Between the Canadian and US election races and the global financial crisis, climate change has been at the forefront of discussion.
Climate change policy became a serious topic of debate and discussion in the Canadian election. Both Elizabeth May and Stephane Dion proposed replacing income taxes with consumption taxes, providing ordinary citizens with tax breaks and polluters paying for the pollution they create. Elizabeth May pushed her agenda in the national debate and Dion plugged his Green Shift plan across the country. Jack Layton entered the fray with a cap-and-trade plan for carbon. While Stephen Harper was pushing intensity targets and supporting increased energy efficiency, he did not meet Kyoto Protocol targets.
In 1997, Canada signed the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. The Protocol called for a six per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2012. Canada’s emission levels have risen 27 per cent since 1990. In 2007, the Conservative government announced that by 2020 it would cut CO2 emissions by 20 per cent from 2006 levels. Meeting this target would fall short of Canada’s Kyoto agreement.
In an effort to force Kyoto compliance, environmental groups Friends of the Earth Canada and Ecojustice took the federal government to court. The groups lost the trial this month. On October 20, 2008, the Federal Court declared that environmental policy was an inherently political, rather than legal, issue.
South of the border, presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama both defend more aggressive action on climate change. They support reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and propose to reach these reductions by a cap and trade program, through research and development in green technologies. Obama sets the most aggressive targets: “ensuring 10 per cent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 per cent by 2025” and “implement[ing] an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.” John McCain’s platform, on the other hand, proposes to return emissions to 2005 levels by 2012, return to 1990 levels by 2020, and be at 1990 levels before 2030.
While climate change may not receive as much attention on the political agenda due to the financial crisis, it hasn’t had the same effect on commercial efforts. In a recent Reuters article, it was noted that many commercial efforts to fight climate change through carbon offsetting would not be affected by the financial crisis. Many large companies such as Marks & Spencer and Yahoo! Inc. have committed to fighting climate change, and their efforts to reduce their carbon footprint comprise a huge part of their public image. Shelagh Whitley, voluntary asset portfolio manager at carbon offset sellers Camco told Reuters that “Companies who made very public statements about their climate change aims will find it difficult to go back on them.”
