Anti-social behaviour -- now it's Canada's turn

First it was David Cameron flipping the bird to the EU, by refusing to go along with plans to revise the Lisbon Treaty in order to deal with the Eurozone debt crisis. (Great line from Ed Miliband, by the way: "It's not a veto if the thing you're trying to stop goes ahead without you. That's called losing".)

Now it's Canada giving an "up yours" to the world, announcing that it will withdraw from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change, rather than pay the $14 billion (yes, really!) in fines it has racked up by not meeting its commitments under the Treaty. (Story from The Independent here). The timing, just a day after the new Durban climate change agreement, looks bizarre, but in fact it is this new deal that has given Canada a figleaf of cover for its withdrawal from Kyoto. It claims that Kyoto never stood a chance of working because of the lack of enthusiasm from the US and China, the two biggest carbon emitters, whereas the Durban agreement stands a much better chance of being effective.

Truth to tell, the main attraction of the Durban accord for Canada is that it is not due to come into force until 2020, giving the country eight years to find a new set of excuses for non-compliance. Although the US and China create far more atmospheric carbon in the aggregate, Canada is probably the worst offender in the world on a per capita basis. Canadians drive big cars over long distances and tend to shun public transit in the cities, and the extreme climate requires huge amounts of energy use for heating in the winter.

Over the past decade, however, the biggest driver of a huge increase in carbon emissions (and in water wastage, another bone of contention for environmentalists) has been the rapid expansion in extraction of oil from the tar sands in Northern Alberta, in response to surging demand from the US. Because the tar sands are in a remote location and are frozen for much of the year, extracting the energy from them and getting it to market is itself a highly energy-intensive process. There is no realistic chance of any slowdown in tar sands activities over the next ten years -- Alberta would walk away from the Canadian confederation in a heartbeat if the Ottawa government attempted to force the issue -- so any warm words about the Durban deal should be taken with a bushel of salt.

Interestingly, the Canadian media are treating the Kyoto withdrawal in a very low key fashion, with even the heart-on-sleeve Toronto Star barely raising a peep. Just as surprising is the reaction of Independent readers to the story linked above. Judging from the comments, even the left-leaning Indy types are a bit jaded with the whole climate change thing. Environmentalists will have to ask themselves whether that's a natural consequence of the economic and financial crisis, or whether, just maybe, it has something to do with all the dubious data fiddling that scientists have resorted to in their zeal to prove that climate change is man-made.