Canada’s Debate

So, someone at the Globe and Mail got a sneak peak at a draft of the Tories’ new environmental plan… how does it stack up? Well, by the look of things, pretty poorly, and exactly how everyone expected it to.

Basically they’ve written the rather unambitious Liberal plan from 2005 and added some medium-term goals which represent the same “business as usual” benchmarking as the short-term ones: intensity based reductions based on flawed baselines.

The government documents set a target for the oil sands of reducing the intensity of emissions by 40 per cent by 2020. If all oil sands projects go ahead, Mr. Bramley said, industry could meet that target while allowing total greenhouse-gas emissions to rise 248 per cent higher than 2000 emission levels. The documents also appear to acknowledge this, he said.

Slapping clean clothes on a panhandler does not solve the homeless problem, it just makes it a bit easier to ignore it for a few more weeks. If this is how the government plans to go about fighting climate change, we’re in trouble.