Harper "Clean Air Act" Panned
Ambrose delivers plan where inaction is the most prominent feature of mis-named “Clean Air Act”
They’re not going to do anything: This is a (law) for inaction. To suggest that you have to consult once more… is ludicrous.John Bennett, Sierra Club of Canada
Instead of using existing legislation and acting immediately, the Conservatives have delivered vague promises to regulate polluters sometime in the coming decades. [The Conservatives] are proposing that greenhouse gas emissions should be allowed to continue to rise for the next 20 years.Hugh Wilkins, Sierra Legal Defence Fund
This sounds to me like a dirty air act.Beatrice Olivastri of Friends of the Earth Canada
The federal government’s plan to reduce greenhouse gases is a nice list of good intentions, but that’s all it is. It reads like a candidate’s lengthy election brochure long on the candidate’s virtue, short on immediate action.
According to the Pembina Institute, “oil sands development (will account) for up to 47 per cent of the projected increase in national greenhouse gas pollution between 2003 and 2010.”
The government’s plan guarantees this jump in greenhouse gases will occur because it won’t even have its emission-intensity regulations in place until 2010. And the jump will occur not only at the oil sands, but elsewhere across Canada.
Then, even with emission-intensity regulations in place, the plan will allow emissions to keep rising until 2020 when the government says it will require “absolute reductions” in greenhouse gases.
How long it will take to achieve absolute reductions, the government doesn’t say.
And, of course, it gives no details about how this is to be achieved, so there is no way of judging whether it will be effective.
This leisurely, 14-year approach to regulation is alarming because global warming is on track to create the hottest climate the world has seen in 55 million years, when temperatures rose 5 to 8 degrees Celsius and most of the globe was turned into deserts and scrubland.Cameron Smith, environment columnist, The Toronto Star
2006–10-20 BBC Climate change threatens supplies of water for millions of people in poorer countries, warns a new report from the Christian development agency Tearfund. Recent research suggests that by 2050, five times as much land is likely to be under “extreme” drought as now.
Citing research by the Oxford academic Norman Myers, Tearfund suggests there will be as many as 200 million climate refugees by 2050.
One of Britain’s leading climate scientists, Sir John Houghton, said the severity of climate change was getting through to world leaders “at a level of rhetoric”, but not yet at a level of action.
“There were promises made at the G8 summit and at the last UN meeting in Montreal about money for adaptation,” he told the BBC News website, “but I understand that very little of that has come through.”
Sir John is a former head of the UK Meteorological Office, former chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, and co-chaired one of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) working groups.Richard Black, environment correspondent, BBC News
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