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By Bill Henderson

Canada finished dead last in the G8—behind even the U.S.—in a ranking of greenhouse gas emissions and planned measures to reduce them in a report sadly released on Canada Day. Canada agreed under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce CO2 emissions to six percent below 1990 levels by 2012, but in 2007 its emissions were 26 percent higher than in that target and our emissions aren’t heading down.

But Canada is a very large northern country with a long winter, and we require immense amounts of fuel for transportation and heating. Isn’t our high consumption of fossil fuels part of a magnificent success story of a skilled and disciplined society utilizing technology to spread a highly complex and enriching civilization across a huge and dauntingly difficult landscape?

Yes, certainly. But burning fossil fuels has raised the amount of gases that cause a greenhouse effect in the atmosphere (and raised the level of carbon generally in the Earth’s carbon cycle system) so that climate change is now a serious risk to Canadians, individually and as a society; a risk to the global civilization we are a part of; and, to some increasing degree of probability, a serious threat to humanity’s very existence and to a large percentage of the planet’s species.

Climate change is happening. It is caused by putting carbon stored underground for hundreds of millions of years up into the atmosphere. The cumulative increase of these greenhouse gases will effect global climate for centuries, maybe longer. There are local effects right now and long-term effects for our grandkids at the end of the century.

And increasingly the science studying the past in ice cores or modeling the future in elaborate scientific computer programming warns of feedback loops and abrupt switches from one climate regime to another. There is an increasing possibility of uncontrollable or runaway climate change or of an abrupt shifting of large-scale weather patterns, which has happened before but would be unprecedented in the eight thousand years of human civilization and be profoundly humanity-threatening.

Think of climate change risk as analogous to a serious medical condition, a heart disease problem, where if we don’t make systemic changes in our lifestyles our health will continue to worsen over time and where the probability of sudden death through heart attack or stroke significantly increases. If we continue to do nothing.

Canadians’ total emissions are small potatoes compared with the U.S. or China, but we have a high annual consumption average of four to five tonnes per person and this is crucial. Climate change is a global problem requiring global agreement about emission reduction and any global deal will require contraction of fossil fuel use in the developed countries to an equitable global average.

A 2008 report, Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction Scenarios for BC, states: “In 2004, the global average per capita emission of carbon was 1.4 metric tonnes (tC). The average for BC was 4.3 tC, more than three times the global value (Appendix 1). To meet the 83 per cent global reduction target required in 2050, annual global carbon emissions that year must total no more than 1.57 GtC, and with a population estimate of 9.2 billion in 2050,28 this allows a mere 0.17 tC per person (i.e. 170 kg) per year.”

The developed world has put the vast majority of greenhouse gases, which are causing the climate change problem, into the atmosphere, and we have wealthy societies with safety nets. There will only be an effective global deal and actual emission reduction on a scale necessary if and when we lead in changing to lifestyles to produce far less carbon.

Canadians use an average 29 barrels of oil annually, Americans 25, Aussies 17, Britons 10, the Chinese two, and Indians less than one. Canada alone produces more greenhouse gas emissions than the bottom half of the world’s countries combined.

If we continue to do nothing we all face catastrophe together. And because we’ve procrastinated for two decades we need that deal now, this December at Copenhagen.

In the bigger picture, our total cumulative emissions don’t really matter except as an example of carbon-obese developed-world intransigence.

We signed on to Kyoto and then did worse than nothing—our emissions rose by 26%.

We remain in denial about our obese carbon footprint and refuse to even consider the level of emission reduction needed or the systemic change to our lifestyles and our consumption dependent economy that this level of reduction requires. We need to cut our emissions by two-thirds fast.

We refuse to even consider individual rationing to try and get closer to the one-tonne global average, or a moratorium on tar sands “dirty oil” development, for example. We should be debating a complete shutdown of this largest contributor to GHG emissions growth in Canada—now five percent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions and rising.

And now we’re accused of being one of the nations trying to block any meaningful treaty at the end of the year in Copenhagen.

Yes, this is our dino Stephen Harper government in action. But Harper’s tar-sands protecting sabotage is done in our name, and as a nation we are determined to stay in denial and imperil future generations because we’ve become weak and fat and insipid.

We are carbon addicts lying to ourselves with puny carbon taxes and green-lite shopping “smart choices” instead of getting serious about our carbon problem. Pathetic addicts with no brains or backbone.

Lester B. Pearson’s reasonable, caring, world-leading Canada has morphed into Harper’s selfish, uncaring, neo-conning Canada. Climate change gets increasingly more ominous and now Copenhagen is a faltering dream because of our intransigence.

And down the road, soon to be sad, ashamed, and bewildered like a drunk driver, that’s us, the guilty party, at the scene of a horrific crash.

Bill Henderson is an activist who lives in Gibsons.