“When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind: the world’s peacekeeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country’s government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee’s tea party.

So amazingly destructive has Canada become … I am watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country … Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada.” The Guardian, United Kingdom.

In further edited excerpts from a variety of articles Lorimer Wilson (www.FinancialArticleSummariesToday.com) posts the following (Words: 1377):

“Canada, the Dudley Do-Right of the international community, insists on exploiting its vast and dirty oil reserves in the so-called “tar sands” under Alberta. The intro to an article by British eco-scold George Monbiot declared: said Jean Piette, chair of Ogilvy Renault’s environmental practice in Montreal.”Canada’s image lies in tatters. It is now to climate what Japan is to whaling.” The South Florida Sun Sentinel, United States

Is Canada’s Sullied Image Deserved?

Says Eric Reguly of Canada’s Globe and Mail: “Canada has had a rough ride at the Copenhagen climate-change summit. It is unloved, even despised, by the scientists, the environmental groups and most developing countries. It will leave the summit with a sullied image – the arrogant, rich country that is part of the problem, not part of the solution. This image is both deserved and undeserved. It is undeserved in the sense that Canada’s new emissions output target – 20 per cent less than 2006′s level by 2020 – is actually slightly more than the [17%] U.S. pledge. And get this: When you dig into the numbers, the drop between 2006 (to use Canada’s arbitrary base-year number) and 2020 is roughly the same as the European Union’s [20% - 30%]. Canada is also pumping small fortunes into clean-energy technology but the Americans and the Europeans will emerge from the summit as good guys, if not heroes. Not the Canadians.”

The Pros and Cons of Canada’s Actions

Julius Melnitzer of Canada’s Financial Post reports that [from the get-go] Canada was not prepared to act independently of the U.S. on climate change legislation but that: “rather, our policy will always closely parellel U.S. law [because] when push comes to shove, we have little choice.”

“It’s hard to imagine Canada not following on the U.S. lead because we desperately need to get inside their carbon market and we desperately need to ensure that their laws don’t work against the interests of our exporters,” said Gray Taylor of [the law firm] Bennett Jones in Toronto.

“Harmonization will be critical not so much from the perspective of regulatory ease but from the perspective of financial necessity,” said Elizabeth DeMarco, who leads Macleod Dixon’s energy practice in Toronto.

“Whatever and whenever the U.S. decides what it is going to do, Prime Minister Harper will follow suit,”said Jean Piette, chair of Ogilvy Renault’s environmental practice in Montreal.

Be that as it may Reguly goes on to say (with Nathan Vanderklippe) in an edited excerpt from another article: “Of the almost 200 countries who attended the recent Copenhagen conference few of them had [and still have] a more blackened image [than Canada]… What shocks some countries is Canada’s response to Kyoto. When it ratified the treaty in 2002, then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien vowed that Canada would reduce emissions by 6 per cent by 2012 over the 1990 base year [yet] they are up 26 per cent or more instead as a result of the turbo-charged expansion of the Alberta oil sands, one of the single biggest sources of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions.”

“Canada did not take its Kyoto obligations seriously, particularly under Stephen Harper, and that goes against Canada’s image… Prime Minister Stephen Harper has committed to a 20 per cent reduction by 2020, but from a new base year – 2006 – when the Canadian economy was on fire. [To emphasize its position] in late 2007 Canada blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding emissions targets for industrialized countries.” said Saleemul Huq, a lead author of the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, the United Nations scientific body that assesses climate change.

Sarah Powell of Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg also believes Ottawa could have done more. “The government originally said it was going to establish a Canadian regime and then harmonize it instead of just being a follower. They haven’t gone about it that way and that’s not acceptable because the government’s stumble means that Canadian business, which could have had the advantage of domestic experience with GHG regulation and a carbon market, will be left behind once the Americans gear up.”

Shabby Image Not Entirely Justified

Not everyone thinks Canada’s shabby image is justified, however. Matthew Bateson, director of energy and climate for the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (whose members include B.C. Hydro and Canadian oil sands giant Suncor) says: “It’s unfair to paint Canada with a black brush. [in spite of the fact that Canada only generates 2% of the world's greenhouse gases,] “Canada is one of the world leaders in developing carbon capture and storage (CCS), a new technology that strips carbon dioxide from the flue gases of coal-burning plants or refineries and buries it underground. CCS is one of the technologies needed to transition to a new, low-carbon economy and Canada is putting its money where its mouth is” [and the oil sands are just 4% of Canada's total emissions with transportation accounting for the highest GHG percentage right across the country].

Reguly concludes that: “much of Canada’s task lies in trying to dab green onto the grubby oil sands – or at least convincing others that some green exists but its efforts have been decidedly low-key and ineffectual. To the public, the image of the oil sands has been shaped by Greenpeace campaigners. Indeed, even some of Canada’s respected business leaders acknowledge that they have fallen behind in the image campaign.” [Even the Premier of Ontario, Canada's largest and most populous province, has chimed in recently suggesting that Canada's moral authority in the world has been damaged by the lack of leadership on the climate file and that "when it comes to the climate change debate we've been punching below our weight."]

Says Murray Edwards, vice-chairman of oil sands miner Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. of Calgary: “The industry has to accept some responsibility. It has not been as pro-active as it should have been or could have been over the last decade in making sure the public understands the balance in the oil sands between the economy and the environment.”

One company, Cenovus Energy Inc., has bought TV spots aimed to show the benefits of its products. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers delivers representatives to various debates to help shape the “conversation” and works to correct inaccuracies in anything written about the oil sands but even strong voices aren’t getting much attention.

1606 Dead Ducks and Counting

Concludes Niraj Dawar, a professor of marketing communications at the Richard Ivey School of Business, “This clearly has the hallmarks of being a situation in which the reputation is under siege and it needs to be managed. A picture of a dead duck [1,606 died in an oil sands tailings pond] is far more powerful than the data or information that they can provide. What they need to come up with is pictures of their own.”

Editor’s Note:
- The above article consists of reformatted edited excerpts from the original for the sake of brevity, clarity and to ensure a fast and easy read. The author’s views and conclusions are unaltered.
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Given universal awareness and belief that greenhouse gases are placing our world on the brink of imminent disaster, we should obligate ourselves to examine the origins of the climate change issue. For many people awareness and concern has emerged as if by stealth. Our children arrive home from school all wide-eyed and anxious about the imminent extinction of polar bears, melting polar ice caps and glaciers. Frequently, too, we see programs on television which portray what seems to be a world hell-bent on its own destruction and predicting an imminent environmental Armageddon. Words: 1839

So says Arnold Bock (www.FinancialArticleSummariesToday.com) in an article edited by Lorimer Wilson, editor of www.munKNEE.com  (It’s all about Money!), for the sake of clarity and brevity to ensure a fast and easy read. Please note that this paragraph must be included in any article re-posting to avoid copyright infringement.  Bock goes on to say:

Former politician Al Gore produced a much viewed movie predicting certain demise of most living things unless greenhouse gases were dramatically limited starting immediately. He was given an Academy Award for his “Inconvenient Truth.” It is clearly apparent that the vehicles of mass communication, especially the popular media, entertainment industry, the public school systems as well as society’s opinion leaders, have been working overtime to inform and alarm us to the calamities ahead if we fail to throttle back the creation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Where, When and How did the Global Warming Issue Begin to Take Shape?
Back in the late 1960’s the United Nations assigned Canadian Maurice Strong the responsibility of giving form to the nascent concept of global warming. Actually the climate change issue started with predictions of a coming Ice Age, but that theme was quickly abandoned in favour of the warming scenario. The earth’s apparent rapid warming gained traction first at a UN conference held in Switzerland in 1971. Funding for climate research was increasingly made available, papers written and findings shared culminating in the creation of the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (IPCC) in 1988. It was this UN sponsored entity which drove the warming issue thereafter resulting in much greater public awareness – in part a consequence of another even larger conference held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992.

It seems that the scale of the Rio conference and those which followed (which involved many thousands of attendees representing most of the world’s nations, international Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) and other technical and interested parties) were designed primarily as a publicity tour de force. Such was certainly the case with the most recent conference of 20,000 held in Copenhagen, Denmark in December of 2009 where delegates had only one task – to endorse what they had been prepped for in advance.

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Kyoto, Japan was the venue for the 1997 conference at which specific greenhouse gas emissions targets were adopted. National governments of the industrialized world were pressured to endorse and formally subscribe to those standards and most countries signed on either because they had become believers in the need to limit greenhouse gases or because political optics demanded it. Canada, for example, cynically accepted its assigned carbon targets even though it had no intention or ability to meet them.

Interestingly, only first world developed nations were asked to commit. Rapidly industrializing nations such as China, India, Brazil and many other smaller emerging economies of Asia were deliberately omitted from the obligations of the Kyoto Protocol. Given the fact that these countries are major polluters and their economies are growing at rates far greater than the economies of developed nations, one wonders why such a gap in coverage was so casually allowed?

Greenhouse gases, which ostensibly cause global warming as well as the consequent and imminent environmental degradation we have been repeatedly warned about, would surely be just as disaster-inducing whether they originate in China or Canada. So why the “get out of jail free pass” for China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and others?

Another peculiar feature of the Kyoto Protocol was the base year selected and proclaimed against which greenhouse gas emissions reductions would be measured. Cynics not only found the free pass given to developing nations odd, but the 1990 baseline proved even more puzzling. The likely explanation is that the year 1990 marked the fall of communism in Europe. Coincidentally it was also the high water mark in European pollution, including CO2 emissions.

Since then dramatic carbon reductions have taken place throughout all of Europe, not just in the former communist bloc nations of Eastern Europe. What is the significance? Simply put, Europe has already come a long way to meeting its greenhouse gas reduction targets simply because much heavy industry has for economic reasons been shut down or moved to the developing world since 1990. Electrical production has also been converted into much cleaner burning natural gas and nuclear power and away from its previous reliance on coal. Meeting their targets therefore became a relative “walk in the park.”

Why are the United States and Canada being Singled Out as the Global Villains?
If developing and third world nations get a free pass and Europe can meet its targets readily because of the arbitrary1990 baseline, what is the point in adopting carbon emission caps which severely impact only the United States and Canada? It seems that North America – the US and Canada – have been consciously and deliberately singled out as the global villains of greenhouse gas emissions.

Why would the phalanx of the third world nations, led by the UN and Western European nations, most of whom share social democratic values, attempt to force North America to pay such a steep price? Below are a number of reasons:

1. Socialist Dogma
Speculation leads to several possible answers which are all plausible. When emissions targets were struck, the United States definitely had the dominant and most vibrant economy in the world. To outsiders the United States was obviously more able to shoulder the financial burden of carbon cuts than most other nations. Ditto for Canada.

Socialist dogma is rooted in the belief that income redistribution is and should be a core function for government. In this instance the UN imposed its values and objectives on its constituent parts. It is also frequently held that the wealth of rich nations comes at the expense of relatively less economically advantaged countries. Hence “taxing” the industries of rich nations through Cap and Trade impositions on carbon emissions seems perfectly fair and reasonable to advocates of wealth redistribution.

2. Global Governance
Keep in mind that the climate change agenda has been shepherded throughout by the United Nations, assisted in no small measure by institutions and individuals which subscribe to the ideals and merits of supranational agencies and organizations. Establishing world governing structures, institutions and processes is their ultimate longer term objective. Advocates of global governance commonly hold the view that nation states are inherently self-serving and remain obstacles to attaining a higher level of civil and civic consciousness. Multinational organizations, measured against values like this, provide a superior form of government resulting in more desirable outcomes. How does the world reach this nirvana of global governance? The simple answer is by assembling it through a series of building blocks.

3. Need for Money
Think about it. The UN has existed since the end of WWII. Its constituent parts include agencies such as the International Court of Justice, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Health Organization, International Labour Organization, governance of the world’s oceans, prosecution of criminal behaviour and actions from wars in such places as the Balkans and Rwanda, peace-keeping and peace-making missions in many of the world’s zones of conflict. Its ubiquitous humanitarian aid and third world development projects are universally known. These initiatives and responsibilities come at the expense of nation states which have ceded authority and money to the UN with its transnational reach.

Until now many sovereign nations jockeyed to set their own foreign aid priorities, targets and funding levels. It is also a fact that citizens in many first world nations, especially the United States, are tiring of giving money to countries which have difficulty in using it efficiently and effectively. Too often too much of it ends up in the pockets and Swiss bank accounts of government officials and other ‘kleptocrats’ in recipient nations. Is it any wonder there is increasing reluctance by national governments, the source of most development funding, to contribute to costly, corrupt and questionable projects in failing and failed nations? Would not the range of programs sponsored by the UN be much more effective if the UN no longer needed to beg, compromise or negotiate with sovereign nations for both mandates and funding?

4. Power and Influence
Referenced above is another emerging category of international institution called the Non Governmental Organization (NGO). Because of their transnational origins, scope, structure and technical specialties, over the years these groups have been enlisted by national governments and the UN as their preferred operational arms to implement their aid and development projects around the world. While many of their activities are project based, a continuing series of projects effectively necessitates large numbers of what amounts to permanent staff.

Employment therefore is frequently institutionalized resulting in the full range of organizational imperatives. Large organizations mean large budgets, layers of management and impressive staffing levels requiring many technical and professional skills. Job security and elevated pay grades assume greater importance. Power and influence are sought over policy and program priorities of both national governments and the international governmental agencies. In many ways NGO and UN interests converge in that they both end up being advocates of supranational governance and institutions at the expense of individual countries.

Summary
The answer to the question why the UN would attempt to force North America to adopt such stringent carbon emission caps? It is simply that the building blocks of international organizations depend on the exploitation of discrete needs and issues around and through which an organization can be established, grow and institutionalize itself on its route to permanent status.

Clearly climate warming provides a case study through which a single issue, global in scope can be structured and managed to enlist the support of various constituencies. It becomes another multinational program initiated, managed and promoted by the United Nations which morphs into the placement of another permanent building block in the UN’s fledgling firmament. Organizations are built and processes created which form a precedent for future initiatives coalescing around a different set of issues each time. This is the building block process employed to create and institutionalize global governance.

Conclusion
The issue of climate change has been enlisted to help construct global governing institutions. President Obama’s chief of staff said some time ago that “it would be a shame to waste a good crisis.” What he meant was that a crisis can be mobilized to enlist the support of individuals, interest groups and organizations which, under normal circumstances, would be impossible.

Global warming is not a crisis created by man wantonly burning fossil fuels to the detriment of nature. Rather, global warming is a methodically fabricated issue cleverly designed and exploited by proponents of global governance under the tutelage of the United Nations.

Editor’s Note:

The above article is Part 2 of a 4-part series including:

• “Global Warming: A Man-Made Crisis (Part 1)”;
• “Why Should WE Make Sacrifices to Offset Global Warming? (Part 3)”;
• “Global Warming: The ‘Anthropocentric’ Crisis (Part 4)”.

Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given as per paragraph 2 above