Intensity-based targets promote oil industry frame

Purported inclusion of developing economies conceals self-serving nature of scheme.

June 5 — What are "intensity-based" greenhouse gas (GHG) targets and why has the Harper government come out so strongly in favour of them at the G8 climate talks?

The idea is to put limits on the amount of GHG that manufacturers produce per unit of production — cars, computers, barrels of oil — rather than placing a firm limit on how much they can produce. Stephen Harper likes it because it enables the oil industry to keep expanding, even though it is the industry that produces the most GHG.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mitigation report, released on May 4, "demonstrated global real emission levels to have risen 77 percent despite global intensity-based emissions decreasing by 33 percent," according to the online magazine Ethical Corporation.

A big part of Harper's promotional effort is based on the idea of fairness and inclusion to poor countries. The concept counters the persistent criticism that Kyoto forbids poor countries, the main base of heavy industry today, from following the example of rich ones in developing by industrializing.

Harper continues, however, to fight against another idea that environmentalists and most world leaders believe would better help developing nations protect the environment — a global market in carbon credits. Under this system, rich countries pay for their own GHG emissions by paying to help poor countries contain or minimize theirs.

In a famous Canadian Alliance Party fundraising letter in 2002, Harper called Kyoto a "massive transfer of wealth from rich countries to poor countries," says Dale Marshall, a policy analyst on climate change with the David Suzuki Foundation. "He thought it was an egregious part of the global agreement that rich countries could invest in poor countries as part of their compliance."

Marhsall says that last year, former Environment Minister Ambrose and Harper consistently held the concept of a global carbon market in disdain. "Every time anyone talked about global trading options, they'd say 'we're not going to spend a cent of Canadian money on Russian hot air.'"

The Harper Conservative climate change plan allows for carbon credits, but "The only thing the Harper plans mentions in terms of global carbon trading is trading with the US," says Marshall. "I'm not sure how genuine that is. It's a market that simply doesn't exist."

Harper Conservative vs. Public Values Frame
  Intensity-based targets / Oil industry
  Consensus / Enables rich to get richer

Links and sources
  Harper's letter dismisses Kyoto as 'socialist scheme', CBC News, January 30, 2007
  Felix von Geyer, North America: Canada and the environment — Gored on climate change

Posted: June 05, 2007

Harper Index (HarperIndex.ca) is a project of the Golden Lake Institute and the online publication StraightGoods.ca