The Canadian Government, led by returning Environment Minister John Baird, has kicked of the UN climate talks in Cancun by winning an incredible first, second and third place Fossil of the Day awards! With three consecutive Colossal Fossil of the Year awards behind them, it seems this government is continuing its reckless approach to climate change in the hopes of setting even more fossil records. Canada won its first colossal fossil in Bali under the leadership of Minister Baird. The Fossil of the Day is an award voted on and given by over 400 leading international organizations to the country who has done the most to disrupt or undermine the UN climate talks.
Canada has been awarded the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place Fossil of the Day for the following reasons:
Canada wins third place for a spectacular year-long effort to regain its title of “colossal fossil” as the country making the least constructive contribution to the negotiations.
“Last January Canada backed off of a weak target to adopt an even weaker one, as part of the government’s plan to outsource climate policy to the United States. Canada’s plan to meet that target is, to put it nicely, still being written,” says Graham Saul of Climate Action Network Canada. “Furthermore, the person they’ve just put in charge as Environment Minister is John Baird; COP veterans might remember him as the solo holdout against science-based targets for developed countries at the end of Bali.”
In second place we have...Canada again. So we’ve already heard that Canada doesn’t have a plan to cut emissions. What it does have is a plan to cut a lot of other things, such as:
-the only major federal support program for renewable energy
-a program funding energy efficiency upgrades for homeowners
-funding for Canada’s climate science foundation
-climate change off of the G8 and G20 agendas when Canada played host this summer, and last but not least...
-clean fuels policies in other countries.
“Internal government documents released today reveal that Canada worked to “kill” a US federal clean fuels policy to protect its tar sands, working with allies like the Bush administration and Exxon”, says Steven Guilbeault of Equiterre. “With friends like that, who needs clean energy?”
Now, turning to our first place winner:
Some of you might think the US Senate wasn’t too helpful on climate change. But today’s fossil winner has a Senate that makes the US look good, and not just because these Senators aren’t elected.
“In Canada, Conservative Senators killed a progressive climate change bill without even bothering to debate it, leaving Canada without a science-based target or any domestic transparency program for the already weak 2020 target the government has brought to these talks,” says Patrick Bonin of AQLPA. “Only in Canada could you find such a fossil-worthy Senate.”
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So Canada is starting off with a substantial lead, taking three prizes today. Killing progressive legislation, cancelling support for clean energy and failing to have any plan to meet its target all position Canada well for another two weeks of ignominy here in Cancun.”
Despite getting of on the wrong foot, we must remind the Canadian Government that there is still time! This is only day one of these negotiating sessions, still plenty of time to wipe the tar from their eyes and clean up their act!
FYI:
Fossil of the Day is presented daily in Cancun from a network of over 400 leading international non-governmental organizations following a vote to determine which country had done the most over the course of the day to delay, stall, and otherwise disrupt these negotiating sessions in Cancun in December.
great to see that Canada is once again setting the tone for upholding regressive policies with no leadership whatsoever...
In particular, regarding the U.S., it is also becoming ever more apparent that rhetoric aside, the Democrats and President Obama are equally uninterested in forcing through real change....
The U.S. is in an impossible position: it is regressing economically in the face of new competition internationally, it is already behind in many areas of green technology, it has a chronically outdated transportation and housing infrastructure premised on never-ending cheap oil, and it is fighting two wars to maintain global hegemony. And this is taking place in the context of a global crisis of overproduction of goods.
Internationally, inter-imperial rivalry over diminishing resources in the context of a global economic recession has sharpened, as countries fight to maintain or extend the power of their own national set of corporations in hostile competition with all the others.
The Copenhagen conference could more aptly be described as a confrontation rather than a conference, as countries faced off across the diplomatic table. In the end, any possibility of an agreement was torpedoed by an unholy alliance of five heavy fossil-fuel users and carbon emitters led by the U.S. and including China, India, Brazil and South Africa.
This time around, in Cancún, the big governments reason that there's no need to turn up because a deal on climate is so unlikely due to the depressed global economic situation and an incipient trade war. Showing up to a failing conference would just be bad PR. Forced austerity, not clean energy, is what's on the table.
Heads of state from Latin America who will likely attend, such as Evo Morales of Bolivia, are trying to force a change. In April, more than 30,000 activists gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia, for the alternative Cochabamba Accords to Protect Mother Earth, which charted an alternative path to reducing carbon emissions, real sustainable social and ecological development, and the provision of development assistance to countries of the Global South most affected by climate change....
In Cancún, the peasant and farmer organization Via Campesina--in echoes of Che Guevara's call for "One, two, many Vietnams"--has issued a call for "thousands of Cancúns" across the world and an International Day of Action on December 7 to coincide with mass farmers protests in Cancún....
Such a movement needs to be resolute in its independence and principles, and will have to incorporate, for the first time since the late 1960s, tens of thousands of working-class people. Five key points need to be argued:
-- A strong, effective and reinvigorated environmental movement must campaign as much about social justice as it does about ecological justice. We cannot have one without the other.
-- This is not about sacrifice; rather, it is about fighting for a higher standard of living and quality of life.
-- The problem is the system itself. Therefore, the solution is structural and systemic, not individual, technical or market-based.
-- To make real headway, the movement must maintain and make absolute its independence from the Democratic Party.
-- We need to fight for intermediate, achievable goals while maintaining a vision of fundamental social change and a completely different, ecologically rational society based on cooperation, worker participation and real democracy....
We can't wait in vain for President Obama or other politicians to do it for us. Ordinary people must step onto the stage of history to organize to force the change that we want to see and that is so urgently needed.
Chris Williams