Kyoto undermined by rhetoric at APEC - Greenpeace

Push for nuclear power could lead Canada to import massive amounts of waste.

Edited by John Stokes

Rather than cleaning up Canada's and the world's environment, this week's APEC summit may have been carefully crafted to move Canada away from Kyoto commitments and closer to importing massive amounts of radioactive waste from abroad.

Stephen Harper, George W. Bush and Australian Prime Minister John Howard say the conference represented progress because it produced agreement that climate change is indeed a problem. According to environmentalists, however, the APEC summit events were used to undermine the Kyoto process of setting targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and to send out false green signals to mask their promotion of the use of coal and nuclear energy.

"For them to claim victory coming out of APEC and to say that this is progress is simply not true," says David Martin of Greenpeace Canada. "It's a step backwards and a very bad precedent because it undermines the very real progress we're hoping to see in Bali," where the next stage of negotiations under the Kyoto protocol are being held in this November. "In terms of the rhetoric Stephen Harper is going further than he's ever gone before," said Stephen Hazell of the Sierra Club of Canada. "He's admitting that climate change appears to be caused by human activities and that it has serious consequences.

It's the strongest rhetoric on climate change we've ever seen from this government." Hazell asks, however, "Back at the ranch what are we actually doing to meet our commitments? We're not at all convinced they're on the right track in terms of regulating greenhouse gas emissions. There's way too much loose talk about how Canada's leading on this and that. The rest of the world doesn't believe it any more."

Undermining Kyoto by replacing hard targets with "aspirational goals"

Martin says Bush, Howard and Harper have agreed on an approach intended to "undermine the Kyoto protocol by moving away from hard targets toward what they call 'aspirational' goals, which typically means intensity- based targets."

Looking at the example of Alberta, which adopted intensity-based targets in 2002, he says "it's very clear you can have a reduction in intensity while still having dramatic absolute increases in emissions."

The efforts to undermine Kyoto coincide with pushed for so-called "clean coal" technology and nuclear energy by the leading producers and users of these technologies, including Australia, Canada and the US. China is one of the world's largest coal producers and users, which explains that nation's interest.

Two international partnerships support this agenda. The Asia Pacific Partnership or AP6 is also known, Martin says, as the "Coal Pact." He says the declaration that's come out of APEC, is all about supporting so-called "clean coal" technology.

Canada and Australia join the US in pushing nuclear energy - and waste repatriation

At the same time comes a push for nuclear energy, led by Bush through the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) launched last year. Canada, the world's largest exporter of uranium, and Australia, the world's number two producer, are clearly supporting this program as well, says Martin. He describes GNEP as "aimed at promoting the export of reactor technology and fissile materials (i.e. uranium). And at the same time, they are packaging this as an anti-proliferation measure by pushing for the repatriation of high-level radioactive waste.

"The idea is that uranium of Canadian origin once converted into fuel and irradiated would come back to Canada," says Martin. "Existing Canadian policy actively prohibits the repatriation of nuclear waste," so this plan would represent a huge policy change and would likely prompt outcry and controversy. In turn, Martin says, there will be pressure for the "extraction of plutonium from that waste. This could start a worldwide race" to produce plutonium, which is used in making nuclear weapons.

"To argue this will reduce proliferation is completely Orwellian double-talk. It will, in fact, worsen proliferation."

Martin is concerned with the political framing of climate change. "If you listen to the language Harper is using, you'd think he's found a new belief in an environmental agenda. It sounds superficially good, but when you understand this is all about undermining climate change negotiations, you begin to see it's a very duplicitous agenda.

He believes direction for the strategy comes from Washington, but points to close ties between Harper and Howard as well. For years, he says, they "have been exchanging election staff and sending them back and forth and having close collegial relationships between their parties on a non-governmental level."

The Sierra Club's Hazell says conservative framing has changed. "They have changed their policy and rhetoric dramatically in a period of only a year," he says of the Harper government. It's been a stunning change, which isn't to say they're actually doing very much about climate change."

False premises of Kyoto

Martin says it also a "false premise" that developing nations had to be brought into the process by abandoning hard targets for reducing emissions. "The myth about Kyoto is that the big developing countries, namely China, India and Brazil are divorced from the process. It was always understood that the developed countries would shoulder the burden in the first and second commitment periods of Kyoto" because they have been responsible for most of the emissions. "It's important to understand," says Martin, "that the developed countries need to step up to the plate in a meaningful way in terms of emission cuts. If that doesn't happen there really will be no impetus for developing countries to start making meaningful reductions of their own."

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