Climate Prentice says goal is 'aspirational'

A5

Bruce Cheadle
THE CANADIAN PRESS

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L'AQUILA, Italy - Less than 24 hours after Prime Minister Stephen Harper praised the G8 for its latest climate-change targets, his environment minister said those targets are "aspirational" and that Canada will not meet them.

Jim Prentice said reducing emissions by 80 per cent by the year 2050 is an "aspirational objective."

The best-case scenario for the Harper government's climate-change program - which does not yet have enforceable regulations in place - is a reduction in Canada's greenhouse-gas emissions of up to 70 per cent by 2050.

Prentice said Canada does not need to change its policy.

"The concept is that amongst the developed countries, some countries will undertake targets that are higher than that, some will have targets that less than that," said Prentice.

"But it's an aspirational objective of 80 per cent in the entire developed world."

The G8 agreement, Prentice emphasized, "very carefully refers to an aggregate" reduction, not a commitment by each G8 member to meet it.

Prentice's language stood in contrast to that of U.S. President Barack Obama, who said Thursday afternoon the G8 had reached "a historic consensus on concrete goals for reducing carbon emissions.

"We all agreed that, by 2050, developed nations will reduce their emissions by 80 per cent, and that we'll work with all nations to cut global emissions in half."

That was the good news for Obama, who chaired a meeting Thursday afternoon of the G8 leaders plus the Major Emerging Economies group. Together the 17 countries around the table create some 80 per cent of global carbon emissions.

A communique released after the meeting made it clear little headway was made at getting agreement with developing countries such as China, India and Brazil.

The wealthy nations agreed to help fund climate-change technology for the poorer, but provided no dollar figure. They hope the G20 can flesh that out further this fall.

The statement said developing nations promised to cut emissions "in a meaningful deviation from business as usual-" about as vague as could credibly be put in print.

Global emissions, said the joint communique, should peak "as soon as possible."

And work will continue until a UN climate-change conference in December "to identify a global goal for substantially reducing global emissions by 2050."

The collective group also agreed that global average temperatures must not rise more than 2C above pre-industrial levels.

Harper did not speak to Canadian reporters Thursday, but in brief comments to a pool camera, he said Canada's failure to even shoot for the targets it agreed to a day earlier does not undermine his government's credibility on climate change.

"I read that Canadians think the Obama plan is credible and their targets are virtually identical to ours," said Harper.

The U.S. legislation actually sets a target of 80 per cent reductions by 2050, and uses a base year one earlier than Canada's 2006.

Nonetheless, Harper maintained that if Canada has regulations "that are not similar to the United States, we will simply have a loss of business and production to the United States."

The Russian delegation at the G8, meanwhile, flatly stated that the 80 per cent target was "unattainable," and said Moscow has a 2050 goal of between 20 and 60 per cent.

Prentice called Canada's targets "transformational" and "realistic." And he held out some hope that technology advances would make the collective 80 per cent target achievable.