What a whirlwind day. I just returned from a series of four meetings with EU Embassies in Ottawa, with more to come over the coming days. These meetings are part of a lobby-busting tour organized by the Council of Canadians, joined by the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and Climate Action Network Canada (CAN Canada).

Our purpose is to meet with EU Embassies and challenge the arguments being brought forward by Canadian lobbying against the EU Fuel Quality Directive (FQD). The tour came to being after being informed that CAPP had requested meetings with at least one Embassy in Ottawa, and as part of our ongoing efforts to challenge Canadian lobbying against this policy.

I just returned from a media scrum in the foyer outside of our House of Commons (not the House of corporations) where Minister Kent announced Canada will legally leave the Kyoto Protocol.

Kent coached the announcement with plenty of key words about our ongoing commitment to the Durban platform, (the so-called real way forward) a fair dose of fear-mongering (as Megan Leslie referred to it) and that we are committed to tackling climate change. But they were just that, words, words that hopefully mainstream media won't buy hook, line and sinker. While this announcement may not come as a surprise, the reality is it is a big deal.

In a media statement released during Kent's speech, the Council of Canadians responded to today's announcement:

CCPA released a new report today by myself and Amanda Card that makes the links between inequality and carbon footprints. We look at the distribution of greenhouse gas emissions for Canada, building on an analysis of B.C. emissions. While it was not planned this way, the analysis is timely given the Occupy movement's focus on surging inequality and movements for climate justice, manifested recently in the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline.

For the past decade, Canada's GHG emission targets were framed by the Kyoto Protocol, in which Canada committed to a six per cent reduction in emissions by 2012 relative to 1990 levels (590 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or Mt CO2e). In spite of signing this treaty and its ratification through Parliament in 2002, Canada has continued to increase emissions.

In 2009, Canada's 690 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO2e) emissions were 17 per cent higher than 1990 levels. But using 2009 makes us look better than we are due to the impact of the recession. In 2008 emissions (734 Mt) were 24 per cent higher; in 2007 (748 Mt), 27 per cent higher.

A recent paper by Ackerman and Stanton did some re-estimates of the Social Cost of Carbon, finding this measure of the externality (or costs imposed on third parties) from burning fossil fuels could be as high as $893 per tonne of CO2, rising to $1,500 per tonne by 2050. These are extreme estimates, but they are calculated using a conservative model. The key point is that the official U.S. government measure, that is $21 per tonne, was unrealistically low because of a range of assumptions in the model itself, as well as many other things the model does not take into account.

Our climate justice framework for B.C. is to eliminate fossil fuels by 2040. In the household sector, this poses a significant challenge, not so much in terms of technology and knowledge, but because natural gas is much cheaper than electricity per unit of energy. Even though B.C. has among the lowest prices in North America, and for relatively clean electricity at that, pricing undermines incentives to shift away from fossil fuels.

It is spun in government press releases as a "first" for any jurisdiction in North America, an achievement that places British Columbia "on the leading edge" of efforts to combat climate change.

But scratch the surface just a little and questions arise about the legitimacy of Environment Minister Terry Lake's recent claim that "from this point forward, every government building in our province will be carbon neutral."