Keeping Up with Kyoto :: Environmental and Health Concerns

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Keeping Up with Kyoto
by author Lucretia Schanfarber

It’s not easy to keep up on the current situation regarding the Kyoto Protocol. Like the weather, it’s always changing. One thing’s for sure, though, global warming is a hot topic–and it’s getting hotter, in more ways than one.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, last year was the sixth-warmest year since weather recordkeeping began in 1880. Climate change scientists predict that 2007 will be the hottest yet.

Heating Up

Scientists have long known we were heating up; they just didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. Accelerated global warming is bringing more than hot temperatures. Ferocious storms, floods, drought, wild fires, the spread of serious diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, and major shifts in water supplies are other global manifestations of climate change.

The world over, scientists agree that even minor changes in global temperature will have a major impact on the survival of all planetary life. Global warming is changing more than just our climate. It’s changing all life as we know it, faster than we ever imagined.

An Inconvenient Truth

There will never be a convenient time to find out that we have made our planet deathly ill and that we have only a few years in which to save it and ourselves from major catastrophe. Since its release, former US vice president Al Gore’s Academy-award winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, has been playing to sold-out audiences seeking the truth about the dire situation we are in, inconvenient as it may be.

The film and its message has led to the formation and training of a corps of global warming “disciples.” This specially trained group of around 1,000 volunteers of all ages and backgrounds are charged with the task of presenting a version of Gore’s climate change message to communities across the US in the hope they will stimulate immediate and effective action amongst the citizenry, personally and politically.

They are undertaking a noble yet daunting challenge. Americans rank highest on the list of energy consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, yet US President George W. Bush has refused to ratify the Kyoto Accord. Sadly, Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper also pulled the plug on Kyoto. Like our insatiable cousins south of the border, we Canadians are habitually wasteful energy guzzlers: per-person energy consumption and subsequent emissions in Canada are almost equal to those of the US according to Stats Canada.

Kyoto in Canada–Then and Now

On December 17, 2002, I turned 50. The same day I made my annual birthday wish and blew out my candles, Canada ratified the Kyoto Accord, hopefully with similar wishes for a healthy future. By signing on to this international treaty on climate change, with assigned targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, Canada made a commitment to reduce emissions to 6 percent below 1990 levels between the years 2008 and 2012.

Although polls in 2002 showed that 70 percent of Canadians supported the Kyoto Accord, powerful detractors within the Alberta energy sector and government mounted campaigns claiming that, by upholding our emissions reduction commitments, Canadian companies would experience trade disadvantages. Threats to national unity were also made.

By 2003 half-hearted, ineffective, and costly federal (Liberal) programs led not to a reduction but to an increase in carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Emissions of CO2 had risen to 24 percent above 1990 levels.

January 2006 saw the new Conservative minority government under the leadership of Stephen Harper, who had made it known that he was less than enamoured with Canada’s getting on board with Kyoto. The government announced in April 2006 that there was no way we would be meeting our emission reduction targets under Kyoto. Instead, declared Rona Ambrose (Canada’s Environment Minster at the time), we would be looking to participate in a whole new program, one sponsored by the US, known as the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate.

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Lucretia Schanfarber is a grandmother who lives simply and gardens organically. She believes we must all make a positive difference for the sake of grandchildren everywhere.

Source: alive #297, July 2007

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