Canada will adopt tougher greenhouse gas reduction targets when the Paris Agreement takes effect in 2020, Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna said yesterday, just days before her departure for this year’s United Nations climate change conference in Katowice.
Now, climate and energy transition hawks across the country will be watching for Ottawa to set an ambitious enough target to do its fair share to reverse the climate crisis—and then meet the target. The IPCC’s landmark report on 1.5°C pathways last October concluded that the country “needs to cut emissions almost in half if it is to do its part,” the Canadian Press reports. Canada’s current target is to cut them by about 27%,” and the country is far behind that goal.
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McKenna’s interview with CP came on the same day that her boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, lectured Chief Judy Wilson of the Neskonlith Band for her outspoken opposition to the now taxpayer-owned Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.
Until now, “McKenna has been reluctant to look at setting tougher goals when the country’s climate change plan is still not strong enough to meet the weaker ones,” CP states. “But, she acknowledged in an interview, ‘in 2020 everyone has to come back and be more ambitious,’ and she said Canada will.” By then, CP notes, the standards to be laid out in the Paris rule book “are needed to help the world take stock of its progress and ensure that everyone is measuring and reporting by universally understood rules. That will give confidence that when a country says its targets are being met, they actually are.”
Climate Action Network Canada Executive Director Catherine Abreu said she was “thrilled” with McKenna’s comments. “That’s something Canada has really hedged on,” she said.
CP notes that Canada is investing C$20 million over the next five years in a new climate change institute to help prepare for the new targets, and Abreu said she “wants the institute to be more than just another think-tank; she wants it to be the organization that assesses Canada’s progress in meeting its emissions targets. Thirty-three members of the Climate Action Network (CAN-Rac) wrote to McKenna and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau this week asking them to set emissions targets in binding legislation that would not only compel the government to hit targets, but make backing out more difficult for future governments.” (Disclosure: Energy Mix Productions was one of the 33 signatories.)
With COP 24 now under way in Katowice, CAN-Rac reports that negotiators are off to a fast start on the large volume of technical issues they need to address. This week’s talks are crucial before ministers, including McKenna, arrive in Poland for the political phase of the conference.
The rule book issue CP raises—the transparency provisions that determine how countries measure and report progress on their Paris Agreement pledges—consumed eight to 13 hours of informal dialogue on Tuesday. “When heads of national delegations begin meeting today, they’ll be working on some of the stickier issues that have come up in negotiations so far,” CAN-Rac reports in its onsite newsletter, CANRaction.
Meanwhile, “CAN-Rac and its partner organizations around the world are working hard to counter the failings in the way Poland is approaching its responsibilities as this year’s COP president,” the newsletter states. “The presidency sets the tone and momentum for each year’s conference. Poland has done that so far by declaring that climate solutions can co-exist with continuing coal burning, and being very unclear on the need to push for an ambitious conference outcome.”
So far at the COP, UN Secretary General António Guterres has urged countries to keep their Paris promises, transform the “real economy”, and foster citizen and youth mobilization to confront the climate crisis. He called on world leaders to attend his climate summit in New York next September “prepared to address not only their progress toward achieving their goals under the Paris Agreement, but also to outline their plans and progress toward raising their ambition.”
Those plans, he added, must focus on energy transition, industry transition, nature-based solutions, cities and local action, and climate resilience.
Renowned broadcaster Sir David Attenborough warned conference delegates that the climate crisis could collapse human civilization and conveyed the mounting public demand for effective action. “Time is running out,” he told a COP plenary session. “They want you, the decision-makers, to act now. They are behind you, along with civil society represented here today.”
In a pre-COP open letter to world leaders, heads of government and the international community from the Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders affirmed its commitment to “fast-track solutions to help you deliver on an enhanced and more ambitious action plan to tackle climate change and meet the goals set out in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement,” adding that “we know this is possible”. Days earlier, the 90+-member Japan Climate Leaders’ Partnership issued a call for broader public climate awareness, a vision for Japan’s leadership in a decarbonized global economy, a zero target for domestic GHG emissions in 2050, and a mix of carbon pricing and public infrastructure investment to hit that target.
Meanwhile, in Krakow, Poland, CBC reports on day-to-day life in a city with one of the worst air quality profiles in Europe.
“The official video promoting the host of this year’s crucial international climate talks paints a glowing green picture,” reports veteran journalist Nahlah Ayed. “The video makes no mention of the tough negotiations starting in Katowice, a city in Poland’s prime coal-mining country,” but “says Poland is a place where ‘care for nature’ and forest management have helped absorb climate-changing carbon dioxide gas (CO2) from the air.”
“It’s a very nice video of a place I would love to live in,” responded activist Magdalena Kozlowska. “It’s good that the government realizes that that’s the place we should live in. So that’s the goal.”
“But it’s still not the Poland we are now.”
With Krakow’s air pollution earning it an unwanted reputation as the Beijing of Europe, Ayed writes about one day care centre that has set itself up as a “virtual fortress against toxic air”.
“Daycare owner Teresa Tkaczyk-Szlachta calls hers Poland’s first anti-smog preschool, and parents have clamoured to enrol their kids,” she writes. “She and her husband invested in a custom-made filtration system to keep the premises virtually pollutant-free. Outside, if her monitor indicates pollutants are high, either the kids wear masks on outings, or they stay indoors.”
Why aren’t we taking action now? Are we waiting for two years so PM Trudeau can push through the Kinder Morgan pipeline, expanding current capacity by 700%? Expanding the KM pipeline now is a crime against future generations, and a crime against humanity and all of nature. We are losing species every single day. Thousands have been lost already, and we are fast becoming a planet of cows, sheep and chickens, where clearcutting rich rainforests to create dry grasslands to feed beef cattle replace the biodiversity we need to keep our planet livable. Our oceans are losing biodiversity daily, as whales, fish, dolphins and other marine life are killed for meat or oil. Krill, a tiny shrimp living in the icy waters of Antarctica, are being over harvested for supplements for humans, orcas and dolphins are being captured for entertainment, held captive in tiny enclosures and forced to perform for noisy audiences who have no idea how these animals are suffering being torn from their families, not being able to swim the vast distances they are used to traveling, up and down the west coast of the US and Canada, and beyond. They’re being captured and slaughtered in Japan for meat that no one in Japan wants to eat. Filled with toxic chemicals, their flesh is dangerous to humans.
Please sign and share this young woman’s bid for a sane and humane world where we protect our ecosystems and all the life that lives in the amazing biodiversity the planet has produced and which is being rapidly destroyed.