – outside the integrity and transparency of the UN process – and cooked up the bogus “Copenhagen Accord.” The targets were not legally binding but “politically binding.”

It was accompanied by a blatant attempt to bribe the developing world into not protesting rising seas and droughts by providing a new Green Climate Fund, to ramp up to $100 billion a year by 2020. It was primarily designed to give Obama political cover in Washington to pass the Waxman-Markey climate bill. But in the end, the White House pulled its support for Waxman-Markey.

By then, the bill was so riddled with compromise, no one could really mourn its loss. Plus, trying to give that hopeless bill cover sabotaged global negotiations.

So here we are five years later in Lima at COP20. The deadline for the acceptance of the treaty that failed in Copenhagen will be next year at COP21 in Paris. The tensions created by Copenhagen are still with us. As is the distrust.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s pledge to cut emissions has been ignored by his administration and we have no hope of reaching it based on current plans.

Last year at COP19 in Warsaw, the failure to meet promised Green Climate Fund commitments took over the COP, with the popular button of the conference being “WTF?” – “Where’s the financing?” At COP20, industrialized countries wanted the developing world to be happy with text that leaves out such annoying promises, while giving the developed world a weak set of self-selected targets of dubious enforceability. The Lima negotiations went into overtime hours, adjourning more than 36 hours late. The deadlock was predictable and the compromise only slightly improves a weak Lima decision.

For years, I have been the only opposition MP at COP. Before next year’s COP in Paris, Canada’s elections will likely deliver a new prime minister with a Parliament with a greener hue – more Green MPs committed to working cooperatively. It is imperative that at least one opposition MP knows the negotiated trail that got us to this point.

Despite the tortuous path and dashed hopes of other COPs, we have no alternative. There is no other forum to navigate a course to global action for a carbon neutral world. We need to see our way through the thicket to reach the clear, aggressive and equitable climate treaty the world needs.

Elizabeth May is the MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands and leader of the Green Party of Canada. Originally published in the Victoria Times Columnist.

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From his first words, “Recently, Green Party leader Elizabeth May orchestrated an open letter to United States Secretary of State John Kerry..,” it was pretty clear he didn’t grasp the concept of writing a letter. “Orchestrated?” “Open letter?”

Not quite. The U.S. State Department had a period for public comment on the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) on the proposed TransCanada pipeline to take unprocessed bitumen from Alberta to tidewater at the Gulf of Mexico. Having reviewed the submission and visited Washington D.C. in February, it was clear to me that some key points were ignored in the FEIS, while many useful findings of the report were being overwhelmed by popular misconceptions about the nature of the project. I thought it would be potentially helpful to Secretary Kerry to point out a few of these points. The letter was admittedly a bit complex as it assumed a general familiarity with the FEIS.

From reviewing Mr. Green’s piece, it seems he never actually read my letter to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. In an effort to draw interest to the letter, a simplified version was circulated by the Green Party as an email message, summarizing some of the points, but including the link to the full submission. Mr. Green seems to have only gotten as far as the short email.

Now to his critique of my main points.

1. In my letter I asked Kerry to reject the Keystone pipeline in order to assist Canada’s long-term energy security and prosperity: “I urge that you do so as the most helpful decision to assist Canada avoid huge future economic losses when the carbon bubble bursts.”

I wrote this being certain that Secretary Kerry was familiar with the term “carbon bubble.” Mr. Green, apparently unfamiliar with the term, leapt to the conclusion that I was talking about Dutch Disease. He then proceeded to box me about the ears for something I had not claimed.

Canada has suffered from a mild case of Dutch Disease. This was the finding of the OECD report to Canada in 2008. However, in my letter to Secretary Kerry, I wasn’t talking about Dutch Disease at all.

Rather, I was referring to the “Carbon Bubble. This term has gained prominence ever since the International Energy Agency explained that of all known reserves of fossil fuels, the planet’s atmosphere cannot withstand the burning of more than one third of them prior to 2050. In other words, two thirds of all known reserves must stay in the ground till mid-century or we will sail right past the danger levels in the atmosphere and unleash truly catastrophic levels of climatic disruption. Other analysts then began to assess the stated value of many fossil fuel enterprises and realize that their assessed values drop precipitously when two thirds of their reserves are removed from valuation.

The other aspect of the term “carbon bubble” is that, just as in any commodity being over-valued, when the bubble bursts a smart investor hopes to have diversified the portfolio prior to the moment of implosion. This is more the point former CIBC Chief Economist Jeff Rubin makes when he talks about the folly of putting all our eggs in the bitumen basket.

The other key economic point is this: all the proposed pipeline projects on the drawing board right now are about shipping out unprocessed product. In other words, Canada’s current government is putting all its weight behind multinationals that want Canada to lose out on all the “value added” processes. Where upgraders in northern Alberta had been on the drawing board prior to the 2008 financial crisis, when the dust settled and investment began to flow once again to the oil sands, the upgraders — and the Alberta jobs they would create — had been replaced by pipelines transporting bitumen to processing in other countries. Shipping out raw bitumen is dumb.

I agree that there is a debate about the economic impact of the current bitumen-based policies. One would think that given the over-blown claims of Canada as an “energy super-power” we might, as citizens and as Parliamentarians, have expected to see a detailed cost-benefit review of the oil sands project. There is none. There is only a pile of assumptions buttressed by unquestioning repetition by most of our news media, fortified by millions of dollars in taxpayer funded propaganda.

2. The product to be shipped is not “crude” at all, neither is it a 100 per cent Canadian fossil fuel product.

There is a very weak level of understanding of the nature of the product to be shipped in the FEIS, as well as in Washington media. Again, my letter to Secretary Kerry adds the context which is a bit truncated in the email. My primary point was that the FEIS was deficient in describing the product as “crude.”

Here’s the excerpt from my letter:

“The State Department report makes the error of describing the Keystone project as being about the shipment of crude oil.

“There are many kinds of crude. Some will argue that bitumen is a form of crude. I ask you to rule that the whole report is deficient in failing to notice that bitumen is not crude.

“I ask you to find that, no matter how light or heavy crude oil may be, to be called ‘crude,’ it is at least required to be a liquid.

“Bitumen is essentially a solid.

“It will only move through proposed pipelines once it has been mixed 30-70 with ‘diluents.’ Diluent is not a term of science, but of industry usage. It has no precise chemical meaning. It is generally a fossil fuel condensate — an otherwise valuable product. It is usually naptha, with benzene added, and often butane as well. It is not produced in sufficient quantities in Canada to keep pace with the planned oil sands boom.

“It is imported to Canada. Enbridge stated in its submission to the NEB hearings that it planned to import its diluents from Saudi Arabia. So ‘dilbit’ is not a 100 per cent Canadian product at all; nor does it necessarily unplug the U.S. from Middle East dependency.”

As one of the sales pitches south of the border is that this is a friendly Canadian product, I thought it was worth pointing out that at least some of the diluents will be coming in from OPEC.

3. Rail versus pipeline.

In my February Washington meetings, I found that the multiple recent rail disasters, most tragically Lac Megantic, are being used as a pro-Keystone argument. My letter to Secretary Kerry made a few key points (well buttressed by research) that are relevant to this claim:

•  If you accept our Prime Minister’s stated goal of more than tripling production in the oil sands, then adding up all existing pipeline proposals – Enbridge, Kinder-Morgan, Keystone and Energy East — still mean the use of rail to get dilbit to market.
• The FEIS found that higher transportation costs would operate as a limiting factor on oil sands expansion. So saying “no” to Keystone would help limit growth in the oil sands because shipping by other means is more costly.
• And lastly, both Canada and the U.S. urgently need to regulate for greater rail safety by removing the DOT111 rail cars from our tracks.

4. I pointed out to Secretary Kerry that the Harper administration, having pledged in 2009 to meet the voluntary Copenhagen target also undertaken by the Obama administration, has utterly failed to make any progress towards it. To this Mr Green essentially argues that Canada is so small a contributor to global emissions, who cares if we never keep any promise we make?

The Obama administration itself claims to care. It was the U.S. administration that decided a key criterion in the Keystone decision will be whether approving Keystone would increase GHG emissions.

The larger point is that Canada has no credibility. Having repudiated legally binding commitments under Kyoto, ratified by Parliament, then legally withdrawn from Kyoto (without any debate or vote in Parliament), Stephen Harper took on the Copenhagen target. Obama’s administration will have reached its target while Canada blows right past ours. I really did not need to include this in my letter to Secretary Kerry as the FEIS reports in detail exactly how lamentable is Canada’s performance.

In the 1980s, when Brian Mulroney wanted to get the Reagan administration to stop polluting Canada with acid rain-causing sulphur dioxide, he adopted a Canadian policy of “clean hands.” We came to the U.S. to ask that they cut their sulphur dioxide emissions by 50 per cent once we were already on track to do so ourselves. And the U.S. did, because Canada had taken the moral high ground. We had done what we were asking the U.S. to do, in the interests of our shared environment.

Prime Minister Harper has turned this principle on its head. He has adopted the “dirty hands” policy. Create a record of callous disregard for the fate of the world faced with increasingly dangerous outcomes due to the profligate waste of fossil fuels. And then claim, as part of a sales pitch for oil sands bitumen exports, that we have robust environmental laws and a shared climate goal. This after eviscerating our laws and betraying every promise.

Mr. Harper is a smart man. The only way he could have the chutzpah to try such a tarry hands policy is if he presumes that Mr. Obama is just as disingenuous as himself on climate.

This may prove to be Mr. Harper’s undoing on Keystone. President Obama has disappointed over and over again, but he does appear to grasp the over-whelming significance of the climate crisis.

I am not a bit surprised that the Fraser Institute thinks it is irrelevant that Canada’s emissions are rising, nor that we will be essentially at the same level of emissions in 2020 as we were in 2005. If the Fraser Institute were interested in fact-checking against climate target claims, the place to look for whoppers is not in my letter to Secretary Kerry, but in the daily talking points of Conservative ministers.

In Question Period, they variously claim we are “on track,” “half way to Copenhagen,” or “130 MT less than we’d be under the Liberals. (That last one is really a desperate “hail Mary” pass of a whopper. It falls apart for anyone with a memory that extends to 2005 when there actually was, at long last, a viable Liberal plan that would have gotten us, if not all the way to our Kyoto pledge, at least below 1990 levels by 2012.)

This is how I summarized the issue to Secretary Kerry:

“In 2005, our emissions were 737 megatons (MT). In 2020, our emissions will be 734 MT. We promised 130 MT in reductions. Despite efforts by several provinces, notably a successful carbon tax in my home province of British Columbia, all progress at the provincial levels has been wiped out by growth in the oil sands.

“The most effective way to send a strong message that Canada must start behaving as a responsible participant in the global challenge to avoid exceeding a 2 degree C global average temperature increase, a pledge to which your administration and ours have committed, is to reject Keystone. It will be helpful to explain that part of the reason is that Canada has negotiated in bad faith at the climate table. There have been no sanctions created globally for neglecting climate obligations. The least that should be done is not to reward bad conduct.”

Lastly, I closed the letter to Secretary Kerry by pointing out that the U.S. has to get its own house in order. I challenged him to stop the State Department’s foot dragging in global summits and start to show leadership. I urged that the U.S. stop burning off flared gas from the Bakken fields, producing high-carbon natural gas from fracking and stop its dependence on coal.

All in all, I am glad I took the time to set out some of the less reported issues around Keystone. And in that spirit, I thank the Fraser Institute for ignoring my detailed letter so that I would have a chance to explain the range of concerns it contained.

Originally posted in the Huffington Post.

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The list of measures is impressive: new standards for trucks and heavy-duty vehicles, investments in energy efficiency for residential, institutional and commercial buildings, more renewable energy projects on federal lands, plans to invest in climate-resilient infrastructure, adaptation planning to prepare for extreme weather events we can no longer avoid and, most importantly, a commitment to regulate carbon from coal-fired power plants.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper weakened Canada’s greenhouse gas target to the same 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020 to which Mr. Obama committed the U.S. The difference is that the U.S. has a plan and is on track to meet that target. Canada, with a patchwork of some strong provincial actions and nothing federally to regulate the oil sands, has no plan and is nowhere near on track for anything but failure.

Elizabeth May, Leader, Green Party of Canada
Originally published in the Globe and Mail

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By Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, Green MP Bruce Hyer

What is an environmental issue? However you define it, Harper is against it.

“Environment” means different things to different people.

To some, it is the natural world for which conservation values will protect sustainable populations and ecosystems for future generations. The roots of that conservation ethic go back to the late 1800s, and Gifford Pinchot, the first dean of Yale School of Forestry. The ethic embraces “sustainable use” of forests and fish and the renewable resources that have supported economies.

Then, there’s the more modern concept of environment, stemming from Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, published in 1962 and credited with helping launch the environmental movement in the U.S. The 1960s era of environmental awareness was actually more concerned with how human activity and new technologies-in this case toxic synthetic pesticides-threatened species, but perhaps more significantly, human health as well. Now that the publication of Silent Spring has passed the 50-year mark, it hardly is “modern” anymore. Our current use of the term “environment” has increasingly been subsumed in the media into one issue only-climate change.

Yet, climate change is not primarily an environmental issue. Sure, it involves the environment. In the same way drowning involves water, but we do not describe drowning as a “water issue.” Climate change, like drowning, is a survival issue. Climate change is an issue that can be described best as a security threat-although it involves questions of energy, economy, and the environment.

The harsh reality of our current political climate is that all the basic notions of the environment are under assault. We have entered a political era of “decision-based evidence making.” Stephen Harper’s administration has launched an unprecedented assault on government science. More than 2,000 scientists and researchers in the federal civil service have lost their jobs. Most of these scientists were working in areas of the “environment.”

All the scientists working in our national parks have been laid off. Fisheries and Oceans has lost all its habitat specialists after Bill C-38 gutted the Fisheries Act to remove habitat protection. The entire Marine Contaminants Program at DFO has been eliminated. The list is long. Mr. Harper is not just neglecting science; he is attacking any science or data or evidence that runs contrary to his beliefs or agenda.

Meanwhile, even though the only legislative change Harper has made to the Species at Risk Act was to remove the application of SARA when a pipeline is involved (also in C-38), still SARA is being more broadly undermined. Species at risk are going unprotected.

National parks no longer exclude oil and gas activity (with the tragic circumstances of the creation of Sable Island National Park.) This could be the thin end of the wedge for industrial activity in parks, in general. Meanwhile, parks are being privatized piecemeal, as is clear from the Jasper National Park “ice walk,” the Banff hot springs, and now a hotel proposal inside the national park in Jasper. Harper may have expanded national park boundaries, but he has endangered the protection of what lies inside the boundaries.

The pressure to clear away any regulatory hurdles to oil and gas expansion has led to the wholesale dismantling of decades’ worth of environmental laws and regulation. From legislation passed under prime minister John A. Macdonald (Fisheries Act and Navigable Waters Protection Act) to laws passed under former prime minister Brian Mulroney, (the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and National Round Table on Environment and Economy), nothing is sacred. The last eight years bear witness to a devastating reversal of environmental law in Canada. It needs to be said that Canada’s laws never were as strong in environmental protection as those of the U.S. or other industrialized countries, such as Germany. In the race for the bottom, Canada has no competition.

Nowhere is the abdication of environmental responsibility as disturbing as in the area of climate change. Harper first cancelled our legally binding Kyoto targets, then withdrew from the treaty, adopted his own targets for GHG reductions in Copenhagen in 2009, and has now declared those will not be met either. True, he has not actually declared his rejection of his own targets, but the new timeline for oil and gas regulations, first promised when John Baird was environment minister nearly seven years ago (The “Turning the Corner” plan), make it clear no real effort is contemplated.

We all use oil. We will for a long time to come, but it must be used wisely, and we should all seek to reduce our consumption as much as possible, and shift to more renewable and sustainable energy sources. The sad and dispiriting irony is that if Canada embraced real action, we will create more jobs and revitalize our economy faster than by pursuing the mindless vision that puts all our eggs in the bitumen basket. Canada deserves better. We deserve an energy plan, a climate plan, and the new industrial revolution of clean-tech and renewables. We can still get there from here. The first step is for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to get out of the way.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May represents Saanich- Gulf Islands, B.C., and Green Party MP Bruce Hyer represents Thunder Bay-Superior North, Ont.

Originally published in the Hill Times.

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The list of measures is impressive: new standards for trucks and heavy-duty vehicles, investments in energy efficiency for both residential as well as institutional and commercial buildings, more renewable energy projects on federal lands, plans to invest in climate resilient infrastructure, adaptation planning to prepare for the extreme weather events we can no longer avoid, and most importantly, a commitment to regulate carbon from coal fired power plants.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper weakened Canada’s greenhouse gas target to the same 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 to which Obama committed the US. The difference is that the US has a plan and is on track to meet that target. Canada, with a patchwork of some strong provincial actions and nothing federally to regulate the oil sands, has no plan and is nowhere near on track for anything but failure.

Elizabeth May, O.C.
Member of Parliament
Saanich-Gulf Islands

Leader
Green Party of Canada

Published in the Globe and Mail.

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