It was obvious that nothing good would come of the Hair rushing back to Ottawa from Beijing to be at the National War Memorial Ceremony last Tuesday. Hobnobbing with a princess was hardly worth the trip. And it was not as though he said or did anything more than lay a wreath. It was what American President Obama was doing after the Hair left Beijing that made the difference.
And it certainly speaks badly of the Canadian intelligence gathering capabilities. Why did the Hair not know that President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China were going to sign an historic carbon emission agreement after the Hair left early from the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference?
It certainly looks as though Alberta’s Keystone XL pipeline will be an early casualty in saving the planet. With the pipeline cancellation, President Obama could save the world from the equivalent of 27,500,000 metric tons of carbon emissions per year. It might seem like a small step forward but as they say, every journey starts with a single step.
But far more seriously, this agreement could spell the end of Chinese interest in Canada’s highly polluting tar sands bitumen. While the Chinese are taking longer to achieve their emission goals than the Americans, they need to address their serious air pollution problems in their cities as fast as possible. It means ending dependence on coal and oil-fired electrical generation and switching to natural gas and nuclear energy. It might provide Canada with a larger market for our liquefied natural gas but we would be competing with Russian gas pipelines directly into the industrial heart of China.
What is particularly interesting in this situation is that the Hair is now faced with living up to his promise to follow the American lead in controlling carbon emissions. How he is going to curtail the carbon emissions of Canada’s largest pollution problem—the oil and gas sector—remains to be seen? There is no other sector that can possibly contribute as much in emission savings.
And if the Hair keeps waiting for that sector to come up with its own suggestions on how it can curtail its pollution problems, he will hardly be prime minister that long.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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